In a move that will excite Star Wars fans still buzzing from the final season of The Clone Wars, Katee Sackhoff has reportedly been cast in season two of The Mandalorian. According to /Film, who was the first to break the news on Rosario Dawson playing a live-action version of Ahsoka Tano, Sackhoff will be reprising her role as Mandalorian warrior Bo-Katan Kryze, who the actress has voiced in both The Clone Wars and Rebels animated series.

The casting decision is not a total surprise, however, as Bo-Katan was featured prominently in the final season of The Clone Wars that recently aired on Disney+. In fact, Sackhoff was asked in early April if she hoped her character would make the jump to live-action, and in light of recent news, the answer she gave Discussing Film seems very telling:

I mean, who wouldn’t! I grew up watching Star Wars. I grew up obsessed with Star Wars. Part of what I loved about playing Starbuck was that she reminded me of Han. I absolutely love that world and it’s part of the reason why I took The Clone Wars and wanted to play Bo to begin with. That being said, of course, there are people that are going to jump to conclusions that Bo is going to be in The Mandalorian because on paper, it does make sense. But you know, we’ll just have to wait and see and cross all my fingers and toes. You never know.

Sackhoff’s casting also makes sense considering Bo-Katan was the last known person in Star Wars canon to possess the legendary Darksaber, which was somehow in the hands of Giancarlo Esposito’s Moff Gideon in the season one finale of The Mandalorian. Although, it should be noted that just like reports of Dawson and Temuera Morrison joining the hit bounty hunting series, there has been no official confirmation from Lucasfilm as of yet.

Season two of The Mandalorian premieres in October on Disney+

(Via /Film)

George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road, one of the best movies of the 2010s (and, let’s face it, of all-time), came out five years ago this week. That’s five years of the Doof Warrior, five years of the “what a lovely day!” GIF, five years of Charlize Theron: action star. Without Fury Road, there would be no Atomic Blonde, and that would be a darn shame. Theron and co-star Tom Hardy notoriously did not get along on the set of the Oscar-winning film (you’d get annoyed with your co-workers, too, if you were “in the desert for so long”), but they only have nice things to say about each other now.

“Charlize arguably laid down the finest lead character in an action movie, and that credit is much deserved,” Hardy said in the New York Times‘ oral history of Mad Max: Fury Road. “Both to her as a phenomenal talent and also to George for recognizing from the very start that it was time to pass Mel’s shoes onto Furiosa.” It’s a great performance, obviously, but Theron also shaped the look and personality of Furiosa, including her hair.

“At first, Furiosa was this very ethereal character, with long hair and some African mud art on her face. It was a different costume designer back then, before Jenny Beavan, and the costume felt a little more Barbarella-y. I worried about it.”

Theron credits Miller for “hearing me out,” for listening when she called him and said, “I don’t know how she’s getting by in the mechanics’ room with all this hair. I think we need to shave my head, and she needs to be a more androgynous, grounded character.” Weirdly, that’s what Elijah Wood said about his character in Happy Feet Two, also directed by Miller (what a wild career). Anyway, Theron had such a pleasant-in-retrospect experience with Miller that they’re reportedly working on a Furiosa spin-off.

The Doof Warrior is willing to reprise his role, but only if gets a hefty raise (three flame-throwing guitars).

(Via the New York Times)

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Tekashi 69 has been called a snitch on multiple occasions, but it appears he’s not going to let that bother him. In fact, he’s really leaning into the descriptor. His first social media activity after being released from prison was a comment about snitching. Not long after that, he hopped on Tory Lanez’s Quarantine Radio and joked about snitching. He’s far from done with owning the “snitch” label, and has done so even more over the past 24 hours.

Yesterday afternoon, he shared an illustration of himself pointing the police and the FBI in somebody else’s direction and captioned it, “Stop playin wit me …. who made this?” Around the same time, he also posted a poll on his Instagram Story. He asked, “QUESTION: If they kidnapped you, stole from you, slept with your baby moms, threatened your mom, stole millions from you, caught on the phone trying to kill you. WOULD YOU,” with the options being “snitch” and “do jail time.”

On top of all of that, Tekashi also only follows one Instagram account now, and it’s the NYPD.

Tekashi certainly seems to be handling his post-prison career well so far: His first livestream since his release absolutely shattered the previous Instagram record for most viewers.

It may have taken over 10 years, a fan streaming party, and an NSFW scam by her collaboration partner, but Nicki Minaj has finally accomplished the goal she’s been striving toward for seemingly her whole career. For the first time since she broke into the rap blog ecosystem over a decade ago, the rapper who dubbed herself the Queen and who has at times been both underdog and tyrant, has topped the Billboard Hot 100 alongside Doja Cat with her remix to Doja’s viral hit turned chart-climbing single, “Say So.”

