In the final minutes of this week’s The Walking Dead episode, “Look at the Flowers,” right before Beta rips off half his mask and does the “Thriller” dance with a horde of zombies, we are briefly introduced to a wild new character (pictured above).
Her name is Juanita Sanchez, and in the comics, she goes by “Princess,” because “Queen” makes her sound too “old.” She is played by actress Paola Lazaro. Princess is a trip, one of those horribly damaged people (she was repeatedly tied up, locked in a closet, and abused by her evil step-brother and step-father in the comics) who uses comedy to mask her pain. Princess has a lot of pain, so her sense of humor is wonderfully off-kilter and inappropriate. Princess has also spent so much time alone that she’s not sure that those she encounters are real or hallucinations. She is very cheerful and very talkative.
In the comic series, she is discovered on a mission similar to the one that Eugene is carrying out now; Eugene wants to meet Stephanie, a woman from a new community with whom he is smitten. In the comics, Eugene, Yumiko, Magna, Michonne, and Siddiq encounter Princess in Pittsburgh on the way to The Commonwealth in Ohio. Here, however, Siddiq is dead, Michonne is in search of Rick, and Magna has decided to stay behind (although, a sickened Ezekiel — dead in the Comics at this point — is along for the ride).
So, presumably, Eugene’s girlfriend, Stephanie, is from The Commonwealth, which is possibly also where Maggie and Georgie reside. They’re meeting in Charleston, West Virginia, which is about halfway between Alexandria and Ohio, which is where The Commonwealth is set in the comics, so that makes perfect sense. The lure to The Commonwealth — which is a functioning society of 50,000 people with modern amenities — may be the medical care that it can offer Ezekiel, who is otherwise dying of treatable cancer. The Commonwealth is also likely to play into CRM and The Walking Dead spin-off, The World Beyond.
We’ll learn more about Princess in next week’s episode, which is not the season finale, but because of delays, it is the last episode for awhile.
The idea of “cinema therapy” might be as old as the movies themselves. When you need a good cry, laugh, escape or new perspective, movies can offer an emotional catharsis that even books, TV shows and music can’t quite match (all right, a good sad song can do wonders, as Elton John noted).
Right about now, everyone needs some kind of good emotional release, and movies are a great place to turn – but there are just too many choices on too many streaming services. With that in mind, here are five films that can fit many of the complicated moods you may be feeling right about now.
From writer-director Albert Brooks, Defending Your Life is about a man who suddenly finds himself isolated from everyone and everything he knows: He dies. But he’s whisked away to Judgment City, a strangely comforting blend of theme park and office complex. His task is to sit in literal judgment of his life and defend himself against accusations he lived in too much fear. An perfectly winning cast led by Brooks, Meryl Streep, Rip Torn and Lee Grant make this romantic-comedy sparkle, but there’s something deeper here, something that all of us can use right now: a reminder that we are all stronger than we think and that fear doesn’t need to get the best of us.
In Joe Versus the Volcano, Joe Banks (played by Tom Hanks) lives in constant anxiety. He’s stuck in a job he hates, and a visit to the doctor reveals a dread diagnosis. That’s when he gets a most unusual job offer that propels him on a trans-Pacific voyage that turns into a grand adventure that makes him face his anxieties. This 1990 film is endlessly silly, sometimes downright weird, and certainly an oddity. It’s also emotionally daring and honest: writer-director John Patrick Shanley wears his heart on his sleeve, and gladly. In a rare triple performance, Meg Ryan shines brightly – she has a monologue about being “soul sick” that will resonate with anyone in self-isolation or quarantine with another person. The visually magnificent moment in which Joe acknowledges a higher power is about as poetic as movies could possibly get.
We’re living in a deeply fraught time that could understandably make someone doubt religion. But what if God showed up in the world with a message of faith? That’s the setup of director Carl Reiner’s 1977 comedy Oh, God!, written by Larry Gelbart (“MASH,” Tootsie). God is played by the inimitable comedian George Burns (if you don’t know him at all, this will be a special treat), and his modern-day prophet is played by a deeply doubtful John Denver (yes, the singer). Despite its subject matter, the movie is completely agnostic – God, it turns out, doesn’t really go in for the religious stuff. Gently, sweetly, the movie takes on some huge issues: Does God even care? Why is there suffering? Does God make mistakes? It’s also a great snapshot of the way suburbia looked in 1977 – yes, it really was that funky. But there’s something undeniably reassuring about its ultimate message.
While fear and anxiety are understandable, sometimes it can help to take a more clinical approach and to examine the problem from a more dispassionate angle. That’s what happens in director Robert Wise’s 1971 film The Andromeda Strain, which is based on a novel by Michael Crichton, undisputed master of science-based fiction. But once you do, you’ll not only marvel at the eerie familiarity of scientists alarmed by the appearance of a never-before-seen virus that causes some pretty awful symptoms and is always fatal … except to two people. You might also feel increasingly comforted by seeing the dedication that four scientists in particular have to learning about and defeating the microbe. Wise also directed Star Trek: The Motion Picture and The Day the Earth Stood Still, and he knows his way around intelligent sci-fi.
