Category: News

Ten years ago today, Christopher Nolan’s Inception arrived in theaters. I saw it opening weekend, and I think I liked it though I know I didn’t understand it. This seems like the typical reaction to Nolan’s work. Few filmmakers have ever made as much money by simultaneously dazzling and confounding movie audiences. And Inception is his single most dazzling and confounding film, a film about a crack team of corporate espionage thieves who specialize in “extracting” information out of powerful people’s dreams, which they achieve by traversing several layers of consciousness with the help of, um, state-of-the-art napping machines and incredible drugs. Somehow, this pulled in about $830 million worldwide at the box office.

When I called Inception Nolan’s most “dazzling” film, I don’t necessarily mean best (I think that’s probably Dunkirk) or the one I’ve seen the most (The Dark Knight) or even my favorite (lately, weirdly, The Dark Knight Rises) — I mean the one that bowls over audiences to maximum Nolan-esque, “holy fucking shit” effect. Inception does all of the things that we expect from him with the highest degree of difficulty, while also making sure that we know precisely how difficult pulling it off is. The puzzle pieces are smaller and the overall picture is more ornate and elliptical. We move freely between different versions of reality, in which characters swiftly morph into other characters, while the plot pieces are moved in and out of order, and explanations for how this all is supposed to work are spoken with great rapidity and sometimes drowned out by the booming and Wagnerian Hans Zimmer score.

Though the most spectacular aspect of Inception, in spite of all this, is how popular it was in 2010, and remains a decade later, when the prospect of an original summer blockbuster unattached to well-entrenched IP that still manages to pack theaters seems all the more extraordinary for Covid and non-Covid-related reasons. It’s the sort of achievement that, right or (definitely) wrong, might theoretically give a man license to remove every chair from his workplace environment. When it comes to the big-budget prestige summer film, Christopher Nolan stands alone.

Critics have always been a little slower to embrace Nolan than the general public, and the reviews of Inception — beyond the predictable “masterpiece!” raves from fanboy film websites — were a little mixed.

“It trades in crafty puzzles rather than profound mysteries, and gestures in the direction of mighty philosophical questions that Mr. Nolan is finally too tactful, too timid or perhaps just too busy to engage,” said the New York Times, which patted Inception on the head with the faint praise of being a “diverting reverie.” I probably would have agreed with that in 2010. Like I said, I enjoyed Inception, but I didn’t feel especially stimulated intellectually by what Nolan was doing. I was, to be frank, very stoned and very into staring blankly at Joseph Gordon Levitt levitate down hotel hallways.

But when I watched Inception again this week — I believe it was my fourth viewing, and the first one without chemical additives — I was surprised by how much it did make sense. Yes, I attribute 20 percent of that to not being baked. But there was something about this film that not only seemed logical now, but even sort of linear. And I realized that this was true because the way that I experience “the real world” has changed a lot since 2010, to the point where following Leonardo DiCaprio into the inner recesses of Cillian Murphy dream skull seem almost as mundane as logging on.

Follow me with this: Inception is a movie that’s basically about two things. The first is the so-called “nature of reality,” which is what every Nolan is about but Inception is really deep into. The central tension for Leo and all the other characters is whether they can maintain separation between the “waking” world and the “dream” world. At face value, the “dream” world seems almost obviously unreal as a place where large-scale gunfights with faceless, suited gunmen take place with regularity. But with greater immersion in this world comes a less firm grasp on what constitutes plausible “actual” life.

To assist with delineating these worlds, each person carries a totem unique only to them, which he or she can use as a kind of tether to the waking world as they drift deeper into the dream world. In the second half of the movie, when they’re attempting an inception caper inside Cillian Murphy’s cranium, we learn that the heavy sedatives they’ve taken to go deeper into his subconscious carry the risk that they will be sent adrift in a “limbo” zone where dreamers no longer realize that they’re in the “dream” world. This is pitched in Inception as a fate worse than death, a self-lobotomy in which a person risks living a vegetative “waking” life in order to live a “false” existence in a “dream” world.

The other thing that Inception is about is the possibility that ideas can be “stolen” from or “implanted” in our brains by other people who have invaded our consciousness without our consent or even knowledge. In the film, “extraction” is conceptualized as a relatively easy maneuver, so long as your team is headed up by Leo and backed by untold millions from Cobol Engineering. “Inception,” however, as we’re told many times by various people, is “impossible.” In the scene on Ken Watanabe’s helicopter, Levitt says that “true inspiration is impossible to fake” because “the subject can always trace the genesis of the idea,” an argument he illustrates by telling Watanabe to not think about elephants. (Now, for a moment, we’re all thinking about elephants.) By the way, this argument doesn’t make any sense. Writers, musicians, painters, philosophers — they all talk about how their best ideas come out of nowhere as they happen to be reaching for the shampoo in the shower. Nobody knows where any ideas come from. Besides, Leo thinks he can perform an inception, which is what he ends up doing.

