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WARNING: Spoiler for Eternals below. Although, the cat’s really out of the bag on this one.

In a casting coup that was unfortunately blasted all over Twitter two weeks before Eternals hit theaters, Harry Styles made his MCU debut in the film’s mid-credits scene as the classic Marvel character, Eros (a.k.a. Starfox if you want to get super nerdy), a hedonistic, yet occasionally heroic Eternal who spends his days wandering the galaxy looking for love. Oh, and also, he’s Thanos’ brother, which is why MCU fans absolutely flipped over Styles showing up in the cosmic film.

With the One Direction singer’s Marvel debut out in the open, Styles recently revealed to Dazed how he ended up playing the sibling of the MCU’s most brutal villain — for now:

Styles cautiously checks the publication date of this Dazed story before confirming his inclusion as the brother of villain Thanos. “I’m only in right at the very end,” he says humbly. “But who didn’t grow up wanting to be a superhero, you know? It was a great experience and I’m so grateful to have gotten to work with Chloé.”

According to Eternals director Chloé Zhao, she had Styles pegged for Eros from the first moment she saw him in Christoper Nolan’s Dunkirk, and that instinct was only further confirmed after meeting him. “There’s so much of Eros in him,” Zhao recently told Deadline while thanking Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige for making the casting happen.

As for what exactly Eros’ presence in the MCU means… that’s still anyone’s guess. He was never close with his genocidal brother in the comics, so there’s probably not a concern that he’ll be looking for revenge. Although, if there’s one thing the MCU has prided itself on, it’s switching things up, so maybe the Marvel Universe is about to be rocked again.

But, you know… handsomely this time.

(Via Dazed)

Go ahead and file Turnstile as the only hardcore band in 2021 dynamic enough to have a track featuring Blood Orange. It’s moments like that on “Alien Love Call” that are in total contrast to a blistering number like “Blackout” and “Fly Again” off of their 2021 breakthrough album Glow On, that have made the Baltimore band a unique specimen. And oh yeah, there’s that whole live concert experience that the band has been resoundingly praised for.

On the latter, Turnstile have announced the 2022 “The Turnstile Love Connection 2022 Tour,” and are ready to punch you in the heart, no matter what city you’re in. They’ll be supported by Citizen, Ceremony, Ekulu, and Truth Cult.

Concert pre-sale begins 11/16 and general on-sale is on 11/19. Get tickets here and check out the full tour dates below.

02/23/2022 — San Francisco, CA @ The Regency Ballroom
02/24/2022 — Los Angeles, CA @ The Novo*
04/26/2022 — Englewood, CO @ The Gothic Theatre
04/27/2022 — Salt Lake City, UT @ Soundwell
04/29/2022 — Vancouver, BC @ The Rickshaw Theatre
04/30/2022 — Seattle, WA @ The Showbox
05/02/2022 — Portland, OR @ The Roseland Theater
05/04/2022 — Albuquerque, NM @ El Rey Theatre
05/06/2022 — Austin, TX @ Stubb’s Waller Creek Amphitheater
05/07/2022 — Dallas, TX @ Amplified Live
05/09/2022 — Atlanta, GA @ The Masquerade
05/10/2022 — Nashville, TN @ Brooklyn Bowl
05/12/2022 — Milwaukee, WI @ The Rave
05/13/2022 — Minneapolis, MN @ Varsity Theatre
05/14/2022 — Lawrence, KS @ The Granada Theater
05/18/2022 — Cleveland, OH @ Agora Theatre
05/17/2022 — Detroit, MI @ Majestic Theatre
05/19/2022 — Toronto, ON @ The Phoenix Concert Theatre
05/21/2022 — Worcester, MA @ The Palladium
05/23/2022 — Brooklyn, NY @ Brooklyn Steel
05/24/2022 — Philadelphia, PA @ The Fillmore Philadelphia
05/26/2022 — Washington, DC @ 9:30 Club

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

Donald Trump and Chris Christie can’t ever seem to agree for long on whether they’re frenemies or straight-up enemies. The former Republican primary rivals previously made nice, which led to Christie making a Hostage Face while backing up his “friend” on Super Tuesday, but that eventually caved to a massively petty feud after Christie contracted COVID while coaching Trump for a reelection debate. Christie subsequently criticized Trump’s sit-back-and-see-what-happens approach to COVID, and that’s led to more ugliness, including a new revelation from the former New Jersey governor: Trump actually asked if Christie would publicly blame him for catching COVID.

