And dozens of a dudes leering at her is still as menacing as it was in 1960.
Season 2 of White Lotus sees the gang in Italy, and the Mike White series has taken full advantage of the landscape, especially in the third episode where Aubrey Plaza strolls front and center through a shot-for-shot remake of an iconic L’Avventura scene. Mike White told Variety that it was cinematographer Xavier Grobet’s idea to film the homage, since the production found themselves in the same plaza in Noto, Italy where Michelangelo Antonioni filmed the original scene.
L’Avventura starts with a missing woman, becomes a romance, and dissolves into a brilliant rumination on life as well as a gorgeously maddening experience for anyone who craves closure. In the scene, Monica Vitti walks slowly through a loose crowd of men in the plaza as they openly and aggressively ogle her. In White Lotus, Plaza takes a few steps in Vitti’s shoes with a new pack of oglers looking on.
The side-by-side is so cool. Only White Lotus offers a sense of relief.
White noted the clear similarities between the two works, saying, “L’Avventura is about the desperate search for the meaning of life as much as the actual disappeared woman. Obviously, White Lotus touches on the malaise of wealthy people and that kind of search for meaning when you’re just lounging by an infinity pool.”
There is a magic resting inside moments of pure unbridled joy. Playfulness has the power to instill hope into even the most dire of circumstances. And while it doesn’t always come easily to humans, nature is always ready to remind us of how to conjure it. Hint: It’s simpler than we think.
While Alvin Kaunda, a local reporter in Kenya, tries his very best to stay professional as he delivers an important message about how human actions have destroyed habitats for the country’s red elephant species (Kenya is the only place in the world where elephants appear red due to bathing in red volcanic soil, how cool is that?!), one baby elephant makes keeping a straight face completely impossible.
As Kaunda does his best to stay focused on devastated ecosystems and a disruption in the circle of life, one mischievous trunk is seen relentlessly prodding and poking his ear and head. To his credit, the reporter stays strong until the trunk finally plops right onto his face. Then his boisterous laughter couldn’t be contained.
Of course, the seriousness of his report is vital to know. Kenya is suffering its worst drought in more than 40 years, killing hundreds of elephants and more than a thousand other animals. We must be aware of how our actions are harming those we share a planet with, as well as how we can help.
But it is the unencumbered playfulness of the baby elephant that reminds us of why it’s important to be aware and make changes. We are all connected to one another, creature and man. When one suffers, we all do. And when one is gloriously happy, we all can tune in and feel that happiness. That connection is sacred, and it’s why we must show up through thoughtful action.
Check out the full video below. It’s only 30 seconds, but contains a lesson good for a lifetime.
As for Kaunda, he plans on taking his ever stoic journalistic skills to even more animals. He told Nairobi’s 89.5FM Ghetto Radio that his goal is to get up close to a “lion and a leopard.” Hey, he’s already proven that he’s cool under pressure!
By the way, if you’d like to help this adorable baby elephant (named Kindani, by the way) you can digitally adopt her and others on the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust website by clicking here.
Takeoff was tragically shot dead in the early hours of November 1 while attending a private event with Quavo at 810 Billiards & Bowling in Houston. The beloved 28-year-old Migos rapper’s celebration of life was last Friday, November 11, at Atlanta’s State Farm Arena. The following day, Quavo shared a heartbreaking Instagram tribute to his nephew and musical collaborator. Offset also took to Instagram to express his overwhelming grief.
The grieving process will continue indefinitely, but those closest to Takeoff want the search for his suspected killer to end.
Kashara Marshall, Quavo’s sister and Takeoff’s aunt, posted a plea on her Instagram Story this week: “Find out who did this to my NEPHEW!!!!!!!!! By any MEANS.” The since-expired post was captured by Daily Loud and Vibe.
Quavo’s sister / Takeoff’s aunt wants the man allegedly responsible for Takeoff’s passing found by any means necessary pic.twitter.com/uSsuPIzxkT
On November 1, Houston Police held a press conference and detailed what is believed to have happened outside of 810 Billiards & Bowling. According to Houston Police Chief Troy Finner and Sgt. Micheal Arrington, an altercation broke out during a dice game that led to someone opening fire, resulting in Takeoff’s murder and injuring two others.
Mayor Sylvester Turner joins Police Chief Troy Finner to brief the media on the fatal shooting of rap artist at 1199 San Jacinto Street on Nov. 1 about 2:30 a.m. https://t.co/eq9nDdp1Kw
“A lot of people that were there fled the scene and did not stick around to give us statements, so we’re asking them to either call us at the homicide division at 713-308-3600 or if they would like remain anonymous, they can call Crime Stoppers,” Arrington said during the press conference. “We’re looking for any information at this time — any videos, any information.”
