The new documentary Have a Good Trip arrives on Netflix at an interesting nexus point in history. People are quarantined, creating a captive audience for streaming; the culture wars are ongoing but also sort of jumbled — with “plandemic” conspiracy theorists on both the liberal and conservative ends of the spectrum; and psychedelics (the topic at hand) are seeing a therapeutic resurgence paired with increased legalization. Considering how the factors behind the first psychedelic wave (the Civil Rights era, the Vietnam War, and mass distrust of the establishment) match up with our current situation (the continued fight for intersectional justice, COVID-19, and mass distrust of the establishment) the doc could have been a harbinger of a new era of self-exploration via controlled substances.

That clearly wasn’t the goal here, though. Instead, director Donick Cary (Silicon Valley, New Girl, The Simpsons, etc.) focuses on making us laugh and getting a little weird with famous entertainers who are unafraid to tell cool drug stories. Of which there seems to be no shortage. The list of guest stars includes Sting, Ad-Rock, A$AP Rocky, Nick Kroll, Rosie Perez, Natasha Lyonne, Ben Stiller, and — actually, let’s just do this:

Two of the most notable names on that very notable list are Anthony Bourdain and Carrie Fisher, who died in 2018 and 2016, respectively. Seeing them on screen, then seeing their worst trips brought to life by actors is still a little jarring. And it’s hard not to wonder, in the case of Bourdain’s death from suicide, if this movie has been sitting on ice for a while in order to respect the dead without having to cut out his part. Or even if it was delayed for Fisher’s sake and then again for Bourdain’s and just happened to land at this exact cultural moment.

Regardless, Have a Good Trip feels well-timed as a quarantine watch. It’s based around famous people recounting their psychedelic use paired with re-creations that utilize either actors or animation. Bourdain, for example, is played by Adam DeVine — who portrays the travel host through an acid and quaalude-fueled night in a seedy motel with a hitchhiking exotic dancer. Fellow Workaholics co-creator Blake Anderson is in the scene too and the chaos they serve up together is probably the doc’s funniest segment. (Though watching Natasha Leggero crawl around Central Park as Princess Leia is definitely in the running.)

These storytelling bits are stitched together with scenes of a heavily mutton-chopped Nick Offerman teaching a little psychedelics 101, various comedians offering practical advice on not freaking out while high, a scientist offering a breezy a breakdown of the chemical processes in play, and a leather-jacketed Adam Scott starring in early-90s style anti-drug PSAs. It’s all a little random but never unfunny by any means. Offerman always thrives in narrator/ringmaster roles like this and Scott’s PSA segments are loyal to the genre with the absurdity dialed up just a few notches. The PSAs also contain reenactments of their own, which include Haley Joel Osment in an extended cameo.

Throughout Have a Good Trip, only Sting, Bourdain, Fisher, and A$AP Rocky really explore how they learned to feel more fully themselves for having had their experiences. The potential for profundity within the whole psychedelic experience is an afterthought. And there’s not much context for how these drugs have influenced art, music, culture, or psychology for the past 50-odd years or how they might affect our world in the future. Shaggy, loose, and funny is the MO here. Sillyness abounds.

If that approach sounds like fun to you… well, it probably will be. It was a lot of fun for me. Still on the fence? Fair enough. Just use this picture of Nick Kroll covered in seaweed while recounting a mushroom trip as your litmus test.

‘Have a Good Trip’ is streaming on Netflix now.

Tekashi 69 may have avoided the full temperature of the hot water his troublemaking landed him in, but now his rabble rousing ways have begun to taint everything he tries to do — even the good stuff. TMZ reports that the rainbow-haired, 23-year-old semi-professional Instagram troll tried to use his hard-won earnings — in the neighborhood of $2 million, thanks to the “Gooba” merchandise flying off of his online store’s digital shelves — to help others, only to get his charitable efforts rebuffed by the nonprofit he attempted to donate to.

According to TMZ’s sources, 69 planned to send $200,000 to No Kid Hungry, a nonprofit working to end child hunger through meal programs, education, and policy promotion. Naturally, No Kid Hungry is also working hard to provide COVID-19 relief, as free school lunches aren’t being served, restaurants are closed down, and food supply chains are being disrupted by the spread of the coronavirus and efforts to combat it.

