“They are the soundtrack to our lives,” we see excited Beastie Boys fans say at the start of Beastie Boys Story, the Spike Jonze-directed, kind of hybrid documentary-live stage performance film that will be released on Apple TV+ this week. (Which was supposed to make its debut at South by Southwest before that and, like everything else, came to a crashing halt.) Jonze doesn’t waste too much time with fan sentimentality before the crushing baseline of “Sabotage” envelopes all of our senses, which is impossible not to cause an adrenaline rush and signal to the viewer’s brain, “Oh, man, here we go!”

But the whole “soundtrack to our lives” line stuck with me a bit. Because, frankly, I was hesitant to write about this film because I am not a huge Beastie Boys fanatic. Like a lot of people, the first Beastie Boys song I ever heard was “(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (To Party!)” because that got constant MTV and radio airplay when I was young. The problem for me was … I didn’t particularly like that song very much. (And, as I learned in Beastie Boys Story, eventually neither did the Beastie Boys.) Over the course of my life I’ve owned two Beastie Boys albums: License to Ill (I mean, of course, I still owned the album; I did grow a particular fondness for “Slow and Low) and Ill Communication. I am not someone who is going to pretend I bought Paul’s Boutique on its release day. (Though a lot of my friends are huge Beastie Boys fans and I always felt a little left out.) Anyway, my point is, it was difficult for me to go along with the whole “soundtrack of our lives” business. That said, hold that thought.

Filmed in front of a live audience in Brooklyn in April of 2019, Beastie Boys Story plays more like a comedy show than it does a straightforward documentary. And, right now, with most of us stuck at home, there’s something comforting and visually pleasing about watching Ad-Rock (aka Adam Horovitz) and Mike D (aka Michael Diamond) on stage, holding court as they, earnestly and hilariously, tell the story of the Beastie Boys. (Of course, Adam Yauch died in 2012 and it’s crazy to think he’s been gone eight years already.) It’s a pretty fascinating thing to watch, as Horovitz and Diamond take us through the history of the Beastie Boys in a style more reminiscent of a Martin and Lewis show. The pair have a way almost levitating themselves out of the story and talking about their past lives as if they aren’t even the same people, in almost a “wink-wink, look at these crazy kids,” kind of way. At almost two hours on the nose, it’s long for a documentary, but Horovitz, Diamond, and Jonze keep the proceedings moving at a pretty blistering pace.

This is a film that’s hilarious, sad, and for some reason features an entire montage set to Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5.” There’s a pretty hilarious juxtaposition as Horovitz and Diamond compare footage of themselves on American Bandstand in 1987 – as the band is, let’s say, just kind of winging it and flopping all over the place – to that of a streamlined machine performing “Sabotage” at the 1994 MTV Video Music Awards. (Also, this is the night of the infamous Nathanial Hornblower incident, as Hornblower, Yauch’s Swiss director alter ego, rushed the stage in protest after “Sabotage” lost to R.E.M.’s “Everybody Hurts” for directing. Rewatching now, it’s kind of amazing how Michael Stipe just laughs the whole thing off, at least on stage.)

Now, here’s what hit me the most while watching: as we go through the Beastie Boy’s story, hearing track after track, memories came flooding back. Even though, even when it came out, I wasn’t a huge fan of “(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (To Party!),” that was the song of a certain period of my youth. As we went further along, “So Watch’Cha Want” brought back a ton of memories from high school. “Pass the Mic” and “Sabotage” were the theme songs of my college experience. And so on and so on…

It’s weird when you break down what the term “soundtrack to our lives” even means. Because when a soundtrack is playing in a movie, it’s rarely presented as that character’s favorite song. The character usually has no control over the soundtrack to their life we are watching. In “Pretty in Pink,” at the prom, as Andrew McCarthy’s Blane is moping around, “If You Leave” by O.M.D. is playing. (I watched “Pretty in Pink over the weekend so I’m going to go ahead and use that movie as an example.) Blane didn’t pick that song. He doesn’t even particularly like that song. But O.M.D is literally the soundtrack to Blane’s life.

