Month: January 2024

A movie based on Minecraft, a popular game about stacking squares (not that one) has been in the works for almost a decade. In 2014, director Peter Sollett was attached to the project along with Frozen II writer Allison Schroeder but the two left the film in 2022. At another point in production, fan favorites Shawn Levy and Rob McElhenney were on board, but that also didn’t pan out. At a certain point, it was looking like we would never see that pixelated little dude.

Finally, it was announced last year that Jared Hess is set to direct, and it seems like the movie is really shaping up. Even though we are over a year out, here is everything you need to know about the upcoming Minecraft film.

Plot

While the plot is under wraps, Minecraft is a pretty versatile game, so we could see this going in many directions. Back in 2019, Warner Bros announced a synopsis: “Based on the globally popular video game, the story follows a teenage girl and her unlikely group of adventurers who, after the malevolent Ender Dragon sets out on a path of destruction, must save their beautiful, blocky Overworld.”

It’s unclear if this will still be the plot of the movie considering how many times the personnel has changed, but it will probably be something like that.

Cast

Almost two years ago, Jason Momoa was announced to star in the film. Jack Black is also set to star as Steve, the main player in the game. Orange is the New Black’s Danielle Brooks stars as Dawn, while Emma Myers, Jennifer Coolidge, Kate McKinnon, and Jemaine Clement have all been added to the cast in undisclosed roles.

Release Date

The Minecraft film is slated to hit theaters on April 4th, 2025.

Trailer

Since the movie has not yet been made, it will probably be a little while until we get to see some footage. Until then, feel free to watch this.

2024 is going to be a great year for craft cocktails. All the big drinks publications are calling it. Bars are gearing up for a banner year with mixology at the center of it all. And while that’s great (for them, not your wallet), it’s still smart to know how to mix up some great cocktails at home too.

One modern classic that should be in everyone’s arsenal is the Paper Plane. The Paper Plane was devised back in 2008 and is an evolution of the pre-Prohibition classic The Last Word. It’s an equal-measure drink that requires some specific ingredients and a little elbow grease but that’s about it. Anyone can master this one at home.

The best part is that besides this being a fast drink one to make, it’s also refreshingly bright and delicious. You’ll be mixing these up all weekend once you get the hang of it. Let’s dive in!

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Paper Plane

Ingredients:

• 0.75 oz. bourbon
• 0.75 oz. Amaro Nonino
• 0.75 oz. Aperol
• 0.75 oz. fresh lemon juice
• Ice
• Lemon peel

The two unique ingredients that you’ll need for this cocktail are Amaro Nonino and Aperol. Those are both brands. The first one is a light, floral, and botanical amaro. The second one is a sweet orange Italian bitter. You can usually get both of these pretty easily from any good liquor store. If you can’t, the local amaro scene is blowing up right now, especially in places like California and New York. So don’t be afraid to use something local, if you stumble into it.

Then there’s the bourbon. I like to use a stone-cold classic mixing bourbon like Four Roses Small Batch. It’s a great mixer in general. But the light floral, fruit, and hint of woody spice all play well with the soft amaro and sweet orange bitters. It’s a great match.

What You’ll Need:

• Coupe or Nick and Nora glass (prechilled)
• Cocktail shaker
• Cocktail strainer
• Fruit juicer
• Paring knife
• Jigger

Method:

• Add the bourbon, Amaro, Aperol, and lemon juice to a cocktail shaker. Add a large handful of ice, affix the lid, and then shaker vigorously for at least 15 seconds.
• Fetch the glass from the freezer and strain the cocktail into it.
• Express the oils from the lemon peel over the glass and then discard. Serve.

Bottom Line:

This is like an Aperol Spritz turned up to max! The flavors burst on your palate. There are soft botanicals, gentle florals, smooth sweetness, and soft fruits with a hint of bourbon-y spice. It’s complex but works wonders as an eye-opener and wakes up your senses.

It’s also super light thanks to the lemon juice and oils. It feels airy while delivering thick layers of cloudy woody spice, stewed fruits, and dried florals with a nice alcohol bite. The texture/mouthfeel is very unique too. There’s a silkiness that has this hint of sharpens to it thanks to that citrus and bourbon sneaking in from time to time. This is a winner.

