If you asked us to come up with a list ahead of time of the likeliest celebrities to pull off the best looks of Golden Globes night … well. Call us horrid, call us bitches, call us whores if you must, but Miss Vanessa, we can guarantee, would never be on it.
This is what’s known as “Shutting our damn mouths.”
We’re feeling a touch of ’80s Cher here. Again, we’d never have predicted she could pull off such a thing, but it really does look spectacular on her.
“A Touch of ’80s Cher.” A fragrance and body splash available at fine drugstores everywhere.
We’re a bit “meh” on the sheer panels, but we’re not mad at them.
It’s not quite right for an actual awards ceremony, but it makes a perfect dress for an after-party and a non-nominee who’s looking to grab some attention. We can’t “Attagirl” this one enough.
But is the head styling up to it, do you think?
Style Credits: Naeem Khan Silver Metallic Deco Beading Velvet Dress with Open Back from the Fall 2016 Collection Emm Kuo Clutch Eva Fehren and Le Vian Jewelry Cesare Paciotti Suede Platform Peep-Toe Heels
[Photo Credit: John Sciulli/Getty Images, Frazer Harrison/Getty Images, IMAXTree]
Boston Police say a man was stabbed several times outside the Drinking Fountain on Nov. 12 by a group of four people who had been denied entrance into the Washington Street watering hole earlier in the evening and that his attackers fled towards Forest Hills in a white sedan. Read more.
Above is a picture from 1999 of the real Tonya Harding working a Florida Tuxedo (it’s like a Canadian tuxedo but without sleeves) and a gorgeous White Rain-encrusted curling iron bang. If that picture was taken in 1994, I’d say that Tonya won the Gold Medal in Shade by throwing that “At least my knee works, bitch” pose. And below are the first pictures of Margot Robbie in Tonya Harding drag on the set of the biopicI, Tonya (working title: I, Margot, Really Want A Fucking Oscar).
That movie also stars Sebastian Stan as Tonya’s child-toucher-looking ex-husband Jeff Gillooly and Allison Janney as Tonya’s abusive mother LaVona Golden. Heather Langenkamp, star of Tonya & Nancy: The Inside Story, is reprising her role as Nancy Kerrigan. That last sentence was co-written by Wishful Thinking. They haven’t said who’s playing Nancy.
When this movie was first announced, my first thought was, “AMY ADAMS WAS ROBBED OF A HOT ROLE YET AGAIN!” My second thought was that Margot should go ahead and add “future Oscar winner” to her autograph, because nothing gives the Academy a leaky voting boner like a gorgeous chick homely-ing herself down for a movie role. But now I’m not so sure. Thanks to prosthetics, Margot is a little Tony Harding-ish in the face, but that hair is not deep fried enough and what in the name of a deformed He-Man action figure is going on with her body? It looks like she’s wearing a child-sized inflatable muscle man costume underneath that sweater.
I know that Tonya was a little bulkier than the other figure skaters, but Margot looks like Tonya after Tonya was exposed to gamma radiation. Maybe that’s Tonya after the Olympics when she gained some chunk, but still. It’s dreadful that Margot is wearing padding. Margot’s Suicide Squad co-star and the thespian who practically created method acting, Jared Leto, must be so embarrassed to share the same profession with her. If Jared got the role of Tonya Harding, he would’ve gained weight by following Rob Kardashian around for a week and eating everything Rob ate, and he’d gain arm muscle by hitting people in the knee with a police baton over and over again. When Margot begins her Oscar campaign, what is she going to say to prove that she truly suffered for her art?! “Well, the child-sized inflatable muscle man costume I wore underneath my sweaters was kind of itchy.”
Here’s the embarrassment of method actors everywhere at LAX earlier this month with her new husband.
Dakota Fanning is making the jump to TV. The actress will star as the female lead in TNT's The Alienist, joining Daniel Brühl and Luke Evans to fill out the high-caliber cast. Based on the book of the same name, The Alienist is a psychological thriller about what happens when a string of boy prostitutes are horrifically murdered during New York City's Gilded Age. Fanning will play an aspiring detective and ambitious secretary to Theodore Roosevelt, then the police commissioner. Brühl and Evans, meanwhile, are the criminal psychologist (i.e.the alienist in question) and reporter, respectively, who get called on by good ol' Teddy to conduct a secret investigation. Any chance that "speak softly and carry a big stick" was just some common sense advice for hunting one of New York City's first serial killers? History is just a big, sloppy game of telephone, after all.
For some, the impending inauguration of President-elect Donald Trump will serve as a grand celebration—while many others see it as a clear sign that the total collapse of civilized society at the hands of an unhinged megalomaniac is nigh. But for the DC service industry, inauguration weekend also means packed seats and massive profits.
Now, one campaign is bringing together the capital's top restaurants, bars, cafes, and distilleries to pledge a portion of their inflated inauguration profits to local service organizations and causes—many of which have been threatened by Trump's discriminatory political policies.
All in Service DC, the brainchild of local service industry professionals Amanda Carper and Alaina Dyne, launched in late December 2016 with the mission to highlight the diversity and compassion of their community as a whole. With an all-female staff of volunteers, the organization has already signed on 54 businesses to participate in the campaign and are hoping to recruit more before Inauguration Day.
A number of high-profile dining destinations, including Café Saint-Ex, 24/7 Diner, Chez Billy Sud, and the new Momofuku CCDC have joined the cause, pledging to donate funds collected over the January 20–22 weekend to a diverse group of nonprofits.
Hey ya! A Languages, Literature, and Philosophy professor at Georgia's Armstrong State University will be offering a course on the seminal hip-hop duo OutKast this coming spring semester for a few lucky students. Titled "OutKast and the Rise of the Hip-Hop South," professor Regina Bradley told the Savannah Morning News that her upper-level English course will explore the numerous ways in which André 3000 and Big Boi's "ideas about the South and southernness seep into other Southern writers"; students will listen to and analyze all of OutKast's albums, as well as other albums in the genre, and examine how hip-hop can be used for political expression. Big Boi has already been made aware of the course, recently musing to Creative Loafing that it's "an honor to be studied" and a "super dope" idea. (The duo now joins Beyoncé for college course glory, as she was the lucky recipient of a Lemonade class at the University of Texas at San Antonio last year.) Somehow, Key & Peele will probably find a way to poke fun at this.
