Nate Haduch

As Bohemian Rhapsody continues to solidify its Oscar villain status, the film’s star, Rami Malek, is getting more candid about the firing of original director Bryan Singer — a firing we still have conflicting narratives about. But as Malek explained during a Friday evening panel at the Santa Barbara Film Festival, Singer’s behavior made his working experience more terrible than anticipated. “In my situation with Bryan, it was not pleasant, not at all. And that’s about what I can say about it at this point,” he said. “For anyone who is seeking any solace in all of this, Bryan Singer was fired. Bryan Singer was fired, I don’t think that was something anyone saw coming but I think that had to happen and it did.”

It was previously rumored that Malek, fed up with Singer’s frequent absences from set, complained to higher-ups about the director’s “unreliability and unprofessionalism,” with the duo’s animosity even resulting in a fight where equipment was thrown. Singer was ultimately fired in December 2017 and replaced with Dexter Fletcher to complete the film.

Singer has claimed the reason for his Bohemian Rhapsody absences was due to caring for a sick family member, but over the past year, many new sexual abuse allegations have been lodged against him. Despite the numerous allegations, Singer is still attached to direct the upcoming drama Red Sonja, and he celebrated Bohemian Rhapsody’s successful Oscars campaign.

BlocBoy JB has filed a lawsuit against Epic Games, the company behind the popular video game Fortnite Battle Royale, as TMZ reports. The suit alleges that Epic stole his viral "Shoot" dance and put it in the game. BlocBoy says he's the creator of the dance, and while he doesn't have a registered … More »

If you’re looking for me between now and Oscar night on February 24, I will be here at my desk, listening to Aretha Franklin and muttering “Will God forgive us for snubbing Ethan Hawke?” The leading man was an on-the-bubble contender for Best Actor who didn’t make the final five when this year’s Oscar nominations were announced on Tuesday morning. In his place were four qualified performances — Christian Bale as Dick Cheney in Vice, Rami Malek as Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody, Bradley Cooper and his Tom Ford bronzer as Jackson Maine in A Star Is Born, Willem Dafoe as Vincent van Gogh in At Eternity’s Gate — and Viggo Mortensen in Green Book.

In First Reformed, Ethan Hawke plays Reverend Ernst Toller, the pastor of a small, historic church in upstate New York. He’s half-reverend, half-groundskeeper: He fixes leaks and gives tours and delivers sermons to a dwindling congregation. He writes lengthy journal entries lamenting his inability to hear God’s voice or feel a divine presence in his life. “Who am I to talk about pride?” he journals. It’s a desperate kind of desire: Reverend Toller needs a place to channel his malaise when a young couple seeks his counsel. The husband is an extreme environmental activist, and even as Toller advises him against action, he begins to see the man’s point. The world really is wasting away, entirely due to human action. God shouldn’t forgive us. Toller’s dread and loneliness is ignited with a sense of purpose and Hawke transforms before our eyes: In the beginning he seems placid and somber. By the middle, he looks like he’s bursting at the seams of some invisible straightjacket. The tension in every scene in suffocating until one shot near the end that allows him to exhale. It’s like nothing Hawke has ever done: There’s no greasy hair, bedraggled slouch; he’s not playing a character particularly eloquent or erudite; there’s no charm.

The devil works hard — I know this firsthand from the number of nominations Vice got this morning, and also because I spilled one single drop of Josie Maran’s argan oil on my dress today — but Ethan Hawke’s forehead wrinkle works harder. So does Ethan Hawke. His performance in First Reformed was a marvel of manic restraint. When I talked to Hawke a few days before Christmas (I hope you didn’t trip over that name I just dropped!), he explained it thusly: “Most performances are trying to entertain you, to capture your imagination, thrill you, make you curious, make you laugh, make you cry. A recessive performance avoids the audience. If it works right, it draws you in and invites you in, and lets you participate, because it doesn’t tell you what you’re supposed to think all the time.” Because it won’t, I will: You should’ve nominated it, you cowards!

Here is what would happen if Ethan Hawke won the Oscar he deserved for Best Actor: He would’ve thanked Paul Schrader, his family, and A24. He would’ve rubbed his glorious fecund beard deep in thought. He would’ve said something about having been acting for 30 years. He might’ve thanked God. He would no doubt issue a strongly worded rebuke of the Trump administration and bigotry and white nationalism, as he did at the Gotham Awards. He would’ve furrowed his brow and I would’ve smiled and I would’ve taken a car home from New York Media’s Tribeca offices warm and happy and listening to “My Man” by Barbra Streisand. Instead, someone else will win and I will take a car home from New York Media’s Tribeca offices annoyed and sleepy and cold. Academy, I hope you are happy.

In conclusion, I would trace Ethan Hawke’s forehead wrinkle the way Jackson Maine traced Ally’s nose in A Star Is Born. The forehead wrinkle deserves an Oscar. Please respect our privacy at this difficult time.

