Month: February 2023

It’s that time of year again: NBA All-Star Weekend is almost upon us. And you know what that means: The rosters for the All-Star Celebrity Game have been announced!

This year, All-Star Weekend will take place in Salt Lake City, Utah, so the teams will be coached by the Utah Jazz governor Ryan Smith, as well as minority owner — and former NBA All-Star — Dwyane Wade.

While Smith says he has no intention of playing, his team is stacked with talent — just maybe not the basketball kind. He’s got a ton of musicians on his team, including rapper Cordae, country star Kane Brown, and Latin trap singer Ozuna.

Not to be outdone on the music front, Wade’s tapped his own all-star squad of the musical variety, with 21 Savage, Janelle Monáe, and Nicky Jam all suiting up.

Of course, neither team is lacking for athletics. Albert Pujols, Calvin Johnson, DK Metcalf, and the Miz are all on rosters, along with WNBA stars like Arike Ogunbowale and Diamond DeShields. It should be a fun game all around — and really, isn’t that the point?

The All-Star Celebrity Game is scheduled for Friday, February 17 at 7 pm ET/4 pm PT. (5 Mountain Time… thanks a lot, Utah. First, you don’t have internet, now this).

Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Christina Applegate is gearing up to attend the February 26 SAG Awards, where she’s nominated for Best Female Actress In A Comedy Series for Dead Like Me. She also describes the event to the LA Times as “my last awards show as an actor probably, so it’s kind of a big deal.” This is the case due to Applegate’s multiple sclerosis diagnosis, which arrived as she filmed the final Dead To Me season for Netflix. In the lead up to that season’s release, Applegate was also flanked by supportive Married With Children costars as she attended her Hollywood Walk Of Fame ceremony. All of this made the Netflix show’s ending land harder.

In other words, the third Dead Like Me installment gave us more than the usual dark humor, meditation on friendship, and devotion to therapeutic rage metal that the show generally delivered. In the aftermath, Applegate is discussing what she went through while filming those episodes, which included her feeling like “a wreck every day,” but generally speaking, she did so in the privacy of her own on-set trailer. As well, if she did “break down on set,” the Dead Like Me cast and crew were “so loving that it was OK.” Here’s more of what she told the LA Times, including her plans for the future:

“Right now, I couldn’t imagine getting up at 5 a.m. and spending 12 to 14 hours on a set; I don’t have that in me at this moment.” She’s considering next steps: producing, development, “doing a s- ton of voice-overs to make some cash to make sure that my daughter’s fed and we’re homed.” And she spends a lot of time in bed, bingeing all the reality shows she’s never seen.

But it took months before she could watch her own show’s last season. “”I don’t like seeing myself struggling,” she says. “Also, I gained 40 pounds because of inactivity and medications, and I didn’t look like myself, and I didn’t feel like myself.” She watched alone, stopping periodically when it became too painful. “At some point I was able to distance myself from my own ego, and realize what a beautiful piece of television it was. All the scenes I wasn’t in were so much fun to see and experience for the very first time.”

The finale of Dead Like Me was freaking beautiful, it is true. No spoilers here in case you want to belatedly dive into the show, but the friendship between Applegate’s Jen and Linda Cardellini’s Judy was second to none. Very Thelma and Louise, obviously. And here’s to hoping that Applegate has an Emmy ceremony in her future, too.

(Via LA Times)

Mike Breen was the latest guest on “The Old Man & The Three,” the podcast hosted by retired NBA sharpshooter and current ESPN personality JJ Redick. Now one of the Worldwide Leader’s top pundits and in-game analysts, Redick told a story about a production meeting where he got a good piece of advice from the Hall of Fame broadcaster about the importance of staying focused on the game if it gets out of hand.

“We get towards the end of the call, and I say, ‘Hey, on the big picture stuff, what’re your guys thoughts? Here’s some general ideas I have,’” Redick recalled saying. “And Mike quickly interjects: ‘Yeah, no, I don’t want this to turn into a talk show.’”

As Breen explained, while “the big picture stuff is great,” there is an entire basketball game happening.

“You still have to respect what’s out on the floor in front of you,” Breen said. “And especially the viewers who are watching. Because at that point, a lot of the only people who are watching still care about their team, and they want to know the 11th guy on the team who’s getting a run, what you think about him, talk about him, because they’ve been tweeting how they want him to play more minutes.

