Month: December 2020

With just 23 days left to go, 2020 is showing no signs of stopping its year-long streak of throwing the most random events directly into our faces. So, meet the new hot and sexy Colonel Sanders played by Mario Lopez in a Lifetime Original Mini-Movie, A Recipe for Seduction. (Yup, all of those words are real.) According to Variety, this unholy creation is basically a 15-minute advertisement for KFC, but the good news is there’s free food involved if your body can survive this sensual journey into the world of 11 herbs and spices. To promote social distancing, KFC is away free extra crispy tenders to anyone who makes a $20 order through Uber Eats for lunch during the event.

Here’s the synopsis for A.C. Slater playing a horned up Colonel Sanders because what is reality anymore? Via Lifetime:

As the holidays draw near, a young heiress contends with the affections of a suitor handpicked by her mother. When the handsome chef, Harland Sanders, arrives with his secret fried chicken recipe and a dream, he sets in motion a series of events that unravels the mother’s devious plans. Will our plucky heiress escape to her wintry happily ever after with Harland at her side, or will she cave to the demands of family and duty?

Not only did Lifetime release a trailer for A Recipe for Seduction, but it tweeted out a promotional image featuring Lopez as the beefcake Colonel, and people are losing their minds. “What am I supposed to do with this?” asks a very confused and yet oddly aroused internet.

(Via Lifetime)

Cardi B will have to go to trial over her 2016 mixtape Gangsta Bitch Music, Vol. 1 after all, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Cardi was sued in 2017 by model Kevin Brophy Jr. over the cover of her debut mixtape which depicted the rapper posing suggestively with a tattooed man. Brophy’s tattoo was apparently photoshopped onto the cover model’s back at Cardi’s direction.

Brophy contends that the distinctive tattoo constitutes misappropriation of his likeness and says it’s used in a “misleading, offensive, humiliating and provocatively sexual way.” Brophy claims that this depicts him in a false light, which in legal terms is a fusion of defamation and privacy invasion. Meanwhile, Cardi’s lawyers argue that the tattoo falls under fair use laws, as it was used “transformatively” since it was copied and pasted onto a different model.

However, Judge Cormac Carney rejected the fair use claim, reasoning, “To constitute a transformative fair use, the revised image must have significant transformative or creative elements to make it something more than mere likeness or imitation.” It’s his view that the tattoo itself wasn’t changed very much — or at all — and that a reasonable jury would be able to identify it from the cover.

The mixtape’s cover artist even admitted that it was the same tattoo. After being paid $50 to make a quick design, he was told to change the original model’s tattoo, Googled “back tattoos,” and overlaid it onto the cover model. Judge Carney did, however, shoot down Brophy’s damages claim. The model believes he’s entitled to over $1,000,000 from the mixtapes streams — nearly all the revenue it generated — as well as over half-a-million dollars from its followup, Gangsta Bitch Music Vol. 2 — which features an entirely different cover image.

Carney said the expert Brophy produced brought a nonsensical theory that “if Defendants had not used Plaintiff’s tattoo on the GBMV1 cover, Cardi B would have made no money on the album—at least on the streaming services where the tattoo appears.”

Cardi’s legal troubles don’t stop there. She’s also due to go on trial for an August 2018 incident in which she allegedly assaulted a pair of bartenders at a strip club. She pleaded not guilty to criminal charges, but will also have to fend off civil charges.

Cardi B is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

As TV shows tiptoed back into production this summer and fall, all of these series faced the question of whether to ignore Covid-19 or write that damn virus into the script. We don’t yet know how all of those efforts will shake out, but in the case of Grey’s Anatomy and Station 19, for example, there wasn’t much of a choice. It simply wouldn’t seem believable for shows about frontline workers to pretend like a raging pandemic isn’t happening. In the case of Showtime’s Shameless, however, the issue didn’t seem so cut-and-dried for the dramedy’s eleventh and final season.

