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I remember watching Chopper, Andrew Dominik’s debut feature about the Australian cult figure Chopper Read, around the time it came out, trying to understand how this person became so beloved in his home country, and what his cult celebrity status said about that country’s people. I remember it as hypnotic and captivating, anchored by Eric Bana’s wild-eyed performance in the title role, but also partly inscrutable, like I’d never be able to quite understand Chopper’s appeal without being Australian.

A lot of directors lose their powers the further their stories get from their homelands (this is my current theory for why In Bruges can be so good while all of Martin McDonagh’s American-set movies are so bad). Yet Dominik only seemed to get sharper when he turned his focus to the USA. Which he did first in the meditative western, The Assassination Of Jesse James… (etc.) and then in Killing Them Softly, a jagged little pill of a movie that had the audacity to end on the line “America’s not a country, it’s a business.” This at the outset of Obama’s second term. That unrelenting cynicism earned it meager box office and a rare “F” from Cinemascore’s audience poll, but in hindsight it was probably warranted. These days people would probably agree that Dominik was onto something and that Killing Them Softly is an underappreciated masterpiece, but I think Dominik partly knew what he was doing all along. He likes to thumb the audience in the eye a little bit. Maybe he can’t help it.

Blonde seems to a large extent an attempt to do for America what Chopper did for Australia. To explore who this character is, what she means to America, and what her celebrity and what happened to her says about us all. As always, Dominik’s movies are more poetry than prose, and he attempts to do this not through a traditional biopic, but in an adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’ 775-page novel, about a semi-fictionalized Marilyn Monroe. Dominik in turn depicts the book’s story through a series of impressionistic, somewhat disjointed vignettes. Blonde stars Ana De Armas, whose Cuban accent is never fully disguised, is rated NC-17, meaning many theaters won’t even screen it (it hits Netflix two weeks later anyway), and is almost three hours long (for what it’s worth, I don’t quite understand the rating, there are many R-rated movies, including De Armas’s last one, Deep Water that seemed more sexually explicit). Again, thumb, meet eye. Though hopefully now there enough sickos among us who know Dominik well enough to seek him out.

They say fiction can get at deeper truths by making stuff up. In that way, this adaptation of a fictionalized biography of Marilyn Monroe, written by a titan of American letters who never met her, in turn pastiched into an exploitation movie by an Australian director and starring a Cuban actress, conveyed what it is about Marilyn Monroe that so captivates better than anything I’ve seen or read about her before, even after an adolescence spent listening to Glenn Danzig bellow about her, the date of her disputed death forever singed into my memory.

So who is Marilyn Monroe? Partly it seems she’s our Mona Lisa, a fascinating mix of sexually attainable and mentally inscrutable (Mona Lisa herself being a prostitute or a “promiscuous courtesan,” depending on your rumor). As always, Dominik delights in torturing his lead character, first as the child of a mentally unstable mother (played by the fabulous Julianne Nicholson) and the abandoned daughter of an absent father; later as the plaything of various powerful men. Always with the tension of whether Marilyn is exploiting the public or the public is exploiting her.

Norma Jean Baker always maintains a distance from Marilyn Monroe, a creation meant to give 1950s America exactly what they wanted: a gorgeous, glamorous sexpot who always looked fabulous, who smiled and blew kisses while being objectified by any and all. That she would eventually be subsumed by her own canny creation isn’t a unique phenomenon (and was Marilyn really Norma Jean’s creation, or one that clever agents foisted upon on her?). Irony poisoning, we’d probably call it today. Agency is always the central question. Was Marilyn trolling America by giving us this parody of sexuality, or were we destroying her by devouring it?

