Month: June 2020
Taika Waititi is set to dive into directing more Star Wars properties, and if he has his way no matter what’s in the screenplay he will have a Baby Yoda puppet on set for him to cuddle with.
The JoJo Rabbit writer, director and (kind of) star got some face time with the most adorable member of the Star Wars universe when he directed the last episode of The Mandalorian’s first season, which revealed a pretty significant item that sets up the second season’s arrival this fall. But Waititi wasn’t tinkering with the Darksaber as much as he was the very expensive and lifelike Baby Yoda puppet, which according to The Hollywood Reporter he kept holding between takes.
Taika Waititi, who helmed the season finale (which shot in December at Manhattan Beach Studios) and voiced the android assassin IG-11, also needed to take occasional breaks to sit down with The Child in his hands. “He reminded me so much of my babies when they were 6 months old,” he says. “I couldn’t help it, I had to hold it in the same way.”
The Hollywood Reporter has a pretty adorable photo of it, as well as some other details about life on set for those involved. But it’s very funny to think the most important episode of the show’s brief history had some big decisions made by its director while he’s gently snuggling The Child. Some jobs have all the perks.
Fathers everywhere are celebrating their day of honor this Father’s Day and as people have done for previous parental days of honor, social media has been filled with pictures and shoutouts for the father figures in their lives. Joining in on the trend, Drake took to his Instagram to shout out his dad and the other father figures he has in his life, but not without showing love to his son Adonis first.
Sharing a picture of his son to his Instagram page, Drake captioned the picture saying, “Happy Fathers Day to all the real g’z handling business.” Moving things to his Instagram story, he one-by-one shouted a number of celebrities and close friends that he viewed as father figures in his life.
Appropriately starting with his own father, Dennis Graham, Drake would go one to wish Rap-A-Lot CEO J. Prince, Lil Wayne, Birdman, Snoop Dogg, NBA legend Charles Oakley, OVO Blizzy, LeBron James, and his uncle Stizzy a Happy Father’s Day. In his message to Lil Wayne, he called the rapper his “brother” while saying “you raised me.”
Drake would also call Snoop Dogg a “stand up G” and Charles Oakley a “real gangsta” with “big father figure energy.” Speaking to LeBron James in one of the posts, Drake said, “We came up together and you are an incredible dad and you made me a killer.”
Photos of Drake’s Father’s Day shoutouts can be found on his Instagram page or below.
Ansel Elgort denied an allegation he sexually assaulted a woman he dated in an Instagram post on Saturday, days after the graphic allegation was shared on Twitter and quickly went viral.
A woman on Twitter, identified only as “Gabby,” posted a detailed account of her relationship with Elgort, who she claimed took her virginity in a painful experience she described as a sexual assault. The details are graphic but were shared by Page Six:
Gabby, who appears to have deleted her Twitter account after posting her message, had written that “when [the sexual encounter] happened, instead of asking me if I wanted to stop having sex knowing it was my first time and I was sobbing in pain and I didn’t want to do it, the only words that came out of his mouth were ‘we need to break you in.’
“I WASN’T there in that moment mentally,” she wrote.
The woman said the two met on social media and offered other details about their relationship. Elgort did not comment on the post until Saturday, when he confirmed that the two had a relationship but said it was “legal and entirely consensual.”
Elgort said he was “disgusted and deeply ashamed of the way I acted” and apologized for how he ended the relationship, but he denied the sexual assault claim and said “her description of events is simply not what happened.”
Among the many problems with hosting a potential NBA season restart in Florida right now is, well, Florida. The state is seeing a surge in cases of COVID-19 and the decision to “re-open” businesses and restaurants well before effective treatment and a vaccine for coronavirus has made Florida a significant hotspot for the disease in the United States.
Amid rising cases and alarming testing results, the NBA is moving forward with a plan to host a “bubble league” at Disney’s Wide World of Sports later in the summer. The plan makes sense in a lot of ways: Disney has considerable athletic facilities and accommodation amenities to house both players and games in an isolated area. It’s also a broadcast partner, with ABC and ESPN able to set up TV crews and logistics to broadcast the games that would undoubtedly see huge ratings in a world struggling to hold sporting events stateside.
