Category: Worldwide

For months now, it has been rumored that The Weeknd and Angelina Jolie are romantically involved, ever since the pair was spotted going out to dinner back in July. Jolie stoked those flames in the eyes of some when she expertly avoided a question about The Weeknd during an October interview. Now, though, fans think The Weeknd is directly addressing the topic on his new album Dawn FM, as one lyric from the record is being interpreted as being about his supposed love interest.

On “Here We Go… Again,” he sings, “My new girl, she a movie star / I loved her right, make her scream like Neve Campbell / But when I make her laugh, swear it cures my depressin’ thoughts / ‘Cause baby girl, she a movie star.”

After the album’s release, fans took to Twitter to share their thoughts about those words, with plenty of them believing that it essentially confirms a Weeknd/Jolie relationship.

Dawn FM has only been out for a few hours now, but fans have already found plenty of elements to explore. Aside from the Jolie angle, The Weeknd also gives out a phone number on the album, which turns out to be real and not connected to the artist at all.

Listen to “Here We Go… Again” below.

Dawn FM is out now via Republic. Get it here.

There’s never a dull moment for former YouTube titan Logan Paul, who somehow came back from the whole “suicide forest” controversy years ago to amass an absurd amount of money. Since that time, he’s been fighting with Floyd Mayweather and feuding with Jimmy Kimmel (who dubbed him as one of the world’s worst humans). In addition, Logan declared that he wants to avoid California taxes by moving to Puerto Rico (and his announcement wasn’t welcomed), where he purchased a $13.5 million mansion and hopped onto the island.

Back to that absurd amassing of money, though, and Logan’s recent revelation that he spent $3.5 million (an amount that most people barely even dream about) on a “sealed & authenticated box of 1st Edition Pokémon cards.”

He was so thrilled by this Base Set purchase that Logan showed off a video of this apparently rare, unopened set, which he called “the only known one in the world.”

Well, the predominant Pokémon fan community over at the Pokébeach site reacted with the utmost skepticism about “the most expensive purchase in the history of the Pokemon TCG.” Pokébeach noted that they previously didn’t report on Logan’s purchase (at the time of the bragging) because they didn’t believe the set — which has quite a history, as the piece notes of sketchy inconsistencies about the set’s origins, all of which have been questioned after it appeared on eBay nearly a year ago — was what the eBay seller claimed it to be. Furthermore, YouTuber Rattle has laid out all the signs that point toward the set’s inauthenticity in a 42-minute video (one of four installments on the subject that are available on the Rattle Pokemon YouTube channel).

Long story short, this set was already suspected of being inauthentic for several months before Logan “dropped” his money. And this was apparently all news to him, for he’s now decided to fly “to Chicago this weekend to verify the case with BBCE, the company who insured [the set’s] authenticity.”

More news shall be forthcoming, no doubt. And it remains mind-boggling that anyone would pay that much money for a set of cards, authentic or not, period.

Sidney Poitier, who made history as the first Black man to win an Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance in 1963’s Lilies of the Field, has died at 94, according to the Bahamian Minister of Foreign Affairs (via TMZ). The cause of death is still unknown.

Poitier was born on February 20, 1927, in Miami, Florida, and grew up in the Bahamas. As a teenager, he moved to New York City, where he got his start in stage plays before transitioning to film. His first credited performance was in 1950’s No Way Out (directed by All About Eve‘s Joseph L. Mankiewicz), and his breakout role came out five years later in Blackboard Jungle. He received the first of his two Oscar nominations in 1958’s The Defiant Ones, making him the first Black male actor to be nominated for a competitive Academy Award in the category, before winning for Lilies of the Field.

Poitier’s best-known role was as Det. Virgil Tibbs in 1967’s In the Heat of the Night, which won Best Picture. That same year, he also starred in To Sir, With Love and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. In later years, he received the AFI Life Achievement Award, an Academy Honorary Award, a Kennedy Center Honor, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Barack Obama; he was also made an honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II in 1974.

“It’s been said that Sidney Poitier does not make movies, he makes milestones, milestones of artistic excellence; milestones of America’s progress,” Obama said about the actor during the 2009 Medal of Freeman ceremony. “On screen and behind the camera, in films such as The Defiant Ones, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Uptown Saturday Night, Lilies of the Field — for which he became the first African American to win an Academy Award for Best Actor — Poitier not only entertained, but enlightened, shifting attitudes, broadening hearts, revealing the power of the silver screen to bring us closer together.”

