Entertainment

The Mosquito Bowl

"A group of WWII-era soldiers in dusty uniforms are shouting and cheering around two men, possibly during a brawl or contest, outdoors near metal barrels and mountains in the background."

The Mosquito Bowl, Peter Berg’s new World War II drama for Netflix, sets the tone right away with a famous Herbert Hoover quote. “Older men declare war,” it goes. “But it is youth that must fight and die. And it is youth who must inherit the tribulation, the sorrow, and the triumphs that are the aftermath of war.”
It is a statement eternal in its truth and devastating in its poignancy, one well worth keeping in mind any time the specter of battle is raised. It is also, you may have noticed, the theme of more or less every single war movie ever made. It would take some really sharp and distinctive execution to make it feel fresh again — and as admirable as The Mosquito Bowl often is in its craft, its storytelling falls well short of that bar.
The premise, at least, had potential. Adapted from the book of the same title by Buzz Bissinger (whose Friday Night Lights also spawned a Berg film), The Mosquito Bowl leads up to a legendary football game played between two Marine divisions while stationed at Guadalcanal on Christmas Eve in 1944. One would expect the sports angle to add a welcome new spin on the usual war-drama storylines — and it does, though not nearly as much as you’re probably guessing, given how little of the 126-minute run time the match actually takes up.
Its leads are a quartet of elite college football players who’ve joined the Marines after the 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor, and all are played by hot rising stars du jour: the ubiquitous but apparently un–typecast–able Nicholas Galitzine as thoughtful Brown alum John McLaughry; Ray Nicholson as charming Purdue alum turned promising NFL draftee Tony Butkovich; Tom Francis and Bill Skarsgard as anxious David Schreiner and wild Bob Bauman, both graduates of University of Wisconsin (though only David maintains a grudge against Tony for beating them in a pivotal game).
But if that Hoover epigraph suggests a well-trod path, the rest of the film confirms it has no intention of straying from it. The central themes are all ones you could guess based on the logline alone. War forges unbreakable bonds of brotherhood. War makes men out of boys, but destroys their minds and bodies in the process. War is hell, as opposed to football, which represents youthful idealism, except that football is also a little bit like war if you think about it: “The Marine Corps is the greatest offensive line in the history of football,” one character declares.
The Mosquito Bowl’s great saving grace — the thing that might nevertheless make it worthwhile for people who simply enjoy war movies — are its technical elements. (Well, maybe aside from the dull gray-brown-blue color palette that seems to aim for “serious and gritty” and lands right back at “produced by Netflix.”) Combat sequences, set in the Pacific theater and filmed in Australia, look expansive and authentic, weaving around hundreds of soldiers running and shouting and shooting at once.
Berg, working with DP Jacques Jouffret, favors close shots that force us to experience battle much like our heroes do, as confusing, terrifying bursts of mayhem. Pinned in place by the machine guns we hear thundering all around, we watch in horror as a friend gets struck down by a bullet mid-conversation, or flamethrowers wave wildly in the periphery. But that’s often all we get. Other soldiers, friendlies and enemies alike, are glimpsed through trees or plumes of smoke. Updates get passed around like rumors. What lurks over the next ridge or the next nightfall is anyone’s guess.
Given that commitment to their perspective, I suppose you could argue that these scenes dragging on for quite a while is part of the idea, too: The guys who’d previously hoped to be home in time for the Fourth of July — of 1942 — are learning the hard way that fighting rarely goes so quick or easy. But as the minutes stretch on, it starts to seem that The Mosquito Bowl is primarily interested in showing off how skilled Berg and his team are at producing action set pieces, be they ones of battle or boot camp or football, and only secondarily interested in its plot or characters.
This impression is not diminished by a script, from Berg and Mark L. Smith, that barely bothers to build any connective tissue between said set pieces. Even the titular Mosquito Bowl finally arrives with almost no build-up at all. No sooner has one Marine complained about low morale than a sergeant has assigned two others to organize a football game; no sooner has that order gone out than we’re watching them line up to play it.
Logically, the necessary pieces are all accounted for; it’s not as if we need to watch Bob and David recruiting teammates to surmise that that must have happened at some point. But in its constant rush to get to the good stuff, The Mosquito Bowl keeps shortchanging the emotional beats required to make them land. Personalities are sketched only in the margins, mostly via brief snippets of chatter between rounds of gunfire. Character development happens offscreen, or possibly doesn’t exist at all — it’s hard to tell if anyone’s changing when everyone’s so vaguely conceived to begin with.
The big ideas we’re meant to take to heart are reduced to disingenuous platitudes. While The Mosquito Bowl does not completely ignore the nastier undercurrents of the military culture and mindset, it’s so invested in the idea of wartime service as an act of noble self-sacrifice that it refuses to engage with them directly. So even as Bob announces in boot camp that “This recruit is here to learn how to kill Japanese people, sir!” the film never stops to reexamine his eagerness or his motives. It introduces such details only to gloss by them completely on the way to a straightforwardly heroic ending.
This refusal to look directly at the shadows is all the more aggravating given how often The Mosquito Bowl pats itself on the back for being clear-eyed. In quieter moments, the film zooms out into a placid view of the globe from space, or zooms into bittersweet details like a seagull walking along a corpse-strewn beach — reminders to maintain a sense of perspective about our place in this vast and indifferent universe. In moments of grand emotion, it often freezes into black-and-white snapshots (sometimes pulled from actual archives) to emphasize that what we’re watching really happened. But in the rest of its run time, it forgets that just because something is true doesn’t mean you can’t make it ring false.

