Reviews
The Rehearsal Confirms Nathan Fielder Is a Comic Visionary: Review
The Pitch: Comedy has long mined the rich vein of desire running within most average citizens for fame — or at least some kind of recognition. That yen for the spotlight is what allowed ’60s duo Coyle and Sharpe and modern day bellower Billy Eichner to turn “man on the street” interviews into improvised gold and fed the creation of far too many prank shows. It’s also a craving that Nathan Fielder has spent the last decade twisting to absurdist ends, both on his acclaimed Comedy Central series Nathan For You and in his behind-the-scenes work on shows like How To with John Wilson and Sacha Baron Cohen’s Who Is America? In each one, everyday people willingly put themselves under the eye of a TV camera, often revealing too much of themselves in the process. The results are either damning, hear...
Stranger Things Season 4, Part 2 Serves Up Oversized Blockbuster Cheese for the Fourth of July: Review
[Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers through the Season 4 finale of Stranger Things, “The Piggyback.”] The Pitch: This year’s super-sized season of Stranger Things felt, if anything, a confirmation of Netflix’s confidence in the series — marking it as their true blockbuster tentpole, the thing to keep people subscribing amid price hikes and a nagging sense of doubt in their catalog. The first seven episodes (all nearly feature-length) set up our rapidly growing set of chess pieces along four branching storylines: Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) and her attempts to get her powers back, Joyce’s (Winona Ryder) quest to get Hopper (David Harbour) back from Russia, Mike (Finn Wolfhard) and crew fleeing from the authorities in California, and the kids of Hawkins facing down a sp...
The Princess Review: The Raid By Way of Tangled, With a Kick-Ass Joey King
The Pitch: What if there was a princess — only she’s not like a regular princess, she’s a cool princess, meaning she can do crazy fight moves, which no one expects because she’s a princess? Girl power! If you’re thinking this sounds a bit like a hacky Matrix-referencing scene from the movie Shrek, you’re right. It does. And Shrek was far from the first or last movie to spoof princess tropes. At this point, Disney has been deconstructing and reclaiming its own fairy-tale princesses for multiple decades, growing from the shallow parody of Enchanted to the multifaceted reimagining of Frozen or Moana. Over this same period, the Disney kingdom has expanded, to the point where it now owns the formerly grown-up movie studio 20th Century Studios (formerly Fox), who have produced their own princess...
What We Do in the Shadows Glides By on Vampiric Charm in Its Fourth Season: Review
The Pitch: When we last left the Staten Island mansion of What We Do in the Shadows in Season 3, the house felt a little emptier — Nandor (Kayvan Novak) had just departed for his “Eat, Prey, Love” (sic) tour of self-discovery, and Nadja (Natasia Demetriou) swanned off to England in a wooden crate to join the Worldwide Vampiric Council, with Guillermo (Harvey Guillén) in unwitting tow. Laszlo (Matt Berry), for his part, chose to stay behind, not least because the dead body of Colin Robinson (Mark Proksch) gave way to a new, childlike form (also Proksch, pasty round adult features grinning eerily atop a child’s body), which he had to take care of. Cut to a year later, and all that potential energy is lost: All Nandor got from his tour was an erstwhile friendship with a nice family from ...
France’s Hellfest Was One Helluva Festival, Featuring Metallica, Nine Inch Nails, and Many More: Recap, Photos + Video
Editor’s Note: The massive 2022 edition of Hellfest took place in Clisson, France, over two weekends, with seven days of performances from many of the biggest metal and hard rock acts in the world. Heavy Consequence photojournalist Raymond Ahner was on hand for the second weekend (June 23rd-26th), where he captured pics of Metallica, Nine Inch Nails, Scorpions, Ministry, Alice Cooper, and many more acts. See his recap and photo gallery below. After canceling the 2020 and 2021 installments due to the ongoing pandemic, Hellfest returned in 2022 in a big way, with not one, but two completely jam-packed weekends, featuring many of today’s biggest metal and hard rock bands on the planet. When the massive lineup was announced last year, it almost seemed impossible that something this big could b...
Westworld Season 4 Review: A Welcome Fresh Start With Some Big Ideas to Explore
The Pitch: The third season of Westworld did not have a lot of luck on its side — specifically, the timing of its premiere could have been better, as March 15th, 2020 was not an ideal day to launch a new season of a TV show which, over the course of eight episodes, became a tale of society nearly descending entirely into apocalypse. But even since the first season, Westworld has experienced a lot of critical scrutiny, especially as the narrative has drifted further and further away from its original Michael Crichton inspiration of disaster at a high-tech amusement park for the ultra-rich. (Funny how Westworld literally is a response to one of Jeff Goldblum’s iconic quotes from another Crichton adaptation: “If Pirates of the Caribbean breaks down, the pirates don’t eat the tourists.”) So wh...
