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I suspect that for anyone who was actually considering seeing it, the only review of The War With Grandpa you need is that my 7-year-old stepson sat through the entire thing, without begging to play on his tablet. Which is to say that it’s certainly a movie you can watch with your kids. But at what cost? Also, it’s only playing in theaters.

Yes, The War With Grandpa stars Robert De Niro, who has already been in enough bad paycheck movies that we don’t need to roast him anew for him being in this one. Suffice it to say, nothing in this is as embarrassing as getting stabbed in the boner with a syringe over a Viagra incident like he did in Meet The Fockers. Get that money, Bobby D.

Despite sounding like it sprung out of easy marketing campaigns like Neighbors (FRAT vs. FAMILY), Daddy’s Home (DAD vs. STEP DAD), or the self-explanatory Fist Fight, The War With Grandpa was actually adapted from a children’s book — Robert Kimmel Smith’s winner of 11 state reading awards of the same name, originally published in 1984. From what I can tell, the book seems to be a light pacifist allegory, using the story of a widowed grandfather whose middle school grandson declares “war” when grandpa takes over his room, in order to make the point that wars are silly and no one wins.

But I’m pretty sure that whichever studio exec optioned it saw only the chance to apply a tried-and-true marketing formula. Grandpa! Grandson! It’s war! Why find something good and figure out how to sell it when you can just find a new version of something you already know how to sell? In old boxing parlance, The War With Grandpa is selling wolf tickets.

The feeling of Neighbors deja vu is confirmed when, in a climactic moment in The War With Grandpa, someone gets pranked with an airbag under their seat cushion. You know, that same gag they used in the Neighbors trailer.

Presumably, this film’s target audience won’t care if it’s derivative. Robert De Niro plays Ed, a widower living in some leafy unnamed suburb where one day, he starts an elderly riot by refusing to use the electronic checkout machine that his local supermarket has installed after firing his favorite cashier. Kudos to writers Tom Astle and Matt Ember for inventing this scene (which presumably didn’t exist in a book written in 1984) which is both relatable and genial, if not quite side-splittingly funny.

That being said, it doesn’t especially make sense as the inciting incident for Ed’s daughter Sally, played by Uma Thurman, to demand that Ed move in with her family so they can look after him. Ed — who actually looks pretty spry, with a full head of hair and decent muscle tone — isn’t exactly unraveling from dementia here. In fact, it seems like he’s the only sane one, refusing to let the supermarket offer subpar service just so they can lay off another low-wage worker. Ed is the hero! This country needs more people like Ed!

That’s basically The War With Grandpa in a nutshell though — a series of madcap scenarios in search of a logical reason for them to exist. Soon we meet Ed’s grandson, Peter, played by a person called “Oakes Fegley,” who like virtually all child actors has at least 20% too much hair. Thus his parents and the filmmakers have now put me in the awkward position of trying not to ridicule a child. Look, I know it’s not the kids’ fault. That’s why it bugs me! How about no actors under 15 from now on? Can’t we just use older kids and age them down, or have Andy Serkis play them all in motion capture scenarios? Andy Serkis loves press tours.

Anyway, Ed takes over Peter’s room and Peter has to move into the attic, leading Peter to declare “war” on Ed, despite them mostly getting along otherwise. This, naturally, leads to a series of escalating Home Alone-esque prank bits, from marbles on the floor to plaster in the shaving cream to a “climactic” dodgeball game shot entirely with stunt doubles and wirework. “If the gag doesn’t work, you haven’t stylized it enough” seems to be The War With Grandpa‘s basic operating principle, where hyperbole always trumps wit. “Robert De Niro’s pants falling down is really funny” is the sub-motif.

A few vestigial elements from the book survive, in the form of vignettes in which Ed patiently explains to Peter why war is bad, in between bits borrowed from Neighbors and Home Alone. Unsurprisingly, the war allegory now just seems kind of odd and out of place. Maybe because it’s kind of weird to try to deliver a pacifist message after you’ve sold people solely on the spectacle of a fight.

