Lana Del Rey says she was robbed of a backpack that contained her laptop computer, which had her new album on it.
The singer stated together with the pc, a number of laborious drives and a digital camera have been additionally stolen.
“A couple of months in the past, I parked my automotive on Melrose Place — truly Melrose Ave. in Los Angeles — and I stepped away for a minute,” she stated on Instagram. “And the one time I left my backpack inside my automotive, somebody broke all of the home windows and took it.”
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Del Rey added that one other challenge, a ebook she is engaged on, was stolen as properly.
“I needed to remotely wipe the pc that had my 200-page ebook for Simon and Schuster—which I didn’t have backed up on the cloud,” Del Rey stated. And regardless of that, persons are nonetheless in a position to remotely entry my telephone and leak our songs and private pictures. I liked the ebook that I misplaced with all of my coronary heart and put loads of ardour into it.”
The artist requested her followers to to not take heed to any leaked music, and stated she is going to proceed to work on new music.
“I simply wish to point out that regardless of all of this taking place, I’m assured within the file to return, regardless of so many security components at so many alternative ranges. I actually wish to persist and make one of the best file I can,” she stated. “Please don’t take heed to the music in the event you hear it, as a result of it’s not popping out but,” she stated.
Del Rey concluded: “Clearly I gained’t ever depart something within the automotive once more, even when it’s only for a second. However we’ve had the identical points on the home, and it’s a fixed factor. And though I’m so grateful to have the ability to share all the good things, I simply additionally wish to share that it has been a problem.”
The sixth entry in the Despicable Me franchise and a sequel to 2017’s Despicable Me 3, Despicable Me 4 sees Felonious Gru (Steve Carell) heading to his school Lycée Pas Bon for a reunion. But he is also undercover for the Anti-Villain League (AVL) to capture Maxine Le Mal (Will Ferrell).
Maxine and Gru have a long-standing rivalry from their school days especially after Gru sang Culture Club’s ‘Karma Chameleon’ dressed as Boy George at the talent show. Maxine, who was planning to sing the same song, also dressed as Boy George, could not do so as everyone would think he was copying Gru (shudder).
Despicable Me 4
Director: Chris Renaud
Voice cast: Steve Carell, Kristen Wiig, Pierre Coffin, Joey King, Miranda Cosgrove, Sofía Vergara, Steve Coogan, Chris Renaud, Madison Polan, Dana Gaier, Chloe Fineman, Stephen Colbert, Will Ferrell
Story line: Gru and his family are relocated to a safe house after some of his activities at the AVL. There, however, is no rest for the wicked as he is hounded by an old school rival and a new fan
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Run time: 94 minutes
Maxine has developed many villainous properties including a machine to turn people into enhanced bugs. Gru arrests Maxine who promptly escapes the AVL’s maximum security prison with help from his femme fatale girlfriend Valentina (Sofía Vergara) and swears vengeance on Gru and his family.
The former director of AVL Silas Ramsbottom (Steve Coogan) comes out of retirement to get Gru and his family, which includes his wife,Lucy (Kristen Wiig) adopted daughters Margo (Miranda Cosgrove), Edith (Dana Gaier), and Agnes (Madison Polan) and son Gru Jr, (Tara Strong) to a safe house in the upscale Mayflower neighbourhood.
A still from ‘Despicable Me 4’
Though the Grus, with the cover name of Cunningham, try to blend in, they do stick out. Gru’s attempt at making friends with his neighbour the super-rich Perry Prescott (Stephen Colbert) fall flat while Lucy’s efforts at the hair salon end up in an epic fail with burning a customer, Melora’s (Laraine Newman) hair. Perry’s wife Patsy (Chloe Fineman) invites the Cunninghams to a game of tennis, which Lucy knows is no sign of being accepted.
The Prescott daughter Poppy (Joey King), however recognises Gru and blackmails him to joining her on a heist to steal the school mascot. Apart from the three minions (Pierre Coffin) who accompany the Gru family, the rest are at AVL headquarters and Silas puts five into a programme for the creation of super-powered Mega Minions. The programme is quickly shut down as the Mega Minions unleash all kinds of mayhem under the guise of helping.
The voice work is fun with most of the gang reprising their roles. Romesh Ranganathan as Gru’s quarter master Dr. Nefario and Chris Renaud as the tough-as-nails principal Übelschlecht have a blast as do Ferrell and Vergara. Some of the sequences are inventive, especially the one with the mega minion and the Swiss cheese.
