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Paddington is arguably more popular now than he’s ever been. The marmalade-loving, raincoat-wearing bear who relocates from Peru to England is now a movie star, battling the leads in The Undoing and, in the case of the sequel, getting a near-perfect score on Rotten Tomatoes. Until we know who he (gently, politely) fights in the third installment, he’s taking a break to have some afternoon tea with the Queen.

On Saturday, to celebrate Elizabeth II’s platinum Jubilee, a video was released showing Her Majesty sitting down with the CGI bear voiced by Ben Whishaw. Naturally Paddington makes a faux pas: He starts gulping from the teapot before his host has had a sip. He gets back on track by talking marmalade sandwiches, prompting the Queen to open her handbag, revealing where she stores her own backup food. Paddington also accidentally sprays an éclair onto a palace footman.

The Jubilee honors the 70th anniversary of Elizabeth II’s coronation, which even brought back Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, who decamped for the United States amidst accusations of racism among the Royal Family. Their return sparked boos from some in the crowd on Friday. But for now, let’s take a brief respite with a nice bear talking tea and fruit preserves.

(Via Deadline)

The Golden State Warriors led by as many as 15 points in the second half of Game 1 of the 2022 NBA Finals. As we’ve seen so many times over the years — especially when they’re playing big games at home — Golden State is excellent at landing a few haymakers and completely taking the opposing team out of a game.

That didn’t happen in Game 1. The Boston Celtics were able to withstand a flurry from the Warriors, compose themselves, and blow them away in the fourth quarter en route to a 120-108 win. On Saturday, Klay Thompson spoke to the media about what exactly happened and expressed his belief that Golden State got a little too comfortable upon opening up a big lead.

“I thought we got comfortable when we went up 15, including myself, our team, the fans,” Thompson said. “We’ve done it so many times, we probably expected we were just gonna win. But then I reminded myself the playoffs are about being uncomfortably until you complete the mission. So, it was a harsh reminder, but it was something we needed to go through, including myself, and it’s about how we respond tomorrow, which I’m very excited for.”

Thompson scored 15 points on 6-for-14 shooting in Game 1 and hit three of his seven attempts from deep. The Warriors will look to bounce back in Game 2 on Sunday night.

Last fall, Big Thief announced a world tour that kicked off at the end of January with performances in France. The string of shows, which comes after the release of their Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You album, was set to last until mid-June with a conclusion in Berlin, Germany. However, the band recently announced that they would extend their world tour with two performances in Tel Aviv, Israel. The shows were billed July 6-7, and together with the announcement, the BAND explained why they felt like it was important for them to perform in Israel, which is bassist Max Oleartchik’s hometown, but they were still hit with criticism.

“Over the last seven years we’ve traveled constantly around 3 of our members’ home country, the United States, meeting each other’s families and childhood friends and sharing in the joys and sorrows of a complicated, beautiful and tumultuous home,” they wrote. “We have grown so close. It is important for us to share our homes, families and friends with each other in order to gain a deeper understanding of one another and the people and places that have made us who we are. It is important for us to go where we have family to share space and play for them. It is foundational.”

They continued, “It is in that spirit that we made our decision to play in Israel. We are well aware of the cultural aspect of the BDS movement and the desperate reality of the Palestinian people. In terms of where we fit into the boycott, we don’t claim to know where the moral high ground lies and we want to remain open to other people’s perspectives and to love beyond disagreement.”

Big Thief concluded their message with the following:

We understand the inherently political nature of playing there as well as the implications. Our intention is not to diminish the values of those who support the boycott or to turn a blind eye to those suffering. We are striving to be in the spirit of learning. With this in heart, the show’s profits will be donated to NGOs that provide medical and humanitarian aid to Palestinian children, including joint efforts between Palestinians and Israelis working together for a better future.

With love,
Big Thief.

You can view the band’s full message in the post above and read some responses from fans below.

The New York Mets are currently without the services of ace pitcher Max Scherzer. The three-time Cy Young award winner joined the team as a free agent this offseason, and while he’s been excellent when he’s been on the bump for the Mets, Scherzer has been on the injury list for an oblique strain he suffered last month.

All that time at home for Scherzer has apparently found a way to quite literally come back to bite him. A report by Mike Puma of the New York Post indicates that Scherzer got bit on his left hand by one of his dogs while he’s working to rehabilitate his oblique strain, but the good news is the Mets apparently aren’t all that concerned.

At home in Florida, the Mets right-hander was bitten by one of his dogs in recent days, according to a source. The bite was to Scherzer’s non-pitching (left) hand, lessening the team’s concern. Scherzer is on the IL with an oblique strain and rehabbing for a potential July return to the Mets.

Since joining the team on a three-year deal that pays him an MLB record $43 million a year, Scherzer has gone 5-1 with a 2.54 ERA. New York is 35-19 on the season, a commanding 8.5 games up on the second-place Atlanta Braves in the NL East.