Ed has a crew of friends that include a womanizer played by Cheech Marin and an adventure junkie played by Christopher Walken, and it’s nice to see those guys for a bit, even if the movie makes no attempt to bridge the gap between “types” and actual characters. On that note, Peter’s focus-grouped cute siblings include boy crazy older sis Mia (played by Laura Marano, who is 24 — see?? it works just fine!) and kid sis Jennifer, whose shtick is loving Christmas, played by Poppy Gagnon. I don’t want to harp on this child actor thing, but does anyone else think it’s super weird that a six-year-old (or whatever) has this dramatic ingenue headshot? Stop this madness.

As you might expect, Ed and Pete eventually go fishing and come to discover that they love each other and that war is bad. As you might not expect, the movie culminates with Ed ditching Pete to go hang out with his new girlfriend, Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman (aka Jane Seymour).

I’m serious, Ed jumps in a car with his new gal while Pete watches sadly from the upstairs window. And then the credits roll! It’s so weird and discordant that it feels almost like they were supposed to shoot another scene but got tired and just said screw it. And I can’t say they were wrong for it. The War With Grandpa kept a seven-year-old entertained for a full 90 minutes, so great job, I guess. Now, can we get that kid a haircut?

‘The War With Grandpa’ is available now in theaters nationwide. Vince Mancini is on Twitter. You can access his archive of reviews here.

When The Walking Dead returns in the Spring of 2021 for six episodes, they will be working from “six of the best scripts we’ve done,” Scott Gimple told The Insider earlier this week. Production on those episodes, in fact, has already begun. According to Deadline, they’ve done table readings and wardrobe fittings, and shooting is expected to begin in the next few days. Season 10 will shoot until Thanksgiving, and then in January, shooting will begin on the final 24 episodes of the series, which will air over 2021 and 2022.

Showrunner Angela Kang warns, however, that we should not expect the same size and scope that we are accustomed from in the season 10 bonus episodes. While The Walking Dead has its own studio and its own backlot, and while it has the ability to build and add locations onto that backlot, the series will still be operating this fall during a pandemic, so don’t expect to see hundreds of extras or huge crowds of zombies. Production, however, is set up well for the Coronavirus. Among other things, according to Kang, they have “UV light things to zap germs” and their own mobile lab, so they can process Coronavirus lab tests themselves.

As for the stories themselves? That’s what may be most exciting about the bonus episodes. They will be focused on only what appears to be six main characters: Daryl, Carol, Negan, Maggie, Gabriel, and Aaron. The episodes will build toward season 11, but without Eugene, Princess, Ezekiel or Yumiko in the episode, we know that it won’t take up with the Commonwealth just yet.

Instead, the episodes will focus on “the dynamics between Maggie and Negan, we’ll see a lot of story related to Daryl and Carol, and where people have been in the past.” The Maggie and Negan reunion is something that a lot of The Walking Dead fans have been waiting for since the last time we saw the two in the same episode, Maggie was trying to kill Negan, who murdered her husband. It’ll be interesting to see, since Maggie obviously isn’t aware of Negan’s redemption arc.

Meanwhile, the Carol and Daryl storyline may continue to build on their future spin-off, and the references to “where people have been in the past” is obviously a nod toward where Maggie has been the last two seasons. That should also mean that we finally find out what’s up with that Ninja guy, how Maggie continued to get mail in the apocalypse, and perhaps what happened to Georgie.

Moreover, the episodes will not be stand-alone or bottle episodes. There will be threads that tie together and set up the big final arc in Season 11, which is likely to kick off in the fall 2021. In the meantime, Season 10C will air in the Spring, while Fear the Walking Dead returns this weekend, along with the second episode of The World Beyond.

Source: Deadline, Insider

Big Boi and Sleepy Brown’s 2017 collaboration “We The Ones” resurfaced today with a remix featuring Big Rube and Killer Mike. Originally appearing on the Organized Noize EP, the song’s been updated with a spoken word intro and outro by Rube, who’s been busy contributing to Spillage Village’s new album Spilligion, and a defiant verse from Killer Mike, who released the album RTJ4 with Run The Jewels partner El-P this summer.

Overall, the track fits with 2020’s ongoing mood of protest, as Sleepy sings, “Stand up to oppression / Stand up to all aggression.” Sadly, it also fit the mood of the Bandcamp compilation album Good Music to Avert the Collapse of American Democracy, which goes to show that we’ve been dealing with these subjects for far too long.

