As fans gear up for the final episodes of Better Call Saul, there are some important questions to ask: what will happen to Kim Wexler? When does Gene get his job at the Cinnabon? Who is Gene? And, an equally important question, when are Walt and Jesse going to show up?
Fans are aware that the duo was on set last year, but details have remained slim. They did not appear in the first half of the final season which means that there are only a handful of episodes where we can expect to see our favorite grumpy old man/over-active millennial duo.
Bryan Cranston recently appeared on the SMX Basic! Podcast where he very briefly spoke about his upcoming appearance on the show–without giving away too much.
“There’s a scene that Aaron [Paul] is in without me. And there’s a scene where I’m in without him. And then there’s a scene where we’re both in. So there’s three scenes to come,” Cranston explained. The actor then said that though he was on set, the details have been so under wraps, that he doesn’t even know what episodes he will appear in.
“It’s pretty cool,” the actor added. “But to be honest with you – because we shot everything in a bubble and completely out of sequence — I don’t even know what episodes we’re in. You’re gonna find out.”
Cranston has been open about his not-so-secret cameo on the series, explaining how the whole thing went down in a recent interview. “Aaron and I shot this episode a year and a half ago,” Cranston recently said on Live With Kelly And Ryan.
He added, “They weren’t even in production yet, so they actually flew us into Albuquerque under the dark of night. We took two steps off the airplane and into an SUV, cloaked, and we went to an Air BNB. They said, ‘Here’s where you stay. You cannot leave.’ It was so interesting. I was literally walking around the perimeter within the wall… You feel like you’re in the witness protection program.” Is that a potential spoiler? Will Saul end up in witness protection? Or will he finally get to eat Cinnabon in peace?!
Among the many shrewd finds from the Memphis Grizzlies’ scouting department is 26-year-old John Konchar. The 6’5 forward is a heady off-ball mover and stout defender who’s drilled over 40 percent of his triples in his career. According to ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski, Konchar agreed to a three-year, $19 million contract extension on Thursday that runs through the 2026-27 season. Wojnarowski reports the deal is fully guaranteed.
Memphis Grizzlies G John Konchar has agreed to a three-year, $19 million contract extension, his agent @GeorgeLangberg tells ESPN. The deal, fully guaranteed, will take the undrafted guard out of Purdue-Ft. Wayne to $30M in career earnings.
Last year, Konchar emerged as a useful part of the Grizzlies’ wing depth off the bench, appearing in 72 regular-season games and logging 17.2 minutes per night. He averaged 4.8 points, 4.6 rebounds and 1.5 assists on 61.5 percent true shooting (.515/.413/.551 split).
With the departures of De’Anthony Melton and Kyle Anderson, there’s a chance Konchar may stand to garner increased minutes next season. However, Memphis is loaded with options, so that’s far from a lock. Nonetheless, Konchar is a rock-solid wing who’s set to earn over $30 million in his career after being undrafted back in 2019, so this is quite the cool development.
Konchar is a bit marginalized because of how many excellent players the Grizzlies roster. He could certainly carve out a more substantial and consistent rotation spot on many other teams. He’s a good player who fills the gaps well on both ends. This is a nice deal for he and Memphis, but most importantly him, of course.
Has an electro rock band ever aged this gracefully? Hot Chip have their eighth album, Freakout/Release, on deck for an August 19th release and they’ve never stopped making dance rock that grows as naturally as they do. Alexis Taylor, Joe Goddard and company have slowly been bringing in more of their crate-digging influences into their last couple of albums and the lead single from Freakout/Release, “Down,” saw them reviving a sample from 60’s soul staples, Universal Togetherness Band. Now on “Eleanor,” the band flexes their incomparable ability to craft electro-pop songs that match up nimbly to the defining Hot Chip sound; emotional, danceable and uniquely cathartic.
