Tag: still

We Still Don’t Know How to Talk About Amy Winehouse

We weren’t very kind to Amy Winehouse when she walked among us. She was a tremendous singer with a mesmerizing style, a strange case of a 21st-century pop star who was largely influenced by postwar jazz. She was also an alcoholic and, in her later years, a connoisseur of harder drugs, including heroin and crack cocaine. We know this much about Amy Winehouse because The Sun published photos of her at home in East London, smoking crack, sure enough, on a famous front page with the splashy headline “Amy on Crack.” The tabloids tracked her emaciation in real time, swarming her at every smoke break and liquor run, running a barefoot woman down as if they were chasing a wet rat all over London, New York City, and Miami. Ultimately, Amy Winehouse recorded only two albums, her striking debut, Frank, and her legendary breakout, Back to Black, the latter selling millions of copies, winning a ton of awards, and setting her up for still more massive success in the long run. But Winehouse died from alcohol poisoning, alone in her flat, at age 27, five years after Back to Black, and so she became the sort of icon who now arouses great defensiveness in all corners—only now it’s too late for anyone to protect her in any real way.

So now we have the obligatory biopic, Back to Black, directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson (Fifty Shades of Grey, A Million Little Pieces). Fans of Winehouse have been dreading this thing for months. The trailers seemed treacherous. Here you have the opportunity to produce a biopic about the edgiest pop singer of the century so far, and yet you’ve got Marisa Abela seeming so perfectly harmless, in the baddest of signs, in the lead role. What also doesn’t help is the very existence of Asif Kapadia’s excellent 2015 documentary, Amy, full of home video footage and passionate interviews with her family, friends, and peers. Back to Black, by comparison, seemed cartoonish. This, many feared, would be Disney’s Amy Winehouse: a pretty, sappy, plastic bit of hagiography turning her into one of those chibi caricatures of famous people that you see in children’s books. A disgrace, surely.

Really, though, Back to Black isn’t bad. We might’ve braced ourselves for something exceptionally awful, but no, Back to Black is perfectly mediocre and otherwise unremarkable, as far as these things go. It’s unsatisfying only so far as biopics, in general, are almost inherently irritating: It’s trite, it’s formulaic, and it’s conspicuously easy on key figures with keen interest in not coming off too poorly in the story of a woman who clearly wasn’t served very well by the company she kept. The two most controversial men in her life were her father, Mitch Winehouse, who notoriously discouraged her from entering rehab to address her alcoholism a couple of years after Frank; and her ex-husband, Blake Fielder-Civil, who introduced the singer to hard drugs circa Back to Black. Nearly a decade ago, Mitch trashed the Amy documentary and told those filmmakers to their faces, “You should be ashamed of yourselves,” presumably due to the film’s characterization of him as self-absorbed and negligent in the face of his daughter’s disorders.

Back to Black, as a biopic, was going to have be a more diplomatic project; Taylor-Johnson met Mitch and Janis Winehouse, and the director ultimately won the family’s approval. Back to Black isn’t entirely uncritical of Mitch but rather depicts him as a loving father who was understandably blinded by the limelight and too proud of his daughter to see the darker signs. Blake Fielder-Civil wasn’t involved in the making of Back to Black, but the biopic nonetheless spares him much blame for the hard drugs and physical violence in his relationship with Amy. What Back to Black says about Fielder-Civil is more or less what he’s said about himself in recent years: He was a bad influence, yes, but he tried to distance himself from Winehouse and ultimately divorced her in July 2009—nearly three years after the Back to Black album and two years before her death—hoping to “set her free.” With this biopic, Taylor-Johnson seems to have a similar agenda—to finally end the cycle of recriminations about the death of Amy Winehouse and instead treat the world to a more sentimental and straightforwardly enjoyable overview of her life and her music.

But who ever wanted to see that? Fans of Winehouse, if anything, might’ve found themselves wishing, perversely, to see something as startling and ugly as the contemporary tabloid coverage, something as irreverent as “Stronger Than Me,” something as righteous as “Rehab,” something as intense as “You Sent Me Flying” or, well, “Back to Black.” Amy is grainy and candid and argumentative, and that’s all about right, but of course that’s a documentary. As a biopic, Back to Black is somewhat hamstrung by the absence of the real Winehouse and its need to be significantly less demoralizing and infuriating than the real story, which culminated with one of the greatest singers of her generation dying alone, watching YouTube, on the losing end of alcohol addiction and also bulimia. The trailers, to the movie’s detriment, show a lot of scenes of the singer in her late teens, the years when she’s less recognizable as the tattooed, beehived icon she’d become, but really, this is who Winehouse was, too. Abela sells both the musical wonderment and jazz geekery of Winehouse in her formative years as well as the bruised and bleary disillusionment of her 20s, as she slathered herself in booze and tattoos, in the years after Frank and Blake. Together, Abela and Jack O’Connell, as Amy and Blake, do a decently captivating dance as two troubled lovers who clung to each other in all the wrong ways and for all the wrong reasons. It just isn’t enough for the audience. It was never going to be enough.

Ultimately, the pre- and post-release grumbling about Back to Black isn’t owing to any egregious failure of Taylor-Johnson or whether or not Abela physically resembles the character so much as it speaks to a mean grief, persisting to this day, for Winehouse. It’s a grief to be rehashed but never relieved by a biopic such as this. We miss plenty of troubled entertainers who died too young, of course, but Winehouse especially rubbed her fate in our faces. Her biggest song was “Rehab,” for chrissakes. She was a dead woman walking through volleys of camera flashes for five years. She made her pain so plain and so integral to her music, yet it was ultimately something to be mocked and gawked at. The tabloids made her out to be some goddamned alien. The late-night comedians reduced her to a punch line. No one’s ever going to feel good about any of this, biopic or not. Amy Winehouse deserved better than just pop sainthood. She deserved so much more than Back to Black, even if it didn’t really do anything wrong. One day, we—so far as the collective consumers of popular entertainment and celebrity metaculture can be addressed as such—will be at peace about Amy Winehouse. But no time soon. We’re still mad about the girl.

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Justin Charity

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May 21, 2024
‘The Conversation’ Is Still Pristine, 50 Years Later

“At my age, I can afford for film to be a passion and not a business.” That’s what Francis Ford Coppola told me 15 years ago during an interview about his 2009 film, Tetro, a glossy, quasi-autobiographical melodrama starring Alden Ehrenreich and Vincent Gallo that he described as being part of a professional rebirth—a “second career” whose guiding mandate (made possible by the Oscar winner’s long-fermenting sideline as a celebrity vintner) was to stay outside the studio system that made him both an icon and a punchline in the second half of the 20th century. More than any other member of his easy-riding cohort, Coppola emerged at the beginning of the ’70s as the face of the New Hollywood—a status beholden to the industry-shaking success of The Godfather films, and one that he retains, proudly but a bit ruefully, because of the startling unevenness of his post–Apocalypse Now output.

