Johnny Depp’s Notorious B.I.G. thriller City of Lies has been pulled from the schedule a month before it was set to hit theaters.
The movie, formerly known as LAbyrinth, was slated to open Sept. 7 in North America by Global Road Entertainment. No new date has been set for the film.
The move comes amid a series of woes for the actor, including a damaging Rolling Stone profile in June, that make any publicity campaign tough.
If you’ve been thinking about upgrading your account and becoming a supporting member of this website, I’d love to encourage you to do so during the month of August. As we start moving toward fall, and the end of the year (holy-shit-time-goes-fast), it’s that time where I start thinking about finances and the sustainability of the website. I’ve run some of the math, and basically, if everyone reading this signed up for just one year, this website would be sustainable basically immediately for multiple years. If only a small fraction of the people reading this right now signed up, this website is viable for me to keep running as my full-time job for another year. And, that’s the ultimate goal.
When you upgrade your forum account you gain access to exclusive content, Dark Mode, an ad-free browsing experience, and the supporter forum.
Even if you don’t have a forum account but want access to Dark Mode and an ad-free experience on the main website, you can become a patron for only $3 per month (or $25 annually) and you’ll get the perks while also helping us maintain our independence as a publisher.
I’m making plans for next year right now and the goal is to re-launch Encore, continue improving and adding new features to the forums, and start writing even more long-form reviews/pieces here on the website. Thank you to everyone that’s continued to help make this dream a reality every single day.
Another week and Drake’s still at the top of the charts:
The set continues at No. 1, earning 145,000 equivalent album units (down 21 percent) in the week ending Aug. 2, according to Nielsen Music. Of that sum, just 12,000 were in traditional sales, as the album continues to be overwhelmingly powered by streaming activity.
Etan Vlessing, writing for The Hollywood Reporter:
MoviePass has changed its plan yet again, this time down reducing the number of movies a subscriber can see to three movies per month. The embattled company also announced on Monday that it is abandoning a price increase to $14.99 a month, and keeping it at $9.95.
Jaret Reddick of Bowling for Soup sat down with Substream Magazine:
We first get on the topic of the band’s longevity when talking about Warped Tour and I recall the summer of 2014 when Bowling for Soup was routinely pulling in the largest crowds of the summer. Reddick mentions that this past summer they were drawing the same large crowds at Warped Tour, before making the comparison to the NFL’s Pittsburgh Steelers noting that the band travels well. “I can say that’s just the loyalty of our fan base, we’re just really, really lucky,” Reddick states.
The Fever 333 have posted up a vinyl preorder for their latest EP.
Remember that story about the McDonald’s Monopoly scam? It sounded like a good movie idea. Well, Ben Affleck and Matt Damon are currently developing a film about it:
Ben Affleck is attached to direct and Matt Damon to star in a true-crime story written by Jeff Maysh and published in The Daily Beast several days ago about an ex-cop who rigged the McDonald’s Monopoly game, allegedly stealing over $24 million and sharing it with an unsavory group of co-conspirators who offered kickbacks to the mastermind. The Pearl Street partners will produce, and the Deadpool scribes Paul Wernick & Rhett Reese will write the script.
Dorian Lynskey, writing at Billboard:
Really, The 1975 only qualifies as a rock band in the sense that it is a commercially successful group of four men who play instruments, which makes them an endangered species in 2018. Their albums include almost everything but straight rock. The self-produced A Brief Inquiry, out in November, ranges from Auto-Tuned house to blue-eyed soul, art-rock to the Great American Songbook. Their fourth album, Notes on a Conditional Form, will be more intimate, nocturnal and cinematic. Healy doesn’t think there’s anyone else in The 1975’s lane.
Last night at NPR Music’s ‘Turning The Tables Live’ concert and discussion, moderator Ann Powers asked Phoebe Bridgers about a new project with her, Julien Baker, and Lucy Dacus. Phoebe confirmed it was real.
Yeah, I am here for this.
Meanwhile, rumors about the multi-instrumentalist’s predilection for taking advantage of his predominantly female adolescent fanbase have been floating around the Internet for years, and there are now multiple online groups that seek to alert the world to Dahvie’s alleged crimes. And yet, somehow, Blood on the Dance Floor continued to record and perform successfully, and to receive positive (or at least neutral) press. Only recently has BOTDF is Garbagecore, a Facebook group devoted to outing Dahvie as a sexual predator, had success derailing the band’s tours.
Now a handful of Dahvie’s victims have bravely stepped forward to tell MetalSucks their stories in the hopes of preventing him from hurting anyone else.
John Mulaney will release his Kid Gorgeous at Radio City comedy special on vinyl, CD, and digitally on September 28th. Pre-orders are now up.
Pete Wentz of Fall Out Boy confirmed with ABC Radio that the band is “just about done” with a new EP and are aiming to release it in September:
As for what’s on the EP, Wentz says it’ll include a full version of the Fall Out Boy demo “Lake Effect Kid,” which was recorded around the band’s 2008 album Folie a Deux, as well as a “semi-new” song and a “really new” one.
Jeff Maysh, writing at The Daily Beast:
On August 3, 2001, a McDonald’s film crew arrived in the bustling beach town of Westerly, Rhode Island. They carried their cameras and a giant cashier’s check to a row of townhouses, and knocked on the door of Michael Hoover. The 56-year-old bachelor had called a McDonald’s hotline to say he’d won their Monopoly competition. Since 1987, McDonald’s customers had feverishly collected Monopoly game pieces attached to drink cups, french fry packets and advertising inserts in magazines. By completing groups of properties like Baltic and Mediterranean Avenues, players won cash or a Sega Game Gear, while “Instant Win” game pieces scored a free Filet-O-Fish or a Jamaican vacation. But Hoover, a casino pit boss who had recently filed for bankruptcy, claimed he’d won the grand prize–$1 million dollars.
I don’t even know which part of this article to quote, just read the whole thing.
Kashmir Hill, writing at Gizmodo:
But in September 2015, she was suddenly plunged into an American nightmare. She got a call at 6 a.m. one morning from a colleague at Re/Max telling her something terrible had been posted about her on the Re/Max Facebook page. [Monika Glennon] thought at first she meant that a client had left her a bad review, but it turned out to be much worse than that.
It was a link to a story about Glennon on She’s A Homewrecker, a site that exists for the sole purpose of shaming the alleged “other woman.” The author of the Homewrecker post claimed that she and her husband had used Glennon as their realtor and that everything was going great until one evening when she walked in on Glennon having sex with her husband on the floor of a home the couple had been scheduled to see. The unnamed woman went into graphic detail about the sex act and claimed she’d taken photos that she used to get everything from her husband in a divorce. The only photo she posted though was Glennon’s professional headshot, taken from her bio page on Re/Max’s site.
Glennon was horrified. The story was completely fabricated and she had no idea why someone would have written it. Someone on Facebook named Ryan Baxter had posted it to the Re/Max page; Baxter also went through Glennon’s Facebook friend list and sent it to her husband, family members, and many of her professional contacts.
Drake still has the number one album in the country:
The set earned 184,000 equivalent album units (down 29 percent) in the week ending July 26, according to Nielsen Music. Of that sum, 15,000 were in traditional album sales. The album debuted atop the list and hasn’t left the penthouse since its arrival.