The Rundown is a weekly column that highlights some of the biggest, weirdest, and most notable events of the week in entertainment. The number of items could vary, as could the subject matter. It will not always make a ton of sense. Some items might not even be about entertainment, to be honest, or from this week. The important thing is that it’s Friday, and we are here to have some fun.
ITEM NUMBER ONE — Listen to me
I don’t know what exactly has gotten into the people in Hollywood lately, but they have been casting big-time projects like no one might get to make another big-time project ever again. Succession has wrangled every tall actor working in Hollywood, your Skarsgards and Brodys, in addition to Sanaa Lathan. The Righteous Gemstones just added Jason Schwartzman and Eric Andre, which is incredible, as well as Eric Roberts, which is incredible. Eric Roberts is so perfect for that show. Put him in a suit and sit him behind a big expensive desk and let him sneer at Danny McBride. That’s a whole show right there. I’m excited. I was already excited because The Righteous Gemstones is just about a perfect television show, but now I’m like, more excited.
But nothing can touch the casting work being done on the sequel to Knives Out. The impressive thing is that we still don’t even know who everyone is playing. All we know for sure is that Daniel Craig and his Southern accent are back to investigate a murder and that this time he’s doing it in Greece. This is… good. It’s already good. But then you look at the list of names that has been trickling out this week and it gets even better. I mean…
After playing a nosy neighbor with a secret in Marvel’s WandaVision, Kathryn Hahn looks to have found another fun role where the character may also be keeping some sort of secret. Sources tell Deadline, Hahn is set to join Daniel Craig in the next installment, which Netflix recently landed the rights too. Dave Bautista, Janelle Monae and Edward Norton were also recently added to the cast.
The only problem with that list of names is that it is impossible to read it and not immediately start dreamcasting other actors and actresses who would be a blast in a Knives Out movie, especially as a murderer. I’ve been doing it for like six days now and I can’t stop. It is too much fun. We deserve to have some fun. Let’s all do it forever.
That said, there are two things worth noting before we begin. The first is that these are not actual casting suggestions that I want Rian Johnson to read and take to heart. He’s doing fine on his own. And who am I, really? Just some doofus with a decent WiFi connection. I would be more mortified if he did read this and take my advice. It’s not that I’m wrong (I am great at this, wait and see), it’s just that he has better stuff to do and also is not paying me.
The second thing is that I had Kathryn Hahn on my list before he cast her and I’m leaving her on it because I HAD IT FIRST, OKAY?
Thank you.
Kathryn Hahn
Kathryn Hahn would be so good as the murderer in a Knives Out movie. This would have been a true statement before her turn in WandaVision but it is somehow even more true now. Kathryn Hahn is the best, just in general, but she is really the best at playing deranged goofballs. I think it’s the eyes. I am glad she is in Knives Out 2. I hope they let her kill one or possibly many people.
Anthony Carrigan
Knives Out characters have to toe that line between silly and menacing and I don’t know if anyone anywhere is as suited for that as the genius who brought NoHo Hank to life in Barry. I would be fine if he just played NoHo Hank in Knives Out, if I’m being honest. I imagine we would need to get lawyers involved on that one, though. Let’s call him… SoHo Frank? Everything else rolls over.
Yvette Nicole Brown
Something about the person who played dear sweet Shirley on Community showing up as the killer in a high-profile murder mystery brings me a lot of joy when I think about it, which seems to be the only requirement so far in the casting. It could work. Let the people have it.
Walton Goggins
This is so good for reasons I have elaborated on in each of the 300 posts I have written about how much Walton Goggins kicks ass, so, in lieu of rehashing all of it again, please just enjoy my favorite picture from his Getty archive. It’s fun to pretend he’s playing a villain and those are his henchmen.
Literally anyone from Always Sunny
Rob McElhenney? Yes, of course. Charlie Day? Absolutely. Kaitlin Olson? Would be tremendous. Glenn Howerton? Reasonable arguments can be made that he was born to do exactly this. Danny DeVito? I mean, you see where I’m headed with that one. Hell, just do a whole crossover. Send Benoit Blanc to Philadelphia to investigate a murder. See what I care.
Jason Mantzoukas
If they’re going to film the second movie in Greece and cast a bunch of comedy-adjacent maniacs, why not cast the Greek comedic maniac who pops up in every television show and promptly makes them all better? Some of the entries on this list are more about having fun, and I know I said in the intro that I was not making actual casting suggestions, but I have become extremely serious about this one just in the time since I started typing this paragraph. Put Jason Mantzoukas in Knives Out 2.