The idea that Coppola lost his mojo in the ’80s has always been a middlebrow myth, albeit one tied to a very real capacity for hubris; when he made a biopic of the iconoclastic inventor and auto-industry disrupter Preston Tucker—a quixotic genius brought down by his assembly-line-minded competitors—it was very obviously an act of self-portraiture. (Another of his on-screen doppelgängers: Gary Oldman as Count Dracula in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, an old-fashioned man trying to adjust to an increasingly newfangled world.) The title of 2007’s Youth Without Youth, meanwhile, suggested an old master nostalgically striving for naivete, an image of the sorcerer as apprentice very different from the majestic maturations of Spielberg and Scorsese, who played with form while stopping short of avant-garde experimentation. Coppola’s postmillennial work, though, went the distance: While not officially a trilogy, the films were more stylistically eccentric than the work of most contemporary auteurs (including the filmmaker’s own daughter, Sofia). In fact, the only real precedent for such aesthetic recklessness lay in their maker’s previous reviled passion projects. Say what you will about the sentimental fantasia of Youth Without Youth (about an elderly professor who de-ages after being struck by lightning) or the metafictional horror of Twixt (which features, among other things, several expressionistic 3D dream sequences and Val Kilmer’s Marlon Brando impression), but they are, if nothing else, Ones From the Heart.

The same would seem to be true of Coppola’s upcoming—and already legendary—sci-fi allegory Megalopolis, starring the patron saint of iconoclastic directors, Adam Driver, and featuring a supporting ensemble that seems to have been generated at random. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Jon Voight, Shia LaBeouf, and Aubrey Plaza walk into a bar. The film, which is hotly tipped to be making its world premiere next month at Cannes, has already been described by industry insiders as “batshit crazy” and a “mix of Ayn Rand, Metropolis, and Caligula”— a fascinating and potentially fatal designation for a self-financed movie that’s been in the works for 40 years and whose budget is reportedly north of $100 million. (So far, no distributor has stepped up to the plate.) Given the material’s themes of excess and empire—with embedded parallels between the ruling classes of ancient Rome and contemporary America—it’s possible that Megalopolis will end up as a complement to The Godfather series, which remains one of the most steadfastly anti-capitalistic epics ever produced in the United States. But if we’re talking purely about artistic legacy, the movie that Coppola is chasing is the one that represents the most rigorous, vertiginous balance between his populist instincts and experimental intuition: 1974’s supremely and persuasively paranoid thriller The Conversation, a movie that defined its specific sociopolitical moment but that also somehow feels more pristinely and discombobulatingly modern than anything on the 2024 calendar.

It begins with a bird’s-eye view: a predatory perspective on San Francisco’s Union Square that renders the park in stark, almost geometric terms. Eventually, the camera begins zooming forward and down, a slow, deliberate movement that heightens the sense of documentary realism—a bustling urban scene observed at a distance—while introducing Coppola’s obsessive and claustrophobic theme of technological control. We’re not as free to look around as we think we are, and it’s not long before the shot isolates our protagonist, Harry Caul (Gene Hackman), who cuts a noticeably solitary figure in his slate-gray raincoat. Accosted by a mime, Harry refuses to engage, suggesting that his loneliness is by choice; the street performer, meanwhile, is a nod to Italian maestro Michelangelo Antonioni, whose 1966 art-house hit, Blow-Up, had been a beacon to so many emerging young American directors. In that virtuosic tour de force, a photographer poring through his own snapshots thinks that he sees evidence of a murder scene; in Coppola’s homage, a surveillance expert, the aforementioned Mr. Caul, comes to suspect that one of his field recordings contains garbled but distressing audio evidence of a potentially lethal conspiracy against two civilians. Haunted by his past complicity in a violent tragedy, Harry decides to figure out who’s trying to kill the people he’d taped in the park and why, effectively contradicting his own philosophies of distance and disinterest. “I don’t know anything about curiosity,” he tells a colleague. As it turns out, what Harry doesn’t know could kill him.

Ostensibly, the model for Harry was Martin L. Kaiser, a wiretapping savant who worked with the CIA and FBI and who also served as a technical consultant for Coppola’s film. Hackman plays Harry as a man who’s more comfortable talking about technology than his feelings; his longest conversations are with a priest, who receives his confessionals in stony silence. The idea of a cipher who intently listens in on other people’s conversations for lack of having much to say (or anyone to say it to) is an irresistible hook, and Hackman—who was coming off an Academy Award for playing the charismatic, two-fisted NYPD hero Popeye Doyle in The French Connection—gives an ingeniously introverted performance. Harry has repressed his desires so deeply that he can’t consciously connect to them. Instead, they’re lurking in the back of his mind through knots of sweaty, tangled, Catholic guilt. In one haunting sequence set against the backdrop of one of Harry’s chronic nightmares, we learn that he was sick as a boy and nearly died in the bathtub after being left alone by his mother, an anecdote that not only unlocks the character’s chronic moroseness but also connects him to Coppola himself, echoing the director’s childhood struggles with polio.

Viewed through this self-reflective lens, The Conversation deepens in resonance and complexity, revealing itself less as a riff on Antonioni than an expression of deeply personal ideas and anxieties around life and filmmaking. “[I] had heard of microphones that had gun sights on them that were so powerful and selective that they could, if aimed at the mouths of people in the crowd, pick up their conversation,” Coppola told Film Comment. “I thought: what an odd device and motif for a film. This image of two people walking through a crowd with their conversation being interrupted every time someone steps in front of the gunsight. … I began to very informally put together a couple of thoughts about it, and came to the conclusion that the film would be about the eavesdropper, rather than the people.”

The concept for The Conversation dates back to 1967, but Coppola waited to make it until the interregnum between the first Godfather pictures, citing a desire to work on something smaller scale. With this in mind, the sinister, enigmatic character of the Director—Harry’s employer, and a man implied to have a number of dizzyingly high-end connections—is legible as an analogue of an industrial power structure that Coppola has always tried to challenge or subvert. (Think of the gleeful, bloody satire of Hollywood casting practices in The Godfather, with its obnoxious A-list producer brought into line by the gift of a racehorse’s head in his bed.) That the Director is played by Robert Duvall cinches the conceptual link between the films, and a case can be made that, beyond Hackman’s impeccable anti-star turn, The Conversation features one of the best and most eclectic casts of the ’70s, including John Cazale, Frederic Forrest, Allen Garfield, Teri Garr, and an impossibly young Harrison Ford, who oozes menace as one of the numerous shady operators in Harry’s orbit.

As a piece of filmmaking, The Conversation is beautifully executed, with textured, tactile cinematography by Bill Butler, who would go on to shoot Jaws; carefully dividing the interior settings into squarish steel-and-glass frames, Coppola evokes the placid sterility of modern architecture only to pause for bursts of expressionistic splatter. (A toilet that spills over with blood during a hallucination sequence simultaneously looks backward toward Psycho and ahead to The Shining.) The almost subliminally precise editing is by Richard Chew and Walter Murch, the latter of whom was also responsible for the film’s phenomenally detailed sound mix, which turns the aural landscape of San Francisco into a character in its own right. In an interview with IndieWire, Murch explained that he and Coppola were primarily interested in questions of realism, starting with the Union Square prologue. “It was shot with hidden cameras,” said Murch, “and apart from the leads and a couple of plants, 90 percent of the people you see were captured in the moment.”

