Chris Hardwick's Blog, page 2287
October 17, 2016
Richard Ayoade Could Be the New GREAT BRITISH BAKE OFF Host
As a fan of baking, baked goods, and cheeky puns, watching the implosion of the The Great British Bake Off has been heart breaking. With move to Channel 4, then the departure of hosts Mel Giedroyc and Sue Perkins followed by the exit of the delightful Mary Berry, you might wonder what it would take to ever mend your sugar-filled heart.
Today, we have hope. The Standard reveals the possibility of none other than Richard Ayoade may be slated to step in and fill the gap left by Mel and Sue.
The actor and comedian was in the fan favorite The Mighty Boosh but is most well known as Moss on the hilarious IT Crowd. I mean if you can’t recite the emergency services number by heart (0118 999 881 999 119 7253) then you have at least used this gif at one point to describe your day:
Being a host is more than just introductions, they consult and console, and put a weirdly positive spin on even the most dour of desserts. His involvement isn’t confirmed as of yet but given Ayoade’s comedic timing and personal demeanor he seems like a great person to be comforting the contestants when they have a run in with soggy bottoms or a run in with Paul Hollywood’s Blue Steel look. Both of which can send shivers down even the best baker’s spine.
Here’s to hoping that the best baking show on television pulls it together so that we can all enjoy more seasons of show stopping bakes and insane technical challenges.
What do you think of Richard Ayoade as the possible new host of The Great British Bake Off? Let us know in the comments!
Images: Channel 4
GOTHAM Recap: “Mad City: Anything For You” Pits Nygma Vs. Butch
Warning: this recap contains spoilers from Monday’s episode of Gotham, “Mad City: Anything For You.” This is a recap, after all! Don’t say we didn’t warn you …
It’s Monday night, and you know what that means: villains make grand plans to cause havoc and heroes thwart those plans to save the innocent on everyone’s favorite Batman prequel series Gotham. Except this time around, it was the villains who saved the day in the end in “Mad City: Anything For You.” What kind of world are we living in?! Let’s dive in and recap all the madness, shall we?
The Red Hood Gang is back, and this time, their target is Gotham’s new mayor, Penguin. After attacking his press conference lauding the new peace in the city–how ironic, right?–they beheaded his new statue memorializing his mother. That’s just plain mean.
That spurred Penguin’s chief of staff/new best friend Ed Nygma to oversee the investigation into the new Red Hood Gang, taking him right into the heart of the GCPD where he, a cop killer, did not receive a warm welcome at all. Of course, Ed being Ed, that didn’t bother him at all. In fact, it downright delighted him. What none of them knew, though, was that the person behind the new Red Hood Gang was none other than Penguin’s other right-hand man Butch, since he was getting saltier by the minute from being excluded from Penguin and Nygma’s new friendship.
Meanwhile, Gordon and Valerie were having a hard time separating their work from their relationship, especially since Valerie is so intent on getting to the bottom of the rumors surrounding Alice’s poisonous blood. Gordon wouldn’t budge on giving her any inside information, so she decided to find it on her own by going on a not-date with someone who could help her out. Gordon wasn’t exactly thrilled at hearing that news from his new not-girlfriend.
Meanwhile, still unable to find where Ivy disappeared to, Bruce approached Gordon to hire him as a private investigator, without Selina knowing since he didn’t want to get her hopes up. After a few suggestive remarks about Bruce and Selina’s growing relationship–turns out Gordon’s still got some jokes after all!–he agreed to help find Ivy. He also gave Bruce advice: tell Selina how he truly felt, since his silence would only drive her away. Sounds like he’s speaking from experience (cough, Lee, cough).
When Gordon and Bruce were scouting for information at the GCPD, they ran into Lee, who pulled Gordon aside to warn him that her engagement announcement to Mario was coming out tomorrow, and he told her that he already knew that Mario was a Falcone, much to her surprise. What came as a surprise to me, however, was how easily she threw around the Falcone name just minutes later when she punched Nygma and warned him to stay away from her. That seemed a little darker than what we’re used to seeing from Lee, no? Maybe her new family ties are rubbing off on her more than she thinks?
