Second-seeded Kentucky holds off No. 3 Houston to advance to NCAA Tournament Elite Eight

 It turns out Kentucky needed PJ Washington to beat Houston after all.

Kentucky's leading scorer blocked a shot to set up Tyler Herro's go-ahead 3-pointer in the final minute of a 62-58 victory over Houston after scoring 16 points on 6-of-8 shooting in his return from a sprained foot.

Second-seeded Kentucky holds off No. 3 Houston to advance to NCAA Tournament Elite Eight

Kentucky vs. Houston score: PJ Washington return helps Wildcats advance into Elite Eight field

The final Sweet 16 game of 2019 certainly lived up to the hype as No. 2 seed Kentucky, enjoying the return of PJ Washington, held on to beat No. 3 seed Houston in a 62-58 thriller.

Having Washington back was a huge addition for the Wildcats, and that's not just because he's the team's leading scorer and best player. Washington, who made his first appearance in the tournament after missing the first weekend with a foot injury, made the defensive play of the game. With just over 30 seconds left in the action, Houston, already up a point, had a chance to add to its lead when Washington made a game-changing block. That led to Tyler Herro hitting the go-ahead 3-pointer in transition to give Kentucky a 60-58 lead.

NCAA Latest: Kentucky Holds off Houston Reach Regional Final
The Kentucky bench celebrates during the second half of a men's NCAA tournament college basketball Midwest Regional semifinal game against Houston, Friday, March 29, 2019, in Kansas City, Mo.

The Highwaymen Is a Pleasant Throwback of a Movie

Watch the Hunt for Bonnie and Clyde in ‘The Highwaymen’
The director John Lee Hancock narrates a sequence featuring Woody Harrelson and Kevin Costner as Texas Rangers coming out of retirement.

The Highwaymen stars were 'haunted' by filming Bonnie and Clyde's death scene
Director John Lee Hancock‘s new Netflix film The Highwaymen attempts to show the hunt for, and killing of, bank robbers Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow in a more realistic fashion than previous depictions.

The Highwaymen Tells The True Story of Bonnie & Clyde's Demise
You're probably already on a first name basis with the members of the Barrow Gang, known for their bold crime spree that spanned from 1932 to 1934. Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were a pair of media-friendly criminals, posing for viral couple shots long before Instagram was invented.

Bonnie and Clyde were Depression-era Kardashians: A source of public fascination
Americans couldn’t get enough of the murderous couple. And still can’t, as a new Netflix movie debuts.

The Highwaymen Is a Pleasant Throwback of a Movie

What do you call a film that takes place too recently to be considered a Western but not recently enough to be a neo-Western? A late-period Western? A retro-neo-Western? A mid-Western?

Whichever term you prefer, feel free to attach it to the Netflix movie The Highwaymen, currently enjoying a small theatrical run and, as of Friday, streaming on the service. A tale of hard men chasing outlaws across dusty byways, it is a sturdy saga that fulfills all the obligations of the classic Western, just without the horses and six-shooters.

Following in the footsteps of such narrative inversions as John Gardner’s Grendel and Gregory Maguire’s Wicked, the film tells a familiar story from an unfamiliar vantage. Specifically, it describes the final 1934 crime spree of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow—vividly memorialized, of course, by Arthur Penn in his 1967 tour de force, Bonnie and Clyde—but from the perspective of the lawmen who hunted the couple across the South and Midwest and ultimately gunned them down in Louisiana.

Said lawmen are the legendary Texas Ranger Frank Hamer (Kevin Costner) and his partner, Maney Gault (Woody Harrelson). Both had left the Rangers due to the reelection of the vehemently anti-Ranger Miriam “Ma” Ferguson (Kathy Bates) as Texas governor. But following Parker and Barrow’s lethal raid on the Eastham prison farm, Hamer was persuaded to accept a special commission. Technically, he was assigned to the Texas Highway Patrol; in actuality, he was entrusted with bringing the fugitives to justice—ideally, a justice they would enjoy in the hereafter. In this undertaking (so to speak), he enlisted the help of Gault.

What follows is largely a tale of near misses. Parker and Barrow are consistently a step ahead of Hamer and Gault as the criminals crisscross state lines—Texas, Oklahoma, Iowa, Louisiana—leaving a stream of bodies in their wake. Throughout most of the film, the outlaws themselves are seen only in glimpses, or from a distance: the perfect whale for Hamer’s Ahab.

