Category: News

During an interview on BBC Radio 2’s The Zoe Ball Breakfast Show late last year, Coldplay’s Chris Martin revealed that the band will retire in 2025. He said they’ll continue to tour, saying, “Maybe we’ll do some collaborative things but the Coldplay catalog, as it were, finishes then.” Martin elaborated during a recent interview with NME, revealing what their fans can expect from them going forward.

“We’re going to make 12 albums,” Martin said some three months after releasing their ninth album Music Of The Spheres. “Because it’s a lot to pour everything into making them. I love it and it’s amazing, but it’s very intense too. I feel like because I know that challenge is finite, making this music doesn’t feel difficult, it feels like, ‘This is what we’re supposed to be doing.’”

Martin’s comments come after he reflected on Coldplay and BTS’ collaboration “My Universe,” from last fall. “For something that could have seemed so artificial, it turned out being one of the most real feelings and I genuinely love those people,” he said during a recent interview on Ellen.

You can read Martin’s full interview with NME here.

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

New York City has been through a lot the last two years. It was once the epicenter of the pandemic. It’s seen violent police pushback against protesters. It’s seen businesses close left and right. Right now it’s buried in snow. And then on top of that it has Sarah Palin scampering about town with COVID. The half-term governor and failed vice presidential candidate is awaiting a trial that had to be postponed because she tested positive for a highly transmissible virus she’s already contracted before. Despite this, she’s still been going out to restaurants, to the horror of everyone, including City Hall.

But there’s one person who thinks possibly infecting people with a disease that’s killed nearly 100,000 Americans alone is…good, actually? That person is Michele Bachmann, former Republican representative, Tea Party star, noted anti-twerker and one of the first far right loonies to invade Congress, paving the way for the likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz. (You can thank her for giving Stephen Miller his first big D.C. job.)

Bachmann went on Jesse Watters’ new Fox News show, where they discussed how the media has dared to paint Palin as a public health menace. And she had a take.

“Honestly, Sarah Palin is to be commended,” Bachmann told Watters, “because she’s trying to act like a normal human being in the greatest city of America, New York City.”

Palin has repeatedly gone to Elio’s, an Italian restaurant on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, both before she tested positive and a couple days afterwards. The CDC advises anyone who tests positive to quarantine for at least five days so as not to get other people sick. But Palin evidently doesn’t care. Neither does Bachmann. Palin is proudly unvaccinated, having flip-flopped from a position she held early last year. Meanwhile, hospitalizations and deaths overwhelmingly affect the unvaxxed over the vaxxed, so perhaps the message Palin is sending isn’t so positive after all.

(Via The Daily Beast)

Earlier this week, it was reported that Kanye West’s Yeezy Gap and streetwear brand Skid Row Fashion Week would team up for an upcoming collaboration. According to TMZ, the goal was to aid Los Angeles’ homeless population, which increased greatly over the past couple of years due to the pandemic. West and SRFW were reportedly also planning to host a fashion show to unveil the items in their collaboration, complete with actual homeless people as models. However, all of that has now been denied in a new report by Complex.

“Ye has a deep and solution-oriented commitment to addressing issues surrounding homelessness but this reported event is not on our schedule at this time nor are we aware of any product collaboration in development,” a spokesperson from Yeezy Gap told Complex.

The news comes after West shared a tentative release date of February 22 for Donda 2. The album could feature his and The Game’s track “Eazy,” which they released earlier this month. The song sparked some controversy due to some lines West directed at Pete Davidson, who is now dating his ex-wife Kim Kardashian. As for Donda 2, it remains to be seen whether or not West will stick to that date, as the rapper has quite the history of pump-faking on release dates.

(Plentiful spoilers from Netflix’s Ozark Season 3 will be found below.)

The final season of Netflix’s Ozark is upon us, but there’s a catch: it’s a supersized season, but only the first half is streaming so far. The final seven episodes should arrive later this year, but for now, we’re left at a climactic point with Julia Garner’s Ruth Langmore about to head straight towards Omar Navarro successor Javi Elizondro.

Javi might be a dead man soon (just like the two people he killed, Darlene Snell and Wyatt Langmore, in Episode 7), even though Marty warned Ruth away from harming Javi. She’s got every reason to feel vengeful (given that Wyatt is her brother and the last soul she feels connected to on Earth after losing Ben), and there’s little reason to believe that Ruth will listen to Marty. After all, Marty largely turned his back on Ruth after refusing to act upon the perpetrators who beat the holy hell out of her in Season 3. Also, Ruth and Marty are no longer really in business together.

