Month: January 2021

The Buffalo Bills entered Sunday with little to play for other than pride and to simply keep the good vibes going on what has been the best season in Orchard Park in a very long time.

Josh Allen, after some up-and-down seasons to start his career, solidified himself as one of the league’s best quarterbacks in 2020, thanks in part to the addition of a true top receiver on the outside in Stefon Diggs. Diggs has likewise enjoyed being paired with a NFL quarterback capable of driving the football down the field after his time with Kirk Cousins in Minnesota, and he and Allen have become quite one of the most lethal QB/WR pairings in the game.

Entering Sunday, Diggs led the league in receiving with 1,459 yards on 120 catches, and while he wasn’t asked to do a ton on the field against the Dolphins (Isaiah McKenzie did Buffalo’s damage early), he did make sure to take some time on the sideline to keep that beautiful smile intact. The CBS cameras cut over to the sideline to find Diggs really working the dental floss on the bench, keeping those pearly whites clear of debris and camera ready.

For those of you that feel you can’t be bothered to floss in your daily routine, please let Diggs here serve as your reminder that you have no excuses for practicing good, quality dental hygiene, because he’s able to do it mid-NFL game. A true role model on the field.

Bad Bunny had by far one of the most productive 2020 years in comparison to his peers in the music world. The Puerto Rico-born singer kicked off his 2020 with his Yo Hago Lo Que Me Da La Gana album, which was the highest-charting Spanish album ever at the time of its release and Spotify’s most globally-streamed album of 2020. He also shared two additional projects last year with Las Que No Iban a Salir and El Último Tour Del Mundo. The latter project, which he released at the end of November, became the first all-Spanish-language album to debut at No. 1 on the Billboard album charts. Now, Bad Bunny continues its promotion with a new video for “Booker T” with none other than Booker T himself.

The video brings the two names together as they post up inside a storage unit of a trailer as they’re driven … somewhere. Booker T stands authoritatively in the middle of the unit as Bad Bunny bounces around it and poses beside the wrestler who appears to be his bodyguard for the visual. Booker T previously spoke about the collaboration on his Hall Of Fame podcast.

“From somewhere across the water, he’s watching Booker T and he’s digging what I’m doing, it lets me know I did something right as far as going out there from a performance perspective,” he said. “I always wondered when somebody was going to come out with a song about Booker T, because I knew I was badass, but this is kind of the stamp of approval.”

Booker T is not the first celebrity Bad Bunny has enlisted in a video for an El Último Tour Del Mundo track. He previously called on Snoop Dogg for his “Hoy Cobré” video.

You can watch the “Booker T” video above.

El Último Tour Del Mundo is out now via Rimas. Get it here.

Donald Trump lost the November presidential election to Joe Biden, and in a few weeks Biden will become the next president of the United States. But Donald Trump is still struggling with that reality, and he’s going to some extreme lengths to try defying the votes of millions of people who decided he needed to leave office.

According to the Washington Post, Trump begged and pleaded with the Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger to “find” enough votes to turn the election in his favor. Biden won the state of Georgia by 12,779 votes, a margin that has already been recounted and certified, but Trump has falsely claimed for months now that he was somehow robbed of the victory in Georgia and several other states that would be necessary to actually turn the election results in his favor.

None of that will happen, but Trump has not stopped in exploring every avenue to overturn legal election results, now including putting pressure on elected officials to “find 11,780 votes” in Georgia to illegally change the result.

The Washington Post obtained a recording of the conversation in which Trump alternately berated Raffensperger, tried to flatter him, begged him to act and threatened him with vague criminal consequences if the secretary of state refused to pursue his false claims, at one point warning that Raffensperger was taking “a big risk.”

Word of that call first leaked, of course, from Trump on Twitter, who spewed more election misinformation and was actually corrected by Raffensperger later in the day.

Shortly after that tweet, the Post story gave more embarrassing details for Trump, who apparently rambled in an hour-long call and called Raffensperger a “child” and “either dishonest or incompetent” for not believing his lies about widespread election fraud. He also called him a “schmuck” twice for endorsing Republican Georgia governor Brian Kemp, who has not followed Trump’s baseless claims of fraud.

At another point, Trump said: “So look. All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state.”

