Gawker - Ham is having a moment

Lesser contessas tried to bribe Food Network to get meetings

There’s a pretty hot business tip for wanna-be Food Network stars in a New York Post story today about Ina Garten’s nineteen-year stint as The Barefoot Contessa: if you want to make it in this town, send ham.

During an interview for a fundraising luncheon, Garten told Willie Geist that Food Network executives hounded her for years about a Barefoot Contessa show. She refused repeatedly, even telling one, “Lose my number.” They were stunned; nobody had ever refused them before. In fact, wannabe chefs were sending executives wet-cured pork bribes.

“They said, ‘People send us hams to even get an appointment to try and get a show,'” Garten explained.

Dune 2's most important casting decision

Frank Herbert’s philosophical and religious epic, the Dr. Bronner’s label of its time, is an unlikely source for a rare theatrical hit in the COVID era, but the box office receipts are in and the news is official: America has Dune fever. Some who watched it, however, may have been surprised to find that Denis Villeneuve’s film was, in fact, merely an adaptation of the novel’s first half. That left major plots untouched, as well as significant characters entirely omitted. Above all, the film robs us of even a glance of what is arguably the story’s most buckwild and unhinged character: Feyd-Rautha, the conniving little shit of a nephew to the novel’s major villain, Baron von Harkonnen.

A standard has already been set for this character. Whatever you think of David Lynch’s much-maligned 1984 adaptation, the one element that the film nails is Sting’s endearingly ludicrous performance as Feyd. From the moment he steps out of a steam bath with a shock of Johnny Rotten-esque orange hair, a wild-eyed grin, and what appears to be a Speedo designed by H.R. Giger, Sting emits the kind of demented energy that the rest of the film lacks. Crucially, the rockstar lends the socially climbing Harkonnen the “has a collection of small animal bones in a shoebox” quality that is so central to his personality.

Chris Evans will play him in a new movie. Okay.

For too many years, the dark origin stories of beloved cartoon characters have been relegated to fanfiction websites and the devious little minds that visit them. Thankfully, Disney is cutting out the middleman and finally answering the question fans have allegedly been asking since 1995: Who was Buzz Lightyear the man?

According to the new trailer for Lightyear, he was a space ranger who sounded less like Tim Allen and more like Chris Evans. For the uninitiated, this is the film that Evans described as being “the origin story of the human Buzz Lightyear that the toy is based on.” I did not misquote him.

Assessing the potential liability of the actor/producer and others involved in the tragic Rust movie shooting

As investigations into the Rust movie shooting that killed cinematographer Halyna Hutchins continue, one of the primary questions that remains unanswered is: ultimately, who is responsible for this fatal incident last week at Bonanza Creek Ranch in New Mexico?

Is it the armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, who was in charge of all firearms and weaponry used on the production? Is it the assistant director Dave Halls, who oversaw safety on the set and handed a loaded gun to Alec Baldwin? Is it Baldwin, who shot the gun that killed Hutchins and injured director Joel Souza? Is it Souza himself? Is it the producers — Baldwin among them — who are accountable for running a production that allegedly cut corners and hired inexperienced or unprofessional people?

The Guardian columnist is in a league by himself

Every reader knows the feeling: the sudden recognition that your favorite writer has run out of things to say. Maybe they’ve been slipping for a while, maybe you’ve already had to stick up for them. But once upon a time you had your world reconfigured by this writer. They deserve to be heard even when they’re wrong. And then they publish something that isn’t even recognizable as writing, and you just know. It’s over. They’re finished.

This will never happen to Adrian Chiles.

Adrian Chiles, who has been a columnist at The Guardian since 2019, will never run out of things to say, for the simple reason that he has never had anything to say. Similarly, his writing will never fall from a transformative peak, because peaks are not his style. In fact, none of the things we associate with newspaper columnists are his style. He’s not an analyst. He’s not a diarist. He’s not a polemicist. What he most resembles is a dog who turns up at your ankles hoping you’ll throw that rubber toy again. And you do, though you don’t know why. And the dog comes straight back, though it probably doesn’t know why. And before you know it, you’ve bonded with the dog. You begin to miss the dog when you don’t see it. After a while you start to hold conversations with the dog in your head. The dog is called Adrian and he is A Good Boy.