Category: News

Before this interview, I’ve had three encounters with Glen Powell. The first time was in 2016, when Richard Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some!! was up for a Gotham Award and there was an extra seat at the cast’s table and Paramount asked if I wanted to take it. (The thinking, I believe, is if they are paying for that seat anyway, maybe they can get some easy press out of it; six years later, that gamble has finally paid off.) This sounds like a fun idea in theory, until I showed up and it kind of hit me, oh, these people all made a movie together and I have nothing to do with that movie and, my goodness, this is going to be awkward. Memories of being the new kid at school during the first lunch break, not knowing anyone and not knowing where to sit, came flooding back. It will probably not surprise you to learn that the cast of that movie is a pretty fun hang. And Powell was certainly an alpha dog at the table among the actors (Megan Ellison was also at the table and she, too, is very much an alpha dog) and I could tell quickly, once he was nice to me, everyone was nice to me. Even when he didn’t have to be nice to the idiot literally crashing their party, he realy was.

The second was in February 2020. Paramount was hosting a mid-day screening of Top Gun: Maverick footage with the cast. As you probably know, February 2020 was a strange time in New York City. I remember that were a lot of handshakes and a lot of running to the bathroom to immediately wash those hands. Everything said about the release of the movie kind of ended with some sort of postscript, “assuming everything turns out to be okay.” (It, uh, did not.) But Powell was noticeably excited. Now, having seen the final, yeah, I can see why. Imagine knowing your whole life is about to change in just a couple months.

Turns out, all our lives were about to change, and Top Gun: Maverick wouldn’t be in a movie theater for another 27 months.

The third was when we were both, randomly, trying to hail a cab after the New York City premiere of Ghostbusters: Afterlife. Powell was getting into his cab, but when he saw me, he said, “I’m going to message you, I have something to tell you.” True to his word, a few minutes later, I started getting messages from Powell about how excited he was for Top Gun: Maverick and that, once I saw it, I’m “going to lose my mind.” Yeah, sure, he was hyping up the movie a bit. Though, at the time, I was still very excited for his excitement. It’s nice to see actors not pretend that what they are doing isn’t cool.

And then I saw Top Gun: Maverick and Powell was right, I lost my mind.

“Talking to Tom about how the first movie changed his life, I feel like this is, at least, a next chapter for me in my career,” says Powell, who is probably correct about that feeling. “And, sometimes, holding onto that secret is tough to not share the excitement that you have with the rest of the world. But also, career-wise, it’s sometimes hard to wait for your career to start a little bit? Even until about two weeks ago, I still felt like I was putting on my tuxedo for a wedding that wasn’t going to happen. You know what I mean?”

In Top Gun: Maverick, Powell plays Jake Seresin, call sign Hangman. Hangman, along with other crack pilots, have been assembled at Top Gun to train for a very dangerous and complex mission, and their instructor is Pete Mitchell, call sign Maverick, of course played by Tom Cruise. Powell originally auditioned to play Bradley Bradshaw, the son of Goose, Maverick’s late best friend (played by Anthony Edwards in the first film, his son is huge source of tension for Maverick in the new one). That part would go to Miles Teller and Powell was instead offered the role of Hangman, who is the best pilot on the team, and isn’t shy about letting people know that fact. (There’s an easy comparison to make to Val Kilmer’s Iceman here. But Hangman isn’t Iceman, except probably for the attention the actor playing each role gets after the movie is released.)

“I was sort of waffling on whether I was going to do the movie or not,” says Powell about when the offer for Hangman came. “This character didn’t exist on the page. And it was a real leap of faith that Tom convinced me to do. This character was not even close to what it is on the screen at the end of the day. So I really had to take a leap of faith in the fact that we were going to start shooting with a character that had nothing to say and a character that had no great payoff anywhere in this movie.”

Powell’s biggest problem with the character was that Hangman was a braggart, but was consistently wrong. If you go back and watch the original Top Gun, Iceman bullies Maverick, but what’s interesting is, it’s not macho hazing, it’s Iceman not wanting for him or the other pilots to be killed. In the final film, Hangman isn’t a bully, but he’s not afraid to be, let’s say, blunt. But the character needed a lot of work from the script. “His original call sign was Slayer,“ says Powell. “And he was a guy who wasn’t right. He wasn’t a wingman, but he also wasn’t right in what he was doing. And I told Tom, I was like, hey, I can be a jerk. I’m happy to play a guy who lacks sensitivity in that way in terms of delivering the news. But he’s got to be right at the end of the day. And Hangman is a character that I think is so fun because yeah, Maverick and Rooster should not be flying together. That is information that needs to be out on the table because that’s information that could get everybody killed.”

