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This weekend, after a year’s delay — to say nothing of being in development hell for over a decade — the latest big screen adaptation of Frank Herbert’s seminal sci-fi novel Dune finally hit theaters. And despite also being available on HBO Max, it went over gangbusters, topping the theatrical box office at home and elsewhere. It’s great news for Herbert’s famously tough-to-film classic. But people online still took umbrage with one aspect: Is there really a character named “Duncan Idaho”?

There is! Duncan Idaho is the “swordmaster” for the goodly House Atreides, and he’s played by Jason Momoa, in what is arguably the film’s most likable performance. Should the other novels in the series be filmed, he’ll be back. Though the story spans thousands and thousands of years, people keep cloning him, over and over and over again. Every character, beloved or hissable, dies at some point over the novels, but Duncan Idaho was so beloved that Herbert kept bringing him back for more.

Still, he is named “Duncan Idaho.”

And so many on social media had the same idea: What a kooky name, let’s make jokes.

Others wished Momoa’s Duncan Idaho had a bit more Aquaman in his DNA.

Mind you, Duncan Idaho isn’t the only bizarre name in Dune. Thufir Hawat (Stephen McKinley Henderson), Glossu Rabban (Dave Bautista), and Wellington Yueh (Chang Chen) are nothing to sneeze at either.

Others, though, found it easy to get over a silly name like Duncan Idaho thanks to the arguably career best work from Jason Momoa.

You can watch the new Dune in theaters and on HBO Max (though it really should be seen on the biggest screen with the loudest sound imaginable). HBO Max is where one can also stream David Lynch’s notorious (but also, to some, enjoyable) 1984 stab, in which Duncan Idaho is played by the excellent character actor Richard Jordan.

Just a month removed from the release of his sixth album Certified Lover Boy, Drake recently had another reason to celebrate, that being his 35th birthday. The rapper officially celebrates a new year of life today, but he got the festivities going a day early with a party in Los Angeles on Saturday night.

The event took place in the city’s Goya Studios and the theme of the night was Narcos as it found some guests like YG, Future, and the rapper’s dad Dennis Graham following it while others like Offset, French Montana, and Jack Harlow kept it casual for the night.

The birthday event comes after Certified Lover Boy spent a fourth non-consecutive week at No. 1 on the album charts. It’s one of eight albums in 2021 to spend multiple weeks atop the charts and it comes after the project spent three straight weeks at No. 1. Including Drake’s album, only four projects have spent a total of three weeks atop the chart year: Taylor Swift’s Evermore, Billie Eilish’s Happier Than Ever and Morgan Wallen’s Dangerous: The Double Album.

Drake also made a surprise appearance during J. Cole’s The Off-Season Tour and called the Dreamville artist “one of the greatest rappers” in a brief speech during the show.

You can check out a video from the night above.

Jack Harlow is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

The Kansas City Chiefs spent Sunday afternoon getting demolished by the Tennessee Titans. By the time the game came to the end, the Chiefs fell to 3-4 on the year thanks to a 27-3 drubbing at the hands of their division rivals, one which served as a reminder that the two-time defending AFC Champions have some major issues that need to be resolved.

But beyond any of those, the single-biggest issue facing the team right now involves the health of star quarterback Patrick Mahomes. During the game’s fourth quarter, Mahomes, while trying to kickstart an offense that had struggled all day, took a knee to his face mask that caused his head to go back and left the former league MVP in a daze.

It was a scary looking injury, and one that caused Mahomes’ day to come to a premature end on the team’s penultimate drive of the afternoon. If there is a silver lining, it is that Mahomes reportedly passed concussion protocol.

Mahomes had issues all afternoon against the Titans’ defense, going 20-for-35 for 206 yards with no touchdowns and an interception, his league-high ninth of the season. If he is to miss any period of time, Kansas City has games each of the next four weeks before the team has its bye.

This article originally appeared on 11.21.16

Photographer Katie Joy Crawford had been battling anxiety for 10 years when she decided to face it straight on by turning the camera lens on herself.

