As improbable as it may sound, it’s impossible to overstate Jay-Z’s impact on rap music and hip-hop culture. No matter how much praise fans heap on him, it’ll never be enough to really capture how truly important he’s been to the culture’s growth over the past 20 years. Yet, every so often, he returns with a reminder, giving fans another reason to re-affirm his greatness and declare him one of rap’s Greatest Of All Time.
The latest is Jay’s four-minute verse on DJ Khaled’s new album God Did. In the title song, which also features Rick Ross, Lil Wayne, and John Legend, Jay-Z reiterates all of his accomplishments, from reaching billionaire status to launching the careers of even more billionaires (Kanye West and Rihanna) behind him to touring the world after surviving the rough-and-tumble hallways of the Marcy Projects in Brooklyn. He even boasts about his efforts in social justice, claiming his REFORM Alliance lawyers are willing to work pro bono based on his stature.
Listeners are taking his messaging to heart, taking the opportunity to praise Jay with comparisons to LeBron James, calling the verse his greatest ever, and calling him the embodiment of Black excellence, even 30 years into his career. Naturally, many are already clamoring for him to record and release a new album ASAP. Should that be the ultimate outcome, may we respectfully suggest that DJ Khaled play executive producer on it? The track record’s immaculate.
30 years into his career Jay-Z embodied Black excellence in his verse on ‘GOD DID’, over coming systematic adversities and taking his loved ones along with him. If you don’t think he the GOAT after this, then something really ain’t right #GODDIDpic.twitter.com/54frYr3UXQ
The RX is Uproxx Music’s stamp of approval for the best albums, songs, and music stories throughout the year. Inclusion in this category is the highest distinction we can bestow, and signals the most important music being released throughout the year. The RX is the music you need, right now.
“Life isn’t about optimizing every part of it,” Australian songwriter Julia Jacklin says over Zoom. She’s right, but the cult of optimization and life hacking is hard to escape from. The billion-dollar self-help book industry pushes the idea that optimizing your life can lead to winning influence, friends, that big promotion, and even “mastering your mind” (whatever that means). The idea of life hacking is meant to be beneficial, but when everything is seen as a problem that needs to be fixed or improved, when do you know you’ve solved it? How can we ever enjoy something when it always feels like there’s more work to be done?
Jacklin was thinking a lot about this idea of optimizing, particularly when it came to her emotions, and how it kept her from living in the moment when working on her masterpiece of a third studio album, Pre-Pleasure. She realized she had become so concerned with figuring herself out, it was hard to actually enjoy all the hard-earned success and acclaim the past few years had brought her.
She had spent much of her late 20’s traveling the world and sharing her music, only to feel burnt out by giving away her raw emotions on stage each night and being away from her hometown for months at a time. That is, until she suddenly found herself with a lot of free time on her hands, more than she’s ever had in her life. And as someone who needs to be busy to feel creative, Jacklin began reflecting on her constant urge to move on to the next thing; whether it be the next career highlight or bit of personal growth. Finally, Jacklin realized it was time to stop feeling like she needed to work on all these aspects of her life, and simply enjoy them. This realization is weaved through her 10-track project Pre-Pleasure, an album that explores pleasure, boundaries, and the art of finally living in the moment.
The title Pre-Pleasure speaks to the difficulty of reaping the rewards of hard work. “I realized in the record I was talking a lot about my relationships — with people and with my own sexual pleasure — and this constant grappling for understanding,” Jacklin says. “I’m always thinking that I need to work on all these aspects of my life, and that one day I’ll be able to just sit around and enjoy them. I’ll have a really healthy relationship with my sexuality, family, friends, and everything will be great, but first I have to do all this work.” The term “pre-pleasure” sums up what she was feeling: always on the brink of happiness, but never actually experiencing it. “You have to just enjoy where it is at the moment, and not keep expecting it to improve all the time.”
One way Jacklin began enjoying life was reconnecting with pop greats who inspired her early love of music. “Coming into making this record, I was listening to a lot of pop music from my childhood; music that just is engineered to make people feel good,” she says. “I love my genre of music, but it’s an intense genre to listen to exclusively.”
She means, of course, the indie rock genre. More specifically, the kind of music that can controversially be labeled “sad girl music,” a category her debut LP Don’t Let The Kids Win and 2019 opus Crushing are oftentimes be lumped into. Jacklin has found her genre of music can be pretty pretentious; there’s a lot of pressure to be “cool,” “irreverent,” and “full of sarcasm.” There can be certain aversion to earnestness, something Jacklin found herself wanting to combat the best way she knew how: by listening to the likes of Celine Dion and Kylie Minogue. “I think I’ve just been trying to uncomplicate [songwriting] over the last little while and remember that it’s just music. It’s meant to be fun.”
