Category: News

Expectations were tempered heading into the release of Wonka, a musical prequel to the iconic Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory starring Gene Wilder. This time around, Timothée Chalamet would be in the title role with Paddington director Paul King at the helm. When the first trailer hit, reactions were mixed, but that’s definitely not the case with the movie itself.

As the first reactions to Wonka pour in, there’s an overwhelming sense of surprise. People can’t believe how much fun the movie is, and Chalamet’s performance is apparently out of this world.

You can see what folks are saying below:

“It’s DELICIOUS – Timmy’s all in,” Jason Adams tweeted. “Total charm and glee and goofball music man razzmatazz magic, and Paul King delivers yet again. SUCH FUN.”

“#Wonka is an instant holiday classic & a truly magical time at the movies,” Zoë Rose Bryant wrote. “Paul King’s whimsical style works as well here as it did in paddington, every musical number enchants, & the entire ensemble takes turns stealing the show, led by an endlessly charming Timothée Chalamet.”

“If I’m being honest: I wasn’t expecting much when I walked into #Wonka,” Jake Hamilton tweeted. “But I fell in love with a charming, heartfelt and pretty spectacular musical that is a loving tribute to everything we love about the ‘71 original. Chalamet is unbelievably fun and charismatic as Wonka.”

#Wonka is SHOCKINGLY good,” Grace Randolph tweeted. “Paul King delivers a movie along the lines of #Paddington for adults turning Wonka into a male #MaryPoppins! The movie manages to be its own thing and is as fun as seeing a live Broadway show! Definitely this year’s big holiday movie!”

“Paul King proves both PADDINGTON films were far from being a fluke with #Wonka,” Sara M Fetters tweeted. “Takes a moment to find its footing but, when it does, this is a scrumdiddlyumptious sorta prequel filled to the candy-colored brim with delectable delights. Can’t wait to see it again.”

You can see more reactions to Wonka below:

Wonka opens in theaters on December 15.

The debate over whether The Nightmare Before Christmas is a Halloween or Christmas movie rages on, but one thing is for sure: Fargo is a Nightmare Before Christmas show. There have been a pair of references to Henry Selick’s 1993 stop-motion masterpiece so far in season five: a “This is Halloween” needle drop and Gator (played by Joe Keery) wearing a Jack Skellington mask.

Creator Noah Hawley included the song in the two-part premiere simply because “I like that movie!” he told Entertainment Weekly. “It’s a specific choice, and I chose that movie because it’s a favorite of my house. My kids will grow up and watch Fargo one day and it will feel meaningful to them. We had to get a blessing from Tim Burton to do it, which is great.”

As for the menacing mask, “[Jack is] someone who, much like Joe Keery’s character, is trying to be something he’s not, which is an evil, scary dude when, really, he’s a softie,” Hawley explained. “There’s just too much pressure on Gator, and he’s always trying to live up to those expectations while at the same time, deep down, with a different father, he would have been a kind soul.”

Gator’s father is played by Jon Hamm. If there’s a Nightmare sequel, maybe he can voice Jack Skellington’s dad? Or better yet, don’t make a sequel, because The Nightmare Before Christmas is perfect as is.

(Via Entertainment Weekly)

At long last, Spotify Wrapped has arrived. Today (November 29), Spotify has gifted users with interactive statistics based on their listening habits. In each Wrapped, listeners get a fun, colorful summary featuring their most listened-to songs, albums, and artists. Spotify also puts together a nifty little playlist featuring each listener’s most listened-to songs, as well as an assessment of their mood and personality.

As this year’s Spotify Wrapped begins to unwrapped, Spotify users have questions as to how they can access their annual stats.

Is Spotify Wrapped only for Premium users?

Both Spotify Free and Spotify Premium users can see their Wrapped statistics. However, Spotify Premium users will have access to some more interactive features. The aforementioned mood and personality assessment will only be available for viewing on the Wrappeds of Premium users.

Some of the newer features also include “Me in 2023,” which assigns each listener one of 12 characters specific to their listening habits, in a tarot-like fashion. Another feature called “Sound Town” matches each user to a city based on the songs and artists they’ve listened to.

According to a press release, listeners will also get their top five genres presented to them in a “sandwich-inspired design.”

All Spotify users can see their individual Wrappeds here.

Today, Spotify rolled out their annual Wrapped feature for 2023, giving listeners a chance to discover what their top songs or most-listened-to artists were. As many wait for the lists each year, new users might be wondering how exactly to find theirs.

Here’s what to know.

How To Find Your Spotify Wrapped For 2023

Spotify Wrapped for 2023 can be accessed through the app on your phone, typically with a pop-up alerting you that it’s ready. If you don’t receive a pop-up, you can also tap under the Wrapped section on the homepage.

For users who still aren’t seeing it or can’t access their Wrapped on the Spotify app, you can try entering through spotify.com/wrapped on a web browser. It will prompt you to sign into your account before showing your Top Listens that way.