It’s hardly an insult to acknowledge that The Highwaymen is no classic on the level of Bonnie and Clyde. But it is, in its way, the perfect corrective to Penn’s film. The latter, so attuned to the countercultural mood of the late 1960s, dripped with style and sex appeal in presenting its protagonists as charismatic antiheroes. By contrast, The Highwaymen is, in true Western fashion, staid and direct, a story of law and order in which—if it comes down to it—order is the more important of the two outcomes. Forget the flash and glamour of youth. This is essentially the story of a grumpy old man, Hamer, who returns from vacation to discover, with horror, what the kids have been up to while he’s been away. Given that what they’ve been up to is mass murder, this interpretation seems considerably more reasonable than the glamorization offered by Penn.

The solid script, by John Fusco (who also wrote the forever-underrated neo-Western Thunderheart), had kicked around Hollywood long enough that Paul Newman and Robert Redford were once considered for the leads. It’s a bit of a surprise that the project lingered as long as it did, given a premise so intriguing. The fact that the director, John Lee Hancock (The Blind Side, Saving Mr. Banks), does not notably elevate the material is almost beside the point: He performs the more important duty of Not Screwing It Up. In contrast to so many contemporary films, The Highwaymen is not larded with unnecessary backstories and love interests and hidden motivations. It simply is what it is—which, in Hollywood terms, might be simultaneously the most subversive and the most reactionary thing about it.

Harrelson is good as Gault, but his role is very much to set a contrast with Costner’s Hamer. Gault is the joker, the drinker, the one who sees both sides, the one who signed on largely because he had nothing else to do. The most interesting element of Harrelson’s performance might be the way it brings him full circle from 1994’s Natural Born Killers, a film in which he played one half of a murderous, road-tripping couple explicitly inspired by Bonnie and Clyde.

Costner’s portrayal of Hamer—stoic, unforgiving, sure of his own righteousness—however, gives a hint that we might have more to look forward to in the actor’s post-stardom career than expected. From his peak in The Untouchables and Field of Dreams and JFK, Costner was always a bit of a square, a fuddy-duddy, a dad. (It’s worth noting that one of his very best roles was when he was cast against type as a crook in A Perfect World, which was written by Hancock.) Now that he’s 64, Costner has to some degree aged into his long-standing onscreen persona. What was once painfully cloying is now merely crotchety—not ideal, perhaps, but trending in the right direction.

billie eilish when we all fall asleep where do we go

I worry about people born in the 21st century. There’s something deep and dark stirring in our collective consciousness. They’re seeing it firsthand. The last generation grew up with at least the pretense of decency, with a sense that “the arc of history bends toward justice.” This decade says morality goes wherever the masses do; if they tug too hard in the wrong direction, the rest of the union gets yanked along by their preoccupations. People coming of age right now are seeing hate, selfishness, and shameless, lawless grift growing new roots. They’re being bombarded with bad news at a speed that’s dizzying to process, and they live with the expectation that they’ll be transparent about their thoughts and feelings all the while. It doesn’t make sense. It requires superhuman poise and a bold belief that in spite of what ails us right now, we, as a planet, are going to be fine in the end. That they’re adapting and not despairing is astounding. “Gen Z” will save the future, but only if we can get them there in one piece.

billie eilish when we all fall asleep where do we go

Billie Eilish is a 17-year-old singer-songwriter with a preternatural self-awareness, a sweet and mousy but also capricious singing voice, and an impeccable ear for melody. Eilish has only been writing music for five years; she composed her first song at 12 and recorded her first one at 13. She’s sharper than a lot of writers who’ve been at it for much longer. She is, like anyone living under the age of 21 through history, the picture of cool, aloof boredom. Eilish is not your archetypal millennial teen — she was homeschooled by her parents, the Scottish and Irish actors Maggie Baird and Patrick O’Connell, and encouraged in her interests in the arts by her older brother, Finneas, who also acts, sings, writes, and produces — but her music resonates because she is able to articulate the absurdities of the young American experience with wit, tenderness, and brutal honesty. Her debut album When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? is a quiet revolution, both intricate and also delicate, sweet but sometimes prickly, like berries in a bramble.

“I’m the bad guy,” Billie Eilish declares in “Bad Guy,” the first song on her debut album, “When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?”; then the music pauses to splice in one spoken, very teenage syllable: “Duh!” You can hear the eyeroll.

Eilish, 17, has spent the last few years establishing herself as the negation of what a female teen-pop star used to be. She doesn’t play innocent, or ingratiating, or flirtatious, or perky, or cute. Instead, she’s sullen, depressive, death-haunted, sly, analytical and confrontational, all without raising her voice.