The rambling, at times incoherent conversation, offered a remarkable glimpse of how consumed and desperate the president remains about his loss, unwilling or unable to let the matter go and still believing he can reverse the results in enough battleground states to remain in office.

“There’s no way I lost Georgia,” Trump said, a phrase he repeated again and again on the call. “There’s no way. We won by hundreds of thousands of votes.”

There are lots of wild, possibly impeachable moments from the Washington Post story, and the paper released audio of the rambling call that was full of random claims and misinformation. The story truly speaks to how, in the dying days of Trump’s presidency he seems completely consumed by his inability to understand he lost an election that happened months ago.

Trump sounded at turns confused and meandering. At one point, he referred to Kemp as “George.” He tossed out several different figures for Biden’s margin of victory in Georgia and referred to the Senate runoff, which is Tuesday, as happening “tomorrow” and “Monday.”

Meanwhile, Ted Cruz’s attempt to aid Trump in his attempts to overturn the election continued on Fox News on Sunday. But even one of Trump’s most loyal Republican Senators, Lindsey Graham, cast doubt on the effort on Twitter.

“Proposing a commission at this late date – which has zero chance of becoming reality – is not effectively fighting for President Trump,” he wrote of Cruz and his effort to somehow delay the certification of the presidential election.

Trump’s remaining supporters at this point are living in a world all but removed from reality, but it’s wild to hear the president begging a politician to do something as clearly undemocratic as overturning an election and peddling baseless conspiracy theories that lived, until recently, only in the darkest corners of the weirdest message boards. As for the other elected officials in Trump’s party, it seems it’s getting harder for those that support Trump to follow along.

Week 17 in the NFL featured a number of games that mattered for playoff positioning, with eight teams in “win and in” situations and 11 total teams fighting for seven final playoff berths. However, for the rest of the league, Sunday was about trying to balance staying sharp with staying healthy, as many of the teams that have already clinched playoff berths were either resting key players or planned to go to the backups at some point in the game.

Tampa Bay is among that group, as they took on a Falcons team likewise without anything to play for and for both teams the goal was to get through it without anything disastrous. Unfortunately for the Bucs, disaster struck late in the first quarter on a non-contact play in which star receiver Mike Evans, who had just gone over 1,000 yards for the season on the same drive, went down in the end zone after appearing to hyperextend his knee slipping a bit on the turf while trying to plant his foot to catch a touchdown pass.

Evans would be helped off the field, unable to put his full weight on his left leg, and was eventually carted to the locker room from the sideline.

Hopefully it is not a serious knee injury, but there is significant concern in Tampa about possibly losing their top receiver for their opening playoff game and beyond. Evans had just crossed the 1,000 yard mark on that drive, making him the first receiver in league history to have seven consecutive 1,000 yard receiving seasons to start a career, surpassing Randy Moss’ record of six. We will provide updates when they become available, but at the very least one can assume that will be the end of his day today.

Months after appearing with her Community castmates Joel McHale and Ken Jeong on The Darkest Timeline, the zaniest podcast episode I heard in all of 2020 (also, the very last, so far, of that podcast), Alison Brie is making the podcast rounds again in support of Emerald Fennell’s awards-season contender, Promising Young Woman. In fact, despite the cancellation of her Netflix series, GLOW, Brie has had a busy year promoting projects. In addition to Promising Young Woman, Brie appeared in her husband. Dave Franco’s nifty horror flick, The Rental, the final season of BoJack Horseman, and the Thanksgiving Hulu hit, The Happiest Season.

Before becoming a hugely in-demand actress, however, Alison Brie starred as Trudy Campbell on AMC’s Mad Men. Fashion was a big part of the ’60s set series, which meant that Brie would often have to wear a girdle. Early on, however, Brie didn’t realize that she shouldn’t wear underwear in addition to the girdle, a lesson she learned the hard way, as she told Justin Long on the Life is Short podcast.