Powell continues, “I think the danger of playing this type of role is you’re playing a derivative Iceman, right? And this character was not even an inspired Iceman with a point of view. It was a character in which he was just the voice of dissent and a negative opinion in the room with no purpose or grounding. And that was a thing in which I go, well, that guy is not a guy I root for. I don’t want to live in those boots for this amount of time.” Powell was then promised by Cruise, director Joseph Kosinski, and co-writer Christopher McQuarrie that the character would be fleshed out.

Randomly, I know multiple people who just know Powell in their normal lives, and I have yet to meet anyone who has a bad word, even privately, to say about him. It makes me think Glen Powell is the kind of person who just kind of knows everyone. One of those people is actor Phil Burke (from Hell on Wheels and who, a few years ago, was also one of my favorite New York City bartenders). The pair met in 2014 on the set of a movie called Windwalkers. A few years ago, without prompting, on a sunny New York City Saturday of day drinking, Burke wanted to tell his (I like to assume) favorite customer (me) about his buddy who just got cast in Top Gun: Maverick.

What was odd about the interaction was there was not one hint of envy at Powell’s success (and I’ve been around enough actors to know that’s kind of rare). I reached out to Burke this week to talk about Powell and he wrote me back a very long email with a lot of stories that don’t really fit in the confines of this particular piece (one involves an alligator; “He may be in Top Gun, and he may have broken some sound barriers up in the Big Blue, but if you want to see a man squirm you talk about alligator-infested waters in Florida”). I’ll have a little more from Burke in a bit.

But, to Burke’s point, Powell has a tendency to deflect questions about himself or his character by praising his colleagues. I asked Powell about walking the tightrope on a character who is smug, but at the same time remains likable to the audience. Instead of answering that, he started praising co-star Monica Barbaro, who plays a pilot named Phoenix, “Phoenix’s character, I’ve got to give Monica Barbaro so much credit. That is an incredibly difficult character to embody because you’re representing all female aviators and you have to be part of the squadron. You don’t want to be in your own pack or your own lane. You want to be part of the group. And yet you have to stand out. And standing out is part of being a female in the Navy, but you have to look proficient because you want to inspire more female aviators. And I think that’s important. So it’s a really delicate dance.”

To not spoil this, I will keep it vague, but Powell’s Hangman has a pretty big moment in the film’s third act. The audience at my screening erupted in applause. When I asked Powell if he knew this moment would be a crowdpleaser when he read it in the script, I was shocked to find out this scene did not exist. “That wasn’t in the original draft,” says Powell. “He just disappears from the script at a certain point. And so, Tom and I discussed that.” There’s literally a point in Top Gun: Maverick we all just knew Hangman was coming back. Which, once you see the film, it’s kind of hard to imagine the movie without that scene.

This has to be a tough moment for an actor in a big movie like this. Weighing the balance between this character suggestion will benefit the movie and this character suggestion will benefit me. The thing is, sometimes both can be true. Powell explains, “The interesting thing, when you’re making a movie, you have to really separate your ego from the story. Right? And it’s so crucial. And I feel like it’s where so many movie stars misstep. Tom just doesn’t have that in him. He really understands how to put himself out of the process and go, What’s best for the story? And in that moment, I really did, I could authentically sell it because I really felt like it was best for the story, not just for me as a character or an actor. I was like, no, I think the audience needs to sense a completion.”

Powell continues, “But on the page at the time, Hangman just disappeared. I felt the exact same way you did. I was like, man, I feel like the audience is going to be left off without the sense of completion.”

So, I had heard a rumor about the, let’s say, spiritual sequel to the original Top Gun volleyball scene – this time a beach football game. (This scene alone will probably cement Powell quite a few new fans.) The rumor I heard was Tom Cruise wouldn’t tell anyone exactly when this scene would be shot so no one could fully prepare for one particular day, physique-wise. So, instead, everyone just had to always be on their toes that this might be the day they have to film shirtless. “We shot it the first time, we literally, we brought beer to the beach,” says Powell. “We immediately went out to this Tater Tot Bar in San Diego. We binged on as many carbs as possible. The first time we shot it, he didn’t push it. The date was set. We executed on that date, and we did the whole thing. Then we celebrated, and then we were told we were going to shoot it again in a couple weeks.”

