Category: News

In her second performance of the night, Lizzo took to the Saturday Night Live stage to deliver a cover of Stevie Wonder‘s “Someday At Christmas.”

Wrapped up in a festive, puffy, silver and gold dress, Lizzo expressed hope for a brighter future and a happy holiday season for all. Joined by a group of equally powerful background singers, the group sang in joyous harmony.

“Someday at Christmas there’ll be no wars / When we have learned what Christmas is for / When we have found what life’s really worth / There’ll be peace on earth,” Lizzo sang.

Lizzo released the studio version of her “Someday At Christmas” cover last month, as part of a series for Amazon Music. Though Wonder’s original version of the song was released over 50 years ago, Lizzo felt the song’s message still rings true today.

“I chose to cover ‘Someday at Christmas’ not just because it’s a classic, but because it’s a reminder to us that almost 60 years later, we are still fighting for peace, compassion, and equality,” said Lizzo in a statement. “A friendly reminder to spread love and kindness this holiday season.”

Check out the performance above.

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

In the last Saturday Night Live episode of the year, Lizzo returned to the stage. In festive spirits, she performed her buzzy track, “Break Up Twice” from her critically-acclaimed sophomore album, Special.

During her performance, Lizzo is woken up by an alarm clock, then arises from a bed after hitting pressing the alarm off. Donned in white nightwear, Lizzo lets her man know that she’s willing to give their relationship another try, but she’s not giving him any more chances after this.

“Boy, you know you better / ooh, you know you better / Boy, you know you bettеr watch out / ‘Cause boy, you know me bettеr / you know me so much better / You know that I don’t break up twice,” she sings on the song’s chorus, which interpolates Lauryn Hill’s “Doo Wop (That Thing)”

As the song progresses, Lizzo is joined by a backing chorus, who sweetly supplement Lizzo’s soulful vocals. She also twerks by her mattress, in true Lizzo fashion.

This is Lizzo’s second time performing on SNL this year, her first being in April upon the release of her comeback single, “About Damn Time.”

Check out the performance of “Break Up Twice above.

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

This article originally appeared on 08.09.18

Recent polls suggest that Republicans and Democrats have slightly different tastes that have nothing to do with politics.

If you like cats, The Beatles, and Starbucks, you tend to vote Democrat. If you’re into Toby Keith, Budweiser, and Dunkin’ Donuts, you tend to vote Republican.

But an interesting new quiz claims to be 98 percent effective at determining people’s political affiliations by asking questions that have zero to do with politics.

Click here to take the quiz.

So how does it work? (Don’t read the answer if you haven’t taken the quiz yet.)

According to ChartsMe, recent studies have found that people who were more prone to disgust are more conservative. This leads them to more closely align with the Republican Party.

Some scientists believe it’s ancestral and that the adverse reactions to conditions we’d label “disgusting” were used to protect primitive ancestors from contamination and disease. This way a person wouldn’t confuse drinking water with dirty pond scum. But if the test told you that you’re a Republican, you probably won’t accept that explanation because studies show you probably don’t believe in evolution.

Click here to take the quiz.

This article originally appeared on 06.15.18

Chloe Dykstra has spoken out about the painful reality of being in an abusive relationship.

In a post on Medium in June 2018, beloved gamer, actress, model, and cosplayer Dykstra wrote about the harrowing experience of being in a long-term abusive relationship.

“One day, I met someone at a convention and ended up falling for a man almost 20 years my senior,” Dykstra wrote. “It wasn’t the first time I’d found myself in a relationship with an older man; I’ve always joked about my daddy issues, and thought that with age came stability and wisdom. Welp.”

From there, Dykstra details the horrors of that relationship. Within the first two weeks, she was isolated from her friends, given a curfew, and told not to speak in public.

