In a recent interview with Pretentious Film Majors, Arrested Development showrunner and executive producer Mitchell Hurwitz claimed he's working on a new edit of the show’s fourth season that would put its events in chronological order. And why not?

The season is already the pioneer of revivalist television, so it makes sense to go ahead and also make it the first season of television to ever be re-edited and released again. Plus, with the fourth season being the first act in an eventual three-act story, a re-release is a good way to get the show back on the radar and persuade executives to green light the next chapter.

But for fans, there’s one very important question: Does this undertaking have any value beyond being a gimmick?

Last year, redditor morphinapg somehow managed to re-cut the entire season in chronological order and post the result online within a week of its premiere on Netflix. I remember the fan edit making the rounds at the time, but I didn’t watch it and it’s likely not many other people did either. Those who loved the new season had just finished binge-watching it, and people who hated it probably weren’t going to bother pirating a different version. In light of this news from Hurwitz, however, and with a year gone since I’d last watched the season, I decided to seek morphinapg’s version out to see if the “chronological” edit held any water as a decent approach to the season’s arc.

Obviously, the fan edit has some flaws: The voiceover doesn’t always transition properly from scene to scene, and there are credits rolling in the middle of the episodes. Despite grouping episodes by storylines, they tend to just start, ramble on for about 40 minutes, and end. But something  dawned on me while watching this Frankenstein’s monster of a season: It works really well. So well, in fact, that I wondered if it had originally been written this way all along.

Turns out that's not the case. When Hurwitz conceived the fourth season, the format was essentially the same as what was ultimately executed: Each episode would follow a different character. Originally, there would be nine episodes around 20 minutes a piece; it wasn’t until the press started reporting on the deal with Netflix that he decided the season needed to be much longer to appease expectations, which resulted in 15 episodes that were 30-40 minutes long. When the length changed, maybe the format should have as well.

Looking at morphinapg’s edit, something becomes apparent about what makes the world of Arrested Development work, especially in longer episodes: Every episode needs every character. Ideally, it’s best to have these characters in the same locations as much as possible, but if scheduling prevents that, it also works to just give them equal screen time. Even if the characters are scattered across the globe, it’s far better to hop between their stories than spend an entire 45 minutes with Buster or Gob. As amazing as every character is, the sum of them is certainly greater than their parts. While Hurwitz compensated for the inability to have the whole cast together in an utterly genius way, it turns out that it may actually have been unnecessary to do so.

By the end of morphinapg’s cut, I liked it so much more that I’d actually recommend it to people watching the show for the first time, if it weren’t for the fact that Hurwitz is releasing a polished version that’ll be working from raw footage. The Cinco de Cuatro celebration is an epic ending for the season, and works far better chronologically than it previously did, as do other rare moments in which the cast comes together, such as the penthouse scene and the convention center piece with the "Love bomb."

Perhaps most importantly, the chronological order gives viewers perspective going into the next chapter of the story. For a season that was always meant as a first act, it’s important to have a clear grasp of where the characters stand at the end of it. Honestly, as much as I loved the ambition of season four’s original cut, I can’t imagine myself watching it again after the new one is released. If a rough fan edit put together in a week turned out this good, I can’t imagine how amazing a chronological cut with Hurwitz’s personal stamp of approval will turn out.

It’s an interesting situation: A fan edit started a dialogue with the original creator that ultimately resulted in a new release of material. Kabir Akhtar, the lead editor on season four, stated in an AMA a year ago that he planned on checking morphinapg’s edit out. Evidently he or Hurwitz did, and it’s ended up changing the course of history for what’s maybe the most underrated season of television ever released. 

This re-edit could ultimately save the show’s future, and Hurwitz deserves some major credit for reconsidering the format, especially after the painstaking efforts he went through to arrive at the format released a year ago. At the very least, it’ll result in me watching the whole season in a span of two days for the third time. 

Screengrab via Netflix/YouTube 

Over the weekend, Lena Dunham fell into a "rage spiral" addressing allegations of sexual abuse. 

In a piece from Oct. 29, National Review columnist Kevin D. Williamson reviewed Dunham’s new memoir, Not That Kind of Girl. He wastes no time ripping the Girls star’s life of “pathetic privilege” apart, and further into the critique, he calls Dunham’s parents child abusers. Then he calls Dunham herself one, in response to a passage in which she recounts experimenting with her younger sister, Grace, as a child:

Dunham writes of casually masturbating while in bed next to her younger sister, of bribing her with “three pieces of candy if I could kiss her on the lips for five seconds . . . anything a sexual predator might do to woo a small suburban girl I was trying.”

Another conservative site, Truth Revolt, singled out Dunham’s “sexual predator” quote and led with that. The full passage was posted on Twitter as well.

Here’s the Lena Dunham “sexual predator” joke, in case yall thought it was made up. pic.twitter.com/XmMUQD1OuK

— Dianna E Anderson (@diannaeanderson) November 1, 2014

Dunham responded on Saturday with a series of tweets.

The right wing news story that I molested my little sister isn't just LOL- it's really fucking upsetting and disgusting.

— Lena Dunham (@lenadunham) November 1, 2014

And by the way, if you were a little kid and never looked at another little kid's vagina, well, congrats to you.

— Lena Dunham (@lenadunham) November 1, 2014

Usually this is stuff I can ignore but don't demean sufferers, don't twist my words, back the fuck up bros.

— Lena Dunham (@lenadunham) November 1, 2014

I told a story about being a weird 7 year old. I bet you have some too, old men, that I'd rather not hear. And yes, this is a rage spiral.

— Lena Dunham (@lenadunham) November 1, 2014

As of yesterday, Dunham cancelled two European dates on her book tour.

Lena Dunham cancelled her book tour? Guess being a sexual predator doesn't resonate well with the generation she's supposed to speak for.

— Yung Mullah Baby (@Tazabelle_) November 3, 2014

The hashtag #DropDunham is also circulating on Twitter, urging Planned Parenthood to drop her as a partner. 

Photo via Fortune Live Media/Flickr (CC BY ND 2.0)

In the Jewish tradition, there’s nothing that says “I am becoming a Jewish man” more than having Iggy Azalea perform at your bar mitzvah. (Seriously, check it out. It’s in the Haftorah.) But the only thing that’s even more of a mitzvah than that? Getting a glimpse at (what might be) the Aussie rapper’s downstairs crotchal area.

That’s what a bunch of very, very lucky 12- and 13-year-old boys learned last weekend, when Iggy Azalea’s pants reportedly split open while she was twerking during a Very Special Bar Mitzvah performance.

