Netflix’s Murder Mystery: Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston are a lot of fun - Vox.com

Every week, new original films debut on Netflix and other streaming services, often to much less fanfare than their big-screen counterparts. Cinemastream is Vox’s series highlighting the most notable of these premieres, in an ongoing effort to keep interesting and easily accessible new films on your radar.

The premise: To celebrate their 15th anniversary, New York detective Nick (Adam Sandler) and his wife Audrey (Jennifer Aniston) head to Europe. On the plane, they meet a mysterious and handsome stranger, Charles Cavendish (Luke Evans), and accept an invitation to stay on Charles’s family’s yacht for the weekend, where a group of his relatives and friends have gathered. But soon, someone turns up dead — and Nick and Audrey decide to take it upon themselves to figure out whodunit.

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

What it’s about: Murder Mystery is part of Adam Sandler’s ongoing lucrative partnership with Netflix, which thus far has produced mostly rough and forgettable comedies (what do you remember about 2015’s The Ridiculous 6, or 2017’s Sandy Wexler?). So the bar is fairly low for Murder Mystery.

Happily, the film clears that low bar with some room to spare. Murder Mystery, oddly enough, has a screenplay penned by James Vanderbilt, best known for writing Zodiac. It’s a self-conscious (and at times explicit) homage to Agatha Christie’s mysteries, which probably helps explains Sandler’s mustache, though he’s no Hercule Poirot. The yacht party attendees include not just Audrey, Nick, and Charles but a bevy of familiar types for a mystery like this: the family patriarch and his much younger fiancée (who may or may not have her eyes on his wealth); the socialite; the spurned son; the foreign dignitary; the world-class athlete who seems to not speak English; the stolid bodyguard; and so on and so forth.

But Murder Mystery is also a comedy about romance and marriage, and about a couple who’s seeking adventure, trying to recapture a spark that hasn’t gone out but is certainly dimmer than it used to be. There’s been a bevy of these comedies released in the past decade or so, some of them better than this one (2018’s Game Night springs to mind, or 2010’s Date Night). It starts out very clunky, with a scene that feels ripped straight from a rom-com made decades ago, as women complain about their husbands and the general helplessness of men while sitting in a hair salon. And though it gets a little more limpid once Sandler and Aniston start sharing the screen, it’s still formulaic.

But it’s helped along by the comic pairing of the two leads, whose sensibilities seem to balance one another well. (The pair are longtime friends and last teamed up for the 2011 film Just Go With It.) Aniston’s pitch-perfect timing and Sandler’s schlubby bull-in-a-china-shop schtick make them a convincingly loving couple and an energetic comedic pair as they romp a bit haplessly around Europe.

Murder Mystery does feel like a very specific sort of direct-to-Netflix offering, designed to ape other movies you’ve already seen and enjoyed without straying too far from the formula or doing anything particularly innovative. But it does so cleverly enough to make watching it a pleasure; it’s just the kind of movie to pop on one night when you’re looking for something fun, silly, and a little mysterious.

Critical reception: Murder Mystery has a score of 40 on Metacritic. In his review at the Guardian, Benjamin Lee writes that the film is “a surprisingly nimble summer comedy that finds both Aniston and Sandler at their most charming.”

Where to watch: Murder Mystery is streaming on Netflix.

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https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/6/14/18677530/murder-mystery-netflix-review-jennifer-aniston-adam-sandler

2019-06-14 14:10:00Z
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Farewell, Jessica Jones: the last woman standing in the Marvel-Netflix era - The Guardian

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Farewell, Jessica Jones: the last woman standing in the Marvel-Netflix era  The Guardian

With Marvel's owner, Disney, preparing its own streaming *service*, Netflix is throwing in the towel. But Krysten Ritter's street-level superhero always knew how to ...

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https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2019/jun/14/jessica-jones-netflix-marvel-season-three

2019-06-14 13:17:00Z
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Taylor Swift shouts out to LBGTQ fans, GLAAD on cheeky new single 'You Need To Calm Down' - USA TODAY

Maeve McDermott and Joshua Bote USA TODAY

Published 8:26 AM EDT Jun 14, 2019

Taylor Swift's return is imminent, promising a busy summer for listeners and patient Swifties alike.

The star announced her new album, "Lover," on social media Thursday, as well as a new single titled "You Need To Calm Down."

An improvement on Swift's enjoyable yet overly earnest lead single "Me," "You Need to Calm Down" is cheekier and more understated, a more promising example of what fans can expect from her new record.

Set for release Aug. 23, the 18-track record will also feature the Brendon Urie-featuring "Me!"It's her first full-length album since 2017's "Reputation."

The album art, credited to "artistic genius" Valheria Rocha, features Swift in glittery rainbow technicolor — a different color scheme than the icy melodrama of her 2017 album "Reputation." 