I wasn’t a diehard Beastie Boys fan, but as I watched Beastie Boys Story, it really hit me how their music has been such a part of my life, even though I was rarely the one playing their music. In my own internal biopic in my head, a lot of important moments of my life would be scored to Beastie Boys music. So, yes, that whole “soundtrack to our lives” comment is pretty accurate, and Adam Horovitz and Michael Diamond make for a pretty hilarious, dynamic comedy team.

You can contact Mike Ryan directly on Twitter.

Look at a list of the horror films released in 2010 and there’s a good chance you’ve heard of a few of them, even if you’re only a casual fan of the genre. There’s James Wan and Leigh Whannell’s back-to-basics Insidious, quietly one of the more influential films of the decade. There’s an awful remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street and a delightfully insane remake of Piranha called Piranha 3-D. Speaking of remakes, 2010 also saw the premiere of Matt Reeves’ Let Me In, an underrated remake of Let the Right One In. There’s The Last Exorcism, one of the best of the found-footage horror films to arrive in the wake of Paranormal Activity. There’s We Are What We Are, a chilling film about cannibals in contemporary Mexico City. There’s something for everyone, really.

Yet none of these movies took hold of the moviegoing imagination quite like The Human Centipede (First Sequence), thanks to a premise so outrageous that no one who hears it can ever forget it — even if they want to. (And if somehow you don’t know the plot of The Human Centipede and want to remain in blissful ignorance, you have permission to stop reading now.)

A quick refresher: Written and directed by Dutch filmmaker Tom Six, The Human Centipede stars veteran German actor Dieter Laser as Dr. Josef Heiter, the sole (permanent) resident of an isolated villa in the German countryside. Once the foremost specialist in separating conjoined twins, he’s gone mad and made a professional 180, trying instead to join three bodies together to form the eponymous human centipede. That sounds unsettling enough, but it’s where Heiter joins them that makes them so memorable. They’re sewn together anus to mouth to form one theoretically seamless digestive system flowing from the first section through the second and out the third.

It’s a gross idea. But it’s also proven to be a remarkably sticky idea (pardon the word choice), one that attracted viewers even before its release and has maintained a cult of admirers ever since. The Human Centipede arrived in theaters in 2010 with a reputation for repulsiveness already established, thanks to months of festival screenings the previous year. On an episode dedicated to the film, Stephen Sajdak, one of the hosts of the We Hate Movies podcast, recalls attending an opening-day matinee and seeing a hyped-up acquaintance arrive wearing a Human Centipede t-shirt before he’d even seen the movie. Nine years after that opening weekend, Alec Baldwin dedicated an episode of Here’s the Thing, a podcast more usually home to chats with Carly Simon and Itzhak Perlman, to an interview with Six. Barely able to contain his excitement, Baldwin volunteers to appear in Six’s next film.

The Human Centipede has inspired bits on Conan and South Park, at least one elaborate Halloween costume, and spawned a pair of sequels. Its weird staying power has made it a reference that’s even many who haven’t seen the film will get. In some strange way, it was the right movie at the right time. Which is odd, because a film whose centerpiece scene involve a man apologizing for defecating into the mouth of the woman behind him would seemingly be the right movie for no time.

So how did the film come to be? And why has it proven so enduring? The first question is easier to answer than the second. “I saw a child molester on television here in Holland, and I made a joke that they should stitch his mouth to the anus of a fat truck driver,” Six told Vulture’s Kenny Herzog as part of an oral history of the series. Developing the idea, Six dropped the idea of righteous retribution but kept the rest. (Even the trucker remained; Heiter’s first victim, he’s deemed incompatible for centipede use, but not before we see him enjoying a roadside bowel movement.) After consulting with a doctor, Six developed the idea then set about bringing it to life.

Doing so required a delicate touch. In New York, the Sixes auditioned actors to play the American tourists brought into Heiter’s lair after a roadside accident. Billing it only as a “controversial European film,” Six attracted many more would-be stars than he kept; many bailed when they learned the nature of their prospective roles. Ultimately, Ashley C. Williams and Ashlynn Yennie signed on as Lindsay and Jenny, who would, respectively, serve as the second and third segments of the centipede. Replacing an injured actor, Akihiro Kitamura came aboard later after auditioning by Skype, taking on the role of Katsuro, the Japanese man who would serve as the centipede’s head. Relative newcomers, Williams, Yennie, and Kiamura joined the well-established Laser, who’d won the German equivalent of the Best Actor Oscar for his work in the 1975 film, John Glückstadt, and appeared in the New German Cinema classic, The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum. Before long, Laser would be ordering them around with a riding crop and delivering dialogue like “Swallow it, bitch!” an order he delivers, like each of his character’s lines, with the unbridled enthusiasm of a madman.