In 2015, Upworthy shared Crawford’s self-portraits and our readers responded with tons of empathy. One person said, “What a wonderful way to express what words cannot.” Another reader added, “I think she hit the nail right on the head. It’s like a constant battle with yourself. I often feel my emotions battling each other.”

So we wanted to go back and talk to the photographer directly about this soul-baring project.

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It was Crawford’s senior year in college. She decided to make herself the central subject of her thesis. She became determined to realistically capture the crippling effects of her anxiety with her “My Anxious Heart” photo series.

“I just firmly believe that the stigma with mental illness needs to be eliminated,” Crawford says.

She hopes the series will help others who may be struggling with anxiety. She wants people to know they’re not alone.

These haunting photos are also meant to encourage those suffering with anxiety to reach out to others who perhaps don’t understand what anxiety feels like. The more we can understand each other, the more we can help each other out.

Here again are Crawford’s 12 poignant self-portraits and captions that show what anxiety feels like for her:

1. “They keep telling me to breathe. I can feel my chest moving up and down. Up and down. Up and down. But why does it feel like I’m suffocating? I hold my hand under my nose, making sure there is air. I still can’t breathe.”

2. “My head is filling with helium. Focus is fading. Such a small decision to make. Such an easy question to answer. My mind isn’t letting me. It’s like a thousand circuits are all crossing at once.”

3. “It’s strange — in the pit of your stomach. It’s like when you’re swimming and you want to put your feet down but the water is deeper than you thought. You can’t touch the bottom and your heart skips a beat.”

4. “You were created for me and by me. You were created for my seclusion. You were created by venomous defense. You are made of fear and lies. Fear of unrequited promises and losing trust so seldom given. You’ve been forming my entire life. Stronger and stronger.”

5. “A glass of water isn’t heavy. It’s almost mindless when you have to pick one up. But what if you couldn’t empty it or set it down? What if you had to support its weight for days … months … years? The weight doesn’t change, but the burden does. At a certain point, you can’t remember how light it used to seem. Sometimes it takes everything in you to pretend it isn’t there. And sometimes, you just have to let it fall.”

6. “A captive of my own mind. The instigator of my own thoughts. The more I think, the worse it gets. The less I think, the worse it gets. Breathe. Just breathe. Drift. It’ll ease soon.”

—7. “I’m afraid to live and i’m afraid to die. What a way to exist.”

8. “I was scared of sleeping. I felt the most raw panic in complete darkness. Actually, complete darkness wasn’t scary. It was that little bit of light that would cast a shadow — a terrifying shadow.”

9. “No matter how much I resist, it’ll always be right here desperate to hold me, cover me, break down with me. Each day I fight it, “You’re not good for me and you never will be.” But there it is waiting for me when I wake up and eager to hold me as I sleep. It takes my breath away. It leaves me speechless.”

10. “Depression is when you can’t feel at all. Anxiety is when you feel too much. Having both is a constant war within your own mind. Having both means never winning.”

11. “Cuts so deep it’s like they’re never going to heal. Pain so real, it’s almost unbearable. I’ve become this … this cut, this wound. All I know is this same pain; sharp breath, empty eyes, shaky hands. If it’s so painful, why let it continue? Unless … maybe it’s all that you know.”

12. “Numb feeling. How oxymoronic. How fitting. Can you actually feel numb? Or is it the inability to feel? Am I so used to being numb that i’ve equated it to an actual feeling?”

“I’ve had a lot of people say that my photographs are too beautiful for what anxiety actually is. That’s OK to feel that way, I think they are too! I didn’t set out to make it look like the monster I felt,” Crawford says. “I wanted clean and simple explanations. I wanted them to almost look numbing, because that’s where I was.”

Crawford goes to therapy once a week. And she’s not ashamed of that. She’s also not ashamed to admit that she sits in her car each time, deciding whether she’ll attend her appointment or not.