In Blonde, there’s not only the blurring of Norma Jean and Marilyn, but also the fracturing of the Marilyn persona itself, splintered by attempting to cater to 1950s America’s fucked up and inherently contradictory sexuality — simultaneously desiring an always-available sex doll and an unattainable chaste glamor goddess in one. The Madonna-Whore complex, if you will. I think a few people may have written about that. The men who attempt to take Marilyn for their own (almost always Marilyn, it becomes impossible to see Norma Jean once Marilyn becomes a superstar) essentially become the old Groucho Marx bit — “I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member.”

The central difficulty is that Marilyn was such a cliché in her own time (certainly by design, whether Norma Jean’s or some svengali’s) that it’s virtually impossible to get at the root of the person without resorting to metaphor. Norma Jean invented (or maybe just accepted!) a pin-up persona with an intentionally cheesy name. When a man points out how corny the name “Marilyn Monroe” is, she points out that she’s Norma Jean, “Marilyn” is just a creation. Which in turn raises the obvious but unspoken question: which one of them is the sucker?

Through this pin-up persona, Monroe marries first the hero jock, Joe DiMaggio, and later the acclaimed intellectual, playwright Arthur Miller (played perfectly by Bobby Cannavale and Adrien Brody, respectively — the film glosses over Monroe’s first husband James Dougherty, pseudonymized as Bucky Glazer in Oates’ book). After that she dates the president. It’s almost like “Marilyn” is a Barbie doll Norma Jean plays with, and relationships were her way of collecting all the most popular Kens. How dumb could 50s America be to fall so completely for this bullshit? How dumb could Norma Jean be for not realizing this bullshit would eventually destroy her? Always the sado-masochistic push-pull of audience as victim, victimizer, and voyeur. Blonde‘s one JFK scene consists of a forced blowjob, depicted in wide-eyed close-up, with just a smidge of the presidential shaft.

Like Marilyn herself, Blonde is an operatic mix of the hackneyed and the transgressive. It’s not the first movie ever to ply the gulf between person and persona, or even the first movie about Marilyn Monroe to do so (see 1996’s Norma Jean and Marilyn, starring Ashley Judd and Mira Sorvino, for the most obvious example here). Likewise, it ascribes many of Marilyn’s problems to that most roasted of movie chestnuts: daddy issues. Little Norma Jean spends the whole movie hoping the father she never knew will magically show up, to explain who she really is, while breathily calling all her boyfriends “Daddy.”

The other central facet of her true self, only slightly less trodden as a storyline, is Norma Jean/Marilyn’s desire to have a child, an unborn fetus whose voice she hears in her head from time to time, like a judgemental Obi-Wan Kenobi, even as she allows herself to be coerced into abortions. Dominik shoots these abortions, by the way, from inside Marilyn’s womb, the doctors looking directly into the camera while stretching open the mucusy passageway. Probably this is why Blonde got an NC-17 rating more so than the actual nudity.

Nudity, and the promise thereof, was always part and parcel to the Marilyn Monroe persona. To some extent Dominik avoids the big clichés by embracing the small ones. Nothing is cornier, after all, than guys going wild over a buxom blonde’s boobs, and Marilyn partly built her brand on it, exploiting a stupid public until maybe they exploited her. Ana De Armas in 2022 promises sex the same way Marilyn Monroe did in 1955, which is why the casting works. Maybe perfectly, despite the overt dissonance of Ana De Armas being a slender Cuban. I can imagine a depiction of Marilyn that maybe didn’t veer as wildly from victim to mastermind, but it’s easily De Armas’s best work, partly through sheer vibes alone.

Likewise, some of the parts of Blonde that work best are the most obviously invented — like that she was in a three-way relationship with star-crossed showbiz lost souls Charlie Chaplin Jr. (Xavier Samuel) and Edward G. Robinson Jr. (Evan Williams) — both men who really existed, even if the connection didn’t. Their sporadic romance is the heart of the film, and their scenes together crackle, maybe because they’re some of the film’s least stylized.

Marilyn Monroe was a confusing, alluring contradiction, and so, necessarily is Blonde, over reductive when it isn’t inscrutably impressionistic. But it’s also mesmerizing, hard to watch and impossible not to watch almost in equal measure, a somewhat guilty pleasure, compelling in spite of, partly because of, the fact that you don’t quite understand.