[A girdle] is “basically like biker shorts that go all the way up to our ribs, and it’s like time-period appropriate,” Brie explained:

“There’s a small hole in them for everything to come out. So I didn’t know, for the first season of Mad Men, that you weren’t really supposed to wear underwear under them, because they are underwear. So I was rushing to set and I had to go to the bathroom. Mad Men was my first real job so I didn’t ever want to be the problem person. So I rushed to the bathroom, tried to pull the hole open, but I didn’t pull my underwear to the side so I’m peeing and not hearing it hit the bowl and then I just feel warmth. I went straight back to set. I just dabbed it with a bunch of toilet paper, because they’re waiting on me, I don’t want to be that person or lose my job. So I go and do several takes.”

Oops.

Fortunately, Mad Men‘s fashion designer, Janie Bryant, was very understanding, and when Brie finally admitted to her that she’d peed in her girdle, Bryant brought Brie another girdle and explained to her that it definitely wasn’t the first time that had happened. “She couldn’t have been better about it,” Brie gushed to Justin Long.

Source: Life is Short with Justin Long

Periodically, I check in on the winners and losers of the box office, but 2020 has obviously been a very different year. Not only was the world rocked by a pandemic, but the pandemic disproportionately affected movie theaters, which led to an absolute bloodbath at the box office in 2020. Here were the winners and (mostly) losers.

Loser: The Box Office itself — The box-office was not only down 80 percent compared to 2019 ($2.3 billion compared to $11 billion in 2019), but it was literally the worst year at the box office in 40 years, since 1980 when there were only three films that topped $100 million (Empire Strikes Back, 9 to 5 and Stir Crazy). There are some glimmers of hope that the box office might start to recover in the summer, but until the vaccine is distributed widely, it’s probably going to continue to be another long year, one in which we will have to readjust our expectations for months where it concerns box-office figures. There are not going to be any $200 million openings for a while.

Loser: Movie Theaters — No box office means that theaters themselves were shellacked in 2020. The two largest theater chains, AMC and Regal, have only narrowly averted bankruptcy, so far. The bigger problem, however, may be smaller and independent theaters, many of which may file bankruptcy or never reopen. It’s going to hasten the demise of those smaller theaters that screen arthouse films. Once the pandemic is over, most of those are not likely coming back.

Winner: Art House and Mid-Budget Films — Although they won’t have movie theaters to screen in, those art-house and mid-budget films are not going away; they’re pivoting to the streaming platforms, which is a more suitable place for many of them anyway. The last movie I saw in theaters, in fact, was Ben Affleck’s The Way Back, a $25 million film about a basketball coach with addiction issues. That movie would have actually been perfect home viewing — it wouldn’t have lost much if it’d be watched on the small screen. There will be a lot of those movies that will move to Netflix, HBO, Amazon, and Disney over the next few years. Expect to see a lot of big stars who are not attached to superhero movies — George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Jennifer Lawrence, Amy Adams, Jennifer Lopez — appear with some frequency on streaming networks instead of movie theaters. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, especially if we get a Netflix sequel to The Accountant.

Too Early to Say: Warner Brothers — Warner Brothers has been manuevering more than other studios during the pandemic. They tried to peg the return of the box office to Christopher Nolan’s Tenet, and while the film managed a decent $364 million worldwide on a $200 million budget, only $57 million of that came from the United States, and even then, it took 100 days to get there. The fizzling of Tenet, meanwhile, prompted Warner Brothers to make the decision to release its entire 2021 slate simultaneously in theaters and HBO Max. While that sounded like an iffy idea, Wonder Woman 1984 had the biggest opening weekend of the pandemic (opening with $16.7 million over Christmas weekend) and nearly half of HBO Max subscribers watched it on Christmas Day. On the other hand, Warner Brothers may have burned bridges with the likes of Christopher Nolan and Legendary Films.

Winner: Disney+ — The Disney parks may have been shut down, and 2020 is the first year without a Marvel movie since 2008, but Disney had plenty to cheer about when it came to Disney+, which grew its subscriber base from 28 million subs in February to a whopping 86.8 million by December. It still has a ways to go to catch up to Netflix (190 million), but its massive back catalog along with a few new series features (like The Mandalorian) have quickly propelled it to the third biggest streamer in the United States (and growing) in just over a year. Expect those numbers to continue to rise once Disney begins releasing all the projects it has in the pipeline.

