Month: September 2021

Late last year, movie fans everywhere were devastated to learn that beloved, Academy award-winning actor Jeff Bridges (True Grit, The Big Lebowski, Iron Man) had been diagnosed with lymphoma. To make matters worse, the actor then revealed he had also tested positive for COVID-19 after coming into contact with it at the very hospital he was undergoing chemotherapy at. While all this news gave us quite the scare, as of today “new sh*t has come to light,” and it seems like at long last we can finally let out that big, collective breath we’ve all been holding since last October.

In a handwritten blog post Bridges published earlier today, the actor shared with fans an update on both his ongoing medical struggles, as well as his upcoming projects. According to Bridges, both his cancer and COVID diagnoses are a thing of the past, and life is generally looking pretty bright for the 71 year old star.

“My cancer is in remission — the 9” to 12” mass has shrunk down to the size of a marble. My COVID is in the rear view mirror. COVID kicked my ass pretty good, but I’m double vaccinated and feeling much better now. I heard that the vaccine can help folks with long haulers. Maybe that’s the cause of my quick improvement.”

Bridges then went on to share that he’s “excited to get back to work on The Old Man!,” an upcoming FX drama the actor is both starring in and producing that follows a former intelligence officer who is forced back into work after he learns someone is trying to assassinate him. Bridges wrote the show is “lookin’ good,” before offering readers a peek.

Assuming Bridges is in shape to get back to work, The Old Man is expected to keep its original 2022 release date. Either way, we’re just happy “The Dude” is healthy and will be around for a whole lot more “abiding.”

There were a few surprising results across the college football landscape on Saturday, from Oregon beating Ohio State in Columbus to USC getting dusted by a Stanford team that couldn’t score against Kansas State one week prior.

That latter result only further increased the chatter around the job status for head coach Clay Helton, who it feels like has been on the hot seat for the entirety of his seven year tenure with the Trojans, but every time it feels like he’s been headed for the exit, he and his team have rallied to a performance that has kept him around. This season, though, there was clearly far more urgency for the Trojans to turn things around and put together a strong season start to finish, which is why the 42-28 loss set off alarm bells in Los Angeles.

This time, Helton won’t have a chance to rebound late in the season and coach his way back into keeping his job, as USC announced on Monday that he had been fired and Donte Williams will be elevated to interim head coach.

Helton joined the Trojans in 2010 under Lane Kiffin and ultimately took over the USC program after Steve Sarkisian left in 2015, becoming the full-time coach in 2016, amassing a 46-24 record across six-plus seasons (plus a bowl win in 2013 as the interim head coach after Ed Orgeron resigned). The high point was their run from 2016-17 when they went 21-6 with a Rose Bowl win.

Last year they went 5-1 in the shortened season leading to high expectations for this season and after scuffling out of the gates to a rather pedestrian 30-7 win over San Jose State and then getting dominated by Stanford, the program has decided to move on from Helton. As is always the case when the USC job opens, it will be fascinating to see the candidate pool they can put together as it is one of the premier jobs in college football but does not have quite the same support as other elite programs. They have yet to find anyone who can get the Trojans back to where they were in the Pete Carroll era, but to start they need to figure out how to consistently be at the top of the Pac-12 again.

The cool thing about the Olympics or the Super Bowl or March Madness is that you don’t have to really know the sport you’re watching in any serious capacity to enjoy the show. It’s a grand finale, winner-takes-all, gladiator-style contest. Previous results mean nothing. You sit down, you watch, and you can see a champion crowned.

That’s pretty cool. It’s no wonder that college football started a playoff format back in 2014, the MLS changed over in 2019, and the NFL continues to tweak its setup.

Add to that list the World Surf League (WSL). Since 1983, back when it was called the Association of Surfing Professionals (ASP), pro surfing has been based on a total points system. And while that’s probably the fairest method to reflect the surfing someone does across a grueling season, packed international travel, it’s not exactly the most dynamic. To the point where it was quite common to see a champion crowned without having to win a single heat in the final event of the year. The WSL had counteracted this by putting the Pipeline Masters event, the #1 “bragging rights” contest in all of surfing, at the end of the tour, but the point remained — it wasn’t a structure that really allowed for casual fandom.

