Monty Python's latest spat, Jon Stewart's big return, and more from the week in news

Top entertainment news stories from The A.V. Club for the week of February 12

By The A.V. Club Bot | February 17, 2024 | 2:00pm

Aux Features Monty Python

Monty Python's latest spat, Jon Stewart's big return, and more from the week in news

Napoleon Photo: Apple TV+

Alicia Keys’ Super Bowl flub already erased from the official record

The growing danger of the Internet is that we won’t be able to trust what we see or hear. It’s already pretty easy to spread misinformation on social media, but as artificial intelligence and deepfakes become more precise and accurate, it will be even harder to separate fact from fiction. Maybe it’s a little dramatic to apply this logic to the editing of Alicia Keys’ Super Bowl Halftime Show performance, but the truth is, reality is already being tweaked before our eyes. Read More

John Cleese has “always loathed and despised” Eric Idle

Ever the source of sound, thoughtful commentary, John Cleese has alerted fans to the fact that he and fellow Monty Python member Eric Idle have “always loathed and despised each other.” This comes in response to Idle telling Twitter followers that Python’s finances are a “disaster” due to mismanagement of the group by manager Holly Gilliam, daughter of American Python Terry Gilliam. Read More

Did Jon Stewart’s much-talked about return to The Daily Show deliver your moment of zen?

Returning to The Daily Show for the first time since 2015, political satirist emeritus Jon Stewart returned to Comedy Central today to the show that made him a star. And for a lengthy, 20-minute opening segment, Stewart did what he does best, host The Daily Show. Read More

Uh-oh! It’s a leap year, the Chiefs won the Super Bowl, and Sarah Palin showed up on another singing show

Maybe the Book of Revelation was onto something with that whole Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse thing. If you’ve been paying attention to world events in 2024, you may have noticed some eerie similarities to a certain calendar year where things went… a bit south. 2020 was a leap year (so is this one), the Chiefs beat the 49ers in the Super Bowl (guess what!), and Biden and Trump were set to go head to head in November’s election. Read More

Marvel confirms the Fantastic Four casting everyone expected

Well… it’s official. The casting news that we all saw coming has finally landed, and Marvel has its new Fantastic Four. If you somehow missed the weeks of speculation and hype, that’s Pedro Pascal as Reed Richards/Mr. Fantastic, Vanessa Kirby as Sue Storm/Invisible Woman, Joseph Quinn as Johnny Storm/Human Torch, and Ebon Moss-Bachrach as Ben Grimm/The Thing. It’s not exactly exciting news since anyone following Fantastic Four news basically knew it already, but at least the announcement came with a cute Valentine’s Day graphic. Read More

The amount of stupidity that led up to the Rust shooting is depressing and mind-boggling

Earlier today, a New Mexico court shut down a request from the attorneys for Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, who had been asking that the case against her—i.e., the involuntary manslaughter of Rust cinematographer Halyna Hutchins, killed on the movie’s set in October of 2021—be thrown out of court. Gutierrez-Reed’s team had been making the case that, after more than two years’ worth of public information about the case (including private messages from Gutierrez-Reed) being dropped into the public sphere, it was now impossible for her to get a fair trial in a prosecution for Hutchins’ death. (A judge, obviously, disagreed.) Read More

Amazon facing predictable class action lawsuit after adding ads to Prime Video

Generally, when previously ad-free streaming services have added ads, they’ve done so by introducing new ad-supported tiers that are cheaper than the regular tier while (probably) increasing the price of the existing ad-free tier to incentivize users to drop down to the one with ads. Amazon isn’t like every other company that owns a streaming service, though, so when it decided to add ads to Prime Video at the end of January, it instituted a wacky new scheme that forced everyone into the ad tier and demanded that they pay up to go back to the old ad-free service they were using before. Read More

Ridley Scott’s Napoleon is still short on streaming

Several months after being released in theaters, Ridley Scott’s big hat-wearing epic Napoleon is finally moving to its forever-home on Apple TV+… but there’s a small catch, and that is not a joke about the historical perception of Napoleon Bonaparte being a short man but is, in fact, a commonly used expression. (Though, especially by modern standards, he was apparently relatively short.) Read More

David Tennant settles the great Scrooge McDuck vs. The Doctor debate

Tennant says McDuck would win a fight and it wouldn’t even be close

Kingsley Ben-Adir describes his first day on set of One Love

The actor also discusses how they managed all of those Kens in Barbie