Month: January 2022

John Cena recently made an appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon to promote his new HBO Max series Peacemaker, dressed in his wardrobe from the show. During the conversation, Fallon asked Cena for the backstory behind his infamous “You Can’t See Me” gesture, which became popular during his peak days as a wrestler in the WWE. Cena explained that the gesture started as a dare between him and his little brother Sean.

“The reason I did this is cause while we were making the album to which my theme music is on, my younger brother, Sean, was always our litmus test,” Cena said. “He kinda liked the same music and he would never go to the studio with us and we’d come home with our tracks and play it for him and he was ruthless man. He would never be satisfied with any song.

“He heard ‘My Time Is Now’ and just did this dance that Tony Yayo did in one of the G-Unit videos,” Cena continued. “It was like, he put his hand over his head and just kind of bobbed his head… and I was like, ‘Man, what are you doing? That looked just ridiculous.’ He said, ‘No, no, it’s Tony Yayo, he’s doing this thing.’”

Cena then suggested that he would mimic the move the next time he was on television, which prompted a dare from his little brother. Cena went through with the dare and the rest is history. “Years later, it just overcame the meme culture and now, literally, I’m invisible,” Cena added. “People are like, ‘Why is Jimmy Fallon talking to an empty chair?’ So many people are going to say that. So I’m invisible now. On a dare, by accident.”

Tony Yayo caught wind of Cena’s comments and showed him some love on Twitter. “Shout out to John Cena,” he wrote in a tweet.

You can watch the interview between Fallon and Cena above.

Miami Heat guard Tyler Herro had himself a night on Wednesday. In Miami’s 115-91 win over the Atlanta Hawks, Herro had a team-high 21 points to go along with 11 assists and 9 rebounds. Had Herro been able to snag one more rebound, he would have had his first career triple-double.

Herro, in fact, had a chance to get a rebound late in the fourth quarter, but as he went up for it, so did his teammate, Omer Yurtseven. Unfortunately for Herro, Yurtseven is significantly taller, so he pretty easily goes up and takes the rebound away from Herro. The best part is that it happened down by the Miami bench, who were keeping close track of Herro’s triple-double watch, and you can see a group of them get get very mad at Yurtseven for denying Herro a shot at his triple-double.

“I don’t know if you noticed the Heat bench a moment ago jump up as Yurtseven wrestled the rebound away from Tyler Herro who happens to be two rebounds shy of a triple-double,” Eric Reid, the Heat’s play-by-play man said on the broadcast. “The Heat bench, apparently aware of those numbers.”

To put some salt in the wound, Herro had two more chances late to secure that elusive 10th rebound. One was tipped away to an Atlanta player and then he grabbed what would have been his tenth after the final buzzer.

Maybe next time, Tyler, but for now he’ll have to settle for a lopsided 115-91 win over their divisional rival.

After months of speculation and two aborted attempts to bring it back, Coachella will make its return this year. The showcase has officially announced its headliners and it’s different than originally intended. Travis Scott, Frank Ocean, and Rage Against The Machine were set to headline, but Frank moved his set to the 2023 show while Travis Scott and Rage Against The Machine were dropped from the bill. Now, Coachella has revealed that Kanye West, Billie Eilish, and Harry Styles will take over as headliners.

West and Eilish were very busy last year. West released his tenth album, Donda, which became his tenth to top the charts. Meanwhile, Eilish’s second album, Happier Than Ever, spent three consecutive weeks at No. 1. As for Styles, he’s been fairly quiet lately, his most recent being Fine Line in 2019. That album topped the charts and gave him a No. 1 single with “Watermelon Sugar,” which also received a 2021 Grammy Award in the Best Pop Solo Performance category.

Other performers at the festival will include Lil Baby, Big Sean, Baby Keem, Phoebe Bridgers, Daniel Caesar, Megan Thee Stallion, 21 Savage, Giveon, Doja Cat, Ari Lennox, City Girls, Brockhampton, Isaiah Rashad, JID, Denzel Curry, Vince Staples, and more.

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

It’s been almost three months since the accidental shooting that left Halyna Hutchins, cinematographer on the movie Rust, dead. The investigation into what happened is still ongoing, but some of the attention has circled around Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, the set’s young armorer. Her lawyer has gone so far as to suggest someone added a live round to star Alec Baldwin’s gun. Now she’s going after the supplier she claims supplied the fatal ammo.

As per Deadline, Gutierrez-Reed has sued Seth Kenney, whose company provided ammunition to the film’s set. In the lawsuit, she accuses Kenny of supplying “boxes of ammunition purporting to contain dummy rounds, but which contained a mix of dummy and live ammunition.” She says she had been led to believe that they had only been given dummy rounds. “In so doing, Defendants created a dangerous condition on the movie set, unbeknownst to Hannah Gutierrez Reed, which caused a foreseeable risk of injury to numerous people.”

