Month: July 2022

In a last-minute effort to create the song of the summer, Steve Martin and the Only Murders In The Building team have cooked up what’s sure to be the best track of 1989! Just kidding, but Hulu has been going all-out with their music production here. In the most recent episode of Only Murders In The Building, the crime-solving trio learned about Martin’s character Charles’ hit track from way back in the 1980s.

“Angel In Flip Flops” is a summer anthem, featuring Charles and his beachy hair on guitar singing about his summer love, who happens to be walking around in a pair of flip flops, as one does in the 80s.

Hulu released a music video for the world-famous song, which has been sampled by “like, 50 rap stars” according to Charles’ step-daughter (played by Zoe Coletti). The video features some much-needed context: “The year was 1989 and Brazzos’ single, Angel in Flip Flops, was riding high on the charts… until the Berlin Wall came down.” As we learned in the episode, the song was a hit in Germany, charting at number 83, just before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Co-creator John Hoffman told Decider how the some came about. “When the notion came up in our writers’ room of Charles-Haden Savage, at the height of his success with his original Brazzos series, maybe having recorded an album that did really well in Germany before the Berlin Wall fell, we knew we had to talk further about it — immediately!” Hoffman explained. “When we shared this idea with Steve Martin — well, I think it was a day (if even?) before Steve had a title and a tune making its way through his genius mind and we were more than off and running.”

Of course, Charles’ friends Mabel and Oliver (Selena Gomez and Martin Short) did not think the song was genius. “I’m such a huge fan of terrible music. How have I never heard this?” Oliver says as they are listening to the track on vinyl. At least he has a nice perm on the album cover!

As anyone who’s been on social media for the past few months can tell you, the Johnny Depp and Amber Heard trial generated a significant amount of activity. Whether you were on Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, or even Facebook, there was no shortage of content, which predominantly skewed towards Depp and attacked Heard’s credibility. Even Chris Rock got in on the action.

Adding to that online fury were widespread anecdotes of social media users being swarmed by Depp fans on Twitter if they spoke critically of the actor or even just sympathetically towards Heard. While the overwhelming theory is that Depp’s team employed the use of fake accounts in Russia (a.k.a. “bots”) to boost support for the actor on social media, a new study reportedly suggests that’s not entirely the case. According to Bot Sentinel, yes, an “organized campaign of widespread targeted harassment,” but there were actual people behind the attacks.

“It does not necessarily mean a bunch of folks in a small room, some place in St. Petersburg that are working together,” Bot Sentinel founder Christopher Bouzy told CBS News. “It could just be a group of people who are against Amber Heard, and they decide on another platform — whether it’s Switch or Discord or whatever — ‘we’re going to attack, let’s coordinate together.’”

Bouzy’s firm found that Heard supporters “were attacked relentlessly,” often with “vulgar and threatening language.” It wrote in the report that, “offensive tweets, misogyny, doxxing, and death threats were rampant” in tweets targeting Heard supporters. The report includes a disclaimer that the firm was previously hired by Heard’s legal team, in 2020, to analyze traffic related to Heard and Depp. However, Bouzy said the research published Monday was undertaken independently, after observing what appeared to be harassment and platform manipulation.

According to the full report, which you can read here, the harassment campaign was described as “one of the worst cases of cyberbullying and cyberstalking by a group of Twitter accounts that we’ve ever seen.” Bot Sentinel also concluded that Twitter failed to act accordingly to protect users.

“It’s our opinion Twitter didn’t do enough to mitigate the platform manipulation and did very little to stop the abuse and targeted harassment,” the report stated. “Twitter essentially left the women to fend for themselves with little to no support from the platform.”

(Via CBS News)

Every now and then, a story about a musician-focused college course emerges, like last year with Drake and The Weeknd, or earlier this year with Taylor Swift. Now, another pop icon is getting his own class, and this time, it’s Harry Styles.

In Spring 2023, Louie Dean Valencia, Associate Professor of Digital History at Texas State University, will teach a course titled “Harry Styles And The Cult Of Celebrity: Identity, The Internet, And European Pop Culture.” The course description reads, “This course focuses on British musician Harry Styles and popular European culture to understand the cultural and political development of the modern celebrity as related to questions of gender and sexuality, race, class, nation and globalism, media, fashion, fan culture, internet culture, and consumerism.”

Valencia told KXAN Austin, “As an historian, I want the class to get to really see how the world has changed in the last 12 years or so, but also how to put that into historical context, through the lens of Harry Styles, and how they can learn from him and his art, activism and philosophy, like any great artist.”

He also said his proposal for the class was 23 pages long and was looked over by a panel of professors before the university approved it.

KXAN notes, “Assignments for the class will include studying [Styles’] music, films and with readings from Murakami, Bethan Roberts, Susan Sontag, Charles Bukowski, Rumi, Alain de Botton, Richard Brautigan and more. Students will also have to create their own podcast.”

