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Even Lions Are Done With DaBaby

Things have been rough for DaBaby since his infamous Rolling Loud festival performance in July 2021. As a reminder, it was then that, on stage in front of many people, he decided it would be a good idea to say things like, “If you didn’t show up today with HIV, AIDS, any of them deadly sexual transmitted diseases that make you die in two or three weeks, then put your cell phone light in the air,” and, “Fellas, if you ain’t suck a n****’s dick in the parking lot, put your cell phone light in the air.”

The rapper quickly insisted his words were taken out of context and “twisted up.” Regardless, since then, DaBaby has lost business deals, been removed from festival lineups, and the version of Dua Lipa’s “Levitating” featuring him fell out of favor. This past October, DaBaby said this whole situation has cost him “$100 million within a year’s span.”

Now, the backlash continues, and this time, it’s coming from a lion.

As TMZ reports, the rapper was recently visiting the Al Buqaish Private Zoo in Dubai, and a video shows him hanging out with a leashed lion. As he makes Lion King references to it, the animal at one point seems to take exception to how DaBaby is holding the chain leash and raises its head, which startled the rapper and prompted him to hand the reigns off to somebody else off camera.

Fortunately for DaBaby, while that first lion blamed it on Baby, different clips show him interacting with other animals and enjoying the zoo facilities without issue.

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Here’s How The Royal Family Has Reportedly Reacted To Netflix’s ‘Harry & Megan’ Documentary

As you can imagine, the British Royals are not thrilled about the Harry & Megan docuseries coming to Netflix soon. This was to be expected, given that the Palace pushed back against Season 5 of The Crown because it (fictionally) presented Prince-Now-King Charles in an even more negative light than Season 4 did. Yet this new docuseries seems to have struck a personal nerve with Prince William and Duchess Kate, perhaps since (as Meghan detractor Piers Morgan noted), the trailer happened to arrive while Prince William and Duchess Kate toured the U.S.

As a result, US Weekly now publishes word from an insider who claims, “Kate and William were left flummoxed when the Netflix trailer aired during their trip to Boston.” This person added, “It’s put a huge amount of strain on relationships that are already hanging by a thread.”

There’s more from this source, who declared, “Harry and Meghan wear their heart on their sleeve in the docuseries and blow the lid off the prejudice they experienced at the palace.” And that’s (reportedly) especially upsetting to William, who US Weekly asserts is “very, very angry with his brother,” along with the entire family being “horrified” by what materialized in this trailer.

Future reactions should be interesting to watch.

Harry & Meghan will arrive in two parts: Part One (Eps 1-3) on December 8, and Part Two (Eps 4-6) on December 15.

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Vladimir Putin Is Reportedly Hatching A Plan To Flee Russia If He Loses His Ukraine War And Gets Stripped Of Power

As the invasion of Ukraine continues to be an ongoing embarrassment for Vladimir Putin, the embattled Russian president has reportedly already made plans to flee the country, should he be ousted from power. According to a former aide, Putin made the plans in the spring as it became clear that the invasion of Ukraine was not going to be a crushing demonstration of the Russian military’s strength. Instead, the embattled country has held off Russian forces and rallied the world to its cause.

Thanks to crippling economic situations and a chance at victory being practically non-existent, Putin is facing everything from assassination plots to outright civil war. Needless to say, he’s not about to stick around and find out how any of that goes.

Via The Daily Beast:

The evacuation plan, according to [former speechwriter Abbas] Gallyamov, got underway back in the spring, when it was unofficially dubbed “Noah’s Ark.”

“As the name implies, it’s about a search for new land to go to in case it becomes completely uncomfortable in the homeland. The leader’s entourage has not ruled out that he will lose the war, be stripped of power, and have to urgently evacuate somewhere,” Gallyamov wrote.

While China was originally an option, Putin is reportedly eyeing Argentina or Venezuela, but will probably choose the option with the least amount of stairs. According to reports, the Russian leader recently fell down a flight of stairs and pooped himself, which is again, not exactly a sign of strength as Putin’s time in power hangs by a thread.

And, yes, it’s not lost on us that both he and Donald Trump have issues with stairs. What are the odds?

(Via The Daily Beast)

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Kim Loaiza Pulled Ahead Of Bad Bunny As The World’s Most-Viewed Artist On TikTok This Year

The most-viewed artist on TikTok this year was a Latin artist and surprisingly it wasn’t Bad Bunny. The popular video platform revealed yesterday (December 6) that Mexican singer Kim Loaiza pulled in the most views globally this year.

