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Pete Davidson isn’t a big social media guy, but he gave it a shot recently by joining Instagram. He seemed to be happy on the platform, as his first post offered a behind-the-scenes look of his upcoming movie The Home and came accompanied by the hashtags #welcometomyinstagram and #thisisthetypeofstuffyoucanbeexpecting. As BuzzFeed News notes, though, Kanye West fans, who are standing by the rappers side as he has expressed discontent with Davidson and Kim Kardashian’s relationship, flooded the post with comments telling him to “find God” and pestering him with the non-laudatory nickname Ye has given him, “Skete.”

Since then, Davidson’s Instagram account was deactivated, which West seems pretty happy about.

Taking to his own Instagram today, West shared a screenshot of Davidson’s blank account and took credit for Davidson leaving the platform, writing, “Ran Skete off the gram Tell your mother I changed your name for life.”

West has been antagonistic towards Davidson since his and Kardashian’s relationship became more serious. On Valentine’s Day, he expressed hope for a reunion with Kardashian, writing in an Instagram post, “I DON’T HAVE BEEF WITH KIM I LOVE MY FAMILY SO STOP THAT NARRATIVE IM NOT GIVING UP ON MY FAMILY […] I HAVE FAITH THAT WE‘LL BE BACK TOGETHER.” In a post shared shortly after that one, he asked that if fans see “Skete” in real life, they “SCREAM AT YHE LOOSER AT THE TOP OF YOUR LUNGS AND SAY KIMYE FOREVER.”

Celebrities often try to insert themselves into situations during times of global unrest. While they may try to do so out of the kindness of their own hearts, most of the time, it doesn’t go over well and often comes off as tone-deaf.

Actor Sean Penn, who does find himself the center of attention most of the time (for better or worse), is currently on the ground in Ukraine, filming a documentary, according to Vice Studios, which is producing the doc. While the timing might seem a little strange, it turns out Penn had actually been visiting Ukraine regularly for his research, and the documentary was months in the works before Russia invaded this week.

Penn was spotted at a news briefing in Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, where he reportedly arrived this morning. In a statement provided to Newsweek, government officials expressed their gratitude towards Penn, who began making the documentary in November. The statement read:

The director specially came to Kyiv to record all the events that are currently happening in Ukraine and to tell the world the truth about Russia’s invasion of our country. Sean Penn is among those who support Ukraine in Ukraine today. Our country is grateful to him for such a show of courage and honesty.

While many internet sleuths (AKA angry Twitter users) are confused as to why Penn would be there, the actor is known for his activism over the years, as he famously flew down to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and founded a relief organization after the 2010 Haiti earthquake. In November, Penn was photographed dressed for combat while interviewing Ukraine officials.

There is no official release date about the in-progress doc, but Penn is definitely getting a front-line experience while in Kyiv today.

2 Chainz’s new album Dope Don’t Sell Itself — which he’s promised is his final trap album — has been out for a little under a month and in that time, he’s released no fewer than five music videos from it, including clips for “Million Dollars Worth Of Game” with 42 Dugg, “Pop Music” with Beatking and Moneybagg Yo, “Neighbors Know My Name,” and “Free B.G.” Today, he released the latest, “Kingpen Ghostwriter,” which features an electric verse from Lil Baby.

In the video, 2 Chainz performs to the camera in a garage decked out in an outrageous-looking puffer jacket and his usual assortment of diamond-covered jewelry while leaning on a trio of matching luxury cars. Intercut between his performance scenes are shots of a model in a diaphanous white gown taking selfies in a room full of fans and white columns, who also shows off her twerking skills. Lil Baby appears in the latter half of the video to rap his verse while wearing a Baja jacket (which is looking like an emerging trend lately). It’s a simple but effective treatment that should help keep Chainz’s last trap album at the top of mind until he’s ready to move onto his next phase.

Watch 2 Chainz’s “Kingpen Ghostwriter” video featuring Lil Baby above.