(For the record, according to a college hip-hop act booking directory, Iggy’s appearance fee is approximately $75,000 to $100,000. No word on whether her clothed/unclothed ladybits command a separate appearance fee. But still, unless Iggy Azalea is an ordained rabbi/cantor who can also perform the actual bar mitzvah ceremony, that's a lot of shekels to entertain at a 13-year-old's birthday party.)

Uproxx claims that the Aussie rapper “‘forgot’ to wear underwear,” thus providing Jewish tweens and their horrified grandparents with an unexpected peek at her “down under.” While it’s clearly a serious wardrobe malfunction, we should probably state for the journalistic record that it’s unclear from the video whether she actually flashed her vagina, and/or if it was clothed/unclothed. She could have been wearing a thong. You be the judge.

H/T Baller Alert via Uproxx | Photo by Laura Murray/Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

It’s called content marketing, and AOL is on board with all hands on deck.

Courtesy of a partnership between AOL, Carnival Cruise Lines, and actor/comedian George Lopez, we are presented withLaughs on Deck, a series heavy on commercial presence and light on memorable content.

Lopez goes on board an assortment of cruises and takes on some unfamiliar jobs, including that of a sushi chef, recreation director, and line cook for the ship’s burger joint. Unlike the more serious reality shows where a company executive goes in disguise to unearth issues at his or her company, Laughs on Deck is played strictly for humor. In the segment where George takes a turn making California rolls, the guests immediately recognize him, which makes the show’s premise somewhat lame. The dialogue is a tad too cornball, too, and it's loaded with not-so-subtle shots of smiling cruisers having the time of their lives. If Lopez’s antics inspire you to book a stateroom for your next vacation, fear not, just click above to video window to set sail to Hawaii.

Content marketing, which has around for decades in some form, can loosely be defined as brands (cruise lines, smartphone manufacturers, car dealers) using advertorials, images, videos, and all sorts of “content” to connect with consumers. It’s about merging captivating media with clever messaging to encourage purchases or improve a brand’s status among eager shoppers. 

AOL is smart to ride the wave of content marketing mania not only with Laughs on Deck, but with Breaking Boundaries featuring actor Andrew McCarthy and a new series starring Kevin Nealon called Laugh Lessons. How long this trend of sponsored video lasts is a question only those who spend millions on marketing can answer for sure. In the meantime, AOL hopes to take full advantage of this current advertiser-friendly phenomenon.

Viewers can find all episodes of Laughs on Deck on AOL's website.

Screengrab via AOL Originals 

On September 11, 2012, four people, including U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens, died in an attack on the U.S. embassy in Benghazi, Lybia. Two years later, and the political reverberations of this tragedy are still being felt in Washington, D.C.'s corridors of power.

Now, Hollywood is looking to turn the #Benghazi horibleness into a movie. Sigh.

Given the topic, the movie could end up taking a litany of different routes depending on the director. Kathryn Bigelow could turn it into a tense thriller about desperate Americans trapped behind enemy lines, as events on the ground quickly spiral out of control. Jay Roach could turn the political circus that followed the attacks into a cutting inside-the-beltway satire. Steven Soderbergh could use Benghazi as a focal point to weave a tapestry about the chaotic unintended consequences of the Arab Spring.

Or, the guy who directed the Transformers movies could use it as an excuse to make a ton of badass explosions while whispering "boom" and giggling to himself.

Yes, Michael Bay, the blockbuster director best know for creating a multi-billion dollar series of toy commercials that only occasionally slowed down and made enough sense to be horribly racist, is in talks to direct an adaption of 13 Hours, author Mitchell Zuckoff's book about the incident, the Hollywood Reporter reports.

Paramount Studios acquired the rights to 13 Hours in February, well before its release.

Zuckoff's book, which came out in September, was complied from in-depth interviews with five Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) contractors present during the attack. The book largely focuses on what happened during the fighting in Lybia—not Republicans' attempts to use the deaths to tarnish the reputation of Hillary Clinton's tenure as Secretary of State in anticipation of her presumptive 2016 presidential run.

Bay's most recent film, Transformers: Age of Extinction, was a massive worldwide hit. Through a strategy of peppering the film with Chinese stars, incorporating product placement with Chinese brands and story elements that showed the Chinese government as powerful and resolute in contrast to the dithering of Western leaders, the fourth film in the Transformers franchise became the highest-grossing flick in Chinese history.

The Benghazi film wouldn't be the first time Bay has made a movie about someone's real-life experience. Bay's 2013 black comedy Pain & Gain was adapted from a series of news articles about a group of bodybuilders who kidnapped and tortured a South American businessman. So there's that.

Photo by Tech Sgt. Larry A. Simmons/Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

There’s at least one place on the Internet you can’t shake it off to Taylor Swift anymore.

Music lovers initially noticed that they couldn’t stream 1989 on Spotify after it was released last week, but now they can no longer listen to any of Swift’s albums on Spotify. A Spotify spokesperson confirmed to Business Insider that she has removed all of her older albums from the service.

Swift, who held out releasing Red to Spotify in 2012 but later changed her mind, wrote about the future of the music industry in July and hoped that artists did not “underestimate themselves or undervalue their art.” Last year, Spotify revealed that artists earn $0.007 per stream, which is far less than Swift would earn on a service like iTunes.

Spotify, for its part, is trying to win Swift back. First, the streaming service tried to guilt her by revealing that more than 16 million people listened to her music in the past month on more 19 million playlists—millions who will no longer be able to listen to her music.

“We hope she’ll change her mind and join us in building a new music economy that works for everyone,” the Spotify team said. “We believe fans should be able to listen to music wherever and whenever they want, and that artists have an absolute right to be paid for their work and protected from piracy. That’s why we pay nearly 70% of our revenue back to the music community.”

Spotify then did what any heartbroken streaming service did: It made a couple of slightly creepy playlists especially for her: “Come back, Taylor!” and “What To Play When Taylor Is Away.”

We were young when we first saw you but now there’s 40MM who say stay, stay, stay. It’s a love story baby #justsayyespic.twitter.com/n6tHkG8GCq

— Spotify (@Spotify) November 3, 2014

1989 doesn’t appear to be available on streaming services yet, but you can still listen to her earlier albums on rival streaming service Rdio.

Time to switch to Rdio everyone. pic.twitter.com/ALlxkKviQV

— Steve Kovach (@stevekovach) November 3, 2014

Swift, meanwhile, doesn’t seem to be hurting for streams and is set to have the biggest sales week since 2002, with more than 1.3 million copies of 1989 sold. Haters gonna hate hate hate hate hate.

