Category: Worldwide

Wonder Woman 1984 is one of the more high-profile films to have its release date pushed back due to the ongoing pandemic, but fear not, if you need your Gal Gadot fix, October is going to be a great month. The Wonder Woman sequel comes out on October 2, followed three weeks later, on October 23, by Death on the Nile. The follow-up to 2017’s Murder on the Orient Express finds Kenneth Branagh returning as world-famous detective Hercule Poirot and Tom Bateman as Bouc, as well as newcomers Gadot, Armie Hammer, Letitia Wright, Annette Bening, Ali Fazal, Sophie Okonedo, Emma Mackey, Dawn French, Rose Leslie, Jennifer Saunders, and Russell Brand.

If the mystery Poirot has to solve is, “Where are the world’s most attractive people and also “feminist” “scholar” Russell Brand, for some reason?” I know the answer. (It’s Death on the Nile. Gadot, Hammer, Wright, Branagh’s mustache, etc. are very attractive.)

Here’s the official plot synopsis:

Belgian sleuth Hercule Poirot’s Egyptian vacation aboard a glamorous river steamer turns into a terrifying search for a murderer when a picture-perfect couple’s idyllic honeymoon is tragically cut short. Set against an epic landscape of sweeping desert vistas and the majestic Giza pyramids, this tale of unbridled passion and incapacitating jealousy features a cosmopolitan group of impeccably dressed travelers, and enough wicked twists and turns to leave audiences guessing until the final, shocking denouement.

Death on the Nile opens on October 23.

Ozark will throw down with a super-sized season to launder all of the Byrde family’s messes and, most importantly, to allow Marty enough time to keep losing his sh*t on multiple occasions before the series concludes. Fortunately for viewers of this enormously popular show, Season 4 will begin filming this fall as planned, and there’s even better news: the show does not actually film at Lake of the Ozarks, where all sorts of pandemic foolishness has been going down, but rather, in Georgia near Lake Allatoona and Lake Lanier.

Sticking to the schedule is important for obvious reasons, including cost-effectiveness, which means that shutting down production when a Covid-19 case pops up is something to be avoided if possible. For that reason, star Jason Bateman has chosen to break an important tradition — he usually directs the first two episodes of each season — in order to keep himself in some semblance of a bubble. It’s a wise move, even if it’s “breaking his heart,” as he recently told Indiewire.

“[A]s we were looking through the protocols, the guidelines, all the complications with COVID, [and] the producer side of me made me think it’s just not responsible to have one of the actors direct the first two,” he reasoned. “Given that we’re still going to be getting our perimeter safe. Because if one of the actors gets sick, we all have to go home for weeks.”

Whereas if a crew member falls ill, Bateman points out, he can “[make] sure their salary is protected” while they stay home until the all clear is called. It remains to be seen whether he can pick up a few episodes to helm toward the end of the season, but that’s probably not in the cards. It’s definitely not the ideal way for him to end the Ozark run, but he knows exactly how much it matters to get things done as safely as possible, and he wants everyone to know that “I love directing the show.”

(Via IndieWire)

Last night was the second day of the 2020 Democratic National Convention, which is a virtual, online-only event this year due to the coronavirus pandemic. The political event is flush with musical talent, as the first night of the DNC saw performances from Maggie Rogers and Leon Bridges, while Billie Eilish and Jennifer Hudson are set to perform in the coming days. Yesterday had a music highlight as well, including a performance from John Legend, the night’s only musical performer.

After being introduced by Tracee Ellis Ross, the broadcast cut to a pre-shot performance of John Legend, who was joined in an empty room only by his piano to perform “Never Break.” That’s how it seemed as first, anyway, before the shot panned around to reveal that he had a choir of backing singers with him as well. The song was thematically appropriate given the state of the country and the world, as Legend sang optimistically, “We will never break / Built on a foundation / Strong enough to stay / We will never break / As the water rises / And the mountains shake / Our love will remain.”