And yes, her Barbz and Doja Cat’s “Kittens” staging a “streaming party” to juice their stats did help push them to No. 1, but the song they were most directly competing against this time, Megan’s “Savage” remix with Beyonce, received a similar push from the Hotties and Beyhive, making the race more-or-less even, for once. Nicki had other chances in the past. She came close in 2011 with “Super Bass,” which peaked at No. 3, again in 2012 with “Starships” (No. 5), and in 2014, she came as close as she ever got to No. 1 with “Anaconda,” which landed at No. 2 behind Taylor Swift and “Shake It Off.” Those past records were all massive hits, so why is Nicki only just now securing this accomplishment? And more importantly, where does she go from here?

In looking at why Nicki has always fallen just short of that coveted No. 1 spot, it’s probably worth noting that a lot of the songs that surpassed her were notable for being novelty tracks or for coming from one-hit wonders (Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used To Know” is in there, as is LMFAO’s “Party Rock Anthem“). They’re also shamelessly poppy — just like some of her attempts were. This is probably the main reason: ‘Til now, Nicki competed with pop stars for position at the top of the pop charts, trying to beat them at their own game. With the above-mentioned songs, she downplayed the very thing that shot her to prominence in the first place: Her top-tier rap skills.

It also bears examining Nicki’s own reasoning — that the industry is weighed against women, especially Black women. It’s certainly true that every artist who beat her to the top in the above examples was either Caucasian, male, or both. In the whole history of the Billboard Hot 100 chart, Black women have been disproportionately represented; it was only recently, after Billboard changed its metrics to allow for streaming numbers, that this began to balance out (hip-hop has dominated the chart ever since, reflecting the genre’s popularity in modern times). And who is to say how Nicki’s songs would have faired if streaming numbers were tabulated into Hot 100 results back then?

But Nicki’s insistence on trying to game the charts by making music that appealed to those sensibilities was a little like when Michael Jordan decided to play baseball for a year. It just wasn’t what her fans wanted her to do — and it wasn’t what she wanted to do, as she later admitted to regretting those songs and not sticking to her own style. Likewise, her collaborations with pop stars like Ariana Grande, Britney Spears, David Guetta, Jessie J, and Justin Bieber read as disingenuous to her natural sound, which would have grated alongside their perky tunes. She muted herself to accommodate the whims of a notoriously fickle audience, all while refusing to play to her strengths by collaborating with other female rappers.

It’s no surprise that when she finally started cooperating in sisterhood with younger rappers like Megan Thee Stallion and Doja Cat, she saw a return to the top ten for the first time since the surprise release of “Chun Li,” the lead single from Queen, which peaked at No. 10 due to her long absence from recording before its release. With “Say So,” Nicki showed that she could not only rap toe-to-toe with the men of rap, but also with the peers to whom she’d be compared to most often (whether fairly or not).

It’s poppy, but not in an overproduced, techno-drenched, manufactured way — its dance groove hails from the mid-70s R&B traditions of Black music, while both Doja and Nicki get some serious bars off. It’s the sort of song Nicki should have been making all along; not running from her roots but toward them. While fans read drama into the bars — as they’ll probably do forever — for once, she didn’t try to use beef with another female rapper for promotion and retired “bitches is my sons” from her vocabulary, at least temporarily. In fact, she even turned around a brewing feud that her fans started with Doja, for once, mobilizing them to promote a critic rather than bullying them. She became someone you want to root for again.

Call me naive, but I personally refuse to believe that anyone was actually gullible enough to think Doja Cat would really “show her boobs so hard” once the song reached No. 1, so the other explanation — the simplest one — is that Nicki finally made the music fans wanted from her, (mostly) free of gimmicks, of needless needling, goofy voices, or obvious pop radio reaches. We don’t know if she’ll stick to this newly winning formula, but given how badly she’s wanted this one accolade and how long it’s eluded her, don’t be surprised if her next album finds her firmly in a new mindset, putting the music first without the need to pursue the numbers.

At this point, we moviegoers may be fully stocked on “emotional truth.” In the years since Steven Spielberg gave us that 20 minute POV-style depiction of the Normandy landing in Saving Private Ryan, filmmakers have used every trick in the book to convey their subject’s transitory inner state. Shakier camera work, jumpier editing, busier sound — you could draw a straight line from Private Ryan‘s POV sequence to Christopher Nolan’s famously muddled dialogue. “I wanted you to feel what they were feeling,” the filmmakers would surely say.

After 20-odd years of increasingly exhaustive subjectivity, I find myself crying out for context. So it was watching Capone, from Josh Trank (written, directed, and edited by), who began his career solidifying the found-footage conceit as the wunderkind director of Chronicle, and now finds himself in need of redemption after the high-profile debacle of Fantastic Four (something it’s fairly easy to believe wasn’t Trank’s fault).

Capone, originally called “Fonzo,” after what friends of Alphonse Capone actually called him, is an impressionistic take on the final year of the famous gangster’s life, when Capone was cooped up in his big Florida proto-McMansion dying of tertiary syphilis. Doctors had tried everything available at the time to cure Capone’s syphilis while he was still in prison, from tryparsamide to injecting him with malaria, in the hopes that the fevers would kill the disease, to eventually penicillin. But by then it was too late and the authorities simply released an increasingly insensate Capone to die at home.

