GoneTrending

A few preliminary notes before we dive into this ranking of the ten Fast & Furious movies that exist as of this writing:

• Ranking these movies is fun but also a little impossible because there’s such a ridiculous range throughout the franchise, to the degree that the first and tenth movies have almost nothing in common beyond Vin Diesel driving cars very fast
• It’s nuts to sit back and think about how these movies have been a consistent part of pop culture around the world for over 20 years, kind of like Star Wars but if Mark Hamill had kept playing Luke Skywalker straight through the mid-1990s
• It would be really funny if Star Wars pulled a reverse-Fast and the final film in the entire franchise was about Han Solo’s descendants stealing consumer electronics from speeding 18-wheelers on Southern California highways

Let’s get into it. As always, these rankings are based on personal taste and your mileage may vary substantially. That’s fine. If we have learned nothing else from the adventures of Dominic Toretto, we have at least learned that you can always put your differences aside over a Corona or two at a backyard barbecue. Even if you’ve tried to kill each other with rockets. Which, I must stress here, I do not want you to do to me. Please do not shoot a rocket at me. Ever. For any reason. But especially not over these rankings.

Thank you.

10. Fast & Furious (2009)

The weird thing about this movie is that I remember almost nothing that happened in it despite watching it multiple times. It’s just kind of… there, the bridge between the franchise losing its stars and heading off to Tokyo and the whole thing becoming a multibillion-dollar enterprise about super-spies with rockets and futuristic technology and everything else it became in the ensuing decade. You could make an argument that it’s the most important movie in the franchise, just for the foundation it laid and the little chronological two-step it did that allowed Han to stick around and tie a few loose ends together. I say “you” could make this argument because I sure as hell am not going to. Not when there’s so much else to discuss.

There is one other thing worth noting here. This film wasn’t the entire bridge between the two parts of this franchise. There was also a short film called Los Bandoleros that came out in 2009, two months after Fast & Furious, that attempted to explain how Dom and Han knew each other. It was directed by Vin Diesel and is 20 minutes long and features some of the crew hijacking gas trucks in the Dominican Republic. It’s really fun to explain this to people who have only watched these movies casually. I recommend doing it as often as you can.

9. 2 Fast 2 Furious (2003)

2 Fast 2 Furious has two things going for it that cannot be overstated:

• It introduced Ludacris to the franchise – officiating a jet ski race with a bullhorn, as one does – and set in motion one of the greatest characters arcs in the history of cinema
• Its dramatic conclusion featured a speeding car flying through the air and crashing into the bad guy’s boat, which set a precedent for “cars crashing into things or dragging things that crash into other things” that has continued through the franchise, from Fast Five (dragging a safe through the streets of Brazil) to Furious 7 (cars flying between and through skyscrapers) to Fast X (cars taking out helicopters, cars taking out bombs, really just the whole movie)

I’m serious about the Ludacris thing. Name one other movie character who has gone from jet ski race officiant to expert computer hacker to amateur astronaut. He is easily the most fascinating character in this franchise.

8. Fast X (2023)

There’s a fine line between acknowledging the past and becoming stuck inside it, and I think Fast X went racing over it in a NoS-fueled muscle car. The action scenes are still there and they still rip extremely hard. The stuff in Rome with the giant rolling bomb is very fun. It’s nice that someone woke up one morning and said “Hey, what if Jason Momoa played like an extremely jacked version of the Joker?” I like that we’re just blowing up planes and helicopters by the dozen now. But the rest of it has started to careen from fun implausibility to… it’s a bit much, man.

Every new character that’s introduced is a previously unmentioned relative of one we knew before. People keep coming back from the dead. The movie is like 40 percent flashbacks to other movies that attempt to explain why the stuff happening in this one is important, instead of just doing a lot of cool new stuff. I kind of want to see it again with someone who has not seen any of the previous nine movies, just to hear them explain what they think is going on.

That would be fun.

7. The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (2006)

A few important things are happening here:

• Tokyo Drift is the first movie in the franchise that was directed by Justin Lin, who took the series to its creative pinnacle a few films later
• It also marked the first appearance of Sung Kang as Han, a character so good they had to twist the entire timeline of the film into a pretzel to bring him back for the next films in the franchise
• Bow Wow played a car-obsessed high school student in this movie and then, six movies and 15 years later, the same character was the scientific mastermind behind a jet-powered Pontiac that sent Ludacris into outer space

Also, it’s a surprisingly fun watch, even today, many years and many improbable adventures later. Go watch it again sometime soon.

