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The first weekend of Coachella is less than two weeks away and the festival might be scrambling to replace a headliner. This comes after yesterday’s report that Kanye West has pulled out of his headlining performance for the West Coast’s marquee two-weekend festival. But as they say in the business, the show must go on, and we can safely assume that Coachella will have this figured out in due time. If you’re holding a pass to the desert festival, there’s literally hundreds of other acts and experiences to look forward to. Furthermore, Coachella just launched a new free NFT for all pass-holders in partnership with the FTX platform and it’s actually a pretty cool new addition to the overall experience.

Dubbed the 2022 “In Bloom NFT,” the NFT design is a technicolor digital seed designed by Jonathan Zawada, that blooms Friday morning of each of the two festival weekends into one of seven desert flowers. It’s just a beautiful design to begin with, but the bloomed NFT flowers can be redeemed for on-site perks like dedicated entry-line access, merch, and food & beverage vouchers. If you’ve arrived late enough into the afternoon in the past, then you know how tedious the general admission entry line can be.

Also, a random batch for the In Bloom NFT blooms into one of six “rare” flowers that will yield premium upgrades at the fest. Things like VIP passes, passes to Coachella 2023, tickets to other Goldenvoice concerts, and even a ride on the giant ferris wheel. Say what you will about the proliferation of NFT culture on the internet, but this shows their practical functionality and undoubtedly a cool way to enhance the Coachella attendee experience.

Full info on the 2022 In Bloom NFT can be found here and Coachella pass-holders can already begin to claim their free NFT using their wristband code on the FTX app.

Just as Justin Bieber’s Justice World Tour was kicking off in February, the pop star announced the “Justice In Action” initiative. The effort connects fans on tour with local and national social justice organizations, to get them to interact, donate, and just flat out engage with these causes. It shows real recognition from the “Love Yourself” singer of the influence he has on close to 100 tour stops in 20 countries worldwide. Now, Bieber is adding to his altruistic effort with his latest initiative to offer free therapy sessions to Beliebers and his tour crew.

Bieber has partnered with online therapy platform BetterHelp, the world’s largest therapy platform, to offer free online therapy sessions to his fans and his touring crew of more than 250 people. The partnership offers a free month of online therapy to fans, which they can also choose to share with a friend or loved one in need. Meanwhile, the touring crew has unlimited access to licensed therapists for 18 months. This is a more than $3 million effort from BetterHelp, whose website states that Bieber “is not being compensated for this initiative.”

“The one thing I’ve learned over the years is that we all go through our ups and downs, and we all need help sometimes,” Bieber said in a statement. “Being able to offer access to free therapy to my fans and tour family is a real blessing, and I’m humbled to be able to do it.”

This is an incredible undertaking from both Bieber and BetterHelp. For tour crew especially, who deal with the physical and mental stress of day-today set-up of this complex tour. Not to mention what the touring industry has had to deal with following the pandemic, which ravaged many people’s livelihoods.

You can find out more at here.

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The guards’ more personal approach helped breathe new life into art appreciation. Dr. Sims told NPR, “I was so energized and enthused to hear these extraordinary reactions to art. It was so beyond the art-speak that I’m used to. It was fresh, immediate, and perceptive.”

When you think about it, it makes perfect sense. Museum security guards spend upwards of eight hours a day, multiple days a week, next to the pieces we tend to walk by after about 20 seconds. Who better to curate the art than those who spend the most time with it?

And yet, these workers are often treated as unapproachable, invisible fixtures of the museum itself. Certainly not fellow humans.

“I think some visitors just don’t even know we exist, to be honest,” security team member Chris Koo told CBS News. “A lot of us hope that more visitors will ask us and have conversations with us about the art, rather than asking us where the bathroom is. We are kinda shadows of the museum.”

Asma Naeem, the museum’s head curator, told CNN/CBS, “It’s a simple idea, but it’s asking some very profound questions about who is art for? Who are museums for? Who gets to talk about the arts? Who holds the knowledge? Are there other kinds of people who have knowledge about art that we want to be hearing from? And the answer is: yes, absolutely. This show overall is telegraphing to the public, art is for everyone.”

This unspoken separation is what gave Naeem and board of trustees member Amy Elias the idea in the first place. “Guarding the Art” was a chance to bring more diversity into the art conversation and be more representative of the community the museum serves.

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Now museum-goers will have all the more reason to invite some friendly chat with the guards standing next to the pieces. BMA hopes that other museums will follow suit in an effort to encourage that ever-powerful ingredient found in so many great works of art: a bid for human connection.

Even amidst a larger boom in whiskeys, rye stands out as a category in the midst of a renaissance. It seems like there’s a great new rye dropping every week. Which is great for rye enthusiasts, but damn near impossible to keep up with (even when you’re in the industry). We thought we could help — at least a little — by calling out the partcular ryes we think you should absolutely be drinking right now.

