At the 2020 Academy Awards, Joaquin Phoenix gave an impassioned speech against injustice after becoming the second actor to win an Oscar for playing the Joker.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about some of the distressing issues that we are facing collectively. I think at times we feel, or we’re made to feel, that we champion different causes,” he said. “But for me, I see commonality. I think, whether we’re talking about gender inequality or racism or queer rights or indigenous rights or animal rights, we’re talking about the fight against injustice. We’re talking about the fight against the belief that one nation, one people, one race, one gender, or one species has the right to dominate, control, and use and exploit another with impunity.” It was less self-congratulatory than the usual Oscar speech, but Phoenix was initially unsure about what he wanted to say — or if he wanted to say anything at all.
“I’ll be honest with you here. I did not want to get up anywhere and do anything. I was not excited about the opportunity. It’s just not who I am. I was full of fear,” he told the Sunday Times. “I was in that situation and there was a part of me that just wanted to say, ‘Thanks so much, great, goodnight.’ But I felt like I had to… If I’m up here, I can’t just thank my mum.” Hey, it worked for Joe Pesci.
Phoenix, as Hollywood’s most outspoken vegan, also discussed whether he plans to pass his no-meat beliefs to his child with actress Rooney Mara. “Well, certainly I would hope that [he is vegan], but I’m not going to impose my belief on my child. I don’t think that’s right,” he said. “I’m going to educate him about the reality. I’m not going to indoctrinate him with the idea that McDonald’s have a Happy Meal because there’s nothing f*cking happy about that meal. And I’m not going to tell him that it’s OK to read books about all the wonderful little farm animals, and they say ‘oink oink oink’ and ‘moo moo moo,’ and not tell him that that’s what a hamburger is. I’m not going to perpetuate the lie, but I’m also not going to force him to be vegan. I’ll support him. That’s my plan.”
The kid will have to build his Joker Happy Meal toy collections in other ways (eBay).
As Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings gets ready to kick things up a notch for Marvel Phase 4, director Destin Daniel Cretton has been opening up about the film’s influences and saying that audiences haven’t seen everything the new MCU hero played by Simu Liu has to offer.
In a new interview, Cretton revealed that Shang-Chi will draw heavily from the East Asian action-cinema genre, which ranges from the fast-paced Jackie Chan films to the mystical, high-flying wuxia films. Via Empire:
“Authenticity and respect and staying true to this genre was the main objective from day one,” he tells Empire in the new issue. That meant drawing from the greats. “There’s choreography that’s reminiscent of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and other fight scenes are inspired by Jackie Chan. We also had choreographers from mainland China who created some beautiful wuxia-style fight scenes.”
Cretton also revealed that Liu’s characters will be more than just a master of kung fu, and he’ll be able to go toe-to-toe with his MCU counterparts. “Shang-Chi is an incredible martial artist, but he’s so much more than that.”
Interestingly, the director who made his name with the indie film Short Term 12 wasn’t interested in tackling superhero fare, and he even told Marvel head Kevin Feige as much during their first meeting. “That’s usually not the way director meetings start, by saying, ‘You know, I was never interested in doing one of these,’” Feige previously told Entertainment Weekly with a laugh. At the end of the day, Cretton couldn’t resist the opportunity to deliver a superhero that he would loved to have seen during his childhood, which has been sorely lacking in Asian representation.
“Because he had the mask on, I could dress up like Spider-Man for Halloween. I had a handful of other characters that looked like me on screen, but there were maybe two or three that I could choose from, and superheroes were not a part of that,” Cretton said.
The sixth season of Fear the Walking Dead has been good. It has been very good. Part of that has to do with much better writing, and more intimate, self-contained stories. Part of that also has to do with the new attitude of the series’ nominal lead, Morgan Jones. He nearly died at the end of last season and returned as a “new Morgan Jones,” a man who would kill when necessary and refuse to take anyone’s bulls–t.