6. Fast & Furious 6 (2013)

We have discussed this before but it’s worth mentioning again, if only because it is still both true and a little hilarious: The titles of the films in this franchise are an absolute mess. There’s nothing even resembling a uniform structure. We have both a “The Fast and the Furious” and a “Fast & Furious.” We have wordplay with the eighth movie having the word Fate (F8… get it???) in the title. We have a Fast Five, with the number spelled out; and a Furious 7, with the actual number; and in between we have this movie, with both a Fast and a Furious and the number 6. It is unfiltered chaos and somehow not even a top-five wildest thing about the franchise and I love it a lot. The tenth movie introduced Roman numerals. There are no limits to how weird this can all get.

Anyway, this is a fun movie. It introduced the Shaw family, which led to both Jason Statham and Helen Mirren joining the franchise. It ended with an insane scene where a bunch of cars chased an airplane down a runway that was apparently 40 miles long. Vin Diesel drove a car out of the aforementioned airplane straight through the nose with a massive fireball trailing him. There’s really not much more you can ask for on a Saturday afternoon at like 2 pm when you’re glued to the couch.

5. The Fate of the Furious (2017)

Some notes here:

• Charlize Theron shows up as a cyberterrorist named Cipher who has braids for some reason
• Jason Statham’s character, who tried to shoot Dominic Toretto out of the sky with a rocket in the previous movie, is now a good guy who protects Dom’s infant son with his life during a pretty funny fight with multiple goons on an airplane
• There is a nuclear submarine now

Lots of other stuff happens, too. The Rock gets framed for a crime involving an off-book retrieval of an EMP device in Berlin and goes to prison. There’s a huge scene with cars being controlled remotely and crashing into each other a lot. There’s a whole car chase on top of a glacier. But mostly I just like the things in those bullet points.

4. F9 (2021)

Wellllllllllll we are in space now. That’s the main thing here. John Cena is here, too, as Dominic Toretto’s estranged brother Jakob, whose entry on the F9 Wikipedia page describes him as “a master thief, assassin, and high-performance driver,” which, I mean, yeah, sure, let’s add one of those to the mix. There are big magnets and satellites that can control nuclear weapons and Charlize Theron’s character has leather pants and a stylish bowl cut despite being housed in a plexiglass jail cell that she eventually breaks out of. There’s all of that.

But the space thing is the story here. It remains deeply funny to me that they did this. They actually did it. The dudes from Tokyo Drift built a rocket and strapped it to a Pontiac Fiero and Ludacris and Tyrese got inside and launched themselves into the cosmos to prevent Armageddon. It’s all just remarkable. Please remember this whenever anyone tells you that your dreams are unattainable. Remember both parts of it. Remember the thing inside the Fast universe where these characters went from humble beginnings — street races and jet ski competitions in Miami — to actual outer space, but also remember the thing where this whole franchise started with stolen DVD players and now has seen its characters thwart multiple nuclear-adjacent plots. Anything is possible in this life if you truly believe.

3. The Fast and the Furious (2001)

This all brings us back to the beginning, where this all started. Back when Vin Diesel was running a lunch counter and feuding with a local gang about stolen DVD players. When Paul Walker — whose character, it should be noted, is still very much alive in these movies, which is a whole extra level of bonkers, because it means the one character in the Family who has actual law enforcement training is just sitting at home and straight-up refusing to help while his closest friends and wife attempt to prevent cyberterrorists from turning the world into a nuclear wasteland — was just an undercover cop who liked driving fast. It’s all kind of quaint, really. Go back and watch this sometime and then chase it with one of the later installments and see how far we’ve all come. It’s staggering.

It is a good movie, though! It’s basically Point Break with cars, which is not a complaint. “Point Break with [literally anything]” is a good starting point for any movie. Point Break with basketball. Point Break with chain restaurants. Point Break with the Westminster Dog Show. These are all free ideas for anyone who has the juice to get them made. Especially that last one. You never know, man, it could lead to a multi-decade franchise that ends with an award-winning corgi preventing a dirty bomb from going off in Las Vegas on New Year’s Eve. Stranger things have happened. In this very franchise. We really can’t rule anything out.