Powell continues, ”So then everybody, after the craziest night at tequila and tater tots and beer, we had to go back into the trenches and everybody’s back in the hotel gym doing crunches until they cried. And then we re-shot it again. And I believe there was even a third time, if I’m not mistaken, where we had to do it again. And it was just like this thing where there was this rumor constantly. And I’m not sure if it was so that we didn’t gain a ton of weight over the course of this movie and be drastically looking different. But there was always this rumor around set that we were going to re-shoot the beach montage. So when you have that level of fear, a montage, like kind of weighing on your shoulders at any given time, you make the right decisions in the kitchen.”

Finally, back to Phil Burke from earlier, my former bartender and friend of Glen Powell — after he finishes up with all the amusing stories (I do love that the stories he provided would be better served for a roast rather than a glowing piece like this one; another one involves Powell’s love of the movie Armageddon), he sums everything up about Powell with a closing thought, “The guy is second to none. Love that man and excited to see him continue moving and shaking.”

‘Top Gun: Maverick’ will open in theaters on May 24th. You can contact Mike Ryan directly on Twitter.

For the past few years now, Billy McFarland has been in prison. If the name’s not ringing a bell, he’s the guy behind the infamously disastrous Fyre Festival that led to him being convicted of fraud. In October 2018, he was sentenced to six years in prison. However, McFarland actually managed to get out of custody sooner than that.

NBC News reported yesterday that on March 30, McFarland was transferred to a low-security federal prison in Michigan before being placed in a New York City halfway house on May 18, according to the Bureau Of Prisons. He’s expected to stay there until August.

McFarland previously claimed that his poor Fyre Fest decisions were caused by mental illness: In 2018, before McFarland was sentenced, his lawyer wrote in a letter to US District Judge Naomi Buchwald, “Nothing in this case speaks to any malicious intent on his part. Just a sea of bad judgment, poor decisions, and the type of core instability that can only be explained by mental illness.” The letter also said McFarland has “delusional beliefs of having special and unique talents that will lead to fame and fortune.”

Coincidentally, Martin Shkreli, the pharmaceutical CEO also known for buying the sole copy of the Wu-Tang Clan’s Once Upon A Time In Shaolin album, was also just released from prison early.

While the people of Pennsylvania still don’t know which Republican’s name will be on the official ballot when they cast their vote for a new senator in November, they do know is that it won’t be Kathy Barnette’s. While the QAnon conspiracy theory-spouting candidate saw a last-minute surge in popularity that had the MAGA World sweating, ultimately the race has come down to TV quack Dr. Oz and David McCormick, who served as the Under Secretary of the Treasury for International Affairs for George W. Bush. But Barnette, whose only real political experience is getting squashed in a 2020 run for a House seat that she has yet to concede, is not about to go quietly—or believe for one second that she had anything to do with coming in third in PA’s primaries. Nope, Barnette is blaming her loss on Sean Hannity—and the Fox News host is not having it.

Last week, Hannity spent almost the entirety of one show talking about Barnette’s meteoric, last-minute rise—then promptly trashing her.

On Wednesday, Barnette posted a video to Twitter in which she thanked her supporters—then claimed that it was Hannity’s fault that she didn’t win. “Never forget what Sean Hannity did in this race,” Barnette said. “Almost single-handedly Sean Hannity sowed deep seeds of disinformation, flat out lies every night for the past five days and that was just extremely hard to overcome.”

But Hannity wasn’t about to let the so-called “Ultra-MAGA” get away with trashing him. As Mediaite reports, he addressed Barnette’s accusations on Wednesday night, saying:

Third-place finisher Kathy Barnette is now attacking yours truly on Twitter. She’s putting out videos blaming me for her loss. Kathy, my first instinct was to put up all of your incendiary tweets again, and there’s a ton of them, but I really don’t need to defend myself.

You’re the one that really needs to answer the questions about all of your comments, and all of your tweets that are there. You can lash out at me all you want. You’re not the first person. But everything that we revealed is true. Prior to the election, we attempted to reach out to you and your campaign for comment over and over and over again. You and your team refused to get back to us to give us answers.

