Category: News

While some Basketball Africa League players have expressed their discontent with J. Cole’s position in the newly formed league, Cole’s teammates on the Rwanda Patriots have a new reason to enjoy having him around. In a video shared to TikTok by basketball trainer Omar Khanani and reposted on TheShadeRoom, Cole gives his teammates boxes of new sneakers — presumably, his Puma RS-Dreamers — which they appreciatively try on.

The announcement that J. Cole would be playing professional hoops abroad sparked waves of excitement among his fans and brought plenty of eyes to the nascent league, a joint venture between the NBA and FIBA. However, Cole’s less-than-stellar debut — he scored three points in his first outing and just two in his most recent — prompted Morocco’s AS Sale star Terrell Stoglin, the team’s leading scorer and one of the top scorers in the league, to posit that Cole being there was “taking someone’s job.”

This is a pretty common sentiment among basketball players toward hoopers who underperform, so it’s not surprising to hear. However, Stoglin’s comments drew criticism from rapper Rick Ross, who admonished him in an Instagram video. “You should be there to support the brother,” he said. “If he made one point on the first game, by the time he get to the 10th, you should make sure he makin’ six a game.”

Check out the video of Cole supplying his teammates with new shoes above.

More details on Showtime’s Dexter revival are coming your way, non-lumberjack fans. And from the way that these tidbits are being received by fans, it’s pretty damn clear that this series is the most anticipated revival/reboot of recent times. No one’s saying, “Who wanted this?” That’s because every Dexter fan wants to see this show redeemed from that anticlimactic ending, and Dexter Morgan must get what he so deliciously deserves. The first chunk of fresh news here is actually a confirmation of what’s been reported already: Dexter’s got a new job at an establishment called Fred’s Fish & Game, which is situated near a gun shop, just to push the murderous theme home. The casting of Michael Cyril Creighton as “Fred Jr.,” the store owner’s son, solidified that report, and Showtime has now revealed Dexter’s new on-the-job name tag on Twitter.

Also, he’s got a homicide-hiding alias now: Jim Lindsay. Could this be a reference to Jeff Lindsay, the author of the Dexter novels? Seems feasible.

So, things are really coming together. Dexter’s got a new life, although he’ll never be able to suppress that urge to kill, as a teaser already revealed. From here, we can all keep running in speculative circles over what original characters might return. There’s been additional back and forth on that issue, although a fresh start indicates that it’s the right call to not start dragging Miami characters in the direction of upstate New York. Fingers are still crossed all over the place for Jennifer Carpenter’s Debra to live rent free in Dexter’s head, though, despite James Remar (who played Dexter’s dad in the O.G. cast) shutting that possibility down, at least outwardly. I’m not really buying that shut down when it comes to Debra, since Dexter could really use her presence in a Dark Passenger sort of way.

The Dexter revival will likely arrive in late 2021.

In celebration of the release of Sour, Olivia Rodrigo sent album-themed gift boxes to some famous folks. Among them was Kim Kardashian, who showed off the gifts only to get outed as a fake Rodrigo fan by her daughter North West.

As Kardashian shows off the goodies in an Instagram Story video from yesterday, she narrates from behind the camera, “How cute is Olivia Rodrigo, you guys? I can’t wait for her album. You guys know I love ‘Driver’s License.’” At this point, North chimes in, “You never listen to it.” With a laugh, Kardashian retorts, “Yes, I do! I listen to it all the time. Stop, North. Saint, don’t we listen to it in the car all the time?” After some prodding, Kardashian gets her other child to audibly agree.

There is certainly some evidence in this very video to support West’s claim that her mother isn’t the world’s biggest Rodrigo stan: Kardashian says she “can’t wait for her album,” but when the video was posted yesterday, Sour had already been released for a few days. As for Rodrigo’s reaction to West’s revelation, she didn’t seem too bothered by it, as she re-posted Kardashian’s video without any added comment.

Along with the Sour merch, the box included a handwritten note from Rodrigo that reads, “Kim, thank you so much for supporting my music! It means the absolute world. I just adore you & I wanted to give you a few goodies to celebrate the release of my 1st album SOUR. Sending you & ur fam so much love.”

After taking the film off Paramount’s hands, Amazon is clearly hoping to go big on July 4th weekend when it starts streaming the Chris Pratt sci-fi actioner The Tomorrow War. In the new official trailer, the film gives off heavy Independence Day vibes but with a time-travel twist as Pratt’s character, a retired military man turned teacher, is drafted to fight a war in the future where aliens have mounted a successful invasion, and mankind is running out of soldiers.

