The karaoke app turned YouTube network StarMaker is helping its users get a leg up in the music game with contests that help to turn homemade cover artists into polished professionals. Alex Hobbs is one such lucky winner, whose cover-song singing won him a prize courtesy of Keep Your Soul Records.

Hobbs won StarMaker’s contest to sing with performers Corey Gray and Alexi Blue, as well as a professional recording session and video shoot, which resulted in Hobbs covering Kygo’s hit “Stole the Show.”

Hobbs has a small 8,000-strong YouTube audience already listening to his covers, and those numbers will hopefully be bolstered by his appearance on Keep Your Soul’s larger channel.

Screengrab via Keep Your Soul Records/YouTube

The first rule of Singles Club is that everyone understands it’s a warped, hobbyist playground with a business model fit for 1969. It’s a subscription-based vinyl record service, with a digital music journal gluing its work to the Web. It hosts live events sometimes. It can throw the phrase “limited edition” around and mean it.

In other words, it’s the pure-blooded antithesis to startups that specialize in, say, adventurous app-making. Singles Club is not built to someday fund a loft office with cement floors and Ping-Pong tables—one where the wealth it gathers provides a hip façade even though the product itself is blandly calibrated.

It’s a passion project that serves as a home page for stubborn creatives that work during inconvenient, odd hours. Its two founders—Jeffrey Silverstein and Chris Muccioli, who met as networking musicians while attending Towson University—have day jobs. So do many of the artists that work with Singles Club.

But its sonic footprint and trusted taste signal a difficult-to-gauge intangible that works just fine for now.

“Jeffrey had written about Monster Rally a few times,” says Ted Feighan, known in music blogging circles as one-man band Monster Rally. He appreciated and respected the small operation. So, with the blessing of his distribution partners at Gold Robot, he reached out to Singles Club. “We’re record nerds and we loved the old-school vinyl subscription idea... I was really struck by the aesthetic of their whole thing. It’s so beautifully done.”

So much so that Feighan, a graphic designer by trade who is self-admittedly controlling about his music’s detailed branding, trusted the Singles Club guys to build their latest quarterly issue around him. Today marks the release of the fifth-such issue—an exhale-worthy benchmark for a niche enterprise.

The service began like you’d expect: “Ultimately, [Singles Club] stemmed from many conversations that Chris and I had as our music projects were coming to a close. We were looking for a way to continue to stretch our creative muscles, if you will… We wanted to work together in the music landscape but not necessarily [as] a magazine.”

The guys were in college and played indie rock. That carefree, scholarly youth withered, and the bands lost the time needed to exist. The men grew up and accepted that a steady income was central to their respective day-to-days. Singles Club sprang from that quarter-life dread that prompts one to fill a void. So the duo turned to their network and forged a channel with which to spotlight its favorite artists.

“The way that we continue to boil it down is a subscription-based record club and digital music journal published quarterly,” Silverstein says. “If you subscribe to Singles Club, you are receiving a limited-edition 7-inch record that is housed in a kinda custom 7-inch box, plus a Singles Club pin and a 45 adapter and some goodies.”

Every issue is a sweet and sour dish with a physical and a digital component. The latest Monster Rally release also includes a custom art print. Silverstein says each issue commissions 300 vinyl records.

Despite working with a Rolodex of traveling writers, Singles Club is a two-man operation that runs on the good will of the inner circle. Girlfriends help package and mail records, friends work an occasional merch booth. It’s a DIY assembly line that Feighan can relate to.

“It’s only me. I am just the guy,” Feighan says on the phone from his place in Los Angeles. Truth be told, I didn’t realize Monster Rally was just one guy, to say nothing of the bold auteur responsible for the album art that I think I’m on the phone with. For this project, the Cleveland-raised Feighan would send Silverstein emails with files to whittle down the right track. All of which were recorded in his home studio.

The operation is a tribute to the modern freelancer economy, one wherein isolated angst spawns standalone beauty and then you invest hours emailing online guardians. It’s often fruitless and a task that’s strong-armed into uncomfortable timestamps, but just the very act of tugging at the robe of controlling publishers is a welcome distraction to the things we do for money.