Photo via Jana Zills/Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

Take a look at the “Popular Now” page of Vine, and you’ll find any number of vaguely teenage boys shouting, pranking, and getting millions of clicks. Vine is populated by guys with names like Nash Grier, Cameron Dallas, and Cody Johns, names so inoffensive they’re actually kind of offensive. You have to wonder if they came from some sort of... Vine stars name generator.

And perhaps they did. Created by Leon Chang, the generator pumps out names like Korey Tane, Pierson Benham, and Zane Plape with one click. You could also probably get a good band name out of it (Mikey Girls, Lil Blort, Gobungo Gungle).

“Half of the names are real (Cody Newkirk), half are made up,” Chang told the Daily Dot. He says he and friends started making fun of teen bro Vine after tweets like this:

@robwhismanpic.twitter.com/iSq3xKxKYf

— leon (@leyawn) March 18, 2014

Which was a spoof on posters for real tours like this:

these keep getting funnier pic.twitter.com/7AEkQRymaF

— rob whisman (@robwhisman) October 28, 2014

While Chang is playing on the interchangeability of their names and personalities (many of the names are men's, but there are women’s names in the generator as well), he points out the content that lands many of these stars lucrative brand endorsements and spots on million-dollar tours is often pretty toxic: “Most Vine teens are six seconds of low-hanging racist and sexist jokes.”

Indeed, stars like Nash Grier have been called out for their sexist and homophobic behavior. Curtis Lepore was accused of rape last year, but took a plea deal in February. He was recently dropped from Rainn Wilson’s new show about Vine, but Grier just picked up an Aeropostale partnership, which people were not happy about.

And yet, these interchangeable personalities and swoopy haircuts continue to multiply, like when you get a Gremlin wet. Is Landon Blabey real? It's hard to tell anymore. 

“The real names are already absurd,” Chang said. “Those are real names. The rapper Kittavelli confirmed, for example, that she knew Wellington Boyce in high school. Like, that is an actual name that someone wrote on a birth certificate.

H/T AV Club | Illustration by Jason Reed

There's only one way to react to Ultra Rich Asian Girls and it's as predictable, vapid, and boring as the stars of the show. Well, almost.

I've never been one of those people who orchestrate feelings of intellectual superiority when it comes to reality programs featuring the rich and beautiful. "They've got every advantage in the world," these people tell themselves, "And yet they still come across as idiots. How stupid must they be!?"

It's all jealousy, of course. There is little more galling than when someone has simply everything that you don't. Jessica Simpson, Paris Hilton, Kim Kardashian: Not only are they more attractive than we are, but they've also spun that natural advantage into enviable levels of wealth. And that's nothing to sneeze at. There are many beautiful people but only a few who can demand $2.7 million to be terrible at something.

But just as we shouldn't easily dismiss the achievements of certain breakout stars, on the flipside, just because a cast is rich and beautiful does not, on its own, good television make. And in Ultra Rich Asian Girls, a Canadian webseries that has found its way onto YouTube, we are presented with 13-minute episodes of exhaustingly glib and uncharismatic ammunition to those reality naysayers.

The success of any reality television show is down entirely to casting—say what you like about Hilton but she always knew her way around a catchphrase—and editing (see: America’s Next Top Model’s unflattering sound effects); both of which are terrible here. The girls have barely met each other before so there are bound to be lulls in conversation but must we linger over every conversational dead-end? This, coupled with an odd sound palate and clunkily-constructed reaction shots mean that our “rich Asians” have tons of ground to make up.

And that's before we even consider our "stars.” They are horrible. "If I'm beef, I'm wagyu," begins one of the girls in her attempt to be both boastful and poetic, by comparing herself to meat that is genetically predisposed to intense fat marbling. "We are not limiting ourselves with other people's standards and we look amazing while doing it," says Flo.Z, as she drinks wine through a straw. "My goal is to depend on my strength," elusively remarks CocoParis, who named herself after a rabbit in a book. Later, in the episode's high point, she is unable to open a bottle.

There's no denying that there is a certain, morbid satisfaction from watching these people. They are comfortingly average and the waves of jealousy one may expect to arrive after you read the title of the program are never allowed to intrude; blocked time and time again by the lack of enjoyment they are having. It may well be that it has something to do with how the girls live somewhat culturally vacuum-packed lives, and that this is isolating for the viewer. The show apparently takes place in Canada, but really could be anywhere; the girls mostly talk Mandarin to each other and only seem to frequent places where their language is accommodated.

Frankly though, I'm starting to make this sound more interesting than it is. It is tremendously boring and is simply a chore to watch. It is a case where the naysayers of the format have it right—the stars of Ultra Rich Asian Girls are idiots.

Screengrab via HBICTV/YouTube

Rob Riggle may embody the guy’s guy everyman, but he’s asking for men everywhere to graduate from sweatpants and fast food, and “gentleman up” for a good cause.

Riggle is featured in a humorous PSA where he calls out his slobbish alter-ego on his lack of gentleman bonafides and declares that “guys can do better.”

MadeMan, a men’s lifestyle site owned by DEFY Media, is behind the campaign. It asks men to improve their gentlemanly skills for a good cause. Riggle’s video encourages men to ditch the “casual Friday” outfits and don a suit on Nov. 7 for a #FormalFriday. It’s not just a fashion statement, however. Each selfie and video view equals dollars for CareerGear, a non-profit organization that aids men facing challenges as they prepare to re-enter the job market.

Riggle is also joined by Tom Lennon, whose The De-Evolution of Man series is also part of the #FormalFriday push.

Other DEFY Media staples like SMOSH, Sceen Junkies, Break.com, and Clevver will also take part in the campaign. November is a notoriously manly month on social media, with No Shave November (also known as Movember) encouraging guys to ditch the razors and raise awareness for testicular and prostate cancer. So if you see a lot of bearded, suit-wearing men on you social media feeds on Friday, know it’s all for good causes.

Screengrab via MadeMan/YouTube

TV host and New Girl actress Hannah Simone appeared on Conan on Monday night to chat about the intricacies on modern dating. Simone doled out advice for both men (compliments about women's cats aren’t sexy pick-up lines) and women (when in doubt, pretend you don’t speak English). Because she was talking about romance, Simone also addressed what she considered to be Tinder’s fatal flaw.

Simone's claim that “the whole concept of the app is broken” and that most of its users are looking for fundamentally different things is debateable, but at other times the actress is right on the money. She’s dished out relationship advice on Conan’s show before—namely that, if you are looking for a “shabangbang,” pubic hair art really isn’t cool, guys.

