Month: October 2023

The Chicago Bears picked up their first win since Oct. 24, 2022 on Thursday night. Thanks to impressive performances by Justin Fields, D.J. Moore, and the team’s defense, Chicago was able to take down the Washington Commanders, 40-20.

The Bears raced out to a 27-3 halftime lead, which drew the ire of one member of Washington’s new ownership group. In a tweet he posted after the game, Basketball Hall of Fame inductee Magic Johnson called out the team, saying they lacked “intensity or fire” in the first half, “didn’t compete” in the game’s opening half hour, and cost themselves a chance to win by digging too deep of a hole.

Johnson is normally a pretty jovial presence on Twitter, and when he is critical of stuff, he doesn’t always go this far. It says quite a bit about how much that performance irked him, but as it turns out, that sentiment was shared by members of the locker room. Per John Keim of ESPN:

“I’d probably say that’s pretty fair,” Washington receiver Terry McLaurin said.

“Definitely,” defensive end Montez Sweat said. “We came out flat.”

The Commanders will look to bounce back — and, by extension, make Johnson a lot happier — when the team travels to Atlanta to take on the Falcons next week.

The funny thing about love is that the person we fall in love with, more often than not, we run into by accident. Another strange twist is that the love of our life is likely to show up when we least expect it.

The following story, which feels like the promise of a hit rom-com, comes courtesy of a twist of fate created by the World Cup and an Airbnb.

In 2013, after six years of battling an illness, Ana was living in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Having been financially drained by years of being sick, she invested the last of her money to buy two bunk beds and convert one of her bedrooms into an Airbnb for small groups of friends.

The Airbnb was a last-ditch effort to pay her rent and medical bills. A year later, the modest investment grew into a success, Ana’s health began to return, and the World Cup, one of the largest sporting events in the world, was coming to Rio.

To take advantage of the soccer fanatics flocking to the Cidade Maravilhosa (Marvelous City), Ana and her roommate, Fabio, turned a half room in their apartment into an Airbnb rental to give tired soccer fans a place to sleep.

“Though it was a small (pantry!) room, we added a bunk bed and listed two beds on Airbnb. One day after the listing went live, we had tons of requests for ‘Fabio’s Pantry,’” she shared. “It was fully booked for the entire World Cup period except for one week in July.”

Around this time, Ana was feeling well enough to go on her first vacation in years and took a quick trip to Uruguay. Just before she left, Ana received a reservation from a man named “Darko B.” for the only unbooked days in July.

“I have always been a big fan of the movie ‘Donnie Darko’ and thought it was a strange coincidence, but didn’t think anything of it,” Ana wrote. “I accepted the request, let him know I would not be there for check-in and Fabio would care for him until I was back the following week.”

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When Ana returned after her trip, she had no idea that her life would change forever. Upon opening the door to her apartment, there stood Darko, who was so taken by her that he nearly fell over. “I was sure he stumbled because he had sand on his feet and didn’t wash it downstairs as the rules of the building say, and I caught him, lol (everybody does that!). But it wasn’t sand, it was just love at first sight… for him, I was still mad about the imaginary sand,” she joked.

As Ana worked on her business classes and workshops in her apartment, Darko lay around watching TV, barely venturing outside to see the marvels of Rio. Even though Ana told him all the great spots to visit, he was just as happy to hang around and talk to her when she took breaks.

It seemed that all Darko really needed was right there in the Airbnb.

“We chatted about everything in life during my breaks and got more and more connected,” Ana remembers. “We were still keeping a respectful distance because, from my perspective, he was my guest and I wanted him to feel safe.” As the temporary tenant, Darko was in a strange position, too. He was a “strange man” in Ana’s home and didn’t want to be too forward.

Ana believes that because the two kept a safe distance, their feelings had more time to grow. “That distance was the key for our friendship and connection to develop organically,” Ana said.

