Category: Worldwide

Today’s Valentine’s Day, but you wouldn’t know it from some of today’s headlines. Fortunately, Atlanta rapper Deante Hitchcock has arrived to put the focus back on romance in his own cheeky way. Dropping the “Neck Up” video, Hitchcock shouts out all the throat GOATs out there with a subtly raunchy visual that focuses on the spicier side of Cupid’s day. The clip sees Deante heading to an appointment and displays his and his potential partner’s preparations, including lighting candles at a shrine with photos of Nancy Reagan, Karrine Stephans, and Andy King… If you know, you know.

The single is the first from Hitchcock’s upcoming EP, Every Day The 14th, which is due February 14 on RCA Records. The EP will be Deante Hitchcock since 2020’s Better, his debut album on ByStorm Entertainment/RCA. Since then, he’s been steadily releasing both smooth singles and witty freestyles in an effort to keep his momentum going. He’s put his own spin on tracks like Drake’s “What’s Next,” SpottemGotem’s “Beat Box,” Outkast’s “Roses,” and Spillage Village’s “Baptize,” which also earned him a spot on the official remix of the song. Most recently, he popped up on the deluxe edition of Isaiah Rashad’s album The House Is Burning, and he’s established himself as one of the Atlanta rappers to watch in the coming year.

Every Day The 14th is due 2/17. You can pre-save it here.

There might not be a bigger star these days than Dwyane “The Rock” Johnson. The former football player turned WWE star turned movie star is everywhere, from blockbuster films to video game movies to the Super Bowl. Yes, even an organization as giant as the NFL understands that letting The Rock introduce the teams for the biggest sporting event of the year is an easy win. He’s a notable name and face that everyone will recognize.

At least on TV, that’s the way it works. In the world of the internet, The Rock is seen a little differently by the NFL. The demographic for places like YouTube is way younger than the average NFL fan and that means the people stumbling across a video of The Rock’s pregame speech might not immediately recognize him as WWE superstar The Rock. Instead, they might know him for something he appeared in such as the guy from Jumanji, or Moana, or Fortnite. Maybe that’s why, when the NFL posted the YouTube video for The Rock’s speech he was labeled as the “Guy from Fortnite.”

For people of a certain age, this is a really funny description for someone as famous as The Rock. Here is arguably the biggest movie star in the world and he’s been labeled down to being a character in a game where players can also use a giant lifelike banana, Spider-Man, or LeBron James. But for younger audiences, that might be an easier way to realize that’s who he is.

Fortnite is one of the most popular games in the world and everyone of all ages plays it. While The Rock may be more famous for everything he did that got him into Fortnite, there’s no question that Fortnite is even more famous than he is. So in this moment, he can be known as “The guy from Fortnite” because there is guaranteed to be someone out there that knows him more for being in the game than for his movies.

In February 2021, it was reported that Kanye West (aka Ye) and Kim Kardashian had filed for divorce, and months later, Kardashian spoke more about the reasons behind the split. While West has attempted to revive the relationship on multiple occasions since then (including earlier today), he has also gotten back out there and tried the dating scene.

Ye’s recent romantic history has been lively since the Kardashian break-up, so let’s break down the timeline of who he has dated post-Kim.

Irina Shayk (June 2021)

Although West and Shayk’s time as a couple only started in 2021, she’s been on the rapper’s radar for a while (as Glamour notes): He name-dropped her on 2010’s “Christian Dior Denim Flow” and she later appeared in his video for “Power” and walked in Yeezy fashion shows.

The two first went public with their relationship in early June 2021, when they were seen together at a luxury French hotel for Ye’s birthday, as TMZ reports. In July, reports surfaced that West and Shayk’s relationship was slowing down, but a source called those reports inaccurate. Either way, in August, People reported West and Shayk had broken up.

Mystery woman (January 2022)

West had a busy January 2022 and he got started right away: On New Year’s Day, he was spotted with a mystery woman at a Miami hotel. This came right around the time Ye started seeing…

Julia Fox (December 2021)

Also on New Year’s Day, West and Fox had dinner at Carbone in New York City. Fox later described the date in Interview, noting she and Ye met in Miami on New Year’s Eve and that they flew to New York City together to see a Broadway production of Slave Play. Then they went to Carbone, which was followed by a trip to a hotel suite decked with an entire new wardrobe for Fox.

From there, the two popped up in headlines regularly, like when Fox gave her and Ye a celebrity couple name (“Juliye”) and when it was reported a few days ago that they were in an open relationship. Now, it appears they’re in no relationship at all, as Fox seemingly confirmed their breakup on social media, writing, “Kanye and I are on good terms! I have love for him but I wasn’t in love w the man Jesus Christ what do u guys think I am 12 years old?!” A representative for Fox also told E! and Page Six, “Julia and Kanye remain good friends and collaborators, but they are no longer together.”

