Category: News

(WARNING: Spoilers for She-Hulk Episode 5 below.)

As She-Hulk: Attorney at Law smashes into the back half of its ten episode season, the Disney+ series is turning into one heck of a cameo bonanza, despite Tatiana Maslany‘s fourth wall-breaking protests to the contrary. After already featuring Mark Ruffalo’s Hulk, Abomination, Wong, and the MCU’s newest star, Madisynn, Episode 5 dropped a major hint that a heavily-anticipated character will be leaping onto the show soon. That character? Charlie Cox’s Daredevil.

After making his first post-Netflix appearance in Spider-Man: No Way Home, Cox will appear in costume for the first time in an upcoming episode of She-Hulk. His arrival was teased in a trailer for the show, which featured Matt Murdock wearing his old school yellow costume from the comics. (Marvel is big into bringing back retro costumes lately.)

According to She-Hulk creator Jessica Gao, Cox was totally onboard with making Daredevil fit into the show’s more irreverent tone while still keeping that badass Daredevil edge.

“He has such reverence and love for that character,” Gao told Collider. “It’s clear that the character meant so much to him, but he also came very game to play around. He was totally up for more funny banter and having this fun dynamic with Jen and She-Hulk. It really feels like the character from the comics.”

While Daredevil does not appear in Episode 5, viewers were shown a sneak peak of his new yellow helmet while Jen Walters was meeting with a superhero fashion designer to find some better clothes for when she’s hulking out. Daredevil’s helmet is seen sitting in a box before being quickly covered up, but that was enough for Marvel fans to start freaking out on social media that ol’ hornhead’s cameo is coming soon.

You can see some of the Daredevil reactions below:

She-Hulk: Attorney at Law streams new episodes Thursday on Disney+.

Bridgerton‘s second season managed to rack up a record number of views for Netflix even though it wasn’t as steamy as the season about Daphne and the Duke. So naturally, people want to know about Season 3, which will revolve around Penelope Featherington and Anthony Bridgerton. Of course, this romance will likely be complicated by Penelope’s secret identity as Lady Whistledown, so expect some drama when her gossip-rag shenanigans fully come into public view. And the show’s also already renewed for Season 4, so the Regency fireworks won’t stop anytime soon from Shondaland on Netflix.

What actually sounds more interesting, though, is the in-the-works spinoff that details more background about Queen Charlotte, who’s one of the more IDGAF characters on the show. From the smallest details — like questions about what she’s snorting on the show — to speculation about her early life, the show’s audience is primed. So, what are the details on when we’ll see this spinoff, as well as Season 3?

So far, we don’t have any concrete confirmation on release dates. However, Netflix will hold a (September 24) Tudum Fan Event, which will likely drop some hefty Charlotte spinoff information as well as some teases about the series proper’s third season. We can guess, though, that we’ll see Charlotte’s show — where the younger version of the monarch will be played India Amarteifio, and the older one still portrayed by Golda Rosheuvel — before more O.G. Bridgerton. Nailing down a Season 3 date is tricky, given that we saw Season 1 on December 25, 2020 and Season 2 on March 25, 2022. This was all complicated by the pandemic, of course, but we can cross fingers for Season 3 in mid-to-late 2023.

Hopefully, that means we’ll see Queen Charlotte’s show sooner, which will feature both older and younger versions of her origins, likely tweaked for our entertainment. This show will also feature Violet Bridgerton and Lady Danbury, but again, Tudum should have more details on all of this Bridgerton madness. Keep your eyes open on Saturday, September 24 for more news.

Bridgerton‘s second season is currently streaming on Netflix.

Kanye West has spent the past several weeks agitating against his business partners at Gap and now accuses the company of violating their contract with him in a letter sent to the company by his lawyer. According to CNBC, Kanye now wants to terminate the deal altogether, despite having four years left to go on the original term of the partnership. The main sticking point, according to West’s lawyer Nicholas Gravante, is the distribution of Yeezy products by the second half of 2021 and the creation of dedicated Yeezy Gap stores.