Back in December, during an interview with Good Morning America, Kenny, owner of PDQ Arm & Prop, denied that the fatal ammo came from his company, saying there was “something very unique about the live rounds that were found.”

The complaint also also alleges that Guiterrez-Reed loaded the gun from a box labeled “dummy rounds,” which she handed to assistant director Dave Hall. Afterwards, she left the set, which was inside a church, so as to adhere to COVID-19 protocols. As per the lawsuit:

“Had Hannah been called back in, she would have re-inspected the weapon, and every round again, and instructed Baldwin on safe gun practice with the cross draw, as was her standard practice on set and under circumstances where: (1) Baldwin did not respond to Hannah’s request on October 15 to schedule cross draw training and (2) the gun had been out of her possession for 15 minutes.”

In the meantime, Baldwin, who has been playing ball with investigators, has claimed he didn’t pull the trigger that killed Hutchins. Last month investigators obtained a warrant for the actor’s phone.

(Via Deadline)

Considering everything Mark Hoppus has been through lately, it’s a blessing that the storied Blink-182 bassist still has his sense of humor. Hoppus was diagnosed with cancer in 2021, and shared updates with his fans throughout the grueling process of chemotherapy, and thankfully, a cancer-free diagnosis in September. He’s since performed his first concert since the cancer-free diagnosis, and remains a great force for good on the internet.

Speaking of that last part, when a fan shared a Blink-182 musing on Twitter this week, Hoppus got involved. “Did you know the word commiserating before blink 182 yes or no,” wrote fan Ashley Hamilton who runs the Celebrity Memoir Book Club podcast. Her tweet went incredibly viral with Blink fans, who thought her point about that pretty hefty vocab word for a pop-punk song was hilarious, What was even more hilarious, though, was Hoppus weighing in on the exact reason why Blink songwriter Tom Delonge chose the verb in the first place.

“Tom already had “watching, waiting” and needed another five syllables,” Mark wrote, quoting Ashley’s tweet on the matter. Of course it was that simple. Then again, in certain live renditions of the song Tom has swapped in, uh, a different verb in place of “commiserating.”

Artistic license is important, right? I’ve included the original music video above, in case you haven’t seen it for a while, it’s definitely worth a rewatch.

This past December marked the two-year anniversary of Juice WRLD’s death. The prospering young rapper was just 21 years old when he passed away following a drug overdose in late 2019 at Chicago’s Midway International Airport. Prior to the anniversary, the late rapper’s mother, Ms. Carmella Wallace, celebrated what would’ve been his 23rd birthday with a heartbreaking birthday letter to him. “You touched the world through your music with honesty and transparency,” she wrote. “You shared a message of healing and sincerely desired to make a difference in the lives of others.”

During a recent appearance on the The Tamron Hall Show show, Wallace opened up about Juice’s struggle with addiction and how she viewed the support system around him. “I just felt like his best interest wasn’t being looked out for,” she said. “I think people had their own agendas and they liked the lifestyle. And they were young too, so I have to give them that. They’re young so they don’t see things the way we would see it but I think that he just didn’t have the people in place to tell him to stop or to know [what was really wrong]. He just didn’t have that support system in place.

“I told him of my fears of him overdosing and encouraged him to speak to the psychologist I arranged for him to speak with,” she added. “But he was 19 and he knew everything. And the people around him, some of them would reach out to me. But not the inner, inner-circle.”

Wallace also spoke about a past conversation she had with Juice that left her confident he would get helpn. “I could tell there was a difference in him and that he wasn’t doing the lean,” she said. “I think he was still doing pills, but he told me he was ready to get help. It was just a special moment. We just had that moment where I just knew he was going to overcome it.”

You can watch Wallace’s interview on The Tamron Hall Show above.

The Memphis Grizzlies are the NBA’s hottest team, winners of 10 straight including a win over the Golden State Warriors on Tuesday night at the FedEx Forum.

Ja Morant once again played the starring role in the win, scoring 29 points to go along with eight assists and five rebounds, and he punctuated the win with an and-1 layup to put the game on ice.

After the game, Morant was asked about how he left the little man in the Steph Curry jersey hanging for a hi-five, and he said it was “disrespectful” of the kid to be wearing a Warriors jersey in Memphis, but that he’d be happy to get him one of his jersey for the next time he comes to the game. Those comments went viral, and the Grizzlies decided to take advantage of the publicity on a story a lot of teams would’ve had some trepidation about embracing, and came up with an incredible campaign around it.

On Thursday, the Grizzlies will host a jersey trade-in event at the arena at 5 p.m., in which kids 12 and under can come (with a parent) and trade-in their jersey from another team for a Ja Morant or Jaren Jackson Jr. replica, plus a pair of tickets to see Memphis host the Timberwolves later that night — with 250 jerseys up for grabs.