Screengrab via Team Coco/YouTube

Jesse Thorn is struggling. It’s a balmy October evening at the Masonic Lodge inside the Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Los Angeles, and Thorn is warming up the crowd for the live taping of his podcast turned public radio show Bullseye, an interview show that, in Thorn’s words, “aims to bring you the best in art and culture.” And it’s going, well, all right.

Thorn’s certainly comfortable onstage, and he cuts a striking figure: He’s tall, dressed tonight in a sharply tailored gray suit and polka dot necktie. But his warm-up bit—about whether mummies are scarier than burglars or airplane crashes—meanders, and it’s clear he’s no standup.

It’s when Thorn takes a seat behind the small wooden desk situated stage left that it becomes clear why he’s earned a reputation as one of the most charming, professional broadcasters in the business.

His first guest is Community creator Dan Harmon—there to promote the new documentary Harmontown—and Thorn’s not letting him off easy.

“Did you deserve the punch of getting fired from Community?”

“Do you think you got fired primarily because the show wasn’t getting watched?”

Thorn doesn’t tiptoe around Harmon’s past. He drills down almost immediately to what people really want to hear. Yet the forwardness doesn’t create an atmosphere of animosity. On the contrary, minutes later, Harmon’s waxing rhapsodic on the role sitcoms play in our lives—“The relationship you have with strangers might be closer than the one you’re supposed to have with your uncle”—and it’s likely Thorn’s frankness that inspired Harmon’s.

This isn’t to say that Thorn is combative. On Bullseye, Thorn doesn’t scan so much as a bulldog journalist determined to get the story as he does a classy golden age talk-show host, Dick Cavett for the iPhone set. What distinguishes his conversations, above all else, is thoughtfulness and research.

It’s those two qualities that have turned Bullseye from a scrappy college radio show into a show distributed by National Public Radio and carried by over 50 stations nationwide, with a stopover in the middle as a popular podcast.

•••

“I started doing radio in college not because I had always aspired to be a radio host, but because I found out how easy it was to get a radio show.” 

It’s two weeks before the show at Hollywood Forever, and we’re in the Bullseye offices near downtown LA. This afternoon, the ever-dapper Thorn has opted for a light blue chambray work shirt with a seashell pattern.

The office is clean and charming, but Spartan. It will become clear that Bullseye, despite its devoted following, doesn’t have This American Life money to throw around.

The son of a culture studies professor and an organizer in the Peace Movement, Thorn grew up listening to hip-hop in inner city San Francisco. He majored in American Studies at the University of California at Santa Cruz, which is where Bullseye began its life as The Sound of Young America, a subtly winking title that Thorn admits was easily misinterpreted. “If I’d known that this thing that I was naming when I was 19 was gonna turn out to be my career, I would’ve given it more careful thought. [People] would think it was either a Nazi Youth-type thing, or it was about young people starting businesses.”

Thorn and his then-cohosts Gene O’Neill and Jordan Morris—Morris is still an active participant in Thorn’s podcast network Maximum Fun—envisioned the show as more of a variety hour, rather than the pop culture Fresh Air that it’s become.

“We only sort of stumbled into interviewing when we realized how much work it was to put together an hour’s worth of actual material every week when we were all full-time students and had jobs and stuff,” Thorn says with a laugh. Even in the early days, the show managed to net impressive guests: gonzo comedy duo Tim and Eric, Colin Meloy of the Decemberists, Bridesmaids director Paul Feig.

Thorn continued to host the show even after he had graduated and was living in San Francisco working as a receptionist for an environmental nonprofit. He describes driving an hour and a half from San Francisco to Santa Cruz to do the show with characteristic frankness: “It’s a funny thing, college radio. It’s even funnier when you’re a grownup and you’ve graduated from college and you’re still doing it, which is the pathetic thing I did for three years.” All the while, Thorn was trying to no avail to land a radio job in San Francisco.

Nonetheless, his show continued to rise in stature, earning notices in the Wall Street Journal, Time, and Salon. “If you’ve never heard The Sound of Young America, then The Sound of Young America is the greatest radio show you’ve never heard,” Salon said tautologically in 2005.

Eventually, the rap sheet of good notices became too long to ignore. In 2006, New York’s WNYC decided to host Young America, and soon after, Public Radio International began distributing the show.

From there, the show—renamed Bullseye in 2012—began to attract bigger and bigger guests: Mel Brooks, Melissa McCarthy, Jeff Bridges, Dolly Parton, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus have all traveled to the Bullseye offices to record interviews. (A flattering 2008 write-up of Thorn’s marriage to lawyer Theresa Hossfeld in the New York Times also erroneously claimed that Thorn interviewed Jay Z. He merely interviewed someone about Jay Z.)

Thorn’s guests aren’t always high-profile—he recently had humorist David Rees on to talk about his book How to Sharpen Pencils—but Thorn brings the same level of diligence and commitment to every interview. Thorn manages to take their work seriously without coming across as an obsequious fanboy trying to artificially inflate the pedigree of his guests.

“The basis on which we book Bullseye is whose work do we think is the best. And for that reason, it’s very easy for me to be sincerely engaged in talking about their work, because the reason we book them is because we like their work.”

At the same time, Thorn’s managed to grow his podcast production company Maximum Fun into an impressive organization featuring over 20 shows covering everything from medicine to parenting to, of course, pop culture. And he’s done it not out of an opportunistic, LBJ-esque ambition, but out of pure enthusiasm: Thorn liked someone’s show, and he asked them to join his podcast network. Bullseye is supported by donations, and Thorn was determined that, if he were going to ask for peoples’ money, he wanted to offer more than just one show. (That same spirit motivated him to establish not one but two Maximum Fun conventions on both coasts, and MaxFunWeek, a weeklong event earlier this month with all the pageantry of a pledge drive and none of the begging for money.)

The recent success of both Bullseye and Maximum Fun as a whole—the network landed comedian John Hodgman as a host in 2010—has allowed Thorn to engage in what he calls “a little bit of affirmative action, so to speak.”

“I’m very proud that… we’ve grown the network with a really strong eye towards making it not just geeky white dudes,” who, he admits, tend to be the ones with the skills and proclivity to be podcast hosts. He points to the fact that while 10 percent of the top podcasts overall feature female hosts, “something like half of our shows are hosted [or cohosted] by women.”

Despite their successes, Bullseye and Maximum Fun remain very much a ragtag operation. “Our total budget is half of what a single host on another national show would get paid.” Late in our interview, Thorn admits that the show has so far failed to turn a profit. It’s actually Put This On, Thorn’s webseries about “dressing like a grownup,” that has emerged as a moneymaker.