“So, it’s a balance, especially for me with working with Mark and Jeff,” Breen continued. “Cause they are great with big picture stuff, and most people are, it’s fun to talk about. But you have to still respect the game that’s going on, I sometimes think we get away from that too much and not stick with the game.”

Breen is one of the best in the business for plenty of reasons, and the respect that he has for the game is certainly high up on the list.

Like the world of late night TV, streamers are in a state of chaos. Paramount+ is absorbing Showtime, which meant the end to certain shows. HBO Max jettisoned a bunch of content, including hundreds of Looney Tunes classics. Even Netflix, the one that started it all, spent last year hemorrhaging subscribers. Now it’s Disney+’s turn to suffer.

As per Variety, in the last three months of 2022, the family friendly(-ish) streamer lost a whopping 2.4 million subscribers. For some context, when Netflix made news for a mass exodus of subscribers, the number was “only” about one million.

That means Disney, with its newly returned CEO Bob Iger, will have to make like the other major streamers and enact some big, possibly ground-shaking changes. Indeed, Iger vowed that there would be a “significant transformation,” which sounds ominous. Does that mean they’ll do what HBO Max has done and remove a bunch of big titles so they can license them out? Will subscribers no longer have the option to watch the legendarily poor 1971 live-action Dean Jones comedy Million Dollar Duck whenever their hearts desire?

Mind you, Disney+ didn’t lose subscribers in North America. In fact, they actually gained about 200,000 of them, bringing the total to 46.6 million. Here’s what really happened:

The drop in Disney+ subscribers — which was bigger than analysts expected — was entirely driven by a 3.8 million sequential decline Disney+ Hotstar, the version of the service offered in India and parts of Southeast Asia, to stand at 161.8 million at the end of 2022.

The news isn’t all bad for the mega-corporation that owns the likes of Marvel, Star Wars, Avatar, The Simpsons, etc., etc., etc. Overall, Disney’s quarterly earnings actually topped Wall Street estimates, up 8% from the previous quarter with $23.51 billion. That’s partly thanks to their parks and “experiences,” which had a 21% rise in revenue, rising to $8.7 billion, with operating income rising 25% to $3.1 billion.

Still, the news of Iger doing some belt-tightening is grim for Disney+ subscribers who like having a place they can always watch the Muppets thwarting a heist by Charles Grodin.

(Via Variety)

Sensing that an opportunity for a Super Bowl ad might be in the air, Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee decided to send a very up close and personal photo of his testicles to Mr. Peanut, an obvious recipient if there ever was one.

“Hey @MrPeanut let’s collab!… I’ll bring the NUTZ!!!!” Lee tweeted along with a picture of his butt and balls taken from behind. WARNING: We must stress to you all in the strongest terms possible that you should not look at Tommy Lee’s tweet unless you want to see an extreme closeup of his testicles. But if curiosity has the best of you, can see the NSFW tweet here.

Of course, this isn’t the only time that Lee’s infamous package has made headlines. On top of his dong being voiced in Hulu’s Pam & Tommy by Jason Mantzoukas, Lee ran afoul of Instagram back in September 2022 after the platform wasn’t thrilled with his nude posts. The drummer reportedly joined OnlyFans where he could be “free as f*ck.” That announcement also included a shot of his butt because, again, we’re dealing with a professional here.

“I showed you my sh*t. They took it down off the internet,” Lee said in a fan-captured video. “What I’ve done is I have now gone over to a place where you can be free as f*ck. And you can show anybody whatever the f*ck you want, and they don’t f*cking take it down.”

The drummer then removed his pants to reveal the words “OnlyFans” written on his butt cheeks in marker. Let it never be said that art is dead.

(Via New York Post)

Earlier this week, Janelle Monáe threatened to withhold her new single “Float” after a fan’s tweet comparing her to the Monopoly man (aka Mr. Monopoly) went viral. Fortunately for all of us, she was just joking around and showing off her sense of humor, and it looks like the release is proceeding as planned.

Monáe finally shared the release date for the single after first teasing it in early January. Since then, she’s shared an extended, NSFW teaser and captioned all of her social media posts with the song’s title, but only today did she finally share when it’s actually dropping, including a cheeky reference to her earlier threat.

“Y’all won,” she wrote. “FLOAT. 2/16.” She even included an emoji of a little person in a suit, a reference to her early career’s monochromatic menswear looks (which inspired the Mr. Monopoly joke). A video clip of the song sees Janelle rocking a cozy look with a checkered, fuzzy bucket hat singing into a home studio mic (I’m pretty sure I have the same one!).

