Sweep the leg! 🥋
With apologies to Prince, we're gonna party like it's 1984.
A new "Karate Kid" movie is in theaters with Ralph Macchio, and the Miyagi-verse expands by bringing Jackie Chan into the fold with some serious martial-arts action and a nod to the old-school fight montage. (Kids, we used to have these all the time back in the day!) Speaking of throwbacks, the "Sex and the City" saga continues with a new season of "And Just Like That ..." And if you're already missing "The Last of Us," we feel you, fam, and are here to help.
Oh, yeah, I mentioned a party: This week, Watch Party's celebrating its first birthday! I've had a blast bringing you great recommendations for the big and small screens, and there's lots more to come. Thank you to everyone who's subscribed and shown love the past year, and if you have a friend or loved one who's not on board yet, let them know the bandwagon's got plenty of room.
Now on to the good stuff:
Watch a new 'Karate Kid' show off his moves in the all-star 'Legends'
While it may not be the Marvel Cinematic Universe or the "Star Wars" galaxy, the Miyagi-verse has interestingly become one of the most enduring pop-culture franchises thanks to the "Karate Kid" spinoff show "Cobra Kai." And for the first time in a while, martial arts drama and youngsters in gis are back in cinemas with "Karate Kid: Legends." Ben Wang is the new karate kid, a teen who moves from China to New York City, runs afoul of a bully and gets trained by sensei Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio) and kung fu shifu Mr. Han (Jackie Chan) for a big karate competition. "Legacy" can't quite figure out what kind of "Karate Kid" it wants to be but, man, Wang is a star. (Peep my ★★½ review.)
I sat down with Macchio and Wang at CinemaCon, the convention of movie theater owners, to chat about how "Legends" expands the Miyagi-verse (named for Mr. Miyagi, obviously), and how the legacy of the original "Karate Kid" still fuels the franchise. Wang's new character is "dealing with an internal struggle a little bit different than what my struggle was back in the day, but at the end of it, you're rooting for people you care about," Macchio says. "That's the storytelling.'
Stream 'Sex and the City' spinoff 'And Just Like That ...' on Max
Confession time: I'm not exactly the target audience for all things "Sex and the City." (My wife, though? TOTALLY into it.) I do enjoy some silliness, however, and that's apparently what Season 3 of the Max revival show "And Just Like That ..." has in spades, according to TV critic Kelly Lawler. In her ★½ review, she writes that the series is "still as lightweight and shallow as a knockoff pair of Manolo Blahniks, unimaginative and dull, this year with a side of ATVs and 'Little House on the Prairie' jokes." (Hard to go wrong with ATVs, honestly.)
My man Patrick Ryan got the scoop from Cynthia Nixon about guest star Rosie O'Donnell having a cameo as a sex-starved nun and also got the lowdown on Carrie Bradshaw's very chic "cloud hat" from Sarah Jessica Parker.
Get your dystopian fix after finishing 'The Last of Us'
So, how about that cliffhanger in the latest season finale of "The Last of Us"?! It's going to be hard to wait till the third season for that. In the meantime, we've got plenty of coverage of the recent closing chapter (streaming now on Max). Kelly recaps who survived and who died, plus she teamed with our colleague Brendan Morrow to look at where Season 3 could go if the show, like it has so far, sticks to its video-game roots.
And if you've finished the season and are already missing all the nightmarish drama, we've got five more dystopian shows to watch. Always good to remind folks to watch "Andor" if they haven't had the pleasure.
Even more goodness to check out!
Got thoughts, questions, ideas, concerns, compliments or maybe even some recs for me? Email btruitt@usatoday.com and follow me on the socials: I'm @briantruitt on Bluesky, Instagram and Threads.
