The Rundown is a weekly column that highlights some of the biggest, weirdest, and most notable events of the week in entertainment. The number of items could vary, as could the subject matter. It will not always make a ton of sense. Some items might not even be about entertainment, to be honest, or from this week. The important thing is that it’s Friday, and we are here to have some fun.
While I do not watch The Golden Bachelor and have no plans to start, less due to the quality of the show than my general aversion to reality dating shows, I have recently become obsessed with the thing where the star of the show, a 72-year-old hunk named Gerry, has a freaking massive tattoo of a lion on his shoulder. That was… not something I expected to learn. Ever. I don’t think you did either. Like, imagine two years ago some guy walks up to like “Yo, someday in the next couple years there’s gonna be a Bachelor spinoff where a Baby Boomer looks for love among a crew of similarly aged ladies and at one point he’s gonna get in a hot tub and reveal to the world that he has a massive lion tattooed on his arm.” You would be surprised, too. For a lot of reasons. Probably. Maybe you’ve seen enough reality dating shows that you’d just yawn and say “I can see it.” We all have our own journeys.
But yes, it’s real. Fans of the show freaked out about it when they first saw it. I’m freaking out now a couple of weeks later. These things have a way of trickling down. Look at my dude.
I was filled with questions about this. When did he get a massive tattoo of a lion? Why did he get a massive tattoo of a lion? Did producers know he had it before he took his shirt off on-camera that first time? What was their reaction like? How would you react if you discovered your grandpa had a massive tattoo of a lion on his body? What if it had been, like, a penguin or an alligator or just a huge dinosaur that covered up his whole back? Not even a T-Rex or a cool one. Like, a brontosaurus or something. What then?
Luckily, for me, Mark Consuelos had questions, too, and he asked Gerry a lot of them on the morning show where he and his wife reveal kind of too many things about each other. And here was Gerry’s answer.
“There was a point in time where I was thinking about taking on more responsibility in business and so forth, and there’s this saying about every morning in Africa, a lion wakes up [and] it must run faster than the slowest gazelle, or a gazelle wakes up and it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be eaten,” Turner said. “It doesn’t matter if you’re a lion or a gazelle…when the sun comes up, you better be running.”
Hmm.
Hmmmmmm.
What I love here is that I’m not sure this makes sense. Like, at all. There’s a thing about lions and a thing about gazelles and then at the end, the moral is just that everyone needs to run. Which, like, fine, I guess, but mostly it all just raises more questions, starting with the thing where… I think in his telling of it the hero is the majestic gazelle who outruns the dangerous predator? Doesn’t this mean he should have a tattoo of a gazelle? How much weirder would that be? If the Golden Bachelor just had a tattoo of a gazelle across his entire back?
I guess the point of this is that if you know Gerry the Golden Bachelor, please tell him to call me so I can ask him 1000 questions about his massive lion tattoo. And maybe suggest he get a gazelle tattoo, too. Or the dinosaur one. I just want to talk about tattoos with a 72-year-old dude. It’s not weird.
This is the trailer for the new Mean Girls musical. You can be forgiven if you didn’t immediately grasp that it’s a musical because there’s, like, barely any music in it. That’s odd. It’s like they’re saying “We think people like musicals enough to make movies out of them but not enough to sit through a little singing in a trailer without getting annoyed.” Or maybe the songs just play better in context. Or maybe another reason I haven’t thought of. This was not a great paragraph, in hindsight.
Anyway!
Here’s the description of the new movie musical, for those of you who never saw the original movie that starred Lindsay Lohan and for those of you who did see it but forgot and for those of you who just really love reading blockquotes.
New student Cady Heron (Angourie Rice) is welcomed into the top of the social food chain by the elite group of popular girls called “The Plastics,” ruled by the conniving queen bee Regina George (Reneé Rapp) and her minions Gretchen (Bebe Wood) and Karen (Avantika). However, when Cady makes the major misstep of falling for Regina’s ex-boyfriend Aaron Samuels (Christopher Briney), she finds herself prey in Regina’s crosshairs. As Cady sets to take down the group’s apex predator with the help of her outcast friends Janis (Auli’i Cravalho) and Damian (Jaquel Spivey), she must learn how to stay true to herself while navigating the most cutthroat jungle of all: high school.
