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During a recent live stream for the Adobe MAX 2020 Creativity Conference, Tyler The Creator revealed a creative video in which he reveals his favorite films and albums to a very special interviewer: Himself. The interview, which was edited by D’Anthony Hamilton on Adobe Premiere for a discussion on “thought leadership” — a category Tyler knows a bit about, as his pioneering vision behind endeavors like Odd Future, Loiter Squad, and The Jellies!, as well as the innovative artistry attached to his own music, has opened doors for other DIY successors like Brockhampton.

The interview video finds Tyler subtly mocking the cultural gatekeepers of hip-hop, adopting a very Funk Flex-ish, New York old head demeanor to grill himself about movies and albums. After running down a list of NY hip-hop “legends” including Fabolous, Jim Jones, and Papoose, “NY Ty” asks “What’s your five favorite albums? And I know you one of them weird, eclectic n****s that be like, ‘Ehhh, Korg,’ and all that.” It’s definitely reminiscent of the way establishment hip-hop heads received Tyler during his initial rise to fame after “Yonkers.”

Tyler reveals that his five favorite albums include Eminem’s Marshall Mathers LP, Erykah Badu’s Mama’s Gun, NERD’s In Search Of…, and Pharrell’s In My Mind. He can’t come up with a fifth. Meanwhile, the movies are easier: 20th Century Women, The Cat in the Hat, Napoleon Dynamite, and Scary Movie 2 all top his list. He also reveals advice he’d give to his 18-year-old self, his favorite places to visit, and which artists he’d want to work with.

The whole thing is hilarious and insightful. Check out his answers above.

In 2019, Thom Zimny and Bruce Springsteen co-directed Western Stars, a meditation of sorts based on Springsteen’s album of the same name. Springsteen’s thinking was he didn’t want to embark on a tour promoting that solo album, especially with plans for a new, full E Street Band album on the horizon the next year, with a whole huge tour attached. So, instead, the film would serve as the tour.

Well, hey, welcome to 2020. And guess what? That Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band world tour to promote the new album, Letter To You, didn’t really pan out, as how most things really didn’t pan out this year. Luckily, Zimny has a new film that documents Springsteen and the band recording the new album at Springsteen’s home recording studio in New Jersey. It’s a look inside how this band, which in this incarnation has been together (with a couple of exceptions) for over 40 years, gets together and creates something pretty special. And the thing is, now, this documentary (which will premiere on Apple TV) is pretty much the only “live” performance we’re going to get anytime soon.

Ahead of the film’s release, we spoke to Zimny, who didn’t know it when he made Letter To You, but now, his film will once again have to do double duty.

Letter To You almost feels like a direct sequel to Western Stars, stylistically.

I think the style of filmmaking on Letter to You is drawing on just the challenges that I’ve watched Bruce do over the years. Which is, I didn’t want to repeat myself…

And I don’t think it does because it’s about the process, but it still has Bruce’s voiceovers, which is almost poetry, like the last film.

Sure. I think what I try to do with these films is, there are certain things of Bruce’s narration and score that really give you an opportunity to expand on what the songs are. So, it kind of gives me this opportunity to step away from it being just a studio film, or behind the scenes kind of thing, or a concert film with Western Stars. What I’m doing is straddling many different genres. I’m not quite sure what it falls under. It’s not typical documentary; it’s not narrative film. It’s a thing that is a combination of many filmmaking genres that I like to play. And at the same time, tying Western Stars to this film does make sense, but I also tie it back to Bruce from the Broadway show and the book.

Oh, for sure…

Reflective pieces and narration. So, I get it. There’s a tone in there that he’s been using since Broadway, of reflecting on his life and music and certain themes. And that is reminiscent in some of the voiceover of Letter To You.

He’s also said this is a continuing conversation with his fans, which I always kind of interpret as starting with the book, then the Broadway show. And then into Western Stars and then to this. It’s almost like the only person that’s going to deconstruct Bruce Springsteen is Bruce Springsteen.

One hundred percent. I think it’s a great point. And I think I live with that understanding. And that’s the kind of place where the art conversation happens in the filmmaking process. where I’m really taking cues from lyric writing, or taking cues to a score. And letting myself feel for this music, and trying to convey visually, a narrative that is aligned and in sync with the emotions of making of this record. And the space itself, the studio was an amazing space to film in.

Oh yeah, I’ve been in that studio. It’s incredible.

It’s an amazing space. And something was happening there that I’ve been wanting to get an understanding of: what happens in the studio? And what is this thing, exactly, when a band like E Street and Bruce come together in a room. And can the cameras capture that lightning in a bottle?

The first film you did with Bruce was the Born to Run documentary, right?

The very first one was Live in New York, but the very first film was the first documentary I made, Wings for Wheels. Making the Born to Run record. In that, I saw the struggles of the studio.

In Wings for Wheels, Bruce is so meticulous you almost get the impression that version of the E Street Band was just like, “Who does this guy think he is?” How is Bruce different today watching him put together an E Street recording, versus the archive footage you have gone through?

