You might have heard a rumor that Jon Hamm, his nipple rings, and his butt are all starring in the new season of Fargo, and that rumor would be 100% true! Luckily for you, it’s not too late to tune in.
Season five of the mid-western comedy/drama Fargo was originally supposed to hit your home screens in September and after some delays, it’s now in full swing. The season follows Hamm as a dedicated lawman looking into the peculiar past of a mysterious housewife, portrayed by Juno Temple. Here is the official synopsis:
The latest installment of Fargo is set in Minnesota and North Dakota, 2019. After an unexpected series of events lands “Dorothy ‘Dot’ Lyon” (Juno Temple) in hot water with the authorities, this seemingly typical Midwestern housewife is suddenly plunged back into a life she thought she had left behind.
Episodes one and two premiered on November 21st, while episode three dropped a week later, on the 28th. The next seven episodes are expected to be released weekly on Tuesdays until January 16th, when the season finale will air.
Of course, if you aren’t a lucky FX subscriber, you will have to wait until the next day for the new episodes to drop on Hulu. Typically, new episodes stream on Hulu by 3 a.m. ET. Then, you can access Jon Hamm and his nipple rings at your earliest convenience.
With the arrival of the Grand Theft Auto VI trailer, fans of the franchise have been poring over details of every frame looking for clues to the gameplay and story for the highly anticipated installment that, unfortunately, won’t be arriving until 2025. (PC players are in for an even longer wait.)
This time around, the series returns to Vice City, the fictional locale that takes its cues from Miami. However, gamers are discovering that GTA VI appears to aping real-life events that only the state of Florida can produce. Naturally, those events are gator-based, but there’s some other Floridian shenanigans thrown in for good measure.
The trailer contains multiple shots of alligators sniffing around buildings, as we often see them do in real-life Florida. Other shots look inspired by local news broadcasts that reported on the weird and wonderful goings on in the state.
The shot of the naked man watering his garden looks like a riff on 2018 news reports about a Florida man who did yard work naked. And yes, the clip of the woman twerking on top of a moving car seems similarly inspired by real-world events.
The tweet below from Central Gaming Hub has a screen-by-screen breakdown of the confirmed news events that GTA VI will make liberal use of in the game, and accordingly, there’s going to be a lot of thong-based humor. We fully expect more real-life headlines to work there way into the sixth installment:
The GTA VI trailer makes reference to various events from real life, for comparison here are images showing which events they are based off. #GTAVIpic.twitter.com/fCQNuiu30G
Christmas is celebrated around the world, but it looks a bit different everywhere you go. While there are some fairly universal traditions, such as decorating a tree and giving gifts, there are some traditions specific to different cultures that are both unique and intriguing.
In Italy, La Befana is a good witch who flies around on a broomstick on January 5th, the night before Epiphany. Children put their shoes out with a glass of wine and a piece of bread for La Befana, and fills their shoes with candy or small gifts—or chunks of coal, onions or garlic for the naughty ones
2. ICELAND—The Yule Lads
Iceland’s 13 Yule Lads are merry and mischievous troll-like figures, each with a different name and personality. They visit children one at a time during the 13 days leading up to Christmas, leaving gifts and playing tricks, including leaving rotten potatoes in the shoes of kids who don’t behave. According to the Smithsonian, the Yule Lads used to be a lot creepier, but in 1746, the country outlawed scaring children with monstrous tales about the 13 lads. (Would love to know what prompted that law!)
3. ALSO ICELAND—The Yule Cat
As if the Yule Lads weren’t enough, a towering, fearsome cat roams the Icelandic countryside around Christmastime, peeking into homes to spy on children’s presents. In Icelandic tradition, if kids get all of their chores done, they are gifted some new clothes. If the Yule Cat (aka Jólakötturinn) sees that a child wasn’t given clothes (in other words, a child was lazy), the cat proceeds to eats the child’s dinner and then moves on to eating the child. Yes, you read that right. It eats the child. Icelandic folklore doesn’t mess around.
