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Frank Ocean very much does things at his own pace. Endless and Blonded came within a day of each other, four years after Channel Orange. Now, though, he may have something else in the works, and his collaborator is waiting on him to get it finished.

The New York Times‘ Kyle Buchanan spoke with Call Me By Your Name director Luca Guadagnino for a yet-to-be-published interview, but he offered a preview of it on Twitter yesterday. He tweeted that the director said he and Ocean worked together on a “secret project,” and that he continued, “We were collaborating on a music video that never happened. I use the Times to launch an appeal to Frank: Frank, let’s do that video. Come on.”

In response to his tweet, a Twitter user asked Buchanan if Guadagnino had any updates on his feature film adaptation of Bob Dylan’s 1975 album Blood On The Tracks, which was announced back in 2018. It appears that project will no longer be happening, or at least Guadagnino isn’t working on it any longer, as Buchanan noted, “He wasn’t able to get the budget he wanted for it.”

Ocean has expressed his appreciation of Call Me By Your Name on multiple occasions, including when he spoke with its star, Timothée Chalamet.

Earlier this week, Cobra Kai star and original The Karate Kid star Ralph Macchio offered us insight into the one significant question that hasn’t been answered yet. While I hope that the show will eventually reconcile that issue with time, people can catch up on the first two seasons when the show arrives on Netflix (August 28) with a Season 3 to come. One of the show’s creators, Josh Heald, recently spoke up about production not being delayed at all due to Covid-19, so hopefully, we’ll see a release date from Netflix soon.

In the meantime, Heald has spoken with Comic Book Resource about how Season 3 (which has a lot to clean up) will work to be “bigger and exciting and take it to the next level” for Johnny Lawrence’s students and Daniel LaRusso’s budding Miyagi-do 2.0. Heald reveals that the series wants to show more complex fight choreography as the students improve, but he also feels that it’s necessary to keep things consistent with the show’s existing emotional tone. It’s easy to see why he’s looking at The Matrix (that the trilogy used kung fu and not karate is beside the point) as an example of why dropping character and plot focus (in favor of building the craziest action scenes possible) is something that Cobra Kai doesn’t want to do:

“[We] always want to stay true to why we love this story in the first place, which is the characters. So sometimes, we don’t want to go too far where it becomes The Matrix and feels like a different thing but it is the balance between really focusing on the story while thinking about those ways to make it bigger.”

It’s a wise approach, given that all the fights in Cobra Kai (and The Karate Kid) are emotionally grounded. The stakes are about the people involved and their rivalries and the settling of old beefs, not necessarily the fight moves themselves. Well, other than that crane kick, but we could debate that all day. What matters is that Heald is stressing that the “heightened stakes” of The Karate Kid II are what have most recently inspired Cobra Kai production, and he is promising “fireworks” to come, “but it’s not something that feels different, necessarily.”

Further, Macchio revealed to us that the show will lean even more heavily into the teen rivalry of Miguel and Robby as their senseis continue to guide them and (possibly) make amends for the past. Season 3 certainly won’t be a dull affair, that’s for sure.

(Via CBR)

Maybe, just maybe, the final line of the first John Wick movie should have been, “I’m thinking I’m back … and I’m bringing Bill and Ted with me.”

So it all started a decade ago… actually, scratch that. It actually all started in the late 1980s when Ed Solomon and Chris Matheson wrote Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. A movie about two earnest, spaced-out high school students traveling through time that cost next to nothing, starred two actors (Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves) who certainly wouldn’t be described as “famous” at the time – that went on to gross over $40 million dollars, which seemed kind of impossible. (Also, if you happened to be a kid at the time, this movie seemed like the biggest thing in the world.) A sequel would follow in 1991 that would do about the same type of numbers, followed by an animated series, then that was it.

Now let’s go back 10 years, right when everyone started realizing IP was king at the box office, so Solomon and Matheson wrote a script on spec and it was flatly rejected by the studio because they had their own idea for Bill and Ted – and it didn’t involve Reeves or Winter, both at one point were being replaced by Instagram stars. But then John Wick happened, which reasserted Reeves as an international box office action star and all of a sudden Reeves returning as Ted seemed like a pretty good idea. Plus, an online campaign for a third movie – which finds Bill and Ted battling their future selves over the song that will unite the world – caught fire and, now, 29 years since the last movie, Bill and Ted are back. Ahead, Solomon and Matheson explain just how that happened.

When I spoke to Alex Winter a couple of weeks ago, I asked if there was a moment he thought this would never happen and he said, “Oh, yeah.”