As for what’s next for Ye, he’s still interested in reconciling with Kardashian, as he wrote on Instagram today, “I DON’T HAVE BEEF WITH KIM I LOVE MY FAMILY SO STOP THAT NARRATIVE IM NOT GIVING UP ON MY FAMILY […] I HAVE FAITH THAT WE’LL BE BACK TOGETHER.”

Look anywhere on the internet and thirsty aspiring rappers are everywhere. They thrive in the margins of comment sections, anxiously trying to get someone, anyone, to check out their album, song, or freestyle. You get the idea. So how does a rapper cut through the white noise of the internet? Trespass onto Diddy’s property and hand him a demo in person, of course!

That’s exactly what rapper Isaiah Smalls (no relation) did over the weekend. TMZ (who else?) posted a video of Smalls shouting rather haphazardly at the security gate of Diddy’s Los Angeles mansion in hopes that the Bad Boy Records boss would hear his cries. Unbeknownst to Smalls, Diddy wasn’t even home, and his security guards refused to let him in, obviously. But this didn’t stop the 23-year-old from hopping the gate and getting onto the property in hopes that he could personally hand-deliver a copy of his demo to Diddy. According to TMZ, security immediately apprehended the hungry lyricist and held him until the police arrived. He was charged with trespassing and was released within the hour.

And yes, I do realize that his stunt led to outlets like us shouting this dude out for what he did, but ya gotta love his determination. Hip-hop is a hustle and sometimes, you just gotta hop a fence and see what happens. Isaiah Smalls, remember that name.

Cut to Feb 10, as Jackman prepares to take the stage as con man Harold Hill. Jackman reveals in a hilarious tongue-in-cheek Instagram post that among the blessings of “gorgeous flowers, champagne and heartfelt wishes,” he also received Ryan’s gift … if you can call it that.

See on Instagram

In Jackman’s dressing room are two black-and-white portraits of Reynolds, one a sketch of him looking dapper while leering with arms crossed and the other a photo while he leaps in the air, sort of the same move Jackman does in the show. Perhaps one to intimidate, and the other mock? Who knows why mad men do what they do.

Attached is a note, with a passive aggressive pep talk from Reynolds.

“Hugh, good luck with your little show. I’ll be watching.”

Despite the jabs, however, Reynolds gave nothing but glowing reviews, calling the show “actually perfect.” But what he had to say about Jackman in particular was even more noteworthy.

“I don’t generally like to speak about @thehughjackman. Particularly in a positive light,” Reynolds wrote. “But his performance in @musicmanbway is one of the most electric things I’ve ever seen him do. The chemistry between [him] and @suttonlenore is off the charts.”

I mean, if even Jackman’s infamous nemesis enjoyed it, this show has to be really something, right?

During an interview in 2020, Jackman told The Daily Beast, “It’s gone back so long now … God, this is a classic sign where your feud has gone too long, where you don’t even know why or how it started,” regarding the playfully tumultuous relationship he shared with Reynolds.

But ask anyone, and I think they’ll tell you that we never want this delightful trolling to end.

Vic Mensa has just sprinkled a surprise Valentine’s Day release in the form of the sensual 4-track EP, Vino Valentino. For Mensa — who was released from a brief stint in jail last month following an arrest for LSD and mushroom possession upon returning to the US from Ghana — the EP is a departure from the politically-charged nature of 2021’s I TAPE and really most of his previous material. But the Southside of Chicago lifer more than holds his own as a romantic crooner on this new joint.

Album opener “D’ussé Tears” is a mildly auto-tuned swoon over gentle bedroom R&B and jolts of electric guitar. “Will you be my Valentine? All the time… every time …anytime?” he asks on the track’s climax, making it a worthy addition for mid-February playlists. He’s brought along a stable of longtime collaborators and Chicago hip-hop’s finest, like producer and multi-instrumentalist Peter CottonTale, producer Stefan Ponce, and poet Malik Yousef.

Check out the Vino Valentino cover artwork and tracklist below.

1. “D’ussé Tears” (feat. Dixson & Malik Yusef) – Produced by Vic Mensa, Additional Production by Peter CottonTale, Greg Landfair, Dwayne Verner Jr., Dixson
2. “Alone Wit U” (feat. Do Or Die) – Produced by Stefan Ponce
3. “Cancer” (Interlude) – Produced by Stefan Ponce
4. “Can I Call U Baby” (feat. Peter CottonTale) – Produced By Vic Mensa, Peter CottonTale, Stefan Ponce, Dwayne Verner Jr., Greg Landfair, and Erik Rumsa

Vino Valentino is out now via Roc Nation. Listen to it here.