This movie has such a great concept, yet I think never have I seen a work of art so stunningly betray the promise of its premise. You’d have to work so incredibly hard to make sure that every single interesting aspect of your premise was carefully not explored in favor of all the most boring and insulting aspects; for this reason alone, the dumbass (presumably) men who cobbled together “Passengers” should be commended. They did the cinematic equivalent of shooting the moon in a game of hearts. LORD
The most obvious problem with this film is its reprehensible construction of heterosexual relationships OBVIOUSLY and I assume you have read other furious essays about this elsewhere. The plot is basically that of all romantic comedies, but pushed to its most extreme logical conclusion. Before watching “Passengers” in fact we had sat down on a lovely Christmas Eve in Maine to watch the VHS tape of “Frankie and Johnny” that we found in one of the drawers of the B&B where we were staying. Since it is a Garry Marshall film we of course knew it would be morally and aesthetically repugnant but I think we were both genuinely surprised by how bad it was. But I’m bringing this up because “Frankie and Johnny,” too, pushes a standard rom-com plot to an extreme: man decides he wants woman; woman hates man and tells him to leave her alone; man basically tricks woman or wears woman down until finally out of exhaustion and a sort of last-ditch means of emotional survival she succumbs to Stockholm Syndrome and decides she really loves him too and has loved him all along. “Frankie and Johnny” is like an hour of a woman crying and pleading with a man to please, please leave her alone, and the man just saying “no” over and over again and then demanding to see her tits. And then at the end she confesses that her last boyfriend beat the shit out of her to such an extent that she can never have children, and he’s like “awww poor baby” and then they are together and happy. I feel that the film is just a long depiction of what it means to be trapped in an abusive relationship—clearly Johnny is exactly like her previous boyfriend, he won’t take no for an answer, he demands what he wants without regard for her feelings or desires, he’s incapable of taking criticism or evaluating his own actions, he negs her constantly and tells her the reason she doesn’t love him is because she’s fucked up and needs him to fix her. But somehow the film presents it as a heart-warming tale of two quirky weirdos finally finding love. It’s bizarre and watching it made me feel alienated from my species.
We spent the next week talking shit about “Frankie and Johnny,” then decided to go see “Passengers,” unaware that it was structured on the exact same principle. Basically it’s about a guy (Chris Pratt) who is accidentally woken up 30 years into a 120 year interstellar journey to a colony planet (great premise). He can’t go back to sleep, and he’s just stuck all alone on this creepy automated ship filled with chipper robots and simulations who just tell him it’s impossible for a passenger to wake up too early. He tries everything–he tries to fix his pod, he tries to communicate with Earth, but ultimately he confronts the fact that he’s going to spend the rest of his life alone on this ship. Then he goes through a bunch of the stages of despair and madness in a quick montage mostly played for laughs, which was just insanely tone-deaf, but this movie is just getting started in terms of being tone deaf, let me tell you!!!! So, a year into being alone on the ship, he then “falls in love” with another comatose passenger (Jennifer Lawrence) because she’s really pretty and he accesses her passenger information and reads her blog and she’s really smart and funny. And then after some soul-searching he decides to wake her up. Knowing that the act will condemn her—a total stranger—to spending the rest of her life alone on this ship with him. He definitely knows it’s bad and he feels really, really bad about it. But he’s SO lonely, he has to do it. So he wakes her up and after she too goes through the horrifying realizations that he went through a year earlier, he starts wooing her. It’s so charming!! He’s so handsome and nice, really he did her a favor by waking her up, it turns out, because she really likes him. They have a lot of fun playing Dance Dance Revolution and talking to this robot named Arthur who is played by Michael Sheen.
Look, I’m not just wholesale against him waking her up as a plot device. It could have been really interesting, an exploration of serious questions of morality and atonement, loneliness, etc. His descent into madness, if examined sincerely and at length instead of for laughs and briefly, could have made his choice to wake her up more understandable–what if we saw him become so crazed and dehumanized that he no longer understood what he was doing? What if he did it in his sleep? e.g.–similarly, once he woke her up, many interesting concepts could have been explored. Maybe once he woke her up, he became so consumed with shame and regret that he killed himself, leaving HER all alone on the ship. Or, it could have become sort of a wry, Don Jon-like exploration of the folly of idealism, like maybe he wakes up his dream girl only to find she’s an asshole, then they’re just stuck together for 90 years on this ship, despising each other, like War of the Roses or something. Any number of things could have made the scenario interesting. But the film didn’t explore any of them–instead, it treated this character’s profound, irretrievably immoral act the same way your average rom-com treats, say, forgetting an anniversary or maybe cheating on someone. A lie, a conflict, that will provide a momentary bump in an otherwise starry and fated love affair. I find this disturbing.
So they fall in love. Then she finds out he woke her up and she’s really mad. Then they have to save the ship, though, and he heroically sacrifices himself so that she may live, and this makes her love him, and then everything is fine, and they get engaged (?). And then that’s just the end! The movie cuts to the actual crew waking up 90 years later and coming out into the grand concourse and being like “Whaaaaaa???” because there’s a tree and vines growing there, and there’s a little wooden house built there (?? where did the wood come from) and an ol’ chicken peckin’ at the ground. And presumably two withered skeletons somewhere on the premises. The film of course is only interested in the two young beautiful people falling in love, not in what is actually interesting about the set-up, which, to me, would be the rest of those 90 years, like, what do they DO and how does their relationship evolve and how do they hack various aspects of the ship to serve their needs and what kinds of philosophical revelations do they have and honestly why don’t they have kids, don’t you think you would, in that scenario? Then the kid would be middle-aged when the rest of the crew woke up and the kid would be like “OH MY GOD MY PERSONAL MYTHOLOGY IS COMING TRUE, I HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR THIS DAY.” And the kid would be some sort of John Savage character type who was inculturated in a totally bizarre and idiosyncratic way that the woken-up citizens of Old Earth would have no way of comprehending, and maybe he’d/she’d become some sort of messiah on the new planet and get everyone to revolt against their corporate overlords or marry robots or something.
