Month: October 2024

Netflix‘s The Diplomat isn’t a spooky, Halloween-type bingewatch, but those who know that the show takes wink-wink swings at Keri Russell’s immaculate hair reputation will enjoy the mop-raising spectacle to come.

Russell’s Kate Wyler does not care about that hair because she has much more important things to do like figure out who pulled off a terrorist explosion in the first season finale. The messy hair is also milked for laughs plenty in the upcoming season, which is high comedy for certain people (myself) who live in yoga pants, and if you belong to that camp or at least appreciate that type of wry humor, you might be wondering when this season will drop.

How Does The Diplomat Season 2 Premiere?

All six episodes of The Diplomat‘s second season will stream on Thursday, October 31. Netflix generally releases new seasons at 12:00am PST/3:00am EST, so the time has almost come for Hal to infuriate his wife once more.

Speaking of Hal, do not worry about him. The season’s full trailer already revealed that Hal lives (the dude is a cockroach), which is an honest-to-god fine approach to this season because now we know that there are even more pressing matters to come. Like how Allison Janney might make everybody want to sink into the floor with one withering glance as Vice President Grace Penn. Are you looking forward to it? Good.

The Diplomat‘s second tour comes to Netflix on October 31.

Prior to the start of the 2024-25 NBA season, Netflix released its documentary series “Starting 5” that followed five NBA stars through last season. The series provided a look at the stars off-court lives, as well as some rarely heard audio from in games that goes beyond what we usually see in “Mic’d Up” segments (as those are all approved by team PR).

It was a fascinating look at LeBron James, Anthony Edwards, Jayson Tatum, Jimmy Butler, and Domantas Sabonis, with each giving fans a peek behind the curtain at the ups and downs of life in the NBA. The Netflix cameras will once again be a regular presence in the NBA this season, as they’ll be bringing “Starting 5” back for a Season 2, and on Tuesday we learned what five stars will be getting the Netflix treatment this season, via Shams Charania.

Kevin Durant, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, James Harden, Jaylen Brown, and Tyrese Haliburton are the five players letting cameras into their lives this season, as Netflix once again leans on a mix of established vets (Durant and Harden), rising stars (SGA and Haliburton), and a Celtics star wing (Jaylen Brown). With that group, Netflix figures to have a decent shot at following at least one player through the Finals, as the Thunder and Celtics are the biggest title favorites, while the Suns are a darkhorse and the Pacers were a surprise conference finals squad a year ago. If nothing else, we should get a unique behind the scenes look at one of the all-time great performers: Kevin Durant on Twitter.

When We Were Young is returning to the Las Vegas Festival Grounds next year with another scene band performing their best-known album in full.

Scheduled for October 18, 2025, the emo- and pop punk-heavy festival is headlined by Panic! At The Disco playing all of 2005’s A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out (featuring “I Write Sins Not Tragedies”). Other big names on the bill include Blink 182, Weever, Avril Lavigne, The Offspring, The Used, and Knocked Loose.

The lineup also features All Time Low, The Gaslight Anthem, Yellowcard, Simple Plan, Taking Back Sunday, Jack’s Mannequin, Mayday Parade, The Maine, Story of the Year, The Starting Line, The Story So Far, Sleeping With Sirens, Straylight Run, The Movielife, and Arm’s Length.

Tickets for When We Were Young 2025 cost $325 for general admission, $550 for general admission plus, and $650 for VIP. The pre-sale begins on Friday, November 1, at 10 am PT. You can find out more information here.

Below, check out the full lineup.

When We Were Young 2025 Lineup

Panic! At The Disco
Blink-182
Weezer
Avril Lavigne
The Offspring
All Time Low
The Used
Knocked Loose
The Gaslight Anthem
Bad Religion
Yellowcard
Ice Nine Kills
Motionless In White
I Prevail
Beartooth
Simple Plan
Kublai Khan TX
The Plot In You
Mayday Parade
Loathe
The Cab
Taking Back Sunday
Asking Alexandria
PVRIS
We Came As Eomancs
Jack’s Mannequin
The Story So Far
Never Shout Never
Alexisonfire
We Came As Romans
Story Of The Year
Sleeping With Sirens
Breathe Carolina
We The Kings
Letlive
Plain White T’s
Destroy Boys
Sunami
Crown The Empire
The Amity Affliction
Straylight Run
The Rocket Summer
Never Shout Never
Don Bronco
The Red Jumpsuit Apparatus
Taylor Acorn
The Summer Set
Alexisonfire
Holding Absence
The Movielife
Her Leather Jacket
Arm’s Length

When We Were Young 2025 Poster

Monterrey, Mexico festival Tecate Pa’l Norte, a predominant event in Mexico’s festival scene, is back: Today (October 29), the lineup for the 2025 edition, set to be held from April 4 to 6 at Parque Fundidora, was revealed. The massive 180-plus-artist lineup is led by Olivia Rodrigo, Green Day, Justin Timberlake, Charli XCX, 
Kings Of Leon, Massive Attack, Seventeen, Fall Out Boy, Gesaffelstein, The Black Keys, Caifanes, Benson Boone, Parcels, 
The Chainsmokers, and Garbage.

