Month: July 2024

Have you ever wondered what it’s like to be a cat? To watch the world from less than a foot off the ground, seeing and hearing things humans completely miss, staring out the window for hours while contemplating one of your nine lives?

Well, thanks to one person, we need wonder no more—at least about what-they’re-seeing part.

The TikTok channel Mr. Kitters the Cat (@mr.kitters.the.cat) gives us a cat’s-eye view of the world with a camera attached to Mr. Kitters’ collar. And the result is an utterly delightful POV experience that takes us through the daily adventuring of the frisky feline as he wanders the yard.

---

In a video titled “Spicy cats,” which has more than 74 million views on TikTok, we begin with the cutest cat sneeze ever. Then we hear Mr. Kitters’ meow as we walk with him through the grass before the scene switches to a thrilling, yowling cat chase he witnesses across the yard (while tucking himself even more securely under the bush he’s in).

The best is seeing his kitty paws as he walks and then digs in the mulch. And there’s apparently something very exciting that needs to be pounced on right along a chain link fence.

Watch and enjoy:

@mr.kitters.the.cat

Spicy cats 🌶️ #fyp #cat #meow

The commenters made their delight known.

“I love how he saw the cat fight and was like that’s not my business today,” wrote one person.

“WHEN HE DIGS WITH HIS LIL PAWS,” declared another.

“People: Cats only meow at humans.” Mr Kitters -Meows at everything-” wrote another.

And of course, countless people responded simply to the sneeze with “Bless you.”

Mr. Kitters has other POV videos as well. This one demonstrates how chatty he is and shows his black cat buddy as well.

@mr.kitters.the.cat

“What do you want?” “Nothing!” #fyp #cat #meow

It really sounds like he says, “Let me in,” doesn’t it?

And this “extreme sports” video is riveting.

@mr.kitters.the.cat

Extreme sports 💀 #fyp

It’s funny how something as simple as putting a camera around the neck of a cat can draw in tens of millions of people. We’re all so curious about the lives of the creatures we see every day, and the adorable quirkiness of cat behavior is a big part of why we keep them as companions in the first place. Seeing the world through their point of view is just one more way we can enjoy and learn about our pet friends.

This article originally appeared on 6.15.23

Babies are really adaptable. The same can be said for baby animals and it’s likely because they just don’t know any other way of life so they just go with it. But even knowing that, it’s still hard to imagine a kitten getting around with no front legs.

Cats essentially use everything from their whiskers to their tails to balance, so how would one walk without two of it’s four legs? The answer is, carefully at first. Duck is a kitten that had to have both of her front legs completely amputated after she was rescued and while she was wobbly at first, she quickly adapted.

---

Duck’s human, Cody shares her daily shenanigans on his Instagram page aptly named Purrasic Duck. But recently he told Duck’s story to The Dodo revealing her rescue story and the kitten’s quick moves. If you’re having a hard time picturing a two-legged cat on the run, it looks a lot like a furry velociraptor chasing a laser pointer.

“I ended up naming her Duck because she kinda waddled. She’d kinda take it slow, she waddled trying to figure out her balance,” Cody tells The Dodo.

Before long though, Duck was off to play with her much larger dog brothers. Her pug brother even offers her a little assistance in the face cleaning area since Duck doesn’t have paws to do it herself. No worries, she returns the favor by cleaning his face too. It’s an adorable relationship but if you want to see a furry velociraptor chase after cat toys, you’ll need to watch the video below.

This article originally appeared on 11.15.23

For nearly two decades, people have been enjoying “Got Talent” competitions all over the world, inspired by the first “America’s Got Talent” in 2006. And thanks to social media and YouTube, we can enjoy the most memorable auditions over and over again.

For instance, this one from Taryn Charles on the 2024 season of “Britain’s Got Talent.”

Charles is a music teacher who works with special needs kids. She even brought one of her students and her parent to be part of the audience during her audition. When the judges asked why she wanted to be on “Britain’s Got Talent,” Charles said, “I love to make people smile and I think my voice is alright.”

Talk about an understatement.

---

As she stands waiting for the music to start, she shakes her hand by her side a few times, clearly getting some nerves out. But as soon as she starts to sing the first line, “Looking out on the morning rain, I used to feel so uninspired…” it’s clear from her rich, raspy voice and easy stage presence that she’s got something special.

And it only gets better from there. “(You Make Me Feel Like a) Natural Woman” was written by singer-songwriter Carole King, then famously covered by Aretha Franklin, which is a hard act to follow. But Charles knocked it out of the park, blowing away the audience and judges alike. In fact, the performance earned her not one but two standing ovations and inspired judge Bruno Tonioli to smash the Golden Buzzer button before the judges even began to offer their feedback.

