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Look, it should come as no surprise that kids look like their parents but that isn’t stopping Beyoncé from fawning over her resemblance to her daughter Blue Ivy in a newly resurfaced photo from her youth. Purporting to be from 1990, the photo shows a young Beyoncé getting her hair braided at a Houston beauty salon, but the angle, lighting, and yes, genetics do make her look almost exactly like her 10-year-old daughter. Funnily enough, fans also noticed that the hairdresser bears a sharp resemblance to Beyoncé’s protege, Chloe Bailey, causing both names to trend on Twitter.

So, what’s Beyoncé actually up to lately? Well, she dropped her long-awaited comeback album Renaissance back in August, although a perceived lack of music videos from the project obviously has her fans hungry for more content. Meanwhile, Blue has been experiencing the highs and lows of being a celebrity pre-teen; although she gets to do things like casually bid $80,000 on items at charity auctions, it seems she still gets just as embarrassed by her parents as any kid, even when she’s sitting courtside at the NBA Finals and her parents are Beyoncé and Jay-Z. And hey, just for the record, Chlöe seems to be doing just fine, too, recently sharing the latest single from her upcoming debut album, “For The Night” featuring Latto, and enjoying coming into her sex appeal on her own terms.

Last week kicked off the annual year-end Indiecasties, an Indiecast segment where hosts Steven Hyden and Ian Cohen nominate the best, worst, and most memorable music moments of the year. Think of it like indie music’s Grammys, but in an audio format and with fewer Machine Gun Kelly appearances. On this week’s episode, Steven and Ian reflect on 2022 by diving deeper into this year’s releases. Their categories include: The “Angular Guitar” Award for Overused Album Review Adjective of the Year, the Comeback of the Year, the Most Memory-Holed Album of 2022, the Rookie of the Year, and, of course, MVP of the year.

Along with continuing the 2022 Indiecasties, Steven and Ian answer some fan mailbag questions. A question about the Grammys voting process and the alphabet sparks a conspiracy theory, which Indiecast dives into to sees if it holds weight.

New episodes of Indiecast drop every Friday. Listen to Episode 118 here or below and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. You can submit questions for Steve and Ian at [email protected], and make sure to follow us on Instagram and Twitter for all the latest news. We also recently launched a visualizer for our favorite Indiecast moments. Check those out here.

Throughout the pandemic (which is still ongoing, despite relaxed safety precautions), the Verzuz battle series has been an uplifting constant. The show, which highlights classic artists and their catalogs, brought hip-hop and R&B fans together when we were still in the house, then gave us a reason to get back out there with its live shows. However, there have been a few names missing from the fun, such as Busta Rhymes and Jay-Z, for whom the show’s producers have had a tough time finding a match, and West Coast gangsta rap pioneer Ice Cube.

That’s not for lack of trying, though. Cube explained why he turned down offers from Verzuz to do battles with both LL Cool J and Scarface during a recent episode of the Bootleg Kev Podcast. According to Ice Cube, “They was talking LL at one point, they was talking Scarface at one point. I said, ‘No.’ Verzuz is good, but my concept would have been, ‘Yo, I’m a fan. You do this song for me.’ Like, okay, I get to have LL do my favorite LL songs and he gon’ have me do my favorite Ice Cube songs, and it’s not Verzuz, but it’s love. It’s like, ‘Yo, do this, and he do ‘Rock the Bells,’ and he asks me, ‘Yo, do ‘Once Upon a Time in the Projects.” That would have been my concept.”

As he put it, “I can’t go against people I admire. LL is an OG to me in the game, so I can’t see it. Me and Scarface love each other, but we don’t communicate enough to do a Verzuz together. I don’t want it to be competition.”

Carly Rae Jepsen just unveiled her new album The Loneliest Time in October, which was previewed with compelling singles like “Talking To Yourself” and “Beach House.” She’s already back with another new song, this time it’s the theme song for Hello Kitty: Super Style!, a 3D version of Hello Kitty on Amazon Kids+.

At only half a minute, the theme song captures Jepsen’s signature effervescence that makes her songs so catchy. About the song, she posted on Instagram, “Hooray, yippee, buttons and bows…,” Jepsen captioned. “@hellokitty is making her 3D debut and I’m singing her new theme song!! Yes indeed.”

Last year, Jepsen celebrated 10 years of her hit “Call Me Maybe” with an emotional post reflecting on her time as a waitress. “The point is, don’t give up on your dreams, kids. Not three months later ‘Call Me Maybe’ was released and let’s just say I hope that song really annoyed them. Hehe. Mostly I want to say thank you all for the joyous videos, silly dances. and wild nights together in different countries! You have opened my world and my heart with this adventure of a song and I could not be more grateful to you all.”

