Entertainment
Snoop Dogg embraces NBC Olympic ambassador of joy role as Games shift to his hometown
MILAN — He’s as smooth as a bobsled track and sharp as a skate blade.
Snoop Dogg, the rap rapscallion who puts the OG in Olympic Games, plopped down on a couch in the NBC green room and muted the TV. It’s exhausting being everywhere at all times at the most spread-out Winter Games in history.
Whether he was carrying the Olympic torch, skiing with Picabo Street, sliding a curling stone or driving a Zamboni, Snoop was everywhere. He finished each day with a highlight show from the Milan studios.
So ubiquitous was the so-called Ambassador of Happiness, you’d swear NBC duped a Snoop — or maybe two.
Snoop Dogg, right, and five-time Olympic gold medalist former speedskater Eric Heiden watch speedskating at the Milan-Cortina Olympics on Feb. 11.
(Ben Curtis / Associated Press)
“The Winter Olympics are underrated,” he said in an interview Friday at the network’s Olympic complex. “It’s not highly touted like it should be. This is an event that is just as good as the Super Bowl, as the Summer Olympics. There’s so much action and there’s so much happening, and it’s not just one day. It’s not just four quarters. It’s weeks of great competition — on ice, for the most part.”
It’s almost as if the angular, 6-foot-4 Snoop is on ice as he glides through the back halls of NBC’s temporary headquarters, wearing a white turtleneck under a red, white and blue leather jacket with “COACH SNOOP” across the front. He’s wearing a gold-rope chain with the Universal logo as a pendant, and gold-rimmed sunglasses that are square and lightly tinted.
He greets everyone he sees and a friendly assistant follows him, handing out Olympic pins of a tiny, cartoonish Snoop with his arms raised at his side, standing in front of an American flag.
Is it any wonder this guy creates a buzz in every venue he enters? He is the No. 1 celebrity sighting at the Games.
“Snoop has a joy about him, a childlike curiosity, and he’s also a people person,” said Molly Solomon, executive producer and president of programming for NBC’s Olympics coverage. “He wants to lift people up in all aspects of his persona.”
NBC began using the rapper as part of its Olympic coverage during the Tokyo Games in 2021 with the streaming Peacock show “Olympic Highlights with Kevin Hart & Snoop Dogg.” Many of their playful clips and humorous commentaries went viral and were especially appealing to younger viewers. Snoop genuinely enjoyed the competition, even though a lot of it was new to him.
Three years later, as the network was preparing for the Paris Olympics, executives were looking for ways to enhance the prime-time coverage, much of which would air on tape because of time-zone differences. They decided to expand Snoop’s role to give the perspective of a “superfan.” With these Olympics, his role further evolved into an experiential one, and to serve as an informal mentor and ambassador to the athletes.
“This is the biggest stage in the world,” he said. “Nobody gets to perform in front of the world like they do, with the whole world paying attention. To have all of that pressure of [something] you’ve been working for four years … Some of these girls and guys get that one shot, their event is only one time.”
As a roving correspondent, he did … well, some serious roving.
That included making the drive from Milan to Cortina for curling, sliding and women’s ski racing. That’s a four-hour van ride each way, some of it winding into the Dolomites.
“Trying to sleep with my head up against the window, with turning curves and every mountaintop,” he said. “Sliding by trains and traffic, and oh my God, I couldn’t drive out here. One-way streets. Little-bitty trains coming this way, that way. Bicycles, mopeds. It’s a lot.”
He also made a 3½-hour trip to Livigno to watch snowboarding — and said that if he had to pick a sport to compete in, that would be his choice.
“I could get good in snowboard, because I just like the creativity of when you’re in the air you have full control but you in the air,” he said. “I just feel like that’s something I could really be good at.”
So he must have skateboarded as a kid growing up in Long Beach, right?
“Never,” he said. “That’s what I’m saying. None of these sports are near and dear to me. That’s why it’s gonna be a first-time trial. But I know who I am. I don’t like to fail. I don’t like to lose. So I’m just such a perfectionist that I will get good enough to be good enough.”
