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Jason Lee was introduced to the American wrestling audience in 2016, through the Cruiserweight Classic. The young man from Hong Kong told the WWE Universe about how when he watched TV as a kid, he thought “One day, I want to be Bruce Lee, so I want to show people how to add kung fu to wrestling.” He was eliminated from the tournament in the first round, but that was far from the end of his wrestling career. Today, the twenty-seven-year-old is one of Dragon Gate‘s rising stars, and he might be one of the industry’s most underrated players.

Lee was inspired to start wrestling when he was ten years old “watching WWE on TV in Hong Kong. I thought that it’s a very exciting program, and I want to do it for my life.” He started pursuing his dream as a teenager by training with Ho Ho Lun, the founder of the Hong Kong Pro Wrestling Federation. He debuted as “Jason New” in 2009, when he was just sixteen years old.

In 2012, Lee started traveling in Japan to work with Pro Wrestling Zero1, training in the company’s dojo and returning to Hong Kong every three months to renew his visa. After “maybe two and a half months” in the dojo, Lee was allowed to have his first match for the company, which kicked off a three-year period as a Zero1 regular. He was the first wrestler from the still-young Hong Kong scene to be offered a full-time contract for a Japanese company.

Lee’s persona evolved when he had the opportunity to do more work overseas and wanted to make himself more memorable in the wider wrestling world. When Lee and Lun headed to the UK for a tour of the indies in 2013, Lee says “I was thinking how to perform like I’m from Hong Kong.” He changed his ring surname from “New” to “Lee” to bring Bruce to mind and started adding a kung fu element to his character and using nunchucks in his entrance. He says he’s never actually trained in martial arts, though: “It’s my gimmick only.” And as for the nunchuck skills, “I actually learned from YouTube.”

A few years later, the Cruiserweight Classic added to Lee’s international resume and fulfilled a childhood dream. “It was a great experience because I always wanted to step in a WWE ring,” Lee says. And after years performing mostly for Japanese audiences, the Full Sail crowd was a change of scene – though American fans weren’t all that different from those in Hong Kong. Lee says that while in Japan fans would typically applaud, then react dramatically “when you have something special… in America and Hong Kong, even you just enter, and they will pop up, make noise.”

Both Lee and his mentor wrestled in the Cruiserweight Classic, but only Ho Ho Lun stayed on with WWE afterward (He left the company in 2017.) Lee realized a career in sports entertainment was not in his future when “I saw the other episodes of the cruiserweight tournament. The guys who were in the first round, they came back for tag team matches or something like that,” but Lee wasn’t invited back after his first-round loss to Rich Swann.

Though he didn’t get a WWE offer, an opportunity for another major company was just around the corner. “I went back to Hong Kong and maybe two months after the cruiserweight tournament, I had a show and some kind of sponsor from Japan got a connection for me with Dragon Gate,” Lee says. “He said, ‘I think you might fit in Dragon Gate style and it might be good for good for Hong Kong Pro Wrestling,’ so he told me to go and try out.”

The sponsor turned out to be right. Lee’s tryout was a success, and after making his Dragon Gate debut in 2017, he quickly fit right in with the company’s wrestling style. The key to that, Lee says, was a lot of drills in the dojo. “Japanese style training is kind of about spirit. Like, you maybe have to do a lot of squats and pushups and cardio. They just want to see your spirit of not giving up; you have to finish strong. But Dragon Gate style, it has a lot of movement and it’s fast, so they do a lot of cardio.” Lee came up with some different moves he could to do fit the promotion’s fast-paced matches, and the work he put in paid off – “Dragon Gate fans remember and like me.”

Since 2019, Lee has been a full-time member of the Dragon Gate roster. He’s held one championship, the Open The Triangle Gate trios titles alongside Masato Yoshino and Naruki Doi, and two of his favorite matches have been unsuccessful title shots with or against Kaito Ishida.

As stablemates in MaxiMuM, Lee wrestled his favorite tag match alongside Ishida when they challenged R.E.D. (Big R Shimizu and Eita) for the tag titles last September. A few months later, Ishida turned heel and Lee had the singles match he says he’s most proud of against his former friend, challenging for his Open the Brave Gate (junior heavyweight) Championship. Lee lost that match, but he’ll have another shot at Ishida this week when the two face off in the first round of DG’s annual King of Gate tournament, which was pre-taped without an audience and will air on the Dragon Gate Network starting May 15.

