Category: Viral
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Knives Out didn’t win the Academy Award for Best Costume Design (Little Women did, rightfully so), but Chris Evans’ sweater in Rian Johnson’s modern-day whodunnit won our hearts. The white cable-knit sweater became A Thing on the internet, and it’s not hard to understand why: it’s Chris Evans… in a sweater… what don’t you understand?
Unfortunately for Captain America (and us), though, the sweater has been retired.
Appearing on Thursday’s The Tonight Show, Evans was asked by host Jimmy Fallon whether he’d ever break the sweater out of the Smithsonian, where I assume it’s being held, and wear it again. Think of all the thirsty Instagram likes! “I can’t wear the sweater. I mean, it’s a shame, I love cable knits,” Evans said. “But now I feel like when I wear them people are like, ‘Urgh.’ I don’t know if it works anymore.” It works. Trust me.
“I didn’t realize it was going to be a sweater game until we started putting them on him. I don’t remember the brands of them, because I was just grabbing so much from all over the place,” Knives Out costume designer Jenny Eagan told us about Evans’ look in the film. “The fact that it takes place on the East Coast really set a tone. I wanted him to feel very relaxed, as you can see he has a lot of attitude and is too cool for everyone. He spends a lot of money on his clothes but he could care less about taking care of any of them. That is why I thought this cable-knit sweater looked great with the hole.”
You can watch the rest of The Tonight Show interview below.
The Snowpiercer TV series knew that it would never be able to match up to Bong Joon Ho’s 2013 film, and to be fair, the show embraces this certainty. It’s almost the opposite of Watchmen in that way. Remember how a lot of comic book fans felt, at best, ambivalent about the HBO series (because Zack Snyder made such an underwhelming flick) before it landed as a successful reimagining? Whereas Snowpiercer is rebooting a masterpiece, and that’s also tough stuff. Comparisons are inevitable, but the notoriety of the movie (and the source material, Jacques Lob and Jean-Marc Rochette’s graphic novels) will bring viewers into the fold. Yet the show pushes hard to be something almost entirely different than the film, which pulled off a deeply dark parable with an absolutely frigid take on class warfare and social uprisings. Starring an unusually gritty Chris Evans and a deliciously bonkers Tilda Swinton, the film also threw down (as I wrote in our Best Films Of Last Decade list) a fiercely confident and savage mating dance between an action dream and an art-house hard-on, one that still chills to the bone.
Bong Joon Ho’s now gained even more respect with the multi-Oscar-winning Parasite, currently one of Hulu’s most-watched titles. If those viewers hadn’t watched yet Snowpiercer, they sure as hell have done so by now and are familiar with a story that’s so compelling that the “babies taste best” line couldn’t ruin the vibe. Expectations must be managed, though, for there’s only a superficial resemblance between and movie and TV show. Yes, TNT’s series is still set in the same place: a post-apocalyptic, globe-circling train, which can never stop and contains the last survivors of humanity. Almost everything else is tweaked, other than the same basic class structure (wealthy, ticketed passengers enjoy opulent luxury near the front, whereas “The Tail” occupants began as stowaways) and the talk of a mysterious benefactor, Mr. Wilford. Within his almost mythic feat of engineering, rules must be followed, lest one lose a limb or two.
Speaking of appendages, this show’s first season (it’s already renewed for a second one) never finds solid footing, although it’s plenty entertaining.
Look, reboots happen, but should one reboot a masterpiece? It’s a dilemma and a valid question on whether this series can justify its own existence after fighting to do so for many years. This Snowpiercer, while striving to be different, doesn’t seem to know what it’s trying to be. At first, the series adopts a Law and Order-esque, procedural framing that later evaporates into campiness that doesn’t quite reach the level of the movie’s schlocky thrills. It does tackle power structures and questions why humans choose what leaders to worship, but the show doesn’t go broadly philosophical like the movie. And things get kinda saucy when people fall into train-sex mode with former lovers and new ones. It’s kinky and strange! And soap-operatic. At least it’s not dull.
Running this version of Snowpiercer would be Melanie Cavill (Jennifer Connelly, doing the ice-queen thing), chief of hospitality and messenger for Mr. Wilford. Melanie is carved from stone but capable of great cruelty and brutality. Her adherence to order is threatened by a murder mystery, and Andre Layton (Daveed Diggs of Hamilton) gets pulled out of The Tail because someone up in third class remembered that he used to be a homicide detective. Can he abandon his people and pledge allegiance to Wilford? It’s a question that’s posed oafishly when Andre gets to eat a grilled cheese sandwich for the first time since the apocalypse. The scene is overplayed, almost sensually, like so many others in this season, as a contrast to the very clinical feel of Melanie’s hopes for how this train should operate. It sounds f*cking weird for me to single out a grilled cheese sandwich scene, but that’s when I (first) sensed that this show was going to overdo things for the sake of overdoing them.
It’s almost so intentionally clumsy that I have to admire all of it. My gut feeling is that much of the show’s jam-packed feel (although in a literal sense, the TV series sets feel far less claustrophobic than the movie did) means to overcompensate for the absence of Tilda’s Mason character and her enormous, scenery-chewing chompers. Of course, Mason did not exist in the graphic novel, so I can accept that she doesn’t exist in the show’s take on the story (even though she should be on the train, since it takes place 7 years after the extinction event, as opposed to the movie’s 15 years), but the show feels like it’s tossing in wacky sh*t to make up for Mason’s omission. It can’t pretend to be hiding Mason somewhere in a corner, but the character’s spirit haunts the TV show in an incomplete way. Blame Bong Joon Ho for putting such an indelible stamp on this franchise, right? One can’t forget the genius of the movie after witnessing it.
