Category: News

In the five years (!) since Jared Leto’s Joker debuted his “DAMAGED” tattoo in 2016’s Suicide Squad, there’s been another, better Suicide Squad movie; Joaquin Phoenix won an Oscar for playing the Clown Prince of Crime; and Leto had a more nuanced, less-slimy crime-lord take on the character for Zack Snyder and made a Marvel movie.

But through it all, director David Ayer hasn’t given up on the world seeing Suicide Squad the way it was meant to be seen. “I made something amazing. My cut is intricate and emotional journey with some bad people who are sh*t on and discarded… The studio cut is not my movie,” he wrote in an open letter that was published before James Gunn’s well-received The Suicide Squad was released. Ayer has also been steadfast that Leto did “magnificent work” as the Joker, a claim he brought up again on Wednesday.

“Jared killed it. But no one knows,” Ayer tweeted, along with a never-before-seen photo of Leto’s Joker carrying a baseball bat. He shared more pictures on Instagram, including a close-up of Leto laughing maniacally and another where he’s holding a golden gun.

Twisted. The cries for Warner Bros. to release the Ayer cut have started all over again:

If you want to see a movie where Leto is caked in makeup, Gucci comes out this month.

Ben Collins has seen a lot of bizarre shit in his time. As a senior reporter for NBC News, Collins’ specific coverage beat is extremism, disinformation, and the internet, which means he’s uncomfortably familiar with QAnon and the conspiracy theorists it/he attracts. But even Collins was blown away by just how many people took a pilgrimage to Dallas this week to try to witness the reemergence of JFK Jr. And by that we mean the “reemergence” that never happened because JFK Jr. died in a plane crash more than 20 years ago.

On Wednesday, as Raw Story reported, Collins chatted with Rachel Maddow about the events of this week, and how even he—seasoned witnesser of bizarre cultist behavior—was “shocked,” and more than a little disconcerted, by just how many people showed up in Texas. Maddow told Collins she had wanted to speak with him specifically because he has been so enmeshed in extremism culture through his reporting.

“It is easy to sort of point and drop your jaw and be agog at this,” Maddow said of the Dallas gathering. “But I feel like you’ve been smart about how these are our fellow Americans and these are people who are politically engaged in their own way and these folks are looking for something and believing they are finding it within these strains.” Collins agreed, but admitted that even he was “shocked about this, frankly. In the QAnon universe, this is like a denomination of it—this JFK, Jr. thing.”

But Collins also wanted to remind viewers “what QAnon is: It’s this idea that there’s this guy named Q who’s embedded in the government. He was saying that there’s this big, secret plan for Donald Trump to save the world from all these pedophiles. At the end of it, all these satanic pedophiles, who they believe are like Hillary Clinton… would be killed in the streets on live television. That’s why this is scary first of all, because all these people believe this. And all these people are hoping for it.”

According to Collins, back in December 2018, even Q “got kind of sick of his followers… He said, ‘Look, this is not true. The JFK, Jr. thing? He’s not alive. He’s not coming back.’” Q, in a rare moment of seeming sanity, also told his followers that the flat Earth theories were not true and that elections were safe. As a result, says Collins, a majority of QAnon followers “moved on to different kinds of conspiracy theories. But there is this one subset, this extremely religious subset, that has made Donald Trump basically a messiah in this space. And JFK Jr. as his ostensible running mate when he comes back to life.”

Collins noted that as most of these people have been thrown off of Facebook and Twitter, they’re using Telegram—a social media platform specifically for extremists—to essentially create “a religion in real time. And the scary thing is, even the people who think they’re nuts in the QAnon community, the end game is still there. The end game is still: Let’s go murder our enemies.”

Maddow summed it up when called this a “spooky and unsettling story.” You can watch the full interview above.

(Via Raw Story)

Ryan Reynolds has been coasting on his Handsome Guy Who Is Game For Jokes persona for the better part of a decade now, enthusiastically auditioning for comedic material that someone may still write him someday. How much longer should we wait? The man is done proving himself with joke-like asides.