TikTok unveiled the list for most-viewed artists on the platform this past year and Loaiza came out on top. The influencer-turned-singer has over 4.4 billion followers on TikTok. In the past few years, Loaiza has leveraged her massive following across social media into a successful music career. One of her biggest hits this year is the alluring “Después de las 12” with Cuban rapper Ovi. A stellar remix followed this year with Grupo Firme‘s Eduin Caz and Chilean rapper Pailita.

Loaiza came up through social media alongside her husband, JD Pantoja, who appeared at No. 4 on the list. Pantoja’s cousin and fellow Mexican singer Mont Pantoja came in at No. 3. Following the success of his album Un Verano Sin Ti, Bad Bunny came in at No. 7. Revved-up this past year from the Motomami LP, Spanish pop star Rosalía pulled in at No. 9 on the list.

Loaiza and her husband will tour the US next year. Tickets are now on sale for their joint tour that kicks off in Chicago, Illinois on March 31, 2023.

03/31/2023 — Chicago, IL @ Park West
04/01/2023 — New York, NY @ Palladium Time Square
04/13/2023 — Houston, TX @ Warehouse Live
04/15/2023 — Los Angeles, CA @ El Rey

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Janelle Monáe Had A Completely Topless Birthday Party And Has Now Explained The NSFW Video On ‘Kimmel’

Janelle Monáe dropped by Jimmy Kimmel Live! to dish on their appearance in Netflix’s upcoming blockbuster, Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery… as well as the backstory behind a video of them posing topless at a friend’s birthday party.

Much like the mystery in the movie, this friend takes Monáe on a secret vacation destination each year, with past places including Jamaica and Las Vegas. This year’s party spot was Mexico — and each night of the trip had a different theme.

The first night of Monáe’s birthday trip was “Intergalactic,” where they channeled an extraterrestrial in a pink wig and lots of fluorescent sparkles. From there, the friends organized a “hot sexy tea party” (with a lingerie dress code) and a murder mystery party night. (It’s unclear if Monáe won this game, considering their recent experience in the genre.)

However, Monáe decided to let their creativity shine when the friends organized a “wine night where […] your clothes need to match your favorite white wine or your favorite red wine.” They opted for neither.

“Earlier in the day they had told me the theme and I was like, you know what, it’s my birthday, I just want to be free!” they explained. “I want to be, like, so free and I want to let it all hang out. So they were all dressed and I was topless.”

Monáe uploaded a video from that night to Instagram, where they are dancing around in just a skirt as a band plays and fireworks set off from the beach. “Still floating. Thank you all for the bday love. This is just a small glimpse of how I spent it,” the caption read. “Fully honoring the present. Thank you to my loved ones for planning such a magical experience + each of them adorning my body with temp tats so I could have a bday suit that matched how i felt.”

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Brendan Fraser Soars As A 600-Pound Man In ‘The Whale,’ An Arthouse Stunt That Gives Arthouse Stunts A Good Name

The bulk of this season’s awards movies are relatively staid and fairly similar-looking, and then there’s The Whale, Darren Aronofsky’s food-based Leaving Las Vegas starring Brendan Fraser as a terminally obese online college English professor. That The Whale’s protagonist looks like a live-action, painstakingly realistic version of the fat gamer from South Park and is played by the guy from Bedazzled and Monkeybone feels like the setup for a joke. Only The Whale‘s joke is that it’s not joking, at all. Taking a joke and playing it straight seems to be most of its reason for existing.

The Whale is not a comedy, a farce, or even an Alexander Payne-style suburban dramedy of pathos. If Darren Aronofsky has proven anything throughout his career, it’s that he’s not locked into any one style or genre, waffling wildly from straightforward realism (The Wrestler) to almost abstract experimentation (mother!). The Whale is more like a Shakespearian tragedy, with complex, finely-sketched characters whose motives are often up for interpretation, all orbiting a former teen heartthrob acting his heart out through what looks like 400 pounds of oatmeal stuffed into a series of clear hefty bags. One thing Aronofsky movies all seem to share: despite their intellectual arthouse trappings, he always also embraces schlock and spectacle. See: Fraser’s giant Ludacris video hands here.

The Whale both transcends the stuntiness of Brendan-Fraser-in-a-giant-fat-suit and is inextricable from it. It’s not about that sight gag, but it doesn’t really work without it. The Whale feels like a play, partly because it was one — adapted from Samuel D. Hunter’s 2012 stage show and set in Moscow, Idaho where Hunter was raised. Normally I hate movies that make me feel like I’m watching a play, which always feels like wastes of a visual medium, giving you the sense of being trapped in a room when the entire point is to create the illusion that you’re not trapped in a room.