Dope Don’t Sell Itself is out now via Def Jam. You can get it here.

New Jersey rapper Chris Patrick may have a relatively unassuming nom de plume, but when he steps to the mic to perform his song “Up Now” for the latest episode of UPROXX Sessions, his star power becomes evident. Coolly switching from punchy, rapid-fire rhymes to crystal-clear crooning, he proves to be proficient at both rapping and singing, all while showing off quick-witted wordplay revealing a quirky worldview that complements his deceptive rap name.

“Sunroof down so the rays hit the melanin,” he smirks. “Spun through town tryna bathe in the element.”

Patrick might be flying under the radar now, but with co-signs from the likes of Black Thought and JID, the lanky East Orange MC’s time in the sun might not be metaphorical for very much longer (well, yeah, it still will be but it’ll mean something different). His 2020 album, From The Heart, Vol. 2 has drawn comparisons to early efforts from relatable rap everymen such as J. Cole and Saba, which bodes well for his earnest, down-to-earth approach. Working with Deante Hitchcock on Deante’s new EP and building his buzz with tracks like “Up Now” and “Gang Activity,” expect to see Chris Patrick to not only elevate to radar level but fly high as his career takes off in 2022.

Watch Chris Patrick perform “Up Now” above.

UPROXX Sessions is Uproxx’s performance show featuring the hottest up-and-coming acts you should keep an eye on. Featuring creative direction from LA promotion collective, Ham On Everything, and taking place on our “bathroom” set designed and painted by Julian Gross, UPROXX Sessions is a showcase of some of our favorite performers, who just might soon be yours, too.

With The Dropout set to premiere soon on Hulu, Amanda Seyfried has been opening about her transformation into Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, the medical and tech phenomenon who duped the medical and tech worlds out of millions with false promises of a blood testing app that would revolutionize the health care industry. Holmes has since been found guilty of defrauding investors, which makes the upcoming Hulu series all the more riveting, but Seyfried almost passed on the whole thing.

Originally, Saturday Night Live alum Kate McKinnon was set to play Holmes, but COVID delays forced her to bow out of the role. The producers then turned to Seyfried who was riding high off of her Oscar-nominated role in Mank. She immediately turned them down. Via The Hollywood Reporter:

“Listen, I was having a f*cking moment, OK?” she explains, laughing, during our early-February Zoom. “I had COVID. I was isolating in the basement of a gross townhouse in Savannah, Georgia, because my husband was working on a movie there. And now an L.A. shoot? Pass!”

The actress insists she’s got nothing against L.A. She merely prefers to stick close to home — which, for the past eight years, has been the upstate New York farm she keeps with her husband (Broadway vet and The Newsroom star Thomas Sadoski), their two children and a menagerie of animals.

However, the next morning, Seyfried’s fever broke, and she called her agents back with a change of heart after realizing the role would be an interesting challenge. From there, Seyfried got to work on nailing Holmes’ distinct, and ultimately fake, speaking voice, even though the actress swears she didn’t stress herself out about it.

“I promised I wasn’t going to give myself a hard time and try to completely mimic this other human being,” Seyfried told THR. “It’d be impossible. And just not fun.” Clearly, Seyfried is being modest, because judging by the trailer, she did a pretty spot-on job of portraying Holmes’ weird, deep voice that everyone now knows was a ruse.

The Dropout premieres March 3 on Hulu.

(Via The Hollywood Reporter)

The big question for any new adaptation of a classic text is which parts do you update and which parts do you retain? Cyrano, a new adaptation of Cyrano de Bergerac, opening this weekend from MGM, bills itself as a “timeless tale of a heartbreaking love triangle.”

The “timelessness” might be a tough sell. We get new actors, updated language, and a bold reimagining of the title character, but the Victorian sexual mores and courtly romance remain, making Cyrano all but impossible to appreciate as a modern love story. It’s more like Masterpiece Theater, something to be enjoyed as a handsome museum piece or nodded at obligingly from behind monocle glass.