“I’ve recently gotten to the point where I’m working now for myself,” Feighan says, toasting the lack of a “terrible freelance gig that I hated” consuming purple blocks of time on a proverbial Google Calendar.

He runs an online business with his wife, however. And his life involves juggling creative enterprises, mostly music and graphic design.

“I get up and I email a bunch of people and then we package a ton of orders, go to the post office… Then I’m emailing bloggers about new songs,” Feighan says. “I’m never unhappy doing it. I’m always psyched that I get to be doing what I’m doing—but it never ends.”

It’s slightly more complicated for the Singles Club team. The guys compose every part in the orchestra, and that’s a sweaty proposition.

“I think Chris and I are both used to working jobs that require many hats,” Silverstein says. “We’re two people wholly interested with getting our hands dirty… We love the fact that we have to approach it from all angles at once.”

But that likewise means mixing reporting with public relations work—an inherent ethical no-no. Silverstein says the key is to outsource the feature writing by way of genre experts.

“I’ve written one of the larger pieces… beyond that we have been working with some other writers across the music journalism world,” he says.

In the grand scheme of the music business, that truce between long-form writing and promotion retains its integrity. Within this skeleton crew operation, there are taste-making editors, hired freelancers fishing out the narrative, and the audience tuning in because it trusts the selection process. There is one critical difference, however: The absence of major league public relations teams to expertly bolster the presentation.

In the age of the bedroom songwriter who can theoretically land in a golden inbox, the distribution channels are decks stacked against independent artists because it’s so easy for a wolf in sheep’s clothing (Bandcamp and SoundCloud pages) to bet on its own horse and rig the conversation. Feighan agrees, and though he’s tactful about not sharing war stories, he offers dignified resignation with respect to landing on the hype-driving music blogs: “It’s becoming increasingly hard to get ahold of those people… I made a mental choice a long time ago to not get discouraged by that.”

Singles Club’s vitality is its transparency. It’s not a label with a bottom line. It’s not a music blog compromised by big PR. For now at least, it’s a pair of fans centrally concerned with disseminating work from bands that they like. The proof is in the ridiculous extracurricular resources dedicated to making the ship float.

I ask Silverstein why the vinyl and not, like he’s graciously provided the Daily Dot, a shareable mix built to glide on modern social outlets. Vinyl is expensive, impractical, and a medium often co-opted by fetishists that exclude fans from the huddle by selling a more challenging—and thus authentic—user experience. 

He says that it’s about indulging a have-and-hold desire for an artifact. A record may be aesthetically pleasing, sure, but it’s also akin to a smoked turkey in the middle of a family table: It’s a communal hub that is itself a standalone occasion.

Singles Club is likewise flying Feighan coast-to-coast so it can host a release concert on Friday. “It’s just so massive that music communities can be difficult to start or to maybe break into,” Silverstein says about New York City, a rent-is-too-damn-high cluster of islands that its leading paper of record recently compared to new-money, glass-house city Dubai.

I ask if he’s going to make sure these travels are rewarded with a lasting concert film that can live forever on Vimeo. But he doesn’t see the effort to criss-cross America and play in Eastern Standard Time as a gesture that the Internet needs to own. 

“I’ve tried to do that a few times—get really geared up to do a live video—and it’s never really worked out. There’s a lot of 15-second Instagrams floating around out there, and that’s fine.

“For me, I’m just one guy using a sampler… It’s much better to be there than it is to watch me pushing buttons for 45 minutes.”

And that's exactly the tangible sort of experience that Singles Club is all about.

Photo via Singles Club

The message was from a young girl named Kaileen who was feeling especially lonely on the holiday after losing her mother last January. 

"My mom was my best friend, the one I laughed with, the one I cried with, and the one I loved with my whole heart," Kaileen wrote. She went on to tell Swift that her music "filled that hole" left by her mother's absence. "You took me out of my sad place and made me happy. And because of you, I got through something that was the hardest thing in the world for me."