Winners: Bad Boys for Life and Sonic the Hedgehog — By opening before the pandemic, Bad Boys for Life and Sonic the Hedgehog were able to stake out the #1 and #2 spots at the box office in 2020 early on and hang on to those leads all year long. In fact, the third highest-grossing film of the year, Birds of Prey, was seen as a disappointment at the time, but perhaps the $84 million domestic tally (and $201 million worldwide number) may be looked upon more favorably in retrospect, particularly if Birds of Prey also gained a sizable following on HBO Max.

Unclear: Universal Studios — While Disney held mostly firm, and while Warner Brothers decided to release its movies onto HBO Max in 2021, Universal chose a route somewhere in the middle of each approach. They struck a deal with AMC theaters to shatter the theatrical window, reducing it to 17 days before making their films available PVOD. It’s still unclear how well that will work, although The Croods: A New Age brought in a respectable $34 million (and $101 worldwide) before being made available for digital purchase, where it’s been the top film since its PVOD release three weeks ago.

Finally, here are the 10 highest grossing movies since the pandemic began in earnest in mid-March.

1. Tenet — $57 million
2. Wonder Woman 1984 — $30 million (estimated)
3. The New Mutants — $23 million
4. Unhinged — $20 million
5. The War with Grandpa — $18 million
6. Honest Thief — $14 million
7. Come Play — $9.5 million
8. Let Him Go — $9.3 million
9. Freaky — $8.7 million
10. The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run — $4.8 million

Drake is officially on the clock for his upcoming sixth album, Certified Lover Boy. The Toronto rapper announced back in October that the album would arrive at some point in January 2021. While he has yet to share a more specific date for the project, fans are already requesting the whereabouts of the album from Drake. However, for a quick moment, the Take Care rapper got his supporters’ minds off Certified Lover Boy by debuting an eccentric haircut for them on social media.

In a quickly-deleted post to his Instagram story, Drake shared the new look that was very similar to what Justin Bieber boasted early in his career with the caption “Big Mood” attached. However, he made sure to keep the heart outline on the left side of his forehead that he’s been rocking since he began promoting Certified Lover Boy last summer. Despite the fact that it was quickly-deleted from his story, a few fans were able to grab screenshots to share on Twitter and the jokes went off from there.

One Twitter proclaimed that Drake’s new look “already ruined 2021” while another said, “Drake done put a curse on 2021 with this haircut.” Other fans used the new look to make comparisons to other celebrities. The Toronto rapper was compared to Justin Bieber in a tweet that read, “Drake couldnt be Justin Bieber in the popstar video so instead he got his haircut.” Another person recalled an infamous episode from Chappelle’s Show to poke fun at Drake.

You can read more reactions to Drake’s new haircut below.

The first few days of 2021 have unfortunately been more of the same from 2020, with Republicans denying election results even as Joe Biden’s inauguration as the next president of the United States grows closer. At times it truly feels like some of Donald Trump’s most rabid supporters are living in a completely different country. And at least part of that group is on a different social media network as the rest of us: Parler.

Though a good portion who migrated over to the “free speech” social media site have found their own complaints with it, many still feel more mainstream sites like Twitter and even Facebook are somehow censoring their thoughts about Trump and his baseless allegations of voter fraud that have fueled conspiracy theories and other election nonsense. Which is why so many people seemed to enjoy discovering that an MSNBC anchor, Ali Velshi, has taken to trolling Parler users with messages that poke fun at just how absurd they sound while supporting Donald Trump’s undemocratic effort to overturn election results.

The latest message was noticed by the excellent NBC News reporter Ben Collins, who covers the dystopia beat for the network. On Saturday, he shared on Twitter a message from Velshi that parodied the numerology that many QAnon followers and other Trump truthers often use to link together seemingly innocuous things into a grand conspiracy against the soon-to-be-former president.

“Friends, today is 1-2-21. In a month it will be 2-2-21. And a year after that it’ll be 2-2-22. A year and a month after that it will be 3-2-23. This is just weird,” Velshi wrote. “Don’t let them get away with this.”

Without the “don’t let them get away with this” it just seems like a harmless, normal-person tweet from a bygone era. But it’s a pitch perfect example of just how weird the Trump fringes get. There’s nothing unusual about the inexorable march of time, but to so many who are dead-set on Trump winning a second term and convinced everyone’s conspiring against him, even the dates on a calendar can seem dangerous.

