34 Years Ago, George Wendt Starred in the Biggest Music Video of All Time
In the video, Wendt is one of the first people we see, a dad who is upset that Culkin is playing music too loud. But then, when Culkin takes his guitar up to Marty McFly/Spinal Tap levels, Wendt is blasted in his La-Z-Boy recliner all the way to the middle of Africa.
At the time, Jackson was the biggest star on the planet, and his music videos were already well-known for massive celebrity cameos. The video itself was directed by cinema legend John Landis, who had previously directed the video for "Thriller."
But, arguably, it was Wendt's inclusion at the beginning of the video that gave "Black or White" its power. A frumpy white dad-type guy is thrust into the multicultural world that Michael Jackson celebrates.
The legacy of Jackson might be mixed to this day, but the fact that Wendt was game enough to make fun of himself, is amazing. Even outside of Cheers, Wendt perfectly embodied a certain trope, and in "Black or White" he mocked that trope to send a positive, and memorable message to the entire world.
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CNET
2 hours ago
- CNET
I'm Still Obsessed With This Cult Conspiracy Thriller and Now It's on Netflix
Every once in a while, a TV show comes out of nowhere and changes the very fabric of the medium. Off the top of my head, I can think of five: Twin Peaks, Lost, The Sopranos, Game of Thrones and Breaking Bad. After Vince Gilligan's hit drug drama ended in 2013, I wondered what series would capture the cultural zeitgeist next. The answer came in the form of an edgy show about the internet, of all things. It starred a relatively unknown character actor as a flawed, neurodivergent hacker genius who gets sucked into a shadow government conspiracy. The show was lifted up by solid performances, relevant themes, slick writing, epic world-building and enough twists and turns to keep you guessing week in and week out. The program I am talking about is an Emmy-winner, a game-changer and one of the best thrillers to ever hit television. Now, for the first time ever in the United States, it is available to stream in full on Netflix. This is Mr. Robot. Read more: Netflix Review: Our Top Pick in a Sea of Streaming Choices Rami Malek plays Elliot Alderson in the hacker drama Mr. Robot. USA Network "Hello, friend," Rami Malek's hacker antihero Elliot Alderson says in the opening moments of the pilot episode. He's talking to the audience. But moreover, I took it to heart that he was talking to me. As someone who related to his antisocial, black hoodie-wearing, outcast vibe, it felt as if Elliot was the TV embodiment of me -- if my goth outcast phase of the '90s and '00s never ended. Without getting too into the weeds here, Mr. Robot follows Elliot, a computer programmer who works for a giant company, named E-Corp (or Evil Corp, depending on who you ask) by day and flexes his chops as a hacker at night. He gets recruited by a mysterious Anonymous-like organization that wants to crash corporate America. The only issue? He works for the company at the top of the greedy corporate food chain. That's the nutshell explanation but there's more going on here than that. Add in a V for Vendetta-style anarchist cult, a mysterious mentor figure (conveniently named Mr. Robot) and a complicated mental health struggle and you have one heck of a layered onion to unpeel. Mr. Robot is an absolute banger of a TV show. It was different from anything else on television (and pretty much, still is). It was clear from the jump that this series was going to move the needle; it was a programming paradigm shift and it had a lot to say. Christian Slater plays Mr. Robot opposite Rami Malek as Elliot Alderson in Mr. Robot. USA Network Christian Slater plays Mr. Robot, whose recognizable cadence and smirky, sardonic delivery make Elliot's sidekick a compelling character who can be charismatic