Entertainment

Subpar CG, messy genre identity crisis, and flagrant visual references to its inspirations mar this ridiculous action flick that I owned on DVD and watched at least a dozen times as a tasteless high schooler in the early 2000s.

No regrets.

Archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20230911165907/https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/drew-barrymore-show-audience-kicked-out-1235587064/

The talk show resumed taping without its three WGA writers on Monday as picketers demonstrated outside of CBS Studios.

Writers Guild of America members and scribes for the Drew Barrymore show picketed outside CBS Studios Monday in New York as the talk show resumed filming amid the writers and actors strikes.

Two audience members, who had signed up for free tickets to the taping, were handed WGA pins as they walked in the door by picketers and say they were asked to leave before the show began because they were wearing the pins.

The two then joined the picket lines outside, donning WGA shirts, as Turiczek said, “If they think we’re part of the strike, we might as well be.” Carter added that she had signed up for tickets as a fan of Barrymore, but now has been “disheartened” by the experience.

Barrymore announced her decision Sunday to resume filming the show, saying that the talk show would not use WGA writers and would otherwise be complying with WGA and SAG-AFTRA rules. The show has returned without its writers and WGA said it will be picketing outside the show this week, since it is still a struck show.

The three WGA writers, who are all co-head writers on the show, were in attendance at the picket line and said they found out that the show, which has been on hiatus since April, would resume via audience ticket giveaways that were posted on social media.

As for whether the three writers will return to the show once the strike is resolved, they say the issue is complicated, adding that they do not know whether there will still be WGA jobs.

Because it’s the weekend and Star Trek’s new Moopsy is possibly the most frighteningly inspired adaptation/extrapolation of Pokémons to hit the screen.

Archive.org link

Excerpt:

Masterson, 47, was sentenced to 30 years to life in prison by Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Charlaine Olmedo on Thursday despite the pleas from his “That ’70s Show” co-stars Mila Kunis and Ashton Kutcher, among others.

“I do not believe he is an ongoing harm to society and having his daughter raised without a present father would [be] a tertiary injustice in and of itself,” Kutcher wrote in his letter, which was published first by reporter Meghann Cuniff.

The letters in support of defendants by their family and supporters are routine in criminal cases before sentencing. In Masterson’s case, they came as part of a 108-page filing reviewed by The Times. Neither Kunis nor Kutcher argued that Masterson was not guilty of the crimes, but they vouched for his character and the person they knew him to be.

“From the very beginning, I could sense his innate goodness and genuine nature,” Kunis said in her letter. “His caring nature and ability to offer guidance have been instrumental in my growth both personally and professionally.”

In Kutcher’s letter, he noted a time when he said Masterson jumped to the defense of a woman whose boyfriend was berating her at a pizza restaurant.

“It was an incident he didn’t have to get involved in but proactively chose to because the way this man was behaving was not right,” Kutcher wrote.

Both actors said Masterson’s anti-drug attitude helped them to stay on the straight and narrow during their careers in Hollywood.

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Excerpt:

Masterson, 47, played Steven Hyde on “That ’70s Show” from 1998 to 2006 and also starred in the television comedy “Men at Work” from 2012 to 2014. More recently, he appeared in the Netflix comedy “The Ranch,” but was fired from the show in 2017 after the rape allegations emerged.

The case against Masterson drew widespread attention, and at times mirrored a television saga, in part because of accusations that the Church of Scientology, to which Masterson belonged, had tried to discourage his accusers.

In May, Masterson was convicted of raping two women at his home in the Hollywood Hills in the early 2000s. The jury deadlocked on a charge that the actor had raped a third woman.

THE BOY AND THE HERON

From Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli In theatres nationwide and IMAX December 8 http://tinyurl.com/ynkjaz6b

An official selection of the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) and New York Film Festival (NYFF) Follow @GKIDSFilms for more updates!

A young boy named Mahito yearning for his mother ventures into a world shared by the living and the dead.

There, death comes to an end, and life finds a new beginning.

A semi-autobiographical fantasy about life, death, and creation, in tribute to friendship, from the mind of Hayao Miyazaki.

The financial impact of ongoing actors and writers strikes has a number on it now, or one at least, as Warner Bros. Discovery said today it’s looking at a hit of $300 million to $500 million in adjusted EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) for 2023 due to the work stoppages.

