Lil Dicky has gone from barely accepted punchline of hip-hop to cornering the market on comedy television acclaim thanks to his semi-autobiographical FX show Dave. Based loosely on his own life and experiences maneuvering on the outskirts of rap stardom, Dave became a sensation after its fifth episode, “Hype Man,” revealed the show’s emotional center and willingness to tackle serious topics alongside its dick jokes and awkward, fish-out-of-water scenarios involving Dicky’s encounters with cooler, more established rappers.

Dicky himself — or Dave, as he has stated he actually prefers to be called — posted a long caption on Instagram reflecting on the show’s success and his personal philosophy, which might well be equated to “shoot your shot.” While he acknowledges in the post that privilege has played a part in his rise to stardom, so too has his boldness — to succeed or to fail, you first have to try, which is what he clearly wants to impress on his followers, who he thanks for believing in him from the beginning.

“This picture was captured of me during the first shoot day of season one,” he reveals. “If I look overwhelmed, it’s because I was.
I had never written a script before. I actually downloaded the screenwriting software for the first time to write this season. I had never acted before. Never executive produced before. Never done anything beyond make rap songs and videos.”

However, he continues, “A lot of people believed in me. Many of you did from the start of my career. I could tell that it wasn’t just about my music, you guys actually liked and believed in ME. As a person.” The takeaway, he writes, “Let me be a prime example when I say that things are totally possible in life. I had no legitimate reason to believe I could be a successful rapper. But I believed, and then I became that. I had no real reason to believe I could make a great tv show without any experience. But I believed, and I believe we achieved that.”

Read Lil Dicky’s full caption in the embed above.

For a musician who is used to being on the road and otherwise staying busy with their hectic careers, this quarantine era can be a period of restlessness for some. Artists are finding ways to stay occupied, though, and for St. Vincent, that involves performing from her home.

Yesterday, she hopped on Instagram to share a quick cover of Led Zeppelin’s “Dancing Days.” The Houses Of The Holy track is originally a guitar-driven rocker, but St. Vincent’s take is a stripped-down acoustic affair. She downplayed the whole thing, writing in the video description, “The moderately-played, half-remembered partial-cover of Led Zepplin’s ‘Dancing Days’ that the world has been clamoring for FOR YEARS at long last.”

This isn’t St. Vincent’s first cover in recent days. Back in January, she joined Foo Fighters and a bunch of other artists for a Grammys tribute concert in honor of Prince. That show was broadcast a couple weeks ago, and St. Vincent offered a funky rendition of “Controversy.” Also this year, St. Vincent launched a line of comfort-focused athletic clothes for women, and she launched her Shower Sessions podcast, in which she interviews artists in a bathroom.

Watch St. Vincent perform “Dancing Days” above.

Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Danny Trejo has lived a fascinating life. A few sentences from his Wikipedia:

“While serving in San Quentin, he became a champion boxer in that prison’s lightweight and welterweight divisions”

“In 2011, he recalled that he had been sober for 42 years”

“While Trejo was working as a youth drug counselor, a teenage patient asked for his assistance dealing with cocaine problems on the set of Runaway Train (1985)”

“In August 2019, Trejo witnessed a car colliding at an intersection with an SUV and helped extract a five-year-old trapped in a child safety seat inside the overturned SUV”

“Trejo is known for his distinctive appearance”

I don’t have to describe his “distinctive appearance” for you to know what he looks like — it’s Danny Trejo; there’s no one else like him. (Did I mention that he’s the founder of Trejo’s Tacos and appeared in the music video for Mobb Depp’s “Got It Twisted”?)

And now his life story has been turned into a sure-to-be-enlightening documentary.

Inmate #1: The Rise Of Danny Trejo, directed by Brett Harvey, chronicles Trejo’s “early life of drugs, armed robbery, and hard prison time, to the red carpets of Hollywood blockbusters and helping troubled addicts,” with the Machete star giving “a firsthand account of one of the greatest transformations of human character ever put to film.”

I hope he spends three hours talking about playing El Jefe in xXx, and another two hours on Anaconda. Inmate #1 (watch the trailer above) will be available on digital on July 7.

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Just nine months removed from the release of his most recent full-length album, So Much Fun, Young Thug remains as productive as ever. After contributing guest verses to projects from the likes of A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie, Lil Uzi Vert, and Travis Scott, he’s returned with a new full-length project of his own — this time, a collaborative mixtape with R&B singer Chris Brown called Slime & B.