The best thing we can do sometimes is just let it all out. But when we’ve been holding it in, we need something to help us break through the emotions, and cinematically speaking you can’t do better than 1983’s Terms of Endearment. Writer-director James L. Brooks puts screen legend Shirley MacLaine together with Debra Winger in a still-hilarious comedy about an over-protective mother and her rebellious daughter who have to maintain a long-distance relationship back when communication wasn’t as speedy. A plot twist turns the story into a heartbreaking drama that is massively effective at getting the tears flowing and letting the emotions out, even when sly, salty Jack Nicholson is on screen.
Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson went live on Instagram today and answered questions from fans, including one that’s a perennial talking point in wrestling circles: Who’s on your Mount Rushmore of professional wrestling?
The Rock, a common face on fans’ mountains, isn’t one of The Rock’s picks, but his choices are widely shared. He puts Hulk Hogan, Ric, Flair, and his arch-rival Steve Austin on his Mount Rushmore, and says “that fourth person I always kind of keep blank” because he can’t choose between Buddy Rodgers, Bruno Sammartino, “Macho Man” Randy Savage, and Dusty Rhodes.
Though his fourth pick isn’t clear, what The Rock thinks makes a wrestler worthy of Mount Rushmore status is:
You always want to pick people who have had the most impact on the wrestling business, who have moved the bottom line, but also, most importantly, they just have this intangible, this X factor, where they can connect with the crowd and connect with an audience. And the bottom line is with those three individuals that I mentioned – Hogan, Austin, and Flair – they really moved the company’s bottom line. They moved the NWA’s bottom line, the WWF and the WWE’s bottom line.
In terms of drawing power, these were the biggest draws in the history of professional wrestling and that’s all that matters. You can have 15 world titles and 27 other kinds of titles that you have nowadays, but the bottom line is how strong can you draw, and are you selling arenas out and are you breaking records. Really, that’s the bottom line, and those three guys have. I think Sammartino did for a very long time. Bob Backlund had an incredible run too as well.
Of course, these are all also qualities people could say The Rock have, and he does give himself an honorable mention:
Where am I on Mount Rushmore? I would say I’m on the back of Mount Rushmore. That’s the part you don’t see. I’m on the back all by myself and I’m raising my eyebrow and “If you smell!” and I’m doing all that sh*t. That’s me on the back.
We’re all handling this epic quarantine in different ways, but it’s clear we all have one thing in common: Everyone’s watching Tiger King, Netflix’s latest true crime doc-series spectacular. Twisty, wild, and weird, the show has made a viral star out of its own star: Joseph Maldonado-Passage, aka Joe Exotic, the zoo owner-turned-presidential candidate-turned-prisoner, who’s currently serving a 22-year sentence for animal abuse and murder-for-hire. He’s also a musician! Strange music videos, featuring songs that are already being covered, are peppered through the show, featuring Joe’s own brand of country music, on the subject of cats. Alas, that’s one thing too strange to be totally true.
After some “light research,” Vanity Fair reporters concluded that the songs are performed by Vince Johnson and vocalist Danny Clinton — two struggling musicians hired by Joe to write some cat songs. They did it for free, because Joe told them it was for a TV show hungrily sought by Animal Planet, Discovery, and National Geographic. They recorded songs for him, assuming he’d re-record them himself. He did not.
“I had no idea he was going to Milli Vanilli the songs,” Johnson told Vanity Fair by email. He continued:
“It was a couple of months and two or three songs [into the collaboration] when I was on YouTube one night and just happened to look up Joe Exotic. And there he was, lip-syncing and acting like the ghost of Elvis [in these music videos]. I called him up, I was hot…And he bamboozled me about his reality show—that it was coming soon and he would make everything right as rain. I just wanted the proper credit.”
The two went along with it for a while, hoping the music would at least make it to television. Instead it only went so far as Joe’s YouTube channel.
“When it finally ended, I told him they could have filmed Gone With the Wind for all I cared—let alone a crummy reality show starring a jerk-off con man kook,” Johnson added.
Johnson and Clinton’s songs were eventually heard by many, once Tiger King made it to Netflix. The two are listed in the film’s credits, but Joe himself wanted to keep his ruse under wraps. Rick Kirkham gave Vanity Fair the skinny:
“It was absolutely ridiculous … One time,” he said, “Joe got a little bit drunk and high, and we actually coaxed him into singing part of one of the songs. He couldn’t even hold a tune. It was just so ludicrous. It was a big joke within the crew and staff that it wasn’t him [singing in the videos]—but he was damned insistent to anyone and everyone, including us and my studio crew, that that was him.”