He’s 54 and concedes his body can’t always accomplish what his mind thinks it can. He tried running the 200 meters at the Olympic trials in Oregon before the Paris Games and did so in 33 seconds, but he limped away with an injury. So he has a goal for when the Summer Games come to Los Angeles in two years.
“When we get to L.A., my mission is for me to run the 200 in under 30 seconds,” he said. “In 2028, I should be 56 years old. So if I can run it in under 30 seconds at 56, that’s a gold medal for me.”
Solomon said NBC is still brainstorming about how Snoop’s role will evolve for the 2028 Games.
Honorary Team USA coach Snoop Dogg throws a curling stone as Americans Daniel Casper and Tabitha Peterson Lovick watch on Feb. 6 in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy.
(Richard Heathcote / Getty Images)
“Of course, L.A. is Snoop’s hometown,” she said. “So he will be a hometown hero.”
Snoop said his love for the Olympics dates to the 1984 Los Angeles Games. He didn’t attend any events at the time, though, noting that for a 13-year-old kid growing up in Long Beach, the city felt “like a whole state away.”
“We were watching on television,” he said. “We never thought we could physically be there. … It just felt good to be an American, to watch us compete against the whole world and to see how great we were.”
He’s particularly interested in flag football — which will make its debut in the Los Angeles Olympics — and created a youth football league that counts among its alumni NFL standouts C.J. Stroud and JuJu Smith-Schuster.
“Flag football is a sport the whole world can grab ahold of,” Snoop said. “There are so many athletes that are in the NFL that are from different parts of the world that they’ve grown the sport from them just making it to the NFL and being an inspiration for the next generation.”
Spoken like a true Ambassador of Happiness.
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NEW YORK (OSV News) – As its title suggests, “Scream 7” (Paramount) is the latest extension of a long-lived horror franchise, one that’s currently approaching its 30th anniversary on screen. Since each chapter of this slasher saga has been a bloodsoaked mess, the series’ longevity will strike moviegoers of sense as inexplicable.
Yet the slog continues. While the previous film in the sequence shifted the action from California to New York, this second installment, following a 2022 quasi-reboot, settles on a Midwestern locale and reintroduces us to the series’ original protagonist, Sidney Evans, nee Prescott (Neve Campbell).
Having aged out of the adolescent demographic on whom the various murderers who have donned the Ghostface mask that serves as these films’ dubious trademark over the years seem to prefer to prey, Sidney comes equipped with a teen daughter, Tatum (Isabel May). Will Tatum prove as resourceful in evading the unwanted attentions of Ghostface as Mom has?
On the way to answering that question, a clutch of colorless minor characters fall victim to the killer, who sometimes gets — according to his or her lights — creative. Thus one is quite literally made to spill her guts, while another ends up skewered on a barroom’s pointy beer tap.
Through it all, director Kevin Williamson and his co-writer Guy Busick try to peddle a theme of female empowerment in the face of mortal danger. They also take a stab, as it were, at constructing a plotline about intergenerational family tensions. When not jarring viewers with grisly images, however, they’re only likely to lull them into a stupor.
The film contains excessive gory violence, including disembowelment and impaling, underage drinking, mature topics, a couple of profanities, several milder oaths, pervasive rough and considerable crude language and occasional crass expressions. The OSV News classification is O — morally offensive. The Motion Picture Association rating is R — restricted. Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian.
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Copyright © 2026 OSV News
Entertainment
His underground puppet shows draw massive crowds to L.A. street corner — and fans don’t even know his name
The artist known as Jeffrey’s Human Persona has remained anonymous for nearly 25 years — the same length of time that he has staged guerrilla-style musical puppet shows titled “almighty Opp” on a gritty street corner in Koreatown on the last Saturday of each month. He missed only three shows in the first 19 years of what he refers to as his “services.” However, the COVID-19 pandemic forced him online in 2020 and a family tragedy kept him away from the corner for another few years.
In December he returned live in front of the used car dealership at Western and Elmwood for the first time since the pandemic-induced shutdown, drawing a crowd of several hundred devoted fans. In February he staged his first ticketed event called “Secret Somewhere Services,” which drew close to 50 guests who paid $100 each for the pop-up show at a private residence in the San Fernando Valley where Willie Nelson’s youngest son, Micah, served as the opening act with his art rock project Particle Kid.