The Obi-Wan Kenobi Finale Pushed Our Exhaustion With Prequels to the Limit
[Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers through the season finale of Obi-Wan Kenobi, “Part VI.”] Sure, it’s a metaphysical impossibility in the real world (for anyone outside of an X-Files episode), but it’s still a good thing that none of us know for certain how our friends and family are going to die. It’s the kind of knowledge that would hang over every interaction, make us wonder if every decision they make is one which will bring them ever closer to their ultimate fate — it’d be hard to connect with your friends and family, if you knew how they were all going to die. It might make it hard for you to care about what happens to them. Which brings us to the season finale of Obi-Wan Kenobi, an action-packed hour of television where all of its major climaxes had, for a Star Wars fa...
Elvis: Baz Luhrmann’s Gloriously Dizzying Film Takes Care of Presley’s Business
Baz Luhrmann’s unparalleled, and some would say over-the-top production style works very well to present the arc of Elvis Presley‘s career. The story is told through the eyes of Presley’s mercurial manager, Col. Tom Parker, astutely played by Tom Hanks. The Oscar-winning actor draws us in with his conspiratorial voiceovers, and then we see Presley’s puppet-like reaction. The funhouse mirror scene when Parker woos Elvis, whether apocryphal, is a perfect metaphor for the career Parker shapes for Presley. Parker leveraged his astute judgment of human nature to pluck Presley from obscurity as a truck driver and move him quickly from a traveling circus-like roadshow to the pinnacle of mainstream popularity. Parker’s voiceovers consistently speak about his skill at conjuring up more snow ...
Bonnaroo 2022 Photo Gallery: Denzel Curry, Stevie Nicks, Tool and More
After Bonnaroo 2020 was canceled due to the coronavirus, and the the 2021 attempt at resurrection was foiled by Hurricane Ida, the festival on the farm looked to make it’s long-awaited comeback in June 2022. And despite a storm delay that triggered flashbacks of last-year’s waterlogged campsite, Bonnaroo 2022 beat the odds and completed its first full weekend in three years. Here’s the visual evidence, courtesy of photographer Anthony Merriweather, who was on the ground for Consequence all weekend long. Headlined by J. Cole, Tool, and Stevie Nicks, the Tennessee festival also featured performances from Denzel Curry, The War on Drugs, Wallows, King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, Goose, Disclosure, and more. Jack Antonoff also led a star-studded SuperJam set, which saw acts like Carly Rae Je...
Bonnaroo 2022 Photo Gallery: Denzel Curry, Stevie Nicks, Tool and More
After Bonnaroo 2020 was canceled due to the coronavirus, and the the 2021 attempt at resurrection was foiled by Hurricane Ida, the festival on the farm looked to make it’s long-awaited comeback in June 2022. And despite a storm delay that triggered flashbacks of last-year’s waterlogged campsite, Bonnaroo 2022 beat the odds and completed its first full weekend in three years. Here’s the visual evidence, courtesy of photographer Anthony Merriweather, who was on the ground for Consequence all weekend long. Headlined by J. Cole, Tool, and Stevie Nicks, the Tennessee festival also featured performances from Denzel Curry, The War on Drugs, Wallows, King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, Goose, Disclosure, and more. Jack Antonoff also led a star-studded SuperJam set, which saw acts like Carly Rae Je...
MUNA’s Brilliant New Album Drips With Sex, Freedom and Synth-Pop Bliss
Hidden beneath all the thumping revelry, newfound freedom, and summertime horniness of MUNA’s marvelous third album, there flows an undercurrent of irony. The Los Angeles trio released two albums, in 2017 and 2019, on RCA Records, a major label with all the resources a budding indie band could ever need to launch them into the pop stratosphere. Yet MUNA remained on the fringes — well-reviewed with two-dozen dates opening for Harry Styles and The 1975, but far from a household name. So what would it take for MUNA’s big break? How about signing to emo-folk favorite Phoebe Bridgers’ new imprint Saddest Factory Records (in partnership with Dead Oceans) in 2021, which birthed the queer-love anthem and alt-radio mainstay “Silk Chiffon” (featuring Bridgers) in September and notched the group’s fi...
Only Murders In the Building Season 2 Continues the Twisty Mystery Fun: Review
The Pitch: When we last saw Charles Haden-Savage (Steve Martin), Oliver Putnam (Martin Short), and Mabel Mora (Selena Gomez), things weren’t looking great for the trio. Season 1 of Hulu’s Only Murders In the Building was a 2021 hit following the journey of the aforementioned crew as the grew from strangers and neighbors in glamorous New York apartment The Arconia to something of a chaotic family. After setting out to solve the murder of fellow Arconia resident Tim Kono by way of true crime podcast — and somehow succeeding in the matter — Charles, Oliver, and Mabel think all that’s left to do is pop some champagne and celebrate. When a mysterious text urges them to get out of the building while they can, things take a turn for the worse — Charles and Oliver stumble into yet another murder s...