The overlay of authenticity on carefully structured fiction is the movie’s ace in the hole: The more naturalistic the presentation, the less the audience notices that they’re being manipulated. The Union Square scene provides Harry—and the audience—with the audio snippet that acts as both a narrative catalyst and an insidious source of misdirection. The pitch-black joke at the heart of The Conversation is that Harry’s preternatural skill at capturing sound—the instincts that make him, in the words of a colleague, “the best bugger on the West Coast”—doesn’t give him the ability to interpret it properly. Slowly, that conjoined, paradoxical sense of authority and confusion boomerangs back on the viewer, whose understanding of events is carefully filtered through Harry’s own (ultimately mistaken) perceptions. Like Roman Polanski’s Chinatown—which was released the same year—The Conversation is a movie about a character whose own brilliance becomes a liability because he can’t see (or in this case, hear) the bigger picture. The two films also share a theme of institutional corruption that couldn’t have been more timely, but where Polanski’s neo-noir used the social and political topography of the 1930s to critique rapacious late-capitalist practices, Coppola’s artistic antenna channeled a zeitgeist in which secretly recorded audiotape was understood as a kind of smoking gun. That the film hadn’t actually been inspired by Watergate or the Nixon tapes didn’t matter. In a moment when surveillance tech was becoming interwoven into every aspect of daily life, The Conversation quickly became a conversation piece—an allegory about the collapsing gap between a generation’s public and private lives.

In 1998, director Tony Scott cast Hackman as a surveillance expert opposite Will Smith in Enemy of the State, sparking fan theories that the character was an alternate identity for Harry Caul. It’s a funny notion that suggests the depth of the late action auteur’s cinephilia, but it also undermines the devastating finality of The Conversation’s closing scenes, which rank among the darkest endings of the 1970s. Without completely spoiling the film’s plot—which is itself really just a pretense for Coppola’s fine-grained and unsentimental exercise in character study—it can be said that Harry comes out on the losing end. However malevolent the larger forces around him may be, the film is ultimately a story about a man disappearing into a rabbit hole of his own making. No matter how many careers Coppola has, he’s unlikely to match the potency of this coda: The manic yet methodical energy with which Harry goes about (literally) dismantling his own little corner of the world—in search of a bug that may or may not exist—provides an indelible image of physical and psychological ruin. A heartbreaking, blood-chilling glimpse of the expert (or maybe the artist) as a helpless, compulsive prisoner of his own devices.

Adam Nayman is a film critic, teacher, and author based in Toronto; his book The Coen Brothers: This Book Really Ties the Films Together is available now from Abrams.

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Adam Nayman

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April 5, 2024
Why Truman Capote Still Fascinates Us

Have you heard the story of Truman Capote’s downfall? That elaborate yarn about one of the 20th century’s literary lions double-crossing his closest friends, developing a terminal case of writer’s block, and slowly drinking himself to death? It’s the postscript in Capote, the 2005 film about the writing of In Cold Blood that’s drawn from Gerald Clarke’s biography about the writer. The 2006 movie Infamous, based on a dishy oral history by George Plimpton, ends with a similar summary. The saga was detailed in Sam Kashner’s Vanity Fair article from 2012, and again in Melanie Benjamin’s bestselling 2016 novel, The Swans of Fifth Avenue. It’s covered in the 2019 documentary The Capote Tapes, and it’s the central focus of Laurence Leamer’s 2021 book, Capote’s Women: A True Story of Love, Betrayal, and a Swan Song for an Era, which is the source material for the new FX series Feud: Capote Vs. the Swans.

Forty years after Capote’s passing, pop culture is still fascinated with this sophisticated soap opera. Maybe that has to do with its Americanness: the gay arriviste who fled a troubled childhood in the Deep South and reinvented himself among New York high society, only to sink as spectacularly as he soared. Maybe it’s because Capote was tied to so many other beloved mid-century luminaries, from Audrey Hepburn and Marlon Brando to longtime friend Harper Lee, who based the crafty To Kill a Mockingbird character Dill on him. Whatever the cause, each Capote chronicle is rendered through contemporary concerns about authorship, fame, relationships, and the passage of time. As the marketing for Feud suggests, the socialites in Capote’s orbit were the “original” Real Housewives of New York City, making him a sort of highbrow Andy Cohen.

Many writers have left colossal footprints over the past 100 years—F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tennessee Williams, James Baldwin, Joan Didion, Norman Mailer. But the Capote legend is the one that seems to enchant people the most. “It’s a testament to how he crafted his own celebrity,” Thomas Fahy, director of English graduate studies at Long Island University and the author of Understanding Truman Capote, tells The Ringer. “His wit, his charm, his talent, and his association with the ultra-wealthy were certainly part of that, and they reflect our own obsessions with access to celebrity culture. We got to watch the trajectory of his life, and that includes the darker side of our celebrity worship, which is relishing or taking some kind of pleasure in the decline of a celebrity.”

Feud explores that decline at length. By the end of its first episode, Capote (Tom Hollander) has already become persona non grata among his core social circle, the posh women whose catty secrets he spilled in a thinly veiled 1975 Esquire short story meant to be an excerpt from a novel he never published. Over lunch at Manhattan’s chic La Côte Basque, Capote’s cohort would exchange wicked gossip. Among the group was the favored Babe Paley (Naomi Watts), married to the mighty chairman of CBS; Slim Keith (Diane Lane), a stylish jet-setter who hobnobbed with Cary Grant and William Randolph Hearst; C.Z. Guest (Chloë Sevigny), commemorated in Diego Rivera paintings, Slim Aarons photographs, and the cover of Time magazine; and Lee Radziwill (Calista Flockhart), a blue blood forever stuck in her sister Jackie Kennedy’s shadow. Perhaps naively, none of them expected Capote to use their chitchat as material. They were furious when he did.

Tom Hollander as Truman Capote in Feud: Capote Vs. the Swans

FX

Hopscotching across the 1960s, ’70s, and early ’80s, Feud recounts what drew Capote and the women to one another—and the toll it took when most of the group ostracized him in climactic fashion. Ryan Murphy, the anthology series’ originator, outlined the season, after which Jon Robin Baitz, the Pulitzer-nominated playwright who created the ABC drama Brothers & Sisters, wrote all eight episodes. “We have so few models of outrageousness amidst glamor,” Baitz says of his attraction to Capote’s pageantry. “He represents a kind of gay outsider, and some of that lives on. YouTube is filled with interviews where he’s a little bit worse for wear, to say the least.” Baitz and director Gus Van Sant (Good Will Hunting, Milk) structured some of Feud according to whether they could pinpoint the right actresses opposite Hollander’s flowery dialogue. Other so-called swans, like Gloria Vanderbilt, Vogue darling Marella Agnelli, and Harper’s Bazaar contributing editor Gloria Guinness, were excised from the narrative.

Each Capote portrait allows its makers to project different hypotheses onto this treble-voiced smoothie whose outsized personality offset his diminutive frame—or, as Baitz puts it, the “ornately decorated, little gay elf.” Capote (which won Philip Seymour Hoffman an Oscar) and Infamous (starring Toby Jones) dramatize the cost of In Cold Blood, the true-crime pacesetter about two brothers executed for murder in small-town Kansas. Both films present a vampiric Capote ingratiating himself with locals in exchange for access. A sensation that made Capote even more of a talk show perennial than he already was, the book saddled him with insurmountable pressure to produce another masterpiece. The Esquire story supplied an easy way to stay relevant in the face of such anticipation. It, too, was an act of vampirism. But unlike In Cold Blood, it was Capote’s undoing. After his friends abandoned him, he had something of a nervous breakdown, subsisting on a buffet of pills, vodka, and regret.