While Penguin riled up his criminal contacts to find the Red Hood Gang, Babs and Tabitha decided to take matters into their own hands so they could get a favor from Penguin and make sure Butch stopped trying to mess with them. They discovered Butch giving orders to his new gang, and they got him to confess that he set up the new gang just so he could take them out and get credit for the save, making him number one again in Penguin’s eyes. But when Nygma figured out where the gang was hiding, Butch was forced to kill them all ahead of schedule. Nygma thought the crime scene was fishy, however, and after a little digging, figured out Butch was the architect of the new gang.
Back at the GCPD, Lee updated Barnes on her experiments with Alice’s blood and how it affects other people. Seeing as how he’s infected, he was extra curious in how long he had until he went psychotic, but she didn’t have any timeline for him. Yikes.
At Penguin’s party at Sirens, the new Ivy ran into Selina, who didn’t recognize her old friend in her new body. And Ivy decided not to clue her in to her identity just yet, since it was “too fun.” Nygma also had a little too much fun when confronting Butch about the Red Hood Gang, offering his help in killing Penguin. You see, Nygma wasn’t content with being someone’s number two, and unaware the Butch didn’t want to hurt Penguin, he came up with a plan for Butch to wear a red hood and kill Penguin at the party, and Nygma would help him escape. When Butch refused, Nygma threatened Tabitha’s life, and gave him a gun with blank bullets to set Butch up for failure. Penguin was furious when Butch tried to shoot him in front of everyone, but Tabitha came to his rescue. Butch then tried to kill Nygma, but Babs knocked him out cold before he could.
Later that night, Bruce decided to tell Selina the truth about how he cared for her as more than a friend, but she thought he only felt that way because she’s literally the only girl he knows. Ouch, but kind of true. That didn’t stop her from kissing him, though! Is there a new romance brewing on Gotham?
Another guy who stepped up in the romance department was Gordon, since he ended up crashing Valerie’s “work” dinner to save her from a horribly creepy guy who wanted to trade information about Alice’s blood for, ahem, sexual favors. Gross. And since Gordon realized he couldn’t separate the woman from the reporter, he decided to go all in with Valerie and tell her whatever she needed to know about the Alice investigation. Gordon is finally letting himself enjoy life again! How long is this going to last? Probably not long.
And while Penguin and Nygma couldn’t be closer than ever, Tabitha wasn’t going to let Butch get taken away by the police. She hijacked the ambulance carrying him, and when Barnes got the bad news, he stood up ina anger, only to realize he didn’t need his crutch anymore. Alice’s blood started to do its work! And speaking of Alice, turns out Jervis still hasn’t given up on trying to get his sister, even though she’d dead. He kidnapped a young girl, dressed her in a blonde wig and blue dress and killed her as a message to Gordon. With the police chief compromised and Gordon not even working as a cop anymore, this means something really bad is about to happen.
What did you think of tonight’s Gotham? Tweet me your thoughts at @SydneyBucksbaum!
Images: Fox
Super Rich POKÉMON Players Now Have a Car to Match the Game
Since the release of Pokémon Go earlier this year, the insanely popular AR game developed by Niantic has been downloaded a whopping 500 million times and garnered millions of daily active users. And as it turns out, a few of those users—very few—not only have Poké fever, but also a Lex Luthor-ish amount of money in the bank. And while most of us hatch our eggs and travel to our gyms on foot or via public transportation or maybe in, say, a Corolla, those folks with plenty of Goldeens in their jeans do things a little differently: by cruising around in a $140,000 BMW i8 wrapped in Poké decals from grille to tail lights.
The “Pokémon Hunter” BMW in the video above, which comes via Jalopnik, was posted by Veluxity, an exotic car rental service with several locations in the U.S., including one in Miami. And as Ronald Petruska, the driver of the i8, proclaims, “[This is] one of the most outlandish and outrageous cars you’ll ever see.”
