Month: October 2021

One of the highlights of 2016, as I barely remember it (people, the past two years have really been something) was when the Internet made the case that Ted Cruz may be the Zodiac Killer. I mean, c’mon. It will never not be funny that someone baselessly claimed that Cruz went on a tour of terror, years prior to his on 1970 birth, and it was such a harmless, preposterous meme that it was fine to run with it. After all, have you ever seen Cruz and the Zodiac Killer in the same place at the same time? I thought so.

Well, Cruz never denied being the Zodiac Killer, so I think you all know what I’m thinking about this. So, it really came as quite a blow to learn that, this week, an independent cold-case group known as the Case Breakers said that they solved the Zodiac Killer’s identity. They believe that Gary Francis Poste, who died in 2018, is the actual serial killer who also inspired that David Fincher movie starring Robert Downey Jr. Well, the group based their claim on “forensic evidence and photos from Poste’s darkroom” and “scars on his forehead that similarly matches scars on a sketch of the Zodiac.” Also, Fox News quoted one of Poste’s former neighbors who was like, “[I]t all kind of makes sense now.”

Well, there’s probably chain-of-custody issues that will could prevent this new “evidence” from going anywhere. In fact, the FBI would not acknowledge the claims to CNN following an inquiry while declaring, “The Zodiac Killer case remains open. We have no new information to share at the moment.” And Ted Cruz, interestingly enough, decided to retweet coverage with a Dr. Evil GIF and no further commentary.

Oh c’mon, Ted. He’s loving the attention, obviously, and he previously joked (following his Cancun debacle), “Look, I haven’t had this much negative press coverage since Northern California in the 1960s.” Oh look, Ted tweeted an RDJ GIF, too.

Good day for Ted Cruz, I guess? It must be noted that a law enforcement spokesperson in Riverside County, California threw some cold water on the Case Breakers’ claim that Francis Poste also killed a woman (Cheri Jo Bates) in their jurisdiction. The PD declared that Zodiac definitely did not kill Bates, so hmm, that’s quite a wrinkle in the Case Breakers’ whole argument. And the search for the Zodiac Killer continues… while Ted Cruz roams free.

Brendan Fraser’s supposedly making a comeback, or a Brenaissance. You may have heard as much. Those are strong words, too, because they presuppose that Fraser went somewhere and emerged, fully formed, into Martin Scorsese’s new project, Killers of the Flower Moon, that’s currently shooting in Oklahoma. News of that casting met with dramatic results. People were incredibly happy for Fraser to land this role, years after his career ceased to flow like gangbusters, during a period when Fraser had a lot going on otherwise. For one thing, he believes that he was blacklisted from Hollywood following alleged sexual misconduct by producer Peter Berk. For another, Fraser’s suffered some injuries that required surgery. He’s been through some sh*t and recently, Fraser grew visibly moved upon hearing that people were rooting for him.

Well, the thing is, Fraser never completely disappeared. Sure, the blockbuster roles faded — yet people still remember how charismatic he was in The Mummy, George of the Jungle, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Airheads, Bedazzled, and so on — but he’s been regularly acting in smaller gigs. There’s also a fantastic role that Fraser picked up a handful of years ago. And it’s a role that he is absolutely crushing. If you’ve ever considered yourself to be a Brendan Fraser fan, you’d be doing yourself a genuine disservice if you didn’t indulge in this one.

I’m talking about Doom Patrol, the DC Universe show that got picked up by HBO Max and is now streaming its third season. It’s a show about f*cked up, misfit superheroes and stacked with a wonderful cast including Matt Bomer, who gives a layered portrayal of a gay superhero, the bandaged-up Negative Man (Matt Bomer), and Diane Guerrero as 64 incarnations of Crazy Jane (including a Karen before her time). Y’all, Diane is phenomenal and gets to do so much more than play the cliché that we saw in Orange Is the New Black, but we’re here to talk about Brendan Fraser.