Not only that, but Christie appeared on The View, where he reiterated that, yep, Trump really was only worried about how this would all reflect on him politically. The M&M strategist also revealed that Trump was like, “How do tough guys like us get this?” And then Christie acknowledged that Melania’s behavior was the precise opposite, and she periodically called him in the hospital:

“And a real contrast, by the way, Sunny, to his wife, who called me every day that I was in the ICU, first thing in the morning, to see how I was doing. And then would call my wife after that to see if she needed anything…. A real contrast between the couple.”

Here’s a clip of that moment:

That’s something, especially in light of previous reports that Melania didn’t give a sh*t about the Jan. 6 insurrection as it happened. Yet by Christie’s account, he knew a very different person and perhaps more significantly, a person who’s very different (when it comes to empathy for a friend) than her husband. Whereas Trump previously declared that Christie’s “spittle” was visible during their debate prep, and that he “tried to duck from the droplets, according to Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury book from summer 2021.

Needless to say, there are plenty of folks out there who don’t care for Donald Trump and the job he did back when he was the POTUS. Among those is Taylor Swift, who has criticized him on a number of occasions. This caused some bad blood (sorry) between the two, so much so that a Trump staffer was advised against listening to Swift’s music.

Former homeland security, counterterrorism, and coronavirus advisor Olivia Troye shared the story with MSNBC’s Chris Hayes (as Billboard notes), saying:

“I remember a moment early in spring, I was really angry after a meeting where I had lost an argument with someone, [about] something I didn’t agree with that was related to the COVID pandemic. I came back and was playing Taylor Swift very loud in my office that night. I had a colleague knock on the door and he said, ‘Are you trying to get fired?’

I was super confused about that. I was like, ‘For being blunt in meetings or for what?’ He said, ‘I don’t think she’s a fan of Trump’s, so if somebody hears that, you should really watch your back. You should be careful on that.”

Swift famously supported Joe Biden’s successful presidential campaign and gave her reasons for doing so last year, saying, “The change we need most is to elect a president who recognizes that people of color deserve to feel safe and represented, that women deserve the right to choose what happens to their bodies, and that the LGBTQIA+ community deserves to be acknowledged and included. Everyone deserves a government that takes global health risks seriously and puts the lives of its people first. The only way we can begin to make things better is to choose leaders who are willing to face these issues and find ways to work through them. I will proudly vote for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in this year’s presidential election. Under their leadership, I believe America has a chance to start the healing process it so desperately needs.”

On Monday, the Halo Infinite multiplayer beta surprise dropped and caught a lot of us off guard. Everyone immediately rushed to their PCs and Xbox’s to try and download the game as quickly as possible. Those who are blessed with faster internet, or managed to get through the servers, were able to get on and play the game first. Unfortunately, not everyone was quite as lucky with their own downloads.

A handful of players are discovering that when they download and launch the game they can’t actually get into the multiplayer beta. Instead what they’re facing is a blank blue screen and nothing else. With Halo Infinite being a Microsoft developed title, everyone swiftly made a blue screen of death jokes but there was concern about why some people couldn’t get into the game. The official response was that a beta build was still being pushed through and a handful of downloads might need to wait on a patch until the game is playable. Eventually, that patch was pushed so players should be able to access the game now, but a handful of players are having to re-download the game altogether. An inconvenience, but a minor one in the grand scheme of everything.

The assumed reason for why the blue screen error occurred in the first place is that the download some players had was only part of the game. It was basically a placeholder code that would then be added to so players could play the game. However, if players launched the game too early all they did was access the placeholder code and end up with the blue screen problem.