Finner added, “There were 40 people, at least, at this event. And people left, possibly out of fear. I ask you one thing, and I want this to resonate with everybody: What if it was your brother? What if it was your son? You would want somebody to step up. So, please, step up. Get the information to us so we can bring some closure to this family who’s hurting right now.”
Last night, TMZ broke the news that Blueface was arrested outside Lo-Lo’s Chicken & Waffles in Las Vegas for attempted murder that allegedly occurred on October 8. TMZ has since shared a video of the incident, in which the rapper pulls out a gun and shoots at the driver of a truck outside a Vegas club. The video depicts him firing several times while the truck speeds off.
Sources told TMZ that the driver walked into the bar and was attacked by Blueface’s crew, though Blueface himself was not directly involved in the altercation. Sources also told TMZ that as the man was leaving, he got in his truck and drove up to Blueface and his crew and asked, “Who hit me?!” Watch the footage of the shots on TMZ‘s site.
His charges, according to files obtained by TMZ, include felony attempted murder with the use of a deadly firearm or tear gas. There’s also another charge of discharging a gun into a house, building, vehicle or craft. When TMZ broke the news yesterday, they also shared a video of the “Thotiana” rapper being handcuffed on the ground, which was likely an undercover operation because cops had an open warrant for his arrest.
After dropping his debut album Golden One to accompany his autobiographical HBO special, Whitmer Thomas is back with a message we could all learn from nowadays: “commit to the cringe.” It’s a line he sings on his The Older I Get The Funnier I Was ballad-like dream pop track “Navel Gazey” and one that sums up his approach to songwriting. In order to “make it” as both a comedian and a songwriter (and to have a viral song about being a big baby), you’ve really got to lean into the cringe.
Thomas isn’t just a comedian who makes comedy music. Rather, he makes earworm indie rock with a humorous edge. Tracks like his demure album opener “Most Likely” speaks to imposter syndrome with a wistful edge, evoking popular indie songwriters like Alex G. Others like “Rigamarole” are more playful, leaning on synths and a catchy chorus while Thomas sings of shaking the depression of a monotonous routine.
To celebrate the release of The Older I Get The Funnier I Was, Whitmer Thomas sits down with Uproxx to talk Cindi Lauper, Hooters, and a hot take about Mark Hoppus in our latest Q&A.
What are four words you would use to describe your music?
Dammit, Dang, Dumbass, Guitar
It’s 2050 and the world hasn’t ended and people are still listening to your music. How would you like it to be remembered?
Hopefully some folks might relate and laugh while listening to some of it and then go watch the Dark Knight on channel Zorp.
What’s your favorite city in the world to perform?
Tough to say, but my favorite show on the tour I’m currently on has been Columbus, Ohio.
Who’s the person who has most inspired your work, and why?
Mark Hoppus. He’s the reason I started playing music. “Wendy Clear” is better than “Hey Jude.”
Where did you eat the best meal of your life?
Probably the Hooters in Ontario on the way home from Morongo Casino after winning 200 bucks.
What album do you know every word to?
True Love by Hovvdy or Enema of The State by Blink-182.
What was the best concert you’ve ever attended?
Watching my big brother’s band Life Left open for Norma Jean in Pensacola, Florida when I was 15 will never be topped.
What is the best outfit for performing and why?
I’m always trying to recreate The Cindi Lauper in Paris 1987 (True Colour Tour) outfit from this taped concert. Check it out on Youtube right now. Timeless. Perfect look.
Who’s your favorite person to follow on Twitter and/or Instagram?
Apart from losing re-election in 2020, nothing bad has really ever happened to Donald Trump. He’s never had to pay the consequences of his actions, and even though he faces numerous legal and financial threats, there’s no reason to think he won’t weasel out of them, like he has every other calamity. Maybe his 2024 presidential campaign, which kicked off with a sad trombone sound, will prove another inexplicable Trump success. But for now, the reviews aren’t good, not even from Russian State TV.
Russia’s top propagandist Vladimir Solovyov couldn’t be less impressed with Trump’s announcement. Watch: pic.twitter.com/CyFXkLC994
“It’s a big joy for Biden that Trump announced that he is planning to run in the elections. Trump did it dramatically, beautifully, just in time at the moment when the world could totally spit on it,” Solovyov said sarcastically. “The world stood on the brink of nuclear war, as everyone thought, expecting that NATO is about to do something. It turned out not to be the case.”
After airing a clip from Trump’s epic announcement, which ran longer than many films, Solovyov really let the big guy have it:
I have a few technical questions. First of all, why is Trump doing this? Really, what is it for? It would be impossible to find a worse time for this. It gives him absolutely nothing. He performed quite poorly. And I mean very poorly. There can be no positives from this. What the heck is it for? Why is he doing this?
