Some of these reviews are cracking me up. It’s clear they have never played the game and have no idea what the fans want or ANY of the rules/ canon of Mortal Kombat. One reviewer was mad that a guy “had a laser eye!” Why the fuck do we still allow people that don’t have any love…
— Todd Garner (@Todd_Garner) May 6, 2026
Entertainment
What it takes to build Coachella’s most recognizable icon
Scroll through Instagram any time in April and you’ll see a stream of photos that are instantly recognizable as being from the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival thanks to the iconic backdrop of a Ferris wheel against a desert mountainscape.
Even though it’s not a permanent structure at the Empire Polo Club, the attraction, officially named La Grande XL, makes the journey to Indio every year on 20 semitrucks, according to owner and operator Ray Cammack Shows. It is assembled by 10 team members over five days with the use of a 70-ton crane.
Ben Pickett, vice president at Ray Cammack Shows, said the La Grande XL wheel, with 36 air-conditioned gondolas, made its debut in 2017, replacing the original La Grande Wheel. He said that hundreds of thousands of festivalgoers have ridden the attractions over the last 15 years.
La Grande XL travels around the country to events including the recent Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo as well as the L.A. County Fair and Orange County Fair. However, there is one element that is unique to Coachella and the Stagecoach Country Music Festival — a custom logo of a palm tree and a roadrunner at the center of the wheel that light up when the sun goes down. It was designed and built exclusively for the desert festivals.
“Because it is only used for Coachella and Stagecoach, the sign remains in Southern California when not in use. Altogether, the wheel features more than half a million LED lights and installing the logo is a detailed process that takes our team approximately six hours to complete. It’s the final element added during setup — we consider it the ‘cake topper’ that completes the entire wheel,” Pickett wrote in an email interview.
Pickett also offered some tips for taking photos of the wheel.
“Some of the best photos are taken at golden hour or sunset with the mountains and palm trees in frame. One of the most viral shots is the forced-perspective ‘holding the wheel’ angle and night shots also work well when the wheel is fully lit against a dark sky,” he wrote.
Riding the La Grande XL costs $15 for a 10-minute general admission ride, but you can spend $80 for a private gondola for up to six people and an express lane.
Movie Reviews
Mortal Kombat 2 film producer asks ‘why the f**k’ critics who ‘have never played the game’ were allowed to review it | VGC
The producer of the Mortal Kombat 2 movie has called out critics who gave it a negative review.
At the time of writing, Mortal Kombat 2 has a score of 73% on film review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes, and a score of 48 on Metacritic.
While this means reviews have generally been mixed, the film’s producer Todd Garner took to X to criticise those who wrote negative reviews, suggesting that some of them were written by critics who aren’t familiar with the source material.
“Some of these reviews are cracking me up,” Garner wrote. “It’s clear they have never played the game and have no idea what the fans want or any of the rules/canon of Mortal Kombat.
“One reviewer was mad that a guy ‘had a laser eye’! Why the fuck do we still allow people that don’t have any love for the genre review these movies! Baffling.”
When questioned on this viewpoint by some followers, Garner explained that while he doesn’t have an issue with negative reviews in general, his problem is specifically reviewers who don’t appear to be familiar with Mortal Kombat.
“My comment was very squarely directed at a couple of reviewers that did not like the ‘zombies’ and the fact that there was a ‘guy with a laser eye’, etc,” he said. “Those are elements that are baked into the Mortal Kombat IP and therefore we were dead in the water going in.
“There is no way for that person to review how it functioned as a film, because they did not like the foundational elements of the IP. I just wish when something is so obviously fan leaning in its DNA, that critics would take that into consideration.”
One follower then countered Garner’s complaint by arguing that he shouldn’t be criticising people who don’t know the games, when the films themselves take creative license with the IP.
“Bro to be fair, you invented Cole Young, Arcana and couldn’t even get the simple lore of Mileena and Kitana correct,” said user Dudeguy29. “I’d say you shouldn’t be tossing any stones here.”
“Fair,” Garner replied.
Garner previously criticised the cast of the Street Fighter movie when, during The Game Awards last year, comedian Andrew Schulz – who plays Dan in the Street Fighter film – claimed that the Mortal Kombat 2 movie cast were also in attendance, before joking: “I’m just kidding, they didn’t come, they don’t care about you, they only care about money.”