The Bullseye offices reflect that struggle. It’s not the kind of sleek, upscale environ you might see on The Good Wife. Rather, it’s a large-ish loft space, located in Westlake, a lower-income neighborhood just west of downtown Los Angeles. Thorn may be blessed by a great view of nearby MacArthur Park, but he’s not quite a podcast mogul surveying his gleaming empire.

•••

Still, back at the live Bullseye taping, Thorn certainly comes off like a giant. Behind the desk, he comes across like Paul McCartney does behind a piano: He’s a commanding presence; he feels like he belongs there.

It’s later in the interview, and Thorn has managed to extract some truly gleaming insights from the probably insane but probably also a genius Harmon. After the master class in the semiotics of sitcoms that began earlier in the conversation, the discussion has digressed into the intimate relationship between podcasters and their listeners.

Harmon, as the host of the popular Harmontown podcast from which the documentary takes its name, can speak with some authority on this issue. “The connection is bigger than either of us,” Harmon says. “It’s like a religion. God is here in the room with us.”

The hushed reverence of the crowd indicates he’s not exaggerating all that much. In 2014, when we’re downright bombarded with choices of what to listen to, watch, and read, the host of a struggling podcast has managed to turn out a sold-out crowd to, essentially, watch him conduct a couple of interviews onstage. Sure, Thorn, always concerned with making sure his audience is having fun, brings two great comedians—Steve Agee and Andy Kindler—to entertain the crowd, and he wraps up the evening with a magnetic performance from folk singer Sara Watkins. But the crowd would’ve turned out no matter who Thorn invited. 

Because even if it hasn’t made him the modern-day David Letterman he strives to be, Jesse Thorn throws his heart and soul into Bullseye week in and week out. And we appreciate that.

After the show, I approach Thorn to say hi. “That went all right, didn’t it?” he asks somewhat sheepishly. Yeah, Jesse. We loved it.

Photo by Billy Youngblood | Illustration remix by Jason Reed

After Beyoncé’s attempt to pull another Beyoncé went awry, Beyoncé’s label simply confirmed that a new album is on the way.

Rumors of a new Beyoncé album started circulating over the weekend after a photo of a tracklist for a special edition of her self-titled album spread around Twitter. The list claimed that she was releasing the album exclusively to iTunes on Nov. 14 before releasing a physical copy on Nov. 25, similar to the move she pulled last December.

BEYONCÉ platinum edition track list. pic.twitter.com/KmlDjWDllg

— Beysus † Godga (@GagaLovesBey) November 1, 2014

The person behind the Twitter account later admitted that the tracklist was fake, but after some digging, people started discovering that listings of a four-disc platinum edition of Beyoncé, which has been rumored since early October, were up on European retailers such as Amazon U.K. and bol.com.

A major music distributor in Europe has confirmed that 'BEYONCÉ: Platinum Edition' is on track for release November 25th

— Beyoncé Australia (@BeyonceAUS) October 31, 2014

Three new songs—“Cherry,” “Donk,” and “Partition (Remix)”—were registered under Beyoncé’s name with ASCAP, which deals with musical copyright, which fueled rumors and speculation even further.

Screengrab via ASCAP

Her label eventually confirmed the existence of BEYONCE Platinum Edition Box Set, a two-CD/two-DVD release that will include the new songs “7/11” and “Ring Off” along with four new remixes. You’ll also get the original visual album of songs and music videos, a live DVD of the “Mrs. Carter Show World Tour,” photo booklets, and a 2015 Beyoncé calendar.

The album is set for a Nov. 24 release, which is consistent with Beyoncé collaborator Nicki Minaj pushing her new album, which was originally set to be released Nov. 24, back to December—which she did with the release of “Anaconda” for the “Flawless (Remix).”

Now that Beyoncé’s new album is no longer a surprise, we can all schedule our collective listening sessions accordingly instead of scrambling around frantically, like we all did last year.

Photo via nonu | photography/Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)

You've seen his work on your iPhone screen: the typewriter font against a stark gray background, the words dripping with sentimentality and signed "r.m. drake.” The best kind / of humans / are the ones who / stay, one of his shorter missives reads. It has more than 60,000 likes.

 

Retype #307 by Robert M. Drake #rmdrake I wrote this last year still hits home. Love you all so much.

A photo posted by R. M. Drake (@rmdrk) on

Jun 6, 2014 at 6:24pm PDT

With more than 685,000 followers on Instagram, close to 12,000 likes on Facebook, and roughly 14,000 followers on Twitter, R.M. Drake, or @rmdrke, may be one of the most successful poets working today—if not in terms of literary credentials and respect in Brooklyn, certainly in terms of reach.

 

#527 by Robert M. Drake #rmdrake @rmdrk Beautiful chaos is now available through my etsy (the link in on my bio) ships world wide.

A photo posted by R. M. Drake (@rmdrk) on

Sep 9, 2014 at 6:27pm PDT

It’s not surprising that there is someone out there, making pictures out of little sayings, posting them on the Internet and getting a lot of clicks. Anyone scrolling social media on the regular will tell you that. What’s unusual is the ardency expressed in the comments on his accounts. Notes like “Wow. It’s like he knows me,” and “I.LOVE.THIS” appear regularly under his updates. His evocative (if at times overwrought) pieces set his presence apart from similar “quote” pages.

It is also no small feat that he’s sold a ton of actual, paper books.

Since he began his account this time last year, he’s put out three self-published collections, and this summer, the most recent one, Beautiful Chaos, landed in the top 20 best-selling poetry books on Amazon. Right now Edgar Allen Poe’s Complete Tales is No. 1; R.M. Drake’s is No. 6.

Google him, though, and you’ll see that for someone who’s arguably pretty public, there are very few photos, and virtually zero life updates, thoughts or other normal social media ephemera on his accounts. Certainly no one in the press has featured him.

So who is this guy?

 

#276 by Robert M. Drake #rmdrake @rmdrk Excerpt from a bigger piece.

A photo posted by R. M. Drake (@rmdrk) on

Jul 7, 2014 at 6:37pm PDT

“R.M. Drake” is actually the nom de plume of 32-year-old Robert Macias. He’s the son of Colombian immigrants, a lifelong Miami resident. Macias took on the surname “Drake” in middle school (way before Drake the rapper was around, he’s quick to add). 

“My close friends call me Bobby, and when I was younger I was really into breakdancing,” he explained to me over the phone. “It just happened one day my buddy was like, ‘We should call you Bobby Drake, like Iceman.’ And it stuck.” In art school at FIU, he began signing paintings and experimental videos as R.M. Drake.