That’s why a little “movie magic” is so important to The Whale, which is both about a shut-in and consists almost entirely of a single location — Charlie’s moldy gym sock of an apartment, through which the other characters pass through. That it depicts this sagging goiter of a man, artificially embiggened through complex prosthetics, offers a necessary element of the fantastic to cut the otherwise dreary realism, not to mention the expected dog-and-pony awards-season show of glamorous actors dressing down in working-class pantomime. Filmmakers, and especially Darren Aronofsky, love the kind of self-imposed technical challenge turning Brendan Fraser into a 600-pound man presents, and the obvious glee with which he shoots it is infectious, even in the midst of an overtly dour story.

Charlie teaches online English courses, instructing Zoom grids of college students in the fine arts of essay structure while pretending his own webcam doesn’t work to shield them from his slovenly corpulence. He knows his physical form alone is a distraction. His blood pressure is 238 over 135, a sign of his worsening congestive heart failure. In the first scene, a door-to-door missionary played by Ty Simpkins finds Charlie moaning from chest pains and Charlie makes the boy read from a book report about Moby Dick to calm him. This Moby Dick essay, it seems, exemplifies for Charlie the kind of genuine sentiment he exhorts his students to strive for. “The Whale” being a bit of a double entendre.

The missionary kid, Thomas, becomes a supporting player, along with Liz (the always amazing Hong Chau), Charlie’s nurse friend who has unsuccessfully begged Charlie to go to the hospital for so long that she has essentially given up. Thomas thinks he can save Charlie; Liz knows he can’t. Charlie is depressed, naturally, having lost his boyfriend some years back and estranged from his daughter (Ellie, played by Sadie Sink) who shows up later in the film, and ends up being the most interesting character.

A 600-pound man surrounded by empty pizza boxes and fried chicken buckets begging a missionary to read him a child’s essay about Moby Dick, again, sounds like a joke, the imagery heavily reminiscent of A Confederacy Of Dunces, not to mention Barney’s short film for the Springfield Film Festival on The Simpsons. Yet Aronofsky’s project is to build sympathy for Charlie, not make fun of him. There’s a moment in one of my favorite sketches from I Think You Should Leave, the one where Tim Robinson’s character takes an adults-only ghost tour and gets bounced because he keeps asking about horse cocks and cum shots. At the end, Robinson’s defeated character trudges out to his mom’s waiting car and as he opens the door, she asks “So, did you make any new friends?”

It’s a perfect button, but also a tiny moment when one of the funniest sketches of all time becomes genuinely sad. Taking a joke and finding the pathos in it seems to be the crux of The Whale.

And who better to do that than Brendan Fraser? Not even a giant suit of dangling skin and arbitrary body hair can disguise the sadness in his sparkling blue eyes, or the optimism. It’s one of those perfect syntheses of character and public personae that only come around every so often, like Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler, Matthew McConaughey in Magic Mike, or Simon Rex in Red Rocket, where how Fraser acts is inextricable from who he is and how we know him.

I don’t think The Whale is quite as good as those movies. That the fat guy is fat because he’s depressed and expresses his depression through binge eating is a little predictable, and all the foods he eats feel like a little like a Hollywood locavore’s idea of yucky poor people foods (fried chicken, pizza, meatball subs… you can imagine Moby tweaking his weird little nipples in horror/pleasure at all the grease, while his personal chef prepares him a cucumber enchirito). Charlie’s estranged wife, played by Samantha Morton, feels both underwritten and obviously English. Charlie’s goals for his students and his purpose as a teacher seem intended to be a central theme, but feel a little like an afterthought (not to mention that the movie vastly overestimates how much online English professors earn).

Yet Aronofsky, for all his arthouse trappings, has always had a firm grasp of movie magic and how to apply it, and The Whale‘s ending is a perfect example. I don’t know that I’ll be thinking about The Whale in two months but it certainly made me smile.

‘The Whale’ hits select theaters December 9th, opening nationwide December 21st. Vince Mancini is on Twitter. You can read more of his reviews here.

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HER Is Pumped To Be Making History As The First Filipina Belle In The ‘Beauty And The Beast’ Anniversary Special

R&B sensation HER (real name Gabriella Wilson) is making history again. As the singer prepares for her musical special debut as part of Disney’s 30th celebration televised special of Beauty And The Beast, Wilson becomes the first Black and Filipina woman to play the role of Belle.