Jeremy Irons
Case closed.
Gonzo from The Muppets
I will accept this, or Gonzo and Rizzo narrating a Knives Out movie like they do in A Muppet Christmas Carol, or an all-Muppet version of Knives Out with Daniel Craig as the only human. I am serious about this one, too.
Lindsay Lohan
The time has come for the LiLo comeback. I am ready. Let her murder someone and almost get away with it. Film it in Ibiza. Have her push someone out of a hot air balloon. This is the whole fun of having the juice to make your decisions of things. You can go as big and weird as you want. I need to see it.
ITEM NUMBER TWO — June 25 is my birthday now
The ninth Fast & Furious movie, accurately titled F9, hits theaters on Friday, June 25. This is thrilling to me. I have been waiting to see it since I saw the first trailer something like 15 months ago. Do you understand? Do you really understand? This trailer dropped during a literal outdoor beach party hosted by the cast on Super Bowl weekend and it introduced John Cena as the evil secret brother Vin Diesel’s character is just finding out about now at like age 50 and then, at the end, featured Han, a character whose death has been depicted multiple times and whose body they went to Tokyo to allegedly collect, sauntering back in the franchise while munching on salty snacks. I think most people reading this column have a general sense of who I am and what I’m about. Can you imagine — really, truly imagine — the degree to which this has been killing me? At the time, I wasn’t even thrilled about the concept of waiting like three months for it to hit theaters. I am not built for things like “waiting” and “being patient.” The past year or so has been tough for a lot of reasons, most of them much more serious than this, but… this is on the list. For me. I know. Believe me, I know.
And it kind of has a greater significance than all that now, too, because it is shaping up to be the first big movie we all get to see in a theater after a year of staying inside too much. There’s a celebratory aspect to it, a victorious feeling, that is making it feel like a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow made of vomit. (Do not picture this.) There are plenty of more significant signs that we’re finally coming through on the right side of things but this one is purely a celebration. I’m going to feel great charging into the theater that weekend. I’m going to shout and whoop and get rowdy around strangers when Ludacris and Tyrese launch themselves into the outer edges of the planet’s atmosphere. It’s going to be great, just to be doing it. Although, as I type this, I realize a lot of you are still picturing that vomit rainbow I said not to picture. In hindsight, this is on me. I ruined the moment. My apologies.
But here’s where I make it up to you. Or at least make it up to myself for making you think about a rainbow made of vomit. (STOP.) Because just this week, just yesterday, news broke that F9 won’t be the only significant piece of entertainment I adore that will be dropping on June 25. Not even the only one about a loose cannon who plays by his own rules but, dammit, gets results. That’s right, ladies and gentlemen. I got a feeling…
BOSCH.
BOSCH COMES BACK FOR ITS FINAL SEASON ON JUNE 25, TOO.
HERE, LOOK:
Slated to bow on Friday, June 25, the series is based on Michael Connelly’s best-selling novel, The Burning Room, (2014) and the real arson case that inspired it. When a ten-year-old girl dies in an arson fire, Bosch risks everything to bring her killer to justice despite opposition from powerful forces. The highly charged, politically sensitive case forces Bosch to face a grueling dilemma of how far he is willing to go to achieve justice.
How far he’s willing to go to achieve justice? Oh, man. Oh, man. He’s gonna be willing to go so far. It’s gonna make all the authority figures so mad. Like, at least this mad.
Maybe even madder than that. Probably madder, now that I think about it. I don’t know exactly how mad but let’s pencil it in somewhere around This Mad.
Effective immediately, June 25 is my birthday. I wasn’t born that day if we want to be technical about everything, but still. I don’t see how I can take this news any other way. But if Han can come back from the dead and Jason Statham’s character can become a good guy after being the one who supposedly murdered him and Bosch can be a grown man who eats pancakes like this…
… then I can change my birthday. Fair is fair.
ITEM NUMBER THREE — There is nothing more pure than Henry Winkler posting fish pictures on Twitter and none of you can ruin this for me
https://twitter.com/hwinkler4real/status/1391528374930083840
Henry Winkler is a wonderful man. He’s had a long career in Hollywood and everyone who has met him or worked with him only has wonderful things to say about him. He started his career playing the coolest dude alive on Happy Days and now plays a slew of nervous dorks who are diametrically opposed to everything the Fonz stood for. It’s a fascinating turn of events, really, kind of the opposite of the “dork becomes cool” plot you see in about 85 percent of teen movies. But this is not the point.
