Category: News

The first social media reactions to Godzilla Vs. Kong are rolling in, and so far, the critics agree that the film gets the most important thing right: giant monsters punching giant monsters. While there are some quibbles over the “human scenes,” for the most part, the early reactions are practically unanimous in declaring that the fight scenes are why people are going to watch this latest installment in the franchise, and it absolutely delivers in that department.

Brandon Davis from Comic Book writes:

I watched #GodzillaVsKong on a big IMAX screen and it was AWESOME. The movie is a blast. It’s like Fast & Furious but with giant monsters. It’s exactly what I wanted it to be. Giant fights and they’re just SO MUCH FUN to watch. It’s a big, ridiculous, awesome movie.

Germain Lussier from io9 had a more tempered reaction where he enjoyed the film’s bombastic fight scenes, but he couldn’t get past some of the non-punchy scenes:

Godzilla vs. Kong has excellent action and effects. The story is crazy ambitious and at times achieves some unique sci-fi-coolness. I’d watch it again for that stuff but most of the human angles are so overstuffed, illogical and pointless, it constantly took me out of it.

But for the most part, critics were in alignment with Uproxx‘s Mike Ryan, who praised the film for delivering incredible fight scenes that you can actually see, which hasn’t always been the case with this franchise:

I absolutely hated the prior Godzilla movie. So here’s the utmost praise I can give a movie like GODZILLA V. KONG: it is a coherent movie with daytime fights and I could always see what was going on. I truly mean that as a compliment.

You can see more early critical reactions to Godzilla Vs. Kong below:

Godzilla Vs. Kong hits theaters and HBO Max on March 31.

By now, you likely agree (from personal experience) that Zack Snyder’s Justice League cut was vastly superior to Joss Whedon’s theatrical cut. Yet the HBO Max-streamed upgrading did arrive with a price: four hours of viewers’ time. Many people felt that this runtime was worth it, given that character development was suddenly a thing (and Cyborg’s backstory functioned as the heart of the film), but still, this was, as former SNL cast member Leslie Jones put it, a #longassmovie.

Yep, Jones came through for everyone and did her usual epic superhero movie thing by live-tweeting the action. Her joyous reactions were infectious, and she was all of us while observing that while the action scenes worked well — “WARRIORS!! I’m losing my shit!” — her eye kept floating down to the runtime left on the movie: “And I still got 3 hours 30 minutes and forty-fiive seconds mfs!! #longassmovie”

As one might expect, Jones’ Twitter thread was long (four hours long), and we’d expect no less. A few of her tweets hit particularly hard, including her “What the fuck is happening?! #longassmovie” reaction to Jared Leto’s Joker scene.

The action scenes appeared to be Jones’ favorite moments, and the Wonder Woman fan did not let her audience down.

The result was a breath of fresh air on Twitter and signaled a return to movies as events (even in the comfort of one’s living room). People agreed that this live-tweeting session might be the best thing to happen to Twitter and comic book fans in a long time.

As the movie began to roll to a close, Jones predicted that this kind of runtime would happen again: “Soooooo we can expect another four hour movie cause they aint giving up on this life equation thang apparently!! #longassmovie”

Finally, though, “ITS OVAH!! #longassmovie.” Whew.

Days after a white gunman killed eight people, including six Asian women, at three Atlanta-area spas, Sandra Oh gave an emotional speech at the “Stop Asian Hate” rally held near downtown Pittsburgh over the weekend.

“For many of us in our community, this is the first time we are even able to voice our fear and our anger, and I really am so grateful to everyone willing to listen,” the Killing Eve actress said. “One thing that I know is that many in our community are very scared, and I understand that. And one way to go through our fear is to reach out to our community.” Oh asked everyone in attendance (and beyond) to support “our sisters and brothers.”

“If you see something, will you help me? If you see one of our sisters and brothers in need, will you help us? We must understand, as Asian Americans, we just need to reach out our hand to our sisters and brothers and say, ‘Help me and I’m here.’”

Oh also led the crowd in a chant of, “I am proud to be Asian. I belong here.”

Stop Asian Hate rallies were held across the country over the weekend, including one in Atlanta, where Bee Nguyen (D-GA), the first Vietnamese American to serve in the Georgia House, lamented that the victims of the shootings “had no one in their community to watch their back, and we are left with deep rage and grief and sorrow.”

(Via the Hollywood Reporter)

Many artists have offered their takes on Radiohead’s “Creep” over the years, and now Thom Yorke himself has revisited the track: He made a new nine-minute acoustic remix of the classic for Jun Takahashi’s “Undercover” as part of Rakuten Fashion Week Tokyo 2021.

Takahashi told Vogue of the show, “The theme is of a person who is frail and weak but has a truly pure heart. I was expressing the worries and anxieties that individuals carry every day and the hope of what lies ahead. It probably doesn’t seem to directly link to clothing design, but I wanted to put the complicated emotional state of society into a physical form. This is what I considered while designing.”