As Darko’s week-long stay neared its end, the duo decided to catch a sunset at the Arpoador Rocks. It was a mesmerizing evening with a dual spectacle: a breathtaking sunset on one side and the grandest supermoon in three decades on the other. Moved by the magic of Rio and his growing bond with Ana, Darko extended his stay by three months, sidelining his plans to travel across Brazil to watch soccer.

“We had 3 awesome months together exploring Rio,” Ana wrote. “We did not go to the stadium to watch the games live, but we went to ‘watch events’ with friends, traveled to small places around Rio, and stayed in an Airbnb in Ilha Grande.”

Sadly, after 3 months, Darko had to return to Canada for work, and it seemed their blossoming relationship had come to an end. “I thought our journey would be over and we would remain as friends, but we kept in contact every day until he came back 3 months later for another 3 months in Rio together,” Ana wrote.

Three years after Darko fell, or at least stumbled, in love at first sight, the couple was married and recently celebrated their 6th anniversary. All because of a chance Airbnb booking in “Fabio’s Pantry.”

Airbnb brought Ana and Darko together and continues to be a big part of their lives. “We went on a big trip together in 2016/2017 to Southeast Asia, and we stayed in tons of Airbnbs in Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia,” Ana wrote. Her relationship with Airbnb, which started in Rio and moved on to Asia, has now gone worldwide.

“By 2017, I was recovered and traveling the world as a program manager for entrepreneurship programs. I had projects (and Airbnbs!) in Brazil, Guatemala, Panama, USA and East Canada (New Brunswick) and luggage all over the world,” Ana wrote.

In 2018, Darko took Ana to his birthplace, the former Yugoslavia, which is now Bosnia, and they visited Rovinj by the sea, a place Darko fondly regards as paradise. Naturally, they used Airbnb during their trip, extending their stay across various Croatian cities.

Darko and Ana’s story is a beautiful example of serendipity’s role in people’s lives. The right people found each other in the perfect place and had all the time in the world. Nice job, Airbnb. If any aspiring screenwriters read this, “Fabio’s Pantry” is a great name for the film adaptation.

The Rundown is a weekly column that highlights some of the biggest, weirdest, and most notable events of the week in entertainment. The number of items could vary, as could the subject matter. It will not always make a ton of sense. Some items might not even be about entertainment, to be honest, or from this week. The important thing is that it’s Friday, and we are here to have some fun.

ITEM NUMBER ONE – Need to see him punch a bee

One of the many things I appreciate about Jason Statham is how many of his movies tell you exactly what his character is doing right in the title. So, like, in The Transporter he is transporting. In Spy, he plays a spy. And in The Mechanic, he’s an assassin, which is apparently what some assassins call their work. (I also appreciate that I learn exciting new things like this from his movies.) And I am pleased to announce that this trend will continue with his next movie, The Beekeeper, from Suicide Squad director David Ayer.

There’s a new trailer for the movie out this week, and I swear I am going to post it here in a second, but first, look at some of these descriptions of this movie the various trade publications have used since it was first announced a year or two ago.

Statham stars as a former operative of a powerful and clandestine organization known as “Beekeepers.” He single-handedly takes on a sinister organization that wronged a friend in a series of violent encounters that end up having national stakes.

God yes.

The film will chart the story of how one man’s brutal campaign for vengeance takes on national stakes after he is revealed to be a former operative of a powerful and clandestine organization known as the ‘Beekeepers’.

Straight into my veins, please.

The Bee Keeper is a lightning-paced thriller deeply steeped in the mythology of Bee Keeping.

DEEPLY STEEPED IN THE MYTHOLOGY OF BEE-KEEPING

WHAT DOES THAT EVEN MEAN?

ACTUALLY, I DON’T CARE

JUST GIVE IT TO ME

This was already my favorite movie ever made before I saw a single second of the actual action. But yes, I will post the trailer now, and yes, it does nothing to dissuade me from that bold statement.