Early-bird tickets for the 14th edition of the festival previously went on sale on October 23 (and then sold out). But, tickets are still available now via the festival website. Of note is that Monterrey is about a 2-and-a-half-hour drive from the Texas border, so it should be relatively accessible for US-based fans to attend.

The festival set-up features different stages that serve to highlight different sounds. Per a press release, Tecate Light will host “main acts” and Tecate Original will have “a mix of music genres,” as more general stages. From there, Villa Maravilla will be home to techno, Afro-house, and house music; Oasis Stage will have reggaeton, hip-hop, and trap; Club Social will have “mainstream and EDM sounds,” the Fusión stage will be for Latin acts; Acústico will “offer a unique show with unplugged sets across the weekend”; the Sorpresa stage will have surprise performances; and the Pilos stage will showcase regional norteño music.

The Sylvester Stallone-starring Tulsa King isn’t filming in Oklahoma anymore, but that hasn’t stopped Dwight Manfredi’s story from continuing to be a hit. Writer Terence Winter has confirmed that the show’s success has led to a New Orleans-set spin off in development, and Deadline recently reported the show’s impressive current streaming numbers (“Season 2 has now averaged more than 10M global households on the streamer”), which are rapidly outpacing where the first series sat before season finale time.

The second season finale is set to stream on November 3, and the very brief (and forthright) synopsis indicates that Frank Grillo‘s Kansas City mobster, Bill Bevilaqua, “prepares for revenge.” Hold onto your crown, Dwight, and from there, the future of Tulsa King will be of interest to viewers.

Will There Be A Tulsa King Season 3?

Probably. Paramount+ hasn’t officially announced that the third season is a-go, but that hasn’t stopped Stallone from seemingly letting the news fly. As he recently divulged on Instagram, “I am elated and so proud of our cast because our show has gone up 75% over last year which is unheard of, and Season 2 got 100% on ROTTEN TOMATOES !” He then added, “Thank you so much and we are working on the third season at this moment.”

Well, he sounds thrilled, and more than that, Stallone seems to be much happier that he wasn’t filming in “hell” for the second season. You know that when an actor prefers “Hotlanta” over filming on location, well, that says something about temps in Oklahoma, but hey, Tulsa is only forecast to reach 84 degrees today (in late October).

Another question remains, however: Will Frank Grillo be in Tulsa King Season 3? We’ll be waiting to find out.

When the Miami Heat unveiled their stature of Dwyane Wade outside the Kaseya Center, they were certainly hoping to draw some coverage and attention to their effort at immortalizing one of their franchise legends. They definitely got that, but it was not the kind of attention anyone involved with the statue was hoping for, as everyone immediately pointed out that the statue’s face did not look much like Wade.

NBA fans had a lot of fun playing the “looks like” game with the Wade statue, with Laurence Fishburne, Kelsey Grammer, and Antoine Walker all getting votes, among many others. Even Wade’s longtime rival Paul Pierce thought the Heat did him dirty with the statue, posting that it looks more like Tony Allen than Wade. On Tuesday, vice presidential candidate Tim Walz got in on the fun when he joined The Dan Le Batard Show and was asked by Le Batard whether he’d seen the statue.

Walz found the Fishburne comp the funniest, but then shouted out Wade for being so gracious about what Walz called a “pretty horrific” statue. He also wanted to know how there wasn’t a process to show some folks beforehand and let them go “hey, this doesn’t look right,” which is a pretty good question. As Le Batard notes, Wade was heavily involved in the process and the Hall of Famer has stated that he loves the statue, but I’m not sure what else he’s supposed to say in this situation.

Ticketmaster is often the subject of ire for one reason or another, like earlier this year, when “dynamic pricing” for Oasis reunion tour tickets got the attention of the UK government. It turns out that Taylor Swift flat-out refused to go with the dynamic pricing model for The Eras Tour.

In an interview with HITS Daily Double, Jay Marciano, AEG Presents Chairman and CEO, was asked about what he learned from The Eras Tour, and he said, “There are a number of things Taylor did that other artists wouldn’t contemplate doing. One is, she had an opportunity to dynamically price her tickets, and she didn’t want to do that to her fans. She specifically said, ‘No dynamic pricing.’ She was willing to make decisions that potentially cut into her income because she was taking a long-term view of her career.”

