Category: News

After declaring in May that a new album was finished, Death Cab For Cutie are in the midst of rolling out Asphalt Meadows, which is set for release on September 16. They released the lead single “Roman Candles” with the announcement, and now they’ve debuted a new song at last night’s show in Newport, Rhode Island.

The tune is called “From Here To Forever,” and it’s jangly and colorful, not unlike their 2005 hit “Soul Meets Body.” At three and a half minutes, it moves at a playful, lively pace and has a texture of hope. It’s not as experimental as “Roman Candles,” which was much darker, reckoning with “the crippling, existential dread that goes hand in hand with living in a nervous city on a dying planet, and that the only way to be in the moment is to let it all go,” Ben Gibbard said upon the release. “The lyrics were cobbled from a couple of different songs dealing with my general sense of anxiety; the feeling that the fabric that weaves a functioning society together was crumbling during the pandemic.” The worry feels absent from this track, focused more on levity.

Watch the band perform “From Here To Forever” above.

Asphalt Meadows is out 9/16 via Atlantic. Pre-order it here.

Death Cab For Cutie is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Ahead of his upcoming Comic-Con appearance, Shazam himself, Zachary Levi has released a first look of the upcoming installment Fury Of The Gods.

Okay, the first look is really more of a short glimpse, but you get to see Levi in his iconic suit and using his powers before saying “just being a tease.” So meta! Levi and Co. will be at Comic-Con at the end of this month, where we can likely expect some more thorough footage.

Not much has been revealed about the upcoming sequel to the hit 2019 superhero movie, but the all-star cast includes Rachel Zegler, Helen Mirren (!), and Lucy Liu, who will all play daughters of the God Atlas, who famously gave Shazam his powers in the first film. Shazam is the buff alter-ego of a teenager named Billy Batson, who gets his God-like powers when he says, “Shazam!” It’s pretty straightforward, right?

This isn’t the only movie getting a first look at Comic Com: fellow DC property Black Adam was initially supposed to be a part of the Shazam sequel before The Rock managed to secure his own movie, which will also premiere this fall before Shazam premieres in December.

Shazam! Fury Of The Gods hits theaters on December 21st.

A Smoky Negroni — sometimes called a South by Southwest if made with Ardbeg 10 — is a bold and delicious summer cocktail. Strike that, it’s a great cocktail, year-round.

However, if you have a backyard smoker and a crew coming over to eat mounds of fatty meats, then this cocktail is the perfect pairing. The key though, is that you need a peaty whisky with flavor notes that lean more into fatty smoked meats and backyard firepits with marshmallows than Band-Aids, oyster pearls, or ashtrays. Not all peated whiskies are created equal.

For that application, you need a little Lagavulin. And while the purists will think it’s blasphemy to make cocktails with Lagavulin 16, trust me, it’s what you want to do here. Say it with me, “the better the spirit you use in your cocktail, the better the cocktail will be.” Use shitty wine in your ragu, your ragu will taste like that shitty wine. The same goes with whisk(e)y or rum or vodka in a cocktail.

Okay, rant over. This cocktail really is a modern twist on a centuries-old classic that just works. So, let’s cut to the chase and stir one up!

Also Read: The Top Five Cocktail Recipes of the Last Six Months

• Our ‘Perfect Whisky And Coke’ Recipe Uses The Last Brand You’d Expect
• The Hemingway Daiquiri Is A Deeply Refreshing Summer Cocktail — Here’s The (Very Simple) Real Recipe
• The Godfather Is A Simple Scotch Cocktail To Power You Through Winter
• Recipe: The Amaretto Sour Is The Ideal Cocktail To Close Out January
• The Tom Collins Is A Classic Cocktail That’s Perfect For The Hotter Days Ahead

Smoky Negroni

Ingredients:

• 1.5 oz. Lagavulin 16
• 1.5 oz. Campari
• 1.5 oz. Carpano Antica Formula Vermouth
• Ice
• Lemon peel

As mentioned above, I’m using Lagavulin 16. You should be able to find it in any decent liquor store. While you can use other peated whiskies, you really need that backyard smoker fattiness to make this a summertime winner. Laga has that in spades. A brinier peaty like Talisker doesn’t quite hit the same note (though their Distillers Edition isn’t far off). That said, if you’re pairing this with a seafood tower, then Talisker would be the play for this drink.

But a peat monster that tastes like licking burnt Band-Aids in a cold Weber (cough, cough, Laphroaig, cough, cough) is a little too overpowering for the Campari and vermouth. On the other end of the spectrum, a super low peaty like Bowmore, Bunnahabbin, or Dalwhinnie kind of gets lost in the mix, especially any of the peatiness since those whiskies are so mildly peated in the first place.