Okay, here’s what we have going on in this trailer, as far as I can tell. Jason Statham plays a literal and figurative beekeeper — like, he keeps bees, but he’s also a member of a secretive society known as Beekeepers who step in where laws fall short — who goes on the warpath after a woman who cares for him very much (played by Phylicia Rashad!!!) commits suicide after getting scammed out of her life savings by a shady criminal organization led by Jeremy Irons. You should see how excited I am after typing that out. I’m practically floating.

It gets better. The trailer is littered with scenes where Statham beats up 8-10 people at once and some of the best dialogue you will ever see. In addition to classics like “You’re telling me one man did this?” and “We have to kill him before he kills his way to the top,” which is maybe the most Jason Statham Movie Quote ever committed to film, we also have all of these. Words alone can’t do them justice. I made screencaps.

Yes.

YES

OH MY GOD

GET IT???

BECAUSE HE’S A BEEKEEPER

AND HE’S USING HONEY AS A WEAPON

YES

I am absolutely renting out an entire movie theater when this comes out. You can come to. We can all show up in beekeeper hoods and make it a whole thing. Let’s make it the biggest movie of the year. Let’s force their hand and squeeze a dozen sequels out of this. Let’s make it the next John Wick but with Statham and bees. I am not joking.

It’s important to support cinematic excellence. We owe it to ourselves as a society.

ITEM NUMBER TWO – The Morning Show continues to amaze

Reasonable arguments can be made that The Morning Show is my favorite television show, which is a pretty wild thing to say when you factor in the thing where I don’t even watch it. I tried, way back in the first season, but I couldn’t get into the experience as a viewer. It was just too… much, which I realize is pretty rich coming from me right after I posted a million screencaps from a movie where Jason Statham keeps bees. But still. We talked about all of this the other week when we discussed how Jon Hamm is in the new season as a handsome tech bro who is obsessed with space, kind of like if Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, you know, looked like Jon Hamm, and how I’ve been consuming the show entirely by watching the brief moments he is on the screen and reading the episode summaries, which are kind of hilarious without context. The important thing here is that Jon Hamm and Reese Witherspoon got in a big rocket and went to space already this season.

Which brings me to this week’s episode, which I have not seen and probably will never see, but which sounds truly incredible. The only real backstory you need here is as follows:

• Reese’s character, an anchor of the titular morning show, has been keeping a big secret with her boss, one so big that they were prepared to pay hackers $50 million to keep them from disclosing it
• This season takes place in 2021
• WE ARE DOING THE INSURRECTION

Look at these maniacs. From a write-up in the Hollywood Reporter:

Well, “Love Island” answered the mystery when it revealed that Bradley, after breaking up with Laura (Julianna Margulies) and leaving their quarantine hub in Montana, goes to cover what would become the Jan. 6 insurrection in Washington, D.C. And while running through the halls of the U.S. Capitol to capture riot footage with her iPhone, her camera zooms in on a familiar face: Her brother, Hal (Joe Tippett), whom she unintentionally records assaulting a police officer during the riot.

Bradley, distraught over the discovery, decides to delete the footage of her brother’s assault and omit it from her reporting on the insurrection. Torn between her career as a journalist and her empathy for her only surviving family member after just losing their mother to COVID-19, Bradley chooses her brother.

Do you see what I mean here? About this show being just a blast to follow as a casual observer from a safe distance? Go read those two paragraphs again. Elle Woods from Legally Blonde, who just went to space with Don Draper from Mad Men, caught her brother doing violence to a cop during the actual insurrection and chose to sit on the story — journalism be damned — because she was still grieving the loss of her mother during the pandemic.

That’s incredible. And it’s a good reminder of just how wild the last few years have been in real life. But mostly it’s just wild. I can’t wait to read every recap of what happens next. I hope Jon Hamm buys a social media site. I hope Jennifer Aniston interviews Trump and he’s played by Paul Giamatti in a floppy blond wig. I hope everyone gets trapped on the Ever Given for a week in the Suez Canal and gets really into Wordle. The best part is that none of these are out of the question.