Yeah, that’s a great question. I think as a filmmaker that I could look at the archive footage and see similarities of some of the moments of Bruce standing behind the board. And there are certain gestures that are just the same. But the difference in this current situation of recording Letter To You is that you see, after working on films where the studio session was, at times, really intense — like the making of Born to Run, or The River, or Darkness — you see the opposite with this. And this film is, it’s a master class of sorts because they walk in and there’s not a sound that they’re chasing. They’re really out of place, that the studio is in control.

It did feel like in the past Bruce was chasing a sound and, here, they’d finish a song and Bruce would kind of just say, “good enough.”

I don’t want to speak for Bruce, but I think what the film reflects is that there’s an acknowledgement of a E Street sound. And in Letter To You, I did see a band come in at the height of their powers where Max Weinberg’s playing is just unbelievable on this record. There was a mission. And I just feel like that’s the beauty, which is an awareness of who you are and what you do. And some of the voiceover, Bruce, I think says it best of the power of E Street, but also the power of that awareness at this chapter.

Does he seem more open today than when you first started working with him?

Well, I think when I look back at the 20 years of working with Bruce, there’s always been a path on pushing the films forward. There’s never the feeling of relying on any sort of formulaic approach to telling any stories, whether it’s music or film. So, in a way, the basis of this collaboration, I see it as time and trust, and he’s giving me those two gifts. And the trust is to explore. How are we going to tell the story of the band playing in a barn? Is it a concert film? Well, maybe it’s not, that’s not enough.

With Western Stars, Bruce didn’t want to tour for that album and that film was what he did instead. With Letter To You the plan was a big tour, that obviously isn’t happening now. So have you thought about how this film really has to do some heavy lifting for this record? And did that change how you presented it?

Oh, as a filmmaker, I’m really aware, with the band not going out, it has a place to live alongside the album and also the history of E Street. But also more importantly, the energy of this band recording in the studio, though it’s not a live event, it has an energy that I think, as we all hunger for the next E Street tour to arrive, this is a satisfying moment to witness. And it’s just a great companion. I hope it’s a great companion to be with the record and the listening experience of the record, because you see the band play this music in such an energetic way and full of life. And those are the elements that I see as a filmmaker, but also as a fan, when I go see Bruce and the band live. So I’m grateful that this thing was made on many levels, but one of the key things is that, in this current time with people not being able to tour, I love the idea that this film can live in that space. And fans can connect with this new music this way, which is as close as we can get to a live event until things change.

So, did that change how you edited it?

No. I don’t think the current situation influenced the way the film was edited, but I do think that there’s a bittersweet sadness when they toast to the road. And they’re so excited about this new music. And they’re at a place of talking about going on the road. And we’ve come to realize that’s not a reality. So I think it would be wrong to not say that the outside world doesn’t influence the work. But in that way of, I made this in an apartment during pandemic, so the outside forces are there. But there wasn’t a moment of, now let’s make this the tour, psychologically. I just wanted to make the best film possible. And tell a story that engages the fans in a way that felt new, and also represent the power and the beauty of this new record.

You can contact Mike Ryan directly on Twitter.

The RX is Uproxx Music’s stamp of approval for the best albums, songs, and music stories throughout the year. Inclusion in this category is the highest distinction we can bestow, and signals the most important music being released throughout the year. The RX is the music you need, right now.

Blackstarkids started small when they were searching for a label partner to release their upcoming album Whatever, Man. But all of labels based locally in the trio’s Kansas City hometown, for whatever reason, were ghosting them. “It got to the point where I emailed maybe 30-40 people,” Ty recalls over a Zoom call sitting next to his bandmates Deiondre and The Babe Gabe. “It’s not even like people were rejecting us, they just didn’t care.” Finally, Ty decided to throw a Hail Mary and send a cold note to the general email address on listed Dirty Hit’s website, label home to The 1975 and Beabadoobee.

Within a day, the group was on the phone with a representative from the label’s A&R department. “We have a cool conversation, but I’m still thinking I’m never gonna hear from them again,” Ty remembers. “[The rep is] like, ‘we’ll be in touch.’ An hour later, the owner DMs us and was like, ‘Yo, I want to sign you guys.’ Dirty Hit were the first people to give us a chance, and no matter what, I really appreciate them for giving us a chance when there was nobody else giving us a chance.” In a modern record label economy that often puts aside gut instinct about a new artist in favor of analytics and trends, the group’s signing sight-unseen to a major indie label is a story more or less of the past. It’s a testament to the instant power that you can feel emanating from the speakers when you click play on “Acting Normal,” the opening track on Whatever, Man, the trio’s first release with Dirty Hit.

