Month: July 2023

Everyone knew Barbie would be huge, ut if anything it did even better than expected. Greta Gerwig’s campy-feminist take on the longtime Mattel doll line Hoovered up an eye-popping sum, enough to narrowly break a highly coveted record.

As per The Hollywood Reporter, Barbie amassed a whopping $155 million over its opening weekend, thus making it the biggest opening ever for a female-directed motion picture. The previous holder? Captain Marvel, directed by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, which four years ago opened to $153 million.

It’s not the only milestone Gerwig has achieved in her directing career. With 2017’s Lady Bird, she became only the fifth woman ever nominated for the Best Director Oscar. (She lost to The Shape of Water’s Guillermo del Toro.) At the time, the previous nominees we Lina Wertmüller, Jane Campion, Sofia Coppola, and Kathryn Bigelow. Bigelow won for The Hurt Locker, while Campion won for her second nomination, for The Power of the Dog.

Having the biggest weekend for a film directed by a woman isn’t the only record Barbie nabbed this weekend. It also had the highest opening day gross of the year thus far, with $70 million.

Of course, not everyone is happy with Barbie. The far right have found themselves triggered by the very pink picture, among them Ted Cruz, Ben Shapiro, and Matt Gaetz’s wife.

Barbie’s record breaking opening was nearly twice that of Oppenheimer, its partner in crime, but its $80.5 million gross is nothing to sneeze at, especially for a three-hour, R-rated downer about the inventor of the most dangerous weapon ever created.

So congrats to Greta Gerwig, who found a very outside-the-box way to follow up her prized adaptation of Little Women.

(Via THR)

If a group of people tried to hang you, you’d be pretty sore about it, right? Almost certainly — unless you’re Mike Pence. The former vice president has kept an almost inhuman cool about his former running mate slinging rhetoric that almost got him killed (and then defending those that wanted to kill him). In fact, on a rare occasion when he’s been confronted with it directly, he did get mad — at the person who brought it up.

On Sunday, Pence went on CNN’s State of the Union. There, host Dana Bash brought up the guy he’d really rather not talk about: Donald Trump, who’s clobbering him in the GOP primary polls. Pence, who’s been lightly critical of him during his campaign, wrote off the big guy’s latest dangerous talk: that it would be “dangerous” to jail him because of his “passionate” (read: violent) supporters. Pence brushed that off.

“Well, it doesn’t worry me because I have more confidence in the American people and in the people in our movement,” Pence replied. He claimed that “not just the majority, but virtually everyone in our movement” would never do something like attempt a violent coup, leading to multiple deaths.

Bash was flummoxed by that reply, saying, “That’s pretty remarkable that you’re not concerned about it, given the fact that they wanted to hang you on January 6.”

She attempted to move on, but bringing up that Trump supporters erected a noose with his name on it outside the Capital two-and-a-half years back enraged the normally flappable Pence.

“Now, Dana, wait a minute,” he interjected. “There’s been an effort to take those that perpetrated violence on January 6 and use a broad brush to describe everyone in our movement. I’m just here to tell you, it’s not the cast. The people in this movement, the people who rallied behind our cause in 2016 and 2020 are the most God-fearing, law-abiding, patriotic people in this country.”

In other words, Pence thinks it was just a couple thousand or so bad eggs who wanted him dead after being revved up by Trump and his cronies on a day that almost ended with democracy overturned. Nothing to worry about, apparently.

(Via Mediaite)

Every single week, our TV and film experts will list the most important ten streaming selections for you to pop into your queues. We’re not strictly operating upon reviews or accrued streaming clicks (although yes, we’ve scoured the streaming site charts) but, instead, upon those selections that are really worth noticing amid the churning sea of content. There’s a lot out there, after all, and your time is valuable.

