Category: News

Tom Cruise does not fear for his safety too much, that much is clear. He perches atop a speeding train like it’s no big thing. The guy’s a notorious daredevil and devoted to the most bonkers of stunts — he leaps off skyscrapers, and casually dangles from the side of helicopters, and runs everywhere. Still, Tom Cruise knows that the smartest move of all during a pandemic is to take things seriously and mask up. Mission: Impossible 7 has resumed filming in Italy, where Tom can be seen above while taking a breather in Venice. As always, he’s happy to wave to fans, and as one can plainly see, Tom is not messing around with Covid-19. He’s double masked (quite like me hitting the grocery store), with a surgical variety underneath a cooler black exterior mask.

The Daily Mail has even more photos of Tom doing car stunts in Rome alongside co-star Hayley Atwell. Both of them, of course, are taking no chances in between takes and masking up while in close proximity with others. Here’s an Instagram shot from director Chris McQuarrie as he prepared to roll camera near a telltale landmark.

It’s been a long time coming, obviously, given that all movies shut down production earlier this year, and Cruise personally called Norway’s culture minister to reboot European shooting, all before igniting a local controversy involving cruise ships. This followed a Polish bridge kerfuffle and a stunt gone wrong, but things are now humming along throughout Italy for the Cruise train.

Mission: Impossible 7 is currently scheduled for a November 19, 2021 release, and please enjoy this stop-motion rendering (by Victor Patator) of Cruise in stunt mode.

Did you know Tyler the Creator was in Grand Theft Auto V? Apparently, one fan didn’t until he noticed that distinctive Wolf Tyler growl coming from a random non-player character (NPC) during a nostalgic playthrough of the game and shared their realization with Twitter. Of course, it’s easy to overlook Tyler’s character as his dialogue almost entirely consists of goofy nonsequiturs like “You like potato salad, ’cause I like potato salad.” Also, staring at him for an extended period results — as it so often does in real life — in a fight when “Tyler” pulls a gun to pistol-whip the player’s avatar.

Now, this isn’t exactly news for longtime gamers, as Tyler’s appearance (as well as Danny Brown and Flying Lotus) was covered extensively at the time. However, since the game is almost a decade old (it released in September 2013) and Tyler was still the fresh-faced creator of hair-raising projects like Goblin and Wolf, it makes sense that a new generation of gamers who venerates Grammy-winning, Flower Boy Tyler as a superstar would not only be unaware and also astonished by this tidbit. If nothing else, the incident highlights how far he’s come; if he were to voice a character in a game now, it would almost undoubtedly be a starring role. Or, he could very well go the Travis Scott route and actually perform in-game as himself now that he’s one of the most respected superstars in music.

Check out the fan’s “discovery” above.

Rico Nasty has been teasing her upcoming album since this past spring. Now after ushering in the beginning of a new era with the singles “IPhone,” “Own It,” and “OHFR?” Rico Nasty has finally uncovered some more details about her impending release Nightmare Vacation.

Rico Nasty returned Monday to officially unveil her Nightmare Vacation album art and tracklist. Speaking about the project in a recent interview with W Magazine, Rico Nasty addressed certain pressures she faced while penning the album:

“I started feeling like I should make what I hear on the radio. I was only making those songs to please my A&R, like, does this sound mainstream? By the time the studio session is over, you have a song that you wouldn’t listen to if somebody paid you. […] I look back at my tracklist like, not only did I overcome people trying to tell me what I should sound like, but I overcame a f*cking pandemic and was still able to create it. I think I’m on the cusp of being ready to just take sh*t head on, take it for what it is.”

Check out Rico Nasty’s Nightmare Vacation cover art and tracklist below.

