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‘SNL’: Kate McKinnon skewers ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill, Oscar Isaac hosts

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‘SNL’: Kate McKinnon skewers ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill, Oscar Isaac hosts

After reserving key roles within the “Star Wars,” “Dune” and Marvel Cinematic universes, Oscar Isaac has conquered one more main leisure establishment: “Saturday Evening Dwell.”

This weekend, Isaac made his extremely anticipated “SNL” internet hosting debut reverse musical visitor Charli XCX. The acclaimed actor kicked off an episode jam-packed with commentary on a variety of hot-button matters, together with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Florida’s “Don’t Say Homosexual” invoice, Rihanna’s child bump and Netflix’s “Inventing Anna.”

“My identify is Oscar Isaac, however my full identify is Oscar Isaac Hernández Estrada,” the “Card Counter” star started his opening monologue.

“I stated to Hollywood, ‘You’ll be able to decide two of those names.’ Guess what they went with? The white ones. I’m half Guatemalan, half Cuban. Or, as casting administrators name that, ‘ethnically ambiguous.’ Based on them, I can play something from a pharaoh to Timothée Chalamet’s daddy.”

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To advertise his forthcoming efficiency in Marvel’s “Moon Knight,” Isaac shared house movies of himself making a superhero film as a baby at his pal’s home in Miami. Marvel’s newest TV entry, starring Isaac because the titular vigilante with a double identification, premieres March 30 on Disney+.

“You is perhaps asking, ‘Oscar, why did you employ your monologue to point out us these previous house movies?’” he continued.

“The reason being: It’s essential to encourage youngsters to be weirdos. As a result of, each on occasion, a kind of weirdos grows as much as host ‘SNL.’”

Additionally on Saturday’s installment, dance-pop star Charli XCX carried out “Beg for You” and “Child,” and longtime “SNL” solid member Kenan Thompson taped his 1,five hundredth sketch on the comedy sequence.

Listed below are some extra highlights from this weekend’s episode.

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Chilly open tackles Ukraine, Fox Information-style

On the primary sketch of the night time, Fox Information anchors Laura Ingraham (Kate McKinnon) and Tucker Carlson (Alex Moffat) hosted the community’s “Ukrainian Invasion Celebration Spectacular,” with particular company Donald Trump (James Austin Johnson), Steven Seagal (Bowen Yang), Donald Trump Jr. (Mikey Day) and Kimberly Guifoyle (Cecily Robust).

On the high of the present, the pair of conservative pundits took a second to deal with “all the great issues we stated about Russia and all of the imply issues we stated about Ukraine” in current weeks.

“We did sound fairly terrible in hindsight and foresight,” McKinnon’s Ingraham stated. “I known as the president of Ukraine pathetic. He stayed and fought together with his folks within the conflict, and I known as him pathetic from a information desk in Washington.”

“I stored saying we must be extra nervous about our personal border getting invaded by Mexico,” Moffat’s Carlson added. “In my protection, I’m racist, so I assumed that was true.”

Chloe Fineman goes full Anna Delvey

One among “SNL’s” latest and brightest stars, Chloe Fineman, took the “gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss” meme to an excessive after watching one too many episodes of “Inventing Anna,” the hit Shonda Rhimes sequence about notorious Russian German con artist Anna Delvey.

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“This meals is, like, primary, you understand,” Fineman stated, mimicking “Inventing Anna” star Julia Garner’s accent on the present. “Chips are broke-ass. We want one thing extra unique. Extra VIP.”

McKinnon defends — then defies —Florida’s ‘Don’t Say Homosexual’ invoice

Throughout Saturday’s “Weekend Replace” section, McKinnon sounded off about new Florida laws banning discussions of sexual orientation or gender identification in colleges — often known as the “Don’t Say Homosexual” invoice.

“I heard about this regulation, and I believe it’s wonderful,” McKinnon joked, initially feigning ignorance concerning the objective of the invoice.

“Once I was in center college within the ‘90s, I used to be tortured by the fixed use of the phrase homosexual. Like, ‘That’s so homosexual’ or ‘Ew, you’re homosexual.’ It made me really feel horrible. And to listen to that [Florida Gov.] Ron DeSantis has taken a stand and stated, ‘No, you can’t say homosexual in class anymore,’ I’m so jazzed. And in Florida, of all locations.”

After “Weekend Replace” co-anchor Colin Jost clarified that the invoice truly prohibits colleges from acknowledging that “homosexual exists in any respect,” McKinnon pivoted along with her signature comedic aptitude.

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“Anyway, I’m deeply homosexual — sorry, deeply involved,” she continued.

