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.
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.
2023 was an absolutely incredible year for game releases. In your average year, you might get a handful of games that are agreed upon by the consensus that everyone needs to play. This year, it felt like there were three or four of those per month. So when it came time to decide what the best games were from the past year, this lone selector was suddenly overcome with guilt. Games like Alan Wake 2, Mario Wonder, Sea of Stars, and Final Fantasy 16 all just missed the cut. Any of these could be a Game of the Year contender in your average year, but unfortunately in 2023, they are among the many that did not make the final list. These are, in this lone selector’s opinion, the five best games of 2023, starting with out Game of the Year pick.
GOTY: Street Fighter 6
Deciding the GOTY every year is hard, but this year in particular was difficult with so many worthwhile contenders. With so many games having such a great case it really came down to one factor that separated Street Fighter 6 ahead of everyone else. No game that came out this year has a greater respect for not only its hardcore audience but its casual one as well. There are so many different ways you can play Street Fighter 6 from the Battle Hub, full of arcade machines and created player characters, to the Fighting Ground where those looking to become the best of the best sink the majority of their hours.
The best mode though has to be the World Tour where players undergo a grand quest with their own original Street Fighter character. This mode is a blast. Not only does it let you create an extremely powerful character that is unique to you, but the option to get into a street fight with quite literally any random passerby is a total delight. Hot dog vendor? They want to throw hands. Random old lady on the street? You best know they want the smoke. Not only does this encourage players to fight anyone they see, but it’s a really fun way to grind out the mechanics of the game and get better at Street Fighter 6 naturally. Of course, you can always just force your way through everything, learn nothing about fighting games, and watch credits with a smile on your face.
Street Fighter 6 invites the player to go deeper into its mechanics by choice, not by necessity, and that decision is leading to many players diving deep into a fighting game like they never have before. It’s a wonderful thing, and it’s this decision that allows Street Fighter 6 to earn the title of Game of the Year. See you in the fighting grounds.
Marvel’s Spider-Man 2
Marvel’s Spider-Man was great. Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales was more of the same in a good way. So with the sequel there was one big question: How are they going to top or match what they did previously? For Insomniac that was simple — take what worked before, polish it even further, and add in more fun ways to be Spider-Man. There was nothing extremely innovative about Spider-Man this year. Nothing about it felt revolutionary or that it was changing the way we felt about video games, and that’s fine because it didn’t need to be that. Instead, it just gave fans of the first game more of what they wanted with some small improvements here and there.
The glide suit? An incredible addition. The ability to switch between Miles and Peter seamlessly to fulfill quests or use their different powers? Extremely cool and a feature that really only works as well as it does on modern hardware consoles like the PlayStation 5. The plot is another well done superhero tale, and while it doesn’t quite punch you in the gut the way the first two did it leaves you feeling excited for the future of not only this franchise but the future of this universe as a whole. There is so much to build off of here and it’s going to be fun to see what direction Insomniac takes it next.
Baldur’s Gate 3
Ever since the early days of video games, developers have been chasing how to make a game that responds to player decisions the way a Dungeon Master does in Dungeons & Dragons. The idea of a game that looks at the decision a player makes and responds to that decision organically is an exciting one and while Baldur’s Gate 3 doesn’t do exactly that, it does get close. No game this year gives players the same level of freedom to come up with their own solutions to problems the way Baldur’s Gate 3 does. No other game this year lets the player kill off one of the main plot-relevant characters because they feel that’s what their character would do in the moment, and then reward them for it instead of punishing them. If you can think of it, then Baldur’s Gate 3 will probably let you do it.
It’s that freedom that makes this one of the must-play experiences of the year. Even if you’re not into Dungeons & Dragons, the way everything is formatted creates very little learning curve for the average player so they can spend less time trying to figure out the world’s rules and more time playing around in it. There is a structure for the player to follow, but you’re never required to play entirely within it. If you haven’t yet, be sure to give this one a try and experience the freedom that few games are willing to give.