2021’s final — almost certain to be held Tuesday, September 14th at Lower Trestles in Southern California and streamed live on the World Surf League site and its YouTube channel — is a sort of hybrid. It honors the work of the #1 seed with a stairstep format of heats that all take place in a single day (both the men’s final and the women’s). It’s a bold setup that flings the door open to the casual fan who might just want to sit down and tune in to this one event.

As you can see, the whole structure is easy enough to understand. And the event itself is full of cool subplots that make for good viewing, even for the pro-surfing newcomer. Here are two of my favorites:

• Gabriel Medina is rich, successful, handsome, and surfs like he sorta hates the waves (but in a cool way). You can find articles about him potentially feuding or having a rivalry with most of the best surfers alive AND he’s having his dominance this season challenged via a format that he’s not particularly thrilled to be the test balloon for. Meaning that someone is going to face Medina, a famously chippy surfer, at a time when he has a very specific chip on his shoulder and is also supremely eager to win a championship. It’s all going to happen on a wave that favors his style nicely but his likely competition, Italo Ferreira, is also Brazilian and knows his surfing better than anyone else on the tour. Jesus, you couldn’t pay me to miss that.
• Steph Gilmore is in the running for the most “household name” surfer in this final event, because of her generation-spanning dominance. She won her first world title in 2007 and her seventh (!!!) in 2018. That’s… bananas. But to win the final at this event, she’d have to systematically take down three surfers (two of which are ranked higher than her at the moment) and then beat Carissa Moore, who has four world titles of her own since 2011 and just won gold at the Olympics. Could Steph pull off a series of upsets? Yes — she arguably understands how to surf with high stakes better than anyone. Will any of the field make it easy? F*ck no.

To preview the finale — stream it here throughout the day Tuesday, Spetember 14th — I spoke with the WSL’s Head of Competition, Jessi Miley-Dyer. Check out the following trailer for the event and see my full conversation Miley-Dyer below:

First and foremost, I want the newbie surf fan to understand that you guys have really in many ways created a prizefight environment where it’s a true five-way duel. As in five men and women step into the water; one man and one woman walk away champions.

It’s never been done that way in the WSL. Can you add some context there?

Winning in the water is… It’s such a big moment. And that’s for sure what we’re trying to do with this one-day event. Is to have a world champ and especially to have the men’s and women’s together. It has become hard to kind of understand how we’ve crowned world champions in the past, because of what we’ve had previously — these situations where someone’s reaching the pinnacle of their career and becoming the world champion, but they’re on the beach during the finals of the last event of the season.

This is a prizefight, as you say, winner takes all, that you’ve got to have that experience of winning in the water and kind of testing yourself against the other competitors on the biggest stage.

I think that’s so cool and I think it’ll do exactly what you want, which is bring surfing to a new audience and make it clear to people what the stakes are in every single moment and not have someone walk away and go, “Yeah, I just won this contest, but I actually, I was behind on points so the champion was crowned three weeks ago and… whatever.”

Totally.

Before we get to the plot lines of the contest, the WSL did something that not everyone knows about that is incredibly progressive — creating equal prize purses across genders. This felt like a proactive decision more than a reactive decision, at least from the outside in. Especially in a sport where, whether or not the biggest sponsorship deals have historically gone to women, women have been used to market the sport over the decades in ways that are both positive and exploitive. So anything less than financial equity feels egregious.

Can you speak about that and how powerful that is and how much support it got across both men and women among the top pros?

It sounds really corny, but you can’t even overstate how powerful and symbolic those kinds of decisions are. I look at other sports here in America and I watch soccer, and those women still striving to be paid the same. And so for surfing and for us as the WSL to publicly put up a really strong message out there — that we value the men’s and women’s competitors equally — it’s a really important one for us. And one that was hugely well received.

I had so many people in tears on the day, because they just didn’t think that they would see something like that happen. It’s amazing for the WSL. To have them stand next to each other at Trestles and be equals as world champions — it’s huge for us. I’m hoping that it’s one of those goosebumps moments for the next generation of young women who have been watching what we’ve doing in the sport because they’re going to see a really… what’s the word? It’s a really obvious visual of the two of them standing next to each other at the pinnacle of surfing.