The BMW i8, which, for any car nuts out there, has a hybrid powertrain consisting of a 3-cylinder engine and a couple of electric motors and can sort-of-rocket to 60 in 4.5 seconds (the quickest all-electric Tesla Model S would destroy this thing), doesn’t actually belong to Veluxity. Petruska notes that it’s owned by the man who owns a sister company of Veluxity in Miami, named Serge. Here are some posts from Serge’s Instagram, in case you’re wondering what very wealthy Pokémon hunters are up to when not catching Rattatas and Weedles.
A photo posted by Serge (@serge_paramount) on Jun 20, 2014 at 2:40pm PDT
A photo posted by Serge (@serge_paramount) on Oct 15, 2016 at 11:55am PDT
A photo posted by Serge (@serge_paramount) on Jun 28, 2016 at 1:05pm PDT
What do you think about this Pokémon Go BMW i8? Would be thrilled to have literally everyone staring at you as you drove by searching for a Squirtle, or is this level of extravagance Pikach-ewww? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!
Images: Veluxity Luxury Services/YouTube
Comic Book Club: Matt Cox
Check out the website at comicbookclublive.com to find out how to watch the show live! And follow the show on Twitter: @comicbooklive, @azalben, @jtsizzle, and @realpetelepage
Dan Harmon Bringing Esports Sitcom to YouTube Red
It’s time to trade in cries of “six seasons and a movie” for “wombo combo” because Dan Harmon is going to be producing a sitcom set in the wild world of esports. The untitled series will follow “a newly formed team of eSports players trying to make it to the top in the cutthroat world of competitive gaming,” according to Variety. YouTube announced that Starburns Industries would be producing the video game comedy on Monday as part of a press release (via Variety) announcing a number of new series, including a time travel thriller from The Rock and a Jumper sequel from Doug Liman.
The six-episode series was created by some of Nerdist’s favorite people in gaming, Michele Morrow and Jesse Cox, who will serve as both executive producers and will act in the series too. The show also has a powerhouse pair of writers and showrunners in Rick and Morty‘s Sarah Carbiener and Erica Rosbe. The half-hour scripted comedy will star Arin Hanson and Dan Avidan of Game Grumps, which makes sense given that the untitled series will debut on the Game Grumps channel in 2017 on YouTube Red.
For those of you who don’t know, YouTube Red is YouTube’s premium subscription service that removes ads, offers offline viewing, grants unlimited access to Google Play Music, and has exclusive content for a fee of $9.99 per month. Considering how annoying some of those Tai Lopez “Here in my garage” pre-roll ads were, it sounds like a small price to pay. “We’re excited to be the ones finally bringing video game content to YouTube,” said Harmon in a press release.
With esports–or competitive gaming for the uninitiated–gaining in popularity among cord-cutting viewers who watch via livestreaming services like Twitch, now seems like the perfect time to explore the inner workings and inherent silliness of the newest billion dollar industry. In fact, a new survey suggests that the rise of esports could be contributing to declining NFL ratings, which is no small accomplishment.
While I’m sure that pre-production is already well underway, I would ask that they find a way to include the world’s greatest handshake, which took place between former Nerdist gaming editor Malik Forté and pro Overwatch player Brandon Larned (a.k.a. Seagull):
NA handshake? @Malik4Play @A_Seagull pic.twitter.com/JRIHXS8yLI
— ELEAGUE (@EL) September 25, 2016
What do you think of this news? What would you like to see from an esports comedy? Do you use YouTube Red? Let us know in the comments below!
Image: Flickr/Bago Games
Dan Casey is the senior editor of Nerdist and the author of books about Star Wars and the Avengers. Follow him on Twitter (@Osteoferocious).
