Category: Viral

Fresh off of the success of Pulp Fiction, NBC was quick to snatch up Quentin Tarantino and have him direct an episode of its soon-to-be-smash hit medical series ER. Tarantino delivered “Motherhood,” the penultimate episode of the first season, which drew in 33 million viewers when it aired in May 1995. However, during a recent cast reunion, Julianna Marguiles revealed that Tarantino was apparently a little paranoid about NBC messing with his work, so he devised a crafty method of filming the episode that initially left the cast a little confused. Via IndieWire:

“When Quentin Tarantino came to direct us, he was such a big fan of the show, he only did one take,” Margulies said. “So they didn’t have a choice to edit. We would rehearse, rehearse, rehearse. We would do one take and he would go, ‘Great, let’s move on!’ And I asked him why he was doing that and he said, ‘It’ll be my cut no matter what.’”

Considering Tarantino is one of the biggest auteurs in Hollywood and has a signature style that’s been the catalyst for his success, it’s interesting to imagine a time when he was still afraid of studio interference and had to come up with clever methods to protect his work, even for TV. Especially since, back in the 90s, doing TV work was sometimes looked down on, with the days of Prestige TV and a blurring of the lines between big and small screens still a few years off. Although, one could argue that ER set the stage for TV to finally get the respect it deserved. Leave it to someone like Tarantino to be at the forefront of having prescient respect for the medium. In any event, whatever his reasons for doing it, this is still really, really funny.

(Via IndieWire)

Grammy-winning singer HER is hard at work on a new project and today, she revealed what it’s going to be called. Back Of My Mind. Incidentally, it’s also her debut album, as her prior efforts, the self-titled H.E.R. and its 2019 follow-up I Used To Know Her, were compilations of previously released material (a quartet of EPs bearing the same titles).

However, despite not having an official “album” to her name, the Bay Area singer has become one of music’s most accomplished artists over the past several years, with singles like “Focus,” “Damage,” and “I Can’t Breathe” charting on the Billboard Hot 100 and appearances alongside stars like Daniel Caesar, Jazmine Sullivan, and YG raising her profile to near-superstar status.

That status was sealed as she secured high-profile placements on the Judas And The Black Messiah soundtrack and sang the national anthem at the 2021 Super Bowl. Meanwhile, “I Can’t Breathe” won Song of The Year at this year’s Grammys, while “Fight For You” was nominated for a Golden Globe. She even jokingly tried out for Silk Sonic, Anderson .Paak and Bruno Mars’ new band, a placement that could help her net yet another platinum plaque in the near future.

There’s no release date yet for Back Of My Mind, but the notebook photo she posted on Twitter suggests she’s got at least of a couple of its unknown number of songs in the can already, while her new single “Come Through” is out now. You can listen to that below.

Sasha Sloan is on her way up. She dropped her debut album Only Child last year, and that was preceded by collaborations with artists like Kygo, Camila Cabello, Charli XCX, and plenty of others. Now she has expanded that last, as her latest single, “When Was It Over?,” is a collaboration with country star Sam Hunt. Sure enough, the acoustic ballad wears its country influence on its sleeve, and Sloan and Hunt’s vocals pair nicely on the emotional track.

Sloan says of the track, “‘When Was It Over?’ is about not being able to let go of someone even when you know there’s nothing left. [Co-writer Shane McAnally] brought the title into the room and Sam and I both loved it. The rest fell into place from there.”

While naming Sloan a rising pop star to keep an eye on in 2020, Uproxx’s Caitlin White wrote, “With one foot in the EDM world and another in the realm of soft songwriting, on her debut full-length, last year’s Only Child, she finally began to meld the two, bringing whispers of a drop and other energy-shifting elements to sparse, acoustic tracks. […] If you’re looking for 2020 gems that got overlooked, her debut is definitely one — and it’s more than likely the follow-up will be even better.”

Listen to “When Was It Over?” above.

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

The Inside The NBA crew has been together in their current form for over a decade, and as such it’s hard to avoid repeating yourself or coming back to the same topics at some point. At times this plays out in basketball debates, as Shaq, Chuck, and Kenny fall into the same arguments, but it also happens with their random tangents as well.