Consisting of 13 tracks, Slime & B appears to split time evenly between the two principal artists, with appearances from frequent collaborators of both such as E-40, Future, Gunna, Lil Duke, Shad Da God, Too Short, and more. It features production from Murda Beatz, OG Parker, RJ Lamont, Tariq Beats, T-Minus, Turbo, and Wheezy. The mixtape’s release falls on Chris Brown’s 31st birthday.

While the tape marks the first full-length collaboration between Young Thug and Brown, it’s one of a handful of collaborative releases from the younger Thugger, who released Super Slimey with Future in 2017, the compilation album Slime Language with his own YSL Records in 2018, and was rumored to be working on a joint album with late Chicago artist Juice WRLD at the time of Juice’s death. There is also a sequel to Super Slimey featuring Lil Baby and Gunna in the works as well.

Listen to Slime & B above.

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

Over the past year or so, LeBron James has gotten really into tacos, and more specifically, eating them on Tuesdays. This past fall, in fact, he even tried to trademark the phrase “Taco Tuesday,” but that attempt was not successful; “Taco Tuesday” was a firmly established thing long before LeBron James started saying it on social media. While he may not have legal ownership of the phrase, he’s the king of it in the Migos universe: The hip-hop group have released a new song called “Taco Tuesday,” and it features a LeBron sample.

The track, which only runs for about 90 seconds, begins with one of LeBron’s famous “Taco Tuuueeesday” exclamations. Today, of course, is the absolute perfect day for this song to come out: In addition to it being a Tuesday, it is also May 5, aka Cinco de Mayo, a celebration of Mexican culture.

The track is full of thematically appropriate lyrics. Quavo says on the chorus, “Taco Tuesday, I got the cheese, she tastin’ the Kool-Aid.” Meanwhile, Takeoff says on his verse, “My name Jose / It’s a long line at the doorway / We servin’ tacos, get ’em with the nachos / F*ckin’ with a bad vibe, and she go both ways.”

Listen to “Taco Tuesday” above.

It’s well established by now that many of Jared Leto’s scenes from Suicide Squad were cut, because, as the edgelord Joker, he “brought so much to the table in every scene that it was probably more about filtering all of the insanity” (according to Leto), or “it just didn’t make sense” (according to Margot Robbie). Whatever the case may be, director David Ayer denied “inaccurate” reports that he cut the Oscar winner’s screentime because he was “unhappy” about his performance – in fact, his “heart breaks” for Leto.

Responding to a Snyder Cut follower on Twitter, who wrote that Leto’s Joker “was too creepy for compassion, and his look didn’t convince everyone like Batfleck did, appearances matter,” Ayer tweeted, “For sure character creation is a tightrope. I took inspiration from the current DC comics. I find it incredible it’s still such a topic 5 years later. My heart breaks for Jared – he did magnificent work. Most of it remains unseen.”

Who cares about the Snyder Cut? I want to see the Joker cut of Suicide Squad. It looks the way drinking a Mountain Dew mixed with Red Bull tastes — exxxtreme.

Don’t expect to see Leto in The Suicide Squad, though. “No one but me and a few others know all the characters in the movie, but if the Joker isn’t in the film, I don’t think it would be strange as he isn’t a part of the Suicide Squad in the comics,” director James Gunn explained. That gives Leto lots of time to silently meditate in the desert.

(Via Comic Book Movie)

By now, there’s a solid chance that you’ve invested part of the last two quarantine weekends watching Extraction. So, you know what happens during the ass-kicking smorgasbord, which stars Chris Hemsworth as a character (Tyler Rake) who’s not unlike Lethal Weapon‘s Martin Riggs, especially where his own death wish is concerned. And end of the movie (which is arguably 2020’s biggest blockbuster and might soon be the most-watched Netflix movie of all time) left Rake’s fate ambiguous, and purposely so. Viewers aren’t quite sure if Rake lived or died, but we’re going to get more Extraction, so a good guess might be that he lived? Or we’re gonna get a prequel, but there’s definitely a followup on the way.

Deadline reports that the Russo Brothers are back onboard to produce with Joe Russo wielding his pen on the script again. Chris Hemsworth is expected to return as his mercenary character, as is director Sam Hargrave, but those details haven’t been finalized as of yet. Here’s what Joe Russo confirmed as of now:

“The deal is closed for me to write Extraction 2, and we are in the formative stages of what the story can be. We’re not committing yet to whether that story goes forward, or backward in time. We left a big loose ending that leaves question marks for the audience.”

