Consider, for a moment, the electric guitar. Consider a tone so processed and mechanized you’d mistake it for a power tool. Think about what you could convey with that kind of timbre — anger, probably, or youthful frustration, or maybe even wild love — and now think about how The 1975 weaponize it.
Consider how that fuzzy onslaught propels “Give Yourself a Try,” the euphoric first song we heard from the band’s A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships, into a caffeine rush of positivity. As band leader Matty Healy calmly intones about addiction, sex, and being “a Millennial that Baby Boomers like,” that guitar noise is not hawking punkish anger, but self-love. He’s not mad. He’s just seen some shit.
Consider one more thing: what happens eight tracks down the line, when that same sound slows to a humid crawl on the Britpop weeper “Inside Your Mind.” Here, Healy and his band build a carousel of lovelorn melodrama around that buzzing fulcrum — the same one that they, years before, used to usher in an emo barrage on a song called “Sex.” Endless moods. One squalling guitar tone.
This effervescent guitar clamor is only one of the devices The 1975 utilize on the hopscotching Brief Inquiry, their third venture into Millennials’ collective heart of darkness. Except this time, Healy isn’t so young anymore. He’ll be 30 soon, so he’s taken to “getting spiritually enlightened at 29” and dropping way too much cash on coffee and records — but hey, it beats the harder stuff. He knows that side of it, too.
Healy offers up “It’s Not Living (If It’s Not With You)” as a musing on his own opiate addiction, for which he sought treatment last year. As there’s no shortage of rock and roll songs about heroin, “It’s Not Living” instead glows like a liquid pop Lite-Brite, glittering with keyboards instead of stadium guitars. Healy treats his own experience carefully, including in interviews, unequivocally calling drug abuse “bullshit” and lowering his sunglasses for emphasis when talking to MTV News last month.
While much of the album’s lead-up focused on his struggle with substances, when it arrived, Brief Inquiry revealed itself to be even weirder. There’s a song called “The Man Who Married a Robot / Love Theme” and a funk-saturated examination of irony. Key moments during “Surrounded By Heads and Bodies” and “I Always Wanna Die (Sometimes)” scream by-the-books British rock (namely Radiohead). And then Healy will hop on a vocoder-drenched mic or rhyme over the late Roy Hargrove’s horns and you’ll remember you’re dealing with a polyglot.
Brief Inquiry, while not being especially brief (at 58 minutes), is certainly very online. An actual computer speaks the robot love song’s lyrics. Endlessly debated single “Love It If We Made It” flicks through world-burning headlines like a thumb on a phone screen. Healy’s earnestness makes a line like “you text that boy sometimes” impossibly endearing. But even as the album maintains its ambitions, quieter acoustic moments punctuate its tech-addled brain. It’s a real document of being alive in 2018. We’re scared of breaking our phones. We’d also love to be so unburdened.
The meme, which has been trending for weeks, came out of Ariana Grande’s latest hit, “thank u, next.”
Big Bird came in hard:
If this doesn’t make you “LOL” or even “L” internally, you need to open up your heart. Sesame Street has an exceptional social media presence. I enjoin you to abandon your hardened Twitter ways and embrace Cookie Monster social.
Ranging from “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” to “meh,” critical reactions to Mary Poppins Returns are all over the place.
Some early audience members delighted in the revamped world of color, propriety, and nostalgia. While other critics, like Mashable’s Angie Han, say the sequel feels contrived, forced, and thoroughly unimaginative.
Starring Emily Blunt, Mary Poppins Returns takes viewers back to Cherry Tree Lane where Michael and Jane are all grown-up with children of their own. When Michael’s wife dies, Mary returns to the Banks’ home to set things right—with help from a newly imagined Bert-type, played by Lin-Manuel Miranda.
Laden with Poppins puns and sequel-to-original comparison points, reviews indicates that one size does not fit all when it comes to this Disney tentpole.