But as it turns out, others have noticed Velshi sending various messages as bait for Trump supporters to amplify. It’s a funny bit, if you’re willing to potentially give Parler a bunch of information to verify that it’s you behind the account sending those messages. For everyone else, though, we’ll just have to wait until those messages are shared outside of that very exclusive, very weird social media site.

In what seems to be an annual occurrence, Jacksonville Jaguars’ head coach Doug Marrone’s job is in jeopardy heading into the final week of the season. Marrone, who has been in Jacksonville since 2015 and got the head coaching title in 2016 — first in an interim role, then as the full-time coach — could be out of a job following Sunday’s season finale against the Indianapolis Colts.

According to Ian Rapoport of NFL Network, there is no word on exactly what is going to happen, but the prevailing thought is that Marrone won’t be employed for much longer after the game ends. Should that go down as expected, things would then get interesting.

The reporting indicates that decorated college football coach Urban Meyer, who most recently coached the Ohio State Buckeyes during the 2018 college football season, would not only be a candidate in Jacksonville, he’s apparently champing at the bit for the job. Meyer, per the report, is telling people close to him that he expects to be the one who leads the Jaguars into the 2021 NFL season.

The team has shown interest in former Florida and Ohio State coach Urban Meyer, who has been lining up a staff and telling people he’s close to in the football community that he expects to land in Jacksonville, per sources.

Now, it must be said that any college football fan will tell you that whenever a big-name job opens up, Meyer’s name will be linked to it at one point or another. He has also seen his name pop up in NFL searches before, but it is curious that he is apparently telling people he is expecting to get this job. Meyer has no NFL coaching experience, not even as an assistant, but is quite possibly the most accomplished coach of his era after Alabama is Nick’s Saban, Who also had a famous foray into the NFL ranks with the Miami Dolphins.

Meyer’s head coaching career included four stops: Bowling Green, Utah, Florida, and Ohio State. He accrued a 187-32 record and won a trio of national titles. There are legitimate questions about how Meyer — who has had a number of health issues in his career and takes losses harder than anyone else in the profession — would do in the NFL, but going to Jacksonville would theoretically mean that he could build a team in his own image, especially because the Jags will have the No. 1 pick in the 2021 Draft and has a clear path to selecting Clemson quarterback Trevor Lawrence, should he make the jump to the NFL.

As for what happens if Meyer decides he does not want an NFL gig, Rapoport reports that his successor, Ryan Day, would pique the interest of the decision-makers in Jacksonville.

The New York Jets are slated to make a coaching change. According to a report from NFL Network, following the teams season finale on Sunday afternoon against the New England Patriots, the Jets will part ways with head coach Adam Gase. The report, from Ian Rapoport and Tom Pelissero, claims a lengthy coaching search is on the horizon following the move.

Gase joined the Jets prior to the 2019 season, immediately after getting fired by the Miami Dolphins, where he served as the team’s head coach for three years. The team went 7-9 last year, but everything went off the rails in 2020, as New York started the season losing 13 games in a row before winning each of their last two.

As for who the Jets could hire, NFL Network laid out some of the contenders, which include college and NFL coaches:

Among the candidates who are slated to be considered are Chiefs offensive coordinator Eric Bienemy, Colts defensive coordinator Matt Eberflus, Ravens defensive coordinator Don “Wink” Martindale, Titans offensive coordinator Arthur Smith and Rams defensive coordinator Brandon Staley to college coaches such as Iowa State’s Matt Campbell, Michigan’s Jim Harbaugh and Florida’s Dan Mullen to everyone in between.

New York faces a major question this offseason in who will line up under center going forward. While the team has Sam Darnold right now, New York will have a high pick in the 2021 NFL Draft. They will not be in a position to draft Clemson star Trevor warrants, should he decide to do clear, but there are other quarterbacks high up in this draft, namely Ohio State’s Justin Fields and BYU’s Zach Wilson, who can step in and take over or should they go in that direction. New York could also, theoretically, trade down and try to replenish its barren roster, which would theoretically mean keeping Darnold around.

It is common for regime changes and quarterback changes to occur in the same off-season, and now, the Jets will have an opportunity to bring in someone new at both places, should they opt to move on from Darnold.