Killer Mike tried a different route to address those concerns in September when he met Georgia governor Brian Kemp. Although the move drew criticism online, he defended himself, noting: “I’d like to see minority contracts rise from 2% to between 8-10%. I’d like to see a program created, as early as high school, pushes in particular working-class poor men and African-American young men into trades because, over the next 20 years, Georgia’s going to be growing… I’d like to see us prepare our young men to fill those jobs because we need fathers, we need husbands, and we need stability, in particular.”

Listen to Big Boi and Sleepy Brown’s “We The Ones” remix featuring Killer Mike above.

Kanye West often makes waves on Twitter, and he has done so again today. One of his latest posts has resulted in Kanye becoming one of the top trending topics on Twitter in the US on Friday afternoon; As of press time, he was in the No. 2 spot.

The tweet in question features a photo of a presidential ballot with Kanye’s name handwritten as a write-in candidate. Furthermore, it would appear the ballot pictured is a California one, since Kanye is officially listed as a vice presidential candidate to American Independent candidate Roque “Rocky” De La Fuente Guerra, as was reported recently. Kanye captioned the post, “Friends writing me in.”

Twitter’s description of Kanye as a trending topic reads, “Kanye West sparks reactions by sharing a ballot appearing to show him as a write-in presidential candidate.” Indeed, there are plenty of reactions.

One user invoked the theory that Kanye’s candidacy is designed to help Donald Trump’s re-election campaign, writing, “If you vote for Kanye West, you are falling for Donald Trump’s latest scam. Vote for Joe Biden! Who’s with me?” Meanwhile, Maine Senate candidate Lisa Savage offered a potential solution for people’s concerns about Kanye’s impact on the election: “To all the people worrying about how people voting for Kanye West could split the vote: pass #RankedChoiceVoting in your state, and you won’t have to worry about ‘vote-splitting’ or ‘spoilers’ anymore. We did it in Maine, and it works. We can fix this broken voting system.”

Check out some more reactions below.

It’s always a treat when Alan Moore pops up for a rare interview because you know you’re in for a cranky ride as the Watchmen creator hates on the comic book industry that he inadvertently helped revive and transform in the ’80s. As Batman fans know, Moore’s The Killing Joke and Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns are the two most definitive stories that moved the character past his campy past and into the dark, brooding vigilante punch-fest that he is today. However, for decades, Moore has famously disavowed his work on The Killing Joke and regrets its impact on the comic industry. In his newest interview with Deadline, he takes it one step further by expressing his disgust that his work inspired Joker.

“I’ve been told the Joker film wouldn’t exist without my Joker story (1988’s Batman: The Killing Joke), but three months after I’d written that I was disowning it, it was far too violent,” Moore said. “It was Batman for christ’s sake, it’s a guy dressed as a bat. Increasingly I think the best version of Batman was Adam West, which didn’t take it at all seriously.”

Of course, this is par for the course for Moore, who has been a vocal critic of the boom in superhero films in recent years, even going so far as to blame them for “infantilizing” the population and paving the way for Trump in the U.S. and Brexit in the U.K. Not to mention, Moore has a long-simmering and justifiable grudge against both Marvel and DC Comics’ treatment of writers and artists, which has prevented him from not watching any superhero films except for Tim Burton’s Batman in 1989.

Oh christ no I don’t watch any of them. All of these characters have been stolen from their original creators, all of them. They have a long line of ghosts standing behind them. In the case of Marvel films, Jack Kirby [the Marvel artist and writer]. I have no interest in superheroes, they were a thing that was invented in the late 1930s for children, and they are perfectly good as children’s entertainment. But if you try to make them for the adult world then I think it becomes kind of grotesque.

Moore’s hatred of Hollywood adaptations of his work is so legendary, that Damon Lindelof was convinced he was cursed by Moore while working on HBO’s Watchmen thanks to feeling “miserable” during the whole production. But if there truly is a curse, it seems contained to Lindelof’s mood and not the series, which scored eleven Emmy wins.

Or maybe that’s just what super wizard Alan Moore wants us to think…

(Via Deadline)

If Conor McGregor is ever going to earn a rematch with Khabib Nurmagomedov, this may be his best shot. After attempting to skirt around the UFC to the tune of a charity sparring contest, McGregor has accepted a bout with former interim lightweight champion Dustin Poirier inside the Octagon under one condition: the fight is held in 2020.