However, No Kid Hungry decided that Tekashi’s antics would reflect poorly on the organization if they were to accept his funds and subtly admonished him to be a better role model in a statement: “We are grateful for Mr. Hernandez’s generous offer to donate to No Kid Hungry but we have informed his representatives that we have declined this donation,” it reads. “As a child-focused campaign, it is our policy to decline funding from donors whose activities do not align with our mission and values.”

Tekashi, who returned right back to his trolling ways almost immediately upon his early release from prison, could stand to clean up his image, but from everything we’ve seen, it doesn’t seem all that likely — which is a shame, because that money could have helped a lot of people in need. At least now Tekashi can start paying back some of the massive debts he incurred while in prison.

If nothing below suits your sensibilities, check out our guide to What You Should Watch On Streaming Right Now.

Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt: Kimmy vs. the Reverend (Netflix stand-up special) — Kimmy Schmidt wraps up with her most spectacularly sunshiney adventure of all. Actually, things might get a little dark, considering that this is a pick-your-own-adventure style episode with viewers in the driver’s seat. Bandersnatch it ain’t, though. There will be Daniel Radcliffe and explosions and a dancing hamburger and Reverend Richard Wayne Gary Wayne causing a heap of trouble before Kimmy’s wedding. Don’t worry, Jacqueline, Titus, and Lillian are all here to help fix and mess things up, too.

The Flash (CW, 8:00 p.m.) — Barry must forget and execute a successful plan to save Iris from Mirrorverse, while Ralph tries to prevent a mistake from Sue.

D.C.’s Legends Of Tomorrow (CW, 9:00 p.m.) — The team bizarrely ends up heading to college and starting a sorority in an effort to secure an ancient artifact. In the meantime, Nate falls under a spell, which spoils the group’s plan for success.

For Life (ABC, 10:00 p.m.) — Aaron’s pushed to a desperate move during his attempt at a retrial despite a powerful new adversary on the scene, whose wrath could blow the whole thing up. And Safiya’s attempting to warn Aaron about his marked-man status.

The Last O.G. (TBS, 10:30 p.m.) — Shay’s career finally sees a big break, while Tray and the family contemplate what this might mean for the rest of them.

Conan (TBS, 11:00 p.m.) — Chris Gethard

The Late Show With Stephen Colbert — Ellie Kemper, Christine Baranski

The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon — Ethan Hawke, Elle Fanning, Kane Brown

The Late Late Show With James Corden — Jeff Goldblum, James Blake

Late Night With Seth Meyers — Paul Giamatti, Nicole Richie

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The 2019-2020 NBA season came to an abrupt halt on March 11 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. With the season effectively three-quarters of the way through, many storylines, records-to-be, and developing comebacks were left in the lurch; all the bizarre, beautiful, and too-absorbing minutiae of the league halted. This is a look back at the most compelling of those suspended narratives in an attempt to figure out what could have been while reconciling, maybe wrenchingly, that however the season concludes, this will be a year in basketball that never fully happened. Welcome to Year None.

Zion Williamson’s professional basketball career has been interrupted, to no end, by acts of god. Natural and global disasters that ebb and flow around his high points, Achilles’ heel-style injuries around the low. Of all the overlarge hats handed to players on NBA Draft night, Williamson’s could not have sat awkwardly on his head fast enough for him, Adam Silver, or anyone watching, but since it did, the rookie is yet to play a continuous stretch of the game he was set to take over.

Summer League 2019, a Friday evening in early July. The parking lot of UNLV’s Thomas & Mack Center fills and people appear to float across pavement flooded with lifting heat that eddies up to their knees, desert sun tumbling into the throbbing lights of the Las Vegas Strip three gargantuan blocks of sage scrub, airfield, and motels over. They are crackling as they enter the arena, the cold conditioned air sloughs the remnants of heat from their shoulders, but there’s another thing bearing down that won’t budge: the voltaic spark of anticipation. Zion, the name already shorthand for a kind of jolting hope, starts in whispers and ends with thousands chanting it at an empty court, conjuring up the smirking face they know is about to slip from the dark of the tunnel.

He played south of nine minutes before he bashed his right knee against Kadeem Allen’s. An impact, if you stretch it out right in the dramatic range of memory, that serves as the foreshock for what was coming — a 6.9 magnitude earthquake that rumbled right out of the Mojave and caused the scoreboard and speaker stacks to sway like pendulums. Williamson was watching from the bench, vibrations humming through the blood pooling in his bruising knee, as the court was cleared of players and all those people who had him on their lips seconds before, demanding We Want Zion, went streaming up the stairwells toward the exits.