Like its characters, audiences may have similarly found the film tough to digest, but that only helped spread its reputation as a beyond-the-pale act of transgression. Also helping matters: Six’s gift for hype and a tagline boasting the film was “100% Medically Accurate,” a questionable assertion, but an intriguing one nonetheless. It would be a stretch to call The Human Centipede a hit, at least theatrically. Released in a single U.S. theater on April 30, 2010, it never played more than 19 theaters at once, earning just $181,467 domestically. But it moved DVDs, back when DVDs still made money. And, at a moment when VOD was coming into its own, the film found viewers willing to take a chance on the gross movie they’d been reading about online even if they wouldn’t take a trip to the theaters to see it. Its reputation grew over the time. The Human Centipede proved it had legs.

You could call it a brilliant bit of hype that found its suckers, but the description doesn’t really fit. Six made a real movie. Not necessarily a good movie, mind you, but certainly a movie that no one else would have thought to make. Six modeled his villain after Josef Mengele, and his admitted influences include Pier Paolo Pasolini’s divisive anti-fascist film Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, David Lynch, and Takashi Miike. (The film’s long takes, deliberate pace, and interest in torture owe a particular debt to Miike’s Audition.) But The Human Centipede is more than the sum of its influences for the same horrific reason it found such a foothold in moviegoers’ psyche: it’s hard to stop thinking about the human centipede itself, what it looks like, how it was made, and what it might feel like to be a part of one.

“It’s definitive psychological horror, positioning the viewer to identify with the victim’s suffering and lack of free will,” Karina Longworth wrote in her Village Voice review. She continued: “The Human Centipede is startlingly relatable: Six uses the centipede to talk about humanity. In the tradition of the first Frankenstein films, various contemporary ‘advanced interrogation techniques,’ and certain interpretations of Catholic purgatory, Centipede plays on the notion that the only thing more frightening than death is a state bridging life and death, in which, though one’s body is no longer his own to control, the mind remains conscious. In Six’s view, the moral imperative to preserve life only goes so far—eventually, death is a relief.”

That reference to “advanced interrogation techniques” deserves special consideration. The Human Centipede arrived toward the end of a cycle of what came to be called “torture porn” film, horror movies that placed special emphasis on the details of pain inflicted on the human body. The Saw films popularized the form, but it’s no accident that it coincided with an international debate over the morality of torture. Those sorts of anxieties inevitably find their way into horror movies. But The Human Centipede was less explicit. Its protagonists’ horror is as much existential as physical (though the physical element probably shouldn’t be understated). Roger Ebert refused to assign it a star rating, but only at the end of a review that noted Six has “the soul of a dark artist.” “Is the movie good? Is it bad? Does it matter?,” Ebert concluded. “It is what it is and occupies a world where the stars don’t shine.” Made at the end of a decade defined by horror’s newfound extremity, its utter, inescapable hopelessness suggest a new sort of extreme.

It’s one Six struggled to reach again. Focusing on a disturbed Londoner obsessed with the film, 2011’s The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence) multiplied the bodies and the stitching and added a new layer of sexual violence. It earned little of the respect, grudging or otherwise, of the original and failed to capture the imagination of the public at large. Released in 2015, The Human Centipede 3 (Final Sequence) made even less of an impression. (I can’t judge this one myself, having bailed on the series after the second entry. Life is short and the brain can take only so many repulsive images.) Six has yet to complete a follow-up project. But, a decade on, the original’s dark vision maintains its weird attraction. It’s driven by an awful idea, but one that’s impossible to forget, and one whose disturbing resonance seems unlikely to fade away any time soon.

When Dieter Laser died earlier this month, headlines from Variety to The Guardian mentioned only one film: The Human Centipede. Some nightmares have a way of overshadowing everything around them.