It’s a great promotion and some savvy marketing from the Grizzlies to do such a quick turnaround from Morant’s comments to execution of a special event — which will also help move some tickets and get more fans in the building for a midweek game against an opponent that isn’t a huge draw.

It’s been over a year since Matt Gaetz, the Trumpist lawmaker and unrepentant Jan. 6 cheerleader, came under federal investigation due to his connection to a sex trafficking ring. Just because it’s been moving slowly doesn’t mean it’s not going to be big. Indeed, Gaetz has already lawyered up, preparing for a “scorched earth” trial. But now things have escalated even further: As per NBC News, an ex-girlfriend recently testified about the case to a grand jury.

The woman, whose name has been withheld from the press, has spent the last few months speaking with prosecutors, hoping to avoid prosecution for obstruction of justice. In exchange, she’s testified whether or not Gaetz had sex with a 17-year-old female for money four years back. She’s also addressing claims that he and others violated a federal law prohibiting the transportation of people across state lines to engage in prostitution.

Gaetz has not yet been charged for any crimes, but he denies all claims, calling the investigation a “witch hunt.” Meanwhile, his ex isn’t the only person who’s played ball with the feds in exchange for lighter sentencing. After an old associate, Joel Greenberg, was charged with multiple crimes relating to the trafficking ring, he’s been singing to prosecutors in exchange for pleading guilty.

All the while, Gaetz is pretending as though his life may not be headed straight for the toilet. Last month he was floating some harebrained scheme to make Donald Trump speaker of the House, as though he’d ever want that gig.

(Via NBC News)

Yesterday, TMZ reported that 23-year-old Justin Johnson, a Memphis rapper and the lead suspect in the shooting death of Young Dolph, was detained in Indiana nearly two months after the incident. Johnson was the second person arrested in the shooting; 32-year-old Cornelius Smith was previously taken into custody following a separate incident that involved the same white car that was believed to be the getaway vehicle in Dolph’s murder. During a press conference on Wednesday, U.S. Marshal Tyreece Miller revealed that a third suspect has been detained.

That person is 27-year-old Shundale Barnett, who was arrested after he was found in the same car as Johnson and charged with being an after-the-fact accessory to first-degree murder. Miller noted that after law enforcement agencies received over 500 tips after they offered a $15,000 reward for information leading to an arrest in the case. These tips took U.S. Marshals to Indianapolis, Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, and Hampton, Virginia in search of their suspect.

“It’s a big deal,” Miller said. “We’re proud of the work that everybody you see standing up here has done and even some that you don’t see.” He added, “There are a lot of unseen heroes that participated in the case … I think we are the best of the best. We get results and today’s announcement demonstrates that.”

Johnson faces charges for first-degree murder, criminal attempt first-degree murder, and theft of property between $10,000-$60,000. Smith was previously hit with multiple charges including first-degree murder.

You can watch a video from the press conference above.

Ben Affleck had a pretty great 2021. The actor and Oscar-winning filmmaker has been raking in award nominations, most recently from the Screen Actors Guild Awards, for his supporting turn in The Tender Bar, directed by fellow Batman George Clooney. He also earned raves for playing a hilariously debauched count in The Last Duel, which marked the first time he’d written a screenplay with Matt Damon (and also Nicole Holofcener) since Good Will Hunting a quarter century ago. Speaking of which, the two reflected on their big breakthrough during a sit down with Entertainment Weekly. In it, they wound up correct a big wrong: They finally thanked someone who was instrumental in getting it made: Kevin Smith.

Back then, Affleck had acted in both Mallrats and Chasing Amy, which also featured Damon in a bit part. (Both would soon team up in Smith’s Dogma.) But they weren’t yet hot commodities, and it was Smith who wound up ensuring they didn’t just sell the screenplay but act in it as well.

“Kevin saved Good Will Hunting,” Damon told EW. “We were dead in the water. And we would’ve lost it. It would’ve been made with other people in it, and we’d still be really angry I’m sure.”

“We would have been the writers, but we wouldn’t have been the actors,” Affleck added. “And the whole thing was we wanted to be actors. And he got it to [executive producer] Jon Gordon and got people to believe in it.”

Problem is, after the movie was made and became a huge success, they failed to pay it forward. “I promised him I would thank him if we ever got an Oscar, and promptly forgot,” Affleck said. “And then I told him if I ever win again, I swear to God, I’m going to thank you, and forgot again. So I owe him very much, and he did that. He believed. I remember he wrote me an email at the time and in typical Kevin fashion said, ‘I started your movie on the shitter. And I stayed on the whole time.’”

So there you have it. Without the guy who invented Bluntman and Chronic, you wouldn’t have Damon melting down as the late Robin Williams tells him, “It’s not your fault.”

(Via EW)