Entertainment

Val Chmerkovskiy back on ‘DWTS,’ Carrie Ann Inaba compliments him

After a one-week suspension from “Dancing with the Stars,” pro dancer Val Chmerkovskiy returned to the ballroom Tuesday, Oct. 27, rejoining celebrity partner Jenna Dewan for the ABC ballroom competition’s Horror Movie Night episode.
Chmerkovskiy, 40, was forced to sit out the Oct. 20 Dedication Night episode following a controversial social media post directed at longtime judge Carrie Ann Inaba that appeared to reference Will Smith’s infamous slap of Chris Rock at the 2022 Oscars. Chmerkovskiy apologized, insisting he intended to defend his wife, fellow pro dancer Jenna Johnson, not threaten Inaba.
Upon his return, Chmerkovskiy was thrilled to reunite with Dewan in rehearsals, telling her, “I am so sorry for all the chaos, you did not sign up for that and I feel awful.” She accepted his apology and offered a hug saying, “I forgive you,” before focusing their sights on the Argentine Tango inspired by “Zombie” movies this week.
After their impressive dance, the judges had only good things to say − including Inaba, who opened her feedback with a compliment for Chmerkovskiy specifically. “Incredible choreography, Val,” she said.
He had a big smile on his face as he thanked her for the acknowledgment.
She also told the pair, “The dance as a whole was perfection,” before giving them a 9 for the dance.
What happened after the ‘DWTS’ cameras stopped?
Inaba and Chmerkovskiy’s reconciliation grew even more intimate after the “DWTS” cameras stopped rolling Tuesday night.
The two embraced in front of the studio audience after the show, with Inaba telling audience members behind her that she and Chmerkovskiy “were coworkers.”
The pair continued talking, with Chmerkovskiy kissing Inaba’s hand and the judge affectionately held his smiling face.
How did this all start?
The dispute began after Inaba criticized a samba performed by Chmerkovskiy’s wife, fellow pro dancer Jenna Johnson, and her celebrity partner Harry Shum Jr., citing an illegal lift.
“You almost saw Fresh Prince enter the ballroom last night,” Chmerkovskiy wrote in a since-deleted TikTok post, apparently invoking Smith’s “Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” character and the actor’s notorious 2022 Oscars outburst.
The post prompted a one-week suspension from the show, with producers saying Chmerkovskiy’s remarks did not align with the competition’s values.
Chmerkovskiy has apologized to Inaba, acknowledging his poor judgment.
“In a moment where my instinct was to defend my wife, I made a poor decision to reference a meme to ‘keep my wife’s name’ out of the conversation, without stopping to think through what else that reference could imply,” Chmerkovskiy wrote on Instagram Stories to his 1.6 million followers on Oct. 18.
During his absence, Dewan, 45, was paired with returning pro Alan Bersten for the Oct. 20 episode, performing a Viennese waltz to the Righteous Brothers’ “Unchained Melody” in honor of her mother, Nancy. Bersten had previously been eliminated from the Season 35 competition with celebrity chef Giada De Laurentiis.
Inaba broke her silence on the situation in an Oct. 25 Instagram comment: “I have not spoke about what happened because of professional courtesy for those who are still competing, and we actually have standards and practices that keep us separated. But I think a part of this ‘headline’ has missed a few important parts of what happened.
“I think it’s important for everyone to know that Jenna and I hugged it out after the Super Bowl show. Jenna was an absolute professional about it, and two women worked through the moment. It came to my attention later that Jenna was deeply hurt. So I also offered to speak with her at anytime. I have also offered to discuss the lift rule and how I enforce it. @sharnaburgess made a great video explaining lifts, assists and which dances allow and don’t allow them,” she said.