Now, maybe you stand by your past comments, maybe you don’t. But you refused to answer our questions. In fact, you only responded to me publicly on Twitter, and then I tweeted you back and said I would invite you on for a debate the day before election day with all the other candidates. I’m on 675 stations nationwide. You never got back to me. That, unfortunately would be on you.

Ouch!

Hannity did admit, however, that he likes Barnette. But that until she addresses the pile of controversial comments she has made in the past, which include anti-Muslim and anti-LGBTQ rhetoric, or the fact that she marched with the Proud Boys on January 6, she would be “unelectable in Pennsylvania and a general election.”

(Via Mediaite)

Top Gun: Maverick brought Tom Cruise to Cannes for the first time in 30 years. The last movie to do so, interestingly enough, was Far And Away, co-starring Tom’s second wife, Nicole Kidman. At the 2022 edition of the festival, the showcasing of that film didn’t include any moments where Kidman was onscreen, and according to Variety, that was a pattern as the festival paid tribute to Tom’s wide-ranging career.

Yup, Tom’s gonna Tom Cruise as much as possible, and more power to him, sure, while pushing back against questions about his stunt obsession, but the Kidman omission — she was virtually erased from all three blockbuster movies in which they appeared together — seems difficult to overlook. As Variety describes things, the Days of Thunder portion of Tom’s career montage only included him driving a car. With Far and Away, Tom was shown atop a horse. And you’d never know that Kidman was splashed across marquees for Eyes Wide Shut from how that film was highlighted:

And, of course, “Eyes Wide Shut” made the grade, it being the final film from auteur-iest of auteurs Stanley Kubrick (the French love their filmmakers!). That erotic drama featured Cruise and Kidman as a married couple whose relationship is challenged by the wife’s admission that she contemplated having an affair. But Cannes didn’t go with anything from the pair’s wrenching confessional moments. Instead, Cruise is glimpsed removing a mask.

It’s a little odd, yes, to completely erase Kidman’s existence, especially in that third (very notorious) movie where the pair was considered co-stars with the same level of star attraction. Thankfully, though, Tom Cruise did not erase Val Kilmer’s Iceman from Top Gun: Maverick (in fact, he insisted that Val appear in the sequel). That would have been several steps too far.

Top Gun: Maverick premieres on May 24.

(Via Variety)

The Masked Singer, by design, is full of surprises, and naturally, that was true of yesterday’s season finale, too. The episode was a hot contest between the Prince, Firefly, and Ringmaster characters, with Firefly ultimately emerging as the victor. Sure enough, when Firefly was unmasked, it turned out to be Teyana Taylor.

In the finale’s opening round, Taylor covered Usher’s “Bad Girl” before singing Robin Thicke’s “Lost Without You” in the final round, a performance that led to her being crowned the champion.

Taylor didn’t just steamroll over a couple non-singers to claim the title, either. The runner-up was Hayley Orrantia (as Ringmaster), who’s best known for her role as Erica Goldberg on The Goldbergs, but was also a contestant on the first season of The X Factor and released her debut EP, The Way Out, in 2019. Third was Cheyenne Jackson (as Prince), an actor (you may know him from 30 Rock, Glee, or American Horror Story) and Broadway veteran who has multiple albums, including some Broadway cast recordings, to his name.

As for Taylor’s resume, she’s super accomplished. Her third and latest album, 2020’s The Album, was her first to crack that top 10 on the Billboard 200 chart, peaking at No. 8. Her 2018 single “Gonna Love Me” was also a success, peaking at No. 10 on the Hot 100 and earning Platinum certification from the RIAA.

Check out Taylor’s performances from the season finale below. She also gave an interview following the big reveal, so find that below, too.

When I watched Boiler Room for the first time around its release in 2000, I never imagined that I’d still be thinking about it on a near-daily basis 22 years later. I don’t necessarily think that’s because Boiler Room is a landmark artistic achievement, though it is a pretty good movie — the kind of unpretentious genre thriller that Manny Farber would’ve called “termite art,” burrowing into its subject matter with a singular, relentless focus.