The comedic duo of the 21st century is here! John Mulaney and Pete Davidson have been touring together, and it has solidified a partnership that no man can tear asunder. Even if that man is Nick Kroll! Pete and John saw The Mule. Did you? Did you know there are multiple threesomes in it? With Clint Eastwood as the apex of the three-way pyramid? Mulaney and Davidson go back and forth riffing on all the bonkers details in Eastwood’s latest xenophobic opus, and it’s fun as hell. Oh, and Davidson made a joke about his suicide threat, so everything’s probably fine now?

Ariana Grande has been riding a high since her break-up with former fiancee Pete Davidson. She found gratitude on "Thank U, Next" and new love on "Imagine." With her new single, "7 Rings," Grande celebrates female friendship with retail therapy. It bops like a modern day, trap remix of "My Favorite … More »

For Outside magazine, Rowan Jacobsen talks to scientists whose research suggests that the current guidelines for protecting human skin from exposure to the sun are backwards. Despite the skin cancer risk, we should be getting more sun, not less.

When I spoke with Weller, I made the mistake of characterizing this notion as counterintuitive. “It’s entirely intuitive,” he responded. “Homo sapiens have been around for 200,000 years. Until the industrial revolution, we lived outside. How did we get through the Neolithic Era without sunscreen? Actually, perfectly well. What’s counterintuitive is that dermatologists run around saying, ‘Don’t go outside, you might die.’”

When you spend much of your day treating patients with terrible melanomas, it’s natural to focus on preventing them, but you need to keep the big picture in mind. Orthopedic surgeons, after all, don’t advise their patients to avoid exercise in order to reduce the risk of knee injuries.

Meanwhile, that big picture just keeps getting more interesting. Vitamin D now looks like the tip of the solar iceberg. Sunlight triggers the release of a number of other important compounds in the body, not only nitric oxide but also serotonin and endorphins. It reduces the risk of prostate, breast, colorectal, and pancreatic cancers. It improves circadian rhythms. It reduces inflammation and dampens autoimmune responses. It improves virtually every mental condition you can think of. And it’s free.

These seem like benefits everyone should be able to take advantage of. But not all people process sunlight the same way. And the current U.S. sun-exposure guidelines were written for the whitest people on earth.

Exposure and sunscreen recommendations for people with dark skin may be particularly misleading.

People of color rarely get melanoma. The rate is 26 per 100,000 in Caucasians, 5 per 100,000 in Hispanics, and 1 per 100,000 in African Americans. On the rare occasion when African Americans do get melanoma, it’s particularly lethal — but it’s mostly a kind that occurs on the palms, soles, or under the nails and is not caused by sun exposure.

At the same time, African Americans suffer high rates of diabetes, heart disease, stroke, internal cancers, and other diseases that seem to improve in the presence of sunlight, of which they may well not be getting enough. Because of their genetically higher levels of melanin, they require more sun exposure to produce compounds like vitamin D, and they are less able to store that vitamin for darker days. They have much to gain from the sun and little to fear.

Tags: medicine   Rowan Jacobsen   Sun

If you’re a fan of Lauren Lapkus, the Good Neighbor guys, and threesomes, then the upcoming comedy The Unicorn was made just for you. Directed by Robert Schwartzman and co-written by Rutherford, Kirk C. Johnson, and Will Elliott, the film centers on Rutherford and Lapkus as an engaged couple “whose eyes are opened when they visit Malory’s free-spirited parents on the occasion of the latter’s 25th anniversary.” Said eye-opening experience, according to the trailer, apparently involves finding a woman to have a threesome with them, but beware — according to the log line, “this fun and innocent new experience takes an intense turn, exposing deeper relationship problems and threatening their future together.”

Rutherford’s fellow Good Neighbor and SNL collaborators Beck Bennett and Kyle Mooney also show up in the comedy along with Lucy Hale, Dree Hemingway, Darrell Britt-Gibson, Maya Kazan, John Kapelos, and Beverly D’Angelo. The movie heads to theaters on February 1, followed by a digital and on-demand release on February 5.

Whether you’ve been naughty or nice this holiday season, Netflix has a special treat for us all: They’re officially making a sequel to the summer’s smash hit romantic comedy To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before. Remember Lara Jean Covey, her love letters, and her amazing platform shoes? Remember Peter Kavinsky, his silver jeep, the golden specks in his eyes, and the way he playfully splashed water at Lara Jean during before their steamy hot tub makeout? Remember Hot Dad John Corbett tearing up and drinking white wine? Remember author Jenny Han’s cameo?! Hopefully we will get all of this and more in the sequel: Lana Condor and Noah Centineo are onboard for the next installment.

P.S. It's Official.

Jenny Han (@jennyhan) December 19, 2018

Turell has been installing works in an extinct volcano in Arizona for four decades.