Now that the solution is slowly moving towards being fixed we can spend less time worrying about blue screens and more time slaying in multiplayer.

Rolling Loud is known for bringing a huge cast of hip-hop acts from all over the world to one place so that music lovers can watch performances from their favorites and discover new artists in the process. In 2021, Rolling Loud has brought showcases to both Miami and New York with a third one planned for Los Angeles next month. Hip-hop’s biggest names which include J. Cole, Travis Scott, Bobby Shmurda, Roddy Ricch, Young Thug, Gunna, Lil Durk, Lil Uzi Vert, Playboi Cart, Lil Baby, and many more all performed at the festival this year.

With that being said, Rolling Loud also has room for R&B acts to bring their own unique energy to the festival. At last month’s New York festival, Kaash Paige and Abby Jasmine were two R&B singers who took the stage at the showcase and it comes after a strong period for them both. Paige shared her debut album Teenage Fever last year while Jasmine delivered a deluxe reissue for her album Who Cares? to close 2020. She also dropped her I Hate You 2 EP earlier this year.

We caught up with both singers at Rolling Loud to discuss their feelings towards returning to the big festival stage. We also discussed their growth as performers and what’s next for them in their respective careers.

I assume it’s been a while since you’ve performed at a festival this big, how did you enjoy your experience in returning to the big stage today?

Kaash Paige: Man, I’m just really appreciative of the moment. You’re right, during COVID we didn’t get to shine. A lot of the artists, like myself, I dropped my debut album during COVID and I didn’t get to perform how I wanted to. But this year, I got to tour, I got to be outside. I’m just grateful for everything and I’m just excited for next year.

Abby Jasmine: It was a crazy experience from start to finish. The anticipation leading up to it was crazy. You anticipate for weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks on a 15-minute moment. I was definitely on edge the entire time up until my performance. As soon as I got to the Rolling Loud, it was a little bit more real. That made me a bit more nervous, but as soon as I got on the stage, it was great. The crowd and dope, everybody came outside ready to have a good time. I’ve definitely done some shows where people just stand around, but the Rolling Loud crowd was dope.

What do you cherish the most about experiences like this?

KP: I think I cherish seeing every different section of the crowd, you see people that don’t mess with you, you see the people that mess with you, you see the n****s that’s like, “who is this?” You see motherf*ckers like, “Oh, I’m getting hip!” It’s really exciting because, in reality, it’s just work. I feel like this was probably the craziest Rolling Loud performance I’ve ever had, it was insane. I jumped in the crowd, they moshed everywhere, I didn’t expect the crowd to go that crazy. Yeah, I’m just in awe right now.

AJ: I think the biggest one for me is being able to share that experience with my friends, I consider them my chosen family. Sometimes I do shows out of state and they’re not able to make those performances. So being able to have all my friends in that one space and be able to turn up and look into the crowd and see my friends. Walking around backstage, I had my little Henny bottle, I was driving that thing around and we’re just having fun and doing sh*t that we do on a regular basis, but now we’re at Rolling Loud. It was just a really dope experience to be able to do that was my friends because we’re all from New York and we’d never been to a Rolling Loud.

You have both hip-hop and R&B in your discography, and being out here at a major rap festival, I wanted to ask: which one do you enjoy performing more?

KP: Nobody is really used to hearing an R&B singer at a festival for hip-hop. I think I just come out and let n****s know “I’m out here like God sent me.” I’m gonna sing these vocals, but I’m bout to turn up with y’all too. So I try to give them both of everything.

AJ: There’s a real big difference between R&B and rap crowds. There are certain songs I can play for R&B crowds that might not slide with the rap crowd because they’re there to turn up. They want to hear like, you know, lit sh*t. I feel like I do a really good job at trying to blend two as far as when I do sets. I always try to give the R&B crowds a little bit of some rap sh*t and I always tried to get the rap crowd a little bit of like R&B sh*t.

What song do you enjoy performing the most?

KP: I like singing “Love Songs” as my first song just because of course, people know me by that

AJ: I feel like the song that does well with both crowds is “Poland Spring.” That’s just a regular R&B joint, just a real feel-good song and it always does well with like crowds. So that’s one of my favorite ones to perform, and probably “On God” because every time I do that one, the crowd’s energy is crazy.