On Thursday night, the crew once again got into it over Shaq’s gas tank theory, in which he doesn’t want to fill his entire tank up every time he stops but just put in enough to get where he needs to go. It drives the rest of the crew nuts, as they point out he’s eventually going to have to put that gas in his tank again to go somewhere else, but he just refuses to back down from his stance. This time, Ernie Johnson had enough, begging them not to get into this same argument they’ve been in for four years now, but even Ernie’s despair couldn’t stop this train from going off the tracks as Kenny and Shaq allowed themselves to get riled up by Chuck once again about gas.

The cut to Ernie’s despondent face in the midst of all of this is why they win so many Emmys. It is truly some sensational production work. The best part is that Chuck got it started, knowing exactly what would happen and then just sat off to the side cackling while Kenny can’t help but engage with Shaq in the world’s dumbest conversation. Shaq breaking out stat sheets to try and illustrate his point is also tremendous, as if the problem here is that Kenny just needs a visual aid to understand his lunacy.

Ahead of Avengers: Endgame, theaters across the country hosted Marvel marathons by showing all 22 movies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I like Marvel movies, but I would rather run an actual marathon than watch 22 movies in 59 hours. That is, in my professional opinion, too many movies. A less butt-numbing idea is to spread the marathon out over multiple weekends, like what Universal is doing with Fast & Furious.

A different Fast & Furious movie will be shown in select theaters every Friday between the end of April and June, when F9 comes out. The “Fast Friday” series begins with The Fast and the Furious on April 30, followed by 2 Fast Furious on May 7, The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift on May 14, Fast & Furious on May 21, Fast Five on May 28, Fast & Furious 6 on June 4, Furious 7 on June 11, and The Fate of the Furious on June 18.

Best of all, the screenings are free. Not F9, though. You have to pay for that one (and it will be worth every cent).

You know what the Marvel and Fast & Furious marathons have in common? Vin Diesel. All I’m saying is, it’s not too soon to start planning a XXX retrospective ahead of the 20th anniversary next year… Anyway, to find out more information about “Fast Friday,” including how to get tickets and which theaters are participating, you can head here.

When I was growing up, first we had Street Fighter, and everyone was obsessed. We were like little drug addicts, congregating in liquor stores and dingy arcades, where kids from all walks of life would come together to beat up each other’s avatars in this irresistible game, and afterward wander around itching and begging for quarters like pre-pubescent crackheads. For a perfect snapshot of this time, there’s an episode of Baywatch where someone throws a beer can at Hobie, and then later Mitch smells it and thinks he’s been drinking, but it turns out Hobie was just playing Street Fighter in a weird little convenience store surrounded by delinquents instead, which is almost the same thing.

Have I set the scene well enough? Okay, well Mortal Kombat was basically the dingier, grosser, more extreme version of Street Fighter. If Street Fighter was Baywatch, Mortal Kombat was your uncle’s porn. We had to go over to the arcade in the bad part of town to play that one, a game with blood and gore where players openly vied to murder each other, just for the thrill of it. This was both revolutionary and seemed instinctively “wrong,” and everything about playing it made you feel slightly dirtier afterwards. This is all a long way of saying that for as much as I’ve ridiculed video game adaptations over the years, Mortal Kombat, an insanely dumb cash grab that I had to watch alone in my bedroom, shamefully, because it has far too much gore and swear words for my seven-year-old stepson, who surely would’ve loved it, made me feel almost exactly the same way.

Firstly I would recommend skipping the first 20 or 30 minutes of this movie. It sets up the plot and the characters but scarcely has a movie’s appeal relied less on characters and plots. It is meant to be viewed while chuckling stonedly at the catchphrases you recognize between asking “wait, what?” at the story developments. Paying too much attention to the latter spoils the effect.

All of the characters from the video games are there (I think?). Only now, some of them are part of Earthworld, while others are from Outworld, a meaner, more brutal version of Earth, that wants to dominate Earth, which it can by winning the latest iteration of Mortal Kombat. Outworld is a place that’s, like, bad, you see, and the Earthworld characters — among them Liu Kang, Sonya Blade, the glowing-eyed demi-God Raiden, and main character Cole Young, a family-man MMA fighter — have to defend it from the Outworld bad guys: Sub-Zero, Kabal, Shang Tsung, and various monsters. There, you’re caught up.