Poirier later responded, acknowledging he’s also accepted the fight, leaving only the date to be figured out.

According to ESPN’s Ariel Helwani, the UFC offered the fight for January 23 at UFC 257. McGregor has been adamant at the bout being held in 2020, and Poirier reportedly is open to fighting on November 21 or December 12. With both UFC 255 and 256 having their main event cards reshuffled, the opening is there for a late addition.

While the UFC has funneled in Alex Perez to fight Deiveson Figueiredo at UFC 255, the UFC 256 card remains without a main event as Kamaru Usman recovers from injuries. Jorge Masvidal versus Colby Covington and a Stipe Miocic-Francis Ngannou heavyweight title fight are among the bouts in discussion for the UFC 256 main event, per Helwani, but neither is a lock as of now.

McGregor hasn’t fought since he TKO’d Donald Cerrone in 40 seconds in January. With no opportunity to make good on his promise to fight three times in 2020, he may have to set for a rematch against Poirier six years in the making.

Rainn Wilson will almost certainly have the name “Dwight Schrute” attached to his career long after any of us are quoting The Office on this mortal plane, but the actor really seems to appreciate that no one expects him to bring beets and Battlestar Galactica to every role he takes.

The actor’s latest role, as a scientist on Amazon’s Utopia, is another very different role from the paper salesman that has served as the biggest gig of his career. And unlike many offbeat character actors, Wilson has been able to expand his catalog of roles considerably in the years since The Office left NBC, both on network TV and in a variety of smaller indie movies.

In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter about Utopia, Wilson was asked about the range of characters he’s been able to play in his career. And he admits that he’s very fortunate not to have been typecast as an office weirdo after his massive success playing just that.

“Yeah, I have been very fortunate. I’ve gotten to play a whole bunch of really cool, awesome roles that are very, very different from Dwight over the last seven years,” Wilson shares. “Whether it was Backstrom, which was my failed show on Fox, or my indie films that no one has seen, I’m very proud of my work as an actor; it’s been great. I’ve been really astounded and happy about that.”

Still, the actor does appreciate the accolades and love he’s seen from Office fans, noting that the “Netflix effect” that’s kept the show at the forefront of pop culture for far longer than anyone anticipated.

The popularity of the show, especially with young people, is ridiculous; I’m talking 10-11 year olds. It’s preposterous. So I don’t know what’s going to happen when it leaves Netflix and goes to another streaming service that people don’t necessarily want to subscribe to, but it’s been an incredible ride. I’m just grateful because I think we made a terrific show that’s got a lot of heart. It also moves people and makes them laugh. It’s been a great balm for people during some really trying times and I hear that all the time. I get messages on my social media — hundreds a day — just like, “Thank you for this show. It’s helped me so much during this time.”

There’s a lot more to the quote Wilson gives about The Office‘s relevance and what it’s done for his career. He even briefly evaluates his feelings about the show’s popularity when it aired, and he makes a pretty good joke about Bones to boot. But just like everyone who has Netflix but not Peacock, Wilson seems to understand the value of appreciating something while also knowing that, eventually, you just have to move on.

So many people have been taking the time to learn to bake bread during this quarantine, steaming up kitchens with sourdough starters and sharing their hottest crumb shots to Instagram. That’s great and all, but if you’re learning to bake bread and still haven’t attempted fresh pasta, you’re missing out. In fact, you’re an idiot.

Fresh pasta is half as hard and twice as versatile as bread. Make some pasta — that’s an instant party. No one’s coming over to your house to sit around your fancy loaf, unless you also packed a main course or a whole charcuterie board (note: if you’re going to do that, please invite me).

In the interest of spreading the noodle gospel, Uproxx Life editor Steve Bramucci challenged me to share a recipe for fresh pasta, using the fewest ingredients and the most minimal equipment. He even stipulated “no rolling pin.” I was like, come on, man, it’s literally a piece of wood, one of the most ancient cooking implements there is! But he said no, use a wine bottle. I did. And honestly, it worked just fine. Who knew?