The point is that Henry Winkler likes to post fish pictures on Twitter. Pictures of fish he caught on vacation. It is the most pure thing I’ve ever seen. Twitter is a piranha tank. People get chewed up on there constantly. Just ravaged. There is usually no room for earnest sentiment because everything is cloaked in three layers of performative rage and irony. And then Henry Winkler just pops in there with the most cheery Facebook-ass pictures you’ve ever seen, holding a big fish, smiling as wide as the ocean. It is, again, so pure.
He hasn’t been able to post a fish picture on Twitter for over a year for obvious reasons. He’s been stuck inside like all of us. But then I saw the tweet up there a few days ago. And I knew something was happening. And I waited for it. I checked repeatedly. And then, finally, at long last, it happened.
I can’t even express the beauty everywhere on our planet pic.twitter.com/K0uzx6gfiN
— Henry Winkler (@hwinkler4real) May 10, 2021
Remember the thing I said in the previous section about how seeing F9 in the theater would feel like a win on a much larger level than it would in normal circumstances? Well, this is that, too, just on a smaller level. It’s progress. It’s a good thing. Look how happy Henry Winkler is. Look at his face.
Do not, however, look into any of this any further. Please. Because if you do, you will discover that this pure and nice image of this pure and nice television icon was temporarily hijacked by a 24-hour news network — you know the one — that found like three harsh tweets in the replies and manufactured a whole segment out of them about whether Cancel Culture had come for The Fonz. You do not have to engage with this. You should not engage with this. Just take the nice story about the sweet man sharing a nice experience. Things have been hard enough. You do not have to make them harder.
ITEM NUMBER FOUR — Oh hell yes, it is Lupin time
Did you watch Lupin back when I first told you to watch Lupin? I hope so, a little bit because LISTEN TO ME but mostly because Lupin is a blast. It is a French show about a fancy jewel thief stealing jewels. He wears disguises and has reasons he steals things and there is a guy on the show who, at one point, wore an outfit that was like 75 percent denim, which I guess you already figured out back when I said it was a French show. It was seriously so fun and so good and if any of you try to say “Ehhhhh I couldn’t follow it because everyone speaks French and I don’t like reading subtitles” I will scream at you until someone calls the police. For the love of God. I just wrote like 1000 words about the Fast & Furious movies and someone posting fish pictures online. If I can handle a foreign show with subtitles, anyone can. Get some culture for once in your life, you bozo.
Anyway, this is the trailer for the back half of the first season, which premieres June 11 on Netflix. It has galas and tuxedos and car chases and one of those scenes from the Bourne movies where he calls the person investigating him on the phone and then says something that reveals he’s watching them. In short, it has everything you need in a good summer show. Watch Lupin. Lupin is the best.
ITEM NUMBER FIVE — Well well well…
I should start with a confession: I am just now getting caught up on Mare of Easttown. I hear you out there, clicking your tongues at me dismissively, saying things like, “Jesus Christ, Brian, your job is to watch television and here’s a big fancy HBO series set near where you live in which Kate Winslet — KATE WINSLET — adopts a borderline incredible Philly/Delco accept, speaking her o’s through her nose to make them eau’s and mashing consonants together like they’re Iggles lineman. How are you not caught up on this series?” Well, first of all, obviously, Go Birds. But also, I just didn’t have a murder show in me last month. Sometimes that happens. But I’m back now. I’m involved. She pronounced the word overdoses like “eauverdeausiz” in the opening match moments and I was hooked. I’m not a complicated man.
But really, honestly, if anyone should be angry about all of this, it’s me. At you. Because, if you’ve been watching the show, that means you saw the first episode, and specifically the first 10 minutes of the first episode, and specifically the thing I have screencapped above where a victim lives on a street whose name is also my last name, and you didn’t say anything to me about it. What are we doing here? How could you drop the ball like this? I mean, come on. There it is, right there on the screen. And yet, nothing. Just a weak effort on your part, all around.
I expect better going forward. I’m not mad. I’m sorry for implying that I was. I’m just… disappointed.
READER MAIL
If you have questions about television, movies, food, local news, weather, or whatever you want, shoot them to me on Twitter or at [email protected] (put “RUNDOWN” in the subject line). I am the first writer to ever answer reader mail in a column. Do not look up this last part.
