Month: May 2022

There’s a new documentary on HBO about George Carlin, the pioneering and highly influential stand-up, who in the ‘70s helped usher in a new and more profane style of comedy. He’s been talked about recently for other reasons, too. When it was revealed the right-leaning Supreme Court were on the verge of overturning Roe v. Wade, many shared his opening salvo from 1996’s Back in Town, in which he tears into Republicans’ inconsistent and illogical hatred of abortion rights.

Nevertheless, Carlin has often been championed by those on the far right as one of their own (at least when he absolutely wasn’t). His comedy, they argue, was about freedom of speech, mistrust of authority, even against environmentalism. (Though to be fair, his lengthy bit on the latter is really about how the planet is trying to get rid of pesky humankind, not that we aren’t making it unfit for the species’ survival.) There’s one person who isn’t buying that: his own daughter.

Kelly Carlin, one of the executive producers of George Carlin’s American Dream, recently went on the podcast The New Abnormal.

“Before he died in 2008, and Hillary was running, my dad was like, ‘You know, it’ll be good. Hillary [Clinton] will get in there and she’ll get some people some jobs.’ I mean, of course he leaned that direction. My dad was a lifelong New Yorker and lifelong New Yorkers hate Donald Trump,” Carlin said. “It just always shocks me when these Trumpers wanna claim him.”

She also laid into the way today’s GOP loves to paint themselves as victims, even trying to popularize white supremacist conspiracy theories about a “great replacement.” “The far right would like to say that they’re the minority now, but [George Carlin] would roll his eyes, because we know where all the wealth and the power is,” she explained. “That was the core, the deepest, deepest core of my father’s moral center from day one of his life.”

Anyway, sorry, Republicans who think George Carlin is speaking to them, even in death. He ain’t.

(Via The Daily Beast)

There was a period, in the mid-aughts, when people turned on Tom Cruise. He started speaking openly about Scientology (and even tried to recruit Seth Rogen into the fold). He railed on psychiatry. He jumped on sofas. Suddenly films starring the biggest movie star in the world were underperforming, or worse. He’s fought hard to get back on top, in part by almost killing himself to entertain. And now, in 2022, he has the biggest opening of his career.

As per The Hollywood Reporter, Top Gun: Maverick, the belated sequel to the blockbuster that made him a megastar 36 years ago, is set to gross $151 million over the four-day Memorial Day weekend. That makes it the second highest-grosser over the same weekend, after 2007’s Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, which Hoovered up $153 million — a mere two million more. Of that $151, $124 million of it came in the first three days, and $51.8 million are from Thursday night and Friday alone, when it was already breaking records.

Despite being Tom Cruise, the actor’s films have never opened above $100 million. By contrast, the last Mission: Impossible, 2018’s Fallout, “only” made $61.2 million in its opening weekend. In its first three days, Top Gun 2 grossed almost double what War of the Worlds made in its opening weekend back in June of 2005. (For the record, none of this is adjusted for inflation.)

For years, Cruise didn’t want to make a Top Gun sequel. In 1990, he described such a film as “irresponsible,” acknowledging critics who derided it as “a right-wing film to promote the Navy.” He also pointed out that kids “loved it,” which made him nervous. “I want kids to know that that’s not the way war is — that Top Gun was just an amusement park ride, a fun film with a PG-13 rating that was not supposed to be reality.”

And yet here we are, with a nearly 40-years-later sequel that is considerably less jingoistic than the Reagan-era original, a more somber affair that reflects on its aging star’s past and future, even as it knows that he can still fly the hell out of a plane.

(Via THR)

Cardi B has been living her best life as of late. She just released a new episode of Cardi Tries with Megan Thee Stallion and it features the “WAP” collaborators showing off their football skills with help from some Los Angeles Chargers players. Days after that episode was released, Cardi and Offset were spotted on vacation, and while the couple might have expected to enjoy a regular day at the beach, things took an unexpected turn as they watched a yacht sink underwater some hundred feet away from them.

The whole thing was caught on camera thanks to a video that Cardi provided and posted on her Twitter. In the video, which she captioned, “I can’t believe I’m actually watching a yacht sink,” Cardi is clearly taken aback by what she’s witnessing. “What the f***?!!? Oh my — it’s sinking!!! Y’all see this?!!?” Cardi says as she watches the yacht slowly sink underwater. “Oh my God, they can’t do nothing about it? “There ain’t no big boat that could save it?!?” After accepting that there was nothing that could be done to save the boat, Cardi gave her farewells to the yacht. “It’s gone! It’s gone!” she said. “Bye-Bye! Bye!!”

