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“I’m not homeless. I’m just houseless. Not the same thing, right?”

Nomadland is one of the best movies of 2020, even if it doesn’t technically come out until 2021. How’s that? Because the film, directed by Chloé Zhao and starring Frances McDormand as a widow who travels the American west in a van after losing her job in the Great Recession, had an awards qualifying run in virtual cinemas this month. Meaning, Searchlight Pictures wanted to get it out now, as opposed to next year, so it could receive Academy Award consideration. This proved to be a good strategy: Nomadland is almost guaranteed to be nominated for Best Picture — it’s arguably the frontunner — and McDormand and Zhao (who also directed Marvel’s Eternals) are locks, too. It’s a really good movie about independence, rejecting the capitalistic “American dream,” and the importance of choosing the right poop bucket. Watch the trailer above.

Here’s the official plot synopsis:

Following the economic collapse of a company town in rural Nevada, Fern (Frances McDormand) packs her van and sets off on the road exploring a life outside of conventional society as a modern-day nomad. The third feature film from director Chloé Zhao, Nomadland features real nomads Linda May, Swankie, and Bob Wells as Fern’s mentors and comrades in her exploration through the vast landscape of the American West.

Nomadland opens in February 2021.

Last week ended with an unexpected development: Barack Obama “performed a dramatic reading” (aka recited the lyrics in a speaking tone instead of rapping them) of Eminem’s classic “Lose Yourself.” Eminem himself caught wind of the clip, and he is a fan of the former POTUS’ take on the song.

Over the weekend, Eminem shared the video on his Instagram Story and gave the clip his stamp of approval by adding a folded hands emoji.

In the clip, Obama reads a snippet from his new book, A Promised Land, saying, “When I needed some inspiration on the presidential campaign. I often turned to music. It was rap that got my head in the right place, two songs especially: Jay-Z’s ‘My First Song’ and Eminem’s ‘Lose Yourself.’ Both were about defying the odds and putting it all on the line. ‘Look, if you had one shot or one opportunity, to seize everything you ever wanted in one moment, would you capture it, or just let is slip?’”

“Lose Yourself” popped up at another point recently, when the song scored a Joe Biden campaign ad. Meanwhile, Em also made an appearance on Saturday Night Live recently with a cameo in a sketch that re-works “Stan” into a Christmas-themed parody.

The Dark Knight famously wasn’t nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars, but on Monday, it received an equally prestigious honor. The superhero film was one of 25 movies added to the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry for being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically” significant. The other titles include Cabin in the Sky, Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, The Joy Lock Club, The Blues Brothers, and Shrek. Hey now, you’re in the National Film Regi-stray, get your game on, go play.

“This is not only a great honor for all of us who worked on The Dark Knight, this is also a tribute to all of the amazing artists and writers who have worked on the great mythology of Batman over the decades,” director Christopher Nolan said in a statement. As the New York Times points out, “films must be at least 10 years old” to be considered for the Registry, so I look forward to The Lego Batman Movie being added in 2027:

A place on the list — always made up of 25 films — guarantees the film will be preserved under the terms of the National Film Preservation Act… Monday’s selections bring the total to 800. This year’s selections include records of nine films directed by women and seven directed by filmmakers of color.

Here’s the complete list for 2020.

1. Suspense (1913)
2. Kid Auto Races at Venice (1914)
3. Bread (1918)
4. The Battle of the Century (1927)
5. With Cara and Camera Around the World (1929)
6. Cabin in the Sky (1943)
7. Outrage (1950)
8. The Man with the Golden Arm (1955)
9. Lilies of the Field (1963)
10. A Clockwork Orange (1971)
11. Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971)
12. Wattstax (1973)
13. Grease (1978)
14. The Blues Brothers (1980)
15. Losing Ground (1982)
16. Illusions (1982)
17. The Joy Luck Club (1993)
18. The Devil Never Sleeps (1994)
19. Buena Vista Social Club (1999)
20. The Ground (1993-2001)
21. Shrek (2001)
22. Mauna Kea: Temple Under Siege (2006)
23. The Hurt Locker (2008)
24. The Dark Knight (2008)
25. Freedom Riders (2010)

