Month: July 2021

Noted golf cheat and failed blogger Donald Trump has a lot of time on his hands since getting kicked off of Twitter and also leaving the White House in shame. Like, apparently, using his taxpayer-funded post-presidential office to talk about how much better a golf tournament would be if he got paid to hold it at his course.

On Saturday, Trump fired off a press statement about the golf tournament he was watching, The Open Championship in the UK. While he called it “terrific,” he used the opportunity to talk about his own course in Scotland and how much better it all would be if the tournament had been held there.

Trump’s history with golf lately is troubled. Last year, the PGA voted to move its 2022 Championship away from Trump’s Bedminster golf course in New Jersey, the same place he may have infected a bunch of people while he was fundraising while ill with coronavirus.

While president, he also actually tried to get the British Open moved to his golf course in Scotland, which is inappropriate for a president to lobby for in several ways but also is a fairly absurd thing to think you can simply will into existence. It’s not exactly a great idea to amplify the words of Trump in any sense, as his influence has led to countless bad things and an insurrection attempt at his behest. But also: this is all very funny in a profoundly sad way.

Denver Nuggets wing Will Barton has been with the franchise since the 2014-15 season, and while he’s going to hit free agency this summer, both he and the team are optimistic he’ll be sticking around. According to reports by Adrian Wojnarowski of ESPN and Shams Charania of The Athletic, Barton declined to pick up the player option in his contract for the 2021-22 season, which would pay him $14.7 million.

Despite this, there is apparently optimism from both sides of the equation that Barton is not going to leave town, as the team and the player would like to work on a deal to keep him in Denver.

While Barton has been a reliable source of perimeter offense for the Nuggets over the years, injuries limited him this past season to 56 games, with 13 of his absences coming at the very end of the season. That carried into the postseason, where he missed all of Denver’s first round series against the Portland Trail Blazers before returning for Games 2-4 against the Phoenix Suns, all of which were Nuggets losses.

On the season, the 30-year-old Barton averaged 12.7 points, four rebounds, and 3.2 assists in 31 minutes per game while connecting on 42.6 percent of his shots from the field and 38.1 percent of his threes.

The Milwaukee Bucks will not have one member of their bench when they travel to Phoenix to take on the Suns in Game 5 of the 2021 NBA Finals. The team placed reserve forward Thanasis Antetokounmpo on the injury report ahead of the game and indicated that he will be out following his entry into the NBA’s health and safety protocols.

Antetokounmpo, the older brother of star Bucks forward Giannis Antetokounmpo, has only appeared in one game during the Finals, appearing for all of 93 seconds during the team’s Game 3 win in Milwaukee. He’s gotten some run this postseason as a high-energy option off the bench, or as a player who can give other frontcourt options a chance to catch their breath before media timeouts or the end of periods. Antetokounmpo appeared in 57 games this season, averaging 2.9 points and 2.2 rebounds in 9.7 minutes a night.

Outside of the fact that a player had to get placed in the protocols, Milwaukee is flying high heading into Game 5, having won each of the last two games to tie the series up at two games each. They have yet to win a game in Phoenix, though, and the Suns will have their eyes on defending their home court and moving one game away from a championship.

Game 5 between the Bucks and Suns is slated to tip off at 9 p.m. EST on ABC.

Kanye West has been in the news for a lot of things in the better part of the last year, but not always for his music. Last summer, the rapper announced he would release his tenth album, Donda. He even went as far as sharing a release date, that being July 24, a cover art, and the tracklist for the effort, but the day came and went without the album.

In addition to that, 2020 concluded without the arrival of Donda, but now it looks like it could dropping sooner than later.

Rapper Consequence uploaded a muted video of Kanye and Tyler The Creator working on music together in a studio. Tyler stands eagerly behind Kanye, who is wearing a mask that fully covers his face, as the two listen to music. Consequence captioned the post, “ConsTV Exclusive. Ye x Tyler. Epic Level. Summer 21′.” While he did not reveal what the two were working on, a whiteboard near Kanye and Tyler listed nine songs from the former’s upcoming Donda album.

