The Chicago Bulls and Toronto Raptors are the two teams most have their eye on coming into trade season, as Friday marked the first day players signed this summer could be dealt, but there are some other teams that figure to be quite active this winter before the February deadline.
The Atlanta Hawks, like Toronto, are off to a disappointing start and are going to be connected to just about every big name that hits the market as they desperately try to figure out what the right fit is next to Trae Young, as Dejounte Murray’s first year-plus in Atlanta has not gone according to plan. The Indiana Pacers and Sacramento Kings are on the opposite end of the spectrum, with playoff caliber teams looking to find some upgrades and consolidate talent. All three of those are rumored to have interest in Pascal Siakam and OG Anunoby, with LaVine also on the radar for the Kings, but there is another team that could become a seller at the deadline that will have the league’s interest.
According to both Marc Stein and Jake Fischer of Yahoo, the Utah Jazz will be very active in trade talks ahead of the deadline, with just about every veteran on the roster available in a trade. Jordan Clarkson, Kelly Olynyk, and Collin Sexton are the most likely to get moved, while John Collins also is on the block (again), but teams will also be trying their best to pry All-Star forward Lauri Markkanen out of Utah. Per Stein, there are teams planning to “test Utah’s resolve” with regards to their stance on keeping Markkanen.
While there has been no tangible evidence that Utah’s stance on Markkanen has changed, there is a rising belief heading into Showcase that a team or two out there is actively planning to test Utah’s resolve this season by making an offer for the Finnish power forward.
Fischer confirms that the Jazz are at least willing to listen on Markkanen, quoting another GM as saying it’s unlikely, but could happen if a team throws a massive haul their way.
“Do I expect Utah to trade Lauri? No,” another general manager told Yahoo Sports. “But they are saying they’re willing to listen. They are willing to listen to calls on everyone, but it’s a matter of meeting their price like Minnesota did for Rudy [Gobert].”
As for why the Jazz would consider this, the thought is they might believe they’re a bit further away from contending and could view Markkanen’s next contract as not worth the value on a team with an apparent ceiling.
The three teams noted by Fischer as likely Markkanen suitors are the Hawks, Kings, and Thunder. Given Atlanta doesn’t have that many first round picks to work with after the Murray trade, it seems highly unlikely they can make the kind of offer that would change the Jazz’s mind on trading the All-Star. Sacramento has a bit more flexibility with picks and could offer Keegan Murray as a young centerpiece, but Oklahoma City is particularly interesting. For years, Sam Presti has stocked his draft cabinet full of assets and refused to part with any of them, but with the Thunder in second in the West right now, if there were ever a time to cash in on a (still young) All-Star like Markkanen to pair with Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Chet Holmgren, and Jalen Williams, this is it. They could offer the Jazz the kind of draft asset haul they got for Gobert, and make money work with Davis Bertans and some smaller pieces.
This is all still in the whispers stage, and anyone who has followed the league semi-closely for the last decade knows better than to get too excited about trade rumors involving Danny Ainge. That said, if there were a team that could give him the haul he wants for Markkanen and flip four or five draft picks without breaking a sweat, it’s the Thunder and we’ll just bookmark this until closer to February.
Fans looking forward to Kanye West’s second Vultureslistening event in Las Vegas were disappointed this week as Kanye West (unsurprisingly) failed to make the event happen. Instead, the world was treated to yet another West rant, this time about the “vultures” who spend all their time cozying up to him despite his pretty reprehensible behavior over the past several months (years, really) hoping for scraps from the table.
Fittingly, the rant was transmitted courtesy of Miami event promoter YesJulz, who live streamed as ‘Ye railed against all the people and entities he feels betrayed him after he, again, went on MULTIPLE antisemitic rants — which, again, he did after five-plus years of bigging up bigots, bullying his ex’s boyfriend, and behaving like a true scammer when it came to the one thing anyone actually wanted from him: new music.
In the video, he again goes off on “Jewish n****s,” particularly entertainment exec Ari Emanuel, who he blames for getting him dropped from his lucrative deals with Adidas and Gap. He also called out Adidas for dropping him and Jay-Z for distancing himself from Kanye when it became clear that Kanye wasn’t going to behave himself (some years before his 2022 meltdowns). Considering Kanye was exhibiting his sex tapes during business meetings, I’m not sure he can blame anyone but himself though.
Kanye goes deep down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole, becoming more and more impassioned as he continues. The 10-minute video ends with Kanye calling everyone in the room with him “fake” for only hanging around him for his money and influence (gasp!) and kicks YesJulz out of the room. You can see the incident below.
Kanye West goes off for 10 mins name dropping Jay-Z, Drake, Travis Scott, Balenciaga and Addias to name a few then says everyone in the room with him is fake stream ended when he kicked YesJulz out the room (she was recording) safe to say vultures is scrapped. pic.twitter.com/kFchoDdbRV
It should go without saying that it’s not cool to steal from your Airbnb. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t still happen.
However, when one Airbnb host recently discovered a guest had—for some strange reason—stolen one of her paintings, then replaced it with a completely different painting, she decided to make the best out of a very uncool situation by sharing the story on TikTok.
As a result, viewers got to witness an continuously unraveling, truly bizarre modern-day art heist.
Okay, let’s get into it.
“OK the weirdest thing just happened,” host Amy Corbett says at the beginning of her video.
She then shows what the living room in the listing normally looks like—with a painting of a map hanging on a wall over a couch.
But when Corbett shows up to the unit, we see that it is definitely not a painting of a map hanging on a wall over a couch. Instead, there’s a painting of an orange airplane.
“I have never seen the picture before in my life!” Corbett exclaims in the video.
Creeped out, she looks around the apartment to see if the oil painting is anywhere to be found. Nada. Zilch.
Needless to say, commenters had their theories. Several mentioned hearing similar stories involving the same painting, leading them to believe this was all part of some long and involved paint-swapping prank. Others went the more traditional route of assuming this guest was trying to cover up some damage inflicted to avoid fees. Others still thought this person was an artist trying to do some sort of clandestine self-promotion.
In a follow-up video, Corbett debunked those theories, saying that not only could that airplane image be found “all over the web,” but the wall it was hanging on was “pristine,” not to mention the fact that the original artwork was next to impossible to accidentally damage.
As for whether or not this person had swapped out other paintings, Corbett has reached out to one of the guest’s previous hosts, who confirmed that it had not taken place there.
Corbett kept audiences in the loop with several follow-ups, including actual security footage of the guest caught in the act.
The video shows a man (now dubbed the Airbnb Bandit) walking from his car carrying the airplane painting. Next, he’s seen in a different-colored hoodie carrying out the map painting, which is bundled up in a blanket.
As if things couldn’t get any stranger, when Corbett sent an official claim through Airbnb about the artwork, the Airbnb Bandit did pay, but only a portion of what was asked. Then when she asked when he could pay the rest of it…he asked for a 5-star review.
Wow. Just…wow.
