Month: September 2022

Over the weekend, R&B singer August Alsina shared bloodied photos of himself, accusing Tory Lanez of attacking him at a show in Chicago. He said that Tory punched him in the face after he declined to dap up the other singer, confronting him while backed up by eight “oversized” bodyguards. In August’s post, he accused Tory of a “broken ego” and stated his intentions to keep the news off the internet, but that he had to post about it because Tory was already spreading rumors to gossip blogs.

Now, according to Rolling Stone, Los Angeles prosecutors are looking into the alleged assault, saying, “We are aware of the allegations that the defendant attacked artist August Alsina and are investigating these claims. The allegations are serious and will be thoroughly examined.” Although the incident took place in Chicago, LA prosecutors are keen on finding any additional information that could help their assault case against Tory Lanez in the Megan Thee Stallion shooting. The trial was delayed last week as Tory’s lawyer is tied up with other cases.

The Chicago police department confirmed that its officers are investigating the incident at the concert, confirming an altercation between two 30-year-old men at the Arie Crown Theatre in which one was “punched in the face” by the other Saturday night (September 17).

Something very strange is happening in the world of NFL broadcasting this week. Prior to the start of this Sunday’s slate of games, someone on the set of Fox NFL Sunday appeared to cut a fart while Jimmy Johnson was talking about something. We do not know who let one rip, but the smart money appears to be on Terry Bradshaw, who acted rather odd in the middle of a segment.

This happened again on Monday night prior to the game between the Buffalo Bills and the Tennessee Titans, although this one seems a little more cut and dry (not the fart, that sounded, well, not gonna keep going down this road). Here is ESPN’s Dan Orlovsky cutting himself off to sneeze and then, it appears, break some wind.

This very obviously sounds like Orlovsky farting on Monday Night Football, but truth be told, we can’t tell for sure. That appeared to change in the early hours of Tuesday morning, when Orlovsky appeared to blame blue cheese for making him gassy — blue cheese, of course, is the best white sauce you can put on buffalo wings.

But wait, there is a twist in the story. Former Packers and Lions offensive lineman TJ Lang tweeted about the incident and praised Orlovsky for keeping his cool, at which point Orlovsky said that he was simply joking around about whether or not he farted.

Could this be a “he who denied it supplied it” situation? Time will tell.

What would you give up to be in a Martin Scorsese movie? For Andrew Garfield, it was sex for six months. “It was very cool, man,” the Silence actor said earlier this year on the WTF with Marc Maron podcast. “I had some pretty wild, trippy experiences from starving myself of sex and food at that time.”

Drew Barrymore (and probably 78 percent of the people reading this) is not impressed.

Garfield’s comments came up during Tuesday’s episode of The Drew Barrymore Show (the only good morning talk show), with co-host Ross Mathews cracking, “I get abstaining from sex, I mean I did that my entire 20s, right?” Barrymore replied, “What’s wrong with me that six months doesn’t seem like a very long time? I was like, yeah, so?”

Mathews carried on the joke, adding, “We buried the lede there, that’s the headline. Drew can go six months, no big deal.”

“Years,” she assured.

Barrymore and Mathews were having a larger chat about method acting, which Garfield admitted that he was “bothered by the misconception” people have of it, “this idea that method acting is f*cking bulls*it.” Barrymore, for her part, agrees with the Spider-Man: No Way Home star. “I definitely, on certain projects, like when I did Grey Gardens, this film I did where I played beloved real-life woman Edie Beale, I was so nervous I didn’t really chit chat with everybody on set, I just really stayed in character,” she said.

The only thing that kept Barrymore from smashing ET with a hammer was method acting.

(Via Decider)

Last weekend, the Bourbon & Beyond Festival came to Louisville, Kentucky, and the city is still nursing a collective hangover. The fest married hard, classic, and country rock bands with everything bourbon in the heart of Bourbon Country. There were hosted whiskey panels with live tastings with the likes of Julian van Winkle (Pappy), Freddie Noe (Beam), and Trey Zoeller (Jefferson’s), just to name a few. And yes, they were pouring Pappy for the crowd at the Van Winkle panel.