But anyway none of that happens, actually it just cuts from them getting engaged to 90 years later and the crew coming out all haggard from being in hibernation and then seeing the tree and the chickens and realizing that some poor schmuck has been awake this whole time. And the captain—played by Andy Garcia even though he has no lines!—just makes a comical face like “HUH?” and then the movie ends with a super triumphant rock ballad about love over Hubble shots of galaxies.
I feel very misled by the trailer for this film, which made it look like they both are awoken from interstellar hibernation by supernatural means, due to having some sort of cosmic task to complete. But no. It’s just this sick rape apology of a film. There’s even a part where one of the crew members, who is Laurence Fishburne, briefly wakes up before immediately dying and discovers that Chris Pratt woke the girl up on purpose, and he’s like “Daaamn” (actual line) and then later when Jennifer Lawrence is demanding that he arrest Chris Pratt because, as she correctly notes, “IT’S MURDER,” Fishburne is like “look it’s really bad what he did. But he was really, really lonely.” I mean, this is the message we tell ourselves about rape. Rape is wrong, right? We know rape is wrong, it’s very bad, we’re so sorry someone raped you. BUT……there’s always a but. But boys will be boys! But you were very drunk! But your skirt was really short! But why were you there alone anyway? So yeah, this guy should certainly not have woken you up……BUT he just really, really wanted to, okay? And now you just have to deal with that. And, much like Frankie and Johnny, she falls in love with him, because, I mean, what choice does she have?? 90 years alone or do you just kind of get over it and try to have some sort of life with this rando you’re stuck with? It’s horrible. And the film presents it as inspiring–because we see in a video testimonial at one point that Jennifer Lawrence’s friends are afraid she’s never gonna find the right man who will give her what she needs, because she’s never satisfied. Thank god Chris Pratt decided to take her life from her! Finally SHE FOUND A GOOD MAN, the only viable goal for any woman’s life! Lord
I am just gettting started. The hateful portrayal of romantic consent is just the beginning! There are a number of other interlocking problems with this fucked up movie.
CAPITALISM
Early on, I sort of had the hope that the film would present a critique of corporate capitalism. The ship is owned by a corporation called Homestead, which is engaged in colonizing other planets in order to exploit their natural resources. We learn that the passengers on the ship are tiered (just like in contemporary airline travel!), with wealthy passengers having nicer staterooms and access to better breakfast and coffee options once they wake up, etc., and poorer passengers having these small cells with hard thin mattresses, no breakfast or coffee options, etc. Furthermore, we learn that poor passengers like Chris Pratt have only been able to afford their tickets on this colonizing ship by signing away 20% of their earnings for the rest of their life to Homestead. So they are indentured servants! Going to inhabit this planet as, basically, slaves for corporate gain. My god, that is a disturbing concept! Will that be how colonization of other worlds really happens?? That is so fucking dark. Does the film have anything else to say about it? Well, yes, but not what you’d expect. Really, the film tells us, this is all fine. We see Chris Pratt humorously longing for the more advanced breakfast and coffee options, and being told over and over again that he is not at a high enough passenger tier to qualify for them. Rather than drawing out the absurdity of this set-up—this guy having to spend the next 90 years surrounded by luxury and plenty but unable to access it because he isn’t from the right economic class—the movie just abandons it. After establishing the breakfast and coffee situation, his low-class status is never explored again, and indeed we see him eating at all the fancy restaurants, drinking the fancy whiskey, using all the cool entertainment, etc., as though he somehow has the credit to access luxury accommodations everywhere on the ship except the breakfast machine. When confronted with this seeming plot hole you are forced to realize that, far from critiquing the bogus notion that capitalism is a meritocracy, the film is actually legitimizing that notion. The breakfast scene is played for laughs—we’ve all been there, huh? Standing in the third class line watching all the first class assholes board the plan first and get their martini in a real glass? We wryly chuckle about it. Guess I should’ve worked harder/been smarter, then I could be in first class too!—it’s like the breakfast scene is there only to signal directly to the middle class audience: this is you, you are this schlub who only gets the shitty poor person breakfast, and now the rest of the film is your fantasy of being allowed to go into all the fancy shops and eat the fancy food and wake up the fancy girl and have sex with her. Middle class wish fulfillment.
Similarly, the movie’s portrayal of corporate logic made no sense. So this corporation sends these ships out to distant planets, and then presumably profits wildly off the resulting raw natural resources that are mined and harvested and shipped back to earth. And yet, as the movie tells us repeatedly, the outbound trip alone lasts 120 years. There is no Interstellar-esque hopping around in time here—they make it very clear (more on this later) that if you went all the way to the planet, then turned around and came all the way back, 250 years would have passed on Earth. So this means some fucking corporation is making this unfathomably enormous cash outlay as a gamble on profits that won’t begin to be realized until, at the earliest, 250 years in the future? I THINK NOT. Corporations aren’t capable of that kind of long-term thinking. As my evidence, I submit: GLOBAL WARMING. The idea of some corporate slob pouring eleventy billion dollars into this interstellar trip because many generations later there might be some benefit to the corporation if the corporation even still exists?? Nope. That kind of long-term thinking is how scientists, explorers, and fiction writers think, not corporations. But for this film, it had to be a corporate mission, or else all the hideous stuff about tiered passengers and all the gross sloganeering and self-propagandizing the ship did (which is necessary for all the fun humor it provides) wouldn’t make sense, because a scientific mission wouldn’t function in that way.