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
Ig you need to understand how stacked 2023 was, the sequel to one of the most beloved Zelda games ever came out this year and it is not a runaway for Game of the Year, despite being a very good game. Like Spider-Man, Teard of the Kingdom is another case of a developer seeing what worked and choosing to improve on it instead of breaking it. All the elements from Breath of the Wild are back. There’s an even bigger map to explore, more crafting to complete, and more puzzles that need creative solutions. As far as a sequel to Breath of the Wild, it did what needed to be done.
Where Tears of the Kingdom improved on Breath of the Wild was in its story beats. One of the biggest complaints of the previous game was how its four “primary” dungeons all felt sparse in puzzles compared to the large bombastic dungeons of previous games. While Tears of the Kingdom didn’t necessarily bring back those old dungeons, it did add a little more flare to these story beats and the dungeons that do exist feel unique and interesting. It might not be enough for Zelda fans who want the original 3D formula back, but for those of us who love the new direction the franchise is going in it’s more of the same, but better. This is a great sequel and would probably be GOTY in any other year.
Resident Evil 4
When Resident Evil 4 Remake was announced it was honestly kinda hard to not poke fun at. The first three Resident Evil games all received remakes cause their gameplay styles were an antiquated design that was surpassed and improved upon in later titles. The game that all those later titles used as their base? Resident Evil 4. So if all the previous remakes were to make them more like Resident Evil 4, then what’s the point of a remake in that same style? Oh, just one of the best playing horror games ever made.
Resident Evil 4 is exactly what made the first game revolutionary, but cranked up to 11. It plays like a dream, every cutscene is just oozing with polish, and it is still a horrifying experience. They even managed to add in some new content that they had originally wanted to put in the first go around. The best change though might be the parry. Long gone are the days of wildly slashing at enemies, as now the player can use the knife as a parrying device to get the edge on enemies in hand-to-hand combat. Why waste bullets when you can simply roundhouse kick them to the face? Resident Evil 4 is one of the best remakes ever made and is now the definitive version for anyone who’s never played it before. If you’re looking for a fun but terrifying experience, you can’t do much better than this.
2023 was an absolutely incredible year for game releases. In your average year, you might get a handful of games that are agreed upon by the consensus that everyone needs to play. This year, it felt like there were three or four of those per month. So when it came time to decide what the best games were from the past year, this lone selector was suddenly overcome with guilt. Games like Alan Wake 2, Mario Wonder, Sea of Stars, and Final Fantasy 16 all just missed the cut. Any of these could be a Game of the Year contender in your average year, but unfortunately in 2023, they are among the many that did not make the final list. These are, in this lone selector’s opinion, the five best games of 2023, starting with out Game of the Year pick.
GOTY: Street Fighter 6
Deciding the GOTY every year is hard, but this year in particular was difficult with so many worthwhile contenders. With so many games having such a great case it really came down to one factor that separated Street Fighter 6 ahead of everyone else. No game that came out this year has a greater respect for not only its hardcore audience but its casual one as well. There are so many different ways you can play Street Fighter 6 from the Battle Hub, full of arcade machines and created player characters, to the Fighting Ground where those looking to become the best of the best sink the majority of their hours.
The best mode though has to be the World Tour where players undergo a grand quest with their own original Street Fighter character. This mode is a blast. Not only does it let you create an extremely powerful character that is unique to you, but the option to get into a street fight with quite literally any random passerby is a total delight. Hot dog vendor? They want to throw hands. Random old lady on the street? You best know they want the smoke. Not only does this encourage players to fight anyone they see, but it’s a really fun way to grind out the mechanics of the game and get better at Street Fighter 6 naturally. Of course, you can always just force your way through everything, learn nothing about fighting games, and watch credits with a smile on your face.
Street Fighter 6 invites the player to go deeper into its mechanics by choice, not by necessity, and that decision is leading to many players diving deep into a fighting game like they never have before. It’s a wonderful thing, and it’s this decision that allows Street Fighter 6 to earn the title of Game of the Year. See you in the fighting grounds.