1. “Candy”
2. “Don’t Like Me” Feat. Don Toliver and Gucci Mane
3. “Check Me Out”
4. “IPhone”
5. “STFU”
6. “Back & Forth” Feat. Amine
7. “Girl Scouts”
8. “Let It Out”
9. “Losers” Feat. Trippie Redd
10. “No Debate”
11. “P*ssy Poppin”
12. “OHFR?”
13. “10Fo”
14. “Own It”
15. “Smack A B*tch (Remix)” Feat. PPCocaine, Rubi Rose, Sukihana
16. “Smack A B*tch (Bonus)”

Nightmare Vacation is out 12/4 via Sugar Trap / Atlantic. Pre-order it here.

Some of the artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

The NFL made it 12 weeks without any games being officially canceled, but as case counts rise across the country and weeks on the NFL schedule become thin with no more bye weeks available to shuffle games into, their hopes of completing the season without such a situation is growing more perilous by the day.

The Baltimore Ravens have been dealing with a COVID-19 outbreak that’s seen stars such as quarterback Lamar Jackson test positive, among many others, causing their Thanksgiving night game with the divisional rival Pittsburgh Steelers to be initially pushed to Sunday and then, later, to Tuesday night. One day out from that hopeful rescheduled game, the Ravens found themselves still in limbo, having not been able to practice on Monday and unsure of whether they would be able to even travel to Pittsburgh for the game.

On Monday evening, word emerged from ESPN’s Adam Schefter that the game would be pushed back yet again (but still would be attempted to be played), this time on Wednesday night rather than Tuesday.

This comes after Ravens players reportedly held a players-only meeting in which they concluded they didn’t want to play if they couldn’t practice, which is why another day of delay will hopefully get them on the field on Tuesday.

From a football perspective, the game is extremely important for the Ravens playoff hopes, who enter the game needing a win to keep pace with the Colts and Dolphins in the chase for the final Wild Card spot in the AFC at 7-4 (and one game behind the Browns at 8-3 for second in the division).

However, beyond that, this situation shows the flaw in the league’s plan for this season, which did not add any additional bye weeks to the schedule when it could’ve built in a later break to account for such a possibility — particularly with there being long held concerns about a second wave spiking around the holidays (which, really, ended up being a third spike). Now the NFL finds itself in a position they had hoped to avoid but had not planned strongly enough to ensure they could work around, with the Steelers and Ravens upcoming games also in flux, likely being moved to a weeknight next week as well.

Will Cain may best be known as a guy you maybe saw speaking on ESPN while the TV was muted at your barber shop, but the reactionary sports commentator somehow parlayed that into a job braying political nonsense on Fox News earlier this year. There were other things going on back in April, of course, so don’t be too hard on yourself if you didn’t realize Max Kellerman’s punching bag was talking about election results.

The latest example came on Tuesday, when Cain advocated for various state legislatures that have certified election results in favor of Joe Biden to defy those results and put in place Electoral College voters who would elect Donald Trump, a man who lost the 2020 presidential election by millions of votes and a substantial margin in the aforementioned Electoral College.

Trump, of course, has baselessly ranted about massive fraud that no one in his legal team or sycophants on TV have been able to claim, so now the next talking point is tearing directly at the fabric of democracy and just putting in electors who will do what Trump says, not the millions of people who voted him out of office.

“It is absolutely unprecedented what happened in this election,” Cain said. “There may not be enough evidence for a court system, but there should be enough evidence for state legislators to change their electors.”

All of that is nonsense, as there is still zero evidence that anything out of the ordinary happened with mail-in ballots and vote counting. None of Trump’s various lawsuits have panned out in any meaningful way, with some of them seeing harsh dismissals from judges, even Republican ones. And while some noted that Cain may not have been expressing his personal opinion and was instead laying out the Trump campaign’s perspective, it is nonetheless incorrect and dangerous to try to delegitimize the election results.

Which is why that video going viral also came with people on Twitter remembering some less-than-flattering moments from Cain’s past life as a sports broadcaster. First of all, the video that made it clear Snoop Dogg really dislikes Will Cain.

And then there’s Shannon Sharpe saying Cain is the one person he absolutely refuses to listen to when it comes to sports talk.

“Will Cain, anytime he’s on I mute,” Sharpe said, barely letting the interviewer finish the question. “He could be telling me I won $10 million, I’d never know. I won’t pick that prize up.”