Watch:

What makes this performance especially memorable is how humble and unassuming Charles is before and after her knock-out performance. If you didn’t watch til the very end, you may have missed her hilariously real, “I think I’ve wet myself,” which only makes her even more endearing.

“WOW I was blown away with her angelic and powerful voice,” wrote one commenter. “And yet she is so humble and has a beautiful soul. Plus, I have never in my life seen a double standing ovation, she so deserves a golden buzzer, wishing her the best success.”

“This is how you do an audition, stunning tone to her voice…..if anyone deserves a chance it’s this lady……BOOM!!” wrote another.

“This was so inspirational. Taryn I am in tears,” shared another. “I know what it feels like to struggle with self-worth. You are a mirror to show me that that those people are not always right. You are phenomenally gifted and you have an amazing career as a professional singer ahead of you! Blessings!”

Talent competition judges often warn contestants about the challenge of singing songs done by big vocal divas, and we’ve seen singers attempt to sing the likes of Whitney Houston or Mariah Carey and fall flat. It’s not easy to sing an iconic song most people associate with Aretha Franklin—the Queen of Soul and Rolling Stone’s #1 singer of all time—and have any hope of impressing people. And yet, Taryn Charles managed to make the song her own and wow everyone in the process with her unique voice.

We’ll definitely be keeping an eye on this humble music teacher as she makes her way through the “Britain’s Got Talent” gauntlet. Heck of a way to kick it off.

This article originally appeared on 5.6.24

Snoop Dogg said he would respect French laws when it comes to his favorite pastime, but he got a nice concession prize. The Doggfather will be one of the lucky few to carry the Olympic flame through Paris ahead of the 2024 Olympic Summer Games. While in Paris to cover the 2024 Olympics for NBC — a job he’s taken to with great enthusiasm — he’ll carry the Olympic torch on its final leg through Paris’ Saint-Denis suburb, where the Stade de France Olympic Stadium is located.

Over the last few months, Snoop has taken to his correspondent role with gusto, participating in track and field trials (“34.44 for a 52-year-old? Ain’t bad.”), and shooting free throws — Rick Barry style! — with the USA 3×3 basketball squad.

After the games, Snoop will return to his day job, releasing his twentieth studio album, Missionary, the spiritual successor to his 1993 debut Doggystyle. In the meantime, though, it doesn’t look like he’s putting his seemingly endless series of side quests on hold; he recently joined the broadcast for the Cincinnati Reds and Milwaukee Brewers ball game after throwing out the ceremonial first pitch, and he’s preparing for his own NCAA football college bowl game this fall. The man appears to be living his best life, like a walking ad for the benefits of getting older.

Has Tom Cruise’s student become the master? Close, but not quite.

Cruise is still going strong at 62 years old (nearly the same age as Jack Lemmon when he made Grumpy Old Men) with multiple projects in production, including Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s next film, a rumored Top Gun 3 and Edge of Tomorrow 2, the movie where he goes to space, and, of course, Mission: Impossible 8. The retitled sequel to 2023’s thrilling Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One started filming in 2022 before production shut down due to the SAG-AFTRA strike. Cameras resumed rolling earlier this year, and Cruise is once again risking his life for our entertainment. Bless him.

Here’s everything we know about Mission: Impossible 8, including plot details, the cast, and release date.

Plot

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One ended with AI threatening to take over the world (couldn’t relate) and Ethan Hunt and friends needing to find a submarine. Mission: Impossible 8 will presumably take place shortly after the events of that film, but director and co-writer (and Taylor Swift fan) Christopher McQuarrie has mostly kept quiet about specific plot details. He did, however, reveal that they filmed in South Africa and the Arctic. “Tom and I are always trying to get the big sh*t out of the way first,” he told Empire. “South Africa was intense. The aerial sequence is… It’s just outrageous.”

To quote an I Think You Should Leave legend, gimme dat.

Mission: Impossible 8 will also have an underwater sequence that fixes a pet peeve of Cruise’s. “Tom and I are constantly reevaluating our own work and asking ourselves how we could have done it better. We’ve done underwater sequences previously. We’ve worked underwater in Edge of Tomorrow, and we worked underwater in Rogue Nation, and we left very dissatisfied with those sequences,” McQuarrie told Collider. “And we analyze why we were dissatisfied. What were all the factors working against us? The biggest being, not having real knowledge in that area.” Now they do.

As for Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning was split into two films (even if Mission: Impossible 8 lost the “Dead Reckoning” subtitle), McQuarrie explained, “I knew I wanted to expand the cast, and I knew I wanted to give each one of those characters more to do, so I knew the movie was going to be bigger and longer than [Mission: Impossible – Fallout]. And at which point I said, ‘Why are we fighting this? Why are we going to try to jam this into two hours? Let’s just break it in half and make it two movies.’ That really was the rationale behind it being a two-part movie. It just it wasn’t just that the story was bigger but that we wanted more emotion in the movie.”

