Frank Ocean. Everything that made Frank Ocean’s Blonde and Endless exciting last year also seemed to frame the two releases as an orchestrated act of conscientious objection to music’s major-label machine. Endless is a genius fake out that freed Frank from his Def Jam contract and still exists only as an Apple Music video nearly a year later (unless you tracked down ripped audio), while Blonde, from its proggy song structures and stripped instrumentation, to the guerrilla one-day sale of hard copies, landed as precariously and perfectly as a BMX trick.
Travis Barker and Kourtney Kardashian have had as normal of a relationship as you’d expect from those two so far, between the finger-sucking and the tattoos. And Barker’s ex-wife Shanna Moakler, in case you were wondering, hasn’t been too happy about that. After a series of shady comments to the press and mocking photos on Instagram, the former Miss USA told People last week that she thought Barker and Kardashian’s PDA was “weird.
At the beginning of (and throughout) every month, Netflix Streaming adds new movies and TV shows to its library. Here is a quick list of several that you might be interested in. Some of these were added halfway through or near the end of May, but we’re going to include them in this roundup anyway, since you may have missed them. Some may also have previously been on Netflix, only to have been removed and then added back.
During Ayo Edebiri’s February 3 episode of SNL, the show announced that 36-year-old comedian, podcaster, and Bud Light pitch man Shane Gillis was slated to make his SNL hosting debut on February 24. Gillis has released two popular comedy specials, 2021’s Live in Austin on YouTube and 2023’s Beautiful Dogs on Netflix, and the podcast he co-hosts with fellow comedian Matt McCusker, Matt and Shane’s Secret Podcast, is currently the top podcast on Patreon in terms of subscribers.
While North America is gearing up for a total solar eclipse on Monday, April 8 — our first since August 2017 — we’ve been thinking about what an eclipse means. In the real world, it pretty much just means that the moon moves in front of the sun for a few minutes and it’s kinda cool to look at, but in the world of cinema and television, it can mean all sorts of things.
If you see Dimitri, the charming con artist and love interest of Fox’s animated Anastasia, tell him to call me. That charming cartoon crook was my first crush. And now that we’re on a journey to the past with an adaptation of the movie premiering on Broadway, it’s worth revisiting the objective and correct fact that Dimitri was 1997’s sexiest man alive (sorry, Clooney). Those bangs! Those bushy eyebrows!
John Mellencamp This is the third entry in Vulture’s occasional series: Pop Culture Mysteries. Read our previous pieces, about the Red Hot Chili Peppers song “Under the Bridge” and Toni Basil’s “Mickey.”
In 2008, ABC’s Good Morning America followed John Mellencamp around his hometown of Seymour, Indiana. Naturally, the story included a mention of the singer’s most famous song, “Jack and Diane,” which hit No. 1 in October 1982, when Mellencamp was still calling himself John Cougar.
Scott Weiland was a great shape-shifter, a reminder that theater and fashion contribute to the whole of rock music as much as anything purely musical does. He died Thursday night in the midst of his fourth decade as a rock front-man, starting with his proto–Stone Temple Pilots project, Mighty Joe Young, to his latest reinvention, leading the glam-rock troubadours the Wildabouts. With Stone Temple Pilots, he sold more than 14 million copies of five LPs between 1992 and 2001.
Don Cheadle and Robert Downey Jr in ‘Iron Man 3.’ Shane Black is responsible for giving life to some of the action movie genre’s most enduring clichés, and one of the principal pleasures of his behind-the-camera work on Iron Man 3 is how often he gleefully subverts those same beats. If you’ve ever wondered how villains are able to keep so many anonymous, doomed-to-die henchmen on their payrolls, you’ll surely laugh at the underling who immediately surrenders to Tony Stark because his evil boss is so “weird.
Guillermo del Toro’s ascent to the directorial A-list over the past few decades has been heartening to watch for several intertwined reasons. That del Toro is a director of tremendous skill has been apparent since Cronos, his independently made debut feature released in 1993. Since then, del Toro has floated between multiplex-friendly crowd-pleasers like Blade II, Hellboy, and Pacific Rim and artful genre exercises like Pan’s Labyrinth, the Best Picture–winning The Shape of Water, and last year’s underrated noir Nightmare Alley.