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The John Wick franchise (which was previously known under a less-appealing name) probably never intended to reach an audience better suited for Al Pacino’s Scarface incarnation, but smugglers are gonna smuggle. One particular band of smugglers dug the Wick universe so much that they included a code name from the franchise, which made Italian police suspicious. (Italian police are also apparently familiar with John Wick characters. Keanu touches everything.)

TMZ reports that the smuggler-cinephiles stuffed a package full of coffee beans, which were actually stuffed with cocaine, into a package, which they addressed to “Santino D’Antonio.” Wick fans will recognize that name as belonging to a mafia-boss-antagonist character who surfaced in the second movie, and the ruse was soon over.

“The coked-up beans were shipped from Medellin in Colombia to Milan’s Malpensa airport,” TMZ posted. “[T]he 2kg package contained 150g of cocaine powder via about 500 beans.” Not only that, but the address on the package led to a Florence tobacco shop, where a 50-year-old gentleman attempted to pick up the high-octane goods and received a pair of handcuffs instead.

Sadly, there were no horse chases or zooming motorcycles or ninjas reported in this incident, but one never knows, really. Tick tock and coffee beans.. there’s another (bad) joke to be made in there somewhere.

(Via TMZ)

Jeopardy! host Alex Trebek, who went public with his stage IV pancreatic cancer diagnosis last year, gave an update on his health during an interview with Good Morning America on Monday. Trebek was told by his doctor that “he is counting on me celebrating two years of survivorship past the diagnosis of stage IV pancreatic cancer, and that two years happens in February,” he said. “So I expect to be around — because he said I will be around — and I expect to be hosting the show if I am around.”

Trebek, whose first memoir comes out this week, has his good days and his bad days (“There was one day a few weeks ago when [Trebek’s wife] Jeanie asked me in the morning, ‘How do you feel?’ And I said, ‘I feel like I wanna die.’ It was that bad”), but his experimental treatment is “going in the right direction.” That being said, if it stops working, he’s “not going to go to any extraordinary measures to ensure my survival”:

When he had to explain it to his family, the game show host said it was “tough,” but “they handled it beautifully.”

“They understand that there is a certain element regarding quality of life,” said Trebek. “And if the quality of life is not there — it’s hard sometimes to push. And just say, well, I’m gonna keep going even though I’m miserable.”

You can watch Trebek’s GMA interview below.

A deluxe edition of Pop Smoke’s new album, Shoot For The Stars, Aim For The Moon, has been rumored since the start of the month. That news was officially confirmed over the weekend, and today, on what would have been the rapper’s 21st birthday, the expanded edition of the album has arrived.

Heralding the release is a video for “The Woo,” Smoke’s collab with 50 Cent and Roddy Ricch. The clip doesn’t stray far off the beaten path of traditional hip-hop videos: 50 Cent and Ricch perform the song among cars and women, with archival footage of Smoke in a tour bus and on stage interspersed throughout.

The deluxe edition of Shoot For The Stars adds 15 new tracks to the album, including guest appearances from Fivio Foreign, PnB Rock, Jamie Foxx, A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie, Burna Boy, Gunna, and Young Thug. One guest you won’t see on the album, though, is Pusha T. He was originally included, but demanded to be removed from the deluxe release over a dispute with Thug.

Watch the “The Woo” video above.

Shoot For The Stars, Aim For The Moon is out now via Victor Victor Worldwide and Republic Records. Get it here.

Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

After a three-week hiatus, HBO’s Last Week Tonight returned with… nothing to talk about. Everything’s hunky dory as is. If only. Actually, last night’s episode was centered around coronavirus conspiracy theories, “particularly why they’re so appealing, how to spot them, and what you might be able to do about it,” host John Oliver explained.

After acknowledging that conspiracy theories are popular because “they help explain a chaotic, uncertain world and appeal to the human impulse to what’s called proportionality bias,” Oliver noted that when confronted with someone genuinely believes that, say, chemicals are making frogs gay, you shouldn’t try to make fun of them for believing something so incredibly stupid, as tempting as it is. Rather, he said, “What experts say is that the most effective way to approach someone is not by shaming them for believing something, or overwhelming them with counter-evidence, but to try and be empathetic, meet them where they are, and nudge them to think a bit more critically.”

Or, y’know, get famous people to educate your conspiracy theorist family members. For your wrestling-loving aunt, there’s John Cena. For your game show-obsessed uncle, there’s Alex Trebek. For your fashion-obsessed cousin, there’s Billy Porter. And for everyone, there’s Catherine O’Hara and Paul Rudd. If those two can’t get through to these people, no one can. To find the clips, which “gently [urge] anyone who watches it to be careful with what they encounter and share online,” head to The True True Truth.