TIME AND HISTORY AND HOW CULTURE WORKS
Jennifer Lawrence’s character is a “writer” (unclear of what) who has decided to go on this trip not as a colonizer but as an artist. Her plan is to take the trip out to the planet, live for a year on the planet taking notes, then travel back to earth and write about her experience. So, to reiterate, her plan is to show up back on earth 250 years after she left, and then write a blog post about what life on the other planet is like. She mouths some obnoxious entrepreneurial nonsense like “I’ll be the only person in the world who’s had that experience! EVERYONE WILL READ IT, I’LL BE SO FAMOUS” and Chris Pratt is awed by her superior vision and grasp of self-promotion, and now feels doubly guilty for waking her up because he deprived the future people of Earth their opportunity to read this amazing blog entry she was gonna write, which, judging from the samples of her writing that we hear in voiceover throughout the film, was basically going to be a Sex and the City-level diary entry documenting observations that the rest of us would have considered pretty pat by, I don’t know, eighth grade or so. (“Why are writers in movies always such bad writers?” “Because people who write movies are bad writers”)
Let me explain how culture works. The thing is, people don’t stay the same over time. Just because you have 5,000 subscribers to your blog in the year 2016 does not mean that if you essentially die and then return in the year 2266 all those subscribers are like AWESOME, FINALLY A NEW ENTRY!!!! It would be impossible to predict the specifics, but there is no doubt whatsover that if you returned after 250 years you would be returning to a place essentially unrecognizable as the one you left. This fact is exponentially multiplied when you are talking about late capitalism—presumably the kind of culture that spawned this space mission—which scholars literally define by the high turnover of all its components (fashion, products, entertainment, industries, neighborhoods, ways of life). Sure—I can easily believe that simply the fact that you are basically a person from the distant past, popping back up in the present, would be interesting to people, but I bet if anything people would just want to hear you talk about what EARTH was like 250 years ago, not this random other planet. And anyway you’d have no reason to be so confident that you’d come back to great literary acclaim. What people cared about, what they were interested in, what they found cool, how and why they communicated and about what, all these would be different, not to mention epic changes in media itself, not to mention in LANGUAGE itself. Maybe there are no more countries! Maybe we’ve achieved full communism! Or maybe we are all living in bunkers underneath the surface of the planet while robots fight nuclear wars in our names above. Maybe a new religion has taken root and flourished, in which writing of any kind is forbidden (Pythagoras belonged to a religious sect that believed this, e.g.). Maybe women have been exterminated and babies are made in labs. Maybe society has crumbled and is starting over at a much more primitive state and no one knows that space travel ever even happened, and they just think you are a god or something. Or a demon, and they kill you immediately. It’s a totally absurd premise and makes her character seem unbelievably shallow and quite frankly very stupid, not to mention the fact that this seemingly well-adjusted happy person who is worthy of love (we see tons of her crying friends’ video testimonials to how much they love her) is just casually hopping onto this ship knowing that when she returns, in what will feel like one year to her, everyone she knew on Earth will have been dead for centuries. YOU SEEM CHILL
CHEKOV
As Chekov famously noted, “if you’re gonna show a gun in the first act of a play, that gun better shoot somebody by the final act, otherwise you are bad at writing plays.” Well guess what?? In act one of this movie Chris Pratt goes into this like corporate boardroom where you can use a fax machine and log on to the internet to google “POD MALFUNCTION WOKE UP EARLY SOLUTION?” or whatever. He tells the computer he needs to send a message to Homestead Corp Inc and let them know he woke up too early and they need to figure out how to get him back to sleep. The computer is like “it will cost six zillion dollars to send this message” and he’s like PUT IT ON MY ACCOUNT or some other weird credit fantasy nonsense which is what this movie is really about (credit fantasies), and then he records his message, which is like “uh…I woke up, it’s only 30 years into this 120 year trip, I need help, thanks,” and he hits “send” and then the computer is like “message will be received on Earth in twelve years; you can expect a reply in fifty six years” and he’s like OH NO and the audience laughs and laughs because this scenario is indeed funny, I mean, technology am I right?? Can’t live with it, etc., Debbie Downer trombone noise. But then this message is never, never referred to again. Literally for the entire rest of this shitty movie I was thinking “I can’t wait to see it when they get the reply 56 years from now!” but then instead the movie just ended. WHAT THE FUCK. Most basic rule of storytelling, invented by a Russian guy 100 years ago???? YOU DARED TO BREAK IT? For this alone I scorn and shun thee, “Passengers!”
SCIENCE QUESTIONS
I am fully ready to suspend disbelief while watching weirdo sci-fi films. But like….if the ship is traveling at “half light speed,” as we are told many times, could you really just hop outside and go on a fun spacewalk, as the characters do constantly? And wouldn’t the vista outside the window look fucked up, somehow, wouldn’t you be passing stuff at light speed and they’d be going by all crazy and streaked looking, or something?? Look I’m not a space scientist, I’m just asking
There’s a hole in the ship and all the air is rushing out into the vast unknowable vaccum of outer space and Jennifer Lawrence plugs the hole WITH HER NAKED HUMAN HAND until such time as Chris Pratt is able to slap an iPad over the hole, which iPad immediately shatters and begins folding in on itself, but her previously-mentioned naked human hand is chill and fine
I really think that even a stupid corporation would program this ship to wake somebody up in an emergency and put them back to sleep again, I mean, hundreds of years are passing, surely you could envision a scenario in which a human crewmember would need to wake up and, say, patch a hole in the ship’s hull caused by an asteroid, and then go back to sleep
I want to know if the math checks out, vis-a-vis food and water rationing. So, the ship has enough food and water on it to last 5,000 passengers four months. If instead two passengers use the food and water for 90 years, will there still be enough for the remaining passengers to live for four months? My old man “did the math,” whatever that means, and said yes, so maybe this does check out. But wouldn’t it be rad if the rest of the passengers woke up four months from their destination only to starve to death because Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence ate all the food on the ship and then died??? Now that’s a movie I would watch the hell out of. Like the movie would become about these two selfish assholes who doomed humanity to extinction before its mission had yet begun, like basically it would be a neo-Adam and Eve story, only instead of attaining forbidden knowledge and dooming us to death and painful childbirth, they used all the resources in the world so that no one could ever live there again, lol
IN CONCLUSION (spoilers for the Le Guin story follow; please go read the actual story instead of this blog entry):