While the actual identity of this unusual art thief remains a mystery, Corbett is being reimbursed by Airbnb. Plus, she has decidedly made her “negative story into a positive one” by hiring a local artist to create a new painting to hang above her couch, one that features a waterfall view and the Jamestown River visible just outside the listing. Plus, she’s raffling off the airplane painting to raise funds for affordable housing in her area.
This might be one of the weirder Airbnb stories out there, but at least it has a pretty happy ending.
If some of your friends have been rewatching Band Of Brothers lately, there’s a good reason why: Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg have come together for another followup (in addition to The Pacific), Masters Of The Air.
As the title suggests, the boys in this series will soar high into the sky, all the way to Hitler’s doorstep in the thick of WWII, and this production is coming your way from Spielberg’s Amblin Television along with Hanks and Gary Goetzman’s Playtone to stream on Apple TV+. Several damn fine directors — Cary Joji Fukunaga (It, Maniac), Dee Rees (Mudbound), Tim Van Patten (The Pacific, Deadwood), and Anna Boden + Ryan Fleck (Captain Marvel) — are onboard.
Let’s talk about what else we can expect from this series.
Plot
The production did not skimp on the budget to bring aerial flight combat scenes in abundance, along with all the urban and village-set destinations that one can imagine. Yes, there will be bucolic fields along with the southeast England countryside, but the series will also delve into a German POW camp. So, expect plenty of lows along with the highs of camaraderie.
Over the course of eight hours, viewers will get an intimate look at the hazards experienced by the “Bloody Hundredth,” i.e. the 100th Bomb Group, as they target Nazi Germany to take down Hitler’s Third Reich. This won’t all be war and games, however, because Apple TV+ promised to present “a true story of brotherhood and American airmen in WWII Europe.” The series won’t shy away from the peril of conducting bombing raids at 25,000 feet high, and some of the settings might be disturbing to some viewers, but that shouldn’t be surprising, given the atrocities of WWII that are well-known in history.
The story is based upon Masters of the Air: America’s Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany, the true-story captured in Donald L. Miller’s book. Band Of Brothers‘ John Orloff stepped up to pen the screenplay, and Breaking Bad‘s John Shiban helped Orloff adapt this into a story.
To lighten the mood ever so slightly, Austin Butler recently related how Tom Hanks offered him this leading role while they pair were working on the Australian shoot for Elvis. Why? “You have immersed yourself so deeply in ‘Elvis’ that, for your mental health, it would be wise to go straight into something else.” Fortunately, Butler also surely found relief while shooting The Bikeriders, too.
Let’s do the synopsis thing:
Masters of the Air” follows the men of the 100th Bomb Group (the “Bloody Hundredth”) as they conduct perilous bombing raids over Nazi Germany and grapple with the frigid conditions, lack of oxygen and sheer terror of combat conducted at 25,000 feet in the air. Portraying the psychological and emotional price paid by these young men as they helped destroy the horror of Hitler’s Third Reich, is at the heart of “Masters of the Air.” Some were shot down and captured; some were wounded or killed. And some were lucky enough to make it home. Regardless of individual fate, a toll was exacted on them all.
Cast
Austin Butler is attracting all the headlines at the moment — he will portray Major Gale Clevin, who goes through it (no spoilers) — but do not sleep on Barry Keoghan. That’s wise advice in general, but here, he’ll portray Lt. Curtis Biddick, and I can’t wait to see if he makes it weird. The rest of the ensemble cast includes Callum Turner, Rafferty Law, Josiah Cross, Anthony Boyle, Branden Cook, Ncuti Gatwa, and Nate Mann. Is it too much to ask for a brief Tom Hanks appearance? Probably so, but it can’t hurt to dream.
Release Date
The series will soar on January 26, 2024 with two episodes with weekly installments to follow through March 15.
Trailer
Got two of ’em coming your way.
Apple TV+’s Masters of the Air streams on January 26, 2024.
The Rundown is a weekly column that highlights some of the biggest, weirdest, and most notable events of the week in entertainment. The number of items could vary, as could the subject matter. It will not always make a ton of sense. Some items might not even be about entertainment, to be honest, or from this week. The important thing is that it’s Friday, and we are here to have some fun.
ITEM NUMBER ONE – This one is a bummer
Andre Braugher passed away this week after a brief battle with lung cancer. That stinks. He was only 61 years old, too, which seems much younger than you’d think. The man carried himself with such force and gravitas for so long that it felt like he should be older than that, like he’s been 50 years old for the last 20 years. I remember watching him on Homicide: Life on the Street — maybe the first real grown-up drama I watched on TV — and being blown away by how powerful he was. He had one of those faces and voices that could turn you into a blubbering child if he ever expressed disappointment in your general direction. I don’t want to get too into the weeds here with a tribute, in part because I’m not great at them and in part because there are better ones out there by people like Alan Sepinwall at Rolling Stone and Maureen Ryan at Vanity Fair. Mostly, I just want to point out that Andre Braugher was awesome.
He was awesome in a few ways, too. He was awesome for the reasons I mentioned in the first paragraph, where he played authority figures as well as anyone ever has, and where he was usually the best part of whatever drama he was in. But he was also awesome because then he turned around and used all that gravitas and well-earned respect to become the funniest part of a silly network comedy, too. That’s not easy to do, to use an instrument finely tuned for one thing to do a different task. But he did it. His performance as Captain Holt on Brooklyn Nine-Nine was a damn comedic masterpiece.
You know this, though. Or you should, at least. Or maybe you never watched the show and this will push you into an overdue binge. It’s not even really the point. The point is that he was willing to take a decade of playing gruff cops and use it to be just as silly as you could ever imagine. Go look at Captain Holt highlight compilations of him on YouTube this weekend. Spend an hour on it. Watch a master at his craft. Hell, you don’t even need the actual video for some of it. I can just post these screencaps and I bet you can hear it in his exact voice without even trying.
FOXFOXFOX
So, yeah. Just a real bummer. And even more so because it means we lost him and Lance Reddick in the same calendar year. Two of our best television authority figures, both willing to use their dramatic history on-screen to deliver laughs at times, both gone way too soon. They would have been great on a show together, just glaring at some poor punks and thundering away at them. Or maybe at each other. God, can you imagine that? Andre Braugher and Lance Reddick as adversaries on camera together? It might have been too powerful. It might have just cracked the screen. I’m sad it won’t have a chance to happen.
I’ll close with this clip from Brooklyn Nine-Nine, one of the rare serious — or at least serious-ish — moments on the show and a reminder that Andre Braugher could deliver a damn speech as well as anyone ever could.
Rest in peace, man. I’m legitimately sad about this one.
ITEM NUMBER TWO – There’s no easy transition here but, still, Julia Roberts seems fun
Touchstone
Julia Roberts has been famous for basically my entire life. That’s wild to think about, which I say with apologies to Julia Roberts if she’s reading this (hi, Julia!), only because my intention is not to make her sound old. Quite the opposite, actually. I mostly just want to point out how cool it is. Maintaining a long career in the public eye is tough. You have to have a lot of arrows in your quiver. Mostly, you have to be talented and charming or so talented you don’t have to be charming. Julia Roberts is definitely the first of those, and could probably be the second of those if she didn’t have a natural charm. And that smile. Which she does. I never really thought about it too much before I started typing this paragraph, but Julia Roberts kind of rules.