The 10 rye whiskeys below are either new drops from this year, late last year, or reissues/yearly releases that we think are still worth drinking too. I’ve pulled tasting notes from my books and ranked these based on taste alone. Look at it this way: the bottom few selections are perfectly good ryes that fit more as mixers than sippers. The top five or so are all bangers that work as unique sippers, each with different attributes that help them pop. My advice is to read through the tasting notes and find something that speaks to your palate, then dive in.

Also Read: The Top 5 UPROXX Bourbon Posts Of The Last Six Months

• The Single Best Bottle Of Whiskey From Each Of The 50 States
• The 50 Best Bourbon Whiskeys Of 2021, Ranked
• Every Winning Bourbon From Our 2021 Taste Tests, Blind Tasted And Re-Ranked
• The Best Value-Per-Dollar Bourbon Whiskeys, Ranked
• The 100 Best Whiskeys Our Head Drinks Writer Tasted In 2021

10. Old Potrero Straight Rye (Reissued in 2022)

ABV: 48.5%

Average Price: $72

The Whiskey:

This whiskey is a bit of a throwback with a West Coast vibe. The juice is 100 percent rye whiskey made at Anchor Brewing in Portero Hill, one of San Francisco’s most iconic spots for booze. As of this year, the spirit is being distilled on the waterfront in San Francisco but still carries that Anchor Brewing heritage. With that move, the bottle also got a brand new design that leans into San Francisco’s sea-faring history.

Tasting Notes:

Rich is the adjective that comes to mind on the nose, as oily vanilla pods mingle with dense and moist sticky toffee pudding with a rich and buttery caramel sauce, plenty of mulled wine spices, and a light kick of sweet oak. The palate has a ginger snaps/pecan sandie feel with a fair amount of dried ginger and cinnamon sticks dipped in cherry syrup. That sweet and spicy mid-palate leads toward a finish that’s slightly dry with a sense of wicker next to spiced tobacco leaves.

Bottom Line:

This runs a little spicy, making it perfect as a mixer. The boldness of this rye means that it’ll really stand up in a Sazerac or boulevardier. It also makes for a bold and spicy highball with some nice fizzy water and plenty of ice. Maybe add an orange peel to help it pop.

9. Redemption Rye (Summer 2021)

ABV: 46%

Average Price: $30

The Whiskey:

This affordable rye is a sourced whiskey from MGP and has become a yearly standard or must-have, especially for mixing cocktails. It’s the famed 95-percent rye, aged for just under three years, that’s dominated the market for the last decade or so. The juice is blended by master blender Dave Carpenter and is brought down to a very reasonable 92 proof with soft Kentucky limestone water.

Tasting Notes:

This opens with rushes of cedar, green grass, nasturtiums, and soft leather. The palate feels like common black pepper next to more cedar with a touch of wet chili pepper flesh. The end combines mint, chocolate, and tobacco and packs all three into an old cigar box, and then dusts the whole thing with white pepper.

Bottom Line:

I swear this gets better every year I try it. The latest drop is the same recipe but feels that little more refined thanks to Carpenter’s continual growth as a master blender. All of that aside, this is a quintessential mixing rye. It works wonders in any cocktail or highball.

8. Balcones Texas Rye 100 Proof (Summer 2021)

ABV: 50%

Average Price: $40

The Whiskey:

This rye is Texas in a bottle. This expression is made of 100-percent rye from a mix of Elbon Rye sourced from Northwest Texas, as well as crystal, chocolate, and roasted rye. The juice is then aged for just under two years in a hot Texas rickhouse and cut with Hill Country spring water and nothing else.

Tasting Notes:

Cherries dipped in chocolate support black tea bitterness, light oak char, and a rush of cracked black pepper. The pepper leads the way as the bitter chocolate leans into an oolong green tea vibe as the sip gains a creamy and buttery toffee taste. The sip then barrels towards its end with a flourish of roasted peanuts and more of that tea bitterness and a final hint of salted dark chocolate-covered raspberry.

Bottom Line:

While we haven’t reached the ryes I’d line up for every year when they drop, this one is close. This is unique rye that remains an outlier batch after batch. Now the question is this: Is this getting better every year? Or is my palate getting more accustomed to it every year? Either way, it’s great rye that shines as both an on-the-rocks sipper and a killer cocktail base. I’m always looking forward to the next batch.

7. Pursuit United Blended Straight Rye Whiskey (December 2021)

ABV: 54%

Average Price: $65

The Whiskey:

This release is a blend of whiskeys from Kentucky and Maryland (which is the source of America’s rye whiskey heritage). The Kentucky rye is from Bardstown Bourbon Company (a 95-percent rye), which is contract distilling and aging whiskey for Pursuit United. The other rye is from Maryland’s famed and beloved Sagamore Spirits (a 52-percent rye), which makes some of the best ryes in the country. Kenny Coleman and Ryan Cecil took barrels from each warehouse and masterfully married them to create this expression with a touch of water to bring the proof down a notch.