The jibe didn’t go down well with Garner, who stated on X at the time: “I don’t climb over others to get ahead”. When recently asked how he felt about the cast vs cast rivalry, however, Mortal Kombat co-creator Ed Boon laughed and said he had no issue with it at all.
Mortal Kombat 2 is released in cinemas this Friday, May 8, while Street Fighter arrives later in the year on October 16.
Entertainment
‘Real Women Have Curves’ makes post-Broadway debut as part of Pasadena Playhouse’s 2026-27 season
Josefina López wrote “Real Women Have Curves,” based on her experiences as an undocumented Mexican immigrant working in a Boyle Heights garment factory, nearly 40 years ago.
Since then, López’s script has yielded a play, a feature film starring America Ferrera and, most recently, a Broadway musical. The latter, which opened at the James Earl Jones Theatre in 2025 and closed after 104 performances, will make its post-Broadway debut next spring as part of an original production at Pasadena Playhouse during its 2026-27 season, the theater announced Thursday. Producing Artistic Director Danny Feldman called the lineup “bigger than our Sondheim season.”
The season begins with a new production of Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s tragicomedy “The Visit,” directed by Tony Award winner Darko Tresnjak and starring Jefferson Mays. (Fans will remember the pair’s memorable collaboration from this season’s “Amadeus.”) Next up is the long-awaited L.A. premiere of “Passing Strange,” the Tony-winning musical based on the life of L.A.-born musician Stew, directed by Tony nominee Zhailon Levingston (“Cats: The Jellicle Ball”). A yet-to-be-announced winter production will follow, then “Real Women Have Curves: The Musical.” Finally, a revival of Tennessee Williams’ Pulitzer Prize-winning play “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” which brings Alfred Molina back to the Playhouse stage, caps the year.
When Feldman learned that “Real Women Have Curves” did not have a national tour lined up, he took matters into his own hands — believing it essential that a story centering L.A.’s Latino community be told at a time when it’s hurting.
“Celebrating a community is another form of resistance and power in these times,” Feldman said.
The artistic director compared the tone of “Real Women Have Curves” to Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show, which many found cathartic for its exuberance.
“[The musical] deserves to have a production at the scale and scope that we do here at Pasadena Playhouse,” Feldman said.
Since Feldman took the reins at the Playhouse in 2016, the historic theater has blossomed into a thriving arts ecosystem. In 2023, the Playhouse received the Regional Theatre Tony Award after its critically lauded Sondheim Celebration spiked both audience engagement and the theater’s artistic profile. Just last year, the theater bought back the building it lost to bankruptcy in 1970, and greatly expanded its educational offerings.
A more risk-averse leader might use such triumphs as permission to take their foot off the gas. Instead, Feldman has assembled a demanding lineup that will require the Playhouse to operate on a larger scale than ever before.
“We’re up for the challenge. We’re ready, and our audiences respond to work when it pushes the limits,” the artistic director said.
Jefferson Mays starred in the Pasadena Playhouse’s recent production of “Amadeus.”
(Jeff Lorch)
That proved true for “Amadeus,” which Feldman called “one of our biggest hits of all time.” The artistic director said the show excelled because of its high production value — something regional theaters are rarely able to execute.
The creative team for “Amadeus” will aim to replicate that success when they reunite for “The Visit,” a play Tresnjak has wanted to tackle for 40 years.
“The work gets so much deeper when you’ve built the trust,” Feldman said. Plus, recycling a star is a classic move for regional theaters, which historically operated as repertory companies that showcased the same group of performers in different roles and thereby exhibited their range.
The artistic director said that he was also compelled by the unique tone of “The Visit,” which Dürrenmatt wrote while Europe was reckoning with its complicity in World War II. The script is as dark as it is entertaining and absurdist.
“It’s a play ultimately about morality and how a community inch-by-inch becomes OK with something that they should not be OK with,” Feldman said. He added that theater excels at getting audiences to laugh in the auditorium, and then mull things over on the way home.
Following “The Visit,” the Playhouse will up the energy with two musicals, “Passing Strange” and “Real Women Have Curves,” (with the undisclosed show falling in between). Feldman considers “Passing Strange” a part of the Playhouse’s ongoing effort to revisit landmark American musicals.