Even though bourbon was the focus, there was still a great lineup of podcasts, food, and music (of course). I was lucky enough to attend two of the four days of the festival this year. There was some serious food on display with local chefs like Ed Lee (of Top Chef fame) mixing it up on stage and in the audience. There were about a gazillion different whiskey tents with all the brown juice you could ever want. There were great hang-out spots like the Zelle tent where multi-course dinners were served and small and intimate shows took place. It was a rollicking event with plenty of places to eat, drink, be merry, and even chill while listening to great live tunes.

Below, I’ve compiled some photos to give you the vibe of this year’s fest. I’m covering food, whiskey, the scene, and the music. Hopefully, these pics will inspire you to book a trip to Louisville next year to enjoy it all yourself!

Also Read: The Top 5 UPROXX Bourbon Posts Of The Last Six Months

• We Blind Tasted A Whole Bunch Of $30-60 Bourbons To See If Any Could Beat Weller
• We Put A Whole Bunch Of Bourbons To A Giant Blind Test And Discovered Some Absolute Gems
• We Blind Tasted Classic Bourbons And Were Shocked By The Winner
• The Best-Known Basic Bottles Of Bourbon, Blind Tasted And Ranked
• All The Double Gold-Winning Straight Bourbons From This Year’s San Francisco World Spirits Competition

The Food

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The Whiskey

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The Scene

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The Music

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The nominations for the 2022 Latin Grammy Awards were announced this morning (September 20). Puerto Rican superstar Bad Bunny is leading the pack with 10 nominations. Among the most-nominated acts, he’s followed by Rauw Alejandro, Christina Aguilera, and Rosalía.

The good news keeps coming in for Bad Bunny. As he celebrates having the longest running No. 1 album on the Billboard 200 chart this year, he is now the most-nominated artist at this year’s Latin Grammy Awards. Among his 10 nominations are Album Of The Year for Un Verano Sin Ti and Record Of The Year for “Ojitos Lindos” alongside Colombian alternative group Bomba Estéreo.

Bad Bunny is followed by fellow Puerto Rican singer Rauw Alejandro with eight nominations. Alejandro’s girlfriend, Spanish pop star Rosalía, follows with seven nominations for the top-rated album on Metacritic this year, Motomami. Among Rosalía’s nominations are Album Of The Year, Record Of The Year for “La Fama” featuring The Weeknd, and Song Of The Year for “Hentai.” Interestingly, the Neptunes (Chad Hugo and Pharrell Williams) are also nominated for Song Of The Year as Rosalía’s co-writers.

With her return to Latin music this past year, Christina Aguilera is tied with Rosalía with seven nominations. Aguilera, who has Ecuadorian roots, is up for Album Of The Year for her self-titled LP. Her girl power collaboration “Pa Mis Muchachas” alongside Becky G, Nicki Nicole, and Nathy Peluso is nominated for both Song and Record Of The Year.

The 2022 Latin Grammy Awards will take place in Las Vegas on Thursday, November 17. The ceremony will be broadcast live on Univision.

Self-described cineastes love nothing more than a former child actor or teen heartthrob who dedicates the entirety of their late twenties and thirties to looking creepy in weird art movies — your Robert Pattinsons, your Kristen Stewarts, your Shias LeBeouf and Ryans Gosling. But maybe for every Robert Pattinson tweeking out in a Safdie Brothers film, there’s a Josh Duhamel, a handsome heartthrob content to mostly stay handsome and be the third or fourth most famous blondish actor named Josh.

Sure, Josh Duhamel, star of Transformers movies and shows like Las Vegas and Crossing Jordan, isn’t cool or romantic or dangerous, the way we like our actors to be. But should we really judge him for parlaying an enviable jawline into what seems like a pretty nice life, just because he never kicks photographers or immerses himself in the lifestyle of an 18th-century cobbler or sends his costars boxes of dead rats?

These were things I pondered while watching Bandit, a perfectly watchable movie about a prolific Canadian bank robber. It’s snappy, looks pretty, and moves along affably enough. Yet as I got to the end, I nonetheless couldn’t shake the feeling that something was missing. Something that would make an impact, stay with me longer than the closing credits, or differentiate it from any number of the other featuring actors named Josh.