Just a remarkable show.

ITEM NUMBER THREE – Rez Dogs was so good

Speaking of remarkable shows…

Actually, no. That’s not fair. I can’t use the same word to describe The Morning Show, a messy but star-studded nostalgia hour, and Reservation Dogs, a legitimately good show that just wrapped up its three-season run. I wrote about Rez Dogs and why it was so special last week so we don’t have to get into it all again, but I did want to highlight something its creator Sterlin Harjo said in a recent interview. The whole thing is worth a read, if only because the guy brings such a cool outsider perspective to the making of a television show, but this part about the universality of death and how it connects people really jumped out to me.

I remember when she passed away, in the back of my mind, I kept thinking, “Wow, we don’t have her anymore to do this. The person that took care of us is gone now.” At her house, after she passed with all of her grandkids and cousins, aunts and uncles, we were eating and I was looking around. All of her granddaughters, without missing a beat, we’re doing exactly what she did.

Every time we lost somebody, they were taking care of everyone. They were making sure you were fed. They were cooking. They were making sure that you felt the love, and they didn’t have to be taught that. They just saw that experience their whole life, and they knew exactly what they needed to do now. I think that a lot of that just comes from being from such a tight, large community. But all of this is a really beautiful thing, and I wanted to show that in this show.

The best part about this is that Rez Dogs, in addition to being all the things he said there and a show that made me cry multiple times in its final season, was still, for the most part, a silly comedy. It was just so good.

Please go watch Rez Dogs if you haven’t yet. I am rarely serious in this column — or, like, ever, for better and worse — but I do mean this: This show was one of the best and funniest and most touching things I’ve ever seen on television. I cannot imagine a world where you read and enjoy the things I write and do not also like this show. Watch it. For both of us.

ITEM NUMBER FOUR – Only Murders in the Building is a nice fuzzy blanket

Three things are true here…

THING NUMBER ONE: Only Murders in the Building ended its third season this week on a fun little cliffhanger I will not spoil

THING NUMBER TWO: The always-terrific Brian Phillips wrote a fun and insightful piece at The Ringer about the show and how fun it is that this series about three weirdos who are obsessed with the numerous murders that happen inside their luxurious Manhattan apartment building is also a cozy little relaxing watch, like the television equivalent of a warm blanket and a cup of hot tea

THING NUMBER THREE: It’s a little frustrating to know that my peak out here is “second best Brian at writing about pop culture on the internet,” but I am trying to deal with it in a mature and healthy wNO YOU SHUT UP LOSERS

… Uh, sorry. I did say I was trying. Anyway, here’s a good bit from the very good article you should go read.

In this sense, Only Murders belongs to the crime subgenre known as the cozy mystery: stories that use violent death, somewhat counterintuitively, to reassure their audiences that the world is a fundamentally nice place to be. Short, Gomez, and Martin are the urban American heirs to a long line of amateur sleuths in quaint English villages: your Miss Marples, your murder-solving vicars, your inquisitive librarians who are never late for tea. Like other cozy mysteries, Only Murders depicts an idealized landscape, but where the English version tends to show us a pastoral world of rosebushes and thatched cottages, Hulu gives us an aspirational, faintly literary New York, an even sweeter version of Wes Anderson’s vision of the city in The Royal Tenenbaums. It’s a world of uniformed doormen, courtyards with fountains, antique theaters with comical ghosts. The neighbors are grouchy but charming; the bassoonist practicing nearby is first chair at the symphony. (She’s also a murderer, but leave that to the side.) Even the show’s title is rendered in a typeface clearly meant to evoke The New Yorker. And sure, that’s partly the show’s way of flashing a Bat-Signal to its desired demographic, but it’s also a legitimate piece of world-building, a way of conjuring the sort of romanticized domesticity on which the cozy mystery depends.