She ultimately does go in and feels better every time. “It’s like this thing you’ve been battling alone is finally being defeated in some way,” Crawford says.

The process of creating these deeply literal photographs helped Crawford identify her fear and figure out what led to her anxiety attacks. Although she didn’t realize it at the time, she was developing new coping skills even while shooting these self-portraits.

It’s important to understand that everyone is struggling with something. We’re never alone, no matter how lonely we feel.

“Get help. Always get help,” Crawford says. “There are so many resources out there. There is no reason to be ashamed that you need help. If mental illness was treated like physical illness, there would be no more stigma.”

By putting her struggles with anxiety out there for the world to see, Crawford is able to help others. She says that feeling alone has changed the way she lives her life.

This article originally appeared on 02.19.16

At one of the worst points, she was banging her head on the floor and the walls of her bedroom, raging and crying.

And I was doing the same because I just didn’t know what else to do anymore.

Something had triggered a full-on, pupil-dilated tantrum for my then-3-year-old, Emma, complete with hair-pulling and biting — both herself and me.

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That’s Emma around age 3. That sweet kid having a meltdown? HEARTBREAKING, let me tell you. All photos by Tana Totsch-Kimsey, used with permission.

Feeling just as helpless as I had the last dozen times this happened, I ticked down a mental checklist: Weird food? Wrong clothes? Too hot? Loud sounds? Missing toy? She fitfully stripped down to nothing, finally signaling to me that yes, it was the jammies. She curled up next to me (me, still sobbing) and promptly fell asleep, quiet and stark naked with brilliantly red-purple bruises blooming on her arms.

This is autism. Or one form of it anyway. It has many, many ways of showing itself.

It can be both good and bad. I’ll get to the good.

Fully known as autism spectrum disorder, it’s a neurodevelopmental quirk that results in various shades of social and behavioral issues. One of the most common challenges across the spectrum is communicating with others; people with autism struggle with the give-and-take flow of conversation, understanding how to interact with others, and processing their own or other people’s feelings. They may even seem lost in their own world or unable to express their thoughts or emotions either verbally or nonverbally.

“Lost in their own world” often looks like this. We took over 100 pictures on family picture day, and this was the only useable one.

I have a non-autistic child, too. She’s five years older than Emma, and I remember my biggest frustration as a brand-new parent was that I just wished she could tell me what she needed. And it wasn’t long before she did: “Mama” quickly became “I have this?” and “Don’t like that” and “I can do it myself” and — now — “Oh-em-gee, Mom, get out of my room, please, GOD, ugh!” She’s 10; it’s fun. She cracks jokes, she rails against gender biases, and she’s lined up for honors classes.

But when Emma came along next with an incessant buzz of energy — ripping pages from books presumably for the feel of it, climbing and jumping off tall things presumably for the thrill of it, eating rocks and grass (and just about anything really) presumably for the taste of it — and all of it without being able to tell me anything at all about what she needed … it took me a long while to understand that autism is not me being terrible at parenting.

What I learned is that Emma calls for a different kind of parenting altogether.

A typical day at home for us includes peanut butter smearing, cabinet scaling, mud eating, and paper ripping. It’s a little exhausting sometimes.

Progress actually happened when I let go of what was “wrong” with Emma and started figuring out what to do about it.

Emma was nearly 4 years old by the time she was given an official autism diagnosis. But when the panel of specialists finally handed over their “findings” of autism spectrum disorder after a particularly awful six-hour doctor appointment, I distinctly felt at that point (and still do) that I could not have cared less what they wanted to call it.

The moment of the diagnosis wasn’t a big deal to me because it didn’t really change anything. By then, Emma was already in speech and occupational therapy and going to preschool, and all of that was helping some. But the autism label did eventually lead us to a kind of therapy we hadn’t heard about before.

It’s called applied behavior analysis — ABA for short — and that has brought a lot of change.

Some doctors explain ABA as a reward system for when a child does something right, but it’s much more than that.