What You’ll Need:

• Cocktail mixing glass/jug
• Cocktail strainer
• Rocks glass
• Barspoon
• Paring knife
• Jigger

Method:

• Add the whisky, Campari, and vermouth to a mixing jug. Add a large handful of ice. Stir until the glass jug is ice cold to touch, about 30 to 45 seconds.
• Strain the cocktail into the glass over new ice.
• Slice a thin layer of lemon peel off the lemon and express the oils over the cocktail (hold the peel toward the glass and bend across its axis with your thumbs).
• Drop the lemon peel into the glass and serve.

Bottom Line:

As you can see from my images, you don’t need any fancy cocktail equipment to make a cocktail. I used an IKEA pint glass and straw for mixing and a rubber spatula to strain the drink into the waiting glass. All of my cocktail equipment is somewhere heading towards a container ship on the North Atlantic coast. So I improvised. And you can too. Hell, I’m even making block ice in old Tupperware containers and breaking it up with a hammer like an early-aughts bar hipster in suspenders (insider tip, block ice is actually way better for cooling and keeping drinks cold, so…).

Anyway, this is pretty delicious. The fatty aspects of the Lagavulin meld beautifully with the bitterness of the Campari and the sweetness of the vermouth. It’s kind of like that hint of espresso you get when you use coffee grounds as a rub on a fatty piece of meat before you put it in a smoker. The peatiness gets very sweet on the nose along with the woody botanicals leaning into an almost rock candy sweetness that’s just been kissed with firepit smoke. It’s not quite a singed marshmallow but it’s not far away from that either.

The overall feel of the drink is bold — this is still a Negroni after all. You get those hefty bitter and woody botanicals and roots next to soft and slightly fruity vermouth with a twinge of fatty peated malt all brightened by that spritz of lemon oil. It’s a beautiful drink and the perfect pairing for backyard smoke-out.

Last summer, Sacha Baron Cohen emerged victorious after a judge dismissed a $95 million defamation lawsuit filed by failed Alabama senate candidate Roy Moore. The suit stemmed from a 2018 episode of Cohen’s Who Is America? series on Showtime, which featured Moore setting off a “pedophile detector” and storming off the set after being humiliated. In another legal victory for Cohen, the dismissal was upheld by a court of appeals who agreed with the initial judge’s decision that, obviously, the whole thing was a comedy gag. Also, Moore signed a waiver before the appearance, which has come back to bite him twice.

Via Entertainment Weekly:

Now, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan has upheld the lower court’s decision, citing the disclosure agreement. The three presiding judges also found that the “obviously farcical” pedophile detector segment was “clearly comedy” and that “no reasonable person could believe [the pedophile detector] to be an actual, functioning piece of technology.”

According to Entertainment Weekly, Moore plans to file another appeal, and if the case somehow goes in front of the current Supreme Court stacked with Donald Trump appointees, there could be a very different outcome.

In the meantime, the dismissal marks a winning streak for Cohen who had sued a cannabis company for the unauthorized use of his Borat character for a billboard. The two parties reached a satisfactory agreement, and Cohen dismissed the case. The actor also prevailed over a lawsuit filed by the family of a Borat 2 subject who died shortly after filming. The family accused Cohen of tricking Holocaust survivor Judith Dim Evans into appearing in the film. However, Cohen produced footage of him explaining his own Jewish heritage to Evans and detailing how her scene would help battle anti-Semitism. The family dismissed the suit “unconditionally.”

(Via Entertainment Weekly)

(Spoilers from The Boys season finale will be found below.)

Another season of The Boys is in the books, so to speak. The third round of Vigilantes Vs. Supes ended with a climactic throwdown of those Supes. Homelander (Antony Starr) got his ass beat by Queen Maeve (Dominique McElligott), who then leaped out of a window, nearly sacrificing her own life to save everyone from a nuclear Soldier Boy (Jensen Ackles). When it comes to The Boys themselves, they landed in the thick of this battle, but their internal turmoil is no less fraught. Billy Butcher (Karl Urban) betrayed the fan-favorite character of Mother’s Milk (Laz Alonso), and as Alonso told us in an interview, that leaves The Boys in an unprecedented spot heading into Season 4.

All along, Mother’s Milk (who’s officially known as MM on the show) has been the most steady, dependable presence on The Boys. He’s the rational member in terms of strategy. He holds a clear vision of why they are fighting against Vought International’s Supes, and boy, did his story go to raw places this season. We learned why his obsessive-compulsive disorder took root and why the trigger of Soldier Boy’s presence ended up worsening MM’s OCD, and how the show portrays the agony with deference. And fans have really responded, as Laz was gracious enough to discuss with us.