Recent days have had reports of players concerned about the logistics of the bubble league, though, and late Saturday we learned a significant reason why: while testing standards have been established for players, the many Disney employees required to support a bubble league will not see the same rigorous testing standards and won’t be staying in the bubble at all times.
ESPN’s Baxter Holmes and Zach Lowe reported late Saturday that players have voiced concerns about the spike in cases in Florida, and even commissioner Adam Silver has acknowledged rising numbers in the sunshine state.
In at least one recent call with high-level team executives, NBA commissioner Adam Silver has acknowledged the spiking numbers in Florida. Team sources described the general tone of that call, including the questions asked of Silver on it, as tense. Another called Silver’s tone “resolute but somber.” He expressed a resolve to go on — a confidence in the NBA’s bubble concept — while recognizing the seriousness of the coronavirus spike, sources said.
The reason for the tone of that call may be something players learned about Disney employees, who apparently won’t be subjected to the testing standards and quarantine restrictions of the NBA’s players and staff.
The National Basketball Players Association held a virtual town hall with players this week and addressed concerns about the Florida cases, sources familiar with the matter told ESPN. Players brought up the fact that Walt Disney World staffers who will not reside in the NBA campus — including hotel housekeepers — will not be subject to any coronavirus testing, sources said. One mitigating factor that was cited, a source added: Many of the new cases are in areas other than Orlando.
Disney’s walled fortress of amenities may be able to isolate players from the rest of Florida, but staff coming and going essentially defeats the purpose and effectiveness of that isolation. It’s not a true bubble, to put it plainly, and more than two months of that could see something go wrong and lead to an outbreak. That would be both dangerous to their health and damaging to the league, which has watched as a variety of other leagues such as Major League Baseball and the National Hockey League deal with reports of positive COVID-19 tests in their Florida training locations last week.
Those outbreaks happened because no one is living at these facilities, but in the greater population of Florida where cases are spiking and social distancing isn’t being maintained. Those positive cases were detected in people living in Florida and going to work in Florida, just like the Disney employees that will be largely responsible for preventing the NBA’s bubble from popping later this summer. With that in mind and given numbers in the state continue to go up, it makes sense that players are concerned to say the least.
[via ESPN]
TikTok has become an important platform in 2020 for the music world. It’s helped push songs, such as Lizzo’s “Truth Hurts,” into mainstream popularity that were previously overlooked. Popular dances like the Renegade Dance to K Camp’s “Lottery” were also created and popularized on the app. Using their exponential growth and popularity to make an effect outside of music, TikTiok users apparently teamed up with K-Pop fans to ensure that Donald Trump set expectations for his rally in Tulsa far beyond what actually happened on Saturday night.
Prior to the rally, Trump promised a full house and overflowing crowd to Tulsa’s Bank of Oklahoma Center, however, the goal was missed by a longshot and it seems an online campaign was informally put together to bombard Trump’s campaign arm with ticket requests was at least partially to blame. Brad Parscale, chair of Trump’s re-election campaign, reported there were more than a million ticket requests, but reporters at the rally reported that attendance was far below the expected number. It turns out that when the Trump campaign posted a tweet asking supporters to register for the rally, TikTok and K-Pop fans reportedly shared the registration link with their followers with the intention of signing up and not attending the rally.
@proloser12245 It would be a shame if people knew reserving seats at a trump rally were free #greenscreen #dumptrump #notbiden2020 #anyfunctioningadult2020
To say the least, the plan worked. The attendance goal for the Trump rally was missed by a large amount, to the point that the campaign was forced to cancel an outdoor rally they had planned for the overflow of attendees they anticipated. “Oh no, I signed up for a Trump rally, and I can’t go,” one woman said sarcastically in one of the many TikToks that graced that app promoting the fake-registration to the Trump rally. According to New York Times, thousands of users posted similar tweets and videos that, in total, racked up millions of views.