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New York Post
19 minutes ago
- New York Post
‘And Just Like That' star believes he was cut from the show for being ‘woke'
Bobby Lee thinks wokeness is to blame for his exit from 'And Just Like That.' The comedian, 53, spoke to Entertainment Weekly at San Diego Comic-Con over the weekend about why he wasn't asked to reprise his role as Jackie Nee, Carrie's (Sarah Jessica Parker) podcast cohost, on the third season of the show. 'Some of the woke elements of the show, they got rid of, and I think I was a part of that,' Lee stated. Advertisement 7 Bobby Lee in 'And Just Like That.' 'I think Sara [Ramirez] didn't come back and some other people,' he added. 'They tried to put minorities in, and — I don't know. I never saw the show.' The Post has reached out to HBO for comment. Advertisement Lee departed 'AJLT' between Seasons 2 and 3, as did Ramirez, who played Miranda's (Cynthia Nixon) non-binary love interest Che Díaz, and Karen Pittman, who played Dr. Nya Wallace. 7 Ali Stroker, Sara Ramirez, Ivan Hernandez, Bobby Lee and Sarah Jessica Parker in 'And Just Like That.' 7 Sarah Jessica Parker as Carrie Bradshaw. HBO Advertisement Season 2 wrapped up Carrie's podcast storyline, which allowed the show to write off Lee and Ramirez. 'Number one, I don't even know why they asked,' Lee told EW about being cast in the HBO Max series. 'And I was super scared to do it. Because it wasn't my brand, really. You know what I mean? But I did it. I walked through the fear.' 7 Bobby Lee on 'Fast Foodies.' Anna Maria Lopez Lee added that getting to work with Parker, 60, was a highlight of the experience. Advertisement 'Sarah Jessica Parker is the nicest person I've ever met. She made me feel so at ease,' he shared. 'I like everyone on there. It was fun. I never have bad blood with anybody. You know what I mean? I am nice. I show up on time.' 7 Bobby Lee spotted getting coffee in Los Angeles on July 21. Phamous / BACKGRID Lee previously revealed that working on the 'Sex and the City' reboot pushed him to get sober. 7 Sarah Jessica Parker in 'And Just Like That.' HBO MAX 'I was in Hawaii and I was blackout drunk and my agent called and said, 'They need you in New York,'' he recalled on Rachel Bilson's 'Broad Ideas' podcast in 2023. 'This is one of the reasons why I'm sober … On the plane, I thought, 'I'm just gonna get s–t faced,' so I was in a blackout when we landed in New York.' Lee said that he learned he was expected to film 'AJLT' that day when he realized that his driver wasn't taking him to his hotel. 7 Bobby Lee on a coffee run in Los Angeles. Phamous / BACKGRID Advertisement 'I remember going and being so high and drunk,' Lee revealed. 'When I was reading the script, I couldn't even understand what the f–k it was even saying. It was a nightmare. I remember thinking, 'This is never going to happen again — I have to get sober.'' New episodes of 'And Just Like That' stream Thursdays at 9 pm ET on HBO Max.
Elle
3 hours ago
- Elle
I Tried to Make Sense of the Convoluted Ending to ‘Untamed'
Spoilers below. As Untamed makes clear, as often as it can, the wildlife are far from the most violent creatures in Yosemite National Park. Humans are always the most dangerous beasts. The new Netflix limited series shares this thesis with any number of contemporary dramas, post-apocalyptic, crime-focused, or otherwise. (Yellowstone and The Last of Us—which, like Untamed, also concern the consequences of grief—spring immediately to mind.) Thus, there's a level to which Untamed is predictable by default. Despite the show's gorgeous visuals, solid performances, and compelling opening, we know the kind of lesson we're in for. Still, Untamed is ultimately less successful than its Hollywood brethren, in part because the threads of its various crimes fail to coalesce in a satisfying manner. The big twists don't land as pulse-pounding revelations. Instead, they manage to be rote, frustrating, and convoluted all at once. By the time National Park Service Investigative Services Branch agent Kyle Turner (Eric Bana) leaves Yosemite behind in the final episode, we're left wondering what, exactly, we're supposed to have learned from his experience. Untamed primarily addresses three main mysteries within the national park, each involving a death or disappearance: the death of Jane Doe/Lucy Cooke, the death of Caleb Turner, and the disappearance of Sean Sanderson. Over the course of the series' six episodes, Kyle digs deeper into the Cooke case, but it isn't until the finale that all the secrets are laid out for the audience. These details are revealed in such a whirlwind (and yet anticlimactic) manner that it's easy to confuse them. If you're left squinting at your screen by the time the credits roll, let's retrace our steps. Here's what we learn by the end of Untamed. At the beginning of the series, a woman tumbles to her death off the edge of El Capitan, an infamous vertical rock formation in Yosemite. (The New York Times accurately referred to this inciting incident as 'a deceptively high-adrenaline start' to the series. What comes next is, generally, much less thrilling.) Slowly, Kyle begins to work with ranger Naya Vasquez (Lily Santiago) to uncover Jane Doe's identity: She is a half-Indigenous