He’s a guy who’s adept at being funny and using his physicality, often using his looming size (along with exaggerated facial expressions) to advantage for stunts, like swinging from vines, and he wasn’t afraid to push things for action pictures like The Mummy to his eventual detriment. In 2018, Fraser told GQ that he really f*cked up his body in movies. Knee and back surgeries are no joke and probably made him long for the days when Weezing the Juice in Encino Man was the most dangerous move on the agenda. Action and comedy aside, though, Fraser has also taken dramatic turns, as with Crash and Gods and Monsters, which proved that he could have lot going on under the surface.

With Doom Patrol, Fraser gets to do it all in an unusually hefty voice role:

– He gets to be tragic and angry and funny and frustrated and soft and harsh and caring and, paradoxically, very human, despite his character enduring a living nightmare in a robot’s body. He’s the tin man with a heart, kind-of, only that we’re talking about a brain.

– Fraser portrays a former race car-driving superstar, Cliff Steele, who suffers a tragic, seemingly life-ending accident. His body is destroyed (and there are particulars that I don’t want to spoil here), but Dr. Niles Caulder is able to extract Cliff’s brain, which he places into a robot’s body. This transforms Cliff into Robotman and, of course, technically preserves Cliff’s “life” and gives him superhuman strength and all that jazz, and makes him virtually indestructible. Yet what kind of life, really, is Cliff able to enjoy?

– Cliff can see and hear through Caulder’s engineering, but he can’t feel anything. And I’m not talking about emotions here. There are plenty of those when Cliff sorts out residual feelings about his wife or attempts to reconnect with his daughter. Rather, I’m talking about the sense of touch. Cliff can no longer reach out and pet a dog, for example, or touch a person and feel anything. Nothing tactile registers to him. It’s enough to drive anyone crazy, and it’s a heartbreaking realization for viewers to witness. Physical sensations are foreign now; he can’t orgasm (though he can fake it). That’s a source of comedy, sure, but even Cliff’s memories of tactile sensations are fading:

“You know how they say the longer you’re away from people, the harder it is to remember what they look like? I have that but with sensations. I used to hold my arm out when it was raining, feeling the drops hit my skin. I remember doing that but not the feeling. Running my hands through my wife’s hair. In my head, I know it felt amazing. But I don’t know at the same time.”

– Not being able to feel sensations would be difficult for any actor to fathom. However, it’s particularly impressive because Fraser’s most endearing turns on film usually saw him engage in high physical comedy. In Doom Patrol, he’s doing the opposite. His character’s physicality, or should I say, the non-physicality of it all, opens the hatch to a great deal of emotion that he must communicate with only his voice; for the most part, we don’t actually see Fraser in this show, beyond racing flashbacks. It must also be noted that Fraser has given credit where credit is due to his character’s robotic movements. That’s actually Riley Shanahan inside of the suit, as Fraser revealed while reuniting with Scrubs-stars-turned-podcasters Zach Braff and Donald Faison during an episode of Fake Doctors, Real Friends:

“[Riley] is a wonderful comedic performer with fantastic timing, and he is full-on playing the character through a mask. He does the heavy lifting there… It’s like a dream job. Somebody else wears the thing, shows up for you, and in recent months I don’t even go in the studio. I can do ADR on a cell phone.”

Yet Fraser downplaying what he is really doing here. This can’t be an ordinary voice gig. This doesn’t roll out like what Chris Rock described as his typical voice work process while presenting at the Oscars. According to Rock, his experience is what one would ordinarily perceive: he stands in a booth and repeats a few lines (while playing a Madagascar zebra with the boisterous version of Chris Rock’s own personality), and “they pay me a million dollars!”

The voice work required to play Cliff/Robotman seems much more intense. Imagine how difficult it would be to portray someone who cannot feel sensations. Cliff’s consciousness is stuck in a robot body, possibly forever. It’s hell, and he’s frustrated as f*ck while also helping to save the world. It’s a lot of work to be able to express that anguish and balance all those moods, through only a voice when one is also trying to communicate everything that Cliff’s also feeling inside of his soul. It’s a disembodied portrayal, by nature, and Fraser, a very physical actor, must convincingly run the gamut of moods as Riley pulls off Cliff’s often-stilted movements, whether that’s while dancing or perching on a curb while Fraser purges all of that emotion.