Capone picks up after that, when all is lost, Capone has the mind of a 12-year-old, and historical context is mostly unnecessary. The better for Trank to be able to focus solely on filmmaking tricks, like people who aren’t really there, sounds that only the protagonist can hear, close-ups of bloodshot eyes, etc. I think I might’ve liked to see a slightly earlier version of Capone’s life, with doctors torturing him with failed cures, rather than this version, where Capone rambles, talks to dead people, and has a recurring vision of a kid with a balloon. Who is this kid? Why does he matter? What does the balloon mean? It’s all up for interpretation, maaaaaan.

Tropic Thunder popularized the extremely accurate but problematically worded notion that an actor should “never go full retard.” Capone seems to suggest a corollary where maybe actors should never go fully convalescent or tertiary syphilitic (Meryl Streep in The Iron Lady and Cate Blanchett theatrically coughing as the old lady version of her character in Benjamin Button may have helped lead us here). Tom Hardy — who is normally one of my favorite actors to watch grunt, scowl, nod, and squint — pisses himself, shits himself, chews a carrot like Bugs Bunny, and blows holes in alligators in Capone, but broadly speaking, plays a character who is senile to the point of irrelevance. There’s theoretically a topical hook here, in the idea of being at the mercy of senile authority figures, but Trank never quite finds it.

The comedian Patton Oswalt used to have a bit about how The Passion of the Christ, a movie about just the final, most painful hours of Jesus’s life, would be like making a movie about Albert Einstein, but focusing only the 12 hours he spent on the toilet after eating some bad clams (something like that, I can’t video of it online). Capone comes disturbingly close to making that Albert Einstein shitting diarrhea clams biopic a reality.

As I watched Hardy (surely one of the most enjoyable actors of his generation, which even Venom proves) croak out an incomprehensible mix of English, Italian, and Caveman, I couldn’t help but think what a perfect comeback role this could’ve been for Val Kilmer. Kilmer hasn’t had a starring role since a tracheostomy robbed him of his natural speaking voice, and a comeback role as Capone, in which a post-cancer Kilmer proved he can still act by playing a gangster coming to grips with his own irrelevance would’ve offered some symbolic heft.

As it stands, the Capone played by the notably able-bodied Hardy spends a whole movie tilting at windmills we know will vanish after a jump cut while his family and the authorities pump him for information about a secret cache of money we know will never materialize. The score by El-P from Run The Jewels (his first) at least gives the proceedings some seasoning, but we hardly hear it until the last third of the movie.

Painstaking subjectivity maybe isn’t the prize it seems when the subject is syphilitic, incontinent, and senile. Context is not the enemy.

‘Capone’ hits VOD on Tuesday, May 12. Vince Mancini is on Twitter. You can access his archive of reviews here.

Just days after earning the interim lightweight title in a five-round slugfest against Tony Ferguson, Justin Gaethje could be preparing for an immediate return to the Octagon to square off with current champion Khabib Nurmagomedov.

After getting stuck in Dagestan due to travel restrictions stemming from the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and observing Ramadan from April 24 until May 23, Nurmagomedov has maintained his training and said he could be ready for a UFC return as soon as July. UFC president Dana White is apparently ready to test that claim, with plans to book the title fight later this summer, according to his comments on ESPN 1000 Chicago.

“I don’t know if it will be the first one, but it will be on Fight Island, unless miraculously the world comes back together faster than I think it’s gonna,” White said, per ESPN.

“Hopefully (the island infrastructure) will be done by mid-June, and I could put on a fight that weekend that it’s done or end of June.”

Nurmagomedov is almost certainly anxious to return to the fight game after he left the United States to travel to the UAE for UFC 249, where it was assumed the event would take place. He was eventually re-routed to Russia due to travel restrictions and acknowledged he went into quarantine. The unbeaten champion hasn’t fought since submitting Dustin Poirier back in September 2019, and there’s no question he’s anxious to return to his throne as the king of the division.

Even July would be an absurdly quick turnaround for Gaethje, having just gone five full rounds with Ferguson. Getting past Gaethje-Nurmagomedov and adding another potential title fight later this year could be the motivation, though, with Conor McGregor waiting in the wings and money to be made in the suddenly stacked lightweight division. Where exactly this leaves McGregor remains to be seen, but he did seem to hint at a July return Monday evening.

Previously on the Best and Worst of WWE Raw: Raw didn’t have much to do at Money in the Bank, so they did an R-Truth vs. Bobby Lashley match. On PAY-PER-VIEW. But Drew McIntyre got a handshake out of the deal, and Asuka won a briefcase by being the best at going upstairs.

Things to do: Follow us on Twitter and like us on Facebook. You can also follow me on Twitter. BUY THE SHIRT.

One more thing: Hit those share buttons! Spread the word about the column on Facebook, Twitter and whatever else you use. Be sure to leave us a comment in our comment section below as well. I know we always ask this, and that this part is copy and pasted in every week, but we appreciate it every week. We’ve finally started the build for Backlash, the show where they bring back Lash LeRoux.

And now, the Best and Worst of WWE Raw for May 11, 2020.

