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Thanks to a recent theory that managed to rope Taylor Swift into the mystery of who is the real Argylle author Elly Conway, director Matthew Vaughn would really like to put this whole thing to bed sooner rather than later.

Here’s the situation: Argylle the movie is reportedly based on the upcoming book of the same name written by a first-time, unknown author going by the name of Elly Conway. However, when the first trailer arrived, Bryce Dallas Howard was revealed as Conway in the movie as the author gets roped into a real-life espionage plot. The trailer left people scratching their heads, but Vaughn insisted that Conway is a real-life person who has yet to out herself.

Unfortunately, the whole thing is getting out of control. After online theories started postulating that Swift is the real-life Conway, Vaughn went into panic mode.

“It’s not Taylor Swift, but books do not write themselves. I wish they did. I wish screenplays wrote themselves. I wish movies directed themselves,” Vaughn told Variety at the film’s London premiere. “There is a Elly Conway. I am begging Elly Conway to come out of the shadows because this Taylor Swift thing freaked me out. And it’s going to happen.”

Conway’s identity continues to remain a mystery, but for now, Penguin, the publisher of the Argylle book, is continuing to insist that Conway is real and reserves the right to reveal her identity at a time of her choosing.

“Elly Conway is a real person who wrote a brilliant spy thriller a couple of years ago,” a Penguin publicist told Variety after being questioned about Conway’s existence. “Matthew Vaughn heard about the manuscript pre-publication via her agent and decided to put Elly’s novel at the heart of his new film Argylle, with a distinctive Matthew Vaughn twist. The book and the film are now being released almost simultaneously.”

Here’s the official synopsis for the film:

Argylle follows the globetrotting adventures of super-spy Argylle across the U.S., London, and other exotic locations, featuring a star-studded, award-winning cast including Henry Cavill, Bryce Dallas Howard, Sam Rockwell, Bryan Cranston, Catherine O’Hara, John Cena, Dua Lipa, Ariana DeBose, and Samuel L. Jackson.

Argylle opens in theaters on February 2.

(Via Variety)

Snoop Dogg explained how his viral photo with the cast of Oppenheimer happened, during his recent appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live. For those who haven’t seen it, the rapper went to an event and happened to pop up in the background.

Considering it was all the film’s actors except for Matt Damon, Snoop’s photo bomb was a hilarious addition. It’s such a random pop-up that it very well could have been Photoshopped. But no, it’s real.

“How did this happen?” Kimmel asked him. “Were you in Oppenheimer and I didn’t notice?”

“No, I wasn’t in the movie,” Snoop answered. “I happened to be at that party that night… I’m a fan of the majority of the cast on there, the director, the actors, and they asked me to be in the picture. They were like, ‘We can’t take a picture unless Snoop Dogg is in it.’ I’m like, ‘Alright.’”

Snoop went on to share how he felt about the Christopher Nolan flick, which became a summer blockbuster during the Barbenheimer craze. (For the record, he also went to see Barbie in theaters.)

“I loved it,” he said of Oppenheimer. “It was a long movie, but I loved it.” Snoop received screeners to view it at home but pointed out that when it comes to movies, he “can’t watch it in pieces,” and opted to run through the 3-plus-hour movie in full.

“I gotta watch it all,” he added. “I wanna respect the director, the actors, the whole storyline, and let it get to where it need to get to.”

Check out Snoop giving the backstory behind him joining the Oppenheimer cast photo above.

The ongoing search for The White Lotus’ season three cast has been a hot topic on the internet since season two was still on. As with other anthologies, creator Mike White tends to get a new crop of actors for each season of the HBO series, and we have started to get a glimpse at what to expect.

Season three, which will take place in Thailand, is set to include Walton Goggins, Parker Posey, Carrie Coon, Michelle Monaghan, and Jason Isaacs (not Jack Black, unfortunately). It was recently announced that Serbian actor Milos Bikovic was added to the cast, and that’s where things get iffy.

Bikovic was called out by Ukraine’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs account on X/Twitter for supporting Russia and accepting a medal from Vladimir Putin. The account posted: “Miloš Biković, Serbian actor who has been supporting Russia since the start of the full-scale invasion, is now set to star in HBO’s The White Lotus Season 3…@HBO, is it all right for you to work with a person who supports genocide & violates international law?”