Those friendships, and their deterioration, are also the foundation of The Swans of Fifth Avenue. Baitz avoided reading Benjamin’s novel, assuming it would cover too much of the same ground. He wasn’t wrong: Swans begins the same way the inaugural episode of Capote Vs. the Swans ends, with the women gathering at La Côte Basque to rant about Capote’s recent treachery. The two depictions have ample overlap—including the starry Black and White Ball that Capote threw in 1966, which is also the subject of Deborah Davis’s 2006 nonfiction book, The Party of the Century, and a forthcoming stage musical—but some of their inventions differ. Feud imagines a tormented Capote communing with Paley’s ghost after she dies of lung cancer in 1978, while Swans of Fifth Avenue envisions a scene in which Capote stations himself outside her funeral, watching surreptitiously as the clique he once commanded convenes without him.

Benjamin says her book was optioned multiple times after its success. At one point, it was going to be a limited series featuring Bryce Dallas Howard. Rob Roth, a visual artist who wrote a 2022 play about the creative kinship between Capote and Andy Warhol, was interested in turning the novel into a musical. Various adaptations lingered in what Hollywood calls development hell. Benjamin was close to inking a final deal when Feud was announced, she says.

“This huge scandal had never really been fictionalized before,” Benjamin says of Swans. “Facts are for the historians, and emotions are what a novelist can do. To me, the relationship between Babe and Truman is the heart of the novel. She had an uninterested husband cheating on her all the time and not much purpose in her life. She was only known for her beauty, and then along comes this giant intellectual who seemed to see something in her. She’s a mother figure in a lot of ways. … She didn’t live long after the fallout. She wasn’t the same old Babe, and neither was Truman.”

Any novelist, screenwriter, or reporter probing the Capote mythology gets to interrogate the “why” of it all. Why did he sell out his friends, knowing how image conscious they were? Did he believe his charisma made him bulletproof? Had he known the whole time that he would use their words as literary grist? If they hadn’t dismissed him, would Capote have finished Answered Prayers, the novel the Esquire story teased? And how much did his own biography inform his decisions? As a boy in Alabama, Capote felt abandoned by his mother, who frequently locked him away while entertaining gentleman callers. She, too, wanted to ingratiate herself into elite Park Avenue circles, depositing Capote with relatives until she summoned him to New York years later. That early rejection haunted Capote throughout his life. Rebranding himself as a bon vivant was a way to overcome it. As that status faded, what did he have left? “He put himself in the position where he was again kind of orphaned,” says Kashner, the author of the Vanity Fair article. In The Capote Tapes, following a clip from one of Capote’s appearances on The Dick Cavett Show, Cavett says to the camera, “It almost was sort of suicide,” referring to his banishment from the swans’ inner circle.

There is, of course, a generous way to interpret Capote’s actions: He didn’t deceive his pals—he immortalized them in the pages of an influential magazine. Nothing Edith Wharton wouldn’t have done. “I don’t think his initial impulse was that this was going to be a betrayal,” Fahy says. “I think he thought that these were lifelong friends who were going to be happy for him and that he’d disguised their names well enough—no hurt, no foul, right? He was desperate to get this material out there as a way to inspire himself to get back to work. I don’t think he anticipated the depth of the controversy.”

Fahy and others cite Capote’s combustion as a precursor to reality television. (A recent Vanity Fair headline dubbed his former sidekicks “the original influencers.”) Capote’s late-’70s slump was documented on Dick Cavett and The Stanley Siegel Show, where he slurred his words and struggled to replicate the aplomb that had made him popular. Unlike certain celebrities who predated the modern media era or tried to hide their foibles from the public, Capote was willful about retaining his spotlight. Perhaps that is what makes him so contemporary. “Truman enjoyed it all, but I think that deep down he wished that he could have just gone to lunch with Babe Paley,” Warhol associate Bob Colacello told Kashner. During Capote’s final years, he contributed to Interview and Playboy, attempted to get sober so that he could finish Answered Prayers, published a handful of short stories, and reportedly planned a follow-up to the Black and White Ball that never materialized. Until alcoholism got the best of him in 1984, he often seemed one move away from a comeback. What happened in between those events remains, more or less, a mystery. And so we do what any captive audience would: We speculate.

“Especially in our age, he was somebody that cultivated celebrity,” says Infamous producer Christine Vachon. “There was a lot of drama around the way he lived his life, and I think all of that is very beguiling. I just have a tremendous amount of empathy for somebody who was as talented as he was, and as damaged. He was unable, ultimately, to bring his talents and the way that he wanted to live together in a way that was not dangerous for him.”

Matthew Jacobs is an Austin-based entertainment journalist who covers film and television. His work can be found at Vulture, Vanity Fair, The Hollywood Reporter, HuffPost, and beyond. Follow him on X @majacobs.

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January 31, 2024
Lil Dicky Has Said Enough About His Dick—but He’s Still Got More to Say

Lil Dicky wants to be taken seriously. The rapper born Dave Burd released his first album in nearly a decade last week, titled Penith (The DAVE Soundtrack). As the name states, it doubles as the soundtrack to Dave, Burd’s TV show not-so-loosely based on his own life as a rapper. Together, the show and the music create a meta feedback loop. The FXX show chronicles Burd’s creation and promotion of an album called Penith. (“Penith,” naturally, is pronounced like “zenith” crossed with the word “penis.”)

In addition to writing and starring in his own comedy, Burd also created the music for the show. Now he is releasing the songs featured in the show as a real-life album. Appropriately, he gave it the same inappropriate name from the show: Penith. It’s art imitating life imitating art imitating dick jokes.

“I’m just over here redefining the alpha male,” Dicky raps on his new song, “HAHAHA,” a nearly uninterrupted three-minute verse intended to flex his rapping bona fides. Later on the album, on the song “No Fruits or Vegetables,” the chorus goes, “I don’t eat fruit or vegetables, no fruits or vegetable.” Burd is the alpha man-child. But Burd’s show is so good that the next phase of his career will be taken seriously.

Dave has perhaps the best celebrity cameos in a television show since Entourage. At various points, the show features Justin and Hailey Bieber, Kendall Jenner and Kourtney Kardashian, and Megan Fox and Machine Gun Kelly. But the star power isn’t as impressive as the way it is used. In Season 1, Dave learns that a young fan of his has died, and the kid’s parents ask Dave to perform at the memorial service. But when Dave arrives, he sees Macklemore showing up to a hero’s welcome. The parents ask Dave to cancel because their son liked Macklemore better. In Season 2, Dave releases a song called “Kareem Abdul-Jabbar” and is elated when Kareem reaches out to talk to him about the song. But to Dave’s horror, Kareem ends up interviewing him about white rappers appropriating Black culture for a profile in Time.