Ed Solomon: Yeah, we’re both laughing out loud. There was only one moment where I actually thought, “This is actually happening,” and that was when Dean said action on the first day of production. I swear to you, I did not believe it until then because we kept getting so close. It’s like we kept coming to the altar and they’d say, “You may now kiss the bride,” and you pull up the veil, and it’s just a skeleton that dissolves into dust and we’re back to square one. We had a couple of days a couple of weeks before we started shooting where we lost financing, and we had to scramble. We lost our third investor, who was the biggest investor. And our two other investors, who were individuals, stepped up and really helped us out. If it wasn’t for them, there would be no movie. But yeah, we fought, and fought, and fought, and fought to get this thing made. It was very stressful.

I guess my follow-up to that is, why? Alex Winter, a renowned director, and you’ve got one of the biggest action stars in the world wanting to make a third movie for this popular piece of IP.

Chris Matheson: Yeah, they were kind of culty movies. They weren’t gigantic yet. They both did well, but they weren’t enormously successful. And I think internationally, they weren’t particularly successful because comedy typically doesn’t travel that well. So, there was that. They just didn’t look at it as being super valuable. Also, we were wanting to deal with themes that pertain to failure and loss and mortality. And that’s a heavy lift for a comedy.

Alex also said a studio wanted to replace he and Keanu with Instagram stars.

Matheson: I believe that was true for a while, yeah.

Wait. Really? Actually Instagram stars?!

Solomon: Yeah, teenagers.

Matheson: Go back and reboot it, get a couple of young guys to restart it was the idea.

Solomon: When we first wrote this, we wrote it on spec with Alex and Keanu as our partners. And I would say there was a certain amount of, I guess in hindsight, hubris because we thought it’s a no-brainer. But when we turned it into the studio that actually owned the underlying material, it was met with kind of a resounding silence, partly because they had another movie in mind that they’d already had written. But we were, of course, not aware of it, that I believe involved young Bill and Ted. It was like a reboot of new Bill and Ted who time traveled with a cell phone. I didn’t read the script, so I don’t know anything about it. That was our initial hurdle. The second hurdle was what Chris said: Because the first movie, it was a culty hit. It wasn’t a giant mega-hit and it didn’t have a big foreign release, so there weren’t numbers to support it. So, it took the power of social media and the voices of the fans to rise up enough to let the powers that be know, “Oh wait, maybe there are people interested in seeing this, and maybe people have discovered this movie over the last three decades, so maybe there is a market.” Thank God, because we fought forever to get it made.

So you were fighting against another script you never read. Did you guys have power to stop that? Because how do you fight against a studio that’s already got this reboot in mind?

Solomon: You don’t. We couldn’t. They could do whatever they want.

So you had no veto in this?

Solomon: We didn’t. Yeah, our very first deal was for a movie that we’d ever made. I think if there was a chance for them to extract our own children from us to give to them during that deal, we probably gave it to them. Honestly, it was the worst deal you could ever make, and we had no power going forward in any way. The only power we had was the power of persuasion, and that didn’t work for a long time. Then, finally, it did work, but it took forever.

Matheson: To the degree that we had power, it was our relationship with Alex and Keanu because I think that they felt that if there was going to be another Bill & Ted, they wanted it to be written by us, so that did give us a little bit.

They’ve got another script ready. They’re ready with their Instagram stars. It’s just remarkable that you got that turned around and now this version exists…

Solomon: That is where the power of the fans came in. And that’s also where, thankfully, John Wick and Keanu’s international presence grew and the fans spoke to such a level that the powers that be, the people who finance this stuff, finally heard it and went, “Oh, maybe we should do it this way.”

So, John Wick is, at least partially, a reason for this?

Matheson: I think it’s a big reason. Yeah, the playing field changed after that came out because at that point, given the Keanuaissance, it’s called, and this not being a very expensive movie, why would you not want to have Keanu play Ted again? Just from a business standpoint, it seemed kind of obvious.

It’s interesting each movie has a different director. Do you two have any say in that?

Solomon: We didn’t have anything to do with the director change in Bogus Journey. It wasn’t in our power. I don’t know why they replaced Stephen Herek. We thought Stephen did a great job and he was a lovely guy to work with, so I have no idea why he didn’t do the second movie, but he was replaced. Again, out of our control. In hindsight, you know what? I think it’s kind of cool that each movie has a slightly different signature, partially due to where Chris and I were as writers at the time they were written, and also partially due to the directors. This movie, we put Dean Parisot on before we got it made. I had known Dean for a long time, and Chris and I both felt like Dean is the perfect guy for this. Not just his absurd sense of humor, but also, he’s lived life and he is like Bill and Ted. He’s had ups and downs on professional and personal level, and he’s a really nice guy and a big-hearted guy. And he knows a lot about music, so on this one, we brought Dean on.