The Las Vegas Raiders have their next head coach, and as it turns out, it’s the guy who has been at the helm ever since Josh McDaniels got fired. According to Adam Schefter of ESPN and Ian Rapoport and Mike Garafolo of NFL Network, the Raiders decided to remove the interim title from Antonio Pierce, making him the franchise’s next coach.

Pierce, who previously served as the team’s linebacker coach, ascended to the interim role after the Raiders decided to fire Josh McDaniels midway through the 2023 season. While he was unable to get them to the postseason, Pierce was able to go 5-4 and breathed some much-needed life into the roster, which was most prominently on display during Las Vegas’ 63-21 win over the Los Angeles Chargers.

It was reported during the team’s search that the locker room rallied around Pierce, with some reports indicating that standout defensive end Maxx Crosby could request a trade in the event that someone else got the job. This is not the first time that the Raiders had the chance to promote a popular interim coach, as the team went 7-5 under interim head coach Rich Bisaccia in 2021 but opted to go in a different direction and hire McDaniels the following offseason.

Prior to taking over the Raiders, Pierce’s only head coaching experience came at the helm of California high school football powerhouse Long Beach Poly.

When you think about actors who do their own stunts, Tom Cruise is usually the first name that comes to mind. Well, add 94-year-old June Squibb to the list. The nonagenarian’s action chops are on full display in Thelma, a new buddy comedy making its Sundance debut this week.

Written and directed by Josh Margolin as a love letter to his actual grandma, Thelma centers around a recently widowed elderly woman who gets bilked out of $10,000 by scammers. So she does what any senior citizen would do: Get revenge.

“Tom Cruise jumping out of a plane is as dangerous as my grandma getting onto a bed,” Margolin told Variety. “I wanted to treat Thelma’s mission with the sincerity and stakes that you would Ethan Hunt globe-trotting to track down the bad guy.”

Those stakes involved filming action sequences with Squibb, who was adamant about not using a double:

In one scene, Squibb hijacks an electric scooter and has a vehicular showdown in a retirement home with Ben, played by the late Richard Roundtree in his final screen performance. The two zoom into each other and crash, as Squibb plows Roundtree’s scooter out of the way.

“They weren’t expecting me to do the scooter work,” Squibb says. “They were so worried about me, they thought I was going to kill myself. They said, ‘Just tap his scooter,’ and I thought, ‘Oh, hell,’ and I just cowed into him.”

Despite her 94-year-old age, Squibb never thinks of herself as old, but she’ll play the elderly woman in need of help just to be nice.

“[People] want to take care of you, which is lovely, and sometimes I just let them take care of me,” Squibb said. “But other times you think, ‘I can do this and I’m fine.’ They want to lend an arm or a hand. So you do it — you take an arm, you take a hand. But I am still independent and able to live a life of my own.”

That life apparently includes the cold, hard rush of doing your own stunts. To quote Dakota Johnson, who’s been bitten by a similar bug: “Watch out, Tom Cruise.”

(Via Variety)

Do you remember Cable? Yeah, it’s been a while, but Cable was so good to you! You could have all of these channels and flip through them like a magician with a little deck of cards. And no matter how uncertain or chaotic life was, you could always be certain that there was a rerun of House playing somewhere on TV at any given moment. That’s a feeling that was ripped from us, thanks to streaming. Sure, you could start any movie from the beginning, but the beauty of cable was having to just jump right into any program after a commercial break and figure out what the heck was going on without being able to rewind. It made us stronger as people.

Cable is probably dead forever, but streaming platforms are starting to realize that not everyone wants to shell out buckets of money on each individual service every month, and combining them might be the next big move. Canada’s Telus recently updated its streaming bundle to include Netflix, Disney+ and Prime Video in one package in a surprising but also optimistic move.

The Stream+ Premium package will offer Netflix and Disney+ without ads, along with Prime Video for 38 Canadian dollars (US $28.20), while the ad-supported tier will cost $20 Canadian per month, or US $14.89. If customers were to buy each service individually, that would cost about US $30 (for the ad-supported level) so the bundle is actually a great deal.