“Float” figures to be the triple threat’s first new standalone work since 2018’s Dirty Computer. While she’s released non-album singles for soundtracks and the like over the past three years, including “Turntables,” “Stronger,” and “Say Her Name (Hell You Talmbout),” “Float” is the first new song that suggests a pivot back to music after spending the last few years building that impressive acting resume.

Coffee addiction happens to be one of the healthier addictions to harbor. According to a new academic study, the practice of tucking into one’s daily caffeine fix can also be healthier than imagined. The gist of the story is that, yes, while a lot of sugar-laden coffee concoctions are perhaps best saved for special occasions, adding a splash of milk can boost the already established anti-inflammatory effects of brewed coffee beans themselves. In other words, you’ll catch a few extra calories from adding that milk, but the added health effects are worth it.

This helpful information lands courtesy of Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry and Prevention, which boiled down the study into layman’s terms and adds insight from a Dallas-based physician, Scott Zashin, M.D. Long story short, the inflammatory-busting polyphenols already existing in coffee can be amplified by the protein found in milk. The combined effect of the existing polyphenols can thusly be amplified into double the usual effect. Here’s more:

In this study, researchers induced inflammation artificially and exposed this inflammation to cells, explains Dr. Zashin. “If you get an infection, your body will mobilize white cells to fight the infection and that causes inflammation in the process.” He further explains that the cells in the study that were exposed to the polyphenols and amino acids seemed to have a better response at decreasing inflammation compared to those with polyphenols alone or those with neither, a.k.a. the placebo group.

Therefore, “If you drink coffee (polyphenols) and milk (amino acids), it works as a more anti-inflammatory effect than the coffee alone,” says Dr. Zashin.

Inflammation in the body can wreak havoc and contribute to a wealth of maladies including weight gain, degenerative diseases, cancer, and more. In other words, milk really can make a world of difference. As the Jerusalem Post further points out, the study supports the same type of anti-inflammatory boosting effect while combining veggies with meat and fruit with yogurt. Probably just don’t act like this while you’re drinking coffee, and you’ll be fine.

(Via Prevention & Jerusalem Post)

Beyoncé’s latest Ivy Park collection with Adidas is set drop this week and although anticipation appears high, a new report from The Wall Street Journal suggests that the outlook for the singer’s clothing line may not be so rosy.

According to documents, the Ivy Park line is falling well short of Adidas’ initial projections. In 2022, the company expected the collection to bring in $250 million in sales banking on the hype for all things Beyoncé; it reportedly only managed $40 million. That was down 50% from the year before. Since Beyoncé gets $20 million a year for licensing her name and likeness to the brand, the Journal estimates Adidas is actually losing money.

The 2019 contract between Adidas and Beyoncé is set to expire after this year, and the Journal‘s sources say the brand’s executives are looking at whether or not they should end the partnership or try something new. Among possible solutions apparently being discussed are how much more or less Adidas branding Ivy Park should bear.

The latest collection is set to release online tomorrow (Thursday, February 9) and in stores the day after; the promotional campaign features breakout rapper Ice Spice and Offset.

Adidas has had a rough road regarding its artist partnerships of late; in 2022, the German athletic wear company cut ties with Kanye West in the wake of his antisemitic press tour, although the company still intends to release the Yeezy Boost designs without his name attached.

No one will be calling Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania a “palette cleanser.” This was always the joke after the prior two Ant-Man movies immediately followed huge Avengers movies with massive stakes for the future of the MCU, then here would come Paul Rudd’s Scott Lang and his quirky cast of characters that remained, until now, fairly self-contained movies. (Self-contained on their own, obviously Scott Lang has appeared in other MCU movies. And, yes, the post-credit scene of Ant-Man and the Wasp crossed over into other events.)

But now, Peyton Reed’s Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania is charged to set up an entire new phase of Marvel movies. (For those counting, this is the fifth.) Reed, who directed all three Ant-Man installments – only the second MCU director to do so, joining Spider-Man’s Jon Watts; James Gunn will join the club soon – is tasked with introducing the world to Kang (Jonathan Majors), who will be the major villain for the considerable future. As Scott, Cassie Lang (Kathryn Newton) Janet van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer), Hope van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly), and Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) are all sucked into the Quantum Realm, where Kang awaits, this sets up a much larger role for Pfeiffer, who spent 30 years down there and very much knows her way around. But, by doing this, we had to say goodbye to the quirky people who surround Scott, like Michael Peña’s Luis, who does not appear in this third movie.

