Category: Viral

LeBron James is arguably the best player in basketball right now (and perhaps ever, depending on where your allegiances lie in the forever-ongoing Jordan vs. LeBron debate). Naturally, then, he has a ton of fans, but perhaps no celebrity supporter is an enthusiastic as Rihanna; She cheered so loudly for the baller during the 2015 NBA Finals that the Warriors owner had to relocate. Now that LeBron is in Los Angeles, Rihanna rocks the purple and gold, so she was pretty pumped when the Lakers closed out their series against the Miami Heat and came away with the 2020 title.

On Instagram, Rihanna shared a video of her and some friends at a tailgating party, complete with an RV, portable grill, and Lakers gear. Queen’s timeless victory anthem “We Are The Champions” is playing, and Rihanna and her cohorts sing and dance along to the track. Rihanna, wearing torn jeans and a Kobe Bryant jersey, takes time to bid farewell to Miami (who she supported during LeBron’s run with the team) and use a traffic cone to amplify her Queen cover.

Rihanna captioned her post, “if you ain’t on this time right now…bye. Lebron remains king, Lakers are the champs, and Kobe is proud. A.D thank you! #[trophy emoji] #Congratulations.”

Check out the video below.

Filming on The Batman was “temporarily paused” in September after a member of the production tested positive for COVID-19. That “member” turned out to be Robert Pattinson, who plays the Dark Knight in the Matt Reeves-directed superhero movie. Filming quickly resumed without the actor, but because it’s tough to make a good Batman movie or show without Batman (ask anyone who slogged through multiple seasons of Gotham), Pattinson is back at work, hopefully safe and sound, after a period of quarantine. And listening to My Chemical Romance albums, apparently.

The Tenet star “was spotted among the crew of the movie filming outside St George’s Hall, opposite Lime Street station, which is doubling for Gotham City Hall,” according to Yahoo! Entertainment. “According to reports, those in the crowd wore their masks between takes, and more than 100 background actors will be taking part in the scenes, which are being shot in the city all week.” Pattinson’s Bruce Wayne looked more Hot Topic-emo than usual: he’s at a funeral… in the rain… under an umbrella… with moody hair… and an even moodier expression. It might as well be the “Helena” music video.

Have a look.

The Batman, which also stars Zoë Kravitz, Paul Dano, Jeffrey Wright, John Turturro, Peter Sarsgaard, Barry Keoghan, Jayme Lawson, Andy Serkis, and Colin Farrell, is scheduled to come out on March 4, 2022 after Dune took its 2021 release date.

Cardi B celebrated her 28th birthday over the weekend, and she went all out. Offset, from whom she recently filed for divorce, went all out as well by getting Cardi a fancy car. Based on Cardi’s social media posts about the shindig, it seems like there may have been a point when she went a little too hard.

In one photo she shared last night, Cardi is laying face-down on the floor, seemingly after having had a fall. While no identifying features are visible on Cardi in the shot, the person on the floor is wearing the same gold and white outfit that Cardi was in another photo from the evening that she shared. So, either somebody else in the same outfit and with a similar physical build ate it, or it was indeed Cardi. She captioned her post, “I don’t know …blame it on Tommie & JT.”

Before that post, she shared a video of herself strutting her stuff while wearing a skin-bearing bikini and holding a handbag. She wrote alongside the video, “My walk on dumb cause I’m still drunk.”

Check out Cardi’s birthday posts above and below.

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

We’re two episodes into the second The Walking Dead spin-off, The World Beyond, and the series is… lacking. If this were our first introduction to The Walking Dead universe, and if the novelty of the zombies themselves had not worn off in 2012, the character confrontations with the “empties,” as they call them here, might be more interesting. But outside of the intrigue with the CRM and Rick Grimes, The World Beyond is suffering from the same problems that plagued the first season of Fear the Walking Dead, namely this: we’ve already seen it all.

Granted, the cast in The World Beyond is uniformly much younger, and if the goal of The World Beyond was to bring in a younger audience (who’s less familiar with the last decade of The Walking Dead universe), perhaps it’s a great idea. However, if I was AMC, I would worry that The World Beyond was only able to hold roughly half of its The Walking Dead lead-in during the first week, and because AMC is apparently not licensing out The World Beyond to Netflix, Hulu, or Amazon Prime, it may have a far more difficult time finding a younger audience to gravitate toward it, since that demo has so prominently shifted away from linear cable and toward streaming.

To even grow its audience, The World Beyond will need good word-of-mouth from regular viewers of The Walking Dead, and so far, The World Beyond is not making a good case to be considered “necessary viewing.” The Campus Colony, from whence the four teenagers departed in the pilot, was interesting, but the CRM apparently wiped it out in the first episode, which leaves four teenagers on a journey to New York and two 20-something characters following behind. It’s a road-trip drama, only they’re walking, and it may actually take two full seasons for them to arrive at their destination. In other words, it’s Lord of the Rings set in the zombie apocalypse with teenagers who have never had to confront zombies.