What Inception ultimately plays on is the general feeling among many of us that we are being controlled by the thoughts, moods, and whims of unseen strangers, just as it exploits our overall suspicion that there is a sizable gap between how we (or at least they) perceive reality and what reality actually is.

When I watched Inception in 2010, I thought about it purely in terms of a literal reading of the movie, which is about the waking world vs. the dream world. But when I watched it again in 2020, the movie took on a different, unintended, but still significant interpretation. It actually didn’t look like a far-fetched sci-fi film; it was more like my own daily life, and maybe yours.

Five months before Inception opened, I joined Twitter. At the time, I had been an internet native for almost 15 years. But like a lot of people, my use of the internet changed dramatically once I was sucked into the social-media sphere. I found that in this world, people acted differently than they did out there, IRL. (In the waking world, if you will.) For one thing, rhetorical gunfights broke out with far greater regularity! People also had the ability to morph into something else. Sometimes the people you thought you were interacting with were in factor avatars for other people. At first, this seemed strange. But it was fun, because you could create your own world in this blank space of endless possibilities, just like the “architect” Ellen Page in Inception.

Over time, as I spent more time in this dream world — usually about eight hours a day, the length of a night’s sleep and also my daily work shift — it became harder and harder to tell the difference between this and reality. Did the things that people cared about so much in the dream world really matter in the waking world? Did drifting down several levels in the dream world, being “extremely online,” run the risk of forever imperiling you there in a spiritual limbo? Could it really be that if you went too far, you could be killed by enemies in the dream world and then “canceled” in the waking world?

Inception isn’t a “dream” movie to me anymore, it’s a movie about the modern internet, a place where stealing people’s brains and stuffing them full of unwanted ideas is at the core of Mark Zuckerberg’s business plan. It’s just that I hadn’t been on Twitter long enough in 2010 to see it back then. Even the ending of Inception plays differently. A decade ago, audiences argued whether the lingering shot of the spinning totem suggested that Leo was now free of the dream world, or stuck there forever. But now, when I see Leo hugging his kids while neglecting to check on the status of his twirling top, I realize that he doesn’t care where he is. For him, IRL and URL have become one and the same. I can relate.

Hamilton is one of the biggest musicals in Broadway history, and it truly has transcended the stage and continues to do so. A filmed version of the musical recently started streaming on Disney+, and it spawned a successful cast recording album. In fact, the Hamilton album is currently doing better than ever, even though it was released nearly five years ago: Hamilton now sits at No. 2 on the Billboard 200 chart, which makes it the highest-charting Broadway cast recording album in over half a century.

The last cast recording to reach the top two of that chart was the original cast album of Hair, which topped the chart for 13 weeks in 1969, 51 years ago. The previous chart peak for Hamilton came on the July 2, 2016 chart, where it reached No. 3. This was shortly after the 2016 Tony Awards, where the musical took home 11 awards, including Best Musical.

This week also marks the album’s 250th week on the Billboard 200, and it hasn’t left the chart since debuting at No. 12 on October 17, 2015. That’s the most time a cast album has spent on the chart since the highlights edition of the original London cast recording of The Phantom Of The Opera, which spent 331 weeks on the chart between 1990 and 1996.

Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Kanye West’s recent announcement that he plans to run for president of the country received a lot of push-back, but not from everybody. Elon Musk gave Kanye his “full support” (but later seemed to cool off on it), and now it appears Kanye has Chance The Rapper in his corner as well.

Last night, Kanye West shared a new song called “Donda,” in honor of his late mother’s birthday. Chance was apparently moved by the video, as he used it as an opportunity to seemingly support Kanye’s presidential bid, sharing the visual and writing, “And yall out here tryna convince me to vote for Biden. Smfh.”

One fan replied to Chance’s tweet, “Chance, I like you, I really do but if you don’t realize this is just an attempt to steal liberal voters and swing the vote for Trump then you got an issue man #AnyoneButTrump2020.” He responded, “Everything I seen been more on the #anyonebutKanye side, but I understand the only vote for who I think can win politics.”

Chance followed that up by asking his fans, “Are we pro two-party system?” After one user responded, “We are against Kanye running for president,” Chance asked, “Why tho? Is there a better choice?” A few minutes later, he added, “Ima keep it real alota u n****s is racist.”

He then posed a question to his followers: “Are u more pro biden or anti ye and why? I get that you’ll want to reply that you’re just tryna ‘get trump out’ but in this hypothetical scenario where you’re replacing Trump, can someone explain why Joe Biden would be better??”