The view of the stage from the back of the crowd during January’s “almighty Opp” puppet show, which has returned to Koreatown after a nearly five-year break due to the COVID-19 pandemic and a family tragedy.
(Carlin Stiehl / For The Times)
“I missed funerals, I missed Christmases, I missed friends’ birthdays. I never took a vacation,” Jeffrey says of his devotion to his monthly performances during a recent phone interview after his late January show, which also drew a large, excitable crowd of supporters. “I treated it like a knife to my heart.”
“Almighty Opp” is truly about Jeffrey’s heart. Services take place in a specially designed black stage populated with a variety of custom fabricated puppets. These creations are not from Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood of Make-Believe. At a recent show the ringleader wore a red dirndl with gray knee socks and black ankle boots. His angular head topped with a green felt crown; his toothy mouth a sinister, grimacing gash; his eyes blackened with what looks like charcoal. Other puppets cavorted around him: A tubby, clownish, snowman-like creature that spits water at the crowd; a tall, spindly clown that uses a miniature pump; a weird sock puppet made out of adhesive bandages; a discarded, disheveled baby doll on strings.
One of the main marionettes used in the “almighty Opp” street show. The puppets sing songs written by the show’s creator, an artist who goes by the name of Jeffrey’s Human Persona.
(Carlin Stiehl / For The Times)
Music is the focal point of each service, with Jeffrey playing guitar and keyboards behind the curtain, singing in a wavering voice reminiscent of Jeff Mangum about the subjects, ideas and feelings that have occupied his mind at various stages of his life. To date, “almighty Opp” has put out 33 albums on Bandcamp featuring songs from services over the years with titles including “Every Day’s the Worst Day,” “Misbegotten Human Beings” and “Bubble Burster.”
“Pretending I had a choice, just as long as we said we did, but now it’s much worse than it seems five years later,” sings a puppet that looks like a bizarro Humpty Dumpty with a huge egg head on a body of red pants during January’s show. “Supporting someone else’s dreams because your good nature’s being used.”
“Almighty Opp” employs a variety of richly detailed, hand-crafted puppets. The show’s creator once worked as an assistant to sculptor Chris Burden.
(Carlin Stiehl / For The Times)
A common refrain, which almost everyone gathered on the gum-stained sidewalk sings in unison, is, “It’s OK to not be OK.”
Jeffrey loves the spontaneous possibilities of the street corner and what he calls the “stumble upon” nature of the services, but the core audience is a returning one. The nearly 200 people gathered on this January evening just past 9 p.m. stand on stools and chairs in the back and loll on the sidewalk on their elbows in the front. They scream and chant and sing along. They turn and hug one another or shake hands when Jeffrey encourages them to meet their neighbors at different points in the show.
Lars Adams attends an “almighty Opp” show on the last Saturday in January. During the show the crowd is encouraged to turn and greet their neighbors.
(Carlin Stiehl / For The Times)
“Even though I’m performing, I don’t really consider myself a performer,” Jeffrey says. He also isn’t a busker, although his shows are free community events. And even though there are puppets, he doesn’t call “almighty Opp” a puppet show. He is, he says, “an obsessive maker.” The audience is “just coming along for the ride with me — life’s ride — of how I’m feeling at that time. It’s kind of like a Catholic Church service, where the sermon changes, but the structure of it remains the same.”
Unlike a church service, shows are rowdy and a bit untethered. A bus whooshes by, an unhoused man screams as he walks by with a shopping cart. Jeffrey’s wife, known as Shambles, operates the puppets from behind the curtain, while wearing their 5-year-old daughter, known as Crumbo, in a sling. Two other assistants, called DingDing and Cylo, can also be seen behind the black curtain — their faces hidden in knitted clown masks or shielded by makeup. Jeffrey comes before the crowd toward the end of the show — wearing a white mask and a red hoodie — and asks audience members to give testimonials. People stand up and talk about having been changed by the show over the years.
