Daily Beast

Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/Getty ImagesJust a few months ago, it was hard to see the ingredients of a Joe Biden comeback—even while squinting at the recipe.The president began the election year with his approval rating at historic lows. He was trailing Donald Trump in almost all of the key battleground states, as well as in national polling averages. Influential liberals were so concerned that the octogenarian incumbent did not have another campaign in him that some were openly calling for him to be replaced as the nominee.As the general election kicks off this spring, however, those calls have quieted—because Biden’s resurgence is coming into focus. While the president still faces serious obstacles to a second term, several important data points are lining up to demonstrate he is picking up badly needed momentum.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast / Emilio MadridIt’s been more than a decade since Tig Notaro broke through in a big way by walking onto the stand-up stage in Los Angeles and telling her audience, “Hello, I have cancer.” And for better or worse, she has even more medical scares to joke about in her latest special, Hello Again, streaming now on Amazon Prime Video.In this episode, which marks the five-year anniversary of The Last Laugh, Notaro returns to the podcast to discuss how she manages to keep finding humor in these terrifying life experiences. The comedian also opens up about collaborating with her wife Stephanie Allynne, who directed the new special, getting heckled by her twin boys at a charity event, mining her awkward interactions with celebrity friends for comedy, and a lot more.“I kind of can’t get over how much I look like Stephen Colbert right now,” Notaro says as she assesses her appearance in the Zoom screen for this special fifth anniversary podcast episode. And, as she explains during our conversation, it’s been nearly that long since she started working out the material that appears in Hello Again.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Apple TV+Sugar is, initially, an ideal marriage of star and material, casting Colin Farrell as a private investigator wrapped up in a byzantine Los Angeles mystery involving a missing girl, corrupt Hollywood cretins, and shadowy operators on both sides of the good-bad divide. It’s Raymond Chandler in a post-Harvey Weinstein world of casting couch abuses and sexual blackmail, and Farrell cuts a perfect figure as a noble and sorrowful gumshoe who’s haunted by his past and boasts a deep, abiding love of the movies, such that his every expression, gesture, and interior thought proves a self-conscious homage.Whether deliberately or instinctively echoing his cinematic ancestors, Farrell’s sleuth is a throwback with his own charismatic brand of cool, and he does much to keep showrunner Mark Protosevich’s eight-part Apple TV+ neo-noir humming—at least, that is, until a twist disastrously upends this serpentine saga, rendering it little more than a gimmicky pantomime.It’s impossible to fully discuss that development without spoiling Sugar, premiering April 5, but there’s also no way to adequately judge this streaming effort without underscoring how drastically and deleteriously its big shocker impacts everything. From the get-go, there are hints that Protosevich’s tale is hiding an enormous secret that pertains to its protagonist John Sugar (Farrell) and the covert organization of which he’s a (somewhat reluctant) member, not least of which are a few subtle foreshadowing comments. Nonetheless, no amount of early suspicions can mitigate the blow of the eventual bombshell, which is at once ill-fitting, silly, illogical, and unnecessary—a rare misstep superfecta that sullies, in hindsight, the preceding action. In other words, regardless of how enticing Sugar seems at outset, prepare for inevitable disappointment.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Couretsy of CannesLike Federico Fellini, whose spirit hovers over her latest, Italian director Alice Rohrwacher has a genuine appreciation for faces, and she seizes upon a fine one in Josh O’Connor, whose alternately pleasant and surly countenance conceals as much as it expresses in La Chimera.As an English expat traipsing about 1980s Tuscany in search of precious and elusive objects of desire, The Crown alum vacillates between pensive and impulsive, despairing and determined, his shifts in thought, demeanor, and perspective written intriguingly on his scruffy and sweaty visage. As a man with “the gift of finding lost things,” he’s the beguiling center of Rohrwacher’s attention, and his superb performance is the engine that drives this enchanting import about life and death, yesterday and today, and magic and realism.Premiering in U.S. cinemas on March 29 following acclaimed showings at last year’s Cannes, Toronto, and New York film festivals, La Chimera fluidly intermingles its own dreams (of cinema’s past) with those of its protagonist Arthur (O’Connor), who’s introduced sleeping in a train car, his slumbering reveries—depicted as 16mm home movies—fixated on Beniamina (Yile Vianello), who in intimate close-up asks him, “Have you noticed the sun is following us?”Read more at The Daily Beast.