“That is gonna make youngsters homosexual and trans — sorry, depressed and suicidal. And I believe these legal guidelines are lesbians — sorry, unconscionable. … If the ‘90s have been proper, and homosexual means dangerous, then that is the gayest regulation I’ve ever seen.”

Rihanna’s impeccably dressed child bump sparks envy

Additionally on “Weekend Replace,” a “weary [pregnant] mom in her darkest hour” performed by Ego Nwodim commented on pop sensation Rihanna’s child bump — which has been glamorously accessorized to the nines and closely photographed in current weeks.

“Take a look at Rihanna … with an ideal, cute little child bump,” Nwodim stated.

“In the meantime, I appear to be I’m making an attempt to shoplift a turducken. I’m simply common pregnant. I need to be well-known pregnant. … You understand how I introduced my being pregnant? I threw up on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.”

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‘PAW Patrol’ protesters say screw the paw-lice

What if the setting of Nickelodeon’s common kids’s cartoon, “PAW Patrol,” was an actual city? That’s the premise of this “SNL” sketch, starring Isaac as a metropolis councilman protesting the mayor’s “PAW Patrol” initiative.

“Sufficient is sufficient!” Isaac stated. “Truth: This mayor fired all of our metropolis’s law enforcement officials, firefighters and paramedics and changed them with a bunch of six speaking canines. I believe that was a foul concept, and I’m not alone….

“Criminals and lowlifes are flocking right here as a result of they know there’s just one cop patrolling our streets, and it’s a canine!”

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Movie Reviews

Film Review: Monster Summer – SLUG Magazine

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Film Review: Monster Summer – SLUG Magazine

Arts

Monster Summer
Director: David Henrie
Pastime Pictures, Nickel City Pictures
In Theaters: 10.04

The spooky season is upon us, and while Halloween at the movies began early with Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, with October here, it’s officially time to go start binging on supernatural cinema. While Monster Summer is the kind of film that is going to play far better right now than any other time of year,it’s not really a bragging point in this case.

It’s the summer of 1997 in the town of Orar Bluffs in Martha’s Vineyard, and 12-year-old Noah (Mason Thames, Incoming) and his friends, Ben (Noah Cottrell, The Spiderwick Chronicles), Eugene (Julian Lerner, Yes Day) and Sammy (Abby James Witherspoon, Secret Headquarters) are soaking in the fun, including Little League baseball season and trips to the lake. Everything changes, however, when Ben is attacked while swimming and is left in a zombified state. Noah suspects a dark force is at play. An aspiring journalist, Noah already has a reputation with the local newspaper owner, Edgar Palmer (Kevin James, The King of Queen’s, Grown Ups) for having a vivid imagination and chasing lurid stories. The only ally that Noah can find comes in the form of Gene (Mel Gibson, Braveheart, Lethal Weapon), an ex-cop who is the town hermit and the subject of many a dark urban legend, as his own son disappeared years ago. As more children are targeted by the mysterious evil, Noah and Gene team up to uncover the truth. The danger escalates when Noah connects the attacks to a new arrival in town, Miss Halverson (Lorraine Bracco, Goodfellas, Medicine Man), whom he believes to be a witch. Together, Noah, Gene and the gang race to confront the evil before it takes the town with it.

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Director David Henrie has roots in the kids and witchcraft genre as a young actor on Disney’s Wizards of Waverly Place, and he does a solid job of setting the mood and mimicking the feel of ‘80s Amblin fare such as Gremlins and The Goonies, and I was having a fair amount of fun with  during the first half hour. Ittakes a little less than that to start feeling that the script by Cornelius Uliano and Bryan Schulz (The Peanuts Movie) is struggling to find a story here, and the movie becomes less interesting and more convoluted as it goes. A significant reason why it veers, of course, is that it’s an uneasy mix of dark elements—the backstory of the kidnapping of Gene’s son and how his grief ultimately ruined his marriage is quite heavy for a family film—and some frustratingly hammy supporting performances. There’s also a surprising and unsettling amount of gunplay from Gibson in the finale, and by the time he’s shooting what looks far too much like a Hocus Pocus-style witch in the head at close range, the question of who exactly the target audience is here really comes into question. 

Thames is a very charismatic young actor, and he’s demonstrated that he has the presence to play the lead. There are moments of interplay between Thomas and Gibson that are really quite enjoyable and made me really want to love this movie. Gibson isn’t capable of giving a half-hearted, just for the paycheck performance, and that’s both a strength and weakness here. When he’s playing the grumpy old reluctant mentor, his comic timing and charm really lift up the movie, and those of us who can remember the days when he was one of the biggest stars in the business are reminded of why. As the movie progresses, we get more of his patented intense, brooding, scenery chewing, emotionally-wounded man routine than is called for, and it’s just too much for this movie. James is doing an over-the-top, Foghorn Leghorn accent and wearing a ridiculous sunhat, and when he and Gibson share the screen while acting in two entirely different movies, it’s just nerve grating. It’s good to see Bracco again, even if she’s underused here.

