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Newswire: Leslie Jones is done with racist jerks, not Twitter
29 minutes ago
As we reported earlier this week, Leslie Jones was the target of some vicious attacks on Twitter. The Ghostbusters star and Saturday Night Live cast member is an avid user of the platform, but she was besieged by racist messages from the kind of assholes who have the time and malice to engage in such things. It appeared to many that she had quit the site entirely, but, as she told Seth Meyers on Late Night, she’s not afraid of those jerks.
In the midst of calling out all the bigoted bullshit being dumped on her timeline, Jones asked Twitter to intervene. The social media company eventually took decisive action, permanently banning several accounts, including that of Breitbart’s Milo Yiannopoulos. Jones explained to Meyers that she brought the matter before Twitter because she felt targeted, not just because people generally post mean things online—she’s all too »
- Danette Chavez
Newswire: Redbox swears it’s got this “streaming” thing down this time
1 hour ago
Back in 2013, the movie-rental kiosk company Redbox announced the launch of a new video subscription service, called Redbox Instant, to much fanfare and excitement within the confines of the Redbox corporate headquarters. A joint venture with Verizon, the service was intended as an alternative to industry leader Netflix, and proved to be exactly as popular as a business venture that shutters its doors 18 months later would lead you to believe. It’s unclear what combination of factors contributed to its failure, but presumably a lack of interest in being able to stream The Hangover Part III played a role.
But the company now thinks it may have finally figured out how to crack this whole “streaming” business, and is even thinking about trading in the rabbit ears on top of its old rotary-dialed television and getting one of them fancy blinking box things. Variety reports Redbox Digital, a ...
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- Alex McCown
Income Disposal: Suicide Squad and squirt guns: Here’s what’s on sale on Amazon today
1 hour ago
In an effort to both serve our readers and help support The A.V. Club, we are going to post daily links to deals and interesting items that we find over on Amazon. If you use these links to click through and buy something—not just the thing you clicked—on Amazon, we will see a portion of that income. You don’t have to do that if you don’t want to, but if you do, know that we appreciate it.
Air Pressure Summer Joker Soaker ($17.58)
It’s hot out, and this is a sweet-looking squirt gun that blasts high velocity water onto yourself or other people. Plus, the reviews are all really good.
Stargate: Atlantis: The Complete Series Blu-Ray ($38.99)
For those who are a little more interested in staying inside, there’s this complete Stargate box set. For those who are less interested in ...
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- Marah Eakin
Great Job, Internet!: The Ghostbusters stunt doubles are a goddamn delight
3 hours ago
When there’s something strange in the neighborhood, you call the Ghostbusters. But when the Ghostbusters aren’t quite up for the challenge, you call their stunt doubles. Meredith Richardson, Luci Romberg, Alyma Dorsey, and Jessi Fisher doubled for Kate McKinnon, Melissa McCarthy, Leslie Jones, and Kristen Wiig, respectively, in the new Ghostbusters remake. And on their last day on set, the four women put together a little dance to celebrate the project:
Instagram Embed
Richardson posted the video on her Instagram, and it captures not only the ladies’ sweet moves but also what sounds like the main cast laughing at their antics. It’s almost eerie to watch the look-alikes, who each do a spot-on job of capturing the physicality of the star they’re playing. And their Instagrams are a treasure trove of more great Ghostbusters-related material:
Instagram EmbedInstagram EmbedInstagram EmbedInstagram Embed »
- Caroline Siede
Great Job, Internet!: This Star Wars IV scene becomes extra tragic with footage from Star Wars III
3 hours ago
It’s hard to argue that too much good came from the Star Wars prequels. But the YouTube channel Shahan Reviews makes a strong case that in small doses, the prequels can be quite effective. In a video entitled “Obi-Wan Remembers The Truth,” Shahan inserts clips of the climatic battle in Star Wars Episode III: Revenge Of The Sith into Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. And the results are unexpectedly moving.
Specifically, the video recontextualizes the scene in which Obi-Wan Kenobi tells Luke Skywalker about the Clone Wars. As he explains to Luke that his father was murdered by Darth Vadar, Obi-Wan flashes back to his own climatic lava fight with Anakin. “What I told you was true, from a certain point of view,” Obi-Wan later tells Luke in Return Of The Jedi. And this video drills home that tragic reality while also showcasing just how much weight »
- Caroline Siede
Great Job, Internet!: Brie Larson had the perfect response to this Twitter post—no seriously, it’s funny
4 hours ago
Brie Larson is widely regarded as “pretty cool,” mostly because she tends to do things that are pretty cool. She was in Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World, she was in a Jenny Lewis video, she was in a Sleater-Kinney video, and she might be flying into the Marvel Cinematic Universe soon. Now, though, Larson has topped all of that with a great tweet related to Room, her most famous movie that does not include Michael Cera defeating seven evil exes.