The group presents a unique blend of sounds informed by the influences brought to the table by each of its members. When asked about who they were listening to while writing Whatever, Man, they bounce back and forth between genre, era, and aesthetic, name dropping artists like Tame Impala, The Smashing Pumpkins, Clairo, Mac DeMarco, and many more. But, as with many young artists who are making music in the late 2010s, no group was more impactful in the formation of Blackstarkids than Odd Future. “Seeing Black kids make that kind of music, it was like, wow. You can really do whatever you want and create whatever sound you want,” recalls The Babe Gabe. Ty adds, “I just liked the creativity and their expression. And of course, the aesthetic that they had and how much music they put out.” Needless to say, it won’t be long before there is a Blackstarkids sketch show á la Loiter Squad. “It’ll most likely happen,” Deiondre explains with a laugh. “We come up with so many skits as jokes and reenact skits.”

Although they are fresh out of high school, the trio has been making music together for the better part of three years, their collective output prolific and consistent. Ty was first drawn to the aesthetic appearance of his future bandmates: Deiondre’s Instagram presence struck him as impressive, while it was one of the outfits that The Babe Gabe wore to school that caught his attention. Initially, Ty was making music with both Deiondre and The Babe Gabe separately, before they collectively realized that they could combine all their strengths into one project to capture all of their individual talents in one place. Thus, Blackstarkids was born. “There’s a picture of all three of us from before we started the group, too,” Ty remember. “We had no idea we were gonna be a group when the picture was taken.”

The new album Whatever, Man, the trio’s third release in the span of year, feels like a culmination that incorporates all of their influences into one coherent and focused piece of work. The LP is impressive in its scope, and executed with the grace of a veteran group as the members seamlessly flip between melodic vocals and spitting rhymes, with most songs built upon a foundation of hip-hop beats and accented with reverb-soaked guitars and modulated vocals. While the single “Britney Bitch” shows the group’s knack for catchy hooks and more pop-centric song structures, tracks like “Beatrix Kiddo” reveals a more debaucherous undercurrent that will surely come through in the group’s live show when they are able to finally tour behind the record.

All told, Whatever, Man is an album about throwing caution to the wind and having fun with your friends. It was written during what Deiondre calls “a really good time in our lives,” a reflection of the moment when you look around and realize that the people you’ve surrounded yourself with can all be parts of a bigger equation to create something beautiful together. It’s an album best understood and experienced in an active setting, ideally when you are (safely) spending time with friends. In fact, the group has a specific request for listening parameters. It’s important “not to take it too seriously,” Ty instructs. “Don’t just sit all stiff and try to form your opinion.” “Go take a walk and listen to it!” The Babe Gabe adds.

For Blackstarkids, the most important aspect of Whatever, Man — and all of their music — is the listener’s ability to find comfort in the music and lyrics, and relate to the stories being told. Collectively, the group hopes that their growing profile can have the same effect on others that Odd Future had on them, to inspire creativity and serve as inspiration for other young people. “Even if it’s not relatable to me, if I just feel like it’s relatable to somebody because you’re just being real, I respect that,” Ty explains. “You’re necessary to somebody. I think that’s cool. That’s what grabs me.”

The music industry is full of gatekeepers that have held their job for decades, making decisions based on what’s worked in the past. But the definition of success in the music industry is beginning to evolve in a way that it hasn’t before, increasingly defined and dictated by the internet, and young people who take the music and run with it in new and original ways. Things are changing, and the kids are ready to take control. Inspired and invigorated, Blackstarkids will be right there to lead the charge.

Whatever, Man is out October 23 on Dirty Hit. Get it here.

Dave Grohl and the rest of Foo Fighters have been performing live for decades now, so they’ve done a number of radio appearances over the years. One of their earliest was for the Rockline radio show in 1996, and now the band has released that session as an Amazon Music-exclusive EP, Live On The Radio 1996.

Ahead of the release, Foo Fighters shared a photo of an original DAT (digital audio tape) of the session from producer Scott Weiss, who recorded it. The band wrote, “Might have to get our hands on that DAT…,” and they linked to Weiss’ website where he wrote:

“I was cleaning my garage and came across this DAT tape in an old box. I thought “Oh yeah, this is from that time I recorded the Foo Fighters for a nationwide radio broadcast!”

In 1996, I was working at a small recording studio in Seattle. The studio took a booking to do a radio interview session with the Foo Fighters and I was booked as the audio engineer. It was a really fun night. Putting this tape in and giving it a listen after all these years was such a flashback! It’s a unique recording and I don’t think Foo fans often get a chance to hear Dave sing like he did that night. And the Watershed improve was a show stopper! Thanks for the memories guys!”

Then, early this morning, the band formally announced the EP by sharing the post again and adding, “‘Alexa, play Rockline from March 18th, 1996.’”

Weiss also shared a statement about the release, saying of the alternate version of “Wattershed” that details a trip to Canada, “The band laughed and then dove in and started to work up the idea. The show would cut away for commercials and [Foo Fighters] would practice the new ‘Wattershed’ idea. The version of Wattershed that would soon be known as ‘Water Fred’ was born.”

Listen to the EP here or stream it below.