Best: Becky Lynch Takes A Pregnant Pause

This week’s most important announcement is that Becky Lynch is pregnant in real life, taking time off to “go be a mother,” and relinquishing the Raw Women’s Championship to the Money in the Bank winner, Asuka. The only real “analysis” anyone needs to give this is a congratulations to the real people who play Lynch and Seth Rollins on TV.

From a fan standpoint, I’ll be sad to see Becky’s title reign end without any “closure” or whatever — in the Best and Worst of Money in the Bank from just yesterday I wrote that I wanted, “anything but Becky Lynch’s reign ending without someone beating her in a real match” — but when it comes to real life love and happiness, that shit is irrelevant. With pro wrestling it’s especially hard to differentiate the performers from the characters they play, considering they’re still technically “playing their characters” when you meet them in real life and the etiquette is to always call them by their wrestler names, but I think it’s valuable to spend moments like these remembering how theater in the round with stage combat isn’t the most important thing in the world, and what YOU get out of watching it is considerably less so.

The face of WWE being a woman is an unprecedented situation, as is that face taking time off to have a baby. It’s not a sad situation, though. It’s not really something to get upset and argue about on the Internet, like we do everything else in wrestling. To quote our own Emily Pratt, “getting pregnant is getting pregnant, it’s not an ACL tear.” And the only reasonable way to even equate it to what we’ve seen before in WWE is to compare it to the last time a female star got pregnant, which involved her sobbing in the middle of the ring while everyone stared at her, getting called fat by the Bella Twins, and being embarrassed out of the promotion forever. Sometimes it feels like WWE hasn’t actually made any progress, but … yeah, there’s been a little, thanks to people like Becky.

As a bonus, hey, Asuka is Raw Women’s Champion! That means she’s been Raw Women’s Champion, Smackdown Women’s Champion, NXT Women’s Champion, Women’s Tag Team Champion, a Royal Rumble winner, and a Money in the Bank winner. “First ballot Hall of Famer Asuka” has a nice ring to it. And oh man, if you didn’t get a lump in your throat watching Asuka react to the very real news that her friend and co-worker is going to be a mom, you might want to check your pulse. The genuine emotion between Becky and Asuka is the kind of heartwarming, graceful humanity it’s hard to find suck inside your house during a global pandemic. All my love to both of them.

So now that we’ve typed that out, let’s talk about the show that usually makes you feel the exact opposite of Asuka and Becky Lynch hugging about motherhood: Monday Night Raw.

Best: Seth Rollins Is Handling Fatherhood Well

If you’re wondering what Seth Rollins is up to following the announcement that he’s going to be a father, he’s handling it as well as he handles anything else: he’s becoming a VIOLENT SOCIOPATH.

Earlier in the show, Rollins hears his name and wanders into a Rey Mysterio promo. Mysterio, famously the father of NXT UK Champion WALTER, shoots on fatherhood and wishes Seth the best. Seth just stares at him with extreme “my life is over” energy and walks away.

Later, when Rollins is supposed to be teaming with Buddy Murphy against Mysterio and Aleister Black, Rollins just stands there on the apron all catatonic until Rey elbows him in the gut. Seth’s completely rational response to being attacked once during a wrestling match is to throw Mysterio on the floor, poke him in the eyes a couple of times, and then force his eyeball into the corner of the ring steps, Lucio Fulci’s Zombie-style. After the match, Rollins goes back to the trainer’s room to try to apologize to the man he just heinously blinded, apparently claiming temporary insanity. Aleister Black decides to beat up Murphy about it, presumably because he wants to keep both of his eyes.

For the record, having Seth Rollins kick the shit out of people and not talk is a great call. I’m all-in on the “I’m in the ZONE” Ken Shamrock version of Rollins who blacks out and destroys folks. Pretty cool that he was a fan favorite dipshit until he got humiliated by The Fiend, which sent him into a weird downward spiral of failure and unpopularity until he ended up being a fake cult leader who sometimes turns into a monster. Give me a Firefly Fun House match where Rollins turns Wyatt’s own shit against him and makes him disappear.

About Those Murders From Money In The Bank

Remember on Sunday night when King Corbin tried to win a wrestling match by throwing two of his opponents off the roof of a seven-story building? It turns out he didn’t actually kill them, they were saved by a “secondary roof” that was “only on that side of the building.” Having Rey Mysterio and Aleister Black be totally fine and completely unaffected by saying they fell six feet onto an additional roof has some real, “James Storm didn’t murder Mickie James with a train, he just emotionally distressed her with the train” energy. Although if they had AJ Styles get buried in an undisclosed location in the middle of the night and show up to work a couple of weeks later, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that they bait-and-swtiched a couple of falling deaths.

Seriously though, King Corbin’s supposed to be on next week’s show* to face Drew McIntyre, and if Mysterio and Black don’t jump him the second he walks through the door and beat him within an inch of his life for trying to actually kill them, they should’ve just rolled their weak asses off the secondary roof and died of shame.

*Survivor Series is the one time each year when Raw and Smackdown go head-to-head.

Speaking Of AJ Styles, He Pulls Up A Chair To Watch An Undetaker Commercial And Then Gets Pissed When It’s About The Undertaker

Don’t be upset! You got to watch the commercial on that cool round TV!

