Month: September 2022

In her new video for “Ain’t No Love” featuring 2 Chainz, Baby Tate makes a show of getting pampered at the nail salon with her crew (fan-shaped with the extra details, okay?). The Atlanta native then hits the streets to flaunt her fresh looks, posting up at the gas station to run through some choreography in front of her tricked-out jeep before hitting a diner for a late-night meal. It’s a fitting theme, considering the single is promoting her upcoming mixtape, Mani/Pedi, and takes inspiration from the video for the ATL classic it samples: Ciara’s 2004 Goodies standout “Oh,” which intriguingly enough featured 2 Chainz’s former label boss, Ludacris. We love a good homage.

In addition to dropping the “Ain’t No Love” video, Tate also shared the release date for her upcoming tape, the follow-up to her breakout 2020 EP After The Rain. The tracklist includes the previously released “Dancing Queen,” as well as a remix of “S.L.O. (Slut Him Out)” featuring fellow Atlanta rapper Kali titled “Slut Him Out Again.” Besides these singles, Tate built anticipation for the project with a series of freestyles and features, including the “extendo verse” from JID’s “Surround Sound,” a feature on Landstrip Chip’s “Wrong Way,” and a fun verse over the TikTok hit “Period Ahh, Period Uhh.”

Check out the tracklist for Mani/Pedi, out 9/30 through Raedio, below. Pre-save it here.

1. “Perfect”
2.”Aint No Love” Feat. 2 Chainz
3. “Do Better”
4. “Karma”
5. “Slut Him Out Again” Feat. Kali
6. “Differences”
7. “Mani”
8. “4Lifers”
9. “What’s Love”
10. “Dancing Queen”
11. “Pedi”
12. “Yasss Queen”
13. “Honest”
14. “I Do” Feat. Slim Wav

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

Donald Trump’s Wednesday night interview with Sean Hannity had everyone talking — largely because of his insistence that, as President of the United States, he had the authority to declassify documents with his brain. But that’s just one of the reasons why Seth Meyers thinks that the former president might have “lost his f***ing mind.”

On Thursday night, Meyers talked about Trump’s newly discovered Jedi mind trick-like ability to declassify documents through sheer mind power, but was also taken aback by Trump’s suggestion that what the FBI was really looking for when they rummaged through his Palm Beach home — and didn’t even have the decency to take their shoes off while walking through his bedroom — were… Hillary Clinton’s emails?!

“[B]y far the craziest part of the interview,” according to Meyers, “came when Trump fully unraveled and seemed to suggest that the FBI was maybe searching Mar-a-Lago to look for Hillary Clinton’s emails. It made so little sense, even Hannity had to jump in and stop him.”

Trump, in a bold attempt to point the finger in a whole other direction, told Hannity that there’s “a lot of speculation, because of what they did — the severity of the FBI coming and raiding Mar-a-Lago — were they looking for the Hillary Clinton emails that were deleted, but they are around someplace.”

First of all: There is no speculation of the sort other than in Trump’s mind, which we guess now makes it official (he just has to think it, after all). But more importantly: Even Hannity seemed unclear whether Trump was asking a question or making a statement. So he interjected with a “Wait, wait — you’re not saying you had it?” To which Trump replied no, but again suggested that the FBI “may have thought” Hillary’s emails were there.

“Wait, WHAT?,” was Meyers’ — and, well, pretty much everyone else’s — reaction to this new line of defense:

The FBI searched your private resort to look for Hillary Clinton’s emails? The ones you supposedly have been looking for forever… But man, what a twist. What a twist it would be if Trump accidentally admitted that he’s the one who stole all of Hillary Clinton’s missing emails. I mean, honestly, that would have been worth it. Even M. Night Shyamalan would have been like, ‘F**k. Hats off!’

You can watch the full clip above, beginning around the 9:50 mark.

The Rundown is a weekly column that highlights some of the biggest, weirdest, and most notable events of the week in entertainment. The number of items could vary, as could the subject matter. It will not always make a ton of sense. Some items might not even be about entertainment, to be honest, or from this week. The important thing is that it’s Friday, and we are here to have some fun.

ITEM NUMBER ONE – This poor miserable goof

I’ll be honest here: I did not expect to enjoy House of the Dragon this much. I thought I was done with Game of Thrones and all of its various kings and queens and magic doodads. I started watching only because it was kind of an obligation for this job. (I am very professional.) But now, a few weeks into it all, I find myself hooked all over again. It’s a truly shocking development. No one is more surprised by it than me. And there’s one main reason why it’s happened: King Viserys and the misery that is constantly stretched across his poor face.

Look at this guy.

Look at him try to hide the fact that he’s just having the worst time anyone has ever had while also sitting on a throne and commanding a squadron of fire-breathing dragons.

