Category: Entertainment

Hilary Duff is opening up about being at the center of the drama surrounding Ashley Tisdale’s viral “Toxic Mom Group” essay.

While appearing on the Call Her Daddy podcast on Wednesday, the actress-singer reflected the buzz around Tisdale’s January essay “Breaking Up With My Toxic Mom Group” for The Cut. In the essay, Tisdale reflected on no longer being a part of a mom group due to feeling excluded and for acting like they were in high school. Though Tisdale did not directly name the members of the mom group, Tisdale has been photographed in the past spending time with Duff, Mandy Moore, and Meghan Trainor’s mom group. She now only follows Trainor on Instagram.

When talking about the essay Duff told host Alex Cooper, “I felt really sad. I honestly felt really sad. I was pretty taken aback and felt just sad.”

She went on to say that she feels “lucky” given that motherhood has brought her a “core group of friends” who have been her “ride or die for 10 to 20 years.”

“I have tons of different groups of mom friends because I have four kids, you know? So, I think I just was like, ‘Whoa.’ It sucks to read something that’s not true and it sucks on behalf of like six women and all of their lives,” she added.

Duff’s husband, Matthew Koma, also made headlines at the time for sharing a pointed response to Tisdale’s essay by recreating her photo used for The Cut and writing a headline that read, “When You’re The Most Self Obsessed Tone Deaf Person On Earth, Other Moms Tend To Shift Focus To Their Actual Toddlers.”

Duff said that she didn’t know Koma was going to post that but noted, “Honestly, everything he does makes me laugh, so I was like, ‘Oh my god. Oh my god,’ but I also don’t censor him and I don’t tell him what he can and can’t post. He is so fierce for me and I love him for that.”

The essay was published amid Duff’s return to music, preparing to release her first album in a decade. Duff said the timing also made her feel “used”: “I think it came at like the craziest time where I was like, like the timing felt not great and I felt used.”

In a conversation with The Los Angeles Times, Duff said that the public attention cased from the essay was something she was used to. “This is not new for me,” Duff told the Los Angeles Times. “I’ve had this since I was maybe 15 and starting to get followed around by paparazzi. Everything starts getting documented and everyone knows my life and all the players in it. So the stories that get news pickup — it’s not what happens to a normal person who maybe became an actor as an adult.”

Duff recently released her new album, luck… or something, her first in years. The album was largely written alongside her husband.

There’s the sort of artistic failure that can only be made by incredibly talented people — misfires, but misfires of audacity and ambition, unsuccessful attempts to buck conventional wisdom or smash through stylistic constraints.

I always try to give some grace to failures of that sort, because the difference between greatness and well-intended awfulness can be an eyelash.

Amazon’s new eight-part Civil War miniseries The Gray House does not lack for talent. The series’ co-writers/co-creators include Leslie Greif (the solid Hatfields & McCoys) and John freakin’ Sayles, while each episode was directed by Roland Joffé, who earned Oscar nominations for The Killing Fields and The Mission, his first two features. Kevin Costner is an executive producer, while Morgan Freeman is an executive producer and sporadically narrates.

The Gray House is not, however, the sort of artistic failure that can only be made by incredibly talented people. It’s just a throwback mess, half endeavoring to tell the under-appreciated story of the Southern women and Blacks who risked their lives to assist the Union cause in the Civil War, and half a hodge-podge of caricatures and stereotypes that go back centuries. There’s no aesthetic excellence or narrative complexity to add value, and while several of the performances are sturdy, many more are underdeveloped at one end of the spectrum or ridiculously hammy at the other.

At best, it’s a dry, poorly edited, questionably acted Wikipedia entry in which most of the facts contain the qualifier, “This information cannot be verified.” At worst, it’s an accidental episode of Drunk History, particularly the finale, which I found to be shockingly and hilariously shoddy at every overextended turn.

There is a kernel of a true story at the heart of The Gray House, which is credited in totality to Greif and Darrell Fetty and Sayles in a way that left me with very large questions regarding the precise nature of the Eight Men Out auteur’s contributions.

Eliza (Mary-Louise Parker) and Elizabeth (Daisy Head) Van Lew are Richmond social royalty, as tensions with the North are ramping up in July 1860. The family has a vast estate financed by Eliza’s late husband’s hardware business and populated by servants whom the husband freed on his deathbed. That Eliza and Elizabeth currently own no slaves makes it possible to root for them, and the show definitely doesn’t want you to think that they’re remaining in a house and lifestyle that was supported on the back of slavery.

