Category: Worldwide

Back in October, Bill Murray let slip something he probably wasn’t supposed to: During an interview with a German-language publication, he strongly suggested he was finally doing a comic book movie. He didn’t say which one, but he didn’t make it hard to figure out. People quickly surmised that it was Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, the third in the MCU wing devoted to the superheroes played by Paul Rudd and Evangeline Lilly. Now it seems Murray has done it again.

In a new episode of The Eli Manning Show (as caught by /Film), the quarterback was hobnobbing around Brooklyn with the screen legend, chowing down in the outside space of a hip eatery. Manning casually asked Murray, “Aren’t you in like a superhero movie coming out?” When Murray responded in the affirmative, Manning pressed him for more specifics, asking what his super-power is.

“My power is, I’m a bad guy,” Murray blurted out, laughing. He said nothing more about the matter, and Manning quickly changed the subject to whether or not Murray agreed with People magazine that Rudd, his co-star, is the sexiest man alive. (He simply said “all of us agree,” although perhaps Rudd does not.)

Was Murray on the level? And if so, is he the main baddie, as Jeff Bridges was in the original Iron Man? We’ll find out later, though surely Marvel top brass aren’t as irritated with him as they doubtless were at Mark Ruffalo when he accidentally revealed the ending of Infinity War a year before it came out.

In the meantime, you can watch Murray Eli Manning Show appearance in the video below.

(Via /Film)

The Indianapolis Colts entered Sunday with the easiest path of all of the AFC teams battling for a playoff spot, as a win over the 2-14 Jaguars in Jacksonville would’ve locked them into a spot.

However, the Colts, stunningly, haven’t won in Jacksonville since 2014 despite some pretty awful Jags teams in that timeline, and while an easy win on paper, there weren’t any teams facing more pressure than the Colts since a win was assumed. Naturally, Carson Wentz had his worst game of the season, tossing a pair of brutal interceptions as Indianapolis’ offense was unable to do anything in the biggest game of the season.

On the other side, Trevor Lawrence had one of his best performances of his rookie season, including a truly incredible play on what could’ve been a disaster in the red zone on third down.

While Wentz’s issues will be the headliner, it was the line play on both sides that was most disappointing for the Colts, as they got dominated at the line of scrimmage on both sides of the ball, including this 4th and goal stuff by the Jaguars.

The Jaguars win meant the AFC playoff picture was suddenly thrust into chaos, with teams that figured to be out finding themselves with a shot and an awful lot of intrigue for the late window. The next most important outcome on Sunday afternoon was in Baltimore, where the Ravens and Steelers tried to set offensive football back 40 years in an elimination game for the AFC North rivals. A Pittsburgh win meant they got in and then whichever team won on Sunday night would also make it in. A Baltimore win would’ve locked the Raiders into a spot, with the New England-Miami game suddenly having stakes for the Chargers, Ravens, and Colts, who weren’t mathematically eliminated with the loss.

That game, naturally, went to overtime, where a tie would’ve eliminated both teams, and the Steelers played for a game-winning field goal attempt after a clutch 4th down conversion kept their OT possession alive. Chris Boswell drilled the winning attempt, setting up what is one of the strangest scenarios in NFL history.

As was noted by a lot of people this week, a Colts loss meant that in the Sunday night game between the Chargers and Raiders, both teams would make the playoffs with a tie and could, theoretically, kneel down over and over until the game was over. Chargers coach Brandon Staley shut down that line of thinking during the week, but after the Colts lost and the Steelers won, it certainly has to be worth considering for both teams. Both teams are now in a “win and in” situation, but a little gentlemanly agreement could allow them both to make it to the postseason.

That seems less likely given they are divisional rivals, but the next four hours will be filled with people pondering the possibility of a Playoff Kneel-off in Las Vegas. If they don’t and someone wins, Pittsburgh is in.

Olivia Rodrigo saw her career shoot through the roof at the beginning of 2021 thanks to her debut single “Drivers License.” A week after its release, the song tallied 100 million streams on Spotify, a massive success that the platform said they’d never seen before. “Drivers License” was the catalyst for Rodrigo’s rise to stardom last year, serving as the lead single for Sour, her chart-topping Grammy-nominated album. It also granted her a sold-out North American and European tour. Altogether, Rodrigo has a lot to be thankful for, and you can see that in a throwback video she shared to celebrate the one-year anniversary of “Drivers License.”

In the video, which she shared on Instagram, Rodrigo can be seen playing “Drivers License” on the piano shortly after she wrote the song. “Happy first birthday to the little song that changed my whole life,” she wrote in the post’s caption. “I made this video a day or two after I wrote [‘Drivers License’] in my living room (with a very squeaky sustain pedal lol). Crazy to think how quickly life changes.” She concluded, “[Thank you] to everyone who has supported me so tenderly. Music is the most magical thing in the world.”