You can watch Poitier’s historic Oscar speech below.

(Via TMZ)

The January 14th release date for Earl Sweatshirt’s new project Sick! is fast approaching. We’ve already heard two cuts from Sick! in the out spaced-existential “2010” and the sprawling “Tabula Rasa” featuring Armand Hammer. Now today, Earl has dropped a third cut in “Titanic,” and shared the tracklist to the project due out next week.

Produced by Black Noise, “Titanic” is a succinct statement, with Earl spitting straight through the under two minute cut with gems like: “Yes sir, think I already feel it. Sweatshirt, ’cause you know how revenge, is best served / Cold dish.”

The ten cuts on the tracklist show only two guest features. Along with Armand Hammer on “Tabula Rasa,” Detroit rapper Zelooperz appears on a track called “Vision.” And for what it’s worth, considering both “Titanic” and “2010” come in at around two minutes, and one of the album’s tracks is an intermission (“Lobby”), what comes out on the 14th could very well be the 21-minute album that the Alchemist referenced last September when he said “I couldn’t even describe it… that would be a disservice to it.”

Listen to “Titanic” above and check out the Sick! tracklist below.

1. “Old Friend”
2. “2010”
3. “Sick!”
4. “Vision” Feat. Zelooperz
5. “Tabula Rasa” Feat. Armand Hammer
6. “Lye”
7. “Lobby (Int)”
8. “God Laughs”
9. “Titanic”
10. “Fire In The Hole”

Sick is out 1/14 via Tan Cressida/Warner Records. Pre-order it here.

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

Kenan Thompson stopped by The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon on Thursday night where he talked about all things Saturday Night Live from having to slap together a scaled down episode with Paul Rudd thanks to COVID and why Dionne Warwick thinks Thompson runs the show. While talking to Fallon, who praised Warwick’s previous appearance on SNL, the late night host brought up a viral tweet where Warwick was asked if she’s ever going to host the show.

“That is a question for the person who runs the show. Lorne or Kenan,” Warwick tweeted back.

As for why Warwick is under the impression that Thompson runs SNL, he explained to Fallon, “I think Black people migrate towards each other. So for some reason she thinks I represent SNL, and she can speak through me, you know, to get her message across. Like, if we see a crowd of people, and we see a Black person in the crowd, we’re going to go to them and ask them, like, “Who made the chicken?” I guess. I don’t know.”

Whether Thompson was right or not, his answer had Fallon almost falling out of his chair laughing. Of course, maybe Dionne Warwick is onto something. Thompson is one of the show’s longest running cast members and Lorne Michaels has recently started talking about retiring. Why couldn’t the top job be his? Let Kenan run SNL, you fools!

(Via The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon)

It’s nearly impossible to take stock of Search Party’s fifth and final season, which lands on HBO Max this week, without revisiting its entire, wild, genre-switching, network-hopping run. The show launched as an interrogation of millennial anxieties, set in the nebulous of hipster culture at the time (Brooklyn) and filled with sly, biting commentary on the self-entitlement and, simultaneously, the very real dread inherited by a generation raised in the post-Y2K internet boom. They brunched, they stalked their frenemies on social media platforms, and they found a misguided sense of purpose in hunting down a familiar face that wound up on a missing person’s poster. They fed each other’s narcissism and delusions of grandeur, but they also filled voids in each other’s lives – ones left by absentee and overbearing parents, needy boyfriends, and unfulfilling career paths.

All of that still rings true for the show’s final hurrah – a trippy Magical Mystery Tour of cults, tech gods, influencer culture, and an apocalyptic event or two. For any other show, this amalgam of competing story threads would probably prove too much to handle. But Search Party’s final magic trick is to take a term we normally reserve for shows that completely lose the plot by their last season and transform it into a kind of weirdly aspirational goalpost for the next-gen of dark comedy on TV.

In other words, Search Party’s final run purposefully “jumps the shark” and, honestly, we couldn’t think of a better way for it to end.

