Month: July 2022

Legendary college football coach Lou Holtz has three rules for living a good life: do what is right, do everything to the best of your ability, and show people you care.

Harley Quinn would care to disagree.

In season three of the fantastic HBO Max animated series, she shares her three rules: eat, bang, and kill.

In the clip below, Harley and Poison Ivy go on a “eat, bang, kill” tour. As you might expect, there’s eating, there’s banging, and there’s killing (there’s also prank calling Jim Gordon while he’s sitting on the can). But don’t worry, Harley only kills a member of the paparazzi. “Send our regards to whatever sh*tty tabloid you work for,” she yells at the photographer while punching him in the face and knocking him overboard. “And tell Ben Affleck I upper-decked his fancy SodaStream.” God, I missed this show.

Here’s more on what to expect in season three:

Wrapping up their “Eat. Bang! Kill. Tour,” Harley Quinn (Kaley Cuoco) and Poison Ivy (Lake Bell) return to Gotham as the new power couple of DC villainy. Along with their ragtag crew – King Shark (Ron Funches), Clayface (Alan Tudyk), Frank the Plant (JB Smoove) – “Harlivy” strives to become the best version of themselves while also working towards Ivy’s long desired plan of transforming Gotham into an Eden paradise.

Harley Quinn season three premieres on HBO Max on July 28.

As Disney+ prepares to bring some fan-favorite R-rated movies to the streamer, there are a few things to consider. One is that the scale of rating movies is so skewed these days, it doesn’t feel like it should matter. And the second (and most important) point is that there are some Disney movies that unreasonably traumatized children and it’s time they take responsibility for that! At least that’s what Ryan Reynolds believes.

The Deadpool star took to Twitter to announce the news about the superhero movie arriving on Disney+, but used it as an opportunity to bring awareness to the unnecessary violence that took place in those early Disney cartoons. Who leaves a baby deer out to fend for itself in the wild? That is some cold-blooded stuff.

“We’re supposed to announce Logan and Deadpool will soon be the first R-rated movies on Disney+. But we all know some Disney movies should already be rated R for irreversible trauma,” Reynolds tweeted, along with updated rating cards for various Disney classics.

Reynolds’ various fake rating updates include Snow White, Old Yeller, The Lion King, and, everybody’s first traumatic childhood memory, Bambi.

For Snow White’s updated rating, the card reads: “Rated R for breaking and entering, Borderline polyandry [and] pretty sure those diamonds aren’t cruelty-free.” Maybe there should be a sequel where the dwarves unionize? While Old Yeller gets an R rating for “Totally ugly-crying inducing straight-up murder of Old Yeller. Also, bear abuse.”

There are also some great points regarding The Lion King’s “Fratricide, mauling, very possibly half-sibling lovin’, or at least kissing cousins. Seriously.” Finally, Bambi got a much-needed rating update for “Cold-blooded killing of an innocent deer mom, that will cause life-long trauma.”

As long as this conversation is going, what about the opening sequence to Up or the gut-wrenching incinerator scene from Toy Story. Who let Disney do that?!

For days, word has been spreading that tonight’s January 6th Committee’s primetime hearing will be packed with some blockbuster moments and some never-before-seen footage. What many outlets are teasing is that viewers will be privy to a sort of “blooper reel” from the pre-taped speech that Donald Trump released on January 7, 2021, in which he only kind of condemned the violent actions of the previous day’s rioters.

The Daily Beast, picking up from a story in The Washington Post, reported that the creation of that three-minute video we all saw (and you can watch again above), in which Trump finally acknowledged that a “new administration” would soon be settling into the West Wing, was basically the political video version of Apocalypse Now, with Trump in the role of Marlon Brando. The then-president’s two biggest hangups? Publicly admitting that he lost the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden, and placing the blame for the violence on January 6th squarely on the shoulders of the violent rioters, according to WaPo sources.

“The outtakes, which could be released as early as Thursday night, reportedly show about an hour of [Trump] struggling to make the remarks that were ultimately shown to the public,” writes The Daily Beast news editor Allison Quinn. “A day earlier, he had famously told rioters still occupying the Capitol that they were ‘very special’ and declared ‘We love you.’”

