Month: July 2021

On July 21, 2020, Donald Trump shocked many people—not for the first time or the last—when he very politely wished accused sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell “well” following her arrest on a variety of charges, including conspiracy to entice minors to travel to engage in illegal sex acts, enticement of a minor to travel to engage in illegal sex acts, conspiracy to transport minors with intent to engage in criminal sexual activity, transportation of a minor with intent to engage in criminal sexual activity, and perjury. Which is not necessarily the thing you want to hear coming out of your president’s mouth.

Maxwell, the longtime confidante and sometime girlfriend of Jeffrey Epstein, was no stranger to Trump—nor was Epstein (who died by suicide in August 2019 while in jail). “I’ve met her numerous times over the years,” Trump said of Maxwell at the time. “Especially since I lived in Palm Beach, and I guess they lived in Palm Beach.”

But according to Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump Presidency, Michael Wolff’s new book, Trump’s hopes for a brighter future for Maxwell didn’t end there. According to Wolff, Trump took a “sudden interest” in Maxwell in his final weeks of being president and discussing who he might want to pardon before he left the White House. In an excerpt from the book, published by the Times of London, and reported on by Insider, Trump was reportedly “bored” with pardoning people, but was determined to make use of the power while he still had it. And Maxwell was one of the individuals he considered pardoning. As Insider reports:

Wolff said he would frequently interrupt conversations to ask: “Who do you think should be pardoned? Give me one person—who’s your top pick?”

Of Maxwell, he asked “Has she said anything about me?” according to the book. Wolff reports that he added: “Is she going to talk? Will she roll on anybody?”

The response must not have been to Trump’s liking, or sustained his interest, as no pardon was given. He did, however, reportedly talk about pardoning himself. “They say I can,” he apparently told aides. “Unlimited pardon power.” So we’ve heard, Donald.

Landslide will be published on July 13, 2021.

(Via Insider)

After being banned from Facebook and Twitter following the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol building, Donald Trump will reportedly sue the CEOs of both social media platforms in a class-action lawsuit. The former president is scheduled to hold a press conference on Wednesday morning where he’ll announce his legal action against both Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey. Via Axios:

Trump’s legal effort is supported by the America First Policy Institute, a non-profit focused on perpetuating Trump’s policies. The group’s president and CEO and board chair, former Trump officials Linda McMahon and Brooke Rollins, will accompany him during the announcement. Class action lawsuits would enable him to sue the two tech CEOs on behalf of a broader group of people that he argues have been censored by biased policies.

As Axios notes, Trump will argue that Facebook and Twitter’s policies are “biased” against conservatives even though there has never been evidence to support this claim. More importantly, Trump has a history of announcing lawsuits that he never follows through on, which is believed to be the case here and the overwhelming consensus from journalists. Not to mention, any type of pre-trial discovery into Trump’s involvement with the failed January 6 coup will surely end badly for him.

In addition to doubts that Trump will follow through on his lawsuit, or be successful if he actually does go through with it, the pending legal action doesn’t make Parler or its newly born cousin GETTR look all that great. If those platforms were reaching a sizable audience, Trump would be on them. Instead, he’s suing to get back on Facebook and Twitter despite repeated accusations that both platforms “censor” conservatives.

Sufjan Stevens is currently in a stretch that’s as productive as any point in his career so far. Since the start of 2020, he has released three albums: Aporia (a collaboration with stepfather Lowell Brams), The Ascension, and this year’s five-volume ambient project, Convocations. Now, he has yet another new project in the pipeline: A Beginner’s Mind, a collaborative album with Asthmatic Kitty labelmate Angelo De Augustine, is set for release on September 24.

Both artists excel in gentle indie folk, and that’s just what they deliver on the two new songs they shared today, “Reach Out” and “Olympus.”