What do you think has made your onstage experience easier or more comfortable as you’ve grown as an artist?

KP: I just got off tour with Lil Tjay. Doing shows every single day just got me more comfortable to know that it’s gonna be tough crowds and it’s gonna be lit crowds. There’s gonna be moments where your mic’s not working or your sound’s not working. So it’s just being able to be prepared for those moments at all times.

AJ: To be very honest with you, live performances were not my strongest suit for a very long time because I felt like my priorities were always the music. Now I’m kind of seeing it for what it is. There are so many different elements to make music, like yes the music isn’t important, but live performances are something that I was really neglecting. I wasn’t paying much attention to it because I didn’t really have a lot of shows during the pandemic. So coming back, I got real humbled when I had a show and it was a sh*t show. I told myself, like, “Yo, this cannot happen at Rolling Loud. I need to be more prepared.” So I really went in on doing rehearsals and just all that type of stuff.

Did you check out other performances? Who did you enjoy the most? Who would’ve you like to see if you had the chance?

KP: I’m looking forward to seeing J. Cole. I need to hear that. It’s something about J. Cole’s aura that just draws me in. It’s not only the fact that he’s talking about real life, it’s the fact that I relate. He’s an artist that is [one of] the greatest of all time, but still tries to humble himself and put himself down. He be like, “Oh, I’m coming in third place” or I’m doing this or that, like n**** shutup. You’re the goat bro you know? I just relate because we’re all hard on ourselves, especially being artists.

AJ: Okay, so I only saw one performance and I’ll tell you why. The Hennessy caught up to me very early. I’m glad I wasn’t smoking because I would have been just passed out somewhere, probably. The Hennessy got to me real early. I remember very vividly, though, telling people to take me to go and see Asian Doll, I wanted to see Asian Doll so badly. They took me to see Asian Doll, I did go and see Asian Doll and I got to meet her afterwards, it was dope. Oh, I got to see a little bit of Kaash Paige’s set.

What’s the next chapter for you look like?

KP: The next chapter for Kaash Paige is let me finish these shows up this year, and top of the year, it’s my time and everybody’s gonna know Kaash Paige. It’ll be a lot of crazy music that’s dropping [at the] top of the year.

AJ: Well, right now I’m kind of on my little spiritual journey. This year’s been kind of rough. I thought last year was rough, but this year it’s definitely been a little rougher. [I’m] kind of on my spiritual journey, just trying to learn more about myself so I can put that into my music so that everything will keep being authentic. At the end of the day, I just want to be my most authentic self. I’m working on music, I should have something ready by the top of the year.

There seem to be three types of fans of Paul Thomas Anderson movies. There’s the obligatory, “everything he’s done is a masterpiece and I will hear nothing that contradicts this statement,” crowd. Then, 180 degrees from that position is the, “I haven’t liked a Paul Thomas Anderson movie since Boogie Nights,” people. (Which usually leads me to ask if they’ve seen Hard Eight, since that’s the only Paul Thomas Anderson movie not excluded, and the answer is almost always, “I haven’t seen it.”)

Then there’s the group where I kind of fall: Someone who loves Hard Eight, Boogie Nights, Magnolia and, especially, Punch Drunk Love. But with movies like There Will Be Blood, The Master, and Phantom Thread, I can watch those and realize, yes, these are all very well made “good movies.” But there’s something about each one, for different reasons, that keeps me at an arm’s distance and doesn’t quite want me to come in. (I didn’t forget Inherent Vice. A (still) very strange movie that I would have predicted, by now, would be something I “totally get” and I rewatch often. That … has not happened.)

Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza is my personal favorite movie of his since Punch Drunk Love. This doesn’t mean I’m claiming it’s a better-made film than The Master or There Will Be Blood, but, emotionally, it let me in there like no other movie of his in the past 19 years. (I just gasped a bit realizing Punch Drunk Love is almost 20 years old.) And for the, “make something like Boogie Nights,” crowd, well, here’s a movie set in the 1970s with fun needle drops, so you will also be happy. (The, “everything Paul Thomas Anderson has done is a masterpiece,” contingent will also like this movie, by definition.)