Dwayne The Rock Johnson is a potential action hero in much the same way. His meathead charisma is undeniable. Carrying an action movie seems like something he might be able to do, but mostly he has shined in supporting roles (Furious 7) or as the best part of bad movies (most of the other ones). Then there’s Gal Gadot, who looks so much like a superhero that people just sort of expect her to become one by default. Yet she remains sort of an enigma, lacking the ability to carry a role on strength of personality alone like Jason Momoa (which is a skill perhaps unique to Jason Momoa).

Red Notice, from Easy A and Dodgeball director Rawson Marshall Thurber, combines all the potentialities of these actors’ respective personae, in a film that mostly still feels like a trial run for some future film that might be better.

Johnson plays John Hartley, who describes himself as “an FBI profiler specializing in art crime.” It’s the best joke in the whole movie. “You don’t look much like a profiler,” his interpol partner played by Rita Arya tells him. “People are always saying that,” says The Rock.

Ha ha ha, it’s funny because it’s true! He is not an FBI profiler, he is world-famous former pro wrestling personality turned actor The Rock!

Johnson and Inspector Das are in Rome trying to stop a theft-in-progress on a hot tip from a mysterious art figure known as “The Bishop.” The thief turns out to be Nolan Booth (Reynolds), who is trying to steal one of Cleopatra’s jeweled eggs. An Egyptian billionaire has promised $300 million to anyone who can bring him all three of these ancient encrustables eggs in time for his daughter’s wedding. Booth is one of the art thieves looking to collect, the other is The Bishop, played by Gal Godot, a much cooler and more badass art thief who’s always beating Booth to the punch.

Parkour, fistfights, computer hacking, and fancy cocktail parties ensue, in a script that seems mostly driven by whatever cursory nonsense will get Reynolds, Gadot, and The Rock in a room together in some exotic world locale. Is there a rule that every blockbuster now has to have at least six title cards and drone shots of skylines establishing different world locales? Rome, Bali, Russia, London, Valencia, Argentina, Cairo, Sardinia… I hope some of these settings provided tax credits because they’re not adding much by way of content.

Mostly Red Notice makes you appreciate how much work Indiana Jones did to make us care about the macguffins and get us invested in the search to find them. That we knew why the bad guy wanted the Ark of the Covenant, what he wanted do with it, and why Indiana Jones wanted it instead, in retrospect seem like important factors. Who is this Egyptian billionaire? Don’t know. Why does he want Cleopatra’s eggs? To give to his daughter, I guess. Who is his daughter? Don’t know. What do the eggs do? Nothing. Why do the Bishop and Nolan Booth want the eggs? Money. And what will they do with the eggs? Uh… get the money, of course.

These are answers, just not interesting answers. What even drives these characters? Why do they do what they do? A line like “IT BELONGS IN MUSEUM!” would’ve done wonders here. Instead the plot feels about as inspired as a late homework assignment. It has some twists, but mostly they’re just reversals of earlier choices that felt like excuses to begin with.

Presumably, the goal here was to get The Rock and Ryan Reynolds together in a buddy comedy, which the filmmakers assumed would be such a crowd-pleasing spectacle that we wouldn’t bother too much about the details. The Rock plays the muscular Danny Glover and Ryan Reynolds the redditor Riggs in this Lethal Weapon scenario, Reynolds constantly flirting while The Rock rolls his eyes. That’s all well and good, sort of, but Riggs and Murtaugh actually had a narrative reason to be together beyond some pitchman hoping that a movie might magically break out if they were. Mostly it doesn’t. Red Notice is content to merely mimic the rhythms and pacing of a fun movie the same way Ryan Reynolds has become adept at delivering lines that have the tone and cadence of jokes without the comedic value.

Red Notice feels like the logical endpoint of an entertainment ecosystem that values the elevator pitch above all else and a wishful-thinking-based economy in general. Ryan Reynolds? Sure, he seems like he could be funny! The Rock? Absolutely, he just screams action star! Gal Gadot? Well obviously, she’s a knockout! Step four was “???” and step five was Red Notice.

‘Red Notice’ premieres on Netflix Vince Mancini is on Twitter. You can check out his film review archive here.