TIE: 10. Transformers: Rise of the Beasts (Paramount movie streaming on VOD and Amazon Prime)

Somehow, this franchise has hit its seventh film, which is kind-of wild because Michael Bay released the first movie (and largely introduced Megan Fox to the masses) in 2007. Creed II director Steven Caple Jr. grabbed the baton and ran with it, and this installment includes Pete Davidson as a Porsche (called Mirage) that’s also an Autobot. Mirage gets stolen by the film’s main character, which means that both are heading into the fray when Optimus Prime comes calling for reinforcements. Get the popcorn ready in your home theater.

TIE: 10. What We Do In The Shadows (FX series streaming on Hulu)

These undead roommates are still going with their antics never seeming to grow stale, but perhaps this all down to Guillermo carrying the weight of the vamps (and their world) on his shoulders. Nandor, Laszlo, Nadja, and Colin would never be able to function without him, but there shall be some infighting this season when Nandor grows a little jealous of Laszlo. Nadja will be in her own little world in for awhile (reconnecting with “family”), and Colin will be distracted by political ambition. Sadly, that happens IRL, too.

9. The Crowded Room (Apple TV+ series)

This Tom Holland drama had a rough start, and the narrative is still oddly reworked, considering that it’s loosely based upon a true story of a murder defendant (Billy Milligan) who invoked a legal defense that had never been successfully used on a previous occasion. Yet no one can deny that Holland is going through the acting paces toward the end of the season, in which he portrays “Danny Sullivan,” whose alternate personalities begin to emerge while an investigator (portrayed by Amanda Seyfried) unravels what really happened inside of his terribly troubled mind.

8. The Walking Dead: Dead City (AMC series streaming on AMC+)

The first in a new wave of undead-focused spinoffs will soon bring its first season to an end, and so, we’ll finally find out if Maggie and Semi-Old Negan can continue to be a team while settling all the Croat business and attempt to save Hershel. So far, we’ve seen Negan let guts fly all over a fancy New York building lobby and take out a dude with a cheese grater, so this franchise’s decision to venture into the city has worked out better for this pair (so far) than it has for former “Dumbass” Rick Grimes.

7. Full Circle (HBO Max series)

Justified: City Primeval launched this week, and while you are waiting for more Raylan, there’s a (mostly) hatless Olyphant in this Steven Soderbergh drama. Olyphant and Claire Danes star as parents of a kidnapped child, and there’s much more than the initial setup at work as well as a ton of tension on display. As well, Zazie Beetz is attempting to investigate the case, and her character probably goes through much more than her pay grade would suggest. Your hands might be gripping your couch arms, so prepare yourself, but the storytelling (also mostly) makes up for the stress.

6. Foundation (Apple TV+ series)

This Isaac Asimov adaptation has taken the slow burn approach, but there’s a payoff already, which would be plenty of Lee Pace (including within a scantily-clad fight scene) at nearly every turn. In addition to the leading man, the visuals of this show are striking to behold, and season 2 expands the scope of the already-epic feel of the show. That’s only to be expected with a story about a crumbling, Milky Way-spanning Galactic Empire and Jared Harris’ prophet foreseeing the final downfall of this rule while attempting to at least mitigate the eventual fallout. Anyone who’s bummed about the delay of a second Dune movie should tuck into this series if they haven’t already done so.

5. Mayans M.C. (FX series streaming on Hulu)

This series finale ended up being even more shattering than Jax Teller driving into a Mack truck (by choice) in the Sons Of Anarchy closer. No spoilers here, but the ending felt like a worthy one for most characters, and now, the club can ride off into the sunset. Fortunately, J.D. Pardo was on hand to talk us through the most shocking turns of the episode, yet I’m still over here wondering if Angel will get that nut farm that was a professed dream from Clayton Cardenas. Let’s ride… off into the sunset.

4. Mission: Impossible – Fallout (Paramount movie streaming on Paramount+)

Tom Cruise had to stop his endless promotional tour due to the strike, but fortunately, the movies are still out there, and you can go watch him
risk his own hide while doing daredevil feats in the name of cinema. That is, if you aren’t busy watching Barbenheimer this weekend at your neighborhood multiplex. The movies of summer have finally kicked into gear, and hopefully, Tom Cruise will never stop making movies because he’s the still the most enduringly capable star at getting butts into theater seats.