Behavioral scholars and autism experts date ABA treatments back to at least 1968, when a group of university researchers wrote in an introduction for the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis that ABA interventions could benefit individuals and society.

The treatment is highly individualized, with analysts measuring specific behaviors for each patient, crafting trials to change variables in controlled environments for each patient, and evaluating outcomes for each patient. It’s used for both children and adults who have intellectual or developmental issues, and it can help them gain skills in language, socialization, and attention as well as in more educational areas, like reading and math.

And this kid is gonna need more skills than taking selfies … although she’s quite amazing at them, IMO.

ABA is complex stuff. But put super simply, it’s empathy on an ultimate level.

It involves patiently observing and trying to understand what a person — often one who can’t fully communicate (or even necessarily process the things going on in the world) — feels and thinks.

ABA is putting yourself in that person’s place, realizing what is motivating them, and then tinkering with those behaviors using positive encouragement and reinforcement. These are “rewards” of a kind, but not necessarily tangible ones; Emma’s greatest motivators are hugs and kisses, high-fives, and tickles.

And wagon rides. And a mom deciding that chewing on a piece of grass to satisfy a sensory need is not so terrible in the big picture.

Even though ABA isn’t a new treatment, it’s gaining attention recently because of how life-changing the empathetic perspective can be. Agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institute of Mental Health (and several autism-research organizations) recognize ABA as an effective treatment for autism. Plus, access to ABA experts is expanding: Clinics with extensive ABA support and research existed mainly in larger cities for many years, but now services are being offered in places all over the country.

For me, an intensified effort to understand Emma through ABA, and to help her understand her world, changed everything.

She’s almost 6 years old now, and these days, she charms just about everyone she meets. She’s still mischievous and daring, but she also runs into a room and gives out hugs to everyone there. (Even strangers! It’s actually really awkward sometimes.)

Seems like a small thing, but she sings about how Old MacDonald has a cow that moos. (You should hear “Do You Wanna Build a Snowman” … adorbs!)

She can pick out her own jammies and a book to be read and a toy to keep her hands busy and the perfect spot to cuddle while she winds herself down to sleep. She giggles and beeps noses and plays chase with the dog and likes to announce, “Happy Tuesday!” She’s even learning to read and write, which blows my mind when I think of those long nights spent banging heads on floors.

Emma still has autistic-meltdown fits, of course, but I get it now.

Even I have moments where I just can’t even. It’s really not that hard for any parent or person to relate to that. What’s great, though, is that I’ve noticed how people outside the ABA therapy world — teachers and family and even total strangers — use the therapy, sometimes without even realizing it.

They change how they do things to adapt to what it must seem like from Emma’s perspective, and that’s how they end up really connecting with her. I find myself, too, exercising those empathy muscles with people other than Emma, and it makes me wonder sometimes:

What if we all did?

Dr. Dre has endured his fair share of up and down moments over the past year. They include recovery from a brain aneurysm and pushing through his divorce from Nicole Young who he married in 1996. Through it all, the famed producer has received plenty of encouraging words from his supporters, one of those being Snoop Dogg. In a video Dre recently posted on his Instagram page, he shared a touching video that Snoop sent him to hopefully boost his spirits.

Dre captioned it, “Thank you to everyone for sending me so much positive energy. I’d like to share this inspirational message from my brother @snoopdogg.”

“Ever since I was f*ckin’ with you before I was f*ckin’ with you, you could always take pain, anger, frustration, anything that was negative and you could get something positive out of it,” Snoop says in the video. “That’s why you the doctor. They say Snoop Dogg is an icon, he’s a God, he’s a king, but there’s one n**** to honor, and that’s you.”

He continues, “So you get your sh*t right and focus on being great. Take all that negative energy, all that shit that you dealing with: the death, the f*cking lawsuits, all that sh*t, put it all in your mind and your spirit and make something magical, n****.”

Simply put, Snoop wants Dre to “take that hurt, that anger, and that pain and make magic,” as he says in the video.

Snoop’s message comes after Dr. Dre was reportedly served with divorce papers at his grandmother’s funeral.