Those of us who adore the Shameless brand of chaos know that the show’s always prioritized keeping it real — sometimes brutally and bleakly so — amid any other absurd happenings. Think Fiona’s prison strip-search, Lip’s battles with alcoholism, Ian’s spiral into manic-depression, and many other heartbreaking developments that went down while humor hovered in the wings. Generally speaking, the writers balanced those heavier moments with more lighthearted antics elsewhere, but none of those character-based struggles could possibly approach the scope of our current global situation. Still, it’d be impossible (not to mention irresponsible) for a show that’s remained relatable for a decade to suddenly ignore reality. So, how is Shameless handling the pandemic?

Well, it’s definitely weird (and not only because Carl’s now a cop), but man, this can’t be an easy transition. The writers obviously don’t want the pandemic to take over the whole show because it’s still an escapist series, and I gotta wonder whether they’ll let the Covid-19 mentions slowly fade away as the season continues. With that said, I also can’t begin to predict whether we’ll see any characters grow gravely ill, but it’s great to see most of the family (other than Frank, who predictably is waving “hoax” around like the cockroach that he is) masking up and taking things more seriously than expected within their Chicago’s South Side setting. Is social distancing happening? No freaking way, but I don’t think Shameless would work if all of the characters hung out at home. Nor would it seem believable that they could afford to do so.

However, nothing too dramatic happens in this season premiere (if Ian was still doing the EMT thing, it’d probably be different), which is mostly Catching Up With The Gallaghers several months after the world turned upside down. At least one character, Tami, has already caught and recovered from the virus, and she’s worried about catching it again, but that’s the extent of the health-related news that we see. The ghost of Fiona isn’t hanging around (even though Emmy Rossum apparently might pop into this season), Frank’s grifting continues, and (no) surprise, the newly-wed Ian and Mickey are already at each other’s throats. This does provide an opportunity for Lip and Ian to have a heart-to-heart about how their parents never taught them how to make a relationship work, and that leads to the beef that I have with this episode.

Why did Shameless provide scant follow-up to Lip falling off the wagon during the last season finale? He downed hard liquor at Ian and Mickey’s wedding reception after a vicious fight with Tami, and we’re supposed to believe that they’re doing alright now, and Lip is back on the wagon, no problem? I’m not buying that their biggest issue is how Lip can manage to fool Tami into thinking he bought fancy-ass paint and coffee, but again, at least he’s wearing a damn mask, and kudos to Shameless for reinforcing to me how low the bar is for judging Americans’ pandemic behavior. And maybe we’re supposed to believe that quarantine brought Lip and Tami back together, but it still feels odd that Lip’s tragic slide back into booze-soaked behavior was a short-lived detour.

Other than that, this was mostly a placeholder episode. Some loose ends:

– Debbie’s still somehow the worst sibling, so of course she walks around with her nose hanging out of her mask. She’s truly aghast at being labeled as a sex offender, and the show makes things uncomfortable by having someone fudge up Debbie’s record to make it look like she committed statutory rape of a 7-year-old girl instead of a 17-year-old one. I kind-of feel like this is post-dated comeuppance for Debbie losing her virginity by raping the guy she was kind-of dating at the time. Then again, she’s allowing Frannie to bedazzle mom’s ankle bracelet, so no lessons have been learned there.

– Kevin and Veronica are as enterprising as ever, so they’re running a speakeasy-gym in The Alibi. That’s not great, but they are requiring masks be worn by patrons at all times. Realistic or not, I’m always happy to see them get more airtime while possibly tiptoeing their way toward a future spinoff. That’s probably a wish in vain, or maybe things will happen Dexter-style with the Gallagher neighbors revisiting TV screens in several years. Hey, a lady can dream.

Showtime’s ‘Shameless’ airs on Sundays at 9:00pm EST.

“Unprecedented.” “Quarantine.” “Pandemic.”

2020 has been awful for just about everything except buzzwords. This year was full of new ones most of us didn’t really use before March but that now hover over our lives as unrelentingly as the world-altering virus they spawned from. Heck, the third one I listed was Merriam-Webster’s word of the year.

Unless you’re a SARS-CoV-2 virus, the past two hundred months have left much to be desired. (That’s how long the pandemic has been going on, yeah?) We’d all have been justified in doing little else in 2020 beyond yearning for large crowds, Thanksgiving dinners with outspoken and politically oppositional family members, and other things we never wanted to deal with again not that long ago.

It’s fair to want to look back at how things used to be, but at least a handful of musicians peered slightly further into the past than 2019. Artists like Dua Lipa, Jessie Ware, and Kylie Minogue had visions of the mid-’70s dancing in their heads as they resurrected a buzzword that on one fateful 1979 evening sent folks at Comiskey Park into a historic fit of rage: “disco.”

For a year without discotheques, clubs, dancehalls, bars, dives, hangouts, hotspots, cantinas, pool halls, and other places where people gather and get sweaty via movement, there sure was a lot of disco music. Many of the year’s biggest singles — Dua Lipa’s “Don’t Start Now,” Doja Cat’s “Say So,” Lady Gaga’s “Stupid Love,” BTS’ “Dynamite” — are at the very least disco-inspired, and the trio of artists mentioned earlier made albums (three of my personal favorites this year) that are totally indebted to the genre.

I’m hardly the first person to notice the 2020 disco revival, I’m sure. The question, though, is how did it happen?

It’s not like it was as inevitable as it seems now. In a Rolling Stone interview from this summer, Dua Lipa’s collaborators described her disco pivot as risky, especially since pop radio was skewing more “urban” at the time the material was being written. Ian Kirkpatrick admitted he “de-discoed” some elements of “Don’t Start Now” and said, “I was just so scared. You just don’t know what’s gonna catch and what’s not gonna catch.”

Of course, though, that gamble paid off and disco ended up soundtracking the year, because the formerly antiquated genre ended up being perfect for the times.

Young people get off on (future) nostalgia, even for things they weren’t actually around for. On top of that, people needed an escape from the burning, insect-infested, mask-covered world around them. What better way to achieve that than doing one of the out-of-house activities that can actually be re-created at home: dancing.

Dance therapy is a real thing, and people the world over self-medicated this year with disco, music made explicitly for dancing, as their score. Moving around in our living rooms — or in my case, making a delighted stank face and nodding my head while busting out Cardi B news posts — to music that’s comfortingly familiar, kinetically stimulating, and endorphin-generating was maybe the most effective temporary escape from reality that we had access to this year.

That said, there’s such thing as too much of a good thing, as anybody who has ever had a salt shaker cap fall off on them can tell you. Over-saturation was a major factor in the build-up to the previously alluded-to Disco Demolition Night, after all. Thankfully, not all 2020 disco was created equal.

Dua Lipa’s Future Nostalgia merged the style with contemporary pop and dance music, Jessie Ware’s What’s Your Pleasure? paid more attention to the genre’s orchestral elements, and Kylie Minogue’s DISCO — as the shouty, caps-lock-indebted title suggests — is a direct tribute to disco’s most pleasingly identifiable elements. There was a ton of disco, but a lot of it arrived to the club in its own uniquely over-the-top John Travolta suit and kept the room from filling up with repetitive, grating caricatures.

When Dua Lipa pushed the release of Future Nostalgia forward in March, she made the announcement with a video in which she said of the album, “I hope it brings you some happiness, and I hope it makes you smile, and I hope it makes you dance. I hope I make you proud.”

“Happiness.” “Smile.” “Dance.” There’s a better set of buzzwords that Lipa and her partners in disco helped bring to life this year. Even if it was only for as long as the runtime of a song, any sort of escape is a valuable public service. So yes, Dua, you made us proud.

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

Slain South Florida rapper XXXTentacion’s father Dwayne Onfroy wants his son’s alleged killers to pay the ultimate price for their actions. Posting to his Instagram Story, he told viewers he would seek the death penalty when the case continues. The text reads, “Y’all killed that young man, that father, that son, that brother without a cause. I say that with no malice in my heart. I am seeking life without parole for the participants in the robbery and COLD BLOODED MURDER OF MY SON. AND THE MAN WHO PULLED THE TRIGGER, I AM GOING TO SEEK THE DEATH PENALTY.”

Dedrick Williams, Robert Allen, Trayvon Newsome, and Michael Boatwright were all arrested shortly after X’s death on June 18, 2018. They’ve been charged with first-degree murder. Police believe Boatwright was the one who killed the rapper. The four men allegedly ambushed the rapper as he shopped for a motorcycle, attacking him as he left the dealership and shooting him multiple times in the neck.

At the time of his death, XXXTentacion was on trial for allegedly brutally beating his ex-girlfriend, even seemingly admitting to it in a recording made after his arrest. He also faced charges of witness tampering after allegedly threatening the victim during the case.

The Crown played nice, for the most part, with the British Royals for three seasons, but all of that ended (in a dramatic fashion) with the fourth season, which sh*ts all over the fairy tale, thereby raising voices on the other side of the pond. That’s because this season has awakened a brand new generation to the ill-fated marriage of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer, which (of course) ended very badly. And some people aren’t happy to see Charles not only portrayed as a cad who ran to his mistress before and after his marriage, but also as a tantrum-throwing man who scowled over the public’s adoration of his wife.

Following Season 4’s arrival, whispers indicated that the Royals were steamed over the Charles and Diana business. British culture minister Oliver Dowden quickly rang the alarm to ask for a “fiction” disclaimer while stating, “I fear a generation of viewers who did not live through these events may mistake fiction for fact.” Well, Netflix has made their perspective clear. Via Deadline, there shall be no disclaimer, for the streaming service believes that its viewers are smart enough to judge fact vs. “fiction” on their own:

“We have always presented The Crown as a drama – and we have every confidence our members understand it’s a work of fiction that’s broadly based on historical events. As a result we have no plans – and see no need – to add a disclaimer.”

Seems clear enough. For what it’s worth, one of the first individuals that came forward to fuss over this season was Princess Diana’s brother, who expressed his desire for everyone to remember that this is a dramatized work of fiction. He only wishes to honor Diana’s memory, and perhaps he wasn’t thrilled to see the semi-graphic portrayal of Diana’s anxiety-exacerbated eating disorder portrayed onscreen. No matter the source of the request, though, Netflix is standing firm.

(Via Deadline)

Back in March, Kendrick Lamar launched PgLang, which appears to be some sort of media company. It was not entirely clear what Lamar’s new venture does exactly, and that remains the case. Whether or not we’re any closer to the truth, PgLang has at least been spotted in the wild.

Last week, The Weeknd dropped a video for his new “Blinding Lights” remix featuring Rosalía, which shows behind-the-scenes footage of a photo shoot. It turns out that at about 2:06 into the video, a photographer wearing a shirt of the PgLang logo, which features two children pointing up at a lowercase letter “a,” can be seen in the dark foreground. PgLang is not credited in the video, so it’s unclear if the company was involved in making the visual or if the photographer was just wearing one of the brand’s shirts.

Back in March, the company shared a mission statement on its website, which didn’t offer much clarity about what specifically they do. It reads in part, “PgLang is multilingual. Our community speaks music, film, television, art, books, and podcasts — because sometimes we have to use different lenguages to get the point of our stories across. Stories that speak to many nations, many races, and many ages. That is why our writers, singers, directors, musicians, and producers break formats when we build ideas and make them real for the curious.”

As for Lamar, he apparently has new music coming “pretty soon,” so keep an eye out for that.

The New York Jets fell to 0-12 on the season on Sunday with a 31-28 loss to the Las Vegas Raiders that should have been their first win of the season.

New York led 28-24 late in the fourth quarter and actually got a defensive stop inside the 10 on a 4th and 3 with just over 90 seconds to play that, with one first down, would’ve allowed them to put the game on ice. However, the Raiders were able to get a three and out and force a punt with just over 30 seconds to play, but still needed to march all the way down the field for a touchdown, being that they trailed by four. What ensued was one of the wildest defensive playcalls we’ve seen all year, with notoriously aggressive defensive coordinator Gregg Williams blitzing eight and leaving poor DB Lamar Jackson in one-on-one coverage with speedy rookie Henry Ruggs III, who dusted him and hauled in a perfect deep ball from Derek Carr to give Vegas the win.

The Jets, who, to be clear, have been a disaster on both sides of the ball this season, likely were well served at a franchise level by the loss as it kept them a game ahead of the Jacksonville Jaguars for the first overall pick and, as such, their choice of any of the top quarterbacks, headlined by Clemson’s Trevor Lawrence. Still, it was a gutting loss for those on the team who are desperately trying to avoid becoming the second winless team in recent history. Williams knows a little something about going 0-16, as he was the new DC in Cleveland in 2017 for their winless season, but he will not have the opportunity to put a second complete winless season on his resume as the Jets made the decision on Monday to let him go after his…interesting play call that assisted in costing New York the game.

It was not just couch coaches that had questions for Williams’ decision-making after the game, as Jets safety Marcus Maye was even confused by the call in the postgame media availability.

As for what’s next for Williams, one has to wonder if this will be his last stop as a defensive coordinator. He was once highly regarded around the league, but will forever have the Saints bounty scandal on his resume as well as some disastrous seasons with Cleveland and New York — although it should be noted his last year in Cleveland was a solid one. The NFL loves to recycle coaches and give them chance after chance, but Williams’ time as a coordinator may be done — although you can never put it past an NFL team to decide he’s worth handing the keys over to once again.

Obsessed hosts Britt Ellis and Taylour Chanel are back to curate a must-watch streaming guide that will keep you more than busy this holiday season, honing in on the inspired storytelling and boundary-breaking casting of some of the hottest entertainment picks coming to a small screen near you.

First up is Shonda Rhimes’ Bridgerton, a Victorian-era drama filled with intrigue, romance, and scandal. Rhimes and company are bringing some much-needed diversity to the historical setting and we’re here for it and what it might mean for representation in Hollywood.

Another interesting, risk-taking series coming early next year is Marvel’s WandaVision, which drops on Disney+ in January. A superhero show with a few seeming nods to vintage sitcoms a la I Love Lucy, it looks all kinds of weird in the best way and both Ellis and Chanel think the show could push the comic book universe forward by letting fans spend more time with some of their favorite characters.

And we can’t talk about Marvel without honoring the late Chadwick Boseman who tragically passed earlier this year. The Black Panther star became a real-life hero for so many, and fans can catch his final performance in Netflix’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, coming later this month. The film, which is already garnering considerable awards buzz, stars Viola Davis as the legendary Blues singer and Boseman as a frustrated young Jazz musician whose ambition disrupts a fateful recording session. Ellis and Chanel reflect on Boseman’s legacy of bringing multi-faceted Black men to the big screen and the impact of his final turn.

Check out the video above for all of their must-see picks.

Drake is recovering after having surgery on his knee. The Canadian star posted an update on his physical therapy to Instagram, informing fans that he’s taken “some confident steps at 5 weeks.” While he never revealed the issue that led to his knee in a brace, some fans speculated that it was a torn ACL — the same injury that caused him to collapse at a show in 2009. As to how he was injured, the prevailing theory is that NBA star Stephen Curry’s dangerous handles had something to do with it — a hypothesis Curry coyly danced around when asked.

The injury was a setback in a year that saw Drake reestablish his pop-culture dominance without even putting out a proper album. Early in the year, he teamed up with his What A Time To Be Alive co-creator Future once again in the comedic “Life Is Good” video, then held TikTok hostage with his song “Toosie Slide” ahead of releasing the odds-and-ends mixtape Dark Lane Demo Tapes.

He then took a break from the limelight to finish up his album, which he began rolling out with the surprise video for “Laugh Now, Cry Later” with Lil Durk. Teaming up with Nike for a collection of merch celebrating his upcoming album, Certified Lover Boy, Drake seemed primed for a huge end to the year. However, despite winning his rec league championship, his plans were seemingly derailed by his injury, while he postponed his album’s release to 2021. Still, with his new Nike sub-label on the way, he’ll likely remain at the forefront of the public’s attention as he regains his mobility and we all wait to see what else he’s got up his sleeve.