Michael B. Jordan got one heck of a chance to rise above some high school teasing from back in the day. While walking the red carpet for Creed III, the actor/director took a minute to field some questions from The Morning Hustle host Lore’l. Turns out, the two of them went to Chad Science Academy in Newark together, and Lore’l had recently admitted on a podcast how everyone in school used to make fun of Jordan because of his name. Also, The Wire star used to bring headshots to school, which his classmates capitalized on.
“We teased him all the damn time because his name was Michael Jordan. Let’s start there, and he was no Michael Jordan,” Lore’l said on the podcast via NME. “And he also would come to school with a headshot. We lived in Newark, that’s the hood. We would make fun of him like, ‘What you gonna do with your stupid headshot!?’ And now look at him!”
When Lore’l caught up with Jordan on the red carpet, he surprised her by revealing she heard what he said:
“[I was] the corny kid, right?” he replied, referencing her recent podcast chat.
“I did not say that! [I was] misquoted, for sure,” she replied, though Jordan noted: “I heard it. I heard it. It’s all good. What’s up?”
“I said we used to make fun of the name,” she then said. “But yeah, he is obviously killing things out here.”
In an attempt to make things right, Lore’l tried to tell Jordan that he’s “not corny anymore,” and he responded by… walking away. So, okay yeah, maybe things got a little awkward.
Saturday Night Live‘s ventures into the world of sports can be fairly hit or miss, but SNL has struck gold with some sports characters and impressions in recent years, particularly in Weekend Update segments. Kenan Thompson’s LaVar Ball stands out in particular, but this weekend James Austin Johnson debuted a new basketball impression that was startlingly spot-on, as he donned a tie-dye shirt and joined Michael Che on the Weekend Update desk as a prescient Bill Walton to talk about the Lakers.
Johnson really hits all the notes as Walton, particularly refusing to answer Che’s very simple question of “will the Lakers make the playoffs” in any direct manner. Walton calling a game from the future that no one else can see is also a very good bit, as he bounces back and forth between his stream of consciousness rambling and Lakers highlights no one else can see.
What makes the bit even more impressive is that Johnson apparently had no idea who Bill Walton was a few weeks ago when the writers pitched the idea to him, but spent the past few weeks watching Walton and doing some research to dial in a near-perfect impression.
@shrimpJAJ didn’t know much about Bill Walton when we suggested this a couple weeks ago. By this Saturday, he had read “Breaks of the Game” and had a perfect impression. https://t.co/o9W320qiUM
Hopefully JAJ’s Walton will make a return appearance for the playoffs, and it wouldn’t be surprising if Bill brings him on his Throw It Down broadcast on the NBA App one day to drive Jason Benetti further into insanity.
When a friend texted to ask how Cocaine Bear was, I responded “there are child actors doing Southern accents in it,” which felt like all the explanation that was necessary. You can stop reading here if you like.
As evidenced by its popularity as a meme, “cocaine bear” is a funny idea for a movie. It’s also already a punchline, and a funny idea for a movie works better when it’s a setup. When it’s already a punchline, there isn’t much left to do except to tediously construct a scenario we’ve already gotten what we want out of. In this case I think I would’ve rather just given them the $12 as a tip for making a funny poster rather than sitting through 86 minutes of extraneous action and four minutes of people saying “cocaine bear.” (One thought for improving Cocaine Bear: make the joke everyone standing around awkwardly waiting for someone to say “cocaine bear,” like Andy Kaufman’s Mighty Mouse bit).
Cocaine Bear is, in case you haven’t Googled it by now, based on the true story of the 1985 cocaine smuggling flight that killed a former narcotics officer-turned-drug smuggler named Andrew C. Thornton II. He bailed out of an overloaded Cessna along with 40 packages of jettisoned cocaine and was found splooshed against the ground after his chute didn’t open. This part of the story opens the movie, with Matthew Rhys playing a Wile E. Coyote version of Thornton we never see after the first scene. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation later found a black bear corpse in the woods, whose stomach was reportedly filled with cocaine. Someone taxidermied that bear and it became a tourist attraction.