You can view Snoop’s video to Dr. Dre above.

The Brooklyn Nets won’t have Kyrie Irving suiting up for the foreseeable future. Irving has refused to get vaccinated against COVID-19, and as a result, the All-Star guard is in violation of New York City’s vaccine mandate. He was given the all-clear to practice at the team’s facility and can play in road games, but the Nets decided they do not want a part-time player around and told him to stay at home until he can play in every game.

It’s a weird situation, and while the team is 1-1 to start the year after a loss to the Milwaukee Bucks and a thrilling comeback win over the Philadelphia 76ers, Brooklyn can only throw its collective hands in the air. Fortunately for them, the fine folks at Saturday Night Live are here to help. Irving’s vaccine resistance was on the receiving end of a joke on the show this week, as a sketch called “Mellen” — a male version of Ellen DeGeneres who is played by Jason Sudeikis and actively seeks to be the worst person in the world, apparently – had Irving, played by Chris Redd, on as a guest.

While discussing his refusal to get vaccinated, Mellen had a doctor come out and put a needle in Irving’s neck (which is not where you get the vaccine injected into your body, of course) with the COVID vaccine. We assume if Irving does get the vaccine, this is not how it will actually happen.

You can watch the full sketch above.

More than two years removed from his last project, No.6 Collaborations Project, Ed Sheeran is set to return with his fourth album = at the end of the week. So far, Sheeran has released three songs in support of the project: “Shivers,” “Bad Habits,” and “Visiting Hours.” While he hoped things would be smooth sailing ahead of his upcoming album’s release, Sheeran experienced a bit of setback as he announced on social media that he recently tested positive for COVID-19.

“Hey guys. Quick note to tell you that I’ve sadly tested positive for Covid, so I’m now self-isolating and following government guidelines,” Sheeran wrote in his Instagram post. “It means that I’m now unable to plough ahead with any in person commitments for now, so I’ll be doing as many of my planned interviews/performances I can from my house. Apologies to anyone I’ve let down. Be safe everyone.”

His announcement comes after he shared the dates for his upcoming “+-=÷x” tour. If you’re against addressing the string of shows as the “plus minus equals divide multiply” tour, by the way, you can save a bit of time by simply calling it “The Mathematics Tour.” The tour only revealed dates for performances in Europe and the UK, as Sheeran will be performing on various dates between April and September 2022.

You can view Sheeran’s post above.

= is out 10/29 via Asylum/Atlantic. Pre-order it here.

Ed Sheeran is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Earlier this month, I read a story in Vice about group of NFT “investors” who had become the victims of a “rug pull.” According to the report, the developer of a planned game called “Evolved Apes” had taken the money investors thought would go to the project and instead simply vanished. The report went sort of viral, I assume partly on account of how absurd a picture it painted of the NFT world, and how hard NFTs are for the average person to understand.

As far as I can gather, the idea behind NFTs is that you can own a piece of digital art, like a digitized animation cel, its authenticity verified by the blockchain (somehow?), and that this is somehow an investing strategy. You pay for the digital art in the hopes that someone else later on will pay even more.

The idea for Evolved Apes then, was that this group of people would all own various NFTs, of these crude ape renderings. They would then pool their money to create a fighting game and some other multimedia projects involving those apes, and the games would, presumably, become more popular, causing the original NFTs to rise in value. For most people, I imagine this idea sounds both bafflingly inane and staggeringly idiotic, an attempt to somehow combine a Ponzi scheme with beanie babies and crypto. The weird idea at the center of it is that the tail can basically wag the dog; that one can begin with the individual, meaningless non-story elements of a story, and then simply create a story incorporating them, thus giving them value. Conceptually, it’s a bit like trying to make Looney Tunes as a pump-and-dump scheme for your rabbit drawing.