(Via New York Times)

Geralt of Rivia comes by being grumpy honestly. Reasons for his constant grunting include dealing with his dangerous profession of monster slaying in the face of an unappreciative humanity, all while he’s gotta listen to Jaskier’s horrible songs that attempt to bolster the White Wolf’s reputation. Now, Geralt’s mood might be even worse because the charismatic actor who embodies him, Henry Cavill, has reportedly been sidelined from ongoing Season 2 production due to an on-set injury.

Deadline confirmed the news with an assurance to fans that Season 2 filming continues with scenes that don’t include Cavill, who reportedly hurt his leg while either training or filming within an assault-style obstacle course. Since the film already worked a holiday hiatus into its schedule, the impact on the Season 2 schedule should be minimal. Still, one hopes that Cavill will recover soon. Here’s what the original report from The Sun initially stated from a source:

“The filming has been hit because of what happened to Henry. He was on an assault course and injured his leg. He just suddenly pulled up and was clearly in a lot of pain. It wasn’t clear if an object had hit his leg or it was some sort of hamstring or muscle injury. It wasn’t bad enough to need an ambulance but it’s messed up the filming schedule as he can’t walk properly.”

The obstacle course apparently include some ax-throwing stunt work, but Cavill was apparently injured while suspended above ground in a tree while wearing a safety harness. He’s sitting things out for an unspecified amount of time, probably while Jaskier elbows his way into singing more tunes. God help us all.

Viewers can breathe a sigh of relief because Cavill’s injury appears to be not-severe in nature. And this probably won’t slow things down further for a 2021 Season 2 release on Netflix. The Witcher has paused twice for pandemic-related shutdowns, although . And we’ll see spinoffs at some point for the series, along with at least one movie. Hopefully, Henry’s soaking in a well-deserved bath somewhere while recovering from his injury.

(Via The Sun & Deadline)

You know Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s “WAP” is a major cultural force because the song was released back in August and people are still talking about it months later. Recently, for example, Snoop Dogg shared his thoughts, saying that he’s in favor of a more modest approach to lyricism: “Let’s have some imagination. Let’s have some privacy, some intimacy where he wants to find out as opposed to you telling him.” Snoop received some backlash for his comments, and now he has offered a retort.

In an Instagram post from yesterday, he pleaded for the “bullsh*t press” to stop because he loves Cardi and Meg and female rappers in general. He wrote, “Stop wit the bullsh*t press I love Cardi b and Meg. Music period point blank and they know that I’m n full support of the female. M. C. Movement so stop trying to make me a hater. U.F.D.H.B. Now carry on Before u get this. L.A. D. [laughing emoji]. That song 6xs platinum talk about that.”

This comes after Offset shared his thoughts about Snoop’s comments with TMZ, saying, “I really f*ck with Snoop, like, on a personal level. So, I could personally call him and be like, ‘Snoop, come on now.’ I don’t wanna seem like I’m dissing at Snoop, that’s my boy. But, at the same time, all men should stay out of women business. That’s women business. You ain’t gon’ have no win. Your comments probably looking crazy from just saying stuff like that. Stay outta women business. Women are strong now. We should uplift our women. Don’t say what they can and can’t do.”

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

Better Call Saul’s Bob Odenkirk came to drama late in his career. He spent the first few decades in comedy, where he was best known for his work on Mr. Show, as well as writing on The Ben Stiller Show, Late Night with Conan O’Brien and Saturday Night Live, where he wrote alongside Conan O’Brien (in fact, Odenkirk was with O’Brien when the latter came up with what would be Tom Hanks’ best ever SNL sketch).