Burd’s greatest strength has been taking his weaknesses and making them his armor. His rap name is based on his insecurities about having hypospadias, a birth defect that led to a surgery that accidentally created a second hole in his penis. (When Burd explained that childhood trauma to The Ringer back in 2020, he explained that when he pees, he has to cover the second hole with his finger or it comes out “like a Super Soaker.”)

On the show, Burd’s craven, shameless desire for fame is spun into an episode in which an internet rumor that he is dead goes viral. When he sees that he is the no. 1 trending person on Twitter, he decides to hide at a motel and wait an extra day for his songs to reach no. 1 on Billboard before announcing that he is still alive (even to his parents).

With the help of Seinfeld writer and Curb Your Enthusiasm producer Jeff Schaffer, the show touches on a stunningly wide range of jokes and emotions. Burd’s friend and real-life hype man GaTa, who also plays himself, gives a genuine and stunning view into the relationship between childhood trauma and sex addiction. This is from the same show where Burd, who is Jewish, hallucinates a conversation where he teaches Anne Frank how to do the “Whip/Nae Nae” dance.

Burd’s next trick is blurring the lines between his TV show and his music. At the end of the second season, Burd buys an ad on a billboard in Los Angeles to announce his (then-fictitious) album, Penith. His plan in the episode is to tape himself, practically naked, to the billboard as the “t” in “Penith” like Jesus on the cross. But Ariana Grande releases a single the same day, and nobody shows up to see him. The image is now the real-life album cover for Penith.

(Incredibly, two years after that joke appeared on the show, Grande released a single on January 12, 2024, one week before Burd’s Penith album came out in real life. Art imitates life, etc.)

Burd is hoping to do what his show did and defy genre. For white guys with white-collar jobs who love rapping Drake lyrics alone to themselves in the car, Lil Dicky is the embodiment of the American dream. He had an excellent career at the powerhouse advertising firm Goodby, Silverstein & Partners working on campaigns like the NBA’s legendary playoff commercials. But Burd quit a potentially lucrative and relatively creative job to become a rapper. Wear your weaknesses like armor, and you too can quit your job to be a famous rapper who writes a TV show about his own life and then convinces Brad Pitt and Drake to be in a season finale. We sat down with Dave to discuss his new album, cold-emailing Brad Pitt to be in his show, what comes next, his custom sex doll, and why he does not eat fruits or vegetables at 35 years old.

What was the weirdest thing about making a show about your own life that you didn’t see coming?

Probably just the amount of people asking, “Is this true? Is that true?”

You want to do a rapid-fire true or false?

Sure.

Rick Ross lent you a chain, and then you got robbed. Is any of that true?

No, no, no, it’s not true. I’ve never experienced anything like that, but GaTa has had a chain get stolen and has had to go through steps to get it back. So it’s like part of the details of that were inspired by stuff that GaTa’s gone through, but I’ve never experienced that.

So do you have a stalker? Was that real?

No, I don’t have a stalker, thank God.

OK. Did you order an absurdly expensive custom sex doll?

Yeah.

What did it cost?

I got the $3,000 model. There were other models that I could have splurged on. There’s a scene in the show where I have sex with the sex doll and very much based on—please, for all the readers, just know that I didn’t bring this up; I was asked this question, and I’m not trying to be intentionally vulgar.

But the first time I did have sex with the sex doll, I just remember being shocked at how heavy it was. Literally. My favorite sexual position is girl on top. So I don’t know why I thought that that was the right thing to do with this 80-pound doll, but that’s where my head went for the first time I ever experienced it. Then it was so hard to get it positioned. I remember by the time I was actually in a position where I could start doing anything, I was so physically tired. The wig started to fall off of it. I remember thinking in my head as it was happening it felt so much like Ex Machina.

Pre-nut clarity?

I didn’t find the experience to be overwhelmingly positive. It was really tiring. But after that, I just immediately went and got on my laptop and started writing things down and details that I don’t want to forget. I remember thinking, “This is such a crazy scene for the show.” So there are times where I’m living life and I’m thinking, “Wow, this is a great scene for the show.”

So you do that a lot? You’ve basically been chronicling this stuff for years?

Even before I had the show, when I was just a rapper going on tour with GaTa, I was like, “I know I want to be a comedian. I know that this life that I’m living right now as I’m a rapper going around the road, it’s really funny.” I don’t have a great memory. I’m not going to leave it up to hoping I remember the insane thing that happened in Iowa. I just have to write it down. So I’ve been writing this stuff down for over a decade.

Did you actually match with Doja Cat on a dating app?

I have matched with Doja Cat.

What happened?

We matched, and we talked. She was very sweet, and we’re friends, but we matched during a time where we didn’t work out. It was always very difficult. I think I was shooting Season 1 or something, or I was just very much doing something and she was doing something. It just was friendly banter, but then I reached out to her for the show, and I was like, “Remember that time we matched?” She was like, “Yeah.” Then I was like, “I want to make an episode based on online texting.”

On the show, you cannot ride a bike. Was that true? And have you learned?

I learned when I was a kid. What’s the phrase? You can’t forget how to ride a bike. Well, I forgot. If you put me in a meadow and there’s a path, I can ride straight. I’m just not good at turning. I’m not comfortable on the road. I don’t know how people can ride. Then if there’s a stick, they get smacked by a car. So, no, I’m no more comfortable riding bikes. I’ve always been a Rollerblader. I’m still a Rollerblader. They always think Rollerblading is a bit or that I’m joking, but no.

On your song “No Fruits or Vegetables,” the chorus goes, “I don’t eat fruit or vegetables, no fruits or vegetable.” When you say no fruits or vegetables, are we talking zero?

I mean, look, 10 years ago, I hadn’t even tried fruits or vegetables.

How old are you?

I’m 35.

Hmm.

When I was 25, I had tried an apple, but I didn’t eat any fruits or vegetables. Today, I’ve tried—when I say tried, I’ve taken a single bite—I’ve tried a lot of them. But I don’t on a regular basis eat any fruits or vegetables. I will eat something like a Caesar salad or a kale Caesar salad. Besides that, no. There’s a lot I haven’t tried. I have never tried a cherry. I could really list endless things that I’ve never tried.

Are you worried about getting scurvy?

I worry about my health in the sense that I live a very high-stress life, and I know that my diet can’t be good. It’s not a good diet. So I don’t know if I worry about scurvy, but I worry about when I go and get my levels checked that they’re going to be like, “Oh my God. The inside of your body is like tar.”

Why didn’t you try stuff?

I think it’s a textural thing for me and my parents. I put this in the show too. I always blame them for not forcing these foods on me when I was young so I could grandfather them in and eat them today, but my mom always said it wasn’t worth ruining her own life. Apparently, I really objected.

While we’re separating fact from fiction, you have a Coca-Cola commercial where you call Jordan Poole the best stealer ever. Do you want to correct anything on the record?

Yeah. I didn’t write that line. I questioned it when it came out, and I just had to go along with corporate. I didn’t want to put up a stink. I think they only had so many players that could be featured. Of course, I was the guy writing these ads 15 years ago, so I empathize with their position. I don’t want to be the talent on set being like, “No,” but I didn’t write that line, and I know that he’s not. Blame Coca-Cola.

You did a video with Benny Blanco where, among many other things, you ordered an unsliced bagel and said, “I’ll slice it myself.” Was that a bit for the video? Or do you actually want to slice a bagel yourself when you get a bagel?

