Brain waves for healing

Rod Wave is an unabashed romantic, deploying a voice that blends airy pop melodies, emo yelps and guttural country rap idioms. On his fourth album, Beautiful Mind, the 22-year-old St. Petersburg, Florida vocalist gushes about love in a way that seems unusual for someone so closely identified with rap. “I don’t wanna be alone…don’t leave me alone,” he pleads anxiously on “Leave Me Alone.” He’s a complicated man, teetering between career ambition, melancholy introspection, macho aggression, and heartbroken sensitivity. And while he carefully avoids suicidal ideation, he’s aware that life is relatively short. “They say I’m crazy, I’m bipolar, I need some damn help/Why say forever if we gon’ die by our damn self?” he sings on “Sweet Little Lies,” all but admitting that the promise of living happily ever after is a myth. Of course, sensitive trap crooners have circulated in mainstream rap for over a decade, and Rod Wave’s growing catalog could be compared to any number of acts, … [Read more...] about Rod Wave Wants To Convince Us He’s a Complicated Man On ‘Beautiful Mind’

Grant Morrison is, at the moment, on deadline for five comic-book scripts – three Batmans, two Supermans – plus the first draft of a screenplay about heroic dinosaurs fighting rapacious space aliens. But he won’t be getting to any of that today. On this bright early-summer afternoon in his native Glasgow, Morrison has some far more implausible stories to tell, and they might even be true. “This is the house that can’t be lit,” he says, striding into the green-walled, wood-floored living room of one of the four homes his lucrative comic-book career and intermittent screenwriting work afford him – this one a 130-year-old town house in a wealthy enclave known as “millionaire’s row.” “It swallows light. There was a séance in the backroom, and the place never recovered. We keep changing the bulbs, but they won’t turn on.” It’s not hard to imagine serious weirdness going down in this shadowy place, decorated as it is in a haute-bohemian Euro-creepy fashion that makes it look like the … [Read more...] about Grant Morrison: Psychedelic Superhero

EXCLUSIVE: North America is getting its latest free streaming service later this month. Mometu , which is marketing itself as a “hand curated” on-demand live streaming platform, will launch on August 19 and has secured free streaming rights to South Korean feature The Policeman’s Lineage . The service will launch with a slate of legacy films and TV series as Dragnet , Bonanza , Batman , Jackie Chan-starrer The 36 Crazy Fists , Apache Ross , documentary Blues on Beale , Sandra Bullock’s Hangmen , Herman Yau action-thriller Shock Wave 2 , Nollywood director Okey Ifeanyi’s Long Walk to Truth and The Gods , which Mykel Shannon Jenkins ( Paper Tigers ) directed, starred in and wrote. In September, it will add the exclusive AVoD premiere of Kyu-maan Lee’s crime thriller feature The Policeman’s Lineage , starring Woo-sik Choi ( Parasite ), Jin-woong Cho ( The Handmaiden ), Myeong-hoon Park ( Parasite ) and Hee-soon Park (Apple TV+’s Dr. … [Read more...] about Free Streamer Mometu To Launch In North America; Service Acquires AVoD Rights To Korean Crime Drama ‘The Policeman’s Lineage’

Farewell, Olivia Newton-John , the eternally beloved pop queen who died Monday at age 73 . No Seventies star had a weirder pop trajectory, going from the world’s favorite Australian country singer to a brazen Eighties black-leather New Wave diva in just a few years. But Olivia could do it all: weepy ballads like “I Honestly Love You,” country twang like “Let Me Be There,” Fifties pastiche in Grease. Disco show tunes with Gene Kelly and ELO in Xanadu. Heavy-breathing rock odes to sex like “Magic” and “Make a Move On Me.” These are all reasons why we loved Olivia Newton-John — we honestly loved her — and that’s why pop connoisseurs are mourning for her today. Olivia could hop from genre to genre, but she threw herself into every style with the same effervescent hyper-glitz enthusiasm, which is why she never sounded the least bit phony. Before fans invented the terminology of stars having “eras,” Olivia perfected the concept, because she hit every stop on the radio dial, from … [Read more...] about Farewell, Olivia Newton-John: Why We Honestly Loved Her

A review of this week’s Better Call Saul , “Waterworks,” coming up just as soon as I call this a fish taco, legally… “This guy? Any good?” —Jesse In a different world, Kim Wexler and Jesse Pinkman should have never met. She was a high-powered civil attorney working for two of Albuquerque’s most prestigious firms; he was Cap’n Cook. In this one, they are linked not only by the fact that she once defended Jesse’s friend Combo(*) in juvenile court, but by their associations with Saul Goodman — associations that eventually destroyed any semblance of the life they had once planned for themselves(**). (*) RIP, Combo. Gone and often forgotten among Jesse’s crew because he was killed so early in the series, while Badger and Skinny Pete made it to the end and beyond. (**) Yes, Walter White is ultimately far more to blame for Jesse’s travails. But without Saul pushing them to expand the operation, and eventually introducing them to Gus Fring, it is not hard to envision a … [Read more...] about ‘Better Call Saul’ Recap: Better Call Kim

Next year’s contract talks and a possible writers strike are looming large over the WGA West ’s ongoing board election, in which 17 candidates are vying for eight open seats. The WGA’s current contract doesn’t expire until May 1, but in their campaign statements, many of the candidates are making it clear that they’re prepared to strike if the guild can’t get a fair deal at the bargaining table. And there’s considerable pent-up demand for major gains, in no small part because in 2020, when the WGA’s previous contract was set to expire, contractual advances the guild had hoped to make became all but impossible to achieve because the threat of a strike was all but off the table as the industry was already shut down by the first wave of the Covid pandemic. Several candidates observed that the guild’s historic victory last year in reshaping the talent agency business – banning packaging fees and limiting agency ownership of production entities to 20% – also has … [Read more...] about WGA West Board Candidates Address Wide Range Of Issues Ahead Of Next Year’s Contract Talks And Possible Strike