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Remember George W. Bush? Before there was You Know Who, the son of the 41st American president was progressives’ Enemy Number One. He oversaw an unjustified war bolstered by bogus intel. He trampled civil liberties. He let a major city get nearly destroyed by weather. He spoke bad. But nowadays, after four years of the guy who would almost certainly sell out his own kids to save his hide, he seems more like Mr. Rogers. He’ll even troll Trump — albeit on the anniversary of the tragic event that he once exploited for power. In fact, that pretty much sums 43 up, though he’s still not even in the same universe as 45.

Bush II’s contradictory nature was on fine display during a speech he delivered in Dallas on Wednesday. At an event looking at the state of democracy and the future of elections in a (possibly) post-Trump America, the former president strongly condemned Russia and its bloody but flailing invasion of Ukraine. But then he made a Freudian slip for the ages.

Bush was discussing how Vladimir Putin stifles dissent and imprisons dissenters. “The result is an absence of checks and balances in Russia, and the decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq,” Bush said. Yes, he said Iraq. But he quickly caught the faux pas, telling the crowd, “I mean, of Ukraine.”

Almost 20 years ago, in the wake of the September 11 attacks, Bush and his administration claimed that Iraq was harboring weapons of mass destruction. They weren’t. But Bush claimed they were, and used the nation’s anger and trauma over the biggest terrorist attack in the nation’s history to justify a long and costly war, which led to somewhere between 150,000 and over a million violent deaths. He later became a painter.

Still, the George W. Bush story may be the most extreme example of “hey, it could be worse.”

(Via Dallas Morning News)

Drake is quite the basketball fan, which he’s made clear on several occasions. He’s been the global ambassador for the Toronto Raptors since 2013 and he can be found courtside at the NBA team’s home games. It was just a few weeks ago that Joel Embiid trash-talked Drake after the former’s Philadelphia 76ers beat the Raptors in a playoff game. He’s also placed bets in favor of the Golden State Warriors and Duke’s men’s basketball team. Drake’s love for basketball seems to be rubbing off on his son Adonis who was seen shooting some baskets at his dad’s basketball gym which is located in his Toronto mansion.

What many may not have expected through the video is how Adonis is already catching on to the mannerisms of a certain active NBA great. After shooting a basket in a video that Drake shared on Instagram, Adonis can be seen tapping his chest a couple of times just like LeBron James has done in moments throughout his career. “Where is he getting the mannerisms from @kingjames (laughing emoji),” Drake captioned the video. LeBron reposted the video on his story and wrote, “My nephew really love the game!!”

While Adonis missed his first shot attempt, he absolutely sunk the second one for a total field goal percentage of 50% which should get him into the NBA Hall Of Fame if he keeps it up.

You can watch the adorable video of Adonis and see LeBron’s response above.

Way, way back in February, Warner Bros. announced it was set to film a Wonder Twins movie this summer, but now that CEO David Zaslav is looking for ways to cut costs following the studio’s merger with Discovery, Zan and Jayna are getting the boot. Form of: budget cuts. Apparently $75 million was too high a price tag for a movie about aliens who transform into different types of water and animals by slamming their rings together.

KJ Apa of Riverdale and Isabel May of 1883 were set to star as the twins with no word on who was playing their alien monkey, Gleek (Andy Serkis, though, right?). Black Adam screenwriter Adam Sztykiel had written the script and was set to direct before the project got the axe. Even as these third-tier heroes are shown the door, DC has Black Adam and Batgirl coming out in 2022, an Aquaman sequel and Flash standalone coming in 2023, and Blue Beetle filming now.

The cancellation is the saddest news for a Wonder Twins movie since the poster for a Kutcher/Kunis version turned out to be a hoax. We’re sorry if this crushes some deep childhood nostalgia yearning you may have been feeling for this porject, even though its demise is no fault of our own. We feel your pain.

(Via The Hashtag Show)

The TNT crew is on the road in San Francisco for the Western Conference Finals and it appears adding a live crowd only encourages them to get spicy with each other on air.

While discussing the Eastern Conference Finals and Jimmy Butler’s sensational Game 1 performance, with Dwyane Wade joining the crew, Charles Barkley made the rather tepid take that it’ll be harder to score like that when Defensive Player of the Year Marcus Smart is back in the lineup for Boston. That, for some reason, infuriated Shaq who insisted Jimmy Butler has crested into a different stratosphere of superstardom in which he can score on anyone whenever he wants, to the dismay of Chuck (and Kenny), as the two screamed at each other for two minutes (again).