So I find that if you get the bagel sliced by the bagel place, they have that machine that goes like this [uses his hands to mimic a bagel-slicing machine]. The bagel ends up being very texturally flat. But if you use your own knife and you slice it in a human way, there’s a rigidity and fluffiness to the bagel that you wouldn’t have gotten otherwise. It’s not that difficult to slice a bagel. Whenever I order a bagel from a bagel place, I always say, “Untoasted, unsliced.”

You want to create your own texture, map your terrain, create your own landscape?

Right.

Speaking of your own terrain, your new album doubles as the soundtrack to your TV show. Is this an album, or is it a soundtrack?

I don’t know why it would have to be one or the other. I feel like it’s labeled as Penith (The DAVE Soundtrack) because the common theme of the music is they’re songs that have existed in the show. But my process for making music is whenever I get free time from the show, I then work really hard on making music. I make music to make music, and I think about it existing on an album one day. Or I think about various ways it could exist, and then it’s time to make the show again. The show is obviously about me, and I’m a rapper in the show. So there’s obviously a need for music in the show. So oftentimes some of my favorite work can get plucked up and put in the show.

It varies in the sense that sometimes I make songs that aren’t for the show at all, and then I’m like, “Oh, OK, we’re making the show. We need music. What’s good music that we could build around and put in the show?” Other times I do make music directly for the show. I didn’t envision my second album being a soundtrack album, but I think this is the right thing to do because I love all this music and I want to get it out as opposed to just waiting to finish whatever’s coming next. I want people to have music, and it’s been so long.

Why is the soundtrack to your TV show coming out eight months after the show ended?

I wasn’t going to put it out during the writers strike. You can’t really promote it and do anything like that, and I just needed to finish. Songs will enter the show in this demo, unmixed form. Maybe there’s not a second verse on some things that I want to add a second verse to maybe. So it’s like certain songs had to get finished, and not only finished, but then mixed and mastered. It’s the whole process. And then we want to shoot videos for it. So it’s like we have to like them. We got to edit the videos, and there’s a little bit of a production timeline. You got to realize I’m working on the show every day up until four days before that episode. So it’s like there’s no time to do all those things that I just mentioned until after I wrap on the season.

You cranked out a lot of TV in a very short amount of time. That’s in an era when people aren’t really doing that anymore. Meanwhile, you have not put out a huge amount of music. My editor always says, “Go where your effort takes you.” At this point, do you like making TV shows, movies, whatever more than the music?

Well, look, I’ll bring it back to the beginning of my career. I always wanted to be a comedian, and that was my grand vision. I started making music with the hope of being found as a comedic presence. Then I fell in love with making music and began making realer and realer music that didn’t even have to rely on being funny as much and started doing real tours. Then my initial dream of being a comedian took a back seat for a few years because I was really rolling with the momentum of music and just going on tour and doing all these things, and the comedy thing had to be put on hold. Then the TV show happened, and it takes up all my time in that way. Then the momentum happened there, and it really started rolling. I had less and less time to make music.

I think what happened was when the strike happened, I was able to finish this body of work, and I thought it was a really good idea. I designed this project to be the type of thing where even if you’ve never seen the show, you can listen to it and sit, and it flows really well, because I think it really is a real album. But in the process of doing that, I’ve re-fallen in love with music again. I’ve always been working on it whenever I can, but I’ve now really been able to start focusing on it without being pulled in all these different directions. If you’re asking me present-day today, what I’m focused on right now, it’s music today. Will that change? Of course. I’ve always loved film and TV, and I will always have a future in that.

Season 3 of Dave ended in May. I know it’s up in the air, but will there be more of the show?

I’m trying to operate under the mentality of focusing on one thing at a time. Like you said, I’ve put out just three seasons. The amount of work that it’s taken to get those three seasons to where it’s been, it has been so unbelievably strenuous to the point where I still feel like I just wrapped Season 3. I feel like I just finished that, and I’m sure, yes, eventually, the story of my life will continue. I’m not kidding when I say I’m really excited about being focused on music for the first time in a while.

Last time we talked about how you have hypospadias. Just wanted to follow up and confirm: You did not get the corrective surgery?

No, nothing as an adult, thank goodness. My dick still is fucked up in the sense that I am peeing out of two holes, but I shouldn’t be. So there is a surgery that could fix that that I could get. I’m just not trying to deal with that. I’d rather just piss on myself.

How long were you friends with Benny Blanco until he was like, “I want to watch you pee”? Because I know he’s seen you pee.

Oh, very soon [after meeting]. Me and Benny are just such instant soulmate friends that I feel like within four times of hanging out, our dynamic was that of best friend brothers. So I’m sure I showed him very early.

You guys do seem like long-lost friends. In one of the early episodes of the show, you’re pulling gum out of his ass or something. For people who perhaps don’t have a relationship like that, how would you describe that bromance, why you and Benny are like that?

Yeah, obviously it’s a foreign relationship to certain people, but I feel like other people can relate to it. It’s weird. I get stopped in the street, and some guys are like, “I got friends who were like that too.” Then other people would be like, “That’s the weirdest dynamic I’ve ever seen.” So it varies, but really it’s just we love each other, not romantically, but just as best friends. I’ve never met someone who I just hit it off with. So we make each other laugh nonstop. Then even if Benny was a plumber, we’d still be best friends.

So to have your best friend who, when you meet this guy, you’re like, “Oh my God. That’s the guy who’s always meant to be my best friend in life,” and then he also happens to be the biggest music producer and best music producer in the world. It’s so fantastic to be able to work on this album with Benny, Penith. Literally, it’s like we’re finishing songs that I love while also sleeping over with your best friend. You’re not even a kid anymore, but it feels like you are. It’s really a joyous experience.

You repeatedly have said, “I will be the biggest star in the world.” You’re also one degree of separation removed from Taylor Swift [Editor’s note: Dave’s friend Benny is dating Taylor Swift’s friend Selena Gomez.] Deep down, when you’re watching this Taylor Swift Eras Tour, is any part of you like, “Damn, I got to do that”?

Not really. No, no, no. In my heart, I know that I’ll never be as big of a musician as Taylor Swift. It’s like ambitious, and she’s the biggest and best of all time. You know what I mean? So, yeah, I obviously have always believed in myself for sure. I think maybe 10 years ago or five years ago, we had our conversation, I would be more likely to say, “My desire is to be the biggest star in the world,” but I don’t even think that’s my actual desire anymore. I think my desire is to make the best stuff in the world and to feel really proud of the stuff that I make, and my desire is to be really, really happy in life.

But there are certain things that come along with being the biggest star in the world that I have no interest in experiencing for my fame. You know what I mean? You got to plan every single time you go outside, and I like the comfortable life I live of feeling like I have achieved the things that I want to achieve while not feeling burdened by a toxic level of fame that is truly damning to your life.

Some of Brad Pitt’s last words in the finale are explaining to you that fame is a prison.

I think Season 3 in a nutshell is it’s under the umbrella of looking for love and romance and then the bait and switch of realizing when you’re living in this endless loop of validation seeking, and then you’re not even truly loving yourself if every single moment is based on how you’re being received and whatnot. So the end message is there’s more to life than seeking validation. I think that’s a real valid lesson from Brad Pitt.