Okay, three more true things…

THING NUMBER ONE: Everything the other Brian says here is true and correct, and extends to the show’s ability to land perfect big-name guest stars, which we talked about the other week when I wrote about how much fun it looked like everyone was having while they were making it

THING NUMBER TWO: You have not seen acting until you have seen a fasting and sugar-crazed Paul Rudd annihilate a cookie in his dressing room, and yes, I will post a GIF, but no, it does not do it justice

THING NUMBER THREE: Between this show and The Afterparty on Apple TV, we are really in a golden age of silly little comedies about murder and I am really enjoying all of it very much.

Good chat. I suspect I will have more to say about this show next week. Stay tuned. And watch the finale so we are all on the same page. I am giving you lots of extra homework in this column today. I apologize but it’s for your own good. I may be tough but at least I am fair.

(I am neither of those things.)

ITEM NUMBER FIVE – This is my favorite television show now

I can’t improve on this video so let’s go straight to the bullet points:

• This is a TikTok by Martin Scorsese’s 23-year-old daughter where she quizzes the legendary director on his knowledge of modern slang
• It is honestly adorable, both for its content and for the fact that Martin Scorsese is willing to let himself look silly on TikTok to make his daughter happy
• I would watch an entire show where children and/or grandchild quiz their famous older relatives about things currently happening in pop culture

If Killers of the Flower Moon is half as good as this it will be the best movie Scorsese has ever made.

READER MAIL

If you have questions about television, movies, food, local news, weather, or whatever you want, shoot them to me on Twitter or at [email protected] (put “RUNDOWN” in the subject line). I am the first writer to ever answer reader mail in a column. Do not look up this last part.

From Jeremy:

I am sure that you’ve watched the newest season of “Welcome to Wrexham”, and picked up on this: “King Charles was ‘very pleased with himself’ after cracking a joke with Rob McElhenney.”

My question- is there any chance he actually has watched “It’s Always Sunny”? Maybe he is a big fan. Maybe he asked his staff to make him a Rum Ham, or hums “Dayman” to himself under his breath while signing important documents, etc. I love the idea of him and Camilla cackling in their weird royal accents while Danny DeVito wriggles naked and sweaty out of a couch. I can imagine you of all people can imagine better scenarios (Kitton Mittons for the Queen’s corgis???). That show rules.

This is just a really good email. One of the best I’ve ever gotten. I’ve spent probably… I don’t know, five or six hours since I received it getting a real good mental image of Charles watching Always Sunny. My current favorite aspect of this visual is him calling Meghan Markle at like midnight, three hours into a binge on Hulu, to tell her she should try to get a role on the show as she rolls her eyes and does that “blah blah blah” gesture you do with your hand when someone is blabbering on and on when you’re on the phone with them. It’s fun.

Also, please take a few minutes this weekend and think about the King of England watching Charlie Day kill rats with a stick in a dingy Philadelphia bar, and then think about whether he thinks that’s what all bars in Philadelphia are actually like. I need him to agree to a wide-ranging interview about this. Preferably with me.

Thank you for this gift, Jeremy. I will cherish it through the weekend.

AND NOW, THE NEWS

To Philadelphia!

A fishy situation unfolded in North Philadelphia Wednesday thanks to some shellfish thieves!

SHELLFISH THIEVES

The early morning theft ended with 184 cases of crab clusters valued at $73,000 being stolen from the back of a tractor-trailer, according to officials.

Police say they were met with several fleeing vehicles when they arrived at the 1800 block of Germantown Avenue around 1:45 a.m.

Lots to like here but my current favorite thing is the vivid image I have in my head of dozens of neon Hondas racing away from an organized crab heist like a scene from 2 Fast 2 Furious. Yes, Ludacris has a big pile of crab legs in the passenger seat.

An open tractor-trailer was then discovered with its driver asleep in the front.

Officers woke the driver, and informed him that trailer was broken into.

