Month: July 2020

Microsoft’s Xbox Series X game event showed off works from 10 of its console exclusive studios on Wednesday, with the biggest title being a first look at Halo Infinite. But we also got another look at an original Xbox game that had plenty of hype. The final thing Microsoft showed off at the end of the event was a whimsical-looking visual of a fairy bouncing around the screen before the reality set in: Playground Games is working on a new version of Fable.

The video showed that fairy frolic to a whimsical voiceover about “legendary heroes” and “stories” that’s abruptly ended by that fairy getting eaten by a bullfrog.

“Not all stories have happy endings,” the voice says. “But yours has yet to be written.

Fable was an action RPG that came out for the original Xbox in 2004. The concept was innovative, telling a story that let your decisions impact how your character’s story actually played out. The game has a devoted legion of fans and saw a sequel, but despite lofty goals for the series many were disappointed overall. Sequels have come out since the original, including 2017’s Fable Fortune, but a next-gen Fable will have plenty of people excited about the new Microsoft console.

We truly only got a brief glimpse in the presentation, and have no details about what gameplay will look like or how the game will actually look outside of cutscenes. But knowing a new Fable is on the way, for some, is already more than enough.

After federal agents dressed in camouflage and with no way to identify them started whisking away Portland protesters in unmarked rental vehicles last weekend, many citizens decided enough was enough. The Department of Homeland Security Acting Secretary, Chad Wolf, has indicated that the feds have no plans to back down, and Portlanders are showing up in droves to express their displeasure.

Portland has never been a place where people do anything in expected ways, so it wasn’t all that surprising when a “Wall of Moms” wearing bike helmets and bright yellow shirts showed up arm-in-arm to shield protesters from the feds.

Not sure if anyone expected that wall to be followed up by a “Dads with Leaf Blowers.” Yet here we are.

Dads with leaf blowers slung over their shoulders, holding signs with messages such as “Fathers Against Fascism,” have joined the thousands of protesters who are now showing up in Portland nightly. Protests in Portland have continued for 50-some-odd days, with numbers increasing since the federal government agents arrived. Local and state government authorities have vehemently opposed the intervention/invasion of federal troops, who have used tear gas, flash bangs, and batons against protesters.

Not sure what the feds were expecting to happen, but according to Washington Post reporter Nick Miroff, a DHS official “expressed frustration and astonishment that Portland protesters were showing up with leaf blowers to disperse tear gas and send it right back at fed agents.”

There are some solutions here. Maybe the agents could just…not use tear gas on peaceful protesters?

And perhaps the feds should realize that “frustration and astonishment” is exactly what you should expect when you attack American citizens, especially in a city that inspired its own surreal-but-almost-real television show about the city’s culture. (Portlandia is fiction that skirts very close to the truth, despite how bizarre it may seem to people who’ve never been to Portland.)

So far, they’ve been met with a diverse crowd of demonstrators protesting racial injustice in addition to a naked woman, a badass Navy vet who took a beating without flinching, a “wall of moms” and now the “dads with leaf blowers.”

A protester who goes by the alias “Doug Smith” told Truthout that the leaf blowers are not necessarily meant to be effective against tear gas individually, but are more of a symbol of what the dads are doing there.

“Honestly, I think you’d need scores of leaf blowers with a phalanx of dads holding their ground under pretty perfect conditions to use them effectively in the dispersal of chemical agents,” he said. “But they are an iconic symbol of a tool dads use to clean up messes.”

So far, the protesters don’t appear to have plans to back away from this fight or to stop exercising their first amendment rights.

The best new hip-hop albums coming out this week include projects from Boldy James, Curren$y, Flo Milli, Logic, Lupe Fiasco, Sada Baby, and The Kid Laroi. After last week’s releases only included a handful of intriguing new projects from longstanding vets, this week brings a balanced mix of newcomers and established presences, with something for every taste.

You may notice that this week’s list is missing one high-profile release that was promised: Kanye West’s Donda project, which the mercurial rapper claimed was coming during an emotional and seemingly improvised “campaign rally” in South Carolina. As with most Kanye projects, release dates are more like guidelines than hard targets, so we’ll just assume that the pattern will hold.

Meanwhile, we’ve got plenty of other engaging material to consume, including Logic’s potential final album, the debut EP from buzzing viral star Flo Milli, who’s been co-signed by everyone from Doja Cat to IDK to Lil Nas X, and the first project from Juice WRLD’s close collaborator and heir apparent, The Kid Laroi.

Here are all the best new hip-hop albums coming out this week.