That’s what happened with Micah Nelson. He came when Jeffrey used to hold mirrors in front of people’s faces and have them watch themselves while the crowd watched them. The sessions were uncomfortably long. Nelson later contacted Jeffrey to say he was covering some of his songs, and that his experience with the mirror had a profound effect on him.
When Nelson introduced Jeffrey at the recent “Secret Somewhere” show, the things he said about Jeffrey made the performer blush. Life, Jeffrey said, has a funny way of coming full circle.
Jeffrey’s Human Persona, who created “almighty Opp” in the early aughts, asks audience members gathered on a Koreatown street corner to give testimonials about the show, which he calls a “service.”
(Carlin Stiehl / For The Times)
Jeffrey moved to L.A. from Pittsburgh in 1995 when he was 19. His father bought him the plane ticket after Jeffrey found himself in a bit of a boredom rut with friends and getting into the wrong kind of trouble. He wanted to work in the film industry — he thought L.A. would be like a 1970s Jim Morrison fever dream, but found it not as inspiring. The film business, in which he worked making fantasy art and other fabrications, was not a creative haven, but rather a soul-sucking void.
“I’m tired of making other people’s puppets,” he told a friend one day, and “almighty Opp” was born.
“If you just show up for a paycheck, what are you really doing?” asked Jeffrey during our interview. “I’d rather be a flop and believe in it.”
Children gather at the very front of the stage during January’s “almighty Opp” show, which features original songs on guitar and keyboard. A total of 33 “almighty Opp” albums are available on Bandcamp.
(Carlin Stiehl / For The Times)
He made the original puppets and wrote the first “almighty Opp” album in the second-floor apartment where he lived, just a stone’s throw from the corner where he still performs — the corner where he would propose to his wife during a particularly difficult period of his life. During all those years he worked in a variety of creative roles to support himself: for the toy industry; briefly for the Disney Imagineers; and for about eight years as an assistant to sculptor Chris Burden for whom he helped fabricate the whizzing future land “Metropolis II,” which resides in Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s permanent collection.
Now that “almighty Opp” is live again, Jeffrey is benefiting from the therapeutic aspects of writing down his emotions and experiences. The “Secret Somewhere Services” will continue once a month, or maybe every two months. Guests can check Instagram for tips on how to score a coveted ticket, which comes with its own handcrafted entrance token and map to the ever-changing private venue. Jeffrey is making big puppets for these performances — one is 7 feet tall — and experimenting with the form of the event.
Still, the street corner will remain the soul of his operation — and the music at the heart of it all.
“It’s all about honesty, and the people who understand it and keep coming, they know that it’s something absolutely real,” he says.
Almighty Opp
Where: Corner of Western and Elmwood avenues, in Koreatown
When: The last Saturday of every month, 9 p.m.
Tickets: Free
Running time: Varies, but usually about an hour.
By ABBIE BERNSTEIN / Staff Writer
Posted: March 8th, 2026 / 08:00 PM
THE BRIDE movie poster | ©2026 Warner Bros.
Rating: R
Stars: Jessie Buckley, Christian Bale, Annette Bening, Jake Gyllenhaal, Peter Sarsgaard, Penelope Cruz, Jeannie Berlin, Zlatko Burić
Writer: Maggie Gyllenhaal, based on characters created by Mary Shelley and William Hurlbut and John Balderston
Director: Maggie Gyllenhaal
Distributor: Warner Bros.
Release Date: March 6, 2026
“THE BRIDE!” (as with the recent “WUTHERING HEIGHTS,” the quotation marks are part of the title) is awash in homages, and not just the ones we might reasonably expect in a movie that takes its most obvious inspiration from 1935’s BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN.
There’s that, of course, plus its source, Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel FRANKENSTEIN; OR THE MODERN PROMETHEUS, and its sober 1931 film adaptation FRANKENSTEIN. But there are also big nods to wilder takes on the legend, including YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN and THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW and even movies that have nothing to do with FRANKENSTEIN, like BONNIE AND CLYDE.