I remember when that decision came down, that it had very vocal support from everyone and just has been so powerful and such a great way to show that surfing is progressive. There’s also been a lot more visibility with the Black surf movement — with a recent piece in the New York Times and a huge paddle out coming up. How do you see surfing evolving next?

Something that I’m going to spend a lot of time doing, particularly as we come into 2022, is that we are regionalizing the first tier of qualification. By doing that, we’re hoping to open up access to different communities for the pro tour.

What will happen now is that you can compete within your region no matter where you are and you will be able to stay close to home and not spend so much money having to travel internationally. There’s obviously COVID, which has made travel harder, but we know that when you’re coming from different places, it could be hard to get visas. There are all sorts of logistical kinds of pieces to international travel.

So what we’re doing now is, each region will have an allocation of men and women who will compete locally — whether or not it’s in your own country or the region more broadly. You will then be able to qualify into The Challenger Series, which is the new tier that we’ve created. And that’s how you’ll go on to the Championship Tour. The idea that you can stay close to home, live in your community, and then give it a crack to be out there in the Championship Tour.

I love that.

It’s really cool.

So moving onto the finale event, what big storylines do you see coming into this event for the newcomer — the new fan, who maybe doesn’t understand all the context and history, but wants to know some of those exciting stories that help them get invested?

When I’m looking at the one-day event and all of the kind of excitement around it, I really find… To be honest, I like your wording of this being a prizefight. The fact that we have the regular season, number one at the very top, waiting to be challenged for the world title, is something that I really get antsy about to watch because it’s going to be such an amazing moment. And everyone understands in pro sports, the idea of a challenger facing the leader.

When we’re looking at people in the first match in the men’s and women’s, we have Stephanie Gilmore who’s our most successful woman. We also have a rookie, Morgan Cibilic, and the fact that they going to have the chance to win their way through to get the right to challenge for the world title, I think is something that’s really cool for us.

Obviously, you mentioned Steph and just the endurance of excellence, the consistency of excellence. It’s amazing. Are there any other athletes that you want to preview for people?

We have Clarissa Moore and Italo Ferreira who are coming off their Olympic gold medals. So they’ll be here competing for the world title, and that’s a cool one for us. They’re also the defending world champions. And it was a proud moment too, for the WSL to see our champions take gold at the Olympics. It was an amazing achievement for them.

With Steph… It sounds crazy, but I think, to be honest, someone like Steph is most definitely the underdog to be winning the world title. The two in the yellow at the very top of a ladder, Gabriel and Clarissa, I think they’re very tough matchups.

Speak real quickly about Clarissa’s style on the wave.

Clarissa is an amazingly powerful surfer but technically, just very precise as well. And she really made a name for herself when she was younger by pushing all the boundaries of progression in women’s surfing. I remember watching her, I’ll date myself with my age, but I remember watching her as a 12-year-old and seeing her doing aerials and things, and I’ve never seen a young girl doing maneuvers like that before. So she’s always been at the very top of progression of the sport. And I think that as we come into a wave like Lowers [Lower Trsetles], for her to have that in her arsenal and her kind of little bag of tricks that she’ll pull out is something that’s immensely valuable on a day like that.

I’ve surfed Lowers a fair few times and I usually go out on days where people like your top five are not going to be there. I went out before a tour stop with Kelly Slater a couple of years ago and it’s a hyper-competitive environment. The waves were firing. I was out there with Kelly and Bethany Hamilton and just being amazed by them and never actually catching any waves, it’s such a fired-up environment. But speak to people about that wave and what that wave presents for people and what they can maybe see or expect to see. It’s not Tahiti, which is so monstrously heavy; it’s not Hawaii, where it’s a barrel wave all the time; but it’s… There’s a lot that people can do on Lowers — it’s an open door for linked maneuvers. Can you speak to that a little?

Lower Trestles is the most high-performance wave in California. It’s an A-frame peak, so a lot of people favor going right but, my other thing is that, when we look at Lowers, it’s just one of those canvases where people feel like they can do any turn that they want, and that’s why coming into the event, it’s really exciting because you kind of have the option to do all the big tricks. You have options to do air, you have options to carve. And it’s one of those waves where we’re not going to see big crazy barrels, like Tahiti, but what we are going to see is definitely high-performance surfing and it’s quite a long line too. So, you’ll definitely have… I think definitely we’ll see people kind of having to pull out the variety of the maneuvers as well.