Indeed, despite a long and storied career, which has seen Odenkirk nominated for 5 Emmys for his role in Saul, Emmy nominations for writing on Mr. Show with Bob and David, and even an Emmy win for writing on The Ben Stiller Show, Odenkirk still thinks that the pinnacle of his career came with one particular SNL skit he wrote in the early 1990s.

“My daughter once asked me, ‘What’s the best thing you ever did?’” Odenkirk said to Michael Rosenbaum on an episode of his Inside of You podcast. “And I said, ‘writing [Chris Farley’s “Matt Foley: Motivational Speaker”] and performing it eight times a week at ‘Second City’ … it’s the greatest thing I’ve ever been a part of … there was nothing greater than to see Chris be funny and act.”

Odenkirk got to see it first hand because in the original Matt Foley sketch at “Second City” (before they took it to SNL), Odenkirk played the role of the father, who would be recast as Phil Hartman on SNL. “I am really proud of it,” Odenkirk added, “because I did write it pretty much the way he performed it, and I wrote it alone in my apartment in Chicago … It’s such a performance heavy thing, but I’ll share credit on inventing the thing.”

Odenkirk also shared a lot of wistful memories of Farley, saying that he writes about him a lot in his upcoming memoir:

“Some of it’s kind of sad,” Odenkirk says. “The hardest party [with Farley] is just how inevitable it all felt. Everything in Chris’ story, the way it played out. People talked about it for years, that this would happen, and then that. And it all played out exactly as they predicted. I hated it. It made me so mad. The one thing you don’t want your life to be is a cliche … I don’t want to live some f**king, boring overtold story that’s just a hackneyed cliche. And his f*cking story just played out like somebody could’ve written it when he was 25. He could’ve written it. He kind of did.”

Odenkirk added that he ever only saw Farley once when he wasn’t intoxicated. “He was at party in Hollywood. With [David] Spade. At somebody’s f*cking apartment. And I couldn’t believe it. I was like, ‘Chris, you’re not drinking,’ and he was like, ‘Nope.’ And he meant it. And he was strong. And he looked great. And I was like, ‘Holy sh*t. This is f*cking great. He’s going to f*cking make it. He’d been to rehab something like 7 times by then, and it finally clicked.”

Unfortunately, Odenkirk never saw that Farley again. It was the only time I ever saw the look in his eye. “But at least I saw it once and it gave me hope. But other than that, you either got him f*cked up, or him in that other mode, him like, ‘I’m a f*cking idiot. I f*cked up again. I’m so sorry I messed up.”

Odenkirk said that, when Farley was drunk, he performed for everyone, like they were an audience instead of human beings. “It was gross. And that’s all you got. And it was sad as f**k because he was such a good person, and his goodness came out in everything he did.”

Look for more stories like these in Odenkirk’s memoir, when it eventually arrives. In the meantime, Saul will probably begin shooting again in the spring ahead of its final season.

(Via Michael Rosenbaum’s Inside of You podcast)

Last week it seemed like one of the Republican party’s newest stars, Navy SEAL-turned-Texas representative Dan Crenshaw, might be the latest to be taken down. Newsweek reported that he was involved in an “orchestrated campaign” to disparage a female veteran who had alleged sexual assault at a V.A. facility. It’s damning news, if true, but Crenshaw isn’t simply pretending like it’s not a big deal. Mere days after the report, he dropped a new campaign video where he pretends he’s a big time action movie star.

Crenshaw — who lords over a cartoonishly gerrymandered district and who rose to fame after being made fun of by Pete Davidson — wasn’t campaigning for himself. He was campaigning for David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, the two Republican incumbents battling to retain their Senate seats, which, if both are lost, would flip the legislative body blue. Crenshaw has done easily mocked action movie-style campaign videos before, including one where his missing eye has superpowers. This one, however, earned him even more scorn.