Cast

Tom Cruise will be back for Mission: Impossible 8, obviously. Other confirmed cast members include Ving Rhames, Henry Czerny, Simon Pegg, Vanessa Kirby, Esai Morales, Hayley Atwell, Shea Whigham, Pom Klementieff, and Frederick Schmidt. Could Rebecca Ferguson return as well, despite what happened to Ilsa Faust in Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One?

“To speak very clearly — because I know a lot of people are sad about it, I’m sad about it — I had filmed three films. My deal was done. And I love her beyond words. Beyond words. I think she’s the most awesome, fantastic character,” the Silo actress said on the UnWrapped podcast. “Selfishly, that’s a lot of time to make a Mission film. And unless you’re going to have a lot of screen time, that’s a lot of time sitting around waiting to film a huge movie that could take over a year to film. It’s dedication.” That sounds like a no.

At least we’ll always have the opera scene.

Release Date

Mission: Impossible 8 is scheduled for release on May 23, 2025.

Trailer

No trailer.

But I have something more important to discuss: what’s your favorite Tom Cruise stunt in the Mission: Impossible movies? Is it the vault scene in the original, or the time he rode a motorcycle off a cliff? I’m partial to the Burj Khalifa sequence in Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol. Cruise really initiated the death-defying version of ghost protocol with this one.

Way back in 2020, it was reported that Timothée Chalamet was set to play Bob Dylan in a biopic. Well, it’s coming right up now: A Complete Unknown is set to hit theaters in December, and today (July 24), we have the first teaser video for the film.

It was previously revealed that Chalamet was going to do his own singing for the movie, and he does a solid Dylan impression in this video as he sings “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” from 1963’s The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.

An official description of the film reads, “Set in the influential New York music scene of the early ’60s, A Complete Unknown follows 19-year-old Minnesota musician Bob Dylan’s (Timothée Chalamet) meteoric rise as a folk singer to concert halls and the top of the charts — his songs and mystique becoming a worldwide sensation — culminating in his groundbreaking electric rock and roll performance at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965.”

Earlier this month, director James Mangold said of Dylan, “I’ve spent several wonderfully charming days in his company, just one-on-one, talking to him. I have a script that’s personally annotated by him and treasured by me. He loves movies. The first time I sat down with Bob, one of the first things he said to me was, ‘I love Cop Land‘ [Mangold’s 1997 film].”

Check out the video above.

Want to watch every NFL game this upcoming season that isn’t on [takes a deep breathe] Peacock, Prime Video, Netflix, or ESPN+? Well, if you’re a Carolina Panthers fan, like myself, probably not. But for the rest of you, there’s NFL Sunday Ticket on YouTube — and here’s how you can save hundreds by getting it for free.

Verizon is offering a promo where “customers who sign up for or upgrade to select wireless and home internet plans will get next season’s NFL Sunday Ticket free — regularly priced at up to $449 — if they act by December 10, 2024,” according to Variety. The following mobile customers are eligible for the deal:

-New premium unlimited mobile customers (or are existing customers who add a new line to their account)
-Purchase a select smartphone (such as a Samsung Galaxy Z Fold6 or Galaxy Z Flip6 or Google Pixel Fold) and sign up for a mobile line on an Unlimited Plus or Unlimited Ultimate plan
-New Verizon Home Internet customers who sign up for premium Verizon Home Internet plans (5G Home Plus or LTE Home Plus, or Fios 1 Gig or 2 Gig)

The offer is also available to existing customers who upgrade to one of the above plans. You can learn more here.

(Via Variety)

This year’s Cannes film festival was typically full of polarizing fare including Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis and Kevin Costner’s Horizon, but no film at this year’s splashiest festival was as gasp-inducing as The Substance.

This body horror/fantasy/parable serves as the sophomore directing turn by Coralie Fargeat (Revenge) and is being held out as “explosive” by distributor MUBI. What can we expect from this outwardly outrageous movie?

Plot

At its core, The Substance is a savage Cinderella story with feminist overtones revolving around the professional downgrading of Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), an aerobics sensation whose wardrobe remains straight out of the 1980s. The industry would love to send her off to a proverbial farm in upstate New York, but a laboratory comes knocking with a mysterious injectable drug that promises to turn her into a younger, more gorgeous version of herself. This transforms her into “Sue,” although the warring versions can only inhabit Elisabeth’s body for a week at a time. (Will there be a pumpkin on display somewhere?) Nudity will be plentiful, as will gore.