Beyond this rivalry, there’s still a lot Jason Lee wants to do in Dragon Gate. He especially wants a match with Doi, one of his mentors in the company, and to become Brave Gate Champion. As for his wrestling career as a whole, Lee says, “Actually, my goal was to step into the WWE ring, and I’ve done that. For now, I want to wrestle as much as possible in my life.”

Bill Murray always goes above and beyond for late-night TV. For David Letterman, he dumpster dove, swung from the rafters like Peter Pan, jumped out of a cake, pulled a Liberace, and pretended to run a marathon. For Jimmy Kimmel, he’s gone for a canoe ride and popped onstage wearing a dress and cowboy boots, but when it comes to a quarantine Kimmel visit, Murray kept things simple, not to mention super real, by hopping into the bathtub. The interview was geared toward promoting the Stripes star’s upcoming, four-way “Nacho Off” competition with Guy Fieri for restaurant worker relief during the pandemic.

Hey, one needs to be clean before visiting Flavortown. That rule matters even more these days, and Kimmel praises Murray for knowing the value of soap, long before our current situation rolled around. The interview doesn’t dig deep into the cause until the final minutes, which is when Kimmel pays lipservice to how Bill and Guy’s sons, Homer Murray and Hunter Fieri, will join them for the virtual chip-and-cheese competition on Friday. The cause, though, is a vital one that hopes to raise even more money than the many millions raised by Guy Fieri himself. Anyone who wants to view the competition can do so from Food Network’s Facebook page while (ideally) donating $10 to the Restaurant Employee Relief Fund.

The above interview stays mostly bubbly and upbeat. “For the purposes of today, it’s kind of a celebration, because I haven’t seen you in a while,” Murray explained. “I thought a bubble bath would be appropriate.” He also talked about how much he misses sports, especially Chicago Bulls games, and the Space Jam actor wanted to remind everyone that he immeasurably helped out Michael Jordan in the film. “People forget I got the assist on the game-winning basket,” Murray offered, but “I wasn’t even interviewed after.” Well, this bathtub interview makes up for everything.

Death Cab For Cutie leader Ben Gibbard has made himself one of the predominant musical voices of the quarantine era thanks to his daily livestream performances (which have since become a weekly affair). On one of those broadcasts, he debuted a new song called “Life In Quarantine,” a tune that is of course about the times we’re living through.

Fans are used to seeing Gibbard perform from his home, but he did it in a slightly different way last night, as he took to his home studio and performed the aforementioned single on The Late Show. Gibbard’s acoustic rendition was gentle and lovely as he delivered poetic lines like, “The sidewalks are empty, the bars and cafes too / The streetlights only changing ’cause they ain’t got nothing better to do,” and, “The airports and train stations are full of desperate people / But no one is going anywhere soon.”

When Gibbard originally performed the song, he said, “I know this is a really f*cked up and scary time for everybody, including myself. And I know that we’re all trying to figure out what we can do to make it better, or what we can do to alleviate the suffering of someone else.”

Watch Gibbard perform “Life In Quarantine” above.

Death Cab For Cutie is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Daveed Diggs is about as far as he can get from his breakout role in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Broadway juggernaut, Hamilton. He’s ditched musical sermons on democracy for rousing speeches meant to fuel a rebellion. He’s left the stage and hopped aboard a train that’s circumventing the earth at dizzying speeds, keeping what’s left of civilization shielded from a nuclear winter.

Well, not at this very moment. Right now, he’s holed up in his home, like the rest of us, waiting to hear what fans think about the long-awaited Snowpiercer spin-off on TNT, set to drop May 17^th. Diggs is familiar with fandom – Hamilton managed to make show tune geeks out of theater virgins – but he also realizes now might be a strange time for a post-apocalyptic drama, even one that carries the prestige of being created by Oscar-winner Bong Joon Ho. A strange time, but not necessarily the wrong time. We chatted with Diggs about the weird kismet of Snowpiercer landing during a pandemic, the trajectory of season one, Hamilton reunions, and making art under quarantine.

Between the film and the comics, there’s a pretty devoted fandom that comes along with this world. Was there pressure to get this right?