Writer/director Maggie Gyllenhaal casts a wide net in metaphors and ideas and looks. Sometimes “THE BRIDE!” is a comedy, sometimes it’s a crime drama, sometimes it’s a love story, occasionally, it’s even a musical.
Mary Shelley (Jessie Buckley) narrates the tale to us from beyond the grave. She is haughty and naughty, intoxicated by verbiage and her own literary genius. She is going to tell us a story, she says, that she didn’t even dare imagine while alive.
We’re in 1930s Chicago, where a young escort (also Buckley) is having a really awful evening out at a fancy restaurant with some of her peers and a bunch of crass gangsters. Shelley dubs the woman “Ida” and takes possession of her, causing her to speak and act in ways that get her escorted outside. There she stumbles and takes a fatal fall.
The two goons who were with Ida are happy to describe her tumble as the result of their intentional actions to their horrible gangster boss (Zlatko Burić). Ida was suspected of talking to the cops.
Around the same time, Frankenstein’s creation (Christian Bale) – let’s just call him “Frank,” like everybody else does – comes to Chicago to seek out the groundbreaking scientist Dr. Euphronious (Annette Bening), whose published works he has read.
Frank wants the doctor to create a companion for him. His appearance is unusual, but the most alarming injuries are covered by clothing, so he’s not as extreme-looking as, say, Boris Karloff in the role. This isn’t about sex, Frank explains when Euphronious asks why he doesn’t just hire a prostitute. After over a century of loneliness, he seeks a soulmate, and he is sure this can only be achieved by reviving a corpse.
So, Euphronious and Frank dig up the grave that turns out to belong to Ida (we never do learn how they know it belongs to a soulmate candidate as opposed to a shot-and-dumped male gangster). Euphronius revives her. Ida remembers how to walk and talk, but not who she is or what happened, so Frank and the doc tell her she’s been in an accident.
Even without Ida’s beauty, Frank is already devoted to the very notion of her. A more accommodating suitor would be hard to find. Frank has another passion, the musical films of Ronnie Reed (Jake Gyllenhaal, the filmmaker’s brother), a Fred Astaire-like star. Frank imagines himself in the midst of those dance routines, and we get some more within “THE BRIDE!”’s “real” action.
One thing leads to another, Frank and Ida go on the run, leaving a trail of bodies in their wake. They are pursued all over the country. Among those seeking them are sad-eyed police detective Jake Wiles (Peter Sarsgaard) and his secretary Myrna Mallow (Penélope Cruz), who’s better at this whole crime-solving business than he is.
It’s all very kaleidoscopic and energetic, occasionally impressive and sometimes very funny. Bening as the frazzled, worldly Euphronious has some great moments. Buckley, currently and justifiably Oscar-nominated leading performance in HAMNET, juggles the very unalike personas of Mary and Ida with impact.
Oddly, Bale underplays Frank. We get that he is trying his hardest not to spook Ida (or anyone else), but it seems like he should have a bit more spark. Cruz, going for a snappy ‘30s working woman, has her own style that works.
But in addition to being entertaining and eye-catching, Gyllenhaal has a message that gets very muddled. This is less because it’s so familiar by now that it feels a little redundant, and more because a crucial part of the set-up collides head-on with the feminist slant.
Ida seeks to be her own person, but she is literally bodily controlled by Mary Shelley, who puts her creation in danger with her outbursts. This may help get Ida out of the clutches of the mob, but it is possession, the aftereffects of which the character understandably finds confusing and upsetting.
If Gyllenhaal wanted to discuss or dramatize the clash between what Mary, as a woman, is doing to this other woman, that would make sense, but it seems we’re just meant to somehow overlook this while being immersed in how men control women. The resulting cognitive dissonance adds another layer to a movie that already has more than it can comfortably service.
Additionally, when Mary has one of her outbursts while inhabiting Ida, the plot comes to a screeching halt until she’s finished. Many viewers will wish Mary would stop declaiming and just let Ida be herself.
“THE BRIDE!” succeeds in being trippy and some of it is memorable. By the end, though, it is more disjointed than even a movie about experiments and a character made up of multiple people’s body parts ought to be.
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