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Stuff keeps happening through Despicable Me 4’s 94 minutes and before you know it, the credits are rolling, which might be a good thing if you want to pounded into submission with a relentless procession of gags. Despicable Me 4 is fun while it lasts, but might not stand as a synonym for enduring.
In a show that boasts appearances by the likes of Emma Stone, Bowen Yang, Amy Sedaris and Aidy Bryant, Julio Torres’ “Fantasmas” may well make a TV star out of someone who aptly goes by a single name: Martine.
“This is the biggest role I’ve ever had,” Martine, a trans visual and performance artist, says via Zoom. “I’m officially the star of a television show. And it might also be my favorite TV show.”
For anyone who’s watched “Fantasmas,” that endorsement should double as insight into Martine’s own aesthetic and artistic sensibility. Because “Fantasmas” isn’t like any other television show out there.
The six-part urban fairy tale, which premiered June 7 on HBO and drops episodes weekly on Fridays through July 12, imagines a New York City where ExxonMobil builds developments and rideshare apps called Chester — with a driver named Chester — exist alongside mermaid sales reps and rodent nightclubs-turned-CVS pharmacies.
Within that fantastical vision of New York, Torres’ Julio (who was hit by lightning as a child and is allergic to the color yellow) is constantly trying to eke out a living with the help of his robot assistant, Bibo (voiced by Joe Rumrill), and his agent, Vanesja (the “j” is silent), played by Martine.
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“The show itself is kind of postgenre,” Martine suggests. “It’s very much a genre-building show. It’s hard to explain what you should expect to see.”
Every set piece in “Fantasmas” — whether it’s a sitcom called “MELF ” that riffs on “ALF ” and features Paul Dano, or a vignette focused on a zealous customer service rep played by “Euphoria’s” Alexa Demie — lays bare its crafted theatricality. It’s always clear that audiences are watching something shot on a set, with painted backdrops and makeshift props. This is a fanciful world that never pretends to be anything more than an absurd and absurdist take on everyday life.
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1.Paul Dano, right, is featured in a skit about an “ALF”-like puppet named MELF.(Atsushi Nishijima/HBO)2.Alexa Demie plays an overzealous customer service rep.(Monica Lek/HBO)
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“It felt like theater,” Martine says of working on the show. “It felt like being onstage with an audience. Everything was built inside this one giant soundstage and it was all repurposed: The school becomes the nightclub, the nightclub becomes a rooftop. And the audience was everyone on set.”
Within this funhouse mirror of a show, which blends sketch comedy with a farcical plot that finds Julio wanting to avoid getting an ID that would serve as his “proof of existence,” Martine was similarly encouraged to play with her own identity — as a performer, artist and actor.
“I don’t recognize myself in the show,” she says. “Because it’s Vanesja. And I think Vanesja happened because I was so nervous about my performance. The only way for me to move ahead was to say, ‘You don’t have to be yourself. You can put forward some kind of armor, some kind of stronger, idealized person you want to move through the world as.’”
For Martine, the very idea of being “yourself” is elusive. Questioning the rigidity of our sense of self has long been at the heart of her art, which has been featured in galleries and art museums all over the country — not to mention at the Venice Biennale — and in magazines like Interview and Artforum.
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“Who am I?” she wonders aloud. “I think I’m constantly trying to shed that definition. I think I’m constantly throwing it away, discarding the old skin, shedding it, as it were, to move into some wider, broader, stronger, faster model. Or predator or something.”
Such facetious language, which moves from the probing to the preposterous with ease and humor, is arguably why she gets along with Torres. Martine first met the Salvadoran comedian close to a decade ago at an archery championship. “It’s truly an unbelievable story,” she recalls. “Julio was there at the buffet. He’s vegan, and I was kind of pretending to be vegan at the same time.”
They both reached for the last tater tot, and at the moment when their fingers touched and their eyes met, Martine knew she’d found a new friend. Maybe even more. “This is your sister wife,” she remembers thinking. “This is your kindred spirit, and you’re both starving … to be seen.”
What Torres most remembers about his first encounter with Martine was something equally ineffable. “Her ability to subvert her own physicality, to find humor in beauty,” he recalls via email.