Listen to her theme song above.

The list of directors and creators Hong Chau has worked with would make any ambitious actor drool — Paul Thomas Anderson (Inherent Vice), David Simon (Treme), Alexander Payne (Downsizing), Kelly Reichert (the upcoming Showing Up), Wes Anderson (next year’s Asteroid City), plus roles on Big Little Lies and Watchmen, which is still omitting a few.

Hot off The Menu (which was great, and in which she was one of the best parts), Chau is back this month in The Whale, from Darren Aronofsky. The directors Chau has worked with are almost exclusively of the kind you’d hear mentioned in other actors’ press tour interviews, the kind that come up when those actors say “I’d really love to work with (insert director here).”

Which is insane considering Chau was little known before her role in Downsizing, which got her nominated for a Golden Globe and a SAG Award (in my own review I wrote “Hong Chau steals the whole movie,”), only a few years ago in 2017. It’s hard to think of any actor with a comparable run of high-profile, critically acclaimed projects. Actors don’t even have that much control over their projects. Besides not having editorial input, only the most famous and be-clouted ones even have the luxury of being choosy. And even now Hong Chau isn’t exactly famous. Yet she was showing up in the hottest projects before insiders knew her name. “Even after I did Treme, I was still auditioning for student films,” Chau tells me.

How to account for such an unknown consistently showing up in the most-coveted movies and shows? The only explanation is that some of our most acclaimed creators have seen the same spark, that same something special in Chau, that me and other critics and awards voters have.

Maybe being outside of the usual fame-generating machine has given her an edge. A creative writing-turned-film studies major, Chau’s first job out of college was at PBS. She says she only took up acting as a way to break out of her own introvertedness, initially in improv classes that she forced herself to attend even though the very idea of it was so nerve-wracking that it would make her nauseous. Yet Chau, the daughter of Vietnamese refugees who grew up in New Orleans (her real-life story being part of what got her cast in the New Orleans-set Treme), stuck with it, and it paid off.

You remember Hong Chau because she’s a little different, and in a real way, being an outsider has been her strength. This is an industry that largely functions as a homogenizing machine, in which it’s increasingly difficult to name acclaimed actors who weren’t already famous as children or the children of famous parents. But then maybe the short explanation is also the most correct: just watch her. Hong Chau gets cast in huge projects because she’s really good. I got the chance to talk to her this week.

So you’ve already been able to work with Aronofsky, Paul Thomas Anderson, David Simon, Alexander Payne… Is getting to work with all these people, was that something that you sought out or was it more of a happy accident?

It took a really long time for me to get my acting career off the ground. It was about 10 years before I got Downsizing, and I think that was the first time I became more widely known to people. I think I secretly dreamed of working with great directors doing sort of unusual, I guess you would call it, arthouse movies. I was never particularly interested in sort of mainstream, more popular fare or saw myself being in them so I just had different expectations. I think if I had looked a certain way or maybe if I were more of a model or something, I would’ve had different expectations or desires.

I was just doing the traditional, “Let’s just be an extra on a set and then see what I learn there,” and then get an agent and they send you out on these random auditions. That was my trouble, I never got to audition. I think I auditioned once every three months or something like that, and it would be for a small part on a Nickelodeon show or something and I would never book it.

I knew that wasn’t for me. What I was actually right for eventually came. It took a while to come, but all of my jobs that I’ve gotten have been because the director saw me in something. When I got Homecoming, it was because Sam Esmail and the writers saw me in Downsizing and I got Watchmen because Damon Lindelof saw me in an episode of Forever. And I got the Wes Anderson movie because he saw me and remembered me from a play that I did I think five or six years ago now. So it feels really good, like it’s happening organically.

Were you ever turning down those more traditional, mainstream things? Or was it just a matter of not getting those calls?

No, I mean, I wasn’t even auditioning for stuff that you would think I would be auditioning for, not even for the specifically-Asian roles. I just couldn’t get an audition, I don’t know why. I remember even after I did Treme I was still going and auditioning for student films. I found myself on whatever websites it was. Literally, I was doing anything and everything I could.

What was Aronofsky’s process as a director compared to some of these other people that you’ve worked with?