On Wednesday’s episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live, Jimmy Kimmel introduced Eric Andre as “the weirdest talk show host there is.” He’s also one of the weirdest talk show guests, as evidenced by The Eric Andre Show creator sitting on a lifeguard station during his interview with Kimmel (who’s had an interesting week). “I have to be safe,” he explained. “I have to keep my distance. You’re known as the most diseased man in Hollywood.”

Later in the chat, Andre discussed an Eric Andre Show stunt with John Cena that went horribly wrong. Cena, a professional wrestler, did everything right, but “we prepped for the stunt wrong. That metal shelf came over and clocked me on the head, and I got concussed. I went to the hospital.” Andre compared his injury to Fred Flintstone or Bugs Bunny get clocked on the noggin with a comically large mallet, “and I haven’t been able to speak English since. I memorized this interview phonetically actually.”

Adult Swim’s The Eric Andre Show returns for season five this Sunday, October 25, at midnight EST with Tyler the Creator, Wiz Khalifa, Chance the Rapper, Henry Rollins, T-Pain, Judy Greer, Blake Griffin, Luis Guzman, and Lizzo in the Bird Up outfit.

And as always, #Investigate311.

Last night’s CMT Music Awards honored the best in country music, but there were plenty of crossovers into the pop world as well.

At last year’s CMAs, Halsey popped up to join Lady A (then known as Lady Antebellum) for a rendition of their “What If I Never Get Over You” and her “Graveyard.” She approved of the “Y’allsey” nickname that was bestowed upon her, and now Y’allsey has made her return at the CMT Awards. This time, she joined Kelsea Ballerini to perform “The Other Girl.” The performance was filmed in a pub set, with Halsey getting up on the bar for a bit of Coyote Ugly action.

Aside from those two, other artists who performed during the broadcast included Ashley McBryde, Dan + Shay, Gabby Barrett, Jimmie Allen and Noah Cyrus, Kane Brown, Little Big Town, Luke Bryan, Luke Combs and Brooks & Dunn, Maren Morris, Morgan Wallen, Sam Hunt, and Shania Twain.

Meanwhile, some other pop folks popped up as presenters. Taylor Swift made a virtual appearance to give Gabby Barrett the Breakthrough Video Of The Year award, an honor she won herself 13 years ago for “Tim McGraw.” Demi Lovato also made a brief appearance to introduce Dan + Shay’s performance.

Other presenters included Brandi Carlile, Diplo, Idina Menzel, Jessica Chastain, Katy Perry, Kelly Clarkson, Rob Thomas, and Tanya Tucker.

Check out the highlights above.

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

Earlier this week, President Trump walked out of a 60 Minutes interview with veteran journalist Lesley Stahl. One could fairly conclude that the taping sessions did not go well, given that Trump cut the whole thing short, and now, 60 Minutes is previewing one of the confrontations that preceded his departure. It’s a contentious moment with Stahl calling out Trump for lying about how he “created the greatest economy in the history of our country.” To that, Stahl responded, “You know that’s not true!” Well, he shot back, “It’s totally true,” to which she held firm: “No.”

Trump obviously wasn’t thrilled to be called out on his lies and embellishments, and apparently, the situation escalated to the point where he didn’t wish to continue. Stahl certainly isn’t Sean Hannity, who doesn’t (as 60 Minutes does) have “a history of asking tough questions of presidential candidates during the run-up to the election.” Well, Trump woke up this morning and tweeted a (second) threat to “soon be giving a first in television history full, unedited preview of the vicious attempted ‘takeout’ interview of me by Lesley Stahl.” He claims that she was full of “anger” in the face of his “full, flowing and ‘magnificently brilliant’ answers to their ‘Q’s’.”

So, he’s claiming to have his own tapes of the interview? That’s very strange, but yes, that’s what he was also suggesting last night.

After word broke that he’d left the interview early, the mask-adverse Trump tweeted a strange clip of Stahl not wearing a mask.

And he also tweeted out some photos of Kayleigh McEnany handing Stahl a book-shaped object that Trump claims contains his contributions to healthcare. Well, the full interview should be an interesting watch on Sunday. (And maybe Trump’s got some “unedited” version on tape, too. Who really knows these days?)

Her father, Dick Johnson’s dementia diagnosis was what inspired Kirsten Johnson to make Dick Johnson Is Dead, a fanciful documentary in which Kirsten imagines various scenarios for her father’s death and makes him act them out — complete with make-up, fake blood, stunt people… the whole nine. It all culminates in a tragicomic fake funeral, where parishioners know Dick isn’t really dead but grieve anyway, in a surreal scene that makes you wonder who’s performing for who.

Hearing what it was about (dementia!), I initially avoided it, the way I do virtually all movies about death and dementia. It’s not something many of us are eager to relive. Yet when I finally saw it, I found it not only wonderful, but weirdly uplifting. Something about the way Johnson shifts seamlessly from history to memory to imagination, constantly filling the cracks between fiction and non-fiction, allows us the space we need for the magical thinking we require without ever feeling like we’re lying to ourselves.