Dashing synths drift comfortably into Taylor’s familiar coo and the band turns heartache and pain into sheer strength. “You’re like a river flowing, that will never stop (Eleanor). You’re like the toughest tree, that withstands the chop,” Taylor sings. “It’s about the world smashing into you, waves crashing into you, all-encompassing pain, and how you have to walk through it,” the vocalist said in a statement. “The verses are about separation when families are divided against their will. It’s about strong friends. It’s also about Samuel Beckett giving Andre The Giant lifts to school, and about how Beckett must have learned a lot from Andre’s wisdom.”
Listen to “Eleanor” above.
Freakout/Release is due out on 08/19 via Domino Records. Pre-order it here.
Since 2017, Westside Boogie has been signed to Eminem‘s label Shady Records. Because of this, he’s been able to talk to the iconic rapper and even receive some wisdom from him about performing and taking criticism. He discussed some of this on Raquel Harper’s It’s Tricky podcast (as HipHopDX notes).
“Performance-wise, he told me stop stage-diving ’cause I can get sued,” he said. “That’s just a physical thing. He don’t like how I be jumping in the crowd ’cause he said I could get sued and how he got into fight for doing that. But I just like jumping into the crowd — it’s like my thing, you know what I’m saying? So I don’t know if that’s necessarily good advice, but that’s the advice he gave me.”
He continued, “Music advice, he talked to me about not taking everything personal from blogs, ’cause it’s hard for me because my music is so genuine to me. So not seeing good responses sometimes frustrates me ’cause I know how much I put into it, but I think that’s every artist. Plus, coming from a neighborhood where we can’t let nobody punk us, gotta stand up for ourselves, when somebody come for me crazy on the internet, it’s always hard to not reply.”
James Caan, the Oscar-nominated actor best known for his role as hot-head Sonny Corleone in The Godfather, as well as roles in Thief and Elf, has died at 82 years old, his family announced on Twitter. “It is with great sadness that we inform you of the passing of Jimmy on the evening of July 6. The family appreciates the outpouring of love and heartfelt condolences and asks that you continue to respect their privacy during this difficult time,” the tweet reads, followed by Caan’s customary sign-off: “End of tweet.”
It is with great sadness that we inform you of the passing of Jimmy on the evening of July 6.
The family appreciates the outpouring of love and heartfelt condolences and asks that you continue to respect their privacy during this difficult time.
Caan made his on-screen debut in 1961 for an episode of Naked City. He landed his first leading role in 1965’s Red Line 7000 before getting his big break in 1970’s Brian’s Song, the made-for-TV movie about Chicago Bears teammates Brian Piccolo and Gale Sayers that’s been known to make even the most stereotypically macho dads weep. Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather — you might have heard of it — came two years later, followed by The Gambler, for which he was nominated for a Golden Globe; a cameo in The Godfather Part II; Funny Lady, which earned him another Golden Globe; and Michael Mann’s neo-noir classic Thief. (Thief rules. You should watch it tonight.)
Caan’s “personal and professional life crumbled in the 1980s,” as the New York Timesput it in a 1990 article, but he had a career rebirth in the 1990s and 2000s with roles in Dick Tracy, Bottle Rocket, Dogville, and Elf. His final film released before his death was 2021’s Queen Bees.
Caan was an incredible actor, but let’s not overlook his equally amazing work on Twitter:
While you were sleeping (at some point), Elon Musk officially managed to have more kids than Nick Cannon does. Really! We hear a lot about Nick Cannon’s fertility (some of that from Nick Cannon himself), so I assumed that he had at least ten under his belt so far, but his official total is seven children. Whereas Elon Musk’s now the parent of nine children, two of whom are twins who were (as the world learned over the past 24 hours) born to one of his executives, Shivon Zilis of Neuralink. These secret children came into this world last fall while Elon was still partnered with Grimes, who had revealed that they had a second child sometime last year.