Right, it’s a wave people will surf through to the end and link maneuvers together.

Totally. If you want to be the world champ you really going to have to surf that wave perfectly.

This exact finals lineup gives you some of the best aerialists in the world, do you… First of all, can you speak to people to help them understand how going into the air has revolutionized surfing and really shifted the entire, really the perspective of the sport, which I’m sure you grew up watching certain surfers who were power surfers and that has been decentralized as people who have gone into the air, but also just preview some of the aggression and some of the aerial moves that people might be taking a shot at?

Aerials have definitely changed surfing for sure, and the level of skill that people are bringing to some of these maneuvers, particularly the full rotation. We see someone like Italo Ferreira. He just… to have so much speed and power that is needed to launch yourself so high up… It’s kind of crazy, to be honest. And one of the things with the aerials, in particular, the men are doing is that the level of risk that is there, not only injuring yourself if you fall a little bit funny on the landing, but it also puts your entire ride at risk, which is why when people pull such huge ones off and then continue to ride down the line, it becomes these amazing kind of moments in sport because they’re basically… You only get as many waves as the ocean decides to give you or allows you at the time, so if you see someone just drive down the line like in lunatic and launch themselves 10 foot, 15 foot into the air, it’s like, “Oh, if I make it, it’s going to be a huge score but if I miss I’m in danger of losing the heat.” We’ve seen a couple of the men as well in the past very occasionally do a backflip. Gabriel did it quite famously in Brazil a few years ago. So it definitely is exciting to see the guys that really push it.

Just like the rest of us in this increasingly forsaken land, Lauren Boebert is apparently trying to find whoever’s responsible for putting her in Congress. And it seems after a lot of thinking she’s settled on it being God’s fault.

The U.S. representative from Colorado may not be long for her district’s seat, if recent public opinion is any indication, but according to perhaps the most notable politician who’s substituting gun affection for a personality, her qualifications for office begin and end with the word of the lord.

In a speech that Boebert gave on Sunday, she said it was not her GED that got her elected to office and making her fit to serve but the calling of a god that clearly doesn’t understand how the American federal government works at all. In the speech, Boebert asserted that God “called” to her to serve him in office and, lord almighty, she said yes.

“I had to say ‘Yes, God. I’ll do it.’ I’m not concerned about my education and the fact that I have a GED,” she said. “It didn’t matter that I wasn’t qualified in the world’s eyes, because God qualifies those who he calls.”

Honestly, when you put it like that it sounds like she didn’t have much of a choice.But it’s about as strong an argument against governing by theocracy anyone has ever conceived. Sure, there were once feudal kings plunging nations into chaos and rewriting bibles to suit their needs. But then there’s even thinking that a higher power’s invisible hand is guiding Boebert to clutch her guns and throw her masks and praise the Taliban in her never-ending quest to win the culture war. Good thing the lord’s vote only counts once, I suppose.

When Drake first revealed the cheeky, emoji-laden cover concept for his new album Certified Lover Boy, many fans weren’t sure if he was joking. Despite reportedly being designed by renowned modern artist Damien Hirst, the cover — which featured a symmetrical pattern of pregnant woman emojis in different skin tones and shirt colors — was derided by fans as being lazy and ridiculous. It also spawned a jaw-dropping, eye-rolling run of similarly themed memes, including one from Lil Nas X changing the emojis’ genders to fit his Montero announcement, but none of that stopped the album from going No. 1 on Billboard‘s album chart, so I guess Drake gets the last laugh.

Except that Drake always seems to be in on the joke, which means he probably knew the troll-ish cover was likely to annoy his fans — if anything, that may have been its intent, considering how closely tied Drake’s rollout was to Kanye’s, which culminated a week earlier in the release of Donda. Today, Drake has been sharing some alternate cover designs on his Instagram, including their designers’ information. In addition to providing a peek at what some more straightforward takes on the album’s theme would have looked like, the trove also gives those fans who were miffed or turned off by the emoji cover to replace it with some less goofy options in their personal music libraries.

Included in the designs are works from veteran comics illustrator Milo Manara, photographer Luis Mora, and a gussied-up second pass of Hirst’s original. Check out Drake’s alternate Certified Lover Boy covers below.