woman named Lucy Cooke, formerly known as Grace McCray, and she went missing for the first time many years ago. Back then, Kyle assumed that her father, an abusive man named Rory Cooke, killed her. But when her adult body shows up off El Capitan, Kyle is forced to reexamine the facts of her case. A DNA test soon reveals that Rory Cooke was not, in fact, Lucy's biological father. And when a random boy shows up at the park ranger headquarters with a photograph of 'Grace McCray' (a.k.a. Lucy) as a child, Kyle begins to understand a much more convoluted story is at play. Still, he's initially convinced that wildlife management officer Shane Maguire (Wilson Bethel) had a role in her death. Kyle has good reason to despise (and suspect) Shane, as we later learn, and his theories are all but confirmed when he discovers video footage of Shane on Lucy's phone. The two of them were indeed involved in an illegal drug operation from within Yosemite, but, as it turns out, Shane didn't kill Lucy. Her father did. In the finale, Kyle finally travels to Nevada to locate the abandoned church seen in the boy's photograph of young 'Grace.' Next to the church, he finds a crumbling home occupied by a senile woman named Mrs. Gibbs. Further inspection confirms Kyle's worse suspicions: Mr. and Mrs. Gibbs kept a group of foster children locked in their basement, barely fed, in order to secure continued government funding. When Kyle finds Native American etchings carved into one of the walls, he understands that Grace was one of these children. Kyle then meets with a casino employee named Faith Gibbs, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Gibbs, who confirms that Grace is Lucy Cooke, and that Lucy ran away at some point after realizing her 'dad,' a cop, was never coming back to get her. So, who's the cop? And did he kill Lucy? Next—though I'll admit it's not clear to me exactly how—Kyle draws the investigation directly back to his own park rangers. Paul Souter (Sam Neill) is Yosemite's chief park ranger, and as such, he's Kyle's boss and close friend. (He was also, once, godfather to Kyle's now-deceased son, Caleb.) After reexamining Lucy's DNA test results, Kyle realizes that Paul's daughter, Kate, was scrubbed from the list (despite being in the park's system thanks to her prior arrest). He thus surmises that Paul is the 'cop' Lucy once claimed would rescue her. Perhaps Kyle puts the pieces together thanks, in part, to Paul's own suspicious behavior. After Naya kills Shane in the penultimate episode (after Shane himself almost kills Kyle), Kyle wants to continue to pursue Lucy Cooke's case. Paul discourages him from doing so, claiming Kyle should move on with his life. In refusing to do just that, Kyle finally turns on wheedles the full story out of him. Paul was indeed the father of Lucy Cooke. After having an affair with Lucy's mother, an Indigenous woman named Maggie who later died of cancer, Paul refused to acknowledge Lucy's existence. (He was afraid it would destroy his marriage and ruin his reputation.) Maggie raised Lucy with her abusive husband, Rory, until she died. Her last wish was for Paul to 'get Lucy away from Rory.' Paul did so by giving Lucy the name 'Grace McCray' and placing her under the Gibbs' foster care in Nevada. ('I thought Lucy would be safe there,' Paul tells Kyle in the finale. I have a hard time buying this coming from a cop, but it doesn't seem Paul is the most thorough investigator on the planet.) Kyle tells Paul he'll need to run ballistics on Paul's hunting rifles, and Paul panics. He initially tries to pretend he's lent his rifles to friends, and so one of them might have killed Lucy. But he can't lie to Kyle, and he soon admits that he chased Lucy throughout Yosemite after Lucy started extorting him for money. When that extortion turned into kidnapping—Lucy kidnapped Sadie, Paul's granddaughter, as a bargaining chip—Paul became desperate. He managed to get Sadie back home after she was abandoned on a ridge inside Yosemite, but he continued to pursue Lucy, wanting to 'make her listen somehow.' After firing a warning shot in her direction, Paul accidentally hit Lucy in the leg with a bullet. Believing she was being hunted, Lucy fled—but was soon attacked by coyotes. Tired, injured, and ready to stop her running, she decided to let herself fall off El Capitan. Upon learning this, a horrified Kyle demands that Paul 'make this right' by owning up to his crime. But Paul claims he can't, and when he realizes Kyle will try and 'make it right' for him, he pulls his pistol on his old friend. Kyle calls his bluff and continues walking away. At last, Paul instead turns the gun on himself, pulling the trigger and falling, dead, into the river below. But wait! Lucy and Paul's aren't the only awful, preventable deaths to have taken place in Untamed's Yosemite National Park. Five years before the series' events, Kyle suffered his own loss: the death of Caleb, the young son he shared with his now ex-wife, Jill Bodwin (Rosemarie DeWitt). We learn midway through the show that Kyle discovered Caleb dead in the park after he went missing from camp. But it isn't until the finale that we learn who killed Caleb: a missing person named Sean Sanderson, whose case Kyle never solved. Jill killed him! Or, rather, she