This comes days after Chance shared video of an old Kanye interview and wrote, “If you have a 30 mins today, watch the Kanye Interview with the breakfast club from 2013. This is on the heels of Yeezus being his most hated album and him and right after he left NIKE for ADIDAS. Its crazy how right he was about everything.”

This also comes a couple years after he came to Kanye’s defense after controversial tweets about Trump.

In maybe the most memorable scene in Todd Phillips’ Joker, Arthur Fleck, played by Oscar winner Joaquin Phoenix, dances down a set of stairs to Gary Glitter’s “Rock and Roll Part 2” while dressed in his Joker attire. Hence, the “Joker Stairs,” which became a popular (and obnoxious for local residents) tourist destination following the film’s release. The dance has been meme-d, criticized, and turned into a Wikipedia page, and now Phillips has shared a behind-the-scenes photo of Phoenix filming the iconic scene.

“Weekend. Although at this point, what’s the difference? Stay safe,” Phillips captioned the image. The Joker doesn’t wear a mask, but Batman does. Be like Batman.

Anyway, Phillips previously explained that Phoenix’s Clown Prince of Crime dances so much because he has “the music” in him. “I think one of the earliest things we spoke about was that Arthur had music in him. You know, like it just existed in him. Some people that you might know personally have that feeling, and I always thought that about Arthur, but it was sort of kept in and trapped,” he said. “I love the dancing in the movie. I think we should have more of it.” Jack Nicholson’s Prince-loving Joker agrees.

(Via Instagram/Todd Phillips)

Sometimes an episode of television sticks with you. It can happen for any number of reasons: the subject matter hits close to home, the timing catches you in a vulnerable moment, or the storytelling is just that good. Once in a while, things align themselves perfectly and an episode will deliver on all three of those aspects and just wallop you, leaving you staring at the screen as the credits roll, or staring at the wall or ceiling, or just, like, staring, generally, with your eyes not fixed on anything in particular as your brain overheats. This — the staring, the sticking — happened to me most recently when I watched the Mythic Quest quarantine episode.

Mythic Quest was a good show before the quarantine episode. Its first season debuted on Apple earlier this year and I binged it all in about two days. The series is set at a video game company that produces a franchise called, you guessed it, Mythic Quest, a kind of epic magical medieval game that is one part The Legend of Zelda and one part Game of Thrones. It stars — and was co-created by — It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia star and co-creator Rob McElhenney, who plays Ian (pronounced “eye-an”), the egomaniac creative genius behind the game. The whole thing is basically a workplace comedy, but more, with silly jokes and long arcs of character growth and moments that are legitimately moving. Again, a very good show. One of the best of the year so far.

The quarantine episode took all that and leveled-up. All the characters were suddenly stuck working from home and communicating via video chat. The silly jokes were still there, in the way other shows doing pandemic specials have touched on, but the episode was also very real in a way those specials didn’t match. That’s what struck me about it. That’s why I wanted to talk to the people involved. I wanted to know more about how this little slice of powerful television came to be.

“The conception of the entire endeavor was, well, how can we get the crew working again?” McElhenney told me when we spoke by phone. The quarantine had screeched things to a halt suddenly, with no end in the foreseeable future. “I mean, it was a full stop end of day Friday, we were done. And then they hadn’t worked for a month and a half. We thought, well, if we can get everybody working and paid and focused on something for two to three weeks, that’s a win. That was really the inception of the entire thing.”

Co-creator Megan Ganz said the same thing: “I think the first and foremost reason was that we had just gone into production on the second season. We shot for one week before we had to shut down production and so the crew was furloughed and we really, really wanted to get people back to work.”

But deciding to do something and actually doing it are two different things. There are always logistical hurdles to clear and unforeseen problems to solve in a normal situation, let alone the one we’re all dealing with now, which — I don’t think I’m going out on a limb here — can safely be referred to as abnormal. It’s even more difficult when you’re trying to capture a specific moment. “We decided that if we’re going to work on anything,” Ganz explained, “we should tell the story of right now and what we’re going through currently. But we knew that story would only be relevant if we could also release the episode during quarantine, which meant that we had to do it on a very expedited timeline.”

This sounded, to me, as I attempted to comprehend it all, like an incredible hassle.

PART I: “Hassle is putting it lightly”

The quote in that heading is from McElhenney, who also directed the episode, in response to me saying the thing I said in the previous sentence. “It was a Herculean effort by a cast and crew of true professionals motivated to get it right. And to get it done in a fashion that made sure that we were presenting a premium episode of the show. All without anyone ever leaving their homes.”