Still, I do think it’s possible for the TV series to find a forgiving audience. As I said earlier, the show quickly dispenses with the procedural framing, and Diggs’ Andre later starts striving toward mutiny. That’s where we’d expect a Snowpiercer show to go, and hopefully to thrilling places in the process, but the show is too confused about its own identify and kind-of disorganized, even while attempting the opposite effect. Multiple framing devices exist, including how each episode begins with a different character monologuing about their life on the train, but the show still can’t wrap its arms around a bigger picture. Again, this reboot isn’t bad at all. It’s fine, but man, this train’s fighting an uphill battle for acceptance. It slip-slides all over the ice while simultaneously attempting to live up to and dodge expectations laid down by Bong Joon Ho’s work of art. That takes guts, so perhaps this less-artsy-train-that-could can grip the tracks and find a fanbase of its own.
TNT’s ‘Snowpiercer’ premieres on Sunday, May 17th at 9:00pm EST.
Admittedly, I had a slight aversion to the prospect of Scoob! (though, not near as much as some people) just because of the title alone. It sounded too “cool” for my tastes. Or, at least, that weird corporate attempt to be “cool.” That title insinuated, “Look, Scooby-Doo isn’t cool. But do you know what is cool? That’s right, kids. Scoob! is cool. See that exclamation point? How can something not be cool with an exclamation point?”
Anyway, title trickery aside, as it turns out, Scoob! is basically a really fun Scooby-Doo episode. It’s billed as an origin story – and, yes, we get to see how Scooby and Shaggy met (voiced later as adults by Frank Welker, who voiced Fred in the original animated series, and Will Forte, who, as you can probably imagine, makes a really great Shaggy) – but this only takes up maybe the first 15 minutes or so of Scoob! before it kicks into a pretty great montage, partially based on the original Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? opening credits, and sends our heroes into adulthood* and just on one of their normal adventures.
*Though, I can’t help but wonder how old Fred (Zac Efron), Daphne (Amanda Seyfried), Velma (Gina Rodriguez), and Shaggy are all supposed to be. When we see Shaggy as a kid he has a Super Nintendo and has a picture of David Letterman interviewing his hero, Blue Falcon, hanging on the wall. Let’s say this was 1995 and Shaggy was 10. Are they all in their mid-30s? At one point in the film the villain refers to them as millennials, so maybe they are? My point is it’s kind of interesting to present a “new and flashy animated reboot” to a new generation and the main characters are pushing 40. Then again, at another point Shaggy mentions he’s known Scooby for 10 years, but that doesn’t really line up with what we see in the flashback. My point is, I think this means Scooby-Doo is supernatural. I mean, we knew he could talk, but apparently he’s also immortal.
It’s weird how, since Scooby-Doo entered popular culture in 1969, he’s always been around, but he’s always had his ebbs and flows. He had a resurgence on Saturday morning cartoons of the ‘80s. (Of anything I wonder why something doesn’t exist anymore, it’s this. I remember when the new Saturday morning lineups would be announced in comic book advertisements and it was genuinely thrilling. “Wait a minute, Mr. T has a show now?!?!”) In the early 2000s, there were the two live-action Freddie Prinze Jr. films. And, now here comes Scoob!, a film kids will probably watch a zillion times over the next few quarantined months.
Though, I think it’s kind of interesting to show how all these people met. Because it’s not really normal that someone like Fred hangs out with someone like Shaggy. There’s really no basis at all for their friendship. Actually, I went back to see how Scooby-Doo was first presented to the masses and it’s just a normal episode of Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? in which the gang is already together, investigating a suit of armor that comes alive every full moon. (Though, while looking all this up I found out that Scooby’s name came from some the end of a Frank Sinatra song and that Shaggy was based on Bob Denver’s character (Maynard G. Krebs) from The Many Loves of Doby Gillis. Denver would of course go on to portray the title character from Gilligan’s Island Later, Scooby-Doo and Gilligan would eventually meet.)
In the main plot of Scoob!, the gang happens to meet Simon Cowell who has harsh words for Shaggy after his bad rendition of “Shallow.” Dejected, Shaggy and Scooby leave the others to go bowling and are attacked by evil bowling robots. The two are saved by Blue Falcon (Mark Wahlberg, who winds up doing pretty funny voicework here) – who we learn quickly is the son of Blue Falcon and he’s not as competent as his father was) – and Dynomutt (Ken Jeong) who are tracking the whereabouts of the evil Dick Dastardly (Jason Isaacs). Dick Dastardly is after treasure hidden in a supernatural underworld that can only be accessed by a descendant of Alexander the Great or Alexander the Great’s dog. As it turns out, Scooby-Doo is that dog. (Wow, alright, that is quite the plot for a Scooby-Doo movie.)
Though, again, I found myself having a fun time while watching Scoob!. It’s really nerdy, which I liked. And it mixes the right balance of nostalgia (again, the theme song montage is really great; and yes we see a few guest stars from classic Hanna-Barbera cartoons along the way during the film) and a modern story and fast-paced enough that will, I assume, satisfy kids today looking for any kind of entertainment while stuck at home. (Or, yes, satisfy adults looking for any kind of entertainment while stuck at home.)
You can contact Mike Ryan directly on Twitter.
