Year: 2024

No one was more surprised than Taylor Tomlinson when she was announced as the newest network late-night TV host, but man, what an excellent pick by CBS. The 30-year-old comedy veteran already has toured for half her life and has racked up two punchy Netflix stand-up specials — Quarter-Life Crisis, Look At You — while careening across the U.S. In doing so, Tomlinson effortlessly gets real on difficult subjects like mental health while also comparing Taylor Swift to the Old Testament. It works.

Tomlinson came by that association naturally, given that she came into comedy while growing up in a Christian conservative family. She does not, however, keep things squeaky clean during her sets, and she will soon take over the time slot previously occupied on CBS by James Corden. No carpool karaoke here, though.

Her new show, After Midnight, will debut on Tuesday, January 16, according to Deadline. That’s only a few months after Tomlinson learned that she had the gig, and this will be a show that follows a similar format as @Midnight, that Comedy Central semi-game show hosted by Chris Hardwick.

The precise airtime? 12:37am EST. She will be the youngest late-night host on TV and the only female currently doing such honors. Ladies and gentlemen, she is damn funny, so get ready to hear a lot more about one of the top Taylors in the business.

For the first time in a while, there has been some serious buzz around potential new music from Ariana Grande, who hasn’t released an album since 2020’s Positions. Now, fans think they’ve figured out the title of Grande’s next single, thanks to Grande herself.

Recently, she was spotted sporting a sweatshirt that read, “yes, and?.” As some have noted, she did the same thing before releasing “No More Tears Left To Cry,” so it seems to some that Grande could be dropping a song called “Yes, And?” in the not-too-distant future.

Also cited as evidence bolstering the theory is the fact that celebrity photographer Miles Diggs, who took the circulating photos of Grande in the sweatshirt, liked some tweets about the potential title.

Towards the end of 2023, Grande recapped her year in a post shared on social media, calling 2023 “one of the most transformative, most challenging, and yet happiest and most special years of my life.” In another post from around the same time, Grande shared photos of herself in a recording studio and wrote, “see you next year,” which sure seems like a clear indication that new music in on the way in 2024. There have also been signs that Grande was working on a new music video recently.

In May December, the new Netflix movie from director Todd Haynes, actress Elizabeth Berry (Natalie Portman) goes deep into her next role by obsessively digging into the life of Gracie Atherton (Julianne Moore) and her husband Joe Yoo (Charles Melton). The couple notoriously made headlines thanks to Gracie being charged and arrested after being caught having underage sex with Joe. Despite the scandal, the two remained together over the years and even started a family.

If all of this sounds familiar, that’s because May December very closely mirrors the infamous real-life story of school teacher Mary Kay Letourneau and Vili Fualaau.

Via The Hollywood Reporter:

In the film, Joe is 13 when he is first seduced by Julianne Moore’s 36-year-old character. Fualaau was just 12 when a 34-year-old Letourneau first victimized him in 1996. Letourneau later pleaded guilty to two counts of child rape.

There are many other similarities. Both men are Asian/Pacific Islander — Joe is half-Korean, Fualaau is Samoan. Both father children born in prison. Both marry their female abusers after the women have served jail time for their crimes. And a key May December scene features dialogue (“Who was the boss?”) lifted directly from a televised interview with Letourneau and Fualaau.

Those similarities were not lost on Fualaau, who did not hold back his thoughts when asked to comment on May December pulling heavily from his real-life relationship with the late Letourneau, who died from cancer in 2020. According to Fualaau, the production didn’t even have the courtesy to consult him.

“If they had reached out to me, we could have worked together on a masterpiece. Instead, they chose to do a ripoff of my original story,” Fualaau told THR. “I’m offended by the entire project and the lack of respect given to me — who lived through a real story and is still living it.”

May December is available for streaming on Netflix

(Via The Hollywood Reporter)

With just six weeks until the All-Star Game, voting for the starting lineups in the East and West is well underway for fans, and this year figures to feature some incredibly tough decisions for filling out the 12-man rosters in both conferences. There are a ton of deserving players, with a number of rising stars having big years and a lot of the familiar faces around the league continuing to play at a high level.

That means eventually we will get a number of snubs that had legitimate cases, but in the meantime, we will figure out who is going to get a guaranteed spot via the fan, media, and player voting section of the process for starters. Fan voting now accounts for 50 percent of the tally for starters, and the first round of voting results yielded very few surprises when the league released the voting numbers from the past two weeks.

While the captain format is gone, LeBron James and Giannis Antetokounmpo are still your leading vote getters, as they often have been since James moved West. The current starters in each conference, if chosen by the fans would look like this:

WEST

LeBron James
Kevin Durant
Nikola Jokic
Luka Doncic
Stephen Curry

EAST

Giannis Antetokounmpo
Joel Embiid
Jayson Tatum
Tyrese Haliburton
Damian Lillard

All of those 10 players are deserving and there won’t be anyone shocked by that list. That said, it was a bit surprising to me to find Tyrese Maxey in fifth in East guard voting at just 480,000 votes (and Jalen Brunson sixth at 375,000). Trae Young is within 100,000 votes of Lillard for the final starting spot among East guards, but he has historically not done well in player voting, so it’ll be interesting to see how that race shakes out once the players and media get tallied in. On the other side, Doncic and Curry leading Shai Gilgeous-Alexander in fan voting is no surprise, even if you can make the argument SGA deserves a starting spot in the West backcourt — he is a lock to be a coaches pick, so there won’t be any real snub issues there.