In addition, I absolutely had to Laz about the most disgusting moment of the show’s recent “Herogasm” episode. Obviously, I’m talking about the scene where MM and Starlight open a door, and a Supe unleashes the biggest money shot ever seen onscreen. It landed all over MM (you can watch that moment here and react like Erin Moriarty does), who immediately (and for understandable reasons) needed a bathroom. And that’s the careful tightwire that this show navigates: putting this character — the guy who least wants to be touched by Love Sausage, for example — into the most revolting scenarios but still managing to respectfully regard the anxiety that dominates his life, all going back to what Soldier Boy did, decades ago.

We also discussed how different Mother’s Milk is from the comics, and why it’s so nuts that some far-right viewers didn’t realize (until recently) that Homelander is not a good guy. Now, what of MM? That’s a whole other story.

Let’s start by acknowledging how different MM is on the show versus the comics. Eric Kripke discouraged Jensen Ackles from reading the comics before playing Soldier Boy. Did that apply to you, too?

I was discouraged from Season 1! Because MM had powers in the comics, and here, we didn’t. In Season 1, I knew that I wouldn’t have those powers, so by Season 3, I had bought into our version of the story. And I really liked the tie-in between Soldier Boy and MM’s backstory, primarily because during 2020, Eric and I were talking about everything.

Because of the pandemic?

Yeah, usually we go from season to season and really don’t have that much time in between to talk and get inspirations from life and add it into the story. But in 2020, we stopped for a year because of Covid. So we were talking about everything from Covid remedies and ways to strengthen your immune system to George Floyd and how to bring some of those real stories (that exist in our society) and infuse them into the characters. That’s where the Soldier Boy and MM tie-in came in. Because Soldier Boy represents good ol’ American values and idealism, but that only works for some people. It hasn’t historically included everyone, and so while to some people Soldier Boy was a hero, in our community, he was policing people very, very hard and not really regarding human life in the process, and that’s what the story was addressing: how it affects everyone else.

Well, MM doesn’t have powers in the show, and there’s an underlying vibe that there are no heroes here, but at the end of the finale, MM’s daughter called him her hero. Maeve pulls off the heroics in the finale against Homelander, but do you think MM’s ultimately the biggest hero of the show?

Well, I wouldn’t say that he’s the biggest hero of the show because everybody plays a part, and it all shows us that we can’t do it alone. We have to rely on each other. You know, even in moments, you might have to take up with somebody that you’re not very fond of to get to your objective. Butcher teaming up with Soldier Boy was not cool to MM. It really broke a level of trust between these two that I think is unfinished business because, you know, up until now, they both knew each other’s demons. Or what they had was trust. And Butcher broke that.

Big time. He stopped MM from pursuing Soldier Boy, who killed part of his family.

So I think that that has fractured The Boys to a certain degree, but the show is always talking about how you don’t need powers. What you need is unity. What happens when that unity is fractured? And so, here we are.

Beyond the action of this finale, MM’s arc this season took him further into the representation of OCD. If I think about how that disorder’s usually portrayed, like with Jack Nicholson in As Good As It Gets, he’s stepping over cracks and turning doorknobs, and it kind-of all leads to him being a dick. And with Tony Shaloub in Monk, OCD is played for laughs. But with MM, the show gets to the heart of the disorder and how it manifests. Did you research it much?

I did. And I also researched triggers. I knew that I needed to find, “Where can I identify what triggers this?” Because the OCD is a symptom of something equal. And when I tell you that this is the first season and also the first character where I’ve received so many DMs and people reaching out to me to thank me for how I portrayed OCD. And they suffer from it and this is the first time that they watched a portrayal of OCD that did not make them feel like they were being made fun of or laughed at or it was minimized to something so simple that didn’t incorporate the mental health behind OCD. So, I’ve taken screenshots and forwarded them all to Kripke because, you know, he’s the guy behind the pen, him and his writing team. And I try to polish off and add and stuff, but I really think that our writers got it, you know. That’s how important it is to — in a backstory when a character exhibits something — to really address the source. And it all came from trauma. It’s all trauma, and OCD is just the means of coping with that trauma.

When you mention how the show doesn’t make fun of OCD, I agree. The wet wipe stuff and Maeve putting her feet on the table — that’s a tiny slice of humor that’s just the right amount, I think.

Yeah, and then this year, we saw just how deep it gets, and we saw his daughter seeing it. Whereas before, he was able to mask it. Now, we’re starting to see his tics, like he’s gonna ring the doorbell, but he’s gotta tap it a few times. He’s driving, he’s gonna turn the turn signal on with a certain ritual first, and all these things compounded, kind-of start giving us a bigger picture of how present it is in his everyday life.

Another thing about MM is that Butcher and Hughie are going off the rails with their vengeance, but MM stays constant and steady to what he believes. We know more about him, but he’s still stayed who he is. How do you balance that?