‘Blonde’ hits select theaters September 16th, and Netflix September 28th. Vince Mancini is on Twitter. More reviews here.

It took less than a week before the first Jeopardy! scandal of season 39 hit. Still interested in the full-time job, Ken?

During Wednesday’s episode of the game show, Luigi de Guzman buzzed in first after getting the following clue in the “Cons” category: “Here’s a typical 19th-century landscape by this British painter.” He answered, “Who is Constant?” to which host Ken Jennings replied, “Say it again?” This time, de Guzman responded with “Sorry, who is Constable?” and his answer was accepted. Later in the show, however, the same answer-changing concession was seemingly not granted to contestant Harriet Wagner:

When contestant Harriet Wagner answered that the fantasy author of “Always Coming Home” was “Angela LeGuin” before attempting to correct her answer to Ursula LeGuin, she was interrupted by Jennings. “No,” he said, before allowing de Guzman to give the correct answer. “Yes, Harriet, you remembered that her name was Ursula, but I had already begun ruling against you when you began correcting yourself,” Jennings explained.

Jeopardy! viewers were not convinced:

But there is precedent for Jennings’ actions:

Even Wagner has his back. “Leave Ken alone!!!! He’s my main man (except for my hubby) and has to work in real time the same as the contestants. He’s doing a great job,” she tweeted following the social media backlash.

After Thursday’s episode, Luigi de Guzman has a five-day total of $140,700.

(Via Fox News)

Since the death of drummer Taylor Hawkins back in March, the future of Foo Fighters has remained uncertain. There’s certainly still an interest in the group: Following the Hawkins tribute concert in London earlier this month, Foo Fighters returned to the top of the Billboard Hot Hard Rock Songs chart. Now, the band is readying to capitalize on that with The Essential Foo Fighters, a new greatest hits album and the band’s first announced release since Hawkins’ passing.

Essential will be the second Foo Fighters best-of compilation and first since 2009’s Greatest Hits. Songs on the new collection but not the previous Greatest Hits include “Cold Day In The Sun” (from 2006’s In Your Honor), “Rope,” “Walk,” “These Days” (all 2011’s Wasting Light), “The Sky Is A Neighborhood” (2017’s Concrete And Gold), “Making A Fire,” and “Shame Shame” (both 2021’s Medicine At Midnight). Included on just the vinyl edition are “Breakout” and “Waiting On A War.”

Check out the The Essential Foo Fighters tracklist below.

1. “Everlong”
2. “Making A Fire”
3. “Times Like These”
4. “Rope”
5. “Monkey Wrench”
6. “My Hero”
7. “Cold Day In The Sun”
8. “Big Me”
9. “Long Road To Ruin”
10. “Shame Shame”
11. “Best Of You”
12. “All My Life”
13. “The Pretender”
14. “This Is A Call”
15. “Walk”
16. “Learn To Fly”
17. “The Sky Is A Neighborhood”
18. “These Days”
19. “Everlong (Acoustic Version)”

With The Daily Show back in full swing, Trevor Noah dove head on into the latest internet freakout over Disney’s live-action remake of The Little Mermaid. Considering Halle Bailey was cast over three years ago, you’d figure people would have had enough time to come to peace with a Black actress playing Ariel. But when the the first trailer was revealed at D23 over the weekend, The Little Mermaid became the latest target of racist attacks.

Trevor Noah isn’t having it, as seen at the 4:40 mark above.

During Thursday night’s episode of The Daily Show, the late night host blasted people getting worked up about Bailey playing the classic Disney mermaid. “Really, people, we’re doing this again?” Noah asked after playing a news clip of online comments complaining about the casting.

Via The Hollywood Reporter:

After joking that the title character in Finding Nemo is Black because the movie is “about a fish who can’t find his dad,” Noah also delivered a sarcastic swipe at the plot of The Little Mermaid.

