A lot has been written about the state of Florida deciding to allow WWE to continue taping their TV shows from an empty gym in Orlando. The company was labeled an “essential business” by the state, a decision later defended by the governor’s office, which issued a statement saying WWE was “critical to Florida’s economy.” A few days later, news came out that a conservative SuperPAC headed up by former Trump cabinet member (and wife of WWE CEO Vince McMahon) Linda McMahon pledged to spend a whopping $18.5 million in Tampa and Orlando, two cities WWE has a large presence in (and two local economies which are certainly reeling due to the loss of WrestleMania week and NXT’s weekly broadcasts). Just last week, the city of Orlando read an anonymous complaint from a WWE employee saying they were being “forced to work” during a pandemic. Nothing to see here, folks!

Thankfully, this hasn’t gone unnoticed by late-night TV hosts. Last week, The Daily Show host Trevor Noah cracked a few jokes about WWE (even having Seth Rollins hit Florida Governor Ron DeSantis with a steel chair, sorta). Then last night during the latest episode of Conan At Home, long-running late-night TV host Conan O’Brien poked fun at the WWE being labeled an “essential service,” with his co-host Andy Richter referring to professional wrestlers as “selfless gladiators who elbow smash, cross-chop and clothesline each other day after day for our amusement,” before taking some potshots at members of the WWE roster:

Who knew Coco was a smark?

Fenne Lily is on the rise. The 23-year-old singer-songwriter found herself an audience with her 2018 self-released debut album, On Hold, enough so that she is now signed to Dead Oceans. She has also opened for established indie favorites like Lucy Dacus and Andy Shauf, and if the global situation allows, she is set to open for Waxahatchee this fall. Lily made her Dead Oceans debut last month with “Hypochondriac,” and now she is back with her second single for the label, “To Be A Woman Pt. 2.”

The song was a strong choice for a follow-up single, as it shows off her versatility. While “Hypochondriac” was a peaceful tune, “To Be A Woman Pt. 2” is less restrained in its approach, carried by its calm rumbling verses that lead to storms of guitar. That’s reflective of the track’s theme, as Lily says of the song:

“Usually when writing about rage, most of the initial anger I feel towards the person or situation becomes diluted through the recording process, but this song was different. ‘To Be a Woman Pt. 2’ is a call to arms. It’s raw and furious, coming from a place of frustration and pain born from a loss of control and a breach of trust. The result of a manipulative relationship, it’s both a retaliation against subordination and a reclamation of power.”

Listen to “To Be A Woman Pt. 2” above.

Sophie Turner and Joe Jonas are happily married and expecting their first child, but they wouldn’t have made it this far, or even started dating, if the Jo-Bro hadn’t agreed to one of Turner’s (room of) requirements. On The Late Late Show, the “Sucker” hitmaker discussed his relationship with the Game of Thrones actress with host James Corden, and how she agreed to start dating him only if he watched the Harry Potter movies.

“Sophie, she said, ‘Look, if we’re going to get married’ — and it was actually, ‘If you’re going to date me, you have to watch the Harry Potters.’ Because every Christmas, for those of you that are watching that don’t know, every Christmas in the U.K. they just stream and play Harry Potter,” Jonas said. “So I watched them all, I fell in love with it.”

This was a risky proposition from Turner. What if Joe Jonas hated the Harry Potter movies because he’s more of a Percy Jackson guy? What if his favorite Harry Potter is Goblet of Fire and her favorite Harry Potter is Chamber of Secrets, which is crazy because that’s no one’s favorite Harry Potter? And what if he demanded she watch his favorite movie as payback, and his favorite movie is Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo? Luckily for the pop culture power-couple, he did not dip into Rob Schneider’s oeuvre:

After Jonas accepted the Harry Potter binge, she had to watch one of his favorites: Lord of the Rings. “And I was like, ‘Well, look, my rule is that you have to watch Lord of the Rings.’ So we’ve been binge-watching Lord of the Rings during this time and building the Legos that go with the movies, which is quite fun.”

And they lived happily ever after, as long as neither one of them confuses Gandalf for Dumbledore, or vice versa. That’s grounds for divorce.

Karen Gillan ended up playing two Nebulas (in separate timelines) as the MCU’s Infinity Saga wound down, and she also played dual roles in Doctor Who (as Eleventh Doctor sidekick Amy Pond and a fleeting soothsayer), and now she’s doing it again. This time, though, she’ll play two actual clones with no timeline or costuming shenanigans on display. Gillan will also be joined by Aaron Paul in the upcoming satirial sci-fi/thriller/action movie, Dual, from director Riley Stearns (The Art of Self Defense).

