Demi Lovato: Dancing with the Devil (YouTube Premium miniseries) — She’s been to post-childhood-stardom hell and back, and now, Demi Lovato is here to present her truth in a four-part series. Expect to see details of not-so-pretty moments and downright destructive ones (Lovato overdosed on a opioid-fentanyl cocktail in 2018), along with details about what led to that moment and how she continues to recover.
Mayans M.C.: Season 3 Premiere (FX, 10:00pm) — This biker drama’s kicking into its darker third gear with the club all wrestling with various personal and professional demons. This week, a very bearded Bishop decides to put EZ’s plan into fruition.
Young Rock (NBC, 8:00pm) — Back in the late 1980s, Rocky is on the road (sounds like ice cream) and Ata discovers a heartbreaking piece of information.
Kenan (NBC, 8:30pm) — Kenan’s former boy-band colleague is now a pop star, and he’s back in town, which may or may not prompt Kenan to seek change.
The Flash (CW, 8:00pm) — Abra Kadabra makes an unexpected return to Central City, and there’s vengeance and a score to settle, and a tricky situation, and, well, it sounds like chaos.
Superman and Lois (CW, 9:00pm) — The world’s most famous superhero and the most famous journalist are behaving as ordinarily as possible in this series, and one can guess how well that will work out. This week, Smallville celebrates Harvest Festival, which sounds delicious and touching and possibly heartbreaking.
New Amsterdam (NBC, 9:00pm) — Max brings Luna back to new York, Bloom’s working hard to ensure safety in the workplace, and Reynolds is shifting around while Sharpe struggles.
The Late Show With Stephen Colbert — Dana Carvey, Imagine Dragons
The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon — Chelsea Handler, Russell Brand, Mary Beth Barone
Late Night With Seth Meyers — Megan Mullally and Nick Offerman, Sebastian Stan, Baratunde Thurston, Ash Soan
Staged: Series 2 (BBC One series on Hulu) — This is the rare COVID-era comedy that’s worth tuning into because who can resist David Tennant and Michael Sheen shooting the sh*t together while playing somewhat fictional versions of themselves? This second installment spans eight episodes and basically follows the two Brits losing their minds during this crisis that’s also making the rest of lose our minds, too. The guest lineup includes Whoopi Goldberg, Ben Schwartz, Jim Parsons, Simon Pegg, Cate Blanchett, Christoph Waltz, Ken Jeong, and Phoebe Waller-Bridge.
Waffles + Mochi: Season 1 (Netflix series) — Michelle Freaking Obama stars in this show about two curious puppets, (obviously) Waffles and Mochi, who explore the world through food and culture. This also doubles as an educational series about fresh-ingredient cooking, so learn how to become a chef, along with the puppets and a former first lady. Don’t resist this one!
The past calendar year has been one of uncertainty for Sixers rookie Tyrese Maxey. The first-year guard out of Kentucky spent eight months working out in preparation for the 2020 NBA Draft, waiting to find out where he’d be continuing his basketball career. Once in Philadelphia, it was a month-long turnaround from Draft to the start of the regular season, learning everything he could about Doc Rivers’ system and his teammates on a squad with title aspirations.
Maxey was thrust into a major role early, as the Sixers found themselves as one of the first teams in the league to have significant absences due to health and safety protocols. During that time, Maxey had an early breakout, scoring in double-figures in six straight games, including a 39-point outburst when the Sixers were stretched to an 8-man rotation. It was an assertion that he belonged, but on a team with title dreams and veteran depth, once the group was healthy Maxey returned to the periphery of the rotation. He’s played sporadically in the weeks since, but his energy and enthusiasm hasn’t diminished.
It was those traits that kept him focused on the work in the seemingly interminable draft process last year, a process detailed in Klutch Sports’ “Drafted” podcast on iHeartRadio, hosted by Keegan Michael Key that follows Maxey and Anthony Edwards throughout last year leading into the 2020 Draft. Maxey spoke with Dime on the phone last week about that Draft process, lessons learned already in his rookie year with the Sixers, how he evolved his game during countless workouts prior to the Draft, and why he’s always ready whenever an opportunity presents itself.
You were just doing COVID testing, right?
Yeah, literally just got done with a COVID test.
What has it been like adjusting to this schedule that y’all have this year and having to do that along with getting acclimated to being in the NBA?
It’s been crazy. It’s been crazy, but like I told a lot of people, it’s not an adjustment for me because it’s all I know. This is my rookie year so it’s all I know, as far as the NBA. Like no fans or limited fans and no interaction with anybody or going to the room and to quarantine in your room until a game and then fly right back, so I haven’t really … it’s not an adjustment, it’s an adjustment to the vets. They’re the ones going crazy. I’m just happy to be here.
Who are some of the guys on the team that you’ve been able to lean on this year for some advice as you make your transition into the NBA on and off the court?