About the cameos: You’re just cold-emailing Brad Pitt?

I did cold-email Brad Pitt.

Will you send me a copy of that?

I won’t send you a copy. It’s between me and Brad, but it was really well-written, and I took my time with it. I didn’t write it in 20 minutes. I wrote it, and then I reread it the next day, and then I thought about it, and then I trimmed it. You only get one shot of Brad reading your email. People always say, “How do you get all the people in the show?” It’s a combination of two things. One, pretty much at this point, anyone who I’m getting in the show has seen the show and loves it. When I didn’t have a show, and I’m trying to get YG in a pilot for a show that he’s never seen, it’s a much harder sell to be like, “Trust me, it’s going to be great.” Now it doesn’t feel crazy to me to email Rachel McAdams and Brad Pitt, the biggest stars of our time, and be like, “Hey.”

Because what I find about the show is that it’s incredibly well-respected in the community of artists—I’ll say, the talent of L.A., the pool of actors, the musicians. It’s everyone’s favorite show, and I’m able to really sell them on it. Oftentimes that’s enough. But back in the day, I think when I moved to L.A. and I became friends with Benny, yeah, I think that it’s like our social circle, and I’m at a party, and I meet Kendall Jenner. I try to be a nice person whenever I’m meeting anybody. If someone likes you, they’re more likely to be like, “Yeah, I remember that guy. He’s cool.” But it depends. It’s just living life and meeting people when you meet them, but at this point, I really feel like it’s just the product speaks for itself.

People like Drake and Brad and Rachel and Killer Mike and Usher, these people, they love the show. There’s really no better feeling than having that belief of these people who are just icons, even to the point where I’ve grown up idolizing a lot of these people. Now they’re so willing to come play in my sandbox and trust me. There’s no more gratifying feeling that I’ve ever had than being on set with Brad Pitt, giving him notes, and him respecting what I’m saying. I can tell that he was looking at me the way he would look at any other director that he works with. This guy’s the biggest star of our time, working with my favorite directors of all time. I think that feeling as a filmmaker was so gratifying.

Last time we spoke, you told me the best day of your life was when you put out the video for your song “Ex-Boyfriend.” It was April 25, 2013. Ten years later, April 2023, you’re putting out Season 3 of a show about your life with Brad Pitt and Drake. So, with the utmost seriousness, I ask you, with everything you’ve done, 10 years from now, what would make you satisfied?

The truth of the matter is 10 years ago, if you asked me this question, I would’ve listed out all the things that I have achieved. When I describe 10 years from now, I’m not listing out, “I want an Oscar.” It’s more like, “I have kids and a family, and I’m married. Life is as good as it possibly can be, independent of all the art that I create.” The tricky thing about me is I’m so aware that wrapping your whole identity up in the art that you create is a never-ending cycle. There’s always more—there’s always improvements, things to do—and I try to infuse that in the show. Trying to be that lesson is something that I try to deal with on a day-to-day level.

Having said that, you’ve alluded to making movies next, including a screenplay about your childhood; you’ve said going through puberty with your condition was formative. Is that basically your next project? A movie about being a kid growing up with a messed-up dick?

[Laughs.] I think that I’ve said enough about the dick, if I’m being quite honest with you. There’s other TV series I’m developing, and I have a bunch of other things at play for sure. The future, there’s so many other things I want to do besides just make the show Dave and even just make music. I feel like I’m only getting started. I know I’ve been in this for 10 years, but I do feel like the things that I’ve done for 10 years have all been setups for the future. I don’t think I need to make another movie about [my penis].

I feel like so much of your stuff started with taking this insecurity about your penis and frankly wearing it like armor. Do you feel like you’ve grown up? Do you feel like you’re over it?

I’m not saying I’m over it in the sense that it’s not an important part of shaping who I am. I just think that I don’t need to make art about the same material every time. Do I feel like I’ve grown up? Yes and no. I definitely feel like the things that I’m saying now are different than the things I would’ve said five years ago, are different than the things I would’ve said 10 years ago. Do I feel any more ready to have children today than I did when I was 16 years old? No, I feel like I’m still a kid at heart, but I think a lot of people feel that way even when they have kids.

In 10 years, I’ll be 45 years old. My back’s starting to hurt. I want to figure out ways to make my back stop hurting. That’s one of my main priorities right now, is to fix my back this year. It’s not really answering your question, but do I feel grown-up? No, but I definitely feel like I’m actively growing up at all times. All you can do is just do that as things are thrown at you and as you live life. I don’t think I’ll ever feel grown-up until I’m dead. I think I’m about to enter the second half of my life. Maybe not half, but the middle of my life.

Well, it’ll be the middle third of your life as long as you start eating vegetables.

Yeah, I’m entering the second half if I don’t fix something.

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Danny Heifetz

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January 24, 2024
Rise of the Tomb Raider is still peak Lara Croft

It’s been more than a decade since Crystal Dynamics, the developer best known for the Tomb Raider series, first introduced players to its reimagined take on Lara Croft. 2013’s Tomb Raider painted Lara as someone capable of adapting and overcoming nearly any situation while maintaining a level of emotional depth and self-awareness, a quality the game’s sequels would go on to further explore.

The original was an excellent game that I’ve completed on no fewer than three occasions, and while her most recent outing, 2018’s Shadow of the Tomb Raider, has its merits, I still stand by 2015’s Rise of the Tomb Raider as the most engaging and interesting version of Lara Croft for how it emphasizes her vulnerability. The result is a story that combines all the hallmarks of what you’d expect from a great Tomb Raider game: suspenseful supernatural elements and a thrilling and romantic notion of archaeology, all tied together with an intriguing and surprisingly emotional story.

Image: Crystal Dynamics/Square Enix

Following the events of the first game, Lara is still traumatized by her trial by fire on the island of Yamatai and her father’s recent disappearance. Her quest to find her father and restore her family’s legacy leads her to the frigid peaks of Siberia and into the path of Trinity, a “Knights Templar meets military contractor” organization with a pseudo-religious goal of world domination. Unfortunately, this places Lara alone in the unique position to foil their plot, by saddling her with a truth that no one else will believe.

Lara fully understands the gravity of the situation, but never lets this inflate her ego. Instead, she’s more preoccupied with the specter of death that inevitably follows her attempts to do the right thing. Lara can never fully atone for how her choices led to the deaths of so many close to her in the past, regardless how well equipped or tough she is. This theme is so pervasive, it even echoes in Rise’s gameplay by presenting us with a Lara who needs to be more resourceful and cunning to overcome her environment.

Image: Crystal Dynamics/Square Enix

Rise of the Tomb Raider doesn’t quite elevate Lara to the level of apex predator we get in Shadow of the Tomb Raider, but she’s clearly far more capable than she was in her first adventure. The result is a character in the midst of becoming the Lara Croft known to players around the world, a more confident and prepared protagonist who can still be humbled. This version of Lara shines when she’s on the back foot, and Rise of the Tomb Raider does everything it can to keep her off balance with a more capable foe and a relentlessly adversarial environment.

