Month: July 2023

You are surely aware of Donald Trump’s ongoing legal troubles. Yes, his bizarre quotes about cows and ladders are very distracting, but Trump could actually be in hot water. He’s possibly going to be indicted a third time (the latest instance has to do with the insurrection), but through all of that Justice Department stuff, Trump has been ALL-CAPS ranting through the gloom, and don’t ever expect him to stop performing at campaign rallies.

Trump could be in prison one day, and he’d still be trying to hold rallies. If it happens, we will discuss it again. However, Trump is on the actual campaign trail because he either really wants to be president again in 2024, or he simply needs those campaign dollars. Maybe both? He has also been begging Republicans to do anything to save him, but he always makes time to attend to his fawning MAGA public. They still exist, and one of them had a question for him in Iowa on Tuesday night: “I’d like to know how you can help us in Iowa save our farmland from the CO2 pipeline?”

In response, Trump had a lot of words but somehow had nothing to say at all. Word salad incoming, via Morning Joe and Aaron Rupar on Twitter:

“Well you know, we’re working on that, and we had a plan. To totally, uh, it’s… a ridiculous situation, isn’t it? But we had a plan, and we would have instituted that plan, and it was all ready, but if we win, that’s gonna be taken care of. That will be one of the easy things we do.”

You can watch the video below. And maybe save it in case, you know, aliens ever touch down on Earth.

Every year before the Grammys, the Roc Nation Brunch brings together some of the biggest names in music. Some of the biggest artists join together in a special brunch, dressed to the nines at the iconic event organized by Jay-Z and Beyoncé.

While it seems like everybody who’s anybody makes an appearance each year at the Roc Nation Brunch, some of the most prolific acts claim they have never been invited. The latest is Snoop Dogg, who shared his theory as to why he’s never received an invitation during an episode of the F3LLAS PODCAST, with HaHa Davis and BlackBarry.

“I know why they don’t want me to come,” Snoop said. “’Cause I’ma be the sharpest. They know when I walk in, my outfit gon’ turn everything out.”

He continued, laughing, assuring the hosts that it’s all love between him and Jay.

“Nah, it’s all good. I f*ck with Jay — that’s my guy,” he said. “I just ain’t had time to slide through to one of those brunches. Maybe next time we can all go together, we’ll roll up in there together. Just come in there with a linen outfit — I think you gotta have on linen.”

Perhaps next year, Snoop.

The Justified: City Primeval Roundup is a weekly recap feature where we take the various people, places, and things from the new limited series and score them on a scale from one to five cowboy hats. We play fast and loose with the rules here, similar to the way Raylan Givens handles an investigation. A real loose cannon situation over here.

EPISODE ONE — “CITY PRIMEVAL”

Trying to carjack Raylan Givens in the cold open of a Justified spinoff series

Buddy, that is a recipe for a bad day, especially when Raylan has his kid in the car. Although, I suspect it would’ve worked out the same way if he were alone. It’s kind of Raylan’s thing, this whole “calmly thwarting bad guys who wish to do him or those around him harm” business. We know that. We’ve seen him do it a lot in Kentucky and at least once before in Florida. These two know that now.

This opening section also did something smart, which is turn Raylan’s “loose cannon who shoots first and sometimes plays fast and loose with the Bill of Rights” deal into a liability. Which… it kinda should be in any reasonable world. It’s fun to watch Timothy Olyphant crack wise and toss loose-lipped punks into his trunk but it’s also good to remember how bad that would look in a long piece of investigative journalism in some newspaper.

A lovely start after a long break. Welcome back.

Barry, the guy who got sold out to the authorities by his own mother

Tough, tough week for Barry. Busted for trying to blow up a judge with a car bomb, which he did because the judge slept with his mother after sentencing him to prison, and which he got caught for because the same mother sold him out to the authorities. That’s really just a tough run. He did get that pot roast, though. There is that.