We’re also scheduled to hear from two key witnesses in the investigation into the events surrounding the Capitol riots: former deputy press secretary Sarah Matthews and former Deputy National Security Adviser Matthew Pottinger, both of whom had the dignity to resign their posts following the deadly events of January 6th.

In other words: Make sure your popcorn supply is well-stocked.

(Via The Daily Beast)

Sit down in a room alone and dim the lights to prepare for Chris Pine in the incredibly sexy and spooky trailer for Don’t Worry Darling, which follows a 1950s housewife living in a glamorous utopian community who realizes that her husband’s company is hiding some disturbing secrets.

While the first Don’t Worry Darling trailer provided a mere glimpse into the psychosexual drama with some brief steamy moments between stars Florence Pugh and Harry Styles, this second trailer is a deeper dive into just how sexy the movie will be. And it adds Chris Pine to the mix: at the end of the trailer he calls Pugh a “good girl.” Hopefully, they didn’t just cram all of the movie’s hottest moments into the trailers.

Director Olivia Wilde (Booksmart) has promised that her second feature film won’t ignore good sex and that the film draws inspiration from some of the greatest erotic thrillers, including Adrian Lyne’s Fatal Attraction and Indecent Proposal. “I kept saying, ‘Why isn’t there any good sex in film anymore?’ I realized how rarely we see female hunger on film, and specifically this type of female pleasure,” Wilde told Vogue in 2021.

Don’t Worry Darling, which was written by Katie Silberman based on a story by Silberman and Carey Van Dyke & Shane Van Dyke and also stars Gemma Chan, KiKi Layne, Timothy Simons, and Nick Kroll, comes to theaters on September 23.

The world of NBA broadcasting looks like it’s approaching a gigantic crossroad. Charles Barkley, the Inside the NBA commenter who has spent the last 20+ years as one of the most popular analyst in the game, took a meeting with the upstart golf league LIV Golf earlier this week to discuss joining in some capacity.

LIV Golf, which launched earlier this year, is funded by the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia. This has led to criticism of the league and the golfers who have accepted gigantic paydays, primarily that they are participating in sportswashing by letting Saudi Arabia use sports as a way to take attention away from their record of human rights violations.

As Barkley explained to Andrew Marchand of the New York Post in the aftermath of his meeting with LIV Golf CEO Greg Norman, he does not believe this criticism is done in good faith.

“I told [Norman,]” Barkley said. “’Listen, they are making up words, like ‘blood money’ and ‘sports washing.’ I said, ‘We have all taken ‘blood money’ and we all have ‘sports washed’ something so I don’t like those words, to be honest with you.’

“If you are in pro sports, you are taking some type of money from not a great cause.”

Barkley, who confirmed to Marchand that he has three years and $30 million remaining on his deal with Turner (which he has said will likely lead to his retirement from broadcasting upon its conclusion), responded to a question about whether he views the NBA’s relationship with China as an example of this by saying he doesn’t “want to practice selective outrage,” then noted that he is sponsored by Nike and that “I’m not going to do that thing where I pick and choose what I’m outraged about, where my money comes from.”

He did, however, essentially mention that a major factor in all of this is that LIV Golf’s offer makes it worth leaving Turner and, potentially, losing his sponsors like Capital One and Subway, many of whom reached out in the aftermath of the news he would meet with Norman.

“Between the number you just mentioned [$10 million per year] and all my commercials, for me to risk all of that, it would have to be some serious money thrown my way,” Barkley said.

During his performance at Coachella this year, Harry Styles premiered “Boyfriends” live on stage. Billie Eilish was there for that moment, although some loud talkers were ruining it for her. So, she had no choice but to request they “shut the f*ck up and listen to this f*cking song.”