To Fraser’s credit, he expresses Cliff’s frustration and anguish (and his crudeness) while still injecting humor. Metaphorically, he’s swinging from vines here, and you can hear it in his voice. It’s nuts, how he pulls it off, working out his rage by dropping enough f-bombs to rival Sam Jackson. Cliff’s failingly macho struggles come to a surprisingly poignant place, as well, which illustrates the careful, almost precarious balance achieved by the writers. Cliff Steele is a group effort, for sure, yet it’s Fraser’s emotional execution that makes him work (and makes Cliff a believably better person, in time).

Granted, I’m really laying things on thick here, but Doom Patrol deserves all the accolades for being ahead of its time (in comic-book form) and lovingly rendered onscreen by Warner Bros. And Fraser’s role, as he portrays it, feels authentic and earnest. I’m not sure whether this is happening because Fraser has experienced plenty of wars against his own body, and he’s gone through some hell. Yet he’s really doling out even more than Cliff Steele, at least as he was as a human, deserves. Yet that’s the beauty of it all. Fraser’s performance in Doom Patrol is unexpectedly transcendent. He’s at the top of the mountain, man, hacking into consciousness from inside a robot bod. Robotman’s a tough gig, and Fraser’s gonna crush that Scorsese role, too.

‘Doom Patrol’ is currently barreling through Season 3 on HBO Max.

After nearly two years of dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic, many states are still seeing record-high numbers of infections and hospitalizations. Why? Simple: Vaccinations, you dumb f*ck! On Wednesday night, Jimmy Kimmel gave his viewers an update on the COVID situation in America right now—and in California in particular. “A lot of people want to know why COVID numbers are so low here, and experts believe it’s because we haven’t had a Kid Rock concert in California since August of 2018,” Kimmel joked.

After putting up a COVID map of community transmission rates, Kimmel pointed out how California and Connecticut were the only two states not in the bright red danger zone. And he has an idea as to why that is: While the nationwide average of fully vaccinated adults is only about 57 percent, “more than 80 percent of eligible Californians are vaccinated,” Kimmel explained. “And many who are not are taking to the streets now to protest mandatory inoculation.”

Kimmel then showed footage of the scene right outside his studio, “where one loud anti-vaxxer got a hard clapback from a man living on the streets.” In it, a small group of clearly clueless anti-vaxxing “protestors” decided to cite the homeless population as part of their argument for why vaccines are unnecessary. Here’s how that went:

Protestor: Do you see all these homeless people around? Are they dead in the streets of COVID? Hell, no! Why?

Homeless Man: Because I’m vaccinated, dumb f*ck.

“She did ask why,” Kimmel pointed out.

You can watch the full exchange above, beginning around the 1:30 mark.

Tucker Carlson is not prone to gushing. But every so often, someone impresses the Fox News host enough with their intellect that he has to give credit where it’s due. While interviewing Andrew Yang for his daytime talk show Tucker Carlson Today, Mediaite notes that Carlson took a few moments to lavish some praise on… Ted Kaczynski. Yes, the Unabomber. The math professor-turned-hermit who spent nearly two decades living in the woods and mailing homemade bombs to dozens of people.

So just how did a conversation with Yang, who is best known for his plan to give every American adult $1,000 per month as part of his 2020 presidential bid, turn toward domestic terrorism? It all comes back to Yang’s recent decision to cut ties with the Democratic party and form his own third party: the Forward Party. When Yang expressed his concern that a two-party system is not tenable, Carlson agreed—and noted that:

“Ted Kaczynski, I have to say, has written very convincingly on this. The Unabomber. Bad person, but a smart analysis, I think, of the way systems work. His argument is that large organizations order time morph into purely self-preservation projects. A big system in the end protects itself and that’s kind of all it does.”

We’d like to think that Kaczynski was listening and appreciated the shout-out, but he’s serving out a life sentence for killing three people with his homemade explosives and injuring nearly two dozen more.