Drake is talkative, nervously at first. He chats a mile a minute in a soft Spanish accent. At one point in our conversation he let a “pero…” slip as he explained his process: He carefully edits each piece on Word, before typing it up on handmade paper with a 1940s Royal typewriter he bought at an antique shop in Miami. He photographs each poem and then, finally, Instagrams it.

 

#441 By Robert M. Drake #rmdrake

A photo posted by R. M. Drake (@rmdrk) on

Jun 6, 2014 at 6:23pm PDT

The dearth of personal detail online is purposeful. He was a lonely kid, he says, which is at least partly why he turned to creative pursuits. He very much prefers the shadows to the spotlight. “I like to be detached,” he told me. “I get a lot of social anxiety. Even doing this interview is a big deal for me because I’ve turned down so many.

“People do say to me, ‘I want to know more about you,’ but in a way what I’m doing is actually way more personal,” he added. “I’m sharing my thoughts and my feelings, versus you sharing your margarita.”

He is currently seeing someone, but the “she” he so often references is just a persona. “She is me. It’s just a reflection of myself that I developed, maybe because in those posts I’m afraid to express myself fully.”

 

#544 by Robert M. Drake #rmdrake @rmdrk Beautiful chaos is now available through my etsy. The link can be found in my bio.

A photo posted by R. M. Drake (@rmdrk) on

Oct 10, 2014 at 4:10pm PDT

Often the “stories,” as he calls them, are snippets of longer pieces or excerpts from one of the two novels he’s currently working on. “I would never consider these poems. I am not a poet. To be honest, I do not know what to call these but they are part of a greater picture,” he explains, adding that their brevity is more of a reflection of the world we live in than anything else. “People live their lives very quickly. They don’t have time to read or do anything that takes time.”

Thanks to the success of Beautiful Chaos, plus all the posters and prints he’s moved via Etsy, he’s been able to quit his job as an art director at Univision. Now he spends his days filling orders and writing. “Just writing all the time,” he said. “I write on my phone, just wherever I am.”

I asked Macias what he’s trying to accomplish with this whole thing, what he really wants people to understand about him and his work. “I guess what I’m doing is I’m trying to discover the connection between all of us,” he said. “It’s like, yes, we all have social media. We do share our lives, but how much do we really understand about each other? I just want people to know, like, I get you.”

Photo via xlibber/Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

Want to see your child’s true colors? Tell him you ate all of his Halloween candy.

Jimmy Kimmel pulls off this tireless trick every year as he recruits parents all over the country to tell a simple fib to their children, and every year it gets funnier and funnier. For the fourth year in a row, Kimmel asked his audience to send in their videos, and he featured some of the best submissions for our amusement. We can only wonder what kinds of scenes didn’t make the cut.

No drawer is left closed, no chair left standing. Screeching levels are at their highest and the tears could sink a boat. Halloween might not be the best time to discover that one of your children has the mouth of a sailor.

We may be as sadistic as Kimmel while we're laughing at these videos, but we’re secretly glad that our parents didn’t pull off something like this when we were trick-or-treating.

Screengrab via Jimmy Kimmel Live/YouTube

This article contains graphic content that may be NSFW.

If you’ve ever refrained from fast-forwarding to the main action and actually sat and watched the cringe-worthy introductory scenes to pornos, you know that porn and comedy are a natural fit. Yet while a handful of adult performers have crossed over into mainstream dramatic films, to varying degrees of success, few have actually ventured into the cutthroat world of standup comedy.

Former adult performer Alia Janine is one of the brave few. A former MILF performer who starred in 150-odd films with such inherently LOL-worthy titles as Big Dick Gloryholes and Your Mom Tossed My Salad 4, the 36-year-old Janine was in porn for only a few years before retiring to start her own podcast, the Scatterbrains Podcast, and to take sketch-writing and standup classes in New York City. Starting Nov. 5, she’ll be hosting her own  comedy showcase at the Cutting Room, a nightclub in midtown Manhattan.

Janine’s material is not for everyone: It shouldn’t come as any surprise that her set is fairly blue, and she’s politically incorrect, to say the least. (During our conversation, she’s intensely critical of gun control, and she referred to having intercourse with little people as “f**king midgets” on more than one occasion.) But the Daily Dot was curious as to how the cutthroat, boys-only world of standup compares to Porn Valley. So we got in touch with Janine to talk standup, her most awkward porn moment, and the funniest inside jokes in the porn industry. (FYI, enema companies: Your products should probably come with more explicit instruction manuals.)

___
 

So how’d you get into this? I’ve never heard of a porn star turned standup comic before.

Well, Ron Jeremy does a little standup. It’s never been anything super substantial, mostly he hosts roasts and stuff, but he holds his own. There’s a couple others. A performer named Alexa Aimes just started doing it, and Kurt Lockwood, and Evan Stone are the other two male performers that have done standup. But it’s mostly guys—I think I’m the only girl.

What attracted you to standup in the first place?

I used to work at a strip club that was above a comedy club, so I would go see shows all the time out there. There was a woman there who also worked as a feature dancer and she was known as the Naked Comedian. And I was like, she was putting together two of my favorite things, dancing and comedy. So I wanted to see if I could do those things as well. This was about 2009, which is when I started doing porn as well, and when I moved to Los Angeles I hired a publicist and she got me standup and my own radio show. But it was only when I started thinking about retiring that I started writing more and doing these little sketches and jokes.

What prompted you to leave the industry [she left in 2013]?

I was sick of it, to be honest. The market’s getting oversaturated with a bunch of other girls. Everyone’s trying to be a huge porn star and that’s just not gonna happen when there’s so many girls in the industry. And also the condom initiative—I don’t like people telling me what to do, especially with my own body. Then it was just time for me to move on. I was 35 [when I left.] I know there are other performers that sustain their careers as they get older, but I didn’t want to do that. I only have so much time before gravity starts taking hold.

You entered the industry when you were in your early thirties. That’s got to be a major disadvantage when most of the other girls are coming up at 18.

Oh, without a doubt. I was automatically in the MILF category without having any kids. I thought that was hilarious. And you’d be surprised—there are a lot of MILF performers out there, and only so many MILF roles. I didn’t like being categorized.

You started taking classes at UCB last year. How does doing standup compare to the experience of having sex in front of a camera crew?

Doing standup is much more terrifying, I’d say, mostly because I haven’t done it as much as I’ve had sex or had sex on film. Standup is a lot harder, because when you’re on stage, you’re fully clothed and you’re just talking to people. You’re sharing your ideas, your thoughts, what you think is funny, what you think is important. And that’s a lot more nerve-wracking than giving a blowjob on film. Maybe it’s because I’ve given blowjobs on film that I feel that way, but it’s more of a mental kind of naked than having sex.

