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Depending on your age, you either know John McEnroe as a tennis icon or the narrator of Netflix’s Never Have I Ever. His range extends to music, including a 2015 performance of Nirvana’s “Territorial Pissings.”

Eurosport Tennis recently featured McEnroe on its “My Playlist” series. While strumming an acoustic guitar, he answered a slew of music-related questions. He was first asked to identify the perfect celebratory song after a victory, and he cited his first Wimbledon title as the reason for choosing “I Fought The Law” by The Clash.

McEnroe’s guilty pleasure song is “Everybody Hurts” by R.E.M., but which band does he want to record with?

“I’d love to play [and] record with the Foo Fighters,” McEnroe said. “My friend — God rest his soul — Taylor Hawkins, the drummer, is no longer with us. So, if I ever had a chance to dedicate something to him, that would be incredible.”

After saying that, McEnroe inserted Hawkins’ name into a rendition of Foo Fighters’ smash “Everlong.”

While R.E.M. are never getting back together, Foo Fighters posted an optimistic update on New Year’s Eve about the band’s future following Hawkins’ sudden death in March:

Because Foo Fighters plan on remaining active, McEnroe at least has an outside chance to record a tribute song for Hawkins.

Watch McEnroe’s full segment with Eurosport Tennis above.

There are low bars and then there’s George Santos doing what he did during his first-ever House speech. The GOP representative quickly became the biggest bête-noire of the House’s freshman class, and for good reason: He misled voters about his background by telling one whopper after another. But credit where credit’s due, we guess: He managed to not lie for a whopping minute and 15 seconds. Baby steps!

As per Mediaite, Santos took to the House lectern on Wednesday for the first time. What did he talk about? Something important: Iranian protesters, whom he called “brave.” He then proceeded to accurately quote a speech Ronald Reagan delivered in 1967. Hey, this guy once defended himself from accusations of lying by dropping a fake Winston Churchill quote.

But there’s more! The bit about how there’s a sizable population of Iranians in his district? True! He also noted that fellow Republican New York representative Claudia Tenney introduced a resolution supporting the Iranian protesters. That — even coming from the mouth of the guy who falsely claimed his mom died in 9/11 — was also correct.

Look, you gotta report the good with the bad, and when a serial fabulist accused of stealing GoFundMe donations intended for a dying dog does something right, it’s worth giving props. Then again, you wouldn’t need to compliment a political figure for telling the truth if that political figure didn’t have a storied history of telling lies.

(Via Mediaite)

He’s Marc Maron, and he’s here to make you think about death and get sad and stuff. The trailer for the stand-up legend’s new special, From Bleak To Dark, is a crushing delight that doesn’t need to come with free anti-depressants because Maron’s uniquely vulnerable perspective on the human condition gives us the space to laugh through the worst of times. Plus, there’s good news: everything is going to get even worse.

The HBO comedy special is set for February 11th, a date which cannot get here fast enough. All good doctors know that Maron’s comedy is the best medicine for a sardonic era.

Here’s the official synopsis:

“Legendary comedian and podcaster Marc Maron stars in his first-ever HBO comedy special filmed in front of a live audience at New York City’s Town Hall. Over the course of a hilarious and deeply personal hour, Maron explores such universal topics as getting older, antisemitism and faith, and the superiority of having cats over children – especially during the pandemic. The comedian also opens up about the loss of his partner in 2020 and reestablishing his complicated relationship with his father. Funny and fearless, Marc Maron: From Bleak To Dark showcases the comedian’s expertly layered cynicism as he deftly weaves humor and pathos into his signature style of storytelling.”

If it seemed impossible for Maron to get any more personal than he already is, this special appears to make it happen. Let’s call go laughing into the darkness, together, shall we?

On Wednesday, Xbox held a showcase called Developer Direct where the devs of five games releasing in 2023 were able to talk directly to viewers about their games through a pre-recorded event — think Nintendo Direct but fewer trailers and more talking. The result was a fairly interesting showcase where we got to hear from the creators themselves what they felt about the games they were working on.

Of course, while hearing from the devs was a nice part of the show, what everyone was really viewing for was to find out what Xbox had planned for everyone in 2023. While all but one of the games on the list weren’t really a surprise we can still say the event left us anticipating a big year for Xbox in 2023. Especially because we know they have even bigger titles on the way that haven’t been shown off yet.