Right. I think this team is very veteran oriented. It just started at the top with guys like Danny Green who’s won three championships with the Spurs, one for the Raptors, and recently one with the Lakers. You have guys like Dwight Howard, who’s made over $200 million in contracts, probably, and has a ring as well, and then you take it down to guys like Tobias Harris who didn’t play his first two years in the league and now he’s making $34 million a year, so he’s been great. Then you got the All-Stars like Joel Embiid and Ben Simmons. It’s a lot of different perspectives and lots of different views of how they see the league and it’s really helpful to get information from all of them.
In your situation, you come in as a rookie on the team that has championship hopes and that’s meant that your role has occasionally been spotty. You played a little more early in the season and haven’t played quite as much recently. What are the things you’re able to talk with somebody like Tobias about staying engaged and continuing to do the work and and all the things you have to do so you’re ready if your number does get called, and just knowing that eventually you’re going to be in that position?
Well, you know, early in the year, like right when we were getting ready to start preseason, one of the biggest things that Doc and Sam [Cassell] and different guys on the team had told me was like, I mean, it’s gonna be a year of staying ready. Staying ready and healthy just because of the COVID situations, next man up is at its finest this year, because you never know when someone gets sick, you never know when someone can get random contact tracing and different things like that. And that hit us early. That his us early in the year, so my 10th game, I was already starting, I had to step up and start, and Doc said something that really registered in my mind. He was like, if we want to be a championship team, championship teams win games even when their stars are out.
So during that time while I had to play a lot more than expected, we were still able to win games and I was able to show what I was capable of doing and producing, really helping the team and not just being out there. So that’s one thing that really helped me and helped my confidence, and helped the confidence in the coaches and my teammates, just knowing that, you know, if something ever happens and I have to step up, then I’m capable of doing it.
Listening to your first episode of the Drafted podcast, and you talk about how you went about your summer and constantly putting in early morning workouts. How does that mentality you’ve always had about putting in the work — in practice and on your own — help you now in a situation where there aren’t as many game reps and minutes, but you know they’re going to be in the future and you have to make sure you’re ready?
It’s kind of like staying the course. Over this pandemic and over the summer and over the offseason and during the down period of me getting drafted and me getting ready to start in the NBA, I could have relaxed. I could have chilled. I could say okay, well, I’m not playing right now so I can kind of relax and ramp it back up, but no, I stayed the course. I was staying consistent, and that’s what I’m doing now. I’m staying consistent and doing the same things that I was doing when I was in the rotation, if not even more, and just trying to stay ready.
You never know, you never know, especially on a team like this, you never know when we have to rest guys or, you know, older guys need their rest, and I have to be ready to step in and help contribute. I want to be able to … there should be no downfall. Like Coach Doc said, we got to be able to win those games when our key guys and our vets, if they’re hurt or when they’re sitting, we have to be able to win those games and that’s how you know you’re championship ready.
I do want to talk about the Draft process and this podcast. What are you hoping that people can can learn about you both as a player and a person by listening to this?
One thing I really want people to learn is just, you can do anything that you put your mind to. I know it’s, like, cliche, people say that all the time and some people say just to say it, but I really do believe that. That you can do whatever you put your mind to. Like I’m a normal kid from Garland, and I just worked extremely, extremely hard to get to my position where I am today. And it’s a lot of stories like that, and I’m not gonna say no one knew that this was possible, but I worked extremely hard. It wasn’t like it was given to me, I had to go get it myself. I want them to know that and then I want them to know just, like, off the court, I like to have fun. I like to live my life, I like to enjoy it — you only get one — so I think you can enjoy it to the fullest while being smart.
Absolutely, and in that first episode you talk about your relationship with your father and your mother and everything they’ve taught you. They talk about how hard your dad coached you but also you say that your mom won’t let you slip up, either. What does it mean having that support system behind you and knowing that you always have someone you can go to whenever you may need advice or just need somebody to talk to about whatever is going on?
It’s great having a support system like that, and it doesn’t just start with my parents. I mean, it goes all the way down the family tree, starting with their parents, both of my grandmothers who lived in the house, one of them passed recently, but both of them, they set the standard. Once they set the standard it just trickled down and everybody, they have to follow it. You don’t want to be the one that’s called slack, you want to be the one who’s not on top of their game. So it’s like a competitive friendly competition or family competition in between all of us. Everybody’s not one upping each other but everybody’s trying to be competitive to show what they bring to the table. And I think, I think that’s how we hold each other accountable. It’s not just my parents, but my grandmothers, my sisters, my uncle and so on and so on.
One of the things I talked with Isaiah Joe about earlier this year was how you had a unique Draft process where it was the longest Draft process and then the shortest training camp run up when you actually knew where you were going to be playing. What are the things that you looked at as you went through the summer as the draft kept getting pushed back and saw as, like, “OK, this is my opportunity to get better?” Were there any things in your game that you really felt like you were able to improve over that period from what you showed while you were at Kentucky?