Back in March, frequent Kanye collaborator Cyhi The Prynce revealed that the rapper had gotten back to work on Donda after a short break. “I think [West] started working on it late last year,” he said. “Once November, December, January comes around, he kind of takes a hiatus, a little vacation break, get with the family. We’re back working, that’s why I’m out here, too.”

You can view the video from Consequence above and check out the tentative tracklist to Donda below.

1. “Remote”
2. “Daylight”
3. “Jonah”
4. “Hurricane”
5. “No Chior Left Open”
6. “New Again”
7. “I Know God Breathed On This”
8. “24 / You’re Gonna Be OK
9. “Come To Life”

Bitcoin enthusiast and New York Knicks fan Spike Lee is known for many things, and a more dubious honor to add to his illustrious film career is spoiling the big winner at Cannes earlier than everyone there would have liked. The She’s Gotta Have It director was asked a question on Saturday and accidentally gave away the film festival’s biggest secret ahead of the official announcement, causing a bit of chaos on stage as a result.

The moment came when Lee was onstage with other judges and was asked through a translator which was said in English as follows: “can you tell me which prize is the first prize?”

The host meant for Lee to simply read off the first winner in the scheduled closing ceremonies, but he thought he was supposed to read off the “first prize” of the entire festival: the overall winner of the festival’s prestigious Palme d’Or. So he said “Titane,” which the Associated Press described as “a wild body-horror thriller featuring sex with a car and a surprisingly tender heart.”

“Wait wait no,” another judge says on stage, and the host and panel start to laugh.

In other words, Lee spoiled the ending of the closing ceremonies, and the film’s director, Julia Ducournau, didn’t even get to go on stage until the end of the program. This isn’t a Moonlight/La La Land moment, though: Titane was supposed to win. But that moment was supposed to come a bit later in the show, and it did get a laugh and a few extremely worried looks from the festival’s panel of judges onstage.

Thankfully everyone seemed to take it in stride, but it just goes to show that word choice is important, especially across languages.

2 Chainz is undoubtedly one of the most talented and popular artists on today’s hip-hop scene. His time as a musician dates back to the late 90s when we went by T*ty Boi, but he truly found success back in 2011 when he changed his name to 2 Chainz and released his official solo debut album, Based On A T.R.U. Story.

Since then, the rapper has continuously shared strong releases that were centered in the trap genre, dropping at least one project every year for fans since 2011. Now, after a decade’s worth of music as a solo act, it appears that the rapper wants to change things up.

In a tweet he shared with fans on Saturday, 2 Chainz said, “This [gon’] be my last trap album, enjoy.” The rapper will most likely continue to make music after the upcoming album, but listeners will probably see a change of direction sonically.

2 Chainz last released an album at end of 2020 with So Help Me God. The fifteen-track project sports guest appearance from Ty Dolla Sign, Kanye West, Brent Faiyaz, Latto, Lil Uzi Vert, Rick Ross, Lil Wayne, and more. Last year, the rapper also teased the release of Collegrove 2 with Lil Wayne, the sequel to their 2016 project. It’s unknown if this will be 2 Chainz’s final trap album or if it’s still a project slated for a future release.

You can check out 2 Chainz’s tweet above.

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

In case you’ve been living under a rock and somehow haven’t heard about Billie Eilish and her massive sophomore album, Happier Than Ever, just know that the young pop star is on a press tear to promote her latest body of work. But, the catch-22 when you’re someone of Eilish’s stature, and have been for several years already, is looking back on what those press cycles looked like in the past. In a recent interview with Vogue Australia, Billie admitted that some of the press she did as an even younger teenager still haunts her.

“I said so many things then that I totally don’t agree with now, or think the opposite thing,” she told the magazine in yet another extensive interview. “The weirdest thing is how nothing ever goes away once it’s on the internet. Every interview I did when I was 15 is still out there, and I think about it constantly. I did an interview where somebody said: ‘What are you doing when you’re not making music?’ And I said: ‘Even when I’m not making music, I’m making music.’ And actually, Lil Wayne said that in an interview and I just saw it and said it, too. And it’s not even true!”

Honestly, based on the stupid sh*t I said when I was 15, seems very reasonable for Billie to feel that way. Read the whole Vogue feature here.