At some point during Marvel’s absurdly extravagant premiere for its new movie The Eternals, which blocked off half of Hollywood Blvd, had police monitoring the crowd from rooftops and featured in-house Marvel “reporters” interviewing guests on the red carpet like it was The Oscars, I wondered if what I was experiencing was essentially just a massive-budget NFT scheme. Disney and Marvel own “The Eternals,” a piece of IP (intellectual property) created by Jack Kirby in 1976, as part of their corporate assets ledger. On its own, the rights to a semi-obscure, 45-year-old comic book can’t be worth much. But what if Disney could create… an entire ecosystem of content… in which those Eternals drawings could… fly around and fight and stuff? Then they might be worth millions! Billions, even!

I know, I know, I’m supposed to be reviewing the movie, and not the spectacle of the premiere or the corporate strategy and blah blah blah. But in a roundabout way, I am reviewing The Eternals the movie. To be sure, The Eternals isn’t the first semi-obscure comic book property to be turned into a film. But it feels more than any before it like the tail trying to wag the dog, driven less by the ideas of its creators than the hopes of its investors.

Chloé Zhao directs, hot off her best picture-winning Nomadland, from a script written by Zhao, Patrick Burleigh, Ryan Firpo, and Kaz Firpo (a name with great mouthfeel, I shall never forget it). Disney has lately been the best in the business at both spotting and nurturing young talent, and The Eternals production seemed like it was shaping up to be a case in point. Yet the film itself is a compellingly disjointed chimera that seems to move the goalposts of its own mythology every five minutes.

Eternals begins with a few paragraphs of prologue. “The Eternals,” we’re told, are a race of immortal humanoids, created by the same “Celestials” that created the universe. The Eternals’ purpose, then, is to defend Earth from the “Deviants,” a race of destructive predators who are always naysaying your investment strategies.

In the first sequence, the Eternal Sersi, played by Gemma Chan, has to save her human boyfriend Dane, played by Kit Harrington from Game Of Thrones, from a man-eating deviant, which basically looks like a stegosaurus made of CGI taffy. Sersi accomplishes this task using her power to transform inanimate objects into other inanimate objects (like a London bus into flower petals, or cobblestones into quicksand), and with the help of her teenage sidekick, Sprite (Lia McHugh), a shapeshifter and illusionist.

Dane manages to absorb all this, and the news that his girlfriend is an immortal 5,000-year-old alien fighter, with all the glibness of a Joss Whedon character ordering schwarma (he also apparently never questioned why his girlfriend’s bestie and roommate is a middle schooler). Almost immediately Dane has to ask why, if the Eternals have been protecting Earth all these years, they just stood back and let Thanos destroy half of all life in the universe a few years back (to say nothing of Hitler and Adam Levine and whatnot).

That Dane has apparently lived through Avengers: End Game along with us may partially explain his nonchalance about the supernatural. But the scene raises the much bigger philosophical question, of why the Avengers and the Eternals should need to exist in the same fictional dimension at all. In two and a half plus hours, we never get closer to an answer. It just feels like corporate fashion. Someone somewhere simply decided that existing alongside The Avengers would make the Eternals more valuable, like dangling the possibility of a future corporate merger. Once again this is less a treat for viewers than a promise to investors. Does Disney know the difference, or are they deliberately conflating the two?

The Eternals, it turns out, are led by Ajak, played by Salma Hayak, whose power is being able to communicate with a Celestial (a massive being with a mostly unintelligible basso voice who looks like a continent-sized version of The Iron Giant). Ajak in turn guides her team of Eternals, which includes Ikaris (pronounced “Icarus”), played by Richard Madden from Game Of Thrones, who can fly and shoot laser beams from his eyes, Kingo (Kumail Nanjiani) who shoots hand rockets, speedy Makkari (Lauren Ridloff), brainy (and gay!) Phastos (Brian Tyree Henry), psychoactive Druig (Barry Keoghan), super-strong Gilgamesh (Don Lee), and weapon-conjuring ‘Thena (Angelina Jolie). The rub of the first scene is that the Deviants they all thought were dead are back, and now they have to get the band back together in order to defeat them.