I bring this up today in part because it’s good to say these things sometimes but mostly because Julia just did this the other day.
Julia Roberts sat down for a pow-wow with CBS Mornings to talk about the lengthy apocalyptic thriller Leave the World Behind. The subject of her big breakthrough came up, with interviewer Gayle King asking her what she thinks her and Richard Gere’s characters would be up to today. Are they still a thing? Did they break up? Roberts had another idea about their fate.
“I think he passed away peacefully in his sleep from a heart attack, smiling,” Roberts replied. “And now she runs his business.”
That’s really funny. Julia Roberts just up and declared Richard Gere’s character in Pretty Woman dead. She didn’t have to do that. She could have played it cool and left the door open for some cash-grab sequel on some streaming network, but nope. He’s dead now. That’s that. I choose to believe there’s some writer out there who was like 80 percent done with a script for this hypothetical sequel and just had their whole Christmas ruined.
The other fun thing here is that it reminded me that Julia Roberts has always had this little rascal streak in her, whether most of the world realizes it or not. Watch this video of her going on Rosie O’Donnell’s show in like 1997 and just cooking Rosie — with receipts — over a joke Rosie made at her expense in an old standup special. Watch the twinkle in her eye as Rosie squirms. She is loving this.
Thinking about that time Julia Roberts was on the Rosie O’Donnell show promoting MY BEST FRIEND’S WEDDING and decided to call her out about a joke she made at her expense…
— This Bussy Depressed… (@HunseckerProxy) May 27, 2023
Perhaps you watched that and were skeptical. Perhaps you said, “Oh, sweet naive Brian, this was probably planned out and coordinated with teams of publicists days before.” Well, here’s my response to that: I considered it and chose to disregard it because my version is better and funnier. It’s okay to do that sometimes, to just take the win and move on. Which is what I’m doing… now.
ITEM NUMBER THREE – Hey, speaking of people that were in the Ocean’s movies…
Good news and bad news here…
GOOD: My colleague here at Uproxx Mike Ryan interviewed George Clooney. And he got a mini-scoop that there’s a solid script going around that would get the whole Ocean’s gang back together for something resembling Ocean’s 14. And they had this exchange, which is just about perfect.
So, we’ve actually met once before. It was at The Monuments Men premiere party. You were in a conga line…
George Clooney: [Laughing] Yeah…
The music stops right where I’m just minding my own business. You look at me, you give me a nod, then give this roundabout, put ‘er there handshake. Then the music starts again, and you conga it off into the night.
George Clooney: And it was Bill Murray leading that conga line, too!
That part I don’t remember.
George Clooney: Yeah, it was Bill. By the way, in general, every conga line is led by Bill Murray. A good rule of thumb in general.
What I like about this is that you can see the whole scene in 4k in your brain if you think about it for 10 seconds. Do it now. Bill Murray leading a conga line, George Clooney somewhere in the middle, that little smile on his face, wearing a tuxedo with the bow tie undone and dangling around his neck, all of it. I wonder how many people George Clooney has met in a conga line in his life. I really don’t think any number you spit out could surprise me. It’s a good story. But, unfortunately, it also brings us to…
BAD: Despite my SPECIFIC REQUEST in the Uproxx chat, Mike did not ask George Clooney about his performances in the short-lived television show Sunset Beat, in which he looked like this…
ABC
I actually did some investigative journalism and tracked down the pilot episode of this show a few years back. I wrote a whole thing about it. This is the most important chunk, though.
The first thing you need to know about Sunset Beat is that George Clooney plays a Harley-riding undercover cop named Chic Chesbro who moonlights as the lead guitarist in a rock band called Private Prayer and wears a leather jacket over a denim jacket despite living in Southern California. You can tell he’s good at guitar because people are always asking him how he played and he always replies “Great. I always play great.” All of that is true, I promise, as is the fact that his ex-girlfriend used to be the group’s lead singer before she got hooked on drugs. She storms the stage in the opening scene. A riot breaks out outside the China Club. As she is getting arrested, she says — I’m almost sure of it — “Don’t be a hero, nosewipe” to the cop. Sunset Beat was a good show.
Forget Ocean’s 14. I need to know what Chic Chesbro is up to. Today. Right now. I hope he’s dressed exactly the same.
ITEM NUMBER FOUR – Hey, speaking of heist movies…
Merlin Films
Let’s be fast here:
The Black List is an annual collection of the best unsold screenplays floating around Hollywood
The 2023 edition dropped this week
You can look at them all but I need to highlight two in particular
First, one called Stakehorse, written by Justin Piasecki, which is described thusly:
A racetrack veterinarian who runs an off-the-books ER for criminals finds his practice and life in jeopardy when he’s recruited for his patient’s heist.
A few things:
I must see this movie
Someone please make it
What the hell are these bozos in Hollywood even doing if this isn’t a movie yet?
The second screenplay I must bring to your attention is called Bad Boy and is written by a man named Travis Braun and is described thusly:
A rescue dog suspects his loving new owner is a serial killer.
A few things:
I must see this movie
Someone please make it
What the hell are these bozos in Hollywood even doing if this isn’t a movie yet?
I know I said the same thing about both movies. That doesn’t make anything I said less true. Jesus Christ. Come on, guys. Help me out here.
ITEM NUMBER FIVE – This might be the most relatable thing a celebrity has ever said
ELLENTUBE
This is a tricky one.
On one hand, it’s hard to be considered relatable when your dad is Don Johnson and your mom is Melanie Griffith and your grandmother starred in The Birds and your stepdad is Antonio Banderas and you’re running around doing interviews with the Wall Street Journal to promote a movie that you star in as a spider-adjacent superhero with Sydney Sweeney and Adam Scott. That’s a tough hill to climb. More of a mountain, really. In many ways, it’s hard to be less relatable than that.
BUT
On the other hand, in the aforementioned interview with the Wall Street Journal, Dakota Johnson, the Madame Web star and daughter of Don Johnson and Melanie Griffith and granddaughter of Tippi Hedren and stepdaughter of Antonio Banderas, went ahead and said… well, this.
What time do you get up on Mondays, and what’s the first thing you do after waking up?
I don’t have a regular [wake-up] time. It depends on what’s happening in my life. If I’m not working, if I have a day off on a Monday, then I will sleep as long as I can. Sleep is my number one priority in life.
I love this. Sleep is great. I am terrible at it (up and down, tossing and turning), but it is just a lovely thing when you get it. You ever have like three crappy nights of sleep in a row and then zonk out for 10 clean hours some night? You wake up feeling like a superhero. It’s stupid that the body still needs it, kind of. You would think evolution could have knocked out the need to be vulnerable to predators for a third of the day. But still. Just great. I wish I could all go to sleep right now. Even just a nap. Naps are great, too. Maybe 90 minutes mid-afternoon on a weekend. Let’s all go ahead and pencil that into the schedule. You, me, Dakota Johnson, all of us.