In essence, it’s the Avengers blueprint. Some bad guys from another world come here and want to rule. The difference here is that there’s no sheen of all this being some kind of social good, where powerful heroes are meant to both inspire and protect humanity. These characters are all just meat sacks for the grist mill, there to avenge their ancestors and satisfy our blood lust and nothing more. Yes, making an R-rated movie out of a nineties video game is a dumb idea, with inspiration that is purely commercial. Its very existence raises a number of questions. Is it for kids? If so, then why R-rated? And based on a game they wouldn’t remember? Is it for adults? Then why based on a video game for kids? Yet in this case, the entire endeavor is so pointless that it almost becomes art.

Something about Mortal Kombat‘s total lack of pretense towards nutritional value is weirdly refreshing. When Kung Lao, the character who wears the bladed hat, turned his hat into a circular saw on the ground and used it to bisect a bad lady in half lengthwise only seconds after she’d been introduced, complete with glistening CGI gore, I nearly cackled. Likewise, the constant and unnecessary swearing, presumably present only to make us feel like we’re sneaking cigarettes behind the autoshop building, is consistently entertaining, and a weirdly perfect complement for all the otherwise stilted dialogue like “Silence!” and “I have come back from hell to avenge my family.”

When Cole Young, the MMA fighter, and his wife, survive an attack by Goro, the four-armed monster, she tells her young teen daughter casually, while packing up the family’s things, “I just wanna get out of here, fuck another four-armed monster showing up.”

Fuck another four-armed monster showing up. I had to pause and rewind. This sentence belongs in the Louvre.

The whole movie is written like this, a mix of uncanny valley broken English videogame speak, Joss Whedonesque smarm, and a 12-year-old who just watched Eddie Murphy’s Raw for the first time. It evokes the same feeling that the Mortal Kombat videogame offered, that somewhere on Earth, there lived an unscrupulous man who believed that America’s youth desperately wanted to watch characters impale, behead, immolate, and bludgeon each other. He probably hated us, but he was right.

‘Mortal Kombat’ hit theaters this weekend and is available to stream via HBO Max. Vince Mancini is on Twitter. You can access his archive of reviews here.

If you visit the IMDB page for Hulu’s newest three-part documentary, Sasquatch, you’ll be met with an overwhelming amount of negative reviews, a discovery that took me aback after finishing up my three-hour binge. Across all these reviews, nearly all dissatisfied viewers made the same claim: for a series called Sasquatch, it has very little to do with hunting down the California cryptid. Admittedly, they’re right, this documentary is not as much about the mythical monsters that lurk in the woods as much as it’s about the ones who live among us.

Sasquatch follows slightly eccentric investigative journalist David Holthouse as he attempts to piece together an October night he never wished to recall: the grisly murder of three men at a marijuana farm hidden in the Mendocino county mountains. When Holthouse begins his investigation — nearly 30 years after the aforementioned murder — he has only his hazy memory and one suspect’s name to go off of: Bigfoot. However, the hunt for something big and hairy quickly turns into a situation far bigger and hairier.

In Sasquatch’s first episode, we watch Holthouse follow Bigfoot’s massive (metaphorical) footprints throughout the Northern California region, interviewing various see-ers and believers while gathering as much information as he can about California culture and cannabis farms in the process. By episode two, however, the show’s tone pivots dramatically as Holthouse reckons with the fact that the monster he’s looking for might be a few feet shorter than he anticipated, and decidedly more human. The journalist is forced to confront drug lords, the “toothless and ruthless,” and suspected murders throughout the series, as well as his past.

While the show doesn’t give most viewers deeper insight into the whereabouts of sasquatch, it does take them on a journey through the infamous Emerald Triangle, a region in Northern California known for producing the highest quality marijuana in the United States. In addition, it touches upon the war on drugs, immigration, xenophobia, and the frankly staggering amount of unsolved murder cases in Northern California. In the most subtle of ways, Sasquatch asks us to question if folklore and imaginary monsters are merely a way we absolve ourselves from acknowledging the real problems and villains surrounding us, such as racism and hate-fueled violence.