I knew about the fandom. I hadn’t seen the film when I was sent the early version of the pilot and I hadn’t read the graphic novels yet, so I went and did that before I auditioned. I know what it’s like to be a fan of things but I don’t know that I was nervous about it, because I think this version exists in a different space. It doesn’t feel like it takes away from it. Because what frustrates me when I’m a fan of something is when I see somebody come along and make a mockery of the thing that I love. [This] feels more like another reason to dive back into a world, if you love it.

The show makes an interesting choice early on, using a murder-mystery storyline to introduces us to different characters in different cars. Why did having that procedural approach make sense?

I think the thing that television gives the opportunity for in this world is to spend time in each class, and to spend time with a lot of characters — getting to understand their motivations and what makes them tick, and just live in the world a little bit longer. I think the kind of procedural-esque structure, particularly of the early episodes, is mostly useful because if we’re hanging out with Layton, everything’s new to him too, right? So we’re getting to experience things with him. I think once the tone is set for that, we get to sort of spread out and it becomes a little less procedural feeling.

You can’t do anything about the timing, but are you worried at all that people might not have an appetite for apocalyptic stories right now?

I’m sure somebody is worried about it. [Laughs] That’s not my job. You know, when I read the really early and very different version of the script years ago, it felt like it was in conversation with our current times. And it still does, maybe in a different way. I think all the conversations that the show is having still continue, because we are all still existing in a pretty similar class structure to the one that is made obvious for the sake of simplicity on a train, right? I think all of those conversations get to continue, but different things jump out based on what the big moment that we are going through as a society and as a culture is. Right now that is COVID-19 and so I think the claustrophobia of it, the lack of movement, the limited resources, like, all of those things come easiest to us because those are the things we are experiencing. It definitely hits different.

Andre Layton is the protagonist of the show early on, but I don’t know if you’d classify him as the “good guy.” Are there any good guys on this show, or is that kind of the point?

I just don’t think any story is really served by heroes and villains. That doesn’t help us. What I like about this show is that it tries to make sure that every character is a human, and then asks us to empathize with them, to try to understand their motivations. That’s something that I think culturally we have a hard time doing. It’s a big ask. But Layton feels real to me because he is flawed.

Sure.

Also just as a career choice, right, as a character that I may in the event of success be playing for a very long time, it’d be super boring if he was infallible.

That brings up an interesting point that relates to Jennifer Connelly’s character and her journey throughout the season. She’s positioned as Layton’s enemy, but the more he learns about train life, the more that changes. How did you build that complicated relationship off-screen?

The more we hung out on set, the more I grew to understand her. I think the great thing about those two characters is that they respect each other an awful lot. They grow to respect each other even when they are working against each other. That is a really interesting thing to play. And particularly with someone like Jennifer, who is so great, there’s like, I don’t know, I wouldn’t call it competition because I don’t think she felt it at all. [laughs] But for me it was like, “All right, I’m not going to let Jennifer act circles around me in this scene today. Not today.” And so, you know, having so much respect for her made it easy to transfer that to her character.

Layton is the face of this revolution in season one, but is he the right choice to lead once the dust settles? Do you think sometimes our “heroes” have shelf-lives?

That is really the question of the show for Layton, right? What you see him grapple with all the time is that he leans so much on his moral compass and on his code. That gets challenged so often based on new information. Whatever he thought, he had no idea how this train worked or why it worked. And I think that leads him to make a lot of really tough choices. Whether or not he’s going to succeed … I don’t know. I’m fascinated by that journey too. It certainly continues on into the second season. I don’t think we answer that.

Can you answer anything about where we’re going in season two, because there’s a big cliffhanger we’re left with?

I think the spirit of the show is that it doesn’t really slow down very often. There’s not a lot of room to breathe and that trajectory does not stop at the end of season one.

Thinking about how Wilford is portrayed in this first season, is there something we can learn about how these characters worship him, and how that worship blurs the line between belief and harmful ignorance?

Yeah, that is one of the big questions that Snowpiercer asks us as an audience to ask ourselves, right? The interesting thing about Wilford is he did create the world so there’s an interesting argument for a God status there, I suppose, if you’re looking for religion. Something that’s brought up a lot is that people need something to believe in and this is such a complicated question when we apply it to our leaders, right? Does the necessity for belief equate giving that much power to somebody, or to a group of people? And is it also necessary that that come at the expense of not educating your public? Not giving them all of the information so that they can make informed choices. This show does such a good job of bringing up a ton of issues that we are all struggling with and systems that we’re all living within, whether we know it or not. You can engage with it at whatever level you feel comfortable with but I hope, for people who feel so inclined to revisit the show after their first viewing, they’ll get another bite at some of these issues that are going on.