Tasting Notes:

This opens with a big Kentucky rye vibe of cherry syrup spiked with loads of cinnamon and nutmeg next to an almost buttery note that’s part brown sugar streusel and part caramel candy beside a slight hint of leather. There’s also a touch of vanilla extract lurking in the background of the nose. The palate is so soft and builds from that cherry spiced syrup towards a hint of wet wicker to an apple tree that ends on the stems and core of an overripe Granny Smith. The finish takes its time and has a light touch of dark spice that’s more on the sweeter side than “hot,” while the apple gets woodier and hints at the brown sugar and vanilla very late.

Bottom Line:

This late drop from last year is still a must-try in 2022. This is also the last rye on the list that I’d lean more towards recommending as a mixer than a classic sipper. I think this is perfectly fine on the rocks, but really makes for a better Manhattan base.

6. Four Gate Whiskey Company Batch 7 “River Kelvin Rye” (December 2021)

ABV: 56.6%

Average Price: $175

The Whiskey:

Four Gate is one of those brands that whiskey nerds will rave about while the rest of the whiskey-drinking world remains in the dark. This expression is a seven-year-old MGP 95 that’s bottled as-is from the barrels. This is on purpose, as Kelvin’s team plans to release this rye again with two different finishings throughout the rest of 2022, making this expression a launching pad.

Tasting Notes:

This opens with a hint of lemon custard and orange oils that leads towards dried mint leaves and a bit of dill on the backend of the nose. The palate lets that orange shine as soft notes of vanilla smooth everything out and makes way for freshly cracked black pepper and candied lemon rinds with a hint of a cigar humidor. The pepper and vanilla work in tandem to bring about a finish that’s very bright with more lemon candy bespeckled with black pepper and a spicy tobacco vibe.

Bottom Line:

If you can get your hands on this one, you’ll be in for a treat. It’s complex yet classic. It’s spicy yet soft and sweet. There are real layers to this whiskey that are worth taking your time to dig into with a little water or a rock. Still, that “classic” vibe holds this one back ever-so-slightly from the bangers on the rest of this list.

5. George Dickel x Leopold Bros Collaboration Blend (October 2021)

ABV: 50%

Average Price: $115

The Whiskey:

The blend is built from four-year-old rye made in Denver at Leopold’s distillery. The rye is their Three Chamber Rye, with a mash bill of 80 percent Abruzzi Rye and 20 percent Leopold Floor Malt. That’s blended with George Dickel’s un-released new column still rye, which is a 95 percent rye cut with five percent malted barley.

Tasting Notes:

The nose on this rings like crafty rye with clear notes of bright florals (think lavender and orange blossom) next to an almost woody touch of maple syrup straight from the treetap with a very mild dusting of dark cacao powder and soft leather that really draws you in. The palate delivers on the promise of the nose, with touches of holiday-spiced orange oils and rosewater leading towards light marzipan next to a prickly bramble of berry bushes hanging heavy with dark, sweet, and slightly tart fruit. The florals come in again with lavender leading the way this time. That note is tied to salted caramel-covered dates. The mid-palate holds onto the sweet and meaty date while bitter yet floral Earl Grey tea with a healthy dollop of fresh honey leads towards a finish full of more of that powdery dark cacao just touched by dry chili flakes, adding a slight embrace of warmth to the very backend.

Bottom Line:

This is where things get great. This is a wildly unique and delicious whiskey. It’s also kind of fun to drink as you go back and forth on the nose and the palate, finding new notes and flavors, adding a little more water, and really taking your time to dig in. While all of that sounds a tad pretentious, this whiskey is anything but. It’s easy-going while still offering all that depth.

4. Sazerac Rye 18 2021 BTAC (November 2021)

ABV: 45%

Average Price: $1,899

The Whiskey:

This rye was made back in 2003 from Minnesota Rye, Kentucky corn, and North Dakota barley. The juice spent 18-and-a-half years in warehouses K and P on the second and fourth floors. Finally, it was vatted, proofed with that iconic Kentucky limestone water, and bottled.

Tasting Notes:

The nose draws you in with this medley of fresh and earthy honeycombs next to bushels of freshly picked Granny Smith apples sitting in straw baskets with a hint of oily herbs like rosemary and thyme. There’s a heft to the body of this sip that touches on clove and allspice while the sweetness edges towards fresh maple syrup with a touch of butter. The mid-palate veers swiftly away from that sweetness towards an espresso bean bitterness, meaty dates soaked in Earl Grey tea, and milky yet dark chocolate bars sprinkled with smoked salt flakes.

Bottom Line:

Last fall’s Buffalo Trace Antique Collection release is still pretty present in whiskey conversations, even in the spring of 2022. This whiskey is straight fire. It’s classic but bold in all the right ways. This is a big whiskey that feels personally built to bring you comfort. While it’s wildly overpriced on the secondary market, it’s worth at least trying to get a sense of just how amazing rye whiskey can be.

3. Cascade Moon 13-Year-Old Rye Whisky (December 2021)

ABV: 50%

Average Price: $540

The Whiskey:

This whiskey dropped at the very end of December 2021. The juice in the barrel is rye whiskey that spent 13 years chilling in the cool Cascade Hollow warehouses in Tennessee. The barrels were then hand selected by Cascade Hollow’s general manager and distiller Nicole Austin for their perfection. They were then proofed down only just to 100 proof and bottled as-is.