Along with showing users their top artists and songs, Spotify Wrapped is also revealing your most-listened genres, where on Earth matches your listening history, your listening personality type, your top podcasts, and more. For those who reached a top percentage of a musician’s listeners, you might even get a special video message from them — as artists like Taylor Swift, Boygenius, and more filmed ones this year.

Enjoy, and happy reveal day to all who celebrate.

Today (November 29) is Spotify Wrapped day, as the world’s leading music streaming platform has unveiled its year-end lists of what artists, songs, albums, and more enjoyed the most streaming activity in 2023. As for what songs were the biggest this year, it depends on where you look.

On the global list, Miley Cyrus’ “Flowers” wound up on top. If you focus in on just the US, though, Morgan Wallen’s “Last Night” takes home the crown. SZA crushed it on both lists, and both ranks have her at No. 2 with “Kill Bill.”

Check out the top 10 songs lists for both the world and just the US below, and find more of Spotify’s year-end data here.

Spotify’s Most-Streamed Songs Globally For 2023

1. Miley Cyrus — “Flowers”
2. SZA — “Kill Bill”
3. Harry Styles — “As It Was”
4. Jung Kook — “Seven” Feat. Latto
5. Eslabon Armado and Peso Pluma — “Ella Baila Sola”
6. Taylor Swift — “Cruel Summer”
7. Metro Boomin, The Weeknd, and 21 Savage — “Creepin’”
8. Rema and Selena Gomez — “Calm Down”
9. Bizarrap and Shakira — “Shakira: Bzrp Music Sessions, Vol. 53”
10. Taylor Swift — “Anti-Hero”

Spotify’s Most-Streamed Songs In The US For 2023

1. Morgan Wallen — “Last Night”
2. SZA — “Kill Bill”
3. Miley Cyrus — “Flowers”
4. Eslabon Armado and Peso Pluma — “Ella Baila Sola”
5. PinkPantheress and Ice Spice — “Boy’s a liar Pt. 2”
6. Taylor Swift — “Cruel Summer”
7. Zach Bryan — “Something in the Orange”
8. Morgan Wallen — “You Proof”
9. Metro Boomin, The Weeknd, and 21 Savage — “Creepin’”
10. Taylor Swift — “Anti-Hero”

Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Happy Spotify Wrapped Day. To celebrate, Taylor Swift finally put one of her best “from the vault” songs on streaming services.

“Um ok this is unreal?? I just wanted to say to anyone who listened to my music this year, anywhere in the world, thank you,” Swift wrote on X. “Getting named Spotify’s Global Top Artist in 2023 is truly the best birthday/holiday gift you could’ve given me. We’ve seriously had THE MOST fun this year out there on tour and now this. Are you serious. So I was trying to think of a way to thank you, and a lot of you have been asking me to put ‘You’re Losing Me (From The Vault)’ on streaming… so here you go! You can finally listen EVERYWHERE now.”

“You’re Losing Me” was initially released on the “late night” edition of her 2022 album Midnights, but the only way to hear the song was to buy the physical album or download the digital copy. It was nowhere to be found on Spotify or Apple Music (which released its Apple Music Replay on Tuesday), but now it’s available on the streaming service of your choosing.

Over the sound of a beating heart, Swift sings in the chorus, “Stop, you’re losin’ me / I can’t find a pulse / My heart won’t start anymore for you / ‘Cause you’re losin’ me.” The song is rumored to be about her breakout with Joe Alwyn. Later, in the bridge, she wonders “how long could we be a sad song / ‘Til we were too far gone to bring back to life?” Then, the line that’s bound to caption millions of Instagram captions: “And I wouldn’t marry me either / A pathological people pleaser / Who only wanted you to see her.”

You can listen below, as well as see reactions.

Spotify Wrapped is the perfect way to music fans to end the year: New music releases slow down in the weeks leading up to Christmas, so it’s a good time to reflect on what the past year in music was like. Well, good news: Spotify Wrapped 2023 was unveiled today (November 29). Aside from offering users a look at their own listening habits, Spotify also unveils what artists, songs, albums, and more were the most popular on the platform over the past year.

This year’s top artist shouldn’t be a major surprise: It’s Taylor Swift. Between her two new Taylor’s Version albums (Speak Now and 1989) and The Eras Tour (and all the buzz that created around her catalog in general), Swift was huge in 2023, as she topped both the global and US most-streamed artists charts.

Check out the top 10 artist lists for both the world and just the US below, and find more of Spotify’s year-end data here.

Spotify’s Most-Streamed Artists Globally For 2023

1. Taylor Swift
2. Bad Bunny
3. The Weeknd
4. Drake
5. Peso Pluma
6. Feid
7. Travis Scott
8. SZA
9. Karol G
10. Lana Del Rey

Spotify’s Most-Streamed Artists In The US For 2023

1. Taylor Swift
2. Drake
3. Morgan Wallen
4. The Weeknd
5. Bad Bunny
6. 21 Savage
7. SZA
8. Zach Bryan
9. Kanye West
10. Peso Pluma

Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Cardi B has long been open and proud about her time working in the strip club, before she came to fame through her music. Those days are behind her now, though, so she’s presumably not practicing her moves as often as she used to. The way Cardi sees it, when it comes to twerking, she’s rusty and just not very good at it anymore.