We’ll end on Some Good News, literally. How did that Hamilton reunion happen?

I mean, John [Krasinski] reached out and everybody said yes. It was kind of a no-brainer. You know, I will say this about quarantines: it makes it really easy for you to do things like that. All we had to do was record ourselves doing our part of the song. There are things that I think we’re learning about the effect we can have, at least on people’s moods, particularly for performers, or celebrities, or whatever. It’s the same thing that Some Good News showed me. I watched the first episode days before John asked me to do the thing, and found myself just like crying the whole time. Like really happy tears.

That was sort of the first time I had let myself cry during the pandemic. I had a lot of stuff pent up. I think we’re all going through these waves of anxiety and stuff and that show helped me so much. John will tell you himself, he’s just scouring the internet for good news and regurgitating it. You know? So, it allows us to take some of the pressure off of creating something that is perfect or creating something that looks a certain way or whatever because we all understand the constraint. We’re all stuck inside. I’ve been doing a lot of performances with The 24 Hour Plays organization. And that’s the same thing. The conceit is always, this is what writers and actors and directors were able to put together in 24 hours from start to finish. That’s as long as you spend on it. So it removes the need to be perfect and to be polished and just gets at the heart of the thing. It makes it pretty easy to spread a little bit of joy when you can.

TNT’s ‘Snowpiercer’ premieres on Sunday, May 17th at 9:00pm EST.

The Killers were originally set to release Imploding The Mirage on May 29, but they recently decided to push the record back to a currently unannounced date “due to delays in finalizing the album.” While it’s not clear when the album is coming, the band is still getting after it in terms of promotion. Yesterday, they guested (virtually) on The Tonight Show for a performance of the album’s lead single, “Caution.”

It was actually a truncated version of The Killers playing the song, as it was just Brandon Flowers and Ronnie Vannucci (and a drum machine) there for the performance, with Flowers on piano and Vannucci on acoustic guitar.

Before playing the song, Vannucci dedicated the performance to healthcare workers dealing with the coronavirus pandemic, saying, “We’d like to play a song for all the healthcare workers who are putting themselves out on the front lines helping everybody in need. Can’t tell you how much we appreciate that and how heroic that is, so thank you very much.”

When the band made the announcement that they decided to postpone Imploding The Mirage, they shared a new single from it, a jaunty new tune called “Fire In Bone.”

Watch The Killers perform “Caution” above.

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If you’ve been on social media at any point in the last month, you may have noticed that Michael Jordan is once again dominating the conversation around sports. ESPN’s 10-part docuseries, The Last Dance, has been a stark reminder about His Airness’ lasting influence on the basketball world.

It’s why, for example, when he called New York City the “Mecca of Basketball,” it was a designation treated as gospel truth. The city has proudly carried that reputation ever since. But another upcoming documentary, produced by Kevin Durant, seeks to shed light on one of America’s lesser known, but equally prolific, hoops hotbeds.

Premiering Friday, May 15 at 9 p.m. ET on Showtime, Basketball County: In the Water, takes an intimate look at Prince George’s County, the D.C. area community that has produced scores of elite players who have gone onto NBA and WNBA fame. Since 2000, more than 25 local prospects have made it to the NBA, including Durant, Victor Oladipo, Michael Beasley, Markelle Fultz, Quinn Cook, and more.

The film probes the community’s rich legacy in both sports and civil rights, which intersected with one another at various points. It was the home of Edwin B. Henderson, the civil rights pioneer known as “The Father of Black Basketball” who first introduced the game to the area and used basketball as a means of keeping youth out of trouble and as a tool for breaking down racial barriers.

P.G. County has more than 400 outdoor basketball courts and boasts some of the country’s most prolific AAU squads. The legendary prep program at DeMatha Catholic High School won five national championships over the course of Morgan Wootten’s Hall-of-Fame coaching career and has long been a pipeline for some of the country’s best up-and-coming players.

We caught up with P.G. County product Quinn Cook via telephone last week to talk about his involvement in the film and why he believes his hometown deserves more recognition. Cook told us about why it was a dream come true to win that first title with a fellow hometown native in Kevin Durant, how Go-Go music has influenced their style of play, and much more.