and abhorrent in the same breath. Cocky, confident, and a bit sociopathic, Slater's Mr. Robot is the antithesis of Malek's Elliot. Their relationship dynamic is reminiscent of the one between Brad Pitt's Tyler Durden and Edward Norton's Jack in David Fincher's 1999 cult classic, Fight Club. Mr. Robot explores a slew of heavy themes that can be tough to stomach. It's the rare occurrence where the use of voice-over narration elevates the whole story instead of feeling like a storytelling shortcut. Elliot regularly addresses the viewer and his narration is never ham-fisted. Carly Chaikin as Darlene and Rami Malek as Elliot in the hacker drama Mr. Robot. USA Network In fact, Malek is on another level here. Emotionally resonant, intense, vulnerable -- his range runs the gamut -- and he's simply enthralling as Elliot. As his world unravels and he's forced to question the chaos happening around him, he regularly breaks the fourth wall to talk with us at home -- which is welcoming and unnerving -- and invites us deeper into his reality. In the series' opening moments, all it took was hearing him say, "Hello, friend," and I was fully invested in the slippery slope of insanity that followed. Mac Quayle's Emmy-winning, techno-laden score kept me nodding my head, even during the show's twistiest twists. Rami Malek as Elliot and Joey Bada$$ as Leon in Mr. Robot. USA Network Slater and Malek are the powerhouses here, and their characters' storylines are the lifeblood of Mr. Robot. The supporting players also bring their A-games. Carly Chaikin, Portia Doubleday, Martin Wallström, BD Wong, Michael Cristofer and Joey Bada$$ deliver memorable performances that succeed in building out Esmail's sleek yet bleak world. The aforementioned hip-hop artist is an absolute delight. Recently, I wrote about FX's Legion and the ways in which that Marvel series pushed the envelope with what can be done on basic cable. Esmail did the exact same thing with Mr. Robot (on the USA Network, no less) by infusing style elements into the city streets and cold buildings, reminiscent of the aesthetic the Wachowskis brought to The Matrix. Elliot (go with me here) can even be viewed as a Neo but without all the supernatural sci-fi minutiae that came with that story. As kooky and bizarre as things get, Esmail manages to keep things grounded and believable. His attention to authenticity, like using real Linux code every time Elliot is seen typing on-screen, is on point. I said earlier that this was a TV show about the internet and, really, it's probably the most accurate-feeling representation of the dark web subculture I have ever seen on television. A hacker series winning Emmy awards? Yes, that happened. Yet, Mr. Robot was anything but mainstream, which, funnily enough, is what made it mainstream. Rami Malek won an Emmy for his performance as Elliot Alderson in hacker drama Mr. Robot. USA Network Even though things get pretty dark, Esmail came prepared. There is a surprising amount of humor threaded throughout the series that helps to offset the bleak nature of the show's looming dystopia. He uses pop culture nostalgia and disruptive production techniques to keep us on our toes. One specific episode featured a reality-altering flashback, curious visuals and an iconic '80s sitcom alien that made me sit up and yell at the television like Leonardo DiCaprio in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. It's been a decade since the conspiracy thriller first hit the USA Network. It was a time before TikTok, misinformation, deep fakes and AI. Yet, through all these social media and technological advancements, the show holds up. In fact, the overarching themes like political corruption, corporate greed and untreated mental health issues, somehow make Mr. Robot even more relevant today. If I'm being honest, friend, I really can't think of anything I'd rather binge this Fourth of July holiday weekend.