Press materials note that the album started when the pair headed to a friend’s cabin in upstate New York for a “monthlong songwriting sabbatical.” At the ends of their days, Stevens and De Augustine would unwind by watching movies, and the duo’s songs soon began to reflect on the films. The album was inspired by “shoshin,” a word from Zen Buddhism that means “Beginner’s Mind” (hence the album title) and refers to a sense of openness and eagerness.

Of the songs, press materials also say, “The results are less a ‘cinematic exegesis’ and more a ‘rambling philosophical inquiry’ that allows the songs to free-associate at will. Plot-points, scene summaries, and leading characters are often displaced by esoteric interpolations that ask the bigger question: What does it mean to be human in a broken world? […] The movies became rhetorical prompts, with the songwriters letting their distinct reactions and creative instincts govern their process. The underlying objective was empathy and openness, absent of judgment: to observe with the eyes of a child.”

Listen to “Reach Out” and “Olympus” above, and check out the A Beginner’s Mind art and tracklist below.

1. “Reach Out”
2. “Lady Macbeth In Chains”
3. “Back To Oz”
4. “The Pillar Of Souls”
5. “You Give Death A Bad Name”
6. “Beginner’s Mind”
7. “Olympus”
8. “Murder And Crime”
9. “(This Is) The Thing”
10. “It’s Your Own Body And Mind”
11. “Lost In The World”
12. “Fictional California”
13. “Cimmerian Shade”
14. “Lacrimae”

A Beginner’s Mind is out 9/24 via Asthmatic Kitty. Pre-order it here.

Who would have thought that 20 years after Cash Money Records took over for the 99 and the 2000, Juvenile’s raunchy introductory hit would form the basis for a wholesome (bit still playfully racy) public health PSA? The New Orleans rapper resurrected his biggest song, “Back That Thang Up,” turning it into “Vax That Thang Up” to encourage horny young singles to get their shots before returning to the dating scene, recruiting longtime collaborators Mannie Fresh and Mia X to reprise and remix the track’s most iconic moments.

“Girl, you look good, why don’t you vax that thang up?” Juvie joshes on the new, cheeky chorus. “You a handsome young brother, why don’t you vax that thang up?” Mannie, meanwhile, cleverly flips his anchor verse: “I know you can’t stand it / No holding hands, chick,” he smirks, turning his opening couplet into something a bit more friendly for radio. And that iconic Lil Wayne bridge? Well, it seemed unlikely they’d be able to hook the original into participating, considering some of his prior reactions to current events, so Mia X graciously steps it up to turn “drop it like it’s hot” into “go get the shot.”

Naturally, fans on Twitter have thoughts, but respect for these legends of the game — who have mostly stayed out of trouble and kept their legacies untarnished — has the jokes trending about as wholesome as the song itself. You love to see it.

Watch the “Vax That Thang Up” video above.

Lance Reddick, pop culture’s greatest disgruntled authority figure, will reprise his role as Continental Hotel concierge Charon in John Wick: Chapter 4. He’s one of only three actors to appear in every movie of the action franchise (the others are Keanu Reeves, obviously, and Ian McShane). When last we saw the ever-mysterious Charon in John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum, he was fighting alongside Mr. Wick during the High Table attacks at the Continental — he then watched John get shot off a roof by McShane’s Winston.

“Lance has been part of the franchise since the very beginning and has had an integral role in shaping the world of John Wick,” director Chad Stahelski told Deadline. “I couldn’t be more excited to be working with him again.”

I might re-watch John Wick: Chapter 3 tonight, which is to say, I am definitely going to re-watch John Wick: Chapter 3 tonight. And maybe John Wick: Chapter 2. But then I might as well start with the first movie. That’s it, I’m watch the entire trilogy.

John Wick: Chapter 4, which also stars Laurence Fishburne, Rina Sawayama, Donnie Yen, Shamier Anderson, Bill Skarsgård, Hiroyuki Sanada, and Scott Adkins (no word on the Tick Tock Man), opens on May 27, 2022.