Yeah I feel like I was able to improve, just playing in the pick-and-roll is so important for a guard my size and just guards period in the NBA. To be able to play in the pick-and-roll, make different reads, scoring reads, passing reads, and just different flows in the game. That’s huge, and I was able to show that immediately when I stepped onto the court here in the NBA. I wasn’t able to show as much of that [at Kentucky], and it was something I need to work on during the offseason. So that’s one thing I really focused on. That and shooting, becoming more confident in different situations. A lot of different shots, different angles to shots, different floaters, runners and different shots that you need as a guard in the NBA.
Your college teammate Immanuel Quickley has been one of the guys that’s had a breakout year, and the Kentucky fraternity is something that I know a lot of guys talk about. Do you still talk with him regularly and other guys from Kentucky around the league and what does it mean to have those kind of resources on top of your teammates in Philly?
It’s great. Of course I talk to Immanuel, I talk to him at least three, four times a week just catching up, checking on him. I’m always watching him. Of course we’re always supporting each other. He’s supporting me when I’m playing, I support him when he’s playing and I think that just goes throughout the entire Kentucky brotherhood. I mean the Big Blue Nation it’s … I think once you’re in it, you’re stuck in it. Everybody looks out for each other.
You mentioned earlier how Doc talking about staying ready stuck with you. What have been the other things that you’ve been able to pull from this coaching staff that you feel is making you already a better player being with a veteran, championship staff?
Just different aspects of the game as far as the details. Our coaching staff is very detail oriented, from Doc all the way down to Sam and the player development. They really believe in film and details and what you’re doing on the defensive end and different concepts of the game It’s was really helped me to just learn, learn to become a better basketball player and a better professional.
Obviously it’s a team that has a strong defensive identity with Ben Simmons and Joel Embiid as two of the best in the league at their respective positions, and strong defenders all over. What have you learned about that side the floor because that that can always that can be one of the bigger adjustments for guys coming into the league, and you’ve got just a great kind of group around you to kind of show what it takes on that end?
Right. I feel like defense is cerebral. It has a lot to do with the mind. A lot of people, you can be quicker or faster, but a lot of people who aren’t as quick and fast can be smarter and can take you out of what you’re doing or what you want to do. So I think that’s the biggest thing that Danny Green and Ben and Joel, even Matisse Thybulle [have shown me]. You know, it’s just his second year in the league but it feels like he’s a seasoned vet the way he plays defense and he’s very good for us. And I’ve learned a lot from him just in this half of a season. Just how he keeps coming on plays and how he’s able to fight through screens and how he’s able to navigate around being screen and different things like that.
Finally, what are the things that you look at in your game that you’re already kind of looking at and saying like, alright, here are the things that are going to take me to the next level and get me into those rotation spots and get you where you want to go in your career?
I think it’s just getting one percent better every single day. Being one percent better, staying healthy, and continue to stay the course. One thing about me is, no matter the situation I’m always gonna put the work in. I’m always gonna have confidence in myself whenever I get the opportunity, and I’m always going to stay faithful, stay prayed up, and stay ready for the moment.
The Golden State Warriors wouldn’t have won three championships without Draymond Green doing what he does best. His impact as a defender, facilitator, and motivator is not something that’s easily quantified, which is partly what leaves him open to the type of criticism he’s received from Charles Barkley and others who would minimize his contributions based solely on stat lines.
A big part of his impact comes from his enormous versatility as a defender. His feel, his awareness, and his ability to anticipate what the opposing team is going to do and react accordingly allows him to wreak havoc on the court. He truly belongs up there with the greats when you start mentioning the best defenders of all-time.
But the very best? Not so fast, says one of his contemporaries. Tony Allen, the Grindfather himself, took exception to Green’s recent comments that he believes himself to be the best defender in NBA history.
And Allen brings up a salient point when asked about who’s given Green their stamp of approval, a reference to the fact that none other than Kobe Bryant once pegged Allen as the best defender he’s ever faced. It’s hard to argue with that kind of endorsement. But Green, of course, wasn’t going to take that lying down.
I was waiting on you to stamp me Big homie, but your stamp book started running low in 2015 when we used you against your team on the way to my 1ST championship. https://t.co/mDHfltdfZ0
Ouch. Allen walked right into that one. What was shaping up to be a competitive series between the Grizzlies and Warriors in 2015 did indeed quickly turn south when Golden State simply stopped guarding Allen when he had the ball, effectively neutralizing his impact. However, Allen made sure to fire back one more time about Green’s own shooting struggles, saying the Warriors are playing “4-on-5” now.