On Friday, Angel Olsen released her sixth album Big Time. The project is her first since 2021’s Songs Of The Lark And Other Far Memories and it delivered ten songs without any guest features. Together with the album’s arrival, Jeff Tweedy from the band Wilco debuted a cover of the project’s title track, which also served as the second single before its release. Tweedy shared the cover through a post on his substack page with the caption, “Here’s a song I learned from Angel Olsen’s new record that came out TODAY!” He also included photos that he took with Olsen when she visited him a few years ago.

As expected, Olsen caught wind of the cover and shared her appreciation for it on Twitter. “Jeff!!!” she wrote, “Covering ‘Big Time’! [four red heart emojis] I owe you one @JeffTweedy.” Olsen may return the favor sooner than you think as Tweedy is just a week removed from dropping his Cruel Country album with Wilco. That project presented 21 songs for their first body of work since 2019’s Ode To Joy.

Olsen herself has been pretty active in the cover department recently. She recently shared a cover of Bob Dylan’s “One Too Many Mornings” and donated proceeds from it to gun control. Prior to that, she covered Harry Styles’ “Boyfriends.”

You can check out Jeff Tweedy’s cover of “Big Time” here.

Big Time is out now via Jagjaguwar. You can stream it here.

Young Thug will spend the next six months behind bars at Cobb County Jail. That’s because a judge recently denied his bond after he expressed his “concern” towards Young thugs possibly being a danger to the community or obstructing justice in the YSL RICO case. “I realize that Mr. Williams is presumed innocent,” Judge Ural Glanville said during the hearing at Fulton County Superior Court. “However, in this particular circumstance there have been significant [claims] about Mr. Williams being a danger to the community.” It was also during this hearing that song lyrics were represented for an alleged shooting that involved YFN Lucci’s mother.

Young Thug and YFN Lucci have not seen eye-to-eye for years now, and according to prosecutors, Young Thug bragged about shooting Lucci’s mother in one of his recent songs. “[Thug] got into a beef, if you will, with another rapper by the name of Rayshawn Bennett, also known as YFN Lucci,” the prosecution says. “At some point, Lucci’s mother was shot at and the song comes out, ‘Bad Boy,’ that says, uh, let’s see…‘You better watch the way you breathe around me ‘fore that breath be your last boy, Smith & Wesson .45 put a hole in his heart, better not play with me, killers stay with me, I shot at his mommy now he no longer mention me.”

The record that the prosecution is referring to is Juice WRLD and Young Thug’s 2021 record “Bad Boy.” The protection presentation of song lyrics has been criticized since the start of the YSL RICO case. It has many asking for a law similar to New York’s Rap On Trial law which states that there should be “clear and convincing evidence” that an artist’s song, video, or other “creative expression” is “literal, rather than figurative or fictional” in order for it to be presented in court.

You can watch the lyrics to “Bad Boy” be presented in court in the video above.

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

Last week, mere days after the worst K-12 school shooting since Sandy Hook in 2012, the NRA held their annual convention. They could have cancelled it, out of respect for the dead, including 19 children and two teachers. They could even have softened the rhetoric. They did not. Ted Cruz admonished fellow conservatives who peaced out. Donald Trump even danced, after one of the weirdest, most disturbing “tributes” in memory. Luckily, Samantha Bee had a correspondent on-site to see how attendees were handling the tragedy.

Amy Hoggart, a British comic who’s been on Full Frontal since 2016, braved the Houston, Texas convention, there to make like Jordan Klepper and get regular folks to blurt out the unthinkable. And they sure did. Hoggart covered a lot of bases, including how they felt about the massacre, which occurred less than a five-hour drive away.

“I think everyone is extremely upset about the timing,” one younger man, who claimed he went to law school, told Hoggart. “It was incredibly, incredibly awkward. During an election week, and also right before the NRA, it’s horrible.” He also claimed the timing of the tragedy was incredibly convenient” for the left.

Speaking of timing, Hoggat asked a number of convention-goers about when was the right time to make an unthinkable atrocity “political.” An older man had an answer: “Two weeks, a month.”

The aforementioned former law school student would go even further. He said it was “too soon” to talk about the Parkland mass shooting, which happened in 2018. He wouldn’t even discuss Sandy Hook, from almost a decade ago.

One woman suggested Hoggart to that they were victims as well. “It’s devasting to see us get blamed, when we are not to blame,” she said about how some blamed not only guns but gun advocates, who bristle at any attempt to make assault weapons more difficult to obtain.

Solutions that don’t include limiting gun accessibility? They had a few. There was the old line about arming teachers, which is incredibly unpopular with already poorly-paid educators. One person agreed they should extended that to cleaning and lunch staff as well. One person said they could use other makeshift weapons as well, such as flashlights, even forks. (At least only one of them blamed doors.)

As for the beloved second amendment, the people Hoggart talked to remembered the first part, about the right to buy arms, but no one could recall the second, about a “well-regulated militia.”

