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Drug addiction is brutal, both for the person addicted and for their loved ones. Addiction can destroy lives, tear apart families and wreak havoc on communities. Anyone who has dealt with addiction themselves or has tried to help a friend or family member through it knows how hard it can be and how helpless it can feel.

Anger, confusion and frustration are natural responses to the behaviors of a person struggling with addiction. So are love, compassion and empathy when you understand the nature of addiction. Parents of people struggling with substance abuse often feel a constant push and pull between all of those feelings, but at the end of the day, every loving parent just wants their child to be OK.

When Sean Hannity aired a leaked 2018 voicemail message from Joe Biden to his son, Hunter, on his Fox News show, the world got a glimpse of the emotional weight of addiction and the unconditional love of a parent who doesn’t know how to help their child stuck in the throes of addiction.

In the voicemail, which was obtained by the Daily Mail, we hear an emotional Biden telling his son that he loved him, that he needed to get help and that he was there for him.

“It’s Dad. I called to tell you I love you. I love you more than the whole world, pal. You gotta get some help. I know you don’t know what to do. I don’t either. But I’m here, no matter what you need … I love you.”

Hannity called the voicemail “sad,” and then tried to use it to make Biden look bad. “Now that voicemail reportedly came at the exact same time Hunter lied on a gun application to buy a handgun,” he said.

However, rather than seeing it as damning, people reacted to the recording with overwhelming support. Those who have struggled with addiction, and those who have loved ones who have, simply saw a concerned father reaching out to a struggling son with compassion and love.

For instance, former NBA star Rex Chapman, who went through a very public struggle with opioid addiction, wrote on Twitter, “As a recovering drug addict I can’t tell you how mean spirited this feels … They’re exploiting a dad’s love for his son who’s troubled. Wow. I guess no one at Fox News knows any of these opioid addicts across the country.”

Chapman pointed out that the Biden family has endured unfathomable tragedy, with Hunter Biden losing his mom and sister in a car accident and losing his brother to brain cancer.

“The fact of the matter is that many addicts have family members who can’t or won’t say these words to them. Who only judge. Hunter is very lucky to have a dad like this,” he shared. “If only every addict were so lucky…”

u201cThe fact of the matter is that many addicts have family members who canu2019t or wonu2019t say these words to them. Who only judge. Hunter is very lucky to have a dad like this.u201d

— Rex Chapmanud83cudfc7ud83cudffc (@Rex Chapmanud83cudfc7ud83cudffc)
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Actor and journalist Ben Dreyfuss shared that he’d gotten calls like this from his family when he was struggling with drugs and mental health issues and that the audio made him want to cry. “Joe Biden seems like a really good dad?” he wrote.

u201cThe actual audio of thisu2014as someone who has struggled with drugs and mental health issues and received calls like this from my familyu2014just sort of almost made me cry u201d

— Ben Dreyfuss (@Ben Dreyfuss)
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The bafflement at how this voicemail could possibly make Biden look bad came from across the political spectrum. Conservative commentator Bill Kristol simply wrote, “The fact that Fox News thinks this reflects badly on Joe Biden says it all.”

u201cThe fact that Fox News thinks this reflects badly on Joe Biden says it all.u201d

— Bill Kristol (@Bill Kristol)
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And conservative writer Megan Basham of The Daily Wire wrote, “This is nothing to sneer at. It’s been quite a number of years, but I’ve been on the receiving end of calls like this from my parents. Praying today for Hunter’s salvation.”

u201cThis is nothing to sneer at. Itu2019s been quite a number of years, but Iu2019ve been on the receiving end of calls like this from my parents. Praying today for Hunteru2019s salvation. Who knows but such a mighty work of God might change Bidenu2019s own heart.u201d

— Megan Basham (@Megan Basham)
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Surveys have shown that about half of American families report being touched by addiction, and addiction doesn’t discriminate between political parties or points of view. What reactions to this voicemail show is that a father reaching out to his drug-addicted child with a message of concern and unconditional love is heart-wrenching, but also relatable for so many people.

There are healthy and unhealthy ways to love a person through addiction, but it’s important for every human being to know that they are loved and that their loved ones are going to be there for them, no matter what struggles they face.

This message from Biden to his son should have remained private. But since it’s out there, let’s acknowledge it for the beautiful example of parental love that it is.

Tyler The Creator has been pretty busy for the past decade or so, going from teenage troublemaker to Grammy-winning superstar. Still, it’s kind of impressive that he was so busy that he completely missed the release of the third Rush Hour film in 2007 — and somehow forgot it exists for the 15 years since. A recent viewing of the first Rush Hour apparently brought it to his attention and not only was he floored by the discovery, he now refuses to watch Rush Hour 3, which he still doesn’t quite believe exists.

