Category: Viral

Despite the fact that they’re the current NBA champions, there is still some uncertainty about the future of the Los Angeles Lakers. Sure, LeBron James isn’t going anywhere, and Anthony Davis skipping town would be a shock, but there are still a number of players around them who need to have their situations resolved sometime soon.

One such example is Kyle Kuzma, who is eligible for an extension this offseason and would reportedly like to be paid handsomely. He could become a restricted free agent next summer if he so chooses, but before then, L.A. has the opportunity to keep him around.

The issue, according to Ian Begley of SNY (who confirmed other media reports), is that there is no consensus on how to handle Kuzma wanting to get paid.

Also, in Los Angeles, there isn’t a consensus among decision-makers about signing Kyle Kuzma to a contract extension, SNY sources confirm (as first reported by The Ringer). I don’t see Los Angeles seriously considering a trade of Kuzma in the offseason, but it’s something worth keeping an eye on if you’re a Knick fan. The Knicks pursued Kuzma in trade talks at the 2020 trade deadline.

This is hardly the first Kuzma-related rumor in recent days. Kevin O’Connor of The Ringer brought up a potential deal where he’d be flipped to San Antonio for DeMar DeRozan, while Ramona Shelburne mentioned that the Lakers are gauging the trade market, even if they are interested in bringing him back.

Still, Kuzma is an interesting case, as he took a reduced role to facilitate Davis coming to L.A. The issue with that was his numbers dropped off in reduced minutes — 12.8 points and 4.5 rebounds in 25 minutes per game with nine starts — and he’ll turn 26 next summer. He’s not a bad player at all, but figuring out how he fits into the Lakers’ future is a bit tricky, which is evident in Begley’s reporting.

After staying quiet for a couple of years, Lil Uzi Vert returned with plenty of music in 2020. In his latest offering, the rapper teamed up with Future for their joint project entitled Pluto X Baby Pluto. Over the album’s 16 songs, the duo kept things in-house, as the album arrived without a single guest appearance. However, less than a day after the project arrived, Lil Uzi took to Twitter to deliver both good and bad news.

In the first of two tweets, the “Futsal Shuffle 2020” rapper revealed that he would retire from the rap game after his next two albums. “I’m dropping two more albums than I’m out,” Lil Uzi wrote in the tweet with a peace sign emoji. The Philly rapper deleted the post shortly after, but it’s unknown what caused him to tweet it in the first place. On the flip side, he also revealed that he and Future have another joint project on the way. “Crazy thing is me and @1future about to drop again,” he wrote.

Any additional information on the project is currently unknown, but if it were to arrive within the next few months, it would be Lil Uzi’s fourth official release in the span of a year, following Eternal Atake, its 14-track deluxe re-issue, and the Pluto X Baby Pluto project. As for Future, it would be his third album in a year, which began with his chart-topping album High Off Life.

Pluto X Baby Pluto is out now via Atlantic and Epic. Get it here.

Lil Uzi Vert is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

The script at the end of a close football game where a team has the lead and the opponents have no timeouts is as tried-and-true as anything: Take a whole bunch of knees, run out the clock, and walk off the field with the win. There are instances where this doesn’t quite work, and on Friday evening, we saw one of them play out in Arkansas.

The Fayetteville Bulldogs had a 35-34 lead with 15 seconds remaining. The game clock was slightly ahead of the play clock, and on fourth-and-32, they milked it quite a bit. A fatal error occurred, though, as the snap came with about four seconds on the clock and the quarterback, feeling the pressure, took a knee with about two seconds left. This wouldn’t be too big of a deal if not for the fact that the knee came on his own 10-yard line.

There looked to be some confusion after the play, but Central realized they had a chance to win. As such, they lined up for a field goal, booted it through the uprights, and celebrated like mad as they came out on top, 37-35.

Listen, gotta know time and score, but Central’s defense did a good job of pressuring the quarterback and making him rush into an early knee. As the saying goes, gotta play until the final whistle.

It’s hard to imagine, but it’s been five years since we last had a David Fincher movie. And that movie was Gone Girl, a monster hit adaptation of a monster hit page-turner. After some time with TV, which produced the excellent Mindhunter, finally back next month with Mank, an already acclaimed look at the Herman Mankiewicz, the Golden Age of Hollywood player best known for co-writing Citizen Kane with Orson Welles. Fincher’s been doing press ahead of its Netflix release, and in one, with The Telegraph, he didn’t care whose toes he stepped on.

Those trod-upon toes included no less than Orson Welles, who he implied was arrogant when he made his debut feature, at all of 25. (Welles would have probably agreed.) But he also dissed a more recent film: Joker, the stand-alone semi-spin-off that, perhaps improbably, made a billion dollars despite it being pretty dark and depressing. But Fincher was not one of its fans, feeling it betrayed the work of another comic book movie critic, Martin Scorsese.

“I don’t think ¬anyone would have looked at that material and thought, Yeah, let’s take [Taxi Driver’s] Travis Bickle and [The King of Comedy’s] Rupert Pupkin and conflate them, then trap him in a betrayal of the mentally ill, and trot it out for a billion dollars,” Fincher said.