According to Deadline, Bikovic is slated to portray a Russian-speaking wellness guru at the hotel. Filming is expected to begin in February, and neither Bikovic nor HBO have commented on the matter, so only time will tell.

On the bright side, Natasha Rothwell is returning! So there will be at least one familiar face during what will likely be a chaotic season.

(Via Deadline)

Earlier this week, Lovers & Friends unveiled its 2024 lineup. The festival will be headlined by Usher (performing Confessions for its 20th anniversary), Janet Jackson, and Backstreet Boys, while Lil Wayne (performing Tha Carter III), Snoop Dogg, Gwen Stefani, Alicia Keys, and more. Mary J. Blige was listed on the stacked poster, but don’t get too excited.

“I am beyond humbled by the response from all of you about the announcement of me on Lovers & Friends Festival,” Blige wrote on her Instagram Story this morning, January 25. “Unfortunately, my inclusion was an error as I will be busy in preparation for my Strength of a Woman Summit just one week later! I have the greatest fans in the world and can’t wait to see you in New York in aa few short months!”

So, Lovers & Friends will have to forge on without Mary J. The festival is slated for Saturday, May 4, at the Las Vegas Festival Grounds. The ticket presale is scheduled for Friday, January 26, beginning at 10 a.m. PST. According to the Lovers & Friends official website, general admission tickets (starting at $325), GA+ (starting at $595), and VIP (starting at $695), and hotel and ticket packages (starting at $679) are available. All tickets start at $19.99 down.

Before Lovers & Friends, Usher will perform the Super Bowl LVIII Halftime Show at Las Vegas’ Allegiant Stadium on February 11, the release date of Usher’s Coming Home album.

For the past few years, there has been no greater sign of a new entertainer’s ascendency than starring in a Super Bowl ad. It’s an honor normally reserved for household names, folks with the sort of brand recognition that ensures viewers at home do the real-life version of that Leonardo DiCaprio pointing at the TV meme from Once Upon A Time In Hollywood.

It looks like the latest rising star to receive that honor is Ice Spice, who will appear in her first-ever Super Bowl commercial for upstart soft drink brand Starry. Starry ( a rebranded Sierra Mist) has been using its competitor Sprite’s 1990s marketing approach, directing its efforts at a “cool/young” demographics via sponsoring the NBA’s All-Star events and employing contemporary rappers in its advertising.

According to AdAge, the brand’s efforts to tap Gen Z have focused on TikTok, where Ice Spice notoriously first made her entry into the public consciousness before becoming nearly ubiquitous in 2023 with features alongside Taylor Swift (“Karma” remix) and Nicki Minaj, the latter on both her own “Princess Diana” remix and the inescapable Barbie soundtrack hit, “Barbie World.”

In the teaser for the ad, which Starry shared today on YouTube, Ice Spice is on a date with a new guy (sipping a Starry, of course) when she notices her ex walk in. We don’t get to see what happens next, which will presumably be revealed during the Super Bowl itself. For now you can check out the teaser above.

Eliza McLamb is sitting in her home, connected over Zoom and wearing a gray short-sleeved t-shirt that reads, “Faulkner?! I hardly know her!” At the time of our interview, McLamb’s debut album, Going Through It, is due to come out in ten days. The road to her album’s arrival has been winding, with sharp turns on a cliff’s edge, much of which is chronicled across her record, but by the end of both our chat and the last track, I’m left feeling as though she’s glad the car always stayed within the guardrails.

In the years leading up to her album’s release, McLamb dropped out of college, thinking that the transition to online schooling during the pandemic wasn’t the best use of her time. She also, “wanted to see what would happen if I just let myself not do that.” Instead, she traveled across the United States, making her way from North Carolina to Los Angeles with the help of work exchange programs on various farms, which is also when she started posting on TikTok. “I would just be literally out in the middle of the farm with my guitar, writing songs. I started this little thing where I said, ‘Leave a comment and I’ll write a song about your comment.’” By the time she arrived in LA her TikTok had picked up some traction and her friend had a laundry shed that she offered up as housing. “She was like, ‘You can stay here until you get your shit together,’ basically. So I lived in the laundry shed for a few months and sold solar panels door to door and I was a nanny,” McLamb says. “I recorded Memos in there, which were songs that I had written over the course of my travels across the country, when I was in a period of being able to reflect on stuff.”