I think with Darren, I don’t know if he’s necessarily this way on every project that he works with, but he likes to really plan things out. We had a three-week rehearsal period before filming where we were in a separate space from the set that was being built and they had taped out the exact dimensions of our set so that we were moving in a way that was accurate to the actual filming. And part of that was because we knew we wouldn’t be able to have Brendan all day in his prosthetic suit, so we would have to figure out a lot of things prior and make those discoveries outside of the set.

Were you ever limited in terms of how many takes you guys could do just because he was stuffing his face with a bunch of food during some of those scenes? Did you feel like you couldn’t mess something up because then he’d have to eat five more pieces of chicken?

It wasn’t necessarily those types of scenes, I think it was just in general because it was so taxing to be in that suit. It was exhausting. I mean, he was the first person in, last person out. It took him four hours to get all of his prosthetics and makeup done in the morning and an hour to take it off. I dealt with that a little bit on Downsizing. My character had a prosthetic leg, and just the amount of people buzzing around you while you’re trying to focus on what you need to do when they call action… I was just so amazed by Brendan. He’s such a class act and I don’t think anybody could have handled it the way he did. He was so gracious with the other artists working around him, but he didn’t close himself off, he was still present with everybody. I find that so incredible.

You talked about starting your career later. How did you first get into acting?

It was just a slow, sort of random, hit-and-miss process. I never really wanted to be an actor. I always thought I was going to be on the other side of the camera, maybe as an editor. I never saw myself necessarily even on set. I was very introverted and had trouble just communicating and talking to people, and I started taking improv classes to help with that. So it was in an improv class that my teacher was very encouraging, for whatever reason. I don’t know what she saw in me because those were very painful experiences. Dragging myself to improv class, I honestly would feel like barfing before every class, but I forced myself to do it.

It was through the encouragement of other people who just saw something in me that I didn’t see in myself that led to me going on auditions. I didn’t want to, I was terrified. I was really bad. I never booked any of them, but I just still sort of forced myself to go. But there was something that I guess I was taking away from it. It was just interesting to observe other people and just the whole routine and the ritual of getting prepared for an audition, going in and greeting these strangers in a random office somewhere. There was something really interesting about that that I just kind of got, not addicted to, but I just really enjoyed it.

Was there a moment that you realized that you were going to be able to make acting a career and that you wouldn’t have to get a day job or whatever? Was there a point when it seemed like, “Okay, this is a real thing now?”

Not until after Downsizing. Even though I had done Treme and Inherent Vice, I struggled to get auditions and I was still in the youth department of this agency that I was with because nobody in the adult department wanted to take me. I mean, it was still really frustrating. I just felt like I wasn’t getting anywhere. You would think, “Oh, she’s been on a David Simon show on HBO and she’s worked with this amazing director that most Hollywood actors would kill to work with,” and nothing.

It wasn’t until Downsizing came along that I had an opportunity to, I guess, showcase myself. And the people who did see it saw that there was an actor there who was making choices, and they weren’t confusing me for the character. Which was a relief because there were people I would come out of screenings and they were afraid to talk to me because they didn’t think that I spoke English very well and they also thought that I might be an amputee in real life and they were just awkward and didn’t know how to talk to me.

Did you ever get pressure to change your name early in your career?

Honestly, no. I mean, it’s funny because someone asked me this recently and that has never occurred to me to change my name. Not even when I was younger in school. I think in elementary school my best friend tried to change my name for me because people were having a difficult time pronouncing it and were making fun of my name, but I felt like, I don’t know, felt a little oblivious to it all. Not oblivious, but just, it didn’t penetrate. I just did not care. I love my name. I’ve always loved my name. And I guess I’m also lucky that I never had somebody come into my life who thought that they knew better than me and tried to do that.

What did she try to change it to, your friend in school?

Oh. Helen. Because it also started with an H. I’m like, “Mm.”

If the acting thing hadn’t worked out, what would the fallback have been like? What would the alternative path look like?

I don’t know. Maybe something entrepreneurial. My parents were small business owners. They just kind of tried everything and failed at a bunch of things until they found something that stuck. So I don’t know, I think I might have tried to open up a shop or something like that.

What was the thing that stuck for them?

When they first came over, they worked in kitchens. My dad was a busboy and washed dishes, and my mom worked in the kitchen chopping vegetables at a Chinese restaurant. And I think that’s what gave them the idea to try to start their own Chinese restaurant because Vietnamese food wasn’t popular yet then. So they tried to open up a Chinese restaurant. That was really difficult and failed. Their whole experience with the two restaurants that they tried to start and failed informed my awareness of how difficult it is to run a restaurant, which played into The Menu and my character there. But my parents — once they had a food truck before food trucks were popular. It wasn’t even a truck, it was just a van that they had a propane tank in to keep the burgers warm. But that was really fun. I remember making hamburger patties and things like that with my parents because they would drive around during lunchtime for the construction workers. I think they were working at a country club at the time in Louisiana. So yeah, that was a really interesting time. And eventually, they saved up enough money to open up a convenience store and that was the thing that stuck, the convenience store. Sort of like a bodega in New Orleans.

