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“Everything we do is a stunt in some ways,” Daniel Kwan says, when I ask whether casting Ke Huy Quan, the now-grown up actor who once played Short Round in Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom, in his movie was an example of stunt casting gone right or some special knowledge he possessed. “But then the stunt becomes earnest.”

This seems about as close as it gets to an interview soundbite summing up an entire career, at least when it comes to the filmography of Daniel Kwan and his directing partner Daniel Scheinert (known collectively as “Daniels”) thus far. Their new movie, Everything Everywhere All At Once, opens this weekend, but more on that in a second.

Having first broken into the mainstream consciousness with their viral music video for “Turn Down For What,” the duo expanded into TV and then movies, winning the directing award at Sundance in 2016 for their first feature, Swiss Army Man, which starred Daniel Radcliffe as a farting corpse. In 2019, Daniel Scheinert directed and starred in a movie on his own, The Death Of Dick Long, about a guy who gets… uh… f*cked to death by a horse (this was my favorite movie of 2019, btw). It also had comedic yet earnest renditions of Nickelback and Puddle Of Mudd songs, which will become important below.

The release of Everything Everywhere All At Once (part of a first-look deal they signed with A24) marks arguably their most ambitious attempt to date — and not just because it brought Ke Huy Quan, known for iconic roles like Short Round and Data from The Goonies, out of a 20-year acting hiatus as a 50-year-old man. In fact, that might be the least of it.

Everything Everywhere All At Once concerns the multi-verse, starring Michelle Yeoh as the owner of a failing laundromat with an unfulfilling life who finds out that versions of her family from parallel dimensions have figured out a way to travel between planes of reality — in a way that threatens all of existence. As represented by a giant bagel. And only she can help.

In typical Daniels fashion, EEAAO feels as if they’ve managed to assimilate the totality of the last 40 years of pop culture and are spewing it back at us in one kaleidoscopic gush. But for all its parallels to Marvel and The Matrix, EEAAO does have a heart; an attempt to find meaning in subatomic particles, and to use the multiverse concept as a way to describe one Asian-American mom’s troubled relationship with her daughter.

The pair have said they worried about a new Matrix movie coming out before their weird take on The Matrix, but if anything, the recent movie theirs most closely resembles thematically is Turning Red, another zany story utilizing the fantastic to try to explain a first-generation Chinese immigrant girl’s relationship with her mother. Which is to say that they do weird, and they do stunts, but always with an earnest purpose.

The Daniels have likened Everything Everywhere All At Once to Douglas Adams, but I think it’s more like if Edgar Wright tried to direct a live-action Pixar movie while high on ether. My response to the publicist who asked me what I thought was “I feel like I just got skullfucked. But… in a good way?”

—
Hey guys, Vince Mancini for UPROXX here. How you doing?

SCHEINERT: Weren’t you the guy who wrote about the movie, skull fucking you?

Yeah, I did. Ryan’s sharing my secrets.

KWAN: It’s a great one-sentence review, we just wanted to give you credit for it.

Okay, well now that it has to go in the actual review and not just the email. But yeah, it actually reminded me of a Dalai Lama joke. Have you heard that one?

KWAN: …I don’t think so?

What did the Dalai Lama say at the pizza place? …”I want you to make me one with everything.”

[mostly polite silence]

So did anyone try to talk you out of this project? Just thinking about how much work this must have been kind of makes me tired.

SCHEINERT: We took turns trying to talk each other out of it. And then there were probably a few reactions to the first few drafts, where we had one friend of ours be like, “The first half’s great. Don’t do the second half.” And we were like, hard pass, man. That’s why we’re doing it.

KWAN: Yeah, we would never want to make the first half of the movie on its own, just because it’s a fun sci-fi action movie. To us, it’s always like, “if, if we can imagine someone else making it, why make it?” Someone else can do that. There’s plenty of filmmakers who want to fill up that space, of just fun sci-fi. Our niche is just making things that no one else would want to make. And so the second half was the whole movie to us. But that was the only big pushback. People were trying to turn it into a more traditional action movie.

I mean, there’s so much of it that seems like you’re playing with all these different worlds and different costumes and different shooting styles. Are you guys able to game this sort of stuff out on paper, or did you need to do a fair amount of shooting to see what you wanted to do with a lot of these sequences?

SCHEINERT: I think we’ve been doing music videos and short films and even our first feature for about a decade now, if you include the time it took to make this movie. So we’ve been practicing with our tone and we’ve been exploring our voice and trying to figure out what techniques work and, basically, trying to figure out what is the perfect alchemy. And so for this movie, we didn’t have to do any test shoots, really. We’ve been basically doing test shoots our whole careers for something like this. So when we wrote it, we were pretty confident that like we would either find a way to make it work in the edit or it would be okay if we had to cut it or, or diminish it.

KWAN: We’re pretty used to getting into the edit and being like, “Oh, there are a thousand options. Let’s just play until something clicks.”

SCHEINERT: I think that’s one of our secret weapons, is that we’re both editors. So we think about the edit while we’re shooting, and also we know when we have enough footage, just enough footage to make it work. So we’re not doing take after take after take, and we’re not perfectionists because we are comfortable in fixing things in the edit and discovering things in post.

I read that you guys turned down a Loki project to make this. It seems like a lot of other directors jump at the chance to get on board with the Marvel gravy train. What made you guys turn that down?

SCHEINERT: It was pretty easy. We were already so deep into trying to get this movie made. It was actors attached. And so it was just a meeting where we got to meet them because they’re doing a lot of cool stuff, and then we were like, “Oh, no way, we just got Michelle’s thumbs up, we’re prioritizing that.”

KWAN: Yeah. And also because we were both trying to do sort of multiversal sci-fi, but in the style of Douglas Adams. We were like, “let’s stick to our guns. Let’s let’s do our thing.” But on top of that, our style is so specific and sometimes it can be hard for us to fit into other people’s voices and other people’s worlds. So it’s probably for the best for everyone. I feel like if we actually did Loki — the Marvel fans would’ve been so mad at us. We would be the next Rian Johnson. Which is honestly a great compliment.

SCHEINERT: That’s our goal. if we ever do a studio pick, we want to go down an infamy.

So, the “Story Of A Girl” song reference in there, that really had me rolling. And then it became a theme and sort of a background thing in the different universes. Is there a story there and did you throw around other songs that you thought about using in that way?

SCHEINERT: What is the story of the girl, is that what you’re asking?

Yeah exactly. Yes.

KWAN: A couple things happened. First, we were writing this sequence because we got a note where someone was like, “I don’t know what the alphaverse wants. What’s their mission?” So I started writing this really over the top, like this, “We are trying to fight the chaos or whatever.”