On Tuesday, Jay-Z surprised the entertainment world by starting an Instagram account. It was an unexpected move from the rapper, who rarely uses social media. He signed up to promote the upcoming film, The Harder They Fall, which he helped co-executive produce. While some may have been looking forward to what else he’d do with the app, they’ll never know because he deleted the page less than a day after launching it.

An attempt to visit @jayz on Instagram presents the error message, “User not found.” This is not the first time Jay quickly deleted an Instagram page. Back in the summer of 2015, he made an account under the name @hovsince96 and shared a picture of himself with Michael Jackson. However, according to the The New York Daily News, Jay deleted the page 14 hours later. As of now, Facebook and Twitter remain as his only social media accounts.

Jay’s decision to delete his Instagram account comes after he offered some advice to kids with “dreams of being successful” during a brief interview with Jazzy, an 11-year-old Brooklyn reporter. “Believe in yourself, even before anyone else believes in you,” he said. “You’ve got to have ultimate confidence like you do. You’re very confident. And just believe in yourself.”

Saba has been involved in some quality projects over his career, including his first two albums, 2016’s Bucket List Project and 2018’s Care For Me. He also spearheaded Pivot Gang’s 2019 compilation You Can’t Sit With Us. However, for the past couple of years, Saba’s releases have been scarce, having delivered just a few singles since his last album. Thankfully, that’s about to change. On Wednesday he officially announced his third album, Few Good Things, is “coming soon,” and he showed his gratitude to his supporters in a string of tweets.

“Thank you to everyone who waited,” he wrote. “I can’t believe I’m writing this right now but i’m ready. With everything going on, it gets hard to take your time. It’s something I find valuable in my own art. But y’all have grown with me through years of this sh*t now. And I’m extremely grateful.”

He added, “I’ve both lost so much and gained so much since the last go round. These last few years have been eternities for me. This next one is special to me. If you’ve ever been a supporter of me and Pivot in anyway, RT my next tweet.” In the following next post, Saba announced the album and promised a new single would arrive on Thursday.

This comes after Pivot Gang producer Squeak was shot and killed back in August. Squeak produced a number of songs for Saba and other Pivot Gang members prior to his tragic death.

Sometimes Tucker Carlson actually tells the truth. It doesn’t appear to be on purpose. These instances, few and far between, are more like slips of the tongue, him accidentally saying the quiet part loud. A few months ago the Fox News host admitted he lies, if he’s “really cornered or something.” (Incidentally, his multi-part series whitewashing Jan. 6 launched this week.) On Wednesday, Carlson host blurted out that, like most of the GOP, he doesn’t actually know what Critical Race Theory is, despite spending a year demonizing it to his millions of viewers.

For those not in the know, Critical Race Theory is a broad academic approach with roots in the 1970s. Generally speaking, it acknowledges that racism is deeply embedded in American society. It’s largely taught, if at all, in colleges, not K-12 schools. In the last few months, however, it’s become a tool for Republicans to scare white voters. Some believe it played a big part in scaring white voters, especially white women, in races in Virginia, which swung overwhelmingly GOP. (That “some” includes Tucker, but more on that in a sec.)

But perhaps Virginia voters were up in arms against something they didn’t understand. And maybe that’s because one of the people warning them against it doesn’t understanding it either. On his show, Tucker straight-up admitted he “never figured out what Critical Race Theory is,” even “after a year of talking about it.”

Undeterred by his own admitted ignorance, Tucker rattled off his own take on the theory he “never figured out.” He said it had something to do with how “some races are morally superior to other, that some are inherently sinful and some are inherently saintly.” That’s not what CRT teaches, but Carlson declared that it’s “amoral to teach” his made-up version of CRT because it’s “wrong.” He added, “That’s my view, and that’s most voters’ view.”

Carlson then praised Virginia’s Republican governor-elect Glenn Youngkin, who beat Democratic incumbent Terry McAuliffe, for making CRT a core part of his campaign. “Critical Race Theory, what our kids are taught,” Carlson said to guest and colleague Britt Hume. “He went right to the things that people talk about on social media, and he won on that.”