Monster Summer has far too many strengths to write off entirely and far too many weaknesses to give it too much of a pass. If the story was more focused and it could settle on a tone, there’s more than enough talent here to make a solidly entertaining Halloween movie. In the end, it has too few tricks up its sleeve to prove to be a satisfying treat. –Patrick Gibbs 

Read more film reviews:
Film Review: A Different Man
Film Review: Joker: Folie à Deux 

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Who's afraid of Roy Cohn? Not Jeremy Strong

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Who's afraid of Roy Cohn? Not Jeremy Strong

Brutal. Vicious. Crooked. Cruel.

So filmmaker Ali Abbasi’s new biopic “The Apprentice” describes its dominant figure, a New York and Washington, D.C., power broker who lies, cheats, charms and browbeats his way into the uppermost ranks of American business and government.

No, it’s not Donald Trump. It’s Roy Cohn.

As the film depicts with garish flair, the pugilistic, Bronx-born attorney — who first came to prominence prosecuting Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for espionage, then served as chief counsel to Sen. Joseph McCarthy during his anticommunist witch hunt — took Trump under his wing in the 1970s, handing the ambitious real-estate developer’s son a fiendish playbook for success. Attack, attack, attack. Deny everything. Never admit defeat. By the time of his disbarment and death from AIDS complications in 1986, however, the roles were reversed, and Cohn lost sway with his erstwhile mentee as Trump stepped out of his shadow.

Throughout “The Apprentice,” Cohn comes across not only with his renowned ferocity, but also with uncommon empathy, courtesy of actor Jeremy Strong.

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“If Roy Cohn walked into this room right now, I don’t think I would want to shake his hand,” says Strong, 45, seated in a bar off the sun-dappled courtyard of the San Vicente Bungalows on an early fall afternoon. “But from the distance of a piece of work and trying to understand him — humanistically and creatively — I had to find, for lack of a better word, love. Which is a bit of a grenade to say out loud.”

Fresh off a silent meditation retreat in upstate New York, the “Succession” star folds the same circumspection into nearly all of his stacked, erudite sentences, which are peppered with literary allusions (Kafka’s “The Zürau Aphorisms”) and film-industry names (Danish director Tobias Lindholm). At times Strong pauses so long that I launch into my next question, only to be interrupted by the continuation of an apparently unfinished thought. He denies being “gun shy” about press since the publication of a viral 2021 New Yorker profile in which a number of his collaborators — some named, others anonymous — looked askance at the lengths to which he’ll go to embed himself in a character.

“I think I’m a fairly earnest person, and that’s gotten me in trouble,” Strong insists, “but I’m not interested in camouflaging or disguising myself. Life is too short.”

Strong, left, as Roy Cohn, with Sebastian Stan as Donald Trump in “The Apprentice.”

(Festival de Cannes)

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The topic at hand isn’t just the life and times of Roy Cohn, of course. When “The Apprentice” premiered earlier this year at the Cannes Film Festival, the Trump campaign swiftly threatened a lawsuit, calling the film “pure malicious defamation” and suggesting it “should not see the light of day.” Then, as if the former president’s wish had come true, the project languished for months without a distributor. Despite repeated reassurances from Abbasi, Strong, writer Gabriel Sherman and actor Sebastian Stan, who plays Trump, that “The Apprentice” was not a political polemic but a character study, it seemed plausible, as recently as August, that the film would remain on the shelf until after next month’s election, if not indefinitely. (It was ultimately picked up by Briarcliff Entertainment.)

“We sort of narrowly escaped the jaws of being effectively censored in this country,” Strong says. “That’s something that happens in Russia, North Korea. Not democratic countries. I think people in Hollywood were really wary of touching this, and that was disheartening.”

In theaters Friday, “The Apprentice” arrives in the home stretch of a bruising, chaotic presidential election campaign, sure to be scrutinized as closely as any film of the fall. Supporters of the Republican nominee will likely follow the Trump camp’s lead in calling the movie — in which Trump rapes first wife Ivana (Maria Bakalova) and undergoes multiple cosmetic surgeries — a hit piece, while his most ardent opponents may see any attempt to humanize Trump or Cohn as beyond the pale.