Marvel’s Spider-Man 2
Marvel’s Spider-Man was great. Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales was more of the same in a good way. So with the sequel there was one big question: How are they going to top or match what they did previously? For Insomniac that was simple — take what worked before, polish it even further, and add in more fun ways to be Spider-Man. There was nothing extremely innovative about Spider-Man this year. Nothing about it felt revolutionary or that it was changing the way we felt about video games, and that’s fine because it didn’t need to be that. Instead, it just gave fans of the first game more of what they wanted with some small improvements here and there.
The glide suit? An incredible addition. The ability to switch between Miles and Peter seamlessly to fulfill quests or use their different powers? Extremely cool and a feature that really only works as well as it does on modern hardware consoles like the PlayStation 5. The plot is another well done superhero tale, and while it doesn’t quite punch you in the gut the way the first two did it leaves you feeling excited for the future of not only this franchise but the future of this universe as a whole. There is so much to build off of here and it’s going to be fun to see what direction Insomniac takes it next.
Baldur’s Gate 3
Ever since the early days of video games, developers have been chasing how to make a game that responds to player decisions the way a Dungeon Master does in Dungeons & Dragons. The idea of a game that looks at the decision a player makes and responds to that decision organically is an exciting one and while Baldur’s Gate 3 doesn’t do exactly that, it does get close. No game this year gives players the same level of freedom to come up with their own solutions to problems the way Baldur’s Gate 3 does. No other game this year lets the player kill off one of the main plot-relevant characters because they feel that’s what their character would do in the moment, and then reward them for it instead of punishing them. If you can think of it, then Baldur’s Gate 3 will probably let you do it.
It’s that freedom that makes this one of the must-play experiences of the year. Even if you’re not into Dungeons & Dragons, the way everything is formatted creates very little learning curve for the average player so they can spend less time trying to figure out the world’s rules and more time playing around in it. There is a structure for the player to follow, but you’re never required to play entirely within it. If you haven’t yet, be sure to give this one a try and experience the freedom that few games are willing to give.
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
Ig you need to understand how stacked 2023 was, the sequel to one of the most beloved Zelda games ever came out this year and it is not a runaway for Game of the Year, despite being a very good game. Like Spider-Man, Teard of the Kingdom is another case of a developer seeing what worked and choosing to improve on it instead of breaking it. All the elements from Breath of the Wild are back. There’s an even bigger map to explore, more crafting to complete, and more puzzles that need creative solutions. As far as a sequel to Breath of the Wild, it did what needed to be done.
Where Tears of the Kingdom improved on Breath of the Wild was in its story beats. One of the biggest complaints of the previous game was how its four “primary” dungeons all felt sparse in puzzles compared to the large bombastic dungeons of previous games. While Tears of the Kingdom didn’t necessarily bring back those old dungeons, it did add a little more flare to these story beats and the dungeons that do exist feel unique and interesting. It might not be enough for Zelda fans who want the original 3D formula back, but for those of us who love the new direction the franchise is going in it’s more of the same, but better. This is a great sequel and would probably be GOTY in any other year.
Resident Evil 4
When Resident Evil 4 Remake was announced it was honestly kinda hard to not poke fun at. The first three Resident Evil games all received remakes cause their gameplay styles were an antiquated design that was surpassed and improved upon in later titles. The game that all those later titles used as their base? Resident Evil 4. So if all the previous remakes were to make them more like Resident Evil 4, then what’s the point of a remake in that same style? Oh, just one of the best playing horror games ever made.
Resident Evil 4 is exactly what made the first game revolutionary, but cranked up to 11. It plays like a dream, every cutscene is just oozing with polish, and it is still a horrifying experience. They even managed to add in some new content that they had originally wanted to put in the first go around. The best change though might be the parry. Long gone are the days of wildly slashing at enemies, as now the player can use the knife as a parrying device to get the edge on enemies in hand-to-hand combat. Why waste bullets when you can simply roundhouse kick them to the face? Resident Evil 4 is one of the best remakes ever made and is now the definitive version for anyone who’s never played it before. If you’re looking for a fun but terrifying experience, you can’t do much better than this.
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