Category: News

While much of the news cycle has been focused on the results of last week’s midterm elections, The Daily Show’s Michael Kosta has been more focused on what’s happening in the financial world. Which is good news for all of us, as he has selflessly shared what the biggest shake ups in the market have taught him, which he shared on Monday night.

The big story, as far as Kosta is concerned, is that crypto exchange FTX Trading has filed for bankruptcy, meaning its customers could wait years to get their money back — if they get it back at all (as the company’s estimated million-plus creditors would be first in line to recoup any losses). In other words, it’s a pretty big deal. “People are losing their third houses because of this,” said Kosta, who did not invest in the company — and for reasons that everyone can take a lesson from:

Obviously, I didn’t invest in FTX. I didn’t like that Tom Brady was promoting it. I have a very simple investing rule: Don’t take financial advice from people who get hit in the head all day, okay? That’s why the only athletes I listen to are swimmers. They don’t get hit in the head! Now, this is important: Wait until they’re out of the pool to hear what they have to say.”

Sounds like some pretty solid advice. You can watch the full clip here, beginning around the 9:30 mark.

Travis Scott played a headlining set at the Primavera Sound music festival in Chile last night. During his performance, he made a surprising shoutout. “One of my favorite artists in the whole world is here tonight,” Scott said before butchering an attempt at Björk’s name. While we’ll give him the benefit of the doubt, as most might struggle with the Icelandic musician’s name, Scott’s version of the pronunciation came out more like “Bij-ork” — not once, but twice.

“She’s one of my biggest inspirations for why I do what I do,” he continued. “I’m so glad to be able to perform in front of her today. Björk, I f*cking love you so motherf*cking much, everybody make some motherf*cking noise.”

Some fans also discovered that Scott has sampled Björk’s music for his own work in the past. For Scott’s 2018 song, “No Bystanders,” he used a sample from her track “Jóga” for the instrumental. Although, the usage of it is very subtle.

Even more interesting, fans pointed out that the title of Scott’s next album might just be borrowed from Björk’s record too. In 2017, she released an album titled Utopia — and now, Scott is gearing up for one under the same name. The rapper’s fourth studio album will be a follow up to Astroworld.

Continue scrolling for some additional fan takes on Travis Scott’s Björk speech.

Cobra Kai superfan Andrew Garfield is simply “eating a burger, just contemplating existence” in his new GQ interview with Alex Pappademas. You probably would enjoy reading this piece, where Garfield, who was definitely-maybe not the Spider-Man with a fake butt in No Way Home, gives a shoutout to his Spider-“Buddies” with whom he was there to be “as inventive, imaginative, and kind of dumb as possible.”

Garfield, of course, has proven that he’s much more than a Spider-Dude, as he’s shown with acclaimed turns in Under the Banner of Heaven, Tick, Tick… Boom!, and The Eyes of Tammy Faye. Still, he seems to very much ruminate on the great anxieties of life in this interview. He grows emotional over his Dad losing his wife, and he talks about how he was raised to grind away in matters of work and art, and then he reveals a moment where he really connected with life, while he was hugging a toilet. This arises in the context of “ego death,” and it fits:

I didn’t exist. Like, it was the thing that I had been longing for, with my work, which is to reconnect with everything. And it’s like, OK. I get it. Let me back. I wanna go back. But I have to say, the moment after I vomited, and found my cheek against the toilet seat, this cold porcelain [laughs] — when I realised I remembered what that was against my face, I think I started sobbing. Thank God for the ego. Thank God for the delineation of things. Thank God for the world of opposites — this being my face, and that being a toilet seat. There’s plenty of time to get to the everything.

This wasn’t a story involving alcohol or the like. Rather, Garfield was discussing plant medicine and the purging that it caused. It’s similar to moments that we’ve all had but for very different reasons. I’m not sure that anyone else has been grateful to find his face against the toilet seat, but that’s what separates me from Andrew Garfield. The rest of the highly entertaining (and enlightening) GQ piece (along with a striking photoshoot) can be found here.

(Via GQ)

Before a certain MTV reality show, when you thought of New Jersey’s shore cultural impact on the world, there was only one person worth mentioning: Grammy-winning rocker Bruce Springsteen. With a whopping total of 21 albums to his name, the Garden State icon is the true personification of what it means to be “Jersey strong” as he continues to navigate the ever-changing music industry.

Keeping in alignment with his nickname, ‘The Boss,’ Springsteen kicked off the second day of his Tonight Show residency with a soulful performance of new single, “Do I Love You (Indeed I Do),” a Frank Wilson cover. The track off of his new covers album, Only The Strong Survive, is a passionate blend of Springsteen’s signature dynamic vocals and uptempo blues instrumentation. With a career spanning several decades, influencing many top-named acts like Phoebe Bridgers along the way, Springsteen has managed to keep both his core fan base and new music lovers sonically satisfied.