McLamb’s first EP, Memos, featured her most commercially successful song to date, “Porn Star Tits.” This song in particular had gone viral on TikTok when she first wrote it in 2020, but when deciding what songs to include on the track listing, it was not at the top of the list. However, it seemed she felt obligated to include it, as it initially helped drive her success. “I wanted to Trojan horse the rest of the work through that song, being like, ‘Okay people listened to this song. Maybe they’ll listen to the rest of it,’” McLamb explains. That tactic seems to have worked as the success of Memos allowed her to move out of the laundry shed, move in with Julia Hava who would become her Binchtopia podcast co-host, find representation, and collaborate with Sarah Tudzin of Illuminati Hotties, on her second EP Salt Circle, as well as Going Through It.

In the spring of 2023, three years and nearly four million streams later, McLamb wiped “Porn Star Tits” from her public music profiles. She tells me that she doesn’t think it’s a bad song, but feels it doesn’t belong in her discography. “It should go in a feminist musical or something,” McLamb says, laughing. “I wanted to challenge myself to not cheapen the rest of what I’m doing here and to not keep something up just because it’s getting streams if I don’t like it.” Though McLamb’s initial success is owed in part to TikTok, she’s barely been on it since the winter of 2021. She recently went as far as to let her followers know that she would be moving towards long-form content, by way of her Substack, in the future. As she puts it, “I don’t think TikTok is like a grand demon for musicians… but the tool works, for lack of a better term, for the man now.” She admits that she initially stopped using it due to her declining attention span, “I couldn’t finish a movie, let alone start a book and I would listen to myself talk on my podcast and be like, oh my god like every other sentence is, ‘So I saw this TikTok… So I saw this TikTok.’ Like you sound stupid b*tch.”

Attention spans aside, McLamb explains that the current landscape for the “TikTok artist” is one that encourages them to simplify themselves and their art, driving them further away from their artistic truth. “They have to start doing humiliating shit like, ‘Are you listening to Elliott Smith, at 1pm, in a flannel, in your Converse?’ It’s degrading. Nobody likes doing that.” As an artist, she realized that being on the app too long caused her to write bad songs, “I got into this mode of getting really hooked by catching the algorithm and I got really good at it. I just figured it out a little bit like where to put the kitschy stuff, how to be a little bit tongue and cheek and like a little provocative, but still listenable.”

That brings us to the release of McLamb’s debut album, Going Through It. On the record’s cover art, McLamb is in a pool, though whether she’s about to emerge from its depths or dive below is unclear. This sentiment is purposefully ambiguous, representing two sides of the album: Side A shows us everything, as we dive into the water with McLamb, eventually hitting the bottom, while Side B asks how she’ll take everything she experienced with her, as she rises back to the top.

The opening track, “Before,” lives up to its name in every sense. Symbolically it represents the surface of the water which has yet to be broken, but it also quite literally mentions the lake under the dock at her grandparents’ house that she frequented as a child. Sonically, the track holds the earliest recording of McLamb on the record. “Where it cuts to this kind of lo-fi recording, that’s from the demo that Sarah and I did at her house when I was maybe nineteen or twenty. So it’s actually the youngest my voice is on the record.” Her stacked harmonious murmurs, layered on top of a woodsy soundscape of birds chirping amidst the slide of electric guitar, evoke a similar feeling as that of Sufjan Stevens’ “Death With Dignity”: delicate in nature, but emotionally potent. This is the only time on the record where we understand that McLamb’s personhood existed before she became familiar with pain. She sings, “Though I was too young to have understood / The beauty in / A time before knowing.” In reference to these lines specifically she says, “I think most people, especially people who have endured significant trauma, reach a point where they kind of realize that something has happened that will just change the rest of their life.”

It’s at this point that she begins to quote William Faulkner and I point out the words on her shirt. “I’m so on brand today!” she laughs. The quote, “Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders,” from the novel Light In August, is one that McLamb doesn’t feel the need to dissect, but in relation to the song, “It’s about that quality of deep memory and just grappling with the totality of a lifetime and of realizing that you are in this period now where it’s always going to be after something has happened.”

