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Even though the futures of various projects on deck at HBO Max are a bit uncertain, one thing is clear: the holiday season is still scheduled to go on as normal! The streamer is determined to spread some holiday cheer to audiences, and it will release four new holiday movies, including the long-awaited A Christmas Story sequel. Sure, Elmo was brutally fired from his first-ever hosting gig, but at least Santa Claus will come to town once more.

A Christmas Story Christmas will bring back the cast of the original movie for an all-grown-up version that centers on an adult Ralphie as he deals with Christmas as a father. Peter Billingsley will star once again as Ralphie alongside Erinn Hayes, Julianna Layne, R.D. Robb, Scott Schwartz, Zack Ward, and Julie Hagerty. The sequel will debut on HBO Max on November 17th, which will be the new official Christmas kick-off date! No more waiting until Thanksgiving.

Also heading to HBO Max will be a romantic comedy Holiday Harmony where an up-and-coming singer finds herself in a small Oklahoma town where she absolutely must help the local kids put on a holiday show (No, this isn’t a Lifetime movie). That movie, along with A Christmas Mystery, a movie about missing jingle bells, will hit the streamer on November 24th.

However, If none of these sound good to you, feel free to check out A Hollywood Christmas on December 1st, which follows an aspiring Christmas movie director who gets her production shut down due to budget cuts. That one is a little too on the nose, even for HBO. But it’s real!

(Via Deadline)

The Los Angeles Lakers officially made a trade on Thursday. The team sent Talen Horton-Tucker and Stanley Johnson to the Utah Jazz in exchange for Patrick Beverley, who the team previously acquired in the trade that sent Rudy Gobert to the Minnesota Timberwolves. It’s an interesting move for the Lakers, as the team brings a veteran into their backcourt who should provide some defensive bite and three-point shooting, both of which they could really use on the heels of a season in which they missed out on the play-in tournament.

The move got announced by Adrian Wojnarowski of ESPN on Wednesday night in a tweet sent just before midnight, but it wasn’t until the following day when the Lakers sent the tweet announcing that Beverley is headed to L.A.

It’s hardly unusual for Woj to get something that becomes official a day later, but apparently, the amount of time between the report hitting the Twitterverse and the move becoming official had some significance. According to Marc Spears of Andscape, the reason that the Lakers did not consummate the deal on Wednesday was in recognition of Kobe Bryant Day.

As Spears noted, the day recognizes the late Lakers superstar, whose numbers during his NBA career were 8 and 24.

Megan Thee Stallion and City Girls’ Yung Miami do some heavy flirting in a preview clip from an upcoming episode of Miami’s Revolt TV talk show Caresha Please. As the two rappers — who are both known for their unapologetically racy lyrics and sexy aesthetics — banter, Miami wonders whether Megan “likes girls,” prompting the Houston hottie to give an answer that causes Miami’s jaw to drop. “I like what I like,” she says. “I like you.”

Megan Thee Stallion’s friendship with City Girls has produced other, similar instances of flirtation, but also more innocent displays of mutual appreciation. When Miami released her solo track “Rap Freaks” late last year, Megan was tickled pink by her friend’s witty, bilingual wordplay, while in a discussion between the two in Interview magazine, Miami recalled having to beg DJs to play City Girls’ music when her musical partner JT was locked up for credit card fraud.

Other excerpts from the upcoming episode find Miami furthering the line of questioning, with both admitting they want to kiss each other and Miami asking Megan, “You would f*ck me?” When Megan responds in the affirmative, Miami looks taken aback — but also, very into it. The episode is set to premiere tonight at 8 pm ET on Revolt‘s YouTube channel.

In an area of Texas between Austin and Dallas, there’s a riverbed that holds real, honest-to-goodness dinosaur footprints, bringing out the 5-year-old in all of us.

How did they get there, you ask? When dinosaurs roamed the area 113 million years ago, the land was at the edge of a tidal sea. Shells from crustaceans that lived in the sea created calcium carbonate deposits, forming a lime-rich mud that was the perfect consistency to preserve the tracks of dinosaurs that occasionally crossed the tidal flats.