Tasting Notes:

The nose is incredibly fresh with bursts of green apple, freshly cut sweet grass, citrus oils, roses, and fresh cinnamon sticks. The palate leans into the green apple with a tart edge as the spices kick up with a wintry vibe before a savory note arrives with a hint of dill, anise, and maybe some rosemary. On the mid-palate, the citrus comes back with a bright orange and grapefruit touch that turns into wet black peppercorns, white moss, and an echo of dried green tea leaves. The finish lets that green tea vibe settles into the earthiness and savory herbs as the sip slowly fades out, leaving you with a whisper of dried wicker deck furniture.

Bottom Line:

This and the next two entries could’ve all been number one. This is a fantastic rye in every respect. It’s nuanced, feels new, and delivers serious flavors. This really feels like Nicole Austin dropping the mic on a second great rye in just a few months’ time (the Leopold Bros. collab above being the other mic drop).

2. Michter’s US*1 Barrel Strength Rye (March 2022)

ABV: 55.8%

Average Price: $130

The Whiskey:

Like Michter’s beloved bourbon, this too is pulled from single barrels that were just too good to vat or cut with water. The juice — released in early March of 2022 — is bottled as-is at a slightly higher proof than when it went in the barrel.

Tasting Notes:

That dark cherry note is still there on the nose but this it’s supported by a butterscotch candy and a mulled wine spice mix that’s heavy on the cinnamon. The palate evens out with this creamy vanilla foundation that’s touched with eggnog spices next to a slight note of smoke — as if someone lit the vanilla husks on fire and let them smolder — while the cherry leans into a spicy tobacco warmth. That spicy tobacco drives towards a Tellicherry black peppercorn, adding to the woody depth of the dry and warm finish, bringing about a true Kentucky hug.

Bottom Line:

This is the rye I pour for people who aren’t sure if they like rye. This feels classic in a way that’s not basic. It’s elevated and refined. And it’s just plain delicious. That’s hard to beat.

1. Barrell Craft Spirits Gray Label 16-Year-Old Seagrass (January 2022)

ABV: 65.41%

Average Price: $250

The Whiskey:

Last year’s Barrell Seagrass Rye was beloved across the whiskey world. This year, Barrell upped the ante by releasing a special edition that’s a 16-year-old version of that same whiskey. This whiskey is made from a 100 percent Canadian rye that’s finished in Martinique rhum, Madeira, and apricot brandy casks. Those casks are vatted at Barrell’s warehouse and bottled as-is at a very high ABV.

Tasting Notes:

You’d never guess this was a high-ABV whiskey on the nose, which is a wild one. There are hints of mustard seed, fresh dill, flat-leaf parsley, rosemary sticks, and fennel that lead to crusty rye bread with a slab of salted butter, chewy tobacco leaves, espresso cream bitterness, and a black potting soil vibe. There’s also a hint of spicy cornbread in there somewhere too. The palate opens with crunchy peanut butter cookies with dark chocolate drops next to black olive brine, oat milk lattes, fancy Almond Joys, grapefruit pith, and a touch of cucumber. The mid-palate leans into the sweet spice and citrus as the finish mellows and dries towards lemongrass, peanut oil, and dried black tea leaves layered into a stack of fresh tobacco leaves.

Bottom Line:

This might be my favorite whiskey of the year (overall) at this point. It’s just f*cking incredible, fresh, and new. It feels like it’s respecting the variation rye can have while pushing the style in a new direction. It’s worth every penny of that $250 price tag.

If you were one of the major stars cast in the 1978 film version of Death on the Nile, Agatha Christie’s beloved Hercule Poirot romp, you got a vacation out of it, too. The entire production was filmed on location, in Egypt. If you were cast in the new, plagued version starring and directed by Kenneth Branagh, you weren’t as lucky. Despite taking place in North Africa, the entire film was shot on a studio lot in Surrey, England, far from the pyramids of Giza.

Of course, you’d never know that to look at it! Or would you? The long-delayed murder mystery, which didn’t performed as well as the last Branagh-Poirot outing, recently hit Hulu, and now people are noticing that its movie magic isn’t always so magical.

A clip recently went viral showing some of the CGI backgrounds an army of techies whipped up to create the illusion that it was filmed in Egypt, all while the cast, among them Branagh and Annette Bening, was stranded in less sunny England. And, well, it’s not terribly convincing.

“I believe CGI is getting worse even as the tech advances,” one person wrote. “I don’t know if it’s laziness or cost cutting but so many shots look so much worse now than in the nineties. Look at these shots from DEATH ON THE NILE. It looks like it was shot at a local tv station’s weather map set.”

The filmmakers can’t even blame the pandemic on the lack of real location shooting. Nile was filmed back in 2019, before COVID turned film shoots into social distancing land mines, and long before one of its stars, Armie Hammer, was outed as an alleged sex freak and was subsequently no long all that present in the advertising.