“Look, stop being ridiculous,” he said. “It’s imaginary. I hope this scandal doesn’t overshadow the rest of the movie. The Little Mermaid is a beautiful story about a young woman changing her core identity to please a man. Let’s not forget about that, people.”

The attacks on The Little Mermaid arrived on the heels of racist backlash against both House of the Dragon and The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, which recently earned a stern rebuke from Whoopi Goldberg. “Get a job!” The View co-host said last week. “Get a job! Go find yourself, because you are focused on the wrong stuff.”

(Via The Hollywood Reporter)

Trevor Noah was full of fire on Thursday, as he kicked off The Daily Show with what he described as “one of the most amazing and positive stories involving a billionaire.” He went on to share how Yvon Chouinard, founder of the outdoor brand Patagonia, has donated his $3 billion company to fighting climate change. Then, unfortunately, he was forced to shift gears. “Because while the owner of Patagonia is trying to be the Earth’s biggest advocate, Florida governor Ron DeSantis is trying to be the Earth’s biggest dick.”

While DeSantis was probably already halfway toward that title, thanks to his fights with Disney and millions of everyday Americans over his “Don’t Say Gay” bill, his decision to use human beings seeking a better life in America as political pawns may have just sealed the deal.

Taking a cue from Texas governor and fellow ghoul Greg Abbott, who really seems to have amused himself by putting migrants on buses to Washington, DC, DeSantis really took basic humanity to new lows when he “borrowed” a group of Venezuelan migrants who came into Texas and sent two planes of them to the tiny island of Martha’s Vineyard — a move that prompted documentarian Ken Burns to compare him to Hitler.

What DeSantis might not have expected was that the tiny island community of less than 20,000 year-round residents rallied to welcome the unexpected visitors, and provide them with the food and shelter they needed. While the planes took off from San Antonio, DeSantis’ office proudly took credit for paying for them. Noah was almost at a loss for words in responding to the stunt:

You know, there’s a**holes, and then there’s this guy. No, because you know sometimes someone is so terrible the word ‘a**hole’ doesn’t quite capture their essence enough, you know? ‘Cause everyone is an asshole. Like, my neighbor’s an asshole. Drivers in traffic are assholes. Hell, I’m an asshole. But Ron DeSantis, he’s like the little edges, the little ridges around the asshole, that really catch all the sh*t.

Because he couldn’t show a picture of what that part of one’s rectum looks like, Noah instead shared a photo of a star-nosed mole, “so you know exactly what I’m trying to say.”

Noah’s main point, however, was that DeSantis is the governor of Florida. “So why is he grabbing refugees in Texas and shipping them to Massachusetts? Why, so he can prove that America’s immigration system is broken? Yeah, everyone knows that. But instead of pushing lawmakers to actually reform the system, he’s using taxpayer money to, what, go viral?”

What really pisses Noah off is that “if you told DeSantis to spend the same amount of money helping these asylum-seekers, he’d be like, ‘Oh, we don’t have the funding for that.’ But to troll the Democrats, suddenly he’s like, ‘Put it on my card!’

You can watch the full clip above, beginning around the 2:10 mark.

If the writers of Saturday Night Live ever Frankenstein’ed a political candidate, they would probably end up sounding a lot like Herschel Walker. Even before the former NFL running back managed to secure the Republican nomination for Georgia’s Senate, his campaign has been a series of jaw-dropping moments. In between claiming that evolution isn’t real because “there are still apes” and asserting that there are 52 states in the U.S., we’ve learned about a lot of “secret children” he has fathered. Yet, just yesterday, Newsweek reported that he is at the top of the polls in Georgia — the same state that proudly claims Marjorie Taylor Greene as one of its own. But one person who isn’t a fan of the one-time football great? Cedric the Entertainer.