Their friendship blossomed in between archery practices and congenial DMs as their careers bloomed in separate if complementary directions. While Torres joined the “Saturday Night Live” writing staff and later premiered his own comedy special (“My Favorite Shapes”), Martine was busy creating art installations that satirized advertising campaigns (Martine Jeans), a publication that similarly critiques glossy high-fashion magazines (Indigenous Woman) and sci-fi-set live performances (“Circle”) that toyed with ideas around gender, femininity and self-expression in equally cheeky and wryly self-serious ways.
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Their earlier collaborations — Martine previously played an unimpressed gallerist in Torres’ feature film debut, “Problemista,” and an impaled beauty queen in his Peabody award-winning show “Los Espookys” — feel like playful preambles to their work together on “Fantasmas.” Vanesja is, after all, a performance artist who’s been playing Julio’s talent agent for so long, she’s lost track of whether it’s still a performance.
“Without Martine, there is no Vanesja,” Torres says. “That’s how I work sometimes, in collaboration with a performer to create something tailor-made for them. She first planted the seeds of Vanesja when leaving me cryptic voicemails. Something about closing a big deal and not being able to discuss it. We welcomed each other into our worlds.”
In the surreal world that is “Fantasmas,” Vanesja is a reminder of how we ourselves can often be indistinguishable from the makeshift roles we play.
“I think a lot of the show’s motifs exist in my work too,” Martine says. “I love mannequins. I love asking a lot of questions broadly about identity and using costumes and using personas to try and get to some deeper truth. And it was so refreshing to lean into that with comedy because the art world is so unbearably serious.”
“I love mannequins. I love asking a lot of questions broadly about identity and using costumes and using personas to try and get to some deeper truth,” Martine says.
(Monica Lek / HBO)
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With Vanesja, you see Martine reveling in that comedy. With her droll sense of humor intact and Vanesja’s aesthetic aching to be described as “business executive realness,” she’s constructed a dry-witted performance of an artist-cum-agent whose indifference to the world around her is bewitching. There’s her voice, for starters, which is sultry and breathy, marked by a glacial pace that makes Julio and audiences alike become engrossed by her every word. She almost feels plucked from the late 1990s, when the blazers and pencil skirts Vanesja wears were synonymous with a feminine, if not outright feminist, brand of seriousness.
“Vanesja is classically binary,” Martine says. “She has both the charm of a woman and all the strength of a man.”
In working within such a gendered binary, I bluntly ask how she was able to create this entrancing character who seems aloof yet interested, cold yet warmhearted. How did she do it?
“How does she Vanesja?” she asks herself, in between laughter, wanting to clarify my question — knowing, perhaps, that she’s arrived at a key philosophical way of understanding her process and her character alike. “I Vanesja every day. I try to Vanesja at least once a day, just for flexibility and my health, my mental health.”
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For Martine, getting a chance to create Vanesja alongside Torres was a joy because it allowed her to unearth parts of herself and her work that exist at the surface yet get at deep-seated ideas about who we are and how we present ourselves. At a purely visual level, though, she had a very simple reference in mind.
“I’m obsessed with Ursula from ‘The Little Mermaid’ when she becomes a cis woman,” she says. “Her name is Vanessa, and I do feel like there is a resemblance between that Vanessa and myself, just like out of drag. This was me trying to implement a villainous persona that I personally feel lives inside me.”
That hint of Disney wasn’t the only personal touch Martine brought to “Fantasmas.” She is to thank for what has already become one of the most talked-about images teased from the show, and seen in Friday’s episode: her scene partner, “Teen Wolf” star Dylan O’Brien, wearing red lacy undergarments, with garters and stockings to match.
Dylan O’Brien and Martine in “Fantasmas.”
(Monica Lek / HBO)
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“That was probably my one contribution, narratively, to the show,” she admits. “It’s a personal taste thing. I think it’s really sexy to see a man in women’s lingerie. Dylan had no problems with it. He was so down. And he looked great.”
Such an incongruous image (in a scene that’s quite melancholy, not really all that steamy, in fact) doesn’t feel out of place in “Fantasmas.” The show, like Vanesja, embraces binaries only to bridge them. Or break them. Or perhaps just toy with them. But it can do so only because the series is fascinated by the personal dramas we all carry within. There’s a push toward empathy for the other that runs through the show, even in its most outlandish moments.