Quickly, the relationship turned into one of fear — “I was terrified to piss him off — so I did what he said,” she wrote — and then became assaultive. Dykstra revealed she developed an eating disorder. Then, when she suffered an ectopic pregnancy and either had to have surgery or risk death, she said her fear of having to tell her partner she was pregnant was stronger than her fear of death.

Dykstra is shining an important light on why people stay in abusive relationships.

When people learn of an abusive relationship, the common question that surfaces is “If it was so bad, why didn’t you just leave?” The answer to this question is complex in general and often has nothing to do with a person’s strength. Often, it doesn’t even seem like there’s a choice.

Dykstra’s answer to this question paints a painful picture of why escaping an abusive relationship can feel impossible:

“I believed that, to borrow an analogy from a friend, if I kept digging I would find water. And sometimes I did. Just enough to sustain me. And when you’re dying of thirst, that water is the best water you’ll ever drink. When you’re alienated from your friends, there’s no one to tell you that there’s a drinking fountain 20 feet away. And when your self-worth reaches such depths after years of being treated like you’re worthless, you might find you think you deserve that sort of treatment, and no one else will love you.”

Her story has clearly resonated with people far and wide.

Dykstra’s main goals were to create closure and warn others about how surprisingly common abuse can be. According to The National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, more than 10 million people are abused by an intimate partner annually. On an average day, approximately 20,000 calls are placed to domestic violence hotlines.

The stigma of being trapped in an abusive relationship is slowly disappearing. The overwhelming support Dykstra has been shown is a sign that progress is moving in the right direction — but there’s so much work yet to to be done.

You can reach the NCADV in the link below:

NCADV is the voice of victims and survivors. We are the catalyst for changing society to have zero tolerance for domestic violence. We do this by affecting public policy, increasing understanding of the impact of domestic violence, and providing programs and education that drive that change.

This article originally appeared on 06.27.18

Up to 8% of the American population will experience post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in their lifetime, according to the National Center for PTSD.

As much as people might not want to discuss it, traumatic experiences are not rare. In fact, recent data suggests that 60% of men and 50% of women will experience at least one traumatic event in their lifetime.

For a long time, it was believed that only those who had served in the military could develop PTSD, but that’s simply not true.

The reality is that, while it may be more prevalent among certain groups, PTSD can affect anyone who’s experienced a traumatic event. It’s important to be able to speak about it clearly and openly, without fear or condemnation, in order to promote understanding and healing.

Today, more treatments exist for PTSD than ever before.

The medical and psychological communities are finding new and effective ways of treating the disorder. For example, therapies involving virtual reality and paintball have shown to be promising in treating veterans. Both are methods where an individual is exposed to the triggers of their symptoms in a safe and controllable way.

Cognitive behavioral therapy (where one learns to think more realistically and logically) and eye movement desensitization reprocessing (in which an individual relives the traumatic experience in small doses and while remaining firmly in reality) can also be effective in treating the disorder. But therapy, no matter how effective, is only one piece of the puzzle.

Helping those with PTSD must also include compassion. Here’s how to be an ally.

It’s likely that you know someone who’s experienced PTSD. It’s also likely that you didn’t know how to think or react to the disorder.

Confusion (and even judgment) are normal responses. After all, most of us aren’t trained therapists. But you don’t have to be a mental health professional to help a friend or loved one who’s experiencing PTSD.

There’s no one right thing to say to someone who’s experiencing the disorder. The best thing you can do is just be there. While it may seem helpful to offer wisdom or offer suggestions for how your loved ones can “move on” or “get over it,” that’s actually counter-intuitive.

Those living with PTSD are already under a great deal of pressure. Suggesting therapy is helpful, but trying to make your loved one see “the good side of things” or “remember that this is all part of a bigger plan” is likely to create even more guilt and stress rather than prompt action. PTSD is painful and it’s serious, but it’s never a sign of weakness.

Respecting boundaries is also important. It’s up to the individual when they choose to talk about their trauma. Nobody should force it or take it personally if they don’t.