In the days, and then remainder of summer that followed, it seemed less like Williamson had hurt himself than it took an earthquake to stop him. He was already something of a legend coming into the league and his false start of a debut only served to turn the narrative around him even more effusive. He was presented as Apollo in potential, but more surreptitiously accurate is how the deity ruled over prophecy, of which Williamson can’t seem to get clear from. A David and Goliath, him against his own reputation cast like a shadow on a wall, ten stories tall and growing.

What happened in the desert came as an aftershock in the Pelicans preseason, not registering on the Richter scale but bound to bone and flinching muscle memory. Williamson eventually needed knee surgery and was sidelined until Jan. 22, when he finally made his NBA debut exactly three months from the 2019-20 season start. He did it against the Spurs, the team that saw him exit the preseason. Coincidence or prophecy, however you’d rule it, the parable of Zion continued to run interference.

There isn’t another player whose bad luck exists in such perfect counterbalance to the league’s own good. People tune in to watch the Pelicans when Williamson takes the floor. Late January in any regular season is a slog, the momentum that carried the season at its start has tapered along with the memories of twelve hours of languid, frantically festive Christmas Day basketball. But this year, Williamson’s return was something of a North Star. We all had a week to churn ourselves into a frenzy that felt even more heightened than the two times before, and whether you want to slice it along idioms or not, the third time was the charm.

Zion Williamson plays basketball very frankly. Other ways to describe his game include “frankly upsetting,” “frankly unbelievable,” and “frankly bending the known laws of physics, but bluntly, direct.” His cues — to his teammates, opposing players, the audience — are candid. In his regular season debut, he lay in wait until the start of the fourth. Then, extending and somehow extending himself once more while mid-air, clearing Jakob Poeltl’s 7-foot frame, Williamson windmilled the game toward himself by tipping a rebound down and out of the atmosphere level with the backboard. This, he seemed to say, is mine now.

He was always in plain sight. He is not a player who can slip into the paint unseen, who can weave his way open into an outside corner. He will simply put himself somewhere and understand the space his frame allows him to hold. One of the most misleading aspects of Williamson’s game, and frustrating for opposing players, is that it can appear slow in how straightforward it is. Like an insult that will drive to the quick of you in a breath, leveling you before you’ve realized you’re undone, Williamson is offensively explicit. He doesn’t feint, he doesn’t dance, he doesn’t tease out all the ways he could blow by a guy, he just moves. Even when he fumbles, like he does in his debut when Poeltl blocks his spin to the basket, he simply steps between Poeltl, Marco Belinelli, and Bryn Forbes, all converging on the ball, to take his rebound and lob it up over his shoulder, backwards.

To watch Williamson is to know that dunks that will pummel you breathless are coming. His dunks hold their own emphasis but are slow to register, maybe because the force of them punches holes through what you’re accustomed to seeing. He does’t gather up kinetic force in his drives toward the basket, he is his own fixed point of gravity. From that, he explodes outward and the game, caught in the lurch of a universe having been shifted. There are times when Williamson lifts himself into air and appears to hold, arms gone back to meet his feet kicked up. He waits, you swear you can see time dragging like he has it on a leash, and only then, both his arms slam forward, down, his legs piston up, you remember he hasn’t even landed yet. And when he eventually does, most often he just walks away.

Maybe that’s what makes it so jolting to watch, how accustomed he is to shifting the physics of what makes sense on the floor. He’ll snake a pass and turn, thunder in measured steps down the floor before the disrupted offensive play has registered with its players. He’ll move to what has become a signature underhanded layup with such floating care that it seems the ball is hesitant to leave his palm, scooping it skyward. He’ll pluck lobs from the air where his teammates have pitched them, so clear and so sure that no one else will reach up to impede because their eyes, like ours, are locked on him.

To watch Zion Williamson work is to reckon with a kind of terror you don’t mind being run down by, a joyful relinquishing of breath and body. That his professional career has been so marred by external crises that it had to be underscored, again, by a pandemic after only 19 games, that he was in the locker room Alvin Gentry refused to let his players out of upon learning a referee who was exposed to the COVID-19 virus was waiting for them on the floor, that he will likely miss out on Rookie of the Year this season, feels, tracing the prophetic cord that’s run through his last less than a year, perfectly and stupidly fitting. Not right, but in step with what will hopefully be the only mythic year he has to deal with.