I love him so much. I get excited whenever he shows up on screen, kind of like I did whenever Philip Jennings showed up to Mope his way through a scene on The Americans. I think if Viserys ever experiences actual happiness, even for a moment, I will be so disappointed I might stay in bed the following Monday. His misery is fueling me right now. I feel okay about it.

To be fair, the man does have legitimate reasons to be having a bad time. For one, his… uh, flesh is kind of rotting and falling off of his body. Which does not seem fun.

And then there’s the thing with his daughter’s wedding, which featured both of them making these faces before any of the real messy stuff went down. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a more accurate representation of raising and being a teenager. It could be the poster for a CBS sitcom about a single dad. It’s thrilling to me.

Then these things happened at the wedding:

• His snotty younger brother showed up — fresh off of murdering his own wife — despite being kind of banished from the realm for being a devious little snot all the time
• His child bride showed up late and wearing a green dress, which I learned later is basically a declaration of war on this show
• His daughter’s not-so-secret boyfriend beat her new husband’s not-so-secret boyfriend to death with his fists during the reception
• His snotty brother and rebellious daughter started dancing and eyeing each other real sexy-like in front of everyone

Look at these two.

Sooooo yeah. My dude has every right to constantly look like he threw up in his mouth a little bit and decided to swallow it. The next episode jumps forward 10 years from the end of this one. Viserys is still alive, somehow, despite his own body and offspring and wife trying to kill him in various ways. This is great news. For me. Probably not for him. Which makes it great news for me. I hope he lives forever and mopes around like a royal Charlie Brown for six seasons. I hope he frowns so hard his whole face slides off of his skull, which it actually might, given the flesh thing we mentioned earlier. I had no clue I needed to see Paddy Considine doing this much face-acting on a show about dragons and incest, but here we are.

One more for the road.

This poor miserable dope. I hope he is never happy for another day in his life. Again, for me. It’s nothing personal. Kind of.

ITEM NUMBER TWO – Meanwhile, on 9-1-1…

Here’s what happened, and I need you to stay with me on this one: 9-1-1 returned this week with an episode that opened in the sky, in a blimp, where the pilot and co-pilot were having a conversation about a nosy mother-in-law, for kind of a while as they floated through the sky. If you read that sentence and started thinking “Hmm, if I know anything about 9-1-1 from all the times Brian has rambled about it, it sure sounds like something crazy is going to happen to this blimp,” congratulations, you are very intuitive. Or you saw the screencap at the top of this section with the flaming blimp. Or both. There are a lot of ways you could have figured this one out. The artwork for this season full-on featured a crashing blimp. I just wrote about it the other week. This was the worst-kept secret in television history.

Anyway, they dialed 9-1-1 from the clouds and had this conversation with Jennifer Love Hewitt, who, if we are to believe this show, handles every emergency call in Los Angeles.

Perfect. Succinct, accurate, objectively hilarious. No notes from me. My only complaint is that I’ve never had a legitimate opportunity in my life to use the phrase “we have a blimp emergency.” There’s still time, but I will need to hurry.

But yes, they were correct, the blimp went down, straight into a soccer stadium. I need to stress to you that the whole series of events looked like it cost the production about $85. I loved it very much. Look at this.

Okay, stick with me some more, because here’s where things get crazy, and yes I realize we’ve already seen a blimp crash into a stadium. To the bullet points:

• Chaos ensues, with people running and screaming and fleeing the stadium
• A girl and her mom get separated just moments after having a vague conversation about living a normal life like a normal kid
• The girl goes down and her backpack opens and some guy sees weird tubes sticking out and shouts “IT’S A BOMB”
• Angela Bassett rushes into the stadium to investigate and discovers it is not a bomb, but an artificial heart that the girl carries with her to stay alive
• It is malfunctioning and the mom has the backup but no one knows where she is amid the commotion
• Jennifer Love Hewitt just like Googles stuff over the phone and talks Angela Bassett through troubleshooting an artificial heart while a blimp balances precariously on the scaffolding of a soccer stadium, which is not a collection of words I ever expected to type
• They find the mom and get things working and everyone is saved, including the blimp pilots, who have been pulled out of the wreckage by firefighters as this is going on

Which is great. Classic 9-1-1 piece of business. Very proud of everyone involved. But here’s the best part. Look at this screencap from the aftermath of it all…

Do you see it?

Do you see the credits on the screen in the corner?

That’s right.

All of this happened before the opening credits had finished.

BEFORE THE OPENING CREDITS HAD FINISHED.

We were not even 10 minutes into the episode and all of this had already happened.

What a beautiful television program.