Cyrano De Bergerac, the actual 17th-century French dramatist who was first immortalized in a famous play by Edmond Rostand in 1897, has since been played on film by at least 10 different stars, most recently by Kevin Kline (2008), Gerard Depardieu (1985), and Steve Martin (1987), the latter in a contemporary-set adaptation in which Cyrano was reimagined as a New York City writer. In every case, the character was a brash wit with a nose so big he was convinced he could never be loved.

In this new adaptation from Darkest Hour director Joe Wright and writer Erica Schmidt, Cyrano de Bergerac is played by famous little person actor Peter Dinklage, the character’s prodigious nose reimagined as a height deficiency. It’s a bold character choice (and a logical one; most big-nosed guys I know smash). It’s also Peter Dinklage as we love to see him: delivering withering insults and concealing mushy sentimentality behind deft verbal parries in a Mid-Atlantic accent. “Isn’t Cyrano de Bergerac a bit like Tyrion Lannister?” is not bad, as seed ideas go. Beyond that, most of Cyrano‘s energy seems to have gone towards sumptuous staging.

This version is still set in 17th-century Paris, Cyrano still pines after Roxanne (the luminous Hailey Bennett, her hair dyed an inexplicable and slightly jarring strawberry — filmmakers love a redheaded love interest), and Roxanne still loves Christian (Kelvin Harrison Jr.). Even assuming only vague memories of a Cyrano adaptation from your childhood (the Steve Martin one for me), you probably remember the basic framework: witty, “ugly” Cyrano teams up with dopey handsome guy Christian to win Roxanne’s affections, with Cyrano providing the words and Christian the chiseled abs and stunning features. (Ben Mendelsohn shows up briefly as the gloriously unctuous fop De Guiche, which is an incredible fop name).

Cyrano is also a musical adaptation, with songs by Bryce and Aaron Dessner, usually soundtracking elaborately choreographed set pieces. How much you enjoy a musical tends to be directly proportional to how much you enjoy the songs in that musical, and Cyrano‘s music is mostly decent. By far its best song is “Wherever I Fall,” sung by Glen Hansard (The Swell Season, Once), a swelling folk-rock number sung from the perspective of Cyrano and Christian’s cadet troops on the eve of a decisive battle. It’s a great number, but also a long one (the movie’s longest), which is weird for something that’s essentially a digression — a song about the hopes and dreams of characters who show up only for this one scene, a war theme in a story about unrequited love, and a contemporary-sounding song in a period piece.

All the while, Roxanne, as you might imagine, seems to be falling harder for the idea of Christian, which is to say, for Cyrano’s words, than for the real Christian’s sexy face and shredded bod. Still, Cyrano protects his secret, well beyond the point of all reason, and the film ends basically the way the original play ends (which I guess I will avoid spoiling here — do we really need to avoid spoiling 120-year-old plays?). Suffice it to say, all of it raises the question of how much use modern audiences have for courtly love. (How much did even gilded age audiences have for it?).

Is it really more romantic to fall for someone’s facility with words than for their physical form? I’m sure we writers — which would traditionally include the authors of Cyrano and all its adaptations — would love to think so, but I’m not convinced that this wouldn’t just be the same human caprice in a different form. Cyrano is based on this basically medieval conception of love as something occurring between two souls, as separate from their physical form, a connection more deep than crass lust for a manly chest or an irresistible butthole or whatever.

A million stories past and present have attempted to explore this same concept, from The Lobster to Love Is Blind on Netflix, and Cyrano‘s version strikes me as especially childish. Thinking someone should love you for some ill-defined, cosmic conception of self and not your general attractiveness to others and affinity for that specific person (the physical and non-physical being inseparable) is about as deep as an Instagram meme (“if you can’t love me at my worst…”). It seems far more interesting to explore that specifically human caprice, of what makes a person attractive, and two people compatible (as The Lobster does), than to lionize this bifurcated, intellectualized love as some aspirational ideal.