SCHEINERT: And so yeah, the speech was like, you can feel something’s wrong… And then like, what’s a poetic way of saying that” And Dan just wrote a monologue. That’s like, “Your hair never falls in quite the same way…”

KWAN: I wrote it out and then I was like, “Wait, what is that? I know I did not write that, but that’s something in my deep subconscious.” And so I Googled it and I was like, “holy shit, that’s from the song ‘Story of a Girl.’ I didn’t tell anyone because I was like, “We’ll fix that later. I’m just writing it for now or whatever.”

SCHEINERT: For like a year or two no one noticed.

KWAN: That was basically the test. I was like, “if someone calls it out, I’ll take it out. But if no one calls it out, maybe I’ll just keep it in.” And then right before we shot that scene, the day before, I was trying rewrite this or at least have some other options, some alts. Because I don’t think we technically have the rights to these lyrics. But we couldn’t think of anything else. We tried to rewrite it, but nothing else was as fun or interesting.

SCHEINERT: You just can’t beat that song. It’s like the perfect lyric.

It’s the perfect, “Why do I know that? Where do I know that from?” At first, I thought it was a Train song, and then I was like, “Wait, but this doesn’t make me want to puke enough for it to be a Train song, it’s something else.” And even now, when I write it, even just in my questions for this interview, the song gets stuck in my head just from that.

KWAN: Exactly. It’s a weird… it almost feels like it’s, yeah, like a beacon from another universe.

SCHEINERT: So then like almost on a whim, we had our music supervisor reach out. Because we were like, “what if we just put the song in the movie?” Because we have a couple scenes that need music and turns out John Hampson is a cinephile — he’s the singer of that band, and now he’s a teacher or something.

KWAN: He’s an English teacher in high school, I think.

SCHEINERT: He was so excited to not only give us permission but to help. So you can barely hear them, but we’ll release them one of these days. He recorded new lyrics to his own song for the different universes in the movie. So we have original re-records of the song for each universe. We use it in three different universes.

That’s amazing. I read in another interview that you guys were kind of worried about the other Matrix movie coming out before this because you guys had been inspired by the Matrix. So on that note, what did you think about Turning Red?

KWAN: Oh no. Well, I actually haven’t seen Turning Red yet. Basically, it came out on streaming and then our press tour took over, so we haven’t had a chance to sit down, but I’m so excited to watch Turning Red just because I loved her short film, Bao. That was pretty incredible. So I don’t know, people are saying it’s a good double feature, Turning Red and then Everything Everywhere All At Once.

SCHEINERT: They’re both super kid-friendly.

KWAN: I don’t know. But we can talk about The Matrix if you want. It’s contentious. I loved it, the new Matrix, knowing that it was never going to live up to the first one, I was like, “this is wild.” And I actually got emotional at times, whereas-

SCHEINERT: We both responded to Trinity. I just wish the whole movie had been about a suburban housewife who compulsively rides her motorcycle and doesn’t think her kid are her kids. I would’ve watched two hours of that. But we’re obviously super fans of the first Matrix, the first and only Matrix, and there’s something so scary about how long it takes to make a movie and watching the filmmakers, you admire release new things and wondering if you are-

KWAN: Chewing on the same things.

SCHEINERT: If you’re chewing on the same things and if the world will still need your story when your story finally comes out.

So tell me about Ke Huy Quan, if I’m saying that right. Was that a stunt casting idea that happened to work out? Or did you have some insider knowledge that convinced you that he would come out of his like 20-year acting hiatus and be great in this?

SCHEINERT: It was an accident.

KWAN: Everything we do is a stunt in some ways, but then also the stunt becomes earnest through the process. And so with, with Ke [pronounced “Key”], we were struggling to find someone to who could fulfill that role, because it’s a really complicated role. And one day I was scrolling through Twitter and I saw a gif of Short Round. And I was like, “What is that kid doing? Where has he been this all this time?” We started doing a lot of research and we found out that he had a black belt in Tae Kwon Do and was on the stunt him for the first X-Men movie. And so we’re like, “Oh interesting. He actually, he’s very sweet and goofy, but he can do Kung Fu. And he also–”

SCHEINERT: Speaks Chinese.

KWAN: “Maybe we should just reach out and see, what’s the worst that could happen?” What we didn’t know is at the same time, literally the same month that we were having this conversation, he was having his own conversation with his agents. Basically, he reached out to an agent for the first time in forever and was like, “I think I’m ready to go back to acting.” And so it kind of timed out perfectly, where two weeks after he reached out to his representation, we reached out to them with this project. Now I can’t imagine anyone else playing this role, he’s so perfect for it.

SCHEINERT: But in a way so much of the casting is like, we just wanted to cast the best people for these parts. ….Aaaand slash also get financing. And so it became this journey into like all these incredible Asian-American actors who’ve been in so many of our favorite films, but haven’t gotten three-dimensional opportunities to shine. It just organically happened that that became the stunt of the movie — you’ve seen James Hong hundreds of times, here he is playing a beefier part. You’ve seen Michelle Yeoh as the supporting actress in 10 of your favorite movies. We didn’t know this, but she hasn’t toplined a Hollywood film ever. And we were like, “Why not?” And then yeah, Ke was a part of everyone’s childhood and now we get to bring him back and he’s better than ever.

This felt a little more expensive than A24 usually goes for. Did you feel any pressure in terms of needing this to be a big hit?

SCHEINERT: A little, but also just excitement. They were very excited from the very beginning about the potential of it to be that movie that lands in between indies that are edgy and blockbusters. And we have a toolkit. We like playing with scrappy tools. And so it did not cost nearly as much as an action movie normally does. So I think it was the perfect place for the movie to land because they believed in the weird parts and were excited about the spectacle.

KWAN: Something I read once in a Coen brothers interview, someone was asking them. “So how have you sustained a career of just doing whatever you want?” And their answer was like, “If you keep the budget low enough, people will let you do whatever you want.” Even if it doesn’t do well–

SCHEINERT: They’ll let you do another one.

KWAN: And so, even though this movie looks like it’s a really big budget, it was low enough that it never felt like there was a lot of pressure. Because people are like, “do whatever you want. This, this is not a big budget.” And so I think people will be really shocked to see that it feels big, and we screened it at a Dolby Digital cinema a couple nights ago and some of the audience members came up to me and he was like, “This felt massive. The seats were shaking. It felt like a proper blockbuster.” And I was so happy. Because they didn’t understand how we could have made it, which is kind of what we want to do. We kind of want to constantly to be showing people that the way things are isn’t always how they should be.

‘Everything Everywhere All At Once’ opens in theaters March 25th. Vince Mancini is on Twitter. More reviews here.

Kid Cudi‘s on the soundtrack of the upcoming Sonic The Hedgehog sequel with his new song, “Stars In The Sky.” An upbeat, indie-rock-ish track, “Stars In The Sky” finds Kid Cudi singing optimistic lyrics reflecting the character’s love of freedom and adventure and the film’s theme of finding a home.