Before we can get to that, though, we have to back up and talk about a site called Amazon. It’s a website where people can buy almost anything, and in order to help other people decide what to buy, users can also leave reviews for things. Sometimes, these reviews are helpful. Sometimes, they are far from helpful.
That brings us to Amazon Movie Reviews, a very popular Twitter account »
- Sam Barsanti
Scenic Routes: Prized possessions say a lot about a person—even if that person is a robot
13 hours ago
In Scenic Routes, Mike D’Angelo looks at key scenes, explaining how they work and what they mean.
Years ago, I dated a voracious reader. Her apartment was wall-to-wall bookshelves, showcasing a highly respectable collection of fiction and nonfiction: the canon, modern classics, cult favorites, everything. We’d been together for months before I discovered the cache of self-help books and romance novels she’d hidden in the closet, as if they were porn. (Possibly the romance novels were.) By the same token, no casual visitor to my house is gonna see my huge stacks of Entertainment Weekly back issues from the ’90s, even though I only hang onto them because a review or column I wrote appears in each one. Our possessions reveal a great deal about us, and we curate them accordingly, striving to create an image.
Even so, it’s always a bit nerve-wracking to bring a »
- Mike D'Angelo
Avq&A: What’s the best version of Satan in pop culture?
13 hours ago
Welcome back to Avq&A, where we throw out a question for discussion among the staff and readers. Consider this a prompt to compare notes on your interface with pop culture, to reveal your embarrassing tastes and experiences, and to ponder how our diverse lives all led us to convene here together. Got a question you’d like us and the readers to answer? Email us at avcqa@theonion.com.
This week’s question comes from commenter DrDischord:
Who’s your favorite devil? The gay, emotionally needy Satan of South Park? The Bowie-esque king of hell from the Sandman comics? Billy Crystal in Deconstructing Harry?
Nick Wanserski
What makes Beelzebot, the robot devil from Futurama, so great is how often he fails at embodying the most notable traits of either robot or devil. As the devil, he attempts cunning, but is also easily duped. As a robot, he’s emotional »
- Joe Blevins, Will Feinstein, Zack Handlen, Will Harris, Jesse Hassenger, William Hughes, Becca James, Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya, Dennis Perkins, Nathan Rabin, Gus Spelman, Nick Wanserski
Coming Distractions: Latest Snowden trailer highlights the emotional toll of being a whistleblower
18 hours ago
Much like an actual employee of the Nsa, anyone watching this new trailer for Oliver Stone’s Snowden will have to sift through a lot of distracting noise if they want to get to the real information. For one thing, Joseph Gordon-Levitt is quickly proving himself to be the new Johnny Depp, but instead of putting on a weird hat he has to do a weird voice in every movie. Also, while the last trailer highlighted the political thriller angle, this one focuses a little more on the romance between Snowden and longtime girlfriend Lindsay Mills. She’s played here by Shailene Woodley, who is 11 years younger than Gordon-Levitt, and it’s almost as hard to ignore that as it is to ignore his weird voice.
If you manage to look past that stuff, though, this Snowden trailer still tells the story of a guy who’s trying to ...
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- Sam Barsanti
Newswire: Oliver Stone is convinced Pokémon Go will usher in totalitarianism
20 hours ago
Even if you’ve never met him and have only seen his movies, it seems fair to categorize Oliver Stone as a pretty paranoid dude. His upcoming film Snowden tells the story of Nsa whistleblower Edward Snowden, and Stone provided some thematically consistent commentary on mass surveillance of American citizens at the Comic-Con panel for the movie earlier today. Basically, Stone thinks that we’re a bunch of chumps who have willingly laid the groundwork to a totalitarian state, all for the sake of pretend-capturing cartoon monsters.
No, Stone doesn’t trust this whole Pokémon Go thing one little bit, calling it “a new level of invasion.” Assuming—probably correctly—that many in the audience already had their app downloaded to their phones, he told the crowd, “they are data mining every person in this room. It’s what they call surveillance capitalism.” And there is some evidence to back »
- Katie Rife
Spoiler Space: Spoiler Space: Star Trek Beyond
20 hours ago
Thoughts on, and a place to discuss, the plot points we can’t reveal in our review.