Joined on stage by his longtime musical support, the E Street Band (including original member David Sancious who was inducted by Springsteen into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame in 2014), Springsteen was visibly overflowing with confidence. Although The Tonight Show stage tried its best to keep up with the “Tougher Than The Rest” singer, even with the beaming blue lights, it was no match for Springsteen’s standard theatrical tour sets.

Even with a cramped stage filled with his full band and background singers, Springsteen and his vocal stand out far beyond the rest. Belting into the mic, his declaration of love feels equally urgent as it is intimate. Fans viewing at home took to Twitter to commend him for his performance, astounded at the high energy he’s still able to pour into his performances even at the tender age of 73.

Watch the full performance above.

“Gregarious” is probably not a word anyone has ever used to describe Mike Pence, unless it was in jest. “Corpse-like,” on the other hand, seems much more likely. The former vice president’s general human awkwardness was on full display when he sat down with ABC News’ David Muir — and Jimmy Kimmel ate every bit of Pence’s robotic being up with a spoon.

On Monday night, Kimmel boasted that while other networks may have had Monday Night Football, ABC had two hours of Bachelor in Paradise and “scored an exclusive hour-long interview” with Pence, which he equated to “herpes in the hot tub and then bleaching it out.” Pence, whose memoir is dropping today and, so help me god, is titled So Help Me God, spent an hour being his emotionless, android-esque self with Muir, which led to many moments of uncomfortable silence. As Kimmel explained:

Mike Pence sat with David Muir of ABC News, who asked him about one of Trump’s most inflammatory tweets on January 6th. You remember, Pence was in hiding with his family. Watch the body language here, because there is something churning inside Mike Pence that might possibly require an exorcist.

The clip is shown at the 8:00 mark of the video above, where Muir recounts Trump’s tweet that Pence “didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done” in order to overturn a completely legitimate election. If you think your screen has frozen for a second, it has not — that is just Pence’s default non-reaction to things that should have him running for cover. As the video president nods his head and nervously taps his foot, Muir and his perfect hair look on, waiting for a response. And waiting. And waiting…

Finally, Pence admits — with an astonishing lack of emotion for a man who was sought to be hanged — that “that angered me,” and that he turned to his daughter and said, “It doesn’t take courage to break the law. It takes courage to uphold the law.”

Kimmel, however, would have gone a different route. “You know what I would’ve said to my daughter at that moment? ‘Run! Hillbillies with horns want to kill daddy!’”

You can watch the full segment beginning around the 7:15 mark.

It’s probably safe to say that there is no figure more important to the Houston rap scene than DJ Screw. Active throughout the ’80s and ’90s, Screw is best known as the creator of H-Town’s signature chopped-and-screwed sound (it’s literally named after him) and the Screwed-Up Click, a collection of local rappers that included pioneers of the city’s scene like Big Hawk, Big Moe, Fat Pat, and Z-Ro. Even George Floyd was a member for a bit, rhyming on one of Screw’s many, many mixes.

Unfortunately, he was just as well known for embracing lean as his drug of choice, leading to an overdose in November of 2000 (it’ll be exactly 22 years tomorrow, November 16). His legacy lives on in the popularity of the style he created, which has since expanded and been adopted by the wider rap world, including such artists as the ASAP Mob, Rick Ross, and more. Of course, he’s still most beloved in Houston thanks to his influence on Texas stars like Paul Wall, UGK, and Travis Scott.

The latter is making his appreciation for Screw even more concrete. According to Deadline, Travis Scott is executive-producing a biopic about DJ Screw for Columbia Pictures. Director Isaac Yowman, who shot Travis’ Look Mom I Can Fly documentary, explained how the collaboration came together in a statement. “There’s been so much work done over the last year,” he said. “The studio and I, alongside Travis’s team, have been connecting with writers — identifying the best way to tell this story on paper. Screw is a music icon, in the South he’s like a God, so there’s a level of delicacy when tapping into his story. That noted I’m grateful as hell to have his sister Michelle and brother Charles in my corner as a support system. I don’t know everything, and there’s so much information out there, so being able to talk to legends like Lil’ Keke, Bun B, and D-Reck and get unbiased perspectives has been helpful with me navigating through the process.”

When she’s not starring in blockbusters and acclaimed streaming shows, or co-writing songs with Taylor Swift, or, uh, drinking milk like a cat, how does Zoë Kravitz like to spend her time? Watching good movies with her boyfriend Channing Tatum, obviously.

In an interview with GQ, where she was named the Superhero of the Year, The Batman actress discussed her relationship with Magic Mike himself. “He’s just a wonderful human. He makes me laugh and we both really love art and talking about art and the exploration of why we do what we do. We love to watch a film and break it down and talk about it and challenge each other,” she said. The first film they watched together? 1993’s True Romance, directed by the late Tony Scott and written by Quentin Tarantino.

I would absolutely watch a True Romance remake with Kravitz and Tatum in the Patricia Arquette and Christian Slater roles. Just throwing that out there.