The feeling was common among other sports fans and reporters who, well, could have told those in the political sphere that this kind of stuff was coming.

It’s just a good reminder that if a professional sportscaster has no respect for what another person does on-air, that sportscaster probably shouldn’t be trusted when he’s suddenly spouting conspiracy theories on another network about something he’s probably not qualified to talk about, either.

Dennis Schröder is coming off of the best season of his career in terms of finally putting together productivity and efficiency, starring in a sixth man role for the Oklahoma City Thunder. The 26-year-old point guard averaged 18.9 points, 4.0 assists, and 3.6 rebounds per game on a 46.9/38.5/83.9 shooting split, with career-highs in field goal and three-point percentage, and that earned him the attention of the defending champs who traded for him this offseason.

While Schröder came off the bench, he still held a starring role for OKC, playing 30.8 minutes per night and was effectively tied with Shai Gilgeous-Alexander (19.0) and Danilo Gallinari (18.7) for the team’s leading scorer. One would think that experience and the success the Thunder saw with that rotation might have made an imprint on the German guard, and led him to recognize that starting isn’t as important as finishing — and that a bench role can actually increase your usage and effectiveness for the team.

However, that doesn’t appear to be the case as Schröder met with the Lakers media for the first time on Monday and made it abundantly clear that he believes he is a starter, full stop, and that his agent made that clear to L.A. prior to the trade.

With Rajon Rondo in Atlanta now (where Schröder started his career), it’s very likely the Lakers see him operating in that starting capacity as well. That likely means a starting lineup with Dennis, Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, LeBron James, Anthony Davis, and Marc Gasol, with Alex Caruso, Montrezl Harrell, Kyle Kuzma, and Wesley Matthews headlining the bench unit. Frank Vogel will have his hands full adjusting his rotations to a new lineup and figuring out exactly how he wants to deploy all of his new players, but one thing is clear and that is that Schröder isn’t here for the “bench stuff” anymore — which isn’t exactly a new stance from Schröder, who didn’t enjoy his time as a reserve behind Jeff Teague in Atlanta.

What will likely determine whether his move back to being a starter is successful is whether his shooting efficiency translates with the Lakers, which is a genuinely big question. Schröder was tremendous shooting the ball last season, but that came in part from being deployed alongside at least one, if not two, fellow on-ball creators in Chris Paul and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander in OKC, who helped tee him up for catch-and-shoot looks. LeBron James can certainly do that, but that’s about it for perimeter players on the Lakers capable of doing so and that will test exactly how real Schröder’s shooting uptick last year was. If he dips back to a sub-35 percent shooter with L.A., it’ll provide some of the same spacing problems LeBron had to navigate a year ago — although, that obviously ended up working out just fine in the end.

It’s a massive opportunity for Schröder to take on a major role with a championship favorite, and his confidence has never been lacking. However, embracing whatever role is asked of him hasn’t always been a strong point, and you can bet that LeBron and Vogel have an idea of what he’ll be doing. How much that matches up with Dennis’ desires to be a starter and key contributor will likely determine exactly how successful their partnership is as the Lakers chase a second straight championship.

After being charged in the Operation Varsity Blues college bribery scandal and serving time for her participation, Felicity Huffman is set to make her return to acting with a new comedy series for ABC. The network has picked up a pilot for the show that’s reportedly inspired by the real-life story of Susan Savage, the owner of the Sacramento River Cats, the Triple-A affiliate of the San Francisco Giants. Via The Hollywood Reporter:

The ABC comedy, meanwhile, will also star Zack Gottsagen (The Peanut Butter Falcon). It centers on Huffman’s character, who inherits her husband’s beloved minor league baseball team after his sudden death. She navigates her new life with the help of her dysfunctional family, including her eldest son (Gottsagen), a baseball devotee with Down syndrome, her new work family and the Sacramento community.