Famously over the years, Yorke has expressed his disdain for the song, or at least his reluctance to perform it: The band has played it live on just a handful of occasions since the ’90s. At a Montreal concert in support of OK Computer, the audience called for the band to play the song and Yorke responded by shouting, “F*ck off, we’re tired of it.” In a 2017 interview, Yorke said of playing the song live, “It can be cool sometimes, but other times I want to stop halfway through and be like, ‘Nah, this isn’t happening.’”

Listen to Yorke’s “Creep” remix above.

As the debate over whether schools should resume in-person teaching rages on, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) updated its “Operational Strategy for K-12 Schools through Phased Prevention.” The findings include “All schools should implement and layer prevention strategies and should prioritize universal and correct use of masks and physical distancing” and “Evidence suggests that many K-12 schools that have strictly implemented prevention strategies have been able to safely open for in-person instruction and remain open,” the key word being “evidence.” The Republican National Committee did not offer any evidence when it tweeted a call to re-open schools over the weekend – but it did (unintentionally) prove the importance of education.

“Keeping schools closed has DEVESTATING effects on the mental health, social, and economic situation, and academic achievement of America’s children. The science is in — schools can safely reopen,” the tweet from @GOP read. It has since been deleted, however, after everyone noticed the typo: that is not how you spell “DEVASTATING.”

Journalist Dan Rather tweeted, “Tweeting without spell check can be devestating,” while another Twitter user wrote, “Extremely on-brand for the Republican Party to misspell ‘DEVESTATING’ while complaining about inadequate schools. Oh, the irony.”

Stay in school, kids (whether virtually or in-person), or else you’ll get schooled like the GOP.

Post Malone hasn’t shied away from busting out a cover in recent years. Most famously, he raised millions of dollars for charity with a full set of Nirvana covers around this time last year. Now he’s gotten back in the saddle, which is appropriate phrasing because he covered two contemporary country music icons during Matthew and Camila McConaughey’s We’re Texas virtual benefit concert over the weekend.

Joined by Dwight Yoakam’s band, Malone busted out a rendition of Brad Paisley’s “I’m Gonna Miss Her,” which he didn’t try to genre-shift and kept faithful to the original version. To conclude the two-hour broadcast, Malone and Yoakam’s band gave a rollicking performance of Sturgill Simpson’s “You Can Have The Crown.”

Elsewhere during the show, Kacey Musgraves also popped up, sitting in her bedroom and armed with an acoustic guitar to cover Willie Nelson’s classic “On The Road Again.” Musgraves also spoke about how she came to be involved with the event, saying it started with the sort of phone call she doesn’t usually answer: “I don’t answer unknown numbers, but for some reason I did and it was Matthew. Obviously it was a hell yes for me.”

Watch the full concert above. Malone’s cover of “I’m Gonna Miss Her” begins at 2:03:54 into the video, his cover of “You Can Have The Crown” begins at 2:10:34, and Musgraves’ rendition of “On The Road Again” begins at 1:26:23.

John Oliver’s recently resurfaced Meghan Markle prediction led to a sympathetic revisiting last week, but Oliver has no love lost for another Meghan: the daughter of late Senator John McCain and co-host on The View. He previously referred to her as “the most embarrassing child of a prominent figure,” and that’s really something, considering that (back in 2019) he chose McCain over any of the Trump kids. Sure enough, the Last Week Tonight host has revealed that his opinion on McCain hasn’t changed, and he ripped into her response to the Atlanta Spa Shootings, during which Robert Aaron Long allegedly killed at least six Asian women before attempting to claim “sex addiction”as a motivation, rather than a straight-up hate crime.

Oliver, naturally, wasn’t having that explanation, nor is he a fan of the Sheriff Department Captain Jay Baker declaring that Long simply had “a bad day.” Oliver dove into how former President Trump fueled anti-Asian sentiment with his “China virus” and “Kung Flu” rhetoric, and then Oliver circled over to Meghan McCain, who was perfectly cool (one year ago) to use such terms to describe a deadly disease-turned pandemic. In the below clip (after the 3:30 mark), Oliver lets her have it.

“If the left wants to focus on P.C.-labeling this virus,” McCain stated a year ago as relayed above. “It is a great way to get Trump re-electeI don’t have a problem with people calling it whatever they want. It’s a deadly virus that did originate in Wuhan.”

Oliver’s response: “Take the word from a wealthy white woman who’s dressed like she’s about to lay off 47 people over Zoom.” He then took issue with McCain’s posting of a “Stop Asian Hate” image on Twitter, and yeah, it’s not the best look, considering what McCain previously declared.

As Oliver points out, “There has to be an understanding that saying, ‘I don’t have a problem with calling it the China virus’ is very much giving space for that hate to grow.” Will McCain respond to the slam dunk against her? We’ll be watching.