Best: Shayna Baszler, Mother Of The Year

“How stupid do you have to be to get knocked up when you’re the champion? Here’s a fact, ten out of ten mothers will try to convince you that pregnancy didn’t ruin their careers. You’re trying to tell me Becky Lynch becomes the longest reigning Raw women’s champion and throws that all away just to house some miserable parasite? Imagine, The Man … barefoot, fat, on the couch eating bon-bons. That kid’s gonna suck. You know who the father is? I rest my case.”

Shayna just Britt Baker’d that kid and it’s not even born yet. Later, Natalya shows up to defend motherhood and not only gets shaded for never having kids and letter her family legacy die, but gets kneed in the face. Shayna Baszler’s out here like the Boogeyman smashing biological clocks on her head.

After the match, Natalya is upset and kicks the ropes. Sorry, Nattie, you lost, that means motherhood is meaningless. Way to ruin it for everybody.

Worst: NBA 1K AD

The Viking Raiders want to prove that anything the Street Profits can do, they can do better. They’re really good at basketball, so they [checks notes] intentionally lose a basketball game 74-2. Then, once the game’s over and nothing matters, Ivar hits a bunch of logo threes and a slow motion dunk to show how they could’ve won if they’d wanted, which I thought was the point?

I guess nothing says WWE like a team losing a match to prove they can win a match. The Viking Raiders pretending to be terrible so they can show off how good they are when they don’t have to pretend is so meta I think I just traveled through time.

Best: The Beat Down Clan

Bobby Lashley submits Humbert Carrillo to his new finisher, the LASHTERLOCK, in this week’s opening match. Full nelson submission wins are nice, but give me a wrestler who can win off dropkicks and hip-tosses, 1960s-style. But anyway, MVP approaches Lashley afterward and is rightfully like, “why are you even wrestling Humberto Carrillo, you are literally in the same spot you were in in this company 13 years ago, get your shit together.” He even drops some truth on Lana, who aimlessly screams about it.

“Who do you think yOU AAAAAARE! WHO-WUH! How dare YOUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU-WUH! [long pause] DAAH!!!”

Is there something you can win for acting worse than a Razzie? Lana’s acting makes old school Maria Kanellis look like Frances McDormand. What a cursed world we live in where Rusev’s unemployed but Lana’s still shouting her way through Bobby Lashley romance segments?

Later in the episode, MVP teams up with his favorite NXT Live jobbers Shane Thorne and Brendan Vink to lose to Cedric Alexander, Ricochet, and R-Truth. Truth brings back his “Pretty Ricky” character this week, which you may remember from over a decade ago. It’s just Truth crossing his eyes and wearing fake hillbilly teeth you can get out of those quarter machines at the grocery store. If the name sounds familiar, please enjoy having ‘Grind With Me’ stuck in your head for the rest of the day.

Anyway, Lashley shows up after the match to turn Truth inside out with a spear. He wants to talk to MVP. I hope MVP’s response is, “hey I appreciate the spear but couldn’t you have done that like 30 seconds earlier? I’m out here tagging with fucking Brendan Vink.” Presumably Lana is backstage during this, scrolling Instagram and shaking her fists and screaming CUUUUUUUUUUTE-HUH! at every puppy she sees.

As a fun note, the pairing of MVP and Bobby Lashley brings back lots of sweet Beat Down Clan memories for anyone who watched TNA in the first half of the ’10s. They’re easily Impact Wrestling’s best faction to not include biker weddings, CM Punk slumming it as a cult fanboy, or AJ Styles in a feathery robe. I really hope this leads to them enlisting fellow former BDC member Samoa Joe to the team, as he could really use something in his life greater than being asked to get wrestlers over between dismissive Byron Saxton quips. Although that didn’t work out well for Bob the last time, so forget I said anything.

BEST: THE IICONICS HAVE PINNED THE WOMEN’S TAG TEAM CHAMPIONS

This week’s best news not revolving around the miracle of childbirth is the return of The Goddamn IIconics, who show up for the first time in months and months to randomly challenge for the Women’s Tag Team Championship. Well, to challenge for a non-title match they’re obviously going to win so they can then challenge for a match for the Women’s Tag Team Championship.

As much as I love seeing Billie Kay and Peyton Royce on my TV again, I have to give a quick supplemental Worst for being the fifth main roster show in a row (not counting the pay-per-view) to feature a challenger pinning the champion to get a championship match.

• 4/27 Raw – Apollo Crews pinned the United States champion Andrade
• 5/1 Smackdown – Forgotten Sons pinned the Smackdown Tag Team Champions The New Day
• 5/4 Raw – The Viking Raiders pinned Raw Tag Team Champions The Street Profits
• 5/8 Smackdown – Tamina pinned Smackdown Women’s Champion Bayley
• 5/11 Raw – The IIconics pinned Women’s Tag Team Champions Alexa Bliss and Nikki Cross

As a quick side note, they need to write some better material for poor Nikki Cross. She’s great, but who knew the difference between being a feral rage monster and being NXT Bayley after she fell down and hit her head on the coffee table was, “having one friend?”