Duhamel plays Gilbert Galvan Jr., a foster kid-turned criminal who flees a minimum-security prison where he was sent on a check fraud charge and relocates to Canada, where he pays a homeless guy $22 for his ID card. In the process, he assumes the man’s name, Robert Whiteman, for the remainder of his criminal career. As this happens, a helpful title card appears on the screen, reading “this actually happened,” a conceit Bandit reuses a few times throughout the movie. This kind of structural fourth-wall-breaking, if you want to call it that, if a slightly inelegant solution, is a nice way to avoid the “truth is stranger than fiction” problem that so many based-on-a-true-story movies eventually face. That that actually happened, and wasn’t just a screenwriter’s dramatic license, actually does enhance my enjoyment of it so it’s good to know. Incidentally, “Robert White Man” feels like the perfect pseudonym for Josh Duhamel.

Duhamel’s entire inoffensive handsome guy persona does seem particularly well-suited for this role, of a guy who becomes Canada’s most prolific bank robber, thanks in part to his cleverness, but also his ability to slip in and out of disguises and not leave too strong of an impression on people. Perhaps to compensate for Duhamel’s lack of edge, Bandit, directed by Allan Ungar from a script by Robert Knuckle and Kraig Wenman (not convinced these are real names, btw) casts Mel Gibson as a local crime lord who becomes Whiteman’s mentor. Gibson, Hollywood’s problematic uncle, has come to specialize in the problematic uncle role, and his first scene in Bandit, set in the eighties, sees his character, Tommy, complaining about a Boy George video on TV. “Music used to be about the music, now it’s all a circus sideshow,” Tommy laments, as if he’s the first old guy ever to be mad at a pop star looking too gay.

Gibson is kind of an awkward fit for this movie in general, doing decaf versions of the same un-PC jags he did in Father Stu, in between otherwise being a pretty caring mentor for Whiteman.

It’s hard not to enjoy a filmed heist, and Bandit, a series of heists set to toe-tapping needle drops (as a friend of Andy Warhol supposedly said of Easy Rider, “how clever to make a movie about your record collection”) is for the most part easy to enjoy. Whiteman becomes a family man, even as he continues to rob banks, a revelation his wife, played by Elisha Cuthbert, is surprisingly cool with. Whiteman’s wife seems like the kind of character who only exists in Canada, suitably played by one of our most Canadian actresses (perhaps second only to Emily Hampshire from Schitt’s Creek on my list of “actors you could tell are Canadian from 50 paces,” with all due respect to Cobie Smulders).

Yet there’s a major flaw in Bandit, and it’s that in this two-hour portrait of this guy, who was, I gather, notable for being Canada’s most prolific bank robber, you never get that strong a sense of who he was as a person or what was driving him. What aspect of his personality was this portrait meant to convey? What does his persona say about the world? Even after 125 minutes, the de rigueur epilogue text at the end of the movie feels rushed, like it’s trying to fill in some memorable information that the movie couldn’t. Bandit is, for all intents and purposes, a cinematic blond guy named Josh.

‘Bandit’ opens in theaters and OnDemand on September 23, 2022. Vince Mancini is on Twitter. More reviews here.

Whew, it’s been too long since Ramy Yousef graced us with a season of his Hulu dramedy (produced by A24), Ramy. Yet the series (and its exploration of Muslim-American identity) is finally back for a third round of being the best show that you’re not currently watching. Heck, even Ramy Yousef believes that you’re not watching this show. Back in early 2020, the second-season awards tour saw Ramy merrily joke (while accepting the Best Actor In A TV Comedy award at the Globes), “You guys haven’t seen my show.” He then kept things lively during the Emmys by showing what it looks like to lose during a virtual awards show. And now, Ramy the character lets everyone know what it feels like to have lost in life.

That sounds ominous and like we’re getting Dark Ramy, but don’t worry. Ramy, as an exploration of Muslim-American life, is still as sharply funny as ever while dealing out comeuppance to the leading man. The well-meaning dude of an endless existential journey faltered. He lost his way before he found it, and he did indefensible things. He hurt those who trusted him, including Mahershala Ali’s sheikh character. He betrayed his new wife (Zainab), who happened to be the sheikh’s daughter. He thoughtlessly vouched for a PTSD-afflicted vet (obviously a loose cannon), who ended up killing someone, all of which led the sheikh to unload the full weight of his disgust.

“F*ck you, Ramy,” declared the voice coming out of a very scary Mahershala Ali during the Season 2 finale. “You little f*ckin’ boy. You hurt people! Is that how I have to talk to you to get you to understand?” And the kicker: “You’re dangerous.”