Three notes here:
Look! Jon Hamm is in the Mean Girls musical!
This is probably not a surprise, both because Jon Hamm has a history with Fey/SNL that dates back many years and also because it’s almost more surprising if a new movie or show comes out and Jon Hamm isn’t in it. He’s really having fun out here.
The funniest thing about it for me is that, even if he is incredible in this sucker, Jon Hamm’s peak here is “second best inappropriate health teacher in a high school movie from the last 12 months,” because Marshawn Lynch kicked that much ass in Bottoms.
I’m ready for the Lynch/Hamm buddy cop movie whenever Hollywood can get around to it. Sooner would be better. But I can be a little patient. Let’s pencil it in for next week.
Okay, here’s what happened…
The New Yorker put out a huge profile of Ridley Scott. It’s tied to the upcoming debut of Napoleon, but it covers his whole life and career, with stuff in there about Gladiator and Blade Runner and all of it, as well as some interesting stuff about his journey and some incredibly sad stuff about the death of his brother and fellow filmmaker Tony. It’s pretty fascinating. You should give it a read.
That’s not what I want to talk about, though. I want to talk about this part of it, where Ridley responds to a complaint about the historical accuracy of his Napoleon movie.
When the trailer came out, the TV historian Dan Snow posted a TikTok breakdown of its inaccuracies. (At the Battle of the Pyramids, “Napoleon didn’t shoot at the pyramids”; Marie-Antoinette “famously had very cropped hair for the execution, and, hey, Napoleon wasn’t there.”) Scott’s response: “Get a life.”
Get a life.
That’s such a great response.
And such a familiar one.
But I couldn’t put my finger on why it felt so familiar.
I thought about it a lot.
It was driving me crazy.
And then I remembered the profile of Alex Trebek.
And I remembered this quote.
Fact: When Trebek shaved off his moustache in 2001, he did it in the middle of the day, himself, without warning the “Jeopardy!” producers. Renee was alarmed to come in and find him mid-shearing. He just felt like it, he says now. “And it got so much press, I couldn’t believe it. The wars with Iraq or whatever at that time, and people are all in a stew over my moustache. I have one response: Get a life.”
“The wars with Iraq or whatever at that time, and people are all in a stew over my mustache. I have one response: Get a life.”
I genuinely don’t know if I’ve ever seen a better quote from anyone, ever, about anything. So thank you to Ridley Scott for helping me remember it. The only downside here is, like…
People have never been in a stew over my mustache.
Something to strive for, I guess.
Let’s go ahead and rip through this one fast.
Aubrey Plaza is currently on Broadway doing the stage thing. Vulture wrote a big thing about it. Feel free to read it. Aubrey Plaza is awesome. But I can only focus on this.
While doing the play, Plaza is living on the Upper West Side with Patti LuPone, with whom she recently worked on the Marvel series Agatha: Darkhold Diaries. LuPone has since become something of a surrogate mother, making Plaza soup and doing her laundry. “She insisted,” Plaza said.
Aubrey Plaza and theater legend Patti LuPone are roommates. Patti LuPone is making her soup and doing her laundry. This is already — to me, a lunatic with access to blogging software — more interesting than the play Aubrey Plaza is starring in right now. Like, I would watch this show. A reality show starring these two or a lightly fictionalized version of the real-life living situation that also stars these two as lightly fictionalized versions of themselves. A Curb Your Enthusiasm situation.
I needed to know more. Which is why I’m thankful People magazine felt the same way and actually followed through by contacting Patti LuPone.
Soon enough, though, LuPone was cooking for Plaza, who was under the weather when she arrived. “She wasn’t eating! And I said, you’ve got to keep your strength up because what you need is physical energy for the stage,” says LuPone, who adds that she only intended to host her. “The taking care of her evolved because she was sick.”
Not that she minded at all. “I love cooking,” continues the actress, who prepared Plaza butternut squash soup, broccoli soup and also made her oatmeal in the mornings.
I must have these soups.
And this oatmeal.
Patti LuPone, please move in with me.