Kanye West is donating $10,000,000 to the James Turrell Art Foundation, reports The Wall Street Journal.

The money will go towards the Roden Crater Project, an extinct volcano in Arizona where light artist James Turrell has been installing artworks since 1977. The site had a profound effect on West when he visited last year, prompting him to call the space “life changing”, before asserting that: “We all will live in Turrell spaces”.

Went to visit the James Turrell crater two days ago. This is life changing. We all will live in Turrell spaces

— ye (@kanyewest) December 13, 2018

Kanye and team visiting the Roden Crater by James Turrell in Flagstaff, Arizona earlier this week.

Kanye also visited the location on December 11. pic.twitter.com/4rySiP5Ujs

— TeamKanyeDaily (@TeamKanyeDaily) December 21, 2018

Turrell recently teamed up with Arizona State University to raise $200 million to complete the project, as well as to turn the crater into a “creative campus”, complete with ampitheatre and artists residencies. The 75-year old artist said that he was “thrilled” by Kanye’s gift at a “critical juncture of the project.”

Read next: The best rap of 2018

The post Kanye West donates $10,000,000 to James Turrell’s Roden Crater project appeared first on FACT Magazine: Music News, New Music..

Raving on ice.

CTM Festival will install an ice rink at Berghain as part of its 2019 edition.

‘Eishalle’, an ice-skating rink that will be installed in Halle Am Berghain from January 24 to February 10 as part of an event called ‘Ice Skating To Adventurous Sounds’, will be soundtracked by DJ sets from Creamcake, Freak de l’Afrique Soundsystem, Skatebård and more.

News of CTM’s ice rink comes alongside the festival’s final lineup announcement, which adds The Black Madonna, Buttechno, Gigsta, Pangaea, Resom, Saoirse and Tama Sumo to the bill.

CTM’s ‘Persisting Realities’ exhibition will also present works from a variety of artists including Mika Taanila & Ø (Mika Vainio) and Brandon LaBelle, who will show the special archive installation ‘The Other Citizen’.

A limited number of festival passes and tickets to some individual events are still available. Check out the full CTM 2019 program calendar here, and see below for a full list of the final additions to the lineup.

CTM 2019 final additions:

100% Halal (Sucuk & Bratwurst)
Andrea Neumann
Angel
Ani Klang
The Black Madonna
Boo Lean
Buttechno
Cocaine Piss
DJ Rachael
Gigsta
Marta Zapparoli
Martin Tétreault & dieb13
Moroto Hvy Ind
Pangaea
Perila
Raed Yassin
Resom
Sabine Ercklentz
Saoirse
Skatebård
Tama Sumo
xin
Zanias

CTM 2019 ‘Eishalle’ DJs:

Creamcake
DJ Occult & Sarj
female:pressure with Mieko Suzuki and Mo Loschelder
Freak de l’Afrique Soundsystem with Wallizz & DJ Nomi
Frikimo
Goro + bod [包家巷]
Joe Muggs
Leevisa
Marylou
Rabih Beaini
Raster with Kyoka, Grischa Lichtenberger, Mieko Suzuki, and Robert Lippok
Skatebård
Yoshitaka Hikawa
& more

CTM 2019 exhibition “Persisting Realities”:

Ali M. Demirel
Basel Abbas & Ruanne Abou-Rahme
Dorine van Meel
Helena Nikonole
Jacolby Satterwhite
Johannes Paul Raether
Kanta Horio
Luciana Lamothe
Martin Tétreault & dieb13
Mika Taanila & Ø (Mika Vainio)
Rie Nakajima
Ryoichi Kurokawa
Tabita Rezaire
Tania Candiani
Vivian Caccuri
Brandon LaBelle shows the special archive installation: “The Other Citizen”.

Read next: Red Bull São Paulo 2018 – Resistance from the marginalized communities under fascist pressure

The post Berghain is getting an ice skating rink for CTM 2019 appeared first on FACT Magazine: Music News, New Music..

Fourteen years after Martin Lawrence was banned from SNL for urging women to douche, co-head writer Michael Che got to do an entire desk piece about the joys of washing one’s ass. Bidet company Tushy had its ads banned from the NYC subway, and Che is not having it. “People need to know about bidets,” he said. “I just got one and it changed by life. It’s glorious. Food tastes better, I can jump higher, I want children now. I’m a better person.” Che got to spend two whole minutes extolling the virtues of ass-washing, which just goes to show that comedy is continually evolving. Or maybe if Lawrence had talked about washing his own as 14 years ago, everything would have been cool. Side note: Tushy was founded by the Thinx lady. You know, the one with the big hat who got fired from her own company for allegedly having no boundaries? Yeah, her.

This year, pretty much every big name artist released an album…to varying degrees of success. Vulture music critic Craig Jenkins listened to all of them (plus just about everything else that was released this year) and put together this list of the fifteen best albums of 2018. Read on below.