"Why are you mad when you could be GLAAD?" Swift sings on the new song, releasing an accompanying lyric video that makes it clear she's name-dropping GLAAD, short for the powerful Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation organization.

"Thank you @taylorswift13" the organization wrote to Swift on Twitter, posting screenshots of GLAAD's mention in the lyric video.

Swift's new album's artwork matches the visual aesthetic of the bright, fantasy-filled music video for lead single "Me," as "You Need To Calm Down" advances the trap-infused pop sound she sought on "Reputation" with a simplistic, booming beat, offering lyrics like "shade never made anybody less gay" that nod to her LGBTQ fans while centering the song as an anti-hate anthem.

Released during Pride month in June, "You Need To Calm Down" suggests that Swift is being more intentional in recognizing her LGBTQ listeners.

Swift encouraged her fans' Easter egg hunt upon the "Me!" music video release by promising that the album's title was hidden somewhere in her next video, with eagle-eyed fans noticing the word "lover" emerge at one point in the clip.

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https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/music/2019/06/14/taylor-swifts-you-need-calm-down-boosts-lbgtq-fans-new-single/1450734001/

2019-06-14 11:20:00Z
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Jennifer Lawrence Has Found Her Wedding Dress - Vogue.co.uk

Jennifer Lawrence has only had one wobble about her wedding to Cooke Maroney so far. This, she tells Catt Sadler on the former E! News host’s Naked podcast, is down to the fact that she’s “too lazy” to get neurotic and she knew her art director fiancé was “the one” from the get-go.

“I haven’t talked about [my relationship] yet in an interview setting,” Lawrence began. “I definitely wasn’t at a place where I was like, ‘I’m ready to get married.’ I just met Cooke and I wanted to marry him. We wanted to marry each other. We wanted to commit fully. He’s my best friend so I want to legally bind him to me forever. And fortunately, the paperwork exists for such a thing. It’s the greatest. You find your favourite person in the planet and you’re like, you can’t leave. So I wanted to take that offer.”

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The Hunger Games star also revealed that it was Maroney who helped her overcome her anxiety around the paparazzi. “I’d get nervous before going to restaurants, or I felt like I couldn’t go to dive bars,” Lawrence explained. “I didn’t want to tell him about [it]. You know, I wanted to be normal and cool, so I just kind of hid that part of me and everything ended up being fine. And I was like, ‘Oh, I can do this’. It was cool.”

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Wedding plans for Lawrence and Maroney, who were first linked in June, are well underway. “I’ve been in a good place,” she said. “I haven’t been neurotic about it... I saw a dress I liked and I was like, ‘That’s the dress’. I saw a venue and I was like, ‘Cool, we got the venue’.”

The hiccup came regarding the hen party. “I didn’t realise that I wanted one until… I realised I couldn’t have it, which is typical.” She cried about it to her partner and then moved on. “Bridezilla moment” over. The fact that it was too “last minute” to organise the bachelorette celebration suggests the big day could be just around the corner.

Style File - Jennifer Lawrence

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https://www.vogue.co.uk/article/jennifer-lawrence-cooke-maroney-wedding

2019-06-14 10:17:42Z
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Reviews | Bruce Springsteen - The Quietus

Team Springsteen has kept Western Stars in a box for almost half a decade, while Bruce got distracted by his Born To Run memoir, boxset re-releases and the Broadway show, which ended up running for over a year. The closest he’d ever come to a day job, he said.

Now as this new album emerges, they’re already flagging up the next one and promising an E Street Band tour in 2020, as if so nervous about Western Stars’ musical swerve they need to mitigate our reaction. It’s a left turn but honestly, it’s not extreme.

Simple orchestral riffs and warm west coast production are thickly glooped onto a collection of songs that otherwise may have been too mellow for his rock canon, yet too nice for a stripped-down solo Bruce record. God, ‘nice’ is a damning word.

The vocal stands out mightily. Springsteen stretches himself and at the same time allows modern studio trickery to go to work, in ways we haven’t heard (or at least noticed) on his recent records. We get smoothness, soaring heights, proper crooning. The chorus of second single ‘There Goes My Miracle’ so powerful it pulls you out of reverie to admire it; the high-end punch of ‘Sundown' that sounds like Bruce doing The Killers doing Bruce; and the tidy melody of ‘Chasin’ Wild Horses’; all gorgeous singing.

On the down side, the much hyped orchestral arrangements have the clipped pace and limited melody of an over-enunciated saxophone or organ part. Often the storytelling has a dulled edge: lyrical role-play in service of the ‘feel’ of the project, resulting in more cheese and cliché than usual. Springsteen is always a romantic but we need his grit and gift for noir as counterweight. So ‘Drive Fast (The Stuntman)’ is an entrancing listen but gives up subtlety halfway through. ‘Wayfarer’ and ‘There Goes My Miracle’ are fully realised sonic adventures but their narratives are modest and loose.