Legend wrote on Twitter of his performance, “Thanks to the @DemConvention for asking me to close out a powerful night with my new song #NeverBreak. The song is about love, hope and resilience, and I think we could all use some of that right now.”

Watch Legend perform “Never Break” above.

When we hopped on the phone with Jake Johnson earlier this month to talk about his new Netflix animated comedy Hoops, we spent a surprising amount of time developing a drinking metaphor to sell the show’s signature brand of funny.

We won’t spoil it here, but it has a lot to do with bourbon, a no-nonsense, honest kind of spirit that a coal miner, or someone who works in a hole, would enjoy.

It’s a very Jake Johnson kind of drink, or at least, the kind of liquor his characters like New Girl’s Nick Miller and Stumptown’s Grey McConnell might prefer. You either like it, or you don’t. That goes for the whiskey and for Johnson’s new series, which follows a middle-aged basketball coach whose dreams of glory hinge on a team of talentless high-school athletes.

Created by Ben Hoffman, the show sports an all-star lineup of comedic voices including Rob Riggle, Natasha Leggero, Ron Funches, Cleo King, A.D. Miles, and New Girl alumni Max Greenfield and Hannah Simone. It earns every bit of its TV-MA rating and it might not be for everyone, but then again, that’s why Johnson likes it so much.

We chatted with him about getting back to work on Stumptown, New Girl’s quarantine fandom, and the Hamilton snub that keeps him up at night.

How are you holding up during quarantine?

I’m trying to figure out things to do. I’ve built a little office in my backyard. I’m trying to train my dogs, but the truth is, I’m dying to get back to work.

Have you heard anything about Stumptown and when you guys might start filming again?

Yeah. I just talked to Dave Rosemont, a line producer, and right now it’s with the unions and the studios to get everything signed off. But it sounds like it’s going to be a lot of testing and a lot of zones. So everybody is going to be very separate from one another.

Maybe, and hear me out, you just go full Jake Gyllenhaal in Bubble Boy? Just get everyone stuffed into a plastic bubble suit?

[Laughs] I actually texted Cobie Smulders about trying to get all the actors and the crew in a bubble, like the NBA. It’s super hard to do.

Speaking of quarantine, is it weird for you to see how many people are becoming New Girl fans now?

I’ll be honest with you, I’m not really on social media very much.

Good for you.

I’m not communicating with anybody, so the way that I found out New Girl was really having a resurgence was the last day and a half of press [for Hoops]. What I will say to the people who are finding the show, ‘I’m glad. I appreciate it.’ I wish they found it two years ago so we could still be making it.

Yeah, we could’ve really used those ratings in the last two seasons.

And that’s what it is. We were in a spot where we had established what the show was and how to make it. We all knew what it was at that point, and the network, in their defense, was really trying to be cool. They gave us eight episodes in season seven, but they really did that to show respect to the few fans we had. So you guys are about 24 months late.

Hoops is about as far from New Girl as you can get. Are you a big sports fan or did creator Ben Hoffman just rope you into working for him?

I used to be a pretty big fan but yeah, I got roped in by Ben. What really pulled [me] in on this one was Chris Miller and Phil Lord, who are also producing, and I liked the idea of doing an R rated animated show that, really, there was no message. It was just for the bits. That’s not something that ever comes my way, where it’s just a stupid comedy for the sake of being a stupid comedy.

So there’s no hidden meaning here.

No, it doesn’t mean anything. There’s no message to it. There’s no statement to it. If you don’t like the comedy of it from the first minute, you’re not going to like it later. It doesn’t grow. It doesn’t change. It reminds me of sitting like backstage at a comedy theater and doing bits and the bits never evolve. It’s just really meant to get funny people, trying to be funny.

It’s straight-forward. Like a shot of bourbon.

That’s right. And if you don’t like it, you’re not going to like it. So there’s no reason to keep watching it. But if you like that first shot of bourbon, you’re going to love your sixth shot of bourbon.