READER MAIL
If you have questions about television, movies, food, local news, weather, or whatever you want, shoot them to me at [email protected] (put “RUNDOWN” in the subject line). I am the first writer to ever answer reader mail in a column. Do not look up this last part.
From Matt:
I know you mention Bosch a lot. Is it… good? It’s hard to tell with you sometimes because you get equally excited about shows that are really, actually good and shows that are dumb as hell. (I promise I mean this in a nice way.) I’m open to watching it in either scenario but I guess I want to know what to expect heading into it. If I’m just watching to see a loose cannon get yelled at by his supervisors and put his hands in his pockets weird, I want to be prepared for that.
Okay, here’s the thing… both are true. Bosch is a legitimately good cop show. Better than any network junk. It’s made by Eric Overmeyer, whose resume includes The Wire and Homicide and Treme. The cast is littered with veterans of these shows, like Jamie Hector and Lance Reddick and more. Both the original and the spinoff, Bosch: Legacy, are massively bingeable shows where Bosch runs off on his loose cannon shenanigans to get justice regardless of what the damn fat cats in city hall say. I enjoy it a lot.
It is also, sometimes, a little silly, what with everyone grumbling Bosch’s name and the plots sometimes getting a little extra and, yes, Bosch putting his hands in his pockets like this…
Amazon
I would absolutely recommend it, though, especially if you’re looking for a show to watch for 2-3 hours at a time on those dumb winter nights when it gets dark at 4:30pm and you want to kill some time before bed. You need those kinds of shows sometimes, too.
Abraham Lincoln’s top hat is missing from a bronze sculpture along the Ohio River in Louisville, Kentucky.
Folks…
We have a top hat heist.
The sculptor, Ed Hamilton, posted photos of his artwork at Waterfront Park on Facebook on Saturday and said someone stole the hat from the sculpture.
“They had to be strong and determined to pry bronze from a base, good grief!” his post said.
Couple important notes here:
I choose to believe these thieves are working for whoever masterminded the golden toilet heist and the end goal is to be using a golden toilet while wearing a bronze top hat
I need to start using “good grief” more
Moving on.
The 12-foot (3.6-meter) statue of Lincoln seated on a rock looking out at the Ohio River was dedicated in 2009. The top hat had rested on a rock beside the former president, who was born in rural Kentucky.
You almost have to appreciate that someone saw this lovely tribute to Abraham Lincoln just chilling by a river in Kentucky for the last 15 years and came away from it thinking “I’m going to steal that bronze top hat.” What a stupid and ambitious goal. I can’t wait to see this guy — absolutely a guy, 100 percent — explain this all to his fellow inmates in prison.
“What’re you in for?”
“Okay… so there’s this bronze top hat…”
I want to see video just to look at all the faces he’s saying this to.
The Rundown is a weekly column that highlights some of the biggest, weirdest, and most notable events of the week in entertainment. The number of items could vary, as could the subject matter. It will not always make a ton of sense. Some items might not even be about entertainment, to be honest, or from this week. The important thing is that it’s Friday, and we are here to have some fun.
ITEM NUMBER ONE – This one is a bummer
Andre Braugher passed away this week after a brief battle with lung cancer. That stinks. He was only 61 years old, too, which seems much younger than you’d think. The man carried himself with such force and gravitas for so long that it felt like he should be older than that, like he’s been 50 years old for the last 20 years. I remember watching him on Homicide: Life on the Street — maybe the first real grown-up drama I watched on TV — and being blown away by how powerful he was. He had one of those faces and voices that could turn you into a blubbering child if he ever expressed disappointment in your general direction. I don’t want to get too into the weeds here with a tribute, in part because I’m not great at them and in part because there are better ones out there by people like Alan Sepinwall at Rolling Stone and Maureen Ryan at Vanity Fair. Mostly, I just want to point out that Andre Braugher was awesome.
He was awesome in a few ways, too. He was awesome for the reasons I mentioned in the first paragraph, where he played authority figures as well as anyone ever has, and where he was usually the best part of whatever drama he was in. But he was also awesome because then he turned around and used all that gravitas and well-earned respect to become the funniest part of a silly network comedy, too. That’s not easy to do, to use an instrument finely tuned for one thing to do a different task. But he did it. His performance as Captain Holt on Brooklyn Nine-Nine was a damn comedic masterpiece.
You know this, though. Or you should, at least. Or maybe you never watched the show and this will push you into an overdue binge. It’s not even really the point. The point is that he was willing to take a decade of playing gruff cops and use it to be just as silly as you could ever imagine. Go look at Captain Holt highlight compilations of him on YouTube this weekend. Spend an hour on it. Watch a master at his craft. Hell, you don’t even need the actual video for some of it. I can just post these screencaps and I bet you can hear it in his exact voice without even trying.
FOXFOXFOX
So, yeah. Just a real bummer. And even more so because it means we lost him and Lance Reddick in the same calendar year. Two of our best television authority figures, both willing to use their dramatic history on-screen to deliver laughs at times, both gone way too soon. They would have been great on a show together, just glaring at some poor punks and thundering away at them. Or maybe at each other. God, can you imagine that? Andre Braugher and Lance Reddick as adversaries on camera together? It might have been too powerful. It might have just cracked the screen. I’m sad it won’t have a chance to happen.
I’ll close with this clip from Brooklyn Nine-Nine, one of the rare serious — or at least serious-ish — moments on the show and a reminder that Andre Braugher could deliver a damn speech as well as anyone ever could.
Rest in peace, man. I’m legitimately sad about this one.
ITEM NUMBER TWO – There’s no easy transition here but, still, Julia Roberts seems fun
Touchstone
Julia Roberts has been famous for basically my entire life. That’s wild to think about, which I say with apologies to Julia Roberts if she’s reading this (hi, Julia!), only because my intention is not to make her sound old. Quite the opposite, actually. I mostly just want to point out how cool it is. Maintaining a long career in the public eye is tough. You have to have a lot of arrows in your quiver. Mostly, you have to be talented and charming or so talented you don’t have to be charming. Julia Roberts is definitely the first of those, and could probably be the second of those if she didn’t have a natural charm. And that smile. Which she does. I never really thought about it too much before I started typing this paragraph, but Julia Roberts kind of rules.
I bring this up today in part because it’s good to say these things sometimes but mostly because Julia just did this the other day.
Julia Roberts sat down for a pow-wow with CBS Mornings to talk about the lengthy apocalyptic thriller Leave the World Behind. The subject of her big breakthrough came up, with interviewer Gayle King asking her what she thinks her and Richard Gere’s characters would be up to today. Are they still a thing? Did they break up? Roberts had another idea about their fate.
“I think he passed away peacefully in his sleep from a heart attack, smiling,” Roberts replied. “And now she runs his business.”
That’s really funny. Julia Roberts just up and declared Richard Gere’s character in Pretty Woman dead. She didn’t have to do that. She could have played it cool and left the door open for some cash-grab sequel on some streaming network, but nope. He’s dead now. That’s that. I choose to believe there’s some writer out there who was like 80 percent done with a script for this hypothetical sequel and just had their whole Christmas ruined.