Rodrigo concluded 2021 with an NPR Tiny Desk concert at a DMV location. She was also one of a few musical figures who landed on Google’s list of the top trending searches of 2021.

It’s a safe bet that no American president in history watched as much television as Donald Trump. What was his favorite thing to watch? Fox News. During his single term, he would reportedly get caught in an echo chamber, making decision based on what he saw on the news network, watch how they covered the actions based on what they said, rinse repeat, for four years. He was so close that some of their stars even texted him during the Capitol siege he helped foment. But not everyone in the White House was a fan of his Fox News bingeing.

As per The Washington Post (in a bit teased out by Raw Story), the House select committee investigating Jan. 6 recently sat down with Stephanie Grisham, former White House press secretary, who’s made no bones about coddling Trump since he left office. Among the intel she dropped was how staffers reacted to Trump using Fox News as inspiration for policy.

“There were times the president would come down the next morning and say, ‘Well, Sean thinks we should do this,’ or, ‘Judge Jeanine thinks we should do this,’” Grisham revealed. “West Wing staffers would simply roll their eyes in frustration as they scrambled to respond to the influence of the network’s hosts, who weighed in on everything from personnel to messaging strategy.”

One former staffer, speaking under anonymity, said that Trump would have certain Fox News stars participate in policy discussions with his staff, including Sean Hannity and Lou Dobbs.

In the year since leaving office, Trump has turned on Fox News multiple times, even roasting Sean Hannity, his best friend at the network. But he never stays mad at them for long.

(Via The Post and Raw Story)

The Denver Nuggets are a team looking to win now, as their window to compete is the present given the presence of the reigning league MVP, Nikola Jokic, who is playing arguably better basketball this season, almost single-handedly keeping Denver in the playoff race out West despite the absences of Jamal Murray and Michael Porter Jr.

As such, the Nuggets are in need of reinforcements now who can help them try to win games until Murray is able to return, with Porter Jr. likely done for the season. DeMarcus Cousins is reportedly on his way to Denver after a stint on a pair of 10-days in Milwaukee, and on Sunday word broke from ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski that Denver was acquiring veteran guard Rodney McGruder from the Pistons along with a future second-round pick via the Nets for Bol Bol, the intriguing youngster who, at this moment, simply does not fit the Nuggets timeline.

This likely will be the best chance for Bol to get on the court more and try and show he is an NBA player, as Detroit will have more incentive to give him some burn and hope they’re trading for a diamond in the rough here. For Denver, they simply need bodies, particularly in the backcourt, and McGruder is an insurance policy for Monte Morris, Austin Rivers, and Facu Campazzo, should any of them miss time.

Michael Lang, who spearheaded Woodstock’s 1969 festival as well as its 1994 and 1999 editions, has died at the age of 77. He passed away at Sloan Kettering in New York City, and according to family spokesperson Michael Pagnotta, his death comes after a battle with a rare form of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. The last time the world publicly saw Lang was a little over two years ago, just before the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, when he was honoring the 50th anniversary of Woodstock’s first festival. He made some controversial attempts to commemorate the anniversary with another rendition of the festival that made his name.

Lang’s start in multi-artist events goes back to the late 1960s, when he hosted his first event, the 1968 Miami Pop Festival, which featured Jimi Hendrix, Frank Zappa, John Lee Hooker, and more. The following year, he launched the first Woodstock festival, which boasted a lineup that included The Grateful Dead, The Who, Santana, Sly and the Family Stone, Joan Baez, Hendrix, and Jefferson Airplane. That first iteration surpassed expectations, but it also had its fair share of downsides.

Woodstock made its return in 1994 and again in 1999, the latter being notorious for the violence, vandalism, and reports of sexual assault that occurred during it. Lang attempted to hold a fourth Woodstock festival in 2019, with a lineup that included Jay-Z, Miley Cyrus, Dead and Company, and more, but his plans fell through when the festival’s investors — financial partner Dentsu and its investment division Amplifi — withdrew their $32 million investment, which set off lawsuits. Lang also struggled to receive permits for the festival despite lowering the festival’s capacity to 75,000. He finally pulled the plug on the show, citing “a series of unforeseen setbacks.”

Lang is survived by his wife Tamara, their sons Harry and Laszlo, and his daughters LariAnn, Shala, and Molly.

The New York Giants entered Sunday with nothing to play for in a Week 18 matchup with the Washington Football Team, who also had nothing to play for. With Jake Fromm starting, there weren’t any expectations for a Giants offensive bonanza, but typically in this situation, teams pull out all the stops and just go balls to the wall trying to score some points and created some kind of positivity.