Entertainment

Jessa Duggar Says She and Husband Ben Seewald Are Expecting Baby Number 7

NEED TO KNOW
Jessa Duggar Seewald is “expecting again!”
The TLC star and her husband Ben Seewald appeared on Wednesday’s Oct. 28 episode of the Unplanned Podcast, where Seewald said she is expecting baby number seven
In a preview of their appearance released Tuesday, Oct. 27, Jessa noted that she is six weeks along
Jessa Duggar Seewald has a big announcement.
The 19 Kids and Counting alum and her husband, Ben Seewald, are the latest guests on the Unplanned Podcast with Matt and Abby Howard.
In a preview of this week’s episode, released on Tuesday, Oct. 27, Jessa appears to shock Matt and Abby as she says, “We’re actually expecting again.”
“What?” says Matt.
“Yeah, six weeks pregnant with number seven,” responds Jessa. PEOPLE has reached out to her representative for comment.
Jessa and Ben have six children: sons Spurgeon Elliot, 10; Henry Wilberforce, 9; George Augustine, 2; Edward Owen, 1; and daughters Ivy Jane, 7, and Fern Elliana, 5.
She announced the arrival of her sixth baby in a birth vlog posted to her YouTube channel, in August 2025, revealing that her mom, Michelle Duggar, was by her side.
Before Edward Owen’s arrival, she responded to negative remarks from commenters about her growing family.
“When it comes to people saying negative opinions, I know this is not the case for everyone, but for me personally, I’ve never had anybody walk up to my face and be nasty,” Jessa said in a YouTube video titled “Baby #6 Q&A + My Morning Routine,” posted in May 2025. “I have heard a lot of rude and unnecessary comments, but generally those are just online.”
In her response, she also addressed a comment claiming that she and Seewald are “trying to follow in [her] mom’s footsteps.”
“I’m not going to have 19 kids, but honestly, my mom is my hero. I love her. I adore her [and] she is my role model in so many ways,” she said. “Her patience, her love, her gentleness [and] her kind speech. She is the golden example of a mother, in my opinion. So, when people say, ‘Do you want to be like your mother?’ I’m like, ‘Yes, please, Lord, help me.’ ”
Having a big family was already on Jessa’s mind before her Nov. 1, 2014 wedding.
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“We both want to have a big family,” she told PEOPLE ahead of the ceremony. “We are talking about our goals and the future with family. We have both talked about adoption and want to adopt, too.”

Entertainment

Who Goes Home On Halloween?