When the story begins, Mary Jane (Amethyst Davis), one of those paid servants who definitely isn’t a slave, is returning from Liberia, where she was learning about the possibilities for emigrating. After the first episode hints that she’s returning with trauma from that experience, it’s barely mentioned again.

As war breaks out, the Van Lews realize they have an opportunity to help the Northern cause, and they set up a spy network, which includes Mary Jane, their chief porter Isham (Ben Vereen), local prostitute Clara (Hannah James), local baker Thomas McNiven (Christopher McDonald) and a growing assortment of other people.

So far, so accurate!

It’s true that Jefferson Davis (Sam Trammell) took up residence in Richmond at what came to be known as The Gray House; that his Secretary of War/State Judah P. Benjamin (Rob Morrow) was an integral part of the Confederate government; and that the real-life Mary Jane took up work at the Gray House, allowing her to gather and disseminate information in heroic fashion.

So, again, you have a real-life spy ring that was absolutely important to the Union cause, with several details — they utilized a cipher, they often transported documents hidden in eggs — that are part of a historical record. But the historical record is fuzzy, and at almost every turn the writers have decided to latch onto information that, when you Google looking for more depth, is described as “disputed” since nearly everything we know about Mary Jane apparently came from a single, questionably reliable source.

I don’t begrudge printing the legend in cases like this, but for all of the pieces of The Gray House that are real and even the pieces that are embellished, it’s the stuff that’s purely fictional that is just excruciating. Elizabeth finds herself in a chemistry-free romance with a Louisiana gentleman (Colin Morgan’s Hamton) that gets upended because he loves the Confederacy and because Elizabeth’s sister-in-law Laurette (Catherine Hannay) is a predatory cartoon character.

And speaking of predatory cartoon characters, every member of the local Richmond Confederacy has been instructed to act as broadly as possible, including sheriff-or-something Stokely Reeves (Paul Anderson), general nefarious gadfly Bully Lumpkin (Robert Knepper) and a few others. I’m not, by any stretch of the imagination, saying the show needs some nuanced, developed slaveowner characters. I am saying that there’s a point at which Bully Lumpkin is cackling and doing a near-jig — a level of superficiality I can accept from a tertiary henchman, not somebody who is one of the series’ most identifiable adversaries.

Indeed, entirely too many of the supporting performances fall into high-school theatrical Dixie burlesque, with lots of exaggerated Southern accents (plus whatever accent McDonald is doing, which is invisible some moments, full-on-Shrek in others) and, when available, mustache twirling. The various unnamed and barely-named slave characters are, in several cases, basically retrograde archetypes that would have been at home in Gone with the Wind.

Trammell and Morrow aren’t really playing Jefferson Davis and Judah P. Benjamin. I’m not even sure they’re playing Wikipedia entries for either man. Trammell looks almost nothing like Davis, but the hair and makeup team give him the oddly two-pronged beard Davis has in some pictures. Morrow looks nothing like Benjamin and the show does nothing to address that. These two neither look nor sound like real people, but they’re better than the wax-museum replicas of Ulysses S. Grant and Abraham Lincoln who appear in the finale, and better than Charles Craddock’s John Wilkes Booth, who pops up in historically inappropriate times and places as a set-up for…nothing.

There are better performances. If anybody sees the show, it will be a breakout for Davis, whom I remember also being decent in FX’s short-lived attempt to adapt Kindred. I think Mary Jane probably has less screen time than Elizabeth, but she’s the more complicated character; I wish we’d had the chance to see what befell Mary Jane in Liberia. Head is feisty and a bit anachronistic in her affect, but if there’s a high-school theater vibe to the whole show, she gives the impression of being the popular girl who has talent as well. Vereen becomes largely invisible in the second half of the show, but he has one early episode in which the pain and injustice of Isham’s years in slavery come bursting out of him in searing monologues, and it’s hard not to be like, “Oh right. Ben Vereen. National treasure.”

And speaking of searing monologues and national treasures, everyone in Hollywood should seek out Keith David‘s agent, who got him a “With” credit for a role — abolitionist Henry H. Garnet — that amounts to exactly one scene, in which he delivers a fiery speech with typical aplomb.