I remember it more for what it was about, and the fact that its relentless focus (the product of then 28-year-old writer/director Ben Younger) was turned upon a “pump-and-dump” scheme (though it also contains easily one of Vin Diesel’s best performances). I find myself constantly thinking about it because what was once a semi-niche financial crime, tailor-made for a slick genre thriller, seems to have gone not only mainstream in the years since, but nigh inescapable. The con that was once pitched over an aggressive phone call from a sweaty outer-borough pseudo frat house (the “boiler room” of the title) is now advertised during the Super Bowl. It’s discussed on late night television.

Boiler Room stars Giovanni Ribisi as Seth Davis, a comfortable suburban Jewish kid from Queens who gets drawn into the world of shady stock schemes, mostly out of a desire to escape his dull, predictable, upper-middle-class existence. He craves status. But, as he puts it, “I’m not a lottery winner. I tried ‘slinging crack rock’ and I never had a jump shot.”

Just as his home casino idea starts to become more trouble than it’s worth, Seth, in an attempt to “go straight,” gets himself a job at the intense, curiously low rent/high return brokerage firm “JT Marlin.” It’s there he gets a crash course in pumping and dumping — talking up a stock to rubes and whales to get them to buy in, thus artificially inflating the stocks’ value, so that those bankrolling the firm can then dump that same stock, which they already owned, having bought in for pennies. This inevitably sends the stock plummeting, wiping out their clients’ savings. Seth, and even his mentor, Greg Weinstein, are mostly ignorant of the latter part of this scheme, at least at first, having failed to question their own windfalls.

These days, JT Marlin doesn’t need Seth Davis. It has Larry David, Lebron James, Spike Lee, Gwyneth Paltrow, Tom Brady, and yes, Matt Damon, whose famous “fortune favors the brave” ad had the misfortune of coming out just before the price of Bitcoin reached its peak. Almost anyone famous who could read a teleprompter and cash a check seems to have shilled for cryptocurrency or NFTs at some point in the past year. Since its Damon-puffed peak (sorry, Matt) Bitcoin is down around 50%. Though it should be noted that I started writing this post when crypto was merely in a mild slump, and as of this paragraph it seems to be in a full-on freefall. I’m not going to predict where it will be when I eventually finish the last paragraph, or when my editor publishes this.

It was strange to watch a pattern I already recognized from a movie play out in real life, with uncanny similarity. Boiler Room not only presaged today’s crop of prestige TV, when almost every new show seems to be about a colorful, real-life white color sociopath running an inventive amoral scam — The Dropout, Inventing Anna, Super Pumped, WeCrashed — it’s also shocking the degree to which it, in all its termite-like burrowing, it nailed both the mindset and the method of this particular scam.

Don’t Pitch The Bitch

The first rule (and I stress, this was the FIRST RULE) Seth gets from his mentor is “don’t pitch the bitch.”

Even in the year 2000 (a particularly un-PC era, when you couldn’t turn on a television after midnight without seeing a Girls Gone Wild infomercial), Seth’s initial response to this question is something like “Whoa, buddy, that seems a little problematic, are you sure you mean what you say here?”

Instead, Greg makes it even more blunt. “We don’t sell stock to women.” (Ah, okay, I guess you did mean exactly what it sounded like, carry on).

“We don’t sell stock to women. I don’t care who it is, we don’t do it. Nancy Sinatra calls, you tell her you’re sorry. They’re a constant pain in the ass and you’re never going to hear the end of it alright? They’re going to call you every fucking day wanting to know why the stock is dropping and God forbid the stock should go up, you’re going to hear from them every fucking 15 minutes. It’s just not worth it, don’t pitch the bitch.” — Greg Weinstein, Boiler Room

It’s been hard, these past six months or so, not to think of this scene almost every time I turned on my television. After watching the Miami Heat take a run at the playoffs from the FTX Arena (the naming rights bought last March for $135 million), you can (still) catch a game break presented by Coinbase. After that, you can throw on a Formula 1 race or a UFC fight, both sponsored by Crypto.com (for $100 million and $175 million, respectively) — with a logo on every fighter’s post-fight shirt (they’re no longer able to have their own apparel sponsors like back in the olden days) and the side of every Octagon. If you’re a UFC fighter or a Sacramento King, you can even get your salary paid in cryptocurrency (though after the past few weeks I doubt many would want that).

Funny how you don’t see nearly as many Crypto ads during the Real Housewives or Below Deck Sailing Yacht. What could possibly explain this discrepancy? Easy: the world still has JT Marlins, and their trainees are still learning not to “pitch the bitch.”