In a recent social media post (as HipHopDX notes), Cardi shared a video of herself with her backside to the camera as she twerked and shook it around. She wasn’t impressed by herself, though, as her on-screen text read, “Body on 10, Twerk on 0 [crying laughing emoji].”

Judge for yourself:

Meanwhile, there’s a chance Cardi will share something new before 2023 ends: A couple weeks ago, she said, “I was thinking about, you know, being really quiet, being private. But I don’t know. Maybe I should just… I don’t know, maybe I should put a lil’ something something out before the year ends. It depends, though, because… hmm, would y’all mind if I just do, like, a video? I don’t know, if I do a music video that’s just probably in my kitchen because I don’t really have nothing planned for, like, right now. I don’t know. I’ll think about it by the end of the day. I don’t know, I don’t know. I just feel like I gotta talk my sh*t a little bit. You know what I’m saying? I don’t know, I don’t know.”

Cardi B is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Teacher Bret Turner thought he’d kick off the morning with his first-grade students using a little riddle.

On the whiteboard in the front of the class, he scrawled it out in black marker:

“I am the beginning of everything, the end of everywhere. I’m the beginning of eternity, the end of time & space.”

One student raised their hand, the first to venture a guess.

Now, the answer, of course, is the letter “E.” (Get it!?) But the student had a different idea.

“Death?”

Turner later described the incident on Twitter in a post that’s now gone massively viral. “Such an awed, somber, reflective hush fell over the class that I didn’t want to tell them that actually the answer is the letter ‘E’, which just seemed so banal in the moment,” he wrote.

u201cThe first guess from one of my 1st graders was u201cdeathu201d and such an awed, somber, reflective hush fell over the class that I didnu2019t want to tell them that actually the answer is the letter e, which just seemed so banal in the momentu201d

— Bret Turner (@Bret Turner)
1514935897

People on Twitter got a huge kick out of the somewhat dark, existential moment. But there might just be an important lesson buried in this story somewhere about how to process “the end.”

Many users who replied to the Tweet were impressed by the unnamed kid’s thoughtfulness and ability to understand the concept of death at such a young age. (How many first graders would peg death as “the beginning of eternity?”)

But it turns out that kids are much more perceptive than we give them credit for.

An article in National Geographic breaks down the three key truths that children must eventually learn about death. First, that it’s irreversible (people who die aren’t just on vacation). Second, it makes your body non-functional (people who are dead aren’t just asleep). And third, it’s universal (everything and everybody dies eventually).

Some studies have shown that kids start to understand the concept as young as 3 years old and gradually learn to accept the many layers of it in the years that follow.

It takes time for anyone to fully grasp the gravity and foreverness of death. But we ought to learn to appreciate the whimsical, partial understanding that young children have.

Some Twitter users who read Turner’s account of the riddle accused the student in question of having a morbid personality or an unusual fascination with the macabre. After all, few adults would be brave enough to blurt out something so dark.

It’s a lot more likely the kid just hasn’t been conditioned to fear death yet, to speak about it in hushed tones — if at all. This might be the same kind of kid who finds out his grandma has died and says, casually, “Oh, OK. Bye, grandma! See you soon!”

When you think about it, that’s actually a pretty sweet and remarkably peaceful way of thinking about death. So let’s stop rushing kids into having adult-sized worries about the world and let them discover it at their own pace.

As long as it gives us funny moments like this one, anyway.

This article originally appeared on 01.12.18

Eight teams are still alive in the race to win the NBA Cup for the first time. After the dust settled on Tuesday night’s slate of In-Season Tournament games, group play officially came to an end, which means the Knockout Rounds are on the horizon.

In the Eastern Conference, the Milwaukee Bucks earned the top overall seed, and as a result, they’ll square off against the New York Knicks, which earned the Wild Card. The other game pits a group of up-and-comers in the conference, the Indiana Pacers, against a juggernaut in the East, the Boston Celtics. The Western Conference is just as fun, as the Los Angeles Lakers grabbed the No. 1 seed and will take on the Phoenix Suns, while the Sacramento Kings won a thriller on the final night of the group to earn a home game against the New Orleans Pelicans.

Shortly after the dust settled, the NBA announced the television info for the four quarterfinal matchups. Here’s how it breaks down (all times EST):

Monday, Dec. 4

Boston Celtics vs. Indiana Pacers, 7:30 p.m., TNT
New Orleans Pelicans vs. Sacramento Kings, 10 p.m., TNT

Tuesday, Dec. 5

New York Knicks vs. Milwaukee Bucks, 7:30 p.m., TNT
Phoenix Suns vs. Los Angeles Lakers, 10 p.m., TNT

The four winning teams are heading to Las Vegas for the semifinals and finals of the inaugural In-Season Tournament. The semis will take place on Dec. 7, while the finals will be held on Dec. 9.