While this situation went down behind closed doors, Swift has publicly shared her thoughts about Ticketmaster, specifically about the platform’s issues with the tour and how difficult the ticket-buying process ended up being. She wrote in 2022:

“Well. It goes without saying that I’m extremely protective of my fans. […] It’s really difficult for me to trust an outside entity with these relationships and loyalties, and excruciating for me to just watch mistakes happen with no recourse. There are a multitude of reasons why people had such a hard time trying to get tickets and I’m trying to figure out how this situation can be improved moving forward. I’m not going to make excuses for anyone because we asked them, multiple times, if they could handle this kind of demand and we were assured they could. It’s truly amazing that 2.4 million people got tickets, but it really pisses me off that a lot of them feel like they went through several bear attacks to get them.”

Just like Eminem, 50 Cent turned down “ridiculous amounts of money.” Unlike Eminem, however, the offer he declined was to perform at a rally for Donald Trump.

While appearing on The Breakfast Club on Tuesday, the rapper was asked by host DJ Envy whether it’s true if the Republican candidate for president offered him money to endorse him. “I got a call, but they wanted me [for] Sunday,” he answered. That was the day of Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden, which was filled with “violent and vulgar rhetoric,” including a comedian referring to Puerto Rico as “a floating island of garbage.”

50 Cent claims “they offered $3 million,” according to Variety (he was only offered $1 million for the inauguration — inflation, am I right?). He continued, “I didn’t talk to them about that kinda stuff. I’m afraid about politics. You understand? I do not like no part about them… It’s because when you do get involved in it, no matter how you feel, some one passionately disagrees with you. That’s the formula for the confusion that sent Kanye to Japan. He said something about both of those things — and now he can only go to Japan.”

Earlier this year, 50 Cent told CBS News that he sees Black men “identifying with Trump” because “they got RICO charges.” He has not publicly endorsed either candidate.

Luca Guadagnino has already made one of the best movies of 2024. Soon, he’ll put out another. A24‘s Queer stars Daniel Craig as William Lee, an American ex-pat living in Mexico City who falls for a younger man named Eugene Allerton, played by Drew Starkey. They talk, they drink, they travel to South America to do drugs. With Eugene, William can be his own queer self.

You can watch the trailer for Queer (set to a cover of Nirvana’s “All Apologies”) above.

Queer is based on the William S. Burroughs novel of the same name. Guadagnino explained why he wanted to adapt the book at the Venice Film Festival. “I was a lonely boy in Palermo, a megalomaniac and dreaming of building worlds through cinema. I read this slim book and I fell into the vivid imagination of this writer that I didn’t know at the time, the profound connection that he was achingly describing on the page between these two characters,” he said. “The romanticism of the idea of the adventure, and the adventure with someone you want and love, all of these really transformed me and changed me forever, and because I want to be loyal to that young boy, I kept thinking, I have to bring this to the screen.”

Here’s the official plot synopsis:

1950. William Lee, an American expat in Mexico City, spends his days almost entirely alone, except for a few contacts with other members of the small American community. His encounter with Eugene Allerton, an expat former soldier, new to the city, shows him, for the first time, that it might be finally possible to establish an intimate connection with somebody.

Queer, which was written by Justin Kuritzkes and also stars Lesley Manville, Jason Schwartzman, Henrique Zaga, and Omar Apollo, opens in theaters on November 27.

While performing at the Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Colorado last night (October 28), Shawn Mendes played “The Mountain,” an unreleased song he has been performing live lately. Notably, the lyrics (per Genius) address Mendes’ sexuality: “You can say I’m too young / You can say I’m too old / You can say I like girls or boys / Whatеver fits your mold.”

During the show, Mendes also spoke more directly about his sexuality, saying (as seen in this video shared on TikTok)

“Since I was really young, there’s been this thing about my sexuality, and people have been talking about it for so long. And I think it’s kind of silly, because I think sexuality is such a beautifully complex thing, and it’s so hard to just put into boxes. It always felt like such an intrusion on something very personal to me, something that I was figuring out in myself, something that I had yet to discover, and still have yet to discover.

Writing this song felt really important to me because it felt like a moment where I could address it in a way that felt close to my heart. I guess I’m just speaking freely now because I just want to be closer to everyone and be in my truth. The real truth about my life and my sexuality is that, man, I’m just figuring it out like everyone. I don’t really know sometimes, and I know other times, and it feels really scary because we live in a society that has a lot to say about that, and I’m trying to be really brave and just allow myself to be a human and feel things. That’s all I really want to say about that for now.”

Mendes’ sexuality, for those not aware, has been a talking point for years now.