There really isn’t a race in either frontcourt, as the top-3 have a clear separation in the East and West, and I’d be shocked if anything changes there even with the players and media voting still yet to happen. The only real drama with starters will come via the players and media on the guard side, who could shake up those rosters a touch, but this gives us a good idea of who will be starting for the East and West in Indianapolis in February.

Katt Williams made a rare appearance on the Club Shay Shay podcast where he proceeded to tear into Cedric the Entertainer right out of the gate. As Williams explained to host Shannon Sharpe, the comedian was still fuming over a November 2022 episode where Cedric the Entertainer denied allegations that he stole one of Williams’ jokes and used it for his closer on The Kings of Comedy special.

“I’ve seen this guy [Williams] 30 times. Like, dog, if you literally was that upset about it, like why didn’t you say nothing, like that don’t even make sense,” Cedric told Sharpe via The Hollywood Reporter. “This is some internet shit, and that’s all I can say, so, you know, when I responded to him, he didn’t respond back to me and I left it at that.”

Williams agreed to appear on Club Shay Shay to set the record straight, and the comedian went all the way off:

“He thought that I was just a no-name comedian and that he could take this joke and nobody would know,” Williams said. “The issue was that I had already done this particular joke on BET’s ComicView twice. It had done so well on BET’s ComicView that they made it part of the commercial.”

The actor-comedian continued, “This is not just a random joke, this is my best joke and it’s my last joke and it’s my closing joke. 1998, I’m doing this joke; Cedric comes to The Comedy Store. He watches me in the audience; he comes backstage; he tells me what a great job I did and how much he loves the joke. Two years later, he’s doing that as his last joke on The [Original] Kings of Comedy and he’s doing it verbatim, he just changed my car into a spaceship.”

Williams acknowledged that he never brought the issue up with Cedric the Entertainer because both he and Steve Harvey apologized to Williams for the joke theft. Williams graciously let the matter slide until Cedric started denying that he stole the joke.

“Why would you downplay me like that? Why would I give you a pass if you were just gonna lie?” Williams told Sharpe while slamming Cedric’s comedy, and at one point, threatening to “bust Cedric’s stomach.”

You can watch Katt Williams call out Cedric the Entertainer below:

(Via The Hollywood Reporter)

One of the films on the 2024 Oscars shortlist for Best International Feature is streaming now on Netflix.

Directed by J.A. Bayona (The Orphanage, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom), Society of the Snow tells the true story of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571, which crashed in the Andes mountains in 1972. Many passengers perished in the accident, and those who survived, including members of a rugby team, resorted to extreme measures to survive. Including cannibalism.

The cast includes Enzo Vogrincic, Matías Recalt, Agustín Pardella, Esteban Kukuriczka, and Tomas Wolf.

“[Society of the Snow] is a film about life in a place where life is not possible,” Bayona said when the Spanish-language movie premiered at the Venice International Film Festival to rave reviews. “And in that place, inhospitable, dead, it becomes necessary to reinvent life itself. Bonds, habits and beliefs have to adapt in the face of a terrible adversity and ultimately reveal our nature. It is there where the odyssey of the Andes becomes a universal story, which tells us about who we are in essence when, having reached the limit, camaraderie and mutual support emerge to the surface as the main survival tool.”

You can watch the powerful trailer for Society of the Snow above.

The “Steamboat Willie” version of Mickey Mouse has sailed to Walt Disney’s biggest enemy: the public domain. Much like Winnie the Pooh took his first bloody steps into the public domain last year, the Willie version of Mickey Mouse is already up for grabs, and now everyone wants a piece of that mouse, which is why there are already a handful of scary Mickey projects in the works.

This won’t be the first time Mickey’s likeness is used horrifically — he appeared in Escape From Tomorrow, the 2013 horror flick that was discretely filmed inside the Disney parks. He also appeared in his own ride, Mickey & Minnie’s Runaway Railway, where he forces Minnie to listen to his guitar playing, much like a certain Ken we know. This mouse must be stopped!

Here are all of the “Mickey” projects currently in the works (This does not include Mickey 17, Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite follow-up due this year. That’s a different Mickey. Stay alert.)

Untitled Steven LaMorte Project

With a name like LaMorte, it’s no surprise that the director is jumping at the chance to make a killer mouse flick, especially after his Terrifier 2 became a cult favorite in 2022. LaMorte said in a statement that “Steamboat Willie has brought joy to generations, but beneath that cheerful exterior lies a potential for pure, unhinged terror,” he teased, adding “and I can’t wait to unleash our twisted take on this beloved character to the world.” Production is expected to begin this spring.