Having sex is a very animalistic thing. We do it all the time. We do it to survive. But we don’t need to stand up in front of people and tell jokes to survive. But once you start getting into a groove and you see how your audience reacts, there’s nothing like it. Getting people to laugh, it’s very addicting. Kinda like how doing porn was, for a little while.

Do you mostly tell jokes about porn and the industry?

I do have a couple, obviously. It would be really silly of me not to, especially because every comedian already has a joke about porn. A lot of my jokes are just crazy life stories that happened before I did porn. But a fair amount of [jokes] are about porn. Why would a porn star not have any jokes about porn? Like I have this Japanese rape scene bit…

Tell me about that.

I got hired by this company from Japan, and they hired girls for this particular scene, which was a rape scene. I’d have to get quote-unquote raped by a little Japanese man who was literally about 4’11,’’ maybe five feet. He came right up to my boob. This tiny little man who tapped me on the back and said, “I’m gonna rape you today!” (laughs). The only reason why I did it is because... I don’t like rape fetish, I don’t make rape jokes in my set, I don’t find that inappropriate... so they tied me up and then he had to act like he was raping me, but because I was so much bigger than him it was hard to feel like he was this big man who was breaking into the house and raping me. And the director was telling me to be scared and crying and stuff, but I was laughing hysterically during all of it. But apparently I was laughing so hard that it looked like I was crying, to the point where they had to stop the scene to ask if I was OK, which made me start laughing even more.

What else do you talk about in your act from your porn life?

I also have a joke that’s like the bucket list of all the guys I didn’t get to have sex with in porn. It’s like, “You know how people have the list of things they want to do before they die? Well, I have a Fuck-It List.”

Who’s on it?

A crossdresser, an Indian guy, and a midget (laughs). The crossdresser because your makeup sweats off during scenes, and you want to have someone to help you with it. The Indian guy because I’ve really been getting into Indian food lately, and I want to experience their whole culture. And the midget because I would be their personal jungle gym. One would be swinging from my titties, the other would be—like, my fantasy is to have a midget threesome (laughs).

How well does that joke usually go over?

Oh, it usually goes over pretty well. And then I have one where I talk about being asked all these crazy questions about different things in porn. Like, “Do all MILFs really have kids?”, “How many guys qualify as a gangbang?”, “What happens when a girl blinks her eyes during the pop shot?” Questions like that.

Do you think that porn stars are inherently funnier than most people, because of the stuff they go through on a daily basis?

Oh, I think you have to have a sense of humor to do porn. Otherwise, there’s no way you can do those first little snippets at the beginning of every scene. Like, the introductions. I did a scene called “Mother teaching daughter how to give a blow job,” where I have to basically tell this girl who’s supposed to be my daughter, “Don’t forget to cup the balls and stroke the shaft,” and I have to do this as her mother, and I have to do it with a straight face. I have to actually be very serious about it. And it turned out being a good scene, but it’s so hard not to laugh at the shit that comes out of your mouth. Like the teacher teaching the student, like, “Here’s one way you can get extra credit.” People don’t actually say that, ya know?

Are there inside jokes in the industry? Like, are there any jokes that are specific to porn people, that civilians wouldn’t get?

Oh, new girls not knowing how to use enemas (laughs).

I’m sorry?

New girls, when they enter the industry and they have to prepare for an anal scene, they usually have to give themselves an enema. But they don’t know what to do with the enema. There’s an instance where the girl drank the enema, and she couldn’t figure out why it tasted so bad and why it wasn’t working.

No way. Is this like an urban legend, or is this something that actually happened?

No, it actually happened! They don’t know. Some of them have had anal sex before, but they’ve never used an enema. They have no idea what a laxative is. Little jokes like that.

Standup is pretty much a boy’s club, and women comedians aren’t treated very well to begin with. Do you feel like other male standups or audiences are more hostile to you because you did porn?

I’ve never experienced any hostility because of that, but I know right away just from being a woman there’s definitely some hostility from some audiences, you can just tell. But I’m prepared for it. Just from being porn in general, it doesn’t matter what industry I’m going into, I’m going to get bombarded with questions or hated because of it or left out because of it. I’m always going to have that stigma.

Do you think being a porn star hurts or helps your career?

Every once in a while, I’ll get questions about it, but not that often. A lot of times, I’ll tell people I was in porn, and they had a hard time believing it, because I don’t look like a porn star. Besides, like, having huge tits (laughs). I’m from Milwaukee, and it’s a very conservative town, but I’ve never been turned down for a gig from doing porn there. And at the same time, I don’t think a club would be contacting me for gigs if they didn’t know what I’d done, in a way.

It seems like that’s what usually happens to people when they leave porn and start doing other things. Like, they’re hired because of their name recognition thanks to porn, but at the same time there’s still this stigma attached to porn that holds them back.

Oh, yeah, without a doubt. I got an email yesterday from a well-known president of a mainstream film company saying “I love your adult work and I just saw your standup,” and he wanted to talk to me about some gigs or whatever. I’ve gotten contacted a bunch of different times from the mainstream because of being in the adult industry. Sometimes it stands out, and other times it’s just creepy guys trying to get in your pants. It just happens all the time. I was an extra in the movie Her because some guy contacted me on Facebook and was like, “I’m an extras casting director, and I’ve seen your porn work, and I can do this for you.” Porn has opened a lot of doors for me.

Do you think there’ll ever be a point where you don’t have to introduce yourself as a porn star comedian, though? Where you’ll just be Alia Janine, the comedian?

That’s a good question. I’d like to think so. But it’s something I’ve always been very open about it. I was in porn. I don’t regret it and I’m not shameful of it. So if that’s what people know me as, then so be it. You need to embrace it, because there’s so many people who try to hide it or lie about it, but with the Internet, you really can’t hide from or lie about anything anymore. And I think the media’s tendency to sensationalize everything and put the blame on everything: Like Amanda Fluke [Alyssa Funke, the young woman who committed suicide after shooting an adult movie], she did one porn, and then she killed herself, and it was porn’s fault, completely leaving out the fact that she had years of mental health issues before that.

So no, I’m honest about it, although actually I used to lie about it. When I first moved to the city, I had a makeup artist job, and it was because I lied about doing porn and they found out about it that I got fired. They said if I was honest about it they would’ve kept me on, but I’m not really sure I buy that. There was this woman there, who really didn’t like me before she found out about the porn, so…

So is that why you’ve started being more honest about it, and incorporating it into your act?