Will Ruth make it out of her path of vengeance alive, though? She’s crafty enough to recruit some new helpers to go up against the cartel, but the bigger challenge is this: will these guys be at-all competent? If it was possible for Ruth to clone herself, then it’d be a no-brainer Ruth victory, but she’s going to have to regroup, cool it for a bit, and plot things out. My hunch is that Ruth doesn’t die, especially at the hands of the cartel. She needs to be the hero of this story who makes it out alive.

What I do wonder about, though, is if Marty will attempt to act upon this:

Is Marty stupid enough to try and kill Ruth? She and her shotgun would mop the floor with him. Wendy, perhaps, could try to take the situation into her own hands, which would be a finally-fatal mistake on the Byrde matriarch’s behalf.

Yes, I am a little bit worried about Ruth. She doesn’t have anything to lose at this point, other than trying to stay alive for Baby Zeke’s sake. Maybe that will be the ultimate saving grace here for everyone. Ruth should survive, take casino boatloads of money with her, and buy a nice house for herself and Zeke.

‘Ozark’ is currently streaming (Season 4, Part 1) on Netflix.

For the second year in a row, the Sundance Film Festival was completely virtual. A lot will be made of what’s missing by not attending in person, and that’s fair. The camaraderie. The energy right before a big premiere. Just being “out of the house,” which I used to take for granted and can’t imagine I ever will again. But Sundance is also tough. (At least as “tough” as something can be that involves watching a lot of movies every day.)

For those who have never been, Park City, Utah, isn’t quite the cozy mountain town you might be imagining. It’s more like a suburban city. There are strip malls, a lot of chain stores, and it is, surprisingly, pretty spread out. Which means getting from one end of town to the other, in the altitude, to get from a screening to an interview, or a screening at one venue to a screening at another venue, is sometimes impossible. (Especially that first weekend when traffic is at a standstill.) So having every Sundance movie just available on an app is actually overwhelming. (Sundance has a screening app that works easily on AppleTV and is better than a lot of actual streaming companies.) Like, as I type this, I can still watch any Sundance movie that I haven’t seen yet. I don’t have to run, out of breath, in the snow, to make it on time. I just have to press a button. After nine years of doing the whole “running while out of breath” thing, it’s still hard to wrap my head around this. Don’t get me wrong, I miss going to Park City. But, next time I’m there, hopefully next year, and I’m lying on icy pavement having just slipped and, once again, injured myself, I will think back to this miracle app with all the movies, watching in my warm apartment, and probably feel some nostalgia for this.

Anyway, even with the ease of this system, there still isn’t enough time to watch everything. So, of what my colleague Vince Mancini and I saw, here are the eight best movies we saw at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. (Even though these are technically ranked, let’s say these are a loose ranking since Vince and I didn’t have a lot of overlap on what we watched. So both of us are taking the other’s word on the movies we didn’t see.)

1. Emily the Criminal

Imagine a student-loan debt-saddled Uncut Gems and you have something like Emily The Criminal, starring Aubrey Plaza as a budding outlaw in writer/director John Patton Ford’s feature debut. There are a lot of films out there about how hard it is to be poor in America, but a realistic victim doesn’t make for as compelling a protagonist as a lot of indie directors think. Being sympathetic alone can only take us so far. Characters more towards the edge of human experience tend to be more interesting, and that’s Emily. Her hard luck story is believable enough, but it’s how she responds that makes her so watchable — in harrowing depictions of various crime schemes that are white knuckle intense in a way that never feels like cheating. Ford has a delicious cynicism towards institutions that reminded me a little of Andrew Dominik’s Killing Me Softly, another nasty little fuck you of a movie. But a true criminal travels beyond sadness to find opportunity in pessimism, and that’s Emily’s journey in a nutshell. –Vince

2. Fire of Love

Sara Dosa’s Fire of Love tells us up front that the story of Katia and Maurice Krafft does not end happily. This is important, because after watching this documentary filled with such passion and love – for volcanoes, but, more importantly, for each other – to have the rug pulled out in tragedy would have been too much. Even knowing, it’s still too much. The footage, from the Krafft’s archives, is stunning. This truly is a remarkable film. That, somehow, a movie about two volcanologist could be in contention for the best love story of the year, but then have a narrative where there’s an evil villain lurking. And in doing so we learn the difference between the “friendly,” beautiful red volcanoes (“friendly” in that they are fairly predictable; these are the volcanoes with the flowing red lava) and the very dangerous grey volcanoes (like Mount Saint Helens) that are not predictable and kill people. That when we see these things explode, that grey plume isn’t just debris, it’s basically a moving, fiery hell called a pyroclastic flow that destroys everything in its path. It’s when the Krafft’s devote their lives to the grey volcanoes, trying to save lives, it’s only a matter of time before one will catch up with them. –Mike