Matheson: I accept that it’s possible that Steve wasn’t replaced, that Steve stepped off.

Solomon: He might’ve. I actually don’t know. That’d be a good question to ask him.

‘Bill and Ted Face the Music’ will be available via VOD on August 28th. You can contact Mike Ryan directly on Twitter.

Kanye West has been active on Twitter in recent days, usually in the form of a quick daily burst of tweets. In one of those from the past few days, he shared a seemingly handmade poster that features a “Kanye 2020 Vision” logo tiled with photos of various faces, all of which appears to be held together with staples. Two of the people featured on the poster are Vogue editor Anna Wintour and actress Kirsten Dunst. Dunst caught wind of the poster, and it left her with questions.

These days, Dunst mostly uses her Twitter for sharing links to songs and videos, but she took a break from her regularly scheduled programming to address the Kanye situation, writing in response to the poster, “What’s the message here, and why am I apart of it? [shrugging emoji].”

Dunst hasn’t offered a public endorsement of any of the presidential candidates against whom Kanye is running, but she threw her support behind Bernie Sanders in March, before he dropped out of the presidential race in April. She said in a statement at the time, “All his life, Bernie Sanders has had the courage to speak the truth, even when no one else would. He stands up for people — all people. Right now we need his courage and conviction to bring justice to this country, to the environment and to the world. It is my honor to join my voice with his, and with the voices of the millions of hardworking people who know a better world is possible and are ready to fight for it. Together we will win.”

Okay, let’s tick off all the reasons Apple TV’s new comedy Ted Lasso should not have worked, just to get it out of the way:

• It is a television show based on a short-lived advertising campaign
• The advertising campaign, while legitimately funny in bursts, centered on a thinly-drawn character with a silly name
• It leaned into a series of riffs on a “football and soccer are different” subject that has been covered many times
• Turning this into a full-length television series without falling into the “dumb American from flyover country doesn’t understand simple concepts” trap seems borderline impossible

That’s is a lot of booby traps for one television show to avoid. On paper, your skepticism is justified. And yet!

That’s right, ladies and gentlemen, I am pleased to report that Ted Lasso — the first three episodes of which are available now, with new ones dropping on Fridays — is good. Very good. Almost unreasonably good, given the condescending bullet points above. In hindsight, it should not have been this surprising. It comes from Bill Lawrence, creator of Scrubs and Cougar Town and producer of many good shows. It stars Jason Sudeikis, a very likable and charming man who should have been given a few cracks at a sitcom lead by now. None of my shock at the show’s quality has anything to do with them. It mostly stems from my own failure of imagination. This is on me. I can and will do better.

Let’s back up, though. Let’s hit the facts. The character of Ted Lasso originated in little ads to promote the NBC Sports acquisition of the rights to English Premier League soccer. Again, they were fun in concentrated small doses. Here, look.

The version of Ted Lasso who shows up in the series is a little different. He’s not quite as oblivious. He’s eager to learn. He’s an incredibly sweet man who tries to establish a connection with everyone he meets and effect change through sheer force of personality, kind of like if Leslie Knope had a mustache and 80 percent less frantic energy and 200 percent more opinions about the Cover 2 defense. There’s also some necessary world-building that takes place early on to provide an answer to the otherwise perplexing “Why did a football coach take a job coaching soccer in England?” and “Why would an English soccer team hire an American football coach?” questions. The latter has a fun dash of the Major League “let’s sabotage this thing” vibe to it, with a twist for the reason. The former involves a one-sided phone conversation with his wife that is kind of devastating and a solid piece for Sudeikis’s future Emmy submission. There is depth here.

There are also, as you might suspect, other characters. Phil Dunster and Brett Goldstein play members of the team named Jamie and Roy, respectively, polar opposites, one a spoiled phenom with a golden leg, the other a grouchy aging star with a glorious bath mat of chest hair. Hannah Waddingham plays the team’s intimidating, biscuit-loving owner. Juno Temple plays Jamie’s girlfriend, Keeley, a model and paparazzi darling who is part muse, part amateur psychologist. Nick Mohammed plays Nathan, a low-level team staffer and punching bag who Ted turns into the team’s tactical mastermind. All of them start out skeptical of Ted Lasso. All of them can’t help but be hopelessly charmed by him. Kind of like the audience watching the show at home.