That aside, Fincher was impressed that a film that dark made bank, though he attributed its success to another movie. “Nobody would have thought they had a shot at a giant hit with Joker had The Dark Knight not been as massive as it was,” he said. He also compared it, at least spiritually, to his experience making Fight Club two decades back. “The general view afterwards among the studio types was, ‘Our careers are over.’ The fact we got that film made in 1999 is still, to my mind, a miracle.”

As for Welles, Fincher had some thoughts. “Well, I think Orson Welles’s tragedy lies in the mix between monumental talent and filthy immaturity,” Fincher said. “Sure, there is genius in Citizen Kane, who could argue? But when Welles says, ‘It only takes an afternoon to learn everything there is to know about cinematography,’ pfff… Let’s say that this is the remark of someone who has been lucky to have [cinematographer] Gregg Toland around him to prepare the next shot… Gregg Toland, damn it, an insane genius !”

And he wasn’t done:

“I say that without wanting to be disrespectful to Welles, I know what I owe him, like I know what I owe Alfred Hitchcock, Ridley Scott, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, or Hal Ashby. But at 25, you don’t know what you don’t know. Period. Neither Welles, nor anyone. It doesn’t take anything away from him, and especially not his place in the pantheon of those who have influenced entire generations of filmmakers. But to claim that Orson Welles came out of nowhere to make Citizen Kane and that the rest of his filmography was ruined by the interventions of ill-intentioned people, it’s not serious, and it is underestimating the disastrous impact of his own delusional hubris.”

Mind you, he’s not entirely wrong, and any appreciation of Welles’ work understands the mix of genius and hubris that led to one of the bumpiest — and greatest — careers in cinema.

Mank hits Netflix on December 4.

(Via The Telegraph)

Run The Jewels are undoubtedly having a year in 2020. They got off to a bit of a slow start, when they were forced to delay their fourth album due to the coronavirus pandemic. After clearing a few hurdles, Killer Mike and El-P delivered Run The Jewels 4 in June and have been running strong ever since. In their latest moment in the spotlight, the rappers took to the Adult Swim Festival to premiere their new video for “No Save Point,” a track they released early this week.

The video features Killer Mike and El-P standing in the Cyberpunk 2077 video game world, appearing as alter egos of Yankee & The Brave and interacting with some of the characters from the game. Cyberpunk 2077 is set to release on December 10, and the game also features guest appearances from A$AP Rocky, Nina Kraviz, Grimes, and more.

The video for “No Save Point” arrives after the duo shared a one for “Yankee And The Brave (Ep. 4).” They also appeared on Adult Swim’s Holy Calmavote concert special, where they performed Run The Jewels 4 in full. The duo also spoke on their inclusion in the game in a promo video from December, saying, “Even in the dystopian future, hard rap lives on. We want to provide you with the soundtrack for f*cking sh*t up.”

You can watch the ‘No Save Point’ video above.

The 2020-21 NBA season seems like it is going to occur in home markets — we say “seems” because it’s awfully hard to predict anything with any certainty this year. If this ends up being the case, the Toronto Raptors are in a bit of a tricky situation. As we saw with the Toronto Blue Jays, the Canadian government has some reservations about having teams go in and out of the United States as the COVID-19 pandemic spreads like wildfire throughout the nation.

The Blue Jays ended up playing their home games in their Minor League affiliate’s stadium in Buffalo. The Raptors, of course, don’t have that luxury — beyond the fact that the minor league system is hardly as robust in the NBA, Toronto’s G League team plays elsewhere in Ontario. Plenty of potential alternate homes have been kicked around, but in an open letter published in the Toronto Star, Raptors president Masai Ujiri made clear that the team’s intention is to work with the Canadian government to play their games at Scotiabank Arena.

“We have to look at other options, because the pre-season is coming up fast — Dec. 1,” Ujiri wrote. “We are proud to represent our city and our country, and we hope to be able to do that while playing in Toronto. Cities in the United States have been very kind to us — they’ve offered us a home away from home. To them I say: Thank you. To you, I say that I hope we get to tell them we won’t be able to take them up on their generous offer.”

Ujiri went on to look back on the team’s stay in the NBA’s Orlando Bubble, which featured the franchise doing everything it could to make it feel like the team was back up north. The point of it all was hammer homer something that he, along with the rest of the team, views as important.

In the NBA bubble, our team spent a lot of time thinking about how we could make a hotel floor feel more like home for our players and our staff. So we put pictures of everyone’s families in their rooms. We pasted action shots from games all over the walls. (I haven’t yet seen a bill for what I’m sure was a big repair paint job.) And whenever you got off the elevators on the ninth floor, and turned to go to your room, the first thing you saw was a massive mural of the Toronto skyline.

Home. It’s where we want to be.

Of course, there are gigantic logistical challenges that will come with trying to figure out how the Raptors and their opponents can stay safe with all the traveling that would come with them staying in Toronto. But it appears the team wants to exhaust every single option that keeps them up north before they have to consider playing anywhere else.