“So we watched rush hour two and i was bout to blurt out ‘sad they didnt get the third one in,’” he wrote on Instagram. “But before i could this f*cking popped up and i feel like im in a vortex. WHEN THE F*CK DID THIS MOVIE HAPPEN BROOD WHERE WAS I, I DO NOT REMEMBER THIS EXISTING
THIS IS FAKE, IVE BEEN LIED TO IM NOT GONNA WATCH IT EITHER.” T also took a screenshot from his Instagram Story and shared it on Twitter, writing, “i dont believe this is real mandela effect or something.”

Mandela effect refers to the phenomenon of false memories being shared by multiple people, but it’s unclear whether Tyler thinks it’s the Mandela effect that he wasn’t aware of the second Rush Hour sequel or that it actually exists. Can Netflix’s algorithm be tricked into proposing movies that no one’s ever seen? Pretty trippy, right? Now we’re all in a vortex. Meanwhile, maybe T really is better off skipping this one; Rush Hour 3 only holds a 17% on Rotten Tomatoes, although the audience score is a little over 60% (not really a great thing, in my experience). On the other hand, he might want to catch up; Chris Tucker and Jackie Chan have been teasing Rush Hour 4 for a little over three years.

On Tuesday, the world lost Angela Lansbury, who passed away mere days shy of what would have been her 97th birthday. Over her long career, the British-born actress was many things: a starlet signed to MGM during the Golden Age of Hollywood; a three-time Oscar-nominee; a Tony-winning musical theater goddess and gay icon; a TV staple who spent 12 seasons on Murder, She Wrote.

Lansbury was also a major part of one of Disney’s biggest-ever hits: 1991’s Beauty and the Beast, in which she voiced Mrs. Potts, the cook-turned-teacup. Her big song was “Be Our Guest,” which she sang alongside Jerry Orbach’s maître d’-turned-candelabra Lumière. It’s a really charming song, maybe the movie’s peak number. Upon news of Lansbury’s passing, people shared not just the movie sequence but the behind-the-scenes footage of them recording it, which might actually be even more delightful than the scene itself.

In the clip, Lansbury is really into it. She makes faces, she contorts her body, she acts it out. Orbach, too, is really into it, and if you only know him as the stern dad from Dirty Dancing or the driven NYPD detective from Law & Order, it should be mindblowing.

Lansbury’s career was long and diverse, and social media was clogged with clips of her work after she passed on. So while we’re here, here’s a bit of a gear shift: her blood-curdling, Academy Award-nominated turn as one of the screen’s worst-ever moms in 1962’s The Manchurian Candidate.

Coming into his third season with the Charlotte Hornets, LaMelo Ball was hoping to take another step into the All-Star realm in the East, as he just missed out on that honor a year ago.

With Miles Bridges off the roster, Ball figured to shoulder an even larger scoring load this season for the Hornets as they enter the year with plenty of questions about who will step into the void around him. Unfortunately, Ball’s third-year campaign got off to a rough start on Monday night when he turned his ankle over on a drive in a preseason game against the Wizards and was quickly ruled out for the rest of the night with a sprain.

It was a nasty looking ankle injury, as his foot turned almost completely over at 90 degrees, and on Tuesday the results of an MRI came back and revealed a Grade 2 sprain that will keep him out into the regular season, per Shams Charania, with the team not offering a firm timetable for his return in their official release.

The Hornets figure to be heavily reliant on Ball this season, so any absence will be a big blow to their hopes of finding their way into the play-in picture in the East once again, but they also will take the long view with their franchise cornerstone and look to ensure he’s as close to full strength as possible before bringing him back.

Despite some various changes in Marvel’s schedule, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever will make its highly-anticipated debut in theaters next month. Though the cast lost its lead, Chadwick Boseman, in 2020, the movie is still finding ways to honor Boseman’s legacy.

Today, Marvel released a new featurette of Wakanda Forever that offers a behind-the-scenes look at the upcoming sequel, alongside stories of Boseman from his peers. “Chadwick knew exactly what this story and these images meant to the world,” Angela Bassett says in the clip, which features various cast and crew sharing stories and praising Boseman’s portrayal of the Black Panther in the original 2018 film. “In the telling of this story, we were all able to honor him together.”

Earlier this year, Lupita Nyong’o described what it was like for the crew to return for the second film after Boseman’s death. “For us as a cast, having lost our king, Chadwick Boseman, that was a lot to process, and in many ways, we’re still processing it. When you lose someone, I don’t know when you stop missing them. And of course, we felt it so much, making this film without him.”