Reviews of the movie include The New Yorker‘s Justin Chang calling this a film with an “outlandish premise,” but “there’s no doubting the ferocity of the two leads, Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley, or Fargeat’s sheer filmmaking verve as she pushes her ideas to their sanguinary conclusions.” Hollywood Reporter‘s Lovia Gyarkye singles out the 140-minute runtime as a weak point while noting that “strong performances… help sustain momentum through the film’s triumphantly amusing end.” And Collider’s Caleb Hammond sees the internal battle as “a savvy read on how the capitalism rat race functions to deflect from the real enemies” while concluding that Fargeat will soon “have a legion of new horror fans” looking forward to her third feature film.

The film might have an excessive runtime, but the selling point stays brief:

Have you ever dreamt of a better version of yourself?
You. Only better in every way.
You’ve got to try this new product.
It changed my life.

THE SUBSTANCE.

A cryptic clip follows the same line of thinking:

Cast

In addition to Demi Moore as Elisabeth and Margaret Qualley as Sue, Dennis Quaid (who replaced the late Ray Liotta) portrays a TV executive named Harvey, whose misogynistic airs in the trailer are not unlike those of Harvey Weinstein. The cast further includes Hugo Diego Garcia and Gore Abrams.

Release Date

The transformation will begin in theaters on September 20.

Trailer

While we await a full trailer, this teaser trailer previews the war within.

We don’t really know when Dune 3 is going to happen. Timothée Chalamet has been busy learning guitar while Zendaya is reportedly hooked into doing another season of Euphoria soon, so there will be quite some time until we can revisit Paul Atreides.

Luckily, there are thousands of Dune stories to tell, thanks to the six original novels and various spinoffs, so HBO took this opportunity to bring Dune to the small screen in Dune: Prophecy. The upcoming series will be loosely based on the 2012 novel Sisterhood of Dune, written by Frank Herbert’s son, Brian Herbert.

On the administrative side of things, the series is now being branded as an “HBO Original” instead of a Max show, so keep that in mind so you don’t accidentally call it a Max Original. Here is everything else to know about the upcoming series.

Plot

Set 10,000 years before the events of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune, the series will retell the rise of the all-powerful Bene Gesserit from the eyes of the women who were there. According to the official longline, the series “follows the Harkonnen Sisters as they combat forces that threaten the future of humankind, and establish the fabled sect known as the Bene Gesserit.”

Initially, Villeneuve was signed on to direct the pilot, though he had to drop when making Dune: Part Two. Still, he gave the series that Villeneuve seal of approval. “The Bene Gesserit have always been fascinating to me. Focusing a series around that powerful order of women seemed not only relevant and inspiring but a dynamic setting for the television series,” he said prevously.

Cast

Emily Watson and Olivia Williams star as Valya Harkonnen and Tula Harkonnen, respectively, two sisters who go on to establish what will later become the Bene Gesserit, the female religious order in the Duniverse. The sisters are part of the Harkonnen family, who have a longstanding feud with the House Atreides. You might recall Vladimir Harkonnen from Dune, played by Stellan Skarsgård. This is where that beef stems from. Familial trauma is everywhere!

Jodhi May will portray Empress Natalya, who is married to Emperor Javicco, portrayed by Mark Strong. Shalom Brune-Franklin stars as Mikaela, a Freman woman who serves the Royal family. Sarah-Sofie Boussnina, Faoileann Cunningham, Aoife Hinds, Travis Fimmel, Jade Anouka, and Chris Mason also star.

Release Date

The series is slated to premiere in November. This will be a nice treat to hold fans over until the next Dune installment, which will hit theaters…eventually!

Trailer

Check out the teaser below:

Drake seems to be putting his feud with Kendrick Lamar behind him. Since dropping “Family Matters,” currently his final contribution to the diss track swap, Drake has linked up with Sexyy Red on “U My Everything” and Camila Cabello on a couple new tracks. Now, the story continues via a new Lil Yachty collab.

Streaming icon Kai Cenat previewed an unreleased Drake/Yachty track on his stream last night (July 23). The song doesn’t have an official title, but some have dubbed it “Supersoak” or “Super Soaked”

Drake sings on the chorus (per Genius), “I’m watching the moves and playin’ it close / S.O.D. (Stacks on deck), super soaked / Rainy days isn’t hers, matchin’ coat / Jet so big, it feel like a boat, stayin’ afloat / I’m watching the moves and playin’ it close / S.O.D., super soaked / She was a hoe, but I ain’t gon’ judge, ’cause that was way before.”

Drake isn’t the only one who’s kept busy in 2024. Yachty started the year by dropping his psychedelic album Let’s Start Here in January. In June, he linked up with James Blake for a joint project, Bad Cameo. Beyond Blake, he also collaborated with everybody from Faye Webster to McDonald’s.

Check out the video above.