Show up, listen, care. These things are enough. More importantly, they’re important steps toward ending stigma and helping our loved ones heal.

Well, folks, I played myself. I was so excited about the prospect of an Avatar sequel that I felt like I needed to defend the feeling. I ended up writing an entire post about it. About how this time, it seemed different. About how it felt like we were actually being sold a movie again, and not a type of fandom, or a corporation’s five-year plan.

Perhaps it was inevitable, then, that the movie, once I saw it, would leave me feeling like the story was only a chapter and not much had been resolved. Beyond the visual trappings and the James Cameron persona, Avatar 2 (minus points for not just calling it that) feels a lot like what I had hoped it was not: a typical franchise movie, a glorified tease for some future sequel. It’s a technological grand slam and a thematic sacrifice bunt.

The first Avatar was released in 2009, which feels like a lifetime ago now, basically because it is. There being sequels was assumed almost from the beginning, and much has been made of the idea that James Cameron had to wait for technology to catch up to his imagination. As Cameron told GQ in a recent profile, “They needed new cameras that could shoot underwater and a motion-capture system that could collect separate shots from above and below water and integrate them into a unified virtual image; they needed new algorithms, new AI, to translate what Cameron shot into what you see.”

That’s right, the guy who made The Terminator had to use artificial intelligence to “translate” his new movie to our eyeballs. More:

“The process for how Cameron builds the Avatar films is complex; it involves creating a data-rich but visually undistinguished package that Cameron calls a template—on which he captures the lighting, performances, and camera moves he wants—which then gets handed over to Wētā to apply algorithms and layers of animation to bring the template to life. ‘It’s not animation in a Pixar sense where they’re just making stuff up,’ Cameron told me. ‘The actors already defined what they did, but it has to be translated from the captured data to the 3D-CG character. And there’s all sorts of AI steps in there.’”

That’s all very complicated, but the end result… well, it looks a lot like animation. Largely that’s due to the fact that Cameron employs a high frame rate system whereby The Way Of The Water uses 48 frames per second (double film’s usual 24) for the action sequences, then clones frames during other sequences to mimic normal, 24 fps film for slower moments with fewer camera moves. The point is to avoid the blurring and strobing that happen when 3D action moves too fast, but avoid the hyperreal effect of the high frame rate when it isn’t necessary.

That’s a lot of work just to jerry-rig a functional version of 3D, and I’m not sure it was time well spent. The high-frame rates still look weird and hyperreal, a conspicuous conceit rather than a streamlined reality. There are some wild set pieces, especially early in the film, that are hard to be invested in because they just look too much like videogame animation (not in a good way). Things like an exploding train on an alien planet look more like miniatures or animation. They don’t make you feel like you’re watching a real thing that happened. There are recognizable actors listed in the credits (Kate Winslet!?) that I don’t remember being in the movie I just saw. “Actors” are largely irrelevant in the traditional sense, which feels a lot like animation by another name. Why do I feel like the pre-fx version of this shot would be more compelling than the post?

Yes, I’m already bored of talking about technical stuff. Yet with Avatar: The Way Of The Water, technical stuff is most of what there is. In the first Avatar, the disabled Marine Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) goes to Pandora to replace his deceased brother in the native pacification project (I remember almost all of this, even though I only saw the movie once, 13 years ago). He ends up going native, and helping his new tribe of Na’vi defeat the evil mining corporation that want to kill Pandora’s magical tree and mine the spirits of Na’vi ancestors for unobtanium to power their quad bikes or whatever.

When we catch up to Jake in The Way Of The Water, he seems to be living a pretty good life on Pandora with his new cat-monkey family, catching fireflies and hopping all nimbly pimbly from tree to tree and whatnot. He’s the leader of his tribe and has a family, which now includes not only his wife Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) but an indeterminate number of kids. Three? Four? He has at least two boys, plus a younger daughter and another maybe-adopted girl who is the daughter of Sigourney Weaver’s character in the first. “Her conception is a bit of a mystery,” we’re told in a voiceover, which are now just there, without the “letters home” framing device to justify them.