As the clip made its way across social media, there were tons of jokes at its expense.

Some pointed out the real problem is with the lighting of the real-life actors not matching the CGI.

There were also other examples of bad CGI backgrounds from the movie.

The images look even worse when compared with the ’78 version of Nile with Peter Ustinov, Maggie Smith, Bette Davis, Angela Lansbury, Mia Farrow, and more, which, again, was actually shot in Egypt.

Some, though, came to its defense. Sort of.

If you’re anything like me, you probably figured Marvel hit the undeniable point of diminishing returns for trying to turn obscure comic book properties into massive franchises right around the time Eternals was released. Yet that movie, which (lest we forget) featured superheroes having slow missionary sex on the beach as well as a suicide-by-the-Sun, was produced entirely by Marvel/Disney.

The real heads out there know that there’s a whole separate class of Marvel movies produced by Sony, who, through a curious arrangement of corporate IP, kind of have to keep making these in order to retain the rights, whether they want to or not. As we learned from Venom, this can be kind of fun (and less than two hours long, praise the lord). On the other hand, Sony was probably due for an Eternals-style disaster of their own, and by most accounts, Morbius seems to be it.

In what I’m sure they once envisioned as their answer to Joaquin Phoenix in a dark-and-gritty Joker movie, they hired Oscar-winning actor Jared Leto (still feels weird to type that, doesn’t it?) to play Morbius, a Spider-man antagonist and “living vampire” first introduced in 1971.

Considering Jared Leto is my favorite sexy buffoon not named Tyrese Gibson (who, by the way, is also in Morbius, and was recently fooled by a fake rave attributed to Martin Scorsese), all of this sounded pretty good to me. What could go wrong?

If you read the reviews, a lot. Beginning with trailers that seem to advertise a completely different movie and post-credit “teasers” for movies that have already come out. There’s something so right about a movie that goes so wrong, isn’t there? Isn’t it so much more interesting when the algorithm breaks down than when it functions as expected?

That doesn’t always mean you want to watch these kinds of movies, but luckily I have a feature designed specifically for just such instances. In Plot Recreated With Reviews, I attempt to piece together the entire plot of a film, from start to finish, using only expository quotes (no analysis! …okay, maybe a smidge) from reviews of that film. It’s predicated on the idea that for some films, hearing them described is more entertaining than sitting through them.

Now then, let’s get to Morbius, starring Jared Leto as a living vampire.
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THE OPENING FRAME

Michael Morbius is a genius doctor who has assembled a team of unnamed characters to travel, by helicopter, to Costa Rica’s Cerro de la Muerte, which translates into English as “The Mountain of Death.” (Vox)

An emaciated Dr. Michael Morbius (Jared Leto), barely able to walk, disembarks from a helicopter to approach the opening of a large cavern that is home to a colony of vampire bats. (ReelReviews)

As a roar of batwings echoes from inside the cave, he murmurs to the copter pilot “if you’re gonna run, do it now.” (NPR)

Morbius, a darkly romantic vision with a curtain of jet-black hair, billowing clothes and hired guns, (New York Times)

is trying to capture a bunch of vampire bats to take home with him to New York City. He slices his palm open, blood drips down, and thousands of bats come shooting out of the cave trying to lick his pale little hand. (Vox)

After his bat procurement trip, Morbius’s fellow doctor and potential love interest Martine Bancroft (Adria Arjona) wants to know why he’s shunned the King of Sweden and the Nobel Prize, and why and how he managed to install a large glass pillar full of bats in the middle of their office. (Vox)

THE DISEASE

With exposition, flashbacks, and monologue masquerading as a conversation, Morbius explains to her that he has (Vox)

a rare disease that prevents his body from creating new blood (Vulture)

(something she presumably knows since she has been working with him for a very long time). (Vox)

This incurable illness’ name and exact symptoms are not really explained; all that really matters is that it makes the perpetually weak and sickly Michael Morbius and his good friend Milo (or Lucien; he seems to have two names for some reason) need constant transfusions. (ScreenCrush)

We’re treated to a flashback from Michael’s childhood at a sanitarium (Reel Reviews)

set 25 years ago in Greece, (Vulture)

(Why Greece? I have no idea.) (New York Times)

showing him as a lonely 10-year-old patient at a private hospital, meeting fellow child patient Lucien, whom he dubs Milo, a name Michael apparently gives to every kid who comes through the hospital and dies. (Vulture)

ARTIFICIAL BLOOD

After a leisurely flashback to his sad childhood, Morbius is back in his New York lab, (New York Times)

where Michael has relocated as an adult. During his life, in an attempt to find a cure for the rare blood disease that afflicts him and Milo, he has invented a form of artificial blood (ReelReviews)

(it’s blue, not red). (Boston Globe)

which he explains by spending an extremely inappropriate length of time repeating the word “coagulants.” (Vox)

Morbius comes to rely on drinking blood, and he sucks down his packs of blue goo like a kid crushing a juice box after soccer practice. Soon the synthetic stuff just isn’t doing it anymore, and he needs real blood to quench his increasing thirst. (Detroit News)

THE CARGO SHIP?