15. The Breeders, All Nerve

All Nerve is the first new album from the Breeders since 2008’s Mountain Battles and a reunion of the lineup that authored the 1993 alternative rock classic Last Splash. Deal sisters Kim and Kelley seem rejuvenated playing alongside ’90s bandmates Jim Macpherson and Josephine Wiggs on tart power-pop tunes like “Wait in the Car” and suspenseful slow burners like “Walking with a Killer.”

14. Blood Orange, Negro Swan

Negro Swan, the fourth studio album from singer, songwriter, and producer Dev Hynes’ Blood Orange project, is an emotional stimulus package for the depressed and downtrodden. Hynes’ message of self-love and acceptance is imparted across an unpredictable and restlessly ambitious blend of woozy hip-hop vibes, gospel moments, and R&B tunes with rock affectations. Guests include Diddy, Janet Mock, A$AP Rocky, and Project Pat.

13. The Weeknd, My Dear Melancholy,

Heinz does ketchup, McDonalds does burgers, and the Weeknd does heartbreak. The Canadian R&B star’s surprise mini-album My Dear Melancholy, is a return to the well of sultry longing and noirish style that informed the 2011 mixtape trilogy that made him a household name. The Weeknd’s only as effective as his production, and Melancholy pulls out the stops, crafting a limber, hybrid style pairing hip-hop hitmakers Mike Will Made It and Frank Dukes with electronic music luminaries Skrillex, Gesaffelstein, and Guy-Manuel of Daft Punk.

12. YOB, Our Raw Heart

Oregon doom metal trio YOB had a bad scare last year when an illness left singer-guitarist Mike Scheidt afflicted in a hospital bed he worried he’d never make it out of. Scheidt passed time writing intense lyrics about the feeling of his body failing him, and those missives power Our Raw Heart. The towering, majestic, eighth YOB album is a seamless journey through the psychedelic scenes of “Beauty Falling in Leaves” and the disquieting uncertainty of “The Screen” and “Lungs Reach.”

11. Gorillaz, The Now Now

After the star-studded death disco of last year’s Humanz, Gorillaz maestro Damon Albarn reins in his apocalyptic musings on The Now Now, the optimistic dawn to Humanz’s dark night. Now is steeped in the Britpop legend’s sleepy, lovelorn vocals and the underlying thesis of his work as a songwriter, which is that we can beat whatever it is that bugs us if we only stick together.

10. Mariah Carey, Caution

Mariah Carey’s tally of Billboard chart toppers is second only to the Beatles, and this fall’s Caution, her fifteenth album, is a short, sweet reminder of reasons people love the diva (spoiler: vocals) and reasons to fear her wrath. Step out of line, and get memorialized in a hit single, like the poor souls who inspired the harsh “GTFO” and “A No No” must have. Play nice, stay put, and enjoy a shower of love and affection.

9. Sleep, The Sciences

Stoner metal titans Sleep served fans a heady holiday gift on 4/20 with the release of The Sciences, the trio’s first album since 2003’s Dopesmoker. The new music lumbering and crushingly heavy, everything fans hope for when they dream for years of a follow-up to a beloved album and wake up one day to find that wish fulfilled. From the bong rip that kicks off “Marijuanaut’s Theme” to the sedate, sublime closer “The Botanist,” The Sciences deals in thick grooves that reveal their true depth with time… and trees.

8. Earl Sweatshirt, Some Rap Songs

Earl Sweatshirt’s I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside was a masterclass in gruff, antisocial inscrutability, and this fall’s Some Rap Songs is a trip even further down the rabbit hole, unexpectedly brighter and quirkier than the last one at no cost to the disorienting otherness that gives Earl records teeth. He’s leaning into the weird, woolly sounds of indie rap here, away from the mannered rhyme patterns and detached ultraviolence of his early music. Follow his trail, and you’ll see that time has made him older, wiser, and even funnier than before.

7. Mac Miller, Swimming

Like fuzzy sweaters and cozy couches, Mac Miller records were made for slipping in and shedding the day’s troubles. He knew your day sucked. He crafted music to help get you through it. Swimming outfits the rapper’s introspective rhymes and lilting melodies with stately embellishments from film score whiz Jon Brion. The artist’s dynamic range is expressed through this album’s unexpected twists; one minute he’s a rapper, then he’s a crooner in a funk band, and later, he’s emoting over lush folk pop. Miller’s craft grew by leaps and bounds every year; he deserved more time.

6. Arctic Monkeys, Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino

After 15 years as England’s premiere trad punk revivalists, Arctic Monkeys sidelined the guitar in favor of the piano, disappeared into their record and film collections, and returned with Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino, a heady sci-fi song cycle obsessed with disorder, middle-period David Bowie, and the films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Alex Turner is just as deadly, delivering this album’s cracked cabaret as he was sloshing through drunken pub crawls in his twenties. Like whiskey, spite gains flavor with age.