We won’t spoil that completely unexpected curtain close, but we will preview the winding road to enlightenment the group travels down to get there. Dory (Alia Shawkat) has somehow survived being held hostage by her twink stalker and the raging inferno we saw her trapped in when season four ended. She was clinically dead for 37 seconds – a medical phenomenon she eventually builds an entire cult around – and subsequently placed in a mental asylum by Drew (John Paul Reynolds), Elliott (John Early), and Portia (Meredith Hagner), when she came to spouting off about doomsday visions and her need to help others experience her spiritual awakening.

While she’s on lockdown, the gang tries to find some semblance of normalcy, although even a concept as familiar as “settling down” conflicts with the megalomania of this trio. Portia and Drew begin dating because they believe no one else will understand what they’ve been through while Elliott reunites with boyfriend Mark to adopt a genetically engineered baby because “they’re conversation starters.” When Dory does eventually escape the mental hospital to find them, there’s judgmental apprehension but also, the feeling that all of them are secretly relieved to be drawn back into their friend’s toxic orbit. Their lives were incredibly boring without her.

It makes sense then that a sincere apology and lunch at a chic pop-up is all it takes to convince the group to join Dory on her quest to spread enlightenment, one that leads them to the door of smarmy tech mogul Tunnel Quinn (Jeff Goldblum continuing the show’s tradition of booking bigger-than-life guest stars who perfectly fit in this world). Quinn’s a billionaire businessman who surrounds himself with inventors and scientists smarter than him in order to peddle products that promise to revolutionize but seem to always disappoint. In Dory, he sees another grift that can bolster his prophetic tech messiah image and earn him some serious cash. (We don’t have to spell out who Goldblum’s parodying here, right?)

It’s a scheme for Quinn, one Elliott is all too happy to buy into and Drew is too spineless to stand up to, but Dory and, oddly, Portia, believe in it. Or, at least, they believe in the image it can help them create. Shawkat is hypnotizing as Dory gently descends down a path so many true crime documentary subjects seem to careen to. She’s quietly powerful, earnestly convincing her friends and us that she does, in fact, just want to help people. Her egocentric impulses are disguised by flowing white linens and soothing mantras about “unconditional love” and one’s individual ability to change the world. She persuades her friends, detractors, and the group of influencers she hires to help get her message to the masses that death is a logical stepping stone to enlightenment. And don’t we all want enlightenment? Or, at the very least, the constant euphoric high it seems to be giving her?

What follows, as Dory assembles her tracksuit disciples and starts promising a scientifically-engineered jelly bean that can both kill you and save your life, is completely unexpected and yet, also, totally predictable. When Dory started this journey, her intentions to find a missing woman named Chantal were good, if not extremely self-serving and they eventually led her to ruin not only her life but the lives of everyone around her. Season five follows that same basic premise – Dory wants to do good and be recognized for it, Dory destroys everything and everyone she loves in the process – but ramps up the drama and fantasy and horror and comedy up to unprecedented heights. It leans into the absurd and impossible in a way that gives everyone, particularly Early and Hagner, room to shine. Those two have been the not-so-secret MVPs of the show’s entire run and here, they get to stretch their legs with the kind of over-the-top weirdness comedically gifted people normally only dream of performing on TV. And Reynolds reliably plays everything – from Drew’s romantic epiphanies to his sleuthing trips to Maine – in a straight-man fashion that can be particularly hard to nail on a show so bizarre, so magnified.

There are some pretty glaring tonal issues, especially as the show makes a grand shift in its final few episodes, and though Clare McNulty’s Chantal Witherbottom is always funny, her subplot with Kathy Griffin (another lucky get) feels disjointed and disconnected from the main story in a way that is never fully rectified.

Still, for a series that introduced itself as a show about millennials who brunch, Search Party has found a way to hit on the singular selfishness, paranoia, and frustrating disillusion of an entire generation in refreshingly unique ways. There’s no show on TV quite like it. We doubt there will be again.

Ben Affleck has played Batman three times (four times if you count Justice League and Zack Snyder’s Justice League as different entities), and while he was initially “thrilled” to step into the Batsuit, he eventually lost his passion.

“It just so happened that I had done a couple of those movies, and I kind of lost my passion for it,” the actor said in 2020. “I kind of lost my passion for telling those stories.” Much like Stella, though, he got his Batgroove back: Affleck had a “great time” being the Dark Knight again in The Flash, to the point where he called it his best work as Batman.