The video begins with Crenshaw being summoned away in the middle of an acceptance speech, informed by government agents that his help is needed. He strips out of his suit, revealing some warrior attire. He then gets in a plane, leaps out of it à la Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible — Fallout, and lands heroically on a vehicle peopled by antifa, who, by the way, are not an organization, no matter how many times Republicans say they are.

The low production values, the unconvincing attempts to turn Crenshaw into a cross between Ethan Hunt and Thor, the silly portrait of anitfa, the arrival mere days after heinous allegations — all conspired to make him a figure of fun over social media.

https://twitter.com/waltshaub/status/1338279889795952646

Some compared it to Threat Level Midnight, the hilarious spy fantasy written by The Office’s Michael Scott.

https://twitter.com/waltshaub/status/1338282944851570690

Some found it the year’s weirdest campaign video.

Others pointed out some plot holes.

Many mocked Crenshaw’s action star aspirations.

And some called him out for what he really is.

Of course, Perdue and Loeffler could really use the help. He was so scared of his opponent that he skipped out on their last debate, while she robotically repeated buzzterms like “radical leftist” during hers. Then again, if Crenshaw really did help smear a woman reporting sexual assault, maybe ludicrous campaign videos are the only places left where he can be the good guy.

CNN’s Jake Tapper has never been one to praise outgoing president Donald J. Trump. Quite the contrary. But on Sunday — mere days after slamming the GOP House for letting a “deranged” lawsuit make its way to the Supreme Court, where it died a quick death — he decided to change that, sort of. Tapper used the end of his program with a monologue in which he offered Trump thanks. Again, sort of.

It began, seemingly, in earnest. Tapper cited some “legitimate achievements” from his presidency, among them Operation Warp Speed, which indeed led to a vaccine being quickly approved and whose first batches have already been dispensed. (Tapper didn’t mention that Trump’s administration, many of whom have recklessly caught COVID-19, were among the first recipients.) He said he’s “rethought trade deals,” “reimagined peace in the Middle East,” and for bringing some service members home, “even if his follow-through has been rather wanting.”

Once Tapper got that out of the way, his tone changed to sarcasm. The remainder of his monologue laid out the many ways Trump has, by challenging democratic, inadvertently exposed cracks in a system largely based, he said, “on the honor system” — ones that could have been even more thoroughly exploited by a more focused conman. “A government upheld upon the honor system only works if everyone involved…has honor,” Tapper said.

Tapper then moved onto the events of the last week, when his legal team, plus a bevy of Republican lawmakers, pushed that aforementioned lawsuit against key battleground states that have already certified their elections for Biden. “It was a clownish legal brief based on conspiracy theories and outright lies,” he said. “And 18 state attorneys general, some U.S. senators, and a majority of the House Republican caucus, 126 members, supported it.”

Thus, in Tapper’s estimation, Trump “did us a favor by exposing these elected officials.” He then described those supporters as “definitionally people who signed on to a desperate desire to subvert the will of the American people, to disenfranchise voters in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan based on lies and conspiracy theories, putting an immoral and corrupt power grab above democracy.”

The GOP has largely kept quiet over the last month-plus since Biden was declared winner, which has seen Trump and his minions make baseless accusations of voter fraud and been shot down in dozens and dozens of court cases. But when the Trump team filed that DOA lawsuit, he forced them to expose their real selves:

“Many Americans hoped that most Republican officials, while they agreed with Trump’s policies, did not like the uglier parts of his style, his willingness to lie or smear to achieve his ends. But President Trump made House Republicans go on the record … He made them stand and be counted, and 126 of them, including Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy and Republican Whip Steve Scalise, they actually signed their names to this, this unconservative, undemocratic, unAmerican, mendacious joke of a lawsuit that would disenfranchise millions of their fellow Americans.

“These House Republicans raised their hands … They said: Sign me up. The hope that most Republicans in the House were better than this — that has been destroyed. For those of us who believe in standards and norms and the U.S. Constitution, we need to thank President Trump for bringing this fact to light.”

