Month: June 2021

After a 2020 NBA Draft cycle that was anything but normal, the league is getting back to its typical events prior to this July’s 2021 NBA Draft.

The first major event to return is the Draft Combine on June 21-27 in Chicago, where there will be 69 expected attendees who will workout, play 5-on-5 games, do drills, and interview with teams, with TV coverage on ESPN2 and ESPNU on June 24 and 25 of the 5-on-5 games.

The complete, alphabetical list of names expected to be in Chicago can be found below, headlined by the likes of Evan Mobley, Jalen Green, Jonathan Kuminga. The most notable players not in attendance are presumptive No. 1 overall pick Cade Cunningham and Gonzaga star Jalen Suggs, but many of the rest will be in Chicago to talk to teams — although its possible some will opt out of games and/or drills. For others, the Combine is a chance to pop in front of the entire league and flash athleticism and skill to try and climb up draft boards and hear their name called in July.

Max Abmas (Oral Roberts)
Ochai Agbaji (Kansas)
Marcus Bagley (Arizona State)
Scottie Barnes (Florida State)
Charles Bassey (Western Kentucky)
Brandon Boston Jr. (Kentucky)
James Bouknight (UCONN)
Greg Brown III (Texas)
Jared Butler (Baylor)
Julian Champagnie (St. John’s)
Justin Champagnie (Pitt)
Josh Christopher (Arizona State)
Sharife Cooper (Auburn)
Ayo Dosunmu (Illinois)
David Duke Jr. (Providence)
Kessler Edwards (Pepperdine)
Luka Garza (Iowa)
Jalen Green (G League Ignite)
Quentin Grimes (Houston)
Sam Hauser (Virginia)
Aaron Henry (Michigan State)
Ariel Hukporti (Nevezis)
Matthew Hurt (Duke)
Nah’Shon Hyland (VCU)
Isaiah Jackson (Kentucky)
David Johnson (Louisville)
Jalen Johnson (Duke)
Keon Johnson (Tennessee)
Herbert Jones (Alabama)
Kai Jones (Texas)
Johnny Juzang (UCLA)
Corey Kispert (Gonzaga)
Jonathan Kuminga (G League Ignite)
Scottie Lewis (Florida)
Isaiah Livers (Michigan)
Makur Maker (Howard)
Sandro Mamukelashvili (Seton Hall)
Tre Mann (Florida)
Matthew Mayer (Baylor)
Miles McBride (West Virginia)
Davion Mitchell (Baylor)
Evan Mobley (USC)
Isaiah Mobley (USC)
Moses Moody (Arkansas)
Trey Murphy III (Virginia)
Daishen Nix (G League Ignite)
John Petty Jr. (Alabama)
Yves Pons (Tennessee)
Jason Preston (Ohio)
Joshua Primo (Alabama)
Roko Prkacin (Cibona)
Neemias Queta (Utah State)
Austin Reaves (Oklahoma)
Jeremiah Robinson-Earl (Villanova)
Terrence Shannon Jr. (Texas Tech)
Day’Ron Sharpe (UNC)
Jericho Sims (Texas)
Jaden Springer (Tennessee)
DJ Steward (Duke)
Cameron Thomas (LSU)
JT Thor (Auburn)
Isaiah Todd (G League Ignite)
Trendon Watford (LSU)
Joe Wieskamp (Iowa)
Ziaire Williams (Stanford)
McKinley Wright IV (Colorado)
Moses Wright (Georgia Tech)
Marcus Zegarowski (Creighton)

There are many actors who can’t watch themselves onscreen. One major exception is Samuel L. Jackson, who loves watching movies featuring him. But then there’s his MCU and Hard Eight colleague Gwyneth Paltrow. The Oscar-winning thespian famously can’t stand watching herself in movies. But there’s one scene in The Royal Tenenbaums — just one, mind you — that’s the only one she can stomach.

As related by EW, Paltrow was one of a number of Tenenbaum alumni who took part in a 20th anniversary screening and pre-taped panel, as part of this year’s Tribeca Festival. We learned some interesting things. Gene Hackman, who was not present for the reunion, took a big pay cut. Alec Baldwin’s narration almost got scotched. Famously mousy director Wes Anderson actually lost his temper at one point, over cuffs.

But maybe the biggest takeaway was the aforementioned scene of herself that Paltrow actually likes. It’s the one, about a half-hour or so in, where her character, troubled playwright Margot Tenenbaum, steps off the bus, reuniting with her half-brother Richie (Luke Wilson), with whom she’s quietly in love. It’s a wordless stretch, in dreamy slo-mo, set to Nico’s “These Days,” written by Jackson Browne. It’s not just that it’s, let’s be fair, a pretty excellent scene.