Craig Hudson/ReutersThe White House on Tuesday suggested a North Carolina radio station was manufacturing controversy over the way an interview with Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre ended, saying the station didn’t air portions of it and attached a sound effect after Jean-Pierre hung up.In the audio, Jean-Pierre called out WBT Charlotte news director Mark Garrison for an “incredibly offensive” and “insulting” question about President Joe Biden’s health during the phone interview earlier in the day, and minutes later ended the chat by cordially thanking the interviewer for his time and hanging up.The White House contends that Jean-Pierre had offered the interviewer seven minutes of her time, sandwiched between other interviews, and that the station was well aware of their own time constraints.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Lloyd Bishop/NBCSeth Meyers has been day drinking with celebrities for almost as long as he has been hosting Late Night. But the latest edition of “Day Drinking,” featuring Kristen Stewart, ended in a way that the Love Lies Bleeding star likely didn’t see coming: with an epic lesbian makeover… for Meyers.Like most “Day Drinking” sojourns, the bit started off amiably enough, with Meyers mixing up an array of mostly revolting cocktails for Stewart based on her filmography. As the imbibing sped up, so did the giddy shenanigans, which led to Meyers declaring the Oscar nominee both an “accomplished actress and a lesbian icon.” And he wanted to have a little taste of what it’s like to live in her world.After pointing out the collection of “lesbian accessories and clothes” that were in full supply just behind them, Meyers let Stewart know that he was not only entrusting her to give him a righteous lesbian makeover, but to turn him into a “lesbian icon.”Read more at The Daily Beast.

Kent Nishimura/Getty ImagesKari Lake is all but throwing in the towel against an Arizona election official who sued her for defamation, notifying a court on Tuesday she has no intention of defending her claims that he deliberately wrecked her gubernatorial campaign in 2022.Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer, a 38-year-old Republican, filed his lawsuit last June. He said Lake had falsely accused him of “intentionally [printing] 19-inch images on 20-inch ballots,” resulting in the counting of 300,000 “illegal, invalid, phony or bogus” early ballots. She also targeted him on social media, according to the complaint, assailing him as an “incompetent, corrupt fool” and a “reprehensible human being.”Read more at The Daily Beast.

Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily BeastBernard Schwartz was the last person in my life to regularly refer to me as “kid.” When in the course of our many collaborations over the past two decades, he would approve of a job I had done on something, he would say, “Nice work, kid.” It was, when you are, as I am, well into your sixties, a title that was as appreciated as it was misplaced.Bernard, a philanthropist, political activist, business leader, father, grandfather, husband, and mensch to the very marrow of his bones was born the same year as my own father, 1925. He was of the greatest generation. He remembered the Depression and served during World War II. Those experiences, as much as the great business success he worked for throughout his adult life, shaped who he was and the kind of America he so strongly believed in.He died earlier this month at the age of 98 after a long and extraordinary life. If, based on that life and the spirit of the man, I were able to bestow a title on him, it would be “the most optimistic man in America.”Read more at The Daily Beast.

Casey Durkin / BravoVanderpump Rules has finally returned to its roots: women bullying and ostracizing other women, while doofus men do doofus things. There’s been a disconnect in messaging post-Scandoval, as many fans and even Bravo angle the show as a girl power show full of women who are great inspirations. But that’s not Vanderpump Rules, nor will it ever be. It’s a show about awful people with great television presence, and I’d want it no other way.The group has had many victims, and now Jo joins the pantheon as persona non grata of the in-group. The group drove her to tears this week merely by mean mugging, proving Jo might not have what it takes to fight for a spot in this group, but she’s still the people’s princess. Well, she’s this person’s princess, singular. But that’s how a revolution starts.While the ladies alliance has been teetering for weeks, this is the episode it finally topples, starting with an “accidental” revelation by Tom Schwartz. Pointing out that everyone in the group has made indiscretions, Schwartz casually mentions to Lala that he made out with Scheana 12 years ago. Record scratch. What?Read more at The Daily Beast.

Celal Gunes/Anadolu via Getty ImagesThe GOP campaign operative who accused Matt Schlapp of inappropriately groping his groin in 2022 has dropped lawsuits filed against the CPAC chairman, his associates, and his wife, Mercedes. The dropped suits appear to end a long saga involving the Schlapps and Carlton Huffman, an ex-campaign staffer for the former Senate hopeful Herschel Walker who has since been accused of sexual assault himself. In a statement shared with Politico by Schlapp’s lawyers, Huffman apologized to the Schlapp family and said he regretted ever filing the lawsuits against them, CPAC, the ACU, and Caroline Wren, an adviser to Matt Schlapp. Read more at The Daily Beast.