Track six, “16,” is where McLamb hits rock bottom. She describes it as, “the soft belly center… there’s minimal metaphor, like lessons trying to be taken from this, it’s just this is the darkness and here’s where I am.” McLamb sings, “Your girlfriend wants to take me to yoga class / And you want me stop cutting myself in the bathtub / The hospital wants to let my mother go home / I said ‘I won’t give consent for that over the phone.’” “I had a pretty tumultuous childhood,” she tells me. From both the lyrical content of songs like “16,” as well as her Substack essays, such as “my mother, bipolar, and me” I’ve come to understand that McLamb was raised in an unstable environment, with a mother who was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and a father who, as McLamb puts it in her essay, was less so “my father: the hero” and “more often my father: the witness.” I hesitate to dissect this song any further than I already have, except to say that the last lyric, “I’ll come later with a hammer and break open my burden,” seems to serve as the conscious choice that McLamb makes to press her feet to the bottom of the pool to push off as she begins her slow ascent to the surface, with all that she’s learned.

While the metaphor of the pool gives the record conceptual structure, it’s girlhood as both an idea and a practice, that McLamb clings onto throughout the album. The second track, “Glitter” speaks to the bond girls have with their best friend, as she sings, “I wanna kill your boyfriend / He can never know you / He wants to crush you in his hands / And every time / That you say ‘he loves me’ / I say ‘that’s not what love means.’” “I think there’s just something really compelling and beautiful about the friendship that happens in adolescence between girls,” McLamb says. “When we’re in this period we are realizing ourselves as a commodity… and simultaneously having somebody who really sees you and really, really knows you. Kind of in a similar way to ‘Before’ where you get this realization that things from this point on will never be this simple again. Relationships will just necessarily become more complicated than they were when you were children.”

This sentiment rings true as the album continues and the relationships she describes become more convoluted. The biggest of these is the relationship she has with herself and how she thinks others perceive her. I notice that on several songs including, “Mythologize Me,” “Anything You Want,” and “Modern Woman,” McLamb uses the idea of the misunderstood woman as a trope. The lyrics, “I’m just so f*cked up / You couldn’t understand me,” on “Mythologize Me,” “I’m a hard person to unravel / I’m an endless ball of yarn,” on “Anything You Want,” and “I feel like a modern woman / An effortless, beautiful mess / I’m crying in a way that’s not pathetic / You just wouldn’t get it,” on “Modern Woman,” all speak to the quintessential girlhood experience, which is that we are simply too complicated to be deeply understood, particularly by men. “I think that women are constantly being misunderstood purposefully and not purposefully by the fact that there’s a great disrespect to the interiority of women,” McLamb says. “I also think it can be something that can be a protective thing to make you feel superior to other people like, ‘I’m so complicated like you would never get it.’ But also I am so complicated and you will never get it.” she laughs.

“All of the suffering / I thought, maybe one day / I’ll use this in a good way / Isn’t it great what I made of it?” McLamb sings on “Mythologize Me.” Even with the twinge of sarcasm in her voice, through these lyrics we can see that McLamb has connected the grief that accompanied her adolescence, as well as her response to it, back to her higher self, to make this album. The final track “To Wake Up” is steeped in gratitude, for being able to appreciate each second as though it may be your very last. To some, this may come off as the nicely tied bow that closes a chapter of a story. Instead I think it’s the realization that to do anything but accept the present moment, for what it is, is futile. “You have to release the idea that you can control and you have to learn that lesson literally every single day, over and over, multiple times,” McLamb says. “But the one thing that you always have is right now. Like this moment is actually the only thing that you will ever have that’s just for you. So if that’s true which I believe it to be, the only thing that makes sense to do with it is to be present for it.”

Griselda is now streaming on Netflix, and the positive reactions are already stacking up for the new Sofia Vergara series from the creators of Narcos.

Based on the true life story of Griselda Blanco, a.k.a. The Cocaine Godmother, Griselda features Vergara embodying the legendary queenpin who was one of the few people that put fear in the heart of Pablo Escobar. The series has already earned rave reviews ahead of its release with critics raving about Vergara’s performance.

“This tale isn’t an account of some distressed damsel who gets swept up in the underworld,” Aramide Tinubu wrote for Variety. “Instead, what creator Eric Newman offers is a window into the mind of a highly meticulous and intelligent woman, intent on taking back everything that was ever stolen from her, even if she destroys herself in the process. Fast-paced and well-acted, the show is brutal, fascinating and full of high drama.”