With the insinuation that human-bat DNA splicing is illegal in the US, Morbius explains to Milo and Bancroft, separately, that the experiment must be done in secrecy and in international waters (Vox)

— literally, a title card onscreen reads “INTERNATIONAL WATERS” — (ScreenCrush)

the international waters in question end up being a Panamanian cargo ship 12 miles off the coast of Long Island (Vox)

THE SERUM

In the bowels of the Panamanian cargo vessel, (Vox)

he injects himself with bat serum and develops a swooshy Fields of the Nephilim cloak, a man bun and the ability to see sound. (TheGuardian)

The bat juice cures Morbius’s illness and somehow also gives him muscles and a tan. (Vox)

After a hit of serum, he goes from needing crutches to swinging midair on pipes like an Olympic athlete. “I don’t know what I’m capable of,” he says. (AP)

He becomes inhumanly fast and strong, and can even fly through the air on wind currents. (ScreenCrush)

For a fleeting moment, Morbius looks like a sexy Jesus. (Vox)

He’s also good at origami. (Boston Globe)

SIDE EFFECTS

Less salutary effects include new fangs that sprout from his gums with decades of decay baked in, and claws that erupt from his fingers pre-filthed. (NPR)

If Morbius consumes blood, he can maintain his hot and sexy human form and possess superhuman strength and speed. Morbius also says the bat-juice has given him echolocation, which is depicted as being able to hear conversations from miles away. If he doesn’t consume blood, he turns into the uncontrollable, screeching creature, and becomes a danger to everyone around him. (Vox)

In this form, he murders and exsanguinates his hired mercenaries on the rented Panamanian cargo ship. (Vox)

Morbius is chained to a desk in a police department’s interview room and says: “I’m starting to get hungry and you don’t want to see me when I’m hungry.” (AP)

THE RUB

Morbius’s gimmick is that Morbius is now essentially a vampire, but without any tether to existing mythology. (Vox)

Here, lights are actually turned on and sometimes the sun even shines, if only to explain that Morbius isn’t your granny’s Dracula. (New York Times)

He’s not bothered by daylight or garlic, nor does he have aversions to Catholic iconography. But he is biologically bound to blood-drinking. (Vox)

MILO/LUCIEN GETS THE SERUM

Michael is horrified by the implications but Milo, who steals a vial of the serum and injects himself, doesn’t share his friend’s compunctions. (ReelReviews)

Milo isn’t perturbed by his transformation. He’s delighted. (Vulture)

Matt Smith morphs into a Wall Street rogue trader, made entirely of pinstripes and evil. (Guardian)

Milo doesn’t want to die. Milo also wants to be hot. Milo, furthermore, wants to drink tequila and live deliciously. Milo is honestly a lot more fun, if rooted in impulsiveness, which results in the murders of finance bros and cops. (Vox)

At least Smith seems to be amusing himself, (Thrillist)

embracing his villainy and delivering many a florid monologue about how great it is to suck people’s blood out of their neck, (TheAtlantic)

dancing around while Leto takes his work Very Seriously. (Thrillist)

This, and their mutual need to chug pints of blood, rather strains their friendship. (TheGuardian)

Milo’s rising body count puts the city on alert for a “vampire murderer” which seems hilariously redundant, but nonetheless puts Morbius in the uncomfortable position of asserting his innocence and dispatching his fanged friend. (Vox)

MARTINE BANCROFT

The two become rivals and, as Michael hunts down Milo with the goal of stopping him, Michael’s girlfriend, Martine Bancroft (Adria Arjona), continues to work diligently in the lab. (ReelReviews)

Adria Arjona gets the thankless role of right-hand-woman/love interest Dr Martine Bancroft, whose main skills seem to be ponytails and pouting (TheGuardian)

a throwback to the era – not really longer ago than yesterday – when love interests were often guarantees of the hero’s heterosexuality and little more. (TheAge)

JARED LETO’S ACTING

His dramatic physicality — his body fluctuates between the skeletal and the pumping-iron robust — read as more vainglorious than strictly necessary, (New York Times)

often left here looking like the snarling lead singer of a death metal band. (AP)

Those sad, intense eyes, that gaunt visage, and that slightly aloof presence… (Vulture)

…does his best to sell the monster within through lots of anguished screaming. (TheAtlantic)

There’s no accent, no ticks, nothing loud that announces he’s performing here. There are a handful of scenes between him and Adria Arjona, who plays his assistant and fiancée, Martine Bancroft, that could pass as an episode of network TV. It’s Leto as Leto, and he just happens to be a bloodthirsty vampire. (It’s funny that this is the role where he comes off as somewhat normal.) (Detroit News)

THE ACTION

From the moment Morbius begins the pacing seems off. It bounces around in time, and moves through exposition without grounding it in any sort of real place or emotion. (Thrillist)

the dour color palette, phrases like “bat radar” said with no hint of irony, (Thrillist)

jiggly camerawork and a buffet of previous films — “The Matrix,” “American Psycho,” “The Usual Suspects” and “An American Werewolf in London.” Typical Marvel violence is unleashed, including so much muscle that our hero smashes though New York City concrete streets to the subway system below. (AP)