Per the original deal, Yeezy would be solely owned by Kanye, who would receive royalties and equity based on the sales. Pending the sales meeting certain targets, Yeezy stood to earn up to 8.5 million shares, with some sources valuing the partnership at nearly $1 billion. Although some Yeezy products were made available in Gap’s Times Square store in New York, Ye’s lawyers claim that they don’t count toward the terms of the partnership because they were a collaboration with Balenciaga — a separate deal altogether.

When the deal was signed with Yeezy back in 2020, Gap believed that the famous rap star’s cosign would boost slumping sales, but the quarterly earnings report released this August revealed disappointing results for the first half of 2022. Earlier this month, Kanye said he planned to continue the Yeezy apparel brand without Gap once the contract expired, but now it appears he’s trying to force that to happen sooner rather than later.

The Taylor Hawkins tribute concert in London earlier this month was packed full of star-power, with a lineup featuring Nile Rodgers, Queens Of The Stone Age’s Josh Homme (including a Them Crooked Vultures reunion), AC/DC’s Brian Johnson, Metallica’s Lars Ulrich, Paul McCartney, Hawkins’ 16-year-old son Shane Hawkins, and many others. Perhaps one of the more unexpected appearances came from Kesha, who’s more known for pop hits than she is rocking out.

Kesha herself admits that her appearance may have struck some as odd, but now she’s discussed the long relationship she has had with Hawkins and the rest of Foo Fighters.

She spoke with NME for a recent feature about the tribute show, explaining how she came to know the group:

“It was an overwhelming day for everyone. I’ve never played anything like that. I’m sure I seemed like one of the more random choices to take part, but I’ve been friends with the band for ages. I remember when ‘Tik Tok’ first came out [in 2009], I met [Foo Fighters] backstage at Madison Square Garden and I was definitely having some real imposter syndrome. Taylor, his wife Alison, Dave [Grohl], and Pat [Smear] all really took me under their wing and reassured me, ‘You’re good; you’re home.’”

Kesha also talked about a memorable moment she and the band had in Japan years later, saying, “The night [2017 album] Rainbow hit No. 1, I was with them in a rock club in Japan and it was such a beautiful night. They were always so supportive and made me feel so appreciated. I’ve always felt like a misfit, first in society then in the pop world, but Taylor and the rest of the band were one of the few people that accepted me with open arms. That’s why I wanted to be there, for whatever they needed. Taylor was just a ray of light.”

She also noted of how Hawkins and company inspired her, “I’ll always remember to give back and be kind to new artists, because I know how much it meant to me when Taylor and the Foos were so welcoming. [I want] to keep making a safe place for musicians that isn’t a competitive space; it’s a family and I want anybody that enters music to feel like they’re part of this community.”

Read the full feature here.

Earlier this year, Dublin rockers Fontaines DC unveiled their latest album Skinty Fia to follow 2020’s A Hero’s Death. Known for riding the wave of Joy Division-influenced post-punk by making dreary yet invigorating anthems, one song on the LP that introduces some color is “Roman Holiday,” which they brought to The Late Late Show With James Corden last night.

Vocalist Grian Chatten sings in a hypnotic drawl as he paces the stage and surrenders his body to Ian Curtis-like twitches. The instrumentation is vibrant and immersive, sometimes slowing down into a meditative, shoegazey state and then building back into a strong whirlwind.

Upon unleashing the song in April, Chatten said in a statement about it: “‘Roman Holiday’ makes me think of the wide streets of north London in the Summer and the urge to discover them at night time. The thrill of being a gang of Irish people in London with a bit of a secret language and my first flat with my girlfriend.”

It came with a very dramatic and entertaining video involving a kidnapped teddy bear that was “the result of attempting to challenge the monarchy and watching too much of The Rockford Files.”

