Latest news with #DinahWashington
Boston Globe
16-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Ananda Lewis helped define the MTV VJ at the turn of the millennium
Music is a natural subject for people talking about it to bring their whole self into the mix, and Lewis did just that during her four-year MTV run: Early on in her tenure, she praised Queen of the Blues Dinah Washington en route to introducing the video for Snoop Dogg's 'Gin and Juice.' During a 2001 tribute to the late singer Aaliyah, she took time out from the script to give her own elegy to her friend and peer. She also had journalistic chops that MTV (and, before that, BET) let her flaunt, hosting 'True Life: I Am Driving While Black' and shows that dealt with the aftermath of the Columbine High School shooting. 'Ananda is Cleopatra. You know she's a queen,' Prince told the Advertisement 'Giving them the space to talk to people who would honor and respect who they were, especially brown people at the time, was really special,' she said in 2020. Three years later, Paramount Global shut down MTV's news division, and Lewis Lewis, who was born in Los Angeles in 1973 and grew up in San Diego, had her own talk show from 2001 to 2002 and hosted the celebrity news show 'The Insider' before stepping away from the entertainment world and becoming a carpenter in the 2010s. The short-lived 2019 reboot of 'While You Were Out' brought her two career trajectories together, and in recent years she'd popped up on documentaries that covered her era of MTV. She had been diagnosed with breast cancer in the late 2010s, and during a 2024 CNN roundtable, she revealed that it had progressed to Stage IV. Lewis died on June 11 at her home in Los Angeles, where she was in hospice care. Advertisement 'MTV was like going to an amusement park and having the FastPass to every ride, and you were on the ride with your favorite people every single time,' Lewis told Check the Rhymes TV. During the channel's reign as America's chief arbiter of pop music, Lewis and other standout VJs brought millions of viewers along for each trip with knowledge and enthusiasm. Maura Johnston is a writer and professor living in Allston. She can be reached at .
Daily Mail
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
If you're only going to play one PlayStation zombie game, make it The Last Of Us. But if you're going to play two, then Days Gone, with its hordes of undead, is a humdinger!
Days Gone Remastered (PlayStation 5, £44.99) Verdict: Back from the dead Rating: As Dinah Washington almost sang, what a difference six-and-a-bit years makes. When Sony first released Days Gone as its latest, PlayStation-exclusive blockbuster back in 2019, most gamers were unimpressed — and you can kind of see why. Here was another moody zombie story with a grizzled, taciturn lead character, when PlayStation already had the superior The Last Of Us. Here was another open-world checklist, when we already had our fill of Assassin's Creed and Far Cry releases. And, to top it all off, here was a game that strained against the capabilities of the hardware at the time, often to breaking point. It was all rather underwhelming. In the years since, however, the original Days Gone has been refined and expanded — so that it now has a vocal band of adherents. And, in the spirit of last week's Oblivion remaster, it's also just gained a prettier, smoother version for the PlayStation 5. A re-evaluation is certainly in order. Here was another moody zombie story with a grizzled, taciturn lead character, when PlayStation already had the superior The Last Of Us And, in the spirit of last week's Oblivion remaster, it's also just gained a prettier, smoother version for the PlayStation 5. A re-evaluation is certainly in order. Of course, some of those original concerns still remain; if you're going to play only one PlayStation zombie game, you better make it The Last Of Us. But, with the remaster, it's now easier to see Days Gone's distinctive features — and to enjoy them too. One is main character Deacon's motorbike, your primary means of getting around the game's sodden, wooded corner of Oregon. It feels great in the hands — that is, through the PS5's DualSense controller — but it's also something more than that. You quickly learn that this bike is your best friend in the game, a thing to be cherished and tinkered with. Then there are Deacon's sporadic encounters with great, seething zombie hordes, for which you've got to use everything at your disposal: guns, explosives, even your little grey cells. It's no surprise that a new 'Horde' mode has been added to this remastered version of the game, so that you can enjoy this creative craziness outside of the main story. It's such an impressive feature.