Licorice Pizza, a hangout movie at heart, is set in the San Fernando Valley in the waning days of the Nixon administration. We meet both Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman, whose father’s scene-stealing role in Hard Eight led to a five-film collaboration) and Alana Kane (Alana Haim) at Gary’s high school picture day. Gary is a student. Alana is a photographer’s assistant and is, well, about 10 years older than Gary. Alana is not interested in Gary, but he feels the opposite and what forms is one of those strange relationships that can only happen around that age where one person is madly in love with the other, and the other is amused enough by it all to keep hanging out because there’s nothing better to do anyway.

I suspect, someday, there will be double features of Licorice Pizza and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Okay, sure, a lot of movies use Hollywood as a backdrop, but both of these particular films have a way of inter-splicing real-life personalities from that era into the narrative. (Gary is a young actor on a Lucile Ball situation comedy and, after crossing her at a publicity event, he feels her full wrath. Also, it’s kind of weird we are getting two portrayals of Lucille Ball within weeks of each other.) And Gary and Alana go on a series of adventures as all these weirdos come in and out of the movie, with the constant always being just these two, which creates a really good effect of presenting just how important their relationship is to each other without having to consistently remind us of that fact. No matter what happens, they are a constant.

You see, Gary thinks of himself as an entrepreneur. And after his dust-up with Lucile Ball, he finds himself laying on a waterbed in a mattress store and is promised that waterbeds would be the wave of the future. (As it turns out, I love Paul Thomas Anderson movies that involve mattress stores. Also, speaking of waterbeds, my roommate in college had a waterbed. And because it was so heavy he, “had to have the downstairs bedroom, you know, because my waterbed is so heavy.” Which also happened to be the best bedroom in the duplex. What a scam. Anyway, I irrationally hate waterbeds.) Soon after, Gary and Alana launch a waterbed company that has them driving around Los Angeles in an old delivery truck, meeting all sorts of characters – including Bradly Cooper’s Jon Peters, who is pure chaos.

It’s difficult to segue into the scenes I want to write about because the charming nature of this movie is, one moment, Gary and Alana are running a waterbed company and then, kind of out of the blue, Alana is auditioning for a movie role starring opposite an actor named Jack Holden, played by Sean Penn. (Which is, perhaps, the best stand-in name ever for a character based on a real actor, in this case, William Holden. It’s like having a character based on Robert De Niro and naming him “Jonathan De Niro.”) But it did feel like Anderson just wanted to have a 15-minute scene with, as Anderson said in a post-movie Q&A, his favorite actor. And that’s a big part of the charm of Licorice Pizza.

It’s funny that Anderson said they had no idea what to even call this movie. That makes a lot of sense. (Anderson said the title is based on an LA record store and the record store got its name from an Abbot and Costello joke about how they can sell a bunch of records that nobody wants as licorice pizza.) It’s almost an impossible movie to describe if someone simply asks, “So, what’s the plot?” In the third act, the movie gets into city politics when Alana starts working for Joel Wachs, the longtime city councilman (played by Benny Safdie, who is great) who, at that time, was still hiding the fact he’s gay and, in the movie, uses Alana to throw people trying to prove that fact off the scent.

The plot of this movie doesn’t matter because it barely has one, even though it’s incredibly entertaining. Part of me thinks Anderson saw Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and thought, huh, yeah, I can do something like that. And, frankly, if all our current upper echelon filmmakers want to try their hand at movies like this, I’m all for it. But, in the end, this is a movie with heart and emotion. Something Anderson hasn’t seemed too interested in over the last 19 years. Maybe it got all stored up in there, somewhere, and he had to let it all out. Maybe it forced its way out. (Is there a way to use the word “vomit” in a positive way?) Regardless, what emerged was Licorice Pizza.

You can contact Mike Ryan directly on Twitter.