Jacklin was able to keep making music fun for her by switching up the way she writes songs. The exuberant, ’70s folk-infused piano pop number “Love, Try Not To Let Go” was the first song Jacklin ever wrote on the keyboard. “It was like, ‘How do I reconnect with songwriting and be able to remove some of the pressure out of my own head?’” After touring her intimate and personal album Crushing, Jacklin was left emotionally drained. “Guitar brings with it a lot of baggage,” she says. “You can get stuck in the same string patterns and you just feel like it’s quite easy to write the same song over and over again.”
So she instead turned to piano, an instrument she knew next to nothing about, to relieve some of the self-imposed pressure of songwriting. “I’m not proficient in any way. I think that made me feel a bit more excited at myself, excited at things that I was doing, because it just felt new and different,” she says. “Whereas the guitar was just starting to make me feel a bit sad. We’d been through too much together, so I think playing the piano was a fresh element.” Her experimentation paid off, as “Love, Try Not To Let Go” is one of the more buoyant songs on the album. Jacklin’s voice reverberates over a delicate, swirling melody. The chorus breaks down to a frantic mix of fuzzy guitars and hurried snares before floating back to the piano-driven beat, like a wave swelling then lulling back on itself.
“I Was Neon” is another danceable number on the album. It shows how Jacklin was letting go and having fun with music. An upbeat, fuzzy riff establishes a jaunty tempo while Jacklin’s lyrics find her appreciating who she is at this current moment. “Am I gonna lose myself again? / I quite like the person that I am,” she repeats. Whereas her more sanguine songs on Crushing were still, well, crushing at times, tracks like “I Was Neon,” “Lydia Wears A Cross,” and “Be Careful With Yourself” maintain a joyful quality while not losing Jacklin’s unique ability to speak directly from her soul.
While several songs on the album reflect her current state of mind, tracks like “Lydia Wears A Cross” and “Ignore Tenderness” unpack lessons learned in her youth. Like most women, Jacklin had a lot of learning — and unlearning — to do about her sexuality as an adult, which was only magnified by her Catholic school upbringing. “Lydia Wears A Cross” lays out a realistic vision of indoctrination, with a young girl going through the motions of prayer and praise without fully grasping its meaning. The girl sees her Catholic school uniform simply as a dress to feel pretty in, and thinks listening to the Jesus Christ Superstar soundtrack is a pious act.
Meanwhile, “Ignore Tenderness” is a lesson on combating society’s lessons on what sexuality should be for women. “There was no [sexual education] in school or family, it was just like zero information about anything to do with sex as a young person,” Jacklin recalls. Any messaging she’d get about sex as a teenager was from an abstinence-only framework, which has time and time again been proven harmful, or disingenuous sex tips from Cosmopolitan designed to be more scandalous than insightful. “Living within rape culture and living in the early-mid 2000s, which was when I was a teenager, I thought that as I got older, I would naturally shed all of that. But it’s been a lot harder to shake all of that shame and stigma. That stuff is fused into your psyche.” “Ignore Tenderness” addresses this early messaging, with lines about watching porn and getting “conflicting advice” like “be naughty but don’t misbehave.”
While Jacklin has done a lot of work from unpacking her religious upbringing to unlearning those weird Cosmo sex tips, she still hasn’t fully figured herself out. And that’s okay. For now, she’s content in liking the person she is in this moment, and trying not to over-analyze it — especially in her music itself. “I think if songwriting was super cathartic, songwriters would be like a happier group of people,” she says. “It’s important to put your feelings down on paper or in a song, but there’s so many other things you need to do to live a fulfilling life.” For Jacklin, part of that fulfillment comes from conquering “pre-pleasure” and finally living in the moment.
Pre-Pleasure is out now via Polyvinyl. Get it here.
W.L. Weller is made by Sazerac at the famed Buffalo Trace Distillery in Frankfort, Kentucky. The juice is made from their wheated bourbon mash bill — that’s a recipe that includes corn as a primary ingredient supported by red winter wheat and malted barley grains. The hot distillate then goes into a new charred oak barrel for a rest (how long depends on which expression from the brand we’re talking about). This whole process is the same as Sazerac’s other juggernaut whiskeys from the Pappy Van Winkle brand. We’re talking about the same exact mash bill and aging process for the two whiskeys, hence Weller’s rise to stardom as a Pappy adjacent whiskey.