Watch the band perform “Roman Holiday” above.

A judge has granted Tory Lanez’s latest request to postpone his criminal trial in the alleged shooting of Megan Thee Stallion. According to Rolling Stone, the trial was set to begin this month, but Tory requested the delay because his defense lawyer Shawn Holley is currently wrapped up with another case. In addition to granting the postponement, Judge David Herriford also ordered Kelsey Harris, Meg’s former friend and one of the primary witnesses to the events in question, to return to court on the new date, December 9. Jury selection would begin on December 5.

The trial has been postponed several times — mostly by Tory Lanez’s request — since LA prosecutors first brought charges of assault with a semiautomatic firearm and carrying a loaded, unregistered firearm in a vehicle against him in October of 2020. Megan had accused Tory of shooting her in the back of her feet after an argument following a party in Hollywood in July 2020. Although aspersions have been cast on Megan’s account, she has adamantly maintained that Tory was the shooter and medical records have corroborated that she did have bullet fragments removed from her feet. Tory pled not guilty and maintains his own innocence.

Megan Thee Stallion is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Ti West, who broke onto the indie horror scene with 2009’s House Of The Devil, which he wrote and directed, belongs to an elite fraternity of filmmakers. Thus far, in fact, a fraternity of one: filmmakers who have punched me in the face.

We met at a Fantastic Fest eight or nine years ago, when West was scheduled for an exhibition boxing match against Drafthouse founder Tim League, and discovered that we were both, for lack of a better term, MMA dorks. He invited me to the kickboxing gym where he trains the next time I was in LA, and we sparred a little. (I’d like to think I hit him in the face a few times too). He’s made three or four films since then, including X, an acclaimed (94% on RottenTomatoes) horror film about a 1970s porn crew who run into trouble at an isolated farmhouse, released in March. Now, barely four months later, he has another movie hitting theaters, Pearl, a prequel to X, also distributed by A24.

With Mia Goth reprising her role (she played both porn ingenue and old woman in X), Pearl takes place in 1918, in the wake of the Spanish flu pandemic. Pearl and Maxine from X were always meant to be two sides of the same coin (hence using the same actress), and if Maxine was inspired by the glow of Hollywood to make porn in X, Pearl yearns for the stardom of a different era. Pearl exists, then, partly as its titular character’s technicolor fever dream, allowing West to go wild with stylistic homage, a textural 180 from X despite being shot on essentially the same set in New Zealand.

Despite West being a filmmaker and me being a film critic, probably 90% of our conversations over the years been about MMA. Interviewing him about movies always feels a little like we’re playacting the roles of “professional.” The upside is that I feel like I get more of sense of what it’s actually like to make movies from West than I do from most filmmakers and actors making the rounds, who have been doing essentially the same interviews for entire days where the questions and answers mostly stay the same and only the interviewers’ faces change.

And it’s an interesting niche Ti West now inhabits. He’s become something of a low-budget James Cameron. In the midst of promoting Pearl, which he shot almost back to back with X, he’s gotten the greenlight on Maxxxine, an 80s-set sequel to X, turning it all into a full-fledged franchise. It’s a position unique probably only to him at this point, the auteur of a horror franchise as prolific as Insidious but with the arthouse cachet of A24. And who better to try to explain that to than someone you’ve punched in the face?

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X is sort of a horror movie about porn and then this is kind of a prequel without the porn. Did you ever worry the audience was going to be like, “Hey, man, where’s the porn?”

Porn is obviously a part of X for sure, but I always thought of X as more of an entrepreneurial thing about these young people who are like, “Oh, our way into the film business is via porn. We can become our own stars and we can pay for our own movie and we can use our own talent and we can distribute it ourselves.” And it always felt like that was their outsider’s way into the film business.