Marvel also released a dazzling new set of posters featuring the cast of the upcoming installment. Plus: Martin Freeman!

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever hits theaters on November 11th and stars Letitia Wright, Danai Gurira, Winston Duke, Florence Kasumba, Dominique Thorne, Michaela Coel, Tenoch Huerta, Martin Freeman, and Angela Bassett.

(Via Deadline)

The Sandman author Neil Gaiman is never afraid to push back at trolls who grow confused about the various fantasy shows on streaming. Recently, he answered to angry J.R.R. Tolkien fans who complained that Amazon’s Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is too darn “woke.” Those trolls also mistakenly believed that Neil wrote the Middle-earth saga, which caused much amusement from the Good Omens scribe. The ordeal also involved Neil coming for Elon Musk and his “fail” lane regarding gripes about Rings of Power, but Neil also has plenty of experience in being called “too woke.” What those complainers — including people who raised a fuss about diverse casting in Netflix’s The Sandman adaptation — don’t realize is that this Gaiman comic would have been considered “woke” in its time, if there was such a thing back then.

Much like a ragey person came at Gaiman over the “‘woke diversity’ sh*t” in Rings of Power, that same gripe is surfacing with someone urging him to “[s]tay unwoke and Sandman will do just fine.” That happened in response to the Audible production, but the point remains the same. And in response, Neil tweeted, “Too late. Sandman was already woke in 1988. But good news! We did fine anyway!”

People who read The Sandman comics (and those who even went back to Neil’s Black Orchid run) know that the comic was ahead of its time in terms of inclusion. The care that Gaiman took with female narratives put women in comic book stores back in the late 1980s. He welcomed a legion of female comic book fans and helped to pioneer their prominence in the community, and as far as The Sandman goes, Dream, Death, and the rest of their Endless siblings do not have a specific race as written.

However, people are gonna complain no matter what, and that’s why Gaiman found himself (even before The Sandman began filming) fending off complaints that the series cast diverse actors, including Kirby Howell-Baptiste (definitely not a pale goth girl) as Death and Mason Alexander Park (a non-binary actor who prefers they/them pronouns) as Desire. At the time, Neil insisted, “I give zero f*cks about people who don’t understand/haven’t read Sandman whining… Watch the show, make up your minds.” The show was a success with fans at large, and Gaiman has been very upfront about this being an expensive production with no second season guaranteed (woke or not).

Fingers crossed, though.

The Sandman is currently streaming on Netflix.

Sometimes, committing to the gag really pays off.

This was certainly the case for reality star Charli D’Amelio and her pro partner Mark Ballas, who showed up on the “DWTS” stage completely looking the part for their “Simpsons” inspired jazz routine—yellow skin and all.

“Disney+” was the theme of the night, which meant that performances reflected not only the usual Disney fanfare, but pretty much everything that can currently be viewed on the streaming platform. To name a few fun examples—Wayne Brady and Witney Carson performed a routine from “Hamilton,” Gabby Windey and Val Chmerkovskiy chose a number based on “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2” and Selma Blair and Sasha Farber danced to “The Muppet Show Theme.”

While everyone brought their A-game, once D’Amelio and Ballas showed up at the end of the night, all bets were off.

Set to the iconic “Simpsons” theme song, the duo traveled their way through Springfield to land back at home on their famous brown sofa, completely bringing the cartoon to life. How D’Amelio kept her giant blue wig on is beyond me … though the “300 bobby pins” she mentioned might have helped.

Watch below:

It was bizarre. It was kooky. It was the very essence of “The Simpsons.”

Granted, this idea isn’t completely new. A similar (um … very similar) dance was performed in 2020 on the BBC’s “Strictly Come Dancing.” But still, the performance was quite impressive, and undeniably fun.

“Mark my words, that is about to go viral,” praised judge Derek Hough. Len Goodman added, “I didn’t like it, I loved it. It was so tight, it was together. It was full of wit and characterization. Marge, you’re magical.”

D’Amelio and Ballas scored 36/40, but it wasn’t just the judges who were floored by the routine. YouTube has been flooded with positive comments.

“I thought this was going to be the cringiest and worst dance of the night , boy was I freaking wrong,” wrote one person.

“They deserved at least one 10. This was creative, entertaining, and perfect,” wrote another.

D’Amelio survived another week with her amazing transformation … and has possibly made us all consider Marge Simpson for a Halloween costume this year.

Just when you thought Kanye West’s bizarre downward spiral into gross antisemitism couldn’t get any worse, Vice has unearthed clips cut from the rapper’s Tucker Carlson interview that paint him in an even worse light than before. It’s pretty wild to think that Carlson’s production team thought the quotes too extreme for even his usual amount of questionable content, but in those quotes, West espoused longstanding (and thoroughly debunked) conspiracy theories about Jewish people, expressed a paranoid belief that “fake children” were manipulating his family, and even admitted to being vaccinated against COVID-19 — which is probably most surprising, considering all that other stuff.