(Via Mediaite)

After months of teasing, Charli XCX is finally kicking off a new era. A month ago, she got things started with the new single “Good Ones,” and now she has brought the track to TV with her performance on The Tonight Show yesterday.

In the song’s original video, Charli finds herself dancing through a goth funeral before making her way to cemetery and continuing to strut her stuff among the headstones. Her Fallon performance is essentially a re-creation of the latter scene, as she performs the track in a spooky, smokey graveyard setting.

Unlike the previous night’s Tonight Show performance, Jimmy Fallon didn’t join Charli XCX’s band.

Charli previously said of the song, “This song is essentially about always kind of running away from people who are good for you and running towards the people who are dangerous, you know? Kind of going for bad people and maybe it’s because they’re a bit more fun and exciting… but also bad for you. And I think that’s something that everyone’s sort of been through at some point, maybe… I hope its not just me.”

Watch Charli perform “Good Ones” above.

Charli XCX is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

The NBA kicked off its preseason this week and fittingly, like a younger sibling tagging along, Jr. NBA Week will start Saturday. It’s the seventh year that Jr. NBA, the league’s global youth basketball program for boys and girls, has devoted a week to celebrating and promoting some of its unique partnerships and initiatives, and this year, the focus is on getting kids back on physical courts.

“I’ll say in particular this year, we felt an urgency to focus on expanding opportunities for boys and girls to participate in our sport and to make sure we were providing access in an equitable way,” David Krichavsky, Senior Vice President and Head of Youth Basketball Development at the NBA says over the phone. “And that really comes off the experience of the past 18 months and the COVID-19 pandemic, when sports were taken away from young people. And really, the experience of the past 18 months as well shined a bright light on the lack of equity across communities, including access to sport.”

It was in examining where that lack of equity stemmed from that helped to guide Krichavsky and Jr. NBA to partnerships with Girls Leadership and Laureus Sport for Good, along with the new initiatives with these organizations designed to remove barriers to participation in youth basketball.

One especially troubling statistic emerging from the pandemic’s effect on youth participation in sports overall is that kids from low-income houses are quitting sports at six times the rate as those from high-income homes. By the age of 14, girls drop out of sports twice as often as boys. As such, the partnership with Girls Leadership, a non-profit leadership development organization that teaches girls to exercise the power of their voice, feels especially urgent.

“We have had, since 2018, our Her Time to Play program, which is a program in partnership with the WNBA to provide girls opportunities in the sport of basketball and women increased opportunities to coach youth. And we’ve had a tremendous amount of success with that program,” Krichavsky says, adding, “but have a new partnership with Girls Leadership that’s intended to provide enhanced curriculum, also very much focused on social and emotional learning and leadership development.”

That program is targeted to reach 20,000 girls over the next NBA season, increasing and enriching girls and young women’s engagement in sports. One part of that enrichment is poised to come from an effort to go full-circle on who youth first encounter organized play from. In partnership with Laureus Sport for Good, an organization focused on improving the lives of young people through sports, Jr. NBA will launch an online training program for youth basketball coaches, organizers, and educators focused on curriculum that includes social and emotional learning, leadership, and player-coach relationships.

“What we thought was a really important point of opportunity and expansion for us,” Krichavsky says, noting Jr. NBA’s existing suite of resources developed to support coaches, “was giving coaches tools to develop their players off the court. And so this online training with Laureus has really focused on social and emotional learning, and helping coaches educate their players around issues like leadership and mental health and building empathy and collaboration with their teammates.”

Krichavsky referred to the new initiatives with Girls Leadership and Laureus Sport for Good as two pillars out of the groundwork his team used to develop Jr. NBA’s new partnerships and their desired impact, with the third being perhaps the most important.

“The third pillar really comes from the fact that schools give us the greatest opportunity to reach the largest number of youth,” Krichavsky stresses. “We’ve had a number of programs in the school setting previously, but we’ve doubled down on that commitment and we’ll be reaching an additional 3,000 elementary and middle schools in the year ahead, again with enhanced resources and curriculum to support basketball in the PE setting, as well as the afterschool setting.”