Sasquatch’s story is compelling, giving enough pieces, clues, and cliffhangers to keep folks interested while savoring its slow burn. The odd-yet-charismatic Holthouse is an engaging person to watch explore and hunt down ‘monsters,’ and the cinematography and eerie animation when he’s off-screen are just as captivating. Like all tall tales, Sasquatch doesn’t resolve itself in a clean and orderly fashion. The documentary is full of rumors, lies, contradictions, and speculation, all reasons I firmly believe the show’s name is far more apt than deceptive. Ultimately, if you go into Sasquatch looking for the legend, like all ‘squatchers’ you might wind up disappointed. However, if you go in looking for a story, you’re in for a chilling ride.

Earl Sweatshirt has seemingly been laying low since the 2019 release of his Feet Of Clay EP — save for a few guest spots throughout 2020 and an appearance on Armand Hammer’s Alchemist-produced 2021 album Haram — but the wandering wordsmith has returned to once again collaborate with The Alchemist on the latter’s upcoming EP, This Thing of Ours, due next Friday, April 30. The track, called “Nobles,” features a trademark, soulful Alchemist beat and an appearance by rapper/skater Navy Blue.

Earl previously collaborated with The Alchemist on “The Whole World” from the deluxe version of Feet Of Clay featuring Maxo, as well as on Alc’s 2018 single “E Coli.” The Los Angeles duo has consistently displayed impressive chemistry, prompting some fans to call for them to work on a full project, a la Alchemist’s 2020 work with Griselda’s Conway and Freddie Gibbs.

The results of those two projects were prolific; The Alchemist was nominated for a Grammy for Best Rap Album for Alfredo, bringing the veteran producer and rapper both a new level of attention and expanded public acclaim. The Alchemist’s next EP, which also features Boldy James (with whom he also released a joint project in 2020), Maxo, Pink Siifu, and Sideshow, will certainly build on that newfound success.

Listen to The Alchemist’s “Navy Blue” featuring Earl Sweatshirt and Navy Blue below.

Earl Sweatshirt is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Clint Capela likely wasn’t at the top of mind for every NBA observer in advance of the 2020-21 season, and that is defensible. After all, Capela last appeared on the court for the Houston Rockets on Jan. 29, 2020 before suffering a right foot injury. Ahead of the 2020 trade deadline, the veteran center was dealt to the Atlanta Hawks as part of a massive four-team exchange. Capela was still out of commission when he arrived in Atlanta and, with the Hawks not invited to the Orlando bubble for the league’s restart, there was an “out of sight, out of mind” element for Capela. Fast-forward to late April 2021, though, and Capela is an integral piece of an up-and-coming team, and he is enjoying the best season of his seven-year career.

After coming along slowly behind Dwight Howard in Houston, Capela averaged 14.3 points and 11.1 rebounds per game in his final four seasons with the Rockets. Noted for his uber-efficient scoring (64.5 percent from the floor in that sample), Capela served as an effective release valve for James Harden and company, filling a vital role but also doing so in relatively understated fashion. He was also viewed as an above-average defensive player, but Capela also wasn’t place in the rarified air that comes with conversation surrounding All-Defense teams at the league-wide level. In Atlanta, though, Capela is operating in a different stratosphere, at least through his first 52 games in a new uniform.

For starters, Capela is leading the NBA in rebounding by a comfortable margin at 14.7 rebounds per game, continuing a steady incline in that he has averaged more rebounds per game in seven consecutive seasons. The 6’10 anchor from Switzerland leads the NBA in defensive rebound percentage (34.8 percent), offensive rebound percentage (17.7 percent) and total rebound percentage (26.4 percent), almost singlehandedly transforming the Hawks from a below-average rebounding team to an above-average one. From there, Capela is tied for No. 3 in the NBA in both total blocked shots (114) and blocked shots per game (2.2), providing highly value rim protection for a group that has operated with sub-optimal defense at the point of attack this season.