Thornton’s story actually sounds like an interesting one, a rich kid turned Army soldier turned cop turned drug smuggler who died during a daredevil cocaine stunt gone wrong. I could see the Death Of Dick Long guys making a great movie out of that. The brilliance of director Daniel Scheinert and writer Billy Chew in that movie was to take a wacky news story and try to imagine every character in it as a real person. That’s basically the opposite of what director Elizabeth Banks and writer Jimmy Warden do with Cocaine Bear.
Cocaine Bear is basically a horror movie about the bear who ate the cocaine, which is a slightly curious choice to begin with seeing as how the real bear was just minding his own bear business when some cocaine literally fell out of the sky and killed it. In the movie though, the black bear eats the cocaine and kills people, first some Scandinavian hikers played by the Tormund Giantsbane guy from Game of Thrones and his fiancee, played by Hannah Hoekstra. I guess it’s supposed to be funny because they were in love?
Later we meet two kids, a tween boy and girl, who ditch school to hike to a waterfall — they of the aforementioned child actors doing southern accents. Now, if you’re adapting a true story that requires no child actors, adding an element that requires child actors has to be one of the greatest unforced errors of all time, but maybe that’s just me. Keri Russell plays the mother of the girl tween struggling to get her daughter back after she finds out the bear “took” her. That’s something cocaine bears do, I guess, they kidnap young girls. I dunno, man.
Other characters include the cop investigating the dead smuggler (the always great Isiah Whitlock, aka Clay Davis from The Wire), a horny park ranger (Margo Martindale), some whacky paramedics, including Scott Seiss (who’s really funny on Twitter) some teen delinquents who hang out in the national park, and the guys from the drug gang trying to get their coke back — which include angry bad guy Ray Liotta (in his last film role) O’Shea Jackson Jr. (aka Ice Cube Jr.) as the straight man, of sorts, and Alden Ehrenreich as Liotta’s character’s son, distraught from just having lost his fiancee to cancer. I guess it’s supposed to be funny because they were in love?
None of these characters really have an arc, though they occasionally get to shoot at each other and yell at, and yell about, a bear. Even the bear is just a killer bear that could’ve come from any number of killer bear movies. Why this one needs “cocaine” as a motive isn’t clear. Does cocaine even make people kill? I guess it can, though first it makes them wired and annoying. Cocaine Bear isn’t really about a bear on cocaine, it’s mostly sort of a pre-fab killer animal B-movie with “cocaine” slapped on the title (which, admittedly, is a good title). It’s a horror movie reconfigured as a comedy, and I suppose the comedy is that no one is taking the horror very seriously.
“Cocaine: It makes bears KILL” feels like a parody of an 80s D.A.R.E. commercial, and Cocaine Bear might have worked if it had embraced this, functioning as a satire of the over-the-top anti-drug propaganda fed to the young minds of my generation. There are actually a few of those ads in Cocaine Bear (the “this is your brain on drugs” one with the egg in the frying pan) suggesting that the filmmakers maybe knew this, or wanted this to be the thrust of Cocaine Bear, but either couldn’t follow up on it or couldn’t sell it to the financiers. I don’t know, I wasn’t in the room.
A movie about a guy having to write a movie called “Cocaine Bear” where the only directive is “and the bear has to kill people” might actually be kind of good. That story has pathos in it. This one is mostly just a poster in search of a story.
‘Cocaine Bear’ is in theaters everywhere now.Vince Mancini is on Twitter. You can read more of his reviews here.
Miley Cyrus confirmed her Endless Summer Vacation tracklist this morning, February 27. The album will feature Brandi Carlile and Sia, but Cyrus is the undisputed star of the show, as evidenced by “Flowers.” In fact, Cyrus’ January single is No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart dated March 4.
This week is the sixth consecutive No. 1 week for “Flowers” since debuting there in late January — Cyrus’ first career No. 1 debut on the Hot 100. Before “Flowers,” Cyrus’ only other No. 1 was “Wrecking Ball” in 2013, which held the top spot for three weeks.
“Flowers,” per Billboard, “drew 95.2 million radio airplay audience impressions (up 11%, good for the Hot 100’s top Airplay Gainer award for a fourth consecutive week — the longest such streak since Lizzo’s “About Damn Time” linked four wins in a row last June-July); logged 28.7 million streams (down 15%); and sold 18,000 (down 16%) Feb. 17-23, according to Luminate.”
