Entertainment
Beyoncé is Billboard's greatest pop star of the 21st century. Mom Tina isn't surprised
The end of the 21st century is still decades away, but Billboard has already declared its greatest pop star: Beyoncé.
The music magazine on Tuesday revealed that the “Crazy in Love” and “Formation” diva had secured the top spot among 25 generational pop talents, including Taylor Swift, Justin Bieber, Rihanna, Drake and Lady Gaga. Billboard’s editorial staff selected Queen Bey for her “full 25 years of influence, evolution and impact,” the outlet announced.
“She’s been Beyoncé for 25 years now, and as she continues to challenge herself (and by extension, the rest of the pop world) to find new and different ways to be define [sic] greatness,” wrote Billboard deputy editor Andrew Unterberger, “it doesn’t seem like she’s going to stop being Beyoncé anytime soon.”
As part of its Beyoncé celebration, Billboard published an essay that chronicled the “Single Ladies” singer’s career from her Destiny’s Child days in the late 1990s to her most recent album, “Cowboy Carter.” The career retrospective praised the Houston native’s consistency, her ubiquity across music and other facets of pop culture — including film and fashion — and her “commitment to innovation.”
While the music outlet dedicated thousands of words to Beyoncé’s life and career, the singer’s mom, Tina Knowles, offered a handful in response to her daughter’s latest honor.
“That’s nice. That’s very nice,” Knowles told TMZ during a brief exchange Tuesday evening on the Sunset Strip.
When the reporter asked whether her family gets “used to those titles” and accolades, Knowles simply responded, “Yeah.”
The “16 Carriages” and “Texas Hold ’Em” singer has not yet publicly addressed her latest honor.
Knowles, Destiny’s Child’s former costume designer and mother to “Cranes in the Sky” artist Solange, isn’t shy about celebrating her superstar kin. On her Instagram, Knowles hypes her daughters’ magazine covers, album sales and even their nonmusic ventures, such as Beyoncé’s Cécred haircare line and her SirDavis whiskey brand.
On Tuesday, Knowles also touted Beyoncé’s upcoming NFL halftime show. The Grammy winner’s performance will stream Christmas Day on Netflix when the Houston Texans host the Baltimore Ravens at NRG Stadium. Knowles told TMZ that “excellence” is what viewers can expect from the holiday gig.
Taylor Swift, who soon will wrap her blockbuster Eras tour after nearly two years, secured the No. 2 spot on Billboard’s list. The historic Grammy winner (she is the only artist to win album of the year four times) “is the most famous woman in the world,” according to Billboard. However, the well-meaning praise inadvertently sparked a twofold backlash last week when her ranking was announced. Before Beyoncé landed the top spot, some of Swift’s legion of fans, known as Swifties, called out Billboard about her second-place ranking and made the case for the “Lavender Haze” singer to be No. 1.
“I like Beyoncé but she’s nowhere near Taylor’s level when it comes to impact and numbers,” a fan tweeted last week. Another Swift devotee on X (formerly Twitter) also cited the “Love Story” pop star’s “commercial success” and “record-breaking sales” as reasons for her to claim the top spot.
Adding salt to the wound, Billboard included a controversial snippet of Kanye West’s “Famous” music video in its montage meant to celebrate Swift. The Billboard clip reportedly featured the music video’s infamous wax figure modeled after a naked Swift, prompting Billboard to issue an apology for including the clip “that falsely depicted her.”
“We have removed the clip from our video and sincerely regret the harm we caused with this error,” the outlet tweeted.
In Tuesday’s Beyoncé reveal, Billboard acknowledged Swift’s accomplishments, lauding her as the “lone artist who really challenged Beyoncé for the top spot” and celebrating her dominance in album sales, streaming and touring. However, she “simply hasn’t been around for long enough to be able to match the expansiveness of [Beyoncé’s] quarter-century of dominance,” the magazine said.
Still, Swift found success with Spotify, which announced Wednesday that the “Shake It Off” diva was its most-streamed artist of the year. Swift also earned the title last year.
“In her Global Top Artist era,” Spotify tweeted Wednesday. “Congratulations Taylor Swift on the over 26+ billion streams in 2024.”
Joining Swift as the audio platform’s top 10 global artists are fellow Billboard 21st century greatest pop star honorees Drake, Ariana Grande, The Weeknd, Bad Bunny and Kanye West.