One man implied that endless mass shootings are just broken eggs in the omelette that is the armed-to-the-teeth United States of America. “Freedom does come with a cost,” the man told Hoggart. When she asked him if the cost included “children’s lives,” he shrugged and said, “Just in general.”

You can watch Hoggart’s segment in the video above.

It’s nearly been a month since Kendrick Lamar dropped his long-awaited fifth album Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers. The project, which presented 18 songs and guest appearances from Blxst, Summer Walker, Kodak Black, Baby Keem, Sampha, Ghostface Killah, and more, left fans with a lot to talk about. There was Kendrick’s push back against cancel culture, Kodak Black’s multiple appearances on the album, and more. Another notable moment from Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers was “We Cry Together,” which found Kendrick in an extremely heated argument with his girlfriend who is played by actress Taylour Paige.

Some have criticized the song, which plays more like a skit despite its rhyme scheme, while others have found it a bit enjoyable. Nonetheless, the experience attached to “We Cry Together” is about to continue as Kendrick Lamar is set to bring the album to a Los Angeles theater. According to HipHop-N-More, a short film for “We Cry Together” will premiere at the Laemmle Royal Theater in West Los Angeles for the next six days. The film, which is billed as “a performance from Taylour Paige and Kendrick Lamar,” premieres today at the theater and it will be available there until June 9.

The news about the film comes after “We Cry Together” had one of the biggest drops on the Billboard singles chart.

You can view a picture of the Laemmle Royal Theater above and purchase tickets for the “We Cry Together” short film here.

Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers is out now via PgLang/Aftermath/TDE/Interscope. You can stream it here.

Kodak Black is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Everyone’s going to see Top Gun: Maverick, but they’re also watching another movie at home: the original Top Gun. The highest grosser of 1986 made Tom Cruise, already popular from Risky Business, into the megastar he’s been ever since (minus a brief stint in the mid-aughts when people thought he was a weirdo). It’s also a much, much stranger film than its belated sequel: jingoistic, overly Reaganistic, and, as Quentin Tarantino once detailed in the mid-’90s indie Sleep with Me, pretty damn homoerotic.

Perhaps the most homoerotic part of the movie (apart from Val Kilmer’s Iceman telling Cruise’s Maverick he can “be my wingman anytime”) is a wildly over-the-top montage in which our ripped flyboys take a break from flying and learning to play volleyball. On the film’s commentary track, director Tony Scott admitted he was forced to shoot the scene by the studio, who wanted to make the film more like a sports movie than a war picture. So he gave them what they wanted: He says he “slicked the boys up with baby oil” and “shot it like a softcore porno.” The song playing is Kenny Loggins’ “Playing with the Boys.”

Well, that’s not exactly what studio execs wanted. On THR‘s podcast Behind the Screen, the original film’s editors described what they were actually looking for. “That scene was scripted as a real game,” said Chris Lebenzon. “They kept score and everything — and Tony shot it like a commercial, and they were angry.”

“The studio was so pissed off,” fellow editor Billy Weber added. “The head of production, Charlie McGuire, he said, ‘I’m gonna fire him’ … because he spent a whole day shooting this scene.”

The new Top Gun has a similar scene, but this time it’s football on the beach, and even with almost everyone shirtless and glistening, it’s not remotely as homoerotic. Indeed, contrast it with the one from the original, which you can watch below:

(Via THR)

MAGA types have a habit of occasionally telling the truth. They don’t mean to. It’s usually Freudian slip. It will be Donald Trump accidentally blurting out the words “I didn’t win the [2020] election.” Or it will be Louie Gohmert letting slip that things are so bad for Republicans that they “can’t even lie” to Congress or the FBI, as he did on Friday.

Gohmert went on Newsmax to complain about the indictment and arrest of Peter Navarro, the former Trump aide who was one of a number of associates who defied subpoenas from the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot. Gohmert, like many in the GOP, is not happy that Department of Justice head Merrick Garland is actually acting on the criminal charges issued by lawmakers.

“It actually puts an exclamation point on the fact that we have a two-tiered justice system,” Gohmert railed. “If you’re a Republican, you can’t even lie to Congress or lie to an FBI agent or they’re coming after you. They’re gonna bury you. They’re gonna put you in the D.C. jail and terrorize and torture you and not live up to the Constitution there.”

Gohmert thought it was a double standard, alleging that Democrats lie, while perhaps accidentally admitting that Republicans do just that. “So [it’s] very clear,” he said. “If you’re a Democrat, then you can lie. You can cheat. You can do whatever you want.”

Gohmert’s slip alarmed even fellow conservatives.

Others weren’t that shocked.

Others were reminded that he’s not the sharpest tool in a shed with plenty of non-sharp tools.

The Texas representative, who assumed office in 2005 but came to prominence a few years later in the Tea Party era, was seen recently melting down over another issue: that Republicans keep getting accused of heartlessness for not doing anything to curb mass shootings, even after children die. He’s also notable for losing a tooth during a press conference about alleged voter fraud in the 2020 election.

(Via The Hill)