The other fun thing here is that it reminded me that Julia Roberts has always had this little rascal streak in her, whether most of the world realizes it or not. Watch this video of her going on Rosie O’Donnell’s show in like 1997 and just cooking Rosie — with receipts — over a joke Rosie made at her expense in an old standup special. Watch the twinkle in her eye as Rosie squirms. She is loving this.
Thinking about that time Julia Roberts was on the Rosie O’Donnell show promoting MY BEST FRIEND’S WEDDING and decided to call her out about a joke she made at her expense…
— This Bussy Depressed… (@HunseckerProxy) May 27, 2023
Perhaps you watched that and were skeptical. Perhaps you said, “Oh, sweet naive Brian, this was probably planned out and coordinated with teams of publicists days before.” Well, here’s my response to that: I considered it and chose to disregard it because my version is better and funnier. It’s okay to do that sometimes, to just take the win and move on. Which is what I’m doing… now.
ITEM NUMBER THREE – Hey, speaking of people that were in the Ocean’s movies…
Good news and bad news here…
GOOD: My colleague here at Uproxx Mike Ryan interviewed George Clooney. And he got a mini-scoop that there’s a solid script going around that would get the whole Ocean’s gang back together for something resembling Ocean’s 14. And they had this exchange, which is just about perfect.
So, we’ve actually met once before. It was at The Monuments Men premiere party. You were in a conga line…
George Clooney: [Laughing] Yeah…
The music stops right where I’m just minding my own business. You look at me, you give me a nod, then give this roundabout, put ‘er there handshake. Then the music starts again, and you conga it off into the night.
George Clooney: And it was Bill Murray leading that conga line, too!
That part I don’t remember.
George Clooney: Yeah, it was Bill. By the way, in general, every conga line is led by Bill Murray. A good rule of thumb in general.
What I like about this is that you can see the whole scene in 4k in your brain if you think about it for 10 seconds. Do it now. Bill Murray leading a conga line, George Clooney somewhere in the middle, that little smile on his face, wearing a tuxedo with the bow tie undone and dangling around his neck, all of it. I wonder how many people George Clooney has met in a conga line in his life. I really don’t think any number you spit out could surprise me. It’s a good story. But, unfortunately, it also brings us to…
BAD: Despite my SPECIFIC REQUEST in the Uproxx chat, Mike did not ask George Clooney about his performances in the short-lived television show Sunset Beat, in which he looked like this…
ABC
I actually did some investigative journalism and tracked down the pilot episode of this show a few years back. I wrote a whole thing about it. This is the most important chunk, though.
The first thing you need to know about Sunset Beat is that George Clooney plays a Harley-riding undercover cop named Chic Chesbro who moonlights as the lead guitarist in a rock band called Private Prayer and wears a leather jacket over a denim jacket despite living in Southern California. You can tell he’s good at guitar because people are always asking him how he played and he always replies “Great. I always play great.” All of that is true, I promise, as is the fact that his ex-girlfriend used to be the group’s lead singer before she got hooked on drugs. She storms the stage in the opening scene. A riot breaks out outside the China Club. As she is getting arrested, she says — I’m almost sure of it — “Don’t be a hero, nosewipe” to the cop. Sunset Beat was a good show.
Forget Ocean’s 14. I need to know what Chic Chesbro is up to. Today. Right now. I hope he’s dressed exactly the same.
ITEM NUMBER FOUR – Hey, speaking of heist movies…
Merlin Films
Let’s be fast here:
The Black List is an annual collection of the best unsold screenplays floating around Hollywood
The 2023 edition dropped this week
You can look at them all but I need to highlight two in particular
First, one called Stakehorse, written by Justin Piasecki, which is described thusly:
A racetrack veterinarian who runs an off-the-books ER for criminals finds his practice and life in jeopardy when he’s recruited for his patient’s heist.
A few things:
I must see this movie
Someone please make it
What the hell are these bozos in Hollywood even doing if this isn’t a movie yet?
The second screenplay I must bring to your attention is called Bad Boy and is written by a man named Travis Braun and is described thusly:
A rescue dog suspects his loving new owner is a serial killer.
A few things:
I must see this movie
Someone please make it
What the hell are these bozos in Hollywood even doing if this isn’t a movie yet?
I know I said the same thing about both movies. That doesn’t make anything I said less true. Jesus Christ. Come on, guys. Help me out here.
ITEM NUMBER FIVE – This might be the most relatable thing a celebrity has ever said
ELLENTUBE
This is a tricky one.
On one hand, it’s hard to be considered relatable when your dad is Don Johnson and your mom is Melanie Griffith and your grandmother starred in The Birds and your stepdad is Antonio Banderas and you’re running around doing interviews with the Wall Street Journal to promote a movie that you star in as a spider-adjacent superhero with Sydney Sweeney and Adam Scott. That’s a tough hill to climb. More of a mountain, really. In many ways, it’s hard to be less relatable than that.
BUT
On the other hand, in the aforementioned interview with the Wall Street Journal, Dakota Johnson, the Madame Web star and daughter of Don Johnson and Melanie Griffith and granddaughter of Tippi Hedren and stepdaughter of Antonio Banderas, went ahead and said… well, this.
What time do you get up on Mondays, and what’s the first thing you do after waking up?
I don’t have a regular [wake-up] time. It depends on what’s happening in my life. If I’m not working, if I have a day off on a Monday, then I will sleep as long as I can. Sleep is my number one priority in life.
I love this. Sleep is great. I am terrible at it (up and down, tossing and turning), but it is just a lovely thing when you get it. You ever have like three crappy nights of sleep in a row and then zonk out for 10 clean hours some night? You wake up feeling like a superhero. It’s stupid that the body still needs it, kind of. You would think evolution could have knocked out the need to be vulnerable to predators for a third of the day. But still. Just great. I wish I could all go to sleep right now. Even just a nap. Naps are great, too. Maybe 90 minutes mid-afternoon on a weekend. Let’s all go ahead and pencil that into the schedule. You, me, Dakota Johnson, all of us.
READER MAIL
If you have questions about television, movies, food, local news, weather, or whatever you want, shoot them to me at [email protected] (put “RUNDOWN” in the subject line). I am the first writer to ever answer reader mail in a column. Do not look up this last part.
From Matt:
I know you mention Bosch a lot. Is it… good? It’s hard to tell with you sometimes because you get equally excited about shows that are really, actually good and shows that are dumb as hell. (I promise I mean this in a nice way.) I’m open to watching it in either scenario but I guess I want to know what to expect heading into it. If I’m just watching to see a loose cannon get yelled at by his supervisors and put his hands in his pockets weird, I want to be prepared for that.
Okay, here’s the thing… both are true. Bosch is a legitimately good cop show. Better than any network junk. It’s made by Eric Overmeyer, whose resume includes The Wire and Homicide and Treme. The cast is littered with veterans of these shows, like Jamie Hector and Lance Reddick and more. Both the original and the spinoff, Bosch: Legacy, are massively bingeable shows where Bosch runs off on his loose cannon shenanigans to get justice regardless of what the damn fat cats in city hall say. I enjoy it a lot.