Minecraft Legends – April 18

The event led off with Minecraft Legends, an RTS Minecraft game which sounds kind of weird until you start hearing them talk about it, then it becomes clear that no franchise needed an RTS more than Minecraft. Think about it. What is the point of RTS games? Resource gathering, base building, and destroying opposing forces by being better at resource gathering and base building. The only non-Minecraft thing in there was the Player vs. Player element of it and that is basically what Minecraft Legends is adding. It should be out in April and I am way more excited about this now than I was before the showcase.

Forza Motorsport – 2023

Probably the big disappointment of the day was Forza Motorsport. There wasn’t anything wrong with the game itself! It looks great, sounds great, and is probably going to be yet another fantastic entry into the Forza Motorsport franchise. The disappointment is it was the only game shown off that didn’t get an official release date, and it might even be delayed past the expected spring release it was initially announced for. It’s Forza Motorsport so we know it’s going to be a great game, but it was the odd game out among a series of release dates to be excited about.

Hi-Fi Rush – January 25 (Today)

Well, this was a pleasant surprise! Usually when a brand new game gets announced the best you can hope for is a release date that same year. Instead, Hi-Fi Rush was announced and shown off to an increasingly excited public before we were blindsided by the announcement that it was ready to go and would be released shortly after the end of the presentation. So if you go to the Microsoft Store or GamePass right now the game is available to purchase or download. Now that’s how you make an entrance.

Elder Scrolls Online – June 20

It’s kind of hard to believe this is the same franchise that, upon release, was quickly ignored by plenty as they moved on to better games. Give the developers over at ZeniMax Online Studios credit, they have stayed firm and created an MMO that many fans have continued coming back to over the years. For fans of the series, a major expansion was announced during the presentation and it featured a new class and story for fans to jump into. For those of us who have never played before, maybe this will be the catalyst we need to jump into the series this June.

Redfall – May 2

Redfall, the vampire FPS game from Arkane Studios has been a point of intrigue ever since it was first announced. Its struggled to capture the interest of fans though through most of its trailers, and maybe the devs noticed that because the game was delayed alongside Starfield back in May. Turns out, this May will be the time for redemption when the game hopefully releases. There’s a lot of potential with the multiplayer aspects of the game, and maybe the gameplay we saw today will be what pushes people to finally get excited about it as a AAA title.

SZA is riding the historic high of logging a sixth total week at No. 1 on the Billboard 200. Miley Cyrus achieved her first career debut at No. 1 on Billboard‘s Hot 100 chart for “Flowers,” the lead single off her forthcoming album, Endless Summer Vacation. Oh, and SZA is also sitting pretty at No. 2 on the Hot 100 with “Kill Bill.”

They’re celebrating by giving each other Twitter flowers.

“MAJOR congrats to Miley !!! Excited for her album and to work together,” SZA tweeted alongside a heart on Tuesday, January 24. Cyrus quote-tweeted back, “You are KILLING it Congratulations! Sending love ”

And then, the internet did what the internet does: take vague niceties and run with it. We can all hope for Cyrus and SZA to collaborate, but we’ll need more than SZA tweeting the general sentiment that she’s excited to work with Cyrus before we totally get our hopes up.

Still, it’s fun to see how fans reacted:

Let’s not forget that SZA told Rolling Stone that she and Lizzo recorded “five or six songs” during an SOS session, but the SOS track list doesn’t feature Lizzo. Before that, SZA also explained to Hot97’s Nessa On Air that there were people she’d hoped would be featured on the album, but they didn’t turn in their verses.

The one thing we can bank on right now is Cyrus’ Endless Summer Vacation dropping on March 10, and it’s likely that she and SZA will continue to dominate the charts for weeks to come.

Endless Summer Vacation is out 3/10 via Columbia. Pre-order it here.

All eyes and ears have been on Karol G, and there are numbers to prove it. She ended 2022 as Spotify’s most-streamed female Latin artist of the year and Vevo’s most-watched artist. More over, the Colombian star’s Strip Love Tour became the highest-grossing US tour by a female Latin act in history by grossing $69.9 million, as reported by Billboard. Karol G is hoping to maintain those crowns in 2023.

Today, January 25, Karol G announced her new album, Mañana Será Bonito, which translates to “tomorrow will be beautiful,” through an endearing Instagram video. In it, a piece of paper slides down her windshield with a message to call a number if she’s feeling sad. She rings the number, and we see a call center full of children. The adorable young boy who answers Karol G’s call is wearing a T-shirt with the album’s title written on it and encourages her with advice. The video ends with him telling her, “Mañana será bonito.” She also drops a tease that the album is “coming soon.”

Karol G’s Spanish caption translates to “Finally!!!! FINALLY!!! Today I announce the project that I have devoted so much love and time to.”