It’s hard to come back from that with a bounce in your step. I’d probably just die right there on the spot, you know? And Ramy doesn’t skip the Cleanup On Aisle F*ck Up. There’s no easy path to redemption after an endearing character lacked judgment and unleashed a truckload of collateral damage. So, that’s where Ramy returns, and his life is a shambles. He’s in debt with the failed marriage hanging over his head, and that leads him into the diamond business. And as Ramy’s toiling away and coming to terms with his surprising awfulness, the show largely chooses to focus upon the shenanigans of the other characters who we’ve already grown to enjoy: Ramy’s family and friends.

Fortunately, the show already laid a fine foundation for these “sidelined” characters, so the story’s reliance upon them doesn’t feel like a stretch. And through them, the show further explores Muslim-American identity from their perspectives. Ramy’s sister (Dena) is struggling to put a foot forward in her career while pushing back against the community’s expectations. Uncle Naseem is still a problematic jackass, and an assortment of diamond-industry professionals keeps things interesting. Ramy’s parents and friends are back, and that latter group now includes Bella Hadid’s character. Yes, a supermodel is on Ramy, and she’s not playing anyone that you’re expecting to see. I’ll leave it at that. There wasn’t enough of Bella, and I’m looking forward to seeing more of her, either on this show or elsewhere. She fit right into this strange little ensemble.

Actually, the ensemble is where it’s at in Season 3 (more than any other season) of Ramy. At times, he does even feel like a guest, but that’s alright. He’s rudderless after losing his spiritual advisor and realizing that his path to enlightenment may have been paved by good intentions (outwardly, at least, because he was really trying to impress the sheikh), but he still really hurt people. This ain’t Seinfeld, where loathsome behavior doesn’t carry a consequence. Let’s face it — Ramy ain’t a show about nothing, either. So, he must walk the walk before naval gazing, and he needs to learn to not leave people in a worse state than he originally found them. Ramy doesn’t spend as much time trying to follow a spiritual path this season, but ironically, the act of him making amends is more spiritual than anything we’ve seen him do.

There’s some serious character growth happening, but the show keeps things so light that it never feels like a chore to watch. For example, Ramy takes a trip to Israel (related to diamond stuff), and it’s a much different voyage than the one he previously took to Egypt, where he threw himself into a trauma-tourism joyride. And I can’t say that Ramy totally ends the season in a fully self-aware way, but there’s progress on display. Meanwhile, we get to see Ramy’s parents take on a new, uh, business venture, Dena deals with her own garbage, and occasionally, a Ramy love interest wafts through the air before realizing that she had better get the hell out of dodge.

That brings me to an interesting point, which is that the women of Ramy do not settle for being drawn under the male gaze. Dena’s got her own issues but is making her own way while refusing to sit down and be a “normal” Muslim-American woman. And the show doesn’t shy away from batting around the stereotypical Muslim-American male fantasy of having more than one wife. As if that’s not enough, Ramy’s mom has had it up to here with running the whole joint and taking care of everyone. So much is happening, and if Ramy was up to full speed himself, there might not be room for all these side stories.

Ultimately, thank god that Ramy, the character, screwed up. He couldn’t stay lovable forever. Instead, he’s busy hustling, which is a good way to keep this show from going stale. And it makes sense because after everything that Ramy did, it would feel disingenuous to see him indulging in soul-searching, at least right away. Rather, this very flawed leading man must earn the right to attempt self-actualization again, and maybe he’ll make real progress with some people that he hurt. By the end of the season, he does earn the right to get introspective, and he finds a new challenge. Ramy is back, and yes, he screwed up, but he’s here to make it up to you. Watch him.

The third season of Hulu’s ‘Ramy’ debuts on September 30.

It was almost the end of the second episode of Andor when I started actively thinking, “where is this all going because it seems to be going nowhere?” And to add to my confusion, the day I was watching these episodes (four total so far), was the day that last trailer premiered that everyone loves. So my entire Twitter feed was full of people declaring Andor the most incredible thing they have ever seen, while I’m watching the actual episodes, let’s say … not feeling quite so confident. I’ll save the suspense and say, by the end of the second episode, things do start to pick up. And by the third and the fourth episode, Andor feels fully in gear.