4. PHILIPPINES—The Giant Lantern Festival
In the Philippines, the Giant Lantern Festival is held in San Fernando City (dubbed the Christmas capital of the Philippines) every year the week before Christmas Eve. According to Travel & Leisure, the lantern tradition is rooted in the history of Filipino Catholics building small, colorful lanterns to light up the procession to Christmas Eve mass. The giant parol lanterns for the festival, however, are huge—up to 20 feet tall—and it can take up to 10,000 light bulbs to illuminate them.
5. SPAIN (CATALONIA)—The Tió de Nadal (pooping log)
Some cultures have a yule log. Catalonia, Spain, has the Tió de Nadal—a log with a hat, a blanket, a smiley face and a penchant for pooping out presents. Children feed the smiling log scraps of food at night and it poop out presents on Christmas Day. There’s even a song kids sing to the log, imploring it to not poop out salted herring (too salty), but nougats in instead, all while hitting the log with a stick. According to Catalan tradition, the eating of the scraps and the beating with the stick leads to Tió de Nadal pooping out presents and nougat on Christmas. And apparently, no one questions it.
6. BAVARIA—The Krampus
In Bavaria (which includes Austria, Germany, Switzerland and some of the surrounding area), the Krampus is a centuries-old tradition that has been revived in modern times. The Krampus is a horned, hairy, hellish creature who follows St. Nick on his rounds to punish naughty children by scaring them (or tossing them in a sack and beating them). Many cities hold Krampus festivals each year, where people parade around in Krampus costumes like the one above.
7. VENEZUELA—Roller Skating to Christmas Mass
Most of us don’t association Christmas with roller skating, but that’s not the case for Venezuelans. Christmas is an all-night roller skating party, which includes singing Christmas songs and culminates with everyone rolling their way to Christmas Mass at dawn. Most interestingly, according to a Venezuelan woman’s explanation in America Magazine, it’s not even like Venezuelans are a big roller skating culture the rest of the year—it’s just a Christmas thing.
8. JAPAN—A Finger Lickin’ Good Tradition
Japan doesn’t have a long history with Christmas and thus no long-standing traditions associated with it. What they do have is 50 years of eating KFC for Christmas, thanks to a “Kentucky for Christmas” marketing campaign launched by the first KFC restaurant owner in Nagoya, Japan, in 1970. Somehow, it stuck and is now a beloved tradition for millions of Japanese families.
9. UKRAINE—Spider Webs on Christmas Trees
According to Ukrainian legend, an impoverished widow and her children grew a tree from a pinecone outside of their house, but they were too poor to decorate it for Christmas. The household spiders heard the children’s sobs and spun their webs into decorations overnight. When the children awoke on Christmas morning, they cried out “Mother, mother wake up and see the tree. It is beautiful!” As the day went on and the sun’s rays hit the delicate webs, they transformed into silver and gold and the widow never wanted for anything again. Today, Ukrainians decorate trees with spider webs for good luck and fortune in the new year.
Whatever your family or cultural holiday traditions are, let’s celebrate the differences that make our world so interesting.
Is “Bongos” rapper Cardi B entering the new year as a single woman? Well, that’s what users online have begun to speculate based on her latest social media activity. Over the weekend, Cardi B was the center of conversation across social media due to her runway debut via Balenciaga’s Fall 2024 outdoor fashion show. But today (December 5), Cardi’s speculated relationship status is fueling her virality.
In a series of Instagram story posts, fans believe Cardi is hinting at a split from her rapper husband, Offset. The screenshots of Cardi’s uploaded, captured by users, read: “You know when you just outgrow relationships,” and “I’m tired of protecting people’s feelings…I GOTTA PUT MYSELF FIRST.”
Instagram
Others also pointed out that the couple is no longer connected on the platform. So, why did Cardi B and Offset unfollow each other on Instagram? The formal answer is unknown. The pair have unfollowed, exchanged subtle jabs, and affectionately recounted on the app several times. It even inspired their latest collaborative single, “Jealous.”