Until then, the couple worked together on her directorial debut, Pussy Island, where Tatum proved to be a calming presence for the first-time filmmaker. “Whether it was making me tea or pouring me a drink or going to whip someone into shape — he really was my protector and it was really wonderful and sweet,” she said. “I think if you can do something like that together, it’s a good test. And we came out even stronger.”

It’s like they say, if you can make it there (Pussy Island), you can make it anywhere.

(Via GQ)

Paramount premiered Damien Chazelle‘s massive new 188 minute film, Babylon, on Monday night, and so far the reactions have been mostly positive. The heady period project stars Margot Robbie and Brad Pitt as it explores the wild excess of 1920s Hollywood, which is apparently a lot like modern day Hollywood depictions because everyone’s doing tons of coke.

If there’s one word that comes up in almost every reaction, it’s cocaine. We’re not even joking. Just take a look at what the critics are saying below:

“Babylon is an ambitious mess of a film,” Scott Menzel wrote. “I don’t even know where to begin with this one but the tone is all over the place. Margot Robbie tries but the script fails her. A love letter to cinema that made me hate cinema.”

“#Babylon feels like if someone read Damien Chazelle the story of Sodom and Gomorrah and then he said, ‘hold my beer!’” Clayton Davis tweeted. “High octane, cocaine-inducing trip. First half is great. Likely the internet’s new favorite movie of all-time. Margot Robbie and Justin Hurwitz are your stars.”

“BABYLON: Truly monstrous in its thudding insistence on shoving the viewer’s face in the muck and claiming it’s something novel or moving,” Ryan Swen wrote. “Chazelle might be the most confident director in Hollywood today, of course he’s also got some of the worst instincts out there.”

“A coked-up Margot Robbie projectile vomiting all over the face of a stuffy old man in a tux pretty much sums up the chaotic energy and glorious messiness of BABYLON,” Kevin Polowy tweeted. “Truly the strangest, most debaucherous love letter to Hollywood ever.”

You can see more Babylon reactions below:

Here’s the official synopsis:

From Damien Chazelle, Babylon is an original epic set in 1920s Los Angeles led by Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie and Diego Calva, with an ensemble cast including Jovan Adepo, Li Jun Li and Jean Smart. A tale of outsized ambition and outrageous excess, it traces the rise and fall of multiple characters during an era of unbridled decadence and depravity in early Hollywood.

Babylon opens in theaters on December 23.

As an actor, Eminem has a relatively limited filmography, but he made his time on screen count with a classic starring role in 2002’s 8 Mile. Around that time, though, he apparently came close to starring in a film adaptation of one of the biggest video game franchises ever: Grand Theft Auto.

In a new episode of BBC’s Bugzy Malone’s Grandest Game podcast (as NME reports), Kirk Ewing, a game industry veteran and friend of GTA creators Sam and Dan Houser, told the story. Around the time of Grand Theft Auto 3‘s release in 2001, a Hollywood agent approached Ewing with an offer of $5 million for the rights to a GTA movie starring Eminem and directed by Tony Scott (who directed Top Gun). However, the Housers were not interested.

Ewing said, “I think at that point it was still in Sam’s mind that it might be something that he wanted to do. “He said ‘Kirk, we’ve got Eminem to star, and it’s a Tony Scott film. $5 million on the nose. Are you interested?’ And I phoned up Sam and I said, ‘Listen to this: They want Eminem in the Grand Theft Auto movie and Tony Scott to direct.’ And he said, ‘Not interested.’”

Ewing also noted that at the time, the brothers felt “the media franchise that they had was bigger than any movie that was going on at the time.”

Indeed, it was: 2013’s Grand Theft Auto V is the second best-selling video game ever, behind only Minecraft.

Drake recently celebrated having his collaborative album with 21 Savage, Her Loss, hit No. 1 on the Billboard charts, as did a select handful of songs from the record. Yet, after “Rich Flex” came in only second place — with Taylor Swift’s “Anti-Hero” spending a third week at the top — the Canadian rapper decided to throw what many suspect is some serious shade.

Although Drake and Swift have appeared to have a longtime friendship, from posing for photos together since 2013 to hanging outside of award shows, his new Instagram Story covered her chart placement completely with emojis. It sparked the question: why? And if it wasn’t shade, why didn’t he cover up the other placement in the top 10 from Sam Smith and Kim Petras?

To make matters worse, Drake’s album producer Vinylz had some even more shady words on his social media. “The world knows what the real #1 song is… #RichFlex,” he wrote.”No tricks on this side.”

Just last month, The Sun claimed that the duo had recorded a diss track together for her 2017 album, Reputation, but it didn’t make the cut. As she is in the process of re-recording her albums, she might’ve wanted to revisit their song for the eventual Reputation (Taylor’s Version) release. However, Drake has also since deleted the photo he had with Swift from his Instagram.

Continue scrolling for some additional fan reactions.