“My dad was there, and it was this very special day,” Paltrow recalled, referring to her father Bruce, who passed away in 2002, the year after Tenenbaums was released. “I really hate, hate seeing myself in a movie ever. That’s kind of like the only scene that I can watch of myself, like of my whole career.”

(Via EW)

In a surprising move given Donald Trump’s presidency fostered a political environment where conservatives view apologies as a sign of weakness and wear stubborn defiance as a badge of honor, Marjorie Taylor Greene held a press conference outside the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum on Monday where she walked back her controversial remarks comparing the genocidal act to mask mandates. It was an unusual turn of events for a party that, again, has built its modern image on doubling down and rarely apologizing for anything.

However, while a rare occurrence, the QAnon congresswoman’s apology wasn’t convincing the ladies of The View the next morning. As Whoopi Goldberg opened up the panel by asking if Greene’s apology was sincere or something she was forced to do by the party, Joy Behar had a lot to say on the matter. Right out of the gate, Behar cracked, “wait until she hears about slavery,” which left Whoopi visibly laughing as she clearly agreed with Behar that the apology wasn’t fooling anybody. From there, Behar got serious as she pointed out that not only has Greene admitted to visiting Auschwitz when she was 19, and should know full well the horrors of the Holocaust from that trip, the Georgia Senator is still using loaded rhetoric.

Via Mediaite:

“I don’t buy it, any of it. I think she’s full of it. … She says she’s apologizing, but then she says Democrats are Nazis, which shows you she has no concept of what Nazis actually did,” Behar added, “so I think that her apology is as empty as her head.”

The other The View co-hosts mostly agreed with Behar, which made for yet another calm discussion thanks to the continued absence of Meghan McCain. The last time the conservative co-host had to talk about Greene, McCain had a meltdown that ended in Whoopi dressing her down live on the air, which forced an emergency meeting where ABC brass had to tell the cast to keep it civil.

(Via The View)

While some comedians aren’t too happy with our more sensitive age, others are fine with it. Entertainers ranging from Seth Rogen to Katt Williams have bristled at the negative reaction to so-called “cancel culture,” telling colleagues, among other things, to simply own up that times change and some jokes don’t age like fine wine. Tina Fey is another. And while on a recent panel at the Tribeca Film Festival, the performer and writer acknowledged that we’re all in the process of wrestling with “terrible” pop culture moments once considered kosher.

As per Mediaite, Fey was on a panel for Girls5eva, the new Peacock comedy for which she’s an executive producer and which concerns a former ’90s all-girl pop group who reunite after one of their songs gets a big time sample. One of the things the characters realize is that some of the stuff they said and did circa the Clinton era doesn’t look so good in the Biden age. That caused Fey to reflect on how we’re all going through a similar cultural reckoning.

“We’re culturally looking back at stuff that we all took as totally normal, fun and just cool… whether it’s the way David Letterman dismantled Lindsay Lohan or an underage Britney Spears singing ‘Slave 4 U,’” she told the crowd, referring to a 2013 interview that caused a stir when it resurfaced a few months back, as well as the documentary Framing Britney Spears. “We’re all looking back at those things now and being like, ‘Oh, we all cosigned that? Oh, that’s terrible.’”

In the past Fey has been critical of her own work. Around this time last year she asked streamers to pull four episodes of 30 Rock that featured blackface jokes. It was part of a strange trend around the turn of the previous decade in which otherwise progressive shows, like Community, Scrubs, and the American The Office, traded in racial jokes that were once thought to be “edgy” but look bad in retrospect, in part because they were always bad.

(Via Mediaite)

Tupac Shakur was one of the greatest rappers of all-time, but he had a lengthy filmography as well, includes roles in Juice, Poetic Justice (alongside Janet Jackson), and Gang Related. The 1997 crime thriller also starred Jim Belushi, who recently shared a genuinely sweet memory about his time with the late rapper. “Every time I watch the sunrise, I think of Tupac,” he tweeted. “We once watched the sunrise together after a long night. It was quiet for a second then he looked at me and said ‘I’m a thug, I prefer the sunrise.’ I really don’t know what that means, but I still live by it to this day.”

And I still think about that tweet every day. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Belushi was asked to expand on his friendship with Shakur — he did not disappoint. “As prolific as he was as a musician, Tupac had never really heard Frank Sinatra,” the According to Jim star and weed farmer said. “So I brought my The Golden Years CD [to set] and we listened to it in the trailer. When we hit ‘Fly Me to the Moon,’ I said to him, ‘Come on, man, let’s write a song. We can do ‘Fly Me to the Moon’ with you rapping, a blend with an old ballad and your style of rap.’ We worked on it between scenes.”