Frankly, all of these children’s conceptions are a bit of a mystery. We probably could’ve used a refresher on that, the movie is three hours long. There’s a malformed plot point about the human-Na’avi hybrids having four fingers like humans instead of three like pure Na’vi, but the movie doesn’t really land the explanation and who really cares anyway.

Suffice it to say, Jake’s cat-monkeys and their dreadlocked chill are shattered when the once-dead Marine thug, Quaritch (Stephen Lang), returns to Pandora for revenge, after he and his crew’s consciousnesses are uploaded into nine-foot, feline Na’vi bodies. They show up on Pandora and wreck shop, and Jake and his family are forced to flee the forest Na’vi tribes to seek protection among the Polynesian-coded island Na’vi tribes. It’s there that they learn, you guessed it, the way of the water. That’s basically the entire movie.

The first Avatar was simplistic, but it was about a clash of civilizations. It was about settler colonialists like Jake trying to unlearn the assumptions of the extractive society in which they’d been raised. The Way Of The Water is even simpler than that, and missing a lot of the broader implications. It’s mostly just about Quaritch seeking revenge and Jake’s family learning to love the ocean. Sure?

The Way Of The Water‘s finest moments are under the water, where one of Jake’s sons (that I don’t remember which, or their names, and could barely distinguish between them is a flaw of the film) gets stranded outside the reef by the Polynesian Na’vi. Out in the open waters he befriends a whale creature. Wikipedia tells me the boy’s name is Lo’ak (Britain Dalton) and the whale creatures are called “Tulkuns.”

The sequences underwater truly are magical eye candy, and the movie comes closest to finding a reason for existing in the conflict between these pacifist, spiritual sea creatures and the whalers trying to mine them for their brain goo. Which apparently can stop human aging (see Sea of Shadows for real-life analog here). Jemaine Clement (one of a handful of actually recognizable actors, including Edie Falco’s nice turn as the commander of the humans’ Pandora base) plays an expert Tulkun scientist forced to help kill them in order to fund his research. “And this is why I drink,” he says.

It’s the most memorable performance and line in what should’ve been the main storyline in The Way Of The Water. Instead, it gets shunted aside in favor of Quaritch’s thin revenge story (why wouldn’t this guy just go native too?). Likewise, when Lo’ak befriends a rogue Tulkun who had been exiled from his pod for killing, you’d think this storyline would have a big payoff. Instead, it lasts about three minutes (I mean what is this, my sex life?!).

There’s a big, elaborate battle at the end, and visually it’s not nearly as fun as Lo’ak whale riding, and conceptually you get to the end wondering what actually got resolved in this billion dollar movie. Jake Sully learned “the way of the water?” Which boils down to a few lines of space age-y mumbo jumbo, about how water connects birth and death, light and dark?

For a movie that’s so epic in its technological ambitions, The Way Of The Water feels very timid in the scope of its storytelling. It feels momentous only in the context of an assumption that there are going to be more of these movies, which is precisely what I had hoped it would allow me not to do. Oh well, at least there was no post-credits sequence. Small mercies.

‘Avatar: The Way Of The Water’ is out now in theaters everywhere. Vince Mancini is on Twitter. You can read more of his reviews here.

Ja Morant was ejected at the end of the second quarter from Grizzlies-Thunder for one of the most bizarre technical fouls of the season. During some free throws, Morant was having a friendly conversation with a fan courtside when the referee hit him with his second T of the night, ejecting him in the process to the disbelief of everyone — Morant, the rest of the Grizzlies, and the fan who pleaded with the refs to walk back the decision.