It’s a hell of a trick, but it’s one Kirsten Johnson may be uniquely suited for. Growing up in a family of Seventh-day Adventists who were always convinced the apocalypse was about to start, she says thought a lot about the future. And unlike Catholicism, Johnson says, Adventism didn’t have a tradition of visual expression for their ideas about Jesus and Mary and Heaven. Which in some way made her do the work on her own, developing what she calls an “intense visual curiosity.”

She’s put that into practice over the past decades as a prolific documentary cinematographer, though in the process worried that she wouldn’t be able to have a family. She eventually had one, with the help of an egg donor and a gay couple she now co-parents with. I spoke with Johnson this week, about how her dad is doing these days, some of the scenes she wanted to shoot but couldn’t, and trying not to compare your kids’ childhoods to you own.

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I see you’ve got a special background — or is that in the picture? [Johnson moves the picture around so I can see that it’s a printed picture of her father’s face attached to a popsicle-stick thing]

It’s a Dick on a stick. Dad is here… it’s so crazy, I’m in the middle of moving his room out, and those are literally my mom’s ashes behind me. They’re the best Zoom background ever.

Were you moving him there or…

Dad is now in a dementia care facility. He has been here with me [in New York] for the last three and a half years, where the film is set. But now he’s down in D.C. So we’re moving these shelves out in a little bit. Box of ashes is the last thing on the shelves.

Was there a turning point or something that made you decide you needed to move him there?

Certainly COVID. Honestly, probably in September of last year, it was pretty clear to me I wasn’t going to be able to keep him home with me much longer because he was waking up so much in the middle of the night that I was not getting proper sleep. And I was starting to have heart palpitations because I was so stressed by the lack of sleep, but I was totally unable to conceive of moving him. Then when the pandemic started, I was traveling, so my brother came up and took him down to live with him in D.C. And it’s just been beautiful for the two of them to have a chance to get to live together and also for my brother to understand how challenging it is to be with dementia on a 24-hour basis. He and his wife together were able to have the lucidity to say, none of us can do this anymore because my dad’s very much himself as he is in the movie, and yet he has no sense of time. So it’s like he can wake up in the middle of the night every hour and you have to wake up with him or else he’ll be out the door. You have to be able to function 24 hours a day as a human being taking care of him, so he needs multiple people to be able to work all of his time shifts, basically.

How does he like it?

The place is fantastic. He likes it. He likes the food and the people, but it was wrenching to put him in. I went down to visit him for the first time about a month ago on his birthday, and he was just like, “please take me home.” I was like, oh, you’re killing me, man. So it’s hard.

I assume he can’t remember all the reasons that he’s there in the first place every time he wants out, right?

That’s right. I think he does forget that he has anywhere to go or that I could come get him, but then me being there, he was like, ‘The car’s right here. Why aren’t we leaving?’

This is one of my things about the film: it’s an ongoing process. It’s not finished yet in any kind of way.

Can you tell me about your upbringing with your father? What it was like, where you guys lived, what kind of childhood was it?

I had an extraordinary childhood. I had two very loving parents. We lived in a wonderful neighborhood called Beaux Arts Village in Washington State. It’s a community that shares a lakefront together. So I grew up in the big trees near a lake, and my parents were both raised as Seventh-day Adventists and that was their entire world in many ways. We went to church every Saturday, but the neighborhood we lived in and the neighborhood kids weren’t Seventh-day Adventists. So I sort of had two worlds, but I went to a Seventh-day Adventist school. At that time, Adventists thought the apocalypse was coming. We may think the apocalypse is coming now, but in some ways you can say the apocalypse has been coming for a long time and it hasn’t happened yet. I thought a lot about the future as a child. I didn’t feel worried because I had a really wonderful world I was a part of, but I thought a lot about Heaven. I had a brother who was really interested in fossils. Traditional Adventists believe that the world is 6,000 years old, but my brother found fossils that were 32 million years old, and my parents accepted that.

In the same way that movies were… now Seventh-day Adventists will watch movies. In fact, thrillingly, there were reviews of [Dick Johnson Is Dead] in the Adventist Today and Spectrum Magazine, which are these Adventists magazines, but at the time of my childhood, that was verboten territory. But I watched TV and I had a life of imagination for sure.

Then with your kids, what will their upbringing be like, will it be a lot different than yours?

What a wonderful question. Their upbringing is radically different than mine because they’re in a radically different period of history. They are also not my biological children. They were born with an egg donor. I am co-parenting with two gay men, Ira Sachs and Boris Torres. We live next door to each other in New York City. The kids go back and forth between the two households, so they have three very different backgrounds. But this year with COVID, we ended up being in a borrowed house of a friend up in Connecticut and I had this constant feeling of returning to my own childhood with them. We were going swimming in the lakes, we were going bike riding — all the things we never do in New York City. I thought a lot about how, in some ways grieving never ends, but people never die. My mom’s presence, my dad’s presence was so with me this summer with the kids out in this landscape, that was like the landscape of my childhood.