This week’s episode entailed watching the teenage foursome (and the two 20-something followers) walk. And then walk some more. They confronted their first zombie, and it didn’t go well. Iris failed to put it down, and then Silas failed to put down the second zombie they confronted, so it trailed them to their overnight quarters, and Hope nearly died trying to lead it away. I realize that zombies are new to them, but they have also been receiving training for a decade from Felix. It shouldn’t be this hard to kill a zombie that’s been rotting for a decade.

Huck and Felix, meanwhile, continue to trail behind the foursome, and in this week’s Lost-style flashback, we meet a young Felix, whose deadbeat Dad kicked him out of the house right before Monument Day because he found out that Felix was gay. This would have been a novel storyline in… 2004. It comes from writer Ben Sokolowski who, fittingly, moves over from The CW’s Arrowverse, but this storyline still felt like a 45-year-old man’s idea of how to pander to the CW audience. For the existing The Walking Dead audience, however, it felt awfully old hat. We’ve seen Negan have sex with Alpha while they were both completely naked wearing only masks made of the skin of dead people. Relatively speaking, a homophobic Dad is not exactly a major concern for most TWD viewers.

The big “obstacle” in the episode, meanwhile, is a literal tire fire, which has apparently been burning since the beginning of the zombie apocalypse. This is actually rooted in fact. Tires can burn for years — in fact, a tire fire in Wales involving 10 million tires burned for 15 years. In The World Beyond, this particular tire fire basically attracted all the zombies in the area to create a BOG, or Blaze of Gory. In order to save time, the foursome decided to cut through the BOG, but by episode’s end, they found themselves stranded in the middle of it, before a cliffhanger in which Hope left the other three sleeping to draw the attention of the zombies away from them so that they could escape.

The biggest logical problem with the episode here, however, is not the tire fire that’s been burning for a decade. It’s the fact that these four teenagers walked halfway through it and then decided to spend the night in the middle of a tire fire. Tire fires produce toxic chemicals, and these kids barely coughed while walking through this fire and thought nothing of sleeping beneath the smoke for the night. It makes no sense whatsoever.

Ultimately, I am interested in a two-season limited series that eventually reveals the whereabouts of Rick Grimes, and I am OK if they want to dribble little bits of information about CRM out in each subsequent episode. The World Beyond, however, desperately needs something more than CRM and its connection to the parent series to sustain it, and so far, its attempts to stand on its own have not been working.

Additional Thoughts

— It was a really good episode of Fear the Walking Dead this week, which ended with yet another spray paint can. I feel like somehow all of these spray-painted zombies are going to eventually tie into the different shows, although the timeline for Fear is still several years behind The World Beyond and The Walking Dead.

— We did not see Elizabeth this week, and there was only one, belabored mentioned of CRM in the episode when Felix reminds us that no one knows where they are and that CRM doesn’t allow any sort of communication in or out. “That means that they enforce that from inside, wherever they are.” OK, OK Felix. We get it. No one knows where CRM is.

— Annet Mahendru was born to an Indian father and a Russian mother; she knows six languages, and she’s lived in Russia, Afghanistan, and Europe. She was also terrific as a Russian double agent in The Americans. That said, I have no idea what kind of accent her character has in The World Beyond. She sounds like a European trying to do a bad impression of someone from New Jersey named Joe who owns a pizza restaurant. It is wildly inexplicable.

— Next week, it appears that we will learn a little more about Elizabeth and the CRM. I’m starting to wish the entire series was about the CRM.

It’s been a couple years since Drake first publicly confirmed the existence of his son Adonis on Scorpion. Since then, he has shared the occasion snapshot of the young boy’s life. In late 2018, he compared Adonis to Picasso while sharing a finger painting the then-1-year-old made. A few months ago, he shared photos of the kid himself for the first time. Last month, she shared an adorable photo of Adonis on his first day of school. Over the weekend, Adonis celebrated his third birthday, and Drake was there to partake in the festivities with him.

Drake took to Instagram to share a photo of himself with Adonis, the pair surrounded by silver and black balloons. Drake captioned the snapshot, “Young Stunna.”

Adonis’ mother, Sophie Brussaux, also took some time to commemorate the boy’s special day. Sharing a gallery of photos, including a couple of baby Adonis with his mother on the day he was born, she wrote, “Joyeux anniversaire mon amoureux! 3 years ago, I was finally meeting you for the first time, after a long 24-hr labour. I’m so proud of the little man you’re becoming, I love you more than life. The world is YOURS! We did that @champagnepapi”

Check out Drake and Brussaux’s posts below.

