Month: January 2022

In a recent interview, Ye (aka Kanye West) claimed he recovered a laptop from Ray J that contained a second sex tape Kim Kardashian and Ray J had made together, saying, “I met this man at the airport, then got on the red-eye, came back… delivered it to her at 8 a.m. in the morning. I gave it to her, and she cried when she saw it. You know why she cried when she saw that laptop? It represents how much she’s been used… It represents how much people didn’t love her, they just saw her as a commodity.”

While Kardashian isn’t denying the story of Ye getting the laptop for her, it appears the computer may not have actually had another sex tape on it.

People reports they obtained a statement from a Kardashian representative that reads, “After review, there was nothing sexual unseen, only footage on the plane on the way to Mexico and footage at a club and restaurant on the same trip. Kim remains firm in her belief that there is no new second tape that exists. After 20 years, she truly wishes to move on from this chapter with focus instead on the positive things she continues to do as a mother, entrepreneur and advocate for justice reform.”

In a 2021 interview, Kardashian told The Los Angeles Times of the original tape, “I do think that, obviously, as producers, I’m sure they loved it. And loved [us] wanting to talk about the elephant in the room. And I probably wouldn’t have, unless it was for the show. Sometimes I feel like, ‘OK, I know I should probably deal and get this over with. Someone’s gonna ask me, so I might as well just go ahead and do it.’ In a way, filming has helped us deal with things, instead of sweeping them under the rug. At the end of the day, I was always open and honest and wanted to share whatever I was going through. I wasn’t gonna hold back.”

The Dallas Mavericks traveled to San Francisco to take on the Golden State Warriors on Tuesday night, and during the first half of action, one of the team’s most prolific perimeter scorers left the game with a potentially serious injury.

Tim Hardaway Jr. pushed the ball in transition and saw a lane to attack the rim. With only Damion Lee between himself and the basket, Hardaway decided to embrace contact, create a little bit of space, and go up for a layup. While he missed, Hardaway was fouled and hit both of his attempts at the free throw line.

However, Hardaway stepped awkwardly on his left foot and couldn’t put weight on it. After the free throws, he was helped to the back for further examination.

The team eventually announced that Hardaway suffered a fracture of the fifth metatarsal of his left foot, and that more will be announced regarding the extent of his injury soon.

According to In Street Clothes founder Jeff Stotts, we’ll learn more about a potential timeline when it’s eventually determined where the fracture occurred.

Hardaway opted to stay with the Mavericks this past offseason, agreeing to a $72 million contract with the franchise that acquired him in the trade with the New York Knicks that also brought Kristaps Porzingis to Dallas. Hardaway has averaged 14.3 points per game this season.

Rihanna has long used her platform to support good causes. In 2021 she signed a pair of open letters that called for police reform, and she, along with Jay-Z and others, demanded that the New York Attorney General “reopen the case and probe the wrongful death of Danroy ‘D.J.’ Henry.” This year, Rihanna is bringing her focus to organizations that are fighting climate change, pledging a $15 million donation through her Clara Lionel Foundation.

A press release said the donation will specifically target groups that “are focused on and led by women, youth, Black, Indigenous, LGBTQIA+ and people of color to accelerate climate justice for those at greatest risk.” Rihanna also shared a statement about the move.

“At the Clara Lionel Foundation, much of the work is rooted in the understanding that climate disasters, which are growing in frequency and intensity, do not impact all communities equally, with communities of color and island nations facing the brunt of climate change,” the singer said in the statement. “This is why CLF prioritizes both climate resilience and climate justice work across the U.S. and Caribbean.”

Justine Lucas, the Executive Director of the Clara Lionel Foundation, also spoke about the donation in a statement of her own. “CLF believes strongly that funders must build partnerships with organizations and acknowledge their deep understanding of what is necessary to achieve climate justice in their own communities,” she said.