One of the things that make superheroes who they are is they traditionally handle saving the world in a very clean manner. They try to not kill if they can help it, help every civilian in need, and want to make sure that they help the citizens of the area they’re protecting feel, well, safe and protected. This is a large part of why they’re so marketable to children, because the violence tends to be over the top action with bad guys typically being knocked out rather than killed — or, at least, leaving it very vague. However, not every hero falls into this mold.

Some heroes are inherently more violent, do not have qualms with killing anyone who gets in their way, and have an ends justify the means mindset. One hero who sometimes falls into this area of supering is the X-Men’s Wolverine. With a brutal backstory, metal claws, and near-immortality there have been many different versions of this Marvel hero. Cartoons, and the movies from the early 2000 to mid 2000’s, had him as a gruff but still fairly clean hero. While other versions of him have explored his more violent tendencies, particularly Hugh Jackman’s goodbye to the character in the R-rated Logan. The upcoming PlayStation 5 game, Marvel’s Wolverine, appears to be falling into the latter category.

The developer of Marvel’s Wolverine, Insomniac is coming off two major hits with Marvel’s Spider-Man and Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales, and both games were rated T for Teen. However, they fall on the lighter side of a Teen rating because while there are some mature subtexts here and there, most of both games is fairly accessible to a younger audience. Marvel’s Avengers and Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy, developed by Square Enix, both receiving T for Teen ratings, and many felt it would be fair to assume that the upcoming Wolverine game would be doing the same. Not exactly! While he didn’t give away too much information, creative director for the game Brian Horton sent out a Tweet about what tone we can expect Wolverine to have.

Simple and to the point! While it might seem obvious that Wolverine would have a mature tone, because it’s Wolverine, we have to consider how all the other Marvel games have been rated so far. They’ve been made to be accessible to a wider audience with Teen ratings. If this game’s rating matches its tone then this would likely be the first Marvel game to receive a mature rating since Deadpool received one in 2013, and definitely the first since they started taking more of an active role in the licensing of their games.

Y: The Last Man (FX on Hulu) — The acclaimed graphic novel gets its due as a dystopian TV drama starring Diane Lane as the globe’s de facto president. Her son becomes, as the title suggests, the very last man on Earth following an apocalyptic event that pretty much obliterates the Y chromosome. FX recently made it known that although the Y appears to refer to the chromosome, the show will take a nuanced approach and not operate on a merely gender-binary level. It also won’t adhere to the biological definition of gender and, instead, will also represent trans characters in accordance with a GLAAD collaboration and a clear affirmation (as showrunner Eliza Clark recently declared) “that trans women are women, trans men are men, nonbinary people are nonbinary, and that is part of the sort of richness of the world we get to play with.”

Reservation Dogs: (FX on Hulu) — Taika Waititi’s FX on Hulu followup to What We Do in the Shadows brings us a comedy series that’s co-written by Native American filmmaker Sterlin Harjo. Yes, the lead quartet in this show rocks suits that look strikingly similar to the characters of Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs, yet they’re four Indigenous teens who fight crime and also commit it. The show (which has some Atlanta vibes) was shot in and near Okmulgee, Oklahoma. This week, Elora Danan, uh, takes her driver’s test. A little late?

Roswell, New Mexico (CW, 8:00pm) — Maria’s enlightened by new information and Liz is looking for help while two others team up to rescue Max.

Late Night With Seth Meyers — Sarah Paulson, Machine Gun Kelly, José Medeles

In case you missed these weekend picks:

Lucifer: The Final Season (Netflix series) — The Devil is back for one last dance-of-a-rodeo in Season 6, and naturally, Lucifer Morningstar is still a total pain in the tush, and you’ll love him for it. Fortunately, he’s no longer attempting to be a detective. Lucifer is now God (don’t ask), and if he doesn’t get with the new program, he’s liable to trigger the apocalypse of all apocalypses. This is one last, fan-requested hurrah for a Netflix-resurrected series, and Neil Gaiman’s creation will live on in fans’ hearts and, most likely while resolving that Unresolved Sexual Tension, their pants as well.