Among the odd statements Kanye made in the unaired clips are assertions that Planned Parenthood was created to “control the Jew population” — which he says is actually Black people, according to the beliefs of the Black Hebrew Israelites, some of whom have been deemed “outspoken anti-Semites and racists” by the Anti-Defamation League. “When I say Jew, I mean the 12 lost tribes of Judah, the blood of Christ, who the people known as the race Black really are,” he explained. “This is who our people are. The blood of Christ. This, as a Christian, is my belief.” This, of course, contradicts the beliefs of the Christian church and is unsupported by historical evidence.

Elsewhere in the cut footage, Kanye claimed that his home had been infiltrated by actors for the purpose of influencing his children. “I mean, like actors, professional actors, placed into my house to sexualize my kids,” he said. “Everyone saw in broad daylight these public figures kidnap my Black child on her birthday. I did not know the location of the birthday party and Travis Scott had to give me the address. When I showed up, they were so frazzled. If that’s not the most Karen-level thing, to feel like you can take a Black child and not give the father the address. This is the way people are treated when they get out of prison when they go to prison. And 100 percent, I am in a glass prison, or else I’d be the one with the say-so over where my children go to school.”

Welcome to co-parenting, I guess?

Vice has more clips, in which West accuses Louis Vuitton of killing Virgil Abloh (“The level of racism, elitism and pressure that he was under, I’m sure, affected his health.”) and admits to being vaccinated (likely cut because of Carlson’s longstanding, paranoid opposition to the COVID-19 vaccine, mostly out of political contrarianism). You can check those out below.

To the MeU who’ve been waiting to see Amber in Europe, you may have have to wait a wee bit longer.

The f(x) main rapper and former SM artist made the announcement on her respective social handles today (October 11) stating the postponement of her self-titled tour:

“For my fans attending my shows in LA, London, & Paris:

Hey guys, sorry for the bad news, but I will be pushing back my tour dates for LA, London, & Paris. My upcoming album release has been delayed, and I really wanted to show all of you guys the new music and perform the new show we’ve been preparing. However, due to many unforeseen factors, my team and I believe it would be best to postpone the tour until it was ready. I always want to give you guys my best and be 1000% and I want to work as hard as I can to get to that point and share it all with you. Anybody who bought tickets will be refunded at point of purchase. Thank you for your understanding.

I will still be performing in NY at the Metamoon Festival 11/26 and I’m looking forward to seeing all of you guys again on stage.”

Amber was originally set to hold concerts in Los Angeles on November 20 and 21, November 30 in London and December 1 in Paris. Just as mentioned in her Instagram post, the “Easier” singer will still make an appearance at Brooklyn’s Metamoon Festival at the Barclays Center next month. She’ll be joined by the other notable Asian acts like Lay Zhang, ØZI, Tia Ray and more.

Barely two weeks ago, Ryan Reynolds set the internet on fire with the bombshell news that Hugh Jackman will return as (a) Wolverine in Deadpool 3. Reynolds also revealed the film’s release date, but it appears he may have spoken too soon. In a move that seems unusual on this side of the pandemic, Marvel has delayed the release of several films and reportedly pulled one unknown movie completely off its schedule.

The delays follow reports that Blade director Bassam Tariq abruptly quit the film just a few weeks before it was set to start production in November. The Hollywood Reporter first broke the news that Blade was now on hold, and that decision has apparently created a ripple effect across Marvel’s release schedule.

Along with Blade moving its date back almost an entire year, high-profile films like Deadpool 3, Fantastic Four, and Avengers: Secret Wars have now been pushed back. Via Variety:

As part of the shuffle, “Blade” has moved from Nov. 3, 2023 to Sept. 6, 2024, which created a ripple on the rest of the MCU. “Deadpool 3” has relocated from Sept. 6, 2024 to Nov. 8, 2024; “Fantastic Four” has been shifted from Nov. 8, 2024 to Feb. 14, 2025; an untitled Marvel film has been pushed from Feb. 14, 2025 to Nov. 7, 2025; “Avengers: Secret Wars” has been delayed from Nov. 7, 2025 to May 1, 2026; and another untitled Marvel film set for May 1, 2026 has been removed from Disney’s calendar.

The good news, for Deadpool fans at least, is that the third film had the smallest delay of the bunch. A move from September to November isn’t that bad, provided no other Marvel directors suddenly quit between now and then. Fingers crossed.

(Via Variety)