It makes sense — to reach the youth who have been shut out of sports over the course of the pandemic, whether through barriers to access or as fallout of fielding the pandemic itself, the most direct way is to bring basketball to them. To do so, Jr. NBA uses an existing network of non-profits to help identify schools across the U.S. with basketball programs that are looking to do more.

It’s on that note that I’m prompted to ask Krichavsky, personally, what excites him most about these new initiatives and the work Jr. NBA is doing. His answer is two-fold, and fits the ethos of these new partnerships and initiatives perfectly, though it’s entirely personal.

He immediately touches on the concentrated efforts in these programs to reach and impact girls, adding that he’s a dad to two young girls himself, and brightens as he notes that Jr. NBA’s first in-person event since the pandemic began will be taking place Sunday, the day after Jr. NBA Week starts, with an outdoor event in New York at Brooklyn Bridge Park focused on play in accordance with the NBA’s health and safety protocols as well as life skills and off-court development.

“All the kids will be masked and we’ll be playing in accordance with the protocols designed by our NBA health and safety team,” Krichavsky says, noting that as successful as Jr. NBA At Home program was, “we’re all very, very excited to get back out there and hear the bouncing ball in person.”

Spice Girls are planning to celebrate the 25th anniversary of their debut album, Spice. They recently inked a deal with Universal Music group’s Bravado division, and according to Music Week, they will be responsible for their brand, merchandising, direct-to-consumer products and campaigns, touring, as well as their retail licensing and distribution. The band unveiled their first line of merch, entitled “Wannabe 25,” on their website. Items for sale include a special mug, an anniversary hoodie, and a vintage “Wannabe” t-shirt. The prices for these products range from about $16 to $68

There’s also, of course, a re-release a 25th-anniversary reissue of Spice. The new project, titled Spice25, will be curated by the band themselves and be released on October 29 as a 2CD set. Music Week also notes that the band’s deal with Bravado marks the first time in two decades licensing rights across all channels were assigned to a single partner. The new partnership will see new products and capsule collections delivered globally to retailers.

“We are so excited to be working with Bravado again, especially in this our 25th anniversary year and are looking forward to collaborating with the team,” Spice Girls said in a joint statement about the partnership. Richelle Parham, president of global e-commerce and business development at UMG, also spoke about the partnership.

“We are thrilled to partner with the Spice Girls, to create new and exciting product lines and to expand the band’s connection directly with their loyal superfans,” Parham said, before adding, “Bravado will work closely with UMG operations around the world on the launch of Spice 25 and beyond, to expand their legacy and cultural impact for years to come.”

The Golden State Warriors are hoping to get themselves back into title contention this season after two years of being out of the playoffs. There’s plenty of reason for optimism with Stephen Curry is coming off of a season where his performance down the stretch earned him MVP buzz and Klay Thompson’s eventual return to the lineup after ACL and Achilles injuries cost him the past two seasons.

Last year also saw the return of Draymond Green seemingly being everywhere, all the time on defense, which will again be critical to the Warriors regaining contender status. Part of Green’s value is the way he flies around and covers for mistakes others make, but this also leads to him living on the edge of being in control. We have seen on plenty of occasions what can happen when he loses that control, and unfortunately for Austin Rivers, that happened on Wednesday night in preseason action between Denver and Golden State when the Nuggets guard took a flying knee from Draymond to the ribs on a closeout.

This is, I guess one could say, vintage Draymond, as his propensity for legs flailing about became a huge story back in 2016 when he was suspended for a game in the Finals for it. This is Green’s essence though, selling out so fully on a contest in the preseason that he can’t help but try to do anything to stop Rivers once he recognizes it’s a shot fake, even if that thing is sticking his leg out and ultimately kneeing Austin in the ribs.

Rivers would stay down for a bit, understandably, and Green was handed a rare preseason flagrant for a move that would’ve looked more at home in the Octagon than on the basketball court. Maybe it bodes well for the Warriors that Green is back to living on that knife’s edge, but Rivers was the unfortunate recipient of what happens when he falls to the wrong side.