In what’s becoming a recurring theme, Alex Jones has lost yet another lawsuit filed by families of Sandy Hook victims. On Monday, a Connecticut judge ruled that the InfoWars host is liable by default for refusing to turn over “financial and analytics data” in a defamation suit filed by the families. Jones and his media entities ignored several requests to produce the documents to the plaintiffs.

However, despite winning another victory against Jones (he lost two lawsuits for failing to turn off over discovery material in early October), attorneys for the Sandy Hook families are not thrilled that the conspiratorial host has been able to hide his business practices, which included calling the shooting a “false flag” operation and questioning whether the victims were even real. Via CNN:

“As the Court noted, Alex Jones and his companies have deliberately concealed evidence of the relationship between what they publish and how they make money,” said Chris Mattei of Koskoff, Koskoff & Bieder, which represents the plaintiffs. “Mr. Jones was given every opportunity to comply but, when he chose instead to withhold evidence for more than two years, the Court was left with no choice but to rule as it did today. While today’s ruling is a legal victory, the battle to shed light on how deeply Mr. Jones has harmed these families continues.”

The issue of Jones continuing to conceal his business practices aside, on social media, the reactions were joyous as the InfoWars host is now staring down another potentially ruinous loss for peddling a beyond-the-pale conspiracy theory downplaying the mass shooting of elementary school-age children.

(Via CNN)

For years, Britney Spears and her supporters in the #FreeBritney movement have been trying to get the pop star out of her conservatorship, and finally, it happened: On Friday, Spears’ conservatorship was officially terminated. Naturally, Spears has been doing some celebrating and today, she reported that this past weekend, her first one post-conservatorship, was “amazing.”

Sharing a Vlada Haggerty photo of a fork stuck in some lipstick on Instagram, Spears described her weekend and how awesome she feels now, writing, “What an amazing weekend … I felt like I was on cloud 9 the whole time !!! I actually got my first glass of champagne at the most beautiful restaurant I’ve ever seen last night !!!! I’m celebrating my freedom and my B day for the next two months !!!!!!!!!!! I mean after 13 years … I think I’ve waited long ENOUGH !!!! I’m so happy my lawyer Mathew Rosengart came into my life when he did … he has truly turned my life around … I’m forever thankful for that !!!! What a sight seeing so many people celebrating my victory …. I love my fans so much … so thank you !!!!⁣”

Just because Spears is out of her conservatorship doesn’t mean that she’s just going to ride off into the sunset. Last month, she declared that she wants “justice,” writing, “This message is to my family … for hurting me deeper than you’ll ever know !!! I know the conservatorship is about to be over but I still want justice !!! I’m only 5’4” and I’ve played the bigger person my entire life … do you know how hard that is ???”

Halo Infinite is one of the most anticipated games of the year. Microsoft’s latest game in the Halo franchise is supposed to be the one that changes everything and revolutionizes the series. One way they’re doing that is by making the multiplayer for Infinite a free-to-play model. Players don’t need to own the campaign to play Halo Infinite. They’ll just need a PC or Xbox console.

If that wasn’t enough, Microsoft took it a step further by deciding to drop the free-to-play multiplayer over two weeks before the game is supposed to drop in December. On November 15, the 20th anniversary of the original Xbox, the multiplayer beta for Halo Infinite was released to everyone. However, since it’s free-to-play and all progress is going to carry over when the game officially launches in December, players are treating it as the release of the actual game and losing their minds.

Infinite immediately became the most viewed game on Twitch shortly after the announcement. It surpassed other recent new releases such as Forza Horizon 5 and Battlefield 2042.

As everyone swiftly moved to their PC or Xbox to play the game however they did run into some problems. The servers are getting hit hard and some people trying to get in are discovering a blank blue screen preventing access to the game. So close and yet so far.

Then there were those of us who weren’t quite as happy about the game being surprise launched. A lot of people like to call out of work so they can play new games. With Halo being a surprise it left a few unlucky people sitting at work waiting for time to pass by so they can go play Infinite.

Yeah, let’s just say this game is a big deal. We’re excited to try it ourselves!