Actually, it’s a little unclear whether there still are trainees. The crypto economy (or “web3,” if we’re being more inclusive here) seems to have streamlined the process. There’s no longer any need for a cold call or for the people who would make them. Now crypto billionaires can just hire Matt Damon and Dana White. The rubes probably don’t have landlines these days, but they do have TVs.

Maybe the sheer volume of money floating around should’ve been a clue. Why would companies spend enough money to afford Super Bowl ads starring the biggest stars on Earth to promote what was supposedly an investment opportunity? An investment with legitimate value probably wouldn’t need all that hype. But if it was an essentially worthless penny stock, like the ones JT Marlin was trading, and someone owned a bunch of them… well, if you’ve seen the movie, you know the rest.

Likewise, Boiler Room‘s brokers notably projected an air of legitimacy, of being financial industry insiders while working in an office somewhere out in the relative boondocks (“The office was a good hour away from Wall Street. Somebody forgot to tell the guys who worked there though,” Seth says in a voiceover). Should it have been a clue, in retrospect, that so many crypto companies were spending hundreds of millions of dollars to name American arenas and dominate its main cultural products while themselves being headquartered in regulation havens like Hong Kong, Singapore, and the Bahamas?

She Would’ve Done The Same To You

Boiler Room was released in a pre-2008 crash, pre-9/11 era when American institutions, at least compared to the ones millennials and zoomers and younger came of age with, seemed pretty solid. Seth’s craving for the high life could be blamed mostly on entitlement, on a desire to be “special,” rather than precarity or fear of scarcity (his father, notably, is a prominent judge). A lot of late 90s films took this tone. “We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars,” as Fight Club‘s narrator put it.

The 2000 and 2008 crashes, and years of seemingly solid institutions crumbling underfoot have only hardened the dog-eat-dog worldview espoused in Boiler Room among my own generation. One of its enduring scenes was Ben Affleck’s big speech to trainees. “You want vacation time? Go teach third grade, public school,” he memorably unloads, on a room full of awed trainees barely old enough to shave.

Affleck’s character is 27. “You know what that makes me here? A f*ckin’ senior citizen.”

The crypto economy was similarly youth and young-man driven. A profile of FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried was titled “Portrait of a 29-year-old billionaire.”

Surely the intention of the Affleck scene, as with Oliver Stone’s in Wall Street, was to depict these characters as amoral psychos. And just as with “greed is good,” almost as soon as it was released, Affleck’s “anyone who tells you money doesn’t buy happiness doesn’t fucking have any” speech, meant to satirize mindless grasping, was invoked as aspirational. It began to be used, basically, as a pump-up jam for brokers, cold callers, and multi-level marketers everywhere.

I spent some of my first post-college years in the pre-crash aughts, just after this movie came out, when its worldview felt fresher and less like an echo. When you felt like an idiot for not getting on board with the latest scam, slinging sub-prime mortgages or sketchy refis or whatever. A friend of mine at the time worked as a cold caller for an online college where the Ben Affleck speech was frequently sent around as a motivational tool. On one call, he eventually broke down and told a cautiously intrigued elderly woman that, you know what, she probably didn’t need to spend thousands of dollars of her savings learning how to sell things on the internet, which she didn’t even have at that point. At which point his supervisor, listening in on the other line took him aside. He demanded to know why he hadn’t taken her money when she was practically giving it away. The friend said he didn’t feel right doing it, because, essentially, it seemed cruel. To which the supervisor screamed, “She would’ve done the same to you!”

This, I think, is the worldview underpinning most of the boom-and-bust cycles ever since. I doubt many people who hyped crypto and NFTs genuinely believed they were promoting a societal good, or even that these investments had any intrinsic value. For people like Jimmy Fallon or Paris Hilton, who famously showed us their apes on late night TV, I assume they either got them at a discounted rate with the assumption they would talk about them publicly (which is illegal if it’s not disclosed), or had web3-optimistic business managers who did it. Either way, talking them up was all upside for them. Buying in low (presumably) they could only stand to benefit, inflating the value of a thing they owned (though I use the term “thing” loosely here).