Given the fraught political environment, Strong strains to frame his approach to the character as a historian might, decoupling understanding from endorsement. Although he uses words like empathy, kinship and love to explain how he got under Cohn’s skin, he also describes the attorney as a “cancerous conundrum” and a “demonic Peter Pan.”

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“God, it’s really dangerous,” Strong says. “I feel like I could get in trouble for saying anything positive about him. When I say these things, I only really mean them in a creative arena, because creatively a character like Roy is like Iago. You don’t want to say anything nice about Iago. But as an actor, Iago is one of the great roles. This feels like one of the great roles.”

Strong is not alone in his estimation. As a key character in Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer-winning 1991 play “Angels in America,” Mike Nichols’ 2003 HBO miniseries adaptation thereof, the 1992 TV movie “Citizen Cohn,” last year’s miniseries “Fellow Travelers” and numerous documentaries, Cohn has inspired more major films and TV series than even Harvey Milk. His many portrayals have resulted in two Tonys, an Emmy and a Peabody. I ask Strong if he thinks there’s any merit to the criticism about straight actors playing gay characters, and receiving acclaim for doing so, when such opportunities and plaudits remain a rarity for out gay actors.

“Yes, it’s absolutely valid,” Strong says. “I’m sort of old fashioned, maybe, in the belief that, fundamentally, it’s [about] a person’s artistry, and that great artists, historically, have been able to, as it were, change the stamp of their nature. That’s your job as an actor. The task, in a way, is to render something that is not necessarily your native habitat. … While I don’t think that it’s necessary [for gay roles to be played by gay performers], I think that it would be good if that were given more weight.”

Then, as I begin to follow up, he interjects, “What do you think?”

I think it’s complicated, if I’m being honest. I think it might be passé of me even to ask about it. At least for cis, white gay men, who have consistently dominated LGBTQ+ representation in film and television, the flagrantly stereotypical performances — the ones that treat the character’s sexuality as if it were another layer of hair, makeup or wardrobe — are now few and far between. It’s hard to muster one’s revolutionary fervor for Cohn, the man the “Bad Gays” podcast once labeled “the polestar of human evil.”

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And yet that is exactly what makes this real-life character — a closeted, self-hating homosexual who helped launch the Lavender Scare and remained silent about the AIDS crisis even as it killed him — an ideal test case. The fact remains that no out gay man has ever won an Oscar for playing a queer character in the 96-year history of the Academy Awards. Meanwhile, this season alone could conceivably add two more names — Strong and Daniel Craig for “Queer” — to the list of nine straight men who’ve previously done so. (The numbers for women, and nominations, are scarcely any better.) In light of the disproportion, one can’t help but draw the conclusion that pundits and voters still understand playing gay as one mark in the column for “outstanding performance.” Which raises the question: Might a gay actor get more credit if he opted to play our community’s most notorious supervillain, instead of another tragic hero we’re determined to uplift? Would that appear, to the film academy’s approximately 10,000 members, a little more like “acting,” and less like life?

Compared with Pacino’s outraged and outrageous Cohn, spraying a vulgarian’s spittle across Nichols’ magisterial “Angels,” Strong’s performance is a model of white-knuckle control, swaggering when Cohn exerts his power, wilting when he can’t. When Cohn learns that Trump has gifted him fake-diamond cuff links for what will turn out to be his final birthday, Strong invests the petty indignity with pathos, as a man who would step over anyone to get ahead realizes he’s subject to the same ruthless forces. Along with Will Brill’s turn in “Fellow Travelers,” painting Cohn as practically lovesick for his partner in anticommunism, G. David Schine, “The Apprentice” is the closest any screen actor has come to reflecting the description of the attorney on the AIDS Memorial Quilt: “Bully. Coward. Victim.”

“What I do feel, whoever plays any part ever, is that you have to take these things as seriously as you take your own life, and it is not a game, and that these people and their struggles and the experiences you’re trying to render are not a plaything,” Strong says. “If I didn’t believe that I could understand on some deep level his anguish and turmoil and his need, and the sort of Gordian knot that every character has but Roy has particularly — if I didn’t believe that I could understand it or connect to it in a way that is faithful or voracious, I wouldn’t have done it. I certainly don’t do these things just for my own self-aggrandizement.”

An actor in a hat looks into the lens.

“You have to take these things as seriously as you take your own life,” says Strong of diving into the role of Roy Cohn. “And it is not a game.”

(Marcus Ubungen / Los Angeles Times)

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Strong has become an almost scholarly fount of biographical information about Cohn, littering our conversation with enough details about the man’s home decor (porcelain frog figurines), taste in poetry (Joaquin Miller’s “Byron”) and dinner order at Le Cirque (Bumble Bee tuna, off-menu) to give Cohn‘s biographers a run for their money.