The touching note struck a deeply personal chord with Swift, who announced just a month ago that her mother Andrea is currently battling cancer. The singer wrote back: 

Kaileen- I love you so much and can’t imagine what you must be feeling today. You’ve lived through my worst fear. I’m so sorry you can’t spend today with her. It’s not fair, and there’s no reason why you should feel okay about it. No one should ever expect you to feel normal today. I admire and respect your ability to put forth such a sunny, sweet disposition when you’ve been through something so dark and tragic so recently. I never would’ve guessed by your attitude or your posts. I never would’ve known if you hadn’t told me. Sending you a huge hug today. Gonna go get iced coffee and cheers to you. :)

Kaileen, who goes by "iced coffee girl" on Tumblr, was elated by the singer's response and took a series of selfies to commemorate her happiness.

H/T UsWeekly | Photo via jazills/Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

Saturday Night Live is being accused of plagiarism after a skit from its latest episode showed many similarities to another skit from a Canadian sketch-comedy show.

The segment from the May 9 episode of SNL, called “Picture Perfect,” featured celebrity host Reese Witherspoon and Bobby Moynihan as a couple competing for $1 million on a game show with celebrity guest Reginald VelJohnson (Kenan Thompson). The contestants are asked to draw the Prophet Muhammad, an act forbidden in Islam.

Laughs ensue as panic sets in and two of the contestants try to get out of drawing Muhammad and game show host Taran Killam urges them on. The sketch aired just days after a SWAT team killed a gunmen who opened fire outside of a Muhammad cartoon contest in Texas.

It's not the first time SNL has been accused of stealing material this season. In October, the Groundlings, which has produced many SNL alums in the past, accused the show of stealing its Tina Turner sketch from last September.

DHX Media, which produces This Hour Has 22 Minutes, is accusing SNL of copyright infringement.

“While imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, DHX Media Ltd. takes infringement of its intellectual property very seriously,” DHX Media executive chairman Michael Donovan told the Hollywood Reporter in a statement.

This Hour Has 22 Minutes writer Bobby Kerr and Mark Critch, who starred in the sketch, are also noting the similarities.

H/T Hollywood Reporter | Screengrab via Saturday Night Live/YouTube

Despite that the original Pitch Perfect soundtrack was a blockbuster hit, the track listing and music from the followup has remained a relative secret, until now.

The full Pitch Perfect 2 soundtrack is now available on Spotify, days before the film premieres in U.S. theaters. According to Billboard, the music has been kept a secret so as not to spoil any plot points or surprises when the girls break into song during the film. 

“You can’t follow the normal formula in this case,” Bruce Resnikoff, president of Universal Music’s UMe division, explained to Billboard. “It would be a disservice to have fans hear what’s on the record without understanding how it fits into the movie. The plot is in the music.” 

Now fans have just a few days to interpret tracks like, “We Belong” and “We Got the World” before seeing them in context of the film. 

Screengrab via Pitch Perfect/YouTube

She landed on the $10,000 wedge, both half of the car wedges, won a trip to Italy, and even snagged the $1 million wedge during one round. We won't ruin it for you, but she even casually guesses the final puzzle without even trying out a few duds first. Insane.

Her only flaw was not actually getting the $1 million envelope on her bonus round win, if you can even call that a flaw. In total, Buganski took home $86,368 in cash and prizes. 

Although the poor other contestants who are completely blocked out of playing during her run look pretty unenthusiastic at the start, by the end even they are cheering for her. You can't help but love it when someone is just that good.

H/T Zap2It | Screengrab via spartya19/YouTube

If you're a fan of Mad Men, then you already know how complex and hypnotic Matthew Weiner’s ambitious depiction of privileged New York life in the ’60s can be. Now, with the show’s seven-year reign over auteur television finally coming to an end, Google Play has partnered with Lionsgate to deliver a gorgeous multimedia overview of the show and its complicated and inspiring run.

The platform is also offering viewers a chance to stream the first episode of the series for free.

Called “The Mad Man Experience,” the new website is brimming with special features and highlights from each season of the show, including exclusive interviews with Weiner, excerpts from the musical soundtrack, storyboards, and much more. 