Most people buying crypto and NFTs weren’t celebrities or insiders though. They were more or less gamblers, trying not to miss out on the latest quick buck. Can you really blame them? I think they probably saw it mostly for what it was: a scam, and they just wanted to be on the right side of one for once. To scam and not be scammed. In the absence of being able to produce anything worthwhile, this has become the new American Dream.

It was Seth’s dream in Boiler Room, only at some point he realized the error of his ways, spending the entire third act of the movie trying to get back a grocery store buyer’s life savings he’d grifted, as an act of penance. In retrospect, this might be the most Hollywood part of the story of all.

Vince Mancini is on Twitter. More reviews here.

Sudan Archives is getting into the swing of things in 2022. She kicked off her 2022 year with “Home Maker,” her first record in three years. The song arrived after she opened a number of tour dates for Tame Impala last year. After knocking off a few festival performances this year, Sudan is back in action with a new record called “Selfish Soul.” The song is a lively and fun one and it arrives with a music video that matches the track’s warm spirit. In it, Sudan dances and turns up with a group of Black women, plays the violin on a roof and upside down on a stripper pool, and much more.

In a press release about the new song and video, Sudan said the song is “about women and the celebration of hair. It’s about representation of different hair textures and embracing all colors and textures of it.” She added:

“I feel like there’s an American standard of what beautiful hair is, and I wanted to show in this video that’s not what all beauty is; to showcase different hairstyles and different types of women and their hair. I was inspired by India Arie’s ‘I Am Not My Hair’, one of the first songs I heard about this subject. She talks about extensions and weaves and natural hair and nappy hair, and that she’s not her hair; she won’t conform to the comparisons that would come up if you had a weave or sew-in or natural hair or Afro – that doesn’t represent her.”

You can watch the video for “Selfish Soul” above.

The Golden State Warriors played host to the Dallas Mavericks on Wednesday night in Game 1 of the Western Conference Finals, and after the Mavs’ stunning Game 7 dominance against the Suns to knock the reigning West champs out, there was plenty of buzz about what they could do in this series.

However, all that optimism was quickly reminded of the reality facing them in the conference finals, as the Warriors jumped out to an quick 10-point advantage after the first quarter, led by stifling defense that held the Mavs to just 18 points in the opening frame. Draymond Green provided the exclamation point to end the quarter with a block in the corner, but the entire team put the clamps on Dallas, as Green, Kevon Looney, and Andrew Wiggins, tasked with being Luka Doncic’s primary defender, all provided terrific efforts.

On the offensive end, it was a likewise slow start from Golden State, but Jordan Poole came off the bench and gave the Warriors a spark, as he’s done all season, providing efficient scoring and individual creation against a Mavs defense that has been stifling through two rounds.

That boost was needed, as Stephen Curry and Klay Thompson got off to ice cold starts offensively, but they were picked up by the “others” like Poole and Andrew Wiggins who scored 15 first half points to lead the Warriors.

Doncic would keep Dallas attached with 18 points to lead all scorers at the break, as he put forth his usual strong first half effort, including back-to-back threes in the second quarter to keep the Warriors from breaking the game wide open.

Still, despite the best efforts of Doncic, the Warriors were able to put together a little run to close the quarter and took a nine-point edge into the halftime break. The third quarter saw the Warriors runaway and hide from the Mavs, opening with a 10-2 run and pushing their lead out to 19 going into the fourth quarter as Curry and Poole got it going.

The avalanche continued in the fourth quarter, as the Warriors would push their lead to as many as 30 as the Mavs offense simply could never get out of first gear, while Poole, Curry, and the Warriors found their stride.

Eventually, the benches were emptied and the Warriors cruised to a 112-87 win, asserting their dominance early in the series. Neither team shot the ball particularly well from three, but the lack of alternative shot creation for the Mavs when nothing was falling was a telling sign that their only chance in the series is going to be if their three balls are falling.

Dallas hoisted 48 three-point attempts in the game and hit only 11 (that is a 23.4 percent rate), only attempting 38 shots from inside the arc. On the other side, the Warriors were just 10-of-29 from three (34.5 percent), but they dominated inside the arc, going 36-of-53 on two-point attempts as they punished the Mavs small lineup and took advantage of opportunities to get out and run in transition off of all of Dallas’ misses. It feels like those Warriors-Rockets series when Houston would put up 40-50 threes and hoped the shooting variance would win them four out of seven, but the problem is, long misses give Golden State opportunities to get out and run, negating Dallas’ strong improvement as a halfcourt defense.