Grimes and Elon broke up (again) shortly after that news, which arrived well after Elon admitted that he doesn’t do much actual parenting with their first child. He’s also the father to twins and triplets with ex-wife Justine Wilson, and man, does this guy have fertility on his side, or what? Of course, plenty of people out there would love to have more children but simply cannot afford (from a cost or time standpoint) to bring more babies into this world. Elon, though, begs to differ, and he officially greeted news of his secret twins with some tweets befitting of a Billionaire Playboy Philanthropist.
Elon tweeted, “Doing my best to help the underpopulation crisis.” He added, “A collapsing birth rate is the biggest danger civilization faces by far.”
Doing my best to help the underpopulation crisis.
A collapsing birth rate is the biggest danger civilization faces by far.
He followed up with a few more tweets about Mars and how people should have more kids to save this world, even though Mother Nature (and her extreme weather wrought by climate change) seems to be rebelling against the people who are already here.
This shouldn’t be too surprising. Elon’s already proved that he’s controversially obsessed with America’s low birth rate, and he’s even had a graph about “below min sustainable levels” pinned to his Twitter profile. It very much sounds like a different spin on the racially-charged replacement theory pushed by Tucker Carlson and the far-right. And never mind that Elon’s transgender daughter, Vivian Jenna Wilson, doesn’t want Elon’s last name or anything to do with him. That’s possibly the result of more of his incendiary tweets about how “pronouns suck.” And Elon will simply keep on tweeting.
As the world awaits a new album from The xx, Oliver Sim is going ahead and taking some time for his solo career. He has a new album, Hideous Bastard, on the way, which he’s offered some previews of so far via a handful of singles. Today, Sim has delivered a new one, “GMT,” an ethereal and subtly thumping tune he co-wrote with his The xx bandmate Jamie xx.
Sim told Apple Music’s Zane Lowe of the track:
“I wrote this song with Mr. Jamie xx, my brother and best friend, and one winter he kind of decided to escape English winter, which is brutal, brutal, brutal. Real months where you question life and everything. So he went off to Australia and I chased him there. And we spent a few weeks in Sydney, did a road trip down to Byron Bay, listening to music, swimming a lot… we were listening to a lot of The Beach Boys at the time. When we arrived in Byron Bay, we started ‘GMT.’ Sampling is such a personal thing. You’re not just sampling because of how beautiful it sounds, but because of all of the emotional memories you have locked into it. We had to solidify the moment. We sampled The Beach Boys and ‘GMT’ was created.”
Listen to “GMT” above. Sim also just announced tour dates for this fall, so find those below.
09/29 — Seattle, WA @ The Showbox
10/01 — Los Angeles, CA @ The Wiltern
10/02 — San Francisco, CA @ The Fillmore
10/05 — Chicago, IL @ Metro
10/06 — Toronto, ON @ The Phoenix Concert Theatre
10/08 — Washington, DC @ Lincoln Theatre
10/09 — Boston, MA @ Royale
10/10 — New York, NY @ Webster Hall
10/11 — Philadelphia, PA @ Union Transfer
10/20 — Copenhagen, DK @ Vega
10/22 — Paris, FR @ Le Cabaret Sauvage
10/23 — Amsterdam, NL @ Melkweg
10/24 — Brussels, BE @ Cirque Royal
10/26 — Berlin, DE @ Admiralspalast
10/27 — Hamburg, DE @ Uebel & Gefaehrlich
10/29 — Manchester, UK @ New Century Hall
10/30 — London, UK @ KOKO
Hideous Bastard is out 9/9 via Young. Pre-order it here.
Back in 2012, when a 17-year-old Joey Badass dropped his star-making mixtape 1999, one of his closest compatriots in the Pro Era crew was Capital Steez, who featured with him on the song “Survival Tactics.” Two years later, Steez was gone after committing suicide by jumping from a rooftop. Since then, his friends have kept his memory alive with their annual Steez Day music festival but that hasn’t stopped Joey from feeling the residual effects. He tackles those thoughts head-on in his new song “Survivors Guilt,” a mournful ode to his late friend.