“Flowers” also remains at No. 1 on Billboard‘s Pop Airplay chart.
The warm (to say the least) reception for “Flowers” hasn’t been lost on Cyrus:
On February 13, Cyrus wrote on Instagram, “Happy 1 month anniversary of Flowers! To still be celebrating #1 on the Hot 100 & around the world is phenomenal. With Valentine’s Day coming up tomorrow this song feels even more meaningful to me. I hope this holiday is filled with the joy of honoring LOVE in all of its forms. It’s human nature to want to give & receive it. Sharing your love is special but it’s always important to save enough of that love for yourself. YOU are enough and anything more is just extra. Thank you for another incredible week. I LOVE YOU.”
Based on “Flowers,” Cyrus should prepare to receive an overwhelming amount of love and enjoy another incredible week when Endless Summer Vacation arrives next Friday, March 10.
Endless Summer Vacation is out 3/10 via Columbia. Pre-order it here.
Cocaine Bear is a movie about a bear that eats a lot of cocaine. Other things happen, too, after the bear eats the cocaine, some of them involving severed limbs and ambulances and children getting high on narcotics. It packs a lot of business into a 90-minute runtime, which is commendable in a number of ways. More movies should get wild animals all gassed up on party drugs and wrap up the action in under two hours. This is something I’ve been saying for many years.
My favorite scene in the movie happens right at the beginning. A man — played by Matthew Rhys, reuniting him with his TheAmericans co-stars Keri Russell and Margo Martindale, which is hilarious — is heaving some duffel bags of cocaine out of an airplane as “Jane” by Jefferson Starship plays. He’s having fun. Maybe too much fun. As he is getting ready to jump out himself, he donks his head on the doorway and falls and dies. This is how and why the bear gets to the cocaine. Because the guy who was supposed to collect it on the ground was dead in a mangled heap on the grass. It’s a nice little piece of business. I have had “Jane” stuck in my head for a full day now.
It is also, kind of, a real thing that happened. A man really did die while skydiving with many duffel bags of cocaine. A bear really did eat a lot of it. The real bear died, though, very quickly (because of all the cocaine), and did not murder anyone in a forest. (As far as we know.) Producer Christopher Miller touched on all of this in a recent interview.
The story that inspired this is wild in its own right, and the kind of true-life, scandalous caper that most Hollywood filmmakers would think, “That’s the movie.” How did you resist that and instead go in a direction like this, which is certainly more unexpected and audacious.
Miller: As we were developing it, it was very clear that the thing you are most interested in, in this telling, was the bear. And when you’re away from the bear for too long, you would get antsy. It was sort of like “get to the dinosaurs,” like in Jurassic Park. We’re like, “Alright, give me some dinosaurs.” But it’s true that Andrew Thornton III [the real-life smuggler] is a crazy character and his story is nuts. There’s a lot you could do with him. But at the end of the day, you gotta get to the dinosaurs.
He is correct on a few fronts here, which I will address in order:
It is good, if your movie is called Cocaine Bear, to get right to the cocaine-eating bear, especially if you want to keep your movie under two hours, which you should always try to do, for me
Andrew Thornton III was indeed a crazy character
Let’s learn a little bit more about the real-life Andrew Thornton III, via the New York Times.
Mr. Thornton was a known drug smuggler and a former police officer. He was found dead the morning of Sept. 11, 1985, in the backyard of a house in Knoxville, Tenn., wearing a parachute and Gucci loafers. He also had several weapons and a bag containing about 35 kilograms of cocaine, The Knoxville News Sentinel reported.
Do me a favor here, just for a second. We’ll get back to the business at hand soon, I promise. But first: Imagine you wake up tomorrow morning and stumble to the kitchen to make some coffee, little crusties all in your eyes, and you look out the window into your backyard and see… wait a second… is that… is that a heavily-armed man in Gucci loafers surrounded by the flowing fabric of a parachute and also many duffel bags full of a white powder that sure might be cocaine? That’s a lot. You could dine out on that story for the rest of your life. Lord knows I would. I’m dining out on it now and it didn’t even happen to me.