This is where making a television show for a technology company comes in handy. Acquiring the equipment was not a problem. Apple had iPhones galore and the stands and brackets necessary to set them up all shipped out within 24 hours of the pitch. “All of these things were delivered to the actors,” Ganz told me. “The microphones and lighting equipment and all of that, already sanitized, and then actors then sanitized them again.” And once all the sanitizing and scrubbing was done, each actor had to position the phone in such a way that the screen was facing the Zoom camera on their laptop so McElhenney could see what everyone was doing from his own setup at home.

“The directing, actually, when I’m speaking directly to the actors, was not that difficult,” McElhenney said. “The prep in getting to those positions was really where the work was put in.”

Yes, about that.

The prep work wasn’t just nailing down the technology of it all. They also had to make the show. The actors had to act, with no one else around them, in their own homes, without the kind of assistance they have on a set. “If I had a couple of scenes to shoot in the day,” said Charlotte Nicdao, who plays Poppy, the game’s tech mastermind, “I would be on a FaceTime call to my makeup artist and my hairstylist, and they would talk me through everything, which I really needed because I was very bad at doing my hair and makeup.”

There was also the matter of finding a spot to shoot in each actor’s home, a stressful and collaborative experience in a number of ways. Think about how you present your home when you have company coming over for dinner. Now think about that company being millions of strangers watching you from their own homes. Now think about all of that and add in the fact that you — like Nicdao in the episode — are playing a character who very much does not have it together during quarantine.

“I would deliberately set things up to look kind of messy and gross,” she said. “I would feel like every time I signed on, I would want to be like, ‘I’ve made it look like this. This isn’t how I usually live.’”

My favorite story about the actors filming themselves at home involved F. Murray Abraham, the 80-year-old, Oscar-winning veteran of the stage and screen, who plays the high-minded story consultant for the game. He was enthusiastic and game for anything, Ganz assured me, but there are certain technological issues that do not transcend generations. “We had to deliver all of his equipment to New York and then, from here, over the phone, set up his whole situation to shoot himself in Zoom,” she said. “And I think the place they started with was trying to figure out what his Wi-Fi password was.”

So, yes. A hassle. But a worthwhile one.

PART II: “Hey, it’s okay to cry. It’s okay to be scared.”

The thing I liked most about this episode was the way it showed how people are struggling in different ways during quarantine. Some are finding goofy outlets for their excess energy (the characters played by Danny Pudi and David Hornsby engage in a heated online Street Fighter battle with large charitable donations and shaved eyebrows on the line), some are just trying to fill the day however they can (there’s a whole bit about passing things from one Zoom window to another that takes on added significance later), and some people are really, truly struggling. This brings us to the part where things get real. This brings us to Poppy and Ian.

Poppy and Ian are opposites in almost every way. Poppy is the hard-charging coder who was born with her foot on the gas pedal, a workaholic who dives into the minutiae of that work, taking on more and more and trying to put out the fires caused by everyone else, most notably Ian. She’d been spending quarantine neck-deep in a coding sprint to finish a huge project. Nicdao describes her character thusly: “The way I see Poppy is that she has not stopped working her whole life. I mean, she’s this supernova genius that probably skipped a bunch of grades in school and moved to the States from Australia to go to college well before she was college age. Then she went straight from that into creating this hugely successful game, which is her baby, that she wouldn’t leave alone, especially not with Ian, for a moment.”

Ian is a big idea guy. He’s great at explaining themes and rallying the troops and projecting confidence, but he is hopeless at dealing with the smaller steps it takes to get to those big ideas, and he is not particularly good at dealing with any part of the world he cannot bend and shape into his own vision through force of will. He’d been spending most of quarantine barricaded in his compound and sending “inspirational” videos to the staff. McElhenney describes Ian’s struggle in quarantine thusly: “A character like Ian, who was such a narcissistic egomaniac, would never admit that he was struggling. And in fact, he would just project this air of machismo more than anything else. And then because he’s so insufferable, he would force it upon everybody else so that he was almost like, it was so clear that what he was doing was creating this aura of confidence that everybody could kind of smell.”

The problem started when the project ended. Poppy finished coding and celebrated for about 10 seconds and then promptly fell to pieces with nothing to do, with no immediate purpose. It’s what I said earlier about her being born with her foot on the gas. Now she’s mashing the gas and brake at the same time and her engine starts to blow.

“I think for years and years,” Nicdao explains, “her entire life has been her work and her ambition and her creation. And being forced into thinking about other things, I think, would be extremely traumatic for her.”

One line, in particular, was traumatic for both Poppy and Nicdao, whose Australian accent in the show is her own: “I had a line that was like, ‘My family are thousands of miles away.’ And every time I had to say that line, I would break a little bit because it’s true.”