Not everyone misses the hustle and bustle of public transportation while they endure life during a pandemic, but for those that love subway maps and free transfers there is a perfect board game out there to pass the time in quarantine. GameWright’s Metro X features the bright color-coordination of metropolitan mass transit graphic design with a quickly-moving “rail and write” card game.

Metro X is a new edition of a game originally made in Japan, with some tweaks to make it play a bit faster and includes erasable boards for up to six players. Gameplay is simultaneous: each player has the same metro map, with the goal to complete routes by filling up as many spaces on the board as possible to gain points. A card is flipped over, and players then choose a rail line to fill and mark the number of spaces equal to the number on the card. Everyone is using the same cards and subway lines, but the routes intersect several times and it’s impossible to fill up everything by the end of the game. Those choices players make get them different point values for routes finished first, and the uncertainty of what numbers (or free transfers or junctions) are coming and when the deck reshuffles add in a bit of luck to keep things interesting.

Both maps are inspired by real-life train systems, though thankfully no actual city’s system is organized this poorly. The concept is a bit brain-twisting at first but once everyone settles in there’s not much to grasp beyond picking a color, crossing off some boxes and hoping for the best. The two-sided game boards offer considerable replay value: Metro City is much easier to grasp conceptually than Tube Town, as the former has routes all moving left to right. But both offer plenty of opportunities to strategize and the dry erase element certainly helps players correct mistakes they might make getting the concept of the game down.

The most interesting thing about Metro X is the focus it requires. The first time I played it was at PAX East in Boston, a huge gaming convention that can be a sensory overload for some. But Metro X requires an amount of attention that manages to block pretty much everything around you out. There’s not a lot of time for cross-talk, as players will be staring hard at their boards to figure out how best to manage different routes without wasting moves. What’s more, there’s really no incentive to looking at another player’s board to see what they’re doing simply because you can’t afford to take attention away from your own work. It’s a game all your own, but the competition can be fierce as a result. Players thinking they’re on the brink of a few extra bonus points can come up just short to someone else prioritizing a different route. It’s a sometimes maddening result, but one that in my playtesting only made players want to give the game another go to figure out a faster way to complete routes.

If you like your game nights more meandering and loud, Metro X might not be the best pick for your next game night. But it’s a great change of pace game that plays quickly, much like Abandon All Artichokes. And the brainpower required to juggle criss-crossing routes and not getting stuck with costly empty boxes makes for a satisfying play, even if you come up a bit short.

There are certainly worse things to become absorbed in right now, and until you master the intersecting routes in Tube Town there are plenty of hours to burn here. In these trying times, any game that can bring a bit of the outside world to your quarantine is a welcome change of pace. For those who miss squinting at a subway map in a strange city to make sure they’re going the right direction, Metro X is a charming little adventure to navigate from the comfort of home.

During her career as a singer and an actress, Lady Gaga has taken on many roles. Whether she’s charting her rise to fame in A Star Is Born or indulging in vampiric delights in American Horror Story, Gaga plays her character well. Maybe a little too well, even: Gaga’s commitment to her roles has led one fan to become convinced that Lady Gaga practices Satanism and is a member of the Church Of Satan.

The fan laid out their alleged evidence that points to Gaga’s Satanic tendencies on social media. The theory even caught the attention of the Church Of Satan, which promptly shut down the fan’s theory.

In a lengthy 33-part thread on Twitter, a fan detailed their hypothesis that Gaga practices Satanic rituals in her spare time. At least when she’s not raising over a hundred million dollars to aid coronavirus relief. The fan began by coaxing readers to join him down the rabbit hole that is his theory. “It takes about 3 seconds on google to tie Gaga to satanism,” the fan began. “so I won’t waste ur time w 20 parts on how symbolic all her current performances are, but instead I’ll try & bring out some stuff maybe u haven’t seen or don’t know about her.”

The fan’s examples include Gaga’s hand placement in several of her early press photos, the singer’s legendary bloody 2009 MTV VMA’s performance, and a screengrab from a scene in American Horror Story: Hotel.