had him killed. Alas, here's where Shane finally factors into the story, beyond the red-herring drug operation he ran with Lucy: In one of the finale's more shocking revelations, Jill reveals to her husband, Scott (John Randall), that she hired Shane to kill Sean Sanderson. Who is Sean, exactly? Apparently just some random, horrible man who sought to prey on children. Some important backstory: After Caleb's death, Shane surveyed footage from motion-capture cameras he had placed throughout the park in order to track wildlife migration. It was from one of these cameras that he first spotted Sean stalking Caleb. Shane then brought this footage to Kyle and Jill, telling them they should 'let him kill' Sean in retaliation for his crime. Kyle refused this offer, in part because he wanted 100-percent confirmation that Sean had killed Caleb—and he could only be certain after he'd arrested Sean and brought him to trial. But Jill couldn't live with the unpredictability of a courtroom. So she hired Shane to blackmail and kill Sean behind Kyle's back. Kyle only discovered Jill's secret after Sanderson was reported missing, Jill tells Scott. 'More than anything, more than losing Caleb, it was me betraying Kyle that ended us,' she says of their consequent divorce. Nevertheless, Kyle agreed to lie on Jill's why he never 'solved' Sanderson's missing-persons case. As he later tells the lawyer pursuing a wrongful death suit for the Sanderson family: 'Sometimes things happen that just don't make sense.' Finally, the series ends with Kyle escaping Yosemite National Park. After being placed on suspension thanks to his earlier fight with Shane, Kyle decides to give up his park ranger job together and leave Yosemite in the dust—at last moving on from the place of Caleb's death. In giving up his vigil, Kyle promises the apparition of his son that he'll always take a piece of Caleb wherever he goes. He turns over his horse (and, by extension, his trust) to Naya, who seems eager to take up Kyle's mantle. It's a touching moment, seeing Kyle take ownership of his grief and choose to move forward with his life. But it's unclear how exactly he plans to do so, nor how the destruction wrought within his inner circle—Caleb's death, Jill's betrayal, Paul's corruption, Shane's violence—has shaped him now. Has he decided that the best path forward is to leave it all behind? Or, like Lucy, will he realize that there's no escaping the past? Maybe he's simply driving out of the park to find a good therapist. That, dear reader, should be every viewer's earnest hope.
Hypebeast
9 hours ago
- Hypebeast
Official 'Peacemaker' Season 2 Trailer Hints at Multiverse Madness and Personal Demons
Summary John Cena's Christopher Smith is back, and the world is about to get a whole lot Studios, co-run byJames Gunn, unveiled the highly anticipated official trailer forPeacemakerSeason 2 at San Diego Comic-Con today. The footage confirms the show will debut onHBO Max(now Max) on Thursday, August 21, 2025, promising a wild ride through parallel dimensions and deeply personal demons. The trailer immediately plunges viewers into Peacemaker's new reality, where he seemingly discovers a 'better' parallel dimension. This isn't just about a new costume or a happier love life with Emilia Harcourt (Jennifer Holland); it's a world that subtly mirrors his own, offering a tempting escape from the baggage of Season 1. However, this newfound peace is short-lived. The idyllic parallel universe quickly proves to have its own dangers, including giant monsters. More critically, the trailer introduces Rick Flag Sr. (Frank Grillo), head of A.R.G.U.S. and father of the late Rick Flag Jr., who is hellbent on vengeance against Peacemaker. This dynamic sets up a central conflict, with Flag Sr. determined to shut down the dimensional rift that Peacemaker has stumbled into. Series creator James Gunn emphasizes that Season 2 will see a different Peacemaker. He's 'dealing with the demons he uncovered from the first season and trying to deal with them, and the world is not accepting him the way he is.' This growth (and potential regression) is central to Gunn's vision, as Smith grapples with his misguided quest for peace at all costs while trying to reconcile his past with a newfound sense of purpose. The ghost of his racist father, Auggie (Robert Patrick), will also haunt him, like a 'sour Obi-Wan Kenobi.' The Season 2 narrative reportedly takes place approximately a month after the events of DC Studios'Supermanfeature film, further integrating Peacemaker into the broader DC Universe continuity. Returning cast members include Danielle Brooks (Leota Adebayo), Freddie Stroma (Vigilante), Steve Agee (John Economos), Jennifer Holland (Emilia Harcourt), and Dee Bradley Baker (Eagly). They are joined by new additions like Sol Rodriguez and Tim Meadows, adding fresh faces to the chaotic ensemble. With James Gunn having written all eight episodes and directing three, including the premiere,PeacemakerSeason 2 promises to deliver the same unhinged humor, emotional depth, and explosive action that made its first season a fan favorite. The trailer, set to the tune of Ozzy Osbourne's 'Road Going Nowhere,' assures fans that this season will be as fun as it is pivotal for Peacemaker's journey.
