Month: October 2020

In the Game of Thrones oral history Fire Cannot Kill a Dragon, George R.R. Martin shared his displeasure with the scene from the pilot episode where Daenerys and Khal Drogo have sex for the first time. In his books, it’s consensual; on the show, it’s rape. “Why did the wedding scene change from the consensual seduction scene to the brutal rape of Emilia Clarke?” Martin said. “We never discussed it. It made it worse, not better.”

Nikolaj Coster-Waldau also has a problem with the scene, as he revealed in an interview with the Times. “For Emilia to play that in series one was really tough and degrading, because what that character goes through is horrific,” the actor, who played Jaime Lannister, said. “She’s sold to a guy who rapes her, but her way of getting through that is a massive journey, right?” He also discussed the show’s, let’s say, polarizing ending.

“Because when you meet people, they’re not angry at all, are they? Then they get behind a keyboard and get opinionated and write a petition. I did a round table with hardcore fans, and we were all talking about the ending and what I found was that, yes, most had another idea for what would have been a great ending, but, ultimately, they just didn’t want the show to end.”

Coster-Waldau is referring to the petition to re-make the final season, which he almost donated to. And which his on-screen dad “would sign,” and his on-screen sister/lover might consider supporting, considering she’s not happy that Cersei didn’t have a “better death.” A Lannister always… comments on the Game of Thrones finale (not as catchy).

(Via the Times)

The Witcher TV universe will eventually include spinoffs and as least one movie, but for now, it’s enough to obsess over how Netflix is dropping Season 2 hints. A first look at Henry Cavill showed off new armor for Geralt after he joined up with Ciri, who’s looking like a warrior while embracing her fate, but where’s Yennefer of Vengerberg? Netflix released a hint about her whereabouts, but Geralt (with whom Yennifer experiences a stormy, on-off relationship in the books and movies) is not aware of where she is at all.

In fact, Geralt believes that Yennifer’s dead, and he’s operating under that assumption. Given how closed off he was to displaying human emotion before he fell in love with her last season, his belief might mess with his monster-hunting headspace. (A confused and saddened Geralt will be interesting to behold.) From the official Netflix logline:

Convinced Yennefer’s life was lost at the Battle of Sodden, Geralt of Rivia brings Princess Cirilla to the safest place he knows, his childhood home of Kaer Morhen. While the Continent’s kings, elves, humans and demons strive for supremacy outside its walls, he must protect the girl from something far more dangerous: the mysterious power she possesses inside.

Fortunately, Geralt is mistaken about Yennifer’s fate, as Netflix revealed last week in photos of her character.

“She used her full might, and the battlefield burned. Then she vanished from sight, But Yen will return,” reads the caption. So, the suggestion there is that Yennifer exhausted her magical energy while fighting the Nilfgaardian soldiers during a fire-filled showdown. Where is she now, though? She’s in chains… somewhere, and looking worse for wear. However, Netflix is promising that Yen will be back, and we’ll find out more when Season 2 arrives in 2021.

HBO’s ‘Lovecraft Country’ is ambitious and astounding and will undoubtedly blow your expectations away. Created by Misha Green, who’s working with Matt Ruff’s 1950s-set dark-fantasy novel as source material, the show counts horror visionary Jordan Peele and sci-fi maestro J.J. Abrams as executive producers. The show is full of literary and musical references, along with monsters, both in-your-face and figurative; we’ll discuss the resulting symbolism on a weekly basis.

Back when I reviewed Lovecraft Country, I wrote that the series makes a fine followup to HBO’s Watchmen, and that it’s the closest thing we’ll see to a second season of Damon Lindelof’s limited series. That statement was based upon five episodes, which (like Watchmen) subverted genre conventions (but with less comic-book-ness and more pulp splatter) to illustrate how Black history and horror are often interchangeable terms. I hadn’t yet seen this week’s episode, “Rewind 1921,” which performs its own retelling of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. And whereas Lindelof went cinematic with the burning of Black Wall Street in Watchmen, Lovecraft Country showrunner Misha Green leaned toward an operatic take. Yep, the LA Times even quotes series composer Laura Karpman as describing the episode’s feel as “a requiem” and “a piece of opera.”

The episode placement also brings a different vibe. Lindelof chose to begin Watchmen with the massacre, so that trauma was on display from the beginning, and we later learned characters’ connections to massacre survivors. In Lovecraft Country, we saw the effects of trauma first, especially with Montrose, a massacre survivor who has been downing liquor as strong as “gasoline” while struggling to cope with memories triggered by George’s death. Well, Montrose traveled back to Tulsa this week (courtesy of one of Hippolyta’s time portals) while helping Leti and Tic chase down the Book of Names, so they can do two things: (1) Save Diana; (2) Deter Christina.