This all leads to one of the most powerful moments of television I’ve seen this year. Poppy crashes — tears and anxiety and hopelessness streaking across her face. Ian sees this and finds the motivation he needs to leave his compound and venture out into a world he finds very scary, filled with things he can’t control. He shows up at her door and they hug. It’s a long hug, a deeply meaningful hug, one that is not romantic at all but more of a release. It’s two flawed people — friends — who need each other, reaching out, knowing in that moment that mental health trumps quarantine for this specific situation. The camera lingers for a long time, much of the action half out of view because it’s only being recorded by Poppy’s laptop camera at her desk. For an extended period of time, it’s basically a black screen and muffled sobs.

This is the part that hit me. The way the show addressed this kind of heavy emotional aspect of our current shared experience head-on. It’s something everyone can relate to even if we don’t often discuss it openly. Nicdao put it beautifully over the phone: “It was really important that people could also see that what they were feeling was valid. I think that there’s been a lot of, ‘Be strong. Set it aside. It’ll be over soon. Don’t worry.’ I found it really comforting when people in my life have said, ‘Hey, it’s okay to cry. It’s okay to be scared. This is unprecedented.’ So I sort of saw Poppy’s storyline as being able to say that to our audience as well.” In short, it’s okay to not be okay sometimes. That’s heavy, and true, and very, very real.

I really can’t overstate how terrific Nicdao’s performance is in this scene. Especially when you add in the weird circumstances she dealt with while filming it. The person she’s hugging isn’t actually McElhenney; it’s her husband, who isn’t even an actor. McElhenney filmed his part outside his house and in his garage. The characters shared a deeply personal, emotional moment while the actors playing them remained miles apart. I feel like I’m not getting across how impressive this is. Let’s just go ahead and turn it over to McElhenney, who said all of this without a single pause when I asked him what he thought of Nicdao’s work in the scene.

We have to recognize that there’s only one person in that room and that’s her. Her husband is out in the hallway waiting. She has to operate the camera. She has to make sure all the settings are correct. She has to operate all the audio settings. She has to make sure her hair and makeup is right, right before we roll. Then she just listened to a little bit of direction and some ideas that I had from a directing standpoint. Then she has to get herself into an emotional state where it’s believable and emotionally resonant and ultimately cathartic when he comes through that door.

Then I walk out to the street and then I say, “Action,” and we begin the scene. Then I step onto my own property and I go into the garage. She then walks through the hallway. I can hear me speaking into her headphones as the character, and then both as the director and producer. The door opens, I’m now talking to her husband and her because their positioning was a little off and I was trying to get them to turn. She’s listening to me give her direction as she’s having this moment of great emotional catharsis, heaving sobs into someone’s chest who yes, is her husband, but it’s not an actor. I’m also giving him direction that she can hear because he’s positioning his body in an unnatural way. All of this is happening as she is giving one of the greatest performances that I’ve seen all year.

To put all of that into perspective, I can say that I’ve never seen an actor pull something like that off in 15 years of producing television.

Yeah, that just about says it. To pull off that scene, under those circumstances, is a borderline superpower. “By the time it was done, I didn’t feel vulnerable,” Nicdao said of the performance. “It kind of felt cathartic.” As someone who did none of the hard work setting up, filming, or performing the scene, and really just sat there in bed taking it all in, I felt the same. I’m kind of feeling it again now, just typing this. I wasn’t joking about this sticking with me.

But you don’t want to end on that moment. You want to end on a win, a triumph for everyone, possibly even, just maybe, with an aggressively complicated Rube Goldberg device that involves over a dozen Zoom windows and the theme music from the Rocky movies. That could work.

PART III: “Let’s see what happens if I just call Sly and see what he says”

My questions after watching the episode’s closing Rube Goldberg scene, which you should watch if you haven’t yet, were twofold:

• How does one set up a huge Zoom Rube Goldberg machine that features 16 people in 16 separate boxes doing something that flows from one box to the other, seamlessly, without having everyone in the same room at any point?
• How does one go about clearing the Rocky music for a television show?

The answer to the first one was as tricky as I imagined, as McElhenney explained. “I called production design, our special effects coordinator, our property department, and said, ‘Hey, we need to figure out how to do this.’ And so each individual box was discussed and then our special effects coordinator, Jonathan, then went and built each individual machine and then would send me videos of them.”

Then it was in the hands of the actors, who actually had to film the moving pieces with their phones, the only shots not lined up with a steady mounted camera. “Everything had to be sanitized and delivered it to the individual actors, who then had to set it up inside their apartments,” Ganz said. “Jessie Ennis, her part of her Rube Goldberg was 100 ping pong balls dumping on her head. And she sanitized each one individually.” And, Ganz added, there were often many, many takes. “Danny Pudi, I think, did 17 takes or something like that. He would do a take and think he got it right and then he would send the video to us, and then we would be like, ‘Oh, but actually, you can’t see it fall out of the frame, or it falls too far to the left or whatever it is. So you have to redo it.’”