And that’s when I remembered two things: First, with something like Obi-Wan Kenobi‘s quick six-episode season, meandering kind of feels like filler. “We only have six episodes, get on with it already!” Andor is a full 24 episodes. (Cut in half into two seasons.) It has the luxury of meandering a bit, setting the stage. Also, the showrunner for Andor is Tony Gilroy, who likes to take his time and meticulously set up characters for payoffs down the road. By this point in Gilroy’s career, if he needs almost two episodes of character study with not much else going on, well, I guess that’s what he needs.

Whereas other Star Wars properties can feel like a story made in a committee (the word offender being The Rise of Skywalker, a truly terrible movie), Andor feels like one person’s vision of what a Star Wars series based on Cassian Andor should be. This is an incredibly focused series. And you might think I’m contradicting myself because, earlier, I used the word “meandering,” but we learn that the early meandering is a focused part of the plot (I’ll get to this in a bit).

We first met Diego Luna’s Cassian Andor in Rogue One, a movie credited to Gareth Edwards, but somewhere during production was handed over to Tony Gilroy. I truly believe that movie is a happy accident that it works at all because Edwards’s and Gilroy’s directing styles are not much alike. So we get weird scenes like the gross alien that does something to Riz Ahmed’s Bodhi Rook with basically no payoff, then we get a very meticulously shot sequence of Rebel Fleet Troopers handing off the stolen Death Star plans to each other like a relay race, trying to avoid a rampaging Darth Vader. There’s no way this movie should work under its circumstances, but it does. (This reminds me of a moment during Star Wars Celebration 2016 in London. The publicists wanted a few of us to go in and “hang out” with Gareth Edwards for a bit and kind of gab about Rogue One. The last thing he wanted to talk about was Rogue One. I found out later he had just gotten the Gilroy news not long before. It reminded me of a student who is being asked by his parents about his grades, but already has his report card and knows it’s bad news and wants to talk about anything else. (I may be speaking from experience with this example.)

But now here’s Andor, and Gilroy isn’t sharing a vision with Edwards. And Gilroy isn’t the type of filmmaker who would take on a project like Andor without almost complete control. Set five years before the events of Rogue One, Cassian is … well, he’s kind of a loser. And the first couple of episodes spend a lot of time having Cassian’s friends and adoptive family telling him he’s a loser. This is not the dashing hero we meet at the beginning of Rogue One, calmly assassinating a source instead of letting him get captured. Cassian basically works at a factory and keeps screwing up.

One night, early in the first episode, two local corporate security guards try to shake Cassian down for some credits. Cassian and a guard start to tussle and the guard, accidentally, winds up dead. The second guard, who witnessed this, also winds up dead, but that’s not so much an accident. So now Cassian knows he’s probably in a pickle here and spends the next couple of episodes asking friends for money so he can get out of Dodge. (That’s a figure of speech, Andor is not set in Dodge, Kansas.) At the same time, we are given brief flashbacks to Cassian’s childhood on his more primitive homeworld. He sees a Republic ship crash landing in the distance, and this event will lead directly to why he lives where he does during the events of Andor.

In the second episode, we are introduced to Stellan Skarsgård’s Luthen. And his presence signals that Andor is about to kick into something else. Cassian’s “local trouble” (as Han Solo would say in the first Star Wars) has escalated to the Empire itself, who has put out a full all points bulletin for Cassian’s capture. Luthen is also looking for Cassian, but for different reasons that you might be able to guess if you’ve seen Rogue One. Though, Andor isn’t all about Cassian Andor. Eventually, we do meet Genevieve O’Reilly’s Mon Mothma who is still very much a senator and is trying her best to, quietly, help “some sort of secret organization that doesn’t like the Empire very much,” while also having to deal with her lousy husband who keeps inviting her political enemies over for dinner because he finds them “fun.”

What’s interesting is, counting only live-action Star Wars, when it’s all said and done, between the 24 episodes of Andor plus Rogue One, we will (I think), have spent more time with Cassian Andor than any other Star Wars character. This seems significant. And my hunch is Tony Gilroy wouldn’t want us to spend that much time with one character unless Tony Gilroy had something to say. In the four episodes I’ve seen, it’s not quite all mapped out yet, but the groundwork is there for something truly special. Andor will be meticulous in what it does. I am a big admirer of Gilroy’s work, so I have faith he knows where this should go and how the politics in Cassian’s world might resemble ours.