Go figure Cardi B’s daughter Kulture would choose an aquatic theme for her fourth birthday party. It’s kind of ironic considering that the mother-daughter duo was recently featured on an episode of Baby Shark’s Big Show! — Kulture’s fave, of course — on which Cardi debuted the kid-friendly “Seaweed Sway.” The pair became another kind of sea creature for the party, donning matching mermaid-inspired outfits in photos from the festivities Cardi posted on Instagram (Cardi’s look is, naturally, a little more risque).

The birthday blowouts Cardi and her husband Offset have thrown for their firstborn have become the stuff of entertainment industry legend. For Kulture’s first birthday, the couple reportedly dropped $400,000 — on what, we can only guess — but it appears they have gotten a little more frugal over time. Last year, they “only” spent $150,000 on a gift, giving fans a little more insight into the princess-themed party in response to fan backlash against what appeared to be an age-inappropriate present. Neighbors even called the police on Kulture’s second birthday party, but to be fair, that was during a pandemic.

But let’s be honest; the real beneficiary here is Wave, because Cardi and ‘Set are really going to have to go overboard (no pun intended) on his parties now that they’ve set the bar so high.

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

From 1997-2003, Russell Crowe starred in five (!) Best Picture nominees: L.A. Confidential, The Insider, Gladiator (which won), A Beautiful Mind (which also won), and Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (which should have won). Crowe was also nominated for Best Actor three years in a row, including a win for Gladiator.

You can argue if the Ridley Scott-directed film is Crowe’s finest work (I contend it’s Master and Commander, one of the best movies of the 2000s, period), but it’s inarguably his biggest, at least among non-superhero films. Gladiator made north of $460 million at the box office, and it’s still wildly popular. Take a look at how many likes this tweet has:

Nearly 450,000! Each and every one of them deserved. “Taking the kids to see my old office,” Crowe tweeted while standing with his girlfriend, Britney Theriot, and his sons outside the Colosseum in Rome. He should make the same tweet for Master and Commander, except this time he’s standing in front of a body of water. Doesn’t matter which body of water. Any water will do it.

A sequel to Gladiator is being written, according to Scott. “Oh, it’s been written. It’s already been written,” he said last year. “We have a good footprint, a good, logical place to go. You can’t just do another Gladiator type movie. You’ve got to follow… there’s enough components from the first one to pick up the ball and continue it.”

(Via Twitter/Russell Crowe)

Rob Zombie’s life-long passion project is finally heading to (small) screens this fall. The Munsters will get a Netflix release just in time for the spookiest season of all, alongside Tim Burton’s highly-anticipated Addams Family spinoff, Wednesday.

Zombie took to Instagram to confirm and celebrate the news, alongside a TV Guide clipping from 1964, when the Munster family made its television debut:

“This fall we are gonna spook-out like it’s 1964! Yep, THE MUNSTERS and THE ADDAMS FAMILY are returning to the boob tube at the same time courtesy of @netflix It’s been 58 years since this clash of the titans first happened. Perfect entertainment for your pumpkin carving party. Check out this wicked fall preview issue of TV Guide for the 64-65 season I found while cleaning . Wacky monster fans unite!”

The first trailer for the movie was released last week, polarizing the internet. The campy comedy looks to be a faithful adaptation of the original, while fans of Rob Zombie’s various works were expecting something a little more…scary.

Zombie has been open about the fact that the movie is a family-friendly, PG-rated take on the iconic family sitcom. After all, the movie will star Zombie’s actual wife Sheri Moon Zombie as Lily Munster so it’s a family project, first and foremost!

The 2022 MLB Home Run Derby will be at Dodger Stadium for the first time ever on Monday night, with a stacked field of baseball’s best home run hitters, including the back-to-back champ Pete Alonso, looking to launch baseballs into Chavez Ravine.

As has been the case since 2017, Karl Ravech will be on the call for ESPN’s coverage of the vent, with Eduardo Perez next to him and Buster Olney and Marly Rivera on the field reporting. On ESPN2, there will be a Statcast broadcast, with Jason Benetti, Jessica Mendoza, and Mike Petriello showing all the launch data from the hitters. It’s great that there are multiple options for the Home Run Derby viewing experience, but here I am going to pitch one more addition to their megacast options:

The BackBackBackcast, featuring Chris Berman (h/t Fletcher Keel for the excellent name).

For a quarter century, Berman was the voice of the Derby, but by the end of his full-time career at ESPN it had become popular to be a Boomer hater. His schtick had worn thin on many fans and media types, tired of his bellowing “BACK BACK BACK” calls and punny nicknames, but absence makes the heart grow fonder and after five years without Boom on the mic, I think fans have come to realize how much more fun it was having Berman on the call.

The Derby, in particular, is an event that needs that larger than life personality to help carry it. In the middle of a round, after the initial excitement wears off and we’re not yet to the finals, there can be a lull in energy that requires some forced exuberance, and no one has ever been better at that than Boom. There was something admirable about his efforts to get a “BACK BACK BACK” in for every home run, even as the pace picked up and guys tried to rapid fire their way through the event, and his energy never waned, even during a rough round.