I had a chance to watch a rough cut of the documentary last night, and I thought it was excellent. Can you talk about how you got involved with the project?

Yeah, Rich [Kleiman] and Kevin [Durant], they had been working on it for a while. And Rich asked me to come on. I brought one of my partners, Jimmy Jenkins, on because we were kind of doing our own thing. Not as big of a platform that Kevin and Rich had and were doing it on. For them to bring us on was great. We made something special, man. We’d been working on it hard for a while. I’m excited to see how everybody enjoys it.

From your perspective, why did you feel like it was an important thing to bring more attention to PG County and how much of a tradition is there?

Honestly, it’s my home. I think it’s a great place, obviously. But I don’t think it gets the credit it deserves just from a basketball standpoint. To have so many pros and so many great players come from that small area, we’re all five minutes, 10 minutes away from each other. We all grew up together, had personal relationships with one another. The family atmosphere is something that needs to be shared with the world. And I think that it’s finally getting the light that it deserves.

I learned so much from watching it. I think they said it’s produced something like 30 NBA players since the year 2000. It’s just such a concentration of good basketball players. I was wondering, from your perspective, what sets P.G. County players apart? What sort of the style or mentality do you get from growing up and playing there?

Tough. It’s that sort of swagger and walk in our step. Because you had to believe in yourself, because you might go to the court, you might not get picked. If you lose, you might get kicked off. So, you better have that belief in yourself. And I just think that togetherness. We’re always happy for one another, we’re always…if you disrespect a guy’s game from my area, we’re going to go at you. We just have that love and respect for one another.

It seems to me like part of that toughness comes from the social and cultural history. Can you tell us a little bit about how coming out of an area like that, with such a rich and inspiring tradition in the civil rights movement, how does that influence you as a player and as a person?

Well, it’s crazy because when I watched a rough draft of documentary, there was some stuff that I learned about a lot of the historic stuff. My first camp ever growing up was going to Morgan Wootten camp. So I went to Morgan Wootten camp every year growing up until I went to high school. You have that tutelage growing up. You have all these guys who have done so many big things. Obviously, basketball is one thing, but the impact that a lot of guys from my area has done in the world, it means a lot.

You’ve been around the league for a few years now. What’s it like for you to see so many players from your hometown and to be able to compete against them at this level, and play alongside them at this level? What’s that mean to you?

Oh, it’s great because I grew up idolizing them. I grew up rooting for them, watching them, wanting them to have successful careers. When I was coming up, they always had their arm around me, always brought me up and always wanted me to be better than them. Not like them, better than them. And I always appreciated that because they never had to do that. And so growing up, watching KD and Jeff Green and all those guys, Jarrett Jack, guys that I grew up idolizing, Tywon Lawson, and getting to be pros with them, and play against them, and form relationships that are beyond basketball, it’s great.

Do you feel like you maybe play a little harder when you come up against those guys? Is there a little more trash talk going on when you’re facing them on the court?

No, it’s just never really trash talk. It’s more love, it’s more jokes, it’s more fun, really. I root with them, obviously. If this person is guarding me, it’s not like we’re going to not try to score. We’re going to be ourselves, but there’s no trash talk. There’s no, “I’m better than you. I scored more points. My team won.” We’re competitors on the floor. We’re brothers off.

You’ve won two titles with Kevin Durant, another P.G. County native. What was that experience like, the two of you knowing where you came from and how far you’d come together?

It meant the world, because we used to always talk about it growing up, and obviously our paths were different professionally, but we all had a common goal. It was about the championship. And we used to tell each other, “We’re going to win multiple championships. We’re gonna do this and that.” Not thinking we were going to do it for the Warriors or do it together, but we got it done. man. It was a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful time.

The movie really digs into that tradition of AAU basketball as well and how important that’s been for so many players. How do you look back on your time coming up in those ranks?

It was fun. It was super competitive. It was super serious. We used to work out. I’m with my coach right now as we speak. He’s in L.A. training me. But yeah, I remember our practices and those workouts. The tournaments were fun. We used to go out of town and represent D.C. and P.G. We used to take a lot of pride in that. But I remember those workouts and practices. Practicing with the older team and practicing with the pros who came back, Durant, Johnson, Jeff Green. All those guys who come back. James White. Those guys who come back and show us love. So AAU was big for us.