Boldy James — Manger On McNichols

The Detroit hustler is only five months removed from The Price Of Tea In China, his February collaboration with The Alchemist, but surprised fans with another full-length project earlier this week. This one, produced in conjunction with fellow Motown resident and jazz composer Sterling Toles, was apparently in the works for a decade before its release, with Boldy recording the first verse for it back in 2007.

Currensy & Harry Fraud — The Out Runners

Currensy and Harry Fraud are like french fries and ketchup at this point; inextricably linked in most fans’ minds as an inseparable and reliable duo who nearly always offer a satisfying combination. This time around, they’ll be joined by Conway The Machine, Jim Jones, Rick Ross, and Wiz Khalifa for yet another consistent set of lush beats and luxurious rhymes.

Flo Milli — Ho, Why Is You Here [EP]

If you haven’t heard of Flo Milli, now is the time to get familiar. The Mobile, Alabama rapper was just 19 years old when she scored her first two megaviral singles, “Beef FloMix” and “In The Party,” helped along by monstrous levels of engagement on TikTok. The songs quickly migrated from the platform to the timelines of some of hip-hop’s most influential follows on Twitter and Instagram, with anticipation for a full project bubbling over. This is her chance to live up to the hype and join her heroes Cardi B and Nicki Minaj in the spotlight.

Logic — No Pressure

Touting No Pressure as both a return to his Under Pressure form and his final album before he retires to become a video game streaming full-time dad, Logic hopes to go out with a bang. While there are some who are undoubtedly glad to see him go, others have taken the opportunity to reminisce fondly on his past catalog, which could very well lead to a reappraisal in the near future.

Lupe Fiasco — House EP

Back in May, Florida-based producer Kaelin Ellis tagged Lupe Fiasco in a tweet containing a video of Ellis making a beat. That was all it took to set the wheels in motion for this collaborative project. Fiasco screen recorded the video, then uploaded his own after adding lyrics to the beat. When Ellis asked whether this could be a continued process, Lupe responded in the affirmative and the result is a five-song EP with a cover paying homage to Charles Mingus. Maybe Twitter isn’t all bad after all.

Sada Baby — Bartier Bounty 2

The Detroit jester caught rap fans off-guard last year when tracks like “Bloxk Party” unexpectedly made a star of the dancing, comedically-gifted newcomer. He’s since released a steady stream of loaded projects including the original Bartier Bounty and Skuba Sada 2, billing this latest project as his last before his official debut studio album (although it’s getting harder and harder these days to distinguish those from anything else).

The Kid Laroi — F*ck Love

At all of 16 years old, The Kid Laroi is likely one of the youngest up-and-coming stars on the emo-hip-hop scene today, benefitting hugely from the blessing of Juice WRLD on the late rapper’s posthumous album, Legends Never Die. He certainly reflects his benefactor’s sensibilities in his own music, which has landed him a contract with Grade A Productions and hit collaborations with fellow teen star Lil Tecca and Lil Tjay.

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

Not only is Australian icon Kylie Minogue affectionately know as the “Princess of Pop,” but she’s also the highest-selling female Australian artist of all time and has been awarded a number of accolades. While she’s known for her disco-adjacent pop, the singer won’t let shuttered clubs keep her from sharing dancefloor-ready bangers. Kylie made a shimmering return Thursday with the effervescent lead single “Say Something,” which heralds her upcoming album Disco.

Disco impressively marks Kylie’s 15th studio record and follows her 2018 effort Golden, which rose to No. 1 in both Australia and the UK. With “Say Something,” Kylie continues her signature electro-pop sound while refining the single’s intricately-layered textures. The song was recorded with longtime-producer Biff Stannard, who is known for co-writing the Spice Girls hit “Wannabe.”

The single opens with diluted synths, which drop into a funky, bass-forward hook. While the song was written months ago, its message takes on a whole new meaning in light of the pandemic. Kylie sings of the ways in which love can cross all boundaries, even if the distance seems insurmountable. “We’re a million miles apart in a thousand ways / Love is love it never ends, can we all be as one again?” Kylie sings.

Listen to “Say Something” above.

Disco is out 11/6 via BMG. Pre-order it here.

After 15 years away from the ring, 53-year-old boxing legend Mike Tyson is returning to the ring to face off against former four-division World Champion, Roy Jones Jr. The eight-round exhibition bout will take place on September 12 at 9 p.m. ET on pay-per-view and multi-media platform, Triller. The Tyson-Jones fight is expected to include bigger gloves and neither fighter will be going for knockouts, per Yahoo’s Kevin Iole.

The three-hour event will also include “significant undercard matches” as well as musical performances yet to be announced, per a release.