5. Pusha T, Daytona

The first cut in Kanye West’s Wyoming wilderness retreat series remains the deepest. Pusha T’s Daytona undercut the fuss about Ye’s political affiliations and Push’s famous enemies with a reminder that great hip-hop doesn’t have to do much more than match the right sample chops to the right snarl. Luxury raps sound disrespectful pouring through the Virginia rapper’s disdainful tone; at his peak, Kanye can give old soul songs outrageous new voicings. They need each other. Daytona’s effortlessness is the evidence.

4. Kacey Musgraves, Golden Hour

2018 delivered great roots music (see: Colter Wall and Amanda Shires’ latest) and some sharp pop-country (see: Kane Brown’s Experiment), but the stately blend of plaintive guitars, psychedelic atmosphere, and disco glamor Kacey Musgraves struck on Golden Hour feels like a breakthrough because we aren’t accustomed to having all its building blocks – lonesome early Neil Young sadness, trippy synth embellishments, and rap and disco drums – figure into the same piece. Why that is, is a matter for genre purists. The album is a joy.

3. Pistol Annies, Interstate Gospel

Miranda Lambert, Ashley Monroe, and Angaleena Presley are all country powerhouses in their own right, and when they unite as the Pistol Annies, it’s like iron sharpening iron. Annies album three, this fall’s Interstate Gospel, deals in rich harmonies and stories of women overcoming setbacks and breakups, alone and together. The Annies’ reckoning can be brutal, as it is on the withering divorcee’s kissoff “Got My Name Changed Back,” or delicate, like “Cheyenne,” where Lambert wishes she could borrow a barfly’s capacity to love and leave and bounce back no worse for wear.

2. Low, Double Negative

Just like the rest of us, Duluth slowcore trio Low has been worrying that the last presidential election broke something in the collective American subconsciousness. The band dramatizes the current climate of uncertainty and political disorder through icy synths and crackling fuzz on Double Negative, its twelfth album. Songs like “Quorum” and “Tempest” manifest their outrage as much through flayed vocals as through coarse electronic textures. The final product feels like an exhausted machine reading humanity the riot act. Imagine Kid A with sharper teeth, or a Grandaddy whose Sopthware slapped rather than slumped, and you get the idea.

1. Mitski, Be the Cowboy

It seems impossible for Mitski songs to be both mannered and explosive, but the perfect two-minute wonders that populate her stunning fifth album Be the Cowboy manage to mine the full depth of human despair and disappointment in little more than a few chilly, economic turns of phrase. Cowboy observes relationships in disarray in an attempt to understand the reasons people stay in uncomfortable situations when it seems like smart business to leave; Mitski grew up bouncing around a dozen different countries, and it’s tempting to see the stoic housewives and long-suffering girlfriends on display here as a withering indictment of the concept of emotional stasis.

Natalie Prass and Kacey Musgraves both put out great albums last year in the groove-heavy The Future And The Past and the lovestruck Golden Hour, the latter of which we named the very best album of 2018. And, as of last night, they're on tour together. More »

For the past few years, the @TerribleMaps Twitter account has been posting maps that aren’t useful or that don’t make a lot of sense. Here are some of my favorites.

(via laura olin)

Tags: maps

Ariana Grande loves going on Jimmy Fallon's Tonight Show. She does it all the time. It seems to be the place where Grande, currently probably the biggest non-rapping pop star in the world, seems most comfortable in public. Last night, Grande was once again on the show. We already posted the first thing that she … More »

When compared to his previous work, Yorgos Lanthimos’s outstanding new film The Favourite seems almost straightforward. That might sound like a strange thing to say about a movie depicting the sexual rivalry between two women in the early 18th century as they battle for the affection of an increasingly ill Queen Anne while surrounded by scheming lords, fish-eye lenses, and 17 symbolic rabbits — 1 for each of the queen’s dead children — but unlike its predecessors, which include a feral family drama from hell (Dogtooth), a dating satire in which people are turned into animals if they can’t find a mate (The Lobster), and a restaging of Greek tragedy in upper-class Cincinnati (The Killing of a Sacred Deer), The Favourite takes place in a world that we might recognize.

This isn’t to say that Lanthimos’s other films don’t have a great deal to say about our current situation; they do, disturbingly so. But their approach tends toward the metaphorical, and the acting style that Lanthimos favored before The Favourite was aggressively deadpan, encouraging a certain distance that, one might argue, went a long way toward making the horror go down. The Favourite is the first of his movies to be scripted by someone other than himself, and the first since his debut, Kinetta, not to include co-writer Efthymis Filippou. It also sheds the deliberately affectless acting for a more naturalistic style, no small risk when you’re five features in and have found an approach that works.