Ursula Le Guin has an amazing novella called “Paradises Lost” that explores a similar scenario as the one in this movie, but that is easily infinity times more interesting. Le Guin actually approaches a real thought experiment with a sincere desire to work out its implications. In the story, humanity has decided to send a colonizing ship to a distant planet, to spread the species throughout the universe. The journey will take many centuries, and there is no hibernation technology. People will get on board the ship knowing that they will live and grow old and die on it. They calculate that seven generations will be born and die on the ship before it reaches its destination. So, the protagonists are members of the fourth generation—one of the middle generations, consisting of people who were born on the ship and will die on the ship—and we watch them grow up, go to school, have hopes and dreams, and basically just go about their lives. We learn about the weird culture that has developed on this ship over the generations—Nobody knows how to cook, nobody wears shoes, procreation and kinship networks become really different. She explores language, all the weird dead metaphors that fill the language that no one understands anymore, metaphors evoking snow and rain, trees, animals, stuff from Earth that is meaningless to these people but that still colors the way they speak. Education is really interesting, because the educational system on the ship was designed by people back on Earth, with an eye toward this multi-generational journey. So the first few generations are educated only about Earth, their history, and the kinds of scientific stuff needed to keep the ship running, but they’re also indoctrinated with a sense of grand purpose, the belief that their lives have meaning and value even though they’re essentially transitional personnel. But then once the final couple of generations is born, the educational programming will switch to preparing them for life on this new planet, life outside the ship. How to build a fire and shit. Agriculture. Meanwhile this weird religion evolves, where some people basically can’t bear the reality of their transitional purposelessness, so they construct a new spiritual framework for understanding life that’s all about traveling without reaching a destination. They come to believe that there IS no other planet, no Earth, that this is all mystical nonsense, that really the ship is all there is, there’s nothing outside of it, no higher purpose. It’s like an opposite-religion! Instead of inventing unseen realms they take those realms away. This religion develops and becomes more and more powerful in the culture of the ship, and so this whole sub-culture of the ship’s humanity emerges that consists of people who truly don’t believe there ever was an Earth, and if someone mentions Earth, or the destination planet, these religious people just sort of smile pityingly and try to explain that you’re ignoring empirical reality, which is just this ship and the people on it–no mystical “destination planet,” no mythical origin story on “Earth.”
But then they realize that there’s been a miscalculation and actually they are going to reach the planet like three generations sooner than they thought. And it turns the ship’s culture totally upside down! The religious sect tries to sabotage the ship’s command center so that word of the miscalculation won’t get out, and then it turns out that over the past couple of generations this sect has also sabotaged the educational programming on the ship, so now all the programs that had been intended to prepare the Arrival generation for arrival are just gone. They have no way of knowing how to live or what to do once they land. So then it becomes this grim battle of theology—some people are like, I believe our purpose was to land on this planet and I’m sticking with it, and other people are like, you’re crazy, why would that be true, what are you even talking about, there’s no planet, there’s no landing!!!!
So then they DO LAND, and they make a deal—the religious people can off-load everybody else and a bunch of supplies, and then take off again, and continue their endless journey. So that’s what happens. And then the story just keeps being interesting! Because once all the people get off the lander and step into the outside world for the first time in their lives, for the first time in living memory, it’s crazy and awful. The sun is so bright! The wind is blowing, what is this???? The world is immense and I feel like I’m falling! The ground is jagged and sharp and there’s this gritty stuff covering it! They all cling to the sides of the ship, sobbing and barfing, it’s not beautiful at all, it doesn’t feel like a return home or anything. They all miss the ship so much. Some people can’t handle it, and get back on the ship before it continues on its journey. No one knows how to do anything. It gets “cold” and “hot” at different times, the sun “rises” and “sets,” it’s fucking bonkers, nothing makes sense or is rational. They find insects and are like WHAT THE FUCK?!??!! IS THIS A CREATURE??? Someone vaguely remembers learning in kindergarten that there were things called “beavers” on old Earth that were animals like humans but smaller and dumber so they decide these little green bugs must be beavers. They get everything wrong in weird ways. Like someone discovers in the ship’s cargo hold these things labeled “tents” that are clearly supposed to be set up as shelters once they’re on the planet. But everyone misunderstands that the word is plural, so they all start calling a single tent a “tents,” and it fucks with the grammar as you’re reading the story. On their first day at work on the new planet, one lady sets her baby on the ground so he can look at the bright sun. She comes back to him a few hours later and starts screaming HE’S BLIND!!!! And the baby is blind and his face is all burned to a crisp and he dies. And they’re like, holy shit, the sun can fucking KILL YOU, what the hell?? They break bones and get sunburned and experience hunger and thirst for the first time. They set up camp right by the river because it seems obvious that you don’t want to have to walk super far carrying water, but then a flood comes and washes the camp away, so then they’re like, aahhh right, we need to camp further away. You basically see these incredibly technologically advanced people re-learning the most basic prehistoric aspects of human life—literally encountering fire and figuring out that it destroys stuff and you shouldn’t touch it, but that it can also be marshalled and used to warm you at night, etc. They are SO EXCITED when they discover fire, they can’t believe it, they’re all like WHOA! This is amazing!! We are geniuses!!
Meanwhile throughout this whole story they’ve been dutifully sending their weekly reports back to Earth, and receiving reports from Earth!!!!!!!!! And over the generations, the reports from Earth have become more and more incomprehensible, full of words and grammar that they can’t follow, and describing mystifying events in terms that don’t make sense. And they send their discoveries on the new planet back to Earth, not knowing if they will be comprehensible or useful when received. Do the people back on Earth know about fire? They must, right? Lets tell them just to be safe. Do they know that if you are in the shade you don’t get sunburned? Do they want to know that we figured out how to shape a roof so that the rainwater runs down it and away from the living space, or is that an example of something they probably don’t care about hearing?? Like, what are we supposed to be doing, according to the Ancients who sent us on this mission? They don’t know, so they just do their best. And it’s like, what the hell is the point, what IS this??? It becomes this thought-provoking and beautiful meditation on purpose and life, because really aren’t we all on that spaceship, just trusting that it’s going somewhere, and making the best of it whether or not it ever does get somewhere?