This seems like it’s one of those roles that they sort of have to de-glam you for. Is it harder to watch yourself in movies where they’re dressing you down a little bit?

No, I love it when I don’t have to put on foundation and spanks! I welcome that. I loved The Whale for that reason. I loved showing up. Elsa in The Menu was a little bit different, I felt like I was wearing a corset in that movie. And then I did actually wear a corset in Wes Anderson’s movie. You do what is necessary for the character, but I really don’t have any vanity in terms of appearing a certain way. I remember even on a movie like Driveways, where I was supposed to be this sort of weary mom who didn’t have a lot of time or money on her hands, still then I was fighting a little bit with the makeup artist. Like “No, I don’t want any foundation.” It’s fine if you see spots or wrinkles or whatever on my face, I think it’s appropriate. I don’t want mascara. I don’t want all of that stuff.”

It’s a conversation that you have each time with the makeup team, and I think it’s just that they’re worried because somebody else that they had worked with prior wanted to look a certain way and so they’re afraid that you might want to look a certain way too. But for me, I’m just like, “I don’t care.”

‘The Whale’ hits select theaters December 9th, then opens nationwide December 21st. Vince Mancini is on Twitter. You can read more of his reviews here.

Grammy-winning singer Alicia Keys is keeping her holiday spirit going. After performing at the annual Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree lighting ceremony in November, Keys released her first Christmas album, Santa Baby. The songwriter stopped by The Late Show with host Stephen Colbert to share the news of the project with a live performance of the title track.

Sporting a posh white floor-length faux fur and statuesque gold sequined body suit, Keys took the stage to belt out the classic tune. Playing into her signature R&B vocal delivery, Keys still managed to sprinkle in the cabaret stylings of the song’s originator, Eartha Kitt. Keys, a trained pianist, opted out of playing to focus on her vocal performance while house musicians handled the instrumentation.

She also delivered a bonus performance of “Please Come Home For Christmas.”

Before her performance, the musician sat down with Colbert to discuss why she dedicated to the record the album, to which she replied, “It was time.”

The pair also discussed her past collaboration with singer Brandi Carlile. Carlisle recently covered folk icon Joni Mitchell’s Blue album as a tribute to the singer. When asked if there’s an artist’s album she would love to cover, Keys answered, “I feel like if I were to pick one, it would probably have to be Songs In The Key Of Life.”

Keys has, on numerous occasions, expressed her admiration for revered musician Stevie Wonder. Keys continued, “I tell you what, it wouldn’t be easy though. It would not be easy. That would be hard because there’s nobody who can play like Stevie Wonder. Period. End of story. You can try as hard as you can, but you’re not going to get that cord exactly right. But that would be amazing.”

Watch Keys’ performances above and her interview below.

Santa Baby is out now via Alicia Keys Records. Get it here.

This photo ^^ is not from the incident that we’re about to discuss. Rather, this Getty image (one of many ridiculous Putin photos) shows Vladimir Putin toasting at the 2014 Sochi Paralympic Games, but the celebratory vibe isn’t too far from a bizarre speech that Putin gave this week at the Kremlin. Was he officially boozed up? It’s certainly not impossible to imagine that one is tipsy while waving a glass of champagne.

The below CNN video clip (posted on Twitter by Will Ripley) shows Putin’s jovial mood — remember, he’s the Botox Boy, so he probably cannot smile too hard, and the vibe can be considered relative — as he admitted to Russian attacks on Ukraine’s infrastructure, including vital energy sources in the dead of winter. “Yes, we are doing it. But who started it?” he wondered aloud.

Putin appears to be ignoring the fact that “who started it?” is a dreadful question, considering that he launched his imperialistic Ukraine invasion back in February. Soon enough, word surfaced that Putin’s own troops didn’t want to fight this war and even made noises about blowing up their general as an act of defiance. These days, Putin has begun to admit that the war isn’t going as planned, and his propaganda buddies are abandoning him, as are his dwindling allies. Word slipped out that Putin is considering fleeing, should he lose this war, but with booze in hand, Putin talked big. Via CNN:

Speaking after an awards ceremony for “Heroes of Russia,” he addressed the group of soldiers receiving the awards. He said of the [infrastructure] attacks, “yes, we are doing it. But who started it?”