Later, before bringing on the conservative activist responsible for turning CRT into GOP triggering words, he took his definition of the academic approach — which, again, he admitted he doesn’t understand, and which even Hume admitted minutes earlier isn’t even taught in public schools — to a next-level. He compared those who teach it to Jim Jones, the cult leader who drove his flock to mass suicide — an interesting figure for Tucker to bring up, given his denunciation of vaccines and other COVID-preventing measures.

“This is not a semantic debate about what critical race theory means,” Tucker railed. “Schools are teaching students, your children, that some races are inherently superior to other races. That’s the definition of racism, that some children are born with the stain of sin, inherently. That’s Nazi stuff!”

Or perhaps it isn’t if you’re a professed lair who admitted, on national television, that you don’t know what you’re talking about.

(Via The Daily Beast)

Jay-Z has a long list of accomplishments, going back for into his career. That makes him more than worthy to hand out advice to those who want to be as successful as he is. That’s exactly what he did during a recent interview. Jazlyn a.k.a. Jazzy, an 11-year-old reporter from Brooklyn who’s previously interviewed celebrities like Nas, Derek Jeter, Giannis Antetokounmpo, and more, asked Hov to share some tips for youngters who have “dreams of being successful like you.” And Jay gave them some.

“Believe in yourself, even before anyone else believes in you,” Jay replied. “You’ve got to have ultimate confidence like you do. You’re very confident. And just believe in yourself.” Jazzy shared the interaction on Instagram and promised that part two of their encounter would arrive at some point on Friday, November 5.

The interview comes after Jay-Z rejoined Instagram for the first time in six years to promote The Harder They Fall, a film he co-executive produced. Soon after, he became the only person that his wife Beyonce follows on Instagram. Jay returned the follow and also made Beyonce the only person he follows on the app.

You can watch a clip of Jazzy’s interview with Jay-Z above.

The Boston Celtics have not had a great start to the season, entering Wednesday’s action at 2-5 that most recently saw them blow a 19-point lead in the second half to the Bulls in what was a truly hideous fourth quarter.

The good news is they were headed to Orlando to face a Magic team that is among the league’s worst — although, one coming off a stunning win over Minnesota. Still, there were clearly some things to work out long term after that loss to the Bulls, particularly after Marcus Smart aired his grievances with the Celtics’ two stars not passing in the fourth quarter, saying that Jaylen Brown and Jayson Tatum have to get better at getting the rest of the team involved late in games so they aren’t so predictable.

Neither Tatum nor Brown spoke after the Bulls loss, and apparently things came to a head in an “emotional” players only meeting in Orlando that, per ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski, wasn’t particularly helpful.

It seems rare that a players only meeting works wonders for a team and fixes all of their problems, but that the Celtics are just seven games into the season and needed to air things out already seems like an especially bad omen for this team. Maybe they can turn things around and get on the same page, but the task for Ime Udoka in his first season on the Celtics bench is not an enviable one as it appears talking it out amongst themselves wasn’t the cure all for the tension in the locker room.

More than two years after they released their eclectic debut album Mirrorland, Earthgang is finally gearing up to share their follow-up. The Atlanta duo, comprised of rappers Olu and WowGr8, announced the release date for their upcoming project, Ghetto Gods, and fans won’t have to wait too long: It’s set to drop on January 28. Earthgang delivered the news through a trailer that’s narrated by fellow Atlanta rapper 2 Chainz and it finds the duo giving listeners a taste of what can expect to hear.

It’s been a long road towards the release of Ghetto Gods. The group previously announced it would arrive on the same day as J. Cole’s The Off-Season, which dropped on May 14. Unfortunately, that day came and went without the arrival of Ghetto Gods. To make the wait better, Earthgang released a number of loosies over the course of the next few months, including “Erykah” and “Aretha,” as well as remixes of Drake’s “Lemon Pepper Freestyle” and their own single, “Options,” with Wale and Coi Leray.

Earthgang also shared the dates for their Biodeghettable European tour, which will start on March 7 in Ireland and continue throughout the month before bringing things to an end on March 31 in Norway.