The Los Angeles Lakers capped off the most hectic season in NBA history with a championship, knocking off the Miami Heat in Game 6 of the 2020 Finals to add a 17th Larry O’Brien trophy to the franchise’s trophy case. The victory comes, of course, months after the passing of Laker legend Kobe Bryant, who passed away alongside his daughter, Gianna, and others in a helicopter crash earlier this year.

The team has made it clear ever since that tragic day that this season would be played out in memory of Kobe, Gianna, and everyone else who died. They managed to honor their memory in the best way possible by getting a ring, and after the game, one of the Lakers’ stars spoke about Bryant.

Anthony Davis, who grew up idolizing Bryant, spoke about how the team’s goal was to make sure he would be proud of what they accomplished. In his eyes, the team took pride in how they did not let Bryant down.

“Ever since the tragedy, all we wanted to do is do it for him, and we didn’t let him down,” Davis said. “It would have been great to do it last game, in his jersey, but it made us come down even more aggressive, even more powerful, on both ends of the floor, to make sure we close it down tonight. And I know he’s looking down on us, proud of us. I know Vanessa’s proud of us, the organization’s proud of us. It means a lot to us.”

After taking a moment to compose himself while his teammates celebrated, Davis wrapped things up succinctly by mentioning how Bryant was viewed in the Laker locker room, both as a person and as an inspiration for what they accomplished.

“He was a big brother to all of us, and we did this for him,” Davis said.

LeBron James won his fourth NBA championship and fourth Finals MVP award on Sunday night after leading the Lakers to a dominant Game 6 win over the Miami Heat.

James had 28 points, 14 rebounds, and 10 assists in Game 6, and his series averages of 29.8, 11.8, and 8.5 weren’t far off from that as he put forth some tremendous performances against the Heat, most notably in their closeout efforts of Game 5 and Game 6. James has now won a title on every franchise he’s been on in his career, and spoke afterwards about what it meant to him to fulfill his promise to Jeanie Buss as well as to bring Anthony Davis along to this level. After talking about how everyone, from the Lakers organization to the team to Rob Pelinka, deserves to be given their respect, he also made sure to note he too wants his damn respect.

There are few players more keenly aware of their legacies than James, but also few that have been as successful chasing down both individual and team accolades at the same time. It has become almost tired for basketball pundits to talk about how we need to appreciate James doing this in Year 17, but it’s true. What he’s doing is something we’ve never really seen, playing at this level for this long — he passed Derek Fisher for the most playoff games in a career on Sunday with 260, and casually posted a monster triple-double to close out a title.

At this point, those that don’t want to appreciate James are effectively lost causes, but he’s more than earned all the respect and praise he gets from those who shower him with it.

For the fourth time in his illustrious NBA career, LeBron James is the NBA Finals MVP. James and the Los Angeles Lakers capped off a 4-2 series win over the Miami Heat on Sunday evening, wrapping up the 2020 Finals in style with an emphatic, 106-93 victory that brought the Lakers their 17th title in league history.

In one of the most prolific games of his Finals career, the soon-to-be 36-year-old James exploded in Game 6, going for his 28th NBA Finals triple-double, second only to the 30 put up by Magic Johnson. In his record-setting 260th playoff game, James scored 28 points on 13-for-20 shooting while reeling in 14 rebounds and doling out 10 assists. For the series, James was a menace, averaging 29.8 points, 11.8 rebounds, and 8.5 assists while connecting on 58.6 percent of his shots from the field and 39 percent of his threes.

After winning the award, James spoke to Rachel Nichols of ESPN, emphatically saying that he wants respect for what the franchise accomplished this season.

James is a deserving winner of the award, which was viewed as a two-man race between himself and his teammate, Anthony Davis, who was magnificent on both ends of the floor during the series. But ultimately, James got to add this packed trophy case. Only Michael Jordan, who won six Finals MVPs during his career, has more. James is also the first player to win three Finals MVPs for three different teams, and did so unanimously this year.

The Atlanta Falcons have finally done what many have been expecting for quite a while now. They have fired coach Dan Quinn and general manager Thomas Dimitroff. Quinn and Dimitroff in Atlanta formed a duo that took the Falcons to a Super Bowl in 2016 and helped earn Matt Ryan an MVP award, but ever since that appearance they have been going backwards, culminating in an 0-5 start to the 2020 season. That start, coupled with a couple of epic collapses this season led to Atlanta owner Arthur Blank losing faith in them to keep the team at the standards they had set for themselves.

Dan Quinn, hired in 2015, initially started off well in Atlanta. He took them to the Super Bowl in only his second year on the job as Matt Ryan blossomed into an MVP quarterback, but once offensive coordinator Kyle Shannahan left to become coach of the 49ers the offense never found that same level of success. That, alongside the deterioration of the defense the last few years, has caused many to question his coaching ability. This came to a head this season when the Falcons had a pair of the most demoralizing collapses in back-to-back games.