He went on to list a series of events he blames on the Ukrainians: “Who hit the Crimean bridge? Who blew up the power lines from the Kursk nuclear power plant?”

Putin went on to accuse Ukraine of “genocide” on its own people due to a lack of fresh water in the city of Donetsk. However, Ukraine has maintained that Russia cut off the freshwater intakes that lead to Donetsk from the neighboring Kherson province. As Reuters notes, Russia has yet to officially comment on the accusation from municipal water chief Borys Dydenko, but it seems like Putin’s booze-accompanied comments speak volumes.

(Via CNN & Reuters)

Some movies are destined to become cult classics before they even come out. Skinamarink is one of those films. The low-budget horror film from writer and director Kyle Edward Ball is about “two children wake up in the middle of the night to find their father is missing, and all the windows and doors in their home have vanished.”

Here’s more:

To cope with the strange situation, the two bring pillows and blankets to the living room and settle into a quiet slumber party situation. They play well worn videotapes of cartoons to fill the silence of the house and distract from the frightening and inexplicable situation. All the while in the hopes that eventually some grown-ups will come to rescue them. However, after a while it becomes clear that something is watching over them.”

But the plot synopsis doesn’t do the trailer justice. It’s genuinely disturbing, like if Eraserhead-era David Lynch directed The Blair Witch Project in the 1970s. “In this house,” a disembodied voice repeats over whispering children and mysterious noises. No wonder it’s gone viral on “platforms like TikTok, Reddit, and Letterboxd,” according to Variety, and been called “the scariest movie I have seen in a very long time.”

Skinamarink, which stars Lucas Paul, Dali Rose Tetreault, Ross Paul, and Jaime Hill, hits theaters on January 13, 2023 before debuting on Shudder later in the year.

After going viral for what she readily admits was a “blunder,” Jennifer Lawrence is setting the record straight that she knows women starred in action films before her turn as Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games. While taking part in Variety‘s Actors on Actors interview series with Viola Davis, Lawrence said the following about being cast in the young adult franchise.

“I remember when I was doing Hunger Games, nobody had ever put a woman in the lead of an action movie, because it wouldn’t work, we were told,” Lawrence said. “Girls and boys can both identify with a male lead, but boys cannot identify with a female lead.”

Obviously, that’s not true, and Lawrence was dragged on social media as people rattled off a list of popular female-led action movies like Aliens, Resident Evil, and Tomb Raider. After catching wind of the brouhaha, Lawrence clarified her remarks in a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter:

“That’s certainly not what I meant to say at all. I know that I am not the only woman who has ever led an action film. What I meant to emphasize was how good it feels. And I meant that with Viola — to blow past these old myths that you hear about … about the chatter that you would hear around that kind of thing. But it was my blunder and it came out wrong. I had nerves talking to a living legend.”

Lawrence also noted she doesn’t make it a point to clarify every time she’s misconstrued, like when an outlet misquoted her as saying “Donald Trump causes hurricanes.”

“I felt that one was ridiculous, that it was so stupid I didn’t need to comment,” Lawrence told THR. “But this one, I was like, ‘I think I want to clarify.’”

(Via The Hollywood Reporter)

This summer, Taylor Swift said in an interview about her All Too Well short film, “It would be so fantastic to write and direct a feature. I don’t see it being bigger in terms of scale. I loved making a film that was so intimate with a crew that was relatively small. Just a really solid crew of people that I trusted.”

Well, she’s now getting that chance: Variety reports that Swift will be directing her first feature-length film for Searchlight Pictures. She wrote the script, too. Beyond that, no other details about the film have been made available yet.

Searchlight presidents David Greenbaum and Matthew Greenfield said in a statement, “Taylor is a once-in-a-generation artist and storyteller. It is a genuine joy and privilege to collaborate with her as she embarks on this exciting and new creative journey.”

Meanwhile, Swift just recently released a behind-the-scenes video for the All Too Well film and wrote about the experience of making it, “The first seeds of this short film were planted over ten years ago, and I’ll never forget the behind the scenes moments of the shoot. I owe everything to @sadiesink_, Dylan O’Brien, my incredible DP @the_rinayang and my producer @saulysaulysauly. I also want to say thank you to our wonderful background actors and crew who made this story come to life so naturally. I loved every second of it and I will always remember it. All. Too. Well.”