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The leading The Bear pair recently reignited their on-screen dynamic in what turned out to be one of only a few crowd-stirring Emmy moments — when Chefs Jeremy Allen White and Ayo Edebiri appeared onstage — at this year’s ceremony. Season 2 of the sleeper FX show (now streaming on Hulu) is in the works, but it won’t premiere tomorrow. In fact, we don’t know when The Bear shall return, but we do know that people have questions about what will happen after The Beef becomes The Bear and, more importantly, whether Carmy will get busy in between (or even during) his shifts.

Now, everyone’s familiar with White’s work on Shameless (spending over a decade in the same role will do that), but what of his co-star, who portrays sous chef Sydney? Ayo’s been all over the place to promote The Bear, which she actually doesn’t find sexy, but here’s where else you can find her while waiting on Season 2:

– Stand-up comedy: Ayo’s got some improv under her belt, but her onstage sets are also solid, and she’s been featured on Comedy Central. Here’s a delightful clip of how she describes feeling disillusioned after finding out that her 20s experience was nothing like The Sisterhood Of The Traveling Pants.

– Other roles: Ayo can be seen heard on Netflix’s Big Mouth, where she picked up the role of Missy while replacing Jenny Slate following a casting controversy.

She also portrayed Hattie (a ghostwriting, hustling maid who wore the hell out of this dress) in a recurring role on Apple TV+’s Dickinson.

– And finally, Ayo’s very well-versed in podcasting land. She co-hosts the Iconography podcast, but she’s also a delightful guest elsewhere. You should pop over to Penn Badgley’s Podcrushed podcast, where Ayo recently discussed many things unrelated to The Bear. That includes all the awkwardness and humiliations of growing up, including first periods and crushes and missing out on a Leonardo DiCaprio thing. Actually, that last point is a bullet dodged because almost everyone is too old for Leo these days. Besides, we’d rather see Ayo on The Bear Season 2.

(Via The Cut)

Death Cab For Cutie’s new album Asphalt Meadows is out today, after a bunch of great singles, some of which required some walking and a QR code. Last night, they celebrated by bringing the title track to Jimmy Kimmel Live!.

Their performance is meditative and thoughtful as leader Ben Gibbard dances and sings like an animated narrator telling a story as the bright guitars provide a colorful backdrop. It’s a vibrant slice of their new album that is sure to inspire watchers to check it out to hear more.

About the release of Asphalt Meadows, the band said in a statement, “The day that for so long felt so far away is finally here. Our new album is out, and we could not be more relieved and thankful. We made it. We found our way through a very dark time and have arrived with a record that is a reflection of everything we’ve done and everything still to come. We hope you love Asphalt Meadows as much as we do — it belongs to you now. We can’t wait to see you at all the shows ahead. As always, thank you for listening.”

Watch their performance of the title track above.

Death Cab For Cutie is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Mumford & Sons leader Marcus Mumford released his debut solo album Self-Titled today, which features a new collaboration with Phoebe Bridgers called “Stonecatcher.” As the song’s first verse builds, Bridgers appears as backing vocals on the chorus — so subtly that might have gone unnoticed, if she wasn’t marked as a feature. Still, her voice serves as a stunning compliment to Mumford’s folk track. “Oh, my God, we’re here again / It all slows down to lines in the sand,” Bridgers sings alongside him.

“We’ve had lots of conversations which have been really helpful to me over the years,” Mumford recently told NME about how their collaboration came to be. “I asked her whether she’d be down to come and hear something and whether she wanted to sing on it. I played her where ‘Stonecatcher’ was at and she goes, ‘Dude, did you get the word ‘heinous‘ into a song?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ She was like, ‘I’ll sing on it!’”

During the interview, he also notes that he’s been friends with Bridgers “for a very long time,” which makes the duo seem like an obvious choice to work together.

In addition to Bridgers, Mumford enlisted a few other singers for his debut album. Clairo appears on the tense-feeling “Dangerous Game” and Brandi Carlile helps him close out the record as a longer presence on “How.”

Listen to “Stonecatcher” above.

Self-Titled is out now via Capitol. Get it here.

Not to be all #oldguy, but when I was a teenager in the ’90s, music discovery was only for the most devoted. If you wanted to find music that wasn’t on the radio or MTV, you had to know the right people or have the right siblings or, at least, know the right places to look. I’ve written before about how Pearl Jam was a great band to follow if you were interested in expanding your music knowledge because they wore their influences on their sleeves and were keen on highlighting up-and-coming artists that they appreciated. Associations like this were crucial for young people just looking for a way in.

This was how a freshman in high school could get into a band like Pavement. I remember seeing them perform on TV as part of the Tibetan Freedom Concert, alongside artists like Pearl Jam, R.E.M., Radiohead, and the Beastie Boys. It would inspire a trip to Blockbuster Music while in Houston that summer — probably the most pivotal record store visit of my life — where I picked up Radiohead’s OK Computer (I was already a fan of The Bends) and Pavement’s Brighten The Corners. These two albums would alter my musical taste for the coming decades and my love for both bands has never really diminished.