God, I love this guy. Just sleeping in the cabin of his crab truck while thieves make off with $75k worth of high-end shellfish they presumably have a plan for. Good for him.

The driver told police he didn’t hear or see anyone take the items, and that the container was locked with a metal seal and padlock.

Two notes here, once again via bullet point:

• I need this to be a movie or television show at some point in the next 18-24 months
• I need Statham to play the truck driver and I need him to hunt down the thieves

Call it The Crabman and get it in theaters as soon as possible. Thank you.

In the grand scheme of things, there are some good things that come out of TikTok. There are some very bad things, though, like spontaneous dance trends and that annoying voice that makes everyone sound like a cartoon character on Looney Tunes. So you really have to comb through the bad to find the gems, and that includes having to listen to Martin Scorsese use the weird little cartoon voice to explain how The King of Comedy was overlooked.

Gen Z’s next great director, Martin Scorsese’s daughter Francesca, was giving her father a lesson in internet slang in which she would say various terms that he would have to describe. He perfectly described “Tea” and “The Ick” but he was a little stuck on “Slept On.” In order to put it into perspective, Francesca described Scorsese’s 1983 crime film The King of Comedy as an example. Of course, this got him to understand it perfectly.

“People hated it when it came out. It was the flop of the year, that’s what it was called,” the director explained before he began to call out some people. “On Entertainment Tonight. New Year’s Eve. ’83 to ’84. It’s okay. It’s alright.” He pretended not to look so disappointed, but you could see the pain in his eyes. Maybe Robert De Niro should try this challenge next.

The King Of Comedy starring De Niro, was a black comedy/drama film that was honestly ahead of its time, so it is not that weird that people didn’t get it yet. Humor wasn’t fully invented until the 90s anyway, so he shouldn’t feel too bad. Ultimately, Scorsese kinda aced the slang test. He knew what “Hits Different” meant, and sorta understands what “Ate” means. The man is 80 years old and he hangs out with Timothee Chalamet enough to know the deal.

In August, Bruce Springsteen And The E Street Band postponed their Philadelphia tour dates due to Springsteen “taking ill.” However, last month, it was announced that they were postponing the entire tour to 2024. A statement said the rocker was “being treated for symptoms of peptic ulcer disease.”

Luckily, the tour dates have now officially been rescheduled to next year, kicking off on March 19 in Phoenix, Arizona and ending on September 13 in Baltimore, Maryland. It sounds like Springsteen is doing much better; upon announcing that they were rescheduling the dates, Springsteen said in a statement, “Thanks to all my friends and fans for your good wishes, encouragement and support,” he said. “I’m on the mend and can’t wait to see you all next year.”

Find the rescheduled tour dates below.

03/19/2024 — Phoenix, AZ @ Footprint Center
03/25/2024 — San Diego, CA @ Pechanga Arena
03/28/2024 — San Francisco, CA @ Chase Center
03/31/2024 — San Francisco, CA @ Chase Center
04/04/2024 — Inglewood, CA @ Kia Forum
04/07/2024 — Inglewood, CA @ Kia Forum
04/12/2024 — Uncasville, CT @ Mohegan Sun Arena
04/15/2024 — Albany, NY @ MVP Arena
04/18/2024 — Syracuse, NY @ JMA Wireless Dome
04/21/2024 — Columbus, OH @ Nationwide Arena
08/15/2024 — Pittsburgh, PA @ PPG Paints Arena
08/18/2024 — Pittsburgh, PA @ PPG Paints Arena
08/21/2024 — Philadelphia, PA @ Citizens Bank Park
08/23/2024 — Philadelphia, PA @ Citizens Bank Park
09/07/2024 — Washington, D.C. @ Nationals Park
09/13/2024 — Baltimore, MD @ Oriole Park at Camden Yards

Delays be damned, Drake’s long-awaited album For All The Dogs has finally seen the light of day. The “Slime You Out” rapper brought out the big guns for the project’s special appearances. So, is Nicki Minaj featured on Drake’s For All The Dogs? Fellow musicians Bad Bunny, J. Cole, Lil Yachty, 21 Savage, Sexyy Red, and more all pop in for a guest verse. However, Drake’s Young Money comrade is notably missing.