He will have plenty of unbelievable ones, hopefully too many to narrow down when he’s facing scarcer seasons in front than behind. But that his inaugural year, where we saw him more as parable than player, has been once again abruptly upended could be the chisel Williamson can take to his own marble facade before getting on with the rest of his career, whenever it can start again, in peace.

George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road, one of the best movies of the 2010s (and, let’s face it, of all-time), came out five years ago this week. That’s five years of the Doof Warrior, five years of the “what a lovely day!” GIF, five years of Charlize Theron: action star. Without Fury Road, there would be no Atomic Blonde, and that would be a darn shame. Theron and co-star Tom Hardy notoriously did not get along on the set of the Oscar-winning film (you’d get annoyed with your co-workers, too, if you were “in the desert for so long”), but they only have nice things to say about each other now.

“Charlize arguably laid down the finest lead character in an action movie, and that credit is much deserved,” Hardy said in the New York Times‘ oral history of Mad Max: Fury Road. “Both to her as a phenomenal talent and also to George for recognizing from the very start that it was time to pass Mel’s shoes onto Furiosa.” It’s a great performance, obviously, but Theron also shaped the look and personality of Furiosa, including her hair.

“At first, Furiosa was this very ethereal character, with long hair and some African mud art on her face. It was a different costume designer back then, before Jenny Beavan, and the costume felt a little more Barbarella-y. I worried about it.”

Theron credits Miller for “hearing me out,” for listening when she called him and said, “I don’t know how she’s getting by in the mechanics’ room with all this hair. I think we need to shave my head, and she needs to be a more androgynous, grounded character.” Weirdly, that’s what Elijah Wood said about his character in Happy Feet Two, also directed by Miller (what a wild career). Anyway, Theron had such a pleasant-in-retrospect experience with Miller that they’re reportedly working on a Furiosa spin-off.

The Doof Warrior is willing to reprise his role, but only if gets a hefty raise (three flame-throwing guitars).

(Via the New York Times)

In a move that will excite Star Wars fans still buzzing from the final season of The Clone Wars, Katee Sackhoff has reportedly been cast in season two of The Mandalorian. According to /Film, who was the first to break the news on Rosario Dawson playing a live-action version of Ahsoka Tano, Sackhoff will be reprising her role as Mandalorian warrior Bo-Katan Kryze, who the actress has voiced in both The Clone Wars and Rebels animated series.

The casting decision is not a total surprise, however, as Bo-Katan was featured prominently in the final season of The Clone Wars that recently aired on Disney+. In fact, Sackhoff was asked in early April if she hoped her character would make the jump to live-action, and in light of recent news, the answer she gave Discussing Film seems very telling:

I mean, who wouldn’t! I grew up watching Star Wars. I grew up obsessed with Star Wars. Part of what I loved about playing Starbuck was that she reminded me of Han. I absolutely love that world and it’s part of the reason why I took The Clone Wars and wanted to play Bo to begin with. That being said, of course, there are people that are going to jump to conclusions that Bo is going to be in The Mandalorian because on paper, it does make sense. But you know, we’ll just have to wait and see and cross all my fingers and toes. You never know.

Sackhoff’s casting also makes sense considering Bo-Katan was the last known person in Star Wars canon to possess the legendary Darksaber, which was somehow in the hands of Giancarlo Esposito’s Moff Gideon in the season one finale of The Mandalorian. Although, it should be noted that just like reports of Dawson and Temuera Morrison joining the hit bounty hunting series, there has been no official confirmation from Lucasfilm as of yet.

Season two of The Mandalorian premieres in October on Disney+

(Via /Film)

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It may have taken over 10 years, a fan streaming party, and an NSFW scam by her collaboration partner, but Nicki Minaj has finally accomplished the goal she’s been striving toward for seemingly her whole career. For the first time since she broke into the rap blog ecosystem over a decade ago, the rapper who dubbed herself the Queen and who has at times been both underdog and tyrant, has topped the Billboard Hot 100 alongside Doja Cat with her remix to Doja’s viral hit turned chart-climbing single, “Say So.”

And yes, her Barbz and Doja Cat’s “Kittens” staging a “streaming party” to juice their stats did help push them to No. 1, but the song they were most directly competing against this time, Megan’s “Savage” remix with Beyonce, received a similar push from the Hotties and Beyhive, making the race more-or-less even, for once. Nicki had other chances in the past. She came close in 2011 with “Super Bass,” which peaked at No. 3, again in 2012 with “Starships” (No. 5), and in 2014, she came as close as she ever got to No. 1 with “Anaconda,” which landed at No. 2 behind Taylor Swift and “Shake It Off.” Those past records were all massive hits, so why is Nicki only just now securing this accomplishment? And more importantly, where does she go from here?