Since then, the dinosaur tracks have been preserved under layers of sediment and silt. They were first discovered in 1909 by a young boy named George Adams, who found some odd three-toed tracks in a limestone riverbed. But it wasn’t until 1937 that paleontologist R.T. Bird explored the area and recognized multiple trackways from therapods and sauropods whose footprints had been preserved almost perfectly under layers of mud.

Today, these trackways can be viewed in Dinosaur Valley State Park. The Paluxy River regularly has dry spots that allow some tracks to be seen at different times, but, according to ABC News, the drought in Texas has revealed tracks that even the park rangers haven’t been able to see in at least 20 years.

To be clear, the footprints don’t appear looking like this when the river dries up. Workers and volunteers have to meticulously clear away the dry mud and sediment with water, leaf blowers and brooms so that the definition of the tracks becomes visible in the limestone. But once they do, they look like something straight out of a movie.

The tracks above are found at the Taylor site, one of multiple track viewing sites in the park.

“The Paluxy River has pretty much gone dry this drought,” a worker shared in a video posted on the Friends of Dinosaur Valley State Park Facebook page. “What’s cool about the river is what you’ll find in the river. Sweep a little bit of the dirt and dust away and this is what you’ll find…dinosaur tracks. You see claw marks. These are awesome, awesome tracks. They are normally underwater so you normally don’t get to see these.”

The revealing of these particular tracks is exciting for researchers, who are mapping the dinosaur trackways in the park. Park Superintendent Jeff Davis told ABC News that the tracks at the Taylor site are possibly the longest tracks made by a single dinosaur in North America. Tracks that aren’t usually visible in other sites have also been revealed in this drought, enabling people to see exactly where these enormous creatures walked millions and millions of years ago.

Drought isn’t a good thing, but dinosaur tracks are an interesting silver lining. For more information about how these tracks came to be, visit the Dinosaur Valley State Park website.

The parts of our brains responsible for processing senses are also used for storing emotional memories. That’s why when we smell, hear or see things from the past we get that irresistible, bittersweet feeling of nostalgia.

A new video posted by @Rerunthe80s on TikTok is giving everyone who grew up in the ’80s and early ’90s the feels.

Gen X and older millennials, I’m looking at you.

In a TikTok called “Sounds from your childhood!” Rerunthe80s lays out a challenge. “I bet if you closed your eyes, you’d still know what most of these are!” the post reads.

The video is a series of quick clips that focus on the sounds of VHS tape boxes, VCRs, a rotary phone, the Velcro on a Trapper Keeper, the clicky-clack of a Walkman and more fun sounds that a lot of folks haven’t heard in decades.

“Holy cow, can anyone else smell these memories or is that just me?” Troy J commented. “Never thought I would miss these sounds,” Jurine Nieddu added.

@rerunthe80s

🔊 Sounds from your childhood! 🔊 I bet if you closed your eyes, you’d still know what most of these are! #1980s #1990s #genx #80skid #90skids

Kayden Kaidence perfectly described the vibe of the TikTok and the era when she said, “Everything had that nice chunky plastic sound to it, I miss those days,” she wrote

The funny thing is that most of those devices have now been replaced by smartphones. If someone told us back in the day that you could play music, movies and call people all on a device that fits in your pocket, no one would have believed them.

Billy Joel fans were in for a surprise while watching his residency show at Madison Square Gardens. And thanks to the internet, we can all be part of the fun too.

On Aug. 24, Joel welcomed pop singer Olivia Rodrigo onto the stage, and to say it brought the house down would be the understatement of a lifetime.

Rodrigo first sang her bittersweet breakup song “Deja Vu”—appropriate, as Joel is famously mentioned in the lyrics.

(If you’re not familiar, here it is: “I’ll bet that she knows Billy Joel, ‘Cause you played her “Uptown Girl.”)

“I’m such a huge fan and I couldn’t have written this next one without you,” the young singer told Joel before she began.

Then, Joel got up from his piano and the two sang “Uptown Girl.” Their chemistry alone was enough to prove that good music connection is not age-exclusive. Instead, it brings generations together.

If there’s any doubt, just check out some of these comments from YouTube:

“This is incredible! So much for the generation gap. Such nice work and musical chemistry between the two of them both. Wow!”