Dumb flaming drinks, generally

Here’s something to think about…

If you order a big loud fizzly sparkly drink at a bar, it looks pathetic. But when you order, say, fajitas at a Tex-Mex restaurant, which are just about the same thing from a presentation standpoint — sizzling, popping, steaming, all of it — everyone looks and is all “oooooo” as the plate hovers past them, jealousy and hunger burning in their eyes and stomachs.

Lots to think about here. There should be an entire college course taught on this phenomenon. The course should serve fajitas during every class session. You know, for educational reasons.

Judge Alvin Guy

Two things are true here:

ONE: The Justified franchise has a long history of colorful judges — please go back and rewatch Stephen Root’s performance as a fiery Kentucky jurist, both to help me prove my point and also because Stephen Root rules — and I was very excited when we were introduced to Judge Alvin Guy, a hot-tempered, mother-seducing egomaniac who was being investigated by the federal government and liked to waive around a ledger filled with potential blackmail. I was actually kind of sad to see him get gunned down so early, even if the misdirect of it all — authorities wondering if he was killed for reasons related to investigations and/or blackmail instead of just your standard road rage fiasco — looks like it’s gonna be fun.

TWO: Keith David, who played Judge Guy, has been in everything over his long career, and I really do recommend you zip over to his IMDb page sometime and start scrolling. It’s a fun way to spend five or ten minutes.

Sandy the Casino Waitress

Sandy:

• Seems like a fun lady
• Kind of got stranded in that car with the Albanian mark while her psycho boyfriend chased down a judge and murdered him over a parking garage fracas
• Is going to be difficult for me if she sticks around this series because I am incapable of saying this name in my head without going full-on Travolta about it

We all have some problems here.

Jukeboxes, generally

See, you think you like a jukebox. You’ll notice it and go “Oh, nice, a jukebox” and go over and pick a few songs and it’ll be a fun time for everyone. But then you remember a few things. Things like, for example, other people getting to use it, too. And those people having different musical tastes than you and playing, to choose an example at random, 15 Dave Matthews Band songs in a row. And things like some people being little punks and shoving a million quarters into the machine to play one song over and over, like in the John Mulaney bit about “What’s New, Pussycat?” This can all go sideways very fast.

My point here is that the music in a bar should not be a democracy. Just pump something in and keep it consistent.

Sweety the Bartender

I don’t have a super great read on this guy yet beyond knowing the following things:

• He runs a dive bar that he pours drinks at himself and has a pool table
• The bar seems to cater mostly to riff-raff and defense attorneys
• He is an old man who goes by “Sweety”

Too early to vault him into the four or five hat section but this is a very promising start.

Clement Mansell

Two things are true here as well:

ONE: What we appear to have on our hands here is an old-fashioned chaos agent, as opposed to the calculated menace of someone like a Boyd Crowder. Very little thought or planning is going on here, and even the stuff that starts out that way — rolling an Albanian hot dog tycoon with his casino hostess girlfriend — gets sidetracked immediately by… well, by chaos. We are about 50 minutes into this whole endeavor and he’s already murdered a crooked judge and marched off with a blackmail ledger. I’m very excited to see where all of this ends up. I hope he gets to use a rocket launcher at some point.

TWO: It is very funny to me that the main antagonist in the original Justified series was a character named Boyd and the antagonist in this new Justified series is played by an actor whose real name is Boyd.

It’s nice when things fit together.

Police dogs that climb trees

Real good news, bad news situation here. Because, like, I love the idea of dogs climbing trees. It would be fun to be out just strolling through a park and see three of them chilling in a little treehouse. But on the other hand, I don’t love something as pure on paper as “dogs climbing trees” being used for police business. Kind of tarnished the fun of it a little.

I don’t know. I’ll think about it more and get back to you.

Raylan Givens

Well well well…

It really is nice to have Timothy Olyphant back on my television screen in a cowboy hat running around solving crimes. I… I don’t think I realized how much I missed that. I’m trying to be careful here not to let my vision get clouded with rose-colored nostalgia glasses but… I don’t know, man. It’s just still really, really good. You could send him to a new city every few years for a new little limited series and I don’t think I would ever complain. Pretty much a perfect match of character and actor.

