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Cinematic literacy has never been a strong suit for conservatives. Case in point: A bizarre new video posted by the Ron DeSantis super PAC, Never Back Down, shows the Florida governor’s head on Obi-Wan Kenobi during the climactic scene for the Star Wars prequel Revenge of the Sith. Donald Trump also appears as the severely beaten Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader who’s missing several limbs and burning alive after being beaten by his Jedi master, now portrayed by DeSantis.

The strange clip leaves all of the original dialogue intact, however, which doesn’t make a lick of sense. You can watch below:

Via Mediaite:

“You were the chosen one,” says Kenobi, or in this case DeSantis.

“It was said that you would destroy the Sith, not join them. Bring balance to the force, not leave it in darkness,” he continues, before Vader — or Trump — screams, “I hate you!”

The context of the scene has barely any connection to Trump and DeSantis. The former president being heralded as a conservative champion who would bring the Republican Party to glory? Sure, that kinda plays. The whole thing falls apart after that though.

For starters, DeSantis never mentored Trump, who was definitely not a Meatball Ron apprentice. On top of that, while Obi-Wan technically defeats Anakin in their fiery lightsaber duel, the Jedi master ultimately loses. He’s forced into exile for the next 19 years while Anakin becomes the iconic, helmeted version of Darth Vader who becomes even more powerful as he rules the Empire with an iron fist.

To quote Luke Skywalker in The Last Jedi, “This is not going to go the way you think.”

(Via Mediaite)

The Lauren Boebert-Marjorie Taylor Greene feud has gone next level after a bathroom fight last year for the former congressional BFFs. This week, Greene called Boebert a “little b*tch” right to her face on the House floor. Greene also alleged that Boebert “copied” her Biden-focused articles of impeachment.

From there, Greene quadrupled down and told Semafor that Boebert “has genuinely been a nasty little b*tch to me” and that there was no hope for reconciliation. Whereas Boebert attempted to take the high road by telling HuffPost, “I’m not in middle school” while denying the “copying” accusation. As The Daily Beast notes, Boebert aimed for the same route with Hannity, below, although one must wonder if she feels differently behind the scenes. Here’s the Hannity clip, and we’ll discuss below.

“Sean, I did not put my life on pause and leave my four boys and my now grandson to come here and just get in spats with people, I came here to legislate and to be effective for Coloradans … Marjorie is not my enemy. Joe Biden’s policy, the Democrats, that is my enemy that I am combatting right now and I am doing everything I can to make sure I put them in check and hold them accountable and take our country back from this radical extremism that we are seeing.”

So yes, high road was the target here, but is there a twist?

Politico has pointed towards infighting within the Freedom Caucus, for which both Boebert and Greene are members. Currently, anyway. In a discussion from the group on who should be purged, “two members” are reportedly pushing for Greene to get the boot. The purported reason for this would be Greene’s alignment with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (who she supported for speaker and who recently let her preside over the House), who obviously isn’t a far-enough right of a move for the Freedom Caucus to approve.

The timing of the ousting-in-process sounds about right, however, for this to have received fuel from the “little b*ch” insult even if the officially stated motivation ends up being Greene’s support of McCarthy. And it sure would be something if we found out that the “two members” were Boebert and Matt Gaetz. He has been infighting with Greene (over McCarthy) as well, and Insider reported that she recently took a verbal swing at him while dubbing herself as “the leading MAGA voice in Congress.”

Man, these people.

(Via The Daily Beast, Politico & Insider)

Hot Union Strike Summer continues unabated.

With 50 days of striking under their belt, the WGA continues to hold firm in their demands to protect wages and ensure humans won’t be replaced by robo-writers who start every screenplay with “FADE IN: As an AI language model, Sam wakes up groggy in his hotel bed, slapping the snooze button on his blaring alarm clock.”

To show his support for the WGA strike, Dermot Mulroney walked out in the middle of his interview on The View, a pre-taped segment that will air today as-is. According to Variety, Mulroney plugged Secret Invasion and chatted a bit about his career before politely bailing to, as the actor explained to the hosts, “symbolically walk off in support of the writers.” A pretty solid example of eating your cake and having it, too.

He picked an excellent venue for it. The View is notably (largely) unscripted, which allows the hosts to make waves and say some headline-grabbing statements, and most of the staff are not union. Mulroney said in a statement, “Since I have such respect for The View, a news program with a heart, it was there that I felt comfortable enough to draw attention to the ongoing WGA strike for fair wages and working hours, as I find it incredibly important to continue to support the union.”

If you’re interested in Mulroneying, you can find ways to support the WGA strike here.