It took me a couple of episodes to get there (and I suspect it will for you, too, if you are expecting it to start with anything resembling action) … but four episodes in, I’m all in on Andor.

You can contact Mike Ryan directly on Twitter.

After exploring the infamous theft of Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee’s sex tape, Hulu is back with another sordid tale from the creator of Pam & Tommy. In the first official teaser for Welcome to Chippendales, Eternals and Silicon Valley star Kumail Nanjiani stars as Somen “Steve” Banerjee, the founder of the male stripping empire that collapsed in the 1980s following the murder of head choreographer Nick De Noia.

In the first look at the upcoming Hulu series, Nanjiani’s Banerjee can be seen building his burgeoning franchise that quickly spirals out of control in the “darkly comedic” tale of ’80s excess and greed. The series also looks to have a little Magic Mike flair added to the mix, which tracks considering Chippendales is where the male stripper explosion all began.

Along with Nanjiani, Welcome to Chippendales stars Murray Bartlett, Juliette Lewis, and Annaleigh Ashford, with recurring guest stars Quentin Plair, Robin de Jesús, and Andrew Rannells and guest stars Nicola Peltz Beckham and Dan Stevens.

Here’s the official synopsis:

A sprawling true-crime saga, “Welcome to Chippendales” tells the outrageous story of Somen “Steve” Banerjee, an Indian immigrant who became the unlikely founder of the world’s greatest male-stripping empire—and let nothing stand in his way in the process.

Welcome to Chippendales struts its stuff November 22 on Hulu.

BTS members are all multi-talented and have expressed their color in music in some shape or form. With the news of BTS’ main dancer and lead rapper collaborating with K-R&B singer-songwriter, Crush, it only felt right to give a mini-crash course on J-Hope‘s history with collaborations.

Whether it’s his own song or not, J-Hope brings a vibrant splash of color to whatever project he touches. He may not have as many collabs compared to some other members in the group, but his performance is more than worthy of praises. As his “Rush Hour” collab with Crush approaches this Thursday, September 22 (6 p.m. KST — 5 a.m. ET/2 a.m. PT), here is a brief rundown of the three songs he’s worked on with different artists.

“Chicken Noodle Soup”

After meeting at the 2019 Billboard Music Awards and expressing his desire to collaborate with the singer and actress, this collaboration between Becky G and J-Hope was nothing but pure wholesomeness. “Chicken Noodle Soup” was a song that the BTS member danced to during his days as a trainee. The remake to the old-school, childhood classic paid homage to both artists’ roots by incorporating Spanish and Korean lyrics to the original. “Chicken Noodle Soup” was said to originally be part of J-Hope’s first mixtape, Hope World.

“A Brand New Day”

As part of BTS’ Netmarble mobile game, BTS World: Original Soundtrack, J-Hope and fellow member V are joined by Swedish pop sensation Zara Larsson for an electronic hip-hop song with hints of traditional Korean instruments. The song is part of a compilation album that features other western artists like Juice WRLD, Charli XCX, as well as Korean artists OKDAL, and Lee Hyun.

“Animal”

As what K-Pop fans may call “fetus” J-Hope (the early, baby days of BTS), the main dancer’s earliest collaboration is dated back to 2012 when he featured on Jo Kwon’s B-side “Animal.” With an unchanging stage presence, J-Hope performed the side track with the 2AM-member-turned-soloist on MBC’s Music Core during the era where electric-dance pop, or incorporating EDM and dubstep in songs, was a huge trend in the K-pop scene. In a 2021 radio interview, Jo Kwon expressed his gratitude toward the BTS member and hopes to perform a new version of the song in the near future.

Honorable Mention: “= (Equal Sign)”

Though this isn’t an official collaboration, every K-pop stan, or even Korean artist themselves, would consider anything they do with South Korea’s Little Sister, and top music soloist, a collaboration. Upon promoting his first studio album, Jack In The Box, over the summer, J-Hope guested on IU’s YouTube series IU’s Palette for a special performance and talk. Midway through the episode, the two artists performed a special rendition of “= (Equal Sign)” where IU re-arranged the first and last parts herself to include her singing.