“I was there with my 14 year old daughter… who love’s Billy Joel…. And also loves Olivia Rodrigo…. This took a magical night …and shot it to the moon…. I love how Billy brought the younger generation to his show…. We will never forget this priceless experience.”

Of course, the 73-year-old is no stranger to what the cool kids are into. Many of his songs, like “Piano Man,” “Vienna” and “Zanzibar,” have become viral dance challenges online. Basically, what “Stranger Things” did for Kate Bush and Metallica, TikTok did for Joel. Gen Z certainly seems to be a more embracing bunch than teens of yesteryear, and it’s wholesomely refreshing.

Rodrigo and Joel shared a warm hug before the special guest went skipping away. And thus, the legendary moment ended.

You can check it out here:

So, over the last month, my process for making an internal list of pros and cons on a new movie has changed somewhat dramatically. Here are some pros about the new Sylvester Stallone movie, Samaritan, that, to be honest, I hadn’t all that much considered before:

1. It’s a movie. And since Bullet Train came out at the beginning of August, there really hasn’t been all that many of them. Which is weird because it sure seems like people enjoyed watching movies this summer.

2. The company that owns Samaritan didn’t just delete the movie off the server for a tax break. Again, in my life I had never really considered this before. But now this seems to be an actual thing that happens, and it didn’t happen to Samaritan, at least at the time I’m writing this. So, there’s a huge pro about Samaritan: if you want, you’ll be able to see it. This is not something we can say about every movie anymore.

Now, of course, there are some cons. One of them being Samaritan isn’t a particularly great movie. Or, really, even that good. Though I found myself enjoying it at times, but that could be due to the whole, “at least it wasn’t deleted,” aspect. Then again, I’ve seen movies that, in retrospect, they should have just deleted. So maybe that’s not it. But what somewhat saves Samaritan is Stallone – who also produced the movie and I’m sure had a lot of say in its direction*, even though that is credited to Julius Avery – who seems to be having a nice time and is actually pretty invested. (For anyone who is worried, this is not one of those movies where a big movie star is billed, yet has maybe three scenes and obviously only filmed for, at tops, two days. Stallone is very much the star of the movie.)

*Yes, anyone who has ever followed Stallone’s career know that he has a tendency to become the director of the movies he’s in, even if he’s not technically the director. But, seriously, reading through the Wikipedia entries of almost every Stallone production between 1980 and 2000, it’s comically similar in its wording of basically, “Sly and the director didn’t see eye to eye on the production and reports are that Stallone wound up directing it himself.” Look, Sly has a vision for his movies.

Samaritan starts out with one of those animated exposition sequences that just bombs the viewer in backstory and lore. Nine times out of ten this is a bad sign. We learn about a mythic battle between Samaritan and his arch-foe on top of a burning building. After, Samaritan was never seen again, though there are numerous websites and YouTube channels devoted to the idea Samaritan still lives, somewhere. (Tough, this seems like the least surprising aspect of this movie. I bet if I searched hard enough I could find a website that claims Peter Lawford is still alive somewhere and will become our next president.)

Many years later, a kid named Sam (Javon Walton) is having trouble with some bullies and a garbageman named Joe comes to his rescue. When Joe grabs a bully’s knife by the blade and destroys it with his bare hand, Sam, who is obsessed with Samaritan, thinks he’s found his long-lost hero. When Sam witnesses Joe get hit by a speeding car and break multiple bones in his body, yet survive and recovers quickly enough to walk away, he knows he’s found Samaritan.

The problem is, those bullies are part of a bigger crime organization run by some sort of warlord named Cyrus (Pilou Asbæk, who played Euron Greyjoy) who has a supernatural axe that used to belong to Samaritan’s arch enemy, but no actual powers himself. This leads to a showdown with poor Joe who just wants to be left alone and doesn’t really like being around other people (it’s here I found myself sympathizing with Joe), let alone be any kind of hero that has to save the city from a crime family. This all leads to somewhat of a twist a lot of people will see coming a mile away, even though I didn’t because I didn’t really even consider a movie like Samaritan would have any kind of surprise at the end. So I kind of found the whole ending somewhat nifty.