Am I a little sad that Tic didn’t get to bring his new pet monster back in time to Tulsa, too? Yes, but while a raging monster eating racists in Tulsa’s Greenwood district would have been an amazing sight, it also (obviously) would have changed the course of history. However, Montrose realized that Tic was the “mysterious stranger” who beat the snot out of a white mob with a baseball bat in front of Montrose and George (and that links back up to Tic’s dream-vision of Jackie Robinson in the first scene of the series).

Lovecraft Country also (much more so than the Watchmen treatment) dedicated airtime to real-life figures who perished in the massacre. Montrose got the monologue while tearfully watching the mayhem unfold all over again:

“Peg Leg Taylor’s last stand on Standpipe Hill. Oh, that was something. Still, they burned down Briar’s tailor shop. Dr. Jackson, best Negro surgeon in all America, shot in the face. Mrs. Rodgers lost her invalid daughter. White Phelps took in Negros, hid ’em in the basement. Commodore Knox, they did him in the worst.”

And the invulnerable Leti walked through fire while holding the Book of Names as an operatic version of Sonia Sanchez’s “Catch the Fire” poem blazed as well. (Obviously, there’s a ton of CGI at work, but Jurnee Smollett did suffer a burn in another fire-filled scene during the making of this episode.)

As with the “Whitey On The Moon” episode, this show continues to crush the spoken word game with Sanchez’s poetry:

“Where is your fire? … Can’t you smell it coming out of our past? The fire of living… not dying. The fire of loving… not killing. The fire of Blackness… not gangster shadows. Where is our beautiful fire that gave light to the world? The fire of pyramids; The fire that burned through the holes of slaveships and made us breathe.”

Oh, and the past turned awfully circular here. We already knew that Tic’s ancestor, Hanna, was the only known survivor of the 1833 Ardham fire, and she escaped with the book, which she passed on to Nana Hattie, who noticed that something wasn’t right about Leti (her shoes). Leti confessed to being from the future and being pregnant with Nana Hattie’s great-great-grandson (George, author of the Lovecraft Country novel that Tic retrieved from the future). Nana Hattie chose to have faith and follow the course of history (instead of saving herself) while passing the book onto Leti.

Notably, Nana Hattie placed a spell upon the book so that it can only be used for good, not evil. This might be the key to Atticus defeating Christina, though it sure sounds like he’s gonna die according to the following: (1) Ji-Ah’s fox-sex-tentacle vision; and (2) Tic’s portal trip to the future. Whether or not he dies, one of Nana Hattie’s proclamations (“When my great-great grandson is born, he will be my faith turned flesh”) will likely echo in the mind of Leti through any future obstacle.

A lot of artistry went into this episode. It’s also wild that Lovecraft Country — although it was in production while Watchmen aired and had already been written, both with Matt Ruff’s novel and the HBO screenplays — follows up on Watchmen‘s comic-book-fueled dissection of generational trauma with pure fire. Leti, undoubtedly, has absorbed a great deal of ancestral trauma while holding the hand of the older woman burning alive. It’s powerful stuff and stands up to scrutiny from anyone who believes that Lovecraft Country is simply goofing off with haunted houses and horror tropes.

From there, we’ve got some loose ends.

Atticus vs. Montrose:

I’m truly hoping that son and (maybe) father managed to heal their rift (on a long-term basis) during their Tulsa time. Clearly, Montrose has been dealing with monsters from the past (both racists and homophobes) for decades, and he and Tic have been at odds for many years. Still, we saw Atticus reading Montrose’s favorite book in South Korea. Atticus suspected that Montrose favors The Count Of Monte Cristo because the protagonist successfully pursued revenge. Wouldn’t it be something if Montrose stepped up next week to save Tic from Christina? I’m here for it.

Christina vs. Leti and Atticus vs. Ruby:

Has Ruby had enough of Christina’s sh*t yet? I hope she’s on the brink of jumping ship there. Meanwhile, Leti (and by extension, her son with Atticus) is now protected by magic, courtesy of Christina bestowing her with the Mark of Cain. Presumably, this was a quid pro quo for Leti handing over negatives of those missing pages, but I think that Christina had no idea that Leti would end up holding the actual Book of Names due to this spell. This development might lead to Atticus stopping Christina from killing him. Still, he agreed to participate in whatever fresh hell that Christina plans to whip up during the autumnal equinox, and I guess we’ll see that go down next week.