Obviously, Joe’s keeping his options open here when it comes to officially going into prequel-or-sequel land. Honestly, I think I’d prefer the former? The ambiguous ending felt right, and I like to imagine that Rake would be seriously p*ssed off to have survived after he attempted to sacrifice himself for Ovi’s sake. Digging into the roots of his past trauma might yield riveting results, although I suspect that folks will be satisfied with a sequel as well, as long as the action choreography keeps riding high. Whatever the case, this is good news, and we’ll take any positive vibes we can get right now.

(Via Deadline)

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I don’t know what I expected from Clark Duke’s directorial debut, but it wasn’t this. Arkansas (adapted from John Brandon’s novel, adapted by Duke and Andrew Boonkrong and directed by Duke) opens with a Charles Portis quote from Dog Of The South: “A lot of people leave Arkansas and most of them come back sooner or later. They can’t quite achieve escape velocity.”

The film goes on to do a pretty reasonable impression of a Southern noir comical crime story, in the vein of authors like Portis, Harry Crews, Elmore Leonard, Carl Hiaasen, etc. The American South, if one were to extrapolate from these stories, is a place where comical bumblings, criminal enterprise, and fatalism about the inscrutability of the universe collide. Again, not the first thing I expected from the glib guy from Hot Tub Time Machine, but certainly a pleasant surprise.

The Arkansas-bred Duke, who shot a pilot with Michael Cera at Loyola Marymount and became an up-and-comer fresh out of college with roles in Hot Tub Time Machine and Kick-Ass in the early aughts, plays another “Clark Duke-esque” character (glasses, quippy, self-effacing) in Arkansas. “Swin,” one of many characters earning a living from criminality and without a regular name, eventually makes an odd couple with our protagonist, Kyle (played by Liam Hemsworth), an alienated, antisocial introvert, when the two are hired to drive a load of drugs to Arkansas. Hemsworth is classic movie star handsome, almost comically so, a strong silent type, in distinct contrast to Duke’s pudgy post-modern hypebeast with top knot and hammer pants. Their dynamic shouldn’t make sense but does because absurdity is sort of the point. As Kyle informs us via voiceover: “The thing about organized crime in the South is that it isn’t that organized.”

Knowing this helps us not question things like a heavy named “Frog” (Vince Vaughn) and a corrupt park ranger named “Bright” (John Malkovich). That’s sort of the thing about the Southern noir; it’s populated largely by oddballs and eccentrics. Not that those oddballs can’t still be dangerous. Arkansas has life-and-death stakes that it never treats as improv opportunities — what separates it from Southern-set screwballs like Logan Lucky and Knives Out. Arkansas isn’t a screwball, it’s more like existentialism slightly leavened with absurd comedy.

Every character in Arkansas is on their own quixotic journey, fatalistic and alienated and just sort of muddling through. Vince Vaughn’s Frog, a drug kingpin turned pawn shop owner (who feels like a slight variation on his character in True Detective season 2), doesn’t have some Tony Montana-esque plan to get money, women, and power by not breaking his balls. He’s just a guy trying to stay alive and eke out a living. For John Malkovich’s Bright, it’s hard to tell whether the Park Ranger gig is a handy cover for working in the drug business or whether the drug business was a handy way to become a Park Ranger. He’s got a little Frances McDormand-in-Fargo to him.

For Swin and Kyle, a life of crime seems more a means to avoid the rat race than a way to afford flashy cars and beautiful women. Kyle is like a Harry Crews protagonist — not exactly noble, eloquent, or uniquely skilled at any one thing. He’s the opposite of a striver. His main goal in life is to be left alone and his guiding philosophy is to just get on with things. As he explains in his opening voiceover, “I’ve always suspected that I didn’t want the desirable things in life as much as I should.”

It comes as something of a cruel discovery then when Swin and Kyle find that the criminal world seems to have just as many company policies and middle managers as the straight one. If it seems weird to watch a drug movie with no wealth porn or to see redneck characters who are meant to be relatable and comical bumblers in almost equal measure, that’s part of the beauty of Arkansas: it never gives you quite what you’re expecting.

Where gangster and mafioso stories so often seem epic, taking the shape of classic rise-and-fall narratives, Arkansas is elusive and ephemeral. Its characters struggle to survive against a universe that doesn’t really care about them. It’s not the most escapist quarantine content, but there’s a simple beauty to it.

‘Arkansas’ hits Apple, Amazon, On Demand, Blu-ray and DVD on May 5, 2020. Vince Mancini is on Twitter. You can access his archive of reviews here.