Month: July 2021

Warning: The following article has spoilers for the 1980 film version of The Shining, so if you haven’t watched The Shining yet, please rectify that.
The Shining is not a holiday movie in the way, say, Independence Day or any number of Christmas movies are. But one pivotal moment from the Stanley Kubrick classic takes place over this holiday weekend, and eagle-eyed fans celebrated the 100 year anniversary of the Overlook Hotel’s July 4 bash this weekend.

In the film, the big turning point into chaos comes when Nicholson’s Jack Torrance, new caretaker for The Overlook Hotel, is revealed to have “always” been the caretaker there. Death and madness follow, and the film’s final shot is of Torrance at the center of a classic photo from the hotel’s July 4 party in the year 1921.

That, of course, is 100 years from Sunday. And avid film fans came together on social media to share that fun fact and (somewhat ironically) celebrate the holiday on social media.

There was even room for a recent meme to make a reappearance in honor of the big day.

Longtime Kubrick fans know more about that image’s history, but when it went viral again this weekend, some people shared details many may have missed. The infamous image from the film, for example, is a real photo from 1923 that was doctored to include Jack Nicholson’s face. That image, which is housed in the Stanley Kubrick Archive in London, was found in a book about photo retouching that revealed the anonymous man whose face was replaced to get the perfect final shot.

And as some pointed out, the pose Torrance has in the photo is made to look like The Devil card from a tarot deck. Given the remarkable attention to detail that Kubrick’s films had, it’s fitting that his biggest fans took a relatively small note from one of his very best works and made it part of their holiday celebrations. Let’s just hope they had a much safer holiday weekend than anyone at the Overlook likely had a century ago.

Despite its 13-year existence, the public continues to learn more and more about Britney Spears’ conservatorship, and more specifically, how the singer herself feels about it. During a court hearing last month, she labeled the court arrangement as “abusive” and pleaded for a judge to terminate it. While the conservatorship was not removed, the singer’s desire for its end was not hidden at all in the days leading up to the hearing.

According to an investigation conducted by The New Yorker’s Ronan Farrow and Jia Tolentino, Britney made a 911 call on the eve of the June 23 hearing to “report herself as a victim of conservatorship abuse.”

The publication confirmed the call thanks to a person close to the singer and law enforcement in Ventura County, California. Normally, emergency calls in California are accessible to the public, but the county sealed the records of the call citing an ongoing investigation. They added that the singer’s team began “texting one another frantically” as they were all worried about what Spears could say in court the following day.

The same report from The New Yorker also revealed that the conservatorship controls Spears so tightly that she was often forced to borrow phones from strangers at gyms and grocery stores.

“Last time she called me, she was at Ralphs, in Calabasas,” her former manager Sam Lufti said in the article. “After she hung up, I got a call from the same number — it’s an Asian doctor, who says, ‘Wow, this is surreal, Britney just borrowed my phone.’ Five years ago, she borrowed a phone at the gym and just made off with it.”

You can read the full piece on The New Yorker here.

Less than three months ago, Lana Del Rey shared Chemtrails Over The Country Club, the singer’s seventh album. It’s a project that arrived less than two years after her sixth effort, Norman F*cking Rockwell. The way the singer tells it, however, fans won’t have to wait nearly as long for her upcoming eighth album.

In fact, the full-length effort titled Blue Banisters was supposed to arrive in time for the Fourth Of July holiday, but it’s been pushed back to an unspecified release date. While the delay might be disappointing to fans, Del Rey shared a new cover art and teased an upcoming single to keep the excitement alive for Blue Banisters.

The new cover art for Blue Banisters now features an image of the singer sitting in between two dogs on a wooden deck over a white background with her name and the album’s title in black lettering. This replaces the previous cover that was much simpler compared to the more professional album artworks that could be found within her catalog. She also teased an upcoming song through a video of her singing in a room as the sun shined brightly behind her. “Album out later later… Single out soonish,” she captioned the video. “Have a good fourth x.”

As for when Blue Bannisters will arrive, that remains to be seen but for now, you can check out the new artwork and video of Del Rey singing the unreleased track above.

Just days before the 2021 NBA Finals tips off, ESPN has seen an explosive controversy made public stemming from events that occurred at last year’s championship involving two of the network’s stars, Rachel Nichols and Maria Taylor.

Sunday’s New York Times featured an expansive story from Kevin Draper about comments made privately by Nichols about Taylor being picked to host the network’s NBA Finals coverage last season. A recording of a conversation Nichols had reveals that The Jump host thought Taylor was picked to anchor Finals coverage instead of her because the network was “feeling pressure” about its “crappy longtime record on diversity” and not on merit.