What’s so shocking, then, about The Favourite is the success of his new direction, and just how vibrantly alive it is — if Lanthimos up to this point had been a sort of necromancer, descending into Hades to show why the dead were damned, then The Favourite reveals him to be just as vital when working with the painfully living. But we should know better than to expect this filmmaker to deliver a simple story, and in the last shots of the movie, he characteristically complicates the narrative.

Where are we, then, at the end? After a film-long struggle between Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough (Rachel Weisz), lifelong friend and adviser to Queen Anne (Olivia Colman), and her upstart cousin Abigail (Emma Stone), newly arrived at court and wily as a fox, a decisive victory has been won. Abigail’s poisoning of Sarah’s tea sent her riding off into the woods, where she passed out and was taken in by the madam of a brothel, then retrieved by her ally Godolphin. Upon returning to court, she tries to force Anne to send Abigail away, and she even threatens to reveal secret letters — scandalous letters, of course — to that old thorn Jonathan Swift. This is the last straw for Anne, who bans her from her bedroom and eventually has her removed from the palace.

Meanwhile, Abigail has, by wedding a colonel, nimbly ascended from maid to lady, and installed herself in the palace, as well as in Queen Anne’s bed. In a moment of great significance, Sarah warns Anne that, while she may be cruel and harsh and sometimes manipulative, she is trustworthy — and that’s exactly what Abigail is not. But Anne brushes her off, and Sarah heads to her estate, where Godolphin advises her to write to the queen and apologize.

Sure enough, Sarah’s words come true when Abigail attempts to suggest that Sarah had been cooking the books, stealing money from the crown for her and her husband. This is going too far: Anne knows that Sarah, despite her faults and ambition, would never stoop to that, and she tells Abigail so; Abigail leaves her bedroom chanting “fuck” like it’s a mantra.

But the critical moment is still to come. Anne waits on the letter that she expects from Sarah, the letter that would allow her to forgive; Sarah finally deigns to write said letter; and Abigail dutifully screens the mail until it arrives, at which point, sealing the fate of all three, she casts it into the fire. A chain reaction follows: Hurt and furious at what she perceives as Sarah’s silence, Anne uses Abigail’s lie to have Sarah and her husband banished, and Abigail is victorious — but at a cost.

Throughout the film, Abigail insists that she won’t betray her morals. By the end, she has clearly done so, and that renders her victory meaningless. Lanthimos has gone to great lengths to show that the ecosystem of the palace is a fragile one, and that its balance was finely maintained by Sarah through a remarkable mixture of statesmanship, affection, and clarity of sight. Sarah might not be a perfect person, but she is honest, and there are few things more valuable to a queen than honesty, particularly when it can be delivered in the proper way.

Abigail, on the other hand, becomes a figure who would fit in beautifully in our own contemporary politics, and, probably, at any other time since man started walking upright. She knows how to gain power, but she has no idea how to wield it: She’s all appetite. Even though the queen sees Abigail for what she is the moment she lies about Sarah’s alleged theft, Anne’s vanity and fragility, well-documented by now, are crippling: She believes that Sarah has forsaken her, and she’d rather hurt Sarah with Abigail than send Abigail away.

In the final scene, Anne forces a defiant Abigail to rub her legs, taking hold of her hair and forcing her down. The message is clear: The scales have fallen from Anne’s eyes. She knows Abigail’s a liar, but she’s too weak and human to send her away. And Abigail might be a lady, but her existence is dependent on the queen. Her victory is Pyrrhic, coming at the cost of the illusion, long believed by Anne, that Abigail was a nice person, an innocent person, a sweet person — all in contrast to Sarah. Ironically, the winner might be Sarah, who is, at least, free.

As Anne digs her hand into Abigail’s hair, Lanthimos performs a magic trick. The image warps and distends, and the two women’s faces are superimposed over one another: They’re caged together in a hell of their own making, one wrought through deceit and greed. And then, terrifyingly, Lanthimos adds the rabbits to this collage, and it grows trippier and more addled until we fade to black. If The Favourite has been set somewhat apart from Lanthimos’s filmography up to that moment, this shot provides a bridge, stamping the movie with his signature brand of psychological terror that conveys a deeper meaning.

The rabbits, of course, represent the queen’s dead children, 1 for each of the 17 lost, but they mean even more than that. Sarah criticized the rabbits as sentimental and macabre; Abigail, on the other hand, used them to ingratiate herself with the queen. In a sense, Abigail appeared to be a rabbit herself, beautiful and cuddly and harmless. But with that final shot, Lanthimos conveys a different message. Abigail’s act has taken on a bastardized truth: She’s a pet, caged and helpless. And the queen’s desperate desire for unconditional love, the love of the children she doesn’t have, has led her to cast off the one person who truly cared about her. All she’s left with are rabbits.