(Via Deadline)

Black Widow has had quite a few release dates. For more than a year now it it has felt like a movie in limbo. There were always rumors back in 2020, once it was realized the pandemic would not be short, that Black Widow might get a release on Disney+, but director Cate Shortland says that was never the case, at least to the best of her knowledge. Now, finally, On July 9th, Black Widow will be released in theaters (and at home on Disney+ for a premium price).

Black Widow does feel like a rare standalone MCU movie these days. It’s set right after the events of Captain America: Civil War as we find Black Widow, aka Natasha Romanoff (aka Scarlett Johansson) on the run and meeting up with her former spy family, played by David Harbour, Rachel Weisz, and Florence Pugh. (“Spy family” in that they aren’t really related, but way back when they were all embedded Russian spies living in Ohio as a family.)

Ahead, director Cate Shortland, who was in her native Australia when we spoke, talks about what was going on in her head last year when Black Widow had delay after delay after delay and how, no, she’s excited people will finally get to see the first MCU movie since 2019. Also, there’s a scene in Black Widow when Natasha is just chilling, watching the James Bond movie Moonraker, so I had to know the significance of that reference. (Turns out I may have been reading too much into things.)

There’s a scene where Black Widow watches Moonraker. And I think I got all the references to Moonraker in this movie?

You know, we debated which film. And then I think it was Kevin Feige and Eric Pearson that said it has to be this film and it just seemed perfect. It just seemed perfect for that, I just love her mimicking the words and that she knows it.

She knows it very well.

She knows every single line from the movie. It’s pretty great.

So am I overthinking it with the references?

What did you think was a reference to it in the film?

Moonraker opens with what people consider one of the greatest movie skydiving stunts ever done. And Black Widow has a set piece involving a similar situation. And there are some similarities between Jaws in Moonraker and Taskmaster in Black Widow.

That was unintentional. If I asked Eric, the writer, he might say, might grab it now, and say it was completely intentional. I’m not sure.

And Jaws’s evolving relationship with James Bond has some similar beats as Taskmaster’s relationship with Black Widow.

That was unintentional.

See, I read too much into it.

I’m happy that there are coincidences, because, it’s kind of a beautiful coincidence.

So last year you were gearing up for this movie to come out and then the world shut down. I’m curious what was going on in your head. Did you think it would be a short delay or if you knew it might be this long?

You know what? When we finished work we were in Burbank and we had heard about this thing called COVID. Like everybody else in the world. And we were kind of, it felt like, so far away. And then three weeks later, we shut down. And I thought, oh, it’s going to be two weeks that we are shut down. Like many people, or many ignorant people, like myself. And so I think the film did not shift. What happened was it took longer to fix, to finish, well, fix and finish, at the end. We still finished the film and then we locked it a year ago. And then we all went our separate ways. So, I think the film hasn’t changed. What’s a beautiful coincidence, again, is the film is really about community coming back together. Or people who have a past, coming back together. It’s sort of a great thing for me to think about: people in cinemas, watching it, because of the idea of us as a community coming back.
Once people realized it wouldn’t be two weeks, was there any talk last year of maybe putting it on Disney+?

No. Kevin was adamant that the film should be screened in a cinema. Where it’s kind of this beautiful ritual, where people will go and enjoy the film together. I don’t think he wanted to break that. I think they wanted to wait, and they believed in the film, and they believed in the spectacle – the beautiful fairground spectacle of people just being uplifted by the excitement of these sequences. I’m so happy that I had those producers.
Are you coming to the United States for a premiere? Or are they doing one for you in Australia?

It’s a big deal in my house. So my 90-year-old dad is coming to Sydney. And my whole extended family, like 40 of us, are going to go and hopefully, one day, watch this in a cinema very soon. And yeah, for me what’s joyous is actually sitting in amongst a crowd an anonymous crowd. And I can just experience it with them. Yeah, I can’t wait, actually. I’m so excited. I’ve got a 12-year-old daughter.
Oh, well, she’s going to love this, right?