[Michael] Beasley mentioned something in the documentary that I wanted to ask you about. There’s a section on Go-Go music [a hybrid subgenre of funk that originated in D.C.], and he talked about how the hesitation move from some of you guys down there is a little bit different, and he likened it to the Go-Go music style. What did you think about that when you heard him talking about that?

That’s it. That’s life. That’s how we play. We play to that beat. Growing up, I know me, I didn’t really listen to rap. When we was going to work out, we’d listen to go-go. So when you’re working out, and when you’re hooping, your moves and your body, you’re moving to the beat. So that’s why we have that certain hesitation, that certain movement. I think it resembles what the music was. Mike and KD, that portion of the movie hit it right on the head.

That part was great. Do you call it the “hands-up hesi”?

It’s called the “hands up.” We definitely call it the “hands up.”

The documentary doesn’t shy away from some of the more difficult topics, specifically about Curtis Malone [Malone was a local coach and highly influential figure in the community who was sentenced to 100 months in prison in 2014 for drug trafficking. He also took Cook in after his father’s death]. Obviously it’s a complicated legacy, but he clearly did a lot of good in the community. For someone who had such a close, personal connection to him, how have you come to terms with all this over the years?

That’s still somebody that I look up to. He was like a godfather to me when I lost my dad. Curt, and my high school coach Mike Jones, stepped up to the plate and helped my mom, and myself, and my sister tremendously. He made a mistake. He owned up to it. He’s done his time, and he’s grown, and he’s continued to give back. Like I said, I had no idea that stuff was going on. So for me, just always remembering all the good that he’s done. I wouldn’t be where I am today without him.

Obviously, having the season on hold must be tremendously disappointing considering how great of a year you and the Lakers were having. What have you been doing to stay ready and stay mentally prepared, if and when the season returns?

Like I said, I have my trainer out here, my coach out here. So we’re still training as if we got to play tomorrow. Obviously, the resources aren’t what they usually are, but we improvise. That’s what we did growing up, we improvised. And for me, staying locked in, I’m always talking to my teammates. We have our group chat popping. I can’t wait to see those guys again.

What is something that people don’t know about PG County basketball players that you think we should know?

I don’t know, we just chill. We chill. We root for each other. We all can play. We’re down-to-earth guys. We don’t really care about the success that comes with the basketball, we just love to play the game. We love the feeling that we get when we play, when we hoop, and we always root for each other, we always have fun. We’re a very together group of guys.

On Wednesday, Bob Odenkirk and David Cross reunited the Mr. Show troops to raise money for Lift, an organization that works to help families facing poverty. The special event, dubbed The Mr. Show ‘Kidz With Beardz’ Presents: Come Join Our Zoomtacular Annual Business Call!, was highlighted by a parody of Gal Gadot’s tone-deaf “Imagine” video. Except instead of Jamie Dornan singing about no countries, or whatever, Odenkirk and Cross got the likes of Bryan Cranston, Jack Black, and Rhea Seehorn to perform a solemn version of “Eat It,” Weird Al Yankovic’s timeless parody of “Beat It.”

Also in virtual attendance: Better Call Saul actors Michael Mando and Michael McKean, Rachel Bloom, Amber Tamblyn, Scott Adsit, Patton Oswalt, Tony Hale, Fred Armisen, John Hodgman, Heidi Gardner, Paul Scheer, Sarah Silverman (who appeared in the “Imagine” video, too), and, of course, Mr. Weird himself, who tweeted, “Truly there’s no problem that can’t be overcome when you get a bunch of celebrities together to sing something.” Especially something with lyrics like, “How come you’re always such a fussy young man / Don’t want no Cap’n Crunch, don’t want no Raisin Bran.”

Weird Al could write “Imagine,” but John Lennon couldn’t write “Eat It.” Watch it above.

Is there a better movie than Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story? It’s a fair question. There are lots of movies out there, some of them pretty good. Almost all of them made more money than Walk Hard. Many of them won more awards. But are they better, really? Better than Walk Hard? I don’t know, man. I’ll go as far as “as good as Walk Hard,” but I don’t think I can get to “better.”