Yahoo
16 hours ago
- Yahoo
Rob Reiner on the Making of His Almost-Didn't-Happen Comedy Classic ‘This Is Spinal Tap'
When Rob Reiner's directorial debut, 'This Is Spinal Tap,' opened in theaters in early 1984, it quickly became a cult classic beloved by music fans and cinephiles alike for its hilarious portrayal of the title band, a heavy metal group plagued by mishaps while on tour promoting its latest album. Told in a documentary style in which Reiner riffed on films like D.A. Pennebaker's 'Don't Look Back' and Martin Scorsese's 'The Last Waltz' to tell Spinal Tap's story, the film was incredibly influential, spawning a whole series of mockumentaries by 'Spinal Tap' band member Christopher Guest ('Waiting for Guffman,' 'Best in Show,' etc.) and television series like 'The Office' and 'Parks and Recreation.' Yet, when Reiner tried to raise money for the movie, no one was interested — even after he shot a 20-minute reel of scenes to demonstrate what he was going for. 'We went to every single studio and got turned down everywhere,' Reiner told IndieWire's Filmmaker Toolkit podcast. 'Nobody wanted it. We went from studio to studio with a 16mm film can under our arms.' More from IndieWire Michael Madsen Remembered by Harvey Keitel, Virginia Madsen, Vivica A. Fox, and More: Late Actor Was a 'Poet Disguised as an Outlaw' Onscreen and Off Ringo Starr Helped Rewrite Scenes for the Beatles Biopics: I 'Would Never Do That' It didn't help that Reiner was known as a TV sitcom actor, thanks to his role as 'Meathead' on the hit comedy 'All in the Family.' 'In those days, there was a big division between movies and television,' Reiner said. 'Television people were peons, and the movie people were royalty. They looked down on us.' Luckily, Reiner got his footage to Avco-Embassy executive Lindsay Doran, who loved it and got studio head Frank Capra, Jr. to agree to distribute the film. Reiner thought he was home free, and then another obstacle sprang up. 'This was after a couple years, so I'm excited,' Reiner said. 'Then Jerry Perenchio and Norman Lear bought Avco-Embassy, and they decided to throw out everything they had in development — including 'This Is Spinal Tap.'' Reiner begged for a meeting with Perenchio and Lear, who he knew from 'All in the Family,' and passionately argued that 'This Is Spinal Tap' would be a big hit with young audiences. 'I heard that after the meeting Norman said, 'Who's gonna tell him he can't do this?' Because I was so passionate.' Reiner and the actors playing Spinal Tap — Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, and Harry Shearer — wrote an outline for the film but improvised all of the dialogue, and Reiner covered the action as though he were shooting a documentary, with minimal blocking and a vérité shooting style designed to catch behavior on the fly. 'We had a cameraman named Peter Smokler who had shot a lot of rock and roll documentaries,' Reiner said. 'He had a good instinct for where to go, and a lot of the time I would act like a human camera dolly, I would get behind him and physically move him.' For the film's concert scenes, Reiner had three cameras and he shot each song three times to give himself nine angles. While the concert footage primarily mimicked music documentaries like the Led Zeppelin film 'The Song Remains the Same,' the director also had fun recreating '50s and '60s TV shows for 'archival' performances from Spinal Tap's supposed early days as British Invasion rockers and psychedelic hippies. He says those moments came straight out of his own memories. 'I'm the first generation that grew up on television,' Reiner said. 'My father [legendary writer, director, and actor Carl Reiner] was on television before we owned a television. We got a television in 1951 and my dad started with Sid Caesar on 'Your Show of Shows' in 1949. From when I was four years old, I just watched television, so in my computer brain I knew what these shows all looked like, 'Hullabaloo' and 'Shindig' and Dick Clark.' Between the performances and the backstage material, Reiner found that he had a lot of footage by the time he got to the editing room. 'Oh, God, it was just like a documentary, where you have millions of feet of film,' Reiner said. His first cut was four hours long, and that didn't include three hours of interview footage — meaning that the initial version of 'Spinal Tap' ran somewhere around seven hours. Slowly but surely, Reiner and his editors whittled away at the movie to get it down to a tight 84 minutes. Reiner found himself rewriting the movie in the editing room by creating an audio track that had all the best jokes and then cutting the image to match. 