Ahead, Peyton Reed takes us through what it was like to shift from “palette cleanser” to a full-on MCU movie that will set up and have repercussions for the next slate of films. Also, he explains how he finally pulled of getting MODOK into an MCU movie.

You are, I believe, only the second Marvel MCU director to date to finish your trilogy. You directed all three.

Yes, I did. It’s exciting. Who would’ve thought when we started the first Ant-Man, when we started shooting in 2014, that there would be a third one? I’m thrilled because, like you, I’m sure, I grew up on the original Star Wars trilogy and Indiana Jones, what was then a trilogy, and Back to the Future trilogy and that stuff. And it’s great to be able to progress these characters and then get to the third movie. Part of the thing, as you get to the third movies, we’ve got to make this different and interesting and not do the same old thing – and mix it up and try and make the third movie as radically different while retaining the same characters that we know and love to see.

Well, speaking of that, of all the reactions, no one’s calling this one “a palate cleanser.”

[Laughs] Well, my job is done then. I think that sort of came about because we always would follow a massive Avengers movie, right? And I jokingly said, well, maybe not so jokingly, said at one point, it’s like, I don’t want to be a palate cleanser. I want to be the Big Avengers movie. And by that I just meant Ant-Man deserves this massive adventure. And we have this thing – particularly after Ant-Man and The Wasp – we have this big, unanswered question that we owe the audience an answer to, which is: what the hell was Janet van Dyne doing in the Quantum Realm for 30 years? She wasn’t wandering around a psychedelic void with a walking stick for 30 years. She had a whole life down there. And what if that was our entree into this big, new villain, Kang the Conqueror? What if there was a prior relationship that happened down there? But also to get to invent and create this entire subatomic world, that seemed thrilling to me.

Well also, speaking of that. I wouldn’t say the whole movie, but honestly, three-fourths of the way through this movie, Michelle Pfeiffer is the main character, which is awesome.

Yeah, we had to do right by Janet van Dyne. She was rescued at the end, basically, of the last movie. We deliberately introduce her in this movie serving pizza at the dining room table, like the most domestic content you can imagine. It’s like, oh wow, I guess that’s what Janet’s doing now back on Earth. She’s serving pizza to the family, which is great. But as they get sucked into the Quantum Realm, you start to see there’s desperation and there’s a mission at hand, but you start to see her come back to life and see how vibrant she was as a hero in the Quantum Realm. And they start to peel back the layers. And you realize all the stuff that she had not told her family about. We liked the idea of exploring family secrets in the movie.

You mentioned Kang and Jonathan Majors. Look, we all know he’s a good actor. But his first day playing Kang, what were you thinking? It’s insane what he’s doing.

Jonathan and I had a lot of Zoom calls way early on, right as I cast him. And we talked about if this is a guy who has dominion over time, and sort of doesn’t live in a straight line… And there’s a line in the movie that Jeff Loveness wrote, “You’re an Avenger. Have I killed you before?” He’s had all these experiences, he can’t even keep it straight. What would it be like being in the presence of that person? And we talked about this economy of movement and this economy of language. He’s very deliberate when he speaks, and when he speaks that way, you listen.

And then we talked about trauma. We talked about, people experience trauma in their linear life. What if this guy had experienced multiple traumas? There’s something very broken about Kang the Conqueror, right? And we liked the idea that if you live in that many lifetimes, what does forming attachments mean? Is there any attachment he’s ever formed? And we liked the idea of peeling away this backstory where maybe his attachment to Janet van Dyne is the closest he’s ever come to actually having a relationship with someone…

And then she betrays him, at least in his mind.

In his mind, he’s betrayed by her. In her mind, she’s betrayed by him. And we love that idea. And also that it’s in a superhero trilogy that’s about family and those attachments. This is something that Kang doesn’t really have, and we liked that juxtaposition.

MODOK is in this movie, because I’m under the impression it’s been at least talked about before in two other prior MCU movies and didn’t happen. And you finally cracked the code, but are you also worried about hardcore MODOK fans, “That is not the way it is in the comics.” I don’t know them, but I’m guessing they’re out there.

Yeah, I suppose there are hardcore MODOK advocates out there. I don’t know who these people are…

I bet you soon will.