We’re still months away from a safe vaccine being widely distributed, but Hollywood has been cautiously going back to work — especially if they’re shooting in countries that did a better job battling COVID-19. James Cameron has been able to complete principal photography on at least one of his Avatar sequels, while Marvel is already plotting its new year. Among its plans: to shoot the fourth Thor entry in Australia. And it will even have a splashy cameo from another wing of the MCU.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Chris Pratt will trek all the way to Australia so that Peter Quill, aka Guardians of the Galaxy‘s resident half-human Star-Lord, can hang with Natalie Portman’s returning Jane Foster, Tessa Thompson’s Valkyrie, and, of course, Chris Hemsworth’s Norse god, in the film called Thor: Love and Thunder. Or maybe he’ll only hang with Thor. After all, the end of Avengers: Endgame, the actual god left Earth with the Guardians, to see where it takes him. So who knows!

The Pratt news comes not long after a strange internet debacle, in which social media users voted him the worst of the MCU’s major players. That inspired much of the franchise’s stable of actors to rush to his defense — though they didn’t do that when the dregs of the internet came for people like Brie Larson.

(Via THR)

This year Ariana Grande and Thundercat have delivered great albums. Back in April, Thundercat delivered his album It Is What It Is, while Ariana’s latest, Positions, arrived a bit more recently, back in October. The two singers decided to join forces, sharing a funky performance of Thundercat’s 2015 Drunk track, “Them Changes,” at the Adult Swim Festival, the music fest happening virtually this weekend.

Accompanied by JD Beck and DOMi on drums and keyboard, the performance began with Thundercat strumming away at his bass before the pop singer joins him on stage.

This is not the first time Ariana has performed “Them Changes.” Back in 2018, she covered it during a session on BBC Radio 1’s Live Lounge. At the time of her appearance on BBC Radio, she called the track one of her favorite songs. As for the Adult Swim Festival performance, the singers performed the song while standing in a replica of the kitchen from Aqua Teen Hunger Force.

Thundercat also spoke to Mac Miller on Friday about his connection with Grande. “It feels like Ariana and I are forever connected through Mac [Miller],” he said. “And this is part of the healing process.”

You can watch the performance in the video above.

It’s been over two months since Chadwick Boseman passed away, and the world is still reeling from his sudden absence. In fact, Marvel hasn’t even started to think about what they’ll do with his Marvel character, Black Panther. But they do know one thing they won’t do.

In an interview with Clarin (dug up by IGN), executive producer Victoria Alonso was asked about a rumor that Marvel would use a digital double of the actor, which was used, somewhat infamously, to bring back late Star Wars baddie Peter Cushing in 2016’s Rogue One. Alonso, who’s been with the MCU since Phase One, had a sharp response to that idea.

“No,” she replied. “There’s only one Chadwick, and he’s not with us. Our king, unfortunately, has died in real life, not just in fiction, and we are taking a little time to see how we return to history and what we do to honor this chapter of what has happened to us that was so unexpected, so painful, so terrible, really.”

Alonso added that Boseman “was not only a wonder of being human every day that we spend together the five years that we spend together, but it also seems to me that as a character what he did elevated us as a company, and has left his moment in history.”

Because of that there’s no rush to find a new T’Challa. “I know that sometimes two months go by or three months go by in production and one says, already, it was a long time,” Alonso said. “But it is not a long time, we have to think carefully about what we are going to do, and how, and think about how we are going to honor the franchise.”

(Via Clarin and IGN)

The Boston Celtics continued to show they’re one of the league’s most promising up-and-coming teams, and despite coming up just shy of their ultimate goal of making it to the Finals, they’re a team that’s loaded with talent and has the chemistry and camaraderie required to compete with the NBA’s elite.

When the 2020-2021 season tips off on December 22, they’ll enter as one of the favorites to win the East, a goal that will largely hinge on their star trio of Jayson Tatum, Jaylen Brown, and Kemba Walker, but is dependent on an arsenal of versatile role players who proved their worth last season.

It’s difficult right now to gauge exactly where beloved rookie Tacko Fall fits into that equation just yet, but he and the rest of us are hoping to see much more of him in the near future as he tries to build on a modest rookie season in which he instantly stole the hearts of everyone in the Boston area and elsewhere. And the feeling is apparently mutual when it comes to his adopted hometown.

Fall told Trevor Hass of Boston.com recently that he’s quickly fallen in love with the town and that he wouldn’t mind spending the rest of his career there.

“I tell a lot of people, if I could retire here, I probably would,” Fall said.

***

“You can tell when someone really wants you and believes in you,” Fall said. “That’s something that I really felt from Boston right away.”

The 7-foot-5 Fall appeared in just seven games during his rookie year with the Celtics, but each appearance drew massive cheers from the home crowd, along with most of the NBA-watching world. He spent the rest of his time with the Celtics’ G League affiliate, the Maine Red Claws, where he averaged 12.9 points. 11.3 rebounds, and 3.1 blocks per game.

Fall also forged a bond with many of his Celtics teammates, especially Jaylen Brown and Enes Kanter, who continued to help him with his swimming lessons in Orlando. We’re all hoping to see more of him on the court next season and find out just what he’s capable of if he can earn more opportunities to prove himself.

(Boston.com)