3. Justified: City Primeval (FX series streaming on Hulu)

Raylan Givens has returned for a road trip that takes him all the way to Motor City. The limited series lines him up with a new big bad (in tighty-whiteys) and a host of morally gray characters swirling in the foreground. Our own Brian Grubb has been recapping the chaos that will further unfold until the audience learns whether Raylan will be lucky a second time and get out of Detroit alive.

2. Bird Box Barcelona (Netflix film)

This sequel doesn’t star Sandra Bullock, but the clicks are coming nonetheless as the first film retains third-most-viewed position among Netflix original films. As you can probably guess, this installment takes place in Spain during the early days of the outbreak that causes people to lose their sh*t in the worst way. Get ready to watch everyone bust out those blindfolds, and hopefully, the streaming service stays smart and never shows us what those monsters look like because no one wants a straight-up comedy here.

1. The Bear (FX series streaming on Hulu)

Carmy Berzatto and his legion of Chefs are still on top. This is one of those rare shows that can be binged on repeat with one discovering new little touches about these rough-and-tumble characters that have won hearts (and loins) over far and wide. FX has yet to announce a third season, but surely, that’s on the way because the season finale leaves the door wide open (as well as closed). Carmy is still center stage and terrible at relationships of several varieties, so I’m hoping that never happens again, but the rest of this second round is nearly flawless. The heat remains on in this kitchen for sure.

There are few things in professional sports funnier than when the very best athletes in the world make mistakes reminiscent of a kids game.

In baseball, that is usually done by making horrific errors in the field, and on Saturday the Red Sox authored exactly that kind of moment against the Mets. Down 2-0 and with runners on second and third, Jeff McNeil laced a liner up the middle to tie the game. The center fielder tried to throw the ball to the plate to get the second runner, but realizing that was not going to be in time, catcher Jorge Alfaro jumped up in front of the plate to cut the throw off and try to get McNeil stretching a single into a double.

The only problem was the throw was, uh, well off line and ended up going all the way to the center field wall 400 feet away, allowing McNeil to round the bases to the delight of his teammates for a very little league home run.

Pete Alonso and Francisco Lindor bouncing around behind the plate in joy as McNeil rounds third is the best part of this. It’s not just that the throw was wildly off line, but it was also thrown so hard that neither outfielder could cut it off before it got to the wall. It was the right play by Alfaro, as an on target throw had a chance to get McNeil at second, it was just the execution that was severely lacking.

Barbie, Academy Award-nominated director Greta Gerwig’s follow-up to her prized take on Little Women, may be making a ridiculous amount of money. But not everyone’s pleased. The far right sure aren’t. People like Ted Cruz and Matt Gaetz’s wife are up in arms over it, for various wacko reasons. Was Ben Shapiro, one of the most dunkable figures in today’s GOP, ever going to like a movie in which a sentient doll takes down the patriarchy? Probably not. But after seeing it, he was so over-the-top in his ire that people couldn’t help laughing at him.

On Friday, as Barbie was having the biggest opening day of any 2023 film release thus far — and Oppenheimer wasn’t doing so bad either — Shapiro posted a picture of himself inside a multiplex, looking grumpy.

“My producers dragged me to see ‘Barbie’ and it was one of the most woke movies I have ever seen,” Shapiro tweeted. He promised a “full review of this flaming garbage heap of a film” would drop on his YouTube channel the following morning. And indeed one did.

It begins with Shapiro setting fire to a Barbie doll.

While Shapiro praised the film’s eye-popping and exceedingly pink production design and costumes, the rest of his comments weren’t so kind. He called Gerwig and her co-writer/real-life partner Noah Baumbach “smug and self-satisfied,” and that they couldn’t decide if they hated or loved their main character, played by a predictably game Margot Robbie.

Not everyone bothered to watch the full video, which runs three-quarters of an hour. But there were still jokes to be had. Some noticed that in his initial anti-Barbie tweet, he had the same black-on-black attire as Ryan Gosling’s Ken does during his big song.