On singles and EPs, like her 2017 EP “Don’t Smile at Me,” Eilish’s songs have treated love as a power struggle, an absurd game, and a destructive obsession, racking up more than a billion streams from listeners who apparently share her sentiments. On her Instagram page, which has more than 15 million followers, she is brusquely anti-fashion, swaddling herself in shapeless, oversized, boldly colored clothes and making silly or ghoulish faces. “I do what I want when I’m wanting to/My soul so cynical,” she notes in “Bad Guy.” But that’s just her starting point. While Eilish’s previous releases have featured her flinty, defensive side, her debut album also admits to sorrows and vulnerabilities.

Though Eilish hasn't had the opportunity to meet Bieber in person (yet!), she's been a fan of his for years now. "It started when I was, like, 12, I believe," she confessed, adding that she totally had "big a**" posters of him plastered all over her bedroom walls.

"He's amazing," she gushed. "He's so sweet and, like, I feel -- just, honestly, I feel for him, man. He's been through a lot, dude."

Like Bieber, Eilish has found her own success in the music industry at such a young age. She began writing original songs at the age of 11, and released her first EP, Don't Smile at Me, in August 2017, when she was 15 years old.

Now, Eilish is preparing for the next big step, with the release of her debut studio album, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? Although it was just released on Friday, the singer-songwriter has already been slashing Spotify and Apple Music Records. Asked if she's ready for this next level of stardom, Eilish adorably exclaimed, "No!"

"No, honestly, I think, like... I feel like I am," she clarified. "I feel like I always have been [ready] a little bit, without really realizing it."

Later in the interview, Eilish also couldn't help herself from gushing over another pop singer, Ariana Grande. She told ET that it's amazing to see all these female forces dominating music right now.

"That girl is the king!" she marveled. "She's the king. For sure. I don't know, it's really [sick] to see how things are changing and how people [are] kind of, like, understanding that [us girls] are all just doing our thing."

"I'm just hoping for the best," Eilish added of her own path. "I'm just trying to enjoy it and not complain. 'Cause what is there to complain about?"

For a peek inside Spotify's Billie Eilish Experience -- and to see her amazing reaction at the moment her album dropped -- check out the video below. 

The party had an open bar, but Billie Eilish was nowhere near the free champagne. At 17, the evening’s star and musical guest was a good 10 years younger than most of the hip Manhattan crowd filling the cavernous Lower East Side gallery on a February night. The occasion? The launch of her magazine cover for Garage, created by the renowned artist Takashi Murakami.

Eilish, a singer-songwriter beloved by Gen Z–she has 15 million Instagram followers–is not yet a household name. But with her debut album, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?, out March 29, she’s well on her way. Even before its release, she has nearly 6 billion streams across platforms and is Spotify’s second most popular female artist this year. And she got there on the strength of an image that’s equal parts enigmatic and open, and music that swings from eerie trap-pop to whisper-sweet balladry, all wrapped up in existential pain. Her refusal to conform makes her a voice of a generation that desires authenticity above all. “I don’t care what you don’t like about me,” she says. “I care what I have to say.”

pop prodigy Billie Eilish has exerted a lot of energy creating a unified, cohesive online and musical identity—no capital letters, fashion cues borrowed from Tyler, the Creator, an intentionally spooky aesthetic—so it makes sense, in a way, that her album release would be an “experience,” coded and packaged for streaming-era release. On Thursday evening, the young singer hosted a release party for her debut album, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?, with Spotify in Los Angeles, California, an event that was attended by guests as varied as Heidi Klum and Amelia Gray and Delilah Belle Hamlin (in a pair of pants that read “stop looking at my d--k” across the front). (Justin Bieber regrets that he was unable to make it.)

Titled “The Billie Eilish Experience,” the fête included rooms based on each of the songs on Eilish’s album. “I wanted it to literally be like an exhibit, a museum, a place to smell and hear and feel,” she told Billboard on Thursday evening. “Every room has a certain temperature, every room has a certain smell, a certain color, a certain texture on the walls. A certain shape, a certain number.” Ushering guests through were staff members in jumpsuits emblazoned with Eilish’s “blohsh” symbol—sort of like the figure that indicates a male restroom, but with a hunchback. Eilish’s status as goth hypebeast par excellence was exemplified in the Takashi Murakami-designed sculpture of her that loomed over the entrance to the event.

And presiding over the whole thing was Eilish herself, in a logo-heavy look riffing on Louis Vuitton by the independent artist Tsuwoop. A bucket hat, balaclava, hoodie, and wide trousers were capped off with white Nike sneakers; stylist Samantha Burkhart, who was also responsible for that extremely memed Poppy look at the iHeartRadio Music Awards and Eilish’s Sailor Moon-illustrated look at the same event, also tagged Chrome Hearts in her post to Instagram depicting the full look.