Huffman’s casting comes as a surprise even though it’s been over a year since she served time for committing mail fraud after she and other wealthy parents, including Fuller House‘s Lori Loughlin, were caught by federal investigators in the intricate scandal. (Loughlin is currently serving her sentence.) The guilty parties took part in a scam that faked their children’s SAT scores and extracurricular activities to get them into prestigious universities. However, unlike Loughlin, Huffman immediately cooperated with prosecutors and only served a 14-day sentence, which earned her scathing criticism from her Desperate Housewives co-star, Ricardo Chavira.

In a now-deleted tweet, Chavira wrote, “White Privilege. And I saw Eight years worth of it, so I know what I’m talking about. Accountability and Responsibility don’t mean sh*t to these people.”

(Via The Hollywood Reporter)

His Dark Materials (HBO, 9:00pm EST) — The Dust-filled fantasy series picks up with an unlikely ally surfacing after Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Lee digging for Grumman. Meanwhile, Lyra and Will face dangerous consequences following Lyra’s decision to ignore the alethiometer, and the witches want some answers.

Industry (HBO, 10:00pm EST) — The Succession-esque series for the younger crowd sees Harper’s very bad workday growing even worse after a wild night out. Her entire team might face up for major losses after Harper’s trade work leads to a discrepancy, but she might find support from an unexpected source, along with some trouble.

Filthy Rich (FOX, 9:00pm EST) — The Kim Cattrall-starring series reaches a season finale with an explosive secret coming to a boiling point, while Mark and Rose are ready to get serious with their budding relationship.

The Late Show With Stephen Colbert — President Barack Obama, Part. 2

Jimmy Kimmel Live — Natalie Portman, Russell Dickerson

In case you missed these recent picks:

The Flight Attendant (HBO Max series) — Kaley Cuoco busts away from the The Big Bang Theory with a fun flight of (darkly comedic) fancy. She plays portrays an airline stewardess whose international jet-setting lifestyle includes falling into bed in various countries with various handsome men. During the course of one particularly fateful encounter, Cassie wakes up next to the dead body of a one-night stand. She spends the rest of the series attempting to clean sh*t up. Surrender to this madcap ride.

Saved By The Bell (Peacock series) — Here comes the official reimagining of the original series with a lot of the O.G. crowd on board for more neon-tinged adventures. Zack Morris is now (a terrible) California governor, Kelly Kapowski’s his first lady, and Elizabeth Berkley and Mario Lopez are back as Jessie Spano and A.C. Slater, respectively. If you’re lucky, you’ll see the return of Zack Attack. Screech is sitting this one out, but prepare for some (still lighthearted) social commentary.

The Christmas Chronicles: Part Two (Netflix film) — Kurt Russell’s hot Santa returns two years after Kate and Teddy saved Christmas. Kate’s now a cynical teenager with family drama, and for some reason, she’s not thrilled to spend Christmas in Cancun. The trouble truly begins when a mysterious toublemaker, Belsnickel, plots to destroy Christmas and make a ground zero out of the North Pole.

Season two of Euphoria doesn’t premiere until next year, but HBO is releasing two specials to bridge the gaps between seasons, the first of which premieres this Sunday. In the Otis Redding-soundtracked trailer, Rue, played by Zendaya, is sitting in a diner, while snippets of dialogue from the season one finale (“What if we just f*cking left?”) echo in her mind. It’s the first new footage from the HBO series since Zendaya made Emmys history by becoming the youngest person ever to win the Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series, beating the previous record-holder, Killing Eve icon Jodie Comer, by two years. She’s come a long way from her Kidz Bop dayz.

No wonder everyone is losing it over one moment in the trailer.

HBO have should gone all-out with the Emmy love, and included “Emmy Award for Outstanding Contemporary Makeup (Non-Prosthetic) winners Doniella Davy, Kirsten Sage Coleman, and Tara Lang Shah” in the trailer, too. (Seriously, half the fun of watching Euphoria is the makeup.) Not much is known about the first special, other than it will follow “Rue as she celebrates Christmas,” according to Deadline. “It was written and directed by series creator Sam Levinson and also stars Colman Domingo, who appeared in season one. Both episodes were produced under COVID-19 guidelines.”