None of this exactly settles the dispute over who is the better defender, but it’s quite entertaining. In the end, it’s largely subjective, and players from other eras, like Scottie Pippen or Hakeem Olajuwon, would probably have something to say about it as well. Both Green and Allen are great in their own respect, regardless of GOAT status.
Owen Copland, 20, is a perfect example of living life to the fullest, even in the most dire of circumstances.
The university student from Liverpool, England, began experiencing severe headaches late last year but had a hard time getting proper medical attention because of COVID-19 lockdowns.
It took three trips to the hospital until he finally got a CT scan last November. Unfortunately, the news was bleak, he had a Grade 4 Glioblastoma, one of the most aggressive forms of brain cancer.
Soon after the diagnosis, he went through a six-hour life-saving operation to remove the cancer. But earlier this month he learned that it continued to grow and he only had days to live. The tumor is pressing on his brain stem, significantly affecting the ability of his heart to function properly.
Owen going in for surgery. via Owens Glioblastoma Story / Facebook
After realizing the severity of his health condition, Owen proposed to Sarah Jones, 21, his girlfriend of two years.
“When I came home I saw my girlfriend and said, ‘I want to marry you,'” he told The Daily Mail. Sarah said, “Yes.”
Given the fact that time is of the essence, the couple was able to throw together a commitment ceremony in a matter of days. He called his buddy Luke and asked him to be his best man, and he was ready with a beautiful speech the next day.
Sarah found a dress, and his family rounded up some flowers, music, and food for the celebration.
“‘It felt good to see my friends and hear my best man’s speech, who I asked to be my best man just the day before,” Owen said. The event was extra special for Owen because COVID-19 had kept him away from his friends for months.
“I’d been wanting to be on my game and speak to my friends online but because of Covid I couldn’t see him,” he said. “So to get a speech from my best man in person was emotional for both of us.”
The wedding was just one of many ways his family has been there for him throughout his cancer battle. “Before I took my family for granted and since my diagnosis I have wanted them there by my side which they have been. I know they will never leave me or give up on me, I love them,” he said.
Owen and his family have been very public about his fight to help to raise awareness for brain tumors. Owens mother, Gill, believes there isn’t enough funding for the disease, so they created a Facebook page called “Owen & Glioblastoma” to bring awareness to his fight.
They’ve also set up a GoFundme page “to raise funds to go towards Owen’s recovery and healing, cover any costs the family might be facing at this difficult time …”
“I passionately believe there should be more funding into research for brain tumors,” Gill said. “He and others who are suffering deserve this change to happen.
“While all cancers and illnesses are devastating, this is in a league of its own. It’s like wading through mud,” she added.
Last year, Boosie Badazz found himself facing backlash for some insensitive and transphobic comments he made about Dwyane Wade’s transgender daughter. Boosie’s remarks not only led to public scrutiny, but it also ended up getting him banned from his local Planet Fitness. Now, nearly a year later, Wade has directly responded to Boosie’s comments, saying that they were able to spark positive and necessary conversations about trans rights.
Wade recently sat down for a lengthy conversation on the I Am Athlete podcast. Throughout the interview, Wade opened up about the effects of toxic masculinity and the strength his daughter, Zaya, showed in coming out as transgender. Wade said that as soon as his daughter came out, he was committed to learning as much as possible about trans rights so that he could facilitate a happy and healthy life for her. The basketball player also addressed all the transphobic comments that were being thrown around after news broke of his daughter’s identity.
Name-dropping Boosie, Wade said the rapper’s comments were a way of bringing important conversations into the limelight: “Boosie, all the people who’ve got something to say about my kids, I thank you because you allow the conversation to keep going forward. You might not have the answer today, I don’t have all the answers, but we’re growing from all these conversations. I thank everybody for even hating and starting those conversations, because those conversations are starting other conversations that we need to have.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Wade described the moment he knew he needed to educate himself about trans rights in order to support his daughter:
“I’m looking at my child, scared to tell me, and I feel like I’m pretty open at this time. I realized that I need to do better, and I need to do more, and I need to educate myself. So what I did is I picked up the phone and I researched as much as I can because I needed to understand. I sat down with my child and I asked questions, because I didn’t know. It’s not our job and responsibility to tell you who you are. You are going to be who you’re going to be. It’s my job to put you in the best position to reach that goal of who you want to be. Right now, we’re experiencing that with Zaya. Last year, we came out and we spoke to the world that, hey, my 13-year-old came home and said, ‘Dad, this is who I am. I am a transgender child.’ We didn’t come out until she was 12, to the world. But the reason why we came out to the world was because I got tired of trying to hide my child. It came to the point where I said, am I hiding her from it, or I am hiding myself from it?”
Watch Wade’s full interview on the I Am Athlete podcast above.
Super teams in the modern era were never meant to last. The NBA landscape can shift dramatically over the course of a single season, and players, coaches, and front offices have to be agile and willing to make bold moves as they juggle the dual and sometimes conflicting goals of trying to win now and set themselves up for the future.