Jack White Played a White Stripes Song for the New PRAIRIE HOME COMPANION
The White Stripes were a rock band, but that doesn’t mean their songs lack a country twist. Jack White performed one of the band’s older songs with Margo Price for NPR, and the result will have you smitten. It’s almost as fabulous as news that Bob Dylan played guitar live for the first time since 2012, Ted Leo covered David Bowie for an all-ages covers album, Bruno Mars started a dance party on SNL, and Robin Pecknold suggested Fleet Foxes are truly hard at work on a new album after all.
Anyone who says NPR is boring and serious has never heard A Prairie Home Companion. The long-running Minnesota Public Radio show will see founder Garrison Keillor step down due to retirement, and Chris Thile of Nickel Creek is replacing him. October 15 marked the first time the radio show saw the new host take over, and to celebrate, he brought Jack White, Lake Street Dive, and comedian Maeve Higgins on board to help. Things got extra special when he launched into The White Stripes song “I’m Lonely (But I Ain’t That Lonely Yet)” with country gal Margo Price by his side. It’s a sweet take on the song, and probably the coolest A Prairie Home Companion will ever get. Well, at least for now. [SPIN]
Bob Dylan won a Nobel Prize in Literature this past Thursday. It’s big news, marking the first time a musician has won the award, and Dylan (knowingly or unknowingly) celebrated by playing guitar for the first time since 2012. In the middle of “Simple Twist of Fate” during a Las Vegas performance, Dylan picked up the guitar and began strumming along, surprise fans and possibly his band too, given he stopped due to arthritis. This man can sing and play guitar. Don’t you forget it. [Stereogum]
Image Credit: Spare The Rock Records
It still doesn’t feel like David Bowie actually passed away this year, but that’s probably because he’s always been more than human. The music icon and culture giant has been the subject of countless covers, tributes, and performances. Now, an all-ages, 20-song Bowie covers album is on the way called Let All The Children Boogie: A Tribute to David Bowie and it sounds pretty dang good. In advance, Ted Leo has shared his cover of “Hereos” for the LP. Spin his cover above before the album drops on November 18th. [Consequence of Sound]
While there was plenty of humor involving Beyonce and politics on this week’s episode of Saturday Night Live, one of the best moments came from its musical guest, Bruno Mars. The funk and pop musician threw a quick dance party during the live debut of “24K Magic” and brand new single “Chunky.” Both songs featured fancy camerawork, dance moves, and those big, bold vocals. Bruno Mars, as usual, gives us a reason to smile even when work gets dreary. [Rolling Stone]
A video posted by Robin Pecknold (@robinpecknold) on Oct 16, 2016 at 12:23pm PDT
Remember when we said Fleet Foxes may be working on new music? Well, now there’s some truth to that hype. Frontman Robin Pecknold released some songs earlier in 2016 as a solo project. On Sunday, he shared a snippet of music on Instagram and said that it’s intended for an upcoming solo album. “FF record kind of crazy/vast so working on ‘putting babies to sleep/living my truth’ palliative solo album on off days,” he wrote. That implies these are rejected Fleet Foxes tracks, which, if true, means they turned down beautiful folk in favor of even more beautiful folk. Not a bad trade. Give one of those song snippets a listen above. [Pitchfork]
See you back here on Wednesday for another Music Dispatch!
Image: Kris Krug via Wikimedia Commons
HARRY POTTER-Style Wands Can Now Apply Your Make-up
Facepaintium Perfecto! Now your magic mug will really look wizard, as you can apply your makeup with wands that could have come straight from Ollivander’s, if Ollivander had been more interested in fashion then levitation and lighting spells.
Storybook Cosmetics, a company run by triplets in Omaha who see a correlation between the sparkling of a magic spell and the glitter of the runway, don’t technically or legally call their products “Harry Potter” anything. But it’s like selling a lipstick inspired by a “space laser sword”; you know where the idea took root.
The brush set, which you can preorder now, comes with five wand-brushes, all with “magical metal handles.” Included with the set is a custom velvet pouch for safekeeping.