What was that decision process with the co-parenting and everything?

Well, it’s literally just this mind-blowing story. Basically, I was traveling, filming a great deal throughout my thirties when my mom had Alzheimer’s and I always imagined I was going to have children, but I really was so emotionally connected to my mom during that period, I was sort of aging with her in some ways, losing my own memory along with her.

I was also filming in some incredibly intense situations, in Darfur, Liberia, and Afghanistan, and it was getting more and more difficult for me to remember where I had just filmed. I think that’s a protective mechanism for my brain, given how intense and difficult the situations were. Cameraperson is very much about this, but I got back from weeks and weeks of filming in Sudan and my mother died the next day after I got back. I wasn’t with her. I was so unprepared for her death, even though I had been grieving her loss for almost a decade because of the Alzheimer’s. I just got this knowledge. I was like, “Oh, I am having children.”

It was just that clear, and I’ve never had that happen to me in my life, something hitting me like a bolt of lightning. I was dating a guy at the time and I said, you know, hey, can we have some kids? And he was just like, “What are you talking about? You’ve been in Sudan for five weeks.” And he and I really loved each other, but he really didn’t want to have children. Of course, he has children now. This thing of what people don’t know about themselves yet…

So we finally broke up and I started looking into possibilities that I didn’t feel comfortable with. As an older woman without financial stability, the adoption agencies weren’t very into me. I looked into sperm donors and I searched for several years. Then I was at a Sundance party talking to a friend and this fellow filmmaker who I’d met once before was walking by and overheard me talking about, what am I going to do? And he said, “Oh, me and my boyfriend are really interested in having kids. Do you want to get together and talk about it?”

I said, yes, because I knew I had never wanted to do it by myself. I didn’t want the children to not have a father. I didn’t imagine that I wanted them to have two fathers, but it was an amazing process. It took us three and a half years of trying, and at a certain point, it was definitely like, I’m too old. I sort of said to them, you should really try to do it with someone else. And they were like, well, uh-oh, we really want you to be the mom now. So that’s when we decided to go with the egg donor idea. We implanted two eggs because we didn’t think that anything would work, and two weeks later I was pregnant with a boy and a girl and the children are now eight years old.

Part of the catharsis of watching this movie, I feel, is that it’s you’re giving your dad the sendoff that we all wish that we could. Do you feel like, having a mom that had Alzheimer’s, that you’re doing some of the things with your dad that you’d wished you’d done with your mom?

Oh, definitely. And you talk about the sendoff — we did a great job for my mom’s funeral. She would’ve loved it. She was one of those people who put on a good party, set an amazing table… she really knew how to give a good send-off. And I just remember the feeling after the funeral, she doesn’t get to see everything we did and I don’t get to hug her. So in some ways, I would say the funeral was as much for me as it was for my father. I really wanted to hug my father after his funeral, and I got to.

Are there important things that you learned from your mom’s passing? When my grandmother died of Alzheimer’s, I remember hearing that you’re not supposed to quiz people on who they recognize and what they remember because it’s traumatizing for them. And so there were all these things that I did that I learned afterwards were supposedly bad things to do, but how could I know at the time? Do you feel like you get a second chance to do things differently or better or having more knowledge now?

That’s so interesting that you were told that. I’m not sure that that was right. I think how cool that you were having a dialogue with her. How did she respond?

She just always seemed confused. She had a much steeper decline than it seems like what your dad has. It was pretty fast actually. Once we found out it all sort of went at once. She lost her personality pretty early on I would say.

That’s what’s just so devastating, the loss of personality. When people become mean, are so afraid or so anxious. That’s the thing I think that’s extraordinary about my father’s situation, he’s not losing his personality. He doesn’t know where he is or what the time is, but he will say, “I just want to make sure you know I love you.” It’s just like, oh my God, amazing. But also challenging to hear that 7,000 times a day. But I’m deeply interested in the fact that this world is so much more complex than we can ever understand. That we each have these deep blind spots. That we cannot know certain things until we’ve experienced them. So I can’t know what I will feel upon the death of my father, even though I’ve practiced a million times now.

That was the project of this film was to stay engaged in the not knowing. So not only did I learn something, this movie was set up so it would teach us how to make it. I was saying to all my wonderful collaborators, how do you want to die?

So you laughed when I said, how do you want to die? How do you want to die, Vince?

Great question. I don’t know. It’s hard to know whether you want to have the instant one or the one where you get to say goodbye first. They both seem good and bad in their own ways.

That is the crux of it, isn’t it? Nicely said. Yeah, that is hard to know.

I don’t. I’ve seen it both ways and I don’t know which one’s better, so…

Right. And I think one of our challenges is why we’re in denial about death is some of us have seen it worse, right? We’ve seen the worst possible outcomes, or we’ve already experienced pain that’s so intense that we’re just like, “No, thank you, not thinking about that.” Or I can think about it in a movie, but I can’t think about it in real life — which is what we were trying to mess with in this film.