The single is just the latest part of a busy year for Cudi, who has a role in the A24 period-horror film X, while he’s also working on his multimedia project Entergalactic for Netflix, launching his live music app Encore, and acting in X costar Brittany Snow’s directorial debut, September 17.

As if all that weren’t enough, he’s plotting his own directorial debut with the film Teddy, which is co-produced by Jay-Z, Jeymes Samuel, and James Lassiter of Will Smith’s Overbrook Entertainment. In his announcement for the film on Instagram, Cudi expressed his excitement and encouraged fans to follow their own dreams.

“This year im directing my first feature film ‘Teddy’ at Netflix which I wrote and will also be starring,” he wrote. “This is a story I started writing in 2013 because I always wanted to write my own movie, so I said f*ck it and started doing it. The road has been long, from it being a tv show for years to finally being a film… I cant wait for u all to meet Teddy, his friends, his family and take a walk in his world for a bit. If I could sum up what the movie is about in one sentence, id say this: It’s as if I took the song ‘Pursuit of Happiness’ and wrote a movie about it.”

Watch Kid Cudi’s “Stars In The Sky” video above.

The Eye features music’s best rising artists in a minimal studio space to perform renditions of their top songs with only one camera, one microphone, and one take. Featured on the latest installment is Mahalia, who in many ways has already risen.

Mahalia is a familiar figure in the R&B scene thanks to her two albums, 2016’s Diary Of Me and 2019’s Love And Compromise. The latter fared well on the charts, as it was top-30 in the her native UK and came close to topping the R&B chart over there, too, with a peak at No. 4. She’s made some powerful friends in recent years, as she’s collaborated with people like Rico Nasty, Burna Boy, and Ella Mai. One of Mahalia’s collaborations even landed her her first Grammy nomination in 2021, as Jacob Collier’s “All I Need” featuring Mahalia and Ty Dolla Sign was up for Best R&B Performance.

Now, Mahalia has earned a different sort of honor: performing on The Eye. For her performance, she busted out the recent single “Whatever Simon Says,” which she just released last week. Here, she strips away the lush R&B production of the studio version in favor of an acoustic guitar-led rendition. The new aesthetic works well here, which is a testament to both the quality of the songwriting and the beauty of Mahalia’s vocals in a more minimal context.

When Mahalia shared the song last week, she explained its background on Instagram, writing, “there’s only one thing i have to talk about today. and that’s individuality. uniqueness is beautiful. it’s a superpower, in fact. ‘Whatever Simon Says’ is my gift to all of you reading this who are over ppl telling you what to do .. how to speak .. how to look. It’s for all of you who are no longer compromising your happiness for the benefit of somebody else.”

Watch Mahalia perform “Whatever Simon Says” for The Eye above.

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

Whenever I contemplate the career of the Red Hot Chili Peppers — which I’ve done possibly more than Anthony Kiedis, Flea, John Frusciante or Chad Smith — I find myself stuck on the same unanswerable question: Why them?

Why them and not any of the other bands (Black Flag, X, Fear) that also came out of Southern California in the early ’80s? Why them and not any of the other indie bands (The Replacements, Husker Du, Minutemen) who also became underground stars in the mid-’80s? Why them and not Jane’s Addiction or Fishbone in the late ’80s? Why them and not Soundgarden or Alice In Chains in the early ’90s? Why did all of those other bands either fall apart or fade away while they survived and thrived? The Chili Peppers played at the start of the riots at Woodstock 99 and the press still blamed Limp Bizkit. They lip-synced at the Super Bowl and yet you still hear “Otherside” every other hour on rock radio. Why are they so bulletproof? Why them?

Coming out of L.A. in 1983, the Red Hot Chili Peppers for years did not seem like prime candidates for rock immortality. One member died from drugs, and several others were crippled by long-running addictions. They have been legally charged on multiple occasions for boorish behavior toward women. Also, they are white guys who play funk rock. And yet, here they are, almost 40 years and more than 100 million albums shipped later, as one of the biggest bands in the world.

Seriously now: Why them?

This question is especially pertinent given that a new Chili Peppers record, Unlimited Love, comes out next week. It’s their first with their prodigal guitarist John Frusciante since 2006’s Stadium Arcadium, and it sets up a tour of stadiums (arcadiums?) due to start this summer. The list of tour openers speaks to the band’s tenure and cultural reach: The Strokes, Haim, St. Vincent, A$AP Rocky, Thundercat, Beck, Anderson .Paak & the Free Nationals, and King Princess.

But do their albums hold up? More important: Are they the greatest bad rock band or the worst great rock band? Let’s investigate.

12. Stadium Arcadium (2006)

Before we get too dappity-doopity-deep into Chilis world, I’ve got two confessions to make: First, Blood Sugar Sex Magik is the number one album here. Sorry to “give it away,” to use the parlance of our times, but … was there really any suspense to begin with? If I were ranking the number of ways that water feels, I’d assume that everyone would guess in advance that “wet” was at the top.

The Chili Peppers have never made a perfect record. They’ve never even made a 75-percent great record. Most of their albums — especially post-Blood Sugar — are too long by at least seven or eight songs. At least the peaks on Blood Sugar Sex Magik are higher than normal. And the filler is also better than normal. For the other Chili Peppers records, as we’ll see, the bar is much, much lower.

Second, I was expecting this to be a turkey shoot. I figured I’d crack some jokes about slap bass, quote a lot of self-evidently terrible lyrics about perverted lady cops humping de bump, cite that mean Nick Cave quote that hurt Flea’s feelings and call it a day. But as I delved into Chilis world, I was shocked by how well I still knew a lot of this music. And then I remembered all of the time I spent as a teenager playing basketball in my friends’ driveways while listening to Anthony Kiedis rap-sing about all of the sex he was having and we were not having. And I accepted, reluctantly but not unhappily, that the Chi Peps are a part of me.

Well, actually, this album is not a part of me. The Chili Peppers’ only official double album is punishingly long; it makes Sandinista! feel like a Joyce Manor record. I’m normally a fan of punishingly long albums (including Sandinista!), because they typically balance out the hits with the sort of batshit, anti-commercial experiments that would never be permitted on a concise, 12-song statement. But Stadium Arcadium doesn’t find the Chili Peppers going deep or wide. This album is 28 songs long simply because the Chili Peppers were so absurdly successful as a relentless radio rock juggernaut after 1999’s Californication that nobody was going to tell them to cut the crap for a goddamn minute.