2. Furious 7 (2015)

Furious 7 asked a very important question that more movies should ask at some point: “But what if Statham, also?” Because, really, the biggest surprise here isn’t that Jason Statham appeared in a Fast & Furious movie. The biggest surprise is that it took everyone until the seventh film in the franchise to get us there. Although he did appear in the post-credits scene of the sixth, so it’s not like a “full” seven. And I guess if we’re being technical about it all, now that we know he was driving the car that killed Han (“killed” Han, technically, as no one in these movies ever really dies, kind of like death is a suggestion more than an act of finality), he was kind of in Tokyo Drift, too, in an offscreen, uncredited role. This is a lot of fun to think about while watching Tokyo Drift now, by the way, years later. The secret Statham of it all.

But anyway, yes, Statham. Between his introduction as a villain and the skyscraper car heist/escape and the ending scene with Dom and Brian where they drive off into the sunsNO YOU CRIED DURING AN ACTION MOVIE ABOUT CARS THAT GO ZOOM AND VROOM.

I’m sorry. I’m still a little emotional about all of this. What I’m saying is that this movie is a big, ambitious, heartfelt endeavor and it had a rocky run-up with the actual death of Paul Walker before filming was completed. It was a miracle they pulled it off and it was a great piece of work by director James Wan and it remains extremely rewatchable today, even with the ending that yoinks on your heart a little.

And, again, it has Statham. And the scene where Vin Diesel soars through the Abu Dhabi sky from one skyscraper to another inside a million-dollar sports car. And at one point The Rock says “Daddy’s gotta go to work” and flexes his broken arm so hard that his cast breaks off and turns to dust on the floor of his hospital room. We should make it a point to think about all of that every few weeks.

1. Fast Five (2011)

An incomplete list of things that happen in Fast Five:

— Vin Diesel’s character, Dominic Toretto, is freed from police custody by his best friend and his sister when they intercept an inmate transfer bus and send it tumbling down a deserted road. Despite the bus flipping over at least four times, Vin Diesel survives. The accident is covered on television by the same actor who played Perd Hapley on Parks and Recreation. This is the first thing that happens in the movie.

— The crew takes part in a train heist that sees them yank a number of expensive racing-type cars off the train while it is speeding down a Brazilian track, and the train heist ends in disaster and explosions and Vin Diesel and Paul Walker flying off a cliff in a sports car and splashing to safety 100 feet below, at which point they are promptly captured by Brazil’s biggest drug lord. This is the second thing that happens in the movie.

— The Rock is introduced as a U.S. government agent named Luke Hobbs who (A) travels to Brazil to arrest Dom and Brian as though jurisdiction is a mere suggestion; (B) has a wardrobe that consists exclusively of military-issue cargo pants and Under Armour t-shirts so tight that you can see his heartbeat through them; and (C) re-introduces the audience to all the characters by saying, “I know you, I read your file,” then ticking off all the history and personality traits “from the file” that you need to know to get caught up. Useful, that guy.

— This scene…

— They rip the drug lord’s cash-filled vault out of the corrupt Brazilian police force’s downtown headquarters and drag it behind two muscle cars through the streets of Rio, flinging it into personal property and storefronts and doing what one has to assume is millions of dollars in damage before fleeing the country.

Fast Five is the best Fast & Furious movie.

If Daenerys Targaryen is the Mother of Dragons, what does that make Kendall Roy? The Brother of Dipsh*ts? The Succession / Game of Thrones crossover came to mind during an interview with Jeremy Strong, who plays the co-CEO (for now) of Waystar Royco, following Sunday’s episode.

“It’s kind of like a Dracarys moment for Kendall,” the method actor told the Hollywood Reporter about Kendall’s maneuvering, including telling Roman that he “f*cked it,” being mean to Jess, and hiring his father’s driver and confidante, Colin. “Dracarys” is the command that the Targaryens, including Dany, use when they want their dragons to light some poor sucker on fire.

As long as Succession doesn’t end like Thrones (a bold move on Strong’s part to even bring mention the show!), keep the references coming.

