Friday is a big day for Bill Burr. The comedian and actor has two things hitting Netflix: the Pete Davidson vehicle The King of Staten Island, in which he has a plum role, and his new comedy special, F is For Family. And last week his wife had a baby! Everything’s coming up Bill Burr, including a pretty decent anecdote, supplied to Variety, about what it’s like to fake-beat up the young SNL star.

Directed by Judd Apatow (who co-wrote it with Davidson and Dave Sirus), The King of Staten Island stars the star as a Davidson-like twentysomething, albeit one minus an SNL gig. Burr plays a firefighter who starts dating Davidson’s character’s mom (played by Marisa Tomei), and at one point they get into it in, of all places, a kiddie pool.

Fight scene, even ones with Pete Davidson for Judd Apatow, aren’t easy to stage. But just because Davidson is a scrawny guy doesn’t mean you should underestimate him. Here’s what Burr told Variety:

Because it was a fight scene, you really have to work out who’s gonna do what so you don’t get hit. Pete was pretty amped up, and also young, so there were a couple of times we clashed heads. I can’t even tell you how light he was. I have a bad shoulder and I was worried, but he felt like he weighed, like, 130 pounds. He’s like 6-foot-2 or 6-foot-3. But he has heavy hands. They’ll knock you out.

You can see the results of their tussle on Friday, when the film drops on Netflix. Meanwhile, Burr was also asked about whether or not it’s too soon to be making Covid-19 jokes, even if we’re still very much in the middle of a seismic pandemic. “No, nothing is too soon,” he replied. He added:

It’s all how you go about it, it’s all how you carve the turkey. You’re not going to make fun of the fact that somebody’s grandparents died, but you can make fun of the person who thinks they’re too good to wear a mask. Or the person with no medical degree that’s talking to you as though they do have one. Or somehow the CDC hasn’t figured out this virus, but this guy here, somehow he knows about it. I was in New York right after 9/11, and we were doing 9/11 jokes right out of the gate. You weren’t making fun of the people that died, but you made fun of the fear, the paranoia — and being in New York and actually having to be nice to people.

You can read our own interview with Burr right here.

(Via Variety)

Vic Mensa chopped it up with Talib Kweli last night in a live episode of People’s Party where the host, Mensa, and co-host Jasmin Leigh delved deeply into what has become a pretty hot topic nationwide: defunding the police. Following the veto-proof decision by the city of Minneapolis to disband their police force, the idea of diverting budget from law enforcement into other community-based initiatives is quickly catching fire.

As a Chicago native, Mensa knows the issue of police overreach well and took some time to expand on the idea of “defund the police” while on People’s Party.

“Police, by and large, have one function in our society and it’s primarily brutality,” begins Mensa, 39 minutes into the interview. “When we talk about ‘defunding the police,’ what we’re saying is ‘fund alternatives solutions to the issues that we face.’ In Chicago, the police are 40% of our city’s budget, so you can only imagine what percent of our city’s budget education is, you can only imagine what percent of our city’s budget housing is, you can only imagine the resources that are not being put into employment opportunities for the youth who are being weaponized as this symbol of black criminality… why don’t we put 10% of that into our education, put 10% of that into affordable housing, into the community point-blank? Statistically, more policing doesn’t equal less crime, but what is the opposite of crime? It’s education and employment.”

The police conversation actually starts around the 35-minute mark of the video, when Kweli asks Mensa about the lasting impact of his song “16 shots” — which detailed the police killing of Laquan McDonald.

“It can get fatiguing when you see a new name every day when you’ve got a new rallying cry every week because another person has been killed by the police,” Mensa says. “I mean, man, Emmett Till is Laquan McDonald and Emmett Till is Breonna Taylor — those brothers and sisters that rode down on the capitalist white supremacist imperialist society, with its foot on their neck, in the name of that man, they were able to change the world so that we do have a different existence than them, and it still ain’t perfect, and it still ain’t right and we still can’t condone it. But the fact that they rode for that man, made our lives differently, and gave us an opportunity to take things further.”

Check out the full chat above where Kweli and Mensa go deep on the verses of Black Star’s “Thieves in the Night,” looting in America, and Vic’s come up with fellow Chicagoan Chance the Rapper.

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Sony’s PlayStation 5 event took place on Thursday and featured a number of big announcements, from a first look at the new console to a number of new game announcements.

From the new Spiderman: Miles Morales to Hitman III and Resident Evil 8, there were a number of games that had people fired up, but Sony chose to open their presentation with the announcement that an old game would be “enhanced and expanded” for the PS5. While fans were hoping for a Grand Theft Auto 6 announcement, they were instead offered a look at what GTA V will look like on the next generation console, with promises of expansion of the GTA world and more online opportunities.

Sony also announced those that play GTA Online on their PlayStation 4 will get $1 million GTA dollars put in their bank account each month leading up to the release of GTA Online on the PS5.

“And starting today, all PlayStation Plus members on PlayStation 4 will get Grand Theft Auto $1,000,000 deposited within 72 hours into their in-game Maze Bank account each month they play Grand Theft Auto O Online until the launch of Grand Theft Auto Online on PlayStation 5.”

Given all the new games they showed off on Thursday, it was a bit of a curious choice to lead with a revamped GTA V, but Sony clearly wanted to promote their partnership with Rockstar and felt it was worthy of top-billing.

HBO Max only launched a few weeks ago, but already the streaming service has renewed one of its top performing original series.

The HBO Max Original Love Life has been officially picked up for a second season, and the news couldn’t have arrived at a better time. The show’s final four episodes were made available for streaming on Thursday, and now, viewers won’t have to wonder in suspense if there’s more of the series to come. However, there is some good and bad news for fans of the show who fell in love with Anna Kendrick’s Darby.