But Cardi’s recent Instagram livestream has fans worried this could be the end. She previously took steps to formally divorce Offset, but the pair found a way to work it out. Hopefully, they can do the same thing this time, especially now that they have two young children.
Cardi B went live and spoke about removing dead weight and leaving it in 2023 she later went and unfollowed her husband Offset .It’s Alleged he cheated on her for the 110th time full story here : https://t.co/g20GjiwSJB
In recent years, Epic Games has really ramped up its efforts to strengthen Fortnite‘s chokehold on pop culture, in part through the use of music stars appearing in the game as playable skins or performers in special events and virtual concerts. Most recently, Ed Sheeran, Kid Cudi, and Eminem have all found their way to the island, and soon, they’ll be joined by The Weeknd, who’ll also perform in the upcoming Fortnite Festival game mode.
When Does The Weeknd Come To Fortnite?
In a new trailer released this week, the skin for Abel Tesfaye, aka The Weeknd, can be seen as the star performs in a virtual concert — as well gameplay for the rhythm-based Fortnite Festival mode a la Rock Band (whose developers also made the new game) or Guitar Hero — in two different incarnation. While his After Hours persona is quickly highlighted, it looks like the big feature is Abel’s more recent, MF DOOM-inspired tour look, complete with a glimmering chrome mask and a white, robe-like hoodie.
The trailer also reveals when he’ll be available in the game: December 9. Fortnite Festival launches the same day, allowing players to play in a band for and with their friends. It sounds like a cool expansion on the core gameplay, especially as Fortnite attracts a larger and larger audience (who may not all want to shoot each other all the time).
Check out the trailer for Fortnite Festival above.
Yellowstone reruns have been keeping CBS primetime slots filled for this year and beyond. That show will finally begin filming its final episodes in late 2024, but fortunately, Taylor Sheridan has kept the Dutton ranch fires burning with spinoffs including 1983 and 1923. Eventually, there will also be 1944 and 2024, but there will be an outlier that enters the fray as well: 6666.
That series is not only titled for an entity other than a year but will also move away from the franchise’s usual stomping grounds. As it turns out, the location will be famous amongst cowboy and ranch-hand circles, too. Let’s talk about what to expect from 6666.
Plot
During what seems like a million years ago (Season 4 premiered in 2021), Yellowstone set the stage for this spinoff by bidding farewell to Jimmy (Jefferson White), who left the building and headed to the 6666 Ranch. Interestingly enough, it was Taylor Sheridan’s character (Travis) who had given Jimmy a ride to the ranch while perhaps intimidating the hell out of him:
“A horse is gonna be your only f*ckin’ friend” does not bode well for Jimmy getting any rest and relaxation. And speaking of sleep, Travis told him to get shuteye on the road because “you are gonna f*ckin’ need it.” Will those F-bombs be edited out when Season 4 eventually airs on CBS? I hope not.
The show will film on the real-life 6666 Ranch, also known as the “Four Sixes” or simply (as referred to in the above clip) “the Sixes.” The ranch was founded in 1870 and named for a head of branded cattle, but the prolific show creator and screenwriter actually purchased the soaring swath of land (which is reportedly twice as big as Chicago), and so, it is gonna be on to film on location for the entire series rather than in limited instance as in 1923. There’s every chance that this series could be most near and dear to Sheridan out of all his currently running series, but ideally, he’ll keep the cowboy soap opera flavor alive, too. Here’s the official 6666 synopsis:
Founded when Comanches still ruled West Texas, no ranch in America is more steeped in the history of the West than the 6666. Still operating as it did two centuries before, and encompassing an entire county, the 6666 has inspired a new scripted series where the rule of law and the laws of nature merge in a place where the most dangerous thing one does is the next thing. The 6666 is synonymous with the merciless endeavor to raise the finest horses and livestock in the world, and ultimately where world-class cowboys are born and made.