Horror and porn have always had a sort of symbiotic relationship of being like that in the movie business. You could, especially in the seventies, independently forge your own path. And so that was a movie about people who were affected by filmmaking in some way. And then Pearl, she’s just being affected by filmmaking in a more wondrous, ambitious, dream kind of way. The glitz and glamor of a life that you get from being a dancer or being in the movies. Just trying to show a different kind of cinema and a different way into it. But I mean, Pearl does get to see a little bit of porn.

In X it seems like their jumping-off point is that they think they found a really good location to make their movie. That seems like part of your own process in the movies that you’ve made.

Yeah, definitely. I mean, when you’re making low-budget movies, whatever you can get out of what you have is a major tool in a way. So for me, certainly with making low-budget horror movies for many years, it was always like– I think there’s a line X where they first get to the farm and RJ is like, “It’s going to add a lot of production value!” And that’s the kind of dumb stuff I say, when I’m going around looking for places. “Like, oh, this is going to be great. This is going to make the movie seem big.” And it’s really just a field that we have.

I think when I talked to you about maybe In A Valley of Violence, that was part of the jumping-off point, was that you had a really good location for it.

Yeah. I knew about a location in New Mexico that was a Western town. I knew what was there. So if I write something that made sense in the town that was already there, we’d have to augment it, but we don’t have to build it. And in many ways that’s how Pearl came together, was we built this barn for X and we built the bunk house and we changed so much of the infrastructure of the location that we were shooting in, and I was like, well, why would we just tear this down? We can just paint it bright red and now it’s a new movie.

What was the turnaround like between this one and X?

There really wasn’t much turnaround. They said we were going to make X, and we were going to make it in New Zealand because it was peak COVID and it was safe to make the movie there. I felt like, “Well, we’re going to New Zealand and we have all these visas, we have this crew and we have the cast, and we’re building all of these locations, it’d be a shame to just finish the movie, tear it all down and go home. Maybe we can make two movies.” But a sequel to X didn’t really make sense because I didn’t want to make a movie where more people showed up at the same farm and terror ensures, so, the only thing that made sense to use all the same stuff was to go backwards.

So once we shot X, we knew we were making Pearl. When we finished shooting X, it was about three weeks in between the two movies, which was a frantic month of putting up wallpaper and painting things and trying to get all kinds of different period props in there. It was wild. It was a really unique experience. I was there for 13 months. I went there thinking I was going to be there for three, four months if I wanted to do some tourism. And then it was 13 months because I ended up doing all the post-production there.

How much fun is it to shoot gore as a horror filmmaker?

It’s much more fun to watch than it is to do because to do it is just really technical. You’re just so nervous that it’s not going to work. So you’re either fussing with a tube and blood and it’s not working right and you’re just frustrated and you’re running over time or it’s like, you get one chance with it because you only have one of these things. If we’re going to throw a model T into the water, you got to get it on that first try because doing it twice is going to be a real hassle.

And so it’s very stressful and sort of tedious, but it is the stuff that when all put together, you never see any of that in so it is the most fun to see. I mean, the scene where she attacked [redacted for spoiler] with the axe, that’s one take. It’s very hard and they’re running full speed and it was a camera on a crane, on a Porsche that had to go up and it was just like, we have to do this and then a whole bunch of other shit today, but this has got to be great. That was hard to choreograph and hard to do. It turned out how I’d hoped, but it was definitely nerve-wracking.

Do you have any super specific pet peeves when you’re watching other people’s movies, about how certain gore should look? Where you’re like, “Oh, come on that blood’s too light or that’s not what guts should look like!”

I have it with CGI. I’m not like, “You should never use CGI,” but when you use CGI for gore stuff, what it’s great for is like, “Oh man, this is the best take we have, and you can see the tube.” Well, with CGI, you can take the tube out and that’s a great tool. But now it’s so much easier, to put everything from squib hits from people getting shot or stabbed or whatever, this sort of CGI blood in. And no matter what you do, it just doesn’t look right. Because it’s not really there. And there’s something that’s not as visceral about it. And part of what you’re trying to do is sell something that’s kind of gross or at least gives you a reaction. I tend to just see CGI stuff and just go “Well, there’s some CGI,” rather than be like, he got shot, and that really kicks me out of it. It’s become so prevalent for obvious reasons, it’s just much faster, but it doesn’t really feel the same.