I have never seen Gang Related, and while I’m sure it’s a fine film, I would much rather watch a three-hour documentary about Jim Belushi trying to convince Tupac Shakur to rap along to Frank Sinatra’s “Fly Me to the Moon.” Alas, it wasn’t meant to be:

“He was so impressed by Sinatra… We were talking about it during that sunrise. But he later said, ‘I can’t do it.’ And I was like, ‘What do you mean you can’t do it?’ He said, ‘It’s too melodically beautiful to interrupt. There’s just no way. It’s too perfect of a song to mess with.’ My response to him was, ‘Well, now you get Frank, don’tcha?’ We didn’t get far into this project, but we toyed with the idea of collaborating. We entertained each other on the set.”

In case you were wondering, one of Belushi’s favorite Tupac songs is “Wonder Why They Call You Bitch.” He listens to it when he’s not watching anime.

(Via EW)

During an insightful interview in which Rick Ross reveals that his money-saving methods include flying commercial, antiquing, and mowing his own lawn (on a 325-acre property, to the tune of $1 million a year), the Miami rapper also shared his love for his horses. Asked by Forbes’ Michelle Hofmann what he does when he’s not recording, decorating, or working on business partnerships, Ross told her that his horses are his greatest passion, giving worthwhile advice that works in any number of situations.

“When I’m at home, that’s when I get to talk to my horses,” Ross shared. “I get to tell them what my week was like. I get to rub them on their noses and their heads. They love me. They try to kiss my ears. When they see me walk up to the gate, they stop doing what they’re doing and they trot to me like they are saying, ‘There he is. We hope he has carrots and apples.’ And I do. Remember, a boss always comes bearing gifts. You’ve gotta bear gifts.”

Interestingly enough, Rick Ross’s love for horses has fascinated fans on social media for years. At one point, his Snapchat content largely consisted of him feeding and petting his horses, and in 2016, a video of Ross struggling to mount one of them for a ride went viral.

Check out the full interview here.

There are plenty of issues facing the great state of Texas right now: a pandemic still thriving thanks to successful anti-vax campaigns, school shootings, voting rights debates, and power outages threatening the most vulnerable populations during a record summer heatwave.

But you know what Governor Greg Abbott cares about? Building a border wall, naturally.

That’s right, the Trumpists’ beloved rallying cry is back (kind of) and Abbott’s picking up the torch left. The embattled politician paid a visit to the Texas-Mexico border last week where he announced that the state would be resuming its plan to build a wall, though he left out some key details about when and who would be paying for it. But, according to the Texas Tribune, in a recent appearance on a conservative podcast, Abbott expanded on his efforts to waste money by walling off parts of his state. His genius idea for getting it done? Crowd-funding!

“When I do make the announcement later on this week, I will also be providing a link that you can click on and go to for everybody in the United States — really everybody in the entire world — who wants to help Texas build the border wall, there will be a place on there where they can contribute,” Abbott revealed during the interview, promising “great transparency” when it comes to how and where funds are directed on his Kickstarter campaign gets underway.

This isn’t the first time conservatives created a donation fund to erect a giant, useless hunk of metal on our border. The Trump crowd’s own Build the Wall campaign raised over $25 million to build 3 miles of fence at one point but, in a twist literally, everyone should’ve seen coming, Steve Bannon and a handful of others in charge of the fund misused that money and defrauded donors. Bannon was pardoned by Trump before he could stand trial, and Trump, despite siphoning taxpayer money from the military and other government departments to finish the wall, never did, which is why Abbott seems so passionate about completing the project in Texas and why he believes “the entire world” will want to help him put up an over-priced fence in his backyard.

Twitter users might not constitute the “entire world” but they had some thoughts:

Maybe a better course of action would be to solve the privatized energy mess he’s gotten his state in first? Just spitballing here.

The security guard Pooh Shiesty allegedly shot at Miami nightclub King Of Diamonds over Memorial Day weekend has reportedly recanted his police statement, claiming that he can’t remember what happened on the night of the incident, according to TMZ.

Pooh’s attorneys have filed a motion to grant the rapper a release from jail on bond with sworn testimony from the guard, Frivin Dor, claiming that he was given a powerful painkiller after the incident and was still feeling the effects when he talked to police. Pooh’s lawyers argue that this should be enough for prosecutors to consider throwing the case or at least granting the rapper the possibility of bail.

According to TMZ, in Dor’s new account, he attributes the club commotion to a cooling fan falling in a nearby garage. He says he doesn’t recall Sheisty aiming at him at all, despite his previous account and video from the night of that suggests that Shiesty shot someone. However, Dor supposedly doesn’t want to press charges or make any other statements.

Previously, the security guard alleged that he was shot trying to prevent Pooh Shiesty from firing at anyone else after the rapper was incensed by someone in the club trying to grab stray bills out of his pockets. While trying to calm him down, the guard says he was shot in the leg when the rapper spontaneously let off a round in anger. Shiesty was arrested last week after turning himself in.