Before shuffle-ball-changing into Mary Poppins Returns on Dec. 19, check out critics’ takes below.
Emily Blunt captures Mary (and Julie) in all the right ways
Why, it’s Mary Poppins, of course, and she hasn’t aged a day! Talking parrot umbrella, smart red bowtie, a stern but enchanted approach to daily chores… the only thing that’s changed about the character is the actress playing her. But while the part only requires Emily Blunt to channel the spirit of Julie Andrews’ performance — once again, the eponymous nanny lacks a clearly defined character arc, and all but blends into the background during the second half of the film — the “Edge of Tomorrow” star can’t help but overachieve. Not only does she capture Andrews’ careful balance between severity and playfulness, but she constantly wobbles the scales in a way that adds tension to a movie that never manages to mine any from its plot, or from any of the mediocre songs that punctuate it.
It takes a while to warm up to Blunt’s performance simply because she has a different rhythm from Andrews, but something clicks (perhaps not coincidentally) around the time that Mary and the children take a trip to interact with an assortment of anthropomorphic animals at a vibrant and lively animated music hall. From that point on, we have a better sense of Mary’s true self as she allows the children to see beneath her prim and proper exterior, and Blunt confidently makes the role her own with a little more sass than Andrews likely would’ve been allowed to portray in 1964.
Dead moms, stolen homes, cynical banks and earnest Bankses: That’s an awful lot of complications for even a wizardly problem solver like Mary Poppins to unravel. The original picture constructed its emotional throughline slowly, stringing together a series of delightful, episodic adventures that meandered their way toward a startlingly cathartic finale. The hectic, calculated busyness of “Mary Poppins Returns,” by contrast, wears you out almost immediately, in part because every throwaway gag and narrative digression has been so vainly contrived to pay off in a flurry of climactic would-be surprises.
Shaiman’s lush underscoring enriches the movie throughout, and his songs with co-lyricist Wittman are their best since Hairspray, full of personality and humor, and reverential without being slavish in their adherence to the musical patterns of the first film. Even the raucous “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” has an equivalent here: “The Royal Doulton Bowl,” full of “marvelous, mystical, rather sophistical” wordplay.
Then there’s the real stumbling block: the musical sequences, which all desperately want to be crowd-pleasers. While composer and lyricists Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman mostly do a very good job of keeping the songs in the same early-20th-century style as those in the first film by the Sherman brothers, the songs quite simply fail to be memorable at all. A day after seeing this film, I would not have been able to recall the rhythms or lyrics of the film’s songs if my life depended on it.
The highlight of the film is a sequence filled with talking animals that seamlessly combines live-action and hand-drawn animation as Blunt playfully growls through “The Royal Doulton Music Hall,” then grabs a bowler hat and cane with Miranda as they sing and dance (and rap!) alongside tux-clad penguins for “A Cover Is Not the Book.”
There are moments in the film that come near to matching the visual enchantment of the original — particularly a long sequence during which, as in the 1964 film, the human children find themselves in a 2D animated world of imagination, having been transported there by Mary, that’s plenty entertaining.
Mary Poppins Returns is good, but too closely tries to mimic its predecessor
Probably the worst thing you can do before watching Mary Poppins Returns is to see the 1964’s Mary Poppins not just because it’s hard to compare to a film that has such a beloved reputation, but because you can see all the ways Marshall comes up short. His movie just doesn’t have the same level of imagination, and it certainly doesn’t have the songwriting chops (there’s not a song in Mary Poppins Returnsthat has the staying power of “A Spoonful of Sugar” or “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious”). That’s not to say that the original Mary Poppinsis some untouchable gem, but rather that it appears Mary Poppins Returns didn’t even try to outdo the original in any respect.