Some other interesting facts about Andrew Thornton III:
He was the child of wealthy thoroughbred owners
In addition to being a police officer and drug smuggler, he was also a lawyer and a former military paratrooper
He actually died because the load he was carrying was too heavy, not because he bopped his head while rocking out to 1980s bangers in an airplane
Let’s ignore that last one, actually. I like the fictionalized version better. But here’s a little more on the other two, from the 1985 write-up of the whole thing in the Los Angeles Times.
“He was an expert skydiver and the type of guy who wouldn’t even let anyone touch his pack. He was a fanatic” about his equipment, said a friend in Lexington.
He joined the Lexington police in 1968 and stayed for nine years. In 1981, the Lexington Herald quoted sources as saying Thornton had set up the department’s intelligence squad.
This all might be ringing a number of bells for some of you, especially if you like watching quality television shows about loose cannon U.S. Marshals from Kentucky who play by their own rules but still get results, as you should. The fourth season of Justified — maybe its best — did a similar thing. The season opened with a dead parachuter in a neighborhood and a lot of cocaine on the ground around him. The plot spun around from there, with smugglers using hidden identities and sweet prostitutes and a collection of organized crime figures who would very much like to locate all of those people. No bears, though. Which was a bummer, in hindsight. I would have liked to see Walton Goggins try to rationalize with a speed-riddled black bear. I still would, if that’s an option. On television or in real life. I can be flexible.
FX
And here’s the reason the two things seem similar in a lot of ways: They were, in fact, both inspired by the actions of Andrew Thornton III. They both came from the same birthplace, all written up in a book called The Bluegrass Conspiracy. They both started with a maniac in an airplane full of cocaine and a parachute that didn’t open, which, to be fair, is a great place to start any story. Please consider this if you are writing and/or producing Paddington 3, or want me to write and/or produce it.
They went off in different directions after that, sure. One focused on secret pasts and featured Timothy Olyphant in a cowboy hat and the other asked that age-old question “what if a bear ate some cocaine and killed everything it saw for a while?” That’s how art works sometimes. Ideas can come from a lot of places. Like, to choose an example at random, from a real story about a former paratrooper turned cop turned drug smuggler whose parachute didn’t open and fell to his death in someone’s yard while a bear ate most of the cocaine he was smuggling. Inspiration is funny like that.
Anyway, if you’re keeping score at home, this brings the list of notable similarities between Justified and Cocaine Bear to two; the first and most notable is… uh, all of this; and the second, they both featured Margo Martindale in a prominent role. Tough to ask for much more out of any piece of entertainment.
“I was really freaking out about announcing,” SZA told Alternative Pressas one of the publication’s spring 2023 cover stars. “I wasn’t even performing or anything, and [backstage] I was like, ‘Wow, I could never perform because I’m gonna lose it just walking out with a piece of f*cking paper.’ I was shaking like, ‘I’m gonna pass out, no deadass.’ And then, it subsided as I got on there and accepted what it was.”
SZA is more alternative than you think. For the first cover of our Spring 2023 issue, the singer-songwriter talks working with Phoebe Bridgers and dives deeper into her explosive album ‘SOS.’ https://t.co/d1COMmxQfB@sza
Elsewhere in the cover story, SZA teased the deluxe edition of SOS and a future appearance on James Corden’s Carpool Karaoke. She admitted to previously turning down an opportunity to be on Carpool Karaoke because she felt “scared of being on camera, looking bad, sounding bad and being perceived,” so maybe she’ll also change her mind about a future Grammys performance.
“Beyoncé — she’s so much bigger than a[n] f*cking Grammy,” SZA said. “She’s Beyoncé! She’s done it for women, she’s done it for Black people, she’s done it for artists. She’s done so much for the world by just being herself.”
“Quite a few years back, I did come to Hawaii and when you come and you’re on vacation alone, you can kind of like create anything you want,” the Emmy and Golden Globe and every-award-in-the-world winner said on The Kelly Clarkson Show last year. “I ended up meeting these two guys that were best friends and I liked them both, and so I told them that I had an identical twin and I dated both guys… for two weeks.” Coolidge isn’t sure if she has “the guts” to pretend to be her own twin again — in real life, or on the show.