ITEM NUMBER THREE – This was really just an incredible week for the cast and crew of Peaky Blinders

Two pieces of Peaky Blinders-related news, both kind of incredible in their own way. First, this, which I can’t believe is true: The people who made Peaky Blinders — the gritty and violent British drama where bootleggers smoke cigarettes and fight each other, often while covered in about an inch of industrial soot — are bringing it to the stage for a dance-heavy production. Please read this.

“Through dance theatre ‘Peaky Blinders: The Redemption of Thomas Shelby’ picks up the story of the Peaky Blinders at the end of World War One, following Tommy Shelby and Grace Burgess through their passionate love affair,” reads the logline. “While Tommy is building his empire, Grace is operating as an undercover agent for Special Branch on a mission to get close to the heart of Tommy’s gang. As the story unfolds, many hearts are broken.”

That’s… it’s fascinating. It would be like if David Chase made a dancing Sopranos musical, which I now want to see more than anything else in the world. Show me Paulie Walnuts sashaying into a restaurant and gliding to his table. I am so mad this doesn’t exist. Dammit. I did this to myself.

And yet, somehow, this is not the wildest Peaky-related story of the week. Not even close. How could it be when Tom Hardy — who played a mumble-mouthed bootlegger on the show — is just running around winning martial arts tournaments in his spare time. From a local news report in Europe.

Danny Appleby, from Ormesby, was stunned when he discovered his opponent at a Jiu-Jitsu tournament at the weekend was Mad Max Fury Road actor Tom Hardy.

The 44-year-old star turned up unannounced at the REORG Open Jiu-Jitsu Championship in Wolverhampton.

This is probably my favorite thing… maybe ever? Definitely this week. Tom Hardy — BANE — is just popping up to whomp on dudes in his free time. It’s somehow both shocking and not surprising at all, given everything we know and don’t know about Tom Hardy. I must know more. Let’s read on.

“It’s been crazy on social media,” he says, “I was waiting match-side for the semi-final in Wolverhampton when Tom showed up. I didn’t know he was going to be there. And they expected me to remain composed,” he laughs.

“I recognised him straightaway. Everyone knows who Tom Hardy is, don’t they?

“I was shell-shocked. He said ‘just forget it’s me and do what you would normally do’.”

Ugggghhhh this is so cool. It’s so cool it actually bothers me a little bit. Like, come on, Tom Hardy. Chill out a little. The rest of us have to be out here too, and we just cannot compete with “an A-list movie star who sometimes shows up at little jiu-jitsu tournaments for kicks and wins adorable little victory certificates.”

Oh. Wait. I’m sorry. Did I not already mention the adorable little victory certificate? Because that actually might be the best part of all of this. I mean…

I hope he frames that and hangs it up in a prominent place in his house. Maybe right next to his, uh… [quick goes to Tom Hardy’s Wikipedia page]… his 2011 BAFTA Rising Star award. Or maybe he just has a trophy case full of these. What if Tom Hardy has like two dozen trophies and certificates like this, like a little kid who displays all his karate awards? Someone needs to investigate this. Not me. But someone.

ITEM NUMBER FOUR – Good for Lacey Chabert, honestly

There’s this big article in Variety this week about Candace Cameron and her quest to start a conservative Christian Christmas powerhouse to rival places like Hallmark and Netflix that churn those movies out 40 per year. You can read the whole thing if you want to. Here’s the link. I want to talk about something else, though. I want to talk about the financials of starring in these movies. I want to talk about people making crazyyyy money by appearing in these movies. Not crazy like billions or anything, but… at least more than I expected.

The key points are as follows:

• Hallmark was paying people $200-300k for a couple weeks of work on these movies
• Which is wild when you consider former Party of Five and Mean Girls star Lacey Chabert has, to date, made 27 Hallmark Christmas movies, which is a real fact I looked up and everything
• Netflix swooped in recently and just started heaving money at people to get their own holiday stockpile loaded up

Like, so much money.

When Netflix came into the game, it was willing to up the ante. Since its overall budgets are more than double what cable networks have, it’s able to land stars like Dolly Parton, Goldie Hawn, Vanessa Hudgens, Kurt Russell and Rob Lowe. One source tells Variety that while some of those movies were pitched elsewhere, Netflix was the only place able to pay bigger leading stars, often shelling out paychecks of more than $1 million per film.

This is pretty funny today, now, with all the news about Netflix struggling a bit and being buried in debt. It’s kind of like this tweet but with Holiday Movie Salaries in place of Candles:

But whatever. Good for the people cashing these checks. Good for Lacey Chabert, especially. This isn’t even the only source of income related to these cheesy movies. It turns out there’s a whole economy based around it, complete with conventions attended by thousands of people. This paragraph is fascinating to me in ways I have been struggling to articulate for days.

In addition to pricy day passes, fans can take part in a professional photo opps with stars like Lacey Chabert, Danica McKellar or Jesse Metcalfe, or buy an autograph for $80. Plus, each actor is paid a guaranteed rate to attend for the weekend — which can be anywhere from $10,000 to $75,000.