Hollywood Reporter reveals that Gillan will appear alongside the Breaking Bad and Westworld star to play an unwitting clone who unwittingly ends up in the worst fight-to-the-death ever: against herself. It sounds ridiculously morbid (with obvious wordplay), and it may be something that will go straight-to-VOD, which is going to happen more frequently than ever (and successfully, if you ask anyone recently endured the Trolls World Tour movie) in the coming years. From the synopsis:

The movie from director Riley Stearns will follow a terminally ill woman (Gillan) who opts for a cloning procedure to ease her loss on her friends and family. When she makes a miraculous recovery, her attempts to have her clone (also played by Gillan) decommissioned fail and lead to a court-mandated duel to the death.

The movie will also feature Jesse Eisenberg, who starred in Stearns’ The Art of Self Defense, an incredibly dark comedy that put an ominous twist on The Karate Kid template. Eisenberg’s role sounds like a smaller one, although Paul’s one of the headliners here, and there’s no indication of who he’s playing. Please, let it be clones, with one of them acting like a thinly veiled version of Jesse Pinkman. Nope, I’m still not tired of that character, even after El Camino, and Dual sounds like it plays with reality just enough to make something unexpected happen. Granted, this wish probably won’t happen, but I’m holding onto that hope.

(Via Hollywood Reporter)

Mac Miller may be gone, but his legacy lives on and now, fans can find out where it all began. While Mac’s K.I.D.S. mixtape wasn’t his first, it was arguably the most important in exposing the talented, then-teenaged Pittsburgh rapper to a wide audience and starting him on the road to superstardom. Released April 29, 2010, Mac’s fourth mixtape, released under indie label Rostrum Records, broke him to the masses with the tracks “Nikes On My Feet” and “Kool Aid & Frozen Pizza,” as well as a diverse array of old-school hip-hop beats that allowed him to showcase his love for the genre and his deft flow.

Now, K.I.D.S. is officially available for streaming on all DSPs after previously only being available on mixtape sites like DatPiff, where it originally debuted. When it originally released, Mac Miller was only 18 years old and often unfairly categorized as part of the then-prominent “frat rap” movement. K.I.D.S allowed him to break out of that box, as well as endear him to an older generation reluctant to accept so-called “blog rappers” as members of the hip-hop canon with its clever use of beats like Nas’ “The World Is Yours” and Lord Finesse’s “Hip 2 Da Game” and its references to the 1995 cult film Kids.

It was also the subject of controversy as Lord Finesse sued over the above-mentioned sample for $10 million, later settling out-of-court for an undisclosed sum. K.I.D.S. was also the launching pad for Mac’s first tour, on which he sold out every location

.

Listen to Mac Miller’s K.I.D.S. mixtape above.

Mac Miller is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Killing Eve’s third episode gave us a double helping of murder with a side of past childhood trauma. Villanelle stayed busy, offing not one but two targets (and an unfortunate witness), both of which changed the game in terms of character development and the show’s narrative future. But only one involved a baby in a trash can, and that’s the hit we’re focusing on this week.

The Trash-Can Baby After A Kill

Technically there were three murders this week on Killing Eve, and though one directly links back to the mystery of The Twelve, it’s the episode’s opening double-hit that feels like it’s foreshadowing a seismic shift in our main psychopath. Babies make everyone sentimental, even a globe-trotting assassin hardened by years of bloodshed and her own turbulent upbringing, but no one could’ve guessed just how up in her feelings Villanelle would get from hanging with a pair of cherubic cheeks.

But before their mommy-daughter date, Villanelle’s got to get rid of the kid’s real mother, a musician with obsessive-compulsive disorder over the cleanliness of her instruments. Villanelle’s offed many people who you couldn’t help but sympathize with. This woman ain’t one of them.

She quickly lodges a tuning fork in the back of her skull before a baby monitor lights up, and Villanelle goes to investigate. She finds a nanny trying to soothe a wailing butterball, one who begs her to spare the child. Killing Eve has always been a darkly funny show but we could have never guessed they’d manage to get us cackling over an innocent maid pleading for her life.

She flits between threatening to kill the house worker and the newborn, wondering why the woman would sacrifice herself for a child that wasn’t hers, before making the nanny’s brain her human bullseye and kidnapping the kid.