Which is to say I have limited use for love stories about people who never admit their feelings. What is romance without chemistry? Cyrano is gorgeous to look at and periodically to listen to, but narratively it’s a lazy take on the material, combining Victorian ideas of purity with Love Actually clichés prizing impotent schoolboy pining over actual connection. In spirit it’s a lot more like the boring, beautiful Christian than it is the audacious homely Cyrano.

‘Cyrano’ opens only in theaters February 25th. Vince Mancini is on Twitter. You can access his archive of reviews here.

The headlines today are full of Russia’s declaration of war upon Ukraine (which is not being handled in the most graceful matter with commercials on CNN), and some famous people are giving takes that aren’t going over so well. John Cena apparently decided to, uh, promote Peacemaker in an ill-received tweet. And AnnaLynne McCord (90210, Nip/Tuck) is making an appearance that feels a lot like Gal Gadot’s “Imagine” video and a subsequent celebrity-filled (and roundly-roasted) PSA that meant to take unprompted responsibility for unchecked racism in society.

AnnaLynne’s video message to Russian President Vladimir Putin, though, is really something. She declared sorrow about not being Putin’s mother and how she couldn’t have protected him from perceived pain and, in turn, protected the world from his fury.

This might be a poem? Here’s part of what what she professed to Putin:

“Dear Mister President Vladimir Putin, I’m so sorry that I was not your mother. If I was your mother, you would have been so loved. Helmed in the arms of joyous light. Never would this story’s plight. The world unfurled before our eyes, a pure demise. Of nations sitting peaceful under a night sky. If I was your mother, the world would have been warm. So much laughter and joy. Nothing would harm. I can’t imagine the stain. The soul-stealing pain. That the little boy, you must have seen. And believed. As the formulation of thought quickly thought… If I was your mother, if the world was cold, I’d have died to make you warm… Perhaps the torture of unwrit youth would not within your heart imbue ascription to such fealty against that world that seemed so cruel. Perhaps you would hold dear human life and on this night instead of Mother Russia you would call me. And I would set your mind quite free with the love that only a mother can give.”

Let’s just say that “the celebs are at it again” Dril-meme-tweet is making the rounds, and this is one of those things that is hard to believe is real.

And people are wondering if Gal Gadot’s feeling a little bit relieved.

Also, people are marveling over the messiness of what they’re watching.

Following the success of her viral singles “ABCDEFU” and “Ur Just Horny,” singer-songwriter GAYLE has revealed the title of her debut EP. A Study Of The Human Experience, Volume One, is set for release Friday, March 18th.

GAYLE introduced herself to the world last year with the catchy break-up single “ABCDEFU,” which went viral on TikTok and has since peaked at No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100. In January, she released the follow-up single “Ur Just Horny.” The upcoming EP has no revealed tracklist at the moment, but it would seem those two songs will be on it.

In an interview with Rolling Stone, GAYLE said of the song’s inspiration, “I thought I was the one at fault. Like, ‘F*ck, I really f*cked up our friendship,’” she says. “But then I realized, ‘No. They were trying to get into my pants the whole entire time: That was their goal. They never cared in the first place.’ Maybe I’m not completely the problem.”

In the same interview, 17-year-old GAYLE says she is comfortable at this point in her life, aware that she may not always want what she wants now. “I’m not necessarily set on ‘This is who I am,’” she said. “I’ve gotten really comfortable with who I am as a person and what I want. But I know I’m going to change. I know that the things I want are going to change. And that’s OK.”

A Study Of The Human Experience, Volume One is out 3/18 via Atlantic. Pre-order it here.