In this week’s episode, however, Morgan Jones took everyone’s bulls–t. What happened to the New Morgan Jones? Where did he go, and why did he choose to disappear? The penultimate episode of the season, “U.S.S. Pennsylvania,” is also easily the worst episode of the season, and a lot of that has to do with the fact that the old Morgan Jones resurfaced. I don’t want to sound too harsh, but honestly, the old Morgan Jones is a pathetic guy.
This week’s episode takes place largely inside of a nuclear submarine, which is a cool setting, especially given the fact that there are also 100+ zombies inside of an enclosed space. There is one mission: Navigate through the submarine to where Teddy, Riley, and Dakota are and prevent them from launching enough nuclear missiles to essentially destroy the continent. It has all the makings of a cool video game.
The setting, however, does not leave a lot of room to maneuver, so early on in the episode, Morgan decides he needs to go it alone, even if that means sacrificing himself. Strand, however, decides for some inexplicable reason that he refuses to let Morgan play hero by himself. For reasons that aren’t entirely clear, Strand seems hellbent on impressing Alicia (currently locked away by Teddy in a fallout shelter), and he believes that stopping Teddy will put him back in Alicia’s good graces. Strand, therefore, forces himself onto Morgan, but Strand never stops being Strand. At one point, when he and Morgan are blocked by a small horde of zombies, Strand takes Morgan’s ax away and pushes Morgan into the horde, sacrificing his friend so that Strand can escape and be the hero. It’s a move that Strand has pulled before, but never on someone as close to him as Morgan Jones.
In any respect, Strand leaves Morgan behind and makes his way toward the command center, but before he enters, he’s confronted by Dakota, who is holding a gun to his face. She gives a big long speech, and just as she’s about to shoot Strand, Morgan arrives and knocks her out (Strand is grazed by the bullet, but otherwise unharmed). Does Morgan kill Dakota for what she did to John Dorie, or what she tried to do to Strand? No, he does not. Does Morgan get angry with Strand for throwing him into a horde of zombies? No, not really. “We’ll deal with what you did later,” is all that Morgan Jones can muster. Do we find out how Morgan escapes a horde of zombies? We do not.
The confrontation with Teddy and Riley does not go much better. Morgan manages to prevent them from launching all but one nuclear missile. After that missile launch, however, Teddy gives Morgan another big speech, and then Morgan just … lets him go. “Get out of here,” he says to Riley and Teddy, arguably the most dangerous villain in Fear history, a man hellbent on near-total annihilation of the human species. And then he tells Strand to “leave,” too.
That’s it. That’s the entire episode. Morgan and Strand try to stop Teddy from launching a bunch of nuclear missiles, but Teddy gets one off, and Morgan lets everyone (who tried to kill him in the episode) go. For dramatic reasons, I may understand it — the showrunners may want to save those big deaths until the season finale and hopefully, at least, allow John Dorie, Sr. the satisfaction of killing Teddy. But from a character standpoint, Fear basically assassinates the “New Morgan Jones” and replaces him with the same old “life is precious” Morgan Jones whose inability to kill occasionally cost him the lives of his friends.
Not that it matters. Teddy and Riley suggest that the one missile that got off would fall back down in their general vicinity in Texas, destroying them all, and that’s what the promo for next week’s season finale portends. It looks like everyone will either be searching for a way to avoid being decimated or finding a way to spend their last few minutes together. I don’t expect everyone to live, and that’s not a bad thing, considering how little screentime characters like Charlie, Lucianna, Wes, Sarah, and the Rabbi have gotten this season. It might be time to use a nuclear bomb to pare down the cast.
It does appear, however, that the bomb will land, which will pave the way for a time jump, which may allow Fear the Walking Dead to catch up to The Walking Dead timeline and, potentially, the Rick Grimes movie.
Fear the Walking Dead airs Sunday nights at 9 p.m. on AMC.