And you also might have a drinking problem.

You’re having a fun Tuesday, yeah.

Did you play any sports in high school?

You know, I played sports until two things happened at the same time that got me uninterested: puberty and marijuana.

A lethal combo.

Yeah, it kind of hit in high school for me. The idea of being on a sports team with a coach yelling at me during practice really lost a lot of value.

So the ranting this guy does on the show, you weren’t channeling any past trauma? You haven’t gotten yelled at like that before?

Well, I have, but it was always my bosses. [Laughs] No, honestly, I really wasn’t channeling much of anything for this. Ben Hoffman was always in the booth and trying to make him laugh is a fun thing to do. For New Girl, it was trying to make Liz Meriwether laugh, which was always fun. For this, it was trying to make Ben laugh. So those crazy rants would make him laugh and it was really fun to do.

This show was born from a presentation you guys gave to MTV years ago and it didn’t get picked up, partly because it was so graphic. Did you have to water anything down for Netflix?

So the opening scene of the pilot where he’s yelling at the ref and then the scene where he’s trying to get the high school kid a prostitute are directly from the presentation.

Were you worried it would be too raunchy, even for streaming?

Well, I kind of feel like because the cold open of this show was coaches screaming at all the players, it’s very clear what this show is. If we lived in a world where there were four channels and a limited number of shows, I would be very cautious because I would think there are a lot of people who aren’t going to like it. But when you have so many options, once you kind of set the standard for what this show is, you kind of have to stay at that level or you’re cheating the people who like it.

That was our train of thought, it was, ‘This is the tone of it.’ You don’t start with a shot of bourbon and then end with a margarita.

You did end up recruiting some New Girl cast members for this thing, though.

A lot of the casting was me. I tried to kind of use my producer muscle by bringing in people I really like to work with, from Max [Greenfield] to Hannah [Simone]. I like working with the same people over and over who I know are really funny. Honestly, a lot of the jobs that I do are for the actual day at work and for me, the actual day at work was recording with these people. And so I would much rather record with somebody who I felt was really fun to come and work with as opposed to somebody I don’t know.

So you guys were all in the booth together for this?

That was the best part. Sometimes we had multiple people in there at the same time. We tried to maximize the improv.

I’ve seen the virtual Comic-Con panel you guys did for this show. How do you keep everyone in line at work?

You don’t. You kind of go off the rails. I think that’s the point, though.

On a serious note, you played Aaron Burr in the first episode of Drunk History, which I recently rediscovered on YouTube. Does the success of Hamilton just absolutely eat away at you at night?

[Laughs] Man, that is a great question. Yes, yes it does.

I thought so.

Because I feel so deeply offended that I wasn’t included. And I just hope… I don’t want to say too much. I don’t want to get in any trouble here, but I just hope that one day my performance as Aaron Burr finally gets the credit that [Lin Manuel-Miranda’s] version of Hamilton has gotten. That’s all I’m going to say.

Up is down, flammable means inflammable, two plus two equals five, dogs cats mass hysteria, all because Fox News had some nice things to say about Michelle Obama.

Yes, that Michelle Obama, the former-First Lady who gave a virtual speech at the Democratic National Convention on Monday that included a powerful indictment of Donald Trump’s presidency: “It is what it is.” That usually riles the Fox News folks up, but anchor Chris Wallace praised Obama for the way she “flayed, sliced, and diced Donald Trump,” while Dana Perino, the former press secretary for George W. Bush, noted that it’s “difficult to try to connect with an audience without an actual audience there with you, but she has the ability to connect with people through the screen.” Wallace added, “This was a very effective speech.” Not everyone at Fox News agrees, however.