The special effects team work overtime to give Leto, unfortunately wearing a messy manbun throughout the film, a sort of bat-ness — his pupils cloud and his ear hairs vibrate like he’s using sonar. His skin will suddenly stretch over bone and he snarls a lot, too. For some reason, whenever he leaps, he is enveloped by a viscous cloud. He can also slo-mo and duck bullets and the action sequences build to moments when everything is suddenly stylistically still and quiet, like inside a hurricane’s eye. (AP)

MARVEL TIE-INS

The references to the Marvel Cinematic Universe are dropped in two nonsensical credits sequences, where Michael Keaton, reprising his role from Spider-Man: Homecoming, shows up in an apparent tease of Spider-Man: No Way Home, a movie which has already come out. (Thrillist)

[The trailers] implied that Michael Keaton’s “Spider-Man: Homecoming” character Adrian Toomes was going to be a major presence throughout the film when in actuality he only pops up in a totally unrelated post-credits sequence. (Fox10)

In those trailers, Tyrese Gibson’s character, an FBI agent named Simon Stroud, has a big robotic arm. In the film, he’s just an ordinary guy, and he only pops up occasionally to examine Morbius’ crime scenes. He also has a line in the trailer about how Morbius “has been missing for two months” something that never happens in the finished movie, which appears to take place over the course of a couple days. (ScreenCrush)

In the actual film, Morbius still says “I… am… Venom!” but that’s it; the punchline is completely missing. Why would he call himself Venom? What is the point? What is the point of any of this? (ScreenCrush)

THE DENOUEMENT

At its core, “Morbius” is a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde ripoff about a good doctor who heals himself thorough illegal experiments that turn him into a monster with pointy teeth. (ABCNews)

As with Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise in “Interview with the Vampire,” there’s an undercurrent of romantic longing to the brotherly bond between Milo and Morbius. And it feels like a better version of “Morbius” would’ve put their complicated dynamic even more front and center. Alas, “Morbius” is too bound to comic book movie convention to become the overt gay vampire superhero melodrama it probably should have been. Instead, Adria Arjona is there because Morbius needs a (female) love interest. (Fox10)

Adria Arjona doesn’t have much more to do than look concerned. She’s not especially good at it (BostonGlobe)

It follows a familiar trajectory that shows the hero and villain gaining their powers, baiting one another, then eventually fighting to the death. (ReelReviews)

Morbius must defeat his childhood best friend and share an erotically violent kiss with his doctor lover in rapid succession to wrap this entire thing up. (Vox)

The five minutes or so in which this all happens borders on psychotic; (Vox)

a nosedive of a final act, during which any sense of climactic action is masked completely by incessant swarms of bats, poorly rendered breaking glass and blurry, crumbling buildings. (Empire)

I found myself hollering an obscene and inhuman hoot — a gurgling death rattle from the last vestiges of my sanity. (Vox)

In the end, we may not feel we need to know much more about Michael Morbius than this movie has already told us, even though a stinger alerts us that we’re due to see more of him in the future. This is a movie that feels like one big windup for something else, even if we walk out feeling we’ve already seen plenty. (Time)

—

There you have it, folks! I know the theme of this post is that the adage “show don’t tell” doesn’t always apply, but now I feel like I might have to see this one. Or at the very least, see the featurette of Jared Leto and Tyrese Gibson hanging out on the set.

Vince Mancini is on Twitter. You can access his archive of reviews here.

We apparently live in a golden age of game show blunders. Recently there’s been a spate of cartoonishly wrong Wheel of Fortune answers. Now the trend is infecting other shows. On a recent episode of the U.S. reboot of The Weakest Link — which swaps out original terrifying host Anne Robinson for the comparatively warmer Jane Lynch — one contestant was asked to show off his knowledge of legendary filmmaker Martin Scorsese. Not only was his expertise lacking, but his answer was powerfully, inventively wrong.

The viral clip shows a man named Sean being asked by Lynch a simple question: Of the nine Oscar nominations the Marvel villain has earned for directing over his long career, which film did he wind up winning for? The answer is one of Scorsese’s most popular films, 2006’s star-studded gangster epic The Departed, which grossed a pretty penny back in the day and has been a home video/streaming favorite ever since.

Sean did not know that. “I’m horrible with films,” Sean admitted while visibly wracking his brain. He admitted he would “have to guess.” And so his mind landed on…8 Mile. The 2002 biopic about Eminem, starring Eminem as himself.

Sadly, the director of Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, The Last Temptation of Christ, and the lengthy video for Michael Jackson’s “Bad” has never once directed the onetime Slim Shady. Those duties went to another Oscar-nominated director, the late Curtis Hanson, the versatile filmmaker of L.A. Confidential who directed 8 Mile in between the comedic dramas Wonder Boys and In Her Shoes. So it’s not too far-off.