Not only does Capela serve as the unquestioned centerpiece of Atlanta’s defense, but he has been a valuable piece on the opposite end of the floor. After an uneven start while he found his sea legs again, Capela lands in the top ten of the NBA in field goal percentage (60.4 percent), and he is a devastating lob threat for Trae Young and Atlanta’s other creators. He is also making small strides as a decision-maker, including a career-best turnover rate of only 8.5 percent. Capela will never be mistaken for a heliocentric offensive piece, even if the Hawks make sure to reward him with the occasional post-up, but his offensive rebounding is invaluable, and Capela attracts consistent defensive attention while scoring efficiently.

Capela’s season-long production has been tremendous but over the last month he’s been stepped up further to play the best basketball of his career in the current moment, as evidenced by some off-the-charts numbers in recent days. The big man is averaging 20.1 points per game, on 67 percent shooting, in the last seven games since April 7, and is also pulling down a robust 18.1 rebounds per contest. In zooming out a bit to the full month of April, Capela is putting up 19.9 points, 16.7 rebounds and 2.5 blocks per game, and the Hawks are 9-2 in the last 11 games with Capela on the floor.

It’s difficult to overstate just how important Caplea is to the Hawks, as his value goes well beyond his significant box-score statistics. Perhaps the best example of how dominant he’s been this season is the difference between Atlanta’s performance when he plays compared to when he doesn’t. In 1,586 minutes this season, the Hawks are outscoring their opponents by 6.7 points per 100 possessions with Capela on the floor. That is the top on-court net rating on Atlanta’s roster, and Capela’s presence buoys the team’s defense in allowing only 107.9 points per 100 possessions.

On the flip side, the Hawks fall off a cliff when he heads to the bench, either for in-game rest or due to a full-game absence. Atlanta has a -4.2 net rating in the 1,271 minutes with Capela off the court, and that inefficiency can be traced to a defensive rating of 113.9 points allowed per 100 possessions. Some of that on-off disparity can inevitably be tied to Atlanta operating without top-tier backup center play, with rookie Onyeka Okongwu still finding his footing (even with improved play lately) and a mash-up of other options early in the season. Still, it is night and day, both statistically and by way of the eye test, when Capela is in the middle of Atlanta’s attack compared to when he isn’t.

A deeper look at more advanced impact metrics paints a similar picture and, if anything, Capela finds himself in an even more impressive light. Per FiveThirtyEight, Capela is the No. 2 player in defensive RAPTOR, trailing only perennial Defensive Player of the Year contender Rudy Gobert, and Capela is No. 6 in overall WAR (8.1) by the same metric. In addition to his defensive impact, FiveThirtyEight installs Capela as a top-10 offensive center in RAPTOR, underlying his overall effectiveness.

It isn’t simply one catch-all metric telling that story, either. Capela is No. 2, again behind Gobert, in ESPN’s defensive real plus-minus, and he ranks in the top 10 in both overall RPM and estimated plus-minus (EPM) for the season. Simply put, any evidence-based recounting of Capela’s performance this season yields a tremendous defensive player, and he is also staying on the floor effectively, based in part by a foul rate that ranks in the 85th percentile.

Through 59 games, the Hawks rank only 20th in defensive rating as a team. Given that figure, it is difficult to envision Capela receiving full-fledged Defensive Player of the Year buzz, especially in a world that includes Gobert leading the team with the best record in the NBA. At the same time, Capela suffers from a similar fate that his teammate, Trae Young, faced last season in that the Hawks are simply not good enough without him to make a casual observer understand just how good he has been by examining league-wide numbers.

Capela, who will be 27 in May, seems to be in the absolute prime of his career, and after just three-quarters of one season, it is apparent that the Hawks extracted a trade-deadline steal when they landed him for the price of Evan Turner’s expiring contract and a mid-first round pick. It remains to be seen as to whether this is a new level of dominance for Capela but, with two more years left on a relatively modest contract, the Hawks have to be thrilled with the production he’s providing, and a case could be made that Capela has been their single most valuable player this season, even when acknowledging Young’s individual brilliance.