It won’t be weird.
It might be a little weird.
But still.
Offer stands.
Tony Hawk was on Hot Ones this week, which was strange because… it feels like Tony Hawk should have been on Hot Ones by now, right? Like, at least once? This feels like a “how has Jon Hamm not been on Only Murders in the Building?” situation to me. Walk up to someone this weekend and ask them how many times they think Tony Hawk has been on Hot Ones. I bet they guess three, minimum.
But that’s not the point. The point is that while he was on Hot Ones he told a story about Looney Tunes executives — fun to picture but also not the point — approaching him way back after the success of Space Jam about maybe doing a skateboarding version of the whole thing with live action and cartoons and all of it. And it was going to be called…
… you guessed it…
… Skate Jam.
We pick up the story at the airport, weirdly enough, where Tony Hawk is about to leave for Australia.
“[They said], ‘When you get back, we’re going to finalize all the details,’ like, that’s set, it’s happening,” he continues. “Awesome! I get on the plane, go to Australia. In the meanwhile, they released Back In Action, which was a Looney Tunes film with Brendan Frasier, and apparently it didn’t do the numbers they had hoped. That was supposed to be their way to reintroduce Looney Tunes characters. By the time I got back from Australia, they weren’t even calling anymore. It was gone. It was just gone. It was more like, ‘What happened?! Let’s all meet up again! This is gonna be fun, right?!’ Yeah. Bummer.”
Three things here:
Poor Tony Hawk.
If you have questions about television, movies, food, local news, weather, or whatever you want, shoot them to me on Twitter or at brian.grubb@uproxx.com (put “RUNDOWN” in the subject line). I am the first writer to ever answer reader mail in a column. Do not look up this last part.
From Pete:
You have the power to transport any character or characters from one show into another. Who are you taking and where are you taking them? Three rules, just to make this harder and because I know you love lists.
No Muppets
No NoHo Hank from Barry
No Boyd CrowderWhat do you got?
Hmm. I like that you gave me parameters here, Pete. Keeping me on my toes. Although now I’m imagining a Justified spinoff where Boyd Crowder and the Muppets are involved in a big heist, kind of like The Great Muppet Caper but with Walton Goggins in the Charles Grodin role. Dammit.
But with that off the table, I think I’ll go with Richie from The Bear transported into What We Do in the Shadows, partially because the show was just picked up for a third season and partially because I love him. Maybe he’s in New York for a restaurant convention. Or just a vacation. Whatever. I just like the idea of Richie having to grapple with the idea that there are just vampires out here now. Like picture this…
… but he’s talking about society at large now that he knows vampires exist. That would be fun. Let’s all think about it a lot this weekend.
To San Francisco!
Steve Mazzari, now commonly known as “Dollarita Steve,” captured the hearts of many when he gave his honest take about the 3.9 shaker.
I love Dollarita Steve so much. Here is his origin story if you’ve been living under a rock for a week.
Dollarita Steve is America’s Sweetheart.
Now, thanks to Mazzari’s viral success, the Dollarita, a $1 margarita and staple of Applebee’s, will officially be back for the month of November at the Fisherman’s Wharf location in San Francisco. KTVU camera crews were there to capture the announcement.
Two things:
We don’t often have a viral sensation who remains pure through three or four internet cycles. This one is special. Embrace it.
“I think this is my magnum opus. Beethoven had his Moonlight Sonata, I had bringing the ‘Dollarita’ back to San Francisco… I dreamed this into reality, I made it happen,” Mazzari told KTVU.
God, what a righteous dude.
Dollarita Steve for mayor.
When asked how he feels about his new moniker, Mazzari said he doesn’t mind it, “Dollarita Steve? Oh, I’m rollin with it, I’m good. I’m talking with my legal experts about whether or not we are gonna make a permanent change,” he said with a chuckle.
DOLLARITA STEVE FOR PRESIDENT.
“This is definitely the weirdest week of my entire life, and if this is how I’m remembered when I die, then so be it,” Mazzari said.
Two weeks ago, I had no opinion on Dollaritas and had no clue this man existed.
Now, I would gladly die for Dollarita Steve.
It’s been a weird November.