Anyway, today we’re going to make what the eye-talians call strapponi — or, as I like to call it, “hand-torn pasta.” Honestly, that seems to get the point across pretty well. I’d love to tell you that this is an old family recipe, but the truth is I cribbed most of it from the Pasta Grannies on YouTube. But it did quickly become the pasta most requested by my family, and they’ve had many different versions of my pasta. So maybe someday it actually will become an old family recipe.

Hand-torn pasta is mildly exotic, easy to do, and doesn’t require any machinery.

You Will Need

• A bowl.
• A flat surface.
• A wine bottle.
• A clean dishtowel.
• A knife (though I suppose you could just use your hands if you really needed)
• One large saucepan.
• One sheet pan (or another pan or anything broiler safe).
• One pot large enough to boil water.
• A scoop strainer, pair of tongs, or slotted spoon.
• A wine bottle.

Ingredients

• 2.5 cups all-purpose flour
• 4 eggs
• Handful of garlic cloves
• 1-2 pounds fresh ripe tomatoes
• Parmesan cheese
• Pinch crushed red pepper
• 1/3rd cup olive oil

For The Noodles

• 2.5 cups flour
• 4 eggs

Often times I double yolk the mix, and go three eggs, plus three yolks, with two cups flour, and then use 00 flour and maybe mix some semolina in there… but honestly, regular old all-purpose flour and whole eggs work just fine. It’s still easy and tastes great.

Have you ever seen “the well method” for making pasta dough? That’s basically what we’re doing here, only we’re using a bowl instead of the countertop (it’s slightly cleaner). They’re both fine. I used the back of my measuring cup to make a little swimmin’ hole for the eggs.

Next I cracked my eggs into the swimmin’ hole. Notice how my eggs overflowed the well? Did I want that to happen? Not particularly. Does it matter? Nope, not really. Most demo videos are going to tell you to take a fork and gently beat those eggs, being suuuper careful not to ruin your nice well, and then gradually take in a little bit more flour with every circle of the fork. If you possess that kind of finesse, wonderful. But honestly, just beat those eggs in a circle and keep incorporating more and more flour and it doesn’t really matter how messy it gets.

Eggs aren’t all exactly the same size and climates aren’t all the same humidity so you’re going to have to adjust a little no matter what. And that’s fine! It’s easy. Just keep mixing until it’s a solid mass.

Just mix it until it’s roughly one big ball and you can’t really move the fork anymore.

Eventually you’re going to get something like this. IF it’s sticking to the bowl more than this, you need to sprinkle in more flour. IF it’s not becoming a ball, add a few drops of water.

Once it’s a rough ball you can start kneading with your hands. You’re trying to get a uniform mass. Anywhere it sticks, either to your hand or the bowl, add more flour.

Let’s make that crystal clear, because it’s the one basic rule of pasta dough: If it sticks, add some flour.

This kneading part might take some elbow grease. We’re talking up to 10 solid minutes of sustained mushing (it also might not take that long and that’s great). Eventually, the dough is going to start to look like a smooth-ish, uniform ball. The more you knead it, the more it’s going to toughen up and start to get less pliable. That’s fine, because we’re going to let it rest. It might even seem a little dry.

Cover the bowl and rest the dough, from 20 minutes anywhere up to six or eight hours. Sprinkle the dough ball all over with plenty of flour, because it’s going to come out wetter and stickier than it went in (insert your mom joke here).

After it rests for a bit, the flour will have had time to soak up more of the moisture, so it’s going to be more moist and pliable, and usually a little darker in color, like so:

Since that’s a lot of dough to deal with at one time, I’m going to cut it into fourths and work on one quarter at a time. You can put the other quarters back into the bowl and recover while you work on one. This is where the knife comes in, although, again, if you just want to rip it into four equal balls with your hands that probably works just fine too.

Now we’re going to take one quarter and roll it flat, using the wine bottle. Remember the only rule: if it sticks, add some flour. Does it stick to your wine bottle? Sprinkle some flour there. Does it stick to your flat surface? Put some flour there.

Just keep rolling until it’s flat. How do you know when it’s done? My rule of thumb is that I want it barely translucent, just thin enough that I can start to see the table through the dough.