Not Joe Judge, though, as the Giants head coach decided that, rather than dialing up some exotic plays like just about every other team in that situation on Sunday, New York would be doubling down on turtling up. This, naturally, was to the dismay of the sparsely filled MetLife Stadium, as Giants fans got to watch their team put up a robust 48 yards of offense in the first half, trailing the football team 3-0 at the break.

Fromm is not good, but the complete refusal from the Giants coaching staff to even try to move the ball through the air was honestly breathtaking, with the finest example coming on back-to-back quarterback sneaks on second and third down from inside their own five late in the first half.

Look at this! What are you doing? Why bother showing up today? Every other coach of a bad team is running wild trick plays and going for it on fourth downs, while Judge is out here running quarterback sneaks just to create an extra yard of space for his punter. The boo birds were very loud in MetLife, despite a light crowd, and they only got stronger after a draw play on 3rd and 8 on the ensuing drive.

There’s been a massive uptick in COVID cases over the last month, thanks to the new, more highly transmissible Omicron variant. And yet that hasn’t stopped people from flocking to the movies, or at least one of them: Spider-Man: No Way Home. (Sing 2, mind you, has also raked in a mint.) The threequel in the Tom Holland iteration of the franchise, with its real-life paramour stars, has been breaking box office records since it dropped in mid-December, right as cases skyrocketed. On its fourth weekend, it surpassed the domestic haul of what was for many years the highest grossing movie in film history (not adjusted for inflation).

As per Deadline, No Way Home grossed another $33 million, handily trouncing the all-ladies action movie The 355, which tanked at a mere $4.8 million. That brings its total domestic cume to $668, and that puts it just ahead of Titanic, the James Cameron epic that once upon a time grossed a jaw-dropping $659.3 million. It was the biggest money-maker in movie history, at least until it was unseated 12 years later by another Cameron blockbuster, Avatar.

Given that No Way Home is still going strong, it’s only a matter of time — days, really — until it soars past another Tom Holland movie: Avengers: Infinity War, which grossed $678.7 million back in 2018.

Keep in mind, none of this is adjusted for inflation, and what Titanic grossed some 25 years ago would today be north of $1 billion. It’s also only taking in domestic grosses. Indeed, globally, No Way Home has amassed a combined $1.5 billion, which is still shy of the $2 billion Infinity War grossed. And Titanic? It grossed $2.2 billion globally, and adjusted for inflation that’s $3.8 billion. So Spidey still has a ways to go.

(Via Deadline)

(SPOILERS for Showtime’s Dexter revival will be found below.)

“Sometimes I wish the hurricane had taken me, released me of the burden of my own urges. Instead, it showed me that I have to bear them alone. That’s my fate… Let me die, so my son can live.” – Dexter Morgan, Season 9, Episode 10

*deep sigh*

I’m feeling oddly torn after the Dexter: New Blood season finale where the show’s principal serial killer bites the dust. After all, this revival set out, from the very beginning, to erase the sins of the lumberjack past (and it did so for at least the first half of the sesaon). The Powers That Be had heard all of our complaints about that series finale. Original showrunner Clyde Phillips and star Michael C. Hall knew that the whole “sail into a hurricane and emerge as a lumberjack” maneuver was silly. Seriously, somebody (back in the day, a decade ago) truly expected people to be cool with the beloved serial killer anticlimactically gliding away with no consequence.

There also was no justice to this ending. Dexter simply tossed the body of his dead sister into the ocean near Miami, sailed into a hurricane, and smirked through his (supposedly) final onscreen moments. It was a weird flex, at best. And to many viewers, it was a mildly insulting payoff for watching eight seasons, the final few of which didn’t measure up to preexisting standards. On one hand, this was bad. On the other hand, this outcome gave Showtime and Phillips and Hall a chance to make things right better. And let’s face it, no matter what happened, not everyone would be happy with a redo. Because the word “lumberjack” is already enough to set off Dexter fans. This had to be handled delicately, and some fans, like our own Dustin Rowles, declared that one of the key things that needed to happen here was that “Dexter must die.”

Mission accomplished. Did this happen the right way, though?

I would argue not, for a few reasons:

– Harrison/Dexter Connection Wasted: The season spent an awful lot of time building Harrison up as having a Dark Passenger and leading us to believe that Dexter’s own character had developed so much that he’d help the kid channel his own dark and violent proclivities for the greater good. Instead, Harrison changes his own mind on a dime because Dexter killed an innocent man, Logan. In effect, Harrison’s “Coach” had died, so all bets were off. Not that this was all wrong because Dexter did deserve to die (sometime, maybe not yet, though). And the swift turn of events (and Dexter praising Harrison for pulling the trigger) felt like a middle finger to the “Born In Blood” vibe explored throughout the season.

