Gawker - Men in peril

Seems like yes

Arnold Schwarzenegger’s action-horror flick End of Days came out in 1999, right before the Y2K bug brought down computer processing infrastructures worldwide and caused complete societal collapse. Still, I am delighted to bring you new gossip about the film today. I am less delighted, however, to tell you the gossip is about a fart.

The tale comes from Schwarzenegger’s End of Days co-star Miriam Margolyes, beloved actress perhaps best known for her work as “Professor Sprout” in the Harry Potter films and “charmingly rude guest” on The Graham Norton Show. She appeared recently on news.com.au's "I've Got News For You" podcast, where she was asked if there were any celebrities she didn’t enjoy working with. She then shared word of a face fart … a face fart we’ll never forget.

"He was actually quite rude,” Margolyes said, about Arnold Schwarzenegger. “He farted in my face.” My, that does sound quite rude. She continued: Continue reading

The brand is in peril

There are certain duos so intertwined that their names seem like a single unit: Tom and Jerry, Rick and Morty, Bill and Hillary, Macron and Teacher, etc. This also applies to the comedy pair Desus and Mero, two funny guys from the Bronx who are also best friends. The two got their start with a podcast, Desus vs. Mero, which debuted in 2013; they went on to host a Viceland show, Desus & Mero, which ran from 2016 to 2018, and a subsequent showtime show by the same name, which hit airwaves in 2019. Suffice it to say, there is not much Desus without Mero, and vice versa.

But it seems something is up, in a Call Her Daddy sort of way. Bodega Boys Daily, a Twitter fan account that posts constant updates on the pair, posted a series of screenshots last night that seemed to confirm the best friends and comedy partners were… no longer best friends and possibly not comedy partners anymore.

First, there was a tweet from Mero — aka The Kid Mero, aka a lot of nicknames he coined on the show, but born Joel Martinez — from a month ago. It read: Continue reading

Stick to the flicks, Stevie!

Steven Spielberg is, depending on how you look at it, either the No. 1 or No. 2 greatest living American film director. At 75 years old he’s still cranking out some of his best work, but I guess that gets old after a while. Maybe that’s why he’s done a reverse-David Fincher and gone from directing films to directing music videos. For his first foray into the MTV arts, he has directed the video for Marcus Mumford’s debut solo single, “Cannibal.”

This does seem like a random pairing at first, but if you think about it for two seconds it will make sense. Mumford is married to famous actress/his childhood penpal Carey Mulligan. Carey Mulligan is starring in Gawker’s most-anticipated film, Maestro (she plays Maestro’s wife). Spielberg is producing Maestro. Apparently they all hit it off, and a few weeks ago they got together in a high school gym and Spielberg shot this on his iPhone. 

The thing about shooting on an iPhone — as we know from the work of the other Steven (Soderbergh) — is that you can always tell, even in black and white. People love to be like, “Wow, you can shoot a whole movie on an iPhone.” And like, yeah, you can, but it doesn’t look as good as an ARRI or a Red. Continue reading

Can someone please style this guy normally

Look at this photo of Chris Evans at the Berlin premiere of his new movie The Gray Man.

Respectfully, he looks like an idiot. Shirt too tight, vest too tight, pants gray like the title of the movie. The late aughts throwback looks on display on the red carpet weren’t doing favors for any of the objectively hot actors involved with the project, but Evans suffers the most — looking like a guy who is both too big and too small at the same time. In fairness to those in Germany, there have been record high heatwaves all across Europe. But while that might justify Evans’s short-sleeved shirt (stay cool, brother), it does not justify the concept behind the outfit. Continue reading

Apple TV’s counterfactual history gets at something true about American empire

For All Mankind, currently airing on Apple TV+, is a show about NASA at the height of the space race. All the perennial tropes of the genre are on display: square-jawed astronauts undergoing training; bespectacled engineers calculating distances with protractors; raucous cheering breaking out in mission control as the latest crisis is averted. At first glance, the show can look like a nostalgia piece. A soothing glass of Tang for aging Boomers, say. Co-created by Ronald D. Moore, of BattleStar Galactica fame, alongside Matt Wolpert and Ben Nedivi, the show presents a counterfactual version of the US over the last 50 years, one where the space race never left the headlines. Astronauts trade jokes with Johnny Carson; rocket launches are prime-time events well into the 1980s. But the show is far more than a vision board of lovingly-curated period details. Now in its third season, For All Mankind crafts a dark, even cynical look at what motivates American society, and what leaves it cold.

Counterfactual stories, or alternate histories, build their worlds out of hinge points: Decisive junctures where history could have just as easily gone one way or another. For All Mankind begins with a doozy. It’s July 1969, and everyone in America is glued to their televisions, watching the moon landing. Live, in black-and-white, an astronaut steps out of the landing module and onto the lunar surface. He opens his reflective visor, looks into the camera, and begins to speak . . . in Russian! Praising the Marxist-Leninist way of life! Planting a hammer-and-sickle flag on the moon! The Soviet Union, and not the US, makes it there first. Continue reading