Speaking on Tuesday’s Tucker Carlson Tonight, host Tucker Carlson criticized Obama’s speech, calling it “a total lie, a calculated lie, a lie designed to make America more fearful, more angry, more divided, and thereby help her candidate win. That’s what Michelle Obama just did. But pretty much no one pointed it out last night. They were too afraid to because as Michelle Obama made very clear if you disagree with what she says, you are a bigot.” Hmm. Only someone who dabbles in “bigotry” would know.

Carlson later compared Obama to Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard. “You probably still think of the Left as secular, but not anymore. They are fervent religious fanatics,” he said. “Michelle Obama is their L. Ron Hubbard. Everything she does is good by definition. She’s the most beautiful, the smartest, the wisest. If Michelle Obama played golf, she would shoot an 18 every time.” At least she doesn’t “cheat like hell.”

You can watch the segment below (or don’t) beginning at 4:35.

(Via the Daily Beast)

“WAP” continues to dominate the world, so Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion are still trying to capitalize on their monster hit. Cardi did so in an absolutely perfect way yesterday, when she announced a new set of “WAP” merch.

The line features most of the usual merch suspects, like shirts and other articles of clothing, but a couple of items stand out. Given how focused on — ahem — wetness the song is, Cardi has included a couple of items to keep people dry for when situations get a bit moist: Raincoats and umbrellas. Available are black, pink, and white raincoats, as well as black and pink umbrellas, all with the song’s title emblazoned on them in big letters.

Earlier this week, the song officially (and unsurprisingly) made its debut at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, about which Cardi and Megan were understandably thrilled. Cardi didn’t love, however, when she saw that the song was used to promote a Republican boat party, so she fired back. Speaking of politics, Cardi also recently sat down to interview former Vice President and current presidential candidate Joe Biden.

Check out the “WAP” merch here.

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As a person whose dad frequently gets compared to Bill Murray, I often wonder exactly what it would be like to have Bill Murray as a dad. Thanks to this On The Rocks trailer, I can get a taste of that; however, this Bill Murray character happens to be a larger-than-life playboy father. So, it’s not an ideal situation, but Rashida Jones’ character makes the best of it, especially because her husband, portrayed by Marlon Wayans, might be a playboy, too.

A24 joins up with Apple TV+ for this Sofia Coppola-directed movie, in which a young mother in New York worries that her husband’s having an affair. It’s up to dad to help her sniff out the truth, and although this setup might sound stressful, what results is a comical adventure that brings dad and daughter to an understanding about their own relationship. If this sounds reminiscent of Lost In Translation (and I don’t mean that in a skeevy way, given that Scarlett Johansson’s character was much younger than Murray’s aging actor), then of course that makes sense. However, Murray is trading Suntory whisky for martinis in this love letter to New York.

From the synopsis:

Laura (Rashida Jones) thinks she’s happily hitched, but when her husband Dean (Marlon Wayans) starts logging late hours at the office with a new co-worker, Laura begins to fear the worst. She turns to the one man she suspects may have insight: her charming, impulsive father Felix (Bill Murray), who insists they investigate the situation. As the two begin prowling New York at night, careening from uptown parties to downtown hotspots, they discover at the heart of their journey lies their own relationship.

On The Rocks arrives on Apple TV+ (and select theaters) on October 20.

The RX is Uproxx Music’s stamp of approval for the best albums, songs, and music stories throughout the year. Inclusion in this category is the highest distinction we can bestow, and signals the most important music being released throughout the year. The RX is the music you need, right now.

The last time I wrote about The Killers, I was not kind. It was 2017, and they had just put out their fifth record, Wonderful Wonderful. Times did not appear to be good in Killers-ville. Bassist Mark Stoermer was publicly backing out of the band. (Guitarist Dave Keuning would eventually join him as a part-time Killer.) Singer Brandon Flowers openly questioned their relevance in interviews, rhetorically asking in Billboard, “Well, what kind of mark have I left?”