That said, there’s a paradox built into “Mary Poppins Returns.” Nearly everything in the film is designed to evoke a song, a visual flourish, or a story detail from the original “Mary Poppins.” So in more ways than you can count, it’s “just like” the earlier film. But, of course, when you first watched “Mary Poppins” (and I’m old enough to have seen it when it came out — in fact, I saw it five times), you weren’t thinking, “Look! It’s just like that classic we love so much!” Nostalgia, in “Mary Poppins Returns,” is a transporting emotion, yet the movie is as calculated a piece of re-enactment as “The Force Awakens.” Even as it throws off sparkles of sweetness, light, and vaudeville fairy dust, the more the film mimics “Mary Poppins” the less it can be “Mary Poppins.”
Failure by countries to agree on rules to implement the 2015 Paris climate agreement on global warming would be “suicidal”, the United Nations chief said on Wednesday.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told delegates from more than 130 countries meeting in the city of Katowice in Poland they had less than three days to find the political will to reach difficult compromises, sacrifices, and common ground needed for a deal.
The two-week talks are tasked with breathing life into the Paris deal, which vows to cap global warming at “well under” 2 degrees Celsius, and funnel hundreds of billions of dollars to poor countries already feeling the sting of deadly storms, heatwaves, and drought made worse by climate change.
COP24: Protesters demand action to check global warming
“Key political issues” deadlocking UN climate talks “remain unresolved”, said Guterres.
“Failing here in Katowice would send a disastrous message to those who stand ready to shift to a green economy,” he said.
“To waste this opportunity would compromise our last best chance to stop runaway climate change. It would not only be immoral, it would be suicidal.”
‘Clock is ticking’
As delegates grappled with how the accord will be implemented, the slow progress also prompted Michal Kurtyka, the Polish president of the talks, to tell delegates time was precious and they needed to find wording acceptable to all.
Environmental activists and some developing countries also raised concern the rule book could fall short of pushing countries towards curbing their emissions to meet the Paris targets.
“The clock is ticking. While we spend time debating texts and demanding their implementation, the planet outside is deteriorating. Species are becoming extinct. Habitats disappearing. Emissions piling up,” Brazilian Environment Minister Edson Duarte said.
Guterres said a recent report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change acknowledged global warming beyond 1.5C will threaten billions of people, especially those who live in small island states.
The report outlined a catastrophic future if no action was taken by countries immediately, he said, adding the window of opportunity was quickly closing.
“This may sound like a dramatic appeal, but it is exactly this – a dramatic appeal,” Guterres said.
A handful of countries at the talks – led by the United States and Saudi Arabia – have blocked efforts to endorse the report in question, which many developing countries see as essential.
Since its release in early November, Ariana Grande‘s “Thank U, Next” has been (rightfully) celebrated both critically and commercially. It hit No. 1 a few weeks later, and it’s also been named one of the best songs of the year by a few different publications. What makes it so endearing is its upbeat and downright zen approach to heartbreak and trauma; “I’m so fucking grateful for my ex,” Ari’s refrain goes, nodding to the fact that every past experience has helped shape who she is today.
In a recent open-hearted Billboard cover story, Grande confirmed that the single is the title track from her next album, which is essentially done and ready to be launched into the world soon. Will it all be as clear-eyed as “Thank U, Next?” According to Ari herself, don’t bet on it.
“Imagine,” her presumed next single, is due out Thursday night, she tweeted. It’ll be yet another piece of music from an already much-celebrated body of work in 2018, including Sweetener, one of MTV News’s albums of the year. Then she went further in detail about how it’s essentially the corresponding denial to the acceptance found in “Thank U, Next.”
“A lot of this album mourns failed yet important, beautiful relationships in my life (as well as celebrates growth / exploring new independence,” she drafted in an unsent tweet, preserved by fans. “I look forward to you hearing it and having your own experience with it.”
“It’s just feelings really,” she concluded. That, mixed with the “feminine energy and champagne and music and laughter and crying” that Ari described in the Billboard piece, is shaping up Thank U, Next to be a continuation and an evolution of an artist who’s at the absolute top of her game, making the music she wants to make in her moment. And we can’t wait to hear it.