For the past few weeks, Fight Club has been in the headlines after cinephiles noticed that China censored the ending to the over 20-year-old film. Interestingly, Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk had a surprising reaction to the film’s censorship thanks to the Chinese version matching the ending he originally wrote in the book. (In the new edit, Tyler Durden is arrested by the police before he can blow up several credit card buildings. He’s released from jail years later to pursue a happier life.)

However, the situation seemed to resolve itself when Tencent Video, who was streaming the film in China, quietly removed the censored ending with no explanation as to how or why the edits were made. Until now. In a new interview, Fight Club director David Fincher reveals how the whole thing happened and why it makes absolutely zero sense to him.

According to Fincher, the film was licensed to stream in China with the standard boilerplate provision that “you have to understand cuts may be made for censorship purposes.” What no one expected is that those cuts would involve just straight-up changing the ending (which will now be a concern going forward), and Fincher, for the life of him doesn’t understand the reasoning behind any of it. Via Empire:

While the ‘trims’ are more significant than that word implies, Fincher is less frustrated, more bemused by the whole situation. “If you don’t like this story, why would you license this movie?” he asks. “It makes no sense to me when people go, ‘I think it would be good for our service if we had your title on it… we just want it to be a different movie.’ The f*cking movie is 20 years old. It’s not like it had a reputation for being super cuddly.”

Like Palahniuk, Fincher also found it amusing that the edit actually matches the book, which means whoever censored it more than likely read the source material. Was this whole thing just someone taking “the book was better” to the extreme? Probably not, but maybe.

(Via Empire)

Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car is the first Japanese film ever to score an Oscar nomination for Best Picture. It’s also up for Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best International Feature, and after slowly rolling out in limited release over the past few months (with arthouse blockbuster success), the film is now in over 100 theaters.

That’s a lot for an indie, but it’s tiny compared to the 3,280 theaters that Death on the Nile — which is an hour shorter than Drive My Car, but feels twice as long — opened to this weekend. If you’re not near any of the cities where Drive My Car is playing (the list is here), don’t worry, it’s coming to HBO Max on March 2. There goes your excuse.

Drive My Car follows stage director Yusuke Kafuku (played by Hidetoshi Nishijima) who, two years after his wife’s death, accepts an offer to direct a production of Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya at a theater festival in Hiroshima, Japan. That’s where he meets Misaki Watari (Toko Miura), who is assigned to drive him in his Saab 900. “Forced to confront painful truths raised from his past, the official plot description reads, “Yusuke begins – with the help of his driver – to face the haunting mysteries his wife left behind.”

Better start looking for a red Saab 900 now. They’re going to impossible to find once Drive My Car (hopefully) wins at least one Oscar on March 27.

The news of Ivan Reitman’s death hit at almost the exact moment the Super Bowl ended. One of the biggest popular culture events of the year ended with the news that the man who created so many cultural touchstones – two Ghostbusters movies, Stripes, Dave among them – was gone. Ivan Reitman just felt like one of those directors who would just be around forever.

It might be a strange choice that, hearing of Reitman’s passing, the first movie I thought about was Meatballs, which was Reitman’s first time directing a somewhat mainstream film. A few months ago I rewatched Meatballs and, honestly, I was expecting something crass or crude. (To be fair, most movies that take place at a summer camp tend to lean on the crass side.) But Meatballs is a surprisingly sweet movie – at least about as sweet as a late-’70s movie that takes place at a summer camp can possible be. But there’s a lot of interesting stuff in Meatballs that would help inform a lot of Reitman’s greater successes over the years.

There’s basically no plot to this movie. The entire film seems to hinge on turning the camera on and letting Bill Murray riff for however long he wants and about any topic he wants. Murray plays Tripper Harrison, a wiseass councilor for Camp North Star who, when we first meet him, is telling a news crew (while pretending to be from another, better, summer camp) about how Yasser Arafat and Henry Kissinger are going to come hang out at the camp with the kids. I have a hard time believing almost anything Murray says in this movie was actually in the script. There are scenes where it feels like Murray literary jumps into frame, does a comedy bit about something that has almost nothing to do with what’s going on in the movie, then jumps out. It’s a movie star performance like we don’t see anymore. It’s jarring, now, how the whole movie hinges on one actor’s ability to capture the screen – especially considering this is Murray’s first starring role and no one was quite sure if he had the ability to do that or not. (You will probably not be surprised to learn that right up until filming no one was quite sure if Murray was going to show up or not.)