While the broadcast team seemed to think he was getting into it with a fan, in actuality Morant was having a discussion with the fan when he said the “refs won’t give me a f**kin whistle,” which drew the second T. Morant wanted to make sure the fan didn’t think he blamed her for the interaction, and even went so far as to FaceTime his dad from the locker room so he could take the phone to the fan and they could continue their conversation and make sure they knew it was all love.

The league has been very active in fining players for using profanity with fans, but this is one of the more preposterous punishments yet. To eject Morant, who had gotten T’d up earlier in the game for arguing a no-call, for this kind of interaction with a fan just cannot be the type of thing the league allows to happen. Fans want to see stars, particularly on the road, and to give out a soft ejection like this is just bad for everyone, and rescinding the second technical (as one would anticipate happening) isn’t going to undo the worst part of this.

Nathan Apodaca, known for his viral TikTok video featuring him drinking cranberry juice while skateboarding as “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac plays in the background, was arrested in his Idaho home, according to a report from TMZ.

According to the news report, the police pulled Apodaca over as he was allegedly driving with an expired registration sticker. The officer said he smelt marijuana as he approached the vehicle. As Apodaca was searching for his registration in the car, the officer apparently noticed some weed gummies.

Apodaca reportedly admitted to having weed in the car, and was later arrested and held on pot possession and possession of drug paraphernalia.

The viral TikTok star was later released and spoke to TMZ upon his release.

“During the arrest, the officers failed to read me my Miranda rights,” he said. “Initially, when officers found weed they said they were only going to write a ticket. They then found a gun and told me I was under arrest because I had a felony on my record and I wasn’t allowed to possess a firearm. However, I do not have a felony on my record, which I told the officers. Despite me telling them this, I was taken into custody. I was held in jail for several hours without bond before they told me they make a huge mistake. Then was told I was only being held on the weed charge and could bond out.”

The rules of boxing, at least as it pertains to the action allowed in the ring, are as clear and simple as in any sport. You can throw punches from the belt line up, don’t hit your opponent in the back of the head, don’t bite, headbutt, or kick, and stop when the referee (or the bell) says to stop.

It’s understandable if, sometimes, a rule gets broken on a borderline punch once, as accidents happen. As such, a first violation is almost always given a warning, but after that, points start getting taken away and the benefit of the doubt goes with it. On Saturday night, Omar Juarez just could not stop punching his opponent, Austin Dulay, below the belt in their super lightweight bout in Las Vegas, sending him to the canvas three times with below the belt shots that resulted in three points being taken away — a warning, a one point deduction, and then a two-point deduction.

As the Showtime commentators note, there was one that was maybe borderline, but the last one that earned him a two-point deduction was a straight uppercut to the dick and when you’ve been warned twice already, that’s just not going to fly.

Credit to Dulay for continuing to step in there and take an absolute beating below the belt. If boxing doesn’t work out, he may have a future with the Jackass crew after this showing. Despite the three points being deducted, Juarez still managed to win the fight on the cards.

Ahead of tomorrow’s World Cup final, Drake has let it be known that he is betting on Argentina to win the closing game against France. Depending on who you’re rooting for, this could be a good thing or a bad thing.

See, Drake doesn’t have the best track record when it comes to making bets or expressing fandom to certain athletes or teams. While he is known to make allusions to professional sports and athletes in his songs, as well as share photos of himself wearing team jerseys. However, his outward support has not always worked out in his favor.

Some examples of teams and athletes who have fallen victim to the “Drake curse” include Conor McGregor, who lost his fight in a fourth-round submission to Russian fighter Khabib Nurmagomedov, after McGregor shared a picture with the rapper in 2018. Just months later, Drake shared a video of him working out while wearing a University Of Alabama hoodie in support of their college football team. Just a week later, the Roll Tide would lose 44-16 to the Clemson Tigers.

Needless to say, Argentina fans are on edge.

Check out some of the hilarious fan reactions above.

The World Cup Final takes place tomorrow at 10 a.m. EST. You can stream the game on Peacock.