It’s almost impossible to differentiate between sincerity and sociopathy when it comes to Villanelle and her choice to lunch with the baby doesn’t do much to define that line. She tells Dasha she’s practicing her character work and the two have a bitingly humorous squabble over Villanelle’s more manic tendencies and her recent managerial failings, but there’s something deeper at play for the notoriously closed-off killer. Psychopaths don’t get sticky-fingers for miniature poop machines. As with anything she does, there’s a method to Villanelle’s madness. While we’re thinking that over, here’s Dasha dumping the baby in the trash.

Villanelle may not be ready to return to London and see Eve but she’s in no position to turn down a job, so she arms herself with the scent of a Roman gladiator returning from battle to meet his old foe, and carries out another hit — this time coming dangerously close to ending Carolyn’s life in the process. She bunks with Konstantin after the job, where the baby continues to haunt her. She’s seen the child reunited with its father on TV. She’s reminded of her own orphaned status, of her mother’s abandonment, of what led her to this life to begin with. She’s also reminded of the fact that she has no idea what she looked like as a newborn.

An unnaturally bulbous head or not, Villanelle seems determined to reacquaint herself with her roots by episode’s end. Again, she claims she needs to know her origins because “knowledge is power,” and she wants to keep enough of it to ensure The Twelve can’t control her life, but it’s odd that this desire to find her family comes after another job gone sideways. Is Villanelle getting sloppy, as Dasha claims, or is she finally breaking free of whatever hold her employers have on her and discovering what she really wants from this life of crime?

View Entire Post ›

Westworld’s penultimate episode answered a few nagging questions but if you thought all of the loose ends would be tied up before the show’s action-packed season three finale — well, you’re too damn trusting to be watching this series in the first place.

We know more about Caleb. We know more about Serac’s genius brother and his tragic end. We know what William believes he needs to do in order to save the world. And we know that the sickest burn for a host is to call him a “can opener.” But there’s still plenty we don’t know — like Dolores’ endgame, the nature of the A.I.s, why Caleb is so important, what timeline we’re operating in … Okay, real talk: We know absolutely nothing. But here’s us brainstorming with the help of Reddit’s brightest theorists.

1. Brain-Powered

We’ve spent most of this season wondering about the show’s new villain. Is Serac a living human being, is he a projection of Rehoboam, is he dead and we’re just seeing him in flashbacks? He’s only interacted with Maeve up until this point, so it seemed likely that theories of simulations and alternate timelines might explain his mysterious absence during pivotal moments. But after this week’s episode, we’re starting to wonder if there was ever a line to be drawn between creator and creation in the first place.
After meeting Solomon and learning more about Serac’s brilliant but troubled brother Jean Mi, fans are viewing these massive A.I. machines in a new way. Solomon seems to have inherited schizophrenic tendencies and an inability to discern which reality is most likely to happen, much like his “father,” while Rehoboam is pragmatic and focused on one solution he believes can prevent the end of humanity. If Solomon is Jean Mi – which is implied since Serac had both shut away in the Sonora facility – then Rehoboam might be Serac. In other words, Serac has uploaded his consciousness into the program and is controlling it, which explains why out of the millions of alternate paths, Rehoboam seems fixed on this current one. It’s Serac’s influence, his very human inability to see more than one solution, that’s contributing to Rehoboam’s rule of law. And isn’t it odd that both machines are shaped like the pearls that power the consciousness of hosts?

Read the full thread here.

2. Cryo Wake Up Call

Fans were finally treated to a bloody showdown between Dolores and Maeve who are fighting for … reasons? Honestly, the adversarial nature of their relationship is one of the more confusing narratives this season but we’re gonna roll with it for now. Dolores looked to be down for the count before she activated an EMP that shut down every powered being in the facility, hosts included. With the lights turned off, many Redditors wondered what that meant for the “outliers” currently trapped in Sleeping Beauty’s cryogenic nightmare. Did they die? Unlikely since they’re technically still human, just more frozen. In fact, turning the switch off might mean the people in those pods – and there were quite a lot of pods – will soon wake up and we can’t imagine they’ll be happy to discover an omnipowerful A.I. condemned them to eternal rest because of their “f*ck the establishment” natures. Serac’s probably going to be sorry he kept these people alive, especially if one turns out to be his psychotic brother.

Read the full thread here.