From Brian (not me):
Have you ever noticed that sometimes a fictional company will be referenced or shown in two or more completely unrelated movies or TV shows? The main two I can think of are Oceanic Airways, which I mostly remember from the criminally underrated Kurt Russell movie Executive Decision, but I gather it was also the airline that went down in Lost although I myself never really watched that show. The other one, which is a little more subtle, is Cobol Engineering. That’s the firm that’s trying to kill Leo in Inception after he botches that first job, but it’s also the name of the outfit, or whatever, that Jason Statham ostensibly works for in The Mechanic, which is a sneaky decent flick if you don’t take it too seriously.
I’m guessing there are others but stuff like this just kinda sticks in my brain and I thought if anyone you might think similarly from time to time.
This is a terrific email for a handful of reasons. It’s got a fun premise, it creates ties between otherwise unrelated films, and it correctly assumes that my brain is mangled enough to also be riddled with examples of these. Unfortunately, it also references a Jason Statham movie — The Mechanic, a blast of a film, although not as fun as the sequel, Mechanic: Resurrection, which co-stars Jessica Alba and, for some reason, Tommy Lee Jones in very tiny sunglasses — and was sent in the same week that I rewatched Collateral, so I’m going to talk about that. Again. I’m going to talk about this part of that again.
This is Jason Statham’s uncredited cameo in the opening moments of Collateral, a very good movie. And that would be enough for me, just an unexplained Statham cameo in a very good Michael Mann movie. But then there’s also this, from the IMDb trivia page.
Although Max refers to himself as “collateral” in the scene where he briefly stands up to Vincent after the hitman kills the jazz club owner, that’s not where the movie got its title. The original script had Vincent’s professional name as “Vincent Collateral”, and there is a deleted scene that confirms this. The title was considered for a change after the unsuccessful release of the Arnold Schwarzenegger action film Collateral Damage (2002), but everyone agreed that they shouldn’t avoid a title everyone liked, just because it echoed a movie that no one cared about.
Ah, whoops. It appears that I have once again pasted the paragraph about Tom Cruise’s character in Collateral, Vincent the mysterious assassin, being named “Vincent Collateral.” I wonder how that happened. Well, nothing that can be done about it now. Let’s just move on and post the correct one.
Statham’s cameo is often regarded as being his character Frank Martin from The Transporter (2002) and its sequels. He delivers a bag to Vincent at the airport and then disappears, no questions asked.
I have known this piece of information for a period of time exceeding 15 years now and it has infuriated me every time I think about it because it means no one has gone back and made a prequel about these two at an orientation for the new jobs at whatever organization this is. Come on. Do it already. They aged a ton of people down in The Irishman. We can age Cruise and Statham down for this one. Put them in The Irishman machine. Give them whole new faces. For me.
AND NOW, THE NEWS
To Pennsylvania! Again!
Secured in a sealed wooded crate, the 192-year-old secret recipe for Yuengling beer was placed in an armored vehicle Friday afternoon to begin a three-day journey to Texas.
I have seen too many movies. This is something I can say without qualification, without any real reason, just because it is objectively true. But it is something I say here because I read that sentence and shouted “SECRET BEER RECIPE HEIST” out loud in my empty living room. I don’t think I’m out of line, though. Tell me you didn’t read that and picture, like, Gerard Butler holding up the armored truck on some rural stretch of highway. Do not lie to me.
The recipe will be delivered next week to Molson Coors’ Fort Worth brewing facilities, where it will start being manufactured later this year.
In addition to the recipe book, proprietary yeast of D.G. Yuengling & Son. Inc. made the trip, which officially marked the start of the company’s westward expansion.
I am straight-up picturing this entire movie right now. Butler’s character was wronged by the family that owns the brewery — maybe it was his grandfather’s recipe and they stole it — so he’s out to get revenge. There’s like four other people in his crew. One would have been Gina Carson before, you know, everything. One is definitely a rapper, maybe Common or T.I. And let’s say Chalamet is the last one, just because I’m ready for action-star Chalamet. Cover him with tattoos and give him an AK-47.
In addition to Jennifer and Wendy Yuengling, their sisters — Debbie Yuengling, employee engagement and culture manager, and Sheryl Yuengling, order services and IT administration — were on hand to bring the recipe from inside the Mahantongo Street headquarters to the armored vehicle.
Once security guard and driver Travis Laukhuf sealed the rear doors and, with an escort by Pottsville police, he drove down Mahantongo Street to begin the approximately 1,475-mile trip to Texas.
BEER HEIST
COMING SUMMER 2022
REVENGE IS A DISH BEST SERVED…
[shotgun pump, sound of fizzy can opening]
…FROSTY.