In the meantime, relive Ari’s most recent performance of the title track below.
To ask why Mary Poppins Returns exists would be to ask why Disney would want a license to print money. The studio has been on a tear remaking, remixing, and revisiting its old classics, to great box-office success; Mary Poppins Returns, with its nostalgia-inducing premise and family-friendly holiday release date, will surely be no different.
Now that Mary Poppins has returned, though, it seems worth asking: Did we really need her to?
The Banks family seems to. Returns picks up in the 1930s, with the Banks children now grown. Jane (Emily Mortimer) is an activist like her suffragette mother, while Michael (Ben Whishaw) is a struggling artist with three little moppets of his own—John (Nathaneal Saleh), Annabel (Pixie Davies), and Georgie (Joel Dawson).
Everyone looks very cozy and cute in their bright wool cardigans and smart little peacoats, but the truth is they’re struggling. Michael’s wife has recently died, and as if grief weren’t heavy enough already, the Bankses find themselves unable to pay their rent.
Into this chaos flies Mary Poppins, sassy parrot umbrella in tow, eager to get the Banks family back in order and impart some crucial life lessons.
Emily Blunt is practically perfect in every way
You’d stop to admire yourself too, if you looked as perfect as she did.
Image: Disney
The new Mary is played by Emily Blunt, and she is, to quote the old Mary, practically perfect in every way. She recaptures the spirit of Julie Andrews’ performance in her stern yet loving attitude, in the almost imperceptible smirk playing at her lips—but she makes the character her own, with an extra dose of sauciness.
Blunt’s voice is clear and confident as a bell, and her footwork graceful and quick. Whenever she’s onscreen, she casts a spell. It’s easy to see how care and advice from this woman might change the entire course of a young person’s life, as they did for Jane and Michael so many decades ago.
A new generation of children may grow up thinking of Blunt’s Mary as an enduring icon, in the way older generations did of Andrews’, and I wouldn’t mind that one bit. If Returns has one saving grace, it’s that they chose exactly the right woman to bring everyone’s favorite nanny back to life.
Lin-Manuel Miranda deserves better
No one can say Lin-Manuel Miranda isn’t giving it his all.
Image: Jay Maidment / Disney
Unfortunately, the film does not treat everyone in the cast with such care. Before we reunite with Mary, we’re first introduced to Jack, a lamplighter played by Lin-Manuel Miranda. The opening scene has him cycling around early-morning London, warbling out a tune about the sky, and it’s… an inauspicious start.
Miranda can be a spectacularly compelling performer, as anyone who’s heard Hamilton or even just watched Miranda speak can attest. But Returns tends to play into his weaknesses, rather than his strengths. The songs are ill-suited for his voice, the Cockney accent sounds uneven and uncertain (at least Dick Van Dyke committed), and the character himself lacks the charisma that’s made Miranda so beloved.
It gives me no pleasure to say any of this, as a fan of Miranda’s. He tries his best and gets a few nice moments, like his Hamilton-style rap in “The Cover Is Not the Book.” If nothing else, he deserves credit for trying to step outside his comfort zone. But Returns does him few favors. I can only hope his next projects do better by him than this one did.
There are a lot of musical numbers (and most of them are bad)
We for sure did not need this.
Image: Jay Maidment / Disney
If it’s any comfort to Miranda or his fans, he’s not the only victim of Returns‘ mediocre songwriting. The film’s 130 minutes are positively stuffed with all-new musical numbers; you’ll rarely go more than a few minutes without stopping for another one. The problem is that none of them are especially memorable, though Returns seems determined to drill them into your head by making them both repetitive and interminable.
The most superfluous of these is “Turning Turtle,” which exists for no other reason than to give Meryl Streep anything, anything at all, to do. The most disappointing is “Trip a Little Light Fantastic,” clearly this film’s answer to the original’s “Step in Time,” without that number’s infectious rhythm.