Earlier this year, Diplo was sued by his ex-girlfriend, Shelley Auguste, for sexual battery, assault, defamation, infliction of emotional distress, and fraud. She alleges that the producer “recorded video of their sexual encounter despite her telling him she didn’t want that” and attempted to “coax her into a threesome with a girl she believes was underaged at the time.” The lawsuit was filed after the producer requested a restraining order against her and alleged she was engaging in revenge porn.

Diplo has yet to respond to the allegations of sexual assault, but that changed on Wednesday when he posted a lengthy message to his Instagram page. He referred to Auguste as “SA” and called her “a stalker [who] scammed her way into my life and tried to extort me for millions and then sued me when she didn’t get what she wanted.” He added, “I will keep this story easy to read because I know the Internet has a short attention span and it was my goal to never address a stalker.” He then went on:

I will refer to her as “SA” (and you can find anything easily online). She was an obsessed fan of mine, and after I relinquished all contact with her, it appears that her only purpose in life has been to disrupt my work, my business, harass me and my close friends and attack me and threaten my family. To be clear, SA was not a minor when I had conversations or sexual intercourse with her. Her own text messages admit this. More on this below.

I had a night of consensual sex with her. Basically, SA reached out to me and I declined a few times but at one time decided to meet her. After that experience, we had exchanged texts for a few months, there was small talk, sexual flirting, she would send me pics and videos.. Eventually it got too much to handle and I stopped contact with her when I realized she had started to become obsessed with me. It began as a nightmare of almost three years of her harassing and threatening me and my family and friends.

SA would offer her friends and other people to have sexual experiences with, and that’s when I began to get suspicious that she was engaging in criminal activity, and was possibly a call girl.

Diplo later explained how he was forced to block “a few accounts” that he believed belonged to SA and “thought she was out of my life” as a result. He then shared how he was affected by an alleged instance of SA stalking him. “One time I just hid in my neighbor’s house and ignored her. I don’t think she could physically harm me, but I was afraid she was going to harm herself,” he wrote. “We always took the high road when dealing with her. We tried to deal with her in court and help her find help. Our detective had found out she had a previous restraining order against her in Florida after we rounded up many of her fake accounts.”

He concluded his message by writing, “I am not this person and I won’t be extorted by anyone no matter how stinging the press can be.” He adeded, “The past 2 years I’ve never been bothered by these rumors if anything it has made me stronger and smarter, all of my friends and partners have never questioned me and that was what has been important to me. The people in my life know me for who I really am.”

You can read Diplo’s full statement in the post above.

The draconian anti-abortion law signed into law in Texas in late August — and then held firm by the right-leaning Supreme Court — was temporarily blocked by a federal judge on Wednesday night, reports The New York Times. The law, which banned the procedure after a mere six weeks — before most women even know they’re pregnant — was met with condemnation, some of it very creative. But for now, at least, those against the law can breathe a sigh of relief.

The decision came from Judge Robert L. Pitman, a Federal District Court judge in Austin. The Biden administration, via Attorney General Merrick Garland, had sued the state of Texas to halt the law. Pittman agreed. In a 113-page ruling, he declared that “the State of Texas, including its officers, officials, agents, employees and any other persons or entities acting on its behalf, are preliminarily enjoined from enforcing Texas Health and Safety Code.”

After Texas asked that they be allowed to appeal the ruling before it takes effect, Pittman had a simple response. “The State has forfeited the right to any such accommodation by pursuing an unprecedented and aggressive scheme to deprive its citizens of a significant and well-established constitutional right,” he wrote.

“That other courts may find a way to avoid this conclusion is theirs to decide;” Pittman added, “this Court will not sanction one more day of this offensive deprivation of such an important right.”

The law, colloquially known as SB8 (Senate Bill 8), has been widely seen as a volley towards the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the landmark case that made abortion legal nationwide. As such, even the temporary reprieve was met with much rejoicing.

https://twitter.com/SRuhle/status/1445920288370274308’

Though some reminded people that it might not last that long.

(Via NYT)