Mañana Será Bonito follows 2021’s KG0516, which was nominated at last year’s Grammys for Best Música Urbana Album.

“Every day I kept finding something I wanted to change or rethink, or finding little details I wanted to update,” Karol G said about the album to Rolling Stone. “It’s always hard, but now I’ve turned it in and it’s finished, and I can’t wait for people to hear it.”

She added, “This definitely represents a specific phase of my life. The name of album is a phrase I kept repeating to myself when nothing felt great. I mean, I was going through the best moment of my career, but personally, I was really disconnected from myself and from my friends. I wasn’t unhappy, but I wasn’t happy either. So every day I’d say to myself, ‘It’s okay, mañana será bonito — tomorrow will be beautiful.’”

It’s never a good thing when another Boomer figures out how to text, but that’s especially true if you’re a twice-impeached former president currently being investigated by multiple federal agencies.

According to a report by The New York Times, Donald Trump has started sending messages via his phone for the first time. Sure, the ketchup-throwing tyrant loved distilling his erratic, incomprehensible thoughts via 140 characters on Twitter and, when banned from that app, having his communications secretaries electronically deliver press releases daily. But, according to insiders, the Florida retiree was averse to texting until recently.

“Friends, confidants and even people not especially close to Mr. Trump began receiving text messages from his cellphone, most of them described as innocuous, such as new year greetings or political observations,” the Times wrote, adding that Trump’s refusal to text likely kept him out of legal trouble during the Jan. 6th hearings.

The real estate tycoon has always been wary of leaving a paper trail even in electronic form, with the report stating he “sometimes asked aides to send electronic messages to reporters, referring to the missives as ‘wires,’ like a telegram.” When he first adopted Twitter, aides described teaching him to type on his phone as something like “the scene in the film Jurassic Park when the velociraptors learned to open doors.”

But now it sounds like Trump is fully embracing that emoji life, which is making some of his supporters nervous. The Times reported that “the fact that Mr. Trump is now sending texts has caused alarm among some of his associates, who are concerned about what he might say,” while describing insiders as “shocked” and alarmed by his POV shift on texting.

We just feel sorry for anyone in his contacts when he discovers how to send voice notes.

(Via New York Times)

Paying attention to politics in America right now is like keeping a close eye on the ball during a tennis match — your head is constantly moving from one side to the other. And in the end, no matter who wins, you wind up with a massive headache. See, for example, the growing list of current and/or one-time presidents and vice presidents who have been caught hoarding classified documents. It’s a list that includes Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and, most recently, Mike Pence — much to Steve Bannon’s annoyance.

The trend — at least the trend of being caught with top-secret documents you have no right to have in your possession — began with Trump, as we all know from the FBI’s raid on Mar-a-Lago in August 2022. (It’s ok though, because Trump says he was able to declassify documents with his mind.) It didn’t help the Democrats’ case for coming down on Trump when, in the intervening months, classified documents from Biden’s time as vice president started popping up in all sorts of places, including the garage where POTUS keeps his kick-ass Corvette. (For the record: Kooky Rudy Giuliani thinks Obama planted them.)

Republicans — even those who initially claimed Trump having those documents in non-secure places was no big deal — really sunk their teeth into the hypocrisy of Biden’s document stash, but said it was worse because Biden was only VP at the time.

But now the ball has bounced back into the Dems’ court as a cardboard cutout with a heartbeat Pence has forked over the classified documents he had sitting around his home in Indiana. Which has Bannon seeing red.

As Raw Story reports, Trump’s shower-hating former strategist posted a link to The Daily Mail’s story about Pence’s brush with misbehavior with the line “Judas Pence attempts to provide cover for Biden.”

While there’s no evidence that Pence just randomly threw together some papers in order to take the heat off of Biden — or to put them on more equal footing, should Pence make a run for president in 2024 — Bannon’s social media-based outrage had some people thinking it was all a bit performative.

As Rodric Hurdle-Bradford wrote for Raw Story, one theory is that Bannon’s “outrage” over the situation is simply an attempt “to deflect attention from his current case and the charges that he fraudulently obtained donations for the Build the Wall Campaign and misappropriated those funds for the unfinished project. Bannon is facing charges of conspiracy, money laundering and scheming to defraud investors.”

Whatever the case, the discovery of Pence’s document stands in direct contrast to his repeated assertions that he did not and would not ever take classified documents from the White House.

(Via Raw Story)

If it’s been a while since the images of the family-values horror flick Barbarian have forced your brain to try to claw its way out of your skull, congratulations! Here’s another reason to think about them. And to call your mother. She misses you.