When Abbasi offered the role to Strong, the actor was already familiar with Cohn, not only from “Angels in America,” but also from the research he did after being approached to play Cohn in another film project about five years ago. Signing on to “The Apprentice” sent Strong’s prep work into overdrive, including studying video of Cohn to learn his “sui generis” voice — a hectoring New York sneer that’s authoritative but rarely loud — and interviewing Cohn profiler Ken Auletta. Strong says Cohn also represents his most dramatic physical transformation.

“I haven’t had to alter my body in that way,” says Strong, who underwent a doctor-supervised “starvation diet” and a regimen of tanning booth visits and biweekly spray tans to match Cohn’s notoriously leathery look. “He was obsessed with his physical appearance. He had a tremendous amount of vanity.”

With an Emmy for “Succession” and a Tony for this spring’s revival of Henrik Ibsen’s “Enemy of the People” under his belt, and Oscar buzz for his performance in “The Apprentice” already building, Strong’s own motivations are evolving. While career disappointment once spurred him, he is now just “looking for a limb to go out on.” I liken it, during the course of our conversation, to gymnast Simone Biles developing never-before-attempted vaults to challenge herself.

“I no longer feel thwarted in that way and I can pay my rent,” Strong says. “And I don’t take any of that for granted because it happened late for me. I have the luxury of choice and the luxury, more importantly, of getting to choose things that matter most to me, things that feel meaningful. I want to keep pushing myself — that Simone Biles thing of finding new ways to find the frontier and work that kind of requires a radical courage to do. Which for me is most things, because I find it all pretty fearful.”

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After we’ve parted ways, Strong texts me a quote by Bruce Springsteen — “The pressures of the business are powerless in the face of what is real” — from music journalist Fred Goodman’s history “The Mansion on the Hill,” which Strong is reading to prepare to play Springsteen manager Jon Landau in the upcoming biopic starring Jeremy Allen White. I, too, am a collector of quotations, and after joking that newspaper stories should have epigraphs, I suggest one, from Wallace Stegner, that seems apropos to our conversation about Cohn: Present your subject in his own terms, judge him in yours.

“That’s a good one,” Strong texts. “For actors too.”

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Film Review: Psychosis is an absurd Aussie experiment that defies categorization – The AU Review

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Film Review: Psychosis is an absurd Aussie experiment that defies categorization – The AU Review

A film like Psychosis is a difficult one to review.  Whilst there’s never a shortage of features that prove wildly divisive (the Joker sequel says hello), Pirie Martin‘s ambitious debut defies categorization as it blends technique and genre, submitting to an extreme eccentricity that, as off-putting it may be to some, is difficult to not be impressed by.

An Australian experiment of sorts, this no-budget, square aspect-ratioed, black-and-white absurdist mystery is a noirish nightmare – complete with BBC-like narrator – about a criminal fixer, Cliff Van Aarle (Derryn Amoroso), who, thanks to a psychological condition, has a multitude of voices in his head fighting for prominence as he goes about cleaning up the many criminal world messes he’s assigned to.

A difficult film to follow (perhaps intentionally so), Psychosis adds even more obscure flames to its fire by introducing the notion of potential zombies, which a duo of amateur drug dealers claim they were attacked by; this ultimately explained by the fact that a drug lord is doping up his lackeys to the point of near-hypnosis.  With the voices continually conversing in Cliff’s head, as well as the constant narration, Psychosis does run the risk of being over-explained to the point that any of the film’s intended mystery is underwhelming, but such is the charm of Martin’s clear love of all the genres this film touches on, the surreal flourishes of it all become oddly enamoring.

Not unlike what Rian Johnson accomplished with Brick, mixed with another of this year’s black-and-white farcicalities, Hundreds of Beavers, it’s the pure cheek of Martin that pushes Psychosis past the point of audience detachment.  It can’t be stressed enough that this film has been made with a very specific target viewership in mind, and it’s mainly earning points here for the sheer fact that Martin had the gall to create such a film that takes glee in pushing against the usual grain.

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It can’t always escape its amateurish mentality, but Psychosis‘ retro-midnight-movie-madness personality will indeed win it the attention and respect it deserves from the type of audience who find glory in the gonzo.

TWO AND A HALF STARS (OUT OF FIVE)

Psychosis is now available to rent and/or buy digitally through Prime Video in Australia.  It’s now available on Tubi in the United States.



Peter Gray

Seasoned film critic. Gives a great interview. Penchant for horror. Unashamed fan of Michelle Pfeiffer and Jason Momoa.

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