– Batista Wasted: Why the heck did they drag Angel Batista into this finale for five minutes if that was gonna go nowhere? This makes no sense, and it feels as though the writers could. not. figure. out. what to do with him. They dropped him in there and made it seem like we’d see him show up in Iron Lake, but yeah, never happened. He was used to clue Angela into Dexter being the Bay Harbor Butcher, end of story.

– Angela’s Career Wasted? On one hand, I’m happy with finally seeing an end to the mystery of who’s been killing girls for decades. On the other hand, I wish that Angela had been the one to discover the final piece of the puzzle, rather than be told by Dexter that Kirk Caldwell did those deeds. However, she did get to declare Dexter’s death to be an officer-involved shooting. And that has to be satisfying on a few levels, not the least of which was her own boyfriend lying about his damn identity and then still refusing to tell the whole truth (and gaslighting Angela with an “I’m worried about you” while he’s being interrogated over Matt Caldwell’s death), up until the bitter end.

These writing slip-ups do make the entire season seem deflating, despite initial success. Yet it’s not all bad, really:

– Doakes (!) has been fully vindicated: Finally, there’s justice for Doakes over the whole Bay Harbor Butcher misnomer. So, here’s as excellent reason as any for an O.G. “surprise m*therf*cker” clip.

– Dexter is, in fact, dead: And I’m good with this. Dexter’s gone. Maybe we’ll see some sort of followup down the line (because Showtime loves to keep their shows going as long as humanly possible) with Harrison in the driver’s seat (which was pretty much the parting shot of this revival’s season). Or maybe it’s really over. And I do appreciate, even though this was not handled in a graceful way, that Dexter saw real repercussions for breaking his code. And Harrison got some closure for his abandonment issues. Also, he inherently realized that dad was too far gone from his own rules, even if Dexter hadn’t given him all the details. However, yeah, all felt too rushed by the writers.

– Deb’s ending was a better one: She got to hold Dexter’s hand as he died and then she released him into the snow. It’s moderately better than being dumped into the ocean to be eaten by sharks or something, and it’d be hard for the writers to not improve on what happened to her in the original series because that was so awful.

In the end, I have mixed feelings about this finale. It’s hard to connect to the whole. Sure, Angela gets the best ending possible (even though fans might not be too connected to her, given that she’s a new character), and the brutal acts of Kirk Caldwell are at least brought to light (even though he’s already dead). Dexter won’t be able to go to Los Angeles, but at least Harrison is free. He can make his own path now, and I’m curious about whether he can tame the Dark Passenger, but the finale makes me doubt that he ever carried one around in the first place.

R.I.P, Dexter Morgan. May you rot in hell, and I mean that in the best-worst possible way.

The ‘Dexter: New Blood’ season finale is currently streaming via Showtime.

Last week, we lost one of Hollywood’s greatest talents: Sidney Poitier, the first Black person to win a Best Actor Oscar, for a long time the director of the highest grossing movie helmed by a Black filmmaker, and who helped break the glass ceiling for Black performers, passed away at the age of 94. His death prompted an avalanche of remembrances (and unearthed anecdotes), but one of the most striking came from Julia Louis-Dreyfus.

“In the middle of the night, when I was 8 years old, I was given a white rose by the most elegant man I would ever meet,” the actress wrote on Instagram. She then detailed how she wound up watching a historic moment for humankind with one of the biggest and most ground-breaking actors of all time.

“I was in Tunisia traveling with my family — my father worked with the 60’s equivalent of Doctors Without Borders. At 2 in the morning, my mom woke me up and, in our nightgowns, we went to the lobby of the Tunis Hilton where they had set up a little black and white television on which at 2:56 am, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon.

“Afterwards, we headed outside to look up through the hot summer night at the never-again-the-same moon in the sky. What could possibly top THAT? Well, it was when we returned to the lobby, and that handsome elegant stranger gave to me and each woman present a white rose to commemorate this historic evening.”

Who was that “handsome elegant stranger”? It was the guy who delivered one of the greatest slaps in screen history. “My mom, in something of a swoon, explained to me that this was not just any man, this was Sydney Poitier,” she recalled. “What a gesture. What a gentleman. Rest in peace.”

At the time, Poitier was wrapping up a hugely successful decade. After breaking through in the late ‘50s, he became one of the most popular and bankable actors in Hollywood and on stage, with films like A Raisin in the Sun (in a role he originated on Broadway), Paris Blues, A Patch of Blue, To Sir, with Love, In the Heat of the Night, and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. He won the Academy Award for 1963’s Lilies of the Field. And he still had a long career and a long life ahead of him.