It is also, sometimes, a little silly, what with everyone grumbling Bosch’s name and the plots sometimes getting a little extra and, yes, Bosch putting his hands in his pockets like this…
Amazon
I would absolutely recommend it, though, especially if you’re looking for a show to watch for 2-3 hours at a time on those dumb winter nights when it gets dark at 4:30pm and you want to kill some time before bed. You need those kinds of shows sometimes, too.
Abraham Lincoln’s top hat is missing from a bronze sculpture along the Ohio River in Louisville, Kentucky.
Folks…
We have a top hat heist.
The sculptor, Ed Hamilton, posted photos of his artwork at Waterfront Park on Facebook on Saturday and said someone stole the hat from the sculpture.
“They had to be strong and determined to pry bronze from a base, good grief!” his post said.
Couple important notes here:
I choose to believe these thieves are working for whoever masterminded the golden toilet heist and the end goal is to be using a golden toilet while wearing a bronze top hat
I need to start using “good grief” more
Moving on.
The 12-foot (3.6-meter) statue of Lincoln seated on a rock looking out at the Ohio River was dedicated in 2009. The top hat had rested on a rock beside the former president, who was born in rural Kentucky.
You almost have to appreciate that someone saw this lovely tribute to Abraham Lincoln just chilling by a river in Kentucky for the last 15 years and came away from it thinking “I’m going to steal that bronze top hat.” What a stupid and ambitious goal. I can’t wait to see this guy — absolutely a guy, 100 percent — explain this all to his fellow inmates in prison.
“What’re you in for?”
“Okay… so there’s this bronze top hat…”
I want to see video just to look at all the faces he’s saying this to.
The Rundown is a weekly column that highlights some of the biggest, weirdest, and most notable events of the week in entertainment. The number of items could vary, as could the subject matter. It will not always make a ton of sense. Some items might not even be about entertainment, to be honest, or from this week. The important thing is that it’s Friday, and we are here to have some fun.
ITEM NUMBER ONE – This one is a bummer
Andre Braugher passed away this week after a brief battle with lung cancer. That stinks. He was only 61 years old, too, which seems much younger than you’d think. The man carried himself with such force and gravitas for so long that it felt like he should be older than that, like he’s been 50 years old for the last 20 years. I remember watching him on Homicide: Life on the Street — maybe the first real grown-up drama I watched on TV — and being blown away by how powerful he was. He had one of those faces and voices that could turn you into a blubbering child if he ever expressed disappointment in your general direction. I don’t want to get too into the weeds here with a tribute, in part because I’m not great at them and in part because there are better ones out there by people like Alan Sepinwall at Rolling Stone and Maureen Ryan at Vanity Fair. Mostly, I just want to point out that Andre Braugher was awesome.
He was awesome in a few ways, too. He was awesome for the reasons I mentioned in the first paragraph, where he played authority figures as well as anyone ever has, and where he was usually the best part of whatever drama he was in. But he was also awesome because then he turned around and used all that gravitas and well-earned respect to become the funniest part of a silly network comedy, too. That’s not easy to do, to use an instrument finely tuned for one thing to do a different task. But he did it. His performance as Captain Holt on Brooklyn Nine-Nine was a damn comedic masterpiece.
You know this, though. Or you should, at least. Or maybe you never watched the show and this will push you into an overdue binge. It’s not even really the point. The point is that he was willing to take a decade of playing gruff cops and use it to be just as silly as you could ever imagine. Go look at Captain Holt highlight compilations of him on YouTube this weekend. Spend an hour on it. Watch a master at his craft. Hell, you don’t even need the actual video for some of it. I can just post these screencaps and I bet you can hear it in his exact voice without even trying.
FOXFOXFOX
So, yeah. Just a real bummer. And even more so because it means we lost him and Lance Reddick in the same calendar year. Two of our best television authority figures, both willing to use their dramatic history on-screen to deliver laughs at times, both gone way too soon. They would have been great on a show together, just glaring at some poor punks and thundering away at them. Or maybe at each other. God, can you imagine that? Andre Braugher and Lance Reddick as adversaries on camera together? It might have been too powerful. It might have just cracked the screen. I’m sad it won’t have a chance to happen.
I’ll close with this clip from Brooklyn Nine-Nine, one of the rare serious — or at least serious-ish — moments on the show and a reminder that Andre Braugher could deliver a damn speech as well as anyone ever could.
Rest in peace, man. I’m legitimately sad about this one.
ITEM NUMBER TWO – There’s no easy transition here but, still, Julia Roberts seems fun
Touchstone
Julia Roberts has been famous for basically my entire life. That’s wild to think about, which I say with apologies to Julia Roberts if she’s reading this (hi, Julia!), only because my intention is not to make her sound old. Quite the opposite, actually. I mostly just want to point out how cool it is. Maintaining a long career in the public eye is tough. You have to have a lot of arrows in your quiver. Mostly, you have to be talented and charming or so talented you don’t have to be charming. Julia Roberts is definitely the first of those, and could probably be the second of those if she didn’t have a natural charm. And that smile. Which she does. I never really thought about it too much before I started typing this paragraph, but Julia Roberts kind of rules.
I bring this up today in part because it’s good to say these things sometimes but mostly because Julia just did this the other day.
Julia Roberts sat down for a pow-wow with CBS Mornings to talk about the lengthy apocalyptic thriller Leave the World Behind. The subject of her big breakthrough came up, with interviewer Gayle King asking her what she thinks her and Richard Gere’s characters would be up to today. Are they still a thing? Did they break up? Roberts had another idea about their fate.
“I think he passed away peacefully in his sleep from a heart attack, smiling,” Roberts replied. “And now she runs his business.”
That’s really funny. Julia Roberts just up and declared Richard Gere’s character in Pretty Woman dead. She didn’t have to do that. She could have played it cool and left the door open for some cash-grab sequel on some streaming network, but nope. He’s dead now. That’s that. I choose to believe there’s some writer out there who was like 80 percent done with a script for this hypothetical sequel and just had their whole Christmas ruined.
The other fun thing here is that it reminded me that Julia Roberts has always had this little rascal streak in her, whether most of the world realizes it or not. Watch this video of her going on Rosie O’Donnell’s show in like 1997 and just cooking Rosie — with receipts — over a joke Rosie made at her expense in an old standup special. Watch the twinkle in her eye as Rosie squirms. She is loving this.
Thinking about that time Julia Roberts was on the Rosie O’Donnell show promoting MY BEST FRIEND’S WEDDING and decided to call her out about a joke she made at her expense…
— This Bussy Depressed… (@HunseckerProxy) May 27, 2023
Perhaps you watched that and were skeptical. Perhaps you said, “Oh, sweet naive Brian, this was probably planned out and coordinated with teams of publicists days before.” Well, here’s my response to that: I considered it and chose to disregard it because my version is better and funnier. It’s okay to do that sometimes, to just take the win and move on. Which is what I’m doing… now.