And, on the heels of this report, Hallmark went out and dropped this year’s holiday movie schedule. Guess who got the primo post-Thanksgiving Saturday night spot?

Saturday, Nov. 26: Haul Out the Holly
Stars: Lacey Chabert, Wes Brown, Ellen Travolta, Peter Jacobson, Melissa Peterman and Stephen Tobolowsky
Premieres 8 p.m. ET/PT.

Emily arrives home, hoping to visit her parents, only to discover that they are leaving on a trip of their own. As she stays at their house for the holidays, their HOA is determined to get Emily to participate in the neighborhood’s many Christmas festivities.

Please consider this your periodic reminder that everything is somehow 40-50 percent weirder than you assume it is, always, often in ways you could not have comprehended before they were presented to you in black and white. Also, that Lacey Chabert is doing great. Good for her.

ITEM NUMBER FIVE – Please think about this one for a couple of minutes this weekend

Three things are important to note here, and then we can move on…

ONE: Sometimes Danny DeVito, Hollywood legend and multi-decade veteran of the stage and screen, will post pictures of his foot on Twitter under the heading “TROLLFOOT.”

TWO: This is deeply funny to me, just the thing where he has leaned into being the weirdest dude all the time now, up to and including the thing last week where he did an ad for Jersey Mike’s Subs where he appeared to be extremely horny for hoagies.

THREE: Please take maybe five minutes at some point in the next few days and picture yourself driving down a California highway on a sunny September day, just picturesque and perfect and everything The Beach Boys ever sang about, and then you look out your window and Danny DeVito is lying on his back with his leg in the air trying to take a picture of his bare foot.

I guess that’s Hollywood for you.

READER MAIL

If you have questions about television, movies, food, local news, weather, or whatever you want, shoot them to me on Twitter or at [email protected] (put “RUNDOWN” in the subject line). I am the first writer to ever answer reader mail in a column. Do not look up this last part.

From Matthew:

We need a rule about movie trailers in theaters. Specifically, horror movie trailers. More specifically, no horror movie trailers except before horror or horror-adjacent movies. People who want to watch a movie about demonic possession or a creepy doll or a haunted house know about these movies already. Those of us hitting up a matinee of Confess, Fletch or like, the Marvel movie du jour don’t know, or, and this is my point, want to know that apparently a movie about an infectious demonic smile that kills you is coming out. Jason Blum is creative. He’ll find a different way to advertise.

Freakin’ THANK YOU, Matthew. God. What a good and simple rule, which I say as someone who loves seeing movies in a theater but very much does not enjoy horror movies, in general. It’s not that I’m some big fraidy cat baby — or at least not just that — as much as it is that I don’t like being scared in real life and do not want to scare myself on purpose in my leisure time. Separate these suckers. Gimme cool action movie trailers before cool action movies and cute rom-com trailers before cute rom-coms. I do not want to be reminded that I’m a huge baby right before I watch Fast & Furious 16: Getting A Little Slower, Actually because they ran a trailer for a movie called Demon Orphanage or something.

Leave me alone.

I just want to see Vin Diesel save the world using cars.

I don’t need all this.

Listen to Matthew.

Thank you.

AND NOW, THE NEWS

To France!

A suspected gang of thieves who allegedly stole items worth €300,000 (£260,000) from first-class passengers on French trains has been captured.

It is thought they stole luggage from passengers after sitting beside them on high-speed trains crossing the country.

Hmm. Yes, I am interested in the train heist. It feels almost old-timey at this point, in the age of hackers and cybercrimes, just dudes sitting down next to rich French people and being like “Hey, look over there!” and then making off with their valuables. I kind of respect it in a way.

One man, aged 57, is said to have posed as a woman, wearing a wig.

I like to believe no one asked him to do this and he just showed up with a woman’s wig on all proud of himself and everyone in his crew groaned and was like “Jesus Christ, Gary, we talked about this.” It also brings me to the thing that hooked me with this story in the first place: the headline. Look at this pile of words: “French police nab first-class wig gang suspects.”

FIRST CLASS WIG GANG SUSPECTS

It’s beautiful.

The alleged modus operandi was to steal items during station stops after the unsuspecting owners got off the train to stretch their legs or have a smoke.

It’s so low-tech and simple that it’s almost charming. No hacking or trickery, just wigs and waiting. I mean, definitely do not do this. Especially do not do this to me. I like my stuff and want to keep it. But if I can’t talk you out of it, if you are truly dead-set on robbing people on a train, I suppose this is better than resorting to violence. Right?

I hope this is the argument their lawyer uses to defend them in court.

