Beyoncé breaks cinema record, Max Max and The Bachelors are back, plus the indie horror game taking over YouTube

Mother Beyoncé brings us Renaissance in film form, and Daddy Günsberg guides us through another cursed season of The Bachelors.(Channel 10/Supplied)abc.net.au/news/icymi-beyonce-furiosa-lethal-company-bachelors/103184466

Renaissance: A Film By Beyoncé landed in cinemas across the world on Friday, and the Beyhive is buzzing.

In just shy of three hours, the concert film covers 35 songs and behind-the-scenes footage from the pop star’s world tour of her disco-tinged Renaissance album – including the drop of new song My House at the credits.

As with Taylor Swift’s Eras tour concert film, fans are singing along, doing the choreography and treating the cinema like their own stadium, making for some joyous footage of people feeling themselves. For Australian fans, it’s their first chance to experience the tour, with Beyoncé last touring here in 2013.

And with the “everybody on mute” challenge (where the crowd tries to stay silent midway through the song Energy) making its way into the film, we have footage of people trying to hush entire cinemas:

It’s not just fans who are lapping up Renaissance, either: critics are calling the film “dazzling”, and a display of Bey at her peak. In the US alone, it’s made $21 million over the weekend, smashing a 20-year record for the notoriously quiet post-Thanksgiving period.

The Bachelors are here, whether you like it or not

Just when you thought 2023 had almost had enough with us, Channel Ten decided to bring not just one straight-man-looking-for-a-wife-slash-fame to our TV screens, but THREE.

That’s right, after the mega flop of doing this exact thing in January (including the lowest premiere viewer numbers in franchise history), they have once again decided that what the world needs now is multiple men finding love, sweet love.

This December we have: International model Ben, who is very rich but wants to use his money to help the environment and apparently has a feud with Zac Efron. “Brazil’s hottest export” and also model Wes who came to Australia to study theology and has never had a girlfriend. And former NRL player Luke who is now a lumberjack (?) and is being billed as a “country boy with a heart of gold”.

Wesley Senna Cortes, Ben Waddell and Luke Bateman are all looking for love at the same time, in a new version of The Bachelor that is sure not to be terrible and weird…right?(Supplied: Channel 10)

All of the marketing for this season has basically been screaming the word BRIDGERTON, because instead of having to create an atmosphere of romance, horniness and scandal themselves, they can just refer to the show a bunch and hope that does the trick. (This includes a lot of string music and a haunted trailer voiceover feat. an Australian woman trying to imitate Lady Whistledown)

The series is actually filmed in Melbourne (in an 1850s mansion in Brighton, according to Newscorp). Which is, according to Daddy Günsberg, “the perfect place to fall in love”.

In the first eps there were the usual things: some PASHING; some gross shaming of strippers; a woman bailing coz she is “too conservative” for the show; and a red-headed and red-lipped German woman named Lisa declaring herself villain by saying: “At the end of the day, I’m not here to make friends… If you do something wrong, I will go straight nukes. World War Three, darling. The world will burn.” YES.

Now, if you want to stay up to date with what Lisa has in store, you only have to watch four entire 75-minute-long episodes a week.

Fall Out Boy rained out during Good Things festival

It might be summer, but Mother Nature doesn’t give a hoot about our collective return to festival season.

Case in point: over the weekend, Good Things in Sydney was cut short due to a sudden downpour, with heavy winds, lightning and hail forcing fans to evacuate the event, hosted at Centennial Park.

It was particularly sucky news for fans of Fall Out Boy. Only a few songs into their headline set, the emo rock icons were forced to pull the plug. Thnks fr the mmrs, I guess?

Following the storm, which also halted an A-league soccer match, Fall Out Boy issued a statement saying they were “working hard to figure out how to make it up to you, stay tuned”.

The festival cancellation follows Spilt Milk festival in Canberra getting temporarily paused in response to a severe weather warning issued by the Bureau of Meteorology.

In the early afternoon (of 25 Nov), an announcer told the young crowd “there will be no bands on for the foreseeable future”. Thankfully, the audience didn’t have to seek shelter for long, and the show was back up and running an hour later with Lime Cordiale.