A lot of this has to do with Sudeikis, who appears to be having a blast. It’s a tough needle to thread, playing an almost relentlessly upbeat character surrounded by cranky figures who start out expecting and/or hoping to see him fail. That can get exhausting if it’s too saccharine and far-fetched if it works too easily. Sudeikis pulls it off with a kind of laid back, calming pleasantness, with Ted gently scraping away at people’s tough exteriors to get to their mushy centers. (As the season progresses, we start to find out why each of the other characters is prickly, largely thanks to Ted’s personal touch.) And pulling it off is a double triumph here because he’s writing and producing as well as acting. There’s a lot of weight on his shoulders in all of this, and he carries it well. The biggest takeaway isn’t so much that Sudeikis is a burgeoning sitcom king as much as it is that he probably should have been one already.

The whole thing somehow ends up running parallel and perpendicular to another good sports-adjacent show, Brockmire. Like Brockmire, it started as a short, one-note comedy bit — the Brockmire character first appeared in a Funny or Die sketch — and grows and grows into something deeply funny and heartfelt. Unlike Brockmire, the main character is a well-adjusted sweetheart who cultivates positive relationships with the people around him instead of a narcotics-Hoovering trainwreck who has to constantly fight his natural impulse to blow up his entire life every morning. (Also unlike Brockmire, Ted Lasso can dance, as Sudeikis breaks out his old “What’s Up With That?” shuffle early on, a performance that leaps immediately to number two on my Dance-Related Moments In Bill Lawrence Shows Power Rankings, just behind the Turk dancing to “Poison” on Scrubs. This is extremely high praise.) Brockmire ran four seasons and became one of the best shows on television in that period. Ted Lasso was just picked up for a second season after a promising start. I would be very happy with at least two more.

Let’s close this out by being fair. I opened up this discussion with snotty bullet points about why the show shouldn’t have worked. Here are some bulletproof points about why it does:

• Funny
• Sweet
• Makes you feel good
• Made by talented people who clearly thought a lot about making it work
• Main character is named “Ted Lasso”
• I know I used the silly name thing as a reason why it shouldn’t have worked but, I’m sorry, I love it
• Mustache
• Dancing

A formula for success if I ever saw one.

Ahead of the full-length trailer (for a movie that came out three years ago) dropping during the DC FanDome event on Saturday, director Zack Snyder released a teaser for the infamous “Snyder Cut” of Justice League. There’s shirtless Superman, played by Henry Cavill, walking across his own monument; a snowy football game with Victor Stone; an on-fire tank hurtling towards a cop; and the boys (and Wonder Woman) being back in town to confront the resurrected Man of Steel. There’s no dialogue, except for the screams of joy from millions of #ReleaseTheSnyderCut supporters.

You can watch the teaser below.

“For me, where the movie falls, it really starts to represent its own path. It’s kind of separate now from what I would say the DC cinematic universe [is] in continuity. I think it’s divergent, in that way. And I think that’s a good thing,” Snyder recently said about his (and not Joss Whedon’s) Justice League fitting within the rest of the DCEU. “They also put filmmaker’s first and they say, ‘We want to hear your individual voices. Take these characters and do a run. Show us what you would do.’ [It’s] in the great tradition of comic book writing, and runs that have been done with all of these amazing characters.”

Zack Snyder’s Justice League, as it’s officially known, comes out in 2021.

(Via CinemaBlend)

Let’s get the bad news out of the way now: Euphoria isn’t coming back any time soon. The glittery Emmy-nominated series suspended production in March due to the global pandemic, and while the entire season has been written, “in order to do it the way we want to do it, we need to wait until it’s safer,” Zendaya told InStyle. The actress was also a guest on Wednesday’s Jimmy Kimmel Live!, where she told guest host Ben Platt, “We’re trying to figure out how to eventually be able to create a season two that we’re all really proud of and get all the best out of it that we want, while also still being safe.” (It’s easier to make something in quarantine when it’s two people, not an ensemble.)

That brings us to the good news.

The Euphoria team, including creator Sam Levinson, is considering a “bridge episode,” Zendaya said, that “we can do with a limited amount of people in a safer environment that can give people something — because we also miss Euphoria as the people who create it, too — and give everyone who loves the show a little something so we have something to live on until we are able to go into season two.” It’s a show about a bunch of teens: make it a social distance-friendly TikTok episode; everyone on the app already looks like they’re in a Euphoria episode, anyway. Just not Zoom. No more Zoom. Ever.

Watch the entire interview below.

There have been signs in recent months that new music from SZA could be on the way. She teased a “20-track music dump” back in May, and in July, she shared her mother’s heartwarming thoughts on some unreleased songs. Now, it seems like SZA has some material ready to drop, but the way she sees it, her label, Top Dawg Entertainment, is what’s keeping it from coming out.