“I have never said this — this is hot off the presses — but maybe my favorite scenes in terms of Batman and the interpretation of Batman that I have done, were in the Flash movie,” he told the Herald Sun. “I hope they maintain the integrity of what we did because I thought it was great and really interesting — different, but not in a way that is incongruent with the character. Who knows? Maybe they will decide that it doesn’t work, but when I went and did it, it was really fun and really, really satisfying and encouraging and I thought, ‘Wow — I think I have finally figured it out.’”

Weird, it looked like he was having so much fun before.

The Flash, which also stars Michael Keaton, opens on November 4.

(Via the Herald Sun)

The Weeknd’s new album Dawn FM has been out for a few hours now, and while fans are enjoying the music, one of the project’s lyrics also inspired some curiosity-driven phone calls. Towards the end of “Every Angel Is Terrifying,” The Weeknd says, “Call 1-800-444-4444 / That’s 1-800-444-4444 now to order ‘After Life.’” Naturally, fans were quick to make note of that number and give it a ring.

However, the number doesn’t lead to any Dawn FM Easter eggs, as The Weeknd has nothing to do with it. In fact, it’s already relatively well-known in its own right and has been for some time: The oldest existing mention of the number online appears to be from a 2003 forum post. Vice noted of the number in 2016, “Perhaps the easiest number you’ll ever dial, this MCI-controlled phone number is perhaps the most prominent example of an ‘automatic number announcement circuit,’ or ANAC number. These numbers, which are generally well-guarded by phone providers, are designed to repeat back to you the number you’re calling from.”

Indeed, when calling the number, a voice says, “Thank you for calling MCI. Our system indicates you are calling from [caller’s phone number]. If this is the number you are calling about, press 1. If not, please listen to the following two options. To enter the number you are calling about, press 2. If you do not have a telephone number currently in service and need to establish a new telephone number, press 3.”

So, if you call 1-800-444-4444 hoping for some sort of Weeknd-related goodie, you’ll come up empty. However, if you do not have a telephone number currently in service and need to establish a new telephone number (which may not be likely considering you’re able to call the number), then today’s your lucky day.

Listen to “Every Angel Is Terrifying” below.

Dawn FM is out now via Republic. Get it here.

I’m a Sex And The City loyalist from way back, though not so much for its style obsessions and cosmos. More for its focus on dating, friendship, and the symbiotic dynamic between the two. Really, the show is one of the all-time best to tackle those topics, leaning on wit, guts, and the skills of its supernaturally gifted foursome and characters that complemented each other so well. Friendships sometimes end, however, creating a hole. And it’s one the Sex And The City sequel series (alliteration!) keeps falling into as it tries to navigate without Kim Cattrall and her character, Samantha Jones – perhaps the sharpest tool that showrunner Michael Patrick King previously had in his toolbox.

Cattrall has (repeatedly and unambiguously) stated that she is done, proving that out with her non-appearance this season, but King and the show haven’t been as able to let go. Even in the most recent episode, Samantha gets mentioned. This time as a sort of cautionary tale for friend drift. Repeatedly, and more tangibly, King has found a way to inject Samantha into key moments, such as when she sent flowers following the death of Big (which is kinda fucked up when you think about Cattrall’s public rejection of Parker’s IG sympathy after the loss of Cattrall’s brother). Or that text exchange after last week’s episode when the Samantha text bot triple-dotted Carrie after a vulnerable moment. I suspect the show is going to go on like this, occasionally commenting on the absence and the distance, conjuring the spirit of Samantha for reasons that aren’t quite clear.

So, should we just shrug and accept, or think up some alternative (and weird!) solutions to And Just Like That’s Samantha problem? Let’s go with the latter since it’s more fun.

Take Samantha Text Bot 9000 To A New Level

Having short typed exchanges be representative of the vivacious Samantha Jones is a shande (a shame so great I had to go Yiddish). I kinda get not wanting to kill her off especially after Pelotoning Big to the great beyond, but trapping her in a cell phone is cruel. Instead, let’s think bigger. Literally. Goodbye, cellphone, hello giant steel and piston-laden robot body that has been ensouled by Samantha’s essence and affixed with a tablet for a face.

Because the love of true friendship never really dims, Carrie, Miranda, and Charlotte could take possession of robot Samantha and re-incorporate her into the friend circle, with machine learning scanning recordings of Samantha’s voice to provide a very choppy, slightly off the mark reading of new dialogue. Think sex-positive Max Headroom for the new millennium. Not perfect, but something is better than nothing, right MPK?