Strong continued, “Starting from the end of episode six, really, I think he can see the endgame. A lot of things happen in the ninth episode. Him feeling blamed for the election and his culpability in making this kind of Faustian bargain, really, he’s compromised himself utterly, and he knows it. I think he’s in turmoil. The real moral jeopardy that we see in the previous episode.”

Kendall? He’s doing fine. See?

The Succession series finale airs next Sunday.

(Via the Hollywood Reporter)

At the end of 2022, Foo Fighters shared a message in which they noted that after the death of Taylor Hawkins, the group was “going to be a very different band going forward.” This led to a bunch of speculation about who the group’s new drummer should be, and now we know that touring with the band will be Josh Freese. He’s not exactly a household name, but who is he?

Well, it’s worth noting that after the aforementioned 2022 message, when Foo fans started discussing who should be the band’s next drummer, Freese’s name was among the most mentioned. One commenter at the time called him “the ultimate rock session drummer,” and indeed, he’s performed with artists like Devo, The Vandals, Guns N’ Roses, A Perfect Circle, Puddle Of Mudd, Nine Inch Nails, Weezer, Sublime With Rome, Paramore, and Sting, among many others. On top of that, he also played with Foo Fighters during their Hawkins tribute concerts in 2022.

Freese was officially revealed as the new Foo Fighters touring drummer during the band’s Foo Fighters: Preparing Music For Concerts livestream, but there were indications that Freese was the pick before that. As Variety noted, Freese recently pulled out of performance obligations with The Offspring and Danny Elfman.

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

The Succession Report Card is a weekly recap feature where we attempt to assign grades to the important people, things, and themes from each episode of Succession. The grades are entirely subjective and the criteria for scoring will change from week to week and occasionally mid-week. Someone might get detention. It’ll probably be Roman.

SEASON 4, EPISODE 9 – “Church and State”

Roman

Roman was riding high. He was doing great, or at least great within the context of Being Roman, by which I mean he was feeling great about leaning his whole torso onto the scales of democracy to get a potential fascist elected president, and about being the co-CEO, and about the eulogy he was going to give at Logan’s funeral. He had pre-grieved, he claimed, and was cracking wildly inappropriate jokes about Shiv and her fetus on the way to the funeral, right in front of and to her. Roman was on a cloud.

Buuuuuuuuuuuuut…

Things rarely stay good for any character on this show, especially the Roy children, who put on masterful displays of insecurity every week, usually in their own little specific broken ways. I’ve been tinkering with a theory that no more than two of them can be happy at any given time, and it sure looked like I was onto something as Roman’s freefall and Kendall’s ascendancy crisscrossed like a big X on a line graph up there at the front of the church. Let’s tick off some of Roman’s lowlights here:

• Melted down in front of the world as he prepared to give his “my dad was a great man” eulogy moments after Ewan hopped up there and reminded everyone what a prick Logan was
• Discovered that he gave away the farm with his Mencken plan, and that the leverage he thought he had was actually a time bomb that he himself had armed
• Stormed out of the reception and into an angry mob that he started cussing at until he got punched in the face and trampled a little, which is, I think, maybe, what he wanted to happen all along, due to the thing I mentioned earlier about the people on this show finding creative new ways to prove how empty they are inside

I’m a little mad at myself that I was surprised by any of this. Like, of course Roman would melt down into a puddle when things got a teeny bit real or hard. He’s a little boy with no spine and he has been pretty much every second we’ve known him. This was always where it was headed for Roman. I should have known that.

GRADE: F

MUST IMPROVE: We could go a lot of places here but let’s stick with “running into an angry mob that hates your family and taunting them with cusses”

Cousin Greg

It says a lot about how far this goof has fallen in my eyes that when I saw him furiously peddling that bicycle through Manhattan traffic to the funeral, I — a person who has written quite literally thousands of words about my affinity for him, and who referred to him as “my sweet boy” as recently as the beginning of this season — found myself thinking “Man, how funny would it be if he gets hit by an SUV right now?”

Whatever. I stand by it. Everything started going to hell once he got that haircut a while ago. It’s a Samson situation we have here, but one with charm instead of physical strength. And come on, don’t act like it wouldn’t have been funny to see all those arms and legs flail about as he launched over the hood of a Cadillac Escalade. I swear I am not a violent person. But still. I’m laughing a little right now just thinking about it.