Players have more agency than ever before, and they’ve grown increasingly savvy about how to manage their legacy. It tests the bounds of loyalty to their teammates, their organizations, and their fan base, and the residual effects of losing a superstar to free agency can leave a bad taste for years.
That’s apparently still the case for the Golden State Warriors. This week, Steve Kerr revealed something we’ve all been well aware of when he said that he enjoyed last year’s 15-50 season more than he did the final season with Kevin Durant before he left for Brooklyn. It’s no secret that their final year together was a tumultuous ride, but Kerr is now taking umbrage with the way he believes his words were painted in a negative light.
Steve Kerr, unprompted, brings up a podcast comment of his that went viral today involving KD’s final season compared to last season. Said he is “angry” about the way it was contextualized.
Steve Kerr, unprompted, brings up a podcast comment of his that went viral today involving KD’s final season compared to last season. Said he is “angry” about the way it was contextualized.
Kerr says at various points that it was a “terribly unfair shot” and “irresponsible and damaging.” In fairness to Kerr, he never pinpointed Durant directly in his original comments about the difficulties of that final season together. But it’s hard to ignore the implications, as Durant’s uncertain future with the team was a central issue — Kerr specifically used the word “agendas” in his remarks, which is the sort of thing that will always be perceived in one very specific way.
Still, Kerr clearly wasn’t happy about the way his comments were handled, and no amount of backtracking can undo the damage, although enough time has passed that both parties should be able to put it behind them and focus on their respective futures.
Apparently it’s vanity project month here on Plot Recreated With Reviews. For our last subject, we had Music, Sia’s disastrous autism musical. Today we have Me You Madness, current-wife-of-the-former-treasury-secretary Louise Linton’s tragic-comic bonfire of money (yes, her husband Steve Mnuchin founded a film financing venture at one point). It’s another movie that sounds like something we don’t especially want to watch, but would love to hear described.
A little backstory: Louise Linton was relatively infamous for being an out-of-touch narcissist even before she met and married her real-life supervillain husband. In 2016, she self-published a memoir about her gap year in Zambia, describing herself as a “skinny white mzungu with long angel hair,” and recounting the nights she spent terrified of the armed rebels then terrorizing a completely different country. In another passage she wrote, “I try to remember a smiling gap-toothed child with HIV whose greatest joy was to sit on my lap and drink from a bottle of Coca-Cola,” she writes. “Zimba taught me many beautiful words but the one I like the most is Nsansa. Happiness.”
She has since made Me You Madness, a slasher-comedy vanity project that she wrote, directed, and stars in, and which co-stars ferret-faced former Gossip Girl star Ed Westwick, who seems to have been mostly unemployable lately thanks to some rape allegations. The picture from the “premiere” looks like they scraped Westwick off the floor in the midst of some retired-action hero bender in order to pose awkwardly next to Mnuchin. The Hollywood Reporter notes that more than half the audience left the premiere screening early, despite the fact that it was held at a drive-in.
Many reviewers compared the film to American Psycho (which the film takes great pains to compare itself to), made by someone who thought Patrick Bateman was the hero of American Psycho. But hey, why spoil it? Let’s dig in. Today, we are all that smiling gap-toothed child with HIV.
Linton stars as Catherine Black, the owner of a hedge fund firm who is inordinately wealthy, verifiably intelligent, fashionable, beautiful, and irresistibly sexy. The character points out having an IQ above 170. (MarkReviewsMovies)
She is addicted to exercise, taking black-lit spin classes wearing glow-in-the-dark bunny ears, lifting weights, and doing 1,000 butt crunches. (Salon)
“You may think that this is a straight rip-off of American Psycho, and in some ways you may be right,” Catherine’s rapid-fire voice-over admonishes us in the film’s early scenes. (Vulture)
She’s a self-aware master of business, intimidating employees and masturbating to stock reports. (BluRay.com)
She’s bipolar, with a lust for murder that demands constant satisfaction, leading her to collect body parts in her home for later consumption. (BluRay.com)
The character, Linton informs us in a director’s statement, is inspired by such iconic cinematic femme fatales as Sharon Stone’s Catherine Tramell in Basic Instinct, Glenn Close’s Alex Forrest in Fatal Attraction and the central figure in the classic 1945 noir Leave Her to Heaven, although the last homage would be more convincing if she knew that the name of that film’s star was spelled Gene, not Jean, Tierney. (Hollywood Reporter)
By way of introduction, she discusses how male spiders risk death in order to mate, then promptly tosses a rather large eight-legged critter into her mouth and eats it. (CNN)
(Not to worry, the end credits assure us that “Kiki the spider was not harmed, or eaten, during the making of the film.”) (HollywoodReporter)
THE BRAGGING