I touched on this earlier, but it really was nice how the show handled the whole “plays by his own rules but gets results, dammit” of it all at the beginning of the episode. Times have changed a little in the last 10 or 15 years. It’s okay for Raylan to have to deal with that, too, especially now that he’s out of Harlan and no longer in a place where he’s a known entity.

It’ll be fun to see how he navigates Detroit, kind of in a reverse Beverly Hills Cop situation. And, now that I typed that sentence and have it in my head, I guess I wouldn’t hate if Eddie Murphy shows up as Axel Foley in his Lions jacket at some point. I would probably start barking and clapping like an aquarium seal. I’m really not a very complicated person.

Carolyn the Lawyer

Very early but I think we like her. She fights for her clients and she’s got a loser ex and she and Raylan kind of made little heart eyes at each other when she wasn’t cooking him like a sirloin steak on the witness stand. I say all this knowing that I am susceptible to being easily wooed by charismatic defense attorneys who may or may not have one foot in the underworld. You know, the Saul Goodman of it all. I feel okay about it.

Maureen Downey

I could end up being very wrong on this one (I am wrong a lot), but my read on her so far is “female Tim Gutterson” and that is really not a bad place for any character to start out from.

Willa Givens

A few notes here:

• I love pretty much any wise-cracking kid in any movie or television show, especially when that wise-cracking kid is paired with the type of hardass character who usually pushes around adults but gets flummoxed by the kid’s shenanigans
• Willa is played by Timothy Olyphant’s re-life daughter, Vivian Olyphant, which is cool
• I would like to see her kabong a bad guy with a frying pan like Ava Crowder

Moving on.

Calling someone “Slim”

This is just cool. “Slick” also works, especially if the person you’re talking to isn’t tall and skinny. I’m a fan of a well-placed “champ,” too, although that can come off dismissive if the tone isn’t right. It really all depends on the situation and delivery, but it’s very, very cool when it works. Try one of these out this week and see if it flies. Little homework assignment for you.

Having Justified back

Let’s just go ahead and do this every summer.

The first reviews for Oppenheimer are beginning to drop, and so far, the new Christopher Nolan film seems to be racking up almost unanimous praise from critics. Despite clocking in with a massive three hour runtime, Nolan expertly uses every second of film to tell a gripping tale about how brilliant physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) created the devastating force known as the atomic bomb.

In true Nolan style, Oppenheimer grapples with the destructive power released on the world as it follows the title character’s journey from scientific discovery to untold horrors. Along the way, an all-star cast buoys this cautionary tale, and the critics are here for it.

You can see excerpts from the first batch of reviews below:

Mike Ryan, Uproxx:

For a literal three-hour movie, Oppenheimer moves pretty well. A big reason is this is a movie that doesn’t stay on one scene very long. A character will be recounting his or her story and we will see brief flashbacks. Sometimes in color, sometimes in black and white (ahem, JFK). A character testifying will set up a scene, then we will flashback for that scene. Which, in a movie that depends heavily on very complicated science, serves as a somewhat effective way to handle exposition about how splitting atoms can be used to create atomic bombs.

Owen Gleiberman, Variety:

It remains every inch a Nolan film. You feel that in the heady, dense, dizzying way it slices and dices chronology, psychodrama, scientific inquiry, political backstabbing, and history written with lightning — no mere metaphor in this case, since the movie, which tells the story of the man who created the atomic bomb, feels almost like it’s about the invention of lightning.

David Ehrlich, IndieWire:

Paced like it was designed for interstellar travel, scripted with a degree of density that scientists once thought purely theoretical in nature, and shot with such large-format bombast that repetitive scenes (or at least Nolan-esque slices) of old politicians yelling at each other about expired security clearances hit with the same visceral impact as the 747 explosion in “Tenet,” “Oppenheimer” is nothing if not a biopic as only Christopher Nolan could make one.