Anyway why doesn’t somebody make THAT film instead of these garbage corporate patriarchy fantasies
Today at London Fashion Week Men’s, Craig Green debuted an ensemble of assembled strips of rugs during his Fall 2017 show. Is this a thing?
Photo: Stuart C. Wilson/Getty Images
YES.
History’s greatest fashion pioneers have had their most iconic moments wearing things that originated as home decor. We won’t soon forget the day when Kim Kardashian wore the fabric from your grandma’s couch to the Met Gala, the most ~fashion~ event of the year. Or when Lenny Kravitz wore a massive blanket masquerading as a scarf for his ‘fit that has been immortalized in the Internet Hall of Fame. How else do you think Aladdin got a princess to fall in love with him? Magic freaking carpets.
Also consider, as Racked senior editor Meredith Haggerty pointed out, how convenient this is. These are all the rug swatches from the rug store now in wearable form. So get to your nearest rug purveyor and impress the cashier by buying a tapestry and asking if you can “wear it out.”
Last spring, we heard the news that Drew Barrymore and Timothy Olyphant, two very charming people, would star as a married couple in a Netflix show about suburban life called Santa Clarita Diet. The plot description mentioned that "Sheila [Barrymore] goes through a dramatic change sending their lives down a road of death and destruction ... but in a good way," which seemed to refer to the fact that she adopts a hip lifestyle or possibly gets into musical improv. This is not the case. In Drew Barrymore's Netflix show, Drew Barrymore eats people.
Jezebel first picked up that something was amiss yesterday, citing a few tabloid ads for the show that feature Drew hawking a very bloody finger smoothie. But USA Today got a better sense of the story in an interview with Barrymore herself. "The 'dramatic change' Sheila undergoes in the series opener is, in fact, death," USA writes. "And while they tend to their open houses and teenage daughter, the couple must sate Sheila’s unbridled id and undead hunger, first with raw meat and, eventually, the human kind."
Barrymore's incipient zombiism then turns into a whole finding-your-truth metaphor for the character, in an Eat, Pray, Blood sort of way. "We do this sort of Cro-Magnon type of evolution with her over the course of the 10 episodes. No gimmicks, no prosthetics, just an awakening,” Barrymore told USA Today. “I just really enjoyed shedding a snakeskin with her, so it became a really fun obstacle that I wasn’t even planning for but seemed so conducive and fun and healthy for my own life." No word on whether that means the actress actually chowed down on brains for the sake of art.
Creator Victor Fresco (of the wacky Better Off Ted, which is a sign we probably should've been more suspicious earlier) added that the cause of Barrymore's character's death and rebirth isn't clear, at least in the pilot. "Presumably, she has been exposed to something — although we don’t know what — which is making her feel a bit off," Fresco said.
To confirm the news that you will soon have the ability to watch the star of Never Been Kissed shove a few limbs in her kisser, here is a Santa Clarita promo still that Netflix added to its site today.
The Halliwell sisters are back, baby! The supernatural series Charmed — which aired for eight ass-kicking seasons on the WB between 1998 and 2006 — is officially getting a reboot at the CW after years of rumors. Spearheaded by Jane the Virgin showrunner Jennie Snyder Urman, the reboot will be reimagined in the year 1976 and is described as "being connected to the original series in some fashion," although it's not clear at this point how so. As The Hollywood Reporter notes, former Charmed stars Alyssa Milano and Rose McGowan have voiced their displeasure at the idea of potential reboot in the past, with both saying it was "too close" to the series finale and that Hollywood is "really running out of ideas." Regardless, a script commitment has been made, and demons and warlocks have never been more fearful.
Can I call it now? Hot Topic is going to win 2017.
And not just because a conversation between a customer and one of the mall store’s retail associates, Jeremy Neiers, went viral this weekend. The customer told Neiers that he’s the “Eternal Dragon Guardian of Time,” a role he defines as a dictator of power, meaning he decides who gets mythic power and how it can be used — watch part of it below. The entertaining video is enough of a sell for me, but where fashion is right now is an even better reason to bet on Hot Topic.
The Official Retailer of the Eternal Dragon Guardian of Time™ hasn’t changed since the last time you were there, and yet its products have suddenly come into vogue. You know where you could buy concert merch with big graphics before everyone started wearing Justin Bieber shirts to fashion week? Hot Topic. Same goes for everything else that will make you feel like the ‘90s never ended — Saint Laurent, Vetements, Tommy Hilfiger — including those wallet chains on Demna Gvasalia’s Balenciaga runway (also sold by Saint Laurent) — at Hot Topic, they’re just $6.
Photo: Victor Virgile/Getty Images
Balenciaga spring 2017 menswear.
As Fashionista pointed out today, male chokers are also potentially a thing retailers are going to force us to care about in 2017. How male chokers differ from other chokers is unclear, but if you’re a guy willing to wear a band of fabric not explicitly marketed toward men, Hot Topic also has you covered there.
Most interestingly, Reddit’s Male Fashion advice subforum wonders if Capes (their cap, not mine) could make a comeback in 2017. Probably because if 2017 is the year of “dapper white Nationalists,” by default it should also be the year of elegant vigilantes. And please don’t wonder for a second longer if Hot Topic carries capes, because of course it does.
The evidence is unambiguous: Hot Topic is shooting to the top of my 2017 power rankings, just above every celebrity who made it to this year unscathed. And honestly, we could really use a fucking Eternal Dragon Guardian of Time rn. Or maybe just a couple of those Razzles the camera was trained on for much of the video — I’m willing to settle.
The holiday season may officially be over, but another special time of year is upon us: Bachelor season. Monday night's premiere gave us plenty of jewel-toned dresses, stilted opening lines, and reasons to be excited for what's in store for the rest of Nick's journey to find love, lust, or at the very least, more Instagram followers. But who will be the one who (hopefully) accepts Nick's final rose? Here are our picks — whether you're playing by ABC's rules or Vulture's own — for whom you should draft into your fantasy league, or just root for through the next few wine-soaked months in the Bachelor Mansion and beyond.
Why you should draft her: In general Bachelor lore, whoever gets the first-impression rose usually has a promising run on the show, if they don't win outright, so the fact that Rachel caught Nick's eye on the first night is a good sign. Plus, she’s so charming you instantly forget how corny her “fantasy teams” introduction line was.