Not into traditional makeup? Well, consider some outside-the-box uses: suppose you’ve become a dark lord and no longer have a nose? Or one of your eyeballs protrudes in a way that could be considered “mad,” so that you want to emphasize your other features? Point is, you don’t have to be a budding Hermione; Dracos-to-be might want to offset that platinum blonde hair with a bit of color in the cheeks too. These wands may not actually cast a patronus or help you fly, but by adding some nerdy style to your beauty routine, they might just make you feel like you can.
Do you “wand” a set of your own? Is that the Horcrux of the matter? You could send us a message by owl to let us know what you think, but it’s a whole lot quicker to just leave a comment below.
Images: Storybook Cosmetics
A Look at the METALLICA Vehicular Combat Game That Almost Was
In the early aughts, before Guitar Hero turned out to be a natural fit, Metallica nearly had a completely different video game. Entitled Damage, Inc., it was a vehicle battle game in the spirit of Twisted Metal and early Grand Theft Auto installments, set in a post-apocalyptic landscape with Mad Max-style mods on the cars and trucks, and burned out cities side by side with deserts as your arena. Now, the excellent archivists at PtoPOnline on YouTube have dug up some footage (sent our way via a tip from Nerdist reader Kyle LeClair), and in the video above, tell the story of how it came about.
Aside from the fact that the Metallica “Scary Guy” logo from the Binge & Purge box set was printed on the roofs of several of the vehicles, it’s not clear how exactly the game reflects the band in any way, though presumably their music would have been on the soundtrack. Like, I think any Metallica fan could imagine a moving platform game based on “The Memory Remains,” a horror/escape game inspired by “Sanitarium,” or even a Five Nights at Freddy’s-style Some Kind of Monster movie game, where you have to maintain the sound booth, keeping every band member at a distance and it ends when either Lars or James enters your room and screams in your face. But this? It looks like it was more inspired by Dr. Dre and Tupac’s “California Love.”
The atmosphere is impressive, enhanced by night and day effects that at times look eerily close to the scene in Mad Max: Fury Road where they all drive into the eye of the storm. Ironically enough, once Damage, Inc. was scrapped as a Metallica game, there was some thought of repurposing it into a Mad Max one. That didn’t happen, but we did get a different one eventually. And equally ironically, Metallica would go on to make the concert-ish movie Through the Never, featuring a side-plot that would be perfect for video-game adaptation, with Dane DeHaan fighting his way through a riot-ridden city to retrieve a leather bag from a stranded truck.
We Metalli-heads are still waiting. Maybe Hardwired…to Self-Destruct will inspire some new designers.
Would you have played this Metallica game, or is there another idea that would be better? Gives us fuel for thought in comments below.
Image: YouTube/PtoPOnline
October 16, 2016
WESTWORLD Recap: What We Want the Most and Experience the Least
Before you saddle up, the spoilers in this recap may be more dangerous than previously assumed.
Well, she up and did it.
After swatting a fly and winking toward consciousness, Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) broke through her programming and shot a Buford Tannen-looking asshole right through his rapey throat. She fought back, which is a no-no when you’re an enslaved skin-milk robot in Westworld. Now she’s on the lam, and we can all assume that the murder will plunge the park into chaos. Will it also bring up 30-year-old memories for Dr. Ford (Anthony Hopkins)?
She’s not the only one to kill for the first time, either. William (Jimmi Simpson) “pops his cherry” when a bounty breaks his chains and holds Clementine (Angela Sarafyan) hostage. He turns down Thank You Sex (again! So chivalrous!) but decides that he’s ready for an adventure outside the town, dragging his friend Logan (Ben Barnes) into the wild country. For all his big talk, Logan seems like he’s never actually left the brothel bedrooms during all his trips to the park, but he confirms one strange thing about Westworld: heading into the desert to search for a dangerous killer looks a lot like heading into the desert to sit quietly by a fire. The MMORPG feel of the park seems like it could get dull really quick if you don’t know the first thing about tracking. They need to offer guests a Fast Travel option.