In looking at why Nicki has always fallen just short of that coveted No. 1 spot, it’s probably worth noting that a lot of the songs that surpassed her were notable for being novelty tracks or for coming from one-hit wonders (Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used To Know” is in there, as is LMFAO’s “Party Rock Anthem“). They’re also shamelessly poppy — just like some of her attempts were. This is probably the main reason: ‘Til now, Nicki competed with pop stars for position at the top of the pop charts, trying to beat them at their own game. With the above-mentioned songs, she downplayed the very thing that shot her to prominence in the first place: Her top-tier rap skills.

It also bears examining Nicki’s own reasoning — that the industry is weighed against women, especially Black women. It’s certainly true that every artist who beat her to the top in the above examples was either Caucasian, male, or both. In the whole history of the Billboard Hot 100 chart, Black women have been disproportionately represented; it was only recently, after Billboard changed its metrics to allow for streaming numbers, that this began to balance out (hip-hop has dominated the chart ever since, reflecting the genre’s popularity in modern times). And who is to say how Nicki’s songs would have faired if streaming numbers were tabulated into Hot 100 results back then?

But Nicki’s insistence on trying to game the charts by making music that appealed to those sensibilities was a little like when Michael Jordan decided to play baseball for a year. It just wasn’t what her fans wanted her to do — and it wasn’t what she wanted to do, as she later admitted to regretting those songs and not sticking to her own style. Likewise, her collaborations with pop stars like Ariana Grande, Britney Spears, David Guetta, Jessie J, and Justin Bieber read as disingenuous to her natural sound, which would have grated alongside their perky tunes. She muted herself to accommodate the whims of a notoriously fickle audience, all while refusing to play to her strengths by collaborating with other female rappers.

It’s no surprise that when she finally started cooperating in sisterhood with younger rappers like Megan Thee Stallion and Doja Cat, she saw a return to the top ten for the first time since the surprise release of “Chun Li,” the lead single from Queen, which peaked at No. 10 due to her long absence from recording before its release. With “Say So,” Nicki showed that she could not only rap toe-to-toe with the men of rap, but also with the peers to whom she’d be compared to most often (whether fairly or not).

It’s poppy, but not in an overproduced, techno-drenched, manufactured way — its dance groove hails from the mid-70s R&B traditions of Black music, while both Doja and Nicki get some serious bars off. It’s the sort of song Nicki should have been making all along; not running from her roots but toward them. While fans read drama into the bars — as they’ll probably do forever — for once, she didn’t try to use beef with another female rapper for promotion and retired “bitches is my sons” from her vocabulary, at least temporarily. In fact, she even turned around a brewing feud that her fans started with Doja, for once, mobilizing them to promote a critic rather than bullying them. She became someone you want to root for again.

Call me naive, but I personally refuse to believe that anyone was actually gullible enough to think Doja Cat would really “show her boobs so hard” once the song reached No. 1, so the other explanation — the simplest one — is that Nicki finally made the music fans wanted from her, (mostly) free of gimmicks, of needless needling, goofy voices, or obvious pop radio reaches. We don’t know if she’ll stick to this newly winning formula, but given how badly she’s wanted this one accolade and how long it’s eluded her, don’t be surprised if her next album finds her firmly in a new mindset, putting the music first without the need to pursue the numbers.

Tekashi 69 has been called a snitch on multiple occasions, but it appears he’s not going to let that bother him. In fact, he’s really leaning into the descriptor. His first social media activity after being released from prison was a comment about snitching. Not long after that, he hopped on Tory Lanez’s Quarantine Radio and joked about snitching. He’s far from done with owning the “snitch” label, and has done so even more over the past 24 hours.

Yesterday afternoon, he shared an illustration of himself pointing the police and the FBI in somebody else’s direction and captioned it, “Stop playin wit me …. who made this?” Around the same time, he also posted a poll on his Instagram Story. He asked, “QUESTION: If they kidnapped you, stole from you, slept with your baby moms, threatened your mom, stole millions from you, caught on the phone trying to kill you. WOULD YOU,” with the options being “snitch” and “do jail time.”

On top of all of that, Tekashi also only follows one Instagram account now, and it’s the NYPD.

Tekashi certainly seems to be handling his post-prison career well so far: His first livestream since his release absolutely shattered the previous Instagram record for most viewers.