Again, a hassle. But again, a good one, as Ganz clarified. “We felt as triumphant as the people did at the end of that Rube Goldberg because we also felt like we pulled off this crazy technical achievement.”

Which brings us to the music. The whole scene is set to Bill Conti’s “Going the Distance” score from the Rocky franchise, which is almost a cheat code to the heartstrings of fans of those movies and Eastern Pennsylvania boys like both McElhenney and this reporter. (I asked both McElhenney and Ganz if he demanded they use the song given his Philly ties. Ganz: “Yes, that was all Rob.” McElhenney: “First of all, I didn’t demand it. I suggested it.”)

The song works perfectly. The bells ding, the swells swell, it sucks you in and gets you invested in anything you set it to. It should be used in everything. There’s a good reason it isn’t, though: Clearing the rights to the music is notoriously hard. So, again, how?

The key here is that McElhenney had cleared the music once before, for the Super Bowl episode of Always Sunny. I was not fully prepared for how that happened when Ganz told me.

“In order to clear it for that episode,” she said, “he called Sylvester Stallone. He called him directly.”

Excuse me? He just called Sylvester Stallone to get permission to use the Rocky music? I asked McElhenney about this later, in part to get confirmation and in part because I had to know more.

“MGM, who owns it, was very nervous about it,” he said. “And they essentially just defer to Sly on those matters and say, ‘Look, this is something that we feel very protective of,’ which they should, ‘and this is a part of our brand.’ And so they actually denied our usage for Sunny. I just figured, well, I don’t know, let’s see what happens if I just call Sly and see what he says. I reached out and he said he was a fan of the show. I don’t know if that was true or not, but he seemed to be really open to what we were going for and he approved it. So we used it in Sunny and the same thing happened with this.”

So that answers the question about clearing the Rocky music. You just call Sylvester Stallone and ask him. Easy peasy.

(I’ll tell you this: I do try to be professional. I try to have follow-up questions locked and loaded when I talk to very busy people. I try to make it appear as though I know what I’m doing as often as possible. I did not have a follow-up to “so I called Sly directly and he said yes.” I’m still wrapping my head around it, to be honest. I listened to the audio of our conversation again when I was putting this together and my entire response in the moment was “That is… cool.” Very professional. Very good.)

The combination of the Rube Goldberg machine and the dramatic emphasis added by the Rocky music gave the episode the triumphant, victorious ending it needed after taking the audience on that emotional rollercoaster. I did not ever expect a Rube Goldberg device to make me cry. And yet, there I was, staring with misty eyes at nothing in particular as the credits started to roll. It put a perfect uplifting bow on an episode that was powerful and emotional and captured a moment I think all of us are feeling right now in one way or another. I laughed and cried and felt understood all in 30 minutes. You can’t ask for much more than that out of an episode of television. Or any piece of art, really.

I think Nicdao put it best when I asked her to sum up the experience: “There was a sense of almost like guerrilla filmmaking in the way that we did it. We were constantly problem solving and experimenting to figure out how to do something. So it really did feel like, whenever we got it right… it felt like a really big celebration and achievement.”

Achievement is accurate, but probably an understatement. To make an episode of television this good under these circumstances is almost a miracle. I think that’s one of the reasons it stuck with me in the first place. It’s definitely one of the reasons it’s still sticking with me now. I don’t see it going away any time soon, either.

When John Krasinski auditioned (in 2005) for the role of Jim Halpert on The Office, he was only two years removed from Brown University, and he was working as a waiter. He’d had a few bit parts on TV shows — a CSI here, or a Law & Order there — but among those auditioning for the role of Jim, he was easily the least known. Among those who considered for the role were Paul Rudd, Steve Zahn, Aasif Mandvi, Michael Showalter, Zak Orth, Josh Radnor, Ron Livingston, and Colin Hanks, but it was the less experienced Krasinski who landed the gig.

But had Krasinski auditioned for someone, perhaps, less forgiving than creator and showrunner Greg Daniels, things could have gone very differently.

As Krasinski tells it in The Office: The Untold Story of the Greatest Sitcom of the 2000s, they originally asked him to come in and audition for the role of Dwight. He convinced them to let him audition for Jim, instead. During auditions, about six other actors went in before him, after which they decided to take a break before auditioning Krasinski.

“The casting director said, ‘We’re going to take a five-minute break for lunch. Is that OK?’ I said, ‘Yeah,’ but in my head I was thinking, ‘Come on, just do one more!’”

At that point, a guy walks out with a salad and fork and sits down next to Krasinski. “Are you nervous?” the guy asks.