Strength: She's a career woman — a lawyer like Andi, one of Nick's Bachelorette exes — and Nick is attracted to accomplished and confident women. Also, her arms look pretty toned, so that's a literal strength.
Achilles heel: While Nick says he is attracted to smart, level-headed career women, it's hard to imagine Rachel taking the bar in California so that Nick can go on Dancing With the Stars when this is all over. Also, we're sort of rooting for her to go far and not win, so that we can finally have our first Bachelorette of color. But let's not get ahead of ourselves!
Why you should draft her: While no one is truly your average girl next door in the Bachelor universe, Vanessa's charm, chemistry with Nick, and easy confidence bode well for her to go far. Also, if his ex Kaitlyn is any indication, Nick definitely has a thing for Canadians.
Strength: Much like Lauren B. from Ben's season, who ultimately won Ben's heart while staying out of all the drama in the house, Vanessa seems like someone who can fly under the radar while she's cultivating her relationship with Nick.
Achilles heel: She hates flowers. When the premise of the entire television show you're appearing on involves receiving flowers for survival, maybe don't bit the hand that feeds you ... a rose.
Why you should pick her: Raven's down-to-earth Southern charm, coupled with the fact that she's a young business owner, will likely make her intriguing to Nick.
Strength: Easy to remember name (Raven with the raven hair) to call at rose ceremonies. Also, Nick's first impression of her was "really cute voice."
Achilles heel: Learning to call the hogs on night one is fun, but this small-town girl will ultimately have to be willing to leave Hoxie, Arkansas, (pop. 2,780), behind if she's going to win over Nick.
Why you should pick her: If Nick's casting as the Bachelor is any indication, The Bachelor loves a good villain. And if you're trying to rack up the points in your fantasy league based on drama in the house, then you'll love Corinne.
Strength: Corinne came to win, and she definitely has never been told to “tone it down” or “maybe be nicer” at any point in her life. Therefore, she is tailor-made for reality TV and your fantasy team.
Achilles heel: Nick will definitely be spooked during hometowns, when he realizes that she has a “nanny” who brings her snacks. Or, more realistically, she’ll suffer the same fate as almost all villains: That terrible thing she’ll inevitably say or do will catch up with her (but only after she's made it decently far in the running).
Why you should pick her: She's a laid back neonatal nurse who fed Nick maple syrup, and then licked the rest off her finger — so in a way, she actually got the first kiss.
Strength: She literally saves babies' lives for a living, which is a solid attribute to have in a partner.
Achilles Heel: If his dating track record is any indication, this gentleman does not prefer blondes.
We're not entirely sure how Alexis will fare in the rest of the season, but if you have an extra "why not" slot on your fantasy team and want to reward true chutzpah, we implore you to draft Alexis, who showed up dressed as a shark but was convinced her costume was that of a dolphin. “Life’s too short, have fun with it” is totally the attitude you should take on this show, and in terms of “I got too drunk in the limo on night one” contestants of years past (oh, Lace, beautiful, beautiful Lace) Alexis at least seemed to be having fun as opposed to a total meltdown. So even if Alexis doesn't make it very far, let her perplexing costume be a reminder to us all that there are plenty of other fish in the sea — but that dolphins are neither fish nor sharks.
If you've never heard of domino paper, gather 'round. In the 18th century — back when Marie Antoinette was the talk of the town and Neoclassicism reigned supreme — this thick, chiffon-like paper was the go-to, and was often hand-printed onto books, boxes, and walls. Often, the designs were geometric and colorful, drawn by hand or stencil, and every inch was worthy of a spot on an art enthusiast's wall.
Except, sadly, the craft died down by the 19th century, and getting your hands on domino paper became nearly impossible. So, in an effort to reintroduce it to the modern-day folk, Diptyque tapped Antoinette Poisson, a Parisian atelier specializing in domino paper, to design the packaging for its limited-edition Rosa Mundi Valentine's Day collection. And the green, blossom-centric print is so pretty, it could rival Monet's gardens.
As for the scent of the candles and fragrances in the line, it's predominantly rose — but it's not the powdery iteration you associate with your grandma. Instead, it's soft, fresh, and completely unexpected. Each piece feels like a luxury, but among one of our favorites in the range is the perfumed drawer liner, designed to fit inside your dresser and scent your clothes for months.
For a mini history lesson, take a peek at the full line, which launched today, ahead. Then head over to the Diptyque website to score a domino paper-dressed item for yourself.
Diptyque Limited-Edition Rosa Mundi Scented Oval, $50, available at Diptyque.
Diptyque Limited-Edition Rosa Mundi Perfumed Paper, $65, available at Diptyque.
Diptyque Limited-Edition Eau Dominotée Multi-Use Fragrance, $90, available at Diptyque.
Diptyque Limited-Edition Rosa Mundi 190g Candle, $68, available at Diptyque.
Diptyque Limited-Edition Eau Rose Solid Perfume, $50, available at Diptyque.
Diptyque Limited-Edition Domino Paper, $120, available at Diptyque.
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Sure, Final Fantasy is one of the best-known, longest-lasting, and most medium-spanning game series of all time, but there is one thing that has eluded the franchise until now, at least according to Ariana Grande. That thing is "the cutest thing i've ever seen in my entire life," Grande herself. Grande will be a character in the new update of mobile game Final Fantasy: Brave Exvius, and, well, the singer is pumped. Revealing the news with an Instagram photo of her attending a meeting with some Final Fantasy higher-ups, Grande gushed: "I'm SO so excited to finally share that I'll be featured in FINAL FANTASY BRAVE EXVIUS *crying* 🌌♡ check out my character in the game, it's the cutest thing i've ever seen in my entire life and i'm so excited and in love with it i cannot contain myself." She also posted an early look at her character, who has the likeness of Grande in Dangerous Woman leather-bunny-ears mode. The headgear means Grande's hair is down, so the whip of that sky-high ponytail is not a weapon, alas. Given that the sneak peek shows Grande's character emanating some punch-packing musical notes, however, Grande could still kill you in the ballroom with her pipes. Check out Grande's adorably compact fury below.
pretty lil thing holds her own in a room of men in suits ♡ 👋🏼 I'm SO so excited to finally share that I'll be featured in FINAL FANTASY BRAVE EXVIUS *crying* 🌌♡ check out my character in the game, it's the cutest thing i've ever seen in my entire life and i'm so excited and in love with it i cannot contain myself. #FFBEWW 🌌🌌🌌🌌🌌🌌🌌🌌🌌🌌
So many rappers rap about how much hot pussy they get, but rapper MSHO has them all beat, because he’s got hot pussy on his head, shoulder and in his arms. MSHO became known as the “The Cat Rapper” after posting videos on Facebook and Instagram of him rapping about cats with his cats, including Ravioli (the ginger one), who is apparently the DJ Jazzy Jeff to his Fresh Prince.