Here’s Weiner, in an exclusive video, describing the way Jon Hamm delivered the first ep’s famous monologue, in which Don Draper pitches a room full of skeptical Lucky Strike executives on a slogan (“It’s toasted”) using a brilliant mix of creativity and sentiment:

“He did it well in the auditions, but there was just a moment in here—and luckily, we were filming—when the whole character clicked in... There was no selling going on—this was about a man revealing himself.”

The website design uses an interactive choose-your-own-adventure approach that lets you travel through the show chronologically, by timeline, or by exploring various overarching themes like identity and ambition. You can also just take a tour of the show’s famous soundtrack—yes, including “Zou Bisou Bisou”—or examine the platform’s exclusive content. 

It’s worth noting that this is the first time Google Play has ever partnered with a series for an interactive website like this. Though there are some notable omissions in the overview—the infamous lawnmower episode, for example—there’s more than enough evidence on display to make a case for Mad Men as one of the greatest series to arise from the much-touted “golden age” of television.

The Mad Men Experience is part of an upcoming panel and webcast celebrating the series, which will be held at the Television Academy on May 17 featuring the cast and crew. Even if you’re not a fan of Mad Men, from a design standpoint, the exhibit is still worth checking out. 

And if you are a fan, this is the perfect supplemental send-off for one of the best shows on TV.

H/T TheNextWeb | Screengrab via MadMen/WithGoogle

What happens to the Muppets once the cameras stop rolling?

We’ve had little information about the newest Muppets series from The Big Bang Theory co-creator Bill Prady and Anger Management’s Bob Kushell, which just got greenlit by ABC. It’ll be a documentary-style show that focuses on the Muppets’ personal lives and more more adult themes (something we’ll have to get used to), but we could only imagine what that would entail until now with the release of the show’s first trailer during ABC’s upfronts.

Basically? They get into the same types of situations that we humans do. They get stuck in traffic, smoke pot, juggle coworkers and home lives, and they have to deal with their exes and the parents who don’t like them. They just have to do it with some fur or fins attached. (Although maybe not so much biting our stitches.)

The Muppets will air Tuesdays this fall on ABC.

But this brilliant new video from Dan Fox and Betsy Kenney of Hank Comedy makes fun of Mac users, PC users, and how little those ads have to do with the actual devices they sell.

The awkward, forced scenario that ensues once the actors go off-script is a must-watch for anyone who's rolled their eyes at an Apple ad.

All Ouija pointers say yes.

Seance is a never-released indie horror film made in 2000, starring Corey Feldman and Adam West. Yes, really. Written by one Rick Vasquez—a man who now works in construction—it languished without finding a distributor, unseen for over a decade. 

But after all these years, a miracle has occurred: Vasquez's son and his friends finally convinced Vasquez to upload the film to YouTube. And Tuesday evening, user neckbeard_le_pirate brought Seance to r/Movies, where it's gotten over 4,000 upvotes in as many hours. 

And what a find it is.

For all you bad film lovers out there, pay attention. In the first 20 minutes alone the film delivers the goods, and how: terrible acting, stilted direction, cheap sets, endearingly awful special affects, and the standard pile of dumb teen cliches on which great terrible horror films are built. 

But it's also easy to see the bones of a genuinely thrilling, entertaining film lurking here beneath the low-budget production values. And those production values aren't that bad; as one redditor noted, "It has SyFy megahit written all over it."

According to Vasquez's family friend, the film is "based on Rick and his brother’s own experience with a ghost in their childhood." This childhood tale—a storyline about a pair of brothers who have a childhood encounter with a demented ghost child named Michael—lends a few moments of genuine creepiness sandwiched in between inexplicable church vandalism, inexplicable serial killing, awkward non-chemistry between friends, characters whose only purpose is to show up in order to be killed, and, of course, the performances of Feldman and West.

Much as with Tommy Wiseau's The Room—another terrible work by a non-Anglican writer/producer who raised a mysterious million to finance his own terrible film—it's easy to see how fans could find the film appealing. To date, Seance's sole IMDB review, which gives it 9/10 stars, is from an alleged family friend who never made good on his plans to distribute it. Yes, good: narcissism and nepotism working to inflate the rating of a badly done horror film? 