GRADE: F

MUST IMPROVE: Hair floppiness

Mencken

Mencken has three things going against him right now. The first is the thing where he’s kind of a Nazi, which we should not overlook here or with any Nazi-adjacent person. The second is that the position he’s in right now means a lot of dopes and idiots are going to harangue him for favors and influence at places like — to choose a relevant example — funerals, even when he just wants to be left alone, which sounds like a living hell to me. And the third is the thing where he might actually have to be the President, which also sounds pretty terrible to me.

It remains my position that anyone who actually wants to be the president should be automatically disqualified from holding the position. That kind of ambition is weird and suspect to me. That goes double — triple, even — for people who might be Nazis.

GRADE: F

MUST IMPROVE: It’s generally not a great thing when a two-paragraph description of you includes the word “Nazi” multiple times

Snot

The problem with snot is that it’s the only bodily fluid that comes out of your face that isn’t sympathetic at all. Like, tears usually get people to say “Aww, it’s okay, man.” Blood gets people concerned for your well-being. Vomit means you’re physically ill and in hell about it a little bit. Even drool makes people feel bad for you sometimes because it means you’ve lost control of things a little bit.

But a dribble of snot comes out of your nose, for almost any reason, and people look at it and you and their immediate reaction is “gross.” It’s not fair. We all have snot. But life isn’t always fair. Snot will take anyone down a peg. It’s the great equalizer like that.

GRADE: F

MUST IMPROVE: Staying inside faces

Mausoleums

It’s incredibly weird to me that we — humans, just in general — take our dead and dress them in their best clothes and put them in beautifully crafted wooden boxes and then bury them in a big grass field with a bunch of other dead people. It’s even weirder when people spend massive sums of money on huge marble tombs to house their body boxes. Think about it all for a little bit this week. Think about how we got here, to a place where this is a normal thing people do. Or… don’t. I’ve apparently thought about it enough for both of us.

GRADE: F

MUST IMPROVE: There is very little stopping you from writing something like “put my ashes in a hot dog cannon and blast them into a lake” in your will

Tom

He’s tired, okay? He’s just very tired. He’s been up running a news network and getting bullied into calling an election for a fascist and he’s not getting any credit for it and he’s just so very tired. He just needs a little nap. Not at the hotel. They know him there. It’s sad. A little nap at home. And some credit for helping the Nazi become president. It would be nice if his pregnant estranged wife would stop drinking champagne a lot, too. But that’s a problem for tomorrow. After he gets a little sleep.

He’s really very tired.

GRADE: D

MUST IMPROVE: He is the boss now and no one could stop him from putting a little cot in his office

Connor

The thing here is that Connor wanted to give a speech at Logan’s funeral that broke the form of the traditional eulogy and — maybe, if the other siblings are to be believed — could have left them open to legal liability and I NEED TO KNOW WHAT HE WAS GOING TO SAY AND HOW HE WAS GOING TO SAY IT.

COME ON.

YOU CAN’T JUST INTRODUCE THAT AND NOT DELIVER IT.

I MEAN, YOU CAN, AND IT IS PROBABLY BETTER FROM A STORYTELLING STANDPOINT BUT…

LIKE…

COME ON.

GRADE: D

MUST IMPROVE: SHOW ME

Matsson

Matsson:

• Looks like he’s getting his deal through now, thanks to the “American CEO” gambit that Shiv cooked up
• Shaved and put on a suit, which I did not love for him, if only because, like… what’s the point of being a billionaire if you still have to shave and wear a suit, you know?
• Got to tell the maybe next President that his personal political platform is “pussy, privacy, pasta,” which had to be a little exciting for him

Mixed bag for Matsson.

GRADE: C-

MUST IMPROVE: Show up to the next funeral in a hoodie

Gerri

Gerri spent most of this episode making concerned faces directed in the general direction of Roman, a man(-ish) she has a complicated relationship with, who also fired her, and who left himself open to a lawsuit worth many millions of dollars based on the many pictures of his penis he sent her.

I would have enjoyed hearing Gerri’s inner monologue this week. Maybe they can offer it as a bonus at some point, like a director’s commentary. Something to consider.