“You guys are unbelievable. What an amazing thing to find out going into our last weekend of eras shows,” Swift wrote to fans Wednesday in an Instagram story. “THANK YOU!”
For Beyoncé and Swift, their respective Billboard and Spotify wins can be a boon as they prepare for the 2025 Grammy Awards. In November, Beyoncé earned 11 nominations, the most of the latest crop of Grammy hopefuls. Top nominees also include Charli XCX, Billie Eilish, Kendrick Lamar, Post Malone, Sabrina Carpenter, Chappell Roan and Swift.
Who will win the top Grammy prizes? It’s best to stick around, ‘round, ‘round for when the ceremony is broadcast on CBS and streams live from Los Angeles’ Crypto.com Arena on Feb. 2
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Movie Reviews
Pushpa 2: Social media user’s ‘brutal review’ of Allu Arjun movie goes viral, says ‘He uses his teeth to…’ | Today News
A social media user has given a ‘brutal’ review to the latest record-breaking movie, Pushpa 2. The user stated that the film lacks logic and that educated people will not appreciate it.
He especially pointed out a scene where the film’s lead actor, Allu Arjun, uses his teeth to fight the goons. He also mentioned that only uneducated people would appreciate this movie.
“Our fault is, despite being educated, we went to watch the film,” he said.
However, several social media users disagree with his review. Few users criticised the reviewer for questioning the educational qualification of the audience.
One of the users commented, “I always say that if you want to watch a South Indian Masala film, leave your brain at home and just watch the movie for entertainment. It’s not an intellectual activity.”
“I am a Chartered Accountant, so am I qualified to review or not?
I loved the movie, especially the action sequences.
The main aim of the picture is entertaining the audience, and it does.
Otherwise,if we judge by logical sense of action scenes, then most films would be rated 0,” another user added.
“Kon kon hai ye jo sun kr movie dekhne nh jaega (Who will not watch the movie after this review?),” one of the users commented.
Another added, “Movie is for entertainment if you didn’t like the film then criticise it but why are dragging people’s literacy here ? Why their education matters when it’s about entertainment ? Even if you defend these then what would you expect from a film which is set around a backward region.”
The Allu Arjun-Rashmika Mandanna starrer Pushpa 2: The Rule hit the theatres on December 5, and its collections are breaking many records. The action thriller is the sequel to Pushpa: The Rise, the 2021 blockbuster film.
Apart from Rashmika Mandanna and Fahad Faasil, the film is directed by Sukumar, with Pushpa (Allu Arjun) facing off against Shekhawat (Faasil). The film also stars Jagapathi Babu, Dhananjaya, Rao Ramesh, Sunil, and Anasuya Bharadwaj in prominent roles.
Entertainment
Review: It's 'The End' but deep underground, a sheltered family keeps on singing in denial
“The End,” by director Joshua Oppenheimer (“The Act of Killing,” “The Look of Silence”), is a gloomy musical about perhaps the only six people left on Earth: an oilman and his trophy wife (Michael Shannon and Tilda Swinton), their bunker-born adult son (George MacKay) and the three aides (Bronagh Gallagher, Tim McInnerny, Lennie James) invited into this underground ark.
Something awful is outside. We hear allusions to a blood-red sun, a poisoned sea and buzzards. But this salt mine-slash-sanctuary boasts walls hung with fine art and a dinner table set for wine and Champagne. These survivors have walled-off suffering for more than 20 years. Still, they can’t breathe.
Not in the literal sense. The cast has the lung capacity for more than two hours of singing and the songs, which Oppenheimer wrote the lyrics for and composer Joshua Schmidt scored, are flat-out stunners, belted with humble charm. If a voice cracks, it cracks. The emotion holds center stage, backed by adamant violins and horns and sneaky melodies that vault up an octave to hit surprising notes.
But there’s not enough air in here for everyone to have a personality. The characters are all rigorously mannered, as though they’re mimicking the mannequins in old film strips of 1950s bomb shelters. In the opening song, people stroll into the living room one by one, casually clutching mugs of coffee, and when they realize the others are already crooning about another perfect new morning, they join in as though to be polite. “We fight through the dark together / our future is bright,” they harmonize, keeping their backs as straight as a church choir.
