| How to entertain yourself this weekend. |
Couch-a-chella >>> Coachella. —Alex Pappademas, culture editor |
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It’s Friday; we miss The Pitt so much we’re online looking up how to self-intubate. How hard can it be? - Wild data point: Sixty percent of Coachella ticket holders bought their tickets on a payment plan, up from just 18 percent in 2009. Sounds extremely sustainable and not at all like a news story from a nation Klarna-ing itself to the brink of total financial collapse! Read Alyssa Vingan’s report on the widening gap between the festival’s VIP attendees and literally everybody else. And, seriously, if you’re not a celebrity being paid to post selfies from a hype house this weekend, you do not need to drain your 401K for a last-minute pass just to see Benson Boone do cartwheels or whatever—as Chris Black points out in his Pulling Weeds column this week, you can stream everything from your couch and probably have a more enjoyable experience, without going into debt. We’re sure Coachella style icon and apparent oldest living Clairo stan Bernie Sanders would agree. Now excuse us while we hit the delivery apps for a breakfast burrito that costs $72 for some reason. Only seven easy payments and it’s ours!
- You can’t watch it until September but this week we dropped first-look images from Chief of War, Apple TV+’s epic new historical-drama series about the birth of the Kingdom of Hawaii at the turn of the 19th century, starring Jason Momoa, who also co-created the show. Telling the story of Polynesian history from an indigenous perspective has been a passion project for the Minecraft star and his co-creator Thomas Pa’a Sibbett for years. This week Sibbett and Momoa talked to us about the long process of bringing this show to the screen and why they think it could be “bigger than Game of Thrones,” and Momoa gave interviewer Vince Mancini the Full Momoa: “He showed up halfway into a Zoom call,” Mancini reports, “wearing a leather bowler hat and quilted leather vest, then immediately lit up a cigar and polished off most of a pint of Guinness while we talked,” which is obviously amazing.
- Watch this week’s episode of The Studio, in which intergenerational warfare flares up between Quinn, the up-and-coming exec played by Chase Sui Wonders, and symbolically old-school suit Sal Saperstein, played by Ike Barinholtz, who talked to Jake Kring-Schriefels this week about basing his character on a host of throwback entertainment-business types he’s met throughout his career, most of whom, he notes, “probably are not in the business…They’ve been fired a long time ago.” And if you’ve been wondering how real this show’s portrait of boardroom culture in the movie business is, wonder no more: We asked novelist and memoirist and actual former studio executive Matthew Specktor to weigh in on the show’s veracity. (FYI for inside-baseball fans, Specktor’s book The Golden Hour, out next week, is a brilliant account of the reshaping of Hollywood in the ‘80s and ‘90s and the rise of superagents like Mike Ovitz—recommended to anybody who’s still reading this paragraph.)
What else? We ranked all the Chris Nolan movies —from least to greatest, not in reverse order or some nonlinear fashion, which we now realize would have been funnier. We took note of one big difference between the second season of The Last of Us and the games it’s based on. We checked out Justin Vernon’s hooping skills at the basketball tournament he threw in downtown L.A. to launch the new Bon Iver album SABLE, fABLE. And we endorsed Richard Pryor’s comedy albums (newly reissued), making friends with your wife’s friends’ husbands, a new meal-delivery service curated by a personal chef who cooks for Ari Emanuel and the Kardashian-Barkers, and divorcing that terrible sports team you’ve been rooting for. Oh—and we broke down the casting announcements for the new Harry Potter TV series and which roles have yet to be cast. If you are an acclaimed British or Irish actor and you have not yet received a role in the Harry Potter TV show, please stay in line! |
An Oxford-cloth button-down looked killer on Davis, Newman, and Dean. It'll look killer on the the next generation of style icons, too. |
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