GRADE: C

MUST IMPROVE: I am going to be very disappointed if Gerri does not follow through with her lawsuit because she feels bad for Roman

Various Karls, Franks, and Karolinas

Quick check-in:

• Hugo spent the whole episode feeding Kendall information during a funeral and has now been upgraded from stooge to dog (woof woof)
• Frank blew off the pitch to join Roman’s posse and then described Logan as “a salty dog” and “a good egg,” which is at least half right
• Karl is probably still watching the footage of Roman blubbering in the church, and he’s probably forwarding it to at least a dozen people

About halfway through this episode, the thought “what if Karl and Frank gave one of the eulogies together?” zipped into my head. I enjoyed that image a lot. Still do, really.

GRADE: C+

MUST IMPROVE: Getting out for good

Kendall

I’ll be honest: I did not expect there to be any situation where Kendall ended up with a B after the way he started the episode. He spent the first 15-20 minutes just yelling strange phrases at the women in his life right out on the sidewalk. There was a “YOU’RE TOO ONLINE” at Rava when she was escaping with the kids, and there was a “YOU’RE DUMB” at Jess when she told him she was quitting. It was going real, real bad for Kendall.

But then…

Against staggering odds…

He kind of nailed the emergency impromptu eulogy and he maneuvered his way through a power vacuum to be in a position to run the company himself and, I mean, he behaved like a reasonably competent — awful, but competent — individual, which is a big step for him. I don’t know. I’m still kind of shocked by it all. He’ll probably fumble it all in pathetic fashion soon enough (it’s what he does), but still. Decent showing.

GRADE: B

MUST IMPROVE: I must again stress that you should never yell “YOU’RE TOO ONLINE” at anyone, ever, especially in public, and especially if you want to win that argument

Shiv

Shiv:

• Might have positioned herself as the American CEO of the GoJo-led Waystar, if the deal does in fact squeak through under a Mencken presidency
• Just kind of blurted out a pregnancy announcement to her brothers in the car on the way to their dad’s funeral, which is probably not how she pictured it all going down when she was a young girl with plans of starting a family
• I mean, again… still drinking a lot of champagne for a pregnant lady

Lot going on here. I think I’m giving her a B just because the bar was set so low in the last few episodes. We grade on a curve here.

GRADE: B

MUST IMPROVE: I haven’t heard her toss out any baby names yet and I’m suddenly very curious to hear what she’s thinking there

Rava

All I ever want for any secondary character on this show is to get as far away from the Roy family as any single episode’s runtime will allow, so I am very happy for Rava and her panicked journey upstate with the children.

GRADE: B+

MUST IMPROVE: Drive faster!

Logan’s exes, collectively

I hope they all bond over this and end up going on a yearly trip to wine country together. I would like to see how Marcia reacts to a wine that disappoints her. And I bet Kerry is fun after a few glasses of white. And I bet Caroline can drink both of them under the table. This paragraph started as a joke but now I’m mad I won’t actually get to see it happen. It’s a problem I have sometimes.

GRADE: B+

MUST IMPROVE: Choices of men

Jess Jordan

YES

JESS

GET OUT

LEAVE

RUN

GO

YES

GRADE: A

MUST IMPROVE: I want to say “doing this weeks and possibly months or years ago” but I don’t want to lose sight of the fact that it’s still good it’s happening at all

Ebba

I love Ebba. Just ruining her boss and leaking any and all information she stumbles across or is openly told, for the very justifiable reason of “he’s a creep who sexually harassed her by sending pints or frozen blood as a joke and/or romantic gesture.” I hope she and Jess Jordan start a podcast titled “Our Manchild Bosses” and violate their NDAs every week by telling stories about stuff Matsson and Kendall did. Make it a whole spinoff. Have Jeremy Strong show up two or three times each season and yell about the lawyers he’s going to hire to try to stop them. It would be riveting television.

GRADE: A

MUST IMPROVE: Ebba should go to Cancun and cut loose a little bit

Ewan Roy

There are power moves and then there’s “storming the lectern during your brother’s funeral to give a eulogy no one asked for about what a jerk he was almost all the time and how the world is probably better off with him dead.”

Fun family, the Roys.

GRADE: A

MUST IMPROVE: I mean, if you’re gonna go for it, might as well spit on the casket on your way back to the pew, right?