Here are links to the individual videos, in case that site crashes: Alex Trebek, John Cena, Billy Porter, Paul Rudd, and Catherine O’Hara.

Chance The Rapper guested on an episode of The New Yorker Radio Hour podcast on Friday (July 17), and during the chat, he revealed that now-presidential candidate Kanye West once considered running for mayor of Chicago.

Chance was asked about his support of Chicago mayoral candidate Amara Enyia, and he responded, “The story of how I ended up working with Amara Enyia is so layered and crazy. I don’t think I ever told anybody this, but I found out about Amara Enyia through Kanye West. He called me right before he was about to move back to Chicago, and he told me that he was thinking about running for mayor of Chicago.”

He was then asked if he would have supported Kanye’s mayoral bid, and he responded, “I don’t think so, honestly, because, at the time, I think our views were a little bit…” The host chimed in, “Divergent,” to which Chance responded, “Yeah. But I think both of us have changed in a lot of ways since then. I think that we do agree a lot more on things now.”

Chance then explained why Kanye didn’t end up running for mayor, saying, “He called me back the next day and said he could not run for mayor, because you have to live in the [city of Chicago] for a certain amount of time. And, basically, he was, like, ‘I’m looking into other people: Have you ever heard of Amara Enyia?’ Amara was not a well-known candidate, and she had some extremely progressive, almost radical ideas about governing Chicago. That included defunding police and co-op grocery stores and gas stations. It was like a bunch of stuff that I had never heard before. She didn’t have campaign dollars or any big donors or anything. I met with her, and I just fell in love with her ideas. I completely and totally put everything I could into backing her campaign. And that sh*t didn’t work out. She ended up having to drop out.”

Listen to the full episode below.

Jim Carrey has been making the Zoom rounds on talk shows this week to promote his new novel, Memoirs and Misinformation, which he describes thusly: “None of this is real and all of it is true.” The actor, who recently reached box-office heights again with Sonic the Hedgehog, has shared more than a few great stories, including one about being in Hawaii during the false missile warning.

Meanwhile, over on WTF with Marc Maron, Jim Carrey — who is very New Age these days — spent some time talking about coming up in the comedy scene with the late Sam Kinison, which is a bizarre pairing considering their different career paths.

As for Jim Carrey’s career path, he got his big break when he moved from stand-up into In Living Color, the ’90s sketch show from Keenen Ivory Wayans and his brother, Damon Wayans, with whom Jim Carrey acted with in Earth Girls Are Easy. It’s the same sketch show where others, like Jamie Foxx and Jennifer Lopez, started their careers.

For those less familiar with Carrey’s early career, he played a character he created with Adam Small and Steve Oedekerk called Fire Marshall Bill, who can best be described as the After Picture of a MacGruber sketch. He is a fire marshall with no lips owing to the fact that he’s been involved in a number of fires. He was absolutely hysterical, and probably the most popular recurring character on the sketch show series.

That character, Carrey admits himself, is basically responsible for the success of Carrey’s first comedy hit, Ace Ventura, which he co-wrote with Oedekerk during downtime in In Living Color. Fans turned out for Ace Ventura to see what Fire Marshall Bill would do in a movie. However, as dark as Fire Marshall Bill already is, the original conception of that character was even darker, as he tells Marc Maron.

“Fire Marshall Bill was born out of a sketch … called The Death Wish Foundation. It was a sketch about kids who were passing away, and their posthumous wish is what we were concentrating on. My posthumous wish as this sick kid was to go to an amusement park after I died. So, it would be me, on the rides, flopping around in the seats on the roller coaster like Weekend at Bernies. That didn’t get on, but the character stuck. The character became Fire Marshall Bill.”

“Oh my god,” Maron exclaimed. “That is a dark backstory!”

Indeed, it is. Fortunately, this was also several years before his method acting made Tommy Lee Jones hate him.

Source: WTF with Marc Maron

Netflix is infamous for not releasing data about how many people watch what on their service unless the numbers are huge. Even then, there’s no way to verify if the data is correct, and no other numbers to compare it to. As such you have to take it with a quarry of salt when they claim, for instance, that The Old Guard — their new action/sorta-sci-fi extravaganza, starring Charlize Theron as an immortal-ish semi-savior of humankind — had ridiculous numbers, as they did over the weekend.

The streaming giant has it that The Old Guard — which of course is based on a comic and which naturally ends with a set-up for a sequel — “is currently on track to reach 72M households in its first 4 weeks!” Big, if true! No, seriously, all we can do is take their word for it that 72 million households is definitely the number that will have pressed play on it. And is that worldwide?