Exactly. So with all the death scenarios that you’re dreaming up in the movie, were there ones that you wanted to do that were more complicated or that you couldn’t film for whatever reason?

Oh, yes. I really wanted to put my dad out on an ice floe. I really did. I wanted to set him on fire. And it’s just classic filmmaking. Like, oh, we don’t have enough money to do that. Well, this time I got enough money to do it and then our protagonist can no longer do the things that I wish him to be able to do, which is just this profound metaphor for the whole project. That it’s already too late for me to push him out on an ice floe by himself.

The funeral that happened in Seattle, did you dream that whole thing up or what were the circumstances?

I sure did. I literally dreamed it up. I had a dream that I saw my dad in an open casket, and he sat up and said, “I’m Dick Johnson. I’m not dead yet.” And that immediately gave me this idea of, we could do this funeral while he was alive. It meant reaching out to the pastor of our church, reaching out to this whole community of people who’ve known me all of my life, and known my father all of their life. We did a multi-camera shoot. We had five different cameras. I had initially imagined wanting to have my dad in the open casket upfront, but my brother was like, “Over my dead body.” And he was right. It would have been a terrible idea because people wouldn’t have been able to go there emotionally.

What we did was, they experienced it as if he was dead. They arrived at the church. He was not there. I was there greeting them. They knew he was alive, but he wasn’t there. And they also knew he had dementia, so they also knew they were losing him. I’d asked everyone to speak in the past tense. Everyone but my brother did that. My brother was resisting all the way and now he’s a fan. To do the funeral was just an extraordinary gift for everyone I believe because everyone got to see him again at the end of really going through his funeral.

What was actually in the casket during that?

So dad was in the casket, but the casket was green-screened onto the stage.

Then the guy that was really crying, did someone comfort him?

That’s such a great question. I wasn’t there. I think if I had been there with a handheld camera, I would have comforted him. I wouldn’t have held that shot. But it was John Foster who was one of the wonderful camera people working that day, and he was on a locked-off camera. I had said to all of the camera people, feel empowered. These are your positions. You’re on a tripod, but film what is meaningful to you to film because I know they know how to do it. That’s what we do.

Similarly, Nadia Hallgren came and took the camera from me when I was standing behind the window with dad. And then she shot that incredible shot of dad walking down the aisle. If I had shot it, I could not be in the moment of the family with him that she spun around and there we all were together. So there are these impossibilities of me doing everything.

That’s what I think this film affirms, that we must do these things together. We must make multiple attempts. You don’t just have one conversation about someone’s dying. You have multiple conversations and if we try to do it all together with some kind of love, it might make it sustain.

—

‘Dick Johnson Is Dead’ is available now on Netflix. Vince Mancini is on Twitter. You can access his archive of reviews here.

Plenty of debate exists about whether chess should be classified as a sport. Dozens of countries have hopped aboard the “yes” train. A few countries are even attempting to push chess into the 2024 Olympics, and good for them. I’m not here to die on either side of that hill, but I will insist upon one point: while chess is certainly not a contact sport, Anya Taylor-Joy’s piercing gaze could qualify as a lethal weapon against opponents. As fictional chess prodigy Beth Harmon in Netflix’s The Queen’s Gambit, Taylor-Joy is every bit of the powerhouse that one would expect from an actress who landed the Furiosa prequel role. Every steely stare and turn of her head, and each lowering of her eyes and crossing of arms — it’s all in the furtherance of battle. And she’s good, damn good.

Little doubt existed, for anyone who’s watched Taylor-Joy in The Witch, Split, or any of her rapidly accumulating credits, that she’s got presence, but The Queen’s Gambit makes exquisite and methodical use of her talents. And like any chess grandmaster, Taylor-Joy’s biggest strengths lie not within the moves themselves but in transitions between game stages, including calculations that no one can see. Her performance here is like a choreographed (yet grueling) dance, even when she’s sitting perfectly still or reclining upon various pieces of furniture. She does that a great deal over the course of the season, but somehow, she’s utterly riveting during every onscreen moment.

Somehow, as well, this chess-drama is a lot more interesting than it has any right to be.

Much of the series’ success has to do with the “chess” aspect of the story acting as a sumptuous cloak for multiple universal themes. Chief among those elements would be the underdog tale, which we don’t often see outside of the contact-sport context. Speaking of which, it feels necessary to point out the common ground between The Queen’s Gambit and another recent Netflix arrival, Cobra Kai. Not only are both the best at making us root for the underdog characters, but each show made me root for projects that weren’t necessarily expected to ride high. Be honest — how many people really believed a The Karate Kid revival would fare so much better than most revivals or reboots? The same question could be asked for a story about chess.

Look at me, mentioning a karate-focused franchise in the same breath as one that revolves around a strategy-focused board game. Yet both stories appeal to a similar audience. Both shows carry the same level of emotional gravity, and The Queen’s Gambit steps up as a dramatic and suspenseful and, yes, unexpectedly intense show.