There were plenty of miscellaneous drags where that came from.

Alas, spending nearly an hour trashing a movie about a doll line wasn’t his dumbest idea this past week. That honor goes to his short-sighted take on climate change, in which he claimed air conditioners will save us from rising temperatures and ever-increasing destructive storms.

There is one silver lining to the far right having a conniption over Barbie: It will inspire even more people to go see it.

Rolling Loud Miami 2023’s lineup reads like a who’s who of rap. But even with acts like Playboi Carti and Travis Scott headlining the festival, Sexxy Red’s performance is what has set the internet ablaze.

To be specific, social media went nuts over the performer’s “iconic” entrance. As Sexyy Red headed to the stage dressed, it wasn’t her jeweled bra that caught people’s eyes. It was her pretending to walk two men on leashes as if they were animals that shocked viewers. While the festival dubbed the entrance “Iconic,” after uploading the clip on Instagram, their followers had something else to say about it.

“J Balvin did this and got in trouble. She does this and nothing,” wrote one.

Another wrote, “Something about Black men and chains.”

Someone else wrote, “So when NLE Choppa walked her and Suki like dogs in his video, the narrative was ‘Black women gotta do better.’ But now, since it’s Black men, it’s just disrespectful, and every Black man in the world isn’t included? Interesting.”

Although people online were overwhelmingly against the act, there were several people that didn’t take issue with it. One such person wrote, “That’s hard. All y’all saying those dudes are lame is just hating because this is a show. It’s called a performance, just like acting. If you don’t do it, someone else will. If I was them, I would be proud of my moment.”

Another wrote, “Not y’all kink shaming. BDSM is a thing, folks.”

Another agreed, writing, “I know we all still traumatized from slavery and antiblackness and all, but y’all never heard of a Dominatrix? ”

This isn’t the first time one of Sexyy Red’s performances was declared inappropriate — not that such furor has impacted her live bookings.

As much as Coi Leray would love for women rappers to push their feuds to the side, not everyone agrees. Based on her latest song, “Butterfly Ku,” Ice Spice doesn’t. As some on social media have pointed out, the track, which appears on her Like..?’ Deluxe EP, contains a few subtle jabs at other acts. After further examination of the lyrics, fans are now asking if the song contains a Latto diss.

The stanza in question comes on the track’s second verse, in which Ice Spice raps, “Where she at? On the floor (Damn) / She get her money, but I’m gettin’ more (More) / I’m a player, you know I’m a score (Facts) / First they was hatin’, now I’m on the board.” Although the reference is faint, Ice Spice seems to be directly responding to Latto’s song “Put It On Da Floor,” a track inspired by her beef with Ice Spice’s mentor Nicki Minaj.

Due to Ice Spice’s budding relationship with Nicki Minaj and Latto’s affiliation with Cardi B, fans believe it will cause a rift in their collective relationship. Meanwhile others believe Ice Spice has simply had enough of being poked at. One example in supporters’ eyes is when Latto was asked to find the lyrics to an Ice Spice song during a red-carpet interview but jokingly laughed it off, pleading that she couldn’t.

Listen to the full track above.

Like…? (Deluxe) is out now via 10K Projects/Capital Records. Find more information here.

John Stamos is a charming, mellow, even moving public figure nowadays, but based on the stories he tells he wasn’t always that way. Recently the actor has opened about the early days of Full House, and he doesn’t exactly come off like the good guy. Indeed, he admitted to temporarily getting the Olsen twins fired. Now we’re learning he almost quit because he was jealous of another child colleague.

As per Entertainment Weekly, Full House creator Jeff Franklin went on cast member Dave Coulier’s podcast, where he reminisced about the show’s very first table read. The biggest star there was Stamos, who’d earned a Daytime Emmy nod for General Hospital, and he’d even been the lead in the spy thriller Never Too Young to Die with Robert Englund, George Lazenby, and Gene Simmons. (The movie was not a hit.) But he wasn’t the one people left talking about.