I wonder how different Stadium Arcadium would have been had the band successfully talked David Bowie into producing it. (They also approached him about manning the boards for the previous LP, By The Way.) But whenever I play this scenario out in my mind, it never gets very far because I get immediately hung up on imagining Bowie listening to “Dani California” for the first time. What would the man who wrote “Life On Mars?” think upon hearing Kiedis sing “she’s a runner / rebel, and a stunner / on her merry way saying baby, whatcha gonna?” over a transparent rip-off of the riff from “Mary Jane’s Last Dance”? Would it make him wish he could leave Earth once and for all?

At the very least, Bowie (more than Rick Rubin, apparently) would have had the gravitas and the good sense to apply a chainsaw to the track list. “Snow (Hey Oh)”? Eradicate that insipidness with extreme prejudice. “She’s Only 18”? Chop it and for once save Kiedis from himself. “Hump De Bump”? You guys were in your mid-40s when this album was released! What the hell is wrong with you?

That’s three clunkers just from the first half of the first disc of Stadium Arcadium. I’m convinced not a single person ever has played this album from front-to-back, including the band. There’s no excuse for this album to be as long as it is. It’s not as though these guys have never shown restraint. During the Californication sessions, there was a song called “Fat Dance” that Kiedis loved but the rest of the band vetoed. He was still smarting about it while promoting the album, telling Spin in 1999, “It was funky, it talked about the beauty of ass.”

11. The Red Hot Chili Peppers (1984)

l love that quote. The form is elegant and the content is stupid. Just like the music of the Chili Peppers.

It was like that from the beginning. It’s kind of shocking to note how far these guys go back. Their self-titled debut came in the same three-month span as Husker Du’s Zen Arcade, Minutemen’s Double Nickels On The Dime, and The Replacements’ Let It Be, and it went on to be the most influential album of the bunch. I know, right? Kinda gross but undeniably true. Pretty much any rock band from the past 40 years who hails from California and performs prurient rap-rock in tank tops owes something to that first record. As Korn’s Fieldy once explained to Chuck Klosterman, “Our musical history starts with the Red Hot Chili Peppers and early Faith No More. As a band, that’s where we begin.” Credit (or blame) where it’s due.

As Kiedis writes in his frankly incredible 2004 memoir Scar Tissue — shoutout to Boy Meets World‘s Rider Strong on the audiobook! — the band wasn’t happy with how this album turned out. Producer Andy Gill — whose band Gang Of Four was the British version of the Chili Peppers, only they were obsessed with socialism and class warfare rather than fornication and California (and Californicating) — tried to get them to buckle down and produce hits. Which, to be fair to the Chilis, makes absolutely no sense. Why would a label sign these back-alley Hollywood street urchins if they were expecting the next Duran Duran?

Nevertheless, that doesn’t excuse Anthony and Flea placing a piece of dung in a pizza box and delivering it to Gill in the studio, the most infamous anecdote from these storied, stormy sessions. And I’m inclined to agree with Gill when he described the song “Police Helicopter” — in his written notes that were subsequently spied by Kiedis — as “shite.” But I can’t help but admire the audacity of this record. Was doing a punk-funk cover of Hank Williams’ “Why Don’t You Love Me” a good idea? No. On future records, however, the Chilis would learn how to pull off their bad ideas more successfully.

10. Unlimited Love (2022)

I didn’t hear the Chili Peppers in 1984. (I was only 6. “Mommy, Where’s Daddy?” was inappropriate for me at that age, or any age.) The Chili Peppers as I came to know them was a different band. Then again, the Chilis have been many different bands, which helps to explain their uncanny ability to transcend so many eras, from funk-rock to alt-rock to rap-rock to (for real) dad rock.

How convoluted is their history? The founding lineup, which includes drummer Jack Irons and guitarist Hillel Slovak, was together for only one album. Naturally, you’d assume it was the debut, but you’d be wrong — it’s the third Chili Peppers record, 1987’s The Uplift Mofo Party Plan. I could explain this but it would take a tediously long time. (Not as tedious as the second disc of Stadium Arcadium, but still pretty tedious.)

Let’s talk instead about the most famous drummer and guitarist in Chili Peppers’ history, both of whom entered the band with 1989’s Mother’s Milk. Drummer Chad Smith is known for being the “most normal” one in the band — he reminds us of this in every Chili Peppers magazine profile — which explains how he ended up with Sammy Hagar in Chickenfoot. (If you were a 60-year-old drummer you would also want to spend time down at Cabo Wabo.) There’s also the matter of his resemblance to Will Ferrell, which resulted in the most tolerable Tonight Show bit of the last 10 years.

But the more important one here is obviously guitarist John Frusciante. The thinking man’s Chili, Frusciante is the only member with enough self-awareness to be occasionally embarrassed about being in the Red Hot Chili Peppers. He’s quit the band twice — the first time to become a heroin addict for the bulk of the ’90s, and the second time to make obscure electronic records for the bulk of the ’10s. Both choices align with the values and mores of their respective eras.

I wish I could argue that the cult of Frusciante is overblown. He does seem to cultivate his reputation as a weirdo genius a little too perfectly. When he returned to the RHCP fold for the first time with Californication, he said things like, “I think the rock star, his role in society, is a very beautiful thing and the best kind of a thing for a child to experience.” Which I guess sounds better than, “I recognize that this band is a cash cow, especially when they’re playing the minor-key variations on Hendrix’s ‘Little Wing’ that I can originate endlessly out of thin air.”

Frusciante exited again after Stadium Arcadium, due in part to his interest in the occult. “The occult tends to magnify whatever you are,” he recently explained, “and I was an imbalanced mess.” I’ll take his word for it on that count.

But I can’t authentically front about being a Frusciante skeptic. When I heard he was back, I found myself caring about Unlimited Love way more than was logical. Having heard the album ahead of its release next week, allow me to blow your mind: It’s way too long! It has 17 songs when it only deserves (trust me I’m being generous here) to have 9. The first single, “Black Summer” — the one where Kiedis explicitly sings like a pirate — is mild Chili indeed but it’s honestly one of the strongest songs on the record. The second single, the lightly funky nostalgia exercise “Poster Child,” has Kiedis rhyming “Robert Plant” with “Record Plant.” (I guess that’s technically two different phrases?) Elsewhere, there are a lot of mid-tempo numbers that attempt to emulate “Scar Tissue,” and one bonafide piano ballad called “Not The One.” I’m serious — this is their River Of Dreams.

That said, there are also some ripping Frusciante guitar solos and I’m tempted to road trip to one of the stadium shows this summer in the hopes that they’ll play “I Could Have Lied.”

9. I’m With You (2011)

Hillel Slovak had to die of a heroin overdose in 1988 to clear the way for Frusciante’s initial foray into the band. Ahead of his return for Unlimited Love, Josh Klinghoffer was shanked in the back by his one-time bandmates, prompting the most excruciating musician interview in recent memory.