After today’s release of her new songs “TV” and “The 30th,” Eilish spoke with Apple Music’s Zane Lowe about how that Styles performance inspired her to debut “TV” live before releasing it. She said:

“I was thinking, ‘Wow, that’s so cool.’ He’s such a big deal, and playing an unreleased song really opens the floodgates of all these questions: Will people sh*t on it? Will they hate it? Will they love it? Will it be a thing? Will they get bored of it? Will somebody steal it? […] I saw that and I was standing there, and he started playing that song, and I thought it was so beautiful. I was in the artist area at Coachella, and, literally, these motherf*ckers were talking so loud, and I turned around and I was like, ‘Shut the f*ck up and listen to this f*cking song’ [laughs]. And everybody was like, ‘Damn! Jesus Christ.’ But I was standing there and I was like, ‘This is so’… It’s really vulnerable to play a song that is not out that is that vulnerable to you, and that’s what I wanted to do. I missed doing that.”

Watch the full interview above.

Mutual beacons of controversy Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson seemed pretty tight on a lot of issues earlier this year when the former guested on the latter’s podcast. They both cater to a far-right audience (and Peterson defended Rogan after scientists urged him to stop spreading Covid misinformation, a mess that led to Spotify warnings), but Rogan’s not about to let every single Peterson stance fly without comment.

The issue that broke the Rogan’s back has been brewing for a few months, it seems, and involves Peterson’s deadnaming of trans Oscar winner Elliot Page. “Remember when pride was a sin?” Peterson tweeted. “And Ellen Page just had her breasts removed by a criminal physician.” And for that, Peterson got suspended from Twitter, even though he also apparently got triggered and quit the social media platform (so much back and forth) due to backlash over his remarks about a Sports Illustrated cover model. Well, Rogan isn’t here for Peterson refusing to recognize Page’s chosen name and apparently believes that it’s a dumb hill to die on.

“He’s kicked off Twitter right now,” Rogan declared (via Mediaite). “I think that was the number one thing. The deadnaming.” Rogan continued while explaining, “My friend Brian Simpson had a very good thing to say about that. He was like, ‘I come to you for like heavy duty intellectual sh*t.’ He goes, ‘Not for this.’ Like this is not a thing to be getting offended about.”

From there, Rogan didn’t see why Peterson wouldn’t leave Elliot Page alone and why he was so dang offended by something that doesn’t even affect him. “Like everybody’s in favor of everybody doing whatever they want to do, as long as it doesn’t hurt anybody until it gets to gender and then people start getting weird,” the host declared.

“Weird” is certainly one way to describe Peterson’s behavior. What’s quite wild is how — when Peterson visited Rogan in early 2022 — he compared being transgender to “satanic ritual abuse.” Fast forward to now, and Rogan’s making his perspective on Peterson’s deadnaming clear.

Previously, Peterson released a video, in which he acknowledged the Twitter suspension. He called it “impossible” to use Elliot’s chosen name, and he added, “[T]he suspension will not be lifted until I delete the ‘hateful’ tweet in question, and I would rather die than do that.”

Meanwhile, Elliot Page simply keeps ignoring Jordan Peterson.

(Via Mediaite)

When it was announced that Muse would be replacing Foo Fighters as the headliner for October’s Aftershock Festival, we were still wondering how Muse would stack up alongside the heavy metal music festival’s lineup of bands like Slipknot, Rob Zombie, and Lamb Of God. Well, now after hearing Muse’s gigantic new single, “Kill Or Be Killed,” it makes a lot more sense.

“Kill Or Be Killed” — which will appear on Muse’s upcoming album, Will Of The People, out August 26th — quickly opens with drums that can best be described as what singer Matt Bellamy calls “modern metal.” While Muse’s signature anthemic riffs rise up from there, Bellamy’s howl morphs from his usual belt into something that’s damn near demonic at times.

Bellamy said in a statement, “‘Kill Or Be Killed’ is Muse at their heaviest! We wanted to update our hard rock sound on this album and with ‘Kill Or Be Killed’ we found a modern metal sound featuring double bass drum action and even a death growl. Lyrically the song takes influence from my favourite Paul McCartney song ‘Live And Let Die,’ a dark take on how life’s adversity can sometimes bring out the worst human instincts to survival at any costs.”

Listen to “Kill Or Be Killed” above and check out Muse’s October tour dates below.