There’s no great reason to be talking about Walk Hard right now. The film — a parody of music biopics, written by Jake Kasdan and Judd Apatow and starring John C. Reilly as Dewey — came out in 2007, 13 years ago, so there’s no major anniversary to tie this to. And it wasn’t a big hit. It was the opposite of whatever a big hit it is. It earned $20 million at the box office against a $35 million budget which, and I am admittedly no great mathematician, seems bad. The whole reason this article exists is because Walk Hard is awesome and I think more people should talk about that more often. Sometimes that’s enough. It should be, at least. It is today.

The time has come to talk about Walk Hard.

1. The beginning is as good a place as any to start. Let’s jump right in. The following things happen in the first 10 minutes of Walk Hard:

— In a flashback, a young Dewey accidentally chops his more talented brother in half during a barnyard machete fight (“Dewey, I’m cut in half pretty bad”), the doctor is unable to save him (“This was a particularly bad case of someone being cut in half”), and their father shouts a refrain that will come up a number of times in the movie and be the key to Dewey’s entire trajectory (“The wrong kid died”)

— A six-year-old Dewey picks up a guitar for the first time and proceeds to play a shockingly good blues song (“I done a bad thing / Cut my brother in half”) that impresses a group of skeptical blues musicians

— Dewey, now a sophomore in high school and portrayed by a fully adult John C. Reilly, plays a sweet little song called “Take My Hand” at a 1950s-style talent show that causes the teens in the audience to revolt and rebel as though Satan himself was shredding on the stage

— To drive this home, a reverend shouts “This is the devil’s music!” and is immediately cold-cocked from his blind side by a sweater-clad student

This isn’t even everything. There are a legitimate five or six laugh out loud moments packed in here, which is more than some movies have in their entire runtimes. There’s something to be said for hitting the ground running, for coming in hot. Walk Hard comes in like the surface of the sun. Find me a funnier visual than a child getting chopped in half with a machete and then saying “I’m cut in half pretty bad” as the top half of his body sits on the ground of a hay-covered barn. This is an honest challenge.

2. The cast of Walk Hard is a straight-up Murderer’s Row of comedic talent. John C. Reilly as Dewey, Kristen Wiig as his neglected first wife, Jenna Fischer as the sultry woman who woos him away, Tim Meadows and Chris Parnell in his band, cameos galore, with everyone from Eddie Vedder and Ghostface Killah as themselves to Jack White as Elvis Presley. The Beatles scene gets its own section in a minute because great things deserve solo recognition. And his parents are played by Raymond J. Barry and Margo Martindale, two perfectly cast characters actors who would later go on to play antagonists on Justified. (Discussion topic: Would Walk Hard be better with a singing Walton Goggins in there somewhere?) (Trick question. Of course it would have.) Just a non-stop parade of familiar faces in small roles that fit like a glove or fit terribly, both of which are funny. The latter might be funnier, actually, in large part because Dewey does this thing where he always calls historical figures by their full names, which results in little bits of gold like him saying “Thanks, Buddy Holly” to a person who is very clearly Frankie Muniz. It’s the best.

3. Dewey’s path to stardom touches on so many kinds of music and so many biopic tropes. It’s incredible, especially when you realize the whole movie is barely 90 minutes long. There’s pop, blues, and rock, much of it stolen from black artists in hilarious and painfully accurate ways. (The best example being, of course, Dewey playing a song titled “You Got to Love Your Negro Man.”) There are references to like a dozen musicians and eras: Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, Bob Dylan, trippy LSD acts, Sonny and Cher, etc. Again, all of it in 90 minutes. Walk Hard is the best possible proof that my long-held “no movie should be longer than two hours” belief is correct. If this movie can skewer 50 years of music history and an entire genre of film in an hour and a half, there’s no reason a Transformers movie should clock in over 150 minutes. Tighten it up.

4. POP QUIZ: What do you get when you take Paul Rudd, Jack Black, Jason Schwartzman, and Justin Long and have them do cartoonishly bad Liverpool accents in a tent? ANSWER: A pretty good scene in a movie.

I’ve chosen to post the extended version of the scene here instead of the version that’s in the finished movie. Some might argue that this is the decision of a hypocrite, seeing as I just ranted about movies being too long. In my defense, it’s good and I don’t have to explain myself to you. I could watch a solid 30 minutes of this. I could watch 30 minutes of Paul Rudd as John Lennon repeatedly saying things like “We, the Beatles, from Liverpool…” and cramming song titles into the dialogue. The whole scene is so stupid and perfect, such an egregious waste of time and resources that it becomes iconic. Make a whole Beatles movie like this. Do a 10-episode miniseries. I am barely joking.