SPOILER ALERT! This post contains details from this week’s episode of Dancing with the Stars.
It’s one of the buzziest nights of the season on Dancing with the Stars: Halloween!
This year, they’ve specifically themed the performances around famous horror movies from The Omen to Sinners. Since no one went home last week, there’s a double elimination tonight.
Shirley Ballas, who is a prolific ballroom dancer and judge in her own right and also happens to be the mother of DWTS pro Mark Ballas, is the guest judge. Watch out, Mark!
Let’s see how things shook out.
Actress Julia Stiles with Ezra Sosa. The actress says her performance last week, which paid tribute to her 10 Things I Hate You costar Heath Ledger and involved the rest of the film’s stars. But, she and Ezra get into it a little bit in rehearsals this week about his critiques, so they have to hug it out before they can rise to the challenge of an argentine tango to “The Dogs Attack” by Jerry Goldsmith, Lionel Newman and National Philharmonic Orchestra, featured in the 1976 film The Omen. Stiles starred in the horror movie’s 2006 remake, so she’s got big expectations. “I didn’t know you could do that with a priest!” Bruno says. SCORE: 26 out of 40 (Shirley gave her a 4?!?!)
Actor Harry Shum Jr. with Jenna Johnson. The Grey’s Anatomy star and his partner are dancing a contemporary to a song DWTS audiences should be familiar with, “Toxic” by 2WEI. Witney and Milo danced to the same song a few seasons ago. The routine is inspired by 2004’s Saw. “Bravo! That is the contemporary we’ve been waiting for,” Carrie Ann told them, literally giving a standing ovation in the process. SCORE: 40 out of 40
Actress Tatyana Ali with Jan Ravnik. These two are dancing a paso doble to the Oscar-nominated song “I Lied To You” by Miles Caton, from last year’s Sinners. Taking on such an iconic and recent film, they’ve got a tall order to make it both cinematic and powerful enough to be considered a true paso doble. Sounds like the jury is still out on whether they accomplished that, but the judges agreed they loved the theatrics. “Whatever you’re selling, I am buying,” Derek said. SCORE: 28 out of 40 (another 4 from Shirley)
Actress Jenna Dewan with Val Chmerkovskiy. Back with her partner after the kerfuffle with Carrie Ann, Jenna is performing an Argentine tango to “Uninvited” by Damned Anthem and Kendra Dantes, inspired generally by zombie films…except there were no zombies to be found on that dance floor. “I’ve seen those moves…but never with that power, that precision!” Derek said, jumping to his feet. SCORE: 37 out 40
Comedian and podcaster Connor Wood with Rylee Arnold. Inspired by Annabelle: Creation, the comedian and his partner are dancing a contemporary to “You Are My Sunshine” by Charles McDonald. Wood has been in at the bottom of the leaderboard most weeks, but he really impressed the judges with his dedication dance last week, so he’s got a lot riding on this one. “Aren’t you too old to play with dolls?” Bruno teases. SCORE: 37 out of 40
Paralympian Ezra Frech with Daniella Karagach. After getting the first 10 of the season, this pair is tackling a jazz routine to “Madness” by Ruelle, inspired by The Invisible Man. Ezra has some issues with his prosthetic this week that interrupted practice, but he’s pushing through. The queen of Halloween routines delivers again, impressing the judges thoroughly. “Jazz is subjective…I actually got your storyline,” Shirley said. SCORE: 36 out of 40
Savannah Bananas midfielder Jackson Olson with Emma Slater. Get ready for a “dark persona” from mister banana ball! They’re doing a contemporary to “That’s Life” by Frank Sinatra, inspired by Joker. To his credit, he totally embodied the character, to the point that even Carrie Ann have to give him credit for intentionally not finishing his movements, rather than being inattentive. “It was a challenging routine, had a lot of momentum. I thought it was terrifying,” Shirley said. SCORE: 35 out of 40
Reality star Tyler Cameron with Sharna Burgess. Dancing a Viennese waltz to “Love Song for a Vampire” by Annie Lennox, The Bachelorette alum is taking inspiration from the 1992 film Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Tyler’s wig! Scary!!! The dance? Pretty good. Well, for all the judges except Carrie Ann. “I did not think your acting was that great in that dance,” she said. SCORE: 26 out of 40
Olympian Amber Glenn with Pasha Pashkov. The figure skater and her pro partner are coming off a high last week, dancing an Argentine tango to “Perfection” by Clint Mansell inspired by Black Swan. These two also got very high scores last week, so they’re riding a high and ready to up the ante even more. And the judges loved the technique, even if the Argentine tango is pretty difficult to master. SCORE: 36 out of 40
Reality star Maura Higgins with Mark Ballas. As the last performance of the night, these two are dancing a contemporary routine to “Cry Little Sister” by Gerard McMann, the theme of the 1987 vampire film The Lost Boys. Mark’s mom is at the judges’ table tonight, so all eyes are on them. “Only you can make the horrible look beautiful,” Bruno told Mark. But, Maura could use some more oomph in her style on the contemporary. SCORE: 32 out of 40
Who goes home?
There’s a double elimination tonight, so Jackson Olson and Emma Slater and Tyler Cameron and Sharna Brugess are sent packing. Next week is Disney Night in the ballroom.