I think that you balance it out by understanding the role on the team, and MM’s role has always been to remind The Boys that they, morality-wise, are supposed to be on the right side of this thing. The lines do get blurred, and MM is kind-of the voice of reminding, reminding, reminding. When they started doing Compound V, you have to remind them and the audience, “Don’t try this at home.” [Laughing] Although you may have a perceived reason for doing that, this ain’t the right way to do it. So, you need that Devil’s Advocate to keep us the good guys, otherwise, we’re just like the Supes. Just justifying our reason for doing it, and they’re justifying the reason for doing it. But at the end of the day, you’re at one end of the circle or the other.

Alright, so we have to talk about “Herogasm” and that scene where MM gets completely soaked. It was so funny when he complained about his jacket getting ruined, and then it really got ruined. Shooting that must have been something, so… were there multiple takes?

[Laughs] We shot it all in one take

Yeah, more than one take doesn’t seem too practical.

And it was the last take of the night. After an entire fifteen-hour day of shooting the most ridiculous stuff you can ever imagine, and we had to get it then and at that moment. We were rushing to get it. You know, it was almost something that we didn’t shoot because we had to make our day. We had to start letting people go and sending people home because we had to be back the next day and shoot other stuff. What happened was that it was the last thing where we had the house intact because the next day, we had to shoot the house as Post-Soldier Boy Blast. So the next day when we came, the house was in shambles, and that night, once we wrapped, they destroyed the house. We had to get that shot that night, and we had one shot to do it. So, they basically shot it from every angle known to man and by luck, we got it.

I’m not sure that you’ve heard about this controversy, but there are apparently far-right viewers who just realized that Homelander is actually a villain. They’re angry now, and especially because this season goes in hard against toxic masculinity. How do you feel about a group of so-called fans who just didn’t get it for awhile?

If they were able to watch Homelander for two seasons and not see him as a villain? That tells us a lot about where society is right now, and it goes back to what echo chamber that you choose to belong to. It’s unfortunate to belong to any echo chamber. In theory, we should be rational people who can call things out. Even if it’s somebody that I consider myself a fan of or a follower of, what he’s doing is not right. And the fact that we’re in a state where we can miss that? It just says a lot about what work we have to do as a society to get back to where we understand what’s right and wrong. There are certain things that should not be based upon whether you’re far-right. It shouldn’t matter if you’re far-right, far-left, or in the middle. It’s pretty obvious that if someone allows a plane full of people to crash, when you’re a “hero,” you’re America’s hero, and you let these Americans die, it should be very obvious. Yeah, this show is supposed to be a mirror to society, and if they don’t like what they saw, they should look in the mirror.

What’s wild is that Garth Ennis wrote the comics fifteen years before the show first aired, but this feels like the right time for it to land.

One-hundred percent. If you look at who he modeled Homelander after, fifteen years ago, you’ll understand why those people did not like it.

I know there was another character originally modeled after George W. Bush, but that’s not Homelander.

It was actually… Donald Trump!

I think I actually needed to block that from my mind because Trump is in too many places. I don’t need to think about him during this show!

In Garth’s interviews, he talks about creating these characters, that was the first supervillain, and he thought, “What if this person had all these powers? How would they behave?” [Laughs]

And we certainly found that out in 2016. And it’s still happening.

It’s weird how things play out.

We are outta time, but if you could take MM and give him a trip to another TV show or movie, where would you want him to go?

Oh wow. Oh man, that’s tough. Hmm, maybe Star Wars?

I can see him in The Bear. Have you seen that show?

I haven’t seen The Bear!

I keep telling everyone to watch it, so now I’m telling you that.

Where can I see it?

It’s on Hulu. It stars Jeremy Allen White from Shameless, and he plays a former fine-dining chef who goes back to run his family’s restaurant and finds out it’s more intense than expected. It’s a different kind of intense than The Boys, and I think MM could run that ship well.

Oh, I’m gonna go watch it! Thank you.

‘The Boys’ Season 3 finale is currently streaming on Amazon Prime.

For the 10th time in WNBA history, one of its players will receive a signature sneaker. Puma announced on Friday morning that Seattle Storm star Breanna Stewart will become the league’s first player in a decade to have her name affiliate with a shoe when the Stewie 1 Quiet Fire drops in September.

Per Nick DePaula of ESPN and Boardroom, Stewart will debut the sneaker this weekend at the WNBA All-Star Game in Chicago.

Here are some additional images of the shoe, which includes a sharp green and black colorway with Stewart’s logo on the tongue.