Then again, maybe no one needs to thank Donald Trump for a thing.

He was a spy who became one of the great spy novelists, bringing realism, technical accuracy, and a weathered sense of what the job does to you to a genre often overrun with sexy Bond-like fantasy. And after a long and storied career, John le Carré has passed on, reports The New York Times.

Born David John Moore Cromwell, le Carré didn’t have the rosiest childhood. His mother abandoned him as a child, and his father was a low-level conman with ties to the infamous Kray brothers. He developed an interest in the secret ways the world really works, which led him to work at both the MI5 and the MI6, the twin secret service agencies in England. Those experiences helped shape his books, including his third, 1963’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, which became his breakthrough.

That book was his also le Carré’s third to feature George Smiley, the career intelligence officer who became his most consistent character and most famous creation. Smiley isn’t always the main star of his books, and he was the opposite of a dashing spy. He was cold, calculating, ruthlessly efficient. He appears in a number of le Carré’s most celebrated works, including The Looking Glass War, The Russia House, and perhaps his most famous work, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.

Like many in his field, le Carré saw his books turned into movies, starting with The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. Released in 1965, it’s as stark and unforgiving as the novel, starring Richard Burton as an agent sent to sow discord in East Germany. Where Thunderball, the 007 entry released the same year, reveled in imperialist fun, the le Carré film showed that espionage work ran counter to true democratic ideals.

More adaptations followed. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy was turned into both a 1979 miniseries, starring Alec Guinness as Smiley, and a 2010 movie, where Gary Oldman memorably took over. The Little Drummer Girl was made into both a film in 1984, starring Diane Keaton, and a miniseries in 2018, with Michael Shannon, Alexander Skarsgard, and Florence Pugh. The film of The Tailor of Panama actually roped in then-Bond Pierce Brosnan to play a crooked, roguish spy, while the movie of The Constant Gardener netted Rachel Weisz her Oscar in 2005. The Night Manager was turned into a well-received TV show in 2016, with Tom Hiddleston and Hugh Laurie.

Le Carré wrote right up to the end. His final novel, or at least the last one released before his death, was Agent Running in the Field, from last year. Throughout his life and career, he wrote page-turners that helped readers better understand how the world works, about the forces that control our lives from behind a veil, about the often broken people who make it all run. Without him, we’re bound to understand less.

(Via NYT)

Cameo has become an incredibly popular way for people to celebrate things by paying famous people to record a personal message for someone. That is, at least, what the entire site was built off of, but sometimes people use it to play jokes on their friends or, apparently, break up with their significant other in maybe the least personal way possible (but also the funniest to the objective viewer).

On Sunday, a video made the rounds showing Bruce Buffer, the legendary UFC ring announcer known for his very animated theatrics and his “IT’S TIIIIIMMMMMMEEEEEE” catchphrase, offering a message to some poor woman named Kayleigh (Kayley?) to “move on.”

I have to appreciate how all out he goes for this video, as you really get your money’s worth out of a 14 second video with Bruce. He has the full tux jacket and bow tie look going for this one — although that’s apparently not standard — and does not mail in the “IT’S TIIIIIIMMMMMMMEEEEEEEE” in any way. I mean, it is the same as you’d expect ahead of the main event in the Octagon on a big fight night in Las Vegas. I appreciate that, because Bruce Buffer Cameo’s are not cheap. Apparently telling Kayle[igh/y] it was over was worth $299 to whomever paid for this video, which really tells you how bad things were going in this relationship.

I love that he says he only films in a tux if he’s already in a tux at the time, and the reason why he was able to do this one in his tux is that he apparently chose to film this before going to work at UFC 256 because (as you can see from the above image from fight night) he is in the exact same fit. What a legend.

Also, Sorry Kayle[igh/y], but at least you’ll always have a strong story for your worst breakup ever.