Let’s be clear though, Weller has a unique flavor profile. So, yes, the barrels might hold the same juice, but whether they become a Pappy or Weller depends on how the profile of those barrels evolved while maturing. Weller is Weller and Pappy is Pappy — one isn’t a knockoff of the other.
The other big reason this whiskey exploded in popularity is that the juice in those bottles is actually pretty freakin’ tasty and was affordable. W.L. Weller has seven expressions and the price range for those should be $29 to $99, according to their MSRP (manufacturer’s suggested retail price) in 2022. But because of that Pappy parallel and the quality of the product, that price now ranges from $130 to well over $2,000 per bottle depending on the expression and how many bottles make it into the wild.
That inflated retail price does create a barrier to entry. That’s why I’m here. I’m lucky enough to get to sample these bottles yearly and report back. So, below, I’ll be giving you my professional opinion and tasting notes on each bottle and ranking them according to which ones I think you should be chasing down. Ready? Let’s go!
Also Read: The Top 5 UPROXX Bourbon Posts Of The Last Six Months
Before Weller blew up, this was part of the three core whiskeys they released along with Special Reserve and the 12 Year. This is a non-age-statement bourbon but it’s called “Old Weller Antique” (OWA) by those in the know. The ripple with this expression is the higher proof. The barrels are vatted and barely proofed down to 107 proof before bottling.
Tasting Notes:
There’s a sense of vanilla blossoms on the nose with a hint of old wood and maybe a hint of wet leather that leads back to cinnamon-spiced caramel and the slightest hint of black licorice. The palate leans into silky vanilla with a cream soda vibe next to sweet stewed apples with woody cinnamon sticks, cloves, and nutmeg followed by black cherry and a hint of sweet cedar. The end layers the cinnamon, cherry, vanilla, and cedar into a rich and chewy tobacco leaf with a hint of dryness on the very back end.
Bottom Line:
This is a great place to start and not so much “last” as “we need to start somewhere.” The only reason I rank this lower is it goes from a vanilla bomb to a cinnamon bomb with a lot of cherries. It’s not as nuanced as some of the other expressions we have coming up. Moreover, I’d argue this really feels like a great cocktail bourbon with which to build a beautiful Manhattan, Sazerac, or boulevardier more than a day-to-day sipper. And if you look at this like a standard $50 bottle, that makes a lot of sense.
The age of the barrels on this blend is also unknown. Overall, we know this is a classic wheated bourbon that’s blended, proofed, and bottled as a just-north-of-budget whiskey.
Tasting Notes:
Tannic old oak really pops on the nose with sweet cherries, soft vanilla, and a hint of wet leather. The palate is creamy with plenty of stewed apples and winter spices next to a hint of raisin and nut (kind of like a nut cluster with caramel and a touch of ginger snap). The finish arrives with a dark cherry sweetness that’s almost candy, as brown sugar counters a hint of sharp winter spice with a twinge of pipe tobacco next to a final note of old leather and dry wicker.
Bottom Line:
Again, look at this like a $30 bourbon. From that lens, this is a solid workhorse whiskey that works as well as a cocktail base as it does in a highball with good and fizzy mineral water as it does on the rocks. It’s also a decent shooter with a beer back. The point is, for a $30 bourbon, this rocks (shame you can rarely get it at the price).
Weller Single Barrel gets a lot of hype because people tend to think of it as an alt Pappy Single Barrel. It’s not. Again, Weller and Pappy are two different beasts. That aside, the juice in play here is pulled from single barrels that hit a perfect Weller profile. That whiskey is then proofed down to 86 proof for this as-is yearly drop.
Tasting Notes:
A bowl of fresh sour cherries just hit with salt and fresh mint mingles with a lush vanilla foundation and a hint of cedar and maybe some winter spice on the nose. The palate amps up those winter spices with a good hit of nutmeg, cinnamon, and clove with a creamy eggnog mouthfeel before a hint of barely bitter dark-chocolate-covered espresso beans link to a whisper of white pepper. The end layers the nutmeg and creamy eggnog into a chewy tobacco leaf and then folds that into a dry pine box.
Bottom Line:
This is where we start to get some serious nuance beyond the cherry/vanilla/cinnamon matrix of the last two. There are more sweet and soft tannic notes at play that play nicely with bright and fresh fruit and herbs and a hint of bitterness. Overall, we’re in solid sipper territory with this one, especially on a single rock which opens a creaminess to the chocolate and nutmeg with a hint of marzipan sneaking in.