For clarity, singer Toni Braxton was the first Black woman to star as Belle on Broadway in 1998. But Wilson’s portrayal will mark the first time a woman of color has played the character on the small screen. During a stop at Good Morning America, the “Back Of My Mind” singer shared with host Michael Strahan what this opportunity means to her.

Wilson confessed, “I never thought I could be a Disney princess.” She later added, “Of course, every little girl wants to be a Disney princess, but I’ve never seen one that looks like me — so I get to be that to little girls now.”

When asked about her experience as Belle, Wilson replied, “Being a Disney princess is fun!”

Striving for the coveted EGOT status, Wilson could very well earn an Emmy as she also serves as a producer of the special. Wilson discussed the production side of the special, stating, “that’s such a huge deal on top of being a producer on Beauty And The Beast, which is crazy. I got to do a lot of the new arrangements and work with Alan Menken, the original arranger and producer. It’s been an amazing experience just learning so much about myself, and it’s been a lot of fun, honestly.”

Without giving too much away vocally, Wilson sang a teaser of the production’s opening number, “Belle,” and let’s say viewers are in for a treat.

@gma

@herofficial singing ‘Belle’ is the highlight of our week! 😍❤ #HER #Belle #BeautyAndTheBeast #Disney #Princess

♬ original sound – Good Morning America

Other notable names joining Wilson in the production include Shania Twain (in the role of Mrs. Potts), Josh Groban (in the role of Beast), Martin Short (in the role of candlestick Lumière), Joshua Henry (in the role of Gaston), and David Alan Grier (in the role of Cogsworth, the clock). Rita Moreno will narrate the special.

The Beauty And The Beast: A 30th Celebration television event will air on ABC on December 15 and on Disney+ the next day.

Watch the full interview above.

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People are rallying to help woman who had ‘Hallmark’ meet-cute moment while buying Christmas tree

Hallmark has produced more than 300 holiday-themed movies over the past decade and they tend to be romantic comedies or stories about families that reunite around Christmas. The movies are meant to be comfort food on a cold winter’s night, so no one seems to mind that they’re filled with predictable plot lines and cliches.

Hallmark movies have become a big part of America’s holiday tradition. Last year, more than 80 million people watched at least part of one.

Each film usually begins with a single woman in a small, quaint town having a meet-ugly or a meet-cute with her love interest. In a meet-ugly scenario, the boy and girl are either adversaries in a cause or inadvertently injure one another in a freak accident. If it’s a meet-cute scenario, the two randomly run into each other and have an instant connection.

Regardless of how they meet, the couple falls for each other and then a major misunderstanding drives them apart before they are brought together again

Writer Shyla Watson went Christmas tree shopping on November 27 and inadvertently found herself in a situation that resembled the first act of a Hallmark holiday movie. Her tweet about it quickly went viral, receiving more than 72,000 likes.


Shyla didn’t get his number but that may not be such a bad thing. Liv pointed out that the movie has just begun and it was a total meet-cute situation.

Amber Picota noted that there is a surefire way to get the man’s attention: gaze at the snow with a warm drink in hand.

Shyla should also prepare herself for a meet-ugly reversal.

Or, she can double down on the heavy-item tactic.

Auld Anxiety knows how to find him and find out if he’s single.

Keep an eye out for ex-girlfriends. They always tend to pop up somewhere in these movies.

But of course, problems will arise.

So when is this going to become a movie already?

The fact that Hallmark holiday films are so predictable isn’t entirely due to a lack of creativity at the channel. Romantic comedies are generally filled with cliches that date back to Shakespeare.

The Take spells it out perfectly:

“The Rom-Com Formula: Two people at odds, a meet-cute, misunderstanding, or an outright lie, an adorably clumsy heroine, a red herring love interest, a whimsical job, a big apartment, zany side characters, kissing in the rain, the epiphany, the happy-ever-after… and more.”

Shyla has yet to update the world on what happened after she had her meet-cute, but maybe that’s because “Handsome Holiday Hunk” is already in development at Hallmark and she doesn’t want to blow the deal.

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The Gen X grief when a ‘Sesame Street’ character dies is so real

“A loaf of bread, a container of milk and a stick of butter.”

It’s a simple, repeated line from a one-minute sketch, but as a Gen Xer raised on public television, it’s one of thousands of “Sesame Street” segments etched into my brain. Such memories still pop into my head at random times, clear as day, well into my forties. Bert singing about his oatmeal box while playing it like a drum. Kermit lamenting that it’s not easy—but it is beautiful—being green. Buffy Saint-Marie breastfeeding her baby and explaining it to Big Bird. Mr. Hooper—the sweet, bow-tied man who ran the Sesame Street corner store—dying.