“Working with Puma to craft the first women’s signature basketball sneaker in the last 12 years was an honor,” Stewart, who joins LaMelo Ball as current basketball players to have a signature Puma kick, said in a statement. “I hope that this is the first in a legacy of signature sneakers to come for women athletes across all sports and serves as inspiration for all young people that this, along with any achievement, is possible.”

Boardroom hinted that Stewart won’t just get a sneaker as part of her partnership with Puma — Ian Stonebrook writes that there will be “accompanying apparel.” Stewart, a two-time WNBA champion and one-time WNBA MVP, will appear in her fourth All-Star Game this weekend.

Over the past few months, four-man hip-hop band Coast Contra has slowly but surely seen its profile rise thanks to a string of viral freestyle videos that see the quartet sitting around a table in their studio trading bars to underground rap faves like Mobb Deep’s “Give Up The Goods,” Nas’ “Speechless,” and JID’s “Never.” Their increased notoriety landed them a performance slot on The Tonight Show last month, their debut television performance, and today, they’ve received what might be their biggest look yet as pop-R&B icon Ciara recruits them to appear on her new single “Jump.”

One of the group’s claims to fame is the raucous, upbeat energy of their back-and-forth rhymes, which harkens back to the unified flows of groups like The Furious Five, Jurassic 5, and more recently, Brockhampton. Their synchronization evokes the lock-step tightness of Ciara’s backup dancers performing the intricate choreography of hits like “Goodies,” “Dose,” or “Melanin.” And while “Jump” isn’t the best showcase for Coast Contra’s sometimes dizzying lyricism, it does showcase their tight-knight chemistry and gives a whole new audience a taste of their unique style — perhaps enough to inspire some more listening and convert a whole new fanbase.

Watch Ciara’s “Jump” video above.

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 – The time has come to get silly

There are a lot of good shows clanging around right now. The Bear is getting people all riled up and reminding me what it was like to work in a kitchen for one summer. Stranger Things is dropping mammoth episodes that reveal mammoth plot details. Better Call Saul is about to return for its final clump of episodes. It’s an embarrassment of riches. It is also all very stressful. Especially The Bear. I’m still a few episodes behind on that because it might be the least binge-y show I’ve seen in years. Good, yes, sure, but two straight episodes of it and I’m ready to smoke a cigarette for the first time since college. It’s not ideal.

Luckily, there are alternatives on the way. Good, fun, silly shows that will lower your bubbling anxiety level. Shows with wonderful vibes and goofs for the sake of goofs and the right kind of energy to watch at night while you are winding down and don’t want to chew your fingernails into useless little nubbies. Shows that both return for new seasons this month. The first of these is What We Do in the Shadows, which is back on Tuesday.

We have talked about this show many times, with good reason. It’s a delightfully little program. We’ve got vampires living on Staten Island and getting into little adventures and sometimes going on the run in character as regular human bartenders named Jackie Daytona. It’s smart and stupid and maybe the most purely funny show anywhere right now. I don’t say that lightly. This is a show that has Matt Berry and his tremendous voice and uses both of them to say things like this.

It’s a good show. In the new season, one of the characters, an “energy vampire” named Colin Robinson who derives his power by sucking the life out of people through boredom, has recently died and a smaller, more childlike version of him has burst out of his lifeless body. So there’s a toddler on the show now. With an adult’s face. It’s a whole thing.

Speaking of whole things that are weird and fun and cool, the Harley Quinn cartoon is back later this month for a third season.

This is another one we’ve talked about before, a few times, because it’s good. Better than it should be, honestly. It’s profane and silly and surprisingly sweet at times, especially with the relationship between Harley and Poison Ivy, who, by the end of season two, have become a couple. The voice cast is incredible. Kaley Cuoco, Lake Bell, Tony Hale, James Adomian, etc etc etc. My favorite is Christopher Meloni as a kind of depressed Commissioner Gordon who sometimes plays with the Bat Signal because he needs someone to talk to.

Again, it’s good. Both shows are good. You should definitely watch them both. You have enough time to binge the first two seasons of Harley if you haven’t seen it yet. You don’t have time to catch up on Shadows before the premiere (unless you don’t sleep, which you should not do), but if you haven’t gotten in there yet, there’s no time like the present to start. Go ahead. Relax. Have some fun. It is July and it’s too hot to be stressed out over television.

ITEM NUMBER TWO — Meanwhile, across the pond

Something very important happened in England this week. No, not the thing about Boris Johnson resigning as Prime Minister. I mean, kind of that, but not really that. We have important business to get to here. Specifically, we have the thing in tweet up there to get to. The thing where, as the British news was reporting on the resignation of Boris Johnson live from London, someone was blasting “Yakety Sax” from The Benny Hill Show.