“In an era of multiple streaming options, bundling your favorite streaming services into one subscription to save money each month is a no brainer,” Dwayne Benefield, senior vp mobility & home products and transformation at Telus, said in a statement.

If this seems to work, then maybe we can get all of these services bundled together and achieve peace and harmony while saving a couple bucks. We can call it: Cablevision!

(Via The Hollywood Reporter)

Kids See Ghosts collaborators Kid Cudi and Kanye West have ended their beef, but Lupe Fiasco has no intention of mending things with Cudi. At least, that’s what his latest post online suggests.

Cudi recently sat down with Apple Music’s Zane Lowe for an interview, and during the chat, he spoke about his time nearly brushing into Fiasco in 2008 while working at Bape’s retail store in New York. Cudi spoke about hiding from rappers when they would shop at the location to avoid giving them ammunition for future diss tracks. One of those rappers so happened to be Lupe Fiasco.

“If I get famous one day, I don’t ever want these n****s saying, ‘Yo, you sold me clothes. You my son,’” he said. “I couldn’t have that. This was my explanation. And when you think about it he hates me ’til this day. He hates me. So, it’s like I was right. I was onto something. I sensed something in the universe.”

On January 19, after getting wind of Cudi’s interview, Fiasco took to X (formerly Twitter) to share a message with his longtime foe. He wrote, “Kid Cudi is a b*tch. And continues to be a b*tch. Ain’t nobody finna bring up he used to work at the Bape Store to diss his b*tch ass for having a regular job before he was a famous b*tch with a cool job.”

The beef between the two rappers isn’t new, as it’s been brewing for a while now.

Watch the full interview above.

All eyes are on Dejounte Murray as we get closer and closer to the NBA trade deadline. Murray’s name has frequently been mentioned in trade talks as the Atlanta Hawks continue to flirt with potentially missing the postseason altogether, and for teams that have a need in the backcourt, a player of Murray’s caliber makes a ton of sense.

The Los Angeles Lakers could absolutely use guard help, so it’s unsurprising that they’ve been mentioned as a Murray destination for quite some time. They haven’t made a move yet, but according to Jovan Buha of The Athletic, things have gotten to the point where the two sides have talked about the framework of a Murray deal, should it come to fruition.

Via The Athletic:

The Murray buzz is only increasing — and to noisy levels. The Lakers and Hawks have discussed potential frameworks of a deal, including a version late last week that centered on Russell, Hood-Schifino, the 2029 first-round pick and additional draft compensation, according to multiple team and league sources. Talks have since stalled, but are expected to pick back up closer to the deadline.

D’Angelo Russell makes slightly less money than Murray right now, but he’s an unrestricted free agent following next season (assuming he picks up the player option for 2024-25) and Murray is about to start a $120 million contract extension. Jalen Hood-Schifino, meanwhile, was the No. 17 overall pick in the 2023 NBA Draft, and has appeared in only nine games during his first year in the league.

Harmony Korine’s movie Aggro Dr1ft screened at some film festivals in 2023, and it’s notable for a handful of reasons. There’s the fact that it stars Travis Scott (and Jordi Mollà). There’s the fact that it was filmed entirely in infrared. There’s the fact that most critics didn’t care for it, as the film currently has a score of 38 percent on Rotten Tomatoes.

Now, the movie’s peculiar legacy continues: Korine is set to host a series of showings for the movie in 2024, and the first of them will go down on February 7 at Crazy Girls, a strip club in Los Angeles (as Variety reports). The tour is presented by multimedia design collective EDGLRD and will hit other “unconventional” venues following Crazy Girls.

EDGLRD head of film strategy and development Eric Kohn said in a statement, “The distribution of Aggro Dr1ft goes beyond the limitations of the outdated moviegoing experience. You don’t just watch Aggro Dr1ft — you step into a new world, and these events will allow audiences to immerse themselves in it.”

At each screening, the film will be accompanied by backdrops featuring visuals from EDGLRD, as well as musical performances by Korine and Aggro Dr1ft composer Araabmuzik.