Cast
It would be awfully bizarre if one of the centerpieces of this show wasn’t Jefferson White as Jimmy, but we can probably expect an ensemble cast to flesh out all the events taking place in ranch-hand world. Speculation has also run rampant about Ryan Bingham joining the cast as Walker, but these days, Sheridan is also adding A-listers to his joints.
Over the past few years, Harrison Ford, Sylvester Stallone, Helen Mirren, Jeremy Renner, Sam Elliott, Nicole Kidman, David Oyelowo, and Donald Sutherland have done the small-screen thing with Sheridan, and Matthew McConaughey will likely be onboard for 2024. Surely, that trend will not stop here, but all casting details have been kept quiet so far.
Release Date
Sheridan previously revealed that the 2023 Hollywood chaos led to 6666 being delayed, but he’s probably also going to be writing this show by himself, so it wouldn’t be surprising to learn that he suddenly has a whole first season of scripts ready to film. Officially, however, no one knows when 6666 will arrive, only that it is on the way. Yet when the show does exist, we can expect it to stream on Paramount+ like every other Taylor Sheridan show other than Yellowstone, which streams on Peacock and now airs reruns on CBS.
Trailer
No trailer has materialized yet, obviously, so let’s imagine that this show is actually a horror series with 6666 being the theme of a cowboy exorcism. Yes, I concede that this is a dumb joke (because a year-based 6666 would be even worse, like with… cowboys and aliens, ugh), but perhaps that will motivate Sheridan (even more than he already is on every other day of his life) to get this show cranking.
Maybe we’ll get some more failed biker brawling? Don’t tell me that this clip wasn’t shading Sons of Anarchy.
A message from Brenda Lee to her Brendanators Watch the exact moment @UMGNashville CEO Cindy Mabe tells the holiday music icon that “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” reaches No. 1 on this week’s #Hot100, breaking multiple @billboardcharts records along the way. pic.twitter.com/UrnzXlK28n
As per Billboard, Lee has waited a long time to hit No. 1 — in fact, it is “the longest wait from a song’s release [65 years]” to No. 1 in the chart’s history. The publication provided more mind-boggling context, as excerpted below:
“Lee is 78 years young; her new Hot 100 coronation will add to her birthday celebration December 11. She becomes the senior-most artist to top the chart, surpassing Louis Armstrong, who was 62 when ‘Hello, Dolly!’ led in 1964. Among women, Lee passes the likewise busy Cher, who was 52 when ‘Believe’ ruled the Hot 100.
In a bit of time-bending, while Lee is currently 78, again, the highest age for an artist atop the Hot 100, she was 13 when she recorded ‘Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree’; if the song had led when she was that age, she’d be the youngest woman to have reached No. 1.”
“Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree” was first released in 1958, and its previous Hot 100 peak was No. 14 in December 1960.
Lee also spoke with Billboard about this achievement and the origins of “Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree.” Read the interview here.
In the time it takes to watch Martin Scorsese’s latest crime epic, Killers of the Flower Moon, a person could fly from NYC to Miami, run a (quick) marathon, or even undergo a lumbar spinal fusion – essentially, a wielding of the vertebrae that constitutes a major surgery. None of those activities sound as watching the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert de Niro con and kill a path to becoming 1920s oil barons over the course of nearly three and a half hours (especially now that it’s on VOD), but the fact that they all last roughly the same amount of time is telling.
Scorsese is, of course, a director known for favoring longer runtimes, but he’s not the only filmmaker testing the bladder control of audiences. Masters like Ridley Scott, Quentin Tarantino, Christopher Nolan, and James Cameron are reliably (and often effectively) verbose. And in the past two years, award-winning and critically adored films like Elvis, Oppenheimer, Babylon, Avatar: The Way Of Water, and Tar all ran for close to or longer than, three hours, doing their part to keep driving this northward trend.
According to What to Watch, the average runtime of the top ten movies by decade has been slowly creeping up from a brisk 110 minutes in the 80s to 126 minutes in the early 2000s to a back-aching 141 minutes in 2022 — a 21 percent jump. It’s not your imagination, your social media dependence, or our collectively shrinking attention spans: movies are getting longer. Critics and film fans aren’t the only ones noticing either.