“If this had happened five years ago, it would have probably destroyed me,” he moaned to Rolling Stone in 2020 about his firing. “Because it would have confirmed all my worst intuitions about how much I suck and how worthless I am as a person.” It actually gets more heartbreaking from there! Klinghoffer explained that they were in the middle of writing a new album when he got the ax. He had already seen photos of Flea and Frusciante hanging out at a basketball game, but he never suspected that the Sword of Damocles was dangling above his neck.

It’s possible to be excited about Frusciante returning to the Chili Peppers while also feeling really bad for Klinghoffer. At least it’s possible for me to hold these seemingly opposing thoughts in my head simultaneously. Klinghoffer was a placeholder who knew he was a placeholder and was forced to deal with that psychological rattlesnake hissing non-stop in the back of his mind for a decade until the very thing that confirmed his deepest insecurities lashed out and poisoned him to death. It’s sad as hell. (Silver lining: He landed a job as a touring guitarist for Pearl Jam, which suggests that tenured alt-rockers have a top-notch pension plan.)

My sympathy for Klinghoffer made me determined not to rank his albums last. Though I also think they’re slightly better than advertised. He’s certainly not, by any means, the worst part of those records. Even if his playing ultimately seems nondescript, it’s not as though he’s detracting from “The Ballad Of Rain Dance Maggie,” which is a song you write when the culture responds to an abomination like “Dani California” by streaming it nearly half a billion times. I can’t say anything about that track that can’t be better expressed by the GIF of Jesse Pinkman screaming, “He can’t keep getting away with it!”

8. The Getaway (2016)

I’ll go as far to say that the second and final Klinghoffer era album is the most underrated Chili Peppers LP. It’s the only one since Blood Sugar that they made without Rick Rubin, the unofficial “fifth member” whose relatively tight quality control early on gave way to the excesses of Stadium Arcadium and I’m With You. Though Klinghoffer later said they only moved off Rubin because he was uncomfortable with working for a producer whose long history with the band effectively froze out their new guitarist. Instead of working with the Chili Peppers in the mid-2010s, Rubin instead served as executive producer of the 2016 electronic album Star Wars Headspace, which included tracks by artists such as Flying Lotus and Rökysopp incorporating sound effects from the films. (So his lax quality control also extends beyond the Chili Peppers.)

For The Getaway the Chili Peppers hired another superstar producer, Danger Mouse, who began his career by deconstructing classic rock on The Grey Album and reassembling it with a hip-hop sensibility. By 2016, however, he was the millennial Don Was, with a track record of overseeing the least interesting albums by long-running alt-rock and indie bands.

The Getaway certainly has a lot of those trappings. Befitting their Carpool Karaoke era, the album cover — in which a little girl strolls down a graffiti-strewn street with a grizzly bear and a raccoon — seems downright wholesome. As for the music, it’s the Chili Peppers at their least punky and funky. On “The Longest Wave,” they sound surprisingly similar to Oasis. The mellow disco-rocker “Go Robot” could be a Spoon track. The album overall has the feel of a late-period U2 album. Which doesn’t sound like a compliment, though I am genuinely impressed that they could make a record this unhorny. In that respect, The Getaway is genuinely subversive, a Chili Peppers record without a cucumber in its trousers.

7. By The Way (2002)

The only Chili Peppers album I wish I liked more than I did. It’s the one that Frusciante truthers like to push as their closet masterpiece, because John took the most control. Which is to say, the focus is on melody and there’s virtually no funk influence. (Though, tellingly, the album’s funkiest track, “Can’t Stop,” is by far its most-streamed song.) By The Way for certain has the widest variety of keyboard sounds on any Chilis record. There are psychedelic strings sections and jangly guitars. One of the best tunes, “Universally Speaking,” sounds like XTC. “On Mercury” hits like a mix of Tex-Mex and ska. “Warm Tape” could’ve been on Hail To The Thief. In other words: It’s barely a Chili Peppers record.

All of this sounds wonderful on paper. I like and admire Frusciante, and the idea of him hijacking this band and making his own Pet Sounds is enormously appealing. But that’s the thing: As much as I like parts of By The Way, it works better on paper than as a record.

It took me a while to understand why By The Way hasn’t connected with me, but I think I get it now: It’s too smart. Much of the Chili Peppers catalog is too dumb, but this album goes too far the other way. It needs more songs where Kiedis talks about the beauty of ass. That’s the essence of this band. You need a proper balance of genius and stupid for their music to take flight. This is the duality of the Chili Peppers.

Also: Flea resented how Frusciante locked him out of the creative process. “John went to this whole level of artistry,” he said in retrospect. “But he made me feel like I had nothing to offer, like I knew shit.” Treating Flea like he’s Mike Love is bad form, so I had to dock this record one slot.

INTERMISSION

Please enjoy Anthony Kiedis shooting himself in the foot in the classic 1991 film Point Break.

6. Californication (1999)

A defining radio rock album of its era, this is the Hotel California of the ’90s, the one where the Chilis inform those of us outside of L.A. — via the title track, a broified redux of The Day Of The Locust — that space is the final frontier but it’s made in a Hollywood basement. Whoa, Anthony. It’s also a sister record to Dr. Dre’s 2001, another classic about Californication that exploited the nostalgia that people in 1999 suddenly felt for the biggest L.A. acts of the early ’90s. In the video for “Scar Tissue,” we see the older but not necessarily wiser Chilis riding together in a convertible, which rhymes with seeing Dre and Snoop Dogg riding together in a convertible in the “Still D.R.E.” video. All these guys checked out any time they liked in the middle of the decade, but by ’99 they showed us they could never leave.

It’s also a defining radio rock record of the late ’90s because it sounds like shit. A victim of the so-called Loudness Wars wreaked on blockbuster releases in the late ’90s and aughts, Californication was mixed to send any car stereo deep into the red, which supposedly was a good thing if you want your song to pop on radio in 1999. But it makes the CD unlistenable. Not to get all Steve Hoffman Forums here, but this is the rare album that sounds better on a streaming platform than on disc, though a vinyl remaster in the early 2010s apparently improved upon the original mix’s “rusty shovel scraping amplified gravel” sound.

It’s actually a shame because based on the music this deserves to be in the top three. The achievement of Californication is that the Chili Peppers deftly navigated an era that all but destroyed most of their alt-rock peers from the ’80s and early ’90s, remaking them as soul-patch balladeers who could also deliver churlish red meat to the nu-metal community while keeping those bands at arm’s length. If any record deserves credit for sustaining their career past the ’90s it’s this one. It turned them into the Rolling Stones of the backward-hat generation.