In a not particularly laudatory review of the movie, Vulture‘s Bilge Ebiri wrote, “I don’t get the sense that anyone involved in Aggro Dr1ft has ever had a normal interaction with anyone, which probably makes it hard to find things for these characters to do,” and, “Maybe the most troubling thing about this film is the gnawing sense one gets that nobody involved with it cared all that much about what was actually on screen. They’re in love with the idea more than the execution.”

Korine himself previously said of the film, “I am excited. I have never made anything like it. I was trying not to make a movie. I don’t know if it will be a scandal, but it will be its own statement.”

The Simpsons has been on for nearly 800 episodes. Take a moment to let that sink in: nearly 800 episodes! (760 specifically.) That puts any show not named One Piece to shame.

Since premiering in 1989, The Simpsons has established a deep bench of supporting characters who, due to the whole longest-running-American-scripted-primetime-TV-show-ever thing, have basically become secondary leads. Is there an entire episode about Groundskeeper Willie getting married? You better believe it. But there are select characters who have only appeared once — many of whom have left an indelible mark.

Former Simpsons writer Josh Weinstein (who was also co-showrunner with Bill Oakley) shared one of his favorites. “The 27th anniversary of ‘The Twisted World of Marge Simpson’ means it’s the 27th anniversary of when you met this guy, Royce McCutcheon,” he wrote on X. “Perhaps my favorite totally random Simpsons one-off character (tied with Handsome Pete).” Royce is on screen for less than 20 seconds in the season eight episode, but Homer threatening to keep all his “moon money” for himself is unforgettable.

The replies to Weinstein’s tweet are filled with other fan favorites:

Hank Scorpio is the obvious choice (although naming a character voiced by a guest star feels like cheating), but I also have to give it up for the annoyed “back to Winnipeg” dad and the Queen of the Harpies.

Since Chat GPT dropped, conversations about the role AI will play in our lives have left people feeling uneasy about the rise of machines. Of course, people in tech know that we’ve had some form of AI in our devices for years now (and for the most part, we’ve loved it). It’s a broad conversation that deserves plenty of nuance, but regardless of where you stand, one thing is for certain: AI isn’t going anywhere. It’s only going to get bigger, smarter, and more intertwined with our day-to-day lives.

Will.i.am, who has long been highly regarded as a futurist, knows as much. Never one to be afraid of “what’s next,” he’s giving AI a major responsibility — co-hosting his new show.

Will.i.am Presents The FYI Show will drop on SiriusXM on January 25th. Episodes will focus on creators, innovators, and the future that people on the cutting edge are dreaming up for all of us to live in. And an AI by the name of Qd.pi. (“Cutie Pie”) will be at his side. Or… in his ear. Or… on his server.

Here’s a preview:

Will.i.am explained the concept to The Hollywood Reporter: “I didn’t want to just do a traditional show, I wanted to bring tomorrow close to today, and so I wanted to have my co-host be an AI… I’m ultra-freaking colorful and expressive. [Qd.pi is] ultra-freaking factual and analytical. And that combination, we ain’t seen in the history of freaking broadcasts anywhere.”

It’s hard to argue when Will.i.am has built an entire groundbreaking and influential career out of looking forward. Though, Qd.pi itself seems open to a bit of skepticism about the experiment. In an exclusive excerpt from The FYI Show‘s first episode, Qd.pi has this to say about the most important thing people need to know about AI right now:

AI is powerful but it’s not perfect. It can make mistakes and it’s important to be aware of that and to fact-check the information it provides. AI can be used for good and for bad so it’s crucial to use it responsibly and ethically. As AI gets more sophisticated it’s likely to have a bigger impact on our lives. From the way we work to the way we communicate and consume information. it’s important for people to stay informed and educated about AI and its potential impacts so that we can make the most of its benefits while also being mindful of its risks. Overall, it’s an exciting time for AI and technology but it’s also a time to approach these advancements with a healthy dose of caution and critical thinking.

Word. Consider us on board. If anyone is going to make this work we’d bet money it’s going to be the same person who dropped a track with Lil’ Wayne, J. Balvin, Britney Spears, and launched his own AI-driven workspace app all in the past 365 days.

Watch Will on Uproxx’s Fresh Pair below for more insight on his career and philosophy.