Art Tavana

"I’ve had an extraordinary life, I must make an extraordinary film," Madonna told Variety in July, as she described her decision to helm her own biopic as a "preemptive strike" against the men who wanted to tell her story. That was last summer, when there were reports of a months-long "Madonna bootcamp" led by casting director Carmen Cuba, which included eleven-hour choreography sessions, where everyone from Florence Pugh, Alexa Demie, Bebe Rexha, Odessa Young and Sky Ferreira auditioned to play the "Material Girl." Madonna said she wanted the role to go to someone who could "convey the incredible journey that life has taken me on as an artist, a musician, a dancer...the focus of this film will always be music.

“Who asked for this?” asked the New York Times in November of the coming Avatar sequel, The Way of Water. Not me. I’m not the audience for this film. I did not contribute to Avatar's $2.92 billion global box office. I don’t, for example, post in the "Tree of Souls" forum, which has 2,093 members (a tiny number). Does Avatar have an army of fanatics waiting to be unleashed at the box office? I don't know anyone obsessed with Avatar, do you? Is it as meme-friendly as Minions: The Rise of Gru? No. Will it draw as many teens as an MCU movie? Probably not. Avatar does not have the built-in fanbase you need to carry a franchise. It requires a global audience — it needs mainstream buzz. It needs the press raving that it's a "visual masterpiece." But is that enough?

No piece of art has ever affected me quite like John Candy’s face in Planes, Trains and Automobiles. It has made me cry for thirty-five years, rivulets of tears. It has shown me that nothing evokes loneliness like a face. John Candy's face simultaneously reveals warmth and fatalism (it's the face of a man who always feared he'd die young — and did). His unibrow is childlike and genuine. His smile is never fake. But Candy’s shower curtain ring peddler Del Griffith is smiling through pain. He’s hiding behind the mask of a gregarious family man and "best in the world" salesman (with a bowtie and bristly mustache). His smile hides a secret: Del Griffith is a grieving widower, and his home is inside an old trunk he carries around like luggage.

"Every single song is like a road map to what that relationship stood for, with little markers that maybe everyone won't know, but there are things that were little nuances of the relationship, little hints,” Taylor Swift told Yahoo! Music in 2010. A decade of songwriting turned those “little hints” into complicated numerology, a scarf metaphor at the centerpiece of her canon, coded song titles, storytelling scattered with cardigan sweaters, Shakespeare references, faded blue jeans, true crime, YA tropes (e.g., witches, cats, prom dresses, teen love triangles and evil alter-egos) and glitter-glue covered diary pages — sealed with red lips. Taylor Swift was fifteen when she began incorporating easter eggs and (wink-wink) secret messages into her work.

Blockbuster is a single-cam sitcom about the last Blockbuster (located inside a strip mall in Michigan). The set is dressed in authentic signage, fluorescent lights, blue walls and an oddly prophetic Howard the Duck poster. The employees have real Blockbuster name tags and uniforms (the producer, John Fox, acquired the rights and handed it over to established showrunner Vanessa Ramos: I have the rights to Blockbuster. Would you like to develop a workplace?). Every episode is packed with movie references and checkout-counter humor. The transitions between scenes are scored to hip-hop beats that sound like something you’d hear on Nickelodeon in the Nineties. You’re inside a Blockbuster for the first time since Carol Danvers fell through its roof in Captain Marvel.

The scaffolding TMZ headline became a tower of terror for Rihanna fans: “Johnny Depp. Savage X Fenty Guess Appearance. In Rihanna’s show!!!” Variety confirmed that, yes, Johnny Depp would appear in Rihanna’s Savage X Fenty Vol.4 on Wednesday, streamed exclusively on Amazon Prime. Depp is the first male celebrity to be a featured guest at one of Rihanna’s Savage X Fenty shows (even though he isn’t mentioned in the press release, which means he was supposed to be a surprise). Past celebrity guests have included Cindy Crawford and Erykah Badu. Savage X Fenty is Rihanna’s global lingerie brand. Its brand ID is built around “diversity and inclusion in sizing, access,” wrote Forbes, “and marketing can lead to an even greater goal, equity in feeling sexy.

Apple Music has “quietly” removed two of Kanye West’s playlists from its platform. This news was leaked to the music press quietly, of course, and has (thus far) produced tons of free media impressions for the streamer. The move was presumably a shrewd public relations stunt, or maybe a rogue employee with coding skills. Who knows? But the media framed it as Apple Music taking a stand, quietly, of course, as the streamer repositions itself in the headlines after it announced last week that it was raising subscription prices. “De-platforming” Kanye West is messaging they’d like to piggyback, for obvious reasons, as it appeals to a swath of bored subscribers who could end up tweeting Apple Music for not being on the “right side of history.

Here are the facts: Kanye West should be in a psychiatric hospital. Instead, he’s speaking his mind, or what’s left of it. For what it’s worth, Kanye West should not be tweeting or going on podcasts. Unlike the side effects of a prescription drug, the results don’t vary. No, the outcome is usually the same, in one form or another: career suicide. Kanye West’s artistic legacy is undergoing seppuku. We've seen this movie before. Remember Roseanne? After a racist tweet in 2018, ABC immediately canceled her show (it was going to be her comeback). Hulu followed up by removing every season of Roseanne from their streaming service.

Watching Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone was like a narcotic experience. The poetical monologue took you into a dimly-lit room, on the crackling leather of a worn couch, into thick plumes of cigarette smoke. Smartly suited, Serling introduced a flaw in the human condition in a rhythmic, jazzy voice, as if he were about to whip out a horn and blow the smoke away to reveal a moral, a twist, or riddle. Through 156 episodes, The Twilight Zone was as much a literary as a celluloid achievement. Remember ‘The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street’ from 1960? A parable of McCarthyism, and a mowing of the lawns of suburban paranoia. ‘The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs, and explosions, and fallout,’ Serling intoned.