Caleb Martin contributed 18 points off the bench for the Miami Heat in their dominant 128-102 win over the Boston Celtics in Game 3 of the Eastern Conference Finals on Sunday night, May 21. In the Heat’s 111-105 Game 2 victory, Martin torched the Celtics for 25 points, and he bucketed another 15 in the series’ opening matchup (another Heat win).

The eighth-seeded Heat are one win away from perhaps the most improbable NBA Finals appearance in history — certainly in recent memory — and we learned during TNT’s Game 2 broadcast that Martin was just one J. Cole call away from Miami last summer.

“We found out some interesting facts about Caleb Martin and how he got to this point,” TNT sideline reporter Allie LaForce said during the second quarter, as captured by Bleacher Report. “We were talking to [Heat head coach] Erik Spoelstra before the game, and he said a week before camp started, J. Cole — yes, J. Cole, the rapper — called assistant coach Caron Butler and said, ‘My guy Caleb Martin is available.’”

LaForce continued, “Coach Butler passed on the information to Erik Spoelstra. He said, ‘Could he come? We’re scrimmaging tomorrow.’ [Martin] showed up, impressed everyone, became a two-way player, and ever since, was a huge part of the starting rotation until they had to decide to sign him full-time. It was a match made in heaven from day one.”

Martin went undrafted in the 2019 NBA draft, signing that summer as an undrafted free agent with the Charlotte Hornets. The Nevada product inked a multi-year pact with the team by that October (as relayed by the NBA at the time), but Martin was waived in August 2021.

Miami signed Martin to a two-way contract in September 2021 (as first reported by The Athletic’s Shams Charania), which blossomed into a three-year extension worth up to $20.4 million come last July.

Undrafted players Martin, Duncan Robinson, Gabriel Vincent, and Max Strus have contributed impressively to this magical Heat playoff run led by six-time All-Star Jimmy Butler.

J. Cole could also be worth a look this coming offseason. The Dreamville rapper (and nasty hooper in his own right) has experience playing professionally in the Basketball Africa League and the Canadian Elite Basketball League.

Game 4 of the Eastern Conference Finals is slated to tip off at 8:30 p.m. ET on Tuesday, May 23, from Miami’s Kaseya Center. The potential elimination game will be broadcast on TNT.

Last month, Mike Lindell was ordered to pay $5 million to a computer forensics expert who successfully proved that the MyPillow’s CEO election data did not prove 2020 voter fraud. Lindell had offered the prize money as part of a contest that spectacularly blew up in his face. However, despite losing the arbitration ruling, Lindell is still trying to get out of paying the $5 million reward.

Lawyers for Robert Zeidman, the cyber expert who won Lindell’s contest, have requested that a judge compel Lindell to pay the prize money immediately, which should be easy considering how often he boasts about MyPillow’s success.

Via CNN:

“It’s kind of put up or shut up time for Mr. Lindell,” said Zeidman’s attorney, Brian Glasser, co-founder of Bailey & Glasser LLP. “If Lindell is not a complete fraudster, he should have the ability to pay.”

Lindell had already asked a state court to vacate the arbitration panel’s decision, according to the new filing from Zeidman’s team. Lindell has not yet made any payments to Zeidman.

In true Lindell fashion, he’s calling the ruling a “sham” and vowing to prove that he knows the real truth, which is exactly how Lindell ended up in this situation in the first place. Why start learning lessons now?

“This is a complete sham. A complete sham,” Lindell told CNN. “The bottom line is this thing is wrong, and I’m not stopping until we prove him wrong.”

(Via CNN)

60 Minutes received intense backlash earlier this year after handing Marjorie Taylor Greene a platform for her anti-trans agenda, which is one of her most frequently articulated stances of late. That is, other than her quest to seemingly impeach every Democrat and abolish porn websites. Her anti-trans sentiment is an old favorite, though, and Greene frequently rages against what she calls the “Trans agenda destroying women.”

Notably, however, Greene’s far-right producer boyfriend, Brian Glenn, is the subject of a video that’s been circulating on Twitter. The Patriot Takes Twitter account shared an old clip from his WFAA newscaster days in Dallas. In the clip, Glenn jokes about how the pantyhose “does feel kind of good actually.”

What was Greene’s response? That Glenn was “reporting on an upcoming local theatre production and the morons over at Patriot Takes think this is an attack…. The left is so stupid.”