The 2021 NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament is only three days old, but it has already been the most wild and unpredictable tournament we’ve ever seen. One of every seed in the tournament, aside from a 16, won a first round game, and after a day of the second round, a 15-seed, 12-seed, 11-seed, and 8-seed have all punched tickets to the Sweet 16.

Sunday night’s action was capped off with 12-seed Oregon State toppling 4-seed Oklahoma State and presumptive top pick in the upcoming 2021 NBA Draft Cade Cunningham, in a 80-70 win in which they led wire to wire. That win marked the 11th upset of the tournament by the NCAA’s definition — a team seeded five or more spots below their opponent winning — which set a new record for upsets in the first weekend with 8 games still to be played.

Those games would be:
13 North Texas over 4 Purdue
15 Oral Roberts over 2 Ohio State
15 Oral Roberts over 7 Florida
8 Loyola Chicago over 1 Illinois
12 Oregon State over 5 Tennessee
12 Oregon State over 4 Oklahoma State
11 Syracuse over 6 San Diego State
11 Syracuse over 3 West Virginia
13 Ohio over 4 Virginia
11 UCLA over 6 BYU
14 Abilene Christian over 3 Texas

There are a number of theories as to why we’re seeing so many upsets. For one, a team like Loyola Chicago was probably underseeded as an 8 and, as such, they were much closer to 1-seed Illinois than most any other 8 would have been and were able to dominate wire-to-wire. There’s also probably something to playing some of these games in smaller gyms with a very limited capacity that makes a smaller school team feel a bit more comfortable, along with the fact that most any shooter will tell you it’s easier to fire away from deep in an empty gym. With lower bowls unoccupied, it’s a better environment for threes and that’s the quickest way for a team to erase a talent gap by bombing away from the arc. Finally, this has been a really weird season of stops and starts, absences and a general lack of rhythm, so these top teams might simply not be as cohesive as they usually are.

In any case, it’s been rather thrilling to see all of the upsets and we have another day of second round games that might bring us more. We’ll see if these Cinderellas can continue their runs into the second weekend, but at least thus far Indianapolis has been quite hospitable for the lower seeds.

Rudy Giuliani had a pretty wild back end of 2020, spending much of his time clumsily trying to overturn the election for his client, former president Donald Trump. But even between the Four Seasons Total Landscaping debacle and the presser in which black goo melted down his head, there was this: He became the biggest part of the sequel to Borat. But we’re only now learning one big detail about the gotcha scene: He did everything he could to throw star Sacha Baron Cohen and team in jail.

As per Deadline, producer Monica Levinson broke the news at a Producers Guild of America panel, saying he called the cops on the makers of the hit mockumentary. “He claimed we were trying to extort him at the time, which — we didn’t ask for anything,” Levinson said. “He called all of his New York City cops and said extortion, which was a federal crime. Very smart to bring that up.”

The scene in question finds Giuliani unzipping his pants on a bed while in the presence of actress Maria Bakalova, who he thought to be 15 years old, all while cameras rolled. He received a Razzie nomination for his efforts, while Bakalova was this week nominated for an Oscar.

What Giuliani did actually succeed in doing was locking the Borat crew out of the hotel suite, forcing them to have to rent new equipment. Luckily they had already spirited the footage out of the room.

“That’s always out first,” Levinson explained. “We would hide tapes in our pants. There’s always ways to make sure we got out the data.”

Luckily not even the former mayor of New York City could get the city’s finest to bust them for doing something that was fully legal.

(Via Deadline)

When Oral Roberts took down Ohio State in the first round on Friday afternoon, it was the first of a number of top Big Ten teams falling in the first weekend of the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament, and facing Tre Mann and the Gators in the second round, few expected them to back it up with another upset.

It was a close game throughout, but one Florida appeared to have within their grasp, leading by five at the half and six with six minutes to play in the game, but the Gators could never make a run to put Oral Roberts in their rearview mirror. Instead, it was the Golden Eagles that looked like the composed team down the stretch in pressure situations, as Max Abmas once again steered the ship as a facilitator, with Carlos Jurgens and Kevin Obanor hitting big shots late as they outscored the Gators 16-7 in the final six minutes to emerge with an 83-80 win.

Obanor led all scorers with 28 points, including that bucket to take the lead late, to go along with 11 rebounds and four steals, as the Golden Eagles hounded the Gators offense all night. Florida shot well, but turned the ball over 20 times in the game, which is a recipe for disaster. Abmas had 26 points and seven assists as he continues to be sensational for ORU, and Jurgens hit timely threes late when the Eagles needed them.

In the end, Florida had two shots at forcing OT late, but after the first missed, the second was a desperation heave that never had much of a chance and the stunning run for the Golden Eagles continues.

It’s the second time a 15-seed has made it to the Sweet 16, as ORU joins Florida Gulf Coast in such a feat, and awaiting them in the Sweet 16 is a high-scoring Arkansas team coming off a thriller of their own with Texas Tech.