Meanwhile, Elsie (Shannon Woodward) may have found one key to the mystery of their glitchy, milk-pouring, eye-bashing Host named Walter from the first episode: he spared some Hosts, but the six Hosts he killed had all killed him in previous storylines. Is that a coincidence? Is it acting on revenge, or is Elsie reading human nature into a machine?
She also hypothesizes that the Host isn’t just rambling during his killing spree; he’s talking to someone unseen who he calls Arnold. A voice in his head?
This is the key to the entire episode–a story threaded together with questions about our own consciences (if not our consciousness).Walter hears Arnold’s voice in his head, Dr. Ford describes the bicameral mind theory (put forth by Julian Jaynes) that suggests a primitive human’s mind would talk to itself as a major step toward “bootstrapping” consciousness, and the new villain Wyatt’s (Sorin Brouwers) backstory marks him as a zealot who can hear the voice of God.
That story, as Teddy (James Marsden) describes it, also mirrors the reality-questioning nature of the park (and, you know, real life) itself. As Silicon Valley denizens are trying to prove you and I are living in a simulation, Wyatt (who is a fictional character created by fictional characters) believes he’s already dead and living in Hell. Turns out he might be onto something there.
Ford’s explanation of the bicameral mind comes courtesy of telling Bernard (Jeffrey Wright) who Arnold is. Turns out Ford had a partner who became obsessed with bringing the Hosts into consciousness, which is a problem when you want them to be the delightful playthings of sadistic, paying customers. When you sprinkle in awareness, you lose control. Now the malfunctioning puppets are hearing his voice in their heads- a remnant of a larger version of the voice-control the park still uses. The mystery of who’s been whispering things to Dolores has been solved, but is “Arnold” just a passive ghost of old code coming back to haunt everyone or a living thing itself?
It’s a little surprising to find out, but Ford isn’t the mad scientist he first seemed to be. Bernard, on the other hand, is chasing down Dolores’ mind not only because of curiosity, but because of self-interest. He can’t let go of the memory of a dead son. As he speaks with his wife about his pain being the only part of his son that he has left, we get Wright at his best, offering us a gentler view of the icy, animatronic Bernard.
Finally we get to see the next possibility for the invention. If you can build a brand new human, why can’t you build one you’ve lost?
The allure of playing God is a powerful one. Bernard opened “The Stray” making Dolores read from Alice in Wonderland in an effort to push the boundaries of her mind. He clearly wanted her to recognize that she’s changed, toying with the sleeping viper of a robot that can think for itself. He ends it, apparently ready to stop pursuing cognition, realizing his obsessive mistake, but something in Dolores’ responses makes him second guess her reformatting. He sends her back into the park as is where she finally pulls a trigger.
After getting scolded by Bernard for digging too deep into the glitch that started the whole series, Elsie teams with Stubbs (Luke Hemsworth) to hunt down a stray Host who has left his scenario (and left his wagon trail buddies without any wood for their campfire). In a perfect bit exposing the human inability to think of all possible emergency outcomes, Stubbs remarks that weapons privileges have to be doled out sparingly just hours before the hulking stray they’ve been hunting picks up a mini-boulder big enough to bash a head in. Maybe it’s time to expand the Westworld definition of “weapon.” Luckily, it bashes its own head into mush in one of the more surreal images of the show thus far.
The whole sequence was a fun march through exposition, but it also gave us another mysterious symbol: the Orion carvings. Did their stray also follow the commands of the disembodied Arnold voice? Do the Hosts have their own maze?
Speaking of which, we don’t catch up with The Man in Black this week, so we’ll have to assume he’s still riding his horse to where the snake lays its eggs. Like you do.