There is one other connection between the two: At the 2020 Oscars, when Scorsese’s The Irishman was up for a pile of awards, the great director was forced to listen to “Lose Yourself,” the song that won 8 Mile’s lone Academy Award. And he did not exactly seem to be enjoying it.

(Via The Independent)

What else does the world need right now, other than not one, but two spinoff shows from a decade-old franchise? It seems to be the trend at the moment. This time, it’s Robert Downey Jr.’s Sherlock Holmes that is getting the TV show treatment.

Sherlock Holmes hit theaters in 2009, just a year after Downey Jr. starred in the first film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Downey Jr. played the titular character, while Holmes’ sidekick Watson was portrayed by Jude Law. The second film was released in 2011, and a third was set for 2021, though that has obviously been delayed.

According to Variety, HBO Max and the Downey family are currently developing two series for the network which will focus on new characters that are set to be introduced in Sherlock Holmes 3. A series has been in the works ever since the massive success of Downey Jr.’s Marvel movies, which allegedly taught him about the expansive idea of “world-building.” In 2020, the Downey family expressed interest in the idea of a whole Sherlock Holmes universe, which is definitely helped by the fact that there is a massive amount of source material from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

“We think there’s an opportunity to build it out more,” Susan Downey said in 2020. “Spin-off characters from a third movie, to see what’s going on in the television landscape, to see what Warner Media is starting to build out, things with HBO and HBO Max.”

It should be noted that these characters are unrelated to the Enola Holmes Netflix franchise, though seeing Millie Bobby Brown and Robert Downey Jr. trying to out-wit each other would be quite entertaining. Also not to be confused with Will Ferrell’s 2018 forgotten film, Holmes And Watson.

With Morbius now out in theaters and, uh, not exactly wowing critics (Or Martin Scorsese. Sorry, Tyrese.), director Daniel Espinosa has been an open book about the process behind bringing the film to life after it experienced a record-breaking amount of delays due to the pandemic. What’s become abundantly clear in these post-release interviews is that Espinosa is clearly a huge fan of Michael Morbius The Living Vampire, particularly the Marvel Comics character’s hey-day in the ’70s. It’s that love of the character that made him deliberate over how Morbius should look in his first film, and that includes getting Jared Leto‘s hair just right even though the actor basically looks like his usual rock star self.

“I think that he should be like the long hair, Tony Stark-y kind of person,” Espinosa told The Wrap before steering the conversation towards the debate on whether or not to use prosthetics or CGI to create Morbius’ vampire appearance, which involved some advice from Ryan Reynolds:

Yeah, but first we went to this idea that it would be prosthetics. Because I know Ryan Reynolds, we had done two movies before, so I called him because I knew that he was a big prosthetics guy, that he really liked what he did on “Deadpool.” And who doesn’t love “Deadpool”?

And so we started with prosthetics, but the hard thing with Morbius is that his look is that his nose goes back. There were like parts of the look of it that has to do with negative space, that you can’t really do that with prosthetics. Then we had to consider if we’re going to do the head extra-large.

Ultimately, Espinosa was talked into going the CGI route by his VFX supervisor, who worked on Thanos’ face for The Avengers movies and said that he could deliver something even better because the tech had already improved so much. To Espinosa’s surprise, Sony ponied up the extra cash, and Morbius‘ got his photorealistic “pig nose” that fans of the comic will easily recognize.

(Via The Wrap)

Johnny Depp’s delayed defamation trial against ex-wife Amber Heard will begin on April 11, and it will be televised. That’s a lot already, so let’s back up a bit.

This U.S.-based trial is entirely separate from Depp’s 2020 U.K.-based libel trial against The Sun, which did not end well for Depp. That court shut down Depp’s claim and (devastatingly) ruled that the tabloid’s “wife beater” claim about him was “substantially true.” Not to be deterred from his lack of desired “vindication,” Depp forged ahead with his U.S. civil trial, in which he’s sued Amber for $50 million.

Depp alleges that Heard defamed him while penning a Washington Post op-ed (in which Depp is not named) about her history as a domestic abuse survivor. After a few years of pandemic-and-schedule-related setbacks, this trial’s about to happen in Fairfax County, Virginia, and Court TV will air the proceedings. Via Deadline:

The network will be the pool feed provider for the trial, and plans to provide coverage of the proceedings.

Ethan Nelson, Acting Head of Court TV, said in a statement, “Court cases that are as high-profile as this one often create a lot of noise, and it can be difficult for viewers to break through these distractions to have a clear picture of the facts, but that’s where we come in.”

Both TMZ and Deadline have both reported word on the apparent (virtual) witness lists for the trial. It seems, well, wild, but Heard is apparently calling Elon Musk and James Franco to testify on her behalf while Depp is calling upon Paul Bettany’s testimony.

Hmm. Musk previously seemed to challenge Depp to a “cage fight” while denying allegations that Musk had an affair with Heard while she was married to Depp. In other words (and if Elon is really going to testify), this trial could be a real (televised) circus.

(Via TMZ & Deadline)