You can repeat this for all the quarters, but when you’re done, be sure to add lots of sprinkled flour to the finished sheets so they don’t stick together (you can even put pieces of parchment paper between them if you want to get super anal about it).

After you’re done with all four of them, you can cover with a clean dishtowel while you work on the sauce.

For The Sauce

I think a lot of people (or a lot of Americans, anyway) have this conception that pasta sauce is this heavy stew that’s going to sit on top of the noodles like a chunky hat. But we’re not making cafeteria bolognese here. A good pasta sauce is more like salad dressing. It’s going to coat the noodles completely and have pops of flavor and textural variation.

Anyway, I’m trying to make the sauce as simple as the pasta. It really doesn’t need to be more complicated than this.

Ingredients

• 1-2 pounds of the freshest, ripest tomatoes you can find. (Small ones like I have here are great because they taste amazing and require no knife work. I try to find anything local and non-hothouse but it depends on the region and time of year)
• A handful of garlic (count those cloves if you want – 12? 15?)
• 1/3 cup olive oil (taste it before you use it — if it doesn’t taste good you need to buy new olive oil)
• Pinch crushed red pepper
• 1 cup (ish) grated Parmesan (it doesn’t necessarily have to be the fancy Reggiano kind, but at least respect yourself enough not to buy it pre-grated).

Line a sheet pan with foil and drizzle with a little olive oil. Add the tomatoes and roll them around a little in the oil to coat. Give it a light sprinkle of salt to help draw out the moisture. Stick it under the broiler on high, decently close to the heat. We’re trying to get some char on these without fully blackening them. A little black is good though. They should split and leak a little, like my work pants.

After you’ve broiled your tomatoes (or while they’re under the broiler, if you’re confident multi-tasking), smash your garlic with the side of a knife and give it a rough chop. Heat a decent-sized sauce pan on the stove over medium-low heat and add your 1/3 cup ish olive oil. Add in your garlic.

The pan should be cold enough that the garlic doesn’t sizzle when you put it in. You want to gently bring it up to a low sizzle. After 5-8 minutes, once the garlic is starting to gently sizzle and slightly changing color around the edges (do NOT let it get brown), add your pinch of crushed red pepper and let it bloom for 30 seconds or so. Then bring the heat down to the lowest setting and pour in your broiled tomatoes. Use a rubber spatula to make sure you get all the tomato juice and charred tomato bits off the sheet pan, that’s the best part! Toss your pan a little to combine and season with salt. I eyeball it, but I’d guess around a half teaspoon of salt. Leave everything in the pan on the lowest setting.

Cooking The Noodles

Heat your cooking water on the stove. If you’ve ever seen a cooking show these words are probably already seared into your brain, but the water should be “as salty as the sea.” There’s no salt in the noodles so the cooking water has to season them from the outside. The water isn’t actually as salty as the sea, but it should be salty enough to taste notably salty, like the amount of seasoning in a soup.

Now take your wine bottle, and use it to roll up one of your sheets of noodle.

Bring that over to the stove and start tearing strips off right into the boiling water. The dough texture will kind of dictate how big of strips you’re going to get, but let’s say we’re going for roughly fist-sized patches.

You don’t have to get crazy about it, but you do want to tear reasonably quickly so that the pasta doesn’t get drastically different cook times. It’s fresh pasta, so it cooks fast — only about two minutes or so depending on thickness. I used my wire scoop strainer to scoop off the cooked pasta into the saucepan, but tongs or a slotted spoon work too. You want to drain most of the pasta water, but not all of it. Some of that floury water is going to go into the pan and become a nice binder for the sauce and pasta. I heard someone call it a “pasta water reduction” once.

Once your batches of pasta are all cooked and in the saucepan, bring the pan back up to medium.

You’re going to flip your pan a few times (or just stir it up if you’re a punk like that) and add cheese.

I don’t measure my cheese. What I do is grate the cheese directly into the pan. I like to completely cover the pasta with grated cheese, then stir it up to combine, then cover it completely with cheese again, and stir to combine one more time.

All that grated cheese, mixed with the floury pasta water that made it into the pan, is going to make a nice binder that glues the sauce to the pasta. Again, it’s a lot like salad dressing.

>Voila!