The red wave did not materialize. They did not take the Senate, not as big of a majority in Congress as they needed. Within the party, DeSantis looks more successful. Is this an attempt to interrupt DeSantis? Or is this a gift for Biden?
In other words, Russian State TV agrees with many in the GOP, who’ve come to the conclusion that Trump is now toxic for the party, at least after the disastrous midterms, which saw one MAGA candidate after another underperform or flame out. They begged him not to run, or at least to hold off. But Trump is Trump — and that means he may still, somehow, have a chance.
When The Super Mario Bros. Movie hits theaters in the spring, it won’t be the first big screen take on the classic Nintendo game. But it will be the first animated one. Back in 1993, Hollywood spent nearly $50 million — almost $100 million today — on a live-action adaptation (that bombed and was hated by one of its leads). For Mario and Luigi, they didn’t cast two Italians. Instead they chose a Brit (Bob Hoskins) and a Colombian with Spanish and African roots (John Leguizamo). It’s the kind of diverse casting you see today — which is why Leguizamo is pretty disappointed that the new one stars two white actors, namely Chris Pratt and Charlie Day.
“I’m O.G. A lot of people love the original,” Leguizamo told IndieWire. “I did Comic-Con in New York and in Baltimore, and everyone’s like, ‘No, no, we love the old one, the original.’ They’re not feeling the new one.’ I’m not bitter. It’s unfortunate.”
He recalls his casting being rare for the time. “The directors Annabel Jankel and Rocky Morton fought really hard for me to be the lead because I was a Latin man, and [the studio] didn’t want me to be the lead,” Leguizamo said. “They fought really hard, and it was such a breakthrough. For them to go backwards and not cast another [actor of color] kind of sucks.”
It’s not the first time Leguizamo has criticized the new Mario Bros. for its non-diverse casting (although it does have Keegan-Michael Key voicing Toad). Last year, when Pratt’s casting was first announced, he sounded off on Twitter.
So glad #superMariobros is getting a reboot! Obviously it’s iconic enuff. But too bad they went all white! No Latinx in the leads! Groundbreaking color-blind casting in original! Plus I’m the only one who knows how to make this movie work script wise! pic.twitter.com/lNokmdpwMq
“So glad #superMariobros is getting a reboot! Obviously it’s iconic enuff,” he wrote. “But too bad they went all white! No Latinx in the leads! Groundbreaking color-blind casting in original! Plus I’m the only one who knows how to make this movie work script wise!”
Leguizamo isn’t the only one critical of Pratt’s casting. Pratt had promised that his voice in the film would be “unlike anything you’ve heard in the Mario world before.” When the first trailer dropped, people had lots of jokes, though perhaps the best one was that he sounded less like an Italian plumber and more like Linda Belcher from Bob’s Burgers.
Fresh off Kristen Stewart‘s nomination for portraying Princess Diana in Spencer and Imogen Poots‘ starring in the Oscar-worthy The Father, the pair are set to keep those Academy vibes rolling along with a prestige memoir adaptation. This time, Stewart will be behind the camera, making her feature film directorial debut and co-writing the screenplay for The Chronology of Water with Andy Mingo.
Based off Lidia Yuknavitch’s creative non-fiction work of the same name, the movie will feature Poots as a woman overcoming familial sexual abuse and violence, discovering her own sexual identity alongside her identity as an artist. Stewart joked(?) in May that if she didn’t get to make the long-gestating film this year, she’d “die.”
“Lidia’s memoir honors corporeal experience, radically,” Stewart told Deadline. “To make that experience physical feels vital to me and what this impulse means … is that it absolutely must be a film. This project has been cooking for five years with the help of Scott Free, whom I could not be more privileged to have as partners and friends. Imogen Poots will carry this movie and the staggering weight of Lidia’s life. She can hold it. I am beyond lucky to have her.”
It’s a bold, audacious project from a singular writer. Yuknavitch is a staple of the Oregon writing scene and wrote the memoir partially because of a good-natured ribbing from Chuck Palahniuk who joked about not seeing much value in the form (but who proclaimed he’d read any memoir she wrote). Stewart is an exciting voice for this, and it’s positioned perfectly to shoot, lounge around Cannes, and then bound onto screens next fall. There’s no official timeline for it, but don’t be too surprised if that’s how it goes down.
To date, more than 80 women have accused former Miramax mogul Harvey Weinstein of sexual misconduct, with charges ranging from harassment to rape. With that many women sharing very similar — and equally terrifying — accounts with the man behind such critical hits as Pulp Fiction, Shakespeare in Love, Gangs of New York, Paddington, and Carol, it was clear from the beginning that the details revealed during any trial would be both disturbing and salacious. But one thing people might not have been expecting were the bizarre details Weinstein’s accusers have given about his highly abnormal genitalia, photos of which the jury in his current Los Angeles trial were forced to examine last month.