The fight, titled “Frontline Battle,” is the first event of a series produced under Mike Tyson’s Legends Only League, a sports venture owned by Tyson and Eros Innovations, which has partnered with Triller on all future boxing events. In the leadup to the bout, Triller will unveil a 10-part docuseries featuring behind-the-scenes, pre-fight footage, releasing two episodes per week.

Tyson, who started his boxing career more than 30 years ago, has shared a slew of training videos in recent months, including one in May where he concludes, “I’m back.” The youngest boxer to ever win the heavyweight title, Tyson held the title of Undisputed World Heavyweight Champion from 1987 to 1990 and was also the first heavyweight boxer to simultaneously hold the WBA, WBC, and IBF titles.

One of the most electrifying boxer of his generation will square off against Jones Jr., 51. In more than 30 years, Jones Jr. has also won numerous championships in the middleweight, super middleweight, light heavyweight and heavyweight divisions.

Horny high schooler Alice (Natalia Dyer) is in the process of discovering masturbation, but her sex-demonizing Catholic school is determined to shame her for it. That more or less describes the entirety of Yes, God, Yes, writer/director Karen Maine’s 77-minute riff on jilling off at Jesus camp (hey, good title), a pleasant enough and consistently chuckle-worthy comedy while it lasts that could maybe use one or two more ingredients.

It’s 2001. Collective Soul rules the airwaves and high schoolers play snake on their ubiquitous Nokia brick phones. Alice is getting really into AOL chat rooms and kinda accidentally on purpose discovers that she likes touching herself, as one does. Which is a problem, because the priest who teaches her morality class (Timothy Simon, best known as Jonah from Veep) just told the whole class than anyone who has premarital sex or sexually pleasures themselves in any way that doesn’t lead to procreation is bound for eternal damnation. This after an analogy comparing men’s’ and women’s respective sexualities to a microwave and an old-timey oven (because women take a while to heat up and you have to get the dials just right).

Yes, they really laid it on thick in sex ed in those post-AIDs scare, mid-purity rings days in the late nineties and early aughts. Maine, making her directorial debut after co-writing the underground success abortion comedy Obvious Child, draws on her real-life experiences attending a weekend-long purity nature camp in the Midwest, a setting which makes up the bulk of her movie. It’s there that Alice meets her new crush, Chris (Wolfgang Novogratz), a hulking dopey football player whose hairy forearms make Alice strangely but undeniably horny — in sequences slightly reminiscent of Election or Eighth Grade.

Maine’s cast does a wonderful job more or less from top to bottom and pretty much all of Yes, God, Yes’s bits and riffs are well-structured and funny. The only-early-aughts-kids nostalgia is both its own reward at times and occasionally a nice spice that turns the comedy up a notch, such as in the scene set to “Shine” by Collective Soul. That song truly was inescapable.

The setting and content strongly evoke Lady Bird and Saved! (Maine does have wonderful taste in influences), but there is also the sense that Yes, God, Yes is set in 2001 not just because that year is personal to its creator, but because its major conflict (worrying about going to hell for masturbating) would feel quaint almost to the point of banality in 2020. When Alice eventually meets an unlikely mentor (a conventionally unconventional lesbian bar owner), the movie seems to treat the mentor’s glib advice as something profound.

Yes, God, Yes‘s lightness is both refreshing (again, only 77 minutes long) and ultimately a little unfulfilling. Natalia Dyer, who looks at times in the film like a skeptical sparrow, can convey a tremendous range of emotions just with her big blue eyes, though it’s hard not to wish her character arc wasn’t quite so obvious.

Yes, God, Yes does so many things right, in casting, acting, and joke structure, that it feels like a solid portfolio piece for most of the people involved. That it needed a little more complexity in its themes and characters makes it hard for me to wholeheartedly recommend as its own movie, but certainly makes an effective teaser for whatever Maine and this crew decide to do next with a little more time and budget.

‘Yes, God, Yes,’ releases July 24th in virtual cinemas and drive-ins, July 28th on digital and VOD. Vince Mancini is on Twitter. You can access his archive of reviews here.

As the Washington NFL franchise continues the process of formally rebranding and choosing a new name, ESPN’s Adam Schefter reports the franchise will go by the name Washington Football Team for the foreseeable future.

Schefter reported this will not be the official new name of the team that owner Dan Snyder committed to choosing this month, but an intermediate step until the franchise can undergo a full name selection process and rebrand.