“I wish Maria Taylor all the success in the world — she covers football, she covers basketball,” Nichols said in July 2020. “If you need to give her more things to do because you are feeling pressure about your crappy longtime record on diversity — which, by the way, I know personally from the female side of it — like, go for it. Just find it somewhere else. You are not going to find it from me or taking my thing away.”

The conversation was apparently recorded while Nichols was in quarantine in Florida ahead of entering the NBA’s Orlando bubble at Disney World. As Draper explained, a camera she used to continue appearing on ESPN during the quarantine period was apparently left on, with the recording getting uploaded to ESPN’s servers and discovered by someone working there. Part of that audio conversation between Nichols and a high-powered advisor, Adam Mendelsohn, was shared by the Times on Sunday after making its way around the network internally.

What resulted has been a nearly year-long simmering controversy, one that’s impacted the network’s NBA coverage as well as a contract dispute between it and Taylor. Her current deal reportedly ends in the middle of this year’s NBA Finals, which begin on Tuesday. The Times piece details how the audio leaked and the fallout it created, with ESPN president Jimmy Pitaro trying to diffuse the situation.

At one point, members of the NBA Countdown program debated whether they would appear on the program at all during this postseason. And the incident reportedly confirmed to several people of color in the organization that some were saying different things about diversity privately than they were in public.

The piece also gave context to an internal tug of war between Nichols and Taylor that followed, as the two were kept away from each other on air. Part of that included new rules put in place to keep sideline reporters off of The Jump, another NBA-centric show that Nichols hosted. That led to another lengthy internal debate with some notable names at ESPN at odds with one another.

On the preshow call involving the stars of the show and production staff in both Los Angeles and New York, Taylor insisted to an executive that she be able to conduct live interviews with sideline reporters. She also brought up the recorded phone conversation. Wojnarowski jumped in and called Nichols a bad teammate. Rose said that ESPN had asked a lot from Black employees over the past year, but that he and other Black employees would extend their credibility to the company no longer.

Taylor, whom executives had asked numerous times to change her interactions with Nichols, said that the only people punished by ESPN’s actions were women of color: Johnson, herself and the three sideline reporters — Lisa Salters, Cassidy Hubbarth and Andrews — who received lesser assignments so that Nichols could have the lead sideline reporter role and now were not being allowed to appear on the show live.

There’s a lot of details in the lengthy piece, which is a must read for sports fans even remotely curious about what’s happening at the biggest sports network on the planet. No one looks particularly positive in what’s clearly a complex reckoning with workplace relations, race, sex, and a very competitive work environment. There are a lot of individual moments that went viral in their own right on social media in the wake of the piece’s publication that, even with context, aren’t particularly postive for anyone.

In a recording of the video obtained by The New York Times, Nichols and Mendelsohn paused for a moment during the conversation after Nichols said she planned to wait for ESPN’s next move. Mendelsohn, who is white, then said: “I don’t know. I’m exhausted. Between Me Too and Black Lives Matter, I got nothing left.” Nichols then laughed.

Mendelsohn, throughout the conversation, strategized with Nichols about how she should respond to ESPN. “Be careful because that place is a snake pit,” he said. They considered a move that Mendelsohn described as “baller” but “hard to pull off”: telling Pitaro and others that having two women competing over the same job was a sign of ESPN’s wider shortcomings with female employees.

Nichols’ comments frame herself as “a victim of them trying to play catch-up for the same damage that affected me in the first place.” But the Times reported that Nichols did not receive any punishment from ESPN for the incident. In fact, apparently the only person to see discipline stemming from this controversy was a Black staffer who admitted to ESPN HR they sent the video to Taylor.

Now that this long-running controversy has been made public in a big way, it remains to be seen how ESPN’s coverage is impacted. But it will certainly bring new context to the drama taking place before the games even start on ABC later this week.

Between “Drivers License” and her official debut album, Sour, Olivia Rodrigo has seen a large amount of success in 2021. The young singer earned the respect of her newfound music industry peers like Taylor Swift, Kelly Clarkson, and Cardi B, but that’s not all. The singer also became extremely beloved by her fans and her latest accolade is proof of that.

A little over a month after releasing Sour, Rodrigo’s debut officially become Spotify’s most-streamed album of 2021 according to Pop Crave. The project posted 2.69 billion streams on the streaming platform, surpassing Justin Bieber’s Justice for the top spot this year to date.