“Not so much for the audition,” Krasinski says. “But I’m really nervous for the people who are making this show because so often these translations are just garbage, and I really hope they don’t screw it up because so many people are waiting to kill this show.”

And the man with the fork and salad says to Krasinski, “I’ll try my best. I’m Greg Daniels. This is my show.” Oof.

Afterward, a “horrified” Krasinski called his agent and told him what happened. His agent told Krasinski to do the audition anyway, and he got lucky, because everyone in the room was already in a good mood and laughing “because I was such a moron. And everyone was like, ‘Is this the jackass that said this is the show that’s going to be ruined? Go for it, kid.’”

“Weirdly,” Krasinski continues, “because everyone was already laughing, the room was really warm and ready to go.” According to those in the room, Krasinski “felt like our Jim immediately.” He was soon thereafter cast, and despite the massive faux pas, the rest is history.

Source: The Office: The Untold Story of the Greatest Sitcom of the 2000s,

Kanye West is in the midst of a flurry of activity, from announcing a presidential campaign to signing a huge Gap partnership deal to dropping new music. He continued this prolific stretch last night by sharing more new music: In honor of what would have been his late mother’s 71st birthday this weekend, he released a song named after her, “Donda.”

He shared the track as a video on Twitter, and it features mostly vintage video footage, including a clip of a younger Kanye rapping in a kitchen with his mother by his side. The song begins with Donda reading lyrics from KRS-One’s “Sound Of Da Police,” and later, Kanye raps of needing his mother, saying, “Momma, I need you to tuck me in / I done made some mistakes and they rubbed it in.”

The track samples The Clark Sisters’ 1980 song “They Were Overcome By The Word.” Fans have speculated that the voice that offers a background “uh” towards the end of the video is Kendrick Lamar, or perhaps Consequence or Conway The Machine.

Kanye wrote in the tweet sharing the video, “In loving memory of my incredible mother on her birthday. My mom reciting KRS1 lyrics. This song is called DONDA.” Donda died at the age of 58 in 2007, due to post-surgery complications. Kim Kardashian also shared a longer version of the clip of Kanye and his mother rapping “Hey Mama.”

Listen to “Donda” above.

If Friends had launched in 2020, the show may not have worked as well as it did back in the 1990s. For sure (and no matter what year), if any of the five leading characters had been situated more dominantly, the show’s careful balance may have been disrupted, potentially with disastrous results. After all, Monica could be unnervingly controlling at times, Chandler too manic, Rachel too frivolous, Phoebe too goofy, and Ross too shouty and overbearing. Well, viewers will receive a plethora of David Schwimmer in Ross-esque mode (with added perviness and homophobia) in Intelligence when Peacock launches on July 15. Presumably, this spy series was meant to be a feather in the cap of NBCUniversal’s streaming service, but Brave New World (which we’ll review soon) fares better than this Schwimmer-starring effort.

Intelligence will be compared to other efforts from the Friends cast to pivot away from their main moneymaker. They’ve done so with varying degrees of success (Courteney Cox’s Cougar Town and Lisa Kudrow’s The Comeback being high points), but the show’s more comparable to Netflix’s recent Space Force (which happens to sparingly feature Kudrow). Here, we’ve got David Schwimmer instead of Steve Carell, seeking to edge his way back into TV comedy. Schwimmer, who managed to humanize Robert Kardashian in The People Vs. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story, surprised many who didn’t realize that a talented dramatic actor lurked beneath the Ross Geller exterior, but the lure of harnessing some workplace-comedy magic must have been too strong.

That’d be okay if Schwimmer’s boss-vibe wasn’t laced with sexual innuendo, and if this wasn’t a “comedy” that lacked comedic qualities. As a result, Intelligence plays like Ross became a maverick NSA agent (named Jerry Bernstein) who not-so-secretly idolizes Larry Flynt. The effect is skeeviness masquerading beneath a Britcom label, and like someone didn’t think this through in the post-#MeToo era. I’m not sure if the goal was satire, but it feels like a misfire even that was the case. Jerry’s a nightmare, plowing through the office, changing rules, and making (bad) lewd jokes, but beyond that, he lacks human qualities. He’s a cardboard standee. Even when we find out about trauma in his past, there’s no way to empathize with this guy or want to toss him any goodwill.

It’s baffling to behold, and Schwimmer recently told E! Online that this was part of the plan for his character. It was a “challenge,” he stated, to portray a “conservative, racist, homophobic, sexist, pompous, ignorant, ultra-patriotic guy who’s come over here to try to grab power.” And I kind-of get that intent. Schwimmer intended to play the stereotypical Ugly American among an office of relatively civilized Brits. Still, the star believes that the show made Jerry “not only likable” but “funny,” and neither is true. The worst part, of course, is the lack of genuine laughs.