Weinstein’s legal team came out of the gate swinging when the trial first kicked off in October, and spent days grilling the first victim to testify, a.k.a. Jane Doe #1, about her claim that Weinstein forced her to perform oral sex on his. Though it was just one of several horrific acts the alleged victim described, Harvey’s legal team pounced on the oral sex aspect of her claim that he had forced her to “suck him and suck his balls” to paint her as a liar. The case has only grown more contentious, and strange, since.
Last week, as Insider reported, another victim — Jane Doe #2 — described Weinstein’s “disgusting” genitalia in further detail, saying that his penis looked as if “it had been chopped off and sewn back on, like something wasn’t right about it.” Jennifer Siebel Newsom, wife of California governor Gavin Newsom, echoed the latter part of this sentiment earlier this week.
Newsom, who is identified in court as Jane Doe #4, testified in California on Monday about her 2005 encounter with Weinstein, who she claimed raped her at the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills. As the New York Post reported, Newsom — clearly shaken up and emotional — described the incident as, “My worst nightmare. I’m just this blow-up doll that he’s just trying to masturbate off of.”
When asked to describe what she recalled of Weinstein’s physique, she replied:
Lots of bruises, markings, yellow and green, lots of stretch marks on his belly, very not physically fit at all. Looked uncircumcised and strange though, kind of fish-like, the penis, something was distorted in the testicles … Lots of skin, lots of skin down there.
Weinstein is currently serving a 23-year prison sentence for rape and sexual assault related to his trial in New York. In Los Angeles, he is being charged with sexually assaulting four women between 2004 and 2013.
If you or someone you know has been affected by sexual violence, help is available 24/7 through the National Sexual Assault Hotline: 800-656-HOPE and online.rainn.org.
Last week, Sam Bankman-Fried was the king of crypto. Now he’s a supervillain. FTX Trading — the young, shorts-wearing exec’s cryptocurrency exchange company, once backed by Larry David and Tom Brady — collapsed in the span of a week. On Friday, they filmed for bankruptcy, leaving millions of people and companies short of funds they may never see again. Details continue to pour in, many of them bizarre. Now, to make things even more surreal, Bankman-Fried has been sending unhinged DMs to reporters.
Vox reporter Kelsey Piper revealed that on Tuesday night she spent an hour chatting on Twitter with Bankman-Fried, who’s mostly spent his infamy sleeping and playing video games, and may or may not be on the run. She asked hard questions; she got weirdly, distressingly honest-seeming answers. For one thing, his previous public stance as an agent of do-goodery who’s even open to the crypto world being regulated? Partly a façade.
“f*ck regulators,” Bankman-Fried told Piper. “they don’t protect customers at all.” He’s not against regulation per se, but he claims that regulators, at least the ones running the show nowadays, “can’t do it” because they “can’t distinguish between god and bad.”
So is that why he may have done some supremely shady things, such as allegedly gamble with — and lose — billions of other people’s money? It’s not clear. He told Piper, “I didn’t want to do sketchy stuff” and that he “didn’t mean to,” adding that “each individual decision seemed fine and I didn’t realize how big their sum was until the end.”
Piper spoke with Bankman-Fried over the summer, long before the collapse of his company and reputation. When reading back some of the altruistic beliefs he shared — like how one should never do “unethical s*it,” he replied, “heh,” laughing off “all that dumb s*it I said,” which he revealed was “not true, not really.” He even agreed that the “ethics stuff” was mostly a “front.”
Bankman-Fried was also pressed about one of the wilder parts of the FTX collapse: that they had transferred billions to a sister company, Alameda Research. He said that their promise that they would never invest their deposits was “factually accurate,” but only, it seems, because it was Alameda that had done it. He admitted he “thought Alameda had enough collateral to reasonable [sic] cover it.” Turned out he was wrong, to which he said, “life creeps up on you.”
Oh, and that missing billion or so dollars that can’t be accounted for? Bankman-Fried blames it on the hack that hit the company last weekend.
Bankman-Fried eventually admits he “f*cked up,” “big,” “multiple times.” But his biggest regret wasn’t that he lost billions. It was that he filed for Chapter 11, thus losing control of the company, which he swears he could right if he had the chance. As of now, he has “2 weeks to raise $2b.” Surely that will be difficult, if not impossible, given that his name — and possibly his entire future — is in the toilet. To that, he can only point out that “a month ago I was one of the greatest fundraisers.”
You can read the full article — and see many of his DMs — over at Vox.
This website uses cookies to improve your experience. We'll assume you're ok with this, but you can opt-out if you wish. Cookie settingsACCEPT
Privacy & Cookies Policy
Privacy Overview
This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these cookies, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may have an effect on your browsing experience.
Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website.