David Fear, Rolling Stone:

So let us now praise movies about famous men, and the famous men who make them. Oppenheimer is most assuredly a Christopher Nolan film, complete with the blessings and the curses of what that phrase entails. The good stuff first: There are a handful of sequences that remind you why this 52-year-old director is considered a godhead by film geeks, genre freaks, and armchair arthouse-cinema scholars alike. When Nolan is on, he is on.

Pete Hammond, Deadline:

From a man who has taken us into places movies rarely go with films like Interstellar, Inception, Tenet, Memento, the Dark Knight Trilogy, and a very different but equally effective look at World War II in Dunkirk, I think it would be fair to say Oppenheimer could be Christopher Nolan’s most impressive achievement to date. I have heard it described by one person as a lot of scenes with men sitting around talking. Indeed in another interation Nolan could have turned this into a play, but this is a movie, and if there is a lot of “talking”, well he has invested in it such a signature cinematic and breathtaking sense of visual imagery that you just may be on the edge of your seat the entire time.

Nick Schager, The Daily Beast:

There’s an embarrassment of riches to digest, savor, and mull over in this saga, which touches upon the exhilaration of scientific discovery, the fear of inventing something over which the inventor has no control, and the alarming consequences of paving a historic path, especially when it leads directly to Pandora’s Box. At every turn, a superb supporting performance lies in wait from Damon, Blunt, Kenneth Branagh, Rami Malek, Josh Hartnett, Casey Affleck, Matthew Modine, Alden Ehrenreich, and Tom Conti as Albert Einstein (who knows how uneasily lies the head that wears the crown).

Alison Wilmore, Vulture:

Its scope comes from Murphy’s haunted performance and the way the movie (with help from Ludwig Göransson’s panic attack of a score) submerges you in the mind-set of its protagonist as though it can create a psychic connection to the past. Robert isn’t an easy character to understand; he’s arrogant, blunt, and aloof and possesses an intelligence about the unseen world of physics that makes him seem half-alien. But Nolan doesn’t want Robert to be relatable. He just wants to explore how his flawed humanity co-exists with his genius in what is ultimately a film about moral slippage and how someone who feels so certain of his own clear-eyed ideals finds himself standing in front of a screaming crowd celebrating the deaths of thousands of people in Japan.

Oli Welsh, Polygon:

In Nolanworld, we humans can attempt to find meaning in the forces of the universe, or to bend them to our will, but they ultimately rule us. The bigness wins. Until Oppenheimer. The paradox of this film — a three-hour historical epic about the theoretical physicist who unleashed the terrible forces of the quantum realm and became “the father of the atomic bomb” — is that it’s a lot less interested in science and mechanics than most of Nolan’s previous movies, and a lot more interested in people. It’s still vast in scope and meticulous in design. But this is the film in which Nolan ponders the scary proposition that the most powerful force in the universe might be us.

Oppenheimer opens on July 21.

There are plenty of similarities between the way Kevin Garnett and Draymond Green have gone about their business during their NBA careers. One such way is that both dudes are famous for being brutally honest and not backing down from confrontation, although on Wednesday, we saw that this can lead to weird situations.

A parody Twitter account posted a fake quote that was attributed to Garnett that, essentially, said that KG was reacting to Green punching Jordan Poole last year. It went as far as to say that KG would invite the chance to fight Green. Of course, this was not real, but Green saw the blue check on the account, fell for it, and called out Garnett.

Again, Garnett has a reputation for being a brutally honest dude who won’t back down from people, so it’s not insane to think that he’d get really riled up and say something like this. Still, Green fell for the joke and went at KG in his own right by bringing up an incident from when the two played against one another, making it a point to tag Garnett in his post.

Garnett ended up seeing this, and instead of addressing Green directly, he decided to tag Twitter chairman Elon Musk in a his response and call out the fact that blue checks on Twitter can now be purchased by anyone — in this case, it’s very easy to confuse this one with the aggregator account @TheNBACentral, which has 1.2 million followers.

Green ended up deleting his tweet, which we’re taking as this entire saga being over.