When you’re designing all your FX and stuff like that, what’s the pettiest reason you’ve ever had to make a prop guy or an FX guy redo a thing? Do you ever end up putting something in the movie just because you feel too bad about having them remake it again?

It’s probably happened. Off the top of my head I can’t think of… I mean, there’s probably certainly times where you’re like, I don’t love this, but don’t want to break someone’s heart over it and let’s find a way to do it. But yeah, I’m pretty obsessive in prep, so I try to get ahead of all that. And most of those tech scenarios happen prior to making a movie where you’re in the office and you’re like, I’m going to have to tell this person that we got to redo this and that’s going to be brutal, but that’s also just part of it, you know.

Do you have to get yourself into a mindset where you can forgive yourself for being super anal and critical and meticulous about that stuff in order to get it done right?

It just kind of comes with the territory. Making a movie is just really traumatic. It’s a series of mistakes and failures that you’re trying desperately to hold off and they keep encroaching upon you. So for me personally, I have to be very meticulous and I have to be very planned and have to be expecting everything to go wrong so that when it does, rather than be devastated by it, I have the backup plan ready to go. I go in as a pessimist and hopefully I’m pleasantly surprised throughout the day. That’s the way that I approach it because it’s so unlikely that any of the stuff would ever work well, for instance, throwing a model T into the water or an alligator that was practical, that was on a winch that had a moving tail and all this stuff. It’s like, all these parts in theory should work, but when the time comes to do it, if it doesn’t work, it’s a real hassle to fix. And you’re just desperately trying to get it. There’s no shortage of times on a film set where you’re off by yourself in the corner, just sitting on the ground, thinking like, “Oh God, how am I going to fix this?”

I’ve read that there are two types of filmmakers, where some really enjoy the pre-production process, and then the actual production process is just a nightmare for them. And then other types where the production part is their favorite part, where they get to feel like they’re doing and playing around and it’s the writing that’s like pulling teeth.

Whatever I’m not doing at the time is the one I like. So if I’m writing, I’m like, “Oh, if only we were just on set.” And if I’m on set, I’m like, “If only I could be back writing.” Or editing, same thing. But I think that at the end of the day, being on set is the most fun because at least it’s social. Whereas for me, because I write and edit also, those are very lonely journeys. Especially editing, because you’ve just had this really interesting experience with a large group of people that you’ve become very close with, and then they all go off to their lives and you go into a room and continue doing the same thing, and now you’re faced with all of the shortcomings and things and trying to deal with that. That’s just kind of psychologically draining in general. This is kind of why I say making a movie is traumatic, is it does kick your ass for the year you work on it, but this comes with the territory.

When you’re editing, do you have any strategies for tricking yourself into feeling like you’re watching something for the first time like the audience would be and not the 15,000th time or whatever it actually is for you?

I don’t. But when I was in New Zealand, James Cameron was there doing Avatar. And I heard from someone — this may not be true, but I heard it from someone — that once he feels pretty good about a cut of the movie, he flips it in the edit so that the screen is a mirror image of itself. So now everything that was on the left is now on the right and he watches it that way, because there are things in the frame that when you flip it, you have to see the movie like it’s the first time because your eyes don’t have a habitual nature of where to be. I don’t know if he actually does that or if it’s just a story that I heard. So anyway, I tried it and it does kind of do that. It’s weird also because you’re sort of jarred by it, but that was something that I learned for the first time after seven or eight movies or whatever. Other than that, if you watch it with people, you can feel it. They don’t have to say anything, you can feel it when it’s not working and you can feel it when it’s working and that’s kind of the best way to do it.