“‘Fantasmas’ is the people who populate it,” as Torres puts it. It’s a show “about characters who, with little screen time, aim to capture the curiosity of the viewers.”
Further echoing those words and in trying to sum up this off-kilter show’s ambitions, Martine is reminded of Jon Brion’s song “Little Person,” which he co-wrote with Charlie Kaufman for the filmmaker’s meta-theatrical opus “Synecdoche, New York.”
That 2008 film is centered on a theater director eager to celebrate the mundanity of real experiences. The only way he knows how is to put on a stage show of his own life and that of everyone he comes into contact with. “I’m just a little person,” Martine sings. “One person in a sea of many little people, who are not aware of me.”
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“I feel like that’s everyone in New York,” she says. “And also everyone in ‘Fantasmas.’ You get this everything, everywhere all at once TikTok universe where every story is simultaneous. Where everyone is the lead in their own narrative. Which is kind of the closest thing to reality that you can get.”
Rating: R Stars: Mia Goth, Elizabeth Debicki, Michelle Monaghan, Bobby Cannavale, Uli Latukefu, Giancarlo Esposito, Chloe Farnworth, Halsey, Kevin Bacon, Lily Collins, Simon Prast Writer: Ti West Director: Ti West Distributor: A24 Release Date: July 5, 2024
MAXXXINE, not counting its flashbacks and flash-forwards, is set in 1985. However, it feels more like a ‘70s indie, with its mix of very tough female protagonist, soft porn (meant to be hard porn where we don’t see all the details), detective story, and horror.
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It’s a completely fun blend, and star Mia Goth commits two hundred and twenty percent to everything she’s doing.
Maxine Minx (Goth), nee Miller, is a star on the XXX movie circuit in Los Angeles. She adds to her income by doing stripper gigs and peep shows. But Maxine wants to break into mainstream films. No one who saw 2022’s X, the film that introduced Goth as Maxine, will doubt her determination.
Maxine has the talent to book a lead role in a horror movie sequel, directed by hard-nosed Elizabeth Bender (Elizabeth Debicki), who will brook no tardiness or excuses from her cast.
This puts Maxine in a difficult position when her porn colleagues and friends start getting murdered in horrible ways. Marks left on their bodies suggest cult killings. Meanwhile, L.A. is being terrorized by the Night Stalker.
Maxine doesn’t want to talk to the two detectives (Michelle Monaghan, Bobby Cannavale) on the case. She wants to talk even less with a private eye from Louisiana, John Labat (Kevin Bacon), who seems to know way too much about events that happened in 1979 Texas (covered in X).
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MAXXXINE writer/director Ti West also helmed and scripted X and its follow-up prequel PEARL, set in 1918 and co-written by and starring Goth as its title character. In fact, in heavy makeup, Goth had dual roles in X, as Maxine and the aged version of Pearl.
West shows great love for recreating Hollywood and particularly Hollywood Boulevard in all of its freak-flag-flying ‘80s heyday, with its styles, songs and subcultures. He also is clearly in his element with the slasher sequences, which have a bit of ‘80s flavor but also fit just fine in their present-day context.
Goth lives up to expectations, which is to say that she is terrific. Debicki, Uli Latukefu as a loyal friend and Giancarlo Esposito as Maxine’s multifaceted agent also make strong impressions. Bacon is overdoing it a tad as the out-of-town slimeball, but since the character is the type who would lay it on thick, the performance suits the purpose.
MAXXXINE has a couple of moments where it is teetering on being funny or scary and doesn’t quite commit fast enough to be either. There aren’t enough of these to severely dent the overall mood, but they register.
While West and Company never overtly promised this, it’s a little surprising to find that MAXXXINE doesn’t provide more narrative throughline with X and PEARL. There is, of course, Goth at the center of all three, and there are tonal similarities in places.
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However, there isn’t some “aha” moment or plot point that makes each essential for the others. X informs Maxine’s character to the extent that we know she’s not easily intimidated (to put it mildly). It’s not necessary to have seen X to understand this, though; Goth makes it wholly clear in MAXXXINE.
PEARL factors in even less to the current proceedings. It is in no way obliged to do so. it’s just that the idea that the three films form a trilogy in the conventional sense will have viewers anticipating a kind of emphasis that doesn’t surface.
MAXXXINE is certainly a kick for fans of the type of moviemaking it celebrates. Moreover, there’s no doubt Maxine herself would love it.
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