“Steezy told me get ’em so I got em / Now my n**** gone, he will never be forgotten,” Joey raps. “Ever since he left I’ve just been struggling without him.” He also admits to feeling guilty for not being there for his friend when he needed him, rhyming, “Then I caught a little wave and headed back to shore / And that’s when he started drowning / And he had no one around him / So partially I feel it’s my fault.”
After “Where I Belong,” “Survivors Guilt” is the second single Joey put out in preparation for the release of his album, 2000, the spiritual successor to 1999, which was postponed due to sample clearance issues. In the meantime, Joey has also offered guess verses to Chance The Rapper’s new single “The Highs And The Lows” and Black Thought’s “Because” with Danger Mouse and Russ.
Khruangbin have teamed up with Brooklyn-based DJ and composer Quantic for an Amazon Original cover of Booker T. & The M.G.s’ “Green Onions.” The cover is groovy and psychedelic, pulsating with a fun rhythm and dynamic guitars. At four and a half minutes, it brings the listener on a journey and doesn’t lose their attention the entire time, only getting more engaging as it goes on.
“A very nice rendition of the song,” Booker T. & the M.G.’s guitarist Steve Cropper said about the cover. “I really like the modern touch with the rhythm.”
In our cover story with Khruangbin, bassist Laura Lee said about her bandmates, “DJ has perfect pitch and perfect timing and he’s so studied and disciplined in a way that I’ll never be able to catch up even if I wanted to,” she said. “Mark is always on the hunt for the chord that’s never been chorded and trying to find things that have never happened. And then Leon comes in and it’s very clear what his thing is. He opens his mouth and it’s just glorious. Mark always says that we could just give Leon a grocery list to read and it would sound so good.”
Each week our staff of film and TV experts surveys the entertainment landscape to select the ten best new/newish shows available for you to stream at home. We put a lot of thought into our selections, and our debates on what to include and what not to include can sometimes get a little heated and feelings may get hurt, but so be it, this is an important service for you, our readers. With that said, here are our selections for this week.
What we have here is an alternate history situation, one where the space race of the 1960s didn’t end, thanks in large part to Russia beating America to a handful of important achievements. The show is now in season three, so there’s plenty for you to dive into if you want, which you probably should, in part due to a bunch of space cowboys doing cool space cowboy things, and in part because all your television-obsessed friends won’t stop talking about it. Win-win. Watch it on Apple TV Plus.
The notorious Jeffs are getting it done, first with Jeff Daniels portraying a complicated lawman in Showtime’s American Rust and now with Jeff Bridges portraying an ex-CIA operative (Dan Chase, what a name) who’s forced into (wait for it) one last job in this adaptation of Thomas Perry’s bestselling thriller novel. John Lithgow plays the impetus, a government agent, who’s really pissing off Bridges’ character, and it’s on. All of Dan’s skills are back, so watch out, naysayers. Watch it on FX/Hulu.
This show brings us the perfect actress, Iman Vallani, for the leading gig of portraying Kamala Khan. She takes us on a fun-filled revamp of her character’s comic character, and this show is a roaring ball of glee that will help to set up The Marvels, which will not only include Kamala and Carol but also Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Paris) from WandaVision. The MCU’s lightening up again, and we love to see it. Watch it on Disney Plus.
One of the biggest problems with television these days is that there are not enough shows that star Maya Rudolph. That’s why it is nice to have Loot, an Apple series that stars Rudolph as a billionaire who learns how the rest of the world lives. It’s a good start. Maya Rudolph is the best. Watch it on Apple TV Plus.
By order of the Peaky fookin’ Blinders, we demand you watch the final season of Netflix’s historical crime drama. Why? Because Cillian Murphy has never been better. Because we’re building up to a second World War. Because there are Fascists with tiny mustaches and Prohibition’s over and familial blood feuds are wreaking havoc across two continents and gypsy curses are being broken and Tom Hardy is back (doing his unintelligible mumbling thing while writing an original opera) and … well, you get it right? Watch it on Netflix.