William is “alive” again, and WTF:

Yeah, so Christina donned William’s skin again to spook-and-threaten Captain Lancaster and his goons. This grew complicated, though, because Lancaster was killed last week by Tic’s pet monster, and the cops are trying some sort of regeneration spell upon him that’s not working. We saw a suggestion of this horrific spell (it’s very Get Out, isn’t it?) in the “Strange Case” episode, in which Lancaster’s head appeared to be sewn onto a Black man’s body. Considering that Lancaster was tight with Hiram Epstein, I can only assume that the spell’s a result of Hiram’s Tuskeegee-esque experiments. Naturally, Christina-William’s thrilled to see it backfiring.

Someone please help Diana, this time for real:

In the last episode, Montrose proved to be the only person who noticed Diana’s distress while she was terrorized by the Topsy-Twin ghosts, who were a result of the cops placing a curse upon her over Diana’s incendiary comic strip. Unfortunately, he didn’t know that restraining her would allow them to attack and infect her arm, which withered away and died. Let’s hope the Book of Names holds the secret to reviving her beyond whatever half-spell Christina performed.

With all the grown-ups letting Diana down (disappearing on her and screwing up magical spells), I hope Lovecraft Country can come through for her during next week’s season finale.

HBO’s ‘Lovecraft Country’ airs Sundays at 9:00pm EST.

LeBron James is arguably the best player in basketball right now (and perhaps ever, depending on where your allegiances lie in the forever-ongoing Jordan vs. LeBron debate). Naturally, then, he has a ton of fans, but perhaps no celebrity supporter is an enthusiastic as Rihanna; She cheered so loudly for the baller during the 2015 NBA Finals that the Warriors owner had to relocate. Now that LeBron is in Los Angeles, Rihanna rocks the purple and gold, so she was pretty pumped when the Lakers closed out their series against the Miami Heat and came away with the 2020 title.

On Instagram, Rihanna shared a video of her and some friends at a tailgating party, complete with an RV, portable grill, and Lakers gear. Queen’s timeless victory anthem “We Are The Champions” is playing, and Rihanna and her cohorts sing and dance along to the track. Rihanna, wearing torn jeans and a Kobe Bryant jersey, takes time to bid farewell to Miami (who she supported during LeBron’s run with the team) and use a traffic cone to amplify her Queen cover.

Rihanna captioned her post, “if you ain’t on this time right now…bye. Lebron remains king, Lakers are the champs, and Kobe is proud. A.D thank you! #[trophy emoji] #Congratulations.”

Check out the video below.

Filming on The Batman was “temporarily paused” in September after a member of the production tested positive for COVID-19. That “member” turned out to be Robert Pattinson, who plays the Dark Knight in the Matt Reeves-directed superhero movie. Filming quickly resumed without the actor, but because it’s tough to make a good Batman movie or show without Batman (ask anyone who slogged through multiple seasons of Gotham), Pattinson is back at work, hopefully safe and sound, after a period of quarantine. And listening to My Chemical Romance albums, apparently.

The Tenet star “was spotted among the crew of the movie filming outside St George’s Hall, opposite Lime Street station, which is doubling for Gotham City Hall,” according to Yahoo! Entertainment. “According to reports, those in the crowd wore their masks between takes, and more than 100 background actors will be taking part in the scenes, which are being shot in the city all week.” Pattinson’s Bruce Wayne looked more Hot Topic-emo than usual: he’s at a funeral… in the rain… under an umbrella… with moody hair… and an even moodier expression. It might as well be the “Helena” music video.

Have a look.

The Batman, which also stars Zoë Kravitz, Paul Dano, Jeffrey Wright, John Turturro, Peter Sarsgaard, Barry Keoghan, Jayme Lawson, Andy Serkis, and Colin Farrell, is scheduled to come out on March 4, 2022 after Dune took its 2021 release date.

Cardi B celebrated her 28th birthday over the weekend, and she went all out. Offset, from whom she recently filed for divorce, went all out as well by getting Cardi a fancy car. Based on Cardi’s social media posts about the shindig, it seems like there may have been a point when she went a little too hard.

In one photo she shared last night, Cardi is laying face-down on the floor, seemingly after having had a fall. While no identifying features are visible on Cardi in the shot, the person on the floor is wearing the same gold and white outfit that Cardi was in another photo from the evening that she shared. So, either somebody else in the same outfit and with a similar physical build ate it, or it was indeed Cardi. She captioned her post, “I don’t know …blame it on Tommie & JT.”