Recent outdoor events in Melbourne have been particularly wet, too — from Christina Aguilera’s first Australian show in 15 years, to trap-pop star Post Malone’s Thursday gig and a cloudy headlining set from Jessie Ware at Summer Camp this Saturday.

Indie horror game Lethal Company has become the breakout hit of the year, thanks to players sharing equal parts terrifying and hilarious gameplay videos on YouTube and live-streaming site Twitch.

While released in October, it’s skyrocketed in popularity in recent weeks and is currently the highest-selling game on Steam in Australia and the globe. That’s an impressive feat for any title, let alone an indie made by a single person, known only as Zeekerss.

In the game, groups of players explore post-apocalyptic planets for loot, avoiding traps and murderous, silly-scary enemies — like jack-in-the-boxes, little ghost girls and giant slugs.

What it lacks in A+ graphics (it’s more PS2-level than PS5), it makes up for in complete chaos, especially in multiplayer — as can be seen in the hundreds of thousands of videos now across the internet.

With players’ voice chat cutting off when they die, each upload feels like a perfectly timed horror-comedy. Watch a few very sweary, extremely screamy videos and you’ll get a sense of why it’s popping off.

Turns out in space, everyone can hear you scream … if you post it to YouTube afterwards.

But if Lethal Company looks a little too scary for you, ABC Gamer has shared its pick of the best five Australian games of 2023.

Get ready to return to the dystopian wasteland of the Mad Max franchise next year with Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga.

This time, we follow a young Furiosa — memorably portrayed by Charlize Theron in the 2015 Mad Max film — and her origin story.

This time, The Queen’s Gambit’s Anya Taylor Joy is taking on the role, as Furiosa is snatched from the Green Place of Many Mothers and falls into the hands of a great Biker Horde led by the Warlord Dementus — aka Chris Hemsworth.

A younger version of Fury Road’s antagonist Immortan Joe will also return, with the two tyrants warring for dominance.

The trailer promises more epic stunts, insane action sequences and a killer soundtrack, with the film set to hit Australian cinemas on May 23, 2024.

— Rachel Rasker

It’s The Simple Life’s 20-year anniversary

Two decades ago, nepo babies Nicole Richie and Paris Hilton rocked up on a farm in rural Arkansas with no cell phones or credit cards for 30 days of tough farm work.

The (frankly pioneering) reality show saw the party girls ask the really important questions like:

“What does a well do?””What does that mean, ‘Soup kitchen’?””What are those?” “I don’t know, I think they’re chickens.””What is Walmart? Do they sell wall stuff?”

They don’t make TV like this anymore. But they should.

Over the course of its five vastly different seasons, The Simple Life introduced us to Paris’s aunt, Kyle Richards (of Real Housewives of Beverly Hills fame) and Kim Kardashian in her assistant/closet organising era.

But, most importantly, it gave us an endless stream of extremely aspirational memes:

Awards season is upon us

If you’re a cute lil film nerd who loves to watch all the Oscars nominees ahead of the ceremony, it’s time to get studying.

While the Academy Awards aren’t until March 2024, and the nominees are not announced until January, there have been some other notable awards on recently — often giving early indications of who might take a statue home come Oscars season.

Queer romance All Of Us Strangers, starring Paul Mescal and Andrew Scott, swept the board at the British Independent Film Awards over the weekend, with a whopping seven wins, including best film, director and screenplay.

Meanwhile the New York Film Critics Circle named Killers Of The Flower Moon its Best Film of 2023 last week, with Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer the best directed, while romance-drama Past Lives won Best Feature at the Gotham awards.

Netflix’s thriller May December is also predicted to win big, but don’t organise a movie night just yet — it’s sadly not dropping in Australia until February 2024.

Ryan Reynolds continues to capture our hearts

Actor and consummate jokester Ryan Reynolds has trolled his wife Blake Lively and her best friend Taylor Swift with a PhotoShop joke deserving of a double take.

The duo were photographed together at Beyoncé’s Renaissance London movie premiere on Thursday (all roads lead back to Bey), with Reynolds sharing a face-swapped version of the pic on his Instagram story, featuring him and Swift’s himbo boyf Travis Kelce.