Earlier this week, the noted comedian held an impromptu roast of Walker, which The Washington Examiner notes was courtesy of the Progress Action Fund, a group that works to turn red states blue. As Cedric told viewers, it’s time for all of us to “fight against the ignorance that’s going on out there, especially in the state of Georgia.” He was only just getting started:

Lord, you know they said ‘Life is like a box of chocolates’? Well, Hershey’s Walker is one of these chocolates that you don’t want. You know the ones where you get a box of chocolates and you be, like, [gagging]? That’s him.

But Ced wasn’t all jokes. Referencing some of the more ludicrous (and outright incorrect) statements Walker has made, Cedric noted that “we just gotta be very concerned about the educational system, one.” He also noted that we’ve already got politicians like Marjorie Taylor Greene — who’s “crazier than a mug” — running around out there, and “we don’t need to add no more crazy to that mix, you hear me? Especially not with the haircut and the extra muscles.”

Cedric went on to list some of Walker’s more bonkers theories, including the evolution bit and his whole bit about our “bad air.”

“What, bruh?,” Cedric asked. “I don’t know what this man’s talking about. Guys: We gotta defeat him, we gotta beat him. We gotta STOP him!”

You can watch the full video above.

(Via The Washington Examiner)

It’s been five years since the release of Paramore’s latest album, After Laughter. Of course, bandleader Hayley Williams has given fans a lot in the meantime, such as fantastic solo albums and a podcast about emo. However, a new Paramore album has been desired for a while. After some teasing earlier this year, they’ve at last announced a new song called “This Is Why” out September 28.

The “Ain’t It Fun” performers shared this announcement on Twitter, along with the artwork and the pre-order link.

In January, Williams revealed through email to Rolling Stone that they were working on the album and it was not necessarily a “comeback ’emo’ record.” She added, “The music we were first excited by wasn’t exactly the kind of music we went on to make. Our output has always been all over the place and with this project, it’s not that different. We’re still in the thick of it but some things have remained consistent from the start. 1) More emphasis back on the guitar, and 2) Zac should go as Animal as he wants with drum takes.” The trio has been teasing this album since last year when they posted screenshots of their text conversation about “Paramore 6.”

Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

A few months back, I asked if it was too soon to call Barbie the most important movie of 2023. The answer was “no” then and it’s still “no” now, because never before in cinema history have Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling played Barbie and Ken, respectively, in a movie directed by three-time Oscar nominee Greta Gerwig. That’s history right there, you understand. But if my anticipation was a 10 out of 10, it’s now down to 9.5 after learning who was supposed to be in Barbie but had to bail due to a scheduling conflict.

“I was supposed to do a cameo because I live in London and they were [filming] there,” Saoirse Ronan told People. “There was a whole character I was going to play — another Barbie. I was gutted I couldn’t do it.” Her filming schedule for The Outrun made it impossible, but Ronan has since texted Robbie, her Mary Queen of Scots co-star, and Gerwig, who directed her in 2017’s Lady Bird and 2019’s Little Women, asking, “If you’re doing any pick-up [shots], maybe I can just walk through the background?”

What do Vito Corleone, the Joker, and Anita from West Side Story have in common? They’re the only characters to win Oscars with two different performers (Marlon Brando in The Godfather and Robert De Niro in The Godfather Part II, etc.). That’s impressive, but even more iconic would have been Robbie and Ronan, who have been up for a combined six Oscars, both receiving nominations for playing Barbie in the same year.

Ronan took pity on the competition, but it’s still a Barbie world — get used to it.

Barbie, which also stars Simu Liu, Kate McKinnon, America Ferrera, Alexandra Shipp, Emma Mackey, Michael Cera, Issa Rae, and Will Ferrell, opens on July 21, 2023.