You can view Cardi’s video of the whole ordeal above.

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

One of hip-hop’s current longstanding beefs is that between The Game and 50 Cent. The two have not seen eye to eye in almost two decades as every now and then, one side pops out to take a shot at the other. It was just last month that The Game challenged Eminem to a rap battle because of 50’s refusal to spar over music. “50 can’t rap,” The Game said when he was asked about his decision to challenge Em. “So I gotta go a level up and challenge the better rapper, that’s why.” While a rap battle between Game and 50 may never come to fruition, Game will never forget his past wins.

During a recent appearance on the All The Smoke podcast, The Game claimed that 50 Cent and former Interscope CEO Jimmy Iovine gave him $1 million to stop saying “G-Unot” at the height of his beef with 50 Cent and G-Unit. “They wrote me a check, they bought it,” Game said. “I had to trademark the G-Unot. And you remember when I was going around with the rat and doing all that sh*t, that sh*t hurt—killed G-Unit.”

He continued, “You stopped seeing the candy cane tank tops and all that sh*t. The whole G-Unit/Mark Ecko, the shoes, all that sh*t died. That sh*t was a hot commodity at once, G-Unit clothing. N****s was wearing the sweats, headbands, the masks, everything.” Game added that the only way to stop him from using the “G-Unot” phrase was to buy the trademark for it.

“So they had to pay me. I should have asked for more but them n****s gave me a million,” he said. “But I’m a hood n****, a million dollars just to stop saying this word? Where’s the check? They wrote the check and I stopped saying it.”

You can watch the clip from the All The Smoke podcast in the post above.

The gun massacre in Uvalde, Texas, which took the lives of 19 children and two adults, has shocked the nation. Democrats have invariably put most of the blame on one thing: guns, and the easy availability thereof. Most Republicans have blamed everything but guns. Some even blamed doors. (Then there’s whatever Lauren Boebert is talking about.)

Then there’s Don Jr. The former president’s went on one of his unhinged, slurry, motormouthed video rants, in which he not only defend semi-automatic weapons but also put the blame on, among other things, “crazy teachers” — despite two teachers being the casualties of the tragedy in Uvalde.

The video, posted on Rumble, finds him in sarcastic mode. “It’s the gun, it’s not the sociopath wielding it, folks,” he fumed while making spastic, Showgirls-esque hand movements. “If it wasn’t for the gun, this kid would be a well-adjusted, reasonable individual, he’d be a wonderful human being, right? He’d be a wonderful human being. He wouldn’t have done the exact same thing with a bat or a bomb or some sort of improvised device or a machete, he’s a great kid, don’t judge him.”

He then tried to find the real culprit. “We can’t acknowledge what the actual causes are. It’s not a drug-addict mother and a missing father and a lack of religion, indoctrination programs in our schools, crazy teachers teaching some of the crap I’ve talking about in these videos. It’s none of those things,” he ranted. “It never ends man.”

In summing up, he said, “Our own stupidity, apathy, wokeness, laziness, that’s the problem, folks, and until we fix that, the rest is just talk and crap.”

Or maybe Don Jr. should keep recording deranged videos that erase credibility from already dodgy arguments.

(Via Raw Story)

Things have been going really well for Michelle Zauner of Japanese Breakfast over the past few months. Zauner ended 2021 with Jubilee, her third album as Japanese Breakfast, being recognized as one of the best albums from that year. Thanks to the project, she was also nominated at the Grammy Awards in two categories: Best Alternative Music Album and Best New Artist. More recently, Zauner made her debut on Saturday Night Live by performing “Be Sweet” and “Paprika” to close out the show’s 47th season. For her latest act, Zauner took her talents to the baseball field before a recent New York Mets game.

It’s here that she threw out the first pitch before the team’s matchup against the Philadelphia Phillies on Friday night. Zauner took the mound rocking a No. 69 Mets jersey with “JBrekkie” written on the back. She also said she was showing love to the Fightin’ Phils by wearing their socks. Ahead of the first pitch, Zauner shared a picture of her wearing the Mets jersey and captioned it, “Lord help her.” As for the pitch itself, Zauner delivered a two-hopper that landed just a bit left of home plate.

You can watch Zauner throw the first pitch in the video above.

Sunday night’s Game 7 between the Heat and Celtics in Miami will sound a bit different than expected, as ESPN will be without its top play-by-play man Mike Breen after the legendary broadcaster tested positive for COVID-19, forcing him out of the booth for Sunday night’s action. In his place, Mark Jones will step in alongside Jeff Van Gundy and Mark Jackson, with Breen hoping to be back for Thursday’s Game 1 of the NBA Finals on ABC when the Warriors play host to the winner of Sunday night’s contest.