But, again, the reason this might be worth your time on a night you don’t have anything else to do anyway – this was basically my experience – is because of Stallone. Stallone seems to be having a great time and we even get rewarded at the end with Stallone full-on yelling his dialogue in a way only Stallone can do. Even though movie doesn’t always make total sense, at least in what it’s trying to say about good and evil, if it’s really trying to say much at all – I’ve just decided to think it’s not.

You can contact Mike Ryan directly on Twitter.

This year, Maury, the show that made the phrase “You are NOT the father” a recognizable pop culture reference, ended, 31 seasons after its 1991 debut. While the program has wrapped up, it apparently still has a social media team, who saw an opportunity with some recent news and beautifully seized it.

Perhaps more than any other celebrity, Nick Cannon is a famous haver of children, and he just announced this week that his tenth child is on the way with model Brittany Bell. (He’s already expecting a ninth child, too, with Abby De La Rosa.) So, as that story made the rounds, the folks at Maury played off their status as a dad-associated show and came through with a perfect tweet. They shared a post about the incoming bundle of joy and wrote simply, “Wildn,” of course a reference to Cannon’s show Wild ‘n Out.

As for what Cannon had to say about his continually full nest, he wrote on Instagram, “Time Stopped and This Happened…” That was the caption of a three-minute video announcing the new child.

Cannon’s children who have already been born are twins Monroe Cannon and Moroccan Scott Cannon (with Mariah Carey), Golden Cannon, Legendary Love Cannon, Zen S. Cannon, — who passed away last December at five months old — Zion Mixolydian Cannon, Zillion Heir Cannon, and Powerful Queen Cannon.

Carice Van Houten received death threats from Game of Thrones fans after her character, Melisandre, burned Shireen to death. The same thing happened with multiple actors on The Walking Dead and Anna Gunn on Breaking Bad. Stranger Things viewers haven’t gotten that far, but some of them did demand that Jamie Campbell Bower, who plays Vecna on the Netflix series, apologize for the death of Eddie Munson. Just to reiterate, that’s asking a real person to say sorry for killing a fictional character. Very normal.

“I haven’t got a single boo [on the streets] yet,” Bower told NME, but when he and Eddie actor Joseph Quinn went to South America, “they tried to make me apologize to Joseph.” His response: “I don’t want to apologize. I’m not sorry! He’s a victim.”

Vecna innocent! Well, not really. He’s pretty evil. But his actions did lead to the death Jason Carver, the worst character in Stranger Things history, so he’s not all bad.

Bower has had positive fan interactions, too.

The day before we speak, he was boarding a plane from London to LA when a mother and her daughter recognized him. “The daughter was quite reserved, but she just blossomed and bloomed in front of me,” he explains, fondly re-enacting their interaction. “Her mum was like, ‘I’ve never seen her like this before’. This is what I love – being able to encounter people [and hear how] the show means everything to them and it makes them feel heard.”

In related Stranger Things news, the writers are back in the room.

It’s inspiring to know that one of the biggest shows on television has the same process as me taking a test in high school. “Eh, I’ll get back to this one.”

(Via NME)

Meghan Markle just earned herself a new crown as The Queen of Spotify. Following Tuesday’s launch of her podcast, “Meghan Markle’s Archetypes,” the royal duchess has already managed to knock Joe Rogan out of the top spot on the streaming platform. “The Joe Rogan Experience” is almost always in the No. 1 spot week-to-week, but “Archetypes” managed to dethrone Rogan in the U.S. and several international markets including Canada, the U.K., Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand.

Via Variety:

In “Archetypes,” Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, invites cultural commentators, historians and contemporary thinkers to delve into the origin of stereotypes about women and how those shape narratives. The weekly series is produced by Meghan and Prince Harry’s Archewell Audio in partnership with Spotify’s Gimlet Media.

The first episode featured a conversation with Serena Williams as the two women discussed “the double standard women face when they are labeled ‘ambitious’ and the ripple effect this has on other aspects of their life, as well as how they are perceived.” Clearly, it was a winning combination that helped Markle snatch victory from Rogan.

However, the controversial podcaster sat down with Facebook/Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Thursday, which is sure to generate headlines and possibly restore Rogan to the top spot. Or not, and we enter a bold new era where Meghan Markle becomes the undisputed champ of podcasts. The internet, right? Who knows how anything works on here.

(Via Variety)