The following organizations have been approved for the donation from Rihanna’s Clara Lionel Foundation: Black Feminist Fund, Black Visions Collective, Caribbean Youth Environment Network (CYEN), Center for Popular Democracy (CPD), Climate and Clean Energy Equity Fund, Climate Justice Alliance, Deep South Center for Environmental Justice, GirlsCARE, Helen’s Daughters, HEY Campaign (The Ashley Lashley Foundation), Hive Fund for Gender and Climate Justice, Indigenous Environmental Network, Integrated Health Outreach, Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), Native Movement, NDN Collective, The Caribbean Climate Justice Project, and The Solutions Project.

You can read more about Clara Lionel Foundation’s work on fighting climate change here.

This April marks four years since Saba released his last album, Care For Me. Luckily the Chicago rapper will release his third at the beginning of next month. Called Few Good Things, it’s locked in for a February 4 release date, and so far, he’s shared three singles: “Stop That,” “Fearmonger” with Daoud, and “Come My Way” with Krayzie Bone. With a little over a week left until the album arrives, Saba unveils its full tracklist and artwork.

The cover for Few Good Things depicts a middle-aged man posed in front of a fence with light pink flowers slightly covering parts of his body. As for the tracklist, it includes featurs from 6lack, Smino, G Herbo, Black Thought, Mereba, Foushee, Eryn Allen Kane, Benjamin Earl Turner, Pivot Gang, Cheflee, Daoud, and Day Wave.

You can view the cover art for Few Good Things above and check out its tracklist below.

1. “Free Samples” Feat. Cheflee
2. “One Way Or Every N**** With A Budget”
3. “Survivor’s Guilt” Feat. G Herbo
4. “An Interlude Called ‘Circus’” Feat. Eryn Allen Kane
5. “Fearmonger” Feat. Daoud
6. “Come My Way” Feat. Krayzie Bone
7. “Still” Feat. 6lack & Smino
8. “A Simpler Time” Feat. Mereba
9. “Soldier” Feat. Pivot Gang
10. “If I Had A Dollar” Feat. Benjamin Earl Turner
11. “Stop That”
12. “Make Believe” Feat. Foushee
13. “2012” Feat. Day Wave
14. “Few Good Things” Feat. Black Thought & Eryn Allen Kane

Few Good Things is due 2/4 via Pivot Gang, LLC. You can pre-save here.

We don’t see or hear from Joe Biden all that much, which is as it should be: It’s not normal to be aware of what the president is doing every day, much less every hour. Americans may have even gotten used to having a commander-in-chief who doesn’t think he’s the center of the universe. Others miss that feeling of non-stop anxiety. One of them is Eric Trump, the less seen non-teen son of the previous president. (Although at least Eric isn’t the one his father reportedly thinks should serve jail time.) Like Don Jr., Eric likes to go on TV and publicly suck up to his own dad. Still, some of the claims he makes about him don’t seem to add up.

Eric went on Fox News Tuesday, where he slammed the Biden administration while also heaping hyperbole upon his own father, whose own former personal attorney thinks will gladly allow his kids to go to jail instead of him. Eric took umbrage with how Biden and team aren’t always “present,” unlike his father, often traveling or relaxing.

“These people are not present,” Eric railed. “The difference between them and my father, my father sat there 24 hours a day.”

For one thing, Trump wasn’t that present either. As per The Washington Post, he visited Trump properties, including Mar-a-Lago, for over half of the weekends he was president. He played 261 rounds of golf in four years; Obama, meanwhile, played 333 rounds over eight years. Most of those were in Florida, at his own golf resort. What’s more, he may have cost taxpayers $109 million just for his Mar-a-Lago flights alone.

But what did he do while in the White House? Well, he watched a ton of Fox News. According to intel leaked to Axios, in his last year in office, he blocked off three hours every morning for “Executive Time,” which isn’t as presidential as it sounded: It was so he could watch TV and tweet, usually angrily. His first meeting wasn’t held till 11am. (George W. Bush, meanwhile, would hold his at 6:45am.) He only worked till 6pm — a mere seven-hour day — though even when he was on the clock, he spent much of that making calls and watching more TV. Some days he would end as early as 4:15pm.

Then again, Eric didn’t actually say his father “worked.” He said he “sat.” So maybe that was just a Freudian slip, revealing what he really did.