Between now and February 24, 2019, when the winners of the Academy Awards are announced, Vulture will consult its crystal ball on a regular basis to determine the changing fortunes in this year’s Oscars race. In our Oscar Futures column, we’ll let you in on insider gossip, parse brand-new developments, and track industry buzz to figure out who’s up, who’s down, and who’s currently leading the race for a coveted Oscar nomination.

Before I started making my own web pages, I spent a not-insignificant amount of my time on the Internet trawling the alt.fan.tarantino newsgroup for bits of knowledge about Quentin Tarantino, Pulp Fiction, and Reservoir Dogs. A big topic of discussion back then was speculation about the contents of the briefcase that Jules and Vincent were tasked to retrieve for Marsellus Wallace. Was it gold? Diamonds? Wallace’s soul? No one knew and Tarantino wasn’t telling. It was the most compelling MacGuffin since Hitchcock himself.

Now, after nearly 25 years, we finally learn what was in the briefcase:

If you’d like to make one of your own, just follow these instructions.

If you want a Bad Motherfucker wallet just like Jules’, here you go.

Tags: movies   Pulp Fiction   Quentin Tarantino   video

Hannah Gadsby has had a busy 2018. Her Netflix stand-up special Nanette inspired plenty of praise and debate, she landed a book deal, and she stole the show at this year’s Emmys. Now today, she delivered the opening remarks at The Hollywood Reporter’s 2018 Women in Entertainment gala. The comedian came armed with a speech calling out the way “good men” — particularly late-night hosts (or as she called them, “the Jimmys”) — talk about the so-called “bad men.” She called out the ever-moving “line in the sand” that men use to excuse misogyny when it hits a little too close to home and even gave that line in the sand a catchy name: Kevin.

You can watch Gadsby’s full remarks above, or read a transcript below:

I want to speak about the very big problem I have with the good men, especially the good men who take it upon themselves to talk about the bad men. I find good men talking about bad men incredibly irritating, and this is something the good men are doing a lot of at the moment. Not this moment, not this minute, because the good men don’t have to wake up early for their opportunity to monologue their hot take on misogyny. They get prime-time TV and the late shows.

I’ll tell you what, I’m sick of turning my television on at the end of the day to find anywhere up to 12 Jimmys giving me their hot take. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with the Jimmys and the Davids and the other Jimmys — good guys, great guys. Some of my best friends are Jimmy. But the last thing I need right now in this moment in history is to have to listen to men monologue about misogyny and how other men should just stop being “creepy,” as if that’s the problem. “If only these bad men just knew how not to be creepy!” Is that the problem? Men are not creepy. Do you know what’s creepy? Spiders, because we don’t know how they move. Rejecting the humanity of a woman is not creepiness; it is misogyny. So why can’t men monologue about these issues? Well they can, and they do. My problem is that according to the Jimmys, there’s only two types of bad men. There’s the Weinstein/Bill Cosby types who are so utterly horrible that they might as well be different species to the Jimmys. And then there are the FOJs: the Friends of Jimmy. These are apparently good men who misread the rules — garden-variety consent dyslexics. They have the rule book, but they just skimmed it. “Oh, that a semicolon? My bad. I thought that meant anal.” Sorry to the vegans in the room.

My issue is that when good men talk about bad men, they always ignore the line in the sand — the line in the sand that is inevitably drawn whenever a good man talks about bad men: “I am a good man. Here is the line. There are all the bad men.” The Jimmys and the good men won’t talk about this line, but we really need to talk about this line. Let’s call it Kevin. And let’s never call it that again. We need to talk about how men will draw a different line for every different occasion. They have a line for the locker room; a line for when their wives, mothers, daughters, and sisters are watching; another line for when they’re drunk and fratting; another line for nondisclosure; a line for friends; and a line for foes. You know why we need to talk about this line between good men and bad men? Because it’s only good men who get to draw that line. And guess what? All men believe they are good. We need to talk about this because guess what happens when only good men get to draw that line? This world — a world full of good men who do very bad things and still believe in their heart of hearts that they are good men because they have not crossed the line, because they move the line for their own good. Women should be in control of that line, no question.

Now take everything I have said up until this point and replace “man” with “white person,” and know that if you are a white woman, you have no place drawing lines in the sand between good white people and bad white people. I encourage you to also take the time to replace “man” with “straight” or “cis” or “able-bodied” or “neurotypical,” et cetera, et cetera. Everybody believes they are fundamentally good, and we all need to believe we are fundamentally good because believing you are fundamentally good is part of the human condition. But if you have to believe someone else is bad in order to believe you are good, you are drawing a very dangerous line. In many ways, these lines in the sand we all draw are stories we tell to ourselves so we can still believe we are good people.

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As punishment, the MPAA may revoke the R rating for the official release of the film, or even stop the ratings process for other IFC films, or ban the distributor from the ratings process entirely for up to 90 days. Their punishment will be decided after a hearing, but seriously, who is taking their kid to see this movie. Don’t they know Aquaman is out?