Ever since the recent premiere of the Friends reunion special, the world has enjoyed having another excuse to look back at one of the most beloved sitcoms of all time. The show has actually been a big moment in the music world, too, and the fun continued over the weekend with a special tribute to Lisa Kudrow, via Courteney Cox, Elton John, Ed Sheeran, and Brandi Carlile.
In a video that Cox shared online yesterday, Sheeran begins by dedicating the video to Kudrow before the show widens to reveal that he’s seated at a piano alongside the aforementioned folks. From there, the quartet performs “Tiny Dancer,” but with the modified “Tony Danza” lyrics from the show, of course.
Shortly after, Kudrow shared a response video, saying while sporting an ultra-wide smile, “That was the most thrilling thing ever. It was so good.” She then got nit-picky about the performance, continuing, “Technically, it’s, ‘Hold me close, young Tony Danza,’ so, but, you know… what you did was great, too, including the original song that you wrote, Sir Elton. That was really good.”
Danza himself also re-shared the original video and noted that he was honored by the performance.
Amid the wave of violence against Asian Americans (following Trump’s “Kung Flu” and “Wuhan virus” remarks), John Oliver previously called out those who embraced (and that includes Meghan McCain) Trump’s rhetoric about the coronavirus. He revisited the theme this week to dig deeper into the long-term discrimination against Asian Americans, and that includes the aggregation of data that groups over 20 different ethnicities into one category under the blanket “Asian American” term.
That large and diverse group of people includes a diverse range (not only Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Filipinos) of education and poverty-level percentages per ethnicity. The range goes from, say, Indian Americans (75% likely to hold bachelor degrees) to Bhutanese Americans (15%, respectively) to wide-ranging poverty rates (10% overall for Asian Americans but 25% for some specific ethnicities, including Mongolian and Burmese Americans). Oliver ended up using an unlikely but digestible analogy around the 7:30 mark about how useless aggregated data really turns out to be:
“Disaggregating the data can reveal big disparities that you couldn’t see previously… looking at averages for Asian Americans as a whole is like looking at the average of the Hemsworth brothers. It’s very misleading when we know that some Hems are Worth a lot more than other Hems are Worth.”
Chris, of course, would be the prevailing Hems who’s Worth more than Luke and Liam, but more to the point, Oliver moved onto what all Asian American groups do share. That would be “the common experience of racial hostility” and “violence,” which goes back to “laws denying them the possibility of becoming citizens or owning land.” Oliver explained what went down as a result of the 1965 Immigration Act that outwardly favored doctors and engineers but also addressed refugees, and in the end, Oliver condemns the U.S. outlook for the bigotry perpetuated by the “model minority myth,” which he flat-out calls a “tool of white supremacy and a trap.”
That trap, as it turns out, extended even further than the vast range of Asian American ethnicities. “Basically, America prioritized wealthy, more educated Asian immigrants, then turned to Black people who’d been subjugated for centuries and said, ‘See, they’re educated and successful, why aren’t you?’” It’s a pervasive treatment that, as Oliver explains, continues in our current times, and there’s no reason to believe it will disappear unless the American people, starting from the top, adapt their perspective. Watch the entire 27-minute segment above.
Mare of Easttown was such a phenomenon that it literally broke HBO Max. But like HBO’s fellow acclaimed limited series Sharp Objects and Show Me a Hero, there’s no plan for a second season… so far. In an interview with Variety, HBO chief Casey Bloys was asked whether he’s spoken to Mare of Easttown creator Brad Inglesby about having Kate Winslet return to “mythical place” Wawa for seven more episodes.
“If Brad felt like he had a story to tell that felt like it would be at the same level, I think everybody would be open to it,” he said. “Right now, he doesn’t have that story. Who knows? We’ll have to wait to see if they come up with something they’re dying to tell.”