Well, no. It’s because I slept with her son (laughs). And I have a joke in my act about that, too.

Photo via AliaJanine.com

Lorde’s musical past has already been partially excavated: You can hear recordings of her Fugazi-influenced high school band And They Were Masked on Bandcamp. But what was 12-year-old Lorde up to?

A 2009 recording of Lorde—then known as Ella Yelich O’Connor—covering Kings of Leon’s “Use Somebody” on Radio New Zealand has started circulating again. It’s a pretty striking cover, and a reminder that Lorde’s version is much more tolerable than Kings of Leon’s.

She also covers Pixie Lott’s “Mama Do,” which you can find here.

Oh yeah, at 12, Lorde was also covering Rainbow’s “Man on the Silver Mountain” for her school's battle of the bands and channeling Ronnie James Dio. No big deal.

H/T Time | Photo via Liliane Callegari/Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

BY BREE BROUWER

Netflix loves breaking entertainment industry standards, even its own. The streaming video-on-demand service will release the first five episodes of DreamWorks Animation’s (DWA) All Hail King Julien on December 19, 2014, with additional episodes released in 2015.

The staggered release differs from Netflix’s typical practice of producing original programming and debuting it all in one binge-watchable fell swoop. However, Netflix and DWA have noted animation takes longer to create, so subsequent release dates for new material is simply part of the equation. The two companies previously released Turbo FAST in the same manner.

Announced earlier this year, All Hail King Julien will center around the popular lemur from DWA’s Madagascar franchise, and feature the voice talents of Henry Winkler, Danny Jacobs, Andy Richter, Kevin Michael Richardson, and India de Beaufort. The series will be available to Netflix subscribers in most parts of the world covered by the agreement DWA and Netflix made last summer (with the exception of Germany, Austria, and Switzerland).

“All Hail King Julien is really a showcase for our talented artists to bring the Netflix audience the great storytelling, compelling characters and fantastic design that is the hallmark of DreamWorks Animation,” said Margie Cohn, head of TV for DreamWorks Animation, in the release.

In addition to the lemur-focused series, DWA will be creating ten new, exclusive series for Netflix by the end of 2016 (including one centered around Puss In Boots and another based on the Veggie Tales universe).

Internet-famous astronaut Chris Hadfield’s cover of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” from the International Space Station racked up more than 23 million views. Then, in May 2014, a one-year licensing issue forced the video offline.

On Facebook and Twitter, fans rallied around Hadfield and urged Bowie to reconsider the licensing deal, claiming it was a piece of history. Social media surges can often change tides, but the video ended up being taken down nonetheless.

Yesterday, Hadfield announced the clip was back on YouTube, with Bowie’s permission.

Bowie's back! Here's the story: http://t.co/ZHIpmTabAA

— Chris Hadfield (@Cmdr_Hadfield) November 3, 2014

In a post on his website, Hadfield recounted the saga of “Space Oddity," explaining that “David Bowie and his publisher had been very gracious. They had allowed his work, his intellectual property, to be made freely available to everyone for a year, and had in fact worked with us and the Canadian Space Agency to make it happen. There was no rancour, and we removed it from YouTube to honour that agreement.”

There was also the issue of how copyright applied to the International Space Station, which Hadfield says he anticipated. Thankfully, the video is now available for two years, so float on over to the cover Bowie himself called “possibly the most poignant version of the song ever created.”

H/T Gizmodo | Screengrab via Chris Hadfield/YouTube

Inception, Christopher Nolan's notorious mind-bending sci-fi/heist/fantasy/romance/thriller… thing… may have been one of the biggest films of 2010, but it's lived on primarily as a cultural in-joke to describe something that may be more complicated than it actually is. If you didn't get Inception (sorry, Troy) then you're free to be mocked, or at least lovingly teased in any number of the endless parodies of the film that have been released in its wake.

But what if you somehow missed the film's moment in the pop culture zeitgeist? What if you're one of the few who never saw it at all? Odds are that if that describes you, you're probably a mom who's too busy with mom things to worry about making sure you track Leonardo DiCaprio's dramatic progress toward winning an Oscar by playing men suffering from the loss of beautiful women who may or may not be deluding themselves.

The concept of a mom who knows nothing about Inception leads us to an interesting query: If you take away the hype, the pseudo-intellectual comparisons to Darren Aronofsky, the cult of Reddit fanboys, and the fangirls lurking in the corners writing Batman and Arthur/Eames fanfic, is a Nolan film still a Nolan film?

YouTuber Joe Nicolosi, better known by his channel name pixelspersecond, decided to find out. It's clear that Nicolosi, known for his creation of "sensible" horror films, has a sensible mom in his life. Last year he brought us The Matrix Retold by Mom, in which she hilariously recapped the plot of the 1999 cult classic. Now he's brought his mom onto the Nolan beat. How does Hollywood's golden film, which won four Academy Awards and was nominated for Best Picture, stack up against one mom's opinion?

Not too well, as it turns out. After summing it up as "tedious," Mom recasts poor Leo as Matt Damon. (No, Mom, that's the other bland likeable actor from The Departed with a tendency to play characters messed up by the deaths of their European soulmates.) Despite this flub, she gives a pretty accurate summary of all the events in the film, with a free lecture on NSA surveillance thrown in—until she suddenly throws a plot twist into the works by mentioniong "all the women" in the film.

There were more than two women in this film? On screen? At the same time? 

Maybe it's time to rewatch this film for the 18 billionth time to see what we missed.

Screengrab via YouTube

The Taylor Swift PR machine has been working overtime to make sure we’ve been thoroughly swabbed. Taylor Swift is everywhere and nowhere. Taylor Swift has always been here. Your next thought is Taylor Swift.

Sometimes you just have to slow down and take it all in. Specifically, a slowed-down, 19-minute version of Swift’s recent Jimmy Kimmel Live performance. YouTuber Mark Blackwell—who informs us this is, indeed, art—produced the most terrifying version of it, slowed down to one-fifth the speed. In this context, Swift’s hater-free pop anthem becomes a plodding, bleak spectacle that sounds almost as if the song is disintegrating. Will she… ever… shake it… off?

Between this, Taylor goat, and the Aphex Twin mashup, Swift is proving the perfect canvas for avant-garde experimentation. Someone introduce her to Merzbow, STAT. 

Warning: Side effects of ingesting Taylor Slow have been known to include night blindness, phantom limbs, and gluten allergies.

H/T AV Club | Photo via Eva Rinaldi/Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)