Why would anyone cast Idris Elba in a movie and then cover him up in layers of prosthetics and make-up? And isn’t it kind of silly that the USS Franklin, the antique Starfleet vessel found by the Enterprise survivors on the unknown planet, holds both a classic motorcycle and a copy of the Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage,” which the young Kirk blasted on a joyride in the first rebooted Star Trek? And what happened to the crew of the Franklin anyway?
The answer to all three of those questions lies with Krall, who is actually Balthazar Edison, the captain of the Franklin. Extending his life (and distorting his appearance) with a technology left behind by an unknown alien species, Edison has waited all this time to exact his revenge. A decorated hero of »
- Ignatiy Vishnevetsky
Great Job, Internet!: Read This: Paul F. Tompkins pays tribute to Garry Marshall
20 hours ago
Paul F. Tompkins has perfected plenty of iconic impressions on Scott Aukerman’s Comedy Bang! Bang! podcast and his own Pod F. Tompkast. But chief among them is his gonzo take on Garry Marshall. The famed director and TV creator died this week, and Tompkins has penned a loving tribute to Mr. Marshall (please, call him Garry) over on Vulture.
Paul F. Tompkins as Garry Marshall on Comedy Bang! Bang!
Tompkins explains that Marshall played a big role in his childhood through his shows like Happy Days, Laverne & Shirley, and Mork & Mindy. Not only did those shows give Tompkins a frame of reference for forming friendships, they also inspired him to go into comedy. He notes that his affection for Marshall is “deeply embedded” in his impression and that he always felt “enormously protective” of the Pretty Woman director.
Tompkins also tells the story of the one and ...
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- Caroline Siede
Movie Review: Fascism is a brat in The Childhood Of A Leader
20 hours ago
Scott Walker’s score for The Childhood Of A Leader (only his second, after Pola X) is a work of dark, twisted genius, skin-crawling and bombastic in equal measure, and first-time director Brady Corbet does his damnedest trying to mount a movie to deserve it. And, mirabile dictu, he eventually pulls it off with the epilogue, a left turn into dystopian nightmare, titled “A New Era.” If only for a few minutes, The Childhood Of A Leader becomes its own film, a tour of the printing presses, paternoster elevators, and mazes of power that ends with a convulsive blur of bodies crowding in a public square. A viewer can’t help but think, “What took so long?”
Most of The Childhood Of A Leader is set in the aftermath of World War I at a dilapidated French manor house, shrouded in greenish medieval fog. Taking inspiration from the Jean-Paul Sartre »
- Ignatiy Vishnevetsky
Movie Review: Beyond has fun going where Star Trek has gone before
22 hours ago
“Things are starting to feel a little episodic,” muses intrepid Starfleet captain James T. Kirk (Chris Pine), as he surveys life aboard the USS Enterprise early in Justin Lin’s diverting, self-aware Star Trek Beyond: every day the same uniform from the same closet, the same coffee in the same mug, the same chair on the same bridge, the wonders of the interstellar far reaches blurring by the viewport at warp speed. Co-written by Simon Pegg, Beyond goes where the decades-old Star Trek franchise has gone many times before—following another distress call to another away mission to confront another bad guy with a secret past and a monologue on another planet that looks like it’s made of spray-painted foam—but this time with a wink. Star Trek’s ideal medium has always been TV, where personalities could develop individually. But the crew of the rebooted big-screen Enterprise »
- Ignatiy Vishnevetsky
Coming Distractions: Nasa fakes the moon landing in the Operation Avalanche trailer
23 hours ago
“This is like one of those good lies—like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.” This statement, uttered halfway through the above trailer, appears to sum up the ideology behind the characters in Operation Avalanche. The film provides a what-if alternate history suggesting the conspiracy theory that the original moon landing was faked really occurred. (Not that anyone alive today would still believe in such nonsense.) In the trailer, a few enterprising young men learn that Stanley Kubrick is using Nasa to evaluate the accuracy of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and decide turnabout is fair play, using his film to create their own phony lunar landing. As you might expect, this kind of world-altering conspiracy is a high-risk venture, and it soon becomes clear the plan won’t go smoothly.
