It’s about time we put an end to that painful running jiggle. If you know, you know.
Taika Waititi is set to dive into directing more Star Wars properties, and if he has his way no matter what’s in the screenplay he will have a Baby Yoda puppet on set for him to cuddle with.
The JoJo Rabbit writer, director and (kind of) star got some face time with the most adorable member of the Star Wars universe when he directed the last episode of The Mandalorian’s first season, which revealed a pretty significant item that sets up the second season’s arrival this fall. But Waititi wasn’t tinkering with the Darksaber as much as he was the very expensive and lifelike Baby Yoda puppet, which according to The Hollywood Reporter he kept holding between takes.
Taika Waititi, who helmed the season finale (which shot in December at Manhattan Beach Studios) and voiced the android assassin IG-11, also needed to take occasional breaks to sit down with The Child in his hands. “He reminded me so much of my babies when they were 6 months old,” he says. “I couldn’t help it, I had to hold it in the same way.”
The Hollywood Reporter has a pretty adorable photo of it, as well as some other details about life on set for those involved. But it’s very funny to think the most important episode of the show’s brief history had some big decisions made by its director while he’s gently snuggling The Child. Some jobs have all the perks.
Fathers everywhere are celebrating their day of honor this Father’s Day and as people have done for previous parental days of honor, social media has been filled with pictures and shoutouts for the father figures in their lives. Joining in on the trend, Drake took to his Instagram to shout out his dad and the other father figures he has in his life, but not without showing love to his son Adonis first.
Sharing a picture of his son to his Instagram page, Drake captioned the picture saying, “Happy Fathers Day to all the real g’z handling business.” Moving things to his Instagram story, he one-by-one shouted a number of celebrities and close friends that he viewed as father figures in his life.
Appropriately starting with his own father, Dennis Graham, Drake would go one to wish Rap-A-Lot CEO J. Prince, Lil Wayne, Birdman, Snoop Dogg, NBA legend Charles Oakley, OVO Blizzy, LeBron James, and his uncle Stizzy a Happy Father’s Day. In his message to Lil Wayne, he called the rapper his “brother” while saying “you raised me.”
Drake would also call Snoop Dogg a “stand up G” and Charles Oakley a “real gangsta” with “big father figure energy.” Speaking to LeBron James in one of the posts, Drake said, “We came up together and you are an incredible dad and you made me a killer.”
Photos of Drake’s Father’s Day shoutouts can be found on his Instagram page or below.
Ansel Elgort denied an allegation he sexually assaulted a woman he dated in an Instagram post on Saturday, days after the graphic allegation was shared on Twitter and quickly went viral.
A woman on Twitter, identified only as “Gabby,” posted a detailed account of her relationship with Elgort, who she claimed took her virginity in a painful experience she described as a sexual assault. The details are graphic but were shared by Page Six:
Gabby, who appears to have deleted her Twitter account after posting her message, had written that “when [the sexual encounter] happened, instead of asking me if I wanted to stop having sex knowing it was my first time and I was sobbing in pain and I didn’t want to do it, the only words that came out of his mouth were ‘we need to break you in.’
“I WASN’T there in that moment mentally,” she wrote.
The woman said the two met on social media and offered other details about their relationship. Elgort did not comment on the post until Saturday, when he confirmed that the two had a relationship but said it was “legal and entirely consensual.”
Elgort said he was “disgusted and deeply ashamed of the way I acted” and apologized for how he ended the relationship, but he denied the sexual assault claim and said “her description of events is simply not what happened.”
Among the many problems with hosting a potential NBA season restart in Florida right now is, well, Florida. The state is seeing a surge in cases of COVID-19 and the decision to “re-open” businesses and restaurants well before effective treatment and a vaccine for coronavirus has made Florida a significant hotspot for the disease in the United States.
Amid rising cases and alarming testing results, the NBA is moving forward with a plan to host a “bubble league” at Disney’s Wide World of Sports later in the summer. The plan makes sense in a lot of ways: Disney has considerable athletic facilities and accommodation amenities to house both players and games in an isolated area. It’s also a broadcast partner, with ABC and ESPN able to set up TV crews and logistics to broadcast the games that would undoubtedly see huge ratings in a world struggling to hold sporting events stateside.
Recent days have had reports of players concerned about the logistics of the bubble league, though, and late Saturday we learned a significant reason why: while testing standards have been established for players, the many Disney employees required to support a bubble league will not see the same rigorous testing standards and won’t be staying in the bubble at all times.
ESPN’s Baxter Holmes and Zach Lowe reported late Saturday that players have voiced concerns about the spike in cases in Florida, and even commissioner Adam Silver has acknowledged rising numbers in the sunshine state.
In at least one recent call with high-level team executives, NBA commissioner Adam Silver has acknowledged the spiking numbers in Florida. Team sources described the general tone of that call, including the questions asked of Silver on it, as tense. Another called Silver’s tone “resolute but somber.” He expressed a resolve to go on — a confidence in the NBA’s bubble concept — while recognizing the seriousness of the coronavirus spike, sources said.
The reason for the tone of that call may be something players learned about Disney employees, who apparently won’t be subjected to the testing standards and quarantine restrictions of the NBA’s players and staff.
The National Basketball Players Association held a virtual town hall with players this week and addressed concerns about the Florida cases, sources familiar with the matter told ESPN. Players brought up the fact that Walt Disney World staffers who will not reside in the NBA campus — including hotel housekeepers — will not be subject to any coronavirus testing, sources said. One mitigating factor that was cited, a source added: Many of the new cases are in areas other than Orlando.
Disney’s walled fortress of amenities may be able to isolate players from the rest of Florida, but staff coming and going essentially defeats the purpose and effectiveness of that isolation. It’s not a true bubble, to put it plainly, and more than two months of that could see something go wrong and lead to an outbreak. That would be both dangerous to their health and damaging to the league, which has watched as a variety of other leagues such as Major League Baseball and the National Hockey League deal with reports of positive COVID-19 tests in their Florida training locations last week.
Those outbreaks happened because no one is living at these facilities, but in the greater population of Florida where cases are spiking and social distancing isn’t being maintained. Those positive cases were detected in people living in Florida and going to work in Florida, just like the Disney employees that will be largely responsible for preventing the NBA’s bubble from popping later this summer. With that in mind and given numbers in the state continue to go up, it makes sense that players are concerned to say the least.
[via ESPN]