Curry finished as the leading scorer on the night with 21 points, with Poole and Wiggins close behind at 19 each, as seven Warriors players reached double figures in the game. Doncic had just two second half points as he finished with 20 and there wasn’t a single Mav in the main rotation who shot over 50 percent on the night. Adjustments are needed from Dallas in Game 2, namely “make threes,” but also generating better shots and being able to slow Warriors runs with shots at the rim when their threes aren’t falling would go a long way in avoiding the long scoring droughts that let Golden State pile on and get the Chase Center rocking.

Towards the end of 2020, Eli Derby made his debut as one of LVRN’s newest signees with an appearance on the label’s Home For The Holidays Christmas album. The young singer was a stand out on the project thanks to his rendition of “This Christmas” with Summer Walker. Derby would go on to release a few singles in 2021 before unveiling his debut project, Left On Read. The project arrived with five songs and a feature from labelmate 6lack who stands beside him for the duo’s new video for “Lately.”

The duo’s slow-burning single sees them share their grievances about their respective lovers who seem to be entertaining other people outside of their relationship. In the video, Derby and 6lack sing about their concerns while showcasing intimate moments with their partner. On Derby’s side of things, he depicts his lover laying with another man as she ignores a phone call from him.

Derby’s Left On Read project is also highlighted by “Skyfall” and “Go Home” which round out the five-track EP. As for 6lack, the new visual comes after he released “Rent Free” and “By Any Means” to close out 2021. He also collaborated with Saba on “Still” which also features Smino.

You can watch the video for “Lately” above.

Left On Read is out now via LVRN and Interscope. You can stream it here.

On Tuesday, Vanity Fair published a sprawling piece on the future of the Star Wars franchise. Short version: It’s mostly a TV thing now. There are lots of Disney+-bound shows en route, but a noticeable dearth of multiplex-bound movie theaters. Taika Waititi has some under-wraps project, but that might see the light until the other 10,000 projects on his pipeline are completed. And no matter what they are, they won’t star young actors playing established characters, as Solo: A Star Wars Story semi-infamously did.

The next day VF ran a solo interview with Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy, who went even further: They don’t want anything to do with the original Skywalker Saga, which is to say the nine-film, three-trilogy run of movies spanning from The Phantom Menace through The Rise of Skywalker (though, of course, they weren’t made in that order).

“Just staying within the construct of George [Lucas]’s storytelling, to keep chipping away at that, I think would be wrong,” Kathleen told VF. “It’s our job to step away now, but still have a connection to the mythology that George created. That won’t stop. But we are moving on from the Skywalker saga. That’s what’s taking a lot of time, discussion, and thought right now.”

Mind you, Lucas did create a whole, bountiful galaxy, replete with endless characters and peoples and stories. Kennedy and team don’t have to keep returning to the Luke/Han/Leia (or Annakin/Obi-wan/Amidala, or Rey/Finn/Rylo-Ken) well. Which is why they’re doing it at least one more time, with Obi-Wan Kenobi, the forthcoming show that catches back up with one of the most iconic characters from the Skywalker Saga. But that’s different from the Han Solo prequel because, a) it’s not a prequel and b) they actually did get the original actor (or, well, the second actor, in three prequels) to return.

“We also can’t go do something with Luke Skywalker that isn’t Mark Hamill. We’re not going to suddenly go try to do that,” Kennedy said. “The beauty of Obi-Wan Kenobi is Ewan [McGregor] desperately wanted to do this. He has been so engaged in the entire process, and our excitement and reason for doing this is that the real Obi-Wan wanted to tell this story. We got excited by the idea that Ewan McGregor wanted to come back, and Hayden Christensen wanted to come back.”

But if you’re lamenting the possibility of no new Star Wars movie anytime soon, or even ever, fret not: Kennedy also discussed taking Star Wars into different mediums, such as Fortnite. She rhapsodized on “the ability to immerse people in stories, building avatars around your character that could actually participate in some way.” In other words, it’s like the computer games Lucasfilm has been making since the ‘90s (or even the arcade games in the ‘80s), but, you know, next level.

In the meantime, Obi-Wan Kenobi begins streaming on Disney+ on May 27, starring the guy who likes the prequels now but wasn’t so sure about them while they were being made.

(Via Vanity Fair)