The achievement comes after Sour spent its second nonconsecutive week atop the Billboard albums chart last week. After posting a total of 105,000 units sold, Rodrigo’s debut joined Morgan Wallen’s Dangerous: The Double Album as the only projects in 2021 to sell more than 100,000 units in each of its first five weeks on the Billboard 200.

On a more recent note, Sour becoming 2021’s most-streamed album on Spotify comes days after the singer released her Sour Prom concert film. The artsy visual captured the singer preparing for an elegant prom night with friends as records from Sour, which includes “Deja Vu” and “Good 4 U,” play at different points in the film.

You can revisit our review of Sour here. Sour is out now via Geffen. Get it here.

Chris Hansen made a career of ensnaring sexual predators on national television, but apparently that line of work got himself in trouble with the law this week.

According to the Associated Press, the former To Catch A Predator host turned himself in Michigan after an arrest warrant was issued for failing to appear in court to explain why he didn’t turn in video in a case of three men attempting to solicit underage girls for sex.

The story involves work Hansen is apparently did investigating a police sting operation in Michigan where three men were charged with trying to meet underage girls for sex. According to the AP, Hansen and a film crew were embedded with the investigators, and a judge associated with the case wanted to know why that video was not made available.

Chris Hansen, 61, checked in at the Shiawassee County jail in Corunna — 65 miles (104.61 kilometers) northwest of Detroit — was released and has 14 days to produce the full video, prosecutor Scott Koerner said.

According to Hansen’s lawyer, though, the warrant has been rescinded and the whole thing was a misunderstanding.

“He wasn’t intending to not appear or to be somebody that was trying to circumvent the process. It was just an unfortunate set of circumstances that resulted in a failure to appear,” he said, citing bad timing and confusion over a subpoena. Hansen, who hosts a YouTube show and a podcast, has a home in Michigan but primarily lives in New York, Perryman said.

Hansen and his team had provided an edited video, but a defendant wanted all of the footage in case there is any exculpatory information, he said.

Hansen himself seemed to echo that in an Instagram post this week, posting an image of the courthouse and claiming that “justice goes on!”

[via AP]

The 2021 NBA Finals are set. In one corner, the Milwaukee Bucks have finally, after years of coming up short, made their way through the Eastern Conference. In the other, the Phoenix Suns’ decision to go all-in by acquiring Chris Paul paid off when they finished their march through the West.

The number of fascinating subplots in this Finals — Giannis Antetokounmpo making his first Finals but going in with an injury, Paul finally getting over the hump, the Suns’ various youngsters making their ascents, Khris Middleton and Jrue Holiday getting Milwaukee over the finish line, etc. — will be examined in the coming days. But before that, we have an NBA champion to crown.

That someone is Torrey Craig of the Suns. You see, Craig played in 18 games for the Bucks earlier this year before getting traded to Phoenix, and as a result, the fine folks over at SB Nation noted Craig is eligible to receive a ring no matter what team ends up winning the whole thing.

This isn’t a new thing — then-Warriors big man Anderson Varejao was famously eligible to receive a ring from the Cavaliers after the 2016 Finals but declined — but it’s a fun coincidence for Craig, a very good role player whose wing defense was important in the Suns’ series against the Clippers. Having said that, we’re gonna go out on a limb and assume he’d rather win a ring than get one on a technicality from the team that moved him for cash considerations.

The Milwaukee Bucks took care of business on Saturday night despite missing their best player, taking down the Atlanta Hawks in Game 6 of the Eastern Conference Finals. The decisive road win set the matchup for the NBA Finals, and shortly after the final buzzer, we learned when the league’s championship series would begin.

Word circulated on Saturday night that the NBA Finals would start on Tuesday, July 6, with the Western Conference champion Phoenix Suns hosting Milwaukee at 9 p.m. EST. The rest of the series schedule came with that news, with all games airing on ABC.

The Finals will follow the 2-2-1-1-1 format, with the Suns hosting the first two games in Phoenix and the Bucks hosting Game 3 and 4, with the final three games (if necessary) alternating between home teams.

The biggest question remaining in the NBA’s marquee event is now the status of Giannis Antetokounmpo, the Bucks star who has missed the tail end of Milwaukee’s win in the Eastern Conference Finals with a hyperextended knee. The quick turnaround on the series gives the two-time NBA MVP just two days to rehabilitate the injury, and he was officially listed as doubtful for Saturday’s Game 6.

We’ll have to wait and see on his status, but at least we now know when to tune in to watch the drama unfold.

The Milwaukee Bucks will play for an NBA championship. Despite the fact that the team was without the services of Giannis Antetokounmpo as he’s working to bounce back from a hyperextended knee, Milwaukee walked into Atlanta and took down the Hawks in Game 6, 118-107, thanks to huge nights from their two stars who could take the floor.

