Juicy J is high as fuck.

We’re seated next to one another inside Irving Plaza, a midsize music venue in lower Manhattan. It’s three in the afternoon, and stagehands can be seen scurrying about hauling various rigging in preparation for Juicy J’s sold-out show later that night. The rapper and I are aglow in red light—fitting, given the similar lighting in the music video for his solo hit “Bandz a Make Her Dance,” which has seemingly supplanted Tyga’s “Rack City” as the de facto strip-club anthem.

When the long-awaited fourth Daft Punk studio record was streamed last week after months of tantalizing teases and leaks, much of the world collectively yawned. Two French men had spent untold amounts of money and several years in the studio and they came out with…a chilled out disco record?

The world wanted to know: Where is the anthem, that track made for the peak hour on the dance floor that Daft Punk is so good at creating? The closest you’ll get on Random Access Memories is the addictive, funky first single “Get Lucky,” and it’s pretty soft by Daft Punk standards.

Ahead of Steven Soderbergh’s film Behind the Candelabra, which debuts on HBO next week and tells the love story of Liberace (Michael Douglas) and his boy-toy lover Scott Thorson (Matt Damon), a primer on the great entertainer.

Who was he again?

Sofia Coppola’s upcoming movie, Bling Ring, is based on a real group of teens and 20-something friends and acquaintances who began robbing the rich and famous in 2008. Over the course of the following year, they stole from Orlando Bloom, Audrina Patridge, Lindsay Lohan, Rachel Bilson, Brian Austin Green, and Megan Fox, and raided Paris Hilton’s house five (!) times (She helpfully left a key under the mat.)

Before they were busted, the group snagged $3 million in loot, including $2 million worth of jewelry from the Hilton fortune heiress, stole Rolex watches and Louis Vuitton luggage from Bloom, and essentially went shopping in Partridge’s designer-laden pad. All members of the crew have since seen their day in court. A few members of the real-life Bling Ring have had a more illustrious postscript than others.

During a career of making films that are neither full-fledged satires nor sentimental exercises in nostalgia, Joel and Ethan Coen have perfected a genre that might be termed smartass nostalgia. For better or worse, a certain strain of cruelty often permeates the Coen Brothers’ distinctive brand of tragicomedy. Take, for example, Barton Fink, which won the Palme d’or, as well as a Best Director award for the Coens and an acting prize for star John Turturro, at the Cannes Film Festival in 1991.The eponymous character, a poor schlemiel apparently modeled after the Depression-era playwright Clifford Odets, never has a chance at triumphing in Hollywood and becomes one of the Coens’ most abject losers.

While another schlemiel’s fate propels the filmmaking duo’s typical blend of pathos and comedy in Inside Llewyn Davis, which premiered on Sunday at Cannes, their anti-hero, while explicitly labeled a “loser” by his peers and still subjected to numerous travails (the Coens’ male protagonists are often labeled “Job-like”) does not appear doomed to a thoroughly hellish existence by the film’s conclusion. Llewyn, whose Welsh moniker suggests a sly tribute to Bob Dylan’s own homage to Dylan Thomas, is a struggling folksinger in New York, circa 1961— a period just before Dylan emerged as the most talented, not to mention the most bankable, folkie in Greenwich Village. As played by the gifted Oscar Isaac, Llewyn is both an irascible cad who seduces any pretty female warbler within his sights and a vulnerable artist who valiantly endures singing for chicken feed at small Village venues.

The Parisian street artist JR posts stuff constantly, but not on Facebook or Twitter. Like a Gallic Banksy, he’s made a career of gluing propaganda-size posters, most of them portraits, onto empty plots of urban landscape. In the mid-2000s, the 30-year-old provocateur secured his reputation by fly-posting photographs of immigrant rioters on the walls of Paris’s bougiest neighborhoods.

Take that, baguette eaters!

Swing Time: Fred Astaire’s Big Dance Scene

Let’s start with one of my favorite movies. That’s from 1936, starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. The scene that I really love has Eric Blore as a character running a dance studio, and he employs Rogers to teach people how to dance. Astaire gets mixed up with her and falls madly in love. We know it’s Fred Astaire, the greatest dancer who ever lived. In order to stick with her, he acts helpless. He keeps flipping so he can hold her. Finally, she says, “Save your money, you’ll never learn how to dance,” which is pretty funny. And Blore overhears her and fires her. Astaire begs him to reconsider—he says, I’ve learned a lot from her. He amazes Blore and the audience with this incredible dancing that saves her job. It’s absolutely one of the most thrilling scenes in the movie. So I recommend everybody in the world who has never seen Swing Time to get it somehow.