After a nearly four year wait, fans of The Weeknd finally received his fifth album, After Hours last week. The album did fairly well critically but it did even better commercially, debuting atop the Billboard album charts. It’s The Weeknd’s third No. 1 album and, thanks to After Hours, fourth No. 1 release overall.
The album, which had a first-week total of 444,000 equivalent album units sold, served as the biggest opening week for The Weeknd, surpassing the previous mark set by his 2015 album, Beauty Behind The Madness. On top of that, After Hours also had the biggest overall opening week and the second-biggest pure album sales week of 2020, falling second to BTS’ Map Of The Soul 7, which nabbed 347,000 pure album sales in its opening week. Of the 444,000 equivalent album units sold, 275,000 were pure album sales — most likely coming from the merch bundles he offered on his website — while 163,000 were streaming equivalent album units.
In addition to the aforementioned accolades, the first-week numbers for After Hours gave it he biggest streaming week ever for an R&B album, registering a total of 220.7 million on-demand streams, and the biggest overall week for an R&B album since Beyonce’s 2016 album, Lemonade.
Elsewhere on the top five, Lil Uzi Vert’s Eternal Atake moved down one stop to No. 2, with 115,000 units sold, and Lil Baby’s album, My Turn, also moved down a spot to No. 3 with 60,000. Bad Bunny’s YHLQMDLG comes in at No. 4 with 51,000 units sold and Conan Gray’s debut full-length album, Kid Krow, checks in at No. 5 with 49,000 units sold.
The fallout from the coronavirus pandemic has impacted the entertainment industry on every level, with movie releases delayed and an endless list of productions put on ice, all because the need to practice social distancing has made gatherings unsafe as the virus spreads. One show that was already on pause, however, was Rick and Morty.
The Adult Swim cartoon has a lot of episodes on deck, but for months now only five from the current fourth season have been made available. With fans hoping to hear news of an airdate for episode six — the last new episode aired on December 15 — any Rick and Morty is welcome.
Thankfully, Adult Swim shared a short on YouTube that features a perhaps-canon samurai battle over a very important Morty. The video starts when a Rick is pushing a Morty along and a bunch of portals open up and reveal a group of Ninja Ricks, one of which reveals that this Rick is about to be in a lot of trouble.
Adult Swim on YouTube
The Rick is addressed as Rick WTM-72, who has apparently kidnapped Shogun Morty.
“That Morty is not a Morty that you nitwits can just make off with,” the subtitles say, though the audio is Japanese and the typical Rick burps and gurgles. “Hand him over and we will let you have an easy death.”
It’s clear that the Ninjas are here to get him back, but it will not end without a bloody fight. The message carrier’s arms get sliced off dramatically just as the threat is finished, setting up a very bloody battle.
Rick WMT-72 is certainly a formidable foe, and that includes some savvy technological moves. At one point the cart carrying Shogun Morty reveals spinning blades that cut off a lot of ninja ankles. He even manages to take down an extremely large Rick, but that only draws more enemies into the field for him to fight.
Oh, and some smoke bombs that cause Rick and Morty to trip the hell out.
Adult Swim on YouTube
Even Rick WTM-72 is mesmerized, but just for long enough to realize the dancing critters floating around him through space and time are actually there to kill him. That sets up a final samurai battle with a bearded Rick and WTM-72, the ending of which I won’t spoil here. But it’s certainly a good time-killer for fans desperate for more Rick content as isolation continues. And of course, it adds yet another layer of possible canon for the show’s already very splintered and uncertain timeline.
Many of us are a good way into our quarantine as COVID-19 continues its American siege. We’re anxious, we’re angry, we’re sad, and we’re also probably more than a little bored. We need stuff to imbibe. Luckily many entertainers have stepped up to the plate: Musicians have recorded videos of them playing songs, actors have recorded videos of them reciting Shakespeare. And now Spike Lee has given you not something to watch but something to read.
As caught by Deadline, the legendary filmmaker — almost certainly antsy about not being able to shoot a new project while quarantining — decided to head over to Instagram and make available an old script that never made it to production. It’s called Jackie Robinson, and it’s a biopic about the trail-blazing baseball deity. And now you can head over to Dropbox, download it and imagine it being real.
In a video posted alongside the text, Lee said it was a “dream project” that he’d planned to make with Denzel Washington not long after their 1993’s Malcolm X. Alas, it was too slow to get going, and eventually, as per Lee, “Denzel said he was too old.”
The script, which Lee wrote by himself and adapted from Robinson’s autobiography I Never Had It Made (as told to Alfred Duckett), runs 159 pages and chronicles his career as a barrier-breaking all-star player for the Brooklyn Dodgers. Lee noted that his many fans shouldn’t “worry about it if you don’t like baseball or sports,” adding, “This is a great American story.”
So crack one open and imagine what a Spike Lee movie starring Denzel as Jackie Robinson would be like, asking yourself where he’d drop one of his famed “people mover” shots. There’s few better ways to flatten that curve.
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