Before that post, she shared a video of herself strutting her stuff while wearing a skin-bearing bikini and holding a handbag. She wrote alongside the video, “My walk on dumb cause I’m still drunk.”

Check out Cardi’s birthday posts above and below.

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

We’re two episodes into the second The Walking Dead spin-off, The World Beyond, and the series is… lacking. If this were our first introduction to The Walking Dead universe, and if the novelty of the zombies themselves had not worn off in 2012, the character confrontations with the “empties,” as they call them here, might be more interesting. But outside of the intrigue with the CRM and Rick Grimes, The World Beyond is suffering from the same problems that plagued the first season of Fear the Walking Dead, namely this: we’ve already seen it all.

Granted, the cast in The World Beyond is uniformly much younger, and if the goal of The World Beyond was to bring in a younger audience (who’s less familiar with the last decade of The Walking Dead universe), perhaps it’s a great idea. However, if I was AMC, I would worry that The World Beyond was only able to hold roughly half of its The Walking Dead lead-in during the first week, and because AMC is apparently not licensing out The World Beyond to Netflix, Hulu, or Amazon Prime, it may have a far more difficult time finding a younger audience to gravitate toward it, since that demo has so prominently shifted away from linear cable and toward streaming.

To even grow its audience, The World Beyond will need good word-of-mouth from regular viewers of The Walking Dead, and so far, The World Beyond is not making a good case to be considered “necessary viewing.” The Campus Colony, from whence the four teenagers departed in the pilot, was interesting, but the CRM apparently wiped it out in the first episode, which leaves four teenagers on a journey to New York and two 20-something characters following behind. It’s a road-trip drama, only they’re walking, and it may actually take two full seasons for them to arrive at their destination. In other words, it’s Lord of the Rings set in the zombie apocalypse with teenagers who have never had to confront zombies.

This week’s episode entailed watching the teenage foursome (and the two 20-something followers) walk. And then walk some more. They confronted their first zombie, and it didn’t go well. Iris failed to put it down, and then Silas failed to put down the second zombie they confronted, so it trailed them to their overnight quarters, and Hope nearly died trying to lead it away. I realize that zombies are new to them, but they have also been receiving training for a decade from Felix. It shouldn’t be this hard to kill a zombie that’s been rotting for a decade.

Huck and Felix, meanwhile, continue to trail behind the foursome, and in this week’s Lost-style flashback, we meet a young Felix, whose deadbeat Dad kicked him out of the house right before Monument Day because he found out that Felix was gay. This would have been a novel storyline in… 2004. It comes from writer Ben Sokolowski who, fittingly, moves over from The CW’s Arrowverse, but this storyline still felt like a 45-year-old man’s idea of how to pander to the CW audience. For the existing The Walking Dead audience, however, it felt awfully old hat. We’ve seen Negan have sex with Alpha while they were both completely naked wearing only masks made of the skin of dead people. Relatively speaking, a homophobic Dad is not exactly a major concern for most TWD viewers.

The big “obstacle” in the episode, meanwhile, is a literal tire fire, which has apparently been burning since the beginning of the zombie apocalypse. This is actually rooted in fact. Tires can burn for years — in fact, a tire fire in Wales involving 10 million tires burned for 15 years. In The World Beyond, this particular tire fire basically attracted all the zombies in the area to create a BOG, or Blaze of Gory. In order to save time, the foursome decided to cut through the BOG, but by episode’s end, they found themselves stranded in the middle of it, before a cliffhanger in which Hope left the other three sleeping to draw the attention of the zombies away from them so that they could escape.

The biggest logical problem with the episode here, however, is not the tire fire that’s been burning for a decade. It’s the fact that these four teenagers walked halfway through it and then decided to spend the night in the middle of a tire fire. Tire fires produce toxic chemicals, and these kids barely coughed while walking through this fire and thought nothing of sleeping beneath the smoke for the night. It makes no sense whatsoever.

Ultimately, I am interested in a two-season limited series that eventually reveals the whereabouts of Rick Grimes, and I am OK if they want to dribble little bits of information about CRM out in each subsequent episode. The World Beyond, however, desperately needs something more than CRM and its connection to the parent series to sustain it, and so far, its attempts to stand on its own have not been working.

Additional Thoughts

— It was a really good episode of Fear the Walking Dead this week, which ended with yet another spray paint can. I feel like somehow all of these spray-painted zombies are going to eventually tie into the different shows, although the timeline for Fear is still several years behind The World Beyond and The Walking Dead.