(Via People)

Ahead of her tenth studio album Midnights dropping October 21, Taylor Swift has shared the back covers of the four limited edition vinyl versions (jade green, moonstone blue, blood moon, and mahogany), which, when placed in an order sequence, resemble a clock. The pop star is also currently selling a clock assembly kit via her online store, where fans who buy all four records can make their own. The record holders on the clock also spell out none another than Swift’s key phrase of this album era, “Meet me at midnight.”

“Alright, I’ve been wanting to show you this for a while. So we have four different covers for the Midnights album. And if you turn them over, there is obviously a back cover to each one of them, they’re each different,” she shared in a video released last night. “What I wanted to show you is that if you put all the back covers together… She’s a clock. It’s a clock. It’s a clock, it makes a clock. It can help you tell time.”

As the video was also uploaded to Swift’s Twitter, many fans took notice of both her retro-inspired outfit in the video and the backdrop of the room she was in, sparking speculation that it was recorded from a music video set.

“blue screen out the window, bright lighting, glittery makeup, guys guys guys taylor swift is filming a music video,” one user wrote.

Others pointed out that the wooden paneling in the background might be the same that Swift used in the Midnights photoshoot. While the album has yet to have a lead single or tracklist reveal, Swift still has the fans counting down the days… or staying up until midnight each night until something else happens.

Midnights is out 10/21 via Republic. Pre-order it here.

Drake gets into some beef every now and again, and now his latest feud is with Anthony Fantano, the music critic best known for his popular YouTube channel The Needle Drop. How it all happened is a bit confusing, though.

Last night (September 15), on his personal YouTube channel, Fantano uploaded a video titled “Drake Slid Into My DMs,” in which he shares a nice-spirited and clearly fake series of Instagram messages from Drake, in which the rapper shares a vegan cookie recipe. Not long after the video went live, Drake took to his Instagram Story to share a screenshot of the real DMs he actually sent to Fantano, which read, “Your existence is a light 1. And the 1 is cause you are alive. And cause you somehow wifed a black girl. I’m feeling a light to decent 1 on your existence.”

Fantano took to Twitter to celebrate, sharing an image of a W and writing, “That b*tch shared the salty ass DM to over 100 million people. [crying laughing emojis].” He added in another tweet, “I made that man leak his own DMs. [crying laughing emojis].”

It’s not clear what exactly prompted Drake’s messages, but Fantano has often given the rapper’s album negative reviews, most recently with this year’s Honestly, Nevermind, which he deemed “not good.”

Once the dust had settled, Fantano took to Instagram Live to break down the timeline of how this all happened. Fantano said this situation started with him receiving an Instagram message request from Drake late Wednesday (September 14) night. In his explainer, Fantano throws shade back at Drake throughout, saying at one point, “A couple of things were running through my head. One: Why is Drake messaging me? I’m not 18 years of age. That’s kind of weird.”

Fantano also wasn’t impressed by Drake’s insults, saying, “This is why he has ghostwriters. That is the quality of insult you get when that man is working solo-dolo. If I wanted a good insult in my inbox, he would have to have paid somebody else to come in and do it.”

As for the progression of events from there, Fantano said he decided to make his video with the fake DMs (a “silly sh*tpost,” as he called it), then Drake shared the DMs on Instagram. In the screenshot Drake shared, Fantano had left him on read, although Fantano did note he has since responded to Drake’s message, saying he asked him, “When is the interview?”

He later concluded, “He was so angry that he got left on read, he had to leak his own DMs. Leak his own DMs! That’s sad. That’s unfortunate. That is a sorry state of affairs. That is a sorry state of affairs, that you couldn’t bait me in the DMs, so you had to show the whole world, you had to show the whole… ‘Look, I messaged him…’ [laughs] What is he saying by sharing that? ‘Look look look, I messaged this man in the middle of the night yesterday to try to pick on him’ [laughs]. Like it’s the schoolyard. Like it’s school. This is not Degrassi [laughs]. […] We should both be adults, being adults, doing adult things. So, too funny. Silly. Silly, silly.”

Check out Fantano’s explanatory Instagram Live broadcast below.