Beth Harmon lives and dies by the fall of the pawns (and rooks and queens) on her opponents’ boards. Even more telling is the presence of Godless director Scott Frank, who’s co-creating, showrunning, directing, writing, and executive producing. If that wasn’t promising enough, consider that The Queen’s Gambit novel, which was published in 1983, was committed to the page by Walter Tevis, who also happened to pen 1959’s The Hustler novel, which led to the 1961 movie (starring Paul Newman) of the same name. What’s truly sobering is that The Queen’s Gambit has been destined for adaptation for over a decade, including a version meant to star Ellen Page and Heath Ledger.

Ledger’s posthumous-Oscar-winning clout lends gravity to anything that he was even tangentially attached to when he died, and even moreso considering the tragic dynamics of The Queen’s Gambit. Beth’s orphan-plight sources from a great trauma, in which her mathematically-inclined mother perished. As a child, she’s stuck in a tranquilizer-fueled orphanage and finds purpose and drive from chess when an orderly (Bill Camp) recognizes her budding genius. She’s adopted by a fellow lost soul, a 1950s housewife played by Marielle Heller with tragic alcoholism on the side but genuine love and respect at the center of the relationship. Yet Beth comes by her own addictive tendencies honestly, and the show’s lush set pieces and glamorous wardrobe turns (both of which are often Mad Men-esque) dovetail seamlessly with the debauchery of it all.

You never thought chess could be steamy, right? Well, it is, but not gratuitously so. The show resists labels, and furthermore, this is Taylor-Joy’s vehicle, and she commands it, but there are other actor-ly attractions on display. It’s tempting to say that Beth is aided in her journey by multiple influential players in her life. That would be incorrect. Rather, she’s enriched by them. That would include Moses Ingram as Jolene, one of Beth’s companions from her orphanage days. And she’s periodically surrounded by fellow chess prodigies who, one by one, end up falling to her prowess while also doing double-duty as potential suitors. Among them are Harry Melling’s Harry and, most delightfully, Thomas Brodie-Sangster as Benny, whose costumed affectations come closest to matching up to Beth’s eccentricities. Their speed-chess scene is a standout one.

There’s plenty else going on in this series, of course, including Beth’s adventures from Kentucky to Mexico and Vegas and Russia, with a smorgasbord of wander-junkie visuals on hand. One could also be persuaded to call this a coming-of-age tale, but that’s only the framing of Beth’s travels. Or you can consider this a meditation upon addiction and danger. More than any of those labels, however, The Queen’s Gambit zeroes in on what it costs to become a champion. Sacrifices must be made, and tragedy and trauma prevail during moments, but it’s ultimately an invigorating and thrilling story.

Besides those creature comforts, The Queen’s Gambit manages to nail its tight pacing for a strategically planned seven episodes. The odd number there is telling. It’s always 8, 10, or 12 episodes on streaming, you know? Seven is weird, but it’s spot-on for this story. No more and no less than necessary, and that’s a rarity in the digital age.

Everyone here — Scott Frank, the screenwriters, the costume and set designers, and (obviously) the talent — is on their game, quite like (and at the service of) Beth. She’s irrevocably and, at the same time, admirably and terrifyingly, focused upon winning a world title. That singular goal comes at the expense of relationships and relaxing downtime that most people covet and cherish. Along the way, she experiences fleeting connections and meaningful ones, and some do stick. Yet her focus, for better or worse, is to overcome being known as a standout for being a female champion amid a male-dominated, competitive subculture. She’d rather become a flat-out champion without mention of gender. The show, in reaching that goal, is a success. More than that, The Queen’s Gambit is a remarkably intense bingewatch.

Netflix’s ‘The Queen’s Gambit’ streams on Friday, October 23rd.

In recent days, Ice Cube has dealt with backlash after the public learned that he worked with the Trump administration on a Black outreach program. This has led to the inevitable speculation that he has become a Donald Trump supporter, and now he has clarified his stance on that front.

Ice Cube sat down for an interview with Hot 97, and during the chat, he declared, “I’m not supporting Donald Trump.” That was in response to an Ebro question about potentially being put off by “the white supremacy alignment of Donald Trump and the people he has working for him who are overt white supremacists.” Ice Cube continued, “White supremacy do turn me off, but it’s everywhere and it’s on both sides of the aisle. That’s just the reality that we live in, and I’m not naive to that. We’re engulfed in white supremacy, so that’s just something we’re going to have to fight our way out of, and we’re going to have to fight on all fronts.”

He also said that the Democratic party doesn’t automatically have his vote. Although he has voted for a Democratic candidate in every election, he insisted he’s still an undecided voter, saying, “I actually haven’t. I’m going to vote because there are a lot of things to vote for in California up and down, our city and state. I’m a real true undecided voter, because they’re not doing enough.”

Watch the full conversation above.