A few examples of Jerry’s behavior from the six episodes screened for critics:

– Jerry opens an episode while speaking at the head of a boardroom table: “And in short, that’s why I have to sleep completely naked.”

– A female colleague comments upon something completely innocuous: “It was very brief…”; Jerry hops into the conversation: “… in a premature ejaculation way.”

– A group of co-workers gathers to take a photo for the organization’s social media page. Jerry instructs everyone to sex things up.

– A female colleague admits that Jerry’s methodology is “rubbing off on me.” Jerry is faux-aghast: “You wish!”

Yikes. And Jerry is hyper-belligerent, whether he’s cracking sexist jokes or telling everyone that he knows best, or yeah, all the homophobia. Sadly, it’s not as though there’s even any substantive reason for Jerry’s displays, no context beyond him being an awful person, and certainly, no lessons learned. It’s all simply a bunch of wisecracks thrown at the wall. There’s no humanity. There’s no humor. It’s aggressively hostile stuff.

For an unknown reason (there are suggestions that don’t make sense near the end of the six episodes screened for critics), Jerry’s introduced himself at the UK’s Government Communications Headquarters, which is like MI5 and MI6 but nerdier and focused on cybercrime (no fancy martinis here), where he recruits an computer analyst, Joseph (Nick Mohammed, who writes the series and is otherwise a competent comedian known as Mr. Swallow and made turns in Bridget Jones’s Baby and the Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie) for some sort of power move. In the process, Joseph, along with the female colleagues on the premises, get buried by Jerry’s baffling displays of toxicity.

Jerry’s pompous-shout factor overpowers the Joseph character by design, but he also relegates all other co-workers — Tuva (Gana Bayarsaikhan), Mary (Jane Stanness), and actual boss Christine (Sylvestra Le Touzel) — to the sidelines. A few of these characters seem mildly interesting, but we don’t get to know them much at all. Instead, Intelligence all comes down to the Super-Obnoxious Ross descendant being, you know, too much.

Peacock’s ‘Intelligence’ streams on July 15.

Actress Kelly Preston passed away on Sunday at the age of 57, as revealed by her husband, John Travolta. The pair married in 1991 after meeting on the set of 1989’s The Experts, and he paid tribute to her on his Instagram account.

“It is with a very heavy heart that I inform you that my beautiful wife Kelly has lost her two-year battle with breast cancer,” Travolta wrote. “She fought a courageous fight with the love and support of so many. My family and I will forever be grateful to her doctors and nurses at MD Anderson Cancer Center, all the medical centers that have helped, as well as her many friends and loved ones who have been by her side. Kelly’s love and life will always be remembered. I will be taking some time to be there for my children who have lost their mother … please know that I will feel your outpouring of love in the weeks and months ahead as we heal.”

Travolta and Preston appeared in multiple films together over the decades, including Battlefield Earth and Gotti, in which she portrayed Victoria Gotti alongside Travolta, who played the infamous American gangster. She also starred with Tom Cruise in Jerry Maguire; some of her other notable roles included For The Love Of The Game, Twins, SpaceCamp, Holy Man, and Secret Admirer.

Preston is survived by two of the couple’s children, Ella (20) and Benjamin (9). In 2009, their first-born son, Jett, passed away at age 16.

See Travolta’s full Instagram post below.

Video games will be very popular inside the NBA bubble, as players look to pass the time in the hotel at night without much else in the way of entertainment options — aside from pool parties with DJs that only Dwight Howard goes to.

There are plenty of NBA gamers that brought elaborate gaming setups, complete with Twitch cameras and multiple monitors, but even the most casual of NBA gamer will be breaking out their system to kill some time without the usual alternatives, like, nightlife or laying low with family. Late Sunday night, we got a peek at how this is going to look in NBA 2K, as Quinn Cook brought LeBron James and Anthony Davis to the park, where pandemonium ensued.

Other MyPlayers chased James, Cook, and Davis, all of whom play as themselves, just in street clothes, so there is no attempt to hide that it’s them. The cuts from Cook’s Twitch stream of people running and flocking around them is pretty hilarious, and once they finally found an open court — after getting bypassed by a team that used VIP status to get on the court they were waiting on — it looked, well, an awful lot like if LeBron James was playing in a random park.

James’ MyPlayer is just as capable of ridiculous plays as the real LeBron, and he recreated “The Block” on a poor, unsuspecting player who thought they had a wide open layup, only to have it swatted off the backboard to the delight of Cook.

This surely won’t be the last time some major NBA stars crash the 2K park, and if anything this will only make 2K even more popular as folks will be hopping on hoping for the chance to play against some of the NBA’s best — even if the end result is a little embarrassment.