Mickey’s Mouse Trap

The team behind Mickey’s Mouse Trap wasted no time promoting their new slasher and dropped the trailer on New Year’s Day, also known as The Day Willie Died. Not to be confused with Five Nights At Freddys, Mickey’s Mouse Trap follows a group of unsuspecting teens being stalked by a man in a mouse costume. No release date has been announced as of yet, but you can check out the trailer below if you’re brave.

Infestation: Origins

Yes, this one is a game, but if you’re interested in becoming one with the mouse, you might want to check it out. The rules are simple: find the mouse, kill the mouse. But could it be that easy? Probably not. The game is now available for pre-save on Steam.

(Via Deadline)

Based on the reaction to Green Day’s “American Idiot” performance on Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve, a startling number of people are just now learning what their 2004 anthem is about. Fox Business pundits cartoonishly discussed it at a roundtable, caping up for former President Donald Trump, which earned a sarcastic response from Rage Against The Machine’s Tom Morello. So, what exactly did Green Day do?

What Did Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong Say About Donald Trump?

To start the second verse, lead singer Billie Joe Armstrong adjusted the “American Idiot” lyrics from “Well, maybe I’m a f*****, America / I’m not part of the redneck agenda” to “Well, maybe I’m a f****t, America / I’m not a part of the MAGA agenda.”

If you have lived in this country for the past decade, you are probably well-aware of Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign slogan, standing for “Make America Great Again.” Under the MAGA umbrella, Trump and his supporters pushed anti-immigration, homophobic, sexist, racist, and xenophobic messaging.

This performance is far from the first time Armstrong and Green Day have side-swiped Trump. In August, Green Day placed Trump’s mugshot on their Nimrod cover and printed the image on T-shirts. Actually, Armstrong pulled off the exact same lyric switch at the 2019 iHeartRadio Festival. And well before that, in November 2016, shortly after Trump was elected Armstrong the 45th President Of The United States, Armstrong chanted “No Trump, no KKK, no fascist” during a performance of “Bang Bang” at the American Music Awards (as per Billboard).

Green Day’s forthcoming album, Saviors, covers everything from “Power pop, punk, rock, indie triumph. disease, war, inequality, influencers, yoga retreats, alt right, dating apps, masks, MENTAL HEALTH, climate change, oligarchs, social media division, free weed, fentanyl, fragility,” as the band explained when announcing the album in October. And its arrival is at the beginning of an election year? Buckle up.

Watch Green Day’s “American Idiot” performance above.

Saviors is out 1/19/2024 via Reprise Records. Find more information here.

On the latest episode of Shannon Sharpe’s show, Club Shay Shay, comedian Katt Williams spent nearly two hours shading some of the biggest names in Hollywood. While Sharpe looked on (understandably) dumbfounded, Williams unleashed rants on everyone from Cedric the Entertainer to Diddy to Steve Harvey, calling them out for past slights and stolen jokes. But of all the Black comedians on his sh*t list, Williams seemed to have the biggest beef with his Friday After Next co-star, Rickey Smiley claiming Smiley lied to him about his role in the film and even suggesting he had a clause put in his contract demanding Smiley play a woman in the follow-up, First Sunday.

Well, now Smiley’s entered the chat.

The comedian told listeners on his The Rickey Smiley Morning Show that he did, in fact, tell Williams he was originally supposed to be Money Mike — the role Williams ended up playing in the film — but ultimately, he thinks the right choice was made.

“I had no reason to lie about that,” Smiley said. “They added that whole pimp twist to that character, which was actually a better decision and made it funnier. There was no way in the hell I could have executed that role like that and I’m glad that they made that decision.”

Smiley also took offense to Williams’ comments about his character Bernice Jenkins, a long-running comedy bit that saw the radio host dress up as a grandmother in films like First Sunday. Williams said he was the reason Smiley played that role because “That’s where he’s a believable actor. Him and Tyler Perry can’t play a man to save their life. They play good women.”

“That has nothing to do with my manhood being lessened for trying to play a role and trying to put food on the table for my family,” Smiley clarified, adding that Williams’ contract “had nothing to do” with his role in First Sunday. He ended his show by wishing Williams the best and encouraging listeners to see him perform live.

(Via AL)

add tags: Rickey Smiley

One of the weirder trends that has developed online in the past few months has been an unofficial “pregnancy watch” of sorts focusing on singer-actress Halle Bailey and her boyfriend, rapper-YouTuber DDG. While Bailey’s been on promo tour for her new film The Color Purple, fans have had a field day speculating about pregnancy rumors, deciding on Christmas that this mystery child had finally been born thanks to a livestream in which Halle wore form-fitting pajamas revealing no baby bump.

DDG decided to address those fans, showing them the alleged baby via Snapchat. The only catch: the “baby” he posed with was a doll — his way of trolling people for caring too much about celebrities’ lives. During the stream, he vented, “I don’t know why people is so invested in what I got going on or what we got going on. Mind your business. Touch some grass. Go do a cartwheel in the backyard or something. It’s weird. I genuinely don’t be understanding. Why do y’all be so invested in people that don’t know you? Whatever is going on in my life or her life is not going to change yours. Let’s focus on ourselves [in] 2024. Let’s try to lock in ourselves, not other people. Please, mind your business.”