I was 8 when Mr. Hooper died. It was a big deal. I rewatched part of that episode recently to see what I’d think of it as an adult. The “Sesame Street” gang of 1983 handled it masterfully, helping us all process his unexpected death through Big Bird’s own experience of learning about what it means to die.


“Big Bird, when people die, they don’t come back,” said Susan.

Big Bird let that reality sink in, then said that things wouldn’t be the same without Mr. Hooper—exactly the sentiment we all had.

Bob comforted Big Bird, saying, “You’re right, Big Bird. It’ll never be the same around here without him. But you know something? We can all be very happy that we had a chance to be with him, and to know him and to love him a lot when he was here.”

And now the always kind, always gentle Bob has joined Mr. Hooper and the original Big Bird, Carol Spinney, in whatever comes next. Bob McGrath passed away this past week at age 90, and I found myself mourning the loss more than I would have expected.

I suspect I’m not alone.

Those of us in the original “Sesame Street generation” were the guinea pigs on which the theory of educational children’s television programming was tested. It was an experiment that proved beneficial for millions of us, helping us grow up smarter, stronger and kinder, according to research—but it also gave us a unique relationship with the people and characters who lived on Sesame Street.

The generation that came before us didn’t have anything like “Sesame Street” or “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” or “The Electric Company,” and the generations after us have had so much more educational programming to choose from. But those shows were all we had besides mostly-horrible-in-hindsight Saturday morning cartoons. For us, the people and characters on “Sesame Street” formed a core part of our most wholesome childhood memories. They weren’t just entertainers, but teachers. They helped us become better humans in addition to teaching us our letters and numbers, and the emotional connection created from that mentorship during our formative years is profound.

I’m not a huge crier, but I cried when Mr. Rogers died and I cried when Jim Henson died. I didn’t expect it, but I couldn’t help it. And when I saw the news this weekend that Bob McGrath from “Sesame Street” had died, I had the same visceral reaction. A piece of my childhood is gone, just like that, never to come back. I didn’t know him, of course, but I felt like I knew him. And in some odd way, I feel like he actually knew me, because he knew and understood kids.

Perhaps that’s why so many of us feel an emotional attachment to our childhood educational show icons. We weren’t just mindless consumers of cartoon entertainment to them, but precious children with the potential to learn and discover, to become more caring and more knowledgeable. We knew they saw us and understood the stages we were going through. I felt that genuine respect for me as a human being even as a young child. And as an adult, I’ve learned about the sincerity and earnestness of the “Sesame Street” creators and how hard they worked to create the absolute best for kids, which only crystallizes what I felt back then.

“Sesame Street” didn’t just make learning the alphabet and counting entertaining. It taught us about life, about people, about relationships and about ourselves—lessons that became part of our identities. I’ve often thought that the world would be an entirely different place if every young child was raised on a steady diet of “Sesame Street,” and the older and more experienced I get, the more I believe that. It really did make us smarter, stronger and kinder.

Rest in peace, Bob. Thank you for everything you taught us and for being such a positive part of our childhood memories.

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A Spooky ‘Yellowjackets’ Teaser Reveals When The Show Is Returning For Season 2

Yellowjackets is the one of the few television shows to appear on best-of lists for both 2021 and 2022, due to premiering in November 2021 and ending in January 2022. That won’t be an issue for season two: Showtime has announced that the horror series, about a high school girls’ soccer team that’s forced to survive in the chilly wilderness after a plane crash (and their well-cast adult counterparts), will return on March 24, 2023.

You can watch the spooky teaser above.

“I think what the show always kind of aspires to do is continue to evolve and become more itself but also have a tremendous continuity with what came before,” co-creator Bart Nickerson told Deadline about season two. “We are watching the emergence of a religiosity in ’96 and seeing the ramifications of that and the rebirth of that in the present day. I think that that kind of trajectory will continue to hopefully keep the show — you don’t have to completely start from scratch each season. Hopefully, this sort of the tone and the feel of the show will continue to become fuller and more itself.”

Sophie Nélisse, who plays Shauna, also teased that there are scenes in season two that are so “graphic” that the cast “all sat and looked at each other, and we were like ‘What the f*ck are we doing? Like, literally, what the f*ck are we doing? You’ll look at it, and you’ll understand, but I don’t think you’ve ever seen such a scene in TV before.” Can’t wait!