Police were first alerted in April when a passenger reported the theft of a briefcase containing jewellery worth €50,000, local media say.

Four months later, police discovered a hoard of stolen goods in the Marseille flat.

Please make this series at once and release it on a streaming service by the end of the year. Pierce Brosnan as the ringleader. Cousin Greg from Succession in a wig. And so on. These are good ideas. Much better than the ones in the actual crime itself.

Think about it.

A certain section of Jeopardy! fans will find a reason to complain about anything, whether it’s a host’s outfit or winning streaks or supposedly inconsistent rules. But no one had better grumble about Martha Bath, the contestant who appeared on the game show in 1972 — and again in 2022, and won.

“This is not your first rodeo,” host host Ken Jennings prompted Bath, a retired CPA from Seattle, Washington, during the Q&A segment of Wednesday’s episode. “That is correct,” she said. “Fifty years ago this spring, I was on the original daytime show with Art Fleming in New York.” She won $40 “and a set of encyclopedias,” Bath added, “and I still have them.” She took home more than 40 bucks and dusty old books this time.

Bath beat out returning champion Emmett Stanton and sports journalist Christopher Pennant to snatch the victory. Despite going into Final Jeopardy! with just $15,400 compared to Stanton’s $22,000, Bath nailed the correct answer and wagered her entire prize pot, giving her a winning total of $30,800.

“Or, if we count 1972, $30,840,” Jennings joked. Unfortunately, Bath’s reign was short-lived. She returned during Thursday’s episode and did well for himself, finishing with $26,100 after Final Jeopardy! (the clue: “In 2011, Leland, Mississippi, where Jim Henson grew up, honored Henson & his Muppets by renaming a bridge this, also a song title”). But fellow contestant Michael Menkhus, a data analyst from Kansas City, Missouri, also got it right (“What is Rainbow Connection?”) for a one-day total of $31,201.

What’s so amazing that keeps us stargazing? Stories like Martha Bath’s.

(Via TV Insider)

Star Trek: The Motion Picture is a movie that I, like a lot of people, want to love. But, unlike the films in the series that would follow, it keeps a viewer at arms length. (I wrote about this last year when the original theatrical cut was released on 4K.) In the early 2000s a Director’s Cut overseen by director Robert Wise and producer David Fein was released on DVD that significantly tightened the film and was met with much praise, but then kind of faded into obscurity because, well, it was only available on DVD and on today’s televisions no longer looked that great. And the problem was the effects for the Director’s Cut were done in standard definition, meaning to upgrade them to Blu-ray or 4K would need another massive overhaul of the film.

Well, that’s exactly what David Fein did. (Robert Wise passed away in 2005.) This is literally his life’s work: finally releasing Star Trek: The Motion Picture the way it was always meant to be seen. And the new 4K disc is a gorgeous, stunning creation that is literally one of the most beautiful movies I’ve ever seen. (If you think I’m being hyperbolic, here’s where I’ll remind you that the effects were done by Douglas Trumbull, who of course also did 2001: A Space Odyssey.)

As Fein explains ahead, the problem with the theatrical cut was, simply, it wasn’t done. It feels long and slow because the movie hadn’t been edited properly. Scenes that may only last two or three seconds too long, or literally one frame, add up over the course of a movie to make it feel long. Now, after 1500 or so edits, Star Trek: The Motion Picture is a film that finally feels properly paced, looks stunning, and, after long last, no longer keeps the viewer at arm’s length. Ahead, David Fein tells us just how he got this accomplished.

There’s not a lot of extra footage in the Director’s Cut or anything like that, but it just feels like a better-flowing movie. Why is that? It’s hard to pinpoint.

Well anytime you do a film, the first thing that you do is a quick assembly of what the picture’s going to be from beginning to end. You put everything in and that’s when they say, well, we have the five-hour cut, or whatever it was. Those are incredibly dull when you just get whatever it is from beginning to end assembled. The problem here was, they had to fine-tune that the best they could, those little pieces. But, because of the problem with the visual effects – and the fact that they had a required 130-minute running time – they didn’t know when the effects were coming in. So they just strung out the film and then put the effects in completely as from first frame to last frame and then were intending to go through and fine-tune and cut it.

What you are seeing (in the theatrical cut) is one long piece of assembled material that they never had the chance to fine-tune it to get the flow down and make that work. So, now it’s a matter of similar work, but there are 1500 edits in this project. In order to cut out single frames every now and then. Why would there be a single frame? The visual effects would come in and there’d be multiple ships in the shot, and some of the ships hadn’t even started moving yet because they just put first to last frame because they knew they would tighten it.

So what you’re seeing now is something that has just been tightened. And, as a lot of people have said, when they’re doing artistic sculpting where you’re just chipping away a little bit at the time, you have to fine-tune a picture to make sure that it works. Robert Wise always had a preview screening. This was a film, before his premiere, he didn’t have a preview screening – and then went on to have 20 years of preview screening.