GAYLE is a Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Maybe you first got turned onto The Regrettes because none other than Olivia Rodrigo starred in their “Monday” video, but there’s plenty more reasons to stick around for this band. They’ve showcased a few with today’s new video, “You’re So F*cking Pretty,” a song and visual that captures an IRL girl crush. The band’s lead singer, Lydia Night, dances and mopes through a little house in the clip, which was directed by Serena Reynolds. “Lydia is the best and we just clicked,” Reynolds said of working on the project. “I love how we were able to collect so much beauty, frustration and sadness in the video to formulate this idea of a person we never visually see. I think the magic is that this “lover” really feels all encompassingly joyful in the end.”

Back when the band shared the song in December, Night reflected on what the song meant to her, noting that it’s the first time she wrote about a girl she had feelings for. “It’s the first time I’ve ever written directly about a girl I had a crush on, and it took me a while for me to even allow my brain to accept the fact that I’m bisexual,” she explained. “I always felt like I couldn’t validate my own feelings because I had never been in a relationship with a girl. But I had a pretty big crush on one of my friends a while ago and this song is an exaggeration of that, but it’s still coming from a very real place.”

“It was the first experience where I was like, ‘Oh, these are real feelings, this isn’t just a sexual attraction,’ and that helped me realize I wasn’t straight,” she continued, “This song means so much to me because it also represents the time we spent in Joshua Tree and opening up to my whole band about that experience and not feeling embarrassed or scared of talking about it. Writing this was important for me because it just validated my own sexuality.”

Check out the video up top.

Britney Spears has made it clear she is not on great terms with her sister Jamie Lynn at the moment, as she has on multiple occasions taken to social media to call her sister out for alleged misdeeds. The latest of those came yesterday, as in a now-deleted post (that was preserved by Pop Crave), Britney apologized for referring to Jamie Lynn as “scum” before throwing some more criticisms her way.

The post starts, “I’m sorry I called you scum but why did you lie about when I went home ??? It’s like you’re going out of your way to lie about me and make me look bad !!! And if I wasn’t your sister I would believe everything you’re saying in your interviews … you’re actually believable !!! It’s scary !!!”

She then detailed an alleged incident in which Jamie Lynn and her and Britney’s father Jamie mistreated her while she had a broken foot. She also claimed Jamie Lynn never let her hold her baby.

Britney concluded by alleging that the timing of Jamie Lynn’s public statements about her is poor, writing, “You have the right to tell your story but honestly the timing … right when people are just counting down the the seconds until I do something wrong, you come out and literally say hurtful things about me lying that’s being so unsupportive and it’s kind of insane … I’m honestly wondering if this is all a joke and you’re testing me because this is so far from you it’s not even funny.”

Find the full post below.

“I’m sorry I called you scum but why did you lie about when I went home ??? It’s like you’re going out of your way to lie about me and make me look bad !!! And if I wasn’t your sister I would believe everything you’re saying in your interviews … you’re actually believable !!! It’s scary !!! You and dad pushed me in the corner about my broken foot and you guys were poking at it … I felt ganged up on so I said ‘shut the f*ck up !!!’ I never stick up for myself, so you were shocked !!! All you said was, ‘dad was poking at your foot, I never touched you !!!’ … you then went into the closet and screamed like a drama queen for like an hour and I was confused ??? Aren’t I supposed to be the one screaming ??? I never screamed at you in front of anyone what you don’t know is that when you were screaming and yelling in Mom’s closet, one of the kids came out and said to me, ‘You need to go say you’re sorry to momma!!’ FOR WHAT ??? I didn’t do anything !!! Let’s not even start about how you would never let me hold the baby … momma’s mouth dropped because you would never say anything you would just yank her out of my arms !!!! You acted like you owned that household and I’m sorry you were too much … I know dad has taken a back seat because he doesn’t do the conservatorship anymore so I guess you’re feeling that your little sassy ass can boss them around, but I’m here as your older sister to keep it real with you and put you in your place !!! You have the right to tell your story but honestly the timing … right when people are just counting down the the seconds until I do something wrong, you come out and literally say hurtful things about me lying that’s being so unsupportive and it’s kind of insane … I’m honestly wondering if this is all a joke and you’re testing me because this is so far from you it’s not even funny.”