5. Speaking of things that are stupid and perfect, ladies and gentlemen, Tim Meadows.

How great is Tim Meadows? In this movie specifically, yes, of course, but also just in general. Have you ever seen a bad Tim Meadows performance? I don’t think I have. And watch all the scenes again. Watch his delivery as he says “you don’t want no part of this” over and over. Watch him give the worst anti-drug PSAs in history. Which one is your favorite? They’re all good, so it’s hard to choose. I’m sorry for putting you on the spot like that. I’ll tell you mine while you think. It’s the cocaine one. The marijuana one is probably more famous and gets to the hypocrisy of the stigma around the drug, but the face Meadows makes when he says “It turns all your bad feelings into good feelings. It’s a nightmare!” always gets me.

6. The last two sections aside, I think my favorite part of Walk Hard is when Dewey goes through his dark period, which you can easily spot with a little help from the man himself.

Between this and the “MORE BLANKETS! LESS BLANKETS!” scene in rehab, I’m not sure there’s ever been a better depiction of an artist’s struggles committed to film.

7. This movie probably works out fine if the songs don’t play well. There’s too much good stuff in there. I know this is true because I got all the way up to number seven without even bringing them up. But we’ll never really know for sure because, guess what, the songs play well. All of them, starting with the title track and moving to genre-appropriate numbers like “Guilty As Charged,” but especially when it comes to “Let’s Duet,” Dewey’s first song with Darlene and the one that leads him down the path of adultery.

It’s catchy and fun and slammed wall-to-wall with blatant sexual innuendos. The song was written by Charlie Wadhams, who elaborated on the process a bit in a must-read oral history at The Ringer:

The “Let’s Duet” one [cowritten with Benji Hughes], that was probably the most fun one to do. I sat around with a piece of paper trying to write every sexual word or phrase or slang that I could think of. And the first one that came to me, I think was that first line, which is, “In my dreams you’re blowing me … some kisses.” So from there it was like, “How do I match that level of humor?” I gotta keep that kind of funny going on throughout the whole song.

Imagine thinking of that line on-purpose and getting to put it in a movie. I choose to believe confetti fell from the sky spontaneously as soon as he wrote it down. Which would have been nice. He probably needed some time to think of how to equal it and “cleaning up a mess of magic confetti” will buy you at least half an hour.

8. It’s been said before — and alluded to by me already in this very article — but it’s worth saying every time Walk Hard is mentioned: This movie ruined the music biopic as we know it, in the best way possible. It does such an exacting and thorough deconstruction of the entire genre that it’s impossible to watch the originals without thinking of Walk Hard. Go watch Ray after watching this movie. Go watch Walk the Line. Go watch Bohemian Rhapsody and Rocketman, which both came out a decade after Walk Hard and still got parodied retroactively. I don’t know if there’s a higher compliment you can give to satire. I’m fairly certain I don’t have one. It’s like when you watch a really good episode of Documentary Now — “Co-op” or “Juan Likes Rice and Chicken” being the best examples — and then try to watch the full-version it was based on. The difference is, again, those take aim at a single target, and Walk Hard goes after the entire herd. There should be film classes taught about this movie. You should be allowed to major in it. It would be at least as valuable as a degree in, say, Communications.

9. It’s worth noting here, if for no other reason than because Popstar rules and I want to talk about it, that Popstar — The Lonely Island’s music biopic parody that came out in 2016 — is also a perfect movie. It’s infuriating that neither of these had anything resembling box office success. Huge bombs, both of them. But so good. You could do a whole lot worse on some rainy Saturday than setting up a Walk Hard/Popstar double bill on your television. They compliment each other so well, too, with the first covering music from the 1950s to maybe the 1980s and the latter focusing on the social-media-heavy fame of music from about 2010-2020. I would pay full price — for good seats — to see a Dewey Cox / Style Boyz concert. I want to see John C. Reilly do the Donkey Roll, in character as Dewey Cox, live, in person. I am barely joking about this either.

10. Let’s close out with a helpful parenting lesson from Dewey Cox’s father, something useful to all new dads out there trying to figure things out in these trying times.

Walk Hard is a good movie.