So the preview screening was literally the premiere.

Yeah. There’s a comment where somebody says, “Well I had the film wet.”

Right, when a film is finished literally right before it hits theaters.

Right, but the catch here is that Robert Wise literally had the last reel of the film literally dripping with chemicals. And he personally flew it to Washington D.C. for the premiere and slept with the film under his bed that night and then brought it into the theater and they premiered it. And we have stories in the feature ads of the editor just talking about watching this and just shrinking down in his seat because the littlest things that you knew you needed to fix, that you just knew, “Okay, we’ll fix that as soon as we get to that section,” but they never got a chance to do it. It is absolutely a testament to the talent of talented people that were there and Robert Wise’s brilliance as a filmmaker that was able to take all of this and make it into a coherent movie that worked. And it was very successful anyway! Even though what you saw was basically this assembly of stuff that implied what was going to go on. But it didn’t even have Spock crying, which was one of the points of the film, was to have that moment in the film. They even had scenes that they took out that they had intended to put back in when they fine-tuned it.

I’m glad you mentioned Spock crying, his whole arc in this movie is much more clear in this version. In the theatrical, he just seems cold. In this it’s very clear he finds emotions to understand the difference between machines and humanity.

And as unemotional as he’s trying to be in the film, that’s that evolution for him. And he’s trying to be focused on being unemotional. But that character has evolved just like V’Ger, they’re connected. V’Ger and Spock, it’s going along together, so it’s radical. It’s important that they be together.

I’ve always thought this movie was pretty, but this version in 4K, I was just blown away by how gorgeous it looks. You’ve made one of the most gorgeous movies I’ve ever seen.

And you know what’s exciting about that? Is you just said, “You made one of the most gorgeous films you’ve ever seen,” that you’ve been watching for 40 years. They were so rushed they took four days, just four days, in order to get the film color graded and it had to be even and consistent in order to let whatever they were putting in work without causing more time. And that four-day rushed color was what they stayed with as, “Oh, that must be the finished film.” Up until now.

So we didn’t have the opportunity back then to give it the proper color grading that it required. Plus HDR today, the amazing ability to pull so much more color and quality in the image, including unbelievable brightness and darkness from levels that were never possible before. Using the tools today to do it properly gave us that beautiful film and every single shot now has your tension focused. Look shot for shot, it’s where is your focus going to be? And that’s where your eyes are drawn to, which was never had that much attention given to it before, which is what you do in the good movie today.

So in ’79, if the movie’s obviously not quite finished, why did it have to come out when it did? Is it because The Empire Strikes Back was coming in a few months? Was that a concern? Why did it have to come out when it did?

It was a business decision that you have to give them credit for. I mean, Star Wars came out and it changed the world and even in merchandising and marketing and everything else.

And because of that, this was changed from the Phase 2 television series to a full movie.

Right. But knowing that it was such a phenomenon and so much of a media creation, Paramount had created so many licensees from Star Trek the franchise that there were McDonald’s tie-ins, there were book tie-ins, there were tie-ins everywhere. Plus there were agreements that they made with the theaters that you’re going to have it on this date for that holiday season and everybody cleared their schedule, that it came down to the point where it became necessary because of all the promises that were made that the film had to come out. It was amazing that the film was so successful and we’re blessed for that. People saw what it was to be. And Doug Drexler [VFX artist] was at our Director’s Cut premiere and I still remember his comment, it’s one of my favorite comments I’ve heard today, which is, “The Motion Picture today is the movie we always wished it would be.”

So how do you go to Paramount and basically say, “Hey, you know how we needed money to make the Director’s Cut in the early 2000s for DVD? Well, we have to update all the effects for 4K disc.” How do you convince anyone to let you do that?

Well, it’s simple. Well, it’s not simple. We have the 40th anniversary coming out, so I re-approached them again, but there’s been a lot of evolutionary changes in technology that made me realize that we could do it effectively and with the quality that we wanted to and not have it be a crazy film. Just have it be what it needed to be. But the fact of the matter is, is that it’s 4K that came around and the new evolutions of technology that made me finally want to come back and do it. And I said to them from the start, I’ll come back, but the focus is, I want to create a new negative. It needs to be a new negative. We can’t have any other version exist as the movie. This has to be finished now in negative form or at least the digital equivalent – where we have digital negatives now – so that it has a chance to be the film from now till eternity. So with a theatrical Dolby Atmos mix…

I was going to say, this movie also sounds incredible.