Eric’s exaggerated comments about his dad’s impossible schedule did not go unnoticed on social media.

Eric also failed to mention his father’s terrible diet, which may explain why he’d spend all day as president sitting on his butt.

(Via Raw Story)

Lana Del Rey just keeps it coming with new music. In 2021 the singer released two albums in the span of two months: Chemtrails Over The Country Club and Blue Banisters. This year, she’s already released the song “Watercolor Eyes,” which also appeared in the trailer for HBO’s hit show Euphoria. Now it seems like Del Rey could have more music on the way thanks to a recent appearance she made during a concert in Austin, Texas. Country singer Nikki Lane was performing during in the city when Lana and singer Sierra Ferrell accompanied her on stage to perform their new song “Prettiest Girl In Country Music.”

Del Ray also spoke to the audience about the song during the concert and revealed that it was created after Lane told her story about being hit on by an older man. “Nikki told me a little story about him about he had a little meeting with her and he crept a little too close to her,” Lana said. “And he said, ‘How does it feel to be the prettiest girl in country music?’ and I was like, ‘Bleh!’” She added, “So immediately I wrote a little chorus and then we expanded.”

The trio’s performance comes after the US Army earned plenty of attention on Twitter after they used a quote from Lana Del Rey to encourage female soldiers.

RZA has filed a lawsuit against multiple e-commerce stores that he claims illegally sold products with the Wu-Tang Clan logo on them. In documents obtained by Complex, the rapper is suing the alleged bootleggers for trademark infringement, counterfeiting, and false designation of origin. It’s also believed that the stores, who are seemingly running their business from China, used the rap group’s brand to convince buyers that they were selling authentic Wu-Tang Clan merchandise.

“Many defendants also deceive unknowing consumers by using the Wu-Tang Clan Trademarks without authorization within the content, text, and/or meta tags of their e-commerce stores to attract various search engines crawling the Internet looking for e-commerce stores relevant to consumer searches for Wu-Tang Clan products,” the documents read. “Other e-commerce stores operating under the Seller Aliases omit using the Wu-Tang Clan Trademarks in the item title to evade enforcement efforts while using strategic item titles and descriptions that will trigger their listings when consumers are searching for Wu-Tang Clan products.”

RZA wants to block the stores from selling the inauthentic merchandise in the future. He is seeking $2 million for the use of Wu-Tang trademarks, or all profits and damages for trademark infringement. He also wants to ask companies like Amazon, eBay, and AliExpress to stop promoting these products.

The lawsuit comes after RZA teamed up for Flatbush Zombies for a pair of tracks: “Quentin Tarantino” and “Plug Addicts.”

Over the weekend, Evan Rachel Wood appeared in the new documentary Phoenix Rising at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. In the film, she claimed her ex-partner Marilyn Manson “essentially raped” her during a music video shoot. The experience, she said, was “traumatizing” and added that even the crew at the shoot was “uncomfortable.” Last spring, Wood accused Manson, whose real name is Brian Warner, of “grooming” and “horrifically abusing” her during their relationship. She also said she was “brainwashed and manipulated into submission.”

Days after the premiere, Manson’s lawyer, Howard King, released a statement that refuted Wood’s claims.

“Of all the false claims that Evan Rachel Wood has made about Brian Warner, her imaginative retelling of the making of the ‘Heart-Shaped Glasses’ music video 15 years ago is the most brazen and easiest to disprove, because there were multiple witnesses,” King wrote in the statement, which was obtained by Spin. “Evan was not only fully coherent and engaged during the three-day shoot but also heavily involved in weeks of pre-production planning and days of post-production editing of the final cut. The simulated sex scene took several hours to shoot with multiple takes using different angles and several long breaks in between camera setups.”

In conclusion, King wrote, “Brian did not have sex with Evan on that set, and she knows that is the truth.”

Warning: This post contains spoilers for the 1999 film Fight Club.