Fresh off a massive pop-punk collaboration with her own inspirations, Avril Lavigne and Travis Barker, Willow is in a pretty punk mode herself. This past Friday she released that joint track “Grow,” and now she’s reinventing one of her own earliest singles. While performing “Whip My Hair” live — an electrifying, spruced up version of it, no less — the young star called a barber onstage during the middle of a wicked guitar solo. She pulled up a stool, sat down, and continued playing while the barber began to razor Willow’s hair off mid-song.

Given the lyrics of the song double down on whipping your hair “no matter if it’s long or short,” she’s definitely acting out her own words with the move. If it seems like Willow has been everywhere lately, well that’s because she has been. “Grow” was just one of the biggest and newest singles off her new project, Lately I Feel Everything, and the album also features plenty of other artist cameos, like Tierra Whack and Cherry Glazer, along with Barker on not one, not two, but three songs. She shaved her hair during the revitalized version of “Whip My Hair” that came out the end of a live set she produced to showcase the new music, deftly proving she’s an artist who knows how to learn and grow as she matures. Check out the epic clip above.

Earlier this year, Soulja Boy was sued for sexual battery, sexual assault, and false imprisonment by his former assistant who filed the lawsuit under the name Jane Doe. She claims to have started working with the rapper at the end of 2018 where things quickly turned for the worst after she began he position. While the two would escalate their relationship to a romantic one, which resulted in her moving in with him, a string of alleged assaults would occur afterward. The woman claims she was pushed out of a moving vehicle by the rapper in January 2019 and physically assaulted just a month later. Now the rapper must stay away from her thanks to a new order.

According to legal documents obtained by TMZ, Soulja Boy must stay away from his former assistant for the next three years thanks to a restraining order that a judge signed off on. The order was filed back in January, and while the lawsuit is still pending, the rapper agreed to the domestic violence restraining order, which expires on July 16, 2024.

Four months after the lawsuit from Soulja Boy’s former assistant was filed, the rapper’s ex-girlfriend filed a separate lawsuit against him while lodging sexual battery and domestic abuse allegations against him. She claims that she met the rapper in 2007 and was involved in a serious relationship with him from 2014 to 2019. She states the abuse dates back to 2015 and worsened to the point that she ended the relationship with him because she could “no longer stand the abuse.”

For some actors, getting out from under your biggest and best-known role can be difficult after that project ends. Sometime it’s as simple as hearing an infamous line from that movie or TV show from adoring fans on the street. But other times it can actually impact your career and typecast you into a certain kind of character.

For Jenna Fischer, who played Pam on The Office, the enduring success the show has seen on TV and streaming services has certainly been a blessing. But being known as Office Pam has apparently impacted her career in at least one particularly negative way.

As Deadline detailed, the subject came up on the ‘Office Ladies’ podcast, which features Fisher and fellow Office alum Angela Kinsey. As Fischer described it, she had been cast as Matt LeBlanc’s wife in a sitcom called Man With A Plan. But when it came to audience testing, the people watching apparently couldn’t see her as anything but Pam. And LeBlanc as, of course, his also wildly popular character, Joey, from Friends.

“They said — this is a literal quote, they said, ‘I don’t believe Pam would marry Joey. The chemistry doesn’t work between these two,’” Fischer told her Office Ladies co-host Angela Kinsey. “That was the feedback they got.”

“They could only see you as Pam and Joey?” asked Kinsey, who played Angela Martin on The Office.

“Yeah,” Fischer said. “So it wasn’t working for them that we got married and had a family.”

As Fischer told it, she actually found out in a pretty horrible way as well: just before upfronts in New York to introduce the show to the public.

“The first thing I said was, ‘Is [Man with a Plan] not getting picked up?’ And they said, ‘It’s worse than that, hun.’ And I was like, ‘What’s worse than that?’ They said, ‘It’s getting picked up, but without you.’ And I was like, ‘Wow, I guess I’ll unpack my suitcase.’”

Without Fischer, Man With A Plan ran for four seasons on CBS. And despite Fischer playing the role in the pilot, Liza Snyder was opposite LeBlanc during that run. It was disappointing to say the least, and Fischer hadn’t really detailed what went wrong on the show until now. But after nine seasons as one of the most notable secretaries (and love stories) on television, apparently fans just couldn’t see her as anything but Pam at that point in time.

[via Deadline]