The blaster beam, that’s the boom sound, is V’ger’s voice essentially. It goes right over your head, in top speakers in front in Atmos. I also promised Robert Wise years ago – he had me come into his house and we often talk at the little breakfast nook that we were at – and he had me promise that, no matter what, I would continue to work forever until we made sure that the film had its negative. That had the same chance as any other film in Paramount’s archive or the crown jewel of the company. So that was what I came back to the studio with and said, “If we do that, we know we also can do it for revivals and have it be that same film quality because now we’re finishing the film.” So they’ve been many times on and off with the studio that we’d gone back and forth, things never aligned. But this time I knew the time was right, and I had great support from the studio as well. It took us about two and a half to three years just to work out the details this time around, and in that time the archive just did an amazing job locating all that material.

What one shot, for you, went from, “I don’t like this,” to, “Okay now this is good”?

Well, on a side note the signature shot is the reflection of Kirk with the Enterprise. That’s the signature Director’s Edition shot to me. But the one thing you’re talking about is a whole sequence and that’s the probe on the bridge. The probe on the bridge always felt to me like the quality difference was so dramatic that I felt like the movie practically stopped and something else went in there that didn’t match the rest of the film. And we spent a month going in and focused on doing everything we can just make it look like the probe actually showed up on the bridge. And a whole goal, from the beginning, was to smooth out the film. To take away anything that’s distracting. Well, when you had a probe going across the screen going, “boing!,” it completely takes you out of the movie. So these were stabilized. Everything was stabilized, enhanced, cleaned up. The grain that was all over the place was stabilized and smoothed out. Uniforms were there, the sound mix is so much better working on it. Now … it works. And it’s a high point that helped us get to a point where you’re exhilarated at the end of it like you should be. Whereas, you need that time to recover from that high point. So it’s roughly the same edit as the 2001, but it feels differently. Because it now has the highs and lows of any a good story.

Seriously, congratulations on this. I know this has been your life’s work…

I’m very touched by that, to make sure everybody knows that, the film is out now. It has never been before. I did it for you guys.

You can contact Mike Ryan directly on Twitter.

The Big Bang Theory‘s unaired pilot isn’t as infamous as the original first episode of Game of Thrones, but everyone involved sounds relieved that it never aired on TV.

The pilot “didn’t work for a bunch of reasons,” co-creator Bill Prady told Entertainment Weekly in a respective for the CBS sitcom, which premiered 15 years ago this month. “In the first pilot, the female character [who, at that point, was named Katie] is kind of rough. She’s dangerous in a way and wasn’t very nice to the guys.”

And the in-studio audience wasn’t very nice to Katie.

“Yeah, the audience hated her,” co-creator Chuck Lorre said. Prady agreed, but “what was amazing was that they were defending Leonard and Sheldon so much.” Lorre continued, “Yeah, we didn’t realize early on that the audience viewed them as children. They were very naive and childlike, regardless of how intelligent they were. They were very vulnerable, and the audience didn’t want a toxic presence around them.”

That’s when Katie (played by Amanda Walsh) was re-written to Penny (Kaley Cuoco), and it “made her much more charmed by the guys and kind to them, as opposed to a woman who would take advantage of them,” Lorre said. Both creators agree that Walsh was “terrific,” but “the role was misconceived. It was our responsibility.”

Prady continued:

“She was actually a very sweet person, and it was a lot of work for her to become that rough character. Afterward, she wanted to come back in for the new version of Penny, but she had been so identified as that first character that it wasn’t able to happen.”

It’s only fair for Cuoco to cast Walsh in the next season of HBO Max’s terrific Harley Quinn. The time is right for Lady Clay to make an appearance.

(Via EW)

Halsey has been on the rise for a while, dominating the pop world with her rock-leaning anthems. But she has been transparent about the trouble she’s experienced along the way — from the way the music industry treated her pregnancy to struggles with chronic illness. Today, she shared an Instagram story opening up about her current emotional state, expressing concern that she may have “chose the wrong life for [herself].”

Read what she posted below.

“I find that often there is a deep sadness inside me that no amount of worldly pleasure can touch, a loneliness, an emptiness.

I wonder often if I chose the wrong life for myself. And the weight of it is suffocating. I’m sorry that melancholy has penetrated my art in a way that hasn’t served a greater purpose other than my own self loathing. I’m sorry that melancholy has penetrated my art in a way that hasn’t served a greater purpose other than my own self-loathing. I am approaching my 28th birthday in a week and just now exhaling and gasping for air for the first time since I took a single breath in this new life at 18. A breath that was meant to sustain me for a decade. I am wandering lawlessly, and I hope to find my way somewhere meaningful soon so that I can give you the guts I’ve always known to scoop heapings of into your ears. They are shrivelling lately. If you cannot be kind, at least be gentle. With love”

You’d be forgiven for not knowing DaBaby had an album coming out this week. Ever since his debacle at Rolling Loud Miami in 2021, he’s dropped in public esteem, losing endorsement deals and watching his ticket sales plummet. The fact that it’s mostly his own fault seems lost on him because even if he’s down horrible, he has to have known that his latest stunt to get attention would backfire in his face.