Unfortunately for Chloé Zhao and the writers of The Eternals, we’ve all seen that movie, so it can’t just be that simple. Instead, and without spoiling anything, it turns out that The Eternals’ mission might not be so straightforwardly noble after all. Their mission is driven by a guiding philosophy seemingly borrowed from Game Of Thrones (along with the Stark actors): What do we say to the God of death? Not today.

I always loved that line, and on a conceptual level, it’s kind of fun that Disney has made a film about heroes learning to defy God. Because, hey, maybe God is a remote micromanager trying to make decisions with no regard for conditions on the ground. In practice, this story is mind-bendingly convoluted and contradictory. Throughout it all, the Eternals team is constantly coming together and fracturing, factionalizing along various lines. They feud, fight, and fall in love with each other, complete with what I’m pretty sure is Marvel’s first depiction of two superheroes having sex on a beach. (Can Sersi transform the sand on their genitals into Gold Bond powder? Let’s explore this further).

Zhao and Co. do their best to individualize all these characters. Kingo has become a Bollywood star, Druig has gone Kurtz in the Amazon, Thena has some kind of remembering disease known as “Madweary” which makes her disassociate and try to kill the other Eternals from time to time, and Sprite is cursed to live out all eternity as a pre-pubescent tween, a la Kirsten Dunst’s character from Interview With The Vampire. Nanjiani, now buff for some reason (does shooting magic lightning bolts from your fingers really require muscle?) actually succeeds in squeezing laughs from the material a few times, but mostly the characters have so little room to breathe between rationalizing the ever-shifting plot that even Marvel’s normally successful formula for comedic insouciance doesn’t really work.

As in virtually all of these movies, the heroes must eventually come to the conclusion that humanity is worth saving, in spite of its faults — like the time they genocided the Aztecs or dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima (events referenced directly in The Eternals). The odd thing is that The Eternals has virtually zero human characters that might justify this view. None get more than a few minutes of screentime, such that The Eternals choosing to save them or not seems mostly a matter of demigod caprice.

It’s an open question of who the antagonist even is. Zhao and company will introduce an admirable level of moral complexity, only to snuff it out one or two scenes later for no apparent reason in what’s meant to be a rousing triumph. The action is not un-compelling, it’s just very, very weird.

It feels like they aren’t really trying to get us, the audience, to engage with any of these characters on a serious emotional level. They’re simply trying to build a massive playground in which these pieces of IP can continue to interact with one another accumulating maximum value. The narrative lengths to which the hired-gun creatives are forced to go to in order to accomplish this corporate mission are often comical and sporadically admirable, but what they haven’t done is create characters or a story that’s emotionally meaningful in any way.

Still, The Eternals is hard not to recommend solely on the grounds that it’s so flailingly bizarre. It’s odd to a degree that’s impossible to convey without spoilers. I need you to see it so I know that I’m not hallucinating.

‘The Eternals’ is available exclusively in theaters November 5th. Vince Mancini is on Twitter. You can access his archive of reviews here.

As it becomes more clear than ever that climate change is one of the great crises facing us right now, plenty of musicians and artists are banding together to do their part to raise awareness. Blackpink are one, joining the Dear Earth special to let their fans know exactly where they stand when it comes to climate change. Dear Earth is “an epic global celebration of our planet and what we need to do to slow climate change. Sprinkled with musical performances, Dear Earth also contains well-known climate activists, creators, and celebs who will all share ways to make our lives more sustainable.”

For their performance during the special, Blackpink appeared in a glass box decorated to look like a normal living room, but throughout the performance special effects changed the backdrop outside their stage to project all different natural landscapes, emphasizing the beauty of the planet and the stakes for what we’re trying to save. Since releasing their official debut full-length, The Album, last year, Blackpink also performed another epic livestream with Youtube called “The Show.” Since Covid-19 has interferred with touring plans for most artists, live performances and virtual shows have been a safer bet of late.

Check out their rendition of “Stay” above.