The best part is Shaq yelling for someone to “call Dikembe Mutombo” and ask about the time Shaq dominated him in the 2001 NBA Finals, which is honestly a pretty good argument from him. The problem, as Chuck tries to note but can’t ever really get out because Shaq is extremely mad about all of this, is that Butler isn’t Shaq and that’s not an apples to apples comparison. As Kenny notes, Jimmy can go out and get 28 a night no matter the defenders, but to suggest he can get 40 whenever he wants is probably a bit too far. Still, it’s highly entertaining and Dwyane was enjoying the entire thing sipping out of his cup and just watching the drama unfold.

The movie that doesn’t sound real keeps getting even more out-there. It seemed odd when it was announced Greta Gerwig would follow up Little Women with a Barbie film, to be co-written with her partner Noah Baumbach, no less. Then they cast Margot Robbie. Then Ryan Gosling as Ken. Then Michael Cera and Issa Rae. Then Simu Liu. Then the first look looked pretty great. Now what already sounded like the most ambitious movie ever made about a line of sexist dolls is getting even more mad.

The New York Times’ Kyle Buchanan took to Twitter with some rumors about what exactly this increasingly swelling ensemble of all-stars will be doing. What he’s been hearing is Robbie and Gosling are not the film’s only Barbies and Kens. Instead, there will be multiple iterations of each one, of multiple ethnicities. As per Buchanan, Liu and Ncuti Gatwa, the Sex Education break-out recently cast to be the next lead on Doctor Who, will play other Kens. Meanwhile, Rae Hari Nef, seen on And Just Like That… and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, will hold down the fort as other Barbies.

Details about the plot are being kept secret, but this news opens up even more questions. Questions like, what’s gong on here? And does this mean about other cast members, like Kate McKinnon, Will Ferrell, and Rhea Perlman? Will the entire cast be made of alternate versions of Barbie and Ken? Will this be a multiverse deal, only more Everything Everywhere All at Once and less Doctor Strange 2?

Whatever happens, Greta Gerwig’s Barbie will be another eclectic movie adapted from unusual source material, joining such august company as Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks! (trading cards), The LEGO Movie (plastic bricks), The Angry Birds Movie (app), The Emoji Movie (emojis), and The Garbage Pail Kids Movie (stickers).

In the meantime, Barbie is scheduled to hit theaters on July 21 of next year.

(Via Kyle Buchanan’s Twitter)

The 2021 NBA Draft class was not the most hyped group beyond top prospect Cade Cunningham, but this season saw a number of first-year players play well and make important contributions to their teams.

Raptors rookie Scottie Barnes took home Rookie of the Year honors for his work as a two-way presence in Toronto, edging out Evan Mobley and Cunningham’s production in Cleveland and Detroit respectively. Elsewhere, Herbert Jones became one of the league’s best wing defenders in New Orleans, and plenty of others showed their skills making this year’s All-Rookie team races quite interesting considering the quality production from debutants across the league.

On Wednesday night, the 10 players to earn All-Rookie honors were announced on TNT, with the three finalists for Rookie of the Year headlining the first team, joined by Houston’s Jalen Green and Orlando’s Franz Wagner.

First team: Scottie Barnes, Evan Mobley, Cade Cunningham, Jalen Green, Franz Wagner
Second team: Ayo Dosunmu, Chris Duarte, Josh Giddey, Bones Hyland, Herbert Jones

The second team features three players who emerged as important rotation pieces for playoff teams in Dosunmu (Chicago), Hyland (Denver), and Jones (New Orleans), with Duarte having a terrific shooting year in Indiana and Giddey emerging as a bright spot in OKC. Jones and Giddey were the two from the second team to also receive first team votes, while the three ROY finalists were all unanimous selections.

DMV rapper IDK earned himself a big moment at the end of 2019 with the release of his major-label debut album Is He Real? The project, unfortunately, came at the wrong time in the world as the coronavirus pandemic arrived just three months later. With that, tours and live concerts alike were paused, which stopped artists from capitalizing on their work with performances in front of their fans. Despite the inconvenience, IDK kept pushing full-stream ahead as he released three more projects in that time period: IDK & Friends 2, USee4Yourself, and the recently-released Simple with Kaytranada. Now that the time is right, IDK is ready to bring impressive discography on a worldwide tour.