This is truly a film-lover's dream.

Screengrab via SeanceFilm/YouTube

Unless you’re a Jeopardy contestant along the lines of Ken Jennings or Arthur Chu, you might only have a few shows at most to make any sort of impression on the audience. But some of them make it count.

Hitfix writer Louis Virtel appeared on the May 8 episode of Jeopardy. And although he didn’t win his show, he managed to put some real flair when getting a “Double Jeopardy” question about Arthur Miller correct. You’d be that excited too if you answered something correctly that you vaguely remember from High School English.

“As a kid growing up in the suburbs who venerated everything about Jeopardy, I would’ve loved seeing an expressive gay contestant own his homosexuality as well as the buzzer,” Virtel wrote. “I’ll never get that chance again, but I take some comfort in having exhibited my sexual orientation through a few glaring clues. It just annoys me to settle for illustration when the correct response to heteronormativity is blatant acknowledgment of my own reality.”

While the episode aired, however, he dished out a burn to one of the viewers who took issue with him being on the show.

Women love the new Dadbod craze, but the men who actually have the body type probably love it even more. After all, they no longer have to adhere to society's expectations of what the ideal male body should look like. 

Kristen Schaal is quick to praise the men for their newfound victory, including actual dad Jon Stewart. But also notes that this wave of body positivity is only going one way, in that moms are still being held to ridiculously high beauty standards. 

“We’re all having a great belly laugh!” she said. “The guys are. If a woman had a belly they would not let her on that show.”

In truth, Schaal is totally right: while dadbods are currently being celebrated, many have pointed out that there's no female equivalent of the trend, or "mombod." In fact, women are still under enormous pressure to shed their baby weight immediately after giving birth.

For the time being, however, Schaal gets her revenge by making Stewart “shake what your mama gave you that you didn’t take care of for 50 years." The result is all sorts of strange and wonderful.

28 Days Later fans who’ve been dying for resolution after the horrifying sequel 28 Weeks Later are finally getting their wish.

Alex Garland, who wrote 28 Days Later, said during an interview with Indiewire about his film Ex Machina that a sequel to 28 Weeks Later is in the works. The third movie in the series will be based on a concept by Garland, but his seed of an idea will be the extent of his involvement. Series producer Andrew MacDonald will take the reigns of the next film, which could be called 28 Months Later.

28 Days Later is about a virus that sends its victims into a homicidal, never-ending rage. It is so virulent that a single drop of infected blood can spread the virus and it tears across England, effectively destroying the country in 28 days. The sequel, 28 Weeks Later is about an American operation to repopulate London with the survivors of the outbreak, that results in the virus getting loose in Europe. The final shot in the film is of a crowd of infected running towards the Eiffel Tower while people broadcast a panicked cry for help.

Garland discussed the production of a third zombie film in the context of knee-jerk expectations that sequels are just part of how film works nowadays. “It’s also ingrained in the audience, like a paradigm,” Garland told Indiewire. “It's just what you're supposed to do. It must be what you want to do. How could you not want to do that?”

28 Weeks Later was released in 2007. Danny Boyle, who directed the first film and the prologue to the second film, said in January that conversations about another 28 Days film were taking place. In April 2013 Boyle said he had an idea as to where another 28 Days film would be set, but the chances of the film being made were “40/60.” And the last word prior to that was in October 2010, when Boyle said another 28 Days film was in the works, without divulging further details.

“Sequels are generally done in a rush. It's done with a sense of urgency,” Garland told Indiewire. “The first movie, you spend a long time developing to get it over the line. The second thing, you don't. Your expectations are different and your motivations are different.”

Clearly, this does not apply to 28 Months Later, or whatever the third film in the series will be titled. One could argue it’s been in nascent development for eight years. Proper development finally kicked off because Garland had an idea that kicked the production into motion.