“Jodie [Sweetin] just stole the whole thing,” Franklin recalled, naming the actress who’d spend years playing middle sister Stephanie Tanner. She was only five when the series began, but she was already “knocking jokes out of the park.”

That didn’t please everyone. Coulier chimed in, saying “And I remember walking out with John and he’s like, ‘The whole show’s gonna be her. We can’t do this.’”

Franklin said Stamos was not happy about “having to play second fiddle to these really funny kids.” He even called his agent, telling him, “This is a mistake. Get me off this show.”

Obviously he didn’t, and the rest is history.

As it happens, Stamos himself talked about the incident on his recent episode of Hot Ones.

“It was pitched to me as a Bosom Buddies… with, you know, a couple of kids in the background,” he remembered. “We did a table read of it, and I was the star. I was coming off of General Hospital. We sit down, and we started reading, and Jodie Sweetin, who plays Stephanie, reads her lines, and people are dying laughing. I mean screaming. I was like, ‘What’s happening here?’”

Stamos added, “They couldn’t even hear my lines. They were laughing so hard at her.”

He recalled ringing up his agent after, saying, “get me the f*ck off this show.”

Stamos admitted he “fought it for a long time,” but he “finally said, ‘What am I doing? It’s a beautiful show.’”

You can watch Stamos on Hot Ones in the video below.

(Via Entertainment Weekly)

Draymond Green has been in headlined plenty this offseason, not only for re-signing with the Warriors in free agency but for sparking a number of spats with other players (and their families), past and present.

Just this past week he got into it with Jordan Poole’s dad over comments he made on Patrick Beverley’s podcast about punching his now-former teammate. He also made waves saying that he’s not just going to suddenly start liking Chris Paul because they’re teammates, and there was a report there’s work to do with his relationship with Jonathan Kuminga. And there was a fake Kevin Garnett quote that Green fell for that led to him trying to start beef with KG on Twitter.

Those are all more recent Draymond-related stories than when he roasted poor Andrew Nicholson on Paul George’s podcast, as George asked him for the player that made him the most mad to get drafted behind. Nicholson did, in fact, hear that and responded in a guest appearance on the Tidal League podcast, prodding at Draymond a bit over his St. Bonaventure comments, while noting mostly he took it as Green showing “insecurity” and that he enjoys seeing those from his draft class succeed, including Green.

If I were to guess, Green will laugh off the idea there’s any insecurity for him when it comes to Nicholson. I doubt anyone had an Andrew Nicholson-Draymond Green back and forth on their offseason bingo cards for 2023, but here we are.

YNW Melly’s highly publicized double murder case has ended in a mistrial. After careful deliberation, the jury could not unanimously decide on a verdict. According to local ABC affiliate WPLG, this gridlock forced the presiding judge, Broward Circuit Judge John Murphy, to make the final call.

On Friday, July 21, Judge Murphy read aloud a note from the jury before ultimately dismissing them: “What if we can’t come to a decision? Everyone is stuck on which side they’ve chosen.” On Saturday, July 22, Judge Murphy declared a mistrial.

Law And Crime on the ground correspondent Bryson “Boom” Paul took to Twitter to share the news. Paul also noted that Prosecutor Kristine Bradley sought guidance from Judge Murphy III on how to proceed moving forward, to which he responded, “Let’s set a scheduling date and start with the 90 days.”

Neither YNW Melly nor his attornies have released a statement at this time. However, when Melly was initially arrested in February 2019 on Instagram, he penned a message for fans. There are no further updates on where this leaves the case of Melly’s former co-defendant Cortlen Henry (professionally known as YNW Bortlen).

“I want you guys to know I love you and appreciate every single one of y’all. A couple of months ago, I lost my two brothers to violence, and now the system wants to find justice. Unfortunately, a lot of rumors and lies are being said, but no worries, God is with me and my brother @ynw.bortlen, and we want y’all to remember it’s a YNW family. I love you, @ynwsakchaser1 and @ynwjuvy #freeus,” wrote Melly.