MSHO, who is from Portland, OR, has done a video for the Oregon Human Society and I’m sure he’s well on his way to landing a Friskies endorsement deal and fronting the Kitty Halftime Show at the 2017 Puppy Bowl. We’ll really know when MSHO has made it when Grumpy Cat (is she still around?) makes a video ho appearance in one of his videos.
MSHO has dozens of videos that get thousands of views each, but I didn’t find out about him until his video of him rapping to Ravioli in the tub went viral. MSHO posted a video of him rapping a bath time rap to Ravioli. Okay, I know I’m shit at math, but I thought the answer to the problem “cat + tub full of water + seemingly naked man” was: some Lorena Bobbitt shit. But either MSHO is brave, crazy or he knows Ravioli better than us, because he did this:
Cat Bath Don’t try this at home kids lol (use this video in a commercial player or in broadcasts, please email licensing@storyful.com)
Posted by Iammoshow on Saturday, December 17, 2016
And because he knew a lot of OUTRAGED!!!!!!!!!!!!!! people would come for him, he dropped this note:
Before a lot of people start giving my dad a HARD TIME. He HAS TO GIVE ME A BATH. I’m a SPECIAL BREED OF CAT that requires it! ❤ please be nice. Happy CATURDAY EVERYONE!
Okay, MSHO isn’t only The Cat Rapper, but he’s also a bona fide crazy cat dude, because he writes as his cat. He’s a crazy cat lady’s dreamboat come true. I don’t even want to think about what kind of pictures horny crazy cat ladies are sliding into his DMs. Okay, I thought about it and I need therapy now.
The new coworker, Fergus, was legitimately the worst. I’m still cleaning up the mess three months later. New Manager continued being awful until I complained enough about Fergus to make him, y’know, manage the guy. When he finally made it clear that Fergus was going to need to shape up … Fergus quit. Good riddance.
I did get confirmation through a colleague that Fergus was being paid more than me — $50k to my $42k. When I asked about it, the justification was “That was the rate we were given by the temp company we hired him from.” I pointed out to our faux-HR Lady that a good manager would have recognized the potential problems with that kind of discrepancy, and made sure my pay was raised to a commensurate degree to avoid the appearance of discrimination. She agreed that was true.
(A million thanks to commenter Jennifer M. for commenting about the unsolicited pay bump her manager gave her to avoid a gender-based pay gap. Clearly, that made an impression.)
All that kind of made me realize that the real problem here was New Manager’s total lack of management skill. I put a lot of thought into what it would take to make me happy with this job, and came up with three things: the team lead position, a raise, and not working under New Manager anymore. With some guidance and moral support from Faux-HR Lady (who is wonderful, she just hates being a faux-HR lady), I wrote a letter to global management and global HR to make my case for those things. Faux-HR spoke to them directly to advocate for me as well.
Almost instantly, New Manager was no longer my manager. I was given a schmancy new job description, which includes a higher level of responsibility and a direct report. I am now managed by some very nice gentlemen in England who do things like listen and care and help. It’s refreshing.
My new job title has the word “Global” in it, as well as “Manager.” (That’s generally in the context of managing processes, not people. Thankfully.) The hiring process for my direct report has been placed directly in my hands. I’ve only pooped my pants in terror, like, once.
Aaaaaaaand… (drumroll please)…..
I GOT. A MOTHER EFFING. RAISE.
A BIG ONE.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
So once again, from the bottom of my heart, thank you. You and the commentariat helped me find enough backbone to keep fighting and advocating for myself, and it’s made a HUGE difference.
It’s been just about a month since we’ve checked in on Drake’s love life, which means we’re long overdue for an update on who Drake is crushing on now.
Drake’s PR person must have finally figured out that people have stopped caring about Drake and Taylor Swift’ssponsored-by-Appleantics. And his phone calls to Doris Burke after their dinner date must have been mysteriously going straight to voicemail. Because Drake has moved on, and apparently the destination of his moving truck was Cougar Town.
TMZ says that Drake and Jennifer Lopez have been “spending time” together lately. The reason they’ve been hanging out so much is because they’re currently working on a music project together. But sources tell TMZ that it’s only a matter of time before things get romantic. They’re basically in that magical in-between period where they’re not quite friends/not quite “dating” to get some publicity for their project.
Drake is reportedly wooing JLo hard. On Monday night, Drake rented out a restaurant in West Hollywood for 20 of his friends and brought JLo as his date. He’s also seen her perform twice in Las Vegas. That picture above was taken a week ago and posted to Instagram by Drake after one of her shows.
We’ve all been burned by JLo’s relationship-hustling ways in the past, so I don’t believe that Drake and Jennifer Lopez are anything but co-workers right now. But if these sources are telling the truth and not just reading the notes off Drake’s vision board, then congratulations JLo. Drake is a major upgrade from Casper Smart. Although I’m sure if JLo gets nostalgic for the past, Drake will be more than happy to pretend to sneak a couple bucks from her purse when she gets up to use the bathroom.
Here’s Drake’s current crush at Barneys in Beverly Hills yesterday who, just like Bieber, also decided to work the bundled-in-fur-in-LA-weather look.
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Photo: Stuart C. Wilson/Getty Images
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Photo: Victor Virgile/Getty Images