Yeah, she’s in some of it.
Oh, she is?

Yeah.
What’s she doing?

She’s in the title sequence. She’s a child and she’s being trafficked.
Oh, that’s sinister. Okay.

So she and her school friends came along and were part of that sequence.
She got to be in this movie, that’s wonderful.

Yeah. The only one of my films she hasn’t been in recently is Lore. My daughter is Black and that was set in 1945 in Germany. So she was always like, “I can not be in it?” I was like, “No, you can’t be in it.”
Yeah Germany, in that era. That’s a whole conversation.

Right.

‘Black Widow’ opens in theaters and begins streaming this coming weekend. You can contact Mike Ryan directly on Twitter.

WARNING: Spoilers for Loki will be found below.
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Picking up where last week’s mind-blowing post-credits scene left off, the fifth episode of Loki, “Journey into Mystery,” was a jam-packed journey filled with so many memorable moments and Easter eggs that Marvel fans can barely keep up with all of them. After being “pruned,” Tom Hiddleston’s Loki finds himself in a “Void” world where the Time Variance Authority has basically been dumping people and relics that no longer belong on the Sacred Timeline. Except not only does that include a grab bag of Loki Variants, but the landscape is literally peppered with easily the most amount of Easter eggs the MCU has ever seen.

While some hidden gems were obviously more exciting than others, there were clearly two Easter eggs that melted the most minds on Twitter: Frog Thor and the Thanos Copter. Dropping them into “Journey into Mystery” was more than a visual treat though. It signaled the MCU’s recent trend of paying homage to classic comic book moments. (Think the Halloween costumes in WandaVision and the arrival of White Vision.) And we’ll circle back to that topic in a moment.

“Journey into Mystery” also reunited Loki and Mobius, whose relationship already has its own fan name, “Lokius,” and man, were those people stoked to see these two characters hug.

Heck, even Sophia Di Martino’s Sylvie is Team Lokius.

“Journey into Mystery” also introduced Kid Loki, who notably survived the episode’s final moments putting even more pieces into place for Young Avengers in the MCU. But more importantly, folks did not expect his Nexus event to be killing Thor.

After being hyped up in trailers and promo spots, President Loki also showed up, but only for a brief moment. However, that was more than enough for fans to demand more of this cock-sure, and now handless prince.

But of all the Variants, Richard E. Grant’s Old Loki ended up being the absolute showstopper. Decked out in the classic Loki costume from the comics, Old Loki brought down the house and demonstrated that Loki is more powerful than anyone, including himself, ever realized.

That being said, there is a dark horse contender for the best Loki Variant even though his name didn’t end up being Croki. We’ll let that slide.

A couple weeks ago, Tyler The Creator took the stage at the BET Awards to perform “Lumberjack,” a standout from his new album Call Me If You Get Lost. There’s one song from the album, though, that we may never see Tyler perform on TV, and that’s “Juggernaut,” as Tyler thinks the Lil Uzi Vert- and Pharrell-featuring song “does not hit live at all.”

This morning, Tyler patted himself on the back on Twitter, writing of a highlight from his new album, “massa is really good.” He then continued, though, by noting that while he believes that song works well in a live setting, “Juggernaut” does not. Tyler tweeted, “massa live is great too. intense, intimate. audience can just absorb. no jumping or yelling. im able to vent. its nice. juggernaut on the other hand does not hit live at all. was shocking as hell but the more i thought about it the more it made sense.”

Meanwhile, in response to the first tweet, a fan bought up the “Massa” lyric in which Tyler notes Pharrell’s (aka Skateboard P) impact on him: “My boy Skateboard P gave me that speech in Italy session / Thankfully, by hour three that detour perspective / Thoughts change so rapid, turn into a butterfly, Flower Boy happened.” Tyler responded by elaborating, “thats when the switch happened. that talk he had with me man. sheeesh.”

Read our review of Call Me If You Get Lost here.