In a tweet from last night that has since been deleted, SZA wrote regarding new material, “At this point y’all gotta ask punch. I’ve done all I can do.” A fan then shared a screenshot of himself asking TDE president Punch to tell SZA to release music from the Ctrl sessions, to which Punch responded, “soon.” SZA wasn’t pleased with that answer, as she replied, “This is all he says to me as well . Welcome to my f*cking life .”

Another Twitter user then asked, “Would you saaay this is an adverse or hostile relationship orrr just out of your hands = you don’t know,” and SZA answered, “BEEN hostile .” Before getting off Twitter for the night, SZA expressed her frustration once more, tweeting, “Brb yelling at the wall.”

After SZA told her followers to ask Punch about her unreleased music, a number of them took to his Instagram and flooded it with comments about SZA. Punch took to Twitter to address the situation, beginning, “What’s poppin? What y’all on?” He added, perhaps sarcastically, “I am a person and you guys are hurting my feelings.”

Amid retweeting and responding to critical and hostile messages about SZA, he answered one user who said of him, “me after I dont let an artist release her own music because I have a superiority complex that makes it impossible for me to have healthy relationships with women because I always want to control them and then everyone calls me out on it.” He responded, “Wow. That was a great read except you’re 100% wrong.”

Somebody else wondered, “i actually don’t get it what buisness reasons does punch have to not drop their music. the only thing i can think of is no tours but it still gon sell well.” Punch answered them, “Don’t listen to them. Passion can grossly misguide a person.”

SZA seems to have had issues with TDE before. She declared in 2016 that she was quitting music and that Punch could release her album (the then-upcoming Ctrl) “if he ever feels like it.” She later said the album only actually came out because TDE took the masters of the album out of her safe. In 2018, she insisted that her Ctrl follow-up will be her last album.

If anyone expected President Trump to idly spectate during his opposing party’s 2020 convention for presidential nominee Joe Biden, well, scratch that idea. No one expected that, and he predictably began the DNC by having a full-blown meltdown over Michelle Obama earlier this week. And on Wednesday night, Barack Obama’s presence (and his vigorous rebuke of Trump) sent the president into a real tizzy within minutes of his predecessor’s arrival on camera.

Yes, he went all caps style from the outset while tweeting out a false conspiracy about Obama concerning the 2016 election: “HE SPIED ON MY CAMPAIGN, AND GOT CAUGHT!”

More non-fan fiction followed with Trump drawing his own conclusions about how Obama customarily waited to endorse his successor as the Democratic party’s nominee: “WHY DID HE REFUSE TO ENDORSE SLOW JOE UNTIL IT WAS ALL OVER, AND EVEN THEN WAS VERY LATE? WHY DID HE TRY TO GET HIM NOT TO RUN?”

And Trump lost it when VP nominee (and former prosecutor) Kamala Harris took her turn. He straight-up made up his own version of why Kamala and Joe Biden clashed over federal school busing at a Democratic primary debate. More fiction here: “BUT DIDN’T SHE CALL HIM A RACIST??? DIDN’T SHE SAY HE WAS INCOMPETENT???”

For her part, Kamala tossed her own barb at the camera when she declared, “I know a predator when I see one.” It’s not the first time that she’s used that term to describe Trump, but oh boy.

The DNC’s final night will unavoidably include Trump tweeting during Biden’s speech. Should be a good time.

Postgame interviews with players are rarely must-watch television. Players tend to speak in platitudes and get out of there without saying something inflammatory or coming off as selfish — every single walkoff interview will include some form of “it was a team effort/win” in it. For those that happen via satellite, it’s often awkward with a bit of lag between questions and answers, but on Wednesday we were treated to an all-timer when the Inside The NBA crew dialed up Boban Marjanovic after the Mavericks 127-114 win over the Clippers in Game 2.

What ensued was one of the finest five minute interviews you’ll see on a postgame show, with Boban offering basketball analysis of his role on the team, what he was saying to Kristaps Porzingis after his Game 1 ejection, how in real life he would kick Keanu Reeves’ ass, explaining why he’s so joyful on and off the court — plus a treat for Shaq at the end.

The “You Rang?!” moment was an all-timer and I honestly don’t think I’ve ever seen Shaq this happy.

Boban has long been a beloved figure in whatever locker room he is in and a fan favorite of those teams, but this offered a glimpse into his delightful personality to the masses. His “thanks for choosing me and not Luka, it’s the first time” line was fantastic and he bounced back and forth between actual basketball topics and goofy topics in such a way that made him the perfect guest for the Inside crew that does the same.

Basically, Boban forever.