It’s so good to have these two true weirdos back on the show. A lot of people who review WWE shows hate them, but there’s no accounting for taste. They’ve got a new finisher — an inverted Magic Killer, because it’s not like the corpses of Luke Gallows and Karl Anderson are going to be using it any time soon — and Peyton’s wearing pre-Crisis Roman Reigns contact lenses, so you know they’re serious about staying on TV.

Please enjoy the above video, wherein Billie Kay shares her emotional thoughts on Becky Lynch’s announcement: “She’s preggers. Great. The IIconics are back, that’s what matters.”

Worst/Best: LIJ Central Florida Is Only Here To Job To The Stars

Firstly, I can’t believe they made Zelina Vega work so soon after the tragic death of her husband.

Secondly, Mr. Monday Night Akira Tozawa continues being brilliant on Wednesdays and the world’s easiest opponent on Raw with a loss to Angel Garza. Garza’s not even paying attention for most of the match because he’s arguing with Austin Theory about a tweet he didn’t like. Definitely worth the continued shit-canning of a guy in the middle of a title tournament on your other show.

After the match, Drew McIntyre shows up and knocks out both Theory and Garza with Claymore Kicks to remind them what the pecking order is, and to make sure NOBODY in that match came out looking good.

That leads into another Drew McIntyre vs. Andrade match, which is pretty good as always but basically the same match they had last month. It still ends with Andrade losing to the full countdown taunt version of the Claymore, and the United States Champion (and the posse he runs with) looking like glorified extras. If Sami Zayn’s not going to come to work, I guess somebody has to be the Sami Zayn.

This is the downside to watching WWE every week. If you only watched every now and then and didn’t see them repeat stuff over and over, or do five non-title match losses for champions in a row, you’d probably have a much brighter outlook on how they’re doing and where they’re going. Please remember that it’s not that I’ve “soured” on WWE or need a break from it, it’s that I actually watch it, and have to pay attention.

Don’t Hinder Jinder 2K20

Jinder Mahal is happy for the championship successes of his former 3MB bandmates Drew McIntyre and Heath Slater, and wants to earn respect as a former champion as he plans a “hero’s journey” back to the top of the promotion. I’ll be honest with you, I think we’re ready for babyface hero champion Jinder Mahal. He’s no great shakes in the ring, but he’s got a good wrestling mind, and a body that could give a Bowflex an eating disorder. There’s a real spot for him on these shows beyond Singh Brothers run-ins and contrarian Twitter threads about how good his bad title reign actually was. Plus, I want at least the backup members of 3MB to be friends again. I don’t see Jinder as Denzel, but I could see him as Denzel’s friend, is what I’m saying.

Hilarious Worst: Randy Orton Dreams The Impossible Dream

Finally, here’s Randy Orton challenging Edge to a regular match at Backlash. I hope they’ve got something really clever planned for that, because if not, they’re doing the feud backwards. You don’t start with a 40 minute emotional street fight at WrestleMania that ends with a con-chair-to on top of a production truck and a man crying about the terrible things he’s done to his former friend and then do a NORMAL MATCH. It’s the creative equivalent of downhill skiing. You started at the top, and you’re just letting gravity take you to the bottom.

Charly Caruso ends the segment with maybe the least true line of dialogue ever spoken on Raw, a show that in just the past month has ret-conned a literal burial and two “secondary roof” murders:

“If this does happen it may just be the greatest wrestling match ever.”

Yeah Charly, it’s Ric Flair vs. Ricky Steamboat 2-out-of-3 falls at Clash 6, Kandori and Hokuto from Dream Slam, and then Edge vs. RANDY ORTON in a Regular Match at the WWE Performance Center. This shit’s only happening because Orton had to wrestle for 40 minutes at WrestleMania and wasn’t allowed to do any slow-ass chinlocks. Who watched that and was like, “this is good, but it would be better if Randy could do more ‘methodical stomps.’” I hope this DOES turn out to be the greatest wrestling match ever, only to be topped by Jinder Mahal vs. King Corbin in a best 0.5 Falls Out Of 1 Match at 25% Capacity SummerSlam.

Best: Top 10 Comments Of The Week

Bobski58

Wow. Becky is now 2-0 against Ronda.

Harry Longabaugh

If Seth was truly Plan B, this pregnancy doesn’t happen.

AddMayne

Brandon tomorrow

SuedeGuy

If the Viking Raiders play Street Profits in Basketball they really should play a game of NORSE

Baron Von Raschke

Dana is watching this at home thinking, “If I had won the match last night, I would have been pregnant? Is that right?”

Redshirt

Becky: “I’ll fight anyone who wins.”
TV: “The winner of the Miss Money in the Bank, Asuka”
Becky: “Welp, I’m pregnant.”

Million Dollar Dan

Natalya: From one mother to another…
Becky: What.
Natalya: BEING A CAT MOM IS TOTALLY THE SAME THING.