“About two years ago, Danny started collaborating on the potential to make Trainspotting 2, another sequel,” Garland told Indiewire. “In that conversation, an idea for 28 Months arrived. I had a sort of weird idea that popped into my head. Partly because of a trip I'd taken. I had this thought, and I suggested it to Andrew and Danny, but I also said I don't want to work on it. I don't really want to play a role, and Andrew said, 'Leave it to me.' So he's gone off and is working on it.”

H/T Dread Central/ Screengrab via TrailersPlaygroundHD/YouTube

As we say our fond farewells to many of rotating cast of late-night talk show hosts, it’s important to remember that the actual celebrity interview portions of those shows are pretty terrible most of the time. And for the women who appear on those shows, it’s usually even worse.

In this send-up of the standard interview segment, Amy Schumer is the young actress in her first starring role stating the fun facts she probably practiced with her publicist while Bill Hader is the welcoming talk show host dripping with creepy undertones. While she talks about how down-to-earth she is, he makes inappropriate comments and sound effects, bringing David Letterman and Conan O’Brien to mind.

It’s completely ridiculous and uncomfortable, but this is the game Hollywood plays—and you’ve likely seen that type of interview before. The only thing missing from this is the variety game the host and star eventually play for laughs (and millions of views on YouTube).

H/T Jezebel | Screengrab via Comedy Central/YouTube

June 1 

The Shining
Roman Holiday
Apocalypse Now
Apocalypse Now Redux
Something Wild
Sid &Nancy
Sucker Punch
Troll
Troll 2
Rep: The Genetic Opera
The Island of Dr. Moreau
Seven Psychopaths
The Paper Chase
People Will Talk
Far From Home: The Adventures of Yellow Dog
Murder of a Cat
Nine Months
Word and Pictures

June 12 

Life of Crime

June 13 

Transformers: Age of Extinction

June 15 

Leprechaun: Origins

June 19

A Most Wanted Man

June 22 

Lucky Number Slevin

June 24 

Covert Affairs (Season 5)

June 26 

Katy Perry: The Prismatic World Tour

June 27 

The Mist

Screengrab via Katy PerryFans/YouTube

The Daily Dot is celebrating Woman Crush Wednesday, better known as #WCWon Twitter and Instagram, by highlighting female creators onYouTube whose work we admire.

There are millions of people who talk every day on YouTube, but there only a handful who have real conversations. Rebecca Brown is in the latter group, unafraid to talk about all topics on her YouTube channel Beckie0 that would have your Grandma blushing.

This unabashed candidness is one of the things I love most about her, coupled with the fact that she owns a purse shaped like a cartoon deer head.

As a longtime fan of her channel, I find myself constantly rooting for Brown and inspired by her conviction to pursue a fulfilled and passionate life. She’s all colors and passion and inner beauty, making her feel like a friend you’re sitting down to chat with each week. She’s unafraid of being herself and in each video, and she reminds us that it is the taboo topics such as sex, porn, mental illness, sexual assault, and depression that need our attention now more than ever if we hope to empower young men and women to approach life with authenticity, confidence, and compassion.

Screengrab via Beckie0/YouTube

Moshe Kasher is a successful comic, podcaster, and author. He’s doing fine, thanks for asking. Oh, and he’d like you to pay his rent.

“About a year ago, I moved into a larger house and my rent went up by a factor of nearly double,” Kasher explained on his GoFundMe page. “At the time I felt that that would be ok, as my income had gone up enough to be able to afford my rent. I was right. My income has only increased since then and each month I am easily able to make my rent payment.”

And here’s where Kasher lays it all out on the line, in a way Lena Dunham and Amanda Palmer neglected to do.

HOWEVER, I do not want to pay. It seems frivolous for me to spend my own money again and again, each month, essentially shoveling money into an incinerator for "shelter" when I can turn to the kindness and support of my friends, family and most especially, my FANS, to help me pay my rent.

So, Kasher would like $11,000 from you, “fans.” No, his rent is not $11,000. Come on. He’s not Kevin Hart.

You have my word that any amount I receive that EXCEEDS my rent, I will apply to other expenses in my life: clothes, gasoline (premium), soy candles, perfumes, meringues, and macarons (the colorful French, almond layer cookies not "macaroons", the pile of coconut shreds. Blech!)