Now, it’s time for regular viewers to offer their thoughts, and they are mostly here for Griselda. Although, a few did get hung up on casting the undeniably gorgeous Vergara in the role:

However, the reactions were mostly positive as people overlooked the, uh, considerable difference in appearance between Vergara’s portrayal and the real-life Blanco.

You can see some of the reactions below:

Here’s the official synopsis:

La Jefa is coming. Sofia Vergara transforms in this series, inspired by Griselda Blanco, a woman who rose from obscurity to become ‘The Godmother’ of the underworld. Witness her lethal blend of charm and ruthlessness in this captivating series.

Griselda is now streaming on Netflix.

Sydney Sweeney talked a big game on Hot Ones. And paid the price.

“I think I psyched myself too high, and I’m good,” the Euphoria and Anyone But You star said after her first hot sauce taste test on the web series. Sweeney was also fine after the second (“That’s not spicy”), third (“Not spicy at all”), and fourth (“I’m really impressing myself right now”) sauces. By the fifth, she was practically bragging. “Interesting choice,” she said before taunting host Sean Evans. After hot sauce #7, Sweeney wondered out loud when she’s “supposed to taste the spice.”

Then came Da Bomb Beyond Insanity.

“Pretty good,” she said after trying the hot sauce. “I mean, I feel tingly on my lips. That one might have an after effect.” It sure did. Before long, Sweeney kept saying “wow” and looked increasingly uncomfortable. “Why is this happening?” Evans tried to talk to her about movie theater snacks, or whatever, but Sweeney couldn’t focus on anything but her hot sauce-caused misery. “Oh my god,” she said while wiping the tears (and snot) off her face with a napkin. “I think they all just waited to kick in all at the same time.”

But Sweeney soldiered on to try “the hottest sauce on Hot Ones,” The Last Dab: Xperience. You can see how that went by watching the video above.

Julia Louis-Dreyfus can really do it all. She’s been the funny friend, the anxious political figure, and even a sassy ant, so she’s got range. But we rarely ever see Louise-Dreyfus in a gut-wrenching movie, which is why Tuesday is the perfect excuse to cry and reflect on the harsh realities of life while being comforted by Julia’s familiar face.

Louis-Dreyfus stars as Zora, a mother with a terminally ill daughter, Tuesday, played by Lola Pettigrew. As the two grapple with Tuesday’s illness, they meet a mysterious parrot (voiced by Arinzé Kene) who encourages them to embrace death. Here is the official synopsis:

A mother (Julia Louis-Dreyfus, in a profoundly moving performance) and her teenage daughter (Lola Petticrew) must confront Death when it arrives in the form of an astonishing talking bird. From debut filmmaker Daina O. Pusić, Tuesday is a heart-rending fairy tale about the echoes of loss and finding resilience in the unexpected.

This isn’t the first time Louis-Dreyfus has lent her talents to A24. She recently starred in the comedy-drama You Hurt My Feelings, which premiered at Sundance last year. Next, she is set to reprise her role as Valentina Allegra de Fontaine in Marvel’s Thunderbolts, assuming it ever makes it to theaters. We can only hope.

Tuesday is expected to hit theaters later this year. Check out the trailer above.

The California-based Ohana Festival is returning to Doheny State Beach in Dana Point this year. While the lineup for 2024 is still yet to be announced, the 2023 iteration of the fest featured The Killers and Foo Fighters — so this year is likely to bring some other major acts.

Ohana Festival 2024 will take place on September 27-29. Their website allows interested festival attendees to sign up via SMS to receive information when it drops.

Because of this, tickets aren’t on sale just yet. Last year, the presale opened up on April 13, two days after the 2023 lineup had been unveiled. It will likely follow a similar timeline again. As for what to expect when it comes to pricing, a 3-Day General Admission pass was $479, VIP was $1499, and the Ultimate VIP ticket was $9950, according to Consequence.

There were also single-day options, with the GA pass starting at $169. A one-day VIP ticket was $549. Attendees should prep for a similar pricing ballpark for tickets this year.

Ohana Festival was first started by Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder in 2016, as he partnered with Live Nation and the band’s manager, Mark Smith, according to Variety. Since the fest’s creation, Vedder has performed there each year — so fans can at least expect him to be on the lineup again in 2024.