A few years back, Buffalo Trace asked hardcore Weller fans to “Craft Your Perfect Bourbon.” C.Y.P.B. was born when fans chose their favorite bourbon recipe, proof, warehouse location, and age on the Buffalo Trace website. A consensus shook out with wheated bourbon aged on the highest warehouse floors for eight years that’s then bottled at 95 proof. From that, a new whiskey was born and is now released yearly.
Tasting Notes:
Expect a nose full of dried orange peels and dry tobacco leaves braided with dry cedar bark next to a creamy vanilla sauce just touched with poppy seeds and a faint hint of real and spicy root beer laced with dark cherries. The palate has a mild spicy warmth that leads to a salted caramel sweetness with an echo of tart apple skins before the dark cherry kicks in with a mix of winter spices and lush marzipan covered in creamy dark chocolate. The end leans into a lightly spiced (think cinnamon, allspice, and maybe some licorice) chewing tobacco with a layer of dark cacao or almond adding a dryness to the finish.
Bottom Line:
This is just an excellent pour of whiskey. The yearly releases do have some nuance year to year, but you can also trust that they’ll be stellar overall. The hardest part of this is that this is so hard to come by. You really have to keep your ear to the ground to know when these drop (May) and where they end up.
This expression is a marriage of some serious barrels of unknown age. That vatted juice goes into the bottle at “full proof” which is not necessarily “barrel proof.” The “full proof” this refers to is the proof of the hot juice when it goes into the barrel for aging. That whiskey will come out of the barrel somewhere around 57% but not right at it. So there may be a little proofing water involved, hence it is always 114 proof and not 114.7 one year and 113.1 the next year or 115.9 the year after that.
Tasting Notes:
Ripe and sour cherries lead the way with a thick vanilla underbelly, a hint of salted caramel, and woody cinnamon next to whole nutmeg bulbs on the nose with this slight echo of almost singed cherry bark. The palate leans into the sharpness of the cinnamon and the lushness of the vanilla as a foundation as layers of buttery caramel cake frosting with a hint of sassafras and licorice next to dry cedar bark braids with a thin line of sweet grass and a whisper of sourdough fritters. The end leans into creamy brandy butter cut with dark-chocolate-covered dried sour cherries sprinkled with salt and rolled in fresh tobacco leaves and stacked next to orange-laced marzipan in an old and slightly sweet cedar box.
Bottom Line:
This is another winner. It’s just so nuanced and deep while feeling familiar and almost comforting. Make sure to add a little water or a single rock to really let the lush creaminess of the vanilla and dark chocolate shine through with an added hint of burnt orange on that rich marzipan.
This is the main age-statement whiskey from Weller. The barrels spend at least 12 years mellowing (some say the barrels can reach into the 20-year range) before they’re vatted, proofed down, and bottled as-is.
Tasting Notes:
The nose opens with soft orchard fruits — think old peaches and bruised pears — that lead to a spun wool, vanilla-heavy pancake batter, and really good marzipan with an echo of rose water and orange oils next to soft and worn wicker canes wrapped in old leather sheets. The taste is a perfect balance of cherry wood, dried cranberry, buttery Southern biscuits, salted toffee candy, and Christmas spices (clove and nutmeg heavy). The end lets those sharp spices shine but isn’t hot by any stretch alongside moist angel food cake, apple-cider-soaked cinnamon sticks, and orange-infused marzipan with a hint of dark chocolate coating and a mild sense of old (damn near musty) cherry tobacco leaves.
Bottom Line:
This at $40 MSRP is wild. It’s crazy good, which makes it easy to see how it blew up in price. That all aside, this is solid whiskey at an extremely approachable ABV. It’s just an easy AF sipper without water or ice. Adding some, and you’ll get this silky and luxurious pour of Weller that’s damn near second to none, which leads us to…
1. William Larue Weller (Buffalo Trace Antique Collection 2021)
Distilled back in the fall of 2009, this barrel-strength bourbon skips the Minnesota rye and instead uses North Dakota wheat with NoDak barley and Kentucky corn. The juice spent 12-and-a-half years mellowing in warehouses C, D, K, L, and Q on floors one through three. While maturing, 64% of the whiskey was lost to the angels before it was small-batched and bottled as-is at barrel strength.