Pooh Shiesty is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Germany and France met on Tuesday in a massive opening round Group F battle during the Euro 2020 tournament and the first half featured some exceptionally strange things. First, the only goal of the half was an own goal by Germany’s Mats Hummels, who launched a ball into the top corner past his own keeper Manuel Neuer to give France a 1-0 lead.

Then, late in the half, Germany’s Antonio Rudiger was defending Paul Pogba and…decided to bite him in the back?!

Pogba reacts like someone would who gets bitten, while Rudiger tries to pretend nothing happens and, somehow, he got away with it despite it being pretty clear on camera and Pogba’s protests to the assistant referee at the half. That Rudiger didn’t get a red card and tossed for the bite after a VAR review was rather surprising to many, including ESPN’s Taylor Twellman who was on commentary.

It is not the first time there has been a biting incident in major soccer, as Luis Suarez has bitten opponents three times across various competitions. Pogba will surely have something to say about the incident after the game, but Rudiger avoided any punishment for the act and was able to play on in the second half.

Revolution Rent (HBO, 9:00pm) — Executive produced by Neil Patrick Harris and Nederlander Worldwide Entertainment, this documentary special heads to Cuba, where Andy Señor Jr. (who originally played the Angel character in the 1990s) directs a stage production of Rent. Yep, that’s not only the same Rent that won Tony awards, but it’s also the first time Cuba’s seen a Broadway musical from an American company in at least 50 years. Señor Jr. reimagines the show in light of his Cuban family’s heritage and their relationship with their home country.

Headspace: Unwind Your Mind (Netflix interactive special) — Get ready to pull some Bandersnatch-style moves on your meditation game with this interactive experience that promotes mindfulness as the third collaborative installment from Headspace and Vox Media Studios. With this particular special, three customizable paths (Meditation, Relax, and Sleep) can help viewers forge their own individualized paths that might just include a bedtime story. What to improve your sleep at night? Then the choice is simple, you gotta check this one out.

Cruel Summer (Freeform, 9:00pm) — This newish series goes down in the 1990s and follows the aftermath of a popular teen going missing. When a seemingly unrelated shy student suddenly becomes massively popular, well, things look pretty strange. This week, the court date fast approaches while Kate and Jeanette find their worlds to be on a collision course.

The Flash (CW, 8:00pm) — Barry is in serious danger after a mistake from Chester while Cecile is attempting to escape from a psychic prison. Yikes.

Superman & Lois (CW, 9:00pm) — Sure, we’ve seen several incarnations of these title characters over the decades, but the CW’s here with one more shot. Lois and Clark must help Lana after Kyle acts oddly, and Sarah’s pissed off while Jonathan’s opening up.

Mental Samurai (FOX 9:00pm) — Is Rob Lowe on every show now? Not quite, but Season 2 continues with Mr. Handsome welcoming contestants that include a model, an ex-soldier, a woman who lost her home in a hurricane, and a martial artist.

Mr Inbetween (FX, 10:00 & 10:30pm) — This season, Ray’s life is looking different while Brittany is growing ever-closer to discovering who Ray really is and what he does, which is doing the hitman thing while holding onto his own strict ethical code and balancing his family life. Meanwhile, severing ties with Freddy complicates matters when a criminal kingpin makes Ray’s struggle feel even more intense. This week, revenge appears to be much more of a priority than forgiveness.

Jimmy Kimmel Live — Owen Wilson, Betty Gilpin, Spice Feat. Sean Paul, Shaggy

The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon — Salma Hayek, Dr. Anthony Fauci, Jessi Ware

Late Night With Seth Meyers — Wendy Williams, Paul Rabil, Stevie Nistor

The Late Late Show With James Corden — Governor Gavin Newsom, Migos

In case you missed these streaming picks:

Infinite (Paramount+ film) — As hard as it might seem to believe, Mark Wahlberg stabs an airplane in this summer blockbuster movie, directed by Antoine Fuqua, that’s coming straight to your living room tonight. Wahlberg is going up against reincarnated warriors known as “Infinites,” and he might be having flashbacks from multiple lives as well. He’s self-medicating, too, and driving a motorcycle off a cliff, so yeah, get your microwave popcorn ready for this gloriously dumb action film.

Flack: Season 2 (Amazon Prime series) — This series began on Pop TV, and Amazon picked it up for a second season for good reason. This is some damn fine guilty-pleasure escapism, even if it feels like an amalgamation of many shows and movies (includingThe Devil Wears Prada, Scandal, Sex and the City) that you’ve seen before. Anna Paquin, who portrays Robyn, who’s part of a PR agency that’s ridiculously good at hiding the most outrageous celebrity scandals imaginable. The show’s dark but breezy, and this season will see more collisions between work and home life, and as always, there will be love affairs and shady dealings and questionable behavior all around.