Harry Styles is keeping is Harry’s House era going strong by dropping a new music video for “Daylight.” It starts off with Styles climbing down from a ladder and straight into a colorful circus. There are jugglers, and he becomes the target of a knife-thrower. He dances with clowns and twirls around as trapeze artists swing from ropes outside.

Then, as the beat changes, Styles has a sudden costume change as he is shot out of a cannon in a yellow feathery costume. He soars through the air like a bird above everyone else before eventually landing back on the ground to interact with more of the circus members during the second verse.

By the end of the video, he also braves heights once again to walk a tightrope in a skeleton onesie. (Phoebe Bridgers’ impact.)

A while back, fans had spotted the set that Styles was filming on and him working in the yellow bird costume — but are only finding out now what it was for. There was also speculation from the circus theme that Niall Horan would be involved (as his latest album is called The Show), but sadly One Direction reunion hopefuls have to wait another day.

This could technically be considered his second video for the song, as he made a low-budget visual with James Corden last year.

Check out Styles’ video for “Daylight” above.

After catching an enormous backlash from fans on his previous comments about Drake, Hot 97’s Ebro Darden course-corrected during his show this morning, adding some much-needed nuance to his original statements.

Fans were upset with Ebro after he pointed out the lack of social commentary in Drake’s music on the latest episode of Apple Music’s Rap Life Review show (Drake’s shot at the Supreme Court for overturning Roe V. Wade notwithstanding). During a discussion comparing Drake’s catalog to “This Is America” by Childish Gambino after Drake called it “overrated” during his tour, the outspoken radio host asserted that Drake “has never shown up to have anything to say about anything going on in society with Black folks or anything other than himself.”

But now, after being drubbed in the various comments sections of the social internet, Ebro appears to be changing his tune. On Ebro In The Morning, he elaborated, “I don’t know if I even want that. That’s not who he is. I don’t think an artist is obligated, if you have a platform… but in this context, you’re talking about a song that did… now you’re in the fray.”

“We love Drake for who Drake is,” he continued. “Drake’s talking about love, he’s very transparent personally. From what we can tell, he’s a nice person. He’s not a mean-spirited person. None of that. We don’t need him to be some social activist.”

Watch Ebro explain his prior comments about Drake in the video above.

Has Ted Cruz learned nothing from his failed fight against Elmo or the time the star of his favorite movie called him “miserable”? In his latest pop culture misstep, the Texas senator has his Eye of Sauron-like sights on Barbie, and like Matt Gaetz and his wife, he’s none too pleased about the movie.

“There’s a scene in Barbie, where there is this map of the world, and it’s drawn like with crayon. I mean, it’s really a very simple cartoon. And so they have this blockish thing that is called ‘Asia.’ And then they’ve drawn what are called the nine-dashes,” Cruz told the Daily Signal. “This is Chinese communist propaganda in which the Chinese are asserting sovereignty over the entirety of the South China Sea. And they don’t have any right to it under international law, but they are trying to take it away from their neighbors there.”

The thing he’s so mad about is a literal “child-like crayon drawing” on a “nonsense map,” explained Dan Drezner, a professor of international politics at Tufts University. “There are squiggles and arrows and hashtags and dotted lines all over the damn place. To the extent that the map is supposed to depict the Pacific Rim, the dotted line is nowhere close to where the actual nine-dash line is. No one is going to be looking at the line, because everyone will instead be staring at Margot Robbie. Because she’s Margot Robbie.”

Cruz could have walked away from his fake moral outrage and gone back to trolling Pat Benatar, for some reason. But he’s just getting started, baby.

It looks like he’ll appear on Wednesday’s episode of the Tucker Carlson replacement series Jesse Watters Primetime to discuss the “woke messaging” of Barbie. Can Watters’ mom come back on to scold him?

(Via MSNBC)

Remember when Keanu Reeves was in a band? Today (July 19), his ’90s band Dogstar has announced their return to music after 23 years. The band will release their new album, Somewhere Between The Power Lines And Palm Trees, in the fall, but ahead of the album, they’ve released its lead single, the breezy “Everything Turns Around.”

