Monthly Archives

February 2023

Rihanna’s Family Portrait for Vogue

Rihanna, ASAP Rocky and their son pose on a beach for the cover of British Vogue

-I thought for sure the Vanity Fair Hollywood issue would be today’s biggest cover drop — and then British Vogue revealed their gorgeous Rihanna family portrait cover. She talks about motherhood (“It’s everything. You really don’t remember life before, that’s the craziest thing ever. You literally try to remember it – and there are photos of my life before – but the feeling, the desires, the things that you enjoy, everything, you just don’t identify with it because you don’t even allow yourself mentally to get that far, because…Because it doesn’t matter”), her relationship with A$AP Rocky (“We’re best friends with a baby. We have to be on the same page, but we’ve always kind of had that in our relationship. Everything changes when you have a baby but I wouldn’t say it’s done anything but made us closer”), and her ninth album (“I want it to be this year. Like, honestly, it’d be ridiculous if it’s not this year”).

-The Vanity Fair Hollywood issue cover is still great, but man I wish Keke Palmer could have squeezed onto the front instead of inside the first fold. I do love that the photoshoot theme seemed to be “horny X-Men.”

–Lana Del Rey is interviewed by Billie Eilish in Interview magazine and it’s quite charming to read Eilish fangirl over her (“I am absolutely stoked out of my fucking mind…You were my lock screen on the first phone I ever got”).

-If you’re not already in love with Jonathan Majors, this profile will do it for ya. He claims to “fall in love every day” and “cry probably a few times a week,” talks about wanting to star in romcoms, and outlines his wooing strategy: “Send a text message with a song. My song of choice would be ‘Come Over,’ by Aaliyah. Then only wear sweatpants. You then have to watch Love Jones–slash–Love & Basketball. After that, the song you should be playing is ‘Whenever Wherever Whatever,’ by Maxwell. The next day, send them another song by Maxwell with ‘I thought you’d like this.’ And it works both ways. If a woman did that to me, I’d lose my mind.” Ladies, take notes!

–Jenna Ortega revealed that needing fencing and cello lessons on top of her 12-14 hour shooting schedule for Netflix’s Wednesday had her crying “hysterically”. That sounds unsustainable.

–Jimmy Kimmel did a Top Gun-themed skit about his upcoming Oscars hosting gig. More of this kind of thing in the show, please!

–Olivia Wilde and Jason Sudeikis are being sued by their former nanny.

-This is the best thing I’ve read yet about the sex scene discourse. “A tedious strain of online scorn and politically tangled discourse has seen way too many people acting as though what pop culture needs in the 21st century is a return to mandated puritanism.”

–Keanu Reeves talked about his apprehension with the increasing use of deepfakes and said he made sure every one of his film contracts prevents digital edits to his acting after one movie “added a tear to my face, and I was just like, ‘Huh?!’ It was like, ‘I don’t even have to be here.'”

-I haven’t finished the first half of this season of You yet, but the new trailer for the second half confirms Victoria Pedretti‘s Love Quinn is coming back.

-Poker Face has been renewed for season 2 at Peacock. I find this show an absolute delight. I would watch an hour of it every week for years.

-Raquel Welch has died at 82.

-I’m so curious about who this terrible Oscar nominee is! The OP has already said it’s not Ana de Armas, Paul Mescal or Austin Butler, and tweeted something nice about Barry Keoghan which seems to rule him out, too.

–Andrea Riseborough talks about her surprise Oscars nomination and called the grassroots campaigning process is “necessary.” “Awards campaigning is as acerbically exclusive as it has always been. I do not yet know which measures will best encourage meritocracy. I’ve been working toward discovering them and will continue to”

-Is it just me, or has Cate Blanchett‘s Oscar campaign been a little shaky? First was her “stop the televised horse race” acceptance speech at the Critics Choice Awards, and now she’s talking about everyone’s obsession with labels and saying, “If [Carol] was made now, me not being gay — would I be given public permission to play that role?” Girl, you are nominated RIGHT NOW for playing a lesbian. Simmer down.