HBO was so impressed with Mare that it has set a three-year exclusive overall deal for TV with Brad Ingelsby, the veteran screenwriter who created the series and served as showrunner. Ingelsby brought the project to HBO with Winslet on board. Bloys hadn’t worked with Ingelsby before but the experience on Mare was so strong that they were eager to keep him in the fold for TV.
Winslet is game for a second season, tellingTVLine, “I would absolutely love to play Mare again. I miss her. I really do. It’s the strangest thing. I feel like I’m in mourning. It was an absolutely wonderful role… There’s something very addictive about Mare, because she’s so outrageous and lovable and brilliant and real, you know? I loved playing her.” Maybe we’ll get more Easttown when she’s done filmingAvatar 17.
In the mid-2000s, T-Pain was an absolute hit machine, with one of his biggest and most memorable being “I’m N Luv (Wit A Stripper).” During a recent appearance on Mike Tyson’s Hotboxin’ podcast, he spoke about how that song actually began its life as a joke among friends.
He told Tyson of the single, “My homeboy was tryna save strippers in the club. The song was a joke. I was literally making fun of him. We was just in the studio f*cking around and Big Boi [was] saying it was dope and I said, ‘Yep.’”
T-Pain has actually told this origin story before. In a 2015 interview with USA Today, for example, he went into greater detail:
“We got one girl to dance on him and he was just automatically trying to take her out of the club, pay for her tuition and do everything. The next couple days in the studio, everybody was still laughing about it. I started playing with GarageBand on my Mac and singing, ‘I’m in love with a stripper,’ and everybody was like, ‘Yo, lay that down and we’ll give it to (him) as a joke.’ Then the label came in and we were going through some songs I had recorded. They heard the ‘joke’ and were like, ‘This is the furthest thing from a joke. We’re putting this out next week.’ [The fact that it became a hit] threw me off. I was literally trying to make a bad song but it didn’t work.”
The Suns and Nuggets both advanced to the second round of the playoffs with wins in six games over their first round opponents, as Phoenix took down the defending champs in the 7-seeded Lakers and the Nuggets vanquished a familiar foe in the 6-seeded Blazers. As such, both teams enter this series with plenty of confidence and two stars playing tremendously well in Game 6 to get them to this point.
The presumptive MVP of the league this season, Nikola Jokic, was unbelievable against the Blazers in most every game aside from a lopsided loss in Game 4, averaging 33 points, 10.5 rebounds, and 4.5 assists per game on 52.8/42.9/91.7 shooting splits in the six games against Portland. Stopping Jokic isn’t an option, but the Suns will have to decide what their gameplan is going to be against the do-it-all big man, as the Blazers seemingly stumped the Nuggets initially with their “let Jokic score” plan in Game 1, but eventually he started picking them apart. Deandre Ayton, who was dominant against the Lakers, will have a much different test in Jokic and how he handles Jokic not just as a scorer but on the glass will be key.
On the other side, Phoenix has the clear advantage in the backcourt with Devin Booker dominating Game 6 in L.A. and Chris Paul steadily getting more healthy after injuring his shoulder in Game 1 of the first round. Still, the Nuggets managed to beat a lethal backcourt in Portland despite being without three of their top five guards, most notably Jamal Murray and Will Barton, and will look to get continued strong play from Monte Morris to lead their backcourt effort. Like with Jokic, slowing Booker and Paul is a tough task, but forcing them into difficult shots (which they’re certainly capable of making) instead of allowing them to get easy looks at the rim is the first task for any team defending the Suns.
Game 1 will be the nightcap after Bucks-Nets Game 2 on Monday night, and will hopefully set the tone for what looks to be a very fun series.