AJ Dusman

“Oh my God! Congratulations Becky!” -The entire roster
“Once agaaaaaaain….yoooooooooou try to steal myyyyyyyyyyyy spotlight, Becks.” -Charlotte Flair

FeltLuke

Missed opportunity to have Dominic show up wearing Rey’s mask and no one commenting on how Rey is suddenly 2 feet taller.

Jae-Su

WWE Proudly announces more Baron Corbin.

Uproxx Thread:

That does it for another episode of The Best and Worst of Quarantine Raw. Writing about it today I found that I liked more about it than I disliked, but watching it I felt like I’d been sitting in my chair for a day and a half. Some of the content is there, but the presentation is still wack.

Anyway, as always you can help us out tremendously right now by sharing the column on social media, as well as dropping down into our comments section to let us know what you thought of the show. I will keep trying to watch these and say something constructive about them, but if I fall into existential, nihilistic despair waiting for real episodes with fans to return, try to laugh at my thinly-veiled cries for help.

See you next week for Baron Corbin’s triumphant return to the show he ruined, and the IIconics not winning the Women’s Tag Team Championship!

God help me, I’m fascinated by politicians and their garbage palates.

Initially, I’ll admit, I’d assumed that the trend of performatively eating bad food originated with Republicans. First, there was Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, who famously claims to have eaten two ham and cheese sandwiches every day for the past 26 years (with sad-looking photo evidence). Walker also gave us what Wired’s Ashley Feinberg called “the nightmare kebab incident of 2017,” featuring some char-less grey meat on a lukewarm grill.

Trump’s trash palate (well-done steaks, Filet O Fish sandwiches, bunless Big Macs) is well known and seems to have infected Air Force One, as evidenced by the viral sad pepper lantern disaster. Meanwhile, Senator Tom Cotton famously copped to eating birthday cake almost every day, Tennessee representative Kent Calfee was snapped swigging from a bottle of Hershey’s chocolate syrup as if it were a flask on the floor of the statehouse (he claimed it was actually filled with water which is slightly less weird), and former Utah Senator Orrin Hatch appeared in a horror film about eating bacon (admittedly bacon is more basic than strange, but not the way Hatch does it).

Taken all together it does paint a vivid picture: A group of doddering old men with the collective palate of a preschool class.

On the flip side, Democrats may not brag about terrible food as often or in quite the same way, but they’re not innocent in this regard. Nancy Pelosi showed off an entire freezer full of expensive ice cream on James Corden as if it was her proudest (and most relatable) possession, while Joe Biden, apparently cribbing from the same playbook (or just using the same consultants) shot a high-larious “social distancing” video with Keegan-Michael Key from Key and Peele, in which Biden made a point of saying “I always start with dessert” while slurping down ice cream. These videos are extremely humanizing if you’re the type of person who enjoys seeing how various corporations celebrate Star Wars Day.

I’m not sure why every politician thinks eating processed unseasoned garbage or fetishizing dessert endears them to the American voter, but my guess is it has something to do with general disdain. Pandering and contempt for your audience are kissing cousins. “Hey, you guys are big fat dumb babies, right? I’m just like you!”

This is all a very circuitous way of introducing the latest bit of viral food content from a politician: a tuna melt recipe so horrifying it may qualify as performance art, courtesy of Virginia Senator Mark Warner. He’s a Democrat, though this recipe seems to owe more to Scott Walker than Nancy Pelosi.

(The embedded version comes from Twitter, but it’s basically identical to the one from Warner’s own Instagram page).

Warner calls this how-to guide for microwaving tuna “one of my favorite recipes.” Was it a bit? If so, it made me cringe more than laugh, and anyway I’m sick of trying to figure out which world leaders are being sarcastic, so I choose to take it more or less at face value.

Still, “don’t knock until you try it,” as they say, so I set out to see if could really create a delicious meal with just a few minutes, a few basic ingredients, and a microwave. First, the ingredients:

I couldn’t tell what brand of mayo Warner was using, but it definitely came in a squirt bottle (my favorite mayo is the Trader Joe’s canola oil brand, very lemony and with a custardy texture, but this Best Foods wasn’t bad). I used medium cheddar just as Warner specified (pleasantly surprised he doesn’t use American) and while we didn’t have the Chicken of the Sea he used, we did have some Starkist — chunk light.

I now think if you’re going to eat canned tuna, at least spring for the albacore instead of the leftovers they stick in chunk light, but I digress.

From what I could tell, Warner used A LOT of mayo, arranged in a circular pattern. Presumably, this is to compensate for just scooping the tuna directly out of the can, creating a kind of deconstructed, half-assed tuna salad.

Of all the offensive things Warner does in this video, I think that by far the most offensive is the way he doesn’t even bother to drain his tuna. He just scoops it straight of out the can, apparently straining with the fork, though he doesn’t seem too concerned about the moisture.

Do you see how wet a can of chunk light tuna is? Yecch.

Mmm, already looks horrible. But Mark Warner is a two-slice man, so today I am a two-slice man.

Pop it in the microwave and bingo bongo…

After 30 seconds in the microwave, the cheese on this tuna “melt” was still unmelted. Maybe my microwave is not as powerful as Senator Mark Warner’s? I popped it back in for 30 more seconds.