ITEM NUMBER THREE – Hey, speaking of people that were in the Ocean’s movies…
Good news and bad news here…
GOOD: My colleague here at Uproxx Mike Ryan interviewed George Clooney. And he got a mini-scoop that there’s a solid script going around that would get the whole Ocean’s gang back together for something resembling Ocean’s 14. And they had this exchange, which is just about perfect.
So, we’ve actually met once before. It was at The Monuments Men premiere party. You were in a conga line…
George Clooney: [Laughing] Yeah…
The music stops right where I’m just minding my own business. You look at me, you give me a nod, then give this roundabout, put ‘er there handshake. Then the music starts again, and you conga it off into the night.
George Clooney: And it was Bill Murray leading that conga line, too!
That part I don’t remember.
George Clooney: Yeah, it was Bill. By the way, in general, every conga line is led by Bill Murray. A good rule of thumb in general.
What I like about this is that you can see the whole scene in 4k in your brain if you think about it for 10 seconds. Do it now. Bill Murray leading a conga line, George Clooney somewhere in the middle, that little smile on his face, wearing a tuxedo with the bow tie undone and dangling around his neck, all of it. I wonder how many people George Clooney has met in a conga line in his life. I really don’t think any number you spit out could surprise me. It’s a good story. But, unfortunately, it also brings us to…
BAD: Despite my SPECIFIC REQUEST in the Uproxx chat, Mike did not ask George Clooney about his performances in the short-lived television show Sunset Beat, in which he looked like this…
ABC
I actually did some investigative journalism and tracked down the pilot episode of this show a few years back. I wrote a whole thing about it. This is the most important chunk, though.
The first thing you need to know about Sunset Beat is that George Clooney plays a Harley-riding undercover cop named Chic Chesbro who moonlights as the lead guitarist in a rock band called Private Prayer and wears a leather jacket over a denim jacket despite living in Southern California. You can tell he’s good at guitar because people are always asking him how he played and he always replies “Great. I always play great.” All of that is true, I promise, as is the fact that his ex-girlfriend used to be the group’s lead singer before she got hooked on drugs. She storms the stage in the opening scene. A riot breaks out outside the China Club. As she is getting arrested, she says — I’m almost sure of it — “Don’t be a hero, nosewipe” to the cop. Sunset Beat was a good show.
Forget Ocean’s 14. I need to know what Chic Chesbro is up to. Today. Right now. I hope he’s dressed exactly the same.
ITEM NUMBER FOUR – Hey, speaking of heist movies…
Merlin Films
Let’s be fast here:
The Black List is an annual collection of the best unsold screenplays floating around Hollywood
The 2023 edition dropped this week
You can look at them all but I need to highlight two in particular
First, one called Stakehorse, written by Justin Piasecki, which is described thusly:
A racetrack veterinarian who runs an off-the-books ER for criminals finds his practice and life in jeopardy when he’s recruited for his patient’s heist.
A few things:
I must see this movie
Someone please make it
What the hell are these bozos in Hollywood even doing if this isn’t a movie yet?
The second screenplay I must bring to your attention is called Bad Boy and is written by a man named Travis Braun and is described thusly:
A rescue dog suspects his loving new owner is a serial killer.
A few things:
I must see this movie
Someone please make it
What the hell are these bozos in Hollywood even doing if this isn’t a movie yet?
I know I said the same thing about both movies. That doesn’t make anything I said less true. Jesus Christ. Come on, guys. Help me out here.
ITEM NUMBER FIVE – This might be the most relatable thing a celebrity has ever said
ELLENTUBE
This is a tricky one.
On one hand, it’s hard to be considered relatable when your dad is Don Johnson and your mom is Melanie Griffith and your grandmother starred in The Birds and your stepdad is Antonio Banderas and you’re running around doing interviews with the Wall Street Journal to promote a movie that you star in as a spider-adjacent superhero with Sydney Sweeney and Adam Scott. That’s a tough hill to climb. More of a mountain, really. In many ways, it’s hard to be less relatable than that.
BUT
On the other hand, in the aforementioned interview with the Wall Street Journal, Dakota Johnson, the Madame Web star and daughter of Don Johnson and Melanie Griffith and granddaughter of Tippi Hedren and stepdaughter of Antonio Banderas, went ahead and said… well, this.
What time do you get up on Mondays, and what’s the first thing you do after waking up?
I don’t have a regular [wake-up] time. It depends on what’s happening in my life. If I’m not working, if I have a day off on a Monday, then I will sleep as long as I can. Sleep is my number one priority in life.
I love this. Sleep is great. I am terrible at it (up and down, tossing and turning), but it is just a lovely thing when you get it. You ever have like three crappy nights of sleep in a row and then zonk out for 10 clean hours some night? You wake up feeling like a superhero. It’s stupid that the body still needs it, kind of. You would think evolution could have knocked out the need to be vulnerable to predators for a third of the day. But still. Just great. I wish I could all go to sleep right now. Even just a nap. Naps are great, too. Maybe 90 minutes mid-afternoon on a weekend. Let’s all go ahead and pencil that into the schedule. You, me, Dakota Johnson, all of us.
READER MAIL
If you have questions about television, movies, food, local news, weather, or whatever you want, shoot them to me at [email protected] (put “RUNDOWN” in the subject line). I am the first writer to ever answer reader mail in a column. Do not look up this last part.
From Matt:
I know you mention Bosch a lot. Is it… good? It’s hard to tell with you sometimes because you get equally excited about shows that are really, actually good and shows that are dumb as hell. (I promise I mean this in a nice way.) I’m open to watching it in either scenario but I guess I want to know what to expect heading into it. If I’m just watching to see a loose cannon get yelled at by his supervisors and put his hands in his pockets weird, I want to be prepared for that.
Okay, here’s the thing… both are true. Bosch is a legitimately good cop show. Better than any network junk. It’s made by Eric Overmeyer, whose resume includes The Wire and Homicide and Treme. The cast is littered with veterans of these shows, like Jamie Hector and Lance Reddick and more. Both the original and the spinoff, Bosch: Legacy, are massively bingeable shows where Bosch runs off on his loose cannon shenanigans to get justice regardless of what the damn fat cats in city hall say. I enjoy it a lot.
It is also, sometimes, a little silly, what with everyone grumbling Bosch’s name and the plots sometimes getting a little extra and, yes, Bosch putting his hands in his pockets like this…
Amazon
I would absolutely recommend it, though, especially if you’re looking for a show to watch for 2-3 hours at a time on those dumb winter nights when it gets dark at 4:30pm and you want to kill some time before bed. You need those kinds of shows sometimes, too.
Abraham Lincoln’s top hat is missing from a bronze sculpture along the Ohio River in Louisville, Kentucky.
Folks…
We have a top hat heist.
The sculptor, Ed Hamilton, posted photos of his artwork at Waterfront Park on Facebook on Saturday and said someone stole the hat from the sculpture.
“They had to be strong and determined to pry bronze from a base, good grief!” his post said.
Couple important notes here:
I choose to believe these thieves are working for whoever masterminded the golden toilet heist and the end goal is to be using a golden toilet while wearing a bronze top hat
I need to start using “good grief” more
Moving on.