On the new album, Baby On Baby 2, DaBaby claims to have had sex with Megan Thee Stallion the day before she was allegedly shot by Tory Lanez after a Hollywood party. In the song “Boogieman,” he rhymes: “You play with me, that shit was childish / The day before she said that Tory Lanez shot her, I was fucking on Megan Thee Stallion / Waited say that shit on my next album / Hit it the day before too, but I kept it player, I ain’t say nothing bout it / Had her pretty-boy boyfriend tweeting me, ready to die ’bout the bitch like a coward.”

Nah, fam. That is an atrocious look. As a wise person once said: “Dig deep and think about the messiest bitch you know… it’s a man ain’t it?”

Now, DaBaby is being utterly ransacked on Twitter by fans rightly pointing out that the antics not only make him look bad but that they still won’t actually generate the streams he needs to bounce back after refusing to own up to his own mistakes. Just a disaster for him no matter how you slice it (of course, there are random guys tweeting messages supporting him, but let’s be serious here). Below is just a sampling of the smoke DaBaby’s latest shenanigans have incurred.

Megan Thee Stallion is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Just when you think Donald Trump has said the most ridiculous thing ever uttered by a human being — let alone a former president — he manages to outdo himself. Especially when he’s attempting to wriggle out of taking responsibility for one of his many wrongdoings. But even Trevor Noah seems to think that Trump’s latest excuse for why he had hundreds of highly classified documents at Mar-a-Lago “may have topped them all.”

On Wednesday night, Trump plopped down for an interview with Sean Hannity, who is famous for throwing softball questions to his disgraced pal. But even the Fox News host seemed momentarily stunned when Trump basically claimed that being president gives you Yoda-like powers.

“When you’re the President of the United States, you can declassify just by saying, ‘It’s declassified’ — even by thinking about it,” Trump explained of what he believes is a president’s ability to perform Jedi-like mind tricks, and have them be legally binding. “There doesn’t have to be a process,” he added. “There can be a process, but there doesn’t have to be.”

But Noah wasn’t buying it:

Whoa, whoa — hold on, hold on, hold on. Donald Trump can declassify documents with his brain? How? HOW? He can’t even read documents with his brain. How does this happen?

I really hope that, ‘I can make things happen with my mind’ is going to be their actual argument at the trial. That would be great. ‘Your honor, the defendant pleads Jedi.’

But Noah brought up a good point when explaining why Trump’s story doesn’t really hold up:

So Trump is saying that he declassified these documents just by thinking about it. Which I don’t even believe, because that would be the first time in his life that Trump has thought something and not said it out loud.

You can watch the full clip above.

After model Sumner Stroh revealed an alleged year-long affair between her and Maroon 5 lead singer Adam Levine, others who viewed her TikTok post began coming forward with messages of their own. Stroh claimed that Levine, who married model Behati Prinsloo in 2014, messaged her (after the two ended their affair) to ask if he could name the child Prinsloo is currently expecting after her. “I really wanna name it Sumner. You ok with that? DEAD serious,” the message read.

Levine issued a statement this week via his Instagram Story. “I used poor judgment in speaking with anyone other than my wife in ANY kind of flirtatious manner. I did not have an affair, nevertheless, I crossed the line during a regrettable period of my life,” he wrote.

TMZ has since published screenshots Levine of other flirty conversations he allegedly had with a comedian named Maryka and a woman named Alyson Josef. “I shouldn’t be talking to you you know,” he messaged Josef.

YouTuber Tana Mongeau shared screenshots of Levine seemingly sliding into her Instagram DMs, but appears to have unsent the message. “Check this one out … he said unsent,” she wrote on Twitter, before also dropping a screen recording as additional proof. Following Mongeau’s screenshot of the musician’s disappearing messages, another woman came forward.

In the replies to Mongeau’s post, Lottie Moss (Kate Moss’ half-sister) shared Levine’s request to message her on Instagram also. However, since there are no longer messages in the screenshot, it means something was sent to warrant the DM request, but has since been unsent by Levine.

According to Newsweek, there are even more women included in Levine’s cheating allegations. Alanna Zabel, his yoga instructor from 2007 to 2010, told Page Six, “One day he texted me saying, ‘I want to spend the day with you naked.’” Finally, Ashley Russell, a 21-year-old college student and exercise influencer, noted that Levine would reply “daily” to her Instagram stories, but he typically deleted them after she had read the messages. Russell’s messages were received throughout March of this year.

As the news of Levine’s messaging scandal continues to make the waves online, there is a possibility of even more women coming forward with infidelity allegations.