In a fascinating Vanity Fair investigative piece from earlier this year, writer Natalie Jarvey found that plenty of producers and executives agree that movie length is becoming an issue on the production and marketing sides. But, the studios and streamers they represent are in crisis mode at the moment, scrambling to justify rising subscription prices and ticket costs to court would-be fans. They’re starting to believe that hours-long epics are their key to remaining relevant and, in their misguided panic, they’re prioritizing spectacle over everything else.
Much has been said about studios and streamers chasing the franchise formula made popular (and profitable) by Marvel and, to a lesser extent, DC. Everything is clawing to earn that “event movie” label in order to stand out from the glut of comic book team-ups and TV binge-watches. It’s created a box office bottleneck that’s all but killed the concept of variety when it comes to movie-going.
“There used to just be a lot more balance,” Erik Anderson, founder and editor-in-chief of the website AwardsWatch, told CNN in 2022. “You go look at the top 10 films of any given year going back to the ’90s, ‘80s, ‘70s, and it was a mix of everything: action and science fiction and drama and comedies. What we see now is just Marvel, Marvel, Marvel, [DC Extended Universe], ‘Dune’ – these other existing IPs rather than original content.”
To compete, streamers are courting big-name directors and promising them unprecedented freedom. Most of the time, that manifests in minutes.
But why are filmmakers like Scorsese and Scott subscribing to this new motto of “bigger is better?” And what does it say about the state of filmmaking that those worthy of final cut approval and hours-long odysseys are so homogenous, that the films we’re getting are limited to overlong crime sagas, historical biopics, and CGI-bogged sequels that demand hours upon hours of movie-goers’ time?
Scorsese can craft a two-hour crime classic that hums like no one else – see Taxi Driver, Mean Streets, and Raging Bull for proof. Killers three-hour-plus runtime not only obliterates the final cuts of these films, but it also gets lost in its own weeds a bit by taking on the entirety of its source material, teetering between a crime thriller, a police procedural, and a more interesting character study of Lily Gladstone’s protagonist, Mollie Burkhart. And it’s not just Scorsese’s opus that struggles to confine itself to a more bearable runtime. Damien Chazelle’s gorgeously shot three-hour Babylon flop, Scott’s deliciously fun two-plus hour chronicle of the fall of the house of Gucci, Nolan’s fascinating three-hour history lesson about the man who drive The Manhattan Project, Cameron’s mesmerizing CGI-saturated sequel to Avatar — they all took hits for dragging in different acts.
And, like Scorsese, all of these directors have proven capable of doing more with less – time that is. Who remembers Whiplash? Blade Runner? Alien? Memento, Batman Begins, Terminator? Most of these films were under two hours but none approached the length these guys are now flirting with in each new project they announce. Perhaps it’s a way to wrestle back control of an industry and a broken system that’s prioritized the instant gratification of franchise fare over everything else for far too long.
Scorsese has made no secret of his distaste for comic book movies. By making three-hour dramas tailored to discerning adults, is he proving cinema should not be limited to spandex and multiverses? Cameron has griped that audiences are willing to binge hours of a TV show but balk at a film measuring the same amount of time. That type of “blitz viewing” isn’t really comparable as so many of these directors are asking fans to trek to theaters instead of streaming at home, but as studios continue to try to court audiences away from their couches, is it a hill Cameron and others are willing to bury their self-control under?
And is all of this added time really serving moviegoers?
After all, studies have shown that most people have an average attention span of just 90 minutes. That’s not a consequence of smartphones or social media, it’s just science, and it’s reflective of audience preference when it comes to theater trips. In a 2021 survey for the LA Times, 36% of respondents “said they often sought out a film’s runtime before deciding to see it.” Of that number, 57% “expressed trepidation about movies running past 150 minutes.”