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Of the international collection of singers and performers who broke out during the mid-’90s ascension of Swedish producer and songwriter Max Martin — a cast that includes megastars Britney Spears, N’SYNC, and the Backstreet Boys — Robyn, the Scandinavian singer whose downtempo breakbeat love song “Show Me Love” breached the Hot 100’s single digit sector in the weeks between Backstreet’s “As Long As You Love Me” and JT and the boys’ “I Want You Back,” has had the strangest and perhaps the most critically buoyant career. The TRL kids made a mint recasting pop music as a parade of squeaky-clean imaging and latent hip-hop style, but that made them seem like product, an impression it would take years of bold creative and extracurricular gestures to shake. Robyn bristled at the suggestion that she ought to make music that sounded like everyone else’s. She has subsisted in the two decades since “Show Me Love” by wrestling for control of her career and then getting good and weird.

Robyn’s tenure as a major-label pop artist was troubled; for a few years, she made great records you could barely find outside of Sweden. The last straw was her label’s refusal to back the early ’00s single “Who’s That Girl,” a collaboration with Olaf and Karin Dreijer of the Knife, whose sophomore album Deep Cuts and its hit “Heartbeats” were released to hometown success and international acclaim in 2003. Robyn realized her arrangement with a major label gave someone else control over her art and bought herself out of her contract, releasing “Who’s That Girl” and her excellent self-titled album independently on her own Konichiwa Records. Since then, she’s been doing what she wants when she wants. You might get three projects in the span of a year; you might get nothing for five years. This week, Robyn follows her last full-length, 2010’s Body Talk, and quality EP-length releases backed by Scandinavian producers like Mr. Tophat, Royksopp, and Christian Falk, with album number eight, the slight, saccharine Honey.

Honey is a peculiar title for this specific batch of songs. In pop and R&B, honey is a signifier of thickness, sensuality, and impossible sweetness. Consider the Erykah Badu, Fiona Apple, Mariah Carey, and Ohio Players records that have invoked the stuff, songs about hot, heavy longing with arrangements that often match their lyrics in evoking viscosity and robustness. When you get past the lead single “Missing U” — which opens the album revisiting the effervescent synths and deceptively chipper vocals of Body Talk’s cry-in-the-club hits “Dancing on My Own” and “Call Your Girlfriend,” like the recap at the beginning of a television season premiere — Honey spreads itself shockingly thin. It’s a 40-minute exercise in bare-bones melodicism, the kind of svelte, downtempo tracks you pop on in the ride home from a function, smiling wryly as dawn breaks, and whatever’s in your system from the night wears off. “Because It’s in the Music” and “Baby Forgive Me” let the bass carry the melody, splashing keys over top of sparse post-disco rhythm sections like garnish. Honey trades in hollowed-out, hypnotic sounds in the same way that early ’80s R&B staples like Taana Gardner’s “Heartbeat” avoided any elements that didn’t drive the groove forward.

Honey’s hollowness is more than an aesthetic choice. The music follows a period of upheaval for Robyn. The loss of her longtime collaborator Christian Falk and some rocky spots in her relationship with director Max Vitali source some of the late-night yearning here. “Missing U” is a poignant lyric about coping with the suddenness of loss, the jolt you feel when someone you care about abruptly becomes a piece of your past, and you fight to keep them alive in your mind in memories. “Send to Robin Immediately” builds to an ominous verse about settling unfinished business while you still have time: “If you got something to say, say it right away / If you got something to do, do what’s right for you / If you got somebody to love, give that love today.” Between these examinations of the phantom pain of loss are songs about nurturing surviving relationships while you still can. “Baby Forgive Me” seeks reconciliation after turmoil; “Honey” and “Beach 2k20” excitedly plot to sweep a lover off his feet when he gets home.

“Human Being” is the beating heart of this collection. Honey is, at its core, a series of observations about the places our minds go in the dark of the night, the processes we can’t shake when we’re alone with our thoughts. Humans are hubristic creatures whose greatest achievements have given us the sense that we can, where it serves us best, set aside our primal, emotional natures and work objectively toward the greater good. Thing is, in the throes of love and loss, our emotions come calling unexpectedly. We can’t schedule torment. We can’t stifle longing. We can try to wrangle with them, to work through them. Robyn deadpanning “I’m a human being” in the middle of a batch of songs about allowing herself to hang out and feel whatever her heart needs her to is a mature assessment of the experience of growing up. We can’t be perfect. We have to suffer. We eventually die. Honey is masterful because it works both as a stunning document of human frailty and a feathery soundtrack to moonlit swooning, depending on how closely you’re willing to engage it. The depth and effortlessness here are reasons to let gifted creatives process art and life at whatever pace they want. Honey might not be syrupy in its arrangements, but it still lives up to the name: like bees processing pollen and nectar, Robyn makes coarse, painful elements seem enticing and even sweet.

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