However, complications abound as Pratt realizes that he’s not only fighting to save the future of humanity but also the past, where his family is no longer safe. Here’s the official synopsis:

In The Tomorrow War, the world is stunned when a group of time travelers arrive from the year 2051 to deliver an urgent message: Thirty years in the future mankind is losing a global war against a deadly alien species. The only hope for survival is for soldiers and civilians from the present to be transported to the future and join the fight. Among those recruited is high school teacher and family man Dan Forester (Chris Pratt). Determined to save the world for his young daughter, Dan teams up with a brilliant scientist (Yvonne Strahovski) and his estranged father (J.K. Simmons) in a desperate quest to rewrite the fate of the planet.

The Tomorrow War starts streaming July 2 on Amazon.

Even the GOP is fed up with Mike Lindell.

The pillow-loving free speech pioneer, last seen hosting a poorly-attended rally with special guests Joe Piscopo and Ben Carson, tried to attend the Republican Governors Association conference in Nashville on Monday. But “only a few minutes after he collected his credential at the JW Marriott Hotel, an event coordinator in the lobby told him he was not allowed at any of the official RGA events,” according to Politico.

“These events are for RGA members, and Mike Lindell is not currently an RGA member,” a Republican Governors Association official said. The MyPillow founder’s dismissal from the event may also have something to do with recent comments he made on Steve Bannon’s podcast. Lindell claimed he was going to confront Republican governors Brian Kemp (Georgia) and Doug Ducey (Arizona) about the 2020 presidential election:

“What I’m talking about, Steve, is what I have been doing since January 9. All of the evidence I have, everything that is going to go before the Supreme Court, and the election of 2020 is going bye-bye,” Lindell said during the podcast. “It was an attack by another country — communism coming in. I don’t know what they’re going to do with it after they pull it down, but it’s going down.”

After being denied entry, Lindell reportedly left Nashville on his private plane rather than staying for a few extra days. He could have at least visited Kid Rock’s Honky Tonk Rock ‘N Roll Steakhouse before going home. He would have fit right in.

(Via Politico)

After an especially rough year when it came to criticism, The Recording Academy is changing a number of things about the Grammys. They recently announced some changes, including the elimination of “secret committees” that decide on award nominees (The Weeknd is still boycotting regardless). Now, in the newly published rules and guidelines for next year’s 64th Annual Grammy Awards, the Academy has unveiled a number of other changes, including a significant one for the Album Of The Year category.

The “Rule Updates” section of the new rules and guidelines document notes that at this year’s 63rd Grammys, the “award credited artists, features artists, songwriters, producers, mixers, engineers with 33% playing time of the album.” Next year, though, the “33% playing time rule” has been removed, which means that more people who were involved in making an Album Of The Year winner will be recognized as Grammy winners.

For example, if these new rules had been in effect for the 2021 Grammys, Bon Iver would have won an Album Of The Year Grammy, as they were featured on “Exile” from Taylor Swift’s Folklore. Another historical example: In 2014, Pharrell Williams, Julian Casablancas, and Panda Bear also would have gotten Album Of The Year trophies for their work on Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories.

There are more changes than that for next year, including the establishment of two new categories: Best Global Music Performance and Best Música Urbana Album. Find the full revised rules and guidelines document here.

As much as Donald Trump loves coming up with a disparaging nickname, he’s utter trash at inventing even the most bare-bones insults. Still, if Amazon founder Jeff Bezos was even slightly offended at being called “Jeff Bozo” by the former president, Stephen Colbert has an idea for how to get back at him: Buy MGM and release The Apprentice tapes!

While the latest news on the possible acquisition is that the two companies are very close to making a deal for Amazon to purchase MGM and all its properties, nothing is yet set in stone. Yet according to The Late Show host, Bezos really wants to make this happen and is even willing to spend $9 billion to see it through, despite industry estimates only valuing the company at about $5 billion. So what could make MGM worth so much to Bezos? Colbert had a thought:

“Why would one of the world’s richest men pay almost twice the value for a struggling movie studio that recently went bankrupt? Well it could be that Jeff Bezos has an ongoing feud with the former president Genghis Con. Guess what? All the outtakes from The Apprentice are owned by MGM. Holy mother of DVD extras! The private footage of a TV billionaire is going to belong to an actual billionaire.”

Unless you’ve been living without Wi-Fi for the past several years, you probably know that several people formerly associated with The Apprentice, from contestants to crew, have claimed that Trump was regularly known to say a lot of offensive sh*t—yes, while cameras were rolling. The N-word? Yep! The C-word? That, too. According to Tom Arnold, who claims to have seen a compilation of the footage, Trump also called his son Eric a “retard.” Classy as always!

Colbert, who thinks all of this is very “on brand” for Trump, said that “If this is true, someday soon, Bezos may release the most racist thing in the MGM catalog. Other than Gone With the Wind. Because these tapes have never been made public, but now Mount Flushmore’s arch-nemesis owns it all. And I am here for it!”

You can watch the full clip above (which begins around the 4:20 mark).

