| How to entertain yourself this weekend. |
He made The Village is what he did—in this house, M. Night Shyamalan is a hero. —Alex Pappademas, culture editor |
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It’s Friday, and all we want to do this weekend is play UNO with Taylor Swift and Texas hip-hop legend Bun B.
Sounds like the kind of weird recurring dream you have after eating so many shrimp, we know—but that unlikely matchup really did happen, at a game night hosted by Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, of the Roots and The Tonight Show and approximately fifty other creative pursuits at any given moment. Thompson has been hosting increasingly elaborate and escalatingly star-studded game nights since the end of COVID; in this first-person dive into the growing celebrity-game-night trend, GQ’s Frazier Tharpe hits a Quest event in Williamsburg, Brooklyn (where he finds himself explaining the rules of UNO to Rowan Farrow while Trevor Noah looks on) and Pharrell’s similarly gamified Met Gala afterparty, to find out why the extremely-famous are trading cocktail hour for UNO, Jenga, Spades and Operation. (It will probably surprise no one that Taylor Alison Swift is a ruthless, stack-throwing beast at the UNO table.)
The Venice Film Festival is in full swing and the stars are dressing for that tappetto rosso. We’ve also got our first Oscar-race data point from the Lido de Venezia: Iana Murray says Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly could win Adam Sandler the Oscar he’s long deserved. First Academy Award winner to swish up to the podium in Dick’s Sporting Goods basketball shorts? Fingers crossed. As it happens, Sandler is also the subject of the first of two career-retrospective pieces we published this week about artists who’ve undergone once-unthinkable critical reappraisals in recent years; Jesse Hassenger looked at the best of the Sandman’s oeuvre here, and then, for an encore, ranked the films of M. Night Shyamalan (derided, back in the day, as a schlocky twist-monger, now the subject of Film Twitter standom on the strength of genre masterpieces like Trap) from least to greatest.
What else? Your English teacher got engaged to your gym teacher, and Chris Black wrote about how to flip a true love story into a PR masterstroke. Frazier Tharpe talked to Alex Russell, onetime writer for shows like The Bear and Beef, about his directorial debut, the masterful stalker thriller Lurker. Gavin Newsom is killing it in the ironic-Trump-merch game. Skateboarding superstar Tyshawn Jones talks to Cole Louison about the night he kickflipped the gap between two New York subway platforms. And if you’re curious about comedian Adam Friedland, whose emotional interview with unemotional U.S. representative Ritchie Torres seems to be all our timeline can talk about for the second day in a row, why not go back and read the brilliant Kieran Reynolds profile of Friedland we published in May? —AP |
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