Spoilers for Annihilation below.
In the feverish crescendo of Annihilation’s wordless climax, the name Bobbi Jene crept into my otherwise paralyzed brain. I’m no modern dance buff, and the dancer and choreographer is not someone who would have been on the tip of my tongue if it wasn’t for last year’s ravishing documentary Bobbi Jene, by director Elvira Lind. The film introduced me to Bobbi Jene Smith, and her ability to turn her entire body into a lightning rod of instinct through her charged, emotionally (and sometimes physically) naked choreography, as sensual as it is self-destructive.
Trawling YouTube is a weekly look at one interesting story or oddity from YouTube. You ever go down a YouTube rabbit hole and suddenly you’ve wasted five hours watching every Madonna video? This is about those rabbit holes, but the comedy-related ones. This is the first one. Thank you for reading.
“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”
–Ludwig Wittgenstein
“If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.
Halle Bailey, left, and her sister Chloe. You were not expecting this, but here you stand, transfixed, in the doorway of a Hollywood rehearsal studio, your throat clamping up and your chest tightening, watching 16- and 17-year-old sisters Halle and Chloe Bailey sing a single word, “Hallelujah,” in gorgeous, repeating crescendos, like a church choir sending a dying loved one off into the light. Those harmonized “Hallelujahs” aren’t even a song, just their way of saying grace.
While you were gorging yourself with beer and barbecue over the holiday weekend, Miley Cyrus celebrated by cameoing on Stone Quackers, FXX’s animated comedy about ducks. She voices the flyest pigeon you’ve ever seen, who skateboards her way into Bug’s heart (not to mention all of ours). Stick around until the end of the episode to hear her charming country twang. Even as a bird, Miley’s still a 10.
Modern Family Diamond in the Rough Season 4 Episode 10 Editor’s Rating 4 stars **** «Previous Next» « PreviousEpisode NextEpisode » Modern Family Diamond in the Rough Season 4 Episode 10 Editor’s Rating 4 stars **** «Previous Next» « PreviousEpisode NextEpisode » This Modern Family hit on some serious family topics hidden in the guise of a mostly jokey episode.
Nelson George For more than 20 years, Nelson George, the filmmaker, former Village Voice columnist, and music-cultural critic, has been dealing less with churning out think pieces on R&B divas or swagged-out rappers and concentrating more on fiction, ranging from semi-autobiographical to romance to crime noir. His latest, the recently released The Lost Treasures of R&B (Akashic Books), is the newest volume to feature D Hunter, a tormented, HIV-positive bodyguard-investigator who comes back to live in a Brooklyn he hardly recognizes and tries to solve a few mysteries, mainly the whereabouts of a rare 45 featuring Otis Redding and Diana Ross on vocals.
Chris Pratt has been absent from the Parks and Recreation set for the past several weeks while filming Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy in London, but he’s never far from co-star Nick Offerman’s thoughts. “I just sent him an e-mail,” Offerman told me when I recently visited the set. “Chris and I often take pictures of our poop and send it to each other.”
Aw, that’s so sweet and … wait, what? “This is not a joke,” he said.
Paul Scheer From his podcast about movies, How Did This Get Made?, to comedy projects like NTSF:SD:SUV:: and ArScheerio Paul, Paul Scheer has built a fan base rooted in a shared pop-culture sensibility. His fans, like him, are fans of movies and TV, in spite of the fact and/or because of the fact they find a lot of it absurd. As Scheer explains in this week’s episode of Good One, Vulture’s new podcast about jokes and the people who write them, this sensibility can be traced back to “The Illusionators,” a Criss Angel parody he wrote with Aziz Ansari in 2007 for Human Giant, the mid-’00s sketch show co-created by Scheer, Ansari, Rob Huebel, and Jason Woliner.
Earlier this year, it was reported that Mr. 007 himself, Daniel Craig, made a personal plea to gimlet goddess Phoebe Waller-Bridge to rewrite No Time to Die, which will be the 25th film in the James Bond franchise. Luckily for us, she said yes, and we’re now getting some hot details about what to expect before the film’s release in April — and no, there’s probably not going to be a bunch of stale martini puns.
We know. Mark Wahlberg playing an inventor in the new Transformers movie feels … off, at least at first glance, and maybe even at second and third glance. As our own David Edelstein put it so well, “I’m sure there are people less suited to being cast as an egghead than Wahlberg, with his swollen pecs and biceps and streetwise Boston diction. Let me think … don’t rush me … Sylvester Stallone?