Euphoria Part 1: Rue airs on December 6 at 9 p.m. ET on HBO, then on HBO Max.

“Would you like to build a snowman?” If you asked five-year-old Brantley from Texas this question, the answer would be a resounding “Yes!” While it may sound like a simple dream, since Texas doesn’t usually see much snow, it seemed like a lofty one for him, even more so because Brantley has a congenital heart disease.

On Dec. 11, 2019, however, the real Macy’s Santa and his two elves teamed up with Make-A-Wish to surprise Brantley and his family on his way to Colorado where there was plenty of snow for him to build his very own snowman, fulfilling his wish as part of the Macy’s Believe campaign. After a joy-filled plane ride where every passenger got gift bags from Macy’s, the family arrived in Breckenridge, Colorado where Santa and his elves helped Brantley build a snowman.

Brantley, Brantley’s mom, and Santa marveling at their snowmanAll photos courtesy of Macy’s

Brantley, who according to his mom had never actually seen snow, was blown away by the experience.

“Well, I had to build a snowman because snowmen are my favorite,” Brantley said in an interview with Summit Daily. “All of it was my favorite part.”

This is just one example of the more than 330,000 wishes the nonprofit Make-A-Wish have fulfilled to bring joy to children fighting critical illnesses since its founding 40 years ago. Even though many of the children that Make-A-Wish grants wishes for manage or overcome their illnesses, they often face months, if not years of doctor’s visits, hospital stays and uncomfortable treatments. The nonprofit helps these children and their families replace fear with confidence, sadness with joy and anxiety with hope.

It’s hardly an outlandish notion — research shows that a wish come true can help increase these children’s resiliency and improve their quality of life. Brantley is a prime example.

“This couldn’t have come at a better time because we see all the hardships that we went through last year,” Brantley’s mom Brandi told Summit Daily.

Brantley playing with snowballs

Now more than ever, kids with critical illnesses need hope. Since they’re particularly vulnerable to disease, they and their families have had to isolate even more during the pandemic and avoid the people they love most and many of the activities that recharge them. That’s why Make-A-Wish is doing everything it can to fulfill wishes in spite of the unprecedented obstacles.

That’s where you come in. Macy’s has raised over $132 million for Make-A-Wish, and helped grant more than 15,500 wishes since their partnership began in 2003, but they couldn’t have done that without the support of everyday people. The crux of that support comes from Macy’s Believe Campaign — the longstanding holiday fundraising effort where for every letter to Santa that’s written online at Macys.com or dropped off safely at the red Believe mailbox at their stores, Macy’s will donate $1 to Make-A-Wish, up to $1 million. New this year, National Believe Day will be expanded to National Believe Week and will provide customers the opportunity to double their donations ($2 per letter, up to an additional $1 million) for a full week from Sunday, Nov. 29 through Saturday, Dec. 5.

There are more ways to support Make-A-Wish besides letter-writing too. If you purchase a $4 Believe bracelet, $2 of each bracelet will be donated to Make-A-Wish through Dec. 31. And for families who are all about the holiday PJs, on Giving Tuesday (Dec. 1), 20 percent of the purchase price of select family pajamas will benefit Make-A-Wish.

Elizabeth living out her wish of being a fashion designer

Additionally, this year’s campaign features 6-year-old Elizabeth, a Make-A-Wish child diagnosed with leukemia, whose wish to design a dress recently came true. Thanks to the style experts at Macy’s Fashion Office and I.N.C. International Concepts, only at Macy’s, Elizabeth had the opportunity to design a colorful floral maxi dress. Elizabeth’s exclusive design is now available online at Macys.com and in select Macy’s stores. In the spirit of giving back this holiday season, 20 percent of the purchase price of Elizabeth’s dress (through Dec. 31) will benefit Make-A-Wish.You can also donate directly to Make-A-Wish via Macy’s website.

This holiday season may be a tough one this year, but you can bring joy to children fighting critical illnesses by delivering hope for their wishes to come true.