3. Fresh

Mimi Cave’s feature debut isn’t the first movie ever to apply elements of the fantastic to the horrors of dating. But it’s one of the few that’s able to combine glib observational dating humor with broad visceral suspense and do both equally well. Daisy Edgar-Jones (who I believe has hollow bones, like a bird) plays Noa, who thinks she’s found her dream guy in Steve (Sebastian Stan), who turns out to be hiding one whopper of a secret. That’s one of the easiest pitches in the world, but the beauty of Fresh is that it never gets reductive, never tries to deliver a high-handed message, and offers the participatory thrills of a whodunnit without ever cheating the details. It’s unabashedly broad but still rewards the viewer who pays attention. -Vince

4. Navalny

As we wrote before, Navalny follows Alexei Navalny as he recovers in Germany from an assassination attempt and his plan to return to Moscow, where, as an enemy of Putin, he will surely be arrested. (Which he was.) But, in that time in between, Navalny serves as a mystery as Navalny and his team try to figure out who actually poisoned him and how. After some high-tech work to get a list of names, the end result basically comes down to some prank phone calls to finally solve this part of the mystery. And the result is, strangely, pretty hilarious. When this was all happening it made no sense why Alexei Navalny would risk everything to return to Russia. What this film does is present why, in his mind, he had no choice but to return, no matter what the consequences are. -Mike

5. Cha Cha Real Smooth

Cooper Raiff’s follow-up to Shithouse (which neither of us saw) follows a directionless college graduate (Raiff) as he becomes a bar mitsvah fixer and pines after an older woman (Dakota Johnson), the mother of an autistic teen. That synopsis sounds like it was designed by an advanced AI to be the most Sundance dramedy plot ever conceived, and I didn’t want to enjoy Cha Cha Cha Real Smooth, but it was so undeniably sweet and eloquently delivered that I just couldn’t help myself. Dakota Johnson is stacking the great performances up like firewood these days, proving yet again how irresistible she and Jamie Dornan can be when they’re not stuck in 50 Shades together. -Vince

6. Honk For Jesus, Save Your Soul

Adamma Ebo’s Honk For Jesus, Save Your Soul is a movie where everyone is just going for it. Regina Hall and Sterling K. Brown just give it everything they’ve got as Trinitie Childs and Lee-Curtis Childs who, as the result of a scandal having their megachurch closed, are planning a comeback. And they decide it’s a good idea to have an award-winning documentary filmmaker follow them around to make a movie about this miracle resurrection. What we get is the anguish of these two when the cameras are off, and the forced-positivity when the cameras are on, that are both hilarious and sad. Honestly, I can’t say enough about Regina Hall and Sterling K. Brown. These are both remarkable performances that thread that line between over-the-top and pitiful, with a touch of empathy. A good example is, as a viewer, we know the day their church reopens, there’s no way this is going to go well for them. But there’s Lee-Curtis Childs, standing outside, with a big smile on his face, telling Trinitie he expects 500 people. Then he emotes pure joy when one lone car pulls up … then after a pause, that car does some parking lot donuts and then leaves. -Mike

7. Dual

Dual director Riley Stearns became the main character of film Twitter this week, for calling out one of the few critics who dared give his film a negative review (who Stearns said had attacked him personally in the past). While I generally wouldn’t advise starting an esoteric beef within an insular subculture that the general public mostly just finds superfluous and distasteful, I do have to praise Stearns’ movie. His follow-up to The Art of Self-Defense, Dual is another odd little film where the characters all sound like chatbots sharing interesting facts they’ve just learned about bread. Whereas in Stearns’ previous film that arch style felt like an impediment to deeper insights, in Dual it only highlights the feelings of alienation and corporate dehumanization that it explores.

Karen Gillan plays a terminally-ill millennial who pays a tech company to clone her so that her family won’t have to miss her. Only she ends up having to fight that clone to the death for the right to continue her identity. Shot entirely in Finland during the pandemic, Dual is the Scandinavian sci-fi equivalent of a Spaghetti Western, and like Stearns’ uncanny valley style, the vaguely European setting feels like a happy accident that ends up working wonderfully. -Vince