Many had noted that choosing a new name for a sports franchise often takes years, and that Washington would have only a handful of weeks until the NFL season began to replace signage, jerseys, and merchandise. This is a step toward a rebrand that will allow Washington to maintain its color scheme and instead just go about removing its logo from FedEx Field and all other official products and branded items.

Schefter confirmed as much, posting photos of the new jerseys and noting that the old logo will be replaced with players’ numbers in gold.

The change was precipitated when FedEx, Nike and other corporate sponsors threatened to cut ties with Washington earlier this summer unless the name was changed. Among the new names reportedly in contention are the Warriors and the Sentinels. Earlier this week, fans discovered that the organization may have web trademarks for a website with the Sentinels name, with official trademarking potentially the last roadblock to an official name change.

Charlize Theron and Tom Hardy notoriously did not get along during the making of Mad Max: Fury Road, one of the best movies of the 2010s. They’ve since buried the hatchet, with Theron admitting that “in a weird way, we were functioning like our characters: Everything was about survival,” which is good, because it’s entertaining to read about how much they were at each other’s throats (or as Zoë Kravitz put it, they “just weren’t vibing”) while shooting George Miller’s masterpiece. The latest tell-all comes from Theron’s stunt double, Dayna Grant, who described the “intense” atmosphere on set.

“It was really hard. It was hard because it was obviously I had to spend time with both of them and both of them didn’t want to be together,” Grant told Metro. “Usually Charlize would come in and they’d do scenes together, but they didn’t want to do scenes together, so I was put in her spot to always be with Tom. Tom’s double was always put with Charlize, so we actually worked with the opposite characters.” She continued:

“We knew right from the get go. We knew from the beginning that it was happening when we were doing the fight choreography… there was tension then. So we were told what was going on. And we were just told to try and make it work as much as possible, which was challenging, because usually you’re all in one big group and working together whereas we were kind of separated.”

You probably wouldn’t want to be around your co-worker for 120 days, either. Anyway, it all worked out. Mad Max: Fury Road made a ton of money and was nominated for 10 Oscars, and Theron and Hardy (a mask-wearing icon) didn’t murder each other. Win win!

(Via Metro)

Zach Braff and Donald Faison’s Scrubs podcast, Fake Doctors, Real Friends, turned to comic-book talk (and doesn’t everything go that way these days?) in its latest episode. In the process, Faison unloaded a wish to suit up again in a universe different than our own. This is also not a massive surprise, given that Faison’s a mega-Star Wars nerd (and has done voice work to that effect) and portrayed Doctor Gravity in Kick-Ass 2. However, he’s not giving up on more heroics, and he was delighted to express as much to former Scrubs co-star (and current The Flash presence) Tom Cavanagh.

Cavanagh, of course, has portrayed Eobard Thawne/Harrison Wells as well as sitting in the director’s chair for The CW show at various points. And Faison didn’t waste time in making his pitch — he wants to play a Green Lantern in the Arrowverse and sees no reason why this shouldn’t happen. “There’s so many that are in the Lantern Corps, and also size doesn’t matter when you’re a Lantern,” Faison reasoned. “You can be tiny, you can be wide. I think that’s one character that would be a lot of fun to play. There’s so many people in the DC Universe… I’d love to be Green Lantern.”

Yep, the possibilities are truly endless when it comes to the Lantern Corps, and Faison is making his case while pointing out that having Green Lantern in the Arrowverse was hinted at when Arrow concluded, and Stargirl hasn’t shied away from suggesting that some Lantern-ing was on the horizon. So, let’s hope that the seed has been planted in Cavanagh’s mind, and one day, we might see Faison sporting a Power Ring.

(Via Fake Doctors, Real Friends)

Fans of the Halo series haven’t seen a game hit consoles since 2017’s Halo Wars 2, while they haven’t gotten anything in the game’s main series of releases since Halo 5: Guardians in 2015. It’s been announced that the wait would come to an end a little bit later this year, and on Thursday during the Xbox Series X Showcase, Microsoft unveiled a trailer and gameplay footage for the console’s most highly-anticipated release of the year, Halo Infinite.

The event kicked off with information about the game, including a trailer that invites gamers to “Become Halo Infinite.”

Things then dove into gameplay, which shows what appears to be the game’s opening scene and then some exploring of the world within the game as the series’ iconic main character, Master Chief, in what is being billed as the most expansive campaign in Halo history.

Things like a release date, pricing, and whether or not there will be special editions of the game are still unclear, but Microsoft did announce that Halo Infinite will drop sometime during this holiday season. In addition to the game being released on the Xbox Series X, which also still does not have a set release date but is going to come sometime later this year, Halo Infinite will drop on Xbox One and for Microsoft Windows.