Tasting Notes:
This opens with a deep sense of vanilla down to the roots with rich and buttery salted caramel drizzled over freshly fried sourdough doughnuts dusted with raw sugar, cinnamon, and a little allspice. The palate leans into the sharpness of the cinnamon to point of teetering near a Red Hot before a soft apricot jam arrives with fresh butter and soft cardamon with a cherry tobacco vibe underneath it all. The end amps the spice up to a dark red chili pepper-infused dark and bitter chocolate flaked with Alder smoked salt and wrapped up in dark cherry tobacco leaves and braided with dry wicker, sweetgrass, and cedar bark threads with this fleeting hint of mint lurking somewhere in the background with some real black licorice.
Bottom Line:
This is a masterpiece. I don’t know what else to say. I guess, if you do come across a pour at your favorite whiskey bar, try it there first before committing a mortgage payment to a bottle. Otherwise, this does not disappoint, ever.
Kanye West has never shied away from this faith throughout his career, turning a plea to God to guide him into a hit back in 2004 with “Jesus Walks.” His walk with his deity reached its peak in 2019 when he released his first gospel album Jesus Is King, with songs like “Follow God,” “Everything We Need,” and “Use This Gospel.” Three years later, “Use This Gospel,” which originally featured Kenny G and Clipse, received a remixed version featuring Eminem and production by Dr. Dre on DJ Khaled’s 13th studio album God Did. For those in the know, it had actually been in the works since 2020.
In a September 2020 tweet, the Donda artist thanked Slim Shady for his contributions. “@Eminem THANK YOU FOR RAPPING ON THE DR DRE REMIX OF USE THIS GOSPEL I HAVW ALWAYS LOVED AND RESPECTED YOU AND IM HONORED TO HAVE YOU BLESS THIS SONG … ITS ALSO NORTH WEST’S FAVORITE KANYE WEST SONG OF ALL TIME.”
Eminem has never been known to profess his faith as loudly as Ye, but the “Use This Gospel” remix finds the “Rap God” artist doing just that. “Today’s the day that I put all of my trust and faith in You, Father / Please let this hate make me stronger,” the Detroit rapper proclaims.
Bartees Strange is having a good year. His new album Farm To Table took the indie world by storm, serving as the perfect follow-up to 2020’s critically-acclaimed Live Forever. Now, he’s back with a stunning reimagining of “Gang Signs” by Freddie Gibbs for Amazon Music.
“I covered ‘Gang Signs’ because Freddie Gibbs is one of my favorite artists and I thought this would be a cool format for the song,” Bartees said about the cover. “This song is so gorgeous in a way that only Freddie could do. He always walks this line of being pretty hardcore lyrically, really pulls no punches. I love that about him — something I really admire. We could all use a little dose of Freddie from time to time.”
In our 2021 interview with Bartees, he spoke about the importance of live performances in his career and the way the pandemic affected that aspect of his music making. “I love the record, but I think that we’re just heavier in person,” he said. “I like to play with the arrangements and make things special. So whenever we play live, the set becomes more expansive than I can do on an album.”
Listen to the cover below.
Freddie Gibbs is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.
Despite sitting on $2 billion courtesy of Saudi Arabia, Jared Kushner has been aggressively making the media rounds to promote his new book, Breaking History: A White House Memoir. Donald Trump’s son-in-law has made stops on Fox News, Megyn Kelly’s SiriusXM show, and other right-wing media outlets to push a book that The New York Times equated with “watching a cat lick a dog’s eye goo.”
While most of Kushner’s interviews have centered around white-washing the Trump administration and/or distancing himself from the numerous scandals contained therein, things took a turn when the former White House advisor did a livestream with Richard Grenell. Apparently, Kushner believes that a combination of exercise and science could make him, and this is not a joke, live forever. Yeah…
Jared Kusher did a live stream for his book, that has an amazing 535 views, where he said he thinks he is going to live forever pic.twitter.com/lM4E8K2R5D
In Kushner’s quasi-defense, his belief isn’t entirely narcissistic. He genuinely thinks his entire generation also has the chance be immortal, so that’s neat. Via Mediaite:
From the last year, the one thing I’ve tried to put a priority on since I left the White House was, you know, getting some exercise in. I think that there is a good probability that my generation is, hopefully with the advances in science, either the first generation to live forever, or the last generation that’s going to die. So, we need to keep ourselves in pretty good shape.