Hide your uteruses! Pierce Brosnan is the worst fertility doctor ever in the False Positive trailer.

As if being a woman wasn’t hard enough, Hulu (through this A24 film) will give us even more fuel to dread going to a gynecologist, or baby doctor, or fertility whiz, or whatever term you want to use. Ilana Glazer stars as one half of a couple, alongside Justin Theroux, who seeks to become pregnant, and things aren’t exactly going well with the natural route, so they find themselves seeking professional help. And from there, things get all Rosemary’s Baby in a very 2021 way, and in an entertaining way, too, while everyone around Ilana’s character slowly realizes that something is simply not right with Brosnan’s Dr. Awesome.

From there, the this trailer shows how the gaslighting really kicks in, and could it be… Satan? The film’s almost guaranteed to put the whole practice of gaslighting on blast because one half of the Broad City duo is not going to put up with being told they’re crazy. Nope. Here’s the synopsis:

After months of trying and failing to get pregnant, Lucy and Adrian finally find their dream fertility doctor in the illustrious Dr. Hindle (Pierce Brosnan), but after becoming pregnant with a healthy baby girl, Lucy begins to notice something sinister through Hindle’s gleaming charm, so she sets out to uncover the unsettling truth about him and her own “birth story.” As if getting pregnant weren’t complicated enough…

False Positive streams (exclusively as a Hulu premiere) on June 25.

It takes a big person to admit that “human boil” Ted Cruz has bested you at anything besides high-tailing it out of the country and leaving your constituents to freeze, but Jimmy Kimmel is nothing if not magnanimous. On Tuesday, the late night host addressed the status of his latest Twitter war with Donald Trump’s favorite doormat, who called Kimmel a “tough guy” and a “punk.”

First, Kimmel gave some background into what had ticked Ted off this time:

“So last night on the show I mentioned the fact that Ted Cruz got some flak for being stupid. He mocked an ad for the Army that featured a female soldier who was raised by two moms. He called our military ‘woke’ and ‘emasculated,’ which I pointed out—fairly, I thought—is funny coming from a guy who let Donald Trump use his testicles on the driving range. I mean look, he was Trump’s Theon Greyjoy, ok? And I guess that struck a nerve.”

It did and apparently is what prompted Cruz to bring up the time he actually beat Kimmel in a charity basketball competition. So Kimmel responded in the only logical way:

Putting aside the fact that the game in question took place nearly three years ago, Kimmel admitted that it is an embarrassing thing he’ll have to live with. But then, addressing Cruz directly, he noted that, “You have to live with being Ted Cruz forever, which is so much worse.” Yet Kimmel also admitted that “neither one of us had anything to be proud of as far as that game was concerned,” adding that:

“[T]his is the most important point, besides the fact that you’re a U.S. senator and a very convincing Grandpa Munster impersonator who we would think has other things to do, but… After you won the game, do you remember what I did? I said, ‘Good game. Thanks,’ and I shook your disgusting hand. I didn’t complain that it was rigged. I didn’t ask for a recount on the referee. I didn’t start a conspiracy theory about the basketball having a microchip in it. I accepted it. I brought shame on my family and I embraced it, as I always do. Listen, it was a terrible day. I lost a basketball game to a man who ate one of his own boogers during a presidential debate.”

You can watch Kimmel’s full clip above, and witness their embarrassing athletic display below.

Selena Gomez has been a performer for essentially her whole life. Her earliest film and TV credits on IMDb are the part of Gianna on Barney & Friends (from 2002 to 2004) and her breakout role in 2003’s Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over as Waterpark Girl. She didn’t pursue music professionally until a few years after that, but as a recent Instagram post from Gomez proves, she always had the music in her.

In a throwback video that Gomez shared yesterday, a much younger version of herself sings Britney Spears’ “Don’t Go Knockin’ On My Door.” Between the sunglasses, the colorful green screen backgrounds, and Gomez’s unbridled passion, the clip is a delightful sight to behold. Gomez captioned her post, “the hustle was real.”

Gomez’s adoration of Spears didn’t stop with this video. She showed love for Spears’ 2011 album Femme Fatale shortly after its release, writing on social media, “I am so obsessed with @britneyspears’s new record!! Soooo amazing!” In 2012, Gomez was asked who her childhood and then-current heroes were and she responded on Twitter, “my inspirations when I was a kid were Hilary Duff and Britney Spears and of course my Mom then and now.” During a 2013 press event for Spring Breakers, Gomez and her co-stars sang “…Baby One More Time” on karaoke. Spears shared the video and tweeted, “Awww @selenagomez can duet with me anytime. PS- I heard @springbreakers is AAA-MAZING! Can’t wait to see it!” Gomez was floored, tweeting in response, “I can’t breath. My life is made! Thank you!!”