Entertainment

Report: Stephanie Vaquer ‘Out Indefinitely’ – Fightful

Reported details on the absence of Stephanie Vaquer.
On Saturday, Stephanie Vaquer announced that she was cleared from her ankle injury and good to compete on Monday’s WWE Raw against Becky Lynch.
Raw general manager Adam Pearce opened Raw by announcing that Vaquer was not cleared.
According to Mike Johnson at PWInsider, Vaquer’s absence is believed to be illness-related. Cory Hays of False Finish followed up by saying that Vaquer will be “out indefinitely.”
Vaquer last wrestled at the Hawaii Live Events on October 16 and 17. She competed at WWE Money in the Bank in a triple threat match against Liv Morgan and Lynch, losing the WWE Women’s World Title to Morgan.
Fightful will provide more details on Vaquer’s absence when they are known.

Entertainment

Lamar Odom, girlfriend join OnlyFans in NBA first

Lamar Odom is making some NBA history. But it has nothing to do with being on the court.
The two-time NBA champion is joining OnlyFans, a subscription service website that is largely known for adult content. He would be the first NBA player to publicly have an account on the website, according to TMZ.
Odom, 46, promoted the account on his Instagram story with a hyperlink — over a picture of him shirtless in a pool — that reads: “Let’s chat” with a water-spraying emoji.
“You’ve seen me on the court,” Odom wrote in the bio section of his OnlyFans page. “You’ve seen me on TV. Now get to know the REAL me. A little more personal. A little more playful. And a side of Lamar you haven’t seen before.
“Come inside my world.”
Odom’s girlfriend, Rachel Bradley, a real estate agent based in Los Angeles, also joined OnlyFans. TMZ reported that the two could film content together.
“People hear OnlyFans and automatically think one thing, but I’m not here to tell you what you will or won’t see,” Odom told TMZ.
He adds, “I’ve lived a pretty wild life, and trust me, there are still a few surprises left. I’ve always been an open book, but there are some chapters people haven’t seen yet.”
The Queen native played 14 years in the NBA, 12 of which were in Los Angeles (seven with the Lakers, five with the Clippers). He had a high-profile marriage with Khloe Kardashian and made appearances on the long-running reality show ” Keeping Up with the Kardashians.”
His life — playing and post-playing career — has included issues with drugs and alcohol, most recently in January, when he was arrested on DUI charges. In July, he reached a plea deal with prosecutors.
Months after the arrest in May, Odom celebrated being 100 days sober.
“There are days I don’t think I could make it,” the former Lakers star wrote on Instagram.