Songs like the latter would be easier to tolerate if they were at least fun to look at—a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down, as a much better song once taught me. But between the frequent cutting and the close-ups, director Rob Marshall makes it difficult to sit back and admire the artistry of the dancers and the intricacy of these sets. There’s not much to do during most of these numbers but wait for them to be over.
But at least that animated sequence is great
Mary Poppins Returns’ best Mary Poppins homage calls back to classic Disney style.
Image: Disney
Most, that is, but thankfully not all. One sequence in Returns stands head-and-shoulders above the rest, and it’s an homage to the dazzling “Jolly Holiday” number from the original. (If you’re wondering why I keep insisting on comparing Returns to its predecessor, it is because Returns is in so many ways a beat-for-beat recreation.) In this one, Mary, Jack, and the children enter the illustrations on a porcelain bowl, traveling through the countryside to a music hall where Mary and Jack perform.
The entire sequence is a visual wonder, done up in a 2D style reminiscent of classic Disney. Yet the live-action characters fit seamlessly into this world, right down to Mary’s trompe l’oeil dress collar. This is Returns at its best, blending old-fashioned magic and newfangled technology to deliver something that truly stuns.
It is the one part of Returns that approaches anything close to the inventiveness of the original, and it’s a shame that more of Returns couldn’t reach quite that level.
Mary Poppins Returns is accidentally about the limits of whimsy
Michael Banks (Ben Whishaw) sings to his recently deceased wife.
Image: Jay Maidment / Disney
Once that sequence ends, though, the Banks children return to the real world, where they are faced once again with their real problems. Like missing their dead mother, and taking care of their overwhelmed father, and worrying about paying for groceries, and scraping together enough money to save the house.
It’s not that Returns‘ more emotional moments fail to land. If anything, they land too well. An early number has Michael singing to his dead wife, his voice trembling. Another scene has the children planning to sell one of their late mother’s most cherished possessions. Returns is an extremely effective tearjerker, and I found myself reaching for the tissues multiple times over the course of the movie.
Which is precisely why Mary’s insistence on whimsy feels so odd. In this grim context, her fanciful diversions are just that, diversions, when what this family really needs is solutions. Being told to worry less won’t make their problems go away, and fantasies can’t keep the lights on. There’s a difference between taking a break from your worries and repressing or ignoring them, and Mary’s regimen of cheer feels more like the latter.
No one needs that extra jolt of magic more than Mary Poppins Returns itself.
Perhaps I’m way overthinking this. Maybe I’m reading too much into Mary’s methods, or getting too invested in the Banks family drama, or fussing too much about what these fictional children “need” when they seem perfectly happy with what they’ve been given. Mary would surely purse her lips at me. But that’s what happens when you find yourself in the middle of a slog. Your mind starts to wander.
There is nothing wrong with seeking out joy and escapism in hard times. Indeed, they’re often how we make it through those times. It’s probably the case that another, better movie could’ve shown us how Mary’s charm fuels the Bankses through crisis, giving them something to smile about again in the midst of so much pain.
As it stands, though, Mary is just some lady distracting a family with warmed-over fantasies, while their lives fall down around them. All throughout the film, Mary tries to spread wonder where she goes. But ultimately, it seems, no one needs an extra jolt of magic more than Mary Poppins Returns itself.
Happy Hump Day, y’all. To get you through the rest of the week, we’re rounding up the most exciting deals from Amazon, Walmart, and Best Buy. Our favorite things on sale today include premium audio gear and headphones, brilliant 4K TVs, and vacuums and floor care products. We also found great deals on Amazon devices, like the new Kindle Paperwhite.
Here are the best deals for Wednesday, Dec. 12:
Listen up: If you’re looking to give Bluetooth speakers and headphones as gifts for the holidays, we’ve got you covered with amazing deals on Bose, Beats, Sonos, and more.