(via Variety)

Blink-182 probably didn’t expect to be part of the narrative surrounding the missing OceanGate submersible, and yet, they are. Brian Szasz — the stepson of British billionaire Hamish Harding, who was on the Titanic voyage — generated some attention by attending a Blink show while the fate of the submarine was uncertain. Szasz wrote at the time, “It might be distasteful being here but my family would want me to be at the Blink-182 show as it’s my favorite band and music helps me in difficult times!”

It appears that amid all this, Szasz actually got a message from Blink drummer Travis Barker.

On his Instagram Story yesterday (June 22), Szasz shared a screenshot of a supposed Insta DM from Barker, in which the artist writes, “Praying for you and your family [folded hands emoji].” Szasz responded across two messages, “Thank you. I will be at the Sd show tonight.”

Szasz recently faced some criticism from Cardi B, who didn’t think he should have gone to the Blink concert. He fired back, “@iamcardib What a pos trashy celeb. Cardi B trying to get clout off me and my families suffering. I went to a Blink 182 concert for coping rather than sitting at home and watching the news. Shame on you Cardi get some class!”

Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Last fall, Carly Rae Jepsen unveiled The Loneliest Time, her sixth studio album. She’s already back with a new single titled “Shy Boy,” a giddy, overflowing pop anthem that’s immediately pulls the listener into its party: “You’re pretty, we’re drinking / So I say what I’m thinking / How come everybody’s dancing but you?”

The singer was teasing the track all week and it precedes her tour with Boygenius. It’s produced by James Ford and comes with a whole music video. She also has a forthcoming tour in Japan this summer and a slot at the Glastonbury Festival alongside acts like Lizzo, Arctic Monkeys, and Lana Del Rey.

In December, Jepsen shared the theme song for Hello Kitty: Super Style! on Amazon Kids+. About it, she told Uproxx in an interview, “I think it is mostly joyful and playful and realizing that fashion can be fun. It can help bring confidence, but the main confidence you always find in yourself. I think that’s really important to know. I think Hello Kitty is about kindness and I love that messaging. It’s something that the world needs a lot of and it’s a message that kids can learn.”

Watch the video for “Shy Boy” above.

Aqua was right: we are living in a Barbie world.

One of the most anticipated (and important) movies of 2023 is being released next month, and with it comes slumber party screenings, limited-edition pink lunchboxes, and viral posters.

A French poster for Barbie features Margot Robbie as Barbie looking triumphant and being held by Ryan Gosling as Ken, giving off unprecedented amounts of “Ken-ergy.” There’s also a tagline — “Elle peut tout faire. Lui, c’est juste Ken,” or in English, “She can do everything. He’s just Ken” — that has a “double-entendre meaning in French slang,” according to the Hollywood Reporter. “Ken” is slang for “f*ck” in French, so to someone in Paris, the poster reads, “She knows how to do everything. He just knows how to f*ck.”

The wordplay was likely intentionial.

Many began to suspect the poster’s NSFW message was a deliberate act of guerrilla marketing. A closer look at the tagline seems to confirm this. The original, English Barbie tagline is: “Barbie is everything. He’s just Ken.” But the French translation of the first line isn’t “Barbie est tout” (“Barbie is everything”), the literal translation, but rather “[Barbie] peut tout faire” (“Barbie can do anything”), a line that feeds nicely into the slang-y Ken line with the dirty connotations.

“It’s definitely deliberate; there’s no way a French speaker wouldn’t have noticed the dirty pun,” a French marketing executive told the Hollywood Reporter. “It’s sort of genius, really, that they slipped that in.”

So, it’s confirmed: Ken f*cks. Even if it’s unclear what he f*cks with.

(Via the Hollywood Reporter)

Taylor Swift’s Taylor’s Version series of re-recorded albums have been a massive hit, and fans might have Kelly Clarkson to thank for that: Back in 2019, she tweeted, “@taylorswift13 just a thought, U should go in & re-record all the songs that U don’t own the masters on exactly how U did them but put brand new art & some kind of incentive so fans will no longer buy the old versions. I’d buy all of the new versions just to prove a point.”

Clarkson doesn’t want to take credit for the idea to re-record the albums, though, as she told Andy Cohen in an interview, “She’s brilliant, she would’ve come up with that on her own, and she maybe already had before I even tweeted it.”

She also spoke about how, her perspective, it looked like Scooter Braun, who bought Swift’s master recordings, may have taken offense to her suggestion. Clarkson said:

“I think Scooter took offense to it, because we ran into each other, and I think he reached out at the time to my manager. I was like, ‘It wasn’t anything against him.’ I just… when she came out and said that and I heard about it, I was like, ‘Whatever. Re-record them. Your fans will support you.’ Uh, they did! She has like every top record right now in the charts.