The ad copy for the film, however, makes it sound a little different: Apparently, these gentlemen are really CIA agents »
- Alex McCown
Newswire: Here’s what’s coming to (and leaving from) Hulu in August
23 hours ago
Hulu subscribers can spend the dog days of summer with FX shows, reality series, and all three Species movies (truly one of the best lesser-known trilogies). The very first day of August will bring the complete second season of You’re The Worst into streaming view, while the very last day of the month will bring its third season to FX. You’ll also be able to enjoy both of the time-traveling adventures of the dashing San Dimas explorers, William “Bill” Preston Esq. and “Ted” Theodore Logan, or take a different kind of journey with the 14th season of Intervention. Later in the month, get caught up on the second seasons of Steven Universe and the Hulu original Casual, before bidding farewell to Bar Rescue and Foot Fist Way (we’re not here to judge you).
Available August 1
You’re The Worst complete season 2
A.R.C ...
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- Danette Chavez
Newswire: Margot Robbie to once again play a crazy criminal in Bad Monkeys
21 July 2016 10:34 AM, PDT
Margot Robbie is sick of playing someone’s girlfriend, but lucky for her, playing villains is becoming her thing. Her skills at playing evil will be put to the ultimate test when Suicide Squad drops next month, and she’ll reprise her role of Harley Quinn in some sort of top-secret DC project. In the meantime, she’s taking on more evil-adjacent work. According to Variety, Robbie will star in and produce Universal’s upcoming action thriller Bad Monkeys, which is based on a novel of the same name by Matt Ruff.
Bad Monkeys is centered on Jane Charlotte (Robbie) who, like Harley Quinn, is a little more complicated than just your typical baddie. In fact, when Jane’s arrested for murder, she purports that she’s actually a part of a secret organization that combats evil. Jane claims she works for the verbosely titled Department for the Final Disposition »
- Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya
Great Job, Internet!: A pocket history of Robin Williams’ wisecracking Genie from Aladdin
21 July 2016 10:15 AM, PDT
In the late 1980s, actor-comedian Robin Williams saw his flailing screen career revived by Good Morning, Vietnam and Dead Poets Society, both released through the Disney subsidiary Touchstone. In gratitude, he agreed to take a pay cut and voice the fast-talking, pop-culture-reference-making Genie in Disney’s Aladdin for SAG scale. His only real proviso was that Disney not overemphasize the character in the advertising. Disney agreed and then proceeded to overemphasize the holy hell out of the character in the advertising anyway. These and other developments are discussed in “The History Of Robin Williams As The Genie,” an episode of the webseries Cartoons 101. This nine-minute minidocumentary reveals that the actor and the company had a fraught, complicated relationship that spanned years.
While they considered John Candy and Eddie Murphy for the part, the makers of Aladdin always wanted Williams as their Genie. They even went so far as to ...
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- Joe Blevins
Coming Distractions: Jacob Tremblay has a powerful imagination in the Before I Wake trailer
21 July 2016 10:10 AM, PDT
The upcoming fantasy horror film Before I Wake looks to be building its otherworldly dread from two of humanity’s biggest sources of fear: our own imaginations and other people’s children. Kate Bosworth and Thomas Jane star as a grief-stricken married couple who decide to take in a foster child after the death of their son. Foster kids very often arrive with a suitcase full of issues needing to be worked out (as do most children, really, but biology has a way helping parents look past their own kids’ complications). However, when Cody (Room’s Jacob Tremblay) comes into their lives, he brings issues that are—how shall we say?—somewhat extraordinary.
His dreams substantiate themselves as reality, which is all well and good when that means you’ve got some pretty Christmas light butterflies fluttering around your living room. But when your deceased child walks briefly back into »
- Dennis DiClaudio
Newswire: VHS dies once again as Japan manufactures its last Vcr
21 July 2016 10:00 AM, PDT
Rather like a certain character on Game Of Thrones, the VHS format looked like it was dead, but then a bunch of dudes dressed in black with big scraggly beards willed it back into existence. Now all things Vcr-related have become a full-on hipster phenomenon, but according to a report from Mental Floss, they’re about to get a whole lot hipper. Wait, scarcer. Did we say hipper?
Anyway, publications like Endgadget mourned the death of the Vcr back in 2008, when manufacturer Jvc went out of business. But apparently Japanese electronics company Funai Electric didn’t get the memo, and has continued to manufacture VCRs in China and sell them in North America under brand names like Sanyo. Until later this month, that is, when the company—which sold a mere 750,000 units worldwide last year—will shut down production of the lovably clunky pieces of outdated technology ...
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- Katie Rife
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