Of course, if no one dies, the planet is going to fill up very quickly, but Grenell chose not to ask a single follow-up after hearing the former President of the United States’ son-in-law basically say he’s immortal. It’d be nice to know if Kushner envisions some sort of Highlander situation or how he thinks this whole thing will work if a bunch of us are about to be doomed to this existence forever.
Then again, it’s not like we won’t have time to figure it out. So, so much time.
A lot of movies are funny, but very few are funny on a cellular level. Few announce themselves as something different from the very first frames. Even most good comedies are mostly built from familiar situations and people, but Funny Pages is that rare breed; bewildering and strange before its characters even begin speaking and projecting its inherent twistedness with every aspect of its construction. Owen Kline’s directorial debut, produced by the Safdie Brothers (Uncut Gems, Good Times), is an esoteric masterpiece, a woolly comedy of the bizarre oozing with rewatch potential.
Daniel Zolghadri plays our main character, Robert, a sort of Holden Caulfield by way of R. Crumb, determined to live out his dream of being a romantic, reclusive, dangerous cult cartoonist, in spite, or to spite his banal, upper-middle-class parents. In the first scene, he’s being showered with praise by his eccentric art teacher, who urges Robert to go further, to get weirder, to subvert more expectations with his vulgar, perverse little drawings.
Ah, those drawings, depicted lovingly in the otherwise grimy, grainy, fluorescent-lit scene. They nearly steal the show, managing to be cute despite depicting full penetration and squinting little buttholes, and laugh out loud hilarious to a frame (the twisted brilliance of Johnny Ryan, who drew them). Mr. Katano, a large lumpy slob who demands Robert caricature him in all his misshapen glory, is played by an actor named “Stephen Adly Guirgis,” a name that, like most aspects of Funny Pages, is self-evidently and almost inexplicably hilarious.
Every actor in Funny Pages is basically the visual equivalent of the sonic qualities of “Stephen Adly Guirgis,” human sight gags, dadaist celebrations of mother nature and all the ways she can be magical and capricious and inspired. Funny Pages’ achievement in unconventional casting choices may never be equaled. My friend Matt, who I brought to the screening with me, said every person in Funny Pages sort of looks like a grown-up Garbage Pail kid. There’s some truth to that, though I suspect Kline partly achieves this effect by opening with a montage of hilarious and semi-cruel caricatures. Such that, from that point on, you begin to envision every character you encounter in Funny Pages as their own inevitable visual parody, your brain filling the gaps on its own like an acid trip. It’s a brilliant and twisted trick that makes the audience complicit in Robert’s cruelty.
Yet also, maybe this cast of characters just looks more like a collection of R. Crumb drawings come to life than any cast ever has before. But it’s also more than that; they’re not just kooky for kooky’s sake, or deliberately gross, which has been done (see: The Greasy Strangler). These characters are both odd and odd looking in a way that seems to define a place.
The same way Napoleon Dynamite could only have been made with and by Mormons from Idaho, Funny Pages is a collection of types only found in the arcades and comic book shops of the suburbs of the tri-state area. And only filmmakers as authentically from that milieu as Owen Kline and the Safdies could depict these characters in this much detail and palpable veracity. I imagine this world it will be intimate for those who know it and impossibly exotic for those who don’t. I grew up in California, whose residents mostly seem milk-fed and focus-grouped by comparison, and the first time I encountered the particular types produced in Northern New Jersey and Long Island when I was in my twenties I thought I was in a Dali painting.
Robert, who seems determined to upset his conventional parents (who are well-meaning but intense in a way that you get at least an inkling why Robert finds them intolerable — played brilliantly by veterans Maria Dizzia and Ron Rifkin) chooses to seek his imagined life of grit and artistic danger in the exotic, far off land of Trenton, New Jersey. Which is always intoned with a mixture of awe and fear by Robert’s comic book store cohorts. “Trenton?? Trenton.”
Robert rents a cheap room in a sweaty basement next to a clanking water heater, populated by a handful of other oddballs, with shades of the six-and-a-half-floor from Being John Malkovich. Funny Pages is constantly riding the line between the banal and the absurd, always with a seasoned eye for the grotesque.
He soon meets Wallace, played by Michael Maher, one of Hollywood’s great weird guys who deserves legitimate Oscar consideration here. Robert is fascinated by Wallace, because Wallace used to work for Image Comics. He’s also a tortured personality, broken by the industry and mostly prickly towards everyone. Eventually, Robert comes to be torn between Wallace, a cruel, broken genius he partly idolizes but who treats Robert like dirt, and his high school best friend Miles, a pimply outcast with a Prince Valiant haircut (played by Miles Emanuel, who Owen Kline met when Emanuel showed up to a video store where Kline worked, to rent Ingmar Bergman’s Hour Of The Wolf with his babysitter when Emanuel was 11). Robert mostly treats Miles with the same dismissive contempt with which Wallace treats Robert.