After teasing that they were linking back up for a track in September, this blatant omission isn’t sitting well with fans. During an interview with Apple Music’s Zane Lowe, Minaj confirmed that the song would make the final tracklist, saying, “You know, I have a song on Drake’s album coming out soon, too. I love the song so much. I’ll just say I really love the song. I know my fans are going to love the song. I know the world’s going to love the song. And that’s all I will say about that.”

Later in the conversation, Minaj revealed that Drake didn’t turn in his verse for her album either. “Barbz, make sure y’all let Drizzy Drake know that Pink Friday 2 is coming out November 17 as well. And we are waiting on his contribution,” declared Minaj, instructing her fans to remind him of his obligation. Maybe Minaj’s forthcoming album will make up for the missed collaboration, or if Drake drops a deluxe edition of For All The Dogs with the unreleased track.

Take a look at some fans’ reactions below.

As Loki unveiled its Season 2 premiere, one character is notably missing from the action: Miss Minutes. However, the cartoon clock’s absence doesn’t pass by without an ominous warning from Loki, and it’s definitely a good idea to catch up on where she stands going into the rest of the season.

In the first season, Miss Minutes (voiced by animation veteran Tara Strong) starts out as an adorable mascot slash helpful assistant for the Time Variance Authority. However, it’s revealed in the final episodes that she’s been working closely with He Who Remains (Jonathan Majors) who has been pulling the strings of the TVA the whole time, and clearly, with the help of Miss Minutes.

Loki is aware of this fact thanks to his calamitous encounter with He Who Remains. In the Season 2 premiere, Loki stops Mobius from paging Miss Minutes and clues him in that she’s not to be trusted. Ke Huy Quan also reveals that Miss Minutes is supposed to be monitoring the Temporal Loom, but she’s conveniently missing as its wildly overloading.

As for whether she’s evil going into Season 2, Loki executive producer Kevin Wright revealed to Screen Rant that the show will explore the nature of Miss Minutes:

She says this season something along the lines of He Who Remains gave her the ability to write her own programming, to create her own personality, to grow, to have wants, to have needs.

I think that’s exciting if that’s true, knowing what we know about He Who Remains, he doesn’t give a lot of people a lot of choices up until his death. And I’d be interested to see how much of her programming is her own, how much of this is just further path that He Who Remains maybe paved for all of our characters to walk down for some bigger reasoning.

Wright’s answers jibes with previous hints dropped by director Kate Herron and writer Michael Waldron shortly after the first season finale. Both shared that there was always a plan to keep Miss Minutes in the story as long as possible.

“She was a really fun way to deliver some pretty heady exposition,” Waldron told Marvel.com. “There’s something sing-songy and sort of non-threatening about [the way she talks]. But yet, when it turns, and when she becomes evil, suddenly it’s really scary.”

Loki streams new episodes Thursday on Disney+.

In true Loki fashion, the Season 2 premiere has already got the theories churning thanks to the show’s reality-bending plot that has kicked into overdrive thanks to the death of Jonathan Majors‘ He Who Remains.

In the final moments of Season 1, Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino) kicked Loki through a time door so she could murder the Kang variant who she rightly blamed for a life of being ripped from her family. However, He Who Remains was keeping the Sacred Timeline in order and preventing a Multiversal War. That’s obviously not happening now, and the effects are immediately being felt in the Season 2 premiere.

The most dramatic effect is Loki’s return to the TVA came with a side effect as the Trickster God starts time-slipping in horrifying fashion. To fix the problem, Ke Huy Quan‘s Ouroboros comes up with a solution that involves Loki pruning himself so Owen Wilson’s Morbius can pull him back into the correct time thread. However, Loki’s time-slipping causes a problem at the last minute when he loses his pruning rod after getting pulled into the future.