The irony is obvious and for the first hour, that’s all there is. The assured magnate, the superficial wife, the doted-upon child who was raised so cloistered he whistles canary songs to a tank of crawdads and tries to teach pet tricks to a fish. These aren’t full characters — they don’t even merit names — they’re just the clichés we’d expect to see dining on Dover sole while the rest of us are dead. (Plus the workers don’t merit much attention.) Oppenheimer and his co-screenwriter Rasmus Heisterberg have given each family member one flaw that they sing about so incessantly that the running time could be slashed by a third. We get it, bunker life is airless. This house is so gray and cold that something’s got to snap.
During the film’s stiff and dull first stretch, the family discovers a young stranger, played by Moses Ingram, who has endured the apocalypse long enough to track the source of their smoke exhaust. If you think that’s implausible, wait til you see how this presumably hardscrabble refugee — a girl who has never before worn shoes — not only arrives with TikTok-trained options about the rights of the working class, but appears unfazed by these opulent digs.
Ingram and MacKay start off like the kind of couple you wouldn’t put together even though they truly might be the last fertile singles alive. But they warm to each other enough to sing their own duet, running through the salt mine with their arms stretched wide. (The choreographers Sam Pinkleton and Ani Taj smartly choose liberated movement over precision.) Finally, the film kicks up its heels and becomes something beautiful.
Oppenheimer is after something that drives right at the heart of what a musical is. To harmonize means to agree. It’s a public display of solidarity — a pact to parrot the same delusions. Here, it’s only when these characters splinter off on their own that they sing their truth. Even then, they’ve been so suffocated by lies that they can’t always come up with the right words. In one number, Swinton, who goes glossy-eyed to show the cracks in her high-fashion veneer, poses in a transparent rain slicker while bleating raw, yowling noises that blend with the despairing strings. As for the naive son, whom MacKay plays with apple-cheeked precociousness plus a brain worm, during his wildest solo, he thrusts his crotch and goes, “Nyah, nyah!”
Lies are to Oppenheimer what the skeleton was to Da Vinci. He’s fixated on understanding how they work, how they evolve and bend, how they wind up controlling the way a person moves through life. When Shannon’s patriarch insists that “drilling for oil was just an excuse for wind farms, clean water, save the chimpanzees,” he’s rewriting history for an audience of no one but himself and how he wants his son to see him. The scale of destruction he has caused is vague and unspeakable. We know riots were involved because he insists they weren’t.
Given that our setting is the end of the world and all, we can estimate that his death toll trumps that of Oppenheimer’s breakthrough 2012 documentary, “The Act of Killing,” in which the former soldiers of an Indonesian death squad reenacted their past massacres to shore up their conviction that they were the heroes. That powerful film sided with our desire to punish the aggressors. But when Shannon’s fossil-fuel tycoon rebuts that the rest of humanity drove cars, too, well, he’s got a point.
Perhaps out of a shared sense of guilt, Oppenheimer yearns to give these sinners a chance to atone for their mistakes. Alone, they plead for forgiveness, like when Shannon scales a mound of salt clutching a taxidermy bird like he fancies himself the heroine of “The Sound of Music.” Rather than condemn its characters forever, “The End” gives these plastic people the choice to reclaim their humanity. That’s what turns out to be torture.
This is a musical that treasures goofy imperfection, a scene where McInnerny does a funny little tap dance, or the joy in Shannon’s hyena cackle. Oppenheimer untethers his script from the responsibilities of explaining how this doomsday manor functions. The food stash, the waste disposal, none of that comes into play, and the characters are wholly incurious about whatever’s going on outside their cave. Instead, all the attention goes to micro-shifts in people’s moods, which, for characters this manicured, are as dramatic as a new ripple in a rock garden.
Only Ingram’s home invader can be both happy and sad at once. The girl can’t wall her emotions away and that rattles this bunker to its very foundation. The film around her is itself built on a fault line of contradictions — it’s at once tepid and sledgehammer-insistent, a slab of decadent milquetoast. But you leave thinking about the question the characters never bring themselves to ask or sing: What’s the difference between being alive and living?
