What Else?

What Else?,The Jonas Brothers new song "Wings" is not what I thought they sounded like and Justine Jones goes long on The Rainforest Café, in all its wet, brownie volcano glory

White Lotus star Haley Lu Richardson is in the Jonas Brothers new music video, “Wings”. Sometimes, I’ll be listening to a playlist and the Jo Bros will pop up, and I go through the same disorienting moment of realizing I have no idea what their music sounds like. “Wings” is another such case, THIS is what they sound like? I don’t know if they’re musical chameleons, or if my brain is just determined to completely memory hole their music, but for the life of me, I did not think this is what the Jonas Brothers sounded like. (Popsugar)

Warner Bros. Discovery is going all-in on new Lord of the Rings movies (in a complex rights deal, Amazon has the TV rights, but Warners kept the film rights). Peter Jackson isn’t involved, so far, but he is being “kept in the loop” about the new film plans. People really love his LOTR trilogy but nobody loves The Hobbit trilogy, and the Rings of Power Amazon series did not hit as big as its billion-dollar budget would presume, it kind of got buried by House of the Dragon. Not sure there’s a real appetite for more LOTR beyond the Warners’ balance sheet. (DListed)

OSCAR ISAAC ALERT. He’s looking very “bad guy wanting to build a mall in place of the scrappy local ski resort”. Also present: Rachel Brosnahan. (They’re in a play together.) (Go Fug Yourself)

Queen Camilla started a reading and literacy campaign during the pandemic (still ongoing), and at an event to mark The Reading Room’s second anniversary, she made remarks supportive of not altering Roald Dahl’s classic books. Keeping up with the culture war is impossible, and this isn’t even a new front. Altering texts to be “less offensive”—I’m not sure calling Augustus Gloop “enormous” instead of “fat” is any better?—is a common practice, so common it has a name: bowdlerizing, to remove offensive material from a text, especially so that it renders the text weaker/worse. It seems like every time this happens, the original texts end up reprinted because demand for the non-crappy version goes up. People aren’t stupid, we can decide what we want to read, and if people want to read Dahl to their kids, trust that they’re either going to have conversations about antisemitism and separating art and artists, or that they’re raising a would-be candymaker with a side hustle in child murder. (Celebitchy)

Justine Jones goes long on the ultimate in mid-America mall dining: The Rainforest Café, in all its wet, brownie volcano glory. I remember when my family moved to Chicago, how blown away I was by the concept of a free-standing, non-mall Rainforest Café existing in the city (it’s closed now). It was truly a concept, and one that nominally promoted rainforest conservation to hordes of hungry Americans (ironic, given agriculture is the #1 threat to the Amazonian rainforest). Revisit Y2K mall dining culture at its most elaborate, some might even say, bonkers, with a fond look back at the Rainforest Café and its place in the history of the Millennial palate. (Eater)