‘Pearl’ hits theaters nationwide September 16. Vince Mancini is on Twitter. More reviews here.

For the second time in the last month, one of the greatest tennis players to ever live has announced the end of their career. Previously, Serena Williams wrote that the U.S. Open would mark the final time she stepped on the court, and despite a valiant effort to make it to the third round, Williams fell to Ajla Tomljanović in three sets.

In a video and letter posted to his Twitter account on Thursday morning, Roger Federer revealed that his competitive tennis career will come to an end. Federer wrote a note explaining that, at 41 years old with more than 1,500 matches under his belt, he is unable to get his body to the point where he can compete on the heels of numerous injuries and surgeries over the years. While he is going to play in the Laver Cup, which begins next week, he will not play on the ATP Tour again.

Federer also put out a video in which he narrated this letter.

Federer has accomplished everything there is to accomplish in the sport. A native of Switzerland, Federer spent 310 weeks ranked as the No. 1 men’s player in the world and has won 20 Grand Slam titles in his career, including a record-setting eight wins at Wimbledon.

Lindsey Graham‘s poorly timed announcement of a nationwide abortion ban is continuing to face criticism from his fellow conservatives. Following Roe v. Wade being overturned by the Supreme Court, Republican candidates across the country saw their chances of victory take a significant hit as Democrats and independents mobilized to protect abortion access. The GOP had been avoiding the hot topic by leaving it up to the states to decide, but Graham’s proposal blew a massive hole in that plan less than two months before the midterms.

Graham stopped by Fox News on Wednesday night to defend the bill, but instead, he found himself being grilled by Jesse Watters who blasted Graham for knocking inflation out of the headlines.

“This is terrible timing, terrible tactics,” Watters said. “We could’ve shoved this down on their throat on the day Americans got hammered with this inflation number and the market crashing. And now all the media and the Democrats are talking about is federal abortion ban, federal abortion ban. You know that’s not smart politics, right?”

After Graham argued that there’s “no bad time to defend the unborn,” the two had a testy exchange to close out the segment. Via Mediaite:

The host wrapped up the interview by telling Graham, “I respect your opinion. Like I said, timing was off and timing is everything. Senator, thank you so much.”

“Tell that to the baby,” the senator quipped.

“I hear you,” the host replied. “I’m just talking raw politics.”

Graham’s less than sympathetic reception at Fox News arrives on the heels of his Republican colleagues throwing him under the bus for going rogue on the abortion issue. Mitch McConnell stuck to the initial GOP talking point that the abortion issue should be handled on the state level while Senator John Cornyn made it clear that Graham is on his own with this one. “That wasn’t a conference decision. It was an individual senator’s decision,” he told Politico.

(Via Mediaite)

Jann Wenner is perhaps the most significant person in the history of music journalism, as he co-founded Rolling Stone back in 1967. Given how long he’s been a prominent figure in the industry, it’s unsurprising that he has a lot of stories to tell from over the years. Well, he released the autobiography Like A Rolling Stone: A Memoir just a couple days ago (on September 13) and went on The Tonight Show yesterday to talk about it.

One story that stood out is how Barack Obama and U2 singer Bono gave him different accounts of a night of drinking they enjoyed together. Jimmy Fallon brought up Wenner’s interview with Obama and Wenner explained:

“Well, I had just been with Bono the night before. I said I was going down there [to interview Obama]. He said, ‘Oh, I was just… I stayed the night two weeks ago at the White House […] and I drank him… we went mano a mano with drinks until like 2 or 3 o’clock in the morning. I just stayed with him.’ And I’m seeing Obama the next day, so I said, ‘You know, I saw Bono last night. He said that he drank you under the table.’ He says, ‘You’re kidding. He… I put him away. I had to carry him to the Lincoln Bedroom.’”

Wenner also spoke about spending time with Paul McCartney and Mick Jagger, so check out the interview above.