10/04 — Los Angeles, CA @ The Wiltern
10/11 — Chicago, IL @ The Riviera Theatre
10/14 — Toronto, CA @ The History
10/16 — New York City, NY @ The Beacon Theatre
10/23 — Amsterdam, NL @ Royal Theatre Carré
10/23 — Paris, FR @ Salle Pleyel
10/26 — Milan, IT @ Alcatraz

Will Of The People is out 8/26 via Warner. Pre-order it here.

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

Kevin Gates‘ new album Khaza is out now on Atlantic Records, and to celebrate, he stopped by Uproxx Studios in LA to drop off a passionate performance of his song “Hard To Sleep” for UPROXX Sessions. Perhaps he enjoyed the California weather because he left his shirt off camera, but he definitely enjoyed performing the new song because he kept it going until the camera faded to black.

In the lead-up to releasing Khaza — which is named after his youngest son, Khaza Kamil Gates — he released a handful of singles including “Super General” and “Intro,” and announced his Big Lyfe Tour, which kicks off next month in Dallas and runs through October, where it’ll conclude in Pensacola, Florida.

Watch Kevin Gates perform “Hard To Sleep” for UPROXX Sessions above.

UPROXX Sessions is Uproxx’s performance show featuring the hottest up-and-coming acts you should keep an eye on. Featuring creative direction from LA promotion collective, Ham On Everything, and taking place on our “bathroom” set designed and painted by Julian Gross, UPROXX Sessions is a showcase of some of our favorite performers, who just might soon be yours, too.

Kevin Gates is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

I should’ve known that something was in the air when the first songs I heard at the biggest jazz music festival in the world were by Outkast, Arrested Development, Common, and A Tribe Called Quest. As a warm-up to Robert Glasper’s Montreal Jazz Festival set at the grandiose Theatre Maisonneuve, his DJ Jahi Sundance coursed through those ’90s hip-hop classics, along with ubiquitous soul music cuts from Marvin Gaye, Minnie Ripperton, and even some Lenny Kravitz joints. These are by all means standards within Black music and hip-hop culture, but very much in contrast to the traditional sense of jazz standards.

Considering Glasper’s latest album, Black Radio III, came out earlier this year and was prominently featured during his set, Glasper used the evening to make a statement on the evolution of Black music. What was forged in jazz and then soul and R&B, now finds its heartbeat in hip-hop. And everything is connected.

Glasper’s performance came after Montreal Jazz Festival’s director of booking, Maurin Auxéméry, presented the pianist with the festival’s Miles Davis Award on stage. It’s an award that recognizes an artist for, “…their influence in regenerating the jazz idiom.” And while people like Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, and Sonny Rollins had won it in the past, Glasper — who beyond his solo work has worked prominently with Kendrick Lamar, Yasiin Bey, Erykah Badu, and Lauryn Hill — was the first recipient whose career was inextricably tied to hip-hop as much as jazz.

This notion of hip-hop’s essential role in shaping the future of jazz music was ever-present throughout my four days in Montreal. Within the 350 concerts (mostly free) across ten days spread out throughout Downtown’s Place des Festivals, hip-hop’s very fabric was around every corner. And I was privy to hip-hop’s stewards of jazz music everywhere, all the way down to a full circle moment in an unforgettable grand finale.

On my first night, I saw emerging jazz-hop duo Domi & JD Beck totally dominate their set at Club Soda. The pair are the first act signed to Anderson .Paak’s Apeshit Records label and Paak has taken them under his wing as he helps push forward one of the most exciting new acts of the year. Domi Louna’s dizzying dance from keys to MIDI bass and JD Beck’s unfathomable work on his snare and kick drum are a sight to behold. They played tunes from their upcoming album, Not Tight, but also wowed with a Madvillain medley that made them go viral on YouTube. With Domi & JD Beck, jazz is hip-hop and hip-hop is jazz; the line is blurred in incredible and fascinating ways. And as jazz takes on a new face as it embarks into the future, no Gen Zers embody it better than these two, who are already masters at their craft.

Outside of the club, even the street musician who played saxophone on the corner has expanded his act. He’s still blowing into his sax, but now he’s doing it over Brooklyn drill beats and rapping in between breaths. The next day, a beat-boxer joined him to warm up the passersby to what lay past the festival partitions.