The Hawks are in a playoff race for the first time since 2016-17, and there are many reasons for that. After all, Young is a dynamic offensive engine, John Collins is a rising standout, and Atlanta spent big on Bogdan Bogdanovic and Danilo Gallinari to pair with their evolving young core. Still, Atlanta wouldn’t be where they are without Capela to anchor their defense, and he’s earned a deeper look as one of the five most impactful defensive players in the NBA this season.

It’s been weird watching The Falcon and the Winter Soldier over the last six weeks because, when I see the complaints about the show, I have that dread that *I* must be the one who’s watching it the wrong way. As I wade through the discourse about the Flag Smashers not being a great villain or that some of the individual episodes seem slow, my first instinct is to think, well, obviously there’s something wrong with me because I’m enjoying the series quite a bit. But then I kind of figured out I was watching the show a different way. And I’m still open to the fact it is the wrong way, but I never cared about any of the Flag Smashers stuff and I didn’t care about the mystery of what they were up to. (And to be fair, over the years, this is what the MCU has trained its audience to do.) The only thing I cared about was Sam Wilson. And Sam Wilson finally got his day.

All of the pomp and circumstance was, yes, mostly filler to insulate what was really going on. And, again, to be fair, that’s not usually how the Marvel properties operate. In reality The Falcon and The Winter Soldier was a six-episode meditation about a Black man struggling with the idea of being the face of the United States and all the repercussions that would entail. And coming from Malcolm Spellman and his writing staff, this is something they’ve obviously thought about a lot. How would this go down in real life? Would someone like Sam actually decide to become Captain America when virtually everyone he trusts is telling him it’s a bad idea and he’ll be hated for doing so? How do we sell white America on the idea of a Black Captain America? And I’m sure they also knew if they tried to sell it as “a meditation about a Black man struggling with the idea of being the face of the United States,” that probably wouldn’t go over particularity well.

Look, I love Sam Wilson. Sam was literally the first comic book character I ever read so he’s always had a special place for me. When I was old enough to start appreciating comics, I busted into my dad’s stash and he had a plethora of Captain America and the Falcon comics from the early 1970s. I remember thinking Steve Rogers was boring, but his buddy, Sam Wilson, now this guy was cool. And on top of that, he had a cool pet. When my parents started getting me my own new comics in the early to mid-1980s, I was shocked Falcon just wasn’t around that much anymore. (Back in 2012 when the first Avengers movie came out, I interviewed Kevin Feige and out of the blue asked if Falcon would be in the next Captain America movie, which wound up being Captain America and the Winter Soldier. In retrospect his answers are pretty funny, doing everything he could to say “Yes” without saying, “Yes.”) But even part of the MCU, Sam kind of got lumped in as a sidekick with not much to do. Mackie can be such an electric actor that you could see the potential bursting out, even though it never quite happened until now. Often Sam was relegated to dumb scenes like the one where Tony Stark shot him in Captain America: Civil War for no reason after Rhodey got hurt. That scene always bothered me: that Falcon was expendable enough in the story to just be used as someone for Tony to use his temper on.

I think a lot about true north superheroes and how we don’t really get those much anymore, or what that even means these days. If 1978’s Superman came out today, would audiences even like it? I used to think they would, but now I’m not as sure. A lot of Superman’s dialogue could be written off as corny. Chris Evans’s Captain America captured some of that. And the first Wonder Woman movie had some of that, too. But things have changed. And if the last few years of reality has taught us anything, it’s that a modern true north hero isn’t going to look like the past examples. The new true north hero is going to look like someone like Sam Wilson. And it’s going to be Sam Wilson giving a kind half corny speech about how global powers should settle their differences with refugees in mind. All the white heroes got to do that in the past, well now it’s Sam’s turn. But interlaced in all that was some truly heavy words. The idea of a Black man, dressed as Captain America for the first time in a public setting, admitting he knows people hate him for it, shouldn’t be taken lightly. It’s a remarkable moment that is easily dismissed as corny (as I half did) but there’s a lot going on in that corn. There are a lot of Black writers behind those words saying some stuff they want to say, now through the cipher of Captain America for the first time. I think it might be a good idea to listen. Anyway, that’s how I watched this show. That’s the arc I cared about.

And, through those words, yes, Sam Wilson, and Anthony Mackie, finally got his day.

You can contact Mike Ryan directly on Twitter.