It all comes to a head eventually, if not to a conclusion. And that’s okay, because Funny Pages is less an epic story than a lovingly crafted, exquisitely detailed portrait of a particular place and people, full of scenes that are largely ludicrous and impossible to forget. It’s an 87-minute lark, the kind of movie you want to frame and hang on the wall, the ultimate conversation piece.
‘Funny Pages’ is available in select theaters and on VOD August 26th.Vince Mancini is onTwitter. You can access his archive of reviewshere.
It’s interesting how “good news” can be relative, isn’t it?
This week, President Biden announced a student loan relief program that has millions of Americans jumping for joy and millions of other Americans irked. What’s considered good news to some is considered bad news to others, and that’s often the way it goes with anything remotely political.
That’s OK. We all have different opinions based on our different understandings and experiences. Unfortunately, social media can often be a place for people to bicker over such things, which is why these weekly roundups of joy are such a refreshing respite.
Here we come together to take a break from the political fray and celebrate things that are universally smile-worthy. So let’s drop the debates for just a few minutes and relish in a little collective serotonin boost.
Here are 10 things that made us smile this week:
1. This smooth 86-year-old roller skater is #aginggoals for us all.
tennessee but with Italy Vibes✨ #engagementphotos #engagementphotoshoot #engagementpictures #bride #weddingtiktok
After this video of a couple posing in front of Olive Garden to get “Italy vibes” in their engagement photos went viral, people said the restaurant should cater their wedding. Instead, the couple was invited to Good Morning America where they were gifted an actual Italian honeymoon, courtesy of Olive Garden. Check out the full story here.
3. This doggo is desperate for some pets from its sleeping hooman.
u201cWhen your person is sleep but you want attention ud83eudd23ud83dude02ud83eudd23u201d
Replying to @Raahi @Naomi Namboodiripad here is an extended version! #dance #avatar #atla #elements #air #water #earth #fire #bharatanatyam #mohiniyattam #kuchipudi #trending #indian #southasian #desi #acting #culture #performance #costume #makeup #jewelry
If you’re a fan of the original “Avatar: The Last Airbender” series, these dances will send you right back to your childhood. So beautiful, from the outfits to the dances themselves. Read the full story here.
5. It took 343 embroiderers from 46 countries 13 years to make this absolutely stunning dress.
Speaking of beautiful outfits, this incredible red dress was embroidered by women all over the world who incorporated pieces of their cultures and personal stories into their stitching. The story of how it came about and how it has traveled the world being worn by women from all walks of life is so heartwarming. Read the full story here.
6. A kid dropped their shoe into an elephant enclosure and the elephant politely handed it back.
u201cThis elephant was up to the… tusk ud83dudc18 The animal returned a childu2019s shoe after it fell into its zoo enclosure in eastern Chinau201d
Saints Row, when it first came out in 2006, was in many ways the anti-Grand Theft Auto despite being a clone of that franchise. As GTA tried to be a satire and make the player laugh through subtlety, Saints Row responded by driving a motorcycle through a glass window and punching you in the face. It was loud, bombastic, and that dumb, stupid kind of fun that fit so perfectly in an open-world sandbox like Stillwater or Steelport.
Fast forward 16 years and the franchise has been rebooted. The new Saints Row takes place in the new location of Santo Ileso. It has the potential for that level of dumb fun but, unfortunately, it’s completely dragged down by a game that can’t decide what it wants to be. Does it want to be a heartfelt crime drama, a satire, or walk in the footsteps of the original franchise?
The moment that it was clear that the new Saints Row wasn’t going to be anything like the games that many fell in love with is relatively early on in its plot. You and your group of friends have recently gotten your new criminal empire business venture off the ground when a rival gang retaliates against one of your friends. In a moment of despair, your friend falls to their knees and begins telling a tragic backstory of why this moment is so painful for them, and in a more well-written story, it would have possibly left an emotional impact.
Instead, it comes across as a forced and unearned way of making you care for this character. It also makes it very clear that this is no longer the franchise that gained popularity because of assassination missions involving dudes in hot dog suits.