The fan then goes on to conjecture that Gaga is “the exact model of almost every pop star controlled by the Illuminati.” According to the theory, the singer has been brainwashed by the CIA and turned into a “human robot” because she goes by the stage name “Gaga,” which is a phrase often uttered by babies and refers to a state of absent-mindedness.

Just when the thread seemingly couldn’t get any more absurd, the actual Church Of Satan arrived as the voice of reason. Re-tweeting the conspiracy theory, the Church Of Satan swiftly denied the evidence. “It takes about 3 seconds on google to see that none of these examples have anything to do with Satanism,” they quipped. “so we won’t waste your time with 20 parts explaining how this makes you look like an ignorant conspiracy theorist.”

While the fan didn’t address the Church’s denial of the theory, his response was still priceless.

Check out the full Twitter exchange above.

Anderson .Paak, joined by the Free Nationals, performed an NPR Tiny Desk concert back in 2016, and to this day, it remains the most popular performance in the series’ history (the YouTube video has over 48 million views as of this post). Since then, Free Nationals have become a more independent unit outside of .Paak, as they released their self-titled debut album last year. On March 4, before social distancing and quarantining became a part of everyday life, the group returned to the NPR offices for a new Tiny Desk performance, which has now been shared.

The band’s album was heavy on guests, and that didn’t change here. Most notably, .Paak popped up halfway through the set to play drums and sing on “Gidget.” He also reflected on what Tiny Desk has meant for his career, saying, “It’s good to be back, you know what I’m saying? So much stuff has happened since the last time we got back, lot of tours, lot of albums… bigger things. We spent a bunch of money, like hundreds of thousands of dollars on videos, big-budget videos, just to have our biggest video be in front of a tiny desk in an office. Thank you NPR, we appreciate that, for letting the music speak for itself.”

Meanwhile, the performance also featured India Shawn and Chronixx, so watch the full set above.

The first major bailout of small American businesses, part of the CARES Act, has already exhausted its budget. Although there was $350 billion in PPP (Paycheck Protection Program) allocated for small businesses, it ran out within minutes. It’s now becoming clear who received the lion’s share of that money — large businesses with multiple properties received their stimulus checks right away while actual small businesses and restaurants have received nothing.

International and publically traded burger chain Shake Shack received $10 million in aid from the program. Now it seems, due to the continued backlash to the program, they’ve decided to return that check. Shake Shack’s founder and chairman, Danny Meyer, and the company’s CEO, Randy Garutti, released a joint statement via LinkedIn addressing the issue. The gist of the statement is that the loan parameters were “extremely confusing” and they thought they could be included because their individual restaurants employ “roughly 45 employees per restaurant,” according to their statement.

The employee stipulation for applying was “any restaurant business — including restaurant chains — with no more than 500 employees per location would be eligible,” according to Shake Shack’s letter. This was enough for them to apply for a relief loan and they got it. But considering that Shake Shack is a non-franchise business that employs 8,000 people and just last Friday said they’d be able “raise up to $75 million from investors by selling shares,” it’s questionable why they applied in the first place.

Shake Shack isn’t the only big name in the restaurant business — or any business for that matter — collecting checks meant for small businesses right now. Bloomberg has reported a long list of companies with employee counts in the thousands with hundreds of millions in yearly revenues receiving PPP checks that were supposedly earmarked for small businesses. One major issue is that the restaurant business isn’t a “single” entity. Different sectors are going to have different needs based on being publically traded like Shake Shack or being franchised chains like Ruth’s Chris or being fully independent/ local operations. The latter category is where many believed the package would be targeted.

Overall, a lot of this comes down to people simply not understanding how the money was going to be distributed and not having the lawyers and lobbyists in place to make sense of these things sooner. Meanwhile, with the money gone, Congress and the White House have gone back into meetings to shore up the program and inject an additional $250 billion into the relief fund.

(Via Bloomberg)

View Entire Post ›

While Despicable Me continues its unstoppable and inexplicable reign as the most popular title on Netflix, there’s a new entry in second place. Too Hot to Handle, a reality show that “puts to the test whether these hot singletons can find emotional connection without the sex,” isn’t a fake 30 Rock series come to life — it’s a genuine hit. Considering the trashy premise (which, again, boils down to whether hot people can refrain from boning or, uh, self-pleasuring themselves for four weeks), it should not surprise anyone that Too Hot to Handle was inspired by masturbation. What is surprising, however, is the show’s connection to the masturbation episode (or lack thereof) of Seinfeld.