Game 1 TV Info
Tip Time: Monday, June 7; 10:00 p.m. ET TV Network: TNT
Game 1 Betting Lines (via DraftKings Sportsbook)
Series Price: Suns -220, Nuggets +175 Point Spread: Suns -5 (-115), Nuggets +5 (-107) Total: Over 219.5 (-110), Under 219.5 (-110) Money Line: Suns -225, Nuggets +175
Player Scoring Props (via DraftKings Sportsbook)
Nikola Jokic O/U 30.5 Points (Over -120/Under -107)
Mikal Bridges O/U 11.5 (-113/-113)
Deandre Ayton O/U 13.5 (-118/-108)
Jae Crowder O/U 11.5 (-106/-121)
Michael Porter Jr. O/U 19.5 (-134/+105)
Aaron Gordon O/U 11.5 (-127/+100)
Devin Booker O/U 29.5 (-113/-113)
The Nets won Game 1 of their first round series against the Bucks in a 115-107 game that didn’t even feel as close as that final score indicated despite the loss of James Harden a minute into the game with an aggravation of his hamstring injury. Harden will be out for Game 2 as well, and as such Brooklyn has a tough task ahead to hold homecourt against a Milwaukee team that will be looking for a much better offensive performance after a sloppy shooting night in Game 1.
Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving were terrific as expected, but in Harden’s absence it was Blake Griffin and Mike James who stepped up to combine for 30 points that was really the difference in Brooklyn’s opening game victory. Whether they can get similar efforts from the supporting cast in Game 2 will go a long way in determining whether they can match the offensive output from the opener where they steamrolled Milwaukee for the first three quarters of play.
On the other side, Giannis was excellent and Brook Lopez had a strong performance, but Khris Middleton had an awful 6-of-23 shooting night, Jrue Holiday wasn’t much better at 7-of-19 from the field, and as a team Milwaukee was a disastrous 6-of-30 from three-point range. It may be as simple for the Bucks as hitting shots, but they also seemed to fall in love with isolation play against Brooklyn rather than utilizing the ball and player movement that helped them dominate Miami in the first round.
From a betting perspective, the Nets covered as 4-point favorites but the came came in well under the total of 239.5.
Game 2 TV Info
Tip Time: Monday, June 7; 7:30 p.m. ET TV Network: TNT
Game 2 Betting Lines (via DraftKings Sportsbook)
Series Price: Nets -220, Bucks +175 Point Spread: Nets -1.5 (-112), Bucks +1.5 (-110) Total: Over 234 (-110), Under 234 (-110) Money Line: Nets -117, Bucks -103
The United States met Mexico in the final of the CONCACAF Nations League tournament on Sunday night in Denver in what was an absolutely wild game that ended in a 3-2 U.S. win in extra time. There was pretty much everything one could imagine, good and bad, from a U.S.-Mexico game, but the USMNT managed to gut out a win and lift the trophy.
Twice, Mexico went ahead in the game and the U.S. had an answer. First it was a goal barely a minute into the game that left the U.S. stunned, but Gio Reyna had the answer later in the first half to level things.
Mexico take the lead 62 seconds into the @CNationsLeague Final
— CBS Sports Golazo (@CBSSportsGolazo) June 7, 2021
In the second half, it was Diego Lainez who got a goal for Mexico late to seemingly put the U.S. on the ropes, but Weston McKinnie found the equalizer to force extra time.
Diego Lainez comes off the bench and scores for Mexico
— CBS Sports Golazo (@CBSSportsGolazo) June 7, 2021
In extra time, Christian Pulisic drew a penalty on a foul in the box that was given after a look at VAR, and the American star stepped up and hit a sensational penalty into the top right corner to give the U.S. a 3-2 lead.
Mere minutes later, Mexico drew a penalty of their own from VAR after they called a handball in the box on the U.S. Ethan Horvath, who came in late in the second half after star keeper Zach Steffen left with an injury, stepped up and made the save of his life to keep the U.S. ahead by one.
— CBS Sports Golazo (@CBSSportsGolazo) June 7, 2021
After that there was a pitch invader and more things were thrown at players along the sidelines, this time with a player on Mexico taking the worst of the hit.
— CBS Sports Golazo (@CBSSportsGolazo) June 7, 2021
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