Saints Row
Saints Row desperately wants you to like its characters and it also really wants younger people to relate to them. They enjoy LARPing, cooking, and trying to hunt down nostalgic fast food toys. Write down a list of things that younger millennials and older Gen-Zers enjoy and that’s probably a personality trait they’ve attached to these characters. Unfortunately, none of it is handled in a way that is particularly interesting and is usually delivered in ways similar to the shallow “tragic backstory ” moments from before.
So, the story and characters are a miss, but for many people, that was never the point of Saints Row to begin with, and as long as exploring the sandbox is fun then that’s all that should matter. This one is going to be hard to explain, but the sandbox accomplishes what someone would have wanted from a game in 2014. In 2022, however, it feels outdated compared to other games in the genre. The side missions aren’t the best, largely because many of them are built on a basic combat system, but none of them are particularly offensive. Some are good, such as the welcome return of insurance fraud, but others, like the wingsuit missions, feel like they had the potential to be so much more. They will scratch that itch of completing a checklist item that most of us like sandbox games for, but it never felt like the side missions were worth sinking too much time into.
Unfortunately, it’s just really hard to recommend playing Saints Row right now at its full price. Not only does the base game not feel like it’s worth the price of admission, but there are many reports of some really awful bugs on the Xbox/PC version, in particular. I played through the PS5 version without too many issues, but it definitely feels like this is a game that you’ll want to wait on a price drop, or Game Pass, before playing.
Saints Row
If there is anything to build on for this game, it’s that the original Saints Row was considered mediocre at the time. This doesn’t have to be the end of attempts to reboot the series, and if this ends up being the groundwork for a better franchise down the road, then awesome. But right now what we have is a game that’s better experienced on Game Pass than at full price. Play this one after it’s been patched, but not right now.
(For You)r Consideration is a weekly column breaking down the rappers and singers doing it RIGHT on TikTok and the viral TikTok music trends and top songs taking over your FYP.
Any Big 4L members out there?
Lyrics from 21 Savage and Metro Boomin’s 2020 “Glock in My Lap” have resurfaced on TikTok to support the app’s latest low-effort trend. If there’s a question you’re constantly asked that baffles you, or if your stream of consciousness takes your brain from point a to z in the most chaotic way, this trend is for you. Creators are using the adlibs from the bar “Big 4L, I’m a member (Yeah) / Leave an opp cold, like December (What?)” to confirm and inquiry like a question about their favorite color or place of birth and then deny whatever wild assumption or thought comes next. Our favorite? A creator who loves ketchup but hates tomatoes. See below.
If there’s one person who’s got the independent game on lock, it’s Russ, who made over $10 million from his independent catalog. Now he’s using his following on TikTok to give out free game to unsigned artists. In a video posted on the app earlier this week, the “Best On Earth” rapper advises independent artists to ride the success of their viral songs before giving their IP to a major label. He elaborates on the financial opportunity for artists and the independence established by autonomously reaching a broad audience on social media. In May, Halsey mimicked Russ’s sentiment in a TikTok where she spoke on difficulties she’s having releasing new music to the public due to her label’s focus on creating viral moments on the app. Check out Russ’ TikTok below.
Throwback celebrity interview clips are consistently the heartbeat of the app, and this week an old Nicki Minaj video is front and center. We see a young Onika telling the camera that she’s not too cool, so say wassup, if you see her out and about. The illest creators on TikTok are using the sound to confirm that despite a chill demeanor or even what some may call “resting b*tch face,” they aren’t above a little small talk and kee. Watch the original video below!
Typically Rihanna’s 2016 “Work” is thought of as a summer anthem, club banger, and one of the last singles we were gifted from the pop icon before she made a hard pivot into becoming a beauty entrepreneur. The first 5 seconds of the track have taken over the app for creators to express what would go down in some otherwordly scenarios. Ever wondered what would happen if Kanye West met Kannah East? Get it? Watch rappers like Lil Dicky and Lil Uzi Vert meet their match below.
Unfortunately, Ginuwine is the butt of many jokes on the app this week. The R&B singer known for singles “In Those Jeans” and “Same Ol’ G” is also famous for sexy live performances during the ’90s and 2000s. Take a minute to revisit his grand entrance to perform “Pony” on 106 & Park here. And about 20 years later, Ginuwine’s lasting charisma and sex appeal are taking over your For You Page as creators mock and recreate a recent clip gif where the R&B legend dances like any 51-year-old would. Want to see Ginuwine bust a move while grocery shopping? Here’s your chance.
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(@TillertheWorld) August 23, 2022