There were other factors in the low attendance numbers, including a curfew the city of Tulsa had put in place in an attempt to limit counter protesters outside the venue. There is also the threat of COVID-19, as the still-ongoing pandemic is highly contagious and could spread at events held inside like Trump’s rally. But with the event being compared by some to Fyre Festival, it’s clear Saturday night went far different than Trump and his campaign hoped.
During the current worldwide pandemic, movie studios are no longer providing box-office figures because theaters have been shut down around the nation and the world. Because we are less interested in the actual figures themselves and more interested in what people are watching over the weekends, each week we will dive into Most Streamed and Bestseller Lists on Fandango, iTunes, Netflix, and Hulu to pinpoint the weekend’s most watched films.
Movie theaters around the country are starting to re-open, but there still hasn’t been much by way of new movies being released theatrically, although last weekend, Unsubscribe, a 29-minute horror movie shot entirely on video-conferencing app Zoom, managed to top the conventional box office with a $25,000 haul, knocking Wretched — which had been the number one film for several weeks, based on drive-in theater grosses — off the top spot.
During the pandemic, several studios have decided to skip theaters and release their films straight to VOD. It’s been a success for family films like Scoob! and Trolls World Tour and appears to have been a success for Judd Apatow’s Pete Davidson film, King of Staten Island, which holds the top spot again this weekend on Fandango’s VOD chart, iTunes, and Amazon. Unfortunately, we still don’t have actual figures, but it appears to be shaping up as a big success for Universal.
Meanwhile, the pandemic has been good for some films that otherwise wouldn’t have gotten much attention. Take for instance, Kevin Bacon and Amanda Seyfried’s You Should Have Left. The Blumhouse Pic was also expected to be released into theaters, but I don’t think there was a huge appetite for it there. In any other time, Universal’s decision to release it digitally would have looked like they were “dumping it,” but during a pandemic, it’s the second most popular new film on both Fandango and iTunes this weekend, even with a $20 rental fee. The film is getting only mixed reviews (46 percent on Rotten Tomatoes), but home moviegoers are clearly starved for new entertainment right now.
It’s clear how starved moviegoers are because, beyond King of Staten Island and You Should Have Left, it’s the usual array of films among the top digital rentals: The Invisible Man, The Hunt, Sonic the Hedgehog, etc. Nicole Beharie’s new release, Miss Juneteenth (99 percent on Rotten Tomatoes!), seems to be doing okay, as well.
There are also some fascinating old movies bubbling up right now on iTunes: Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Commando, Tom Cruise’s The Last Samurai, Twister, and even Ryan Reynolds’ horrible film, R.I.P.D., is ranking, too. It’s weird what we turn to for comfort.
Disney+ and HBO Max do not offer charts, but it’s fair to say that the disastrous Artemis Fowl is doing well on Disney, and that the most Dad movie of the last year Ford vs. Ferrari, is doing well on HBO Max, where it was released for Father’s Day.
Meanwhile, over on Netflix, the top five is a strange assortment of films. The top film this weekend is a movie that’s been hanging around in the top five for a couple of weeks, 365 Days (365 Dni), the Polish erotic drama that apparently makes 50 Shades of Grey look tame by comparison. While the top film is Polish, the number two film is the French film, The Lost Bullet, which has no reviews on RT and very little information from which to glean its plot. I have no clue how it managed to rise to number two. Number three is the Netflix original, Feel the Beat, a dance film starring Sofia Carson, which looks cute but insubstantial. Magnetic, a 2018 documentary film about what appears to be extreme surfing is the fourth most popular film of the weekend, followed by the 2014 family film, The Nut Job. Meanwhile, last week’s top film, Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods, has fallen to number six.
Next weekend sees the VOD release of Jon Stewart’s Irresistible, starring Rose Byrne and Steve Carell, and on Netflix, Will Ferrell and Rachel McAdams’ Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga.