Month: December 2020

Teyana Taylor has been very open with her frustrations regarding her current standing at her Def Jam. The singer has shared the ill feelings she carries toward the label, but this time around it seems that they have reached a breaking point for her. She recently announced that she will be “retiring this chapter” of her career due to “being overlooked,” a statement that left some fans confused about what chapter she meant. As a result, she went on Instagram Live on Saturday night to clear up the confusion and confirm her desire to retire while explaining the exact things that upset her about her label.

“[The] majority of what that post was to warn my label who I’ve been signed to for almost 10 years,” the “Rose Harlem” singer said. “Everything that you guys see of me, everything that I put out, everything that I do is like, 100% me… My thing about it is, there’s no gun to anybody’s head to do anything that they don’t want to do. So yes, I am going to feel under-appreciated if I’m putting in 110% and my label is giving me, they’re reciprocating what 10% of that.”

She added, “I constantly feel alone, I constantly feel under-appreciated, I constantly feel failed…there is literally no push.” She then revealed that she’s asked Def Jam to drop her “on almost 10 different occasions” before addressing some of the reactions she’s received from fans.

I asked Def Jam to drop me on almost 10 different occasions. Straight to the face. Up in the building. At this point, I can’t let this kill me. Granted, to my fans, I think that, you know — and I can see how my message can come across but at the same time, I feel like it’s a tiny bit selfish to say, “What about your fans? Do it for your fans.” Baby, I gotta do it for my mental health. I have to do it for my emotional health. I have to do it for my kids so I can stay alive for my kids.

Elsewhere in the livestream, Teyana said that she’s never received the support from her label that she felt like she deserved and that she’s been left high and dry to handle issues that are the label’s responsibility, like the recent conflict she had with Mykki Blanco.

“I constantly get attacked for all the f*ck sh*t the label do and, y’all know me, I stay quiet. But, it’s so much I can take. So maybe, if I retire, n****s will let me go. Drop me, fam. Let me be free,” she said. “I’m tired… Baby, I’ve been doing this since I was 15 years old. I’m about to be 30. And besides performing for my real fans and actually being in a booth, nothing else about music makes me happy.”

You can watch clips from her livestream above.

Jason Bateman hosted Saturday Night Live for the first time in 15 years, and his monologue got right to talking about the last time he did a monologue in Studio 8H. While the cold open and Weekend Update focused on current events, Bateman got a bit nostalgic talking about the time a monkey nearly bit his face off.

“It is very very great to be back hosting SNL for the second time. The first time was 15 years ago so you know I made a hell of an impression, Bateman said during the monologue. “Honestly I was just too busy I had not one free Saturday for 15 years but I finally freed up.”

Bateman did explain, though, that “something kinda weird” happened to him last time he hosted. As he detailed, he was in a sketch called “Monkeys Throwing Poop At Celebrities,” and the show used a real primate for the sketch. That creature was on stage after the show, when everyone hugs it out and says goodbye for the night.

“We’re all hugging, saying goodbye, the credits are rolling and then the monkey tried to kill me,” Bateman said. “The chimp unhinges his jaw, flashes the teeth and tries to bite my entire nose off.”

As Bateman explained, the animal got a bit territorial because it got directly in its face, and lashed out in response. The actual video of the incident played during the segment, so you know he’s not kidding. And the monologue is funny, if only to see his reaction to the moment compared with what he was actually thinking.

“I’m smiling, but inside I’m thinking a monkey just attacked me and nobody cares,” Bateman said.

There are some pretty wild reactions to the moment, despite Bateman downplaying the reaction to it. Rachel Dratch, for one, looks as horrified as Bateman claims he actually was. Bateman said the animal was later “destroyed,” joking “it was my choice, lessons have to be learned” despite the fact that the two creatures apparently did meet up after the show to make things right.

Bateman stressed that the monkey is “still alive” at the very end of the sketch, so nobody has to feel all that bad about the jokes. But it certainly made for an interesting story. And, for the record, there was no monkey waiting for him to bump elbows with after Saturday’s show.

The Walking Dead: World Beyond ended its first season last Sunday with a few twists that ultimately saved a season that started off slowly but picked up dramatically in the last few episodes. As it turns out, Annet Mahendru’s character, Huck, was a mole all along — in fact, her character’s real name is Jennifer, and she’s the daughter of the lieutenant colonel of the CRM, Elizabeth. The reveal, in addition to Hope’s decision to surrender herself to the CRM, sets up what is essentially another All-Out War between the CRM and the remnants of the Campus Colony, including Felix, Iris, Silas, and Elton.

With a limited two-season series, however, what’s the end game? How does that All Out War end?

Where it began, of course: with Rick Grimes, according to Annet Mahendru herself in an interview with ComicBook.com.

“We’re the lead-up to the movies, so we’re going there. All the questions fans have had for, I don’t know, inherently a decade, right? Our show is the answers to that. So we are very much heading to CRM. I mean, that’s the helicopter… We’re getting really close, you know?”

Still, despite the end of the series leading into the Rick Grimes movies, Scott Gimple — the architect of The Walking Dead universe — wants viewers to know now that Rick Grimes will not be making an appearance in The World Beyond. “That’s one, I don’t know if people are being cagey about that. But I feel that one’s important not to be cagey about,” Gimple told ComicBook.com. “I think people could watch this show and learn a lot about the mythology that Rick Grimes is caught up in. And they might even see places where Rick Grimes has been … I just don’t like people watching it, sort of expecting Rick.”

Gimple also added that he and others are very much still “cranking away” on the movies, and they’re excited about the prospect of theaters for screening the Rick Grimes movies returning in 2021. “As we move toward the spring,” he told The Hollywood Reporter, “we’re talking about things potentially getting better in a permanent way. I would hope that come the end of next summer, people are piling into movie theatres again and laughing until they’re screaming together, eating popcorn together, and that we are once more enjoying each other’s company in front of a huge screen with awesome things happening on it. We hope to be a part of it.”

Despite the pandemic, all the threads for those movies seem to be coming together, with The Walking Dead coming to an end in 2022, writing on the second season of The World Beyond continuing and writing on season seven of Fear the Walking Dead ramping up even as they are finishing shooting on season six. Season 10C of The Walking Dead — the six bonus episodes — have already been shot, and they will air in February. Fear, meanwhile, should return soon thereafter with season 6B.

After giving their writers and actors nearly a month off after six straight weeks of new episodes, Saturday Night Live made its return and quickly got to work on addressing the numerous events that occurred in the last 30 days. An example includes a re-enactment of Rudy Giuliani’s Michigan election hearing led by Cecily Strong. Elsewhere in the new episode, the show got into its creative bag on a few occasions, one of them being a skit led by Pete Davidson that parodied Eminem’s legendary “Stan” video.

In the skit, Pete takes on the role of “Stan,” the extremely fanatic supporter of Eminem that the rapper debuted back in 2000. However, fitting for the Christmas season, Pete’s character, “Stu,” takes aim at Santa Claus in his letter. Just like Stan did in the video for the The Marshall Mathers LP track, Stu spends the majority of the skit writing letters to Santa in hopes that he’ll be able to get him the new PlayStation 5 for Christmas.

Unfortunately, a lapse in communication between the two causes Stu to grow increasingly upset with Santa’s refusal to respond to his requests. As a result, he sends one final letter in a fit of rage while driving off a “fifth of eggnog.” Due to his anger and repeated letters, Santa dismisses Stu’s requests and instead, gives the PlayStation 5 to Eminem himself who appears at the end of the skit.

The “Stu” skit comes a few months after Eminem celebrated the 20th anniversary of The Marshall Mathers LP with new merch for fans and the release of his “Stan” and “The Real Slim Shady” video remastered in HD

You can watch the “Stan” parody in the video above.

Comedian and actor David Cross is probably best known to comedy audience for his roles in Arrested Development and Mr. Show or perhaps even the three seasons of The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret, a show he created and starred in. Alas, however, to younger audiences, Cross is probably best known for playing Ian in three Alvin and the Chipmunks movies, which earned over $1.1 billion worldwide.

Cross’s disdain for those films, however, is not a secret to anyone. “All I wanted was to get the f**k out of there as soon as possible … and buy a summer home with the check,” he once told Conan O’Brien during an appearance on his late-night talk show. He also called working on the third movie, Chipwrecked, “literally, without question, the most unpleasant experience I’ve ever had in my professional life,” and has long held a producer on the film responsible for mistreating Cross on that final film, which essentially saw him “forced at legal gunpoint” to spend an entire week on a Carnival Cruise.

“There was no reason for me to be there,” he had told Conan back in 2012.

It turns out, bad-mouthing the film actually cost David Cross a $150,000 bonus for violating his non-disparagement clause, as Cross told Justin Long on this week’s episode of his Life is Short podcast. It was one of many grievances Cross had with the movie, for which he has eaten “a lot of sh*t” over the years. In fact, one person who gave mocked Cross for taking the role was Patton Oswalt, who turned originally turned down the role. “Comedian Brian Posehn and I both threw the script across the room in disgust,” Oswalt joked. “David Cross caught it.”

Cross took the gig, he said, because he hadn’t worked in over six months, which felt like “an eternity” to him at the time. He had no idea that the first film would be so successful, so he had never anticipated being contractually locked into the franchise for three films.

Nevertheless, Cross said that shooting the first film was “fine,” and the second film, “OK,” but he put shooting the third film “in a different category of bad experiences. They were disrespectful of me, and just so mean to me, and so petty and weird … they were so sh*tty to me … it was so inexplicably awful. Just awful. They were sh*tty in every single way at every single point.”

Many of his problems with the movies revolve around a specific producer, who Cross has long accused of being antisemitic. Cross gave a couple of examples of how petty the producer on the movie was being. At the time, Cross says, he was in London doing pre-production on Todd Margaret, a show upon which a number of jobs were dependent. Cross had no idea if he’d be in the third Alvin movie, and the producer wouldn’t tell him, even though he repeatedly asked, because was working on another project and needed to align his schedule. He finally got the call right before Christmas, and when his agent called, he asked Cross to sit down.

“They are doing the third one,” his agent said. “You are in it, and they want you in Hawaii in ten days.”

“I was in London at the time,” Cross said. He told his agent — because he was in the midst of pre-production on Todd Margaret — that he couldn’t possibly do that, and the Chipmunks producers told him that if he didn’t show up, “we’ll sue him for breach of contract.” Keep in mind, too, that Cross was forced to shoot the film on a Carnival Cruise, in spite of the fact that he was under a pelican suit nearly the entire time and had no lines. They forced Cross to appear in the third film, Cross has explained, for no other reason than to torture him.

Another example of how petty they were being to Cross was the fact that, though he was number two on the call sheet — in other words, billed second, only below Jason Lee — they gave him a “broken down, smaller trailer” that was “about 40 years old, covered in rust and discolored” and it was placed amid a lot of very nice trailers. “I knew exactly what they were up to,” Cross told Justin Long.

The film earned an anemic 12 percent from critics on Rotten Tomatoes, but it made $350 million worldwide. Cross said that he’s still recognized worldwide for his work on the film, and takes some small solace in the fact that a number of parents have told him that he made an otherwise miserable film tolerable to watch for them.

Source: Life is Short with Justin Long

AMC renewed Fear the Walking Dead for its seventh season earlier this week, which might have felt like a surprise two months ago — before the debut of season six — but now feels inevitable given the creative resurrection of the series. It felt all the more inevitable when AMC announced that the 11th season would be the last for The Walking Dead meaning that, theoretically, the spin-off could outlast the original. Indeed, Fear could be the SVU to Law and Order, a spin-off that outlasts the original.

There’s still a long way to go to get there, and with The Walking Dead ending and AMC ordering up two more series from the same universe, a Carol and Daryl spinoff, plus Tales of the Walking Dead, AMC could decide to pull the plug on the series in its seventh season and go out on a creative high. Should AMC decide that the 7th season be the last for Fear, it would actually be a great time to bring back Madison Clark, an original Fear character played by Kim Dickens, who was “killed off” in the fourth season.

Although Madison wasn’t actually very popular with fans when she was on the series, killing her off has proven to be the most unpopular move (among many) executed by Andrew Goldberg and Ian Chambliss, the showrunners who replaced the OG showrunner Dave Erickson in the fourth season.

Fans may recall that Erickson had loosely mapped out Fear the Walking Dead through the seventh season, envisioning that it would end there with a surprising villain: Madison Clark. She’d become a Governor-like figure. Killing her off in season 4, however, made that impossible.

Or did it?

There has been speculation since she left that Madison could return, and both the series itself and fans have hyped that possibility. In fact, some Fear recappers hyped a Madison Clark “Easter egg” in the midseason finale, which turned out to be little more than a mention by Madison’s daughter, Alicia, of the stadium where Madison “allegedly” died.

That said, while it felt like Madison’s return had been foreclosed, both the showrunners and the chief architect of The Walking Dead universe, Scott Gimple, have lately been suggesting just such a possibility. In fact, Ian Goldberg has not only teased the possibility of Madison returning but that she might have been the mysterious person who saved Morgan in the season premiere. “There’s always a chance. There’s always a chance,” he told ComicBook.com.

I’d still be skeptical of that possibility, save for the fact that Scott Gimple has also teased the possibility of Madison’s return in an interview with The Insider:

“I believe that not only within ‘Fear,’ but just within the greater ‘Walking Dead’ universe, there’s absolutely a chance that we could see Madison. There’s a lot of narrative possibilities that we’re exploring and then certainly, you know, [we] got to work it out with everybody involved and Kim Dickens is a very, very busy person. But I think it’s entirely possible.”

That sounds like more than a possibility. That sounds like it’s actively being discussed. I suspect that would come as very welcome news to the other two original cast members, Alycia-Debnam-Carey and Colman Domingo, who have openly mourned the loss of Dickens over the last couple of years. Dickens was last seen in USA Network’s Briarpatch, which was canceled after one season, so Dickens may very well be available to return for the seventh season, if not sooner.

The back half of Fear the Walking Dead continues to shoot in Texas. No airdate has been set for its return.

Plenty has happened in the political world in SNL’s few weeks off since the conclusion of the 2020 election, so it’s no surprise that the show’s cold open stayed with election fodder. The same can be said for Weekend Update, which took aim at Donald Trump’s failing attempts to overturn the election he lost.

Calling the prolonged attempt to overturn results in several states an “Advent calendar of losing,” host Colin Jost joked that the ordeal has proven the Trump campaign will “never stop fighting, except the coronavirus.”

Jost also poked fun of Trump’s “psychotic OnlyFans” video where he rambled through all the various ways the election was stolen from him. The show, unfortunately, taped too early in the day to include anything from Trump’s latest rally where he insisted he didn’t lose the election by millions of votes and the same margin he beat Hillary Clinton by in the electoral college in 2016.

“Trump said this was a ‘rigged election at the highest level.’ Dude, you’re the highest level. You were in charge when the election happened,” Jost said. “And, hey. Look, I’ll believe any conspiracy theory you want as long as in 44 days, you leave.”

He then spoofed some of the various conspiracy theories that have made the rounds both online and in the mouth of the president. Later in the segment, Michael Che made a joke about the White House Christmas decorations as well.

Saturday Night Live didn’t waste any time in giving the people what they wanted in its latest episode, leading things off with a spoof of Rudy Giuliani’s Michigan election hearings for its latest new episode on Saturday. That included a pitch — or perhaps pitcher — perfect impression of one of his star witnesses by Cecily Strong.

The cold open stayed political for the Jason Bateman-hosted episode, as despite the election being long over Donald Trump’s lawyer has put together an impressive string of legal losses that continue to make headlines. And possibly rumblings out of Giuliani himself that have made them go viral for all the wrong reasons.

And with Strong ready to knock her impression of a slurring, unhinged “star witness” for the Trump campaign for Kate McKinnon’s Giuliani out of the park, the cold open topic was a no-brainer. There was Giuliani making noise of his own to start, then a rotating cast of characters making things up about the election and false claims of widespread fraud that somehow mean the election was stolen from Trump.

Strong’s impression of Melissa Carone was actually the more accurate parts of the sketch, in that she falsely claims a lot of what was said in the sketch in real life. Still, those fabrications are lined up with some equally untrustworthy claims such as aliens fabricating ballots seven years ago, a large number of ballots being eaten out of a food truck and that Nicole Kidman’s accent from The Undoing was supposed to be from America. In a week where reality seemed to become more and more like an SNL sketch than ever, it was somehow refreshing to know that SNL can sometimes hit their layups, too.

Mike Lindell, also known as the MyPillow Guy, has made quite a name for himself and his product thanks to Donald Trump. Which is probably why he’s just as convinced as the current president that his term isn’t ending next month. Lindell has already gone on Fox News supporting Trump’s already-lost effort to overturn the election he, well, already lost.

His latest antics, other than constantly posting his support of Trump and his phantom second term on social media, is appearing at any rally in support of Trump he can despite a still-ongoing pandemic and the fact that the election ended last month. The latest of those happened in Georgia on Saturday, where Trump appeared in support of two Republican senate candidates headed to a runoff election in January.

Most of that appearance, however, was a rambling Trump rally where he bemoaned the election that already happened and spread more misinformation about the results of said election. And there was also the MyPillow guy there, too, saying the path forward for a Trump victory was for the Republican governor in Georgia, Brian Kemp, to break the law for the president.

Lindell advocated for the legislature in charge of picking electors in Georgia to “pull down” the vote of Georgia’s members of the Electoral College, and for the same thing to happen in other states, so Biden would not officially get to 270 votes despite those votes being given to him by voters in the November election. And in case you thought this might be just the ramblings of one man at a rally, it’s something that Trump said on stage later that night, too.

It’s difficult to count the number of times Trump has obliterated norms during his four years in office. But on a day where Trump reportedly asked Georgia’s governor directly to break the law in regard to the election, it’s just another thing to add to the pile.

Before Star Wars fans got a chance to freak out about the big Boba Fett reveal on The Mandalorian they were abuzz about a potential shooting location for another Star Wars show on Disney+. More specifically, a lot of people got to make some jokes about Boston accents because of a website that appeared to reveal Boston, Massachusetts as a shooting location for the Obi-Wan Kenobi show.

That news garnered a lot of laughs on social media, but there was always something a bit off about that news despite it being widely reported. As a local Boston journalist noted on Friday, that news didn’t seem to line up for a number of reasons, starting with the other filming location noted: London. As it turns out, there’s a Boston in the UK that’s nearby, which may be a much more likely location to recreate a galaxy far, far away.

And the news outlet that helped the story go viral earlier in the week reported the same thing on Saturday — they got the wrong Boston listed on the website the information came from. So Star Wars isn’t coming to that Boston: the show will be filmed entirely in the UK.

A posting by the Film & Television Industry Alliance on productionlist.com said on Thursday that the new series “Star Wars: Kenobi” was set to shoot in London, England and Boston, Massachusetts on Jan. 4, 2021.

Someone at the website appears to have made an error. After the story became an online hit, the location was changed to Boston, England, United Kingdom and London.

That Boston is about 100 miles north of London.

WBZ Boston also posted a screengrab of the updated website which, indeed, does list Boston, England along with London. It’s unfortunate news for those that hoped the Boston accent could further engrain itself in the Star Wars canon — though if you watched the last episode of The Mandalorian you know all hope is not entirely lost in that regard.

Still, you can’t make something go un-viral. Which is why the Boston, MA version of the Star Wars: Kenobi show already has a Cheers-influenced theme song thanks to Stephen Colbert.

Perhaps those in the UK can react to this news with some very good jokes about their Boston, but I wouldn’t hold out hope. It seems like yet another piece of misinformation in a year of fake news. At least we’ll always have this also-fictional theme song to remember it by.