This is… funny. It’s really funny. One of the funnier things I’ve ever seen, maybe. And very British. Just absurdly British. I spent the better part of 20 minutes today trying to come up with the American equivalent of this — an impossible task, due to a number of reasons including, but not limited to, people who know things about it using actual phrases like “activate the Queen” — and the closest I came was “the President resigns and someone shows up on the White House lawn with a boombox that is blasting the music from Jackass.” Not perfect, but close.

And it gets better. A lot better. Because once you get past the part where this actually was a thing that happened, you are naturally going to, like, why and how it happened. And then you, like me, will look into it. And then you’ll discover that the song was played by a political activist who was put up to it all by Hugh Grant. Yes, that Hugh Grant. And he did it via tweet. Look at this.

So, to recap, we have:

• The Prime Minister of England resigned in disgrace
• The Queen being activated
• The whole thing being set to the Benny Hill music
• Hugh Grant being a naughty boy online

This is easily the most British thing I’ve ever seen. And one of the best. Every single layer that unfolded was better than the last. I really did not ever expect to be this interested in British politics. Here I am, though. I don’t even know where else it can go from this point. Maybe there’s a clause that makes Jason Statham the new Prime Minister. Or the king. That would be cool. And funny. I would like it a lot.

Here’s the main takeaway from all of this, whatever it is.

Accurate. This has been a helpful and informative chat about global relations. Now, moving to more important matters…

ITEM NUMBER THREE – I need new pictures from the set of Barbie every day, please and thank you

Here’s the thing about the upcoming Barbie movie: I love it. Which is weird. It’s a little weird. It’s not, in theory, a movie narrowly tailored to my target demo, and it’s not, in theory, something that would be able to cut through the noise just from a series of paparazzi photos from the set. And yet! We all have plenty to consider here.

Part of it is the talent involved. We’ve got Greta Gerwig behind the camera and everyone from Margot Robbie to Ryan Gosling to Will Ferrell in front of it. It’s an embarrassment of riches, really, and the least you can do if you’re trying to cash in on a children’s toy with a big-budget film (see also, The LEGO Movie, also starring Will Ferrell), so there’s all of that. But mostly, if we’re being honest, and why would we lie about this, it’s the photos. They’re good photos.

My colleague Josh Kurp wrote about all of this more eloquently than I suspect I can, so let me just link to the thing he wrote and post another picture.

It’s perfect. Look at… well, look at all of it. The colors and the rollerblades and the pretty people in colors and rollerblades. It’s all so good that it has temporarily made me forget to be angry about the thing where Ryan Gosling is funny and charming and talented and literally looks like a Ken doll so much that they cast him as a Ken doll. It’s too much. Come on, buddy. Share with the rest of us a little bit. It’s tough out here.

All of which is to say, yes, again, I’m excited, to the point that I’m already dreading the moment where I have to ask some poor theater employee for a ticket to it while both of us make the faces you’re picturing now. It’s really going to be hard to improve on any of it. I mean, I don’t even see how you c-…

Okay. Fine. Yes. This is a movie I would watch. Let Barbie and Paddington get married and live in a castle. They can be the new king and queen of England. This will solve a lot of our problems.

ITEM NUMBER FOUR – Oh, look, it’s my new favorite shows

This is a trailer for an upcoming television show called The Resort. It looks so good. I want it now. Here’s the description in its most basic form…

Noah and Emma are vacationing in the Mayan Riviera at the Oceana Vista Resort for their 10th anniversary. Noah has been content with life, whereas Emma feels like their marriage isn’t advancing. They are then pulled into an unsolved mystery of two missing persons from fifteen years ago, which tests the resolve of their marriage.

… and here’s a list of people who are in it: Cristin Milioti, William Jackson Harper, Nick Offerman, Skyler Gisondo. That is a really good list of people with really good resumes. We’ve got alums of The Good Place and Parks & Rec and a current star of The Righteous Gemstones and freaking Cristin Milioti, who is great in everything, but especially in Palm Springs. Remember how good Palm Springs was? Go watch it again this weekend if you don’t. It’s on Hulu. You won’t regret it even a little.

In fact, now that I think about it… this show feels like it has a Palm Springs kind of vibe. Maybe with a little Lodge 49 thrown in. Lodge 49 was so good. God, that was such a good show. I wonder why The Resort is giving me all the good vibes from television shows and movies I like. Let’s head over to IMDb and check out some of the credits for its showrunner, Andy Siara, who is co-producing w-… aaaaaaand he wrote Palm Springs and was a writer on Lodge 49.

It’s nice when things make sense. We are definitely watching that show. And we are watching this one, too. Probably.