In the wake of 9/11, Rudy Giuliani was nicknamed “America’s Mayor” and honored as Time Magazine’s Person of the Year for the strength he showed in the face of a global tragedy. The 20 years since have not been kind to the former mayor of New York City. Most recently, his close friendship and business and political association with Donald Trump have cost Giuliani any political clout he may have ever had, not to mention his right to practice law in the state of New York—and it’s about to start costing him money right out of his very own sloppily tailored pockets. Good thing his pal Bernard Kerik stepped in… or is it?

In late June, Kerik—who served as New York City’s police commissioner while Rudy was still mayor, but was later sentenced to four years in prison due to a number of felony charges, including failure to pay taxes (fortunately, Trump pardoned him)—set up The Rudy Giuliani Defense Fund (though the website is called The Rudy Giuliani Freedom Fund—yes it’s real, now stop laughing) to help his fellow reprobate pay his quickly mounting legal fees.

The goal, according to the website? To raise $5 million to help the man whose “fate will determine if America still is a Republic governed by We The People, or if the swamp has finally amassed total control of our great country.” Yet as of Tuesday, as noted by Vanity Fair, the crowdfunding campaign had so far earned a total of just $9,590—which is less than .2 percent of its goal. And almost $46,000 less than some random dude once raised just to make some potato salad (seriously, stop laughing).

While Giuliani showed some pretty dogged dedication in doing anything and everything he could to make Trump look good, the former president reportedly couldn’t give two sh*ts about his former BFF. According to Michael Wolff’s new book Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump Presidency, Trump began to sour on Rudy toward the end of his presidency, when Giuliani had the audacity to ask Trump to finally be paid for all the work he has done for him. Paid?! For work?!? How dare he!!

“Trump is annoyed that [Rudy] tried to get paid for his election challenge work,” writes Wolff—never mind the fact that Rudy was just about the only person who stuck by Trump throughout the 2020 presidential election and the pathetic battle to contest its results. Of course, there were some shady shenanigans around that whole thing, too, with a Giuliani associate admitting that he attempted to bill Trump $20,000 per day for Rudy’s help.

“To be fair,” writes VF’s Bess Levin, “Giuliani probably should have seen this coming, given that Trump is famously known for stiffing his contractors, from dishwashers to painters to architects, and when confronted about it saying things like, ‘Maybe he didn’t do a good job and I was unsatisfied with his work.’”

(Via Vanity Fair)

As we get further away from Donald Trump’s four years as president (at least until August 13, as the wise one Mike Lindell prophesied), more and more administration insiders are willing to talk. You know what that means? It’s tell-all book season, baby!

According to Michael Wolff’s Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump Presidency, Trump would rarely go to the second floor of the White House because he hated climbing the stairs, while Yasmeen Abutaleb and Damian Paletta write in Nightmare Scenario: Inside the Trump Administration’s Response to the Pandemic That Changed History that the former-president wished for COVID to “[take] out” John Bolton.

Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost, from author Michael Bender, might have the most shocking claim yet, though. While visiting France in 2018 for the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I, Trump reportedly told then-chief of staff John Kelly that Adolf Hitler “did a lot of good things.”

Bender reports that Trump made the remark during an impromptu history lesson in which Kelly “reminded the president which countries were on which side during the conflict” and “connected the dots from the first world war to the second world war and all of Hitler’s atrocities.” Bender says unnamed sources reported that Kelly “told the president that he was wrong, but Trump was undeterred”, emphasizing German economic recovery under Hitler during the 1930s… Trump denied making the remark about Hitler.

Bender adds that Kelly told Trump that even if his claim about the German economy under the Nazis after 1933 were true, “you cannot ever say anything supportive of Adolf Hitler. You just can’t.”

Good advice. This was the same trip where Trump made disparaging remarks about U.S. soldiers, calling those who’ve died in combat “losers” and “suckers.” No wonder he was voted the worst living president (and fourth-worst overall).

(Via the Guardian)