While backstage at the 2023 Screen Actors Guild Awards over the weekend, actor Jon Gries, who plays no-good Greg on The White Lotus, suggested that Coolidge could play Tanya’s sister in season three, considering… Coolidge quickly shot the suggestion down, however. “I don’t think Mike’s going to allow that,” she said, referring to creator Mike White. There goes that theory!
But what about Pamela Anderson as Tanya’s sister?
Coolidge seemed more open to the idea that Pamela Anderson joins as Tanya’s sister. “Oh wow,” she said. “I just recently saw Pam’s documentary and I called 100 people to watch it. And I swear to God, we all had the same reaction. It’s amazing. You finally get the real story and she’s got this huge comeback.”
As long as someone, be it Tanya’s twin or Pam Anderson, ends Greg…
watch jennifer coolidge come back as tanya’s secret twin sister in white lotus s3 to destroy greg once and for all
Sunday was the best day of the 2022-23 NBA regular season thus far. All four national TV games delivered, as Suns-Bucks, Lakers-Mavs, Timberwolves-Warriors, and Clippers-Nuggets all produced thrillers that went all the way down to the wire in the fourth quarter and/or overtime. We also got to see a buzzer-beater, courtesy of Trae Young to lift Atlanta over Brooklyn, and Damian Lillard put 71 points on the Rockets to match Donovan Mitchell for this season’s highest scoring output.
It was a tremendous day of hoops, and as such Stephen A. Smith and the First Take crew decided to dial in Charles Barkley to break down what we all saw as well as the overall state of the league as we enter the stretch run. As always happens, Barkley was asked about Kevin Durant and the Suns (full video above), with Chuck playing the hits and talking about how KD has to win without Steph Curry and insisting he’d never join a superteam while conveniently forgetting about his tenure in Houston.
However, he did push back when Stephen A. tried to make the issue with KD about money, as Smith tried to say Durant’s inability to lead a team to a title should hurt him at the negotiating table. That set Chuck up for a comeback that had Smith in stitches, as he explained that you can’t come at stars about money because “we’re paying bums today.”
Charles Barkley sounds off on today’s player salaries
“We’re paying bums today … We’re just giving $200-300 million out like candy.” pic.twitter.com/SXQKNAoUez
It’s a very funny riff from Charles that has Stephen A. cackling — although, it should be said that we should generally respect folks who do genuine hard work like being janitors — but the point stands that you can’t be mad about what someone like KD gets paid with some of the contracts that get thrown around. Barkley tries to make clear that he’s not mad (although he seems a little bit jealous), but he does want players to be a bit more appreciative of their financial standing, which led to another load management diatribe about guys needing to play if they’re going to make $30-$50 million a year.
Netflix has been experimenting lately by adding live content to the mix. First, the streamer hosted the SAG awards this week, which went out live on YouTube. Next up, it will host its first-ever live global streaming event for Chris Rock’s latest comedy special. Chris Rock: Selective Outrage will air live on March 4th, along with two other pre and post-show specials (they must really want this to work out). Who knows what they will dream up next? Squid Game live?! Hopefully not.
The first pre-show will be aptly titled The Show Before The Show and feature clips from the comedian’s famous friends, like Jerry Seinfeld and Amy Schumer, who is hopefully not traumatized anymore. The pre-show will be hosted by The Daily Show’s Ronny Cheing and is set to include Arsenio Hall, Deon Cole, and Leslie Jones.
Then Rock’s special will begin streaming live from Baltimore, Maryland at 10 pm ET. at What could Rock possibly talk about? There are a few things he could touch on, though we all know how dangerous it can be to give someone all that free live air time, so who knows what will happen.
Finally, if none of that seems like a way to spend your Saturday night, you can always stream that movie where Jennifer Coolidge is a psychic medium, which is also on Netflix. It’s nice to have options!
One of those new places we might be seeing SZA is on James Corden’s popular series, Carpool Karaoke. In a new interview with Alternative Press magazine, SZA explained why she turned the show down the first time around, as well as why she might take a different route if she’s asked again. She says she rejected the prior offer to appear on the show because she was “scared of being on camera, looking bad, sounding bad and being perceived.”
However, she’s since come to terms with all of the above, saying, “I really have to remind myself this is my moment in the sun, and I have to take every opportunity because this sh*t may never happen again.”
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