Though I’m certain that Joffé deserves blame for the coaching of the motley cast — it takes effort to steer Parker to a performance this less-than-good — there are moments when his cinematic pedigree comes through and you can see him, for example, getting unexpected depth from the generically verdant Romanian locations. Then again, there are moments in which bad lighting over-exposes the excessively pristine period costumes and slathered-on hair and makeup. There are also at least four key character death scenes that I had to rewind and watch multiple times because the action was so poorly shot and edited together.

The editing. Man. The show is called The Gray House, which doesn’t in any way reflect its focus, but it probably should have been called Appomattox, because it feels like somebody simply surrendered at trying to build any kind of momentum within the show. The first episode, at 81 minutes, is borderline abusive and I nearly quit watching entirely. The middle of the season, in which episodes are still mostly over an hour, moved a bit better. But then the finale really is comical in its haphazard attempt to depict the bedlam of end-of-war Richmond and give “satisfying” resolution to characters — mostly meaning killing off those wicked Confederates in ludicrous and operatic fashion.

I know that sometimes when I write a negative review, people say, “Well now you made me want to watch!” This is a negative review and I’d urge restraint. If you want a Civil War resistance thriller, watch WGN’s Underground, now streaming on Hulu. If you want a little more Civil War history with a few fictional leaps and far better production values, watch Manhunt on Apple. And if what you really crave is an overpriced, 66-minute Drunk History episode, skip straight to the Gray House finale. You may not get the context, but you’ll still find things to laugh at.

Robert De Niro teared up and choked up when he passionately discussed Donald Trump on a podcast.

The progressive actor — a frequent and longtime critic of the president — appeared on Nicolle Wallace’s MS NOW podcast, The Best People, on Monday, where he tore into Trump and urged people to protest his actions.

“Trump is the enemy of this country, let’s not kid ourselves,” De Niro said. “It’s that simple. Everybody has to stick together to get them out and get back on track. We can all argue and fight about our little differences and all that. This is the big problem.”

When asked if he thought Trump would step down at the end of his second term, De Niro replied, “No way.”

“He won’t leave,” De Niro said firmly. “Let’s not kid ourselves. He. Will. Not. Leave. It’s up to us to get rid of him. We have to make sure … We’ve got to get rid of him. He’s going to ruin the country. People have to mobilize now and be ready for the midterms.”

In addition, De Niro made the case for people peacefully protesting and uniting against Trump in every legal way possible.

“Everybody has to get out there every way possible,” De Niro said. “This is our country. You know, I want my country back. I don’t want everybody going around with their MAGA flags and American flags like they’re the only ones [who are patriotic]. We are Americans, too. And there are more of us because we believe in what’s right and wrong; empathy, and kindness. Bringing the country together, not dispersing it … I understand tribalism — you stick with your own and all that. But this is way, way, way more serious.”

In fact, even if Trump dies, De Niro is concerned that the movement he’s created won’t go away.

Even if Trump dies for some reason — by having an illness or something — parts of that movement are still there, and that’s the scary part,” he said. “It has to be neutralized by the people who say, ‘Wait a minute, our rights are being trampled on.’ We have to stand up. Period.’”

During the most emotional part of the interview, Wallace played a clip of De Niro’s 1981 Oscars acceptance speech for best actor and asked him about why he’s always been driven to “lift up everybody around you.”

“You have to lift people up,” the 82-year-old Goodfellas actor said, his voice cracking and eyes watering. “You have to bring them together, period. You can’t divide people. You can’t win that way. It’s a no-win situation. It’s almost like our destiny to have this thing there attempting to destroy this country, and maybe not even understanding why. So it’s up to us to protect the country that we love.”

Trump has slammed De Niro repeatedly in turn, including today, when he urged the actor to leave the country on Truth Social, writing, “[Reps. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Rashia Tlaib of Michigan] should actually get on a boat with Trump Deranged Robert De Niro, another sick and demented person with, I believe, an extremely Low IQ, who has absolutely no idea what he is doing or saying — some of which is seriously CRIMINAL.”

If you’re interested in De Niro’s comments, it’s worth watching the whole 40-minute video rather than just reading the cherry-picked quotes above because this is a very earnest, deep-dive conversation that gets into a lot of detail about the actor’s feelings on this issue.

Presidents use television for lots of reasons. Eisenhower used it to message cuddly. Bill Clinton used it to message cool. Barack Obama used it to message compassionate.