He didn’t say anything to me. I think he called my manager at the time, I heard, and I don’t know what happened or what was said, but I think he thought I was attacking him. I was like, ‘I honest to God didn’t even realize who had the [rights].’ I didn’t even know all the information. All I heard was, ‘Man, I really want to own,’ and I was like, ‘Man, that song… She writes everything. It’s so important to her. She’s a businesswoman.’ It felt wrong that she didn’t have the opportunity, right? That’s the thing: If you have the opportunity and you choose to not pay that much money, that’s one thing, but to not have the opportunity to own something that is really important to you [is another].”

Clarkson, by the way, has a new album, Chemistry, out today (June 23).

Check out the interview clip above.

Kelly Clarkson is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Once it was confirmed that the Titanic-exploring submersible that went missing on Sunday with five people on board suffered a “catastrophic implosion,” killing everyone on board (including a teenager who reportedly didn’t want to be there), CNN spoke to James Cameron about what happened.

The frequently aquatic director of Titanic, The Abyss, and Avatar: The Way of Water, who traveled to the deepest part of the ocean in 2012 in a vessel that didn’t require a video game controller, told Anderson Cooper that once he heard the sub had disappeared, he knew what the outcome was going to be.

Cameron reached out to members of “the deep submergence community,” and with their help, “tracked down some intel that was probably of a military origin, although it could have been research — there are hydrophones all over the Atlantic — and got confirmation that there was some kind of loud noise consistent with an implosion event. That seemed to me enough confirmation. I let all of my inner circle of people know that we had lost our comrades. And I encouraged everybody to raise a glass in their honor on Monday.”

Cameron was “hoping against hope” his conclusion was wrong, “knowing in my bones that I wasn’t (wrong),” he said Thursday. “I couldn’t think of any other scenario in which a sub would be lost where it lost comms and navigation at the same time, and stayed out of touch, and did not surface.”

You can watch the CNN interview with Cameron above.

(Via CNN)

It was announced last year that Once Upon A One More Time, a new Broadway musical based on the songs of Britney Spears, was on the way. Now, it has arrived and Spears herself has revealed that, despite not being involved in the creation of the show, she’s a fan.

In an Instagram post shared yesterday (June 22), Spears wrote, “Good luck to the hardworking cast and crew of ‘Once Upon a One More Time’ on opening night tonight !!! I’ve seen the show and it is so funny, smart and brilliant !!!”

The show’s website describes the musical, “When our storybook heroines gather for book club, they always discuss the same book, Grimms’ Fairy Tales — because as far as they know, it’s the only book that’s ever been written. That’s until a rogue fairy godmother drops The Feminine Mystique into their corseted laps. From now on, ‘happily ever after’ will never be the same. Once Upon a One More Time weaves the chart-topping hits of the undisputed Princess of Pop, Britney Spears, into a brand-new kind of fairy tale.”

Deadline notes that the songs in the show were “fully authorized and licensed by Britney post-conservatorship,” per production notes. The publication also says of the musical, “Smart, funny, splendid to look at and all with a beat you can dance to, this tribute to the Brothers Grimm, the sisters of the Second Wave and, not least, the indomitable Ms. Spears, is a delight.”

The Charlotte Hornets held the first real decision of the 2023 NBA Draft, as they had to decide between Scoot Henderson and Brandon Miller with the second overall pick after the Spurs took Victor Wembanyama. Ultimately, Charlotte chose Miller, the 6’9 sharpshooting forward out of Alabama, as he is a clearer fit alongside LaMelo Ball than Henderson.

While most evaluators had Henderson as the best player available, Miller is certainly a strong prospect given his size and skills as a shot-maker. He did have some questions coming in for teams to dig into, namely about a deadly shooting in Tuscaloosa back in January where police claimed he brought the gun to teammate Darius Miles that was ultimately used in the tragic event. After the Draft, Hornets GM Mitch Kupchak was asked what made Charlotte comfortable with Miller, a question seemingly pointing to both his on-court skillset and the off-court incident, and Kupchak gave an incredibly bizarre answer that he stopped mid-thought after deciding better of it.

“Well, everything that we…every answer we got to every question,” Kupchak says. “I would say, he is a freshman, right? So he’s a little bit, I would say younger than…excuse me I wouldn’t even say younger — Nah, I better not even go in that direction actually. I’ll just back off.”

Alright! That’s certainly a number of words that Kupchak put together into almost sentences.

Kupchak had stated earlier that Miller was their “favorite all along,” although there was “spirited discussion” debating whether to take Miller or Henderson before landing on Miller.

Prior to the Draft, Kupchak confirmed the final decision on the pick would be Michael Jordan’s, even though Jordan is in the process of selling his majority stake in the franchise and won’t be the primary owner when the season rolls around. When paired with Kupchak’s odd answer here to a fairly straightforward question (and one he should’ve been expecting), one can’t help but wonder if he wasn’t all-in on Miller given his apparent difficulty offering a coherent defense of the pick.