Entertainment

Broke With Expensive Taste hit iTunes with little warning

Azealia Banks’ debut album, Broke With Expensive Taste, is sort of like the Loch Ness Monster of hip-hop: few expected it would show itself in this lifetime. But after years of delays and label disputes and her own trash-talking, it seems the “212” rapper has some news for ye-of-little-faith: the 16-song set is now available for purchase on iTunes.

The move recalls Beyoncé’s surprise release of her self-titled visual album last December, though Banks fans got a bit more of a heads up than Mrs. Carter’s followers, when Banks hinted Tuesday at a “magic trick” on Twitter. And while setting herself up for inevitable Beyoncé comparisons might be a risky move for an artist with just an EP and a mixtape to her name, Banks didn’t have much to lose, either. Despite some promising signs of progress, like “Heavy Metal and Reflective,” the record became more of a joke with each passing day. This way, she’s cutting her losses — Banks finally put her money where her mouth is.

Middle-Earth is going to war... again

The rap mogul loves "Ace of Spades" champagne so much he raps about it and served it at an Obama fundraiser

He’s not a businessman. He’s a business, man.

Oh wait, actually he’s also a businessman.

Jay-Z has bought the Armand de Brignac champagne business for an undisclosed amount. The champagne is known as “Ace of Spades,” and is produced by eight people in the French town of Chigny-les-Roses, the BBC reports. It was featured in at least one Jay-Z music video and sells for $300 per bottle.

The 44-year-old rap mogul (and businessman) is known for his love of champagne. Jay-Z raps about the Ace of Spades brand in his song “On To The Next One:” “I used to drink Cristal, the muhf***ers racist, so I switched gold bottles on to that Spade sh**” Jay-Z raps. In the music video for the song, you can see the Ace of Spades champagne flash onscreen about one minute and 57 seconds in.

At a fundraiser Jay-Z held for President Barack Obama in 2012, he and his wife Beyonce Knowles reportedly displayed 350 bottles of the drink.

Jay-Z has an estimated net worth of $520 million, according to Forbes magazine, making him the third richest hip-hop star in the world. He has a clothing line, restaurants and a recording label.

The story centers on a black WWII pilot

A John Steinbeck story titled “With Your Wings” will be published Friday in The Strand magazine, 70 years after the Of Mice and Men author read it in a radio broadcast that until now was thought to be undocumented and unrecorded.

The quarterly journal’s managing editor recently found a transcript of the story while going through the University of Texas at Austin’s archives.

“With Your Wings” tells the story of a black WWII pilot who returns home after training feeling out of place and apprehensive. When his father sees the silver wings pinned to his chest, he expresses how meaningful his service will be at a time when the U.S. Army was still segregated. “‘Son,” he says, “every black man in the world is going to fly with your wings.”

[AP]

The social satire takes austerity measures to a whole new level

We’ve heard of actors dropping massive amounts of weight in the quest for an Oscar, but for his role in Alexander Payne’s Downsizing, Matt Damon’s weight loss will be more sci-fi, less South Beach.

The Bourne Identity actor has agreed to play a man who undergoes a shrinking procedure as a way to cut costs. His wife agrees to this austerity measure, too, but backs out after he’s already been downsized.

Payne wrote the script for Downsizing with his writing partner Jim Taylor between 2004’s Sideways and 2011’s The Descendants, when it was slated to star Paul Giamatti and Reese Witherspoon. It was tabled so Payne could work on The Descendants (which won a Oscar for its screenplay), and again when he started work directing Nebraska.

But it’s back on track now, and with no financing announced, the team may have to think big to get small.

[The Hollywood Reporter]

Coming along in the season of Renée Zellweger and J-Law, Lisa Kudrow's Hollywood satire is more relevant than ever.

My review of the comeback of HBO’s The Comeback is in the new print issue of TIME. I wish I could share it with you here, because I like the review and I like the show, but I also like having a paid job, and the column is for subscribers only. (Thirty bucks gets you a year’s worth of TIME! Cheaper than HBO!)

What I particularly like about the new season is that it de-emphasizes what I thought was worst about the original–the shooting-fish-in-an-aquarium reality-TV satire–and builds on what was best: Lisa Kudrow’s microcalibrated performance, and its cringe-making yet sympathetic depiction of an actress, now around 50, trying to make it in an industry that stamps a sell-by date on women:

I watched the five episodes HBO sent around the time that Renée Zellweger, 45, tripped the Internet chatter alarm over her “unrecognizable” face, which was not long after the summer’s doxing of stolen nude photos of young actresses, including Jennifer Lawrence, 24. Valerie may be grasping and desperate, but she’s no dummy: she knows how actresses enter this cattle chute as hotties and exit as jokes.

One thing that’s compelling about Valerie is that she’s aware of this dynamic but has no illusions about her ability to change it. Early in the season, when she scores a career coup–she’s cast in an HBO series about the series made in the first season of The Comeback–she’s flabbergasted to discover that it starts shooting almost immediately. She won’t have time to “prepare,” she protests–where “prepare” means to set up and recover from plastic surgery.

The way our culture deals with its Valerie Cherishes is to make fun of them for being “phony”–for putting on false faces figuratively or, in the case of plastic surgery, literally. But that’s the easiest kind of sanctimony, to define actresses’ worth by their hotness and then blame and mock them for it when they accept the terms. Stay young forever! But never be fake!

The beauty of The Comeback is that it can be painfully funny dealing with Valerie, and yet it’s never unsympathetic–it’s conscious of why she is the way she is, and that’s the much tougher and ultimately more rewarding laugh. If I like the new season even better than the original so far, one reason may simply be that Valerie is nine years older, and by the simple harsh math of Hollywood, the stakes are that much more real.

And coming so soon after the mass Zellweger freakout, it feels all the more relevant. It’s easy to feel superior to celebrities willing to do anything to maintain their image, whether it’s landing a reality TV show or going under the knife. What Kudrow and The Comeback never forget is: there are a whole lot of us with our fingerprints on that scalpel.