The 12-foot (3.6-meter) statue of Lincoln seated on a rock looking out at the Ohio River was dedicated in 2009. The top hat had rested on a rock beside the former president, who was born in rural Kentucky.
You almost have to appreciate that someone saw this lovely tribute to Abraham Lincoln just chilling by a river in Kentucky for the last 15 years and came away from it thinking “I’m going to steal that bronze top hat.” What a stupid and ambitious goal. I can’t wait to see this guy — absolutely a guy, 100 percent — explain this all to his fellow inmates in prison.
“What’re you in for?”
“Okay… so there’s this bronze top hat…”
I want to see video just to look at all the faces he’s saying this to.
We’ve written a lot about The Muppet Christmas Carol here at Uproxx Dot Com. We called it “the best Christmas movie” (no offense to my colleague, but it’s a two-way tie between The Muppet Christmas Carol and Gremlins). We interviewed director Brian Henson. We even told you how to watch the “lost” cut of the film. And now I’m here to inform you where you can watch The Muppet Christmas Carol this holiday season. Or in July. It’s good year-round.
The Muppets are the stars of The Muppet Christmas Carol, obviously, but the Charles Dickens adaptation — witg Gonzo as Dickens and Rizzo the Rat as himself — wouldn’t work without its human lead, Michael Caine. Henson told us about casting the two-time Oscar winner as Ebenezer Scrooge.
“As we put Gonzo in as the narrator, as it started coming together, we were thinking, ‘No, you know what? This really becomes an opportunity for a great actor to do their Ebenezer Scrooge.’ We kind of went in that direction in the casting,” he explained. “We thought, ‘Who is a mature and highly respected actor that deserves their turn as Scrooge?’ That brought us to Michael.”
Henson added, “Michael is the first person we offered the role to. We didn’t offer it to anybody else first.” This Christmas, all I want is to watch Michael Caine dance with a giant Muppet (merry Christmas to me).
We’ve written a lot about The Muppet Christmas Carol here at Uproxx Dot Com. We called it “the best Christmas movie” (no offense to my colleague, but it’s a two-way tie between The Muppet Christmas Carol and Gremlins). We interviewed director Brian Henson. We even told you how to watch the “lost” cut of the film. And now I’m here to inform you where you can watch The Muppet Christmas Carol this holiday season. Or in July. It’s good year-round.
The Muppets are the stars of The Muppet Christmas Carol, obviously, but the Charles Dickens adaptation — witg Gonzo as Dickens and Rizzo the Rat as himself — wouldn’t work without its human lead, Michael Caine. Henson told us about casting the two-time Oscar winner as Ebenezer Scrooge.
“As we put Gonzo in as the narrator, as it started coming together, we were thinking, ‘No, you know what? This really becomes an opportunity for a great actor to do their Ebenezer Scrooge.’ We kind of went in that direction in the casting,” he explained. “We thought, ‘Who is a mature and highly respected actor that deserves their turn as Scrooge?’ That brought us to Michael.”
Henson added, “Michael is the first person we offered the role to. We didn’t offer it to anybody else first.” This Christmas, all I want is to watch Michael Caine dance with a giant Muppet (merry Christmas to me).
The film is currently sitting at 19% on Rotten Tomatoes as critics are not enjoying Snyder’s attempt at space opera that is heavy on stylistic choices, but completely empty when it comes to story and characters. Plus it overly apes Star Wars to the point where some reviews are blasting Rebel Moon as an example of AI screenwriting.
“Rebel Moon” isn’t based on anything; it’s a complete original. Yet in another sense it’s based on about twelve things. It’s “Stars Wars” meets “Guardians of the Galaxy” meets “The Lord of the Rings” meets “Black Panther,” all smelted down and reduced to a highly edible sauce of overfamiliar tropes, minus any semblance of a sense of humor. Movies this derivative, in my view, are inherently uncool, but you could argue that what’s almost cool about “Rebel Moon” is that it’s so unabashedly a gloss on only the 1977 “Star Wars.”
Snyder never met a superhero team roundup he didn’t love, and although he’s put aside capes and spandex for rugged galactic garb, the screenplay he co-wrote with Kurt Johnstad and Shay Hatten plays like the result of someone feeding Seven Samurai and Star Wars into AI scriptwriting software.
Snyder lacks the skill to establish meaningful relationships between any of the five zillion different elements he’s borrowed from better films, and he lacks the imagination to inject even a single one of them with a lifeforce of its own. The result is (the first half of) a singularly torturous slog that tries — and fails, and fails, and fails again for 134 minutes of agonizing tedium that are only interrupted by the occasional jolt of sadness for the wasted talent of everyone involved — to distill an iota of creative value from pre-existing images that never seemed worthless until Snyder tried to make them unique. It’s the cinematic equivalent of an NFT.
The storytelling is linear and, at times, tediously predictable. The characters lack depth and undergo little development, making it difficult for the audience to invest emotionally in their journey. The film’s reliance on slow motion, a stylistic hallmark of Snyder’s earlier works, feels antiquated and distracting. Rather than enhancing the action sequences, it often serves to obscure them, suggesting an attempt to mask possible flaws in direction and choreography.
In film school, some professors use the familiar example of Star Wars to teach Campbellian mythmaking, the theories that identify and codify the narrative units re-contextualized since Grecian times. Snyder demonstrates a clear fluency in these concepts with his classically minded scripting, except he forgot the part where the archetypes are meant to be refreshed through novel contexts.
Snyder just heaps in other influences, ranging from the spear-versus-spaceship play of Avatar to the names in Legend of Korra to the fashion of Vampire Hunter D and the psycho-sexual tube-play of 1984’s Dune. And while the too-muchness of all that might have made for an exciting and rich pastiche, there’s so little connective tissue between these things that Snyder’s vision instead feels like a lazy collage, stealing from richer, original genre works.
Rebel Moon is recognisably the work of the man who directed 300, Watchmen, Man of Steel and Justice League, and so, compared to the authorised Star Wars films, it has more blood, more swearing, more semi-nudity and more threats of sexual assault. There are more lens flares, more slow-motion action sequences, more shades of brown in the murky colour palette, and a lot more clumsy, expository speeches.
As usual, Snyder doesn’t seem to care about these characters so much as he likes their style guide features, like their cleavage, their haircuts, and their hard-stressed accents. Some actors, like Hunnam and Stoll, dig in with both hands, but not everyone fares as well with dialogue that never stops expositing even as matte-painting replica landscape shots threaten to swallow up whoever’s pushing the plot this time around.
It would be great to report that the first installment, Rebel Moon Part One: A Child of Fire, heralded a bold new sci-fi epic storming onto the scene. But everyone but the #ReleaseTheSnyderCut fanboys would be better off immediately ejecting this turgid whimper of a movie into the farthest reaches of the galaxy.
Rebel Moon: Part One – A Child of Fire starts streaming December 22 on Netflix.
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Privacy Overview
This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these cookies, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may have an effect on your browsing experience.
Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website.