Kate (Netflix film) — Granted, this movie sounds a whole lot like Crank (those infamous Jason Statham flicks), but it’s got Mary Elizabeth Winstead kicking enormous ass, so are we really complaining about derivative stories here? Nope. Here, Winstead stars as the title character, who’s taking revenge upon a criminal organization after being poisoned and only having 24 hours to live. Woody Harrelson’s also on board here, and let’s hope that Kate gains some vengeance against her killers before the clock expires.

Just a few days removed from the release of his debut album, The Melodic Blue, Las Vegas rapper Baby Keem has released the music video for its latest single “First Order Of Business.” Opening on a shot of Keem sitting solo in a sparsely decorated living room, the rapper is asked what his favorite trait in a woman is. “Loyalty, off the top,” he answers. Then he reveals that his “first order of business” upon making his first million dollars went toward buying his grandmother a house. From there, the video actually portrays the event in question, as well as views of Keem cuddling with a female companion and racing a Porche through the desert.

The Melodic Blue dropped Friday after a lengthy building that increased expectations and excitement with each new single release. In a rollout as smooth as just about any seen for a hotly-tabbed new artist like Keem (a 2020 XXL Freshman with a blood relation to rap royalty), Keem dropped videos for “Durag Activity” featuring Travis Scott and “Family Ties” featuring his cousin Kendrick Lamar, then debuted the final pre-release single “Issues” on The Tonight Show before releasing a similarly-themed video the night the album came out.

Watch Baby Keem’s “First Order Of Business” video above.

The Melodic Blue is out now via Columbia Records. Get it here.

It’s been 18 years since the last The Matrix movie. Considering the disappointing reaction to the sequels and sister/co-director and writer Lilly needing “time away from this industry,” you could understand Lana Wachowski not wanting to return to the world of Neo and Trinity. But she found the inspiration to make The Matrix Resurrections (which brings back Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss) as a way to channel her grief.

“My dad died, then this friend died, then my mom died,” Wachowski said (via Indiewire) while speaking at the International Literature Festival Berlin, alongside co-writers Aleksandar Hemon and David Mitchell. “I didn’t really know how to process that kind of grief. I hadn’t experienced it that closely… You know their lives are going to end and yet it was still really hard. My brain has always reached into my imagination and one night, I was crying and I couldn’t sleep, and my brain exploded this whole story.”

She said that she “couldn’t have my mom and dad, yet suddenly I had Neo and Trinity, arguably the two most important characters in my life. It was immediately comforting to have these two characters alive again… This is what art does and that’s what stories do, they comfort us.”

The Matrix Resurrections comes out on December 22.

(Via Indiewire)

Lil Nas X’s “Industry Baby” video continues to cause controversy for its explicit content but when one parent decided to complain about the video’s prominence on her YouTube search, Nas had to remind them how search functions work. Other Twitter users joined in, pointing out that YouTube already has parental control functions to prevent small children from seeing inappropriate content — and while it’s far from a perfect feature, it’s probably well capable of keeping Nas’ gyrations aware from concerned parents, with just a little more effort than taking screenshots and posting angry messages on a completely different platform.

“This was the THIRD video that popped up when I searched ‘Baby videos’ on YouTube,” read the original complaint. Ordinarily, that’d be enough to garner some sympathy, but the next line kind of belied the bad faith argument the user was actually trying to make. “How much more proof do people need that they are after our kids???” Nas, who is pretty much the Shang-Chi of Twitter trolling, expertly reversed the argument with a sarcastic quote-tweet, highlighting that merely searching “baby videos” might not be the most effective method of finding quality kids’ programming.

“BREAKING NEWS,” he joked. “Local woman shocked that search results for ‘baby’ included videos with baby in the title.” Other users were quick to point out that YouTube has a wholly separate app, YouTube Kids, to circumvent exactly this concern. “Just say y’all not attentive parents and move on,” one jabbed.

Meanwhile, the phrasing of the bad faith questioning “that they are after our kids” — implying that evil gay people are out to brainwash children into … being gay, I guess? — echoed more conspiracy nonsense recently spouted by Louisiana rapper Boosie. However, true to form, Nas disarmed that line of reasoning just as deftly on last night’s MTV VMAs as he won the award for Video Of The Year for “Montero (Call Me By Your Name),” shouting out the so-called “gay agenda” in his cheeky acceptance speech. Check out more responses to YouTube’s parental control policies below.

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