The robots are back. Kind of. Maybe. HBO’s always mindbending Wild West robotic uprising show is back, once again, after a long break. You might want to dig back through previous seasons before diving in again, though. Or at least scan through some summaries. The show is a lot, for good and occasionally messy, but it always delivers on its promise of robot-human violence, which has to count for something. Watch it on HBO Max.
It’s a sublime return for the misfit superhero family. As they are crushed to learn, the Sparrow Academy now aims to be front and center, and the O.G. Hargreeves siblings must adjust to this strange new timeline where their common Bad Dad Reginald’s other kiddos exist. Oh, and there’s another rift in the universe, which actually leads Elliot Page’s Viktor to unite with a character who acted fully like an enemy last season. Gerard Way’s comic book series keeps on giving good adaptation, and hopefully, there will be more dancing to go with yet another apocalypse. Watch it on Netflix.
Good news for mankind: this show takes place 100 years from now when the Moon hosts a utopian colony. The bad news, though, is that there are shadowy forces at work and a conspiracy and a murder and all that jazz. So an intrepid pilot teams up with a detective, and we’ve got a sci-fi procedural vibe going on, which will hopefully be able to vanquish the evil at work. Emma McDonald, Dominic Monaghan, and Joe Manganiello star, but try not to think too hard about that Magic Mike XXLconvenience store scene while you’re enjoying this gorgeous-looking show about the very fate of civilization. Watch it on AMC Plus.
There are a couple of reasons to watch Apple TV+ latest original, the prison drama Black Bird. First, it marks one of Ray Liotta’s final performances on-screen – here he plays a decorated cop who’s “not mad, just disappointed” that his son has followed in the footsteps of the criminals he once hunted. Second, it gives Taron Egerton, the guy who should’ve won that Oscar for a musical biopic about a Queer British icon, a chance to showcase his chops – the serious kind. Third, it’s based on an unbelievably true story about a guy named Jimmy Keene who wiped clean his 10-year sentence behind bars by getting reassigned to a maximum-security prison, buddying up to a criminally-insane serial killer, and eliciting a confession from the guy so that law enforcement could pin down all of his victims. Personally, we’d take the decade of commissary snacks and toilet paper rationing. Watch it on Apple TV Plus.
Finally, The Boys. Are. Back. And so is Homelander, although he is most decidedly not okay after the events of the Season 2 finale, so plenty more increasingly sadistic behavior will soon arrive on that end. He’s got competition in the “hero of heroes” department, though, because Jensen Ackles climbs aboard as Soldier Boy (a profane Captain America knockoff), who’s definitely all up in the “Herogasm” episode, which you should sit down before watching. And expect the show to actually transcend those exploding heads, the whale collision, and Homelander’s self-pleasuring scene atop a skyscraper. In other words, clear you calendar for these weekly decadent delights. Watch it on Amazon Prime.
The second chunk of the fourth season of Stranger Things doesn’t have the same hefty episode count as the first but it is still, in a word, epic. And that’s not because of its cinematic runtimes. Well, not entirely. It is partially due to the cinematic runtimes. But all those minutes are packed with all of the 80s nostalgia, Dungeons and Dragons references, demonic possessions, prison breaks, rink parties, and secret government experiments you could ask for. Who knows what song from the 1980s it will rocket to the top of the charts next. But, no matter what takes place (or who doesn’t make it out alive?), the joy of this season is watching the rest of these weirdos and misfits band together to save each other … and themselves. Watch it on Netflix.
Jeremy Allen White can’t leave Chicago, it seems. The Shameless actor’s now portraying a too-intense, former fine-dining chef who ends up back home and attempting to helm a sandwich shop for his family. There’s an emotional reason for this, and the actual realities of running this business turn into a cluster. In the midst of it all, there’s a sense of humanity in how this show portrays relationships, while White’s character (Carmy) transforms his own sense of self and learns to find a second family. Watch it on Hulu.
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