She seems fine with drag as a “joke,” apparently, but Greene sure won’t tolerate the attire when her boyfriend isn’t involved. The Patriot Takes Twitter account has posted various clips about her blaming “drag queen story time” for corrupting the children (and much worse).

Yet it’s fine with Greene that her boyfriend did the drag routine back in the day for fun on local news. Naturally, the tweets flowed in to call out her hypocrisy.

Janelle Monáe has been one of the most talked-about pop culture figures in recent weeks, due largely to the skin-bearing rollout of her upcoming album, The Age Of Pleasure, and how it contrasts her previous style era, which featured her mostly covered up in suits. Now, Monáe has talked about what’s going on here.

In a new Rolling Stone feature, Monáe offered some succinct reasoning behind her skimpier outfits as of late, saying, “I’m much happier when my titties are out and I can run around free.”

The piece explores the regular parties Monáe hosts and opens with an anecdote about them showing their butt to their friends at one of them. Monáe said of how these events inspired “Lipstick Lover,” “I have a whole spreadsheet with 50 to almost 100 experiences that I had at this party. I’ve been a Lipstick Lover. I wear red lipsticks at the parties. I’ve had moments where if me and a girl or an energy want to engage, you’re going to see lipstick. […] I remember how it felt when I got kissed on my neck with red lipstick. I remember how I went to bed feeling. It was a deep rouge. It wasn’t matte. I remember the way the person looked. And I was like, ‘That’s a f*cking song.’”

Monáe also revealed that even when they were publicly more buttoned up, their lifestyle off-camera wasn’t necessarily that way: “Even when I was really, really wearing only suits, I was either in a suit or you would find me at my own parties naked. It was no in-between.”

Read the full feature here.

Janelle Monáe is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

It’s a common experience. You finally get around to watching the television show that everyone has been talking about, except it’s a show that everyone was talking about 5, 10, 20 years ago, and now, in 2023, you get weird looks when you bring up, like, the Man in Black from Lost. Aubrey Plaza recently had that happen to her with The Sopranos.

“I’m shook,” she told Vanity Fair about the series finale of The Sopranos, which she’s been watching with her buddy, New Girl‘s Jake Johnson. “Yesterday I was like, ’Oh my God, what do you think happened?’ And he was like, ‘I don’t know but I was crying,’ and I was like, ‘I was crying too.’ I was like, ‘This is ridiculous, that we’re going through Sopranos finale stuff.’” Why did Plaza decide to start The Sopranos now? It’s one of the best shows ever, that’s why.

Also, she worked with Sopranos star Michael Imperioli on The White Lotus.

Plaza finally feasted on the series that birthed prestige television while making the second season of another obsession-inducing show, The White Lotus. She was starring alongside Michael Imperioli, who played the tragic Christopher Moltisanti on The Sopranos, and figured if she had plot questions, she could just ask him.

If you haven’t gotten around to watching Deadwood yet, don’t wait like Plaza and The Sopranos. As long as Ian McShane works with you.

(Via Vanity Fair)

Foo Fighters are in a transitional period, so a lot of new things are happening for Dave Grohl and company. They have a new album, But Here We Are, on the way (their first since the death of Taylor Hawkins). They delivered the Foo Fighters: Preparing Music For Concerts livestream event this past weekend, where they introduced Josh Freese as their new touring drummer. Also during that performance, they debuted a new song, “Nothing At All.”

The song has a bit of a slinky groove to it in the verses before ramping up the rock intensity for an in-your-face chorus. Grohl starts the song, “I’ve been meaning to tell you / I’ve been out of my head / Put my arm on your doorstep / Get you out of my bed / Maybe I’m delusional / Is that so unusual?”

Press materials previously said of the upcoming album, “But Here We Are is in nearly equal measure the 11th Foo Fighters album and the first chapter of the band’s new life. Sonically channelling the naiveté of Foo Fighters’ 1995 debut, informed by decades of maturity and depth, But Here We Are is the sound of brothers finding refuge in the music that brought them together in the first place 28 years ago, a process that was as therapeutic as it was about a continuation of life.”

Watch Foo Fighters perform “Nothing At All” above.

But Here We Are is out 6/2 via Roswell Records/RCA Records. Find more information here.