“I’m happy when I wake up, because I remember that I’m me and my life is incredible,” Catherine tells us. (HollywoodReporter)
“I’m rarely if ever comfortable, but I look incredibly stylish, which is much more important.” (AlternateEnding)
THE HOUSE
As seen in various swooping overhead drone shots through the film, Catherine’s home appears to be several football fields long, but only one story tall. It is Snowpiercer: The House. It also appears to be from an alternate timeline of The Office where Michael Scott got rich: The home is absolutely filled with neon, which occasionally reflects off characters’ faces when they’re talking. (Defector)
TYLER
The plot is set in motion with the arrival of Tyler (Ed Westwick, Gossip Girl), a hunky young man who answers Catherine’s ad for a room to rent (HollywoodReporter)
He’s thunderstruck by Catherine’s mansion and all the surprises it contains. (Blu-Ray.com)
He turns out to be a petty criminal and con man, although not a very bright one, as indicated by his failing to notice when she slips a roofie into his drink. (HollywoodReporter)
She then gropes him while he’s unconscious, forestalling any audience disapproval by looking directly into the camera and announcing, “Oh, shut up, PC police! No one wants to hear you bitch about it.” (HollywoodReporter)
She states with glee that it’s “hilarious to harass a man.” (CommonSenseMedia)
Soon, after a three-way with best friend Yu Yan (Shuya Chang), (Deadline)
…multiple costume changes, repeated cutaways to Catherine gyrating, and some montage-y hot sex, (Vulture)
he’s smitten and has second thoughts about robbing her (Vulture)
…and she doesn’t want to kill him. What’s a couple in love to do? (Salon)
The none-too-bright Tyler generally sounds as confused as the audience. “I can’t tell if you’re being funny,” he tells Catherine. (CNN)
FOURTH WALL BREAKING
one thing audiences like is references, that way they can relate to the film easier pic.twitter.com/cIe9nCMd1e
In no time both he, and we, find out what she’s been up to, thanks to a freezer stocked with various heads and body parts. In fact, Catherine does a Flashdance-style piece of choreography while seductively embracing the various dismembered parts she retrieves from her storage. (Deadline)
The lead performers don’t so much wink at the camera as leer at it and threaten to lick it all over (HollywoodReporter)
Rather than reference films she likes obliquely, Linton sometimes decides to just state the name of the film she would like to refer to, often in a monologue directed straight at the camera (Defector)
…declaring “this moment should remind you of this movie, since that’s where I stole it from” (AlternateEnding)
At one point, (Defector)
an entire list of movies that feature guns (complete with quick-scrolling onscreen text!), and the relative merits of using a curling iron as a murder weapon… (Vulture)
just scrolls up the screen as her character names them. At some point, her voice is sped up so as to more quickly make it through the list. (DEFECTOR)
The movie fast-forwards (squeaky high-pitched sound and all) to get through the list faster. (AlternateEnding)
The second time she does this is obviously knowingly making fun of the first time she did it (AlternateEnding)
CANNIBALISM
Yes, Catherine has a freezer full of body parts, and occasionally dines on them. (CNN)
She makes a killer “frat boy bouillabaisse.” (Vulture)
Men get punched, kicked, stabbed, drugged, killed, beaten to death with shoes or hit with household items or sporting equipment like a tennis racket. Frozen body parts are chopped up and sawed. A severed man’s head is used as a dance partner and more. (CommonSenseMedia)
ASININE DIALOGUE
Along the way, they engage in such seemingly endless debates as whether a piece of furniture is a couch or a sofa and the correct pronunciation of Van Gogh. (HollywoodReporter)
The film tries to punch it up by cutting directly on the dialogue, making one conversation after another a perilous adventure in choppy rhythm that feels like the movie is going to start choking on its tongue if it doesn’t take a second to draw a breath. (AlternateEnding)
The sound design also plays up various effects — a whoosh here, a clang there, a cat screech there, even a couple of farts — as if to lend some Looney Tunes–style verve to the action (Vulture)
PHILANTHROPY
Late in the film, she turns to the screen for a monologue about and why she’s actually doing the world a favor by killing these dudes—prison is expensive, she says, and rehabilitation isn’t possible. (Defector)
Her victims are homophobes, pedophiles, sex traffickers, neo-Nazis and even — gasp! laugh! — Republicans. (Don’t worry, she’s a bipartisan, bisexual murderess who also dispatches Democrats). (Salon)
And while Catherine pauses to give a PSA about not leaving animals in cars (even with the windows cracked), this important information is misplaced. (Salon)
There’s a weirdly high degree of Asian fetishism and exoticization in the film. Of the very few side characters in the film, 2 of them are Asian, both are confidants, one a manicurist named Tien-Ting (Jimmy Dinh), the other a lover named Yu Yan (Shuya Chang). In every scene with these two Linton shows off her Mandarin and “downness” with Asian peoples. (CommonSenseMedia)
THE CLOTHES
Half of the film seems intent on finding reasons to show off Linton herself, in all her different and expensive costumes and dresses and lingerie. (CommonSenseMedia)