You can watch the trailer for Ghetto Gods in the post above.

Lindsay McCormick wants to make a low-waste lifestyle easy for everyone. In order to do so, she’s creating sustainable-yet-stylish personal care products under the name Bite — Because It’s The Earth. This direct-to-consumer daily care company took off like a rocket during the pandemic and continues to grow, with low-waste toothpaste and mouthwash “bits” (they look like mints) and a new deodorant.

Bite’s deodorant, in particular, feels like a brilliant idea that everyone missed. It features an aluminum case with refillable sticks in three scents — Neroli, Rose Vert, and Santal. It also solves a serious problem: the 15 million pounds of packaging that ends up in landfills yearly from products in this category. So it’s no surprise to learn that Mark Cuban tried to buy a 15% stake in the company on ABC’s Shark Tank in 2020.

“If you’re doing it right, the challenges don’t stop,” McCormick says of her blossoming business. “And they also don’t get easier, because you’re leveling up and you’re having new, just as hard, just as scary challenges.”

In 2017, McCormick started Bite in her living room, taking chemistry classes online at night, sourcing non-toxic ingredients, and purchasing several tablet pressing machines to create Bite’s natural, tubeless toothpaste bits while still working her day job as a TV producer. The problem she wanted to fix was staring her right in her face, as she constantly traveled for work on a plane, where TSA liquid rules don’t allow any personal care items over 3 oz. in a carry-on bag. The bigger issue, she soon realized, is the enormous amount of waste that plane-appropriate, travel-size items create.

“Pick a problem that you are fiercely dedicated to solving,” she says. “It will be astronomically harder than you ever thought, but that much more rewarding.”

For as long as she can remember, McCormick has been obsessed with all things sustainability and the environment. As a child, instead of asking for presents, she would ask her parents to adopt a specific animal from the World Wildlife Fund in her name. At just seven years old, she stopped eating meat after watching Disney’s The Little Mermaid. Her parents agreed but made her commit to a scoop of peanut butter with every meal.

Growing up, McCormick admired her dad, who worked at the Washington Post, and her mom, who taught marketing to high schoolers. Shadowing the two of them, she came to revere the power of the media and cultivated a gift for storytelling. After college, she moved to LA’s Venice Beach, where she made videos for travel companies. Yearning to travel the world, she took her life savings, sold her car, and convinced a travel outfitter to fly her out to Alaska in exchange for promotional videos she would create while there. Ending up in Sweden, she kept on traveling, eventually to South East Asia. But watching the Superbowl from abroad in 2013, when Beyonce’s performance literally changed the world, McCormick knew she missed the high-intensity energy of being on set.

Aspiring to work on nature documentaries, McCormick returned to LA and scored a job as a TV show producer for HGTV and the Travel Channel, which took her all around the globe, living her dream. But she saw a problem that needed to be solved when she noticed the correlation between her career and the waste that it produced.

“It started with the question of ‘why did we do it this way?’” McCormick says of her initial idea. “Like people in general, how have we gotten to where we are with these products that exist? And if we redid it and just stripped this down to the studs and figured out how we could make this the most eco-friendly way and the most, you know, clean way — what would I put in it and how would I make it? That was the beginning of that thought.”

A long-time vegan, McCormick lives in SoCal with her boyfriend and Co-founder of Bite, Asher Hunt. In 2018 they had planned to leave LA, and live in their converted Sprinter van — selling Bite toothpaste bits in glass jars on the road. But when a promotional video went viral, the company’s sales soared and the duo decided to stay home and hit the gas on their shared business.

These days, McCormick manages 10 employees but still produces all of Bite’s videos, ads, and social content. She’s always sure to share the company’s selling points — sleek packaging, clean look, quality (vegan) ingredients — but she also hopes to send a bigger message about the importance of creating less trash.

“We were built on social media,” she says. “But we’re not just about being a toothpaste company. We are trying to get people to live a low-waste lifestyle.”

With leaders like McCormick and brands like Bite, that lifestyle finally feels viable for everyone.