“None of them can actually do it, and so they actually all lose the money. And I thought, ‘There’s a TV format in that.’ Why don’t we get some of the hottest people on planet to try and see if they can hold themselves back for cash?” creative director and show developer Laura Gibson told Oprah magazine about where the idea for Too Hot to Handle came from. She’s referring to the Seinfeld season four episode, “The Content,” where Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer compete to see who can go the longest without masturbating; the winner is… not Kramer (it’s Jerry, as we learn in the series finale).

So, that’s Too Hot to Handle‘s origin story. But did you know “The Contest” was inspired by an actual contest that Seinfeld co-creator Larry David took part in. “I would say there was only one other person involved [in the actual contest],” he told New York magazine. “I don’t remember what the bet was. There must have been some money involved. I think it was a small amount. [The contest lasted] two days. Maybe three. I just remember it didn’t last very long. I was surprised at how quickly it ended. I won handily, yes.”

The reason Too Hot to Handle exists is because Larry David didn’t masturbate decades ago. Something to think about.

(Via Oprah)

In February of this year, WWE announced that 2021’s WrestleMania 37 will take place at Sofi Stadium in Inglewood, California. Now the coronavirus pandemic and the restrictions placed on gatherings in order to stop the spread of COVID-19 reportedly have the wrestling company considering an alternative location for its biggest show of the year in 2021.

Construction of Sofi Stadium has continued through the stay-at-home orders in California, even as two construction workers were diagnosed with the virus. However, when the building will open isn’t totally certain. The two Taylor Swift concerts that were supposed to open the venue in late July have been canceled, but so far the Kenny Chesney concert scheduled in the stadium for August 1 is still on. NFL preseason games will most likely still take place in Sofi Stadium as well, though possibly without fans in attendance.

Uncertainty over when California will allow large gatherings again has WWE thinking further in the future, according to WrestleVotes. The wrestling insider Twitter account posted that “WWE has begun researching a ‘plan B’ on an alternative site to host WrestleMania 37 if the state of California is not allowing large gatherings and/or SoFi Stadium is not finished on time.”

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti recently stated that L.A. might not allow large events until well into 2021, but Inglewood is in a different jurisdiction.

If all else fails and stay-at-home orders continue across the country for another full year, WWE could always run the Performance Center again next spring, as long as they’re still an essential business.

A24’s The Lighthouse managed to solidify Robert Pattinson (even before the Batman casting) as a master of reinvention, but the movie could have been even stranger than what materialized from being trapped in a lighthouse with Willem Dafoe. Stranger than the “ferocious masturbation” scene that Pattinson claimed left director Robert Eggers “a little in shock” after shooting? Yes, but this time, Eggers is the one doing the talking, and he reveals that the movie would have been more sexually graphic as originally pitched.

The film, which is now available to stream on Amazon Prime, also dabbled heavily in the art of flatulence in addition to all that madness, given that A24 was keen to embrace the weird with Eggers. However, A24 did draw the line on talk of graphic nudity and a visible “erection” from one of the male leads. Which one? That’ll remain a mystery, but here’s what Eggers said during a Film Independent-hosted Q&A session (via IndieWire):

“There wasn’t much of a pitch, really. There was convincing to do it on 35mm black-and-white negative, and there was also some full-frontal male nudity, an erection, and they were kind of like, look, it can be black and white and weird and all this stuff, but it can’t be rated NC-17.”

The Lighthouse was never meant to even vaguely resemble a blockbuster, but an NC-17 rating wouldn’t have fared well for this art house film either. So, A24 made the wise call because, who knows, a full-frontal shot might have ruined that cinematography Oscar nod in a movie that some feel was already snubbed to some degree. It was just delightfully weird enough without a naked Pattinson or Defoe strutting around onscreen. Still, Eggers also told the Q&A session that A24 was “happy” to make a movie with him following The Witch, and for solid reason, so yes, please go enjoy it on Amazon Prime if you haven’t seen it already.

(Via IndieWire)