Your handy Hollywood Hills map to the real-life stars in Quentin Tarantino’s ninth film. Warning: spoilers ahead.
Quentin Tarantino plays fast and loose with historical revisionism like he’s a kid left alone with action figures, or a Harry/Louis slash-fic writer drowning in AO3 tags. He takes a piece of history that’s captured his imagination, creates a Mary Sue or two to beat the boogeymen at the boss level, and poof!
Call her Master of Covers. To paraphrase the great Shania Twain: Whose bed have Miley Cyrus’s combat boots been under? In a conversation with designer Rick Owens for Interview magazine, Cyrus revealed that she’s been working on a Metallica covers album — from someone else’s bed. “We’ve been working on a Metallica cover album and I’m here working on that,” she told Owens. “We’re so lucky to be able to continue to work on our art during all of this.
Streamliner At your service. Streamliner At your service. Sonic the Hedgehog’s “buy” and “rent” buttons are now part of a false advertising lawsuit against Apple. One of the biggest, most beveled companies on the planet is in new legal trouble, courtesy of its own digital retail business. Apple was sued last week in Buffalo, New York, in a class-action alleging deceptive practices and false advertising over its use of “buy” and “rent” buttons.
Alyssa Sutherland in Evil Dead Rise. When 20-year-old Sam Raimi first showed his ultralow-budget 1981 indie film Evil Dead to the local dentists and merchants who had helped finance it, he was met with some disappointment. These people thought they had put their money into a horror flick, but Raimi, they claimed, had made a comedy instead. Indulging in their fondness for Three Stooges slapstick, the young director and his college chums had combined goofy pratfalls and visual gags with homemade special effects and patently artificial gore to create something grotesque and silly.
This past weekend Bad Moms passed $95 million domestically, continuing on a trajectory that will surely have it clearing $100 million by this time next week. Soon to join it is the unabashedly juvenile Sausage Party, which finished this weekend at $80 million. No matter where the two movies wind up, their box-office yields will be seen as huge wins for their studios, since both films cost about $20 million to make.
Serena. If you produced a movie featuring the two hottest movie stars in the world, with an Oscar-winning director and a script based on a beloved best-selling novel, you might assume you’d end up with a massive hit, right? Or at least a movie that everyone was scrambling to get a piece of? But what if that didn’t happen — and you ended up with pretty much the opposite of that? What if you ended up with Serena?
Andy Warhol’s Green Car Crash.Photo by AFP / Getty Images
When Andy Warhol’s Green Car Crash (Green Burning Car I) hit the block at Christie’s, experts thought the auction house’s estimate — $25 to $35 million — was optimistic. Warhol’s previous auction record was $17.38 million, but more to the point, would buyers want such a grisly image on their living-room wall? As art consultant Sandy Heller told ABC News, “It’s hard to put an image of an impaled figure in a burning car in a home where you have little kids.
There’s a shot in Richard Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some!! that is so casually obscene, I couldn’t believe a straight director filmed it. If you have any eye at all for the male form, you’ll know the moment when you see it: It’s the shot where Tyler Hoechlin, as college ballplayer McReynolds, reclines on a couch, his barely clothed body draped over the piece of furniture like an artful provocation. The camera hangs at crotch level, gazing up at the tanned abs that Hoechlin’s crop top leaves uncovered, while the actor’s muscular left arm is tucked behind his head, his armpit an erogenous zone on confident display.
Ellen Pompeo and Justin Chambers. It’s remarkable for any television show to make it to 13 seasons. It’s even more remarkable when said television show is producing more than 20 hour-long episodes each year. But ABC’s soapy, sexy, tragedy-filled hospital drama Grey’s Anatomy is doing just that — and it’s still a solid force in the ratings to boot! With a 14th season already guaranteed, Grey’s Anatomy isn’t going away anytime soon.
Issa Rae in Insecure. Last night’s episode of the usually excellent Insecure felt atypical. The pacing was clipped, the subplots thin, and it lacked the usual commitment the show has to depicting a slice of modern black life with bawdy energy. “Hella Blows” spends its time focusing on Molly and Issa hitting new lows. Molly fully commits to being a side accoutrement to Dro’s open relationship with his wife, Candice, leading to great sex and mixed emotional results; Issa gets desperate about having a ho phase, leading her to disrespect the men in her life in different ways.