5. The Uplift Mofo Party Plan (1987)

The most incredible aspect of the Chili Peppers’ longevity — aside from their ability to survive insane drug abuse, changing music trends, and the passage of time — is the fact that they’ve never been canceled. Videos like this are very easy to find!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1mISkY2lcw

All I can figure is that the Chili Peppers slide on this stuff — check out Scar Tissue for more sordid details — due to their aforementioned duality. They are meatheads, yes, but they can also be chill hippie mensches. They are intelligent morons, violent pacifists, enlightened rogues. And that stems from the marriage at their core. Kiedis is the devil — he has the body of Iggy Pop and the mind of a Labrador Retriever in heat. And this other guy seems like a sensitive angel … who happens to be totally in love with the devil.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvheDpULAqE

Kiedis wrote a book about doing a lot of drugs and screwing a lot of women. Flea wrote his book, Acid For The Children, about how much he adores Anthony Kiedis. That, in a nutshell, is the Chili Peppers duality.

Flea is rightfully celebrated for his fluid, wiry, trebly tone, which functions as both a bass and a rhythm guitar in the Chili Peppers sound. On the most forward-thinking track from this record, the psych-pop confection “Behind The Sun,” he provides the infectious bounce and a great deal of melody, pointing toward the conscious pop moves that would eventually make his band stupidly rich. Producer Michael Beinhorn also teases out their metal side, which really blossomed on the next record, Mother’s Milk (also produced by Beinhorn), and eased them into the burgeoning grunge era of the early ’90s.

Flea almost always sounds good whenever he plugs in. I totally get why Thom Yorke wanted to form a band with him. But this album also includes “Party On Your Pussy,” which has aged as well as you might expect a song called “Party On Your Pussy” to age. I docked this record one spot strictly because it’s the “Party On Your Pussy” album. (The sub-mental cover of Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” doesn’t help, either.)

4. Freaky Styley (1985)

Before Frusciante joined, Flea was unquestionably the most talented instrumentalist in the band. He may still be, though the Chili Peppers didn’t start having hits until they largely abandoned funk. Despite their “Funky Monks” reputation, this band’s relationship with funk was always fraught. In the ’80s, they were widely presumed to be a lesser version of their one-time tourmate, Fishbone, a talented and versatile group that didn’t have the benefit of being stocked with shirtless Caucasians with unusually strong constitutions. In the ’90s and beyond, they tended to bury the funk stuff in the deep cuts and front-load melodic power ballads for the radio, selling their music on the backs of mournful morality tales about the downside of shooting speedballs in the City of Angels.

Few things seem as unseemly in 2022 as an all-white funk band made up of old Gen-Xers. But in 1985, they did work with Dr. Funkenstein himself, George Clinton, who apparently thought the Chili Peppers had the right stuff to play this music, so who are we to argue?

Then again, maybe George just wanted to snort a metric ton of blow with some young party animals from L.A. out at his house in suburban Detroit. Kiedis’ depiction of the Freaky Styley sessions in Scar Tissue makes it clear that the album existing at all is a minor miracle, given all the self-abuse happening in the studio. Clinton seemed particularly poised, no matter the loads of white powder accelerating his heart rate. He even offered to help Kiedis learn how to sing before performing the Sly Stone classic, “If You Want Me To Stay,” which is far better than it has any right to be.

The album overall gets a lot of mileage out of vibe. After the conflicted, sterile debut, Freaky Styley really does sound like a party, due in no small part to Clinton’s ability to orchestrate controlled chaos. But the Chili Peppers pull off the funk due to their sheer guilelessness. Flea and soon-to-be-departed drummer Cliff Martinez play one of the band’s best grooves of this era on the title track, while Kiedis masters his “David Lee Roth Does James Brown” goofball act.

3. One Hot Minute (1995)

The controversial Dave Navarro era. I was excited to hear this album in 1995, and I’m weirdly excited to hear it in 2022. It’s their Goats Head Soup, the hangover from the high of Blood Sugar Sex Magik. It’s also their Presence because Navarro plays like Jimmy Page all over the record. More than anything, it’s the Chili Peppers’ version of a Jane’s Addiction record, though it doesn’t seem like they set out to do that. Navarro just willed them in that direction for one album, and then he was jettisoned from the band once the other guys realized they’d been hoodwinked.

Hiring Navarro in retrospect seems like a decision that was doomed to fail, akin to inserting Russell Westbrook into the Los Angeles Lakers. Like Westbrook, Navarro is a shooter — he can’t not overplay his ass off, and he can’t not dominate the proceedings. In Jane’s Addiction, he was the most gifted hard-rock guitar player of the alternative scene. He was also allergic to playing funk licks, which automatically makes him an unintentionally hilarious choice for the Chili Peppers.

Navarro nevertheless tried to dabble in wah-wah riffs on songs like “Aeroplane” and “Walkabout,” but it comes out sounding like the funk tracks on House Of The Holy. Otherwise, Navarro shreds on this album. On the album opener “Warped,” he tries to cram every cool riff from Ritual de lo Habitual into one song. On “One Big Mob,” he replicates the middle section of “Three Days.” The closer “Transcending” is a genuinely disturbing descent into junkie hell, peaking with some “Dazed And Confused”-style bombast. The one attempt at a radio hit, “My Friends,” has had zero legs as a radio standard, which is a shame, because whenever I hear Everlast’s “What It’s Like” for the one billionth time, I always hope that it’s the winsome acoustic Chili Peppers song instead. But it never is.

The worst that can be said of One Hot Minute (if you happen to like Chili Peppers records) is that it doesn’t really sound like a Chili Peppers record. It probably should have been presented as a new band or a side project. Though I would argue that any Chili Peppers record released in 1995 was bound to take a commercial hit, given how alt-rock at that time was trending downward anyway. One Hot Minute therefore functioned as a palate cleanser, setting the Chilis up for the triumphant return of Frusciante four years later. But aside from the utility of this record, I like One Hot Minute and I’m glad it exists. And if you don’t like Chili Peppers records generally, there’s a decent chance you’ll like this one.

2. Mother’s Milk (1989)

The peak of the early mook years. My love of Mother’s Milk is not something I can explain or justify, as it’s a record that’s inseparable from my own personal experience. Even now, I can remember the first time I saw the album cover — it was on a T-shirt that this kid was wearing in my seventh grade homeroom class. It was 1990, but even back then it wasn’t exactly acceptable for a 13-year-old to wear clothes depicting a topless woman with strategically placed Chili Peppers hiding her nipples. This kid was bold. And my mind was forever corrupted.

My first contact with the Chili Peppers, courtesy of this album, implanted the subliminal idea in my head that this was music for grown-up party animals. The kind of people who wear Hawaiian shirts and drink entire cans of beer in one gulp. And since I aspired in the seventh grade to be a grown-up party animal, Mother’s Milk become a sacred text. It made me want to be a less-than-better man.