When it came out almost a quarter century ago, Fight Club was — and very much still is — one of the most radical and politically charged movies ever released by a major Hollywood studio. It turned one of the biggest dreamboats, Brad Pitt, into an anti-capitalist cheerleader who advocated dropping out of society, destroying property, and slipping lone frames of hardcore pornography into animated family fare. (He also forms an all-incel terrorist organization that now seems like a precursor to the Proud Boys, lest you forget.) It even enraged Rosie O’Donnell.

In any case, it took some 23 years for one nation to realize it was too subversive for the masses. According to Variety, Tencent Video, the largest streamer in China, recently released a new version of the film, which now has a new and “happier” ending. In the 1999 original, Edward Norton’s protagonist thwarts terrorist leader Tyler Durden (Pitt), who it turns out is really his alter ego. Newly cured, he holds hands with lady friend Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter) as the bombs Tyler and team planted go off anyway, destroying buildings that had been evacuated of people, all while wiping out the nation’s credit card information.

Well, no more, at least not in China! Their version ends before the buildings explode, cutting instead to a title card explaining that Durden, who again it’s revealed is actually Norton, gets busted.

“The police rapidly figured out the whole plan and arrested all criminals, successfully preventing the bomb from exploding,” reads the new card. “After the trial, Tyler was sent to lunatic asylum [sic] receiving psychological treatment. He was discharged from the hospital in 2012.”

Well, at least Tyler Durden has back amongst us for a good decade.

It’s not clear exactly how this new ending came about, but China’s censors are famously vigilant, removing anything that could disturb social order, celebrate criminal behavior or, well, show people of the same gender kissing. (They also do things like add scenes to Marvel movies in which characters praise Chinese scientists.)

At least audiences in China can finally see Fight Club. When it was first released in 1999, Pitt’s movies were still banned because he starred in 1997’s Seven Years in Tibet, which showed the Dalai Lama before China’s invasion of his nation. The nation’s ban on Pitt films lasted all the way up to Allied, in 2016.

When news of the censored ending hit the news, some people naturally made Poochie jokes.

In the meantime, you can watch Fight Club on Amazon Prime. And you can see the original version of that ending below.

(Via Variety)

Which director created the modern superhero movie? You could say Jon Favreau, who helmed the original Iron Man, the one that birthed what became the Marvel Cinematic Universe. You could go all the way back to 1978’s Superman: The Movie, the first blockbuster to take superheroes seriously, and say it’s the late Richard Donner. You could also say Sam Raimi, whose 2002 movie Spider-Man revamped the genre after the fall of the Batman franchise in the late ’90s.

Jump two decades and Raimi is in an unusual situation. Not only has the comic book movie he’s now helming undergone “significant” reshoots, but even he — Sam Raimi, the director of said movie — isn’t sure if it’s done filming. That film is Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, the long-awaited solo sequel for a character who also plays a major role in the new, money-gobbling Spider-Man: No Way Home. Raimi chatted with Variety (in a bit teased out by The AV Club) about, among other things, the status of that project. And, well, maybe someone else knows.

“I wish I knew the answer to that question,” Raimi replied when asked if they’d wrapped filming. It’s not as earth-shattering as that may sound. Marvel movies have simply become, well, bigger than the people credited with directing them, some of whom aren’t even allowed to direct their own action scenes. Raimi explained:

“I think we’re done, but we just cut everything. We’re just starting to test the picture and we’ll find out if there’s anything that’s got to be picked up. If something’s unclear or another improvement I can make in this short amount of time left, I’ll do it. One thing I know about the Marvel team is they won’t stop. They’ll keep pushing it until it’s as close to being great as it could.”

Mind you, Raimi’s not complaining. He says Marvel is a “great team to work with” and that he’s been “super-supported” by everyone, including honcho Kevin Feige. There is one thing, though: It is slated to hit theaters pretty soon, on May 6 of this year. But Hollywood is a place of magic, and if Ridley Scott could film Christopher Plummer’s scenes for All the Money in the World about a month before it hit theaters nationwide, Marvel can still film some new stuff for Doctor Strange 2 with a whopping four months until release day.

Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness hits theaters on May 6.

(Via Variety and The AV Club)