-I keep forgetting that Justin Long and Kate Bosworth are together, but this is very cute.

-I gotta say, I’d never thought the Super Bowl commercial I’d rewatch the most is one with Miles Teller and his wife dancing to hold music with Bud Lights but it’s just so charming!

-We get our first very brief glimpse of Melissa McCarthy‘s Ursula in the new Little Mermaid trailer.

-The first full trailer for Daisy Jones & the Six has me excited for both the show and the music.

-Speaking for trailers for adaptations of books by Taylor Jenkins Reid, here’s the trailer for One True Loves, starring Phillipa Soo, Simu Liu, and Luke Bracey.

-Here’s the trailer for Extrapolations, Apple’s new drama about climate change starring, um, everyone? Meryl Streep, Sienna Miller, Kit Harington, Daveed Diggs, Edward Norton, Diane Lane, Yara Shahidi, Matthew Rhys, Gemma Chan, David Schwimmer, Keri Russell, Marion Cotillard, Forest Whitaker, Eiza González, Murray Bartlett, Tobey Maguire and more.

Penn Badgley Explains Sex Scene Stance

penn badgley on the cover of Variety

-I’m glad Penn Badgley is clarifying his anti-sex scene stance but whew, there’s still a lot to unpack. In his new Variety cover story (which isn’t fully out until tomorrow), he talks about how being a child actor exposed him to a lot of boundary violations at a young age, which totally makes sense. But I think a bunch of stuff can be true at the same time: everyone (including actors) should obviously be able to consent to who is touching them and how their bodies are shown. But it’s odd to focus on sex scenes when talking about the morality of this particular show, which revels in violence — and often violence against women. (Yes, he’s been vocal about what a creep his character is, but also acknowledged that “you’re meant to fall in love with him.”) It’s also odd to tie it to marriage fidelity, as if all sex scenes are cheating or will automatically lead to cheating because — yikes! And it doesn’t help that his comments are coming at a time when film and TV has become pretty sexless while puritanical attitudes and trad wife content are trending. Like, this take feels unhinged! (TL;DR: if you don’t want to participate in or watch sex scenes, don’t; but things get murky when it’s framed as a moral value judgement.)

-Meanwhile, I think this is a really good grappling of what’s happening with audience reactions to sex scenes these days. And this is an interesting thread that uses that article as a jumping off point to examine the slippery slope of evaluating a sex scene as “necessary” to the story.

-I adored this profile on SZA.

-Speaking of good profiles, The Last of Us’ Bella Ramsey talks to GQ about reading the harassing reactions to the news of her casting (“You’re looking for a comment that’s more painful than the last one. I’d kid myself that I was doing it in jest”), her time on Game of Thrones (“[The cast] were very, very kind to me. The one who really sticks out to me is Liam Cunningham, who played Davos. He really was protective over me”), and having conversations with Pedro Pascal about gender and sexuality (“And they weren’t always deep: they could be funny and humorous, the whole spectrum. We were just very honest and open with each other”).

-I could not for the life of me figure out how I knew Lamar Johnson (who plays Henry on this week’s The Last Of Us) — and then I realized he was in the TVOKids dance show Pop It! that I used to watch with my niece! The way every lyric and move for this song is engrained in my cerebral cortex…

-It’s Valentine’s Day, which means celebs are spreading the love on socials. Chris Evans posted a series of sweet snaps of Alba Baptista on his IG stories, while Emily Ratajkowski and Eric Andre went Instagram official — with nudity.

–Tom Cruise was the center of attention at the annual Oscar Nominees Luncheon.

–Hong Chau says of her Oscar nomination for The Whale: “I really feel nothing. [Or] If I can be completely honest, it’s more like, ‘Oh dear.'” My hero!

–Olivia Wilde really can’t breathe without everyone going after her these days, huh?

-Alan Sepinwall got to hang out on the set of the Party Down revival and interview most of the cast.