Dimitroff on the other hand has been a bit of a staple in Atlanta. Hired in 2008 as the GM he built the team into the playoff contender it was and had it on the rise, but as the team tried to recover from their Super Bowl loss he failed to continue to add the talent, particularly defensively, needed to win games and stay at that level.

A new era of Falcons football will be beginning soon, which might be for the best.

As a series, Fear the Walking Dead had a very slow start back in 2015 and steadily improved until around the fourth midseason finale when Madison Clark (Kim Dickens) was killed off the series. It’s been downhill since, reaching its nadir in last year’s terrible season finale. I am a fairly forgiving fan of The Walking Dead universe, but I have not been kind to Fear in recent seasons. In fact, since the fourth midseason finale, there have only been three or four decent episodes (the June and John origin story, among them), and those decent episodes all seem to have had something in common: they were stand-alone stories.

Still, I was skeptical of the idea that the sixth season of Fear would split the characters apart and evolve into something akin to an unofficial anthology series (as opposed to Tales of the Walking Dead, the official anthology series that will arrive after The Walking Dead ends its run). But if the opening episode of the sixth season — the best episode since Madison died — is any indication, maybe the strategy might work out for showrunners Andrew Chambliss and Ian Goldberg. I’m not going to count my chickens or anything, because Fear has delivered decent episodes in the past only to devolve once again, but this week’s Morgan-centered episode was Fear at its best.

For those who may have forgotten, all the surviving Fear characters were split up by Virginia last season and taken to separate quarters. Each episode of this season, we have been promised, will center on a separate character or characters and tell disparate, stand-alone stories about their struggles to get out from beneath Virginia’s rule.

If you’ve paid any attention whatsoever to the marketing or trailers for the sixth season of Fear the Walking Dead, there is nothing surprising about the fact that Morgan Jones survived the events of the fifth-season finale, when he was shot by Virginia and left to die, surrounded by walkers. He not only survived, but some still unknown character (perhaps Sherry?) saved him and sort-of nursed him back to health.

The sixth season premiere opens several weeks after those events. Morgan has a bushier beard, bloodshot eyes, and the walkers mysteriously leave him alone. It’s an interesting new wrinkle: Morgan has a gangrenous infection. He smells like death, so the walkers believe him to be one of their own, which allows him to traverse among them without rubbing himself in zombie guts. It’s a good twist.

Meanwhile, Virginia has hired a post-apocalyptic hitman, Josiah LaRoux (Demetrius Grosse), to track Morgan down and kill him. LaRoux is easily the best villain that Fear the Walking Dead has ever had. He is sufficiently menacing, and his whole deal is that he brutally, unmercifully decapitates his targets and collects their heads in labeled boxes. He’s terrific, and I almost wish he could stick around for a few more episodes because Fear has otherwise had a history of terrible villains.

In any respect, Morgan is in a very bad way, and he has Josiah LaRoux trying to track him down, which is when Morgan meets Isaac, whose wife is pregnant, about to go into labor, and holed up behind a dam that is surrounded by walkers. Isaac can’t get to his wife to bring her supplies, and so he recruits a reluctant Morgan to help since he is able to walk invisibly among the zombies. After Isaac saves Morgan from an attempted hit by Josiah LaRoux, Morgan agrees, but instead of quietly walking through the zombies, Morgan goes full-Morgan — just like old times! — and kills them. Josiah LaRoux enters again, and this time, Morgan is able to kill Josiah, allowing Isaac to bring supplies to his wife, although we quickly learn that Isaac is close to death, having been bitten by a zombie while hunting down the necessary supplies for his wife. Before Isaac dies, however, he and his wife (who successfully gives birth to a baby girl) remove the bullet from Morgan’s chest, which probably means that he will no longer smell like a dead person.

There are two tags to the episode. In the first, Virginia discovers that Morgan has put Josiah LaRoux’s decapitated head in the box labeled “Morgan Jones,” and while Virginia initially seems to appreciate that Morgan is a bigger threat than she anticipated, she’s terrified to get a transmission from Morgan on her walkie talkie. “Morgan Jones is dead,” Morgan says to her. “And you are dealing with someone else now.”

Old-school, killing-machine Morgan is back!

The final tag of the episode, meanwhile, suggests a season-long arc about two men searching for a key, which we saw Josiah LaRoux collect from one of his targets. We don’t know if the two men are good or bad, and we don’t know what the key opens, although it possibly opens up something in a submarine stranded in the desert. We do know, however, that that key is in Morgan’s possession. Given the nature of this season, however, it may be several more weeks (or longer) before we see Morgan again. We will see a lot of new communities this season, and a number of standalone stories. I am guessing that next week will focus on Strand and Alicia.