— We did not see Elizabeth this week, and there was only one, belabored mentioned of CRM in the episode when Felix reminds us that no one knows where they are and that CRM doesn’t allow any sort of communication in or out. “That means that they enforce that from inside, wherever they are.” OK, OK Felix. We get it. No one knows where CRM is.

— Annet Mahendru was born to an Indian father and a Russian mother; she knows six languages, and she’s lived in Russia, Afghanistan, and Europe. She was also terrific as a Russian double agent in The Americans. That said, I have no idea what kind of accent her character has in The World Beyond. She sounds like a European trying to do a bad impression of someone from New Jersey named Joe who owns a pizza restaurant. It is wildly inexplicable.

— Next week, it appears that we will learn a little more about Elizabeth and the CRM. I’m starting to wish the entire series was about the CRM.

It’s been a couple years since Drake first publicly confirmed the existence of his son Adonis on Scorpion. Since then, he has shared the occasion snapshot of the young boy’s life. In late 2018, he compared Adonis to Picasso while sharing a finger painting the then-1-year-old made. A few months ago, he shared photos of the kid himself for the first time. Last month, she shared an adorable photo of Adonis on his first day of school. Over the weekend, Adonis celebrated his third birthday, and Drake was there to partake in the festivities with him.

Drake took to Instagram to share a photo of himself with Adonis, the pair surrounded by silver and black balloons. Drake captioned the snapshot, “Young Stunna.”

Adonis’ mother, Sophie Brussaux, also took some time to commemorate the boy’s special day. Sharing a gallery of photos, including a couple of baby Adonis with his mother on the day he was born, she wrote, “Joyeux anniversaire mon amoureux! 3 years ago, I was finally meeting you for the first time, after a long 24-hr labour. I’m so proud of the little man you’re becoming, I love you more than life. The world is YOURS! We did that @champagnepapi”

Check out Drake and Brussaux’s posts below.

The Los Angeles Lakers capped off the most hectic season in NBA history with a championship, knocking off the Miami Heat in Game 6 of the 2020 Finals to add a 17th Larry O’Brien trophy to the franchise’s trophy case. The victory comes, of course, months after the passing of Laker legend Kobe Bryant, who passed away alongside his daughter, Gianna, and others in a helicopter crash earlier this year.

The team has made it clear ever since that tragic day that this season would be played out in memory of Kobe, Gianna, and everyone else who died. They managed to honor their memory in the best way possible by getting a ring, and after the game, one of the Lakers’ stars spoke about Bryant.

Anthony Davis, who grew up idolizing Bryant, spoke about how the team’s goal was to make sure he would be proud of what they accomplished. In his eyes, the team took pride in how they did not let Bryant down.

“Ever since the tragedy, all we wanted to do is do it for him, and we didn’t let him down,” Davis said. “It would have been great to do it last game, in his jersey, but it made us come down even more aggressive, even more powerful, on both ends of the floor, to make sure we close it down tonight. And I know he’s looking down on us, proud of us. I know Vanessa’s proud of us, the organization’s proud of us. It means a lot to us.”

After taking a moment to compose himself while his teammates celebrated, Davis wrapped things up succinctly by mentioning how Bryant was viewed in the Laker locker room, both as a person and as an inspiration for what they accomplished.

“He was a big brother to all of us, and we did this for him,” Davis said.

LeBron James won his fourth NBA championship and fourth Finals MVP award on Sunday night after leading the Lakers to a dominant Game 6 win over the Miami Heat.

James had 28 points, 14 rebounds, and 10 assists in Game 6, and his series averages of 29.8, 11.8, and 8.5 weren’t far off from that as he put forth some tremendous performances against the Heat, most notably in their closeout efforts of Game 5 and Game 6. James has now won a title on every franchise he’s been on in his career, and spoke afterwards about what it meant to him to fulfill his promise to Jeanie Buss as well as to bring Anthony Davis along to this level. After talking about how everyone, from the Lakers organization to the team to Rob Pelinka, deserves to be given their respect, he also made sure to note he too wants his damn respect.

There are few players more keenly aware of their legacies than James, but also few that have been as successful chasing down both individual and team accolades at the same time. It has become almost tired for basketball pundits to talk about how we need to appreciate James doing this in Year 17, but it’s true. What he’s doing is something we’ve never really seen, playing at this level for this long — he passed Derek Fisher for the most playoff games in a career on Sunday with 260, and casually posted a monster triple-double to close out a title.

At this point, those that don’t want to appreciate James are effectively lost causes, but he’s more than earned all the respect and praise he gets from those who shower him with it.