With an unprecedented two-thirds of the programming at this year’s Montreal Jazz Festival being free, new stage environments were set up that made for the fest’s biggest Downtown footprint ever. The Pub La Traversée Molson Export hosted chilled-out jazz acts like Japanese trumpet player Takuya Kuroda. Kuroda rose to prominence with his collaborations alongside jazz and hip-hop vocalist Jose James, including one of the greatest renditions of Roy Ayers’ classic “Everybody Loves The Sunshine” you’ll ever hear. His set proved a relaxed gathering place for a twenty-something son and his parents, older folks perched above on a cafe terrace, and a Bohemian young couple with a stroller drinking beer while dancing with their baby, as their friends smoked a joint next to them.

The makeup of the crowd at Montreal Jazz Festival is a constant reminder of how well-funded arts programming (with support from the Canadian Government through the Canada Economic Development for Quebec Regions initiatives) directly increases access to people of all socioeconomic backgrounds. This much was evidenced everywhere I turned as attendees were exposed to a range of artists, sometimes not knowing what they were in for.

The best stage banter and one of the most refreshing performances I heard all week had to be from Edmonton rapper Rollie Pemberton, better known by his stage name, Cadence Weapon. “This song is from my album, Parallel Worlds, which won the Polaris Music prize last year. And that, my friends, is how I ended up here on the Montreal Jazz stage,” he said with a chuckle, introducing “Play No Games.” And then before they realized what hit them, three generations of a family in front of me were hearing Pemberton spitting lyrics like, “My Prime Minister wears Black face, but no he don’t really wanna face no Blacks.”

Cadence Weapon performed on the Rio Tinto Stage — the festival’s 2nd largest outdoor area — and people were covering every inch of the tiered seating plaza. He made sure to shout “F*ck Rogers!” as the largely Canadian crowd found solidarity in the communications company’s widely-publicized weekend-long outage — which coincidentally forced The Weeknd to cancel his hometown performance in Toronto that same day. But it was how the Cadence Weapon set morphed from Pemberton — in a slick Toronto Raptors Charles Oakley kit — in front of a laptop solo to begin the set, to then being backed by a full band, even including a cellist and a sax player, that kept him connected to the stratified crowd. This was raw, pull-no-punches hip-hop that took on more expansive life with the jazz band behind him. It showed a polymorphous rapper offering a different dimension to how he’s presented, without changing a thing about how he delivers his pointed messages.

And as the festival started coming to a close, nobody showed the power of hip-hop as an elevator of jazz music forms quite like The Roots. The world’s most well-known instrumental hip-hop band changed the face of the genre forever — and even brought it to your network TV lineup on The Tonight Show.

Hip-hop has been among the most progressive art forms of the last three decades-plus and The Roots are a perfect reflection of that. Their closing set on the festival’s Main TD Stage in the heart of the Place Des Festivals was glorious. They’re the group who can find common ground with the masses by playing pop culture staples from Kool & The Gang and 2Pac to Manu Dibango and Erykah Badu, in a cascading arrangement led by Questlove’s incredible breaks. But then, create life-affirming moments with modern-day hip-hop standards like “Proceed,” “The Next Movement,” and the uncanny melody of “Act Too (The Love Of My Life)” reverberating through the crowd that went on as far as the eyes could see.

Black Thought was divine. No MC can lead an explosive band of jazz musicians into one of the greatest live hip-hop acts on the planet like this. We should all know this much to be true by now. Later in the night, Questlove would play an unannounced DJ set at the intimate Club Rio Tinto venue a stone’s throw away from where the band was closing their set with “The Seed 2.0” into a rendition of Curtis Mayfield’s “Move On Up.” And I couldn’t escape what The Roots have come to represent in this new millennium.

Here was a group that I saw live for the first time on stage at a rave in Los Angeles in 2000, closing out the largest jazz music festival in the world in 2022. They did it all with hip-hop as the touchstone for all of the music and art that they create. And this year at Montreal Jazz Festival, they embodied the inescapable force that hip-hop wields in culture, in jazz, in humanity, and throughout the world.

Uproxx was hosted for this event by Montreal Jazz Festival. However, they did not review or approve this story. You can learn more about the Uproxx Press Trip policy here.