So that should make you feel better about contributing. Well, you’d think so, but as of today, he’s gotten less than $300.

Part of that showing might be due to the top level reward having been unjustly cancelled by GoFundMe. Apparently offering to have sex with you (or your partner) is against this Amish-run startup’s terms of service. How’s that for injustice?

A more cynical person might see Kasher’s campaign as satire, a slap at filmmakers, TV producers, successful singers, actors, and producers who realized they could leverage their popularity, success, and financial security into more success and financial security because as fans, what have you done for them lately?

There are some folks who apparently feel pretty significantly at sea when they come crashing into irony, as some of the GoFundMe commenters testify.

Jason and Brad think Moshe’s a douche. Others are outraged—outraged I say—because, you know. The children. Won’t somebody think about the children?

Not Moshe. He’s going to be spending next month in Rome. But hey, rent’s rent.

Screengrab via The Laugh Factory/YouTube

When news of an Iggy Azalea and Britney Spears collaboration first hit the Internet, fans of the singers went considerably nuts, especially when the song they were supposedly working on got leaked ahead of time.

Well, the video for “Pretty Girls” is now available for mass consumption, and it’s a giant mess. Let’s break it down.

The concept of the video—reportedly taking its cue from a sci-fi comedy set in the ’80s about a California teen making friends with three hairy aliens who came to Earth in a spaceship—features Iggy as an outer space chick with beehive hair and laser eyes. The valley girl is played by Brit, and for a while, you kind of dig how she looks, until her character gives Iggy’s a crimp makeover to match her own.

They then decide that it would be a great idea to blow dry their hair in a top-down Jeep.

Once they arrive at the car wash and Brit starts body-groovin’, you eagerly await for her epic moves you know are bound to come because she’s Britney, bitch. All it does, however, is remind you that the “Baby One More Time” video came out in the late ’90s and the fact that this new sequence reminds you of that is kind of sad.

And then there’s some blatant product placement, in the form of a Samsung smartphone morphed from a broken throwback cell phone via laser eye magic. (Am I the only one who thinks an iPhone would have been more fitting?)

If “Pretty Girls” ends up being 2015’s song of the summer, then we now know why.

The day has come: We finally have a glimpse of CBS's long-awaited entry into the superhero battle. Supergirl, the much-touted crime procedural-slash-"female empowerment story" starring Melissa Benoist, is here.

If ever a trailer, in all its seven-minute glory, spoke for itself, it's this one. This show looks incredible.

The trailer comes hard on the heels of the news that the show will be going up against Fox's Gotham on Monday nights beginning in November. Given that Supergirl is a consciously feminist drama already being compared to The Good Wife, and Gotham is a nigh-incoherent villain smorgasbord with no discernible narrative to speak of, we can already tell you where our eyes will be glued come fall.

Screengrab via CBS/YouTube

From the imagination of director Guillermo del Toro comes a supernatural mystery starring Tom Hiddleston, Jessica Chastain, Mia Wasikowska and Charlie Hunnam.

Such is the description of the new trailer for Crimson Peak, Guillermo del Toro's latest, A-list-studded haunted house fest. The trailer began trending worldwide almost instantly on Twitter, presumably because half of the viewers responded very enthusiastically to the concept of a sumptuous Victorian Gothic by horror king del Toro, and the other half responded very enthusiastically to a shirtless Tom Hiddleston.

Judging from the trailer alone, however, Crimson Peak is already using its atmosphere to better use than Don't Be Afraid ever did. This despite, or perhaps because of, a plot stuffed full of gothic cliches: a possibly murderous husband, a creepily intimate sibling relationship, a forbidden wing of the dark mansion, and a hilariously vague official synopsis that's the bare-bones plot of every Gothic novel and Bluebeard tale ever written:

Young author Edith Cushing discovers that her charming new husband is not who he appears to be.

Fortunately, costar Chastain is here to assure us that the film is so scary it made Hiddleston cry—and she also describes it as "kinky," which is just how we like our horror films set in creepy, isolated Gothic Victorian mansions.

Screengrab via Legendary/YouTube