Starting this summer, IDK will hit the road for the Simple World Tour. A flyer for the tour reveals that IDK plans to perform IWasVeryBad, Is He Real?, USee4Yourself, and Simple while he’s on the road. The string of shows begins at the end of June with a performance in Switzerland followed by two festival sets in Netherlands and Germany. IDK will then return to the states to continue the tour alongside Charlotte rapper Mavi. After concluding the North American section of his tour at the end of August with a show in Boston, IDK will bring things back to Europe at the end of October for a collection of shows that goes through November.

You can view the full list of dates for the Simple World Tour above.

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

The best things come to those who wait — or in the case of Stranger Things fans, maybe it’s the most things. It’s true, it’s been ages since the third season; indeed, it dropped almost a year before there even was a pandemic. But when the fourth season and its new, scarier villain arrives starting next week, creators Matt and Ross Duffer will atone by giving plenty more than expected.

In a new interview with The Wrap, the Duffers revealed that some of the nine forthcoming episodes are going to be longer than usual — much, much longer. “Seven and nine in particular are movies,” Matt told them. “And nine is a long movie.”

How long are talking here? As per Ross, “We’re still refining it but we will say that it is over two hours. It’s a big one.”

Netflix, of course, has never had to worry about things like time slots and commercial breaks (at least for now). As such, even sitcoms, like the dearly departed reboot of One Day at a Time, could run well over the traditional half-hour-including-commercials running time. Episodes could run a full hour. They could also run some strange, modern in-between length, like 39 minutes.

And yet the Duffers still felt like they needed permission to go potentially Marvel movie long. “The more we were writing, the more we realized we need more time in order for these reveals to land, in order for these storylines to work,” Matt explained. “Partway through we knew we needed to ask Netflix for nine episodes instead of eight and as we started shooting we realized, Oh these are mega-long episodes.”

One reason they’re so long: Matt points out they had “characters spread out in three locations and we had a lot more plot. It must be quadruple the plot we had in Season 3.” They also needed to build towards Season 5, slated to be their fifth, so they needed to set things up so they could end things big.

Does this sound like a lot to binge-watch, even over a holiday weekend? Well, don’t worry, because they split the season into two volumes, the first dropping on May 27, the second one over a month later, on July 1. All of this sounds like good news for a streamer that could sure use some.

(Via The Wrap)

Like Jeremy Clarkson and Xzibit before him, Robert Downey Jr. is getting into the classic car game with a view to changing the planet. Instead of retrofitting classic rides with a minibar and an airbrushed mural of The Vision, Downey’s Dream Cars will upgrade the cars in the actor’s garage to make them better for the environment.

“My goal is to showcase that it’s possible to keep the integrity of classic cars while leveraging new tech and innovation to make them more eco-friendly,” Downey Jr. said.

His collection includes a 1967 Corvette Stingray Convertible, a Bentley Continental GT, several Audis, a Ferrari, and a luxury vehicle that already comes with green bonafides: the Fisker Karma, which pioneered pricey plug-ins before going out of business when their battery manufacturer tanked. Maybe Downey’s Dream Cars will find a way to bring it back to life.

With major car makers pledging to go mostly or all-electric within the next decade, a dad-bait show about classic cars and saving the planet feels like the last step in the process of making electric vehicles cool. Maybe Downey Jr. can invite Sydney Sweeney on to show him how it’s done and let him borrow the pink gloves.

(Via The Hollywood Reporter)

Pan’s Labyrinth got a 22-minute standing ovation, The French Dispatch earned 9 full minutes, but Top Gun: Maverick‘s 6-minute standing O at Cannes is nothing to chomp your teeth at. The Tom Cruise-starring legacyquel has scored tons of excellent reviews (including from our own Mike Ryan), but unless Maverick says, “I feel the need, the need for poetic dialogue and internal torment set to a xylophone-only score,” it isn’t exactly the type of movie Cannes usually vibes with. Granted, they’ve dipped their toes into the populist water a few times (shout out to Shrek), but the hullabaloo surrounding Top Gun: Maverick goes above and beyond. That’s because the standing ovation happened before the movie even played.

The mania of the event started with an 8-fighter-jet flyover at the red carpet, continued with a video tribute covering Cruise’s entire career, and ended with a surprise Palme d’Or bestowed upon the actor, who started to cry as the audience climbed to its feet again for another round of applause before watching the film. Cruise also took the opportunity to drop the mic on the question of why he does his own life-threatening stunts, stating, “No one asked Gene Kelly, ‘Why do you dance? Why do you do your own dancing?’” instead of the more honest answer that he’s trying to die while at work to double the insurance money.

Top Gun: Maverick, which also stars Jennifer Connelly, Miles Teller, Jon Hamm, hits theaters May 24th.