I’ll admit that on its standard difficulty, Rise of the Tomb Raider doesn’t present much of a challenge. Because of that, I consider Survivor Mode, the hardest difficulty, to be the definitive Tomb Raider experience. While you won’t succumb to starvation or dehydration, at this difficulty, the player’s health doesn’t regenerate, checkpoints are disabled, and foes are far more deadly. As if that wasn’t enough, by default, the game also will not highlight interactable items in the environment. While you can turn on the “Survival Instincts” at any time during your playthrough, dialing down the difficulty isn’t an option, which further reinforces that there’s no going back once the journey starts.

Image: Crystal Dynamics/Square Enix

This dialed-up difficulty has the benefit of making the game more immersive and forcing you to carefully consider and prepare for every encounter. A handful of bad guys normally wouldn’t be an issue, but when just a couple of bullets can put Lara in the ground, things get a little more tense. For an added challenge, I like to rely almost exclusively on stealth kills and Lara’s trusty bow during combat, resorting to firearms only when absolutely necessary.

Rise of the Tomb Raider still keeps some of the Metroidvania elements of its predecessor to guide you along its critical path, while the world feels more open and encourages exploration of its various regions. This is further reinforced by a more robust crafting system, which forces you to scrounge and hunt for many of the materials you need to upgrade your gear. The tomb puzzles hidden throughout the world aren’t quite as challenging as those found in Shadow of the Tomb Raider, but still do a great job at shaking things up between scavenging and combat encounters.

2013’s Tomb Raider did a fantastic job of establishing Lara as a character, and Shadow of the Tomb Raider makes for a fitting capstone to the latest trilogy. But for me, Rise of the Tomb Raider was the peak of Crystal Dynamic’s trilogy. Beyond its challenging gameplay, Rise offers a robust and complex narrative that shows us that the personality archetype of badass archeologist doesn’t have to constantly revolve around snappy one-liners.

Rise of the Tomb Raider is available on Xbox Game Pass.

Alice Jovanée

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January 6, 2024
The Death of Bellator, Tom Aspinall’s P4P Rankings Debut, and Why Jon Jones Vs. Francis Ngannou Might Still Happen!
Still buzzing from last weekend’s UFC 295, Ariel, Chuck, and Petesy have a lot to get into on today’s show. First, the guys discuss this weekend’s final Bellator card and why the energy (or lack thereof) surrounding Bellator 301 is symbolic of the promotion’s entire existence. Then, the guys break down their latest pound-for-pound rankings before taking Discord questions about Alex Pereira’s legendary run, Ian Garry’s beef with Team Renegade, how the Saudis could convince Dana White to make the fight of the century, and more. Plus, a classic game of Buy or Sell.

To enter into our lovely Discord community, click this link.

TOPICS:
- Intro (00:00)
- The end of Bellator (03:07)
- Why Bellator doesn’t invoke the same nostalgia Strikeforce does (08:49)
- Saturday’s Paul Craig vs. Brendan Allen card at The Apex (21:02)
- Ariel’s conundrum with getting Tom Aspinall into his November pound-for-pound rankings (24:19)
- UFC fighters we feel most emotionally connected to (37:38)
- How the Saudis could get Dana White to make Jon Jones vs. Francis Ngannou (57:30)
- Buy or Sell (01:05:09)
Hosts: Ariel Helwani, Petesy Carroll, and Chuck Mindenhall
Producer: Troy Farkas

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Ariel Helwani

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November 16, 2023
The Lost Boys paired vampire camp with real teenage fears

The Lost Boys’ poster made the prospect of becoming an undead creature of the night pretty attractive: “Sleep all day. Party all night. Never grow old. Never die. It’s fun to be a vampire.” But the movie’s story is full of teenage terrors: an older sibling in the grips of addiction, divorced parents, starting over in a strange new place, and contending with adults who won’t listen to your real, valid teenage problems.

Released in 1987, The Lost Boys isn’t particularly terrifying as a horror film. With its gaudily dressed vampires and long-flowing mullets — plus its iconic, extremely sweaty saxophone man — it reads more camp than straight horror three decades later. And despite its R rating, it’s fairly tame. Its single sex scene is pretty chaste and the film’s gore is limited to gushes of blood from dying vampires.

The Lost Boys succeeds as an enduring piece of vampire fiction because of its stars, with Kiefer Sutherland standing out as vampire gang leader David, and the strong bones of its story. In that story, recently divorced single mom Lucy (Dianne Wiest) moves to the fictional Southern California town of Santa Carla, “the murder capital of the world,” the film tells us, with her teenage sons, Michael (Jason Patric) and Sam (Corey Haim). The displaced family moves in with Lucy’s dad, an eccentric taxidermist known only as Grandpa.

Image: Warner Bros./Everett Collection

As they settle into the town, which appears to consist primarily of a densely trafficked beach boardwalk, Lucy gets a job (and a potential boyfriend) at a video rental store, while Michael and Sam seek new friends — Michael’s comes in the form of a group of young vampires, while Sam bonds with comic book store geeks Edgar (Corey Feldman) and Alan Frog (Jamison Newlander). When Michael falls for Star (Jami Gertz), a seductive vampire in the making and apparent partner of David, peer pressure compels him to become a vampire himself.

Opposite Michael’s path, Sam throws in with the Frog brothers, who warn the new kid in town that Santa Carla’s whole murder-capital-of-the-world problem stems from a nest of vampires. The Lost Boys doesn’t shy away from established vampire fiction with the Frog brothers; they use horror comic books as a field manual to identify and kill vampires. (Refreshingly, unlike far too many modern zombie genre stories, which refuse to use the word “zombie” at all, vampire fiction isn’t afraid of calling its monsters what they are.)

While Michael’s story of becoming bewitched by both Star and David is at the center of the film’s story, The Lost Boys is also Sam’s story of watching his brother slip into a metaphorical addiction during the “just say no” era of the Reagan administration’s war on drugs. It’s also a story set during an era of skyrocketing divorce rates; The Lost Boys plays masterfully on the fear of watching your parents split and the inevitable replacement father figure coming into the picture.

Photo: Warner Bros./Everett Collection

Sutherland and Patric hold The Lost Boys together as rivals ostensibly competing for Star. As David, Sutherland channels Billy Idol as a spiky trickster, making Michael hallucinate that he’s eating worms and maggots — when, in reality, he’s eating Chinese takeout — before David presents him with a taste of real vampire’s blood. As Michael, Patric plays it both cool and disaffected, but also earnest in his love for Star and terrified of his new vampire powers. There are strong set-pieces involving the two male leads, including a moment where David and his vampire gang convince Michael to hang out underneath a moving train, compelling Michael to let go and embrace his ability to fly. It’s the movie’s strongest allusion to its inspiration, J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan.

Despite strong performances and great character twists, The Lost Boys rushes toward its ending in clumsy and unsatisfying ways. Dianne Wiest’s Lucy has too little to do outside of reacting to the men in the film, and Grandpa seems to have much more going on than the film reveals. Its 98-minute run time needed a little more time to breathe.

But The Lost Boys, much like ’80s kid-heroism movies E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and The Goonies, is about its young people. As an oft-campy time capsule of ’80s-era hopes and fears, it will never get old.

The Lost Boys is currently streaming on Max.

Michael McWhertor

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November 11, 2023