And by the way, how does that compare to other Netflix original movies? Last year, they claimed Murder Mystery, starring Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston, was watched by 30 million households in its first three days alone. How did that one do over its first four weeks? Is Charlize more powerful than Sandler? Oh, and what about the other films mentioned on the list of Top 10 hits in the streamer’s history, which is also filled with data that can’t be cross-checked?

We may never know, because Netflix is holding all the cards here and expecting media sites to simply repeat the data it feeds them, no questions asked. But if these soaring numbers are true, good for it and good for Theron, who has blossomed into one of our most nimble action stars, and someone who’s cool with never having been in a Marvel movie.

(Via The AV Club)

Back in June, Kanye West proclaimed the last Friday of the month as the West Day Ever, on which the rapper shared a plethora of new announcements from both his fashion and musical endeavors. In the following weeks, more announcements followed, the latest coming Saturday night with the announcement of his upcoming album, Donda. Now he’s turned back to his presidential campaign, having submitted the required documents and officially launching it with a rally in South Carolina.

Taking the stage at Exquis Event Center in North Charleston, West spoke to attendees while wearing a security vest and rocking a “2020” haircut style for the first rally of his campaign. It didn’t take long for him to spark a bit of controversy. At one point during the speech, he looked to make a clarification on the work of Harriet Tubman saying, “Harriet Tubman never actually freed the slaves, she just had them work for other white people.” His statement didn’t seem to go over well with the crowd. A bit later, West had an emotional moment when speaking about his mother, father, and current family with wife Kim Kardashian. West also addressed his past comments on Planned Parenthood.

West’s rally arrives less than 24 hours after the rapper revealed the tracklist and release date for Donda. It arrives next week July 24, not long after he previewed the album’s title track on Twitter.

For the second straight week, a posthumous album has topped the Billboard albums chart. Last week, it was Pop Smoke’s No. 1 with Shoot For The Moon Aim For The Stars. This week, Juice WRLD has now earned his second No. 1 album with Legends Never Die. It marks the first time in Billboard history that the No. 1 spot on the albums chart has been occupied by posthumous albums for consecutive weeks.

Legends Never Die sold 497,000 equivalent album units in its first week, meaning it now holds the record for the biggest first-week number in 2020, passing The Weeknd’s number of 444,000 with After Hours. On top of that, Legends Never Die now holds the record for the fourth-biggest streaming week ever, having tallied 422.63 million on-demand streams in the week ending on July 16 in the US. Juice WRLD also logged the biggest week for a hip-hop album or a male artist since Travis Scott’s 2018 album Astroworld.

As for the rest of the top half of the chart, Pop Smoke clocks in at No. 2 with Shoot For The Moon Aim For The Stars, with 110,000 equivalent album units. Coming in at No. 3 we find the original Broadway cast recording ofHamilton: An American Musical backed by 95,000 equivalent album units. Rounding out the top five is Lil Baby’s My Turn at No. 4 and Post Malone’s Hollywood’s Bleeding at No. 5.

As for the bottom half of the top 10, DaBaby’s Blame It On Baby comes in at No. 6, Harry Styles’ Fine Line holds it down at No. 7, Summer Walker’s newly-released Life On Earth EP debuts at No. 8, The Weeknd’s After Hours is at No. 9, and Polo G’s The Goat comes in at No. 10.

Read our review of Juice WRLD’s Legends Never Die here.

(via Billboard)

Some artists are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music.

When the NBA gets back on the court later this month for its restart in the Disney bubble in Orlando, a number of players will be wearing uniforms with various social justice messages on the back in place of their names.

The NBA offered players a list of messages through collaboration with the players association, but many were left underwhelmed by the options and not particularly pleased that they were constrained to the list. It’s for that reason that some like LeBron James and Jimmy Butler won’t put a message on their uniform, with LeBron simply wearing his regular jersey while Butler will remove any name or message and play with just a number on the back.

On Sunday, word emerged from Shams Charania of The Athletic that the NBPA is partnering with Russell Westbrook’s clothing line to create warmup t-shirts for players that will feature more messages that were not on the approved list, including things like “Am I Next?” and “Police Reform.”

Westbrook’s Honor The Gift will create the shirts and apparently supply them to the players in the bubble — Westbrook himself hopes to join the Rockets in Orlando relatively soon after testing positive for the coronavirus earlier this month.

It will be interesting to see how players respond to these shirts and whether they feel they offer a better array of messages to choose from. As players like Jrue Holiday and others pledge to donate their bubble salaries to social justice causes and Black-owned businesses, they will continue to seek out ways to use the platform that will be available to them to amplify the message and keep the issues at the forefront of people’s minds, even as basketball begins.