Linton appears in a new outfit on the order of once every two minutes, their bright, over-saturated colors and sleek lines that are not meaningfully designed to accommodate the human body providing a garish, poppy contrast to the space. (Alternate Ending)
Catherine Black’s outfits – the New York Times informs us she wears 42 of them—seem expensive but are not noticeably cool. (Defector)
Westwick, for the record, spends the entire movie in a white Henley with a yellow plaid shirt tied around his waist, like 1997 never ended. (Alternate Ending)
STX Films
THE NARCISSISM
Don’t be threatened by this “really special” lady, who is amazing, beautiful, elegant, charming, smart, and sexy. (Those are words from the script; Linton also penned the screenplay). (Salon)
Many scenes simply devolve into Linton dancing (often erotically), working out, or showering. (CommonSenseMedia)
We’re treated to so many lascivious shots of Linton’s toned, bared physique that one would accuse the filmmaker of sexual exploitation if it weren’t Linton herself. (HollywoodReporter)
Spying Catherine in yet another of a series of provocative, body-hugging outfits, Tyler comments, “Really, another costume change?” At another point, he exclaims, “Whoever wrote this is a fucking genius.” (HollywoodReporter)
THE CONFUSING ACCENT
Linton’s dumbfounding performance intensifies, with her outlandish cornucopia of accents – she was born in Edinburgh, and that keeps bodily forcing itself through what sounds like she’s trying to do a Mid-Atlantic accent, but also with a clipped, bird-like tone, and on top of all of this she takes great pleasure in segregating the word “fuck” from every single line where it appears, just really caressing and rounding it, so we get lines like “Did you know there are actually no. Fuck. -ing spiders in Antarctica?” (Alternate Ending)
PG PORN
And the kissing. The kissing!! Louise Linton very much did not want to open-mouth kiss Chuck Bass. Every sex scene in this film is a chaste encounter where she makes out with his philtrum. (Defector)
Every time they kiss, they’re just mashing their tightly-closed lips against each other. (AlternateEnding)
MUSIC
The darkly comic, psycho-sexual thriller seemingly devotes most of its budget to two things: Licensing songs from the 1980s, and acquiring lavish wardrobe options for its central character. (CNN)
There are innumerable dance scenes, both from Westwick and Linton, none of which are interesting. (Defector)
And, then, the montages. My Christ, the montages. Me You Madness has no fewer than 22 fairly major hits from the ’80s and ’90s on its soundtrack (a few of them awful sound-alike covers), almost every last one of them artlessly faded in and out under a short flurry of shots of Catherine or Westwick’s thief-turned-cannibal-escapee Tyler doing something; “Jump (For My Love)” by the Pointer sisters accompanies a shot of Catherine walking up the stairs to her private jet, for example. (Alternate Ending)
A sequence of Tyler randomly dancing and lip-syncing in a red robe and red underpants to “I’m So Excited,” crosscut with Catherine carving up frozen corpse parts in her killing room, goes on for nearly the whole length of the song. (Alternate Ending)
CONCLUSIONS
Imagine the passion project of a very rich and very confident woman without any evident talent or perspective, or a functioning sense of humor. Me You Madness is that movie. (Defector)
A dazzling movie in the darkest possible way, a cutesy romcom buried under the most rancid cynicism, except that the film genuinely doesn’t seem to be cynical about it. (Alternate Ending)
There is a ridiculous “happy ending” in which the two main characters, who appear not to have aged at all, suddenly have three children. (Defector)
—
So there you have it. Say what you will about her terrible taste in… well… everything, the best thing Louise Linton could do for society is waste a lot of her awful husband’s money, and in that she seems to have succeeded spectacularly.
A female friend once told her husband that her doctors had dismissed her when she described how much pain she was in. Her husband gave the docs the benefit of the doubt, saying that pain was subjective and maybe she just needed to describe it differently. Then he went to a doctor’s appointment with her, saw the phenomenon himself, and apologized. She was right. She’d explained exactly what she was experiencing—the doctors just didn’t believe that her pain was as bad as she was describing.
Gender bias in pain assessment and treatment in clinical settings is well-documented, but a new study has found that it’s not just health professionals who tend to think women exaggerate pain levels. In a paper published this month in the Journal of Pain, an international group of researchers from the U.S., France, and China shared that among a sample of average adults, both men and women show a “reasonably strong gender bias” in their interpretations of patients’ pain. The main takeaway is that people tend to believe that women aren’t in as much pain as they really are.
The study involved two experiments, the first with 50 participants and the second with 197, in which people watched videos of both male and female patients experiencing shoulder pain. Participants were asked to observe the patients’ expressions of pain and rate their pain level on a scale of zero (absolutely no pain) to 100 (the worst pain possible).