And then there were the songs. At best, Wonderful Wonderful was knowingly cheesy, like the part in “The Man” in which Flowers refers to himself “USDA certified lean.” At the record’s frequent worst, however, The Killers once again grasped at an elusive profundity, ruminating like middle-aged rock ‘n’ roll Hamlets about the fragile state of their own creative mortality. The album ended with the laughably lousy “Have All The Songs Been Written,” a self-pitying blues-rock dirge featuring some aimless Mark Knopfler guitar licks and Flowers’ greeting-card existentialism: “Has every ship gone sailing / has every heart gone blue?”

Who wanted that kind of defeatism from, of all bands, The Killers? Flowers once sang about burning down the highway skyline on the back of a damn hurricane! And now he was droning on about sailing ships and blue hearts? What is the point of this band if they aren’t playing the arrogant and indestructible arena-rockers?

At the time of Wonderful Wonderful, it was painfully clear that all the good Killers songs had indeed been written. With the band crumbling internally and struggling to recover their lost joie de vivre, I made a cruel but honest observation: “The Killers seem like a band on their last legs.”

Having written them off, I initially ignored the singles for The Killers’ latest LP, the extremely Killers-monikered Imploding The Mirage. “Why bother?” I thought. They’re finished. But on a lark, I streamed a promo of the album. The first track that queued up was “My Own Soul’s Warning.” What in the hell does “my own soul’s warning” mean? The first verse offered little guidance. Flowers sang about how he “tried going against my own soul’s warning / And in the end, something just didn’t feel right.” (Is Brandon Flowers’ soul not trustworthy? If he doesn’t have soul, does that now make him a soldier?) But like so many memorable Brandon Flowers lyrics, this line made somehow made sense because he sang it as if it made sense.

Then something incredible happened: Flowers hollered, “But man … I thought I could fly!” and there was this huge rush of synths and guitars and drums and my heart was suddenly three feet outside of my chest. Suddenly, I could feel my defenses being lowered by this silly (though sometimes brilliantly silly) band. Here was a Killers song in 2020 doing exactly what I always want a classic Killers song to do, against my will even. I could only laugh at my reaction: Were the Killers … kinda great again?

Two songs later, to my utter surprise, they did it again: On paper, “Caution” is another example of The Killers’ doing ersatz Springsteen. There’s a guileless narrator drawn to mixed metaphors like a horse to a flame. There’s a “featherweight queen” with “Hollywood eyes” that the guy is determined to whisk away to a magical land that is “wild and free.” While the plot about how they’re trying to escape this town seems straightforward, little else about “Caution” makes a lick of sense. (Sample lyric: “Doesn’t like birthdays / They remind her of why / She can go straight from zero / To the Fourth of July.”) But it didn’t matter: I was with them. I have no idea what you’re saying, Brandon, but I understand you.

At this point in the review, I should be pulling the standard 2020 music-critic maneuver and link “Caution” to (waves hands at all this). Does this song “speak to the moment that we are in” by making allusions to “the apocalypse” and “our communal isolation” and [insert your favorite pandemic cliché here]? I won’t kid you: Hell no. “Caution” has nothing to say about anything, nor does any other track on Imploding The Mirage. What this album offers instead is escapism. It’s a portal to a lost world in which tens of thousands of people gather in arenas and sing along to confusing songs with irresistible choruses. A place where I desperately want to be. There are dozens of better albums I have heard in 2020, but few of those records have made me feel as giddy as the part in “Caution” when Lindsey freaking Buckingham magically appears and plays a searing guitar solo that pretty freaking accurately replicates the glory of “The Chain.” This album doesn’t comment on the pandemic; this album irradiates it temporarily from your brain.