3. The Passed Pawn

People who not only understand but actually enjoy playing chess are hella smart. Case in point: This Redditor who explained the episode’s titular meaning. Apparently, a “passed pawn” is a piece on the chessboard with no enemy directly in front of it that can be upgraded to a more valuable piece. There are narrative illusions and then there are the metaphors that Westworld comes up with. Subtle, they are not. Caleb seems to be the stand-in for this pawn theory, a man who’s finally coming to terms with the truth about his past, who’s been positioned to lead a revolution while Dolores faces down her mortal enemy. Other characters seem to have more present and immediate threats as well: William wants to eradicate the hosts, Charlores has it out for her maker, Maeve needs to kill Dolores to be reunited with her daughter, etc. The only character without a real nemesis is Caleb, which might make him the most dangerous player on the board.

Read the full thread here.

4. Prime Dolores

As invincible as Dolores often appears, this episode really drove home the fact that she can be beaten. Maeve nearly killed her before she was able to cut the power and their tense battle had most fans holding their breath. If Maeve had crushed Dolores’ pearl, would that be the end of the girl in the blue dress? Probably not. In fact, there’s still one pearl unaccounted for and fans think it might be Prime Dolores, the original consciousness of the host. Is she squatting in a flat in Berlin, raging out to some techno beats and cooking schnitzels? Eh. But there’s some weight to this idea that there may be one more trick up the host’s sleeve.

Read the full thread here.

5. FutureWorld

We know, we know, we’ve theorized about FutureWorld before, but this latest episode laid even more groundwork for the idea that the timelines on this show are just screwing with us. After all, we still need to account for that post-credits season two scene set in the future that shows the A.I. creating fidelity tests that involve William. Add to that Solomon’s throwaway line that caused Dolores to give him a knowing smirk and, well, who’s to say Caleb isn’t a human replicant reliving his memories. What that means for Dolores’ master plan, we still don’t have a clue.

Read the full thread here.

6. Fore(Arm) Shadowing

There are so many moving parts on Westworld, it’s hard to keep up with all of the Easter eggs the creators are dropping in random places. Like the opening credits scene. Should we have guessed Dolores would lose her arm since the host in the show’s intro seems to be missing one as well? We guess. But really, that’s putting a lot of pressure on our observational skills.

Read the full thread here.

Big Thief have apparently been looking through their vaults lately, because the group has been sharing some previously unreleased material that didn’t make their recent albums. Earlier this month, they released Demos Vol. 1 — Topanga Canyon, CA — Feb 2018, a collection of demos shared to benefit their touring crew, who, like many others in the music scene, have been financially impacted by the coronavirus pandemic. Now, the group is back with another song that didn’t find its way onto a record, as Big Thief has shared “Love In Mine.”

The finger-picked acoustic guitar track is a gentle and lovely tune, especially with Adrianne Lenker’s beautifully retrained vocal performance. Lenker sings the poetic lyrics, “Whatever comes / Whatever leaves / What we leave behind / Like cicada shells / Will be hollowed / And eaten by the hills.”

The group shared the song and wrote, “Listen to ‘Love In Mine,’ an outtake that is very dear to us from the Two Hands session. We all felt this song was one of the strongest songs/captures in the Two Hands batch but we could never quite get it to fit in a sequence. Happy to be sharing it now.”

Listen to “Love In Mine” above, and revisit our review of Two Hands here.

With the Academy relaxing the eligibility qualifications for next year’s Academy Awards, there’s nothing in the rulebook that says a video of Jake Gyllenhaal doing a shirtless headstand can’t win Best Picture. Oh… there is? Well, it’s still a great video, and we have Tom Holland to thank for it. The Spider-Man: Far From Home actor challenged his co-star to the “heavy breathing” feat, which went viral for extremely obvious reasons. But as Gyllenhaal revealed on Tuesday’s The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, he was originally going to refuse Holland’s challenge, until Ryan Reynolds beat him to it:

“I think he beat us all with his [‘no’] response,” Gyllenhaal said of Reynolds. He was also going to refuse until Reynolds beat him to it, which forced him to crush the challenge while showing off his ripped lats.

Thank you for your service, Jake Gyllenhaal. After filming his video, he challenged his sister Maggie, Hugh Jackman, and 50 Cent (name a more iconic trio) to take part in the challenge — Maggie went through with it, but “Hugh Jackman and 50 Cent did not respond at all.” At least at first. Gyllenhaal eventually emailed Jackman, who replied:

“I said, ‘Come on, man.’ And he said, ‘I hope you’re well.’”

Now that the feud is over, Jackman and Reynolds are in cahoots against Gyllenhaal.