Truth be told, I don’t think that subliminal idea has fully exited my head all of these years later. Blasting this album for the first time in years (decades?) instantly put a smile on my face. Am I saying that “Good Time Boys” is my equivalent of a Proustian Madeleine? Goddamn it, I think I am. Even the songs that should make me cringe hit squarely upon my pleasure centers. (I’ll spare you my critical justification for enjoying the song “Stone Cold Bush.”)

Frusciante hated the metallic sheen that producer Michael Beinhorn put on his riffs, and Kiedis was also dismissive in retrospect, calling the album “decent.” But the post-Appetite For Destruction crunch of the music really works well all these years later. (This is easily the hardest rocking Chilis.) Really, pretty much everything on this album works. (Even “Magic Johnson” — yeah, I said it!) It’s the one Chili Peppers record that isn’t too long. Even the throwaway tracks bore fruit, most notoriously “Pretty Little Ditty,” a clearinghouse for leftover Frusciante riffs that was later sampled for the irresistible dumb-dude classic, “Butterfly” by CrazyTown. Somebody stop me before I defend CrazyTown!

1. Blood Sugar Sex Magik (1991)

Like death for all of us, this is the natural endpoint for any Chili Peppers list. I’ve talked a lot about duality on this journey, and so it applies to this landmark of sexy, druggy alt-rock that instructed millions of sober virgins locked in suburban wood-paneled rec rooms on the ways to be a shirtless free spirit in the great big world that awaited them beyond high school. You can make fun of the Chili Peppers — they provide ample ammunition, though the haters should recognize that the Chili are often in on the joke. But truly understanding this band requires accepting a reality in which a song called “Suck My Kiss” can slap, even if you don’t want to admit it.

Come on, you have to be a pretty insufferable snob to not acknowledge the moments of genuine beauty and power here: the strings on “Breaking The Girl,” the way Frusciante revs into his final solo on “I Could Have Lied,” Chad Smith’s drumming on “Give It Away,” Flea’s bass playing at the end of “Under The Bridge.” They were trying to make an album as deep and epic as a Hendrix or Zeppelin record, which must have seemed laughable tin 1991 but here we are and … I think they got pretty damn close!

Oh yeah, says a hypothetical Chilis skeptic. What about “Sir Psycho Sexy”? Oh yeah, that song. You can’t really talk about Blood Sugar Sex Magik without addressing the “horn dog fantasy about having sex with a female police officer” elephant in the room. My only defense of “Sir Psycho Sexy” is that I heard this album when I was 14, and it seems like an album that is best appreciated with a 14-year-old’s mindset.

Actually, here’s one more defense of “Sir Psycho Sexy” — the coda. It’s gorgeous. It might be the most purely pretty music of their career. That they would tack it on at the end of their raunchiest song once again typifies their duality. Are they the greatest bad rock band or the worst great rock band? The answer is “uh huh.”

Red Hot Chili Peppers is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Last year, Plant Her star Doja Cat ranted on Instagram Live about the pressures of being an artist. “I don’t want to take f*ckin’ pictures,” she said. “I feel pressured to do sh*t like that. I don’t want to do that. I want to be home. I wanna make music. I wanna play f*ckin’ video games.” Many celebrities will attest to the hardships that come with being catapulted into instant, overwhelming fame and the way that that new status impacts their ability to make art.

Doja’s resentment of her own fame seemed to reach an all-time high last night when she engaged in a Twitter fight with fans from Paraguay who were angry with her for not sharing photos or videos from her time in that country. In the replies, she wrote, “it’s gone and i don’t give a f*ck anymore i f*ckin quit i can’t wait to f*cking disappear and i don’t need you to believe in me anymore. Everything is dead to me, music is dead, and i’m a f*cking fool for ever thinking i was made for this this is a f*cking nightmare unfollow me.”

Then, she changed her name on Twitter to “i quit,” and took the conversation out of the replies and tweeted: “This sh*t ain’t for me so I’m out. Y’all take care.”

As of this post, Doja tweeted that nine hours ago and hasn’t shared any sort of follow-up since, so that may be her last tweet for a while.

WARNING: Minor spoilers for The Batman below.

With the deleted Joker scene from The Batman now out in the wild, fans now have a better look at Barry Keoghan‘s version of the classic villain who made a brief appearance in the final moments of the film. To director Matt Reeves‘ and the hair and makeup team’s credit, Keoghan’s Joker looks almost nothing like any of the cinematic Clown Prince of Crimes that audiences have seen before. That said, Keogan’s version does veer more towards Heath Ledger’s iconic take, but only because he once again has people wondering, where did he get those scars?

Fortunately, Reeves provided an answer to the Joker’s facial conundrum. Around The Batman‘s release, the director was practically an open book including confirming that, yes, Keoghan’s unnamed Arkham prisoner is “who you think it is,” but also highlighting that he’s not quite the Joker yet. As for his distinct look, here’s how Reeves and his team tried to separate this Joker from the pack. Via IGN:

“He’s got this congenital disease. He can never stop smiling. And it made Mike and I think about — I was talking about The Elephant Man because I love David Lynch. And I was like, ‘Well, maybe there’s something here where it’s not something where he fell in a vat of chemicals or it’s not the Nolan thing where he has these scars and we don’t know where they came from. What if this is something that he’s been touched by from birth and that he has a congenital disease that refuses to let him stop smiling? And he’s had this very dark reaction to it, and he’s had to spend a life of people looking at him in a certain way and he knows how to get into your head.’”

Keoghan’s Joker being able to get into your head definitely comes through in the deleted scene as Pattinson’s Batman leaves the interaction visibly rattled by how easily the Joker was able to twist the situation and turn it on the Dark Knight. As for the Joker being the main villain in the sequel, Reeves is upfront that, for now, his appearance in the film is just to establish that the character is out there slowly evolving into his final form, and he honestly doesn’t know when he’ll appear next.

(Via IGN)

Last year, The Killers unveiled Pressure Machine, their seventh studio album following 2020’s Imploding The Mirage. It was announced last week that the Las Vegas-native band would be releasing Pressure Machine Deluxe Edition, featuring new versions of the songs “West Hills,” “The Getting By,” and “Runaway Horses.” Today, a video for “The Getting By II” is out along with the release of the deluxe album.

The video is directed by Robert Machoian and it stays true to the album’s theme of growing up in the American Southwest. With footage of horses, old factories, and even just the sky, the music video is a fitting, wistful visual accompaniment to the songs. They also unleashed a 33-minute film a few days ago that focused on similar themes of rural hometowns; it was titled Notes From A Quiet Town and premiered on their Facebook page.

About Nephi, Utah, where Brandon Flowers is from, he told NME, “It’s no secret that I didn’t have a lot of struggle in my upbringing. My parents stayed together; they loved me and nurtured me. What I found was that the memories attached to sorrow, sadness and shock were really emotional for me. I was still walking around with them.”

Watch the video for “The Getting By II” above.