In the market for a new TV? Here’s a tip: Don’t ever pay full price. We’ve scoured the web to find you the best deals on brilliant 4K TVs from Samsung, Sony, and LG, and more.
Save up to 50% on the next generation of Amazon devices for video streaming and home security, and shop all of Amazon’s “12 Days of Deals” here.
Keep your home clean with floor care products from Bissell, iRobot Roomba, and more on sale.
Looking for more deals, the latest news on cool products, and other ways to upgrade your life? Sign up for the Mashable Deals newsletterhere.
Michael Cohen, US President Donald Trump‘s former personal lawyer, was sentenced to a total of three years in prison on Wednesday for his role in making illegal hush-money payments to women to help Trump’s 2016 election campaign and lying to Congress about a proposed Trump Tower project in Russia.
US District Judge William Pauley in Manhattan sentenced Cohen to three years for the payments, which violated campaign finance law, and to two months for the false statements to Congress. The two terms will run concurrently.
Cohen pleaded guilty in August to charges by federal prosecutors in New York that, just before the election, he paid adult film actress Stormy Daniels $130,000 and helped arrange a $150,000 payment to former Playboy model Karen McDougal so the women would keep quiet about their past relationships with President Donald Trump, who is married. Trump denies having the affairs.
Cohen also admitted to unrelated charges of tax evasion and making false statements to banks.
Prosecutors say the hush money payments violated campaign finance laws and they concurred with Cohen’s assertion that the payments were directed by Trump, implicating Trump in a possible campaign finance law violation.
In an interview with Reuters on Tuesday, Trump denied the payments were campaign contributions. “If it were, it’s only civil, and even if it’s only civil, there was no violation based on what we did,” he said.
Federal law requires that the contribution of “anything of value” to a campaign must be disclosed, and an individual donation cannot exceed $2,700.
Cohen also pleaded guilty to a separate charge of lying to Congress brought by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who is investigating possible coordination between Trump’s campaign and Russia.
The sentencing caps the stunning about-face of a lawyer who once said he would “take a bullet” for Trump but has now directly implicated the president in criminal conduct.
Trump has denied any collusion with Russia and has accused Mueller’s team of pressuring his former aides to lie about him, his campaign and his business dealings. Russia has denied US allegations of interfering in the election to help Trump.
Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani has argued the hush payments cannot be considered campaign finance violations because they were made to protect Trump’s reputation and would have been made even if he had not been a presidential candidate.
‘Substantial term’
Although Cohen asked in a November 30 court filing to be given no prison time based on his assistance in the investigation, prosecutors asked on Friday for Cohen to be given a “substantial term of imprisonment” for his crimes, with only a “modest” reduction to the roughly four- to five-year term they say he faces under sentencing guidelines.
They said Cohen declined to sign a formal cooperation agreement, which would have required him to be fully debriefed about his entire criminal history and his knowledge of others’ crimes. His refusal to cooperate fully, they said, limited his credibility as a witness.
In his guilty plea to Mueller’s charge, Cohen admitted he lied to Congress about the timeline for discussions about plans for real estate businessman Trump’s skyscraper in Moscow.
He said in written testimony to two committees that the talks ended in January 2016, before the first contests to select the Republican presidential candidate, when they actually continued until June 2016 after Trump clinched the Republican nomination.
Mueller’s sentencing recommendation was more generous, saying Cohen had provided valuable information about contacts between Trump’s campaign and Russia. He recommended any sentence for lying to Congress be served concurrently with Cohen’s sentence on the charges in New York.
/https%3A%2F%2Fblueprint-api-production.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fuploads%2Fcard%2Fimage%2F903670%2F97088a52-404c-4f53-9af0-8fe990a54ca0.jpg)
/https%3A%2F%2Fblueprint-api-production.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fuploads%2Fcard%2Fimage%2F903589%2Fac53d664-6584-43f9-b356-cfb0dcaaa6d3.jpg)
Daily Trends Hunter 