For Donald Trump, TV has served more purposes than most, including a chance to gain dominion over our mindshare (see under: all those televised rallies in the first campaign) or to seem like a martyr in the face of evil (see under: the 2024 RNC appearance right after the assassination attempt) — both of which helped him win elections many pollsters saw him losing.

Tuesday night’s appearance on all major networks for the State of the Union required some particular television magic. Trump’s approval ratings are abysmal, with the numbers consistently in the 35-40 percent range, a double-digit drop from a year ago. Independents, who will be key to many midterm races, believe the country is worse off today than a year ago to the tune of nearly 70 percent. 

Could Trump use television to pull another polling and ultimately electoral miracle? That was the question hovering above the SOTU, and Trump responded by trying two key prongs.

The first was old-fashioned showmanship. Having been gifted the specter of a major U.S. win on the international Olympic stage, Trump grabbed the box and tore off the bow. The dramatic entrance of the United States men’s hockey team into the gallery early in the speech, complete with gold medals and USA sweaters, had all the trappings of a reality-show triumph. Mark Burnett, Trump’s maker and mentor, would be proud.

Trump’s talk about all the “winning” the U.S. is doing can’t be focused on affordability, which is a growing challenge for many Americans and seen largely as a loss So the president shifted to a kind of winning we all agreed on. Toss in some “U-S-A” chants, some good-natured jokes about goalie Connor Hellebuyck and the sight of Jack Hughes’ heroically toothless grin, and you have the makings of a perfect Trump small-screen spectacle in line with so many of his other effective small-screen spectacles.

Whatever your politics, the moment was great by pure TV standards. Sure, there were the five athletes who were conspicuously absent. Yes, ICE and inflation concerns continue to rock the country. But the scene on national television did what all good showmanship is supposed to do — make you forget about the facts and get caught up in the moment.

But this is the modern era, and television can’t just be used for great television moments. So Trump went to another trick, one honed by his years of dominating and mastering social media. He crafted a spectacle on TV he knew would go viral — knew would engage and engage again on all the platforms that prized the verb.

He asked Democrats to stand up.

“If you agree with this statement then stand up and show your support,” he called out to the chamber, proceeding to read the statement, “The first duty of the American government is to protect American citizens, not illegal aliens.”

This substantively meaningless statement is of course an obvious trap, and a pretty brilliant one. If the Democrats do stand up, they look subservient to Trump and his ICE agenda and he affirms his power. If they don’t, they look petulant and dissenting of the first part of his message,  about protecting Americans. They didn’t stand, and took the lesser of two evils.

Trump then implemented the next phase of his neat one-two plan, riding the sitting for all it was worth. He shook his head in performative disappointment and exclaimed, “Isn’t that a shame? You should be ashamed of yourself! Not standing up. You should be ashamed of yourselves.”

Having crafted the perfect feelgood spectacle moment, which is what television is made for, Trump had now crafted the perfect outrage spectacle moment, which is what social media is made for. Needless to say, the bit did exactly what it was meant to do, going viral and causing many right-wing influencers to shriek online about how awful Democrats were. I suspect not much will be remembered about the speech itself and its awkward combination of fearmongering about immigrants and Panglossian visions of an America on the rise. But we will remember the afterburn of these two moments — a smiling USA Hockey Team, and a sitting USA congressional bloc.

The bad news, if we care about democracy, is that television and digital platforms have now been turned over to such shenanigans. Presidents have always used the medium for the message; to decry that is to be naive. But before Trump they’ve rarely tried to poison it — turn it into something whose sole purpose is to get us angry. Given how effective Trump has been politically over the last decade, there’s not a ton of reason to think it will stop; the outrage-farming will probably be adopted by plenty of future Democrats and Republicans alike. The medium may be the message. Unfortunately, that message is now fear and anger about other Americans.

But the good (or at least better) news, if we care about democracy, is that these manipulative moments may in fact be losing their effectiveness. We’ll see what the latest president poll numbers show, but early anecdotal reports, like the swing-voter panel CNN convened, did not seem to go for it. Creating viral outrage moments is not the electoral tool it was a decade ago when Trump began his disruptive journey — our social media itself is too divided, too wary, for even shrewd tricks like this to break through and sway undecideds. Presidents will always find new ways to have the medium deliver the message. But the angry message, at least, may not land like it used to.