From HBO Max:

Season two will remain set in New York City but will focus on a new character’s journey – one which explores what happens when you’ve lived your whole life knowing who your soulmate is, only to find out years into a marriage that it’s not the right fit at all. The new season will also cleverly key off characters in season one, and ‘Darby’ (Anna Kendrick) will appear occasionally.

Originally, Love Life was supposed to be an anthology series, but it sounds like Kendrick, who also executive produces the show, couldn’t resist coming back for more despite where Darby’s story ended in the first season. “It’s been a labor of love working with everyone on Love Life and all who helped shaped Darby and brought her story to life,” Kendrick said in a statement. “I am excited to be able to collaborate again with the team on a new character and their journey.”

The first season of Love Life is currently available to stream on HBO Max.

Sony’s long-awaited PlayStation 5 event took place Thursday afternoon and they seemed to learn a lesson from Xbox’s previous gameplay event that featured lots of trailers, but little in the way of actual gameplay. Sony offered up a combination of trailers and actual gameplay footage for a number of games, making some big announcements along the way — including finally revealing the first look at the new console, which has a digital only edition as well.

Among the new games announced was the sequel to their wildly popular Spiderman title from 2018, Spiderman: Miles Morales, which will feature the titular character from Spiderman: Into The Spiderverse and looks pretty incredible. There will also be an “expanded and enhanced” release of Grand Theft Auto V for the PS5 launch this fall, as well as the release of Hitman III, the third (and final, as noted by the developer in the trailer) installment of the most recent reboot of the Agent 47 saga.

The gameplay reveal showed Agent 47 slinking around the tallest building in the world in Dubai, in what the developers promise to be “the most personal” of his missions. It will be the eighth overall game in the Hitman series that dates back to 2000 and will come out in January 2021. The series remains ever popular because it has a pretty foolproof premise: being an assassin in a video game is very fun.

Sony put the PlayStation 5 at the center of attention on Thursday afternoon. The event, titled “The Future of Gaming Show,” gave gamers a look at some of 2020 and 2021’s most highly-anticipated releases for the console, which is slated to some out sometime later this year. We’ve already seen the console’s “DualSense” controller, and at the end of the event, Sony unveiled its latest entry into the console wars.

The company put out its full slate of PS5 hardware, including a pair of consoles. One of them includes a slot for gamers who want to get their hands on physical releases, while the other lacks that feature, instead opting for a digital-only approach.

The two biggest questions for the PS5 — how much will it cost, and when will folks be able to get their hands on the new console — are still up in the air, and it’s unclear whether or not the console will be able to lay horizontally, as both of these stand upright. Having said that, we had not seen the console before this, and it’s an interesting twist that Sony will have a digital game-only option. Aside from the console itself, handful of games were unveiled on Thursday, including Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales and Hitman 3, while NBA fans got their first look at NBA 2K21.

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Despite the fact that the NBA’s 2020-21 season will operate on a different timeline than usual due to the suspension of this year’s campaign, the folks at 2K Sports are still putting in the work for the latest release in its revered basketball series. With a little help from one of the league’s brightest stars, 2K gave us our first glimpse at NBA 2K21 on Thursday afternoon.

Zion Williamson of the New Orleans Pelicans made a brief cameo at Sony’s highly-anticipated “The Future of Gaming Show.” After a quick introduction, the No. 1 pick in the 2019 NBA Draft went from real to virtual, and those watching got the chance to check out what Williamson will look like in the upcoming game on the PlayStation 5.

We don’t get a gigantic look at NBA 2K21 here, but we do get a glimpse at Williamson, the Jordans he had on his virtual feet, and some clips of him getting up shots and dunking. At some point this summer, we’ll assuredly get a full-length trailer for the game, one that includes a more exact release date — NBA 2K21‘s coming out sometime this fall, but it’s unclear exactly when, or if it will hit shelves before the resumption of this current NBA season, which may not end until mid-October.

In a new interview, Lil Wayne-associated rapper Lil Twist claims Justin Bieber’s management asked him to take drug charges to protect the young singer’s image. Video calling into Mina SayWhat’s podcast Mina’s House, Twist told the Philadelphia radio personality he was Bieber’s scapegoat for legal issues in the early 2010s. While the two young performers were friends, Bieber did have a proclivity for getting into trouble in his early 20s, which resulted in an arrest for DUI in 2014. Lil Twist had his own similar issue in 2013 when he was arrested for DUI while speeding in Bieber’s car in Calabasas.

In the new interview, Twist says that Bieber’s handlers kept him around in case the young star ran afoul of the law (which he did on several occasions before his arrest). “If they would have put weed charges on Justin in his early career, it would have been bad on him,” So I got a call one day saying, ‘Twist, do you really love this kid?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ They said, ‘Cool, if you love him then you can take the heat for him because you can come off a little weed charge. You’re associated with Lil Wayne. You’re a rapper.’”

Twist doesn’t specify which charge this story refers to. Bieber’s first arrest was almost a year after Twist’s, although it’s possible he’s referring to a situation that wasn’t widely reported. But it seems likely that Twist could referring to the general arrangement of keeping him on-hand as a potential fall guy should the need arise. In any case, he says that eventually, Twist was being blamed for incidents with nothing to do with him.

“It got to a point where I didn’t even have to be there at times and they were putting it, ‘Twist did it, Twist did it, Twist did it.,’” he laments. “It became overwhelming.” It’s an accusation those close to the situation have made before. In 2014, Lil Wayne said that Justin’s manager was the one feeding stories to the press.

Watch the video of the interview above.