'I learned from Bob Leighton, our film editor who I picked because he had done a ton of BBC documentaries, that when you put together a documentary the thing that jars you isn't cuts in the visuals, it's the dialogue,' Reiner said. 'If that doesn't match up, that'll be jarring. Sometimes I was on people was on people who were not talking and the best jokes came from off camera, but that's okay. As long as you can marry them together dialogue-wise you can be on whatever.' While sifting through the endless footage, Reiner found it was easy to lose perspective on whether or not the movie he was making was actually any good. 'You sit there and start to question, 'Is this funny?'' Reiner said. 'And then the first time you find out whether you were right or wrong is when you put it in front of an audience and then they'll tell you if it's funny or not.' In the case of 'Spinal Tap,' Reiner said it took a while for the film to find an audience because some people were confused about whether or not the movie was a comedy or an actual documentary — and some rock and rollers were insulted by what they saw as a mockery of their work. Over the years, however, both cinephiles and music fans — and many musicians, including Jimmy Page, U2's The Edge, and Metallica's Lars Ulrich — have embraced the film, and it's now returning to theaters in a fantastic looking and sounding 4K restoration. Reiner is also preparing a sequel for release this fall. 'It's finished and it's coming out September 12,' Reiner said, adding that although it's essentially in the same style as the original, there will be a few upgrades. 'It's a tiny bit slicker, because Marty Di Bergi [the director played by Reiner in the original] has seen all the reality television shows and all these four-part and six-part docs,' Reiner said. 'But I wanted to try to do it pretty much the way we did the first one.' The new 4K restoration of 'This Is Spinal Tap' will screen in theaters nationwide from July 5-7 via Fathom Events. To hear Rob Reiner's episode of Filmmaker Toolkit and other great filmmaker conversations, make sure you subscribe to the podcast on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform. Best of IndieWire The Best Lesbian Movies Ever Made, from 'D.E.B.S.' and 'Carol' to 'Bound' and 'Pariah' The Best Thrillers Streaming on Netflix in June, from 'Vertigo' and 'Rear Window' to 'Emily the Criminal' All 12 Wes Anderson Movies, Ranked, from 'Bottle Rocket' to 'The Phoenician Scheme'
Geek Tyrant
a day ago
- Geek Tyrant
Horror Icons Kane Hodder and Bill Moseley Team Up for Supernatural Slasher COVET — GeekTyrant
Two of horror's most recognizable faces are finally colliding in a new blood-soaked nightmare. Kane Hodder, the stuntman and actor who famously played Jason Voorhees in four Friday the 13th films, and Bill Moseley, the twisted face of The Devil's Rejects and Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 , are joining forces for a new horror-thriller titled Covet . The film comes from writer-director Brian McQuery, whose debut feature Plea starred horror royalty Heather Langenkamp. Covet is described as a supernatural whodunnit with a sinister twist: 'When a sleazy car salesman is framed for the murder of his mistress, he must prove his innocence — only to learn the forces responsible may not be human.' McQuery seems ready to tap deep into genre roots while playing to his stars' strengths. The director said: 'I'm thrilled to work with Kane in a role crafted to take advantage of both his intimidating presence and sense of humor. And I can not wait to see what Bill Moseley will do with his portrayal of Sheriff Troy.' Covet is being produced by Spyder Dobrofsky under his Worlds Apart banner. Dobrofsky has been steadily carving out a space in indie horror, having recently produced The Weeping , featuring Doug Jones and Reggie Lee, and directed Down Below , starring Eric Roberts and Bai Ling. Dobrofsky is clearly banking on horror fan fervor with this cast: 'Icons Kane Hodder and Bill Moseley sharing the screen together, with Brian's wildly original script, is exactly the type of horror we've been looking for at Worlds Apart. 'We couldn't be more excited to bring Brian's vision to life, and give the horror audience the chills, scares, and nostalgia they love so much.' Both Hodder and Moseley come with serious slasher legacy credentials. Beyond his Friday the 13th legacy, Hodder terrified audiences as Victor Crowley in the Hatchet franchise. Moseley, meanwhile, remains a fan-favorite for his absolutely unhinged turns as Chop Top in Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 and Otis Driftwood in Rob Zombie's film universe. They most recently starred together in the horror film Hayride To Hell . Source: Variety