As he races around a seemingly empty TVA, he surprisingly runs into Sylvie who simply says, “There you are.” But before Loki can react he’s pruned from behind, which fortunately, was what he needed. Of course, this raises the question of who pruned Loki and fans are already concocting a theory: Himself.

The crux of this theory is that Sylvie acted like the two of them recently got separated and she thought she was seeing the Loki from that timeline, who was actually behind the time-slipping Loki and pruned him.

Of course, this is a time-travel/multiverse show, so the options are literally limitless. Some fans have even suggested that Sylvie is working with a different Kang variant, which would be a wild, yet on-brand twist for the show.

And then there’s this theory, which frankly, we all should consider. Everything is on the table:

Loki streams new episodes Thursday on Disney+.

The case can be made that Al Michaels is the most iconic living sports broadcaster. Over the course of his career, Michaels has provided the audio soundtrack to some of the biggest games in American sports, and more recently, Michaels has been an institution in the world of the NFL. He’s currently plying his trade on Thursday nights alongside Kirk Herbstreit on Amazon’s NFL broadcasts.

Michaels has seen and done a whole lot, but there is one thing that he has managed to avoid doing in his nearly 79 years on this rock we call home: knowingly eat a vegetable. Michaels sat down with CNN’s Chris Wallace for a conversation and essentially explained that both of his parents were 18 when he was born, and as a result, his mother “just let me have the run of the course, and I always pushed the vegetables away.”

Wallace, bless his heart, asked Michaels if it’s plausible that he would like “one of the more non-objectionable vegetables,” and immediately brings up a carrot.

“Oh please, please,” Michaels responded. “No. No. That’s an objectionable vegetable … I look at it, I just don’t even like the look of it. And I surmise what it might taste like, in terms of the texture of it.”

Michaels assumes that a carrot — a god damn CARROT — “doesn’t look like something that would go down well.” If anyone at Amazon (or Al Michaels himself) reads this, all of us at Uproxx Sports would like to formally invite him to come eat some vegetables with us, but, like, fried ones that you can cover in sauce. We would like to find out if Michaels would eat an onion ring, basically. Also: What are his thoughts on fruit? I’m going to spend the rest of the month thinking about this.

Euphoria star Angus Cloud recently passed away at age 25 with TMZ recently reporting that he succumbed to a lethal cocktail of drugs. His role as the drug-dealing Fezco “Fez” O’Neill was his first acting credit, although his star had begun to rise, and he had even wrapped three upcoming films prior to his death. One of those movies, Your Lucky Day will arrive in theaters later this fall, and the trailer is a lot to witness.

An apparent chance encounter at a convenience store involving a $156 million lottery ticket transforms from a straight-up attempted robbery into a hostage situation with a dead police officer on hand. Additionally, other parties descend upon the scene with no-good intent. An eerie rendition of “America The Beautiful” in the background is not subtle, nor is the messaging about how one can get rich in America. According to the film’s description, “After a dispute over a winning lottery ticket turns into a deadly hostage situation, the witnesses must decide exactly how far they’ll go and how much blood they’re willing to spill for a cut of the $156 million.”

The Well Go USA movie was directed and written by Dan Brown, who recently told Collider about how Cloud strove to unearth the “best parts” within his character, which was an undoubtedly heavy process:

Really, he took what was written, just shifted it around a little bit, and then he added a bunch of stuff at the end that made it poignant in a way that I hadn’t kind of expected. And so that was really just kind of like a lovely moment where he took this scene in a place and portrayed a sadness and a deepness that the character didn’t have in that moment, and I felt like it was much stronger for that.

Cloud also completed filming on an Untitled Monster Movie for Universal Pictures and appeared in Freaky Tales (starring Pedro Pascal and Ben Mendelsohn) prior to his passing. Both films are expected to arrive in 2024.

Your Lucky Day comes to theaters on November 10.