8. After Yang

What a haunting film. (And it’s definitely weird that a film this haunting has one of the most fun, best opening credit sequences I’ve seen in a few years.) In Kogonada’s After Yang, Yang (Justin H. Min) is a caregiving robot who stops working. His family has grown attached to Yang as we watch Jake (Colin Farrell) take Yang from shop to shop, always told there’s nothing that can be done, but the good news is that Yang can be traded in for a discount on a new model, as if Yang is basically an iPad that stopped turning on. It’s haunting because this will be our future. Tech will become more and more personalized, yet easily discarded at the corporate level, but not so easy at the personal level. Eventually Jake turns to the black market to illegally try and repair Yang (the company that makes these robots has made it illegal to access their data) and Jake finds that Yang has been refurbished a few times before and has a wealth of memories from the numerous lives he’s lived. But the question is, what made an artificial intelligence choose the memories to save that he did? After Yang is poignant and forlorn, but also always interesting. That’s not always an easy thing to do. In the end, I can’t stop thinking about this movie. -Mike

(Plentiful spoilers from Netflix’s Ozark Season 3 will be found below.)

Netflix’s Ozark Season 4, Part 1, recently landed on the streaming service with an eye toward the finish line. All of the main characters are now poised to end the show with a bang, and there’s a strong likelihood that not everyone will make it out alive (Marty will hopefully die, if there’s any poetic justice in this world), but let’s circle back to who died in Part 1. After all, these two big deaths should reverberate throughout the show (especially where the electrifying Ruth is concerned) while setting up the final act for a showdown, so let’s discuss.

Two characters, Darlene Snell (the cocky hillbilly drug dealer who edged into heroin, angering the Navarro cartel) and Wyatt Langmore (who’s perpetuating the Langmore curse by being with Darlene), met their (rather shocking) end in Season 4, Episode 7:

As reflected in the above screencap, Javi shot Darlene first, and then he went for the stunned Wyatt, for no other reason than to eliminate a witness. “Sorry, whoever you are,” Javi declared while also shooting Ruth’s other brother in the head.

Where this immediately goes from here, one can guess: Ruth will get her revenge. Javi, who doesn’t know what’s headed his way, is the successor to Navarro’s throne while he languishes behind bars. Darlene was definitely the sole target here, given that she had been warned not to deal heroin. And Wyatt got pulled into the middle of this scene because he decided to marry Darlene to keep Child Protective Services from taking baby Zeke into custody. This marriage, of course, upset Ruth because she had planned on running away with her slightly older (but definitely not wiser) brother.

Following the double murder by Javi, Ruth stumbles onto the scene, and the rest of her world crashes down around her. She heads straight to the Byrde family home, where she threatens the hell out of Marty over who killed Wyatt. Jonah (who money laundered with Ruth for several episodes) steps up and is happy to provide that information, and so, the scene is set for Ruth to plot out her vengeance.

Following the Wendy-sanctioned murder of Ruth’s true love, Tom, at the end of Season 3, Ruth theoretically has nothing to lose after Wyatt’s death. So one can expect her to take some wild risks while going after Javi, but at the same time, she’s been the smartest one on the show for a few seasons already. Whatever the case, her path will be an emotional one, but we still don’t know one thing: What happened to baby Zeke?

‘Ozark’ is currently streaming (Season 4, Part 1) on Netflix.

The plot thickens. A few days ago, Neil Young made it clear that he’d be removing his music off Spotify because of their refusal to shut down the anti-vaccine conspiracies spouted by Joe Rogan. Young doubled down today after most of us his music was pulled, by reminding everyone that he hates the audio quality on Spotify as well. Now, that part might not have any influence on Joni Mitchell, but the first part of Neil’s stance definitely did, as the legendary singer-songwriter has now opted to pull her music off the streaming service as well.

Tonight, Mitchell posted a statement to her website titled “I stand with Neil Young.” She went on to keep it short and sweet, but let fans know they’d no longer be listening to her there: “I’ve decided to remove all my music from Spotify,” she wrote. “Irresponsible people are spreading lies that are costing people their lives. I stand in solidarity with Neil Young and the global scientific and medical communities on this issue. — Joni Mitchell”

It’s worth noting that both Neil Young and Joni Mitchell are survivors of polio, a crippling disease that was, as well all know, all but eradicated due to vaccinations.

The Super Bowl Halftime Show has become one of the biggest events in music. Last year, The Weeknd cited his booking at the big game as something that possibly drove The Grammys to snub him for his most successful album to date, After Hours, that’s how important it’s become. This year, the NFL has assembled an all-star crew, tapping Dr. Dre to lead Snoop Dogg, Eminem, Kendrick Lamar and Mary J. Blige. And even though all those veterans on one stage together — or rather, one football field together — is a huge deal, it’s inevitably still Kendrick that’s going to steal the spotlight.