The cheese still wasn’t melted in the way I would imagine for a “tuna melt,” but the bigger issue was the giant, revolting wet spot that had developed in the middle of the bread — a predictable result of putting undrained tuna on top of some bread and then microwaving it. You might say this was a mistake, but I watched Warner do it four times and he absolutely does not drain his tuna. Maybe my bread was the wrong brand, or too fresh. Maybe you need two slices of 40-day dry-aged Wonder bread to make this recipe truly sing, hard to say.

Enough talk, time to taste.

Now, however gross you imagined this microwave tuna melt to be, let me assure you that the reality is ten times worse. It smelled like cat food and the texture was like something you’d find at the bottom of a trash can. Nonetheless, I am a professional so I forced myself to choke down at least one bite, even though the sight of the soggy bread made me shiver. It was somehow both soggy and dry, pungent yet unseasoned and bland. It barely held together long enough to make it to my mouth and when I lifted it, all the tuna goo dripped out and pooled into a toxic puddle on the plate:

This was a horror movie. One bite was enough. It was more than enough. I did the rational thing and fed it to my dog. Even he seemed a bit skeptical.

My advice: absolutely do not attempt to make a tuna melt like Mark Warner. Now, I’ve nothing against tuna. I used to make it every day when I worked at a sandwich place and it was great. Drain your tuna (preferably not chunk light), add mayo, mustard, celery, salt, and pepper, and it’s a solid sandwich filling. You can swap the celery for water chestnuts if you want the celery crunch but not the flavor.

Let’s say for the sake of argument that the eight minutes you might spend making your canned tuna into actual tuna salad is a bridge too far. I would say that’s insane, but let’s accept the hypothetical. In that case: why the microwave? If you set your oven to broil just before you opened your tuna can and constructed the sandwich, you could stick the open-faced sandwich in there on the top or second-to-top rack and it probably wouldn’t take much longer than 30 seconds for your cheese to melt. Even better, put it on a cast iron pan and get a light toast on the bread while you melt that cheese. Not only would the cheese melt, the bread would dry out a little instead of getting soggier. The man is a senator, he clearly has an oven.

All I can say about Mark Warner’s sandwich recipe is that this is a prison sandwich conceived by a particularly uncreative inmate. I know it’s some attempt at a cute and relatable bit but like most political food content, it just makes me think that yet another politician is irredeemably strange, with values I barely recognize. In fact, anyone who thinks that this is an acceptable way to prepare food shouldn’t be in charge of anything.

Vince Mancini is on Twitter. Read more of his cooking commentary in UPROXX’s Cooking Battles. For past Top Chef Power Rankings, go here.

In a new interview to promote Tenet — maybe? — Robert Pattinson gave GQ a peek into his quarantine life, and it was an absolutely surreal trip from start to finish. The actor is currently holed up in a London apartment that was supposed to be a temporary home while filming The Batman, but when that production shut down barely a month into shooting, Pattinson found himself stranded with only a few T-shirts and a delivery of what he calls a “Batman meal plan” to keep him bulked up for the role. Or at least that’s the idea.

In reality, Pattinson hasn’t been working out at all and has been eating the kits like a college student shoveling down cheap meals between existential ponderings.

I’ll have oatmeal with, like, vanilla protein powder on it. And I will barely even mix it up. It’s extraordinarily easy. Like, I eat out of cans and stuff. I’ll literally put Tabasco inside a tuna can and just eat it out of the can.

You’ve been training all your life for this, apparently.
I… It is weird, but my preferences are…just sort of eat like a wild animal. [laughs] Like, out of a trash can.

And that’s just the beginning. Pattinson apparently fancies himself a chaos agent while talking to the media, which he definitely delivers in spades during the video calls with GQ. “My, um, my publicist always calls me up after an interview, and she’s like, ‘Is there anything, like, is there any kind of fires you set now? What do I have to fix for you now?’ And I’m like, ‘I don’t even remember anything I said.’”

Several times during the interview, Pattinson admits that he has a very loose grasp of time and often finds himself in situations where he thinks something happened two years ago, but it was only two weeks ago. It’s led to some, uh, misunderstandings. “I’ve been emailing this guy recently who’s absolutely terrified of me,” the Twilight star tells GQ. “He eventually passed my email on to one of the actresses in his movie so she would speak to me instead so I wouldn’t email him anymore. And I thought it had been, like, two years and six months, in between each email, but it’s only, like, a few weeks apart.”

But things really took a turn when the actor revealed his business plan for a fast-food pasta restaurant, which he legitimately pitched to investors before the lockdown.

What if, he said to himself, “pasta really had the same kind of fast-food credentials as burgers and pizzas? I was trying to figure out how to capitalize in this area of the market, and I was trying to think: How do you make a pasta which you can hold in your hand?”

The investors didn’t bite, and Pattinson went on to prove that was probably a smart decision by literally exploding his microwave while trying to make a pasta dish for GQ. Earlier in the interview, he had expressed anxiety over what happens if the owners of his London apartment want it back. He probably should be a little more concerned about if it will still be standing once the pandemic is over.

(Via GQ)