Khris Middleton and Jrue Holiday came up absolutely gigantic when Milwaukee needed them most. Holiday was on his game all evening, mixing a very solid offensive night with the usual pesky defense that has made him such a good player throughout his career. His 27 points were his second-most throughout this postseason run, with nine assists, nine rebounds, four steals, and two blocks.

But when it came time for someone to create breathing room between the two teams, Middleton was masterful. Middleton fed the Hawks defense a steady diet of jumpers during the third quarter, as he scored 23 of his 32 points in the period. Like Holiday, Middleton stuffed the stat sheet, pitching in seven assists, four rebounds, and three steals.

And as is usually the case, a number of veterans who have never gotten to this point before did what they could to get the team over the hump. Pat Connaughton and Jeff Teague had 13 (with eight rebounds) and 11, respectively, off the bench, while Brook Lopez scored 13, Bobby Portis had 12 and nine rebounds, and PJ Tucker had five, although his only made triple on the evening was the dagger.

For Atlanta, the surprise of the night was the emergence of Cameron Reddish. After making his postseason debut in Game 2 following a four-month injury absence, Reddish had the best game of his young professional career. He competed admirably on defense, and on the other end of the floor, the former Duke standout was lights out from deep. He scored 21 points on 7-for-12 shooting from the field and a breathtaking 6-for-7 mark from three.

A heads up play late in the game breathed some light into the Hawks’ comeback attempt, as Reddish saw Clint Capela streaking down the floor after a turnover and fed him for a dunk.

But on the whole, it just wasn’t Atlanta’s night. Unsurprisingly, Trae Young’s foot injury was a major issue, as he scored 14 points on 4-for-17 shooting with no made threes, although he pitched in nine assists. Bogdan Bogdanovic did his best, scoring 20, with Clint Capela mixing in 14 points and both John Collins and Danilo Gallinari having 13.

Now, for the first time since 1974, the Bucks are headed to the NBA Finals. A major test is ahead of them, as the Phoenix Suns are the champions of the Western Conference, and it is unclear if Antetokounmpo’s knee injury will keep him from playing on the game’s biggest stage. We’ll have to wait a few days to find out — Game 1 of the NBA Finals will take place in Phoenix, and is scheduled to tip off on Tuesday, July 6 at 9 p.m. EST on ABC.

Ice Cube‘s Friday series is a classic, but the chances of getting another film in the series is apparently in doubt due to a dispute between the multi-hyphenate and the studio behind the series.

According to a Wall Street Journal story detailing the dispute, Ice Cube apparently wants Warners to surrender the rights to the Friday series as well as All About The Benjamins and The Players Club, two other films he made with the studio.

According to letters between the parties, Warner Bros. doesn’t intend to do this, instead blaming Ice Cube for dragging his feet on a new movie with the studio.

Warner Bros. replied, calling the demand “extortionate” and saying it won’t release rights to the valuable franchise or any other Ice Cube movies, according to the correspondence.

One letter from Ice Cube’s lawyer said the studio has been excessive in its feedback notes on the scripts Ice Cube wrote for the latest “Friday” and contends Warner Bros. has been a “poor steward” for the franchise. “These guys don’t get me, and I don’t get them,” Ice Cube said in an interview.

The report indicates that Cube’s other projects, such as the Big 3 basketball league, is distracting him from the next installment in the series, titled Last Friday. Meanwhile, the rapper and actor says potential discrimination in allocating resources is part of his issues with Warners.

In one letter, Ice Cube’s representative wrote that movies he has done for the studio “are habitually underfunded in comparison with projects featuring white casts and creative teams.” The correspondence points to other Ice Cube films he says weren’t well supported; it doesn’t offer specific comparisons to projects from other filmmakers.

Warner Bros. denies it has discriminated against Ice Cube or that it gave short shrift to any of his projects. In a letter sent in May to Ice Cube’s lawyer Bryan Freedman, the studio said the complaints are “grounded in a libelous set of knowing falsehoods.”

The disagreement between the two sides seems serious, and also doesn’t seem likely to be resolved anytime soon. Which means a sequel to Friday, which came out in 1995, isn’t on the horizon anytime soon. As the report noted, an agreement to make a new Friday movie was first signed in 2012. The story details some plot details the studio objected to, and the pushback that Cube gave about the film’s direction.

It’s all certainly been a long time coming, but fans are likely to have to wait even longer before any real progress is made on on Last Friday.

[via Wall Street Journal]