-This is a quite a flex: Pharrell Williams will succeed the late Virgil Abloh as the next designer at Louis Vuitton Men’s.

-Apple announced that Ted Lasso season 3 will premiere on March 15. I’m surprised they released a cute clip instead of a full trailer since that’s so close, but I guess one is coming.

–Emma Corrin landed the lead villain role in Deadpool 3.

-Netflix dropped the first trailer for Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story.

-Woof, the reviews for the new Ant-Man movie are rough.

–Kevin Bacon and Kyle Allen star in the trailer for Space Oddity.

–Celine Dion plays matchmaker for Priyanka Chopra Jonas and Sam Heughan in the Love Again trailer.

Cate Blanchett Reflects on Tar

Cate-Blanchett-Tar-Vanity-Fair

–Cate Blanchett tells Vanity Fair that Tár was the most “all-consuming, life-affirming” endeavour she’s ever taken on — and it could make her a three-time Oscar winner.

-She also did a cute video on Australian slang, explaining everything from a “dunny” to a “pash.”

-People are really upset with the theory that the last act of Tár is a dream. I don’t think it is, but I don’t mind that interpretation. The breadcrumbs about it not being real or it being a ghost story are there if you want to follow them.

–Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds have welcomed baby no. 4.

-In her first major interview since Batgirl was shelved, Leslie Grace opens up about the movie’s cancellation, which she learned about from the NY Post breaking the news: “I found out like the rest of you. And then my phone just started blowing up. I thought I was getting punked, but it checked out. Then came hysterical laughter like, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me?’…When we were expecting XYZ amount of support and money to expand scenes — to do pickup shots and those kinds of things — that was a gut punch. But then we learned that it was in the interest of writing down some debt? That part really stung.”

–Colin Farrell talked about being newly sober and meeting his Banshee’s costar Brendan Gleeson. “He said ‘will ya have a drink?’ opened his hotel fridge saying ‘I’ve still or sparkling’. In that moment, I fell in love with him as he had gone out and bought them. I thought ‘that’s a fella who’ll look after you.'”

–Penn Badgley keeps saying a lot of head-scratching stuff during the new season of You’s promo tour, considering the morality of the show he’s promoting. When asked about the popularity of Netflix’s Jeffrey Dahmer show, he said that viewers who find themselves fixated on killers to “need to look at that, inside.” He added, “To be fair, with our show, you’re meant to fall in love with [Joe]. That’s on us. [But] Ted Bundy? That’s on you. Jeffrey Dahmer? That is on — Netflix. That is squarely on the shoulders of Netflix.”

-Ok, but this is cute tho.

-Paramore’s Hayley Williams talked about her divorce from New Found Glory guitarist Chad Gilbert, and says she wasn’t aware she was depressed during their relationship. “I was so in denial! I was very ignorant about what depression really looks like in your day-to-day life. I wasn’t really aware that I had anything more than just some bad days. It was my physical health that jolted me awake. It helped me to get out of a toxic, bad relationship, but it did not answer any other questions for me.”

-What is it with the Joker movies not giving extras enough pee breaks?

-For all the cameo rumours surrounding Rihanna’s halftime show, no one predicted the real guest star – her fetus.

-Opinions seems split on her set, which featured no guest stars and minimal choreography.

–Megan Fox and Machine Gun Kelly reportedly “had a big fight” during Super Bowl weekend and the actress deleted photos of him and posted a cryptic Beyonce lyric about dishonesty before deleting her whole account.

-In terms of Super Bowl ads, my favourite were Bradley Cooper and his mom’s T-Mobile ad, Will Ferrell joining the cast of Netflix shows for GM, Ben Affleck and JLo for Dunkin‘, and Dave Grohl appreciating Canada for Crown Royal.

-When it came to Super Bowl trailers, it felt a little overwhelming compared to other years. We got Ben Affleck and Matt Damon‘s Air, Creed III,  Fast X, Guardians of the Galaxy 3, and Indiana Jones. The best of the bunch, I’m sad to say, was The Flash trailer.