I’m willing to cede that Berman might not be for everyone and not everyone would love him back on the main broadcast, but I think there are enough of us out there that grew up on Boom that the BackBackBackcast could do numbers. Just watch this and tell me you don’t want to hear this again.

If you didn’t crack a big smile when he dropped that “on it’s way to Yuma,” then sure the BackBackBackcast wouldn’t be for you, but there’s enough of us out there who want to hear him say “Acuña hit that one to LAGUÑA” tonight that ESPN should pay whatever it takes to get Boom to fly in to L.A. from Hawaii to give the people what we want, at least one more time.

There’s about a month and a half left until this year’s midterm elections, after recent moments in politics like Roe v. Wade being overturned, it’s no surprise that there’s a heavy emphasis on voting this year. Billie Eilish is stepping up to the plate to make sure her fans participate in the upcoming elections, and it’s an expected move from her as she’s been a big voice in the activist world. Eilish is really making a push for voter participation this year, but she’s not doing it alone.

Eilish is teaming up with voter registration organization HeadCount to ensure her fans vote in the upcoming mid-term elections. The partnership will allow fans to check their registration status on their website while also giving people the opportunity to win a VIP experience that includes travel Eilish’s upcoming shows in Australia and New Zealand. Eilish spoke about the new partnership in a press release for the partnership.

“I’m working with HeadCount to encourage everyone to show up at the polls and use their voice during these midterm elections,” Eilish said. “With what is going on in our country we need to get out to the polls and vote for what we believe in. Not showing up is not an option.”

You can read more about Eilish’s partnership with HeadCount on their organization’s website here.

The Cleveland Cavaliers debuted their new jerseys for the upcoming 2022-23 season on Monday. With the release, Cleveland elected to keep things simple, a direction many NBA teams seem to be headed these days. Prior to the Cavs, the Utah Jazz most recently unveiled new jerseys, ones that also embrace minimalist concepts. Fortunately for Cleveland, its jerseys are much better than Utah’s.

As for a power ranking of these kits, the white ones strike me as the clear winner. The wine pops on the white backdrop, while the hints of gold in the Nike Swoosh are elegant complements. The V serving as a net with a ball dropping in is a snazzy touch, drawing back to their classic look from the 90s but with a cleaner look. The lone downside is the sponsorship lettering being blue and green. It sticks out like a sore thumb once you notice.

The wine and red jersey is, like, fine? It feels incomplete, though. It’s too simple. It needs more to beat the Summer League Jersey Allegations. The white jersey rules because of the aforementioned details. This wine one is lacking those subtle, creative intricacies. There’s room for growth here.

Lastly, the black jersey with the massive Cavaliers C stamped across the chest isn’t doing it for me. I don’t love that logo in general, let alone as the centerpiece of a uniform. Black and gold is typically a rather challenging color combination to botch, but I think that’s what transpired here. They’re clearly paying homage to the sleeved unis they wore en route to their 2016 championship, but they didn’t look great then when they were winning titles in them and still don’t look great now.

Despite these milquetoast kits, the team donning them next season should be quite enjoyable, which always trumps the aesthetics of any jerseys. Darius Garland and Jarrett Allen emerged as stars last season, snagging their inaugural All-Star team appearances. Evan Mobley delighted en route to a runner-up Rookie of the Year finish and stardom is a matter of when, not if, for him.

Collin Sexton and Ricky Rubio will be back after suffering season-ending injuries before the turn of the calendar. Their returns will bolster a previously depleted ball-handling unit. Lauri Markkanen found his niche as a versatile on-ball wing defender who launches spot-up triples. Isaac Okoro displayed signs of growth. There’s a whole lot to be excited about with this club that stretches well beyond its new, nifty white jerseys.

In 2015, Tom DeLonge left Blink-182 behind, so the band responded by bringing in Alkaline Trio singer/guitarist Matt Skiba to take his place. So, Skiba has been in the band for about seven years now, but he’s actually not even sure if he’s currently a member of Blink-182 or not.

In the comments of one of Skiba’s recent Instagram posts, a fan asked, “You guys think he is still in Blink? No Blink content here and the Blink guys dont Post pictures mit matt.” Skiba himself responded, writing, “your guess is as good as mine. Regardless, I am very proud of and thankful for my time w @blink182. We shall see… [heart emoji].”

Neither Mark Hoppus, Travis Barker, nor DeLonge have offered any sort of public comment about Skiba’s status in Blink-182.

Back in November, DeLonge told James Corden on The Late Late Show of his interest in reuniting with Blink-182, “It’s so funny: Blink, it’s like, we’re there and then we’re gone and then we’re there and then we’re gone. I feel like I’m always talking about some kind of reunion. We always talk about playing together again and I think that that’s definitely something we’re all interested in. Finding the time to do it where it lines up with everybody’s priorities is really all that’s needed, and getting Mark healthy again, getting him strong again. But yeah, I’m down, I think those guys are down. I think just finding the time to do it and when is really what we just got to figure out.”

Blink-182 is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.