Why? Because fans are starving for new music from the sometimes dubbed “greatest rapper alive,” who hasn’t released much of anything since his electric Damn back in 2017. That’s three years deep into a pandemic with no new bars from Kung Fu Kenny to help us get by. At this point, fans are grabbing onto any hints at all that the SUper Bowl will be a runway ramp for Kendrick’s new album release, and Billboard has got those straws, no matter how flimsy they might be.

Asking fans to vote in an R&B/hip-hop poll about anticipated music yesterday, they dropped these lines in about Kendrick: “sources tell Billboard a Lamar single may arrive on Feb 4. or Feb. 11 before he plays the Super Bowl halftime show.”

I’ll take it! Okay Kendrick, after months of teasing that the new album is done, it’s time to release it.

WARNING: Spoilers for The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett below.

After making his live-action return in The Mandalorian Season 2, the iconic Star Wars bounty hunter Boba Fett is now headlining his own spinoff series, The Book of Boba Fett, which is finally giving the character more to do than quietly stand around before getting unceremoniously knocked into the Sarlacc Pit and left for dead.

However, with Boba Fett’s return comes questions about his mysterious origin. Namely, where did he get that badass armor? Fortunately, both The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett have provided answers to the long journey of Boba’s armor, so let’s start with the easy question of where he got it in the first place: his dad.

In Star Wars: The Attack of the Clones, the bounty hunter Jango Fett is introduced as the template for a new army of clone soldiers to be used by the Republic in its ongoing war with the separatist droid armies. Also introduced is Jango’s son, Boba, who is an unmodified clone of his father. In the film’s climactic ending, Jango is beheaded by Jedi Master Mace Windu, and young Boba is seen holding his father’s helmet, which closely resembles the one he’s seen wearing in the original Star Wars trilogy. That’s because it’s one and the same.

In The Mandalorian Season 2 episode, “The Tragedy,” Boba Fett reveals that his armor belonged to his father who is confirmed to be a Mandalorian foundling. Prior to Boba’s return in The Mandalorian, Jango Fett was accused of stealing the armor and not being a true Mandalorian. However, Boba shot down that accusation through coding in the armor’s gauntlet.

As for how Boba Fett regained his armor following the events of Return of the Jedi, that story was also revealed in both The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett. In the Season 2 premiere, Boba Fett’s armor appears for the first time, only it’s not the bounty under the helmet. Instead, it’s worn by Cobb Vanth (Timothy Olyphant) who acquired the armor from a pack of Jawas.

In exchange for helping Cobb Vanth defeat a Krayt dragon, Mando takes possession of the armor so it can be given to a true Mandalorian. (At this point in the story, Mando is unaware it belongs to Boba Fett.) However, from the distance, Boba witnesses Mando acquiring the armor and tracks down Mando on the planet Tython with the help of Fennec Shand (Ming-Na Wen). After being ambushed by Stormtroopers attempting to capture Baby Yoda, Boba Fett enters Mando’s ship during the fray and comes out wearing his iconic armor, which he then uses to wreck a whole lot of Imperial scum.

With his armor secured — and neatly buffed and polished — Boba Fett returned to Tatooine where he murdered Bib Fortuna and began his takeover of Jabba the Hutt’s empire, kicking off the events of his spinoff.

The Book of Boba Fett is currently streaming on Disney+.

Now that Kanye is back in a prolific phase, releasing Donda last year and almost immediately announcing a follow-up, he’s got a whole new slew of producers and collaborators in the mix. That’s a good thing, Ye’s taste level in other artists has always been one of his strong suits — except for that whole Marilyn Manson fiasco — and now one of his new producers, Digital Nas, has spoken to Rolling Stone about his time working with Yeezy on Donda 2.

Digital Nas, aka Nasir Pemberton, said he initially traveled from his home in Atlanta to work with Kanye in LA, but ended up moving to the city of angels in the end. “I went out there on a whim, no expectations,” the 23-year-old told Rolling Stone. “Then it turned into me living out there. By the fifth day, my manager gets an email like, ‘Hey, we want Nas out here indefinitely.’ And we’ve been just rocking ever since.”

Not a bad way to kick off your career! As for what fans can hope for from Donda 2, Kanye is planning and hoping to have it soundtrack major moments in his listener’s lives. “These are the directives for the album: ‘If it cannot be played at a funeral, childbirth, graduation, a wedding, it will not be on our record,’” Nas said. “We learned a lot from Donda 1. We learned what hit. We learned what was sticking. So we took from there. It has to be able to be played at four major moments in people’s lives. That’s crazy, right?”

Check out the entire interview here, and keep an eye out for Donda 2, which drops in just a few weeks on February 22.