At worst, you spot Bruce untidily squeezing and mispronouncing lyrics to fit his scansion, rather than perfecting them first. Lesser writers do this all the time – but whole decades have passed by without him doing it even once – and this album has some clangers.

It may not matter, when it’s this beautiful and uplifting as a casual listen. But it may be an enduring problem for Western Stars: music all chewy and delicious like this emphasises – rather than disguises – the need for nuanced, pungent story. Especially when the resurgent world of Americana songwriting has become so adept on comparatively tiny budgets. Never mind Jason Isbell, one can measure the achievements of Hooray For The Riff Raff or The Delines and find Western Stars wanting. In fact songs here lack the depth and realness of, say, Lorde or Billie Eilish in the outright pop world. The marshmallow needed more toasting and the fire’s right there.

I wonder if Springsteen came to know himself too well, excavating so brutally for the memoir and on Broadway, with excoriating dark humour and visionary truth. He set a new standard; pitched close to where Darkness On The Edge Of Town or Nebraska took him in earlier decades.

This isn’t that. Still, it’s a rewarding hour and he's earned the light relief.

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https://thequietus.com/articles/26637-bruce-springsteen-western-stars-review

2019-06-14 10:42:04Z
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Bruce Springsteen: Western Stars | Review - Pitchfork

The voices in Western Stars are old and restless, lost and wandering. On the title track, Bruce Springsteen sings from the perspective of an actor who once worked with John Wayne but now mostly does commercials—credit cards, Viagra. Elsewhere, we meet a stuntman whose body has been destroyed by the job, a lonely widower idling in his old parking spot, and a failed country songwriter wondering if any of the sacrifices he made in his youth were worth it. Sung in a defeated growl, this latter track is among the shortest, starkest things that Springsteen has ever recorded: an acknowledgment of how quickly a song—and life—can pass by.

That song is called “Somewhere North of Nashville,” and it’s an outlier on Springsteen’s 19th studio album, both geographically and musically. On the rest of the record, Springsteen, with producer Ron Aniello, aims to conjure the golden expanse of the American West, with sweeping orchestral accompaniments unlike anything in his catalog. Springsteen albums are usually grand affairs but he’s never made one that sounds so vast and luxurious throughout. Paired with the down-and-out characters who haunt its mountains and canyons, the purposefully anachronistic arrangements—recalling jukeboxes, FM radios, sepia-toned montages, faded memories—carry an elegiac tone. It’s been a long time since popular music sounded like this, and it ties these characters to an era as much as a place.

Neither is where you expect to find Springsteen, who turns 70 this fall. He has spent the last few years drawing attention to the most beloved corners of his career, from lovingly curated box sets and live releases to an anniversary tour behind 1980’s commercial breakthrough The River. His nostalgic bent culminated in two presentations of his life story: a 500-page memoir and a one-man Broadway show. Both begin with a wink toward his self-described fraudulence—an “absurdly successful” entertainer who made his fortune by telling stories of blue-collar workers—and end with solemn prayers and reflections on mortality. In the book, Springsteen discusses the struggles with depression that have threatened to derail him over the past 10 years. “Mentally, just when I thought I was in the part of my life where I’m supposed to be cruising,” he writes, “My sixties were a rough, rough ride.”

All this looking back plays into the music of Western Stars. “Hell, these days there ain’t no ‘more,’” he sighs in the title track, “Now there’s just ‘again.’” Repetition and waiting course through the record as constants—sunrise, sunset. There’s a song called “Chasin’ Wild Horses” that prescribes its title as a means of counterbalancing pain; the arrangement grows more romantic as the chorus hardens into a routine. Springsteen’s narrative writing has always served to reflect his host of anxieties outward. A darkening mindset and feelings of isolation in his early 30s inspired him to summon the hellbound outsiders and dark highways of Nebraska; navigating his first marriage resulted in the doubt-plagued domestic portraits on 1987’s Tunnel of Love. During his exhaustive live shows, he is known to venture into the crowd to be swarmed by the community that’s united by his work. In the studio, he has to invent it himself: a sea of faces where he can find his own reflection. Western Stars transports him to a ghost town of broken male narrators, alone with their never-ending work and shortening timelines. He sings to us from somewhere among them, looking wearily beyond.

Following 2012’s Wrecking Ball and 2014’s High Hopes—records that responded to current political issues and sought to modernize the E Street Band’s rock’n’roll exorcisms with loops and samples and Tom Morello—this music is a left turn. The stories, however, remain archetypically Springsteen. Occasionally, he sounds like he’s checking in with characters from his songbook, furthering them along or bidding them farewell. For those wild spirits who worked 9 to 5 and somehow survived till the night, there’s “Sundown,” a tour through a bittersweet twilight where you long for companionship. After all his promises of escape—these two lanes that could take us anywhere—there’s the hardened narrator of “Hello Sunshine,” cautioning that “miles to go is miles away.”