Yet, here we are, with over a dozen of the year’s most notable films teasing anxieties around that 150-minute mark. Almost all are made by men, most trade on existing IP or history, and too few feature protagonists of color. While some of these movies have found breakout success at the box office, more still haven’t made a dent big enough to justify their “event viewing” bloat, despite being helmed by prolific directors, sporting star-studded casts, and boasting fascinating subject material. These movies aren’t categorically bad, just the opposite. Films like Oppenheimer and Killers of the Flower Moon are rich, engrossing awards contenders that deserve to be seen, but are their runtimes working against that objective?
As this is a piece debating the value and prolificacy of longer films, now is about the time Roger Ebert’s definitive stance on the subject would be wielded to argue against the correlation between more minutes and weaker storytelling. “No good movie is too long and no bad movie is short enough,” might as well be the bumper sticker attached to every marathon movie audiences have had to endure over the past few years. But, when it comes to the latest crop of overlong cinematic slogs, there’s another, more apt motto from Orson Welles that filmmakers might benefit from investigating: “The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.”
It’s not true for some, but it does apply to most. Hopefully, Hollywood remembers that.
Stop us if you’ve heard this one before: Hugh Grant is being all kinds of salty while talking to reporters. This time around, the actor is bemoaning his experience on the set of Wonka where he plays an Oompa Loompa across from Timothée Chalamet’s beloved chocolatier.
During a press conference for the film, Grant went so far as to equate the CGI camera rig he wore for Wonka with a “crown of thorns” because why not work in the suffering of Christ? Clearly, Grant was not a fan of the process, and he did not hold back his disdain for the Wonka experience and filmmaking in general. It’s all a big pain in the ass to Hugh Grant.
“I made a big fuss about it,” Grant said. “I couldn’t have hated the whole thing more.” Asked if the ends justified the means, he replied: “Not really.”
Grant later joked that it was nothing personal against Wonka and director Paul King. “I slightly hate [making films] but I have lots of children and need money,” he said.
Grant’s grouchy attitude towards filming Wonka arrives after a similar incident at this year’s Oscars ceremony where the actor could not have been more disinterested in a red carpet interview with Ashley Graham. Grant was bluntly dismissive of her questioning and made no effort to even act like he wanted to be there. It was palpable and increasingly on brand for the actor who’s openly admitted to having tantrums on set.
Charli XCX shared last week that she and George Daniel, drummer for The 1975, will be “f*cking for life!!!” Charli XCX has since deleted her Instagram post, but Peopleconfirmed that the couple are engaged. Charli began this year remixing Caroline Polachek’s “Welcome To My Island” with Daniel, and she ended it on the red carpet at the 2023 British Fashion Awards at Royal Albert Hall in London, where she was asked by ES Magazine to identify the highlight of her year. (There was a bop for the Barbie soundtrack squeezed in there as well.)
The platinum-certified pop star stopped herself from saying the first thing that popped into her head before finally replying, “Um, I finished a record, but it’s not out. So, next year, that will be out, and then I can say that’s my highlight.”
Not to be that person, Charli, but technically, releasing an album will be your highlight of 2024, and we will never know what you refrained from publicly sharing as your true highlight of 2023.
Regardless, Charli XCX doubled down on album mode by posting an Instagram carousel from Monday’s (December 4) British Fashion Awards alongside the caption, “bye for now.” That can only mean one thing: The next time we hear from her, she will probably wipe all of her social media accounts and announce her aforementioned new album.
Charli XCX’s last LP, Crash, arrived in March 2022 and was met with such success that she wasn’t sure how to follow it up.
“It’s still a shock to me — and it’s quite stressful because I’m like, ‘Oh crap, what do I do now?’” she told BBC Music in August 2022. “I feel like the narrative around my work has often been, ‘She’s one step ahead,’ or, ‘She’s pushing the boundaries and no one ever quite gets her.’ So to achieve these things feels really special and unique, and it’s something I feel like I’ve achieved with my fans. But at the same time, what does it mean for me?”
It sounds like we’ll all find out together in 2024.
Charli XCX is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.
The Barbie soundtrack is a Warner Music release. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.
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