Just when you think Ted Cruz couldn’t make a bigger ass out of himself, there he is—jetting off to Cancun while his constituents freeze to death. But even by Ted’s standards, this has been a doozy of a week. It started off with him going full Karen on an airline employee at a Montana airport when the Texas senator was visibly annoyed that he had missed his flight, to the point that the authorities had to be called. As Jimmy Kimmel explained on Thursday night, it only got worse from there:

Today marked the final day of the Supreme Court hearings for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson. Ted Cruz, he even out-slimed himself this week. On Tuesday, he singled out this children’s book called Anti-Racist Baby for promoting critical race theory, which it actually doesn’t. He said the book teaches that babies are born racist, which it also doesn’t. And as a result of Ted’s tirade, that book is now #1 on Amazon… It’s like the opposite of Oprah’s Book Club or something.

And not only is the book selling well: Since Cruz’s little grandstand, Amazon is also seeing a spike in sales of psoriasis medication, wart remover, nose hair trimmers, male Spanx, slug repellent, and mullet combs. So, congratulations to Ted.

Unfortunately for all of us really, Cruz wasn’t even done making an ass of himself in full view of the American public. Right after his nonsensical (and, yes, racist) tirade, he hopped right onto his phone to check Twitter and see what people were saying about his little dust-up with Dick Durbin.

“If you were wondering what Ted Cruz was really focused on during the hearings,” said Kimmel, “someone got a shot of him on his phone yesterday searching for his own name on Twitter. How embarrassing! Can you imagine being Ted Cruz and still wanting to know what people are saying about you online?”

You can watch the full clip above, starting around the 6:30 mark.

By now, you’re well aware that countless movies saw their release dates evaporate as the pandemic fully unfurled. Jared Leto as Morbius even broke the most-delayed record (a status that no film wants to have), but he will finally vamp out in theaters on April 1. In the case of Mission: Impossible 7, though, the original 2021 release date got bumped a few times and landed in September 2022. This decision went down even after Tom Cruise went on a profanity-laden tirade over people not following Covid-19 protocols.

In that rant, Tom lectured the crew about how the future of the movie business was in their hands, and the Hollywood Reporter (in a feature-length piece) detailed Tom’s ongoing battles while making this Paramount Pictures blockbuster in such fraught conditions. It’s a fascinating article (if a bit too soon for that sort of dissection), and the part about Tom really not being a streaming dude is something. Tom was apparently so upset with Paramount’s then-CEO Jim Gianopulos (he had to be the guy who told Tom that the movie would move to Paramount+ after only a 45 day theatrical window) that it might be a key reason why Gianopulos got ousted:

Says an associate, “Jim was bridging between what [Paramount’s] Shari [Redstone] and [president and CEO] Bob [Bakish] wanted and what Jim felt was the right thing to do,” which was to protect the relationship with Cruise. “Part of the reason [Jim] is gone is that Shari and Bob thought they could wave a magic wand” and persuade the star to accept the shortened window.

Sure enough, Cruise was having none of it. Seeing himself rightly as Paramount’s most important, not to mention longest-term, partner, he was said to be furious. He had no intention that any of his movies would play for a day less than his standard three-month run. “For him, 45 days is like going day-and-date,” says a Paramount source. He also felt that setting a date when the movie could be seen on the service would discourage people from going to the theater.

The piece also details how talks about the shortened theatrical window ended with Tom agreeing to argue at a later date and contacting his attorneys to alert them for the battle (kind-of understandable, since part of Tom’s pay correlates to box-office dollars). Reportedly, Gianopulos attempted to explain to Tom how the theater industry had changed, and how 45 days seems to be the magical amount of time to capture most box-office revenue for a movie. Tom apparently wasn’t buying it, and yeah, don’t look for Tom Cruise to get big into streaming. He is, after all, the guy who made a big show out of watching Tenet while masked in a theater.

There’s probably no Netflix contract for Tom, in other words. After all, he’s gotta run and perch atop speeding trains on the big screen.

(Via Hollywood Reporter)

Over the past several years—including the four he was President of the United States—Donald Trump spent enough time talking about Hillary Clinton that he could have likely declared it a second job. When he isn’t leading groups of MAGA-heads in a rousing rendition of “Lock her up!,” he has come up with increasingly immature nicknames for her (Crazy Hillary, Crooked Hillary, Heartless Hillary, and the kinda folksy Lyin’ Hillary all spring to mind), and just generally attempting to besmirch her reputation whenever he can.

While the former president is undoubtedly an unpredictable man, the news that has now filed a totally bonkers RICO lawsuit against Clinton, the DNC, and several others, claiming that they engaged in a criminal conspiracy to “destroy his life”—which is something Trump is clearly fully capable of doing all on his own.

As Bess Levin writes for Vanity Fair:

In a 108-page filing, Trump claimed that Clinton, along with the Democratic National Committee, former FBI director James Comey, White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan, and more than a dozen other people “orchestrated an unthinkable plot” to undermine his campaign and subsequently his administration, by “weav[ing] a false narrative” that Trump “was colluding with a hostile foreign sovereignty,” i.e. Russia. While the allegations are both vast and likely baseless, the basic idea is that Clinton and company tried to take down Trump the candidate and then Trump the president through illegal espionage and other subterfuge. The complaint argues that the alleged conspiracy falls under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, i.e. the law that was originally passed to prosecute the Mafia.

“The Defendants, blinded by political ambition, orchestrated a malicious conspiracy to disseminate patently false and injurious information about Donald J. Trump and his campaign, all in the hopes of destroying his life, his political career and rigging the 2016 Presidential Election in favor of Hillary Clinton,” the filing reads. “When their gambit failed, and Donald J. Trump was elected, the Defendants’ efforts continued unabated, merely shifting their focus to undermining his presidential administration. Worse still, the Defendants continue to spread their vicious lies to this day as they unabashedly publicize their thoroughly debunked falsehoods in an effort to ensure that he will never be elected again.”

Yes, it’s OK if you’re chuckling a bit right now. Though you’ve got to give the man some credit for being proactive if he does indeed decide to run for president again and either doesn’t win the Republican nomination or the election itself. It also speaks to Trump’s loss to Joe Biden, so: win-win-win.

As far as the Russia investigation goes, The Washington Post made sure to remind readers that “Despite Trump’s repeated claims that he was exonerated by former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III after a two-year investigation, Mueller in 2019 said only that his team had made no determination on ‘collusion’ and that it had not found sufficient evidence to charge any member of Trump’s campaign with criminal conspiracy.” Translation: He was never exonerated.

As Levin notes, the downside to the lawsuit for Trump’s most loyal followers is that he has filed it as a civil suit, meaning that the former POTUS won’t be responsible for anyone “locking her up.” Instead, Trump is looking to score a $72 million-plus payday for his “pain and suffering.”

(Via Vanity Fair)