But the biggest congratulations go to writer/director Zach Cregger, who has catapulted from that Detroit basement into the stratosphere with a deal from New Line for his upcoming film Weapons. According to The Hollywood Reporter, New Line came out on top in a bidding war that resulted in giving Cregger an 8-figure paycheck, guaranteed greenlight, and final cut (!) of the film as long as it scores a high enough audience test rating. It’s an astonishing deal that feels like an artifact of decades past in a creatives-first Hollywood that’s been dormant as IP has dominated.

As with any great story about a follow-up effort from a hot new director, there are almost no public details about Weapons. THR describes it as “an interrelated, multistory horror epic that tonally is in the vein of Magnolia.” So, at least we know it’s ambitious. Plus, New Line has a long history with horror and has pushed the envelope in recent years, so they might make an excellent home for something of this magnitude. It’s enough to get the neck hairs tingling with hope and anticipation, and it offers a silver lining for directors making weird stuff (and the fans that love it). But no matter what happens next, Cregger has a big check and a sure thing to shoot.

(via The Hollywood Reporter)

The short story Cat Person took the internet by storm in 2017, which is kind of a reason I wanted to avoid this movie all together at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. It just seemed too “online.” Also, Cat Person, the story, has to rank in the top 30 things where I know the most amount of people’s opinions on one thing that I don’t care that much about one way or another. I decided I could live my life happily without another round. And how could that story become a full movie anyway? Against my better judgment, I watched Cat Person and I found myself … pretty engaged. It’s nuanced, the two leads are great, and it captures the not great vibe of the original story well. I found myself thinking, wow, they pulled this off. And then the events of the short story end yet there are around 40 minutes left in the movie. It’s exactly at this point the movie just becomes something else. And that something else isn’t good. And it’s really infuriating because what came before was really something worth watching.

Emilia Jones (from CODA) plays Margot, a student at a local college who also works at a movie theater. Nicholas Braun (Succession) plays Robert, a frequent customer at the theater who always orders Red Vines, which Margot finds both interesting and odd. Which kind of sums up her whole early relationship with Robert … she finds him pretty much altogether interesting and odd. The two exchange numbers and start a flirty text message campaign. The two start dating. At first, it seems Margot is more into Robert than he is with her. But after things get physical (consensually), Margot’s opinions about Robert change. She’s so turned off by his performance she decides she wants to move on. At first, Robert takes the news with grace, but his texts get more and more agitated and, like in the short story, it finally crescendos on the word “whore.”

That’s pretty much where the short story ends. But how does a movie end like that? Well, this one certainly doesn’t. Up until this point, Robert is kind of a sad sack, but like Margot tells her friend, he’s really never actually done anything bad, but he just has a weird vibe sometimes and she just doesn’t like him anymore. But then after she breaks it off, she admits there are attributes she misses. As a movie, this all seems real and interesting. I really can’t understand how a third act like the one in Cat Person even happens.

A friend of mine texted me, asking me to tell him what happens. I did. He then wrote back, “lol, no but really.” He didn’t believe me. I sounded like I was making it up. I have half a mind to just blurt it all out right now because no one will believe me anyway. But I can’t remember the last time a movie I was actually enjoying quite a bit fell off a cliff like this at such a precise moment. Both Margot and Robert act nothing like they did in the first two-thirds of the movie. The genre switches to almost an action movie? I feel weird saying that, but there’s literally a scene where the two are in a fistfight as they tumble down a flight of stairs then crash into a space heater that sets off a massive blaze. I know what you’re thinking, did Robert break into Margot’s house? No no, the opposite. She broke into his house and got caught. Look, I’ve seen the movie and your guess is as good as mine as to how we got to this plot point.

It’s about that time, as the two tumbled down the stairs, crashing into a space heater and setting off an out-of-control fire that I started thinking about all those nuanced moments from the first two-thirds of the movie. Little actions or things said that could spark such emotions in a viewer. Then it turns into utter nonsense.

Honestly, they’ve almost got something really good here. I’ve never felt this way before about a movie or have ever suggested such a thing, but I’d honestly just consider cutting off everything that happens after the original short story ends and deleting it. Or maybe include it as a bonus feature on the Blu-ray under a section called, “Can you believe we almost went this route?” Replace it with literally anything else. (I understand this costs money.) Honestly, the movie is better if it just ends with Robert’s text tirade like the short story does. That feels real. As is, this is a huge disappointment because it really felt like this movie was doing something interesting.

You can contact Mike Ryan directly on Twitter.