‘The End’
Not rated
Running time: 2 hours, 28 minutes
Playing: In limited release, opens Dec. 6
Movie Reviews
Johannes Grenzfurthner’s ‘Solvent’ (2024) Melds Obsession With Transcendence – Movie Review – PopHorror
After reading our interview with Filmmaker Johannes Grenzfurthner about his new project, Solvent, I decided I needed to check this film out. Anything involving missing Nazis, decrepit farmhouses, delusional filmmakers, and the director’s actual grandfather had to be awesome, right?
Here’s the synopsis:
While searching for Nazi documents in an Austrian farmhouse, a team of experts uncovers a hidden secret buried in its bowels. American expatriate Gunner S. Holbrook becomes obsessed with solving the mystery, and as his sanity wanes, he must confront an insatiable evil. Can he find redemption before it drains the life out of him?
Solvent (2024) was directed by Johannes Grenzfurthner (Masking Threshold 2022) from a script co-written by himself and Benjamin Roberts (Able Bodies 2022). The film also stars Grenzfurthner, Napoleon Dynamite’s Jon Gries, Polish actress Aleksandra Cwen (F Is For Freaks 2019), and Grenzfurthner’s late grandfather, who only appeared in photographs but played a major role in the story.
Solvent tells the story of guerrilla filmmaker Gunner S. Holbrook (Gries) as he films his investigation into the disappearance of Ernst Bartholdi’s (Grenzfurthner) grandfather, Wolfgang Zinggl (Otto Zuckerberg), a Nazi during the Second World War. He has a team of people working with him, including Bartholdi and his ex-girlfriend, Krystina (Cwen). Everyone is there for the adventure, at least at first. Searching the old man’s the dilapidated, mold-encrusted farmhouse proves to be quite the treasure hunt. Photos and documents are found under collapsed ceilings and inside the brittle pages of old books. The mood is almost jolly. Who knows what they’ll find in the next room?
When the filmmakers stumble on a partially hidden cave on the property, they see no reason not to continue on with their search. However, something terrible happens when Krystina goes into the cave alone, and her reaction to whatever it is has fatal consequences. Yet, despite the death of one member of his crew and the abject refusal of Ernst to allow Gunner back onto his grandfather’s property, the young filmmaker becomes obsessed with what’s lurking in this underground lair.
What Works
Not only does Solvent follow Gunner on his very personal journey through the mind of an insane madman, it takes place in a found footage, first person POV, only showing us what he sees and hears. We don’t get any information that doesn’t come straight from the American’s experiences. I haven’t seen such a clever and compelling use of this filmmaking style since Jozsef Gallai’s I Hear The Trees Whispering (2022). The viewer is chained to the mindset and visuals of the slowly deteriorating Gunner, with no way to look away from everything he experiences. And he makes sure to keep his camera on at all times.
“All life is a rebellion against faith…”
While there’s nothing particularly bloody about Solvent, there are some disturbing visuals, including a dead fish being stuffed into a bag, dozens of bottles of collected urine, a dead mouse in a glass jar that looked a little too real, and an extremely gory shot at the end of the film of a place no pipe inspection camera should ever go. These gruesome images are made worse by the off handed way they’re presented, as if these are just normal things that one does with their time.
I love the idea that what Zinggl has created is a sentient liquid, something that can leech through the ground, infecting anything it comes into contact with. Much like Vonnegut’s Ice-9, anything that this nefarious substance touches will be changed forever, and there is no way to return it to its natural form. No matter how innocent or undeserving, the receiver will always be contaminated. There is no escape and no cure. It’s solvent to both body and soul.
What Doesn’t Work
The voiceover of Jon Gries as Gunner could sometimes be a bit flat, not always reacting well to what was going on around him. This took me out of the film a few times. Although I realize that the countryside rambling and long-winded soliloquies were there to show Gunner’s state of mind, they could be a bit boring. Sometimes realism is not as entertaining as one might hope.
Final Thoughts
It’s obvious that Solvent is a very personal film for Grenzfurthner. The photos of his grandfather and the treasure hunt through his family’s actual abandoned farmhouse are a love letter to the filmmaker’s heritage, despite the fact that he made his affable familial patriarch into a antisemitic psychopath bent on eternal life in any form. The secondary characters are darkly funny and entertaining, proving to be an uneasy break away from Gunner’s increasing insanity. The multiple layers and subtext in Solvent alone make it worth a watch, and adding the bizarre visuals, creepy locations and contagious psychosis are the icing on the cake.
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