If you find beauty in uniformity you might not think hand-torn noodles make as beautiful a plate as machine cut noodles. Personally, I like the natural rusticity of the hand-torn noodles and the way no two noodles are exactly the same, like snowflakes. Anyway, I honestly think they taste better. I also like the way they bind to the sauce.

You could cut the tomatoes, but I love the little bursts of condensed sweetness you get when you leave them whole like we did here. The broiler just intensifies their flavor. This is super simple, a guaranteed crowd-pleaser and it always makes me happy. I’ve never seen the pasta grannies do this kind of sauce with strapponi before, so maybe there’s an Italian superstition against it. But I think it’s perfect.

Variations

If you want something a little heavier with some meat, you can render some little bits of bacon (or prosciutto, or pancetta) in the pan and then turn it down before you add the garlic. You can also add few tablespoons of cream at the very end to tie it all together. I’ve done it both ways. They’re both great.

Too spicy for the kiddos? God, kids are the worst, aren’t they? Luckily this one’s an easy fix — just grab a pan and melt some butter in there. Then add some cooked pasta to that, and do the cheese thing just like before. It creates a butter-pasta water reduction-cheese sauce that’s like the best mac and cheese you’ve ever had. Cheesy pasta is one of those dishes most kids love.

So there you have it. Even if you’ve never made pasta before I’m pretty sure you can make this one. We’ve all just about had it with your excuses.

Tool released their long-awaited new album Fear Inoculum in the summer of 2019, but their touring plans got cut short by the pandemic. Like a non-insignificant amount of people around the world, Maynard James Keenen had to deal with the coronavirus, which he contracted in February but only just publicly revealed in a recent interview.

Keenan was speaking with the Arizona Republic about dealing with his band’s plans being thrown off by the pandemic when he mentioned off-hand that he had COVID-19, saying, “I was still recovering from having gotten COVID at the end of February. I’m still dealing with the residual effects. But it was ugly. I survived it, but it wasn’t pretty. So I definitely had to deal with that.”

When the interviewer expressed surprise at that revelation, Keenan responded, “I kind of didn’t want to run around screaming it. But it’s real. And there’s after-effects. I had to go through some major medications to undo the residual effects. Still coughing. There’s still lung damage.”

He was then asked if he was feeling OK now, and Keenan revealed that he is still dealing with the effects of the virus, well over half a year later: “Well no. I still have the cough. Every other day, I have these coughing fits because my lungs are still damaged at the tips. And I just got over the inflammation that was going on with my wrist and hands. I had an autoimmune attack on my system in the form of, like, a rheumatoid arthritis. Basically, from what I understand, it attacks weird spots and it’s random. So that’s what I got. That was my prize.”

Check out the full interview here.

There are many perfectly valid reasons to have an issue with Mel Gibson, especially if you’re Jewish, a woman, gay, Mexican, Black, or Weird Al Yankovic.

The Grammy-winning “Albuquerque” singer (it’s not his most well known song, but I will take any excuse to mention “Albuquerque” that I can get) recently caught wind of Gibson’s new film, Fatman, in which he plays a drunk and angry Santa Claus who’s being hunted by Justified favorite Walton “John Bronco” Goggins. “Why didn’t they just call the new Mel Gibson vehicle “Weird Al’s Intellectual Property: The Movie’?” Yankovic tweeted, along with artwork for “The Night Santa Went Crazy,” a violently jolly single from Bad Hair Day, and “Fatman,” a cartoon that appeared on The Weird Al Show.

He is correct to be upset, even if he’s joking, as “The Night Santa Went Crazy” is a perfect song and Gibson inspires headlines like, “How Does Mel Gibson Still Have a Career?” (Do not answer that question. It’s too depressing to consider.)

If Gibson’s next movie involves fly rabbis, we’ll know Yankovic is on to something. Here’s more on Fatman.

To save his declining business, Chris Cringle (Mel Gibson), also known as Santa Claus, is forced into a partnership with the U.S. military. Making matters worse, Chris gets locked into a deadly battle of wits against a highly skilled assassin (Walton Goggins), hired by a precocious 12-year-old after receiving a lump of coal in his stocking. ‘Tis the season for Fatman to get even, in the action-comedy that keeps on giving.

Fatman comes out on November 17, but The Weird Al Show is available right now!