Yeah, I know. I’m going to hear from them. That’s the thing with Marvel Comics, is everybody has a prior relationship with these characters as a comic book fan. So you have to make finite choices when you bring these characters to the screen, and some people are going to like them, and some aren’t. But at the end of the day, he’s still a bizarro, grotesque character who’s a giant floating head. And he is also a mechanized organism designed only for killing.

But when we talked about how we could fit him in, it seemed like the perfect movie to introduce him. And we liked the idea, his plot function. And we also like the idea of, as we reveal who MODOK is in this movie, there are ramifications for Cassie Lang. It’s actually kind of triggering for Cassie, because she mentions early on in the movie that someone came into her bedroom when she was six and tried to kill her! And for a six-year-old, that’s going to leave a mark. So all of those things sort of accrued to, okay, we have a take on him that I think could be a little scary and a little dramatic. And, ultimately, he’s got his own arc in this movie, which we were thrilled about.

I’ve always found MODOK funny. But seeing him in a live-action movie, he’s kind of terrifying.

Oh, yeah. No, he needs to be terrifying. He’s down there for a reason. He’s got a function, and conceptually it’s one of the strangest things that the Marvel Comics people ever created.

So like I said, Michelle Pfeiffer is front and center. So is Michael Douglas this time around. But it seems like to do that, we had to say goodbye to characters like Michael Peña’s, who was so great in the last two movies. And Scott Lang’s whole quirky cast of characters. I did miss them. I understand that they can’t all go to the Quantum Realm.

I think it’s just, we had done it for two movies. And I love those characters. Like you, I really genuinely love them. But there was so much story to tell on this thing, and it’s one of those things. As you start to formulate what this third movie’s going to be, there are certain things that you just don’t have room for. You may have to make these hard choices, and that was really one of them.

I do have a thing. There is, for me, a personal good luck charm, and you can’t make an Ant-Man movie without David Dastmalchian. David plays a very different role in this movie. But yeah, it was definitely a decision, like with the Ant-Man family and then Kang the Conqueror and MODOK and introducing all the Freedom Fighters, there’s only a certain amount of real estate in the movie.

It’s funny you mentioned him, because I’m from Kansas City originally, and between David and Paul Rudd, you’ve got two Chiefs fans to deal with while you do the press this week.

[Laughs] Absolutely, man. And yeah, there’s no bigger Chiefs fan than Paul Rudd.

No, I am.

[Laughs] Okay, you’ll have to talk to him about that!

I know, yeah.

Someone asked him a question about if he were able to travel through time, what would he go back in his life and relive. And it was the Chiefs winning the Super Bowl and being at the game with his son.

I went to that game, too, and you know what? That’s also what I would pick. He is right about that.

I love it.

You can contact Mike Ryan directly on Twitter.

Andy Samberg and Jean Smart have signed on for a time-bending romantic comedy for Amazon, which practically sells itself because we said Andy Samberg and Jean Smart earlier, right? Ok, good. Titled 42.6 Years, the film is based on a story from Samberg, who co-wrote the script with Late Night With Seth Meyers writer Seth Reiss, and it definitely takes an unconventional approach to the rom-com genre. Craig Gillespie, who last directed I,Tonya and Cruella, is attached to helm the project.

Via The Hollywood Reporter:

The story centers on a young man (Samberg) who, in order to save his life, undergoes an experimental procedure in which he’s cryogenically frozen. When he wakes up 42.6 years later, physically unchanged thanks to being frozen, he finds himself alone in a future with no one to turn to but his ex-girlfriend, who is now much older than him (and played by Smart).

Pairing Samberg and Smart is a solid casting choice. The two have been delivering standout comedy projects in recent years. Samberg starred on the hit series Brooklyn Nine-Nine and the breakout indie flick Palm Springs, which played around with the concept of time a bit. (It’s fun. Watch it.) Smart, for her part, has racked up rave reviews on HBO with Watchmen, Hacks, and Mare of Easttown. She can currently be seen in Damien Chazelle’s Babylon because, again, putting Jean Smart in anything is always a good call.

Anyway, if Marty McFly can go back in time in Back to the Future and kind of date his mom, Andy Samberg gets to freeze himself and date Jean Smart in the future. That’s only fair. And a lot less troublesome. It’s kind of wholesome, actually. Good for them. And good for us, too, because we get to watch it.

(Via The Hollywood Reporter)