I haven’t spoken about the rest of Imploding The Mirage all that much. It’s also pretty good — which, I must once again reiterate, is much, much better than I expected going in — but since this is a Killers album, it should go without saying that Imploding The Mirage is pretty egregiously front-loaded. In the back half, there are some inevitably goofy flourishes, like the electro-calypso pulse that moves through “When The Dreams Run Dry” or the blustery Born In The U.S.A. homages of the title track. These songs aren’t essential, but at least they approach the likability of the filler on Hot Fuss. Meanwhile, the good stuff that’s fronted — basically the first six tracks, which also include the hard-charging “Dying Breed” and the U2-like “Blowback” — is so much better than what The Killers have mustered in at least a decade. Substantial credit for that must be given to the band’s key collaborators: Jonathan Rado of Foxygen and the excellent producer and songwriter Shawn Everett, whose work on The War On Drugs’ A Deeper Understanding is an especially obvious influence on Imploding The Mirage. (Adam Granduciel himself shows up on “Blowback,” for what it’s worth. But his spiritual fingerprints all over this record.)

Given that A Deeper Understanding is one of my favorite albums of the last five years, you can take my praise for The Killers’ most War On Drugs-like songs with a grain of salt. Perhaps the fact that they’re taking cues from a younger band could be viewed as a sign of decline. The Killers certainly aren’t what they were in their aughts-era prime. Let’s be real: Imploding The Mirage is the work of a duo, Flowers and drummer Ronnie Vannucci Jr., trying to hold the brand together with some well-heeled hired hands.

And yet, when I put the album on, none of that matters for once. Imploding The Mirage is just plain fun, at a time when “fun” feels like the opposite of plain and more like a balm. When you hear this record, it often makes no sense. But I got it. My, ahem, own soul’s warning was that I needed it.

Imploding The Mirage is out on Friday via Island Records. Get it here.

Damian Lillard did his thing in the Portland Trail Blazers’ 100-93 win over the Los Angeles Lakers on Tuesday night. Lillard went for 34 points in the win, which included a collection of threes from other area codes despite the best effort of the Lakers’ defenders. They were the latest reminders that Lillard has range that no one can match in the league right now, as he was able to pull up and hit gigantic shots from way downtown when Portland needed them most.

That “right now” qualifier is a big one, because there’s a dude in Lillard’s division who has the kind of limitless range that can match Dame. However, Steph Curry’s at home during the Bubble, as injuries led to the the Golden State Warriors having a pretty brutal season.

Still, when he’s healthy, Curry is the most electric shooter in NBA history. On Inside the NBA following the Blazers game, Kenny Smith threw a bit of a challenge Curry’s way, questioning whether he still has this kind of range. Curry, in turn, thinks Smith was saying something off-base.

Smith ended up wearing this L, chalking this up to forgetting what Curry can do when he’s out there doing his thing.

In fairness to The Jet, it has been a minute, as Curry hasn’t been able to suit up since before the COVID-19 hiatus that began in March. Still, this gives me a reason to direct you to this 12-minute video of Steph hitting threes from all over the place as a refresher for us all.

Charles Barkley is one of the folks who believe that the Portland Trail Blazers have what it takes to knock off the Los Angeles Lakers in the 1-8 series in the Western Conference. None of us can tell the future, but the Blazers took the first step towards making that prediction look really good, as Portland gutted out a Game 1 win on Tuesday night, 100-93.

A fun wrinkle to this game is that Barkley thought it was must-win for the Lakers. In his eyes, Los Angeles needed to win or else they were going to get swept by a hungry Blazers squad led by a superstar in Damian Lillard. Because L.A. did indeed lose, Barkley decided to go grab a broom and celebrate before Inside the NBA provided analysis on the game. Barkley went around and swept up the set, much to the delight of Ernie Johnson, Shaquille O’Neal, and Kenny Smith.

Barkley went as far as to guarantee that a sweep is coming, which is quite the lofty proposition, even if the Blazers are better than most teams you’d expect to get the 8-seed. Still, if he has his way, we’re getting three more appearances out of that broom, the first of which would come at the conclusion of Game 2 on Thursday night. Chuck might need to find a different way to show off the broom, though, as that one will be broadcast by ESPN.