“We are so excited to re-introduce Dogstar with our new single ‘Everything Turns Around,’” said the band in a statement. “It feels like a fun summer song to us. It has an uplifting message and a positive vibe that hopefully makes your day a little bit lighter. It’s one of our favorite songs to play live and can’t wait to share it on our upcoming tour.”

The song’s accompanying visual features the Bret Domrose-fronted band singing against a Los Angeles backdrop, as the scene goes from day to night.

In addition to their upcoming album, which will mark their first since 2000, the band will also be hitting the road for a special tour.

You can see the Somewhere Between The Power Lines And Palm Trees artwork and tracklist below, as well as the tour dates.

1. “Blonde”
2. “How The Story Ends”
3. “Everything Turns Around”
4. “Overhang”
5. “Dillon Street”
6. “Lily”
7. “Lust”
8. “Glimmer”
9. “Sunrise”
10. “Sleep”
11. “Upside”
12. “Breach”

08/10 — Hermosa Beach, CA @ Saint Rocke
08/11 — Phoenix, AZ @ Crescent Ballroom
08/12 — Las Vegas, NV @ Brooklyn Bowl
08/15 — Salt Lake City, UT @ The Complex
08/17 — Denver, CO @ Marquis Theatre
08/18 — Boulder, CO @ The Fox Theatre
08/19 — Aspen, CO @ Belly Up
08/22 — Napa, CA @ Uptown Theatre
08/23 — Menlo Park, CA @ The Guild Theatre
08/24 — San Luis Obispo, CA @ Fremont Theater
08/26 — Ventura, CA @ Ventura Music Hall
08/27 — Solana Beach, CA @ Belly Up
08/28 — Santa Ana, CA @ The Observatory
09/05 — Osaka, Japan @ Zepp Namba
09/06 — Yokohama, Japan @ KT Zepp
09/07 — Yokohama, Japan @ KT Zepp
11/30 — Los Angeles, CA @ Troubadour
12/03 — San Francisco, CA @ The Great American Music Hall
12/05 — Sacramento, CA @ Crest Theatre
12/07 — Chicago, IL @ Thalia Hall
12/08 — Detroit, MI @ The Majestic Theatre
12/09 — Toronto, Ontario @ Lee’s Palace
12/11 — Brooklyn, NY @ Music Hall of Williamsburg
12/12 — Boston, MA @ Paradise Rock Club
12/14 — Philadelphia, PA @ Underground Arts
12/15 — Washington, DC @ The Howard Theatre
12/16 — Norfolk, VA @ The NorVa
12/18 — Charlotte, NC @ The Underground
12/19 — Atlanta, GA @ Center Stage
12/20 — Nashville, TN @ Brooklyn Bowl

Somewhere Between The Power Lines And Palm Trees is out 10/6 via Dillon Street Records. Find more information here.

We’re at the point of the NFL offseason where the itch for football really starts coming back. The slow drip of news pertaining to next season — contract updates, the team that will be on Hard Knocks, players starting to report to training camp — is becoming a bit more frequent, and on August 3, the first preseason game of the year will kick off when the Cleveland Browns play the New York Jets.

One of the more fun things about this time of year revolves around uniforms, as NFL teams start to tease the threads they’ll wear for the upcoming season. On Wednesday, we got the best bit of uni news that we’ll receive this offseason, as the Seattle Seahawks revealed that they’ll wear 90s-inspired throwbacks during their Week 8 matchup against the Browns.

This will mark the first time since the 2001 season that the Seahawks have worn uniforms with this color scheme, which is a shame, because their current uniforms aren’t especially great and these have an argument for being the best throwback uniforms in the NFL right now. As for the team itself, Seattle was one of the NFL’s most pleasant surprises last season, going 9-8 and earning a berth in the postseason. It enters the season with the sixth-best odds of representing the NFC in the Super Bowl.