“It was a musical that was revolutionary and changed the game,” he said, characterizing the show as “a rock concert where a play breaks out.”
Strangely, for a coming-of-age story written by an Angeleno about a musician from South Central L.A., “Passing Strange” never made it to L.A. after its 2008 Broadway debut. The musical, which had its world premiere at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, arrives at the Playhouse just in time for its 20th anniversary.
While “The Visit” and “Real Women Have Curves” will be presented largely as is, “Passing Strange” and “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” directed by Jessica Kubzansky, will be lightly updated for contemporary audiences.
Williams published multiple versions of his play and never truly stopped revising it, Feldman said, “so we’re trying to figure what best suits our production in our world.” Audiences can rest assured that the emotional core that secured the play’s spot in the theater canon will be preserved no matter what changes are made.
Feldman said he regularly hears the refrain from visitors, “When the world is crazy, I just want to escape. I want to come to you and escape.” But what he thinks people actually mean when they say that is: “I want to be in community. I want to have an experience that is above me and bigger than me, with other people.”
“It’s why I’m making the case that theater is going to be more relevant and important in decades to come than ever before in my career,” he said. The more technology continues to dominate our lives, and the more we become isolated as a result, the more precious those moments in the theater are, Feldman added.
He sensed it when audiences roared with laughter during the Playhouse’s production of “Eureka Day,” and during a beat of pin-drop silence in “Amadeus.”
“Those moments of lightning, of electricity, in a room — that’s what I live for,” he said. “That’s what we do best.”
Within the family at the center of Blue Heron, the black sheep is a blond. Fair-skinned teenager Jeremy (Edik Beddoes) is an outlier among his siblings, two jostling preteen boys and watchful, 8-year-old Sasha (Eylul Guven), who are all darkly featured and take after their Hungarian parents (Iringó Réti and Ádám Tompa). Jeremy’s hair color doesn’t really matter, of course, but the contrast makes a useful shorthand for Jeremy’s otherness.
If “other” sounds inexact, that’s the point. To the frustration of his devoted but exhausted parents, there’s been no straightforward diagnosis for what ails Jeremy – for the mood swings, the “acting out.” A move at the beginning of the film to a new home is hopeful but short-lived: The mystery of Jeremy, to himself and to others, persists.
Much of Blue Heron is set over the course of one summer on Vancouver Island in the late Nineties, mirroring filmmaker Sophy Romvari’s own backstory, though the film shouldn’t be confused for straight autobiography. (Her 2020 short film, “Still Processing,” explored her family’s struggles with mental health through first-person documentary.) Still, the remarkable texture of these family scenes and how they favor Sasha’s childlike perspective – her small hands as they handle a potato peeler for the first time, the easy smiles as her mother dabs sunscreen on her face – feels intensely personal. There’s a hushed, dreamy quality to these scenes, mimicking memory itself, that plays into Blue Heron’s remarkable ability to hold two seemingly contradictory things to be true. Sasha can resent her brother and love him. Jeremy can be terrifying and in pain. A film can be whisper-quiet and still trip the wires in your brain that scream “danger.”
With very little dialogue and no cookie-cutter story beats, this fraught family life is vividly, tenderly rendered by Romvari and her naturalistic cast. That makes it all the more disorienting when, at arguably the moment of highest drama, Romvari shifts to a different vantage point. Boldly, she is asking the audience to look anew at what we’ve seen: to acknowledge what we saw was not the whole picture (how could it be, from an 8-year-old’s eye line?). The effect for me – and I suspect for you too, if you’re the kind of person who likes to take a movie apart and understand how it ticks – is exhilarating.
But not entirely effective – and in this reservation I gather I’m the outlier; Blue Heron has been rapturously received at festivals and by critics. This second half (of which I’m loath to spoil the specifics) becomes at once more experimental and more documentary-like, and revolves around a muted performance stranded in the in-between of drama and docudrama. Nothing ruinous, but a hangnail nonetheless on a film that otherwise had me in its thrall.
Blue Heron
2026, NR, 90 min. Directed by Sophy Romvari. Starring Eylul Guven, Edik Beddoes, Amy Zimmer, Iringó Réti, Ádám Tompa, Liam Serg, Preston Drabble.
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This article appears in May 8 • 2026.
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