What’s surprising about Meatballs is it never devolves into, well, pretty much every other movie from this era with similar topics. There’s no scene of “the boys peaking into the girl’s shower,” or any of the other crude tropes at the time. Tripper is just a positive guy who just wants the kids to feel good about themselves and do the best they can in the athletic competition against the rival, more expensive camp. It’s here that Murray delivers a speech about none of this mattering that is, strangely, both motivational and also feels like it’s not entirely part of the script. And about halfway through the kids in the room stop rooting for Tripper Harrison and begin rooting for Bill Murray.

One of Reitman‘s greatest attributes as a director is it feels like, after the success of Meatballs, he decided, “What if we let all these kinds of moments happen in a movie where there is a plot?” So instead of Bill Murray just kind of hanging out, not doing much of anything, the same kind of “anything goes, let’s see what happens” momentum was used in Reitman’s next two movies where Bill Murray joins the Army, then Bill Murray busts ghosts. There’s just something so freewheeling about all three of these movies and it creates a one-two-three punch of movies in a row that’s hard to beat for comedies from one director. (It’s the one thing about the original Ghostbusters that’s so difficult to recreate. It’s not the lore that makes it works, or really even the jokes, but more just the (at least displayed) laid-back atmosphere of the production. It’s basically Meatballs only with a plot and a huge budget. To the point, I think it’s just something that’s impossible to recreate. It was a perfect storm of happenstances that will probably never happen again.)

Reitman’s next movie after Ghostbusters, Legal Eagles, works as the exception that proves the rule. This is not a freewheeling movie where it feels like everyone is going with the flow. Legal Eagles is a movie that should be terrific. (To be fair, it was a fairly big hit at the box office.) Ivan Reitman, Robert Redford and Debra Winger all together (not to mention a hit Rod Stewart song with a video in heavy rotation at the time) should have been a recipe for success. To the point I also rewatched Legal Eagles somewhat recently in a, come on, this has to be good kind of way. But it gets bogged down with too much plot. To the point Reitman’s three prior films lean into their vibe, while the movie feels like it’s fighting against itself, resulting in a movie that is way more confusing than it should be for what it is. (I thought maybe I was just being stupid, then I looked up the contemporary reviews from the time and almost everyone complains about how confusing this movie is.)

What’s remarkable is if not for Legal Eagle, Reitman has a seven comedy film stretch that would be hard to beat. After Legal Eagles, Reitman puts out Twins, Ghostbusters II (I am in the camp that thinks this is a good movie), Kindergarten Cop and Dave. Few comedy directors have that kind of run.

Meatballls is not Reitman’s best movie. But I truly believe Reitman was at his best when he incorporated the feel and vibe of Meatballs into his big-budget movies. With Meatballs, it was proven Reitman could have a hit with no plot, no budget, and one charismatic star. That’s all it took to keep people entertained. Then was a deft enough director to realize, hey, what if we keep these elements that work and just add money and plot. And it worked and we, as a society, benefited and will continue to benefit from Ivan Reitman’s work. But I’m not convinced any of this happens without Meatballs.

You can contact Mike Ryan directly on Twitter.

(Plentiful spoilers from Netflix’s Ozark will be found below.)

Any devoted Ozark viewer surely already tore through the first half of the show’s final season (which arrived on January 21), so you’re undoubtedly wondering when the next fix will arrive. The unusually structured season will actually wrap up the show, and god only knows whether the Byrde family’s money laundering ways will end, and they’ll be able to peacefully head back to Chicago. This doesn’t seem too likely, especially since the series has let us know that there’s a major car wreck involved.

As well, Ruth Langmore ended the half-season in a rage, justifiably so, following the death of her cousin, Wyatt, who was murdered by Javi after he killed Darlene. Ruth discovered the scene and went straight to Marty and demanded answers on who did the deed. She steadfastly vowed that justice will be served upon the killer. Jonah, of course, spilled the details of Javi’s identity, and even though Marty warned Ruth away from vengeance, it’s unlikely that she’ll listen to him.

When will the repercussions go down? Netflix hasn’t revealed a precise date, but we can make a guess, based upon similarly structured seasons from the streaming service. With Masters of the Universe: Revelation, the first part arrived on July 23, 2021 and the next followup on November 23, 2021. For Unsolved Mysteries, the first half season streamed on on July 1, 2021 with the rest arriving on October 19, 2021.

So, anywhere between four and six months seems like the spacing that Netflix typically works with during divided seasons. We should know more soon, but fingers crossed that we’ll see the Ozark finale this summer.

‘Ozark’ is currently streaming (Season 4, Part 1) on Netflix.