An Iconic Stand In

In the same vein, the show producers could go more fantasy than sci-fi while borrowing from another iconic Cattrall role. This suggestion came from a friend during our weekly And Just Like That kvetch sessions: what if they brought in Cattrall’s mannequin double from the ‘80s film, Mannequin?

Hear me out. You sit the Mannequin mannequin down for brunch and task SJP, Cynthia Nixon, and Kristen Davis with just reacting to it like Cattrall is back even if, to us, it’s just a still mannequin. They could laugh at the Mannequin mannequin’s assumed quips, they could pretend to listen intently as it tells of its sexcapades. Maybe there’s some fishing line and some marionetting at play too. I don’t know, I’m more a big idea type than a details fella. Regardless, it’d be like old times, so long as we all can unlock the power of our imagination.

Too avant-garde? Fine. An alternative approach would be to have the Mannequin mannequin in scenes, but also have someone do a passing Kim Cattrall impression to verbalize for the mannequin. Mario Cantone is already sitting in as 4th chair with the group, maybe he could play Anthony, but also throw his voice to read Samantha’s lines? This is far-fetched, but it would still imbue the show with a measure of Samantha without the bother of actually having to convince Cattrall to be involved. So, bonus, right?

And Then There’s… Just Trying Something Else

One could glibly suggest caving to whatever Cattrall wants or suggest making a titanic financial offer to get her to come back, but she has literally stated that it’s not about money in a 2017 Daily Mail interview:

“This isn’t about more money, this is not about more scenes, it’s not about any of those things. This is about a clear decision, an empowered decision in my life to end one chapter and start another.”

With that in mind, the efforts to keep pulling Samantha back into the events of Carrie, Charlotte, and Miranda’s lives feel a bit messed up. You could recast, sure. And Cattrall even endorsed that in that same interview (as well as urging the show to showcase new points of view… which it’s clumsily doing, but doing all the same). But the character is so closely tied to Cattrall that it feels disrespectful to continue the ruse that she’s involved in any of this. Cattrall made a choice, an “empowered decision” to disconnect her life from this show and that character. And continuing to sprinkle in Samantha — even in small doses — feels disrespectful to that choice, to a show that can live without her as something new, and to fans who get strung along seeing these blips as evidence that there might someday be a reunion when that seems nearly impossible. (And wow if a reunion happens will this be a bad take.)

For a franchise that has shown so many breakups through the years, it’s weird that it’s failing to observe the clearest lesson about them: don’t draw things out or cause drama for drama’s sake. Free And Just Like That to be the next chapter it’s been billed as — one without the baggage of a relationship it can’t fully explore anymore.

If you thought Ted Cruz ditching Texas for sunny Cancun during a historic winter death that killed at least 246 people was bad, well, you’re right. It was bad. But the senator sunk nearly as low on Thursday night when he essentially asked for repentance from Tucker Carlson for calling what happened on January, 6, 2020, a “violent terrorist attack” (the one time he got something right, he almost immediately backtracked).

“There are a lot of dumb people in the Congress. You are not one of them,” Carlson said at the beginning of the interview. “I think you’re smarter than I am. And you never use words carelessly. And yet you called this a terror attack when by no definition was it a terror attack. That’s a lie. You told that lie on purpose, and I’m wondering why you did.”

Cruz replied, “When you aired your episode last night, I sent you a text shortly thereafter and said listen, I would like to go on because the way I phrased things yesterday, it was sloppy and it was frankly dumb.” Carlson wasn’t buying what “cowardly” Cruz was selling, and neither was anyone on Twitter or CNN’s New Day anchor John Berman.

“Can I just say one more thing about Ted Cruz?” Berman asked co-host Brianna Keilar on Friday morning. “It’s like 7:28 a.m. Ted Cruz, do you know where your spine is? I thought he handled it better in Game of Thrones when he was Theon Greyjoy to Ramsay Bolton there. Honestly, that was like Reek, that was like watching Reek in Game of Thrones there for how he was addressing him… I was so uncomfortable watching that.”

For all three people who still haven’t watched Game of Thrones (or if you Eternal Sunshine-d it away after the series finale), Reek is Ramsay’s pet name for Theon while he emasculates, humiliates, and tortures him. I guess Ted is used to it by now.

You can watch the CNN clip below.