Finally, Teddy is the connective tissue between most of the stories this week. He’s got a human sidekick named Marti (Bojana Novakovic) who accompanies him on the highly dangerous new Wyatt adventure. Ford reprograms him to give his backstory some specifics as part of the new fiction he began building last week at the church. Teddy also proves his limitations to Dolores, who has reservations about running away with a man incapable of seeing anything past the sunset.
That conversion was a brilliant showcase of the tension between the show’s genre-entrenched writing and its need to keep a modern audience entertained. Westworld does an excellent job of driving the line between cheeseball and compelling, considering the park experience is written by a hack (whom we thankfully didn’t have to see this week). Almost every line of dialogue between Teddy and Dolores is hammy, but the overall scene serves an incredible purpose of showing us Dolores in the middle of her awakening. She’s aware enough to want to leave, but not aware enough to realize Teddy’s true nature. When he defaults to “someday,” it may have loosened the last shackle tethering her to the park, or it may have sparked the urge to save him by giving him the awareness she’s attaining.
Dolores is a fascinating figure even before considering her incipient sentience. It’s way too common to use women in Westerns as victims, but Dolores is programmed and, in fact, exists specifically to be an object of sexualized violence. She exists so that guests who have the inclination can murder her father and gunfighter boyfriend, and then use her however they want. Her purpose in “life” is to be brutalized–just as many female characters in genre work are. Her existence and awakening are statements on the Women in Refrigerators trope–or an outright rebuke of it.
Her pulling the trigger on her greasy would-be attacker (after needing Teddy’s rescue earlier) signals that she’s gained some agency. Dr. Ford and the others behind the scenes had better watch out.
SOME STRAY THOUGHTS:
How do they make Hosts smell? The posse all guards their noses (including the human) when they roll up on that Se7en-cribbing almost-corpse.
Elsie and Stubbs have to create an algorithm for where their stray may have gone. Do these things not have GPS chips in them?
Where are all the prostitutes for the straight women?
Are cell phones not allowed in the park at all? This is a weird future where no one is constantly taking selfies with the robot they just shot to death.
Load your six-shooter and let us know what you thought in the comments section.
Images: HBO
Statues of Christopher Walken’s Head Decorate This Garden
What does the following description sound like to you?
“A garden dotted with stone sculptures of Christopher Walken‘s head sticking out of the ground.”
Is that the setting for an unsettling horror film? No, somehow it is not (though it sounds like something right up Tim Burton’s alley). It’s an actual garden full of little stone busts of actor Christopher Walken, and while he is certainly an appropriate subject for such a weird piece of modern art, it’s somehow even stranger looking than you’d think.
Believe it or not, we first came across this unusual garden and its unique decor at Ripley’s, and it is the work of artist Bryan Zanisnik. It’s not just some random work of art either, it’s an official installation, titled “Monument to Walken,” as part of the Emerging Artist Fellowship Exhibition at the artist run Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Island City, Queens.
Have you been WALKEN through the Park in Queens, New York recently? You might lose you head! https://t.co/OoNhJSM6U2 #NYC #ChristopherWalken pic.twitter.com/IJW0gGbMkl
— Spicetag (@Spicetag) October 6, 2016
Photos: Christopher Walken's Disembodied Head Highlights Socrates Sculpture Park Exhibit https://t.co/47HcPks4E2 pic.twitter.com/ZGLOS0Ll7F
— Gothamist (@Gothamist) October 2, 2016
Legend has it that if you walk through the garden at night you can hear the faint playing of a cowbell. (No, we don’t feel badly about that joke.)
We have no idea what will happen to these pieces when the installation is removed, but if they go on sale you can always grab one to adorn your closet, turning it into a Walk-en. (No, no, we don’t feel badly about that joke either!)
If you want to see the installation for yourself, besides in a fever dream, the Walken statues won’t be heading out until the end of March next year. After that, the garden will be the Walken dead.
What other actor would have made for a good choice for this installation? Steve Buscemi? Gary Busey? Tell us your best idea in the comments below.
Featured Image: Miramax
Statue Image: Socrates Sculpture Park
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