Unfortunately, I got into Pavement too late to see them live (too young for the first Coachella or to make my way into LA to attend concerts on my own), but I was elated when they reunited in 2010, my first year working as a professional music writer. I was able to catch their first American reunion show, a Coachella tune-up in Pomona, and their final one, Matador’s 21st birthday party in Las Vegas. And while I’ll remember both of those shows for how massive the moments felt — especially for a band that couldn’t be more unassuming on record — many at the time noted, particularly towards the tour’s end, that there was a sense that leader Stephen Malkmus was disengaged.

And it’s not completely surprising. Malkmus rarely revisits Pavement material as a solo artist, he’s spoken openly about feeling like he’s outgrown the material, and the band members are hardly the “band of brothers” that many of their longstanding peers claim to be. Where Malkmus can still have a decent career as a musician, the majority of his bandmates returned to normal jobs after Pavement, and a reunion tour where they could play venues bigger than at their height had life-changing implications. It was a ton of pressure for the bandleader, and one he didn’t seem to relish.

Now, as the band commences in their pandemic-delayed second reunion, things appear much different. Sure, the financial implications remain. But witnessing the band’s first show in 12 years at the Fonda in Hollywood this past May, as well as the proper theater show at the Orpheum last week, something was clearly different. Maybe it’s that the stakes are a bit lower. After all, this isn’t a tour playing Coachella and the Hollywood Bowl. They’ve opted instead for friendly spaces like Spain’s Primavera Sound festival and multi-date runs at mid-sized venues. And, a second reunion feels more for the diehards than the casually curious. The audience on these nights wasn’t just friendly and forgiving, they were already won over.

But it also feels like a change has occurred in the attitude of the band. Malkmus, for one, is clearly having… fun? His faux rock star poses are nothing new, but they don’t feel begrudged. Whether he wants to be on stage, singing these songs, we may never know. But as far as anyone can tell, this is five guys — Malkmus, secondary songwriter Scott “Spiral Stairs” Kannberg, hypeman/Pavement incarnate Bob Nastanovich, and rhythm section Mark Ibold and Steve West, not to mention new touring keyboardist Rebecca Cole — that are playing equally for the fans and for themselves, to prove that they can still wrestle magic out of these decades-old songs.

Take a look at their recent setlists and you’ll see a band hellbent on honoring their history and diving into the depths of their legend. They’re not only playing the “hits,” but they’ve opened up their songbook to deep cuts not heard on their last reunion tour, and many not played since the original runs for the albums they appeared on. At the Fonda, this meant getting not only the suddenly massive “Harness Your Hopes,” but songs like “Embassy Row,” “Transport Is Arranged,” and “Type Slowly” — all cuts that I fell in love with that summer in 1997 and that the band hadn’t played live since that year. At the Orpheum, they offered “Stop Breathin’” and “We Dance” for the first time since 2010, having managed to play a handful of shows without returning to those classics. The next night, the glorious “Pueblo” was played for the first time since 1996.

Any conflict that Malkmus feels about these songs has faded to reverence, as the band finally seems willing to accept how much this music means to their fans, and how much it could mean to his fellow bandmates if he fully bought in. Malkmus even went as far as to (somewhat jokingly) apologize for lyrical flubs, explaining that at least we “get the gist.” Pavement’s biggest in-band advocate, Nastanovich, was quick to respond: “It’s Pavement, for Christ’s sake.”

And maybe that’s the heart of why these shows were, well, moving. Pavement is a band of notorious slackers, who Beavis once yelled at for not trying, and here they are in their 50s, well, not slacking at all and seeming to try their hardest, performing two-hour sets packed with as many songs as possible. Their faithful fanbase could act their geekiest in this safe space, practicing little interpretive dances and yelling Malkmus’ delightfully nonsensical poetry back at him, with each line somehow striking as genius when plucked out to stand alone. For these nights, Pavement was not only active but thriving, sounding great and embracing the moment. The world felt like a better place because of it.

This summer’s Indiecast episodes have leaned banter heavy thanks to a slow trickle of review-worthy indie albums. But this week, it seems like every indie band got together to give the people want they want: an all-meat Indiecast episode. On this week’s episode, hosts Steven Hyden and Ian Cohen review four albums: The Mars Volta‘s self-titled LP, Death Cab For Cutie‘s Asphalt Meadows, Whitney‘s Spark, and Young Jesus‘ Shepherd Head.

In the Recommendation Corner this week, Ian gave a shout out to Top Shelf Records. The indie record company announced this week they were royally screwed over by their main distribution company abruptly shutting down, and founder Kevin Duquette said all their inventory is being held in limbo. Ian also urges listeners to check out a new joint project by Philly bands They Are Gutting A Body Of Water and A Country Western. Meanwhile, Steven recommends Daniel Romano, a very prolific Canadian musician who put out eight albums in 2020 alone ranging from folk to punk rock.

New episodes of Indiecast drop every Friday. Listen to Episode 106 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.

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

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.