And while nearly every one of Springsteen’s road songs is sung from the driver's seat, this record opens with “Hitch Hikin’,” a folk song propelled by a gentle windmill of strings, sung by a drifter with nowhere to go. He invites us into the backseats of three cars, whose drivers stand in for the pillars of Springsteen’s career. There’s a father, a trucker headed toward a big open highway, and a solitary racer in a vintage model from 1972, which also happens to be the year that Springsteen scored his record deal with Columbia. These avatars introduce a record that favors new sounds and perspectives—he often sings as a shadow or a visitor, giving credence to a recently revealed habit for crashing strangers’ funerals—but remains carefully rooted in his history. David Sancious, an early collaborator who played the virtuosic piano solo in 1973’s “New York City Serenade,” returns here to guide “The Wayfarer” to its tragic-triumphant conclusion. His jazzy touch on the keys offsets the thump of Springsteen’s acoustic guitar and the earthy twang of his baritone, as open-hearted and desperate as it has ever sounded.

In this song, Springsteen reframes his wanderlust in a series of confessions. He acknowledges that put in his position most people would be happy with what they have. He knows his worries are nothing new. The title of Western Stars is a phrase that also appears in “Ulysses,” a 19th-century Tennyson poem that Springsteen has drawn from before. (Another, more ubiquitous, Tennyson quote is invoked at the end of this record: “It’s better to have loved,” he sings in “Moonlight Motel,” his voice trailing off.) It’s easy to see why Springsteen finds resonance in these particular texts: defining works by a grief-stricken poet wondering if our brief, complicated lives are worth the legacy we leave behind. “Ulysses” is narrated by a hero approaching old age, returning from a long journey only to realize he felt more fulfilled on the road. So he heads out again, “to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” And stay alive, if he can.

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https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bruce-springsteen-western-stars/

2019-06-14 05:00:00Z
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Jessica Biel Sets the Record Straight: 'I Am Not Anti Vaccinations' - Showbiz Cheat Sheet

On June 13, it came out that actress Jessica Biel had gone to California legislators and lobbied against a bill that would restrict vaccination exemptions in that state. When the media caught wind of it, it instantly turned into a story about how Biel is against vaccinating children. She recently released a statement on social media that says otherwise.

Jessica Biel | Dan MacMedan/Getty Images

Biel lobbied against a bill that would eliminate vaccination exemptions by nearly 40% in California

On June 13, the media dove into the latest celebrity scandal: Jessica Biel is against vaccines. However, they may have jumped the gun. Earlier in the week, Biel had gone directly to California legislators to lobby against a bill that would reduce exemptions for vaccinations within the state by nearly 40%. This year, the United States has seen its worst measles outbreak in decades due to parents who chose not to vaccinate their kids — and it’s had the public in a frenzy. However, Biel doesn’t agree with the majority of the public about vaccinations. She joined Robert F. Kennedy to speak out against the bill, saying that parents should have the right to choose whether they want to vaccinate their children or not.

Biel says she supports the right for people to make ‘educated medical decisions’

Many people took Biel’s stance to mean that she is against vaccinations altogether. However, she released a statement on her Instagram account that says otherwise. “I am not against vaccinations — I support children getting vaccinations and I also support families having the right to make educated medical decisions for their children alongside their physicians,” Biel wrote. She then went on to tell a personal anecdote of a friend who has a child with a condition that warrants vaccination exemptions. Biel encouraged everyone to learn more about bill and the issue before having an opinion.  

Fans had mixed reactions about Biel’s stance

When it comes to fan reactions, there is almost no better place than the comments section of an Instagram post. And fans had mixed reviews about what Biel had said. Some people suggested that parents could have a choice, but if they chose not to vaccinate, their kids shouldn’t be allowed to attend public school with other kids. Others stood with Biel and said that it should ultimately be up to the parents to decide whether their kids are vaccinated, and there shouldn’t be any repercussions. Others were simply glad to hear that the media had misconstrued Biel’s stance on saying she was against vaccinations, which isn’t the case.

Biel and her husband, Justin Timberlake, share one son together

Biel has been married to Justin Timberlake since 2012, and the couple have one son together. Back in 2015, there were rumors that Biel wasn’t going to vaccinate her kids. However, the couple never commented on whether the rumors were true, so it’s unclear if their son is vaccinated. The two recently said they’re hoping to grow their family, but still haven’t made any comments on their personal decision of whether to vaccinate. However, people will be more curious now than ever about what Biel is doing for her own kids.

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https://www.cheatsheet.com/entertainment/jessica-biel-not-against-vaccinations.html/

2019-06-13 14:00:52Z
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