The hope, of course, is that Breen continues to feel fine and is able to clear protocols to be in San Francisco on Thursday. Breen’s presence is synonymous with big moments and big games in the NBA and he will certainly be missed in Miami on Sunday night, but the most important thing is that the voice of the Finals gets well soon.

Mark Jones will surely step in and perform admirably as one of the best play-by-play commentators in the business, but it is almost fitting that in a series that has been defined by major absences on both the Celtics and the Heat, that even the commentary booth will have to deal with a lineup change of its own.

The new season of Stranger Things dropped on Friday, or at least most of it. Netflix did the unthinkable, which is break up the latest batch of episodes into parts, the first seven of nine episodes arriving in time for the holiday weekend, and the other two set to drop this coming week. (The reason? Probably because some of these new episodes are really, really long.) There’s a lot of increasingly dense mythology to get through, but there’s still room for some hang-time and Tarantino-esque pop culture name-dropping.

One of them came in episode three (the shortest one, at a mere 64 minutes). The boys are in the cafeteria, eating lunch, when Joseph Quinn’s Eddie Munson, leader of the Hellfire Club, turns to Gaten Matarazzo’s Dustin Henderson and Finn Wolfhard’s Mike Wheeler, taking a moment to reflect on their friendship.

“I knew it the moment I saw you,” Munson tell them. “You sat at that table right over there, looking like two little lost sheep.” He then turns to Dustin, adding, “You were wearing a ‘Weird Al’ T-shirt, which I thought was brave.” (It’s not a non-sequitur. Dustin really did wear a “Weird Al” shirt in an episode of Season 3.)

The moment did not go unnoticed by the man himself, who simply turned the adjective into a hashtag.

The response also elicited a remark by The New York Times’ Dave Itzkoff, who reflected on the novelty musician’s 1986 album Polka Party!, which features such classicsd as “Living with a Hernia,” “Addicted to Spuds,” and, yes, one of his polka medleys, this one including takes on “Sledgehammer!”, “Sussidio,” Party all the Time,” and many more.

It’s a big time for “Weird Al.” Roku will be nipping further into original content with the forthcoming biopic Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, starring Daniel Radcliffe, who already knows his way around novelty songs.

(Via THR)

It’s said that Donald Trump would even turn on his own kids to save his hide. He has a long history of burning bridges, to say nothing of pocketing donations from his own cash-strapped supporters. So when Lauren Boebert tried to paint him as a generous person, it was bound to be unconvincing. And yet you have no idea.

The Colorado representative was in Wyoming on Saturday, taking part in a Trump rally to unseat Liz Cheney, the Republican who dared come out against the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. “I want to tell you a story about his generosity, about how kind he is, about how welcoming he is,” Boebert told the crowd about the former president. She then launched into a doozy.

“My family and I were with President Trump,” she recalled. “And even not liking germs, President Trump shared a bowl of popcorn with my 14-year-old son.” Boebert then admitted not even she shares food with her son, because “I know where he’s been.”

As such Boebert was blown away that “President Trump welcomed him and engaged with him and showed him love and respect, just like I’ve seen him do with hundreds and thousands of other people, all throughout America. Because he’s not a politician; he’s a family man. He’s a businessman. And he loves you.”

Boebert also vowed that “he will be back again.”

The crowd cheered at that last bit, though there were a bit more muted during the story about how Trump’s Christ-like sharing of popcorn with a kid who might have germs. As such, it seems like yet another unconvincing argument from the politician who thinks America shouldn’t pass gun control laws because we didn’t ban planes after the September 11 attacks.

(Via Raw Story)

Fans of Young Thug and Gunna received some unfavorable news about the rappers last week. Thug and Gunna were among 28 members of the YSL collective that were arrested and charged in the 56-count Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act case. Gunna received a single charge of conspiracy to violate a RICO Act, however, during a recent trial prosecutors said Gunna had a “command” role in YSL, which prosecutors described as a criminal organization. As a result of his alleged “command” role, and other allegations, Gunna was denied bond and his next court date was set for January 9, 2023.

Days after news of Gunna’s denied bond and new court date arrived, one of his frequent collaborators took a moment to show him love on Instagram. Roddy Ricch shared his support for Gunna with a sweet post. “Free @gunna,” Roddy wrote on his Instagram Story. “We miss you out here champ. Mom’s praying 4 U.”

Gunna’s arrest was an unfortunate turn in a year that was set to be the best of his career. He kicked things off with the release of his third album DS4EVER, a project that debuted at No. 1 on the albums chart to become his second chart-topping album.

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