This show looks so strange. I am either going to love it or bail after 1.5 episodes because I am cringing so hard it is grinding my bones to dust. This is the thing about Nathan Fielder. He’s both a genius and maniac, in a way that can legitimately unsettle me sometimes. I don’t know. I have trouble putting it all into words. Luckily, the good folks at Vulture put it into words for me in this long profile of him and the new show.

As the series progresses, the line between Fielder’s life and work blurs, until he finds himself at the center of his own experiment. At times, he seems to question the wisdom of manipulating people the way he does. When the teacher likens him to Willy Wonka, he looks disturbed. “Isn’t he the bad guy?” he asks. As the credits roll, we hear the eerie tinkling of a celesta, the swell of strings, and then Gene Wilder’s voice, soft as cotton candy. To engineer a moment of intimacy with the teacher, he takes him to a heated pool. Hoping to get the guy to open up, he says he was once married. The teacher begins talking about the pain of his own divorce, but a moment later, the conversation ends. “I didn’t want to go too deep into my private life,” Fielder explains in voice-over, “so I had preplanned for an elderly swimmer to interrupt us.” The Fielder who appears in these scenes is not unlike the real Fielder. “You’re seeing me control and not wanting to share,” he told me. “I’m aware that I’m like that, and so it’s in the show.”

Yeah. Like I said, I’m either going to adore this show or watch it through the fingers that are over my eyes for a week or two and then go watch Palm Springs again instead. A fascinating conundrum we have on our hands here.

ITEM NUMBER FIVE – Let Joe Pera have a show

I have terrible news. Joe Pera Talks With You, the nicest show on television, one that was unlike anything else anywhere, one that was somehow heartfelt and chaotic and peaceful all at once, was canceled by Adult Swim after three seasons. Pera announced the news in a typically lovely note on his own website, which briefly crashed under the weight of the sudden traffic to it, which is kind of perfect and something that would have made a great episode of the show. If it hadn’t been canceled. I’m sad again.

Let’s just blockquote Joe.

It was the best when I’d meet someone after a show and they’d mention they watched the Christmas Tree Special every December, or tell me that the sleep episodes actually work, or that they showed the series to their Dad and at first he hated it but now they watch it together regularly.

I thought about that as I ate my chicken sandwich and fries. I also thought about how we were really just getting going. This winter I spent three weeks in Marquette doing research (also drinking beer) and was filled with new ideas. But mostly, it’s a shame that the characters’ stories can’t continue. I knew where things were headed but I won’t say here cause part of me is holding out hope that sometime down the line we can film a proper ending for Joe, Sarah, the Melskys, Gene, Lulu, and most importantly, Fred the Sample Guy.

We had an idea where Fred starts a ‘Regret Club’ where people are encouraged to come and share things they regret most in their lives under the pretense that the club will help them find some resolution but Fred hasn’t planned that far ahead and everyone just gets pissed off at him.

At the same time, I thought about how lucky we were. The more I learn how TV works, the more I realize that it’s kind of a miracle that our quiet, 11-minute show about rocks, beans, grocery stores, and breakfast crews got on the air and lasted as long as it did.

I hate this. It feels strange to say in a world where there are 50,000 shows on 500 channels and/or streaming sites, but there are really so few original things happening out there. This show was one of them. It moved at its own pace in such an oddly confident way. Like, there was a whole episode about just going to the grocery store. There was a whole season where the main unifying story was “Joe builds a bean arch.” Watch the video embedded at the top of this section. It’s just Joe Pera talking to you and helping you get to sleep. It sounds like the most boring thing ever when you just type it out like this. But it worked. It was kind of incredible.

I’m really bummed out about this one. I’m sure everyone involved will land on their feet, if only because everyone involved was talented enough to pull this one off. But still. It stinks to lose something that was legitimately unique. There are enough outlets around that something like this should just be allowed to exist.

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 Phil:

I was driving to drop my son off at his friend’s house yesterday and we drove past a homemade sign for a little lawn and garden business that was stapled to a lightpole that said “PAUL LANDSCAPING.” Before I had even processed any of it, I said “good fake name” out loud under my breath. This is your influence at work.

Oh god. Oh, Phil. Phil, I am so sorry. Actually… wait. I’m not really sorry. I’m howling with laughter. I do feel a little bad that my stupid love of dumb fake names has infiltrated your brain, but mostly I’m happy. PAUL LANDSCAPING. I can picture him now. He has a mustache and a safari hat and he’s strutting through the produce section of the fancy supermarket in the area that’s not Whole Foods but is kind of Whole Foods. He has lots of opinions about bell peppers.

Anyway, if you’re wondering if this is just a bit on my part, that maybe I’m all talk and not really committed to the fake name lifestyle, please know that I ended up on a detour due to construction last weekend and saw this sign and immediately whipped my handicap-accessible minivan off the road and into the parking lot so I could take this picture and make this joke.