In both experiments, participants perceived female patients to be in less pain than the males, even when they were experiencing the same intensity level of pain. And across the sample, women were just as likely to underestimate women’s pain as men were.
Participants were also asked how they would prescribe treatment for the patients’ pain if they were doctors. Though the numbers weren’t drastically different, women were more likely than men to be prescribed psychotherapy (42% for women, 38% for men), while men were more likely than women to be prescribed pain medication (58% for women, 62% for men).
Why such discrepancies? The study authors think on reason is gender expectations and stereotypes.
“Generally, boys are discouraged from expressing emotions, whereas girls are permitted to express them,” the study authors told The Academic Times. “As a result, men may be more reluctant to express pain and other vulnerabilities than women. Thus, masculine gender norms are associated with high pain tolerance and stoicism whereas feminine gender norms are more permissive of expressing pain.”
In other words, since people perceive men to hide their emotions more, the assumption is that they are actually in more pain than they’re letting on. Since women show their emotions more, the assumption is that their pain may not be as bad as they’re expressing.
Researchers also included a Gender Role Expectation of Pain Questionnaire in their second experiment, which found that women tend to believe that women are able to endure pain longer than men, and both genders believe that women are substantially more willing to report pain than men. According to the authors, those pain-related stereotypes predicted the pain estimated biases shown in the experiment.
Paradoxically, women may be perceived as exaggerating their pain precisely because they are more open and honest about it.
“Women are consistently found to report higher levels of pain than men and to be more expressive of pain than men,” the authors said. “Perceivers may in turn get habituated to more frequent or more intense pain expressions in females and as a result reduce the pain they attribute to those expressions.”
Such gender biases in pain estimation matter, as they can interfere with effective clinical care when coming from physicians and impact social support when coming from the people around us. Similar pain perception biases also happen along racial lines, so women of color face an even steeper climb to have their pain recognized and treated effectively.
Though biases are subconscious and can be tricky to weed out, a simple solution here is a shift in mindset to believing women when they describe what’s happening in their own bodies. Pain is subjective, which should be all the more reason not to make your own judgments about what someone else is experiencing. If a woman says her pain level is a 7 out of 10, that’s what she means. She knows her body. It’s okay to take her at her word.
With theaters re-opening in New York and Los Angeles after being off-limits for nearly a year due to the pandemic, the movie industry is returning to normal (whatever “normal” means anymore). But not entirely. Disney announced on Tuesday that its biggest title of the year, Black Widow, will be released simultaneously on Disney+ and in theaters.
Black Widow, the 24th film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, will premiere on July 9 (it had previously been scheduled for May 7), while the Emma Stone-starring Cruella de Vil origin story, Cruella, is out May 29, also on Disney+ and in theaters. Like Mulan and Raya and the Last Dragon, both films will cost $30 on the streaming service.
The scheduling shift for Black Widow means that Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, which was previously set for July, was bumped back to Sept. 3. It’s expected to have a traditional theatrical release. Elsewhere, Pixar’s Luca won’t play in theaters and instead is launching exclusively on Disney Plus, for no extra fee, on June 18.
Other release date changes include Ryan Reynolds and Jodie Comer’s video game movie Free Guy (now out August 13), Matthew Vaughn’s The King’s Man (December 22), Deep Water (Jan. 14, 2022 — it stars Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas, which should make for an interesting press tour), and the Murder on the Orient Express follow-up, Death on the Nile (February 11, 2022). I believe Tom Cruise said it best:
Black Midi impressed a lot of folks with their 2019 album Schlagenheim and now they’re ready to return with more. Today, the UK experimental group announced Cavalcade, a new album that’s set for release on May 28. They’ve also shared a new song, the erratic and aggressive “John L.”
Morgan Simpson described writing the album, which was largely written by individual band members at home, “The experience this time round was completely the flipside to Schlagenheim. A lot of the material was really fresh but that was something that played into our hands and we relished it.” Geordie Greep added of working with John “Spud” Murphy on the album:
“It worked really well with John. We wanted a natural, open sound combined with fourth wall breaks – for lack of a better expression. Do you know on record when you can hear the tape screeching, the things that make you aware that you’re listening to a recording? [With a lot of records,] it feels like either you’re listening to the ECM, high-fidelity, 25 mic amazing sound or you have the lo-fi album full of crazy effects. And I thought, ‘Why not have an album where you combine the two?’ That was one of the main ideas going into it and John was very keen on that idea.”
Watch the “John L” video above and find the Cavalcade art and tracklist below.
Cavalcade is out 5/28 via Rough Trade. Pre-order it here.
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!!! Who stamped you? Who you clamp!? 
Owen going in for surgery. via Owens Glioblastoma Story / Facebook