I do not regret any of it.

AND NOW, THE NEWS

To Nebraska!

Three semi-trailers full of meat products were stolen this weekend in Grand Island and the thefts may be part of a nationwide trend.

MEAT HEIST

MULTIPLE MEAT HEISTS

NATIONWIDE MEAT HEIST EPIDEMIC

“It does not look like it was possible for a single person to conduct these thefts. Most likely it was a minimum of two people or more and then on top of that we have a similar thefts of meat products in other areas such as Colfax County and Omaha over the past several weeks that are probably related,” Grand Island Police Captain Jim Duering said.

Two things are important to note here:

• In the original Fast & Furious movie, Dominic Toretto and company were operating as a team to steal DVD players from trucks that were driving down the highway
• It would be extremely funny to me if the next movie — the tenth, one after they went to space and two after a cyberterrorist played by Academy Award winner Charlize Theron tried to steal a nuclear submarine — took them back to basics for a meat heist

Vin. Please. If you’re reading this. Please. For me. Meat heist. Vin.

The Nebraska State Patrol found the two tractors and two of the trailers outside Grand Island city limits. The trailers were empty. One of the tractors was found Sunday in Lancaster County. The third trailer, which reportedly contains $232,666 worth of beef from JBS Swift, was still missing as of Monday morning.

“We think it’s probably the same crew who made two trips and took the meat into two different locations. At some point you can’t unload 160,000 pounds of meat without having another truck available. If those were stolen or not, we don’t know,” Duering said.

This is the only thing I care about now. Imagine the amount of work that went into this. Imagine the layers of planning. To steal meat. Not a Picasso, not a priceless diamond. Meat. I will never get over this.

“The first tractor and trailer that was taken had a little over $232,000 worth of meat. If you look at the cost of beef right now it can be anywhere between $200,000 to $1 million depending on what meat cut was on board at the time.”

MILLION-DOLLAR MEAT HEIST

If that’s not the title of some straight-to-VOD movie starring like the third lead from a lesser CSI spinoff by next summer, I am going to be so angry at everyone.

Now that Thor: Love and Thunder has rumbled into theaters, Marvel fans are blowing up social media with their reactions to the film. While the reviews have been mixed for the fourth installment in the Thor franchise, there’s been a steady common denominator with both viewers and critics: Christian Bale absolutely nails his performance as Gorr the God Butcher.

First introduced in 2012’s Thor: God of Thunder by writer Jason Aaron, Gorr is a terrifying threat who goes on god-killing spree across space and time that is like nothing Thor has ever faced before. For his live-action portrayal, Bale hews closely to the character’s almost colorless look while tossing in influences from Nosferatu to Aphex Twin. (There was talk of giving the character a Kate Bush dance number, but it never made into the film.) The actor also had to work with extremely long nails that apparently were the hardest part of his villainous transformation. Bale has drastically altered his body for roles, but throw long nails on him, and he has no idea what to do.

Despite being buried underneath a considerable amount of make-up, prosthetics, and black ooze, Bale delivered one heck of a performance that Marvel fans have been praising on social media since the film opened on Thursday night. In fact, Bale is so good that they wish there was more of him in Love and Thunder, which clocks in as one of the shortest MCU movies.

You can see just a small tase of the praise for Bale’s performance below:

Thor: Love and Thunder is now playing in theaters.

The American Century Championship celebrity golf tournament will take place this weekend in Lake Tahoe, Nevada. The tournament usually quite entertaining, as a bunch of celebs do funny stuff while also scratching their competitive itch. There is one constant through all of this: Charles Barkley shows up, competes, and does not do particularly well.

But things might be different this year. Tony Romo, the favorite to win the whole thing, said that Barkley “hit the ball really well” during a driving range session and would bet on a finish in the top-70 of the 87-player field. According to David Purdum of ESPN, Las Vegas agrees, and bettors have been pouring money onto a good finish for the Inside the NBA stalwart.

Caesars Sportsbook opened Barkley as a 5-1 underdog to finish in the top 70. As of Thursday, Barkley’s odds had improved to +260, with 96% of the bets on 95% of the money wagered backing the NBA Hall of Famer to finish in the top 70.

There is, however, one person who very strongly disagrees: Wardell Stephen Curry II, who told the press that he is far less confident in a good finish for Chuck.

“No, hell no,” Curry said. “Clip that, send it to him, let him play it on every tee box. There’s no way he’s doing it. As much faith as Chuck has had in the Warriors and jump shooting teams winning championships, that’s the amount of faith I have in him hitting the top-70.”

Barkley finished 76th at the event last year. Curry finished in first place in NBA Finals MVP voting recently as the Golden State Warriors beat the Boston Celtics to win their fourth championship in the last eight years.