In a filing this morning with the Securities and Exchange Commission, WBD said “it is expecting lower adjusted EBITDA for the full year in the range of $10.5 to $11 billion, reflecting the company’s assumption that adjusted EBITDA will be negatively impacted by approximately $300 to $500 million, predominantly due to the impact of the strikes.”

WBD execs indicated on a qarterly earnings call in August that their full-year financial guidance assumed the strikes would be resolved by early September. But with no resolution in sight, it is revisiting and quantifying that guidance now.

It will be interesting to see if and how the tone starts to shift heading into the fall, and if other studios will also start to revise earnings guidance. The earnings hit that WBD announced today is already baked in for 2023 — meaning it wouldn’t really change even if the strikes resolved soon.

Archive link: http://archive.today/7Welk

“How I Met Your Father” has been canceled after two seasons at Hulu, Variety has confirmed.

The Hilary Duff-led “How I Met Your Mother” spinoff concluded its second (and now final) season July 11 without revealing who Duff’s character, Sophie, ended up having a child with. The show debuted in January 2022 and aired 30 episodes overall.

Archive link: http://archive.today/XEZYt

In a sign of Hollywood’s escalating internal tensions, a prominent Directors Guild of America member openly advocated against the election of 10 writer-directors to the guild’s board earlier this month on the grounds that they were “primarily writers” and hailed from “fringe groups.”

In a leaked email that has been shared widely in the creative community, Linda Montanti, chair of the guild’s Western AD/UPM Council, urged a bloc of DGA voters to not support the board candidacies of a number of multihyphenates who are members of both the DGA and WGA — some of whom have been outspoken about strike issues. The list includes writer-producer Boots Riley, Oscar-winning “CODA” writer-director Sian Heder, actor-filmmaker Justine Bateman, actor-writer Paul Scheer and “Chernobyl” creator Craig Mazin. The unorthodox move prompted DGA president Lesli Linka Glatter to contact the members affected to assure them that Montanti’s move was not condoned by top DGA leaders.

DGA critics who are familiar with the flap over Montanti’s message say it points to rigidity within the guild and the aversion by its established players to the more “activist” stances taken by the WGA and, of late, SAG-AFTRA, sources said.

Montanti’s note specifically flagged “Sorry to Bother You” filmmaker Riley as “anti-DGA.” It also included “Queen Sugar” showrunner Shaz Bennett, “A Teacher” director Hannah Fidell, “Cat Person” director Susanna Fogel, “Vida” showrunner Tanya Saracho and “Little America” director Tara Miele.

A DGA spokesman called the message and its comments about members “unacceptable,” and he emphasized that it was not part of a coordinated effort by leaders to sway the Aug. 5 vote.

Five people who viewed Montanti’s email were dismayed to see Riley, the creator and showrunner behind this summer’s Amazon Prime Video series “I’m A Virgo,” characterized as “anti-DGA.” Riley has been vocal and visible in his support for the WGA and SAG-AFTRA work stoppages.

Another individual who read the email said Montanti’s advocacy was “union-on-union crime,” and noted that there’s a “real resistance to activism in the DGA.”

Carlos Santana, Alice Cooper, Róisín Murphy, Dave Chappelle, J.K. Rowling, Harry Jowsey, Bette Midler, Macy Gray, Kevin Hart, John Cleese

ghostarchive link

The biggest names in late night have turned their private group chat into a Spotify podcast, Strike Force Five. All the proceeds will go to support their staff during the writers' strike.

Who are they?

• The hosts of the shows arguably most immediately affected by the strikes: Jimmy Kimmel, John Oliver, Seth Meyers, Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Fallon.

. . .

So I recently rewatched Snowpiercer, a dystopian movie from 2013 directed by Bong Joon-Ho. Although it's one of my favorite movies, I see complaints about tone problems in that movie which I do think are valid. It doesn't have a dystopian thriller tone all the way through. It changes.

And this got me thinking, maybe caring about tone is a culture thing? Keep in mind Bong Joon-Ho also directed Parasite (2019) which starts off as a dark comedy before rapidly shifting into a thriller / horror movie. I'm also reminded of some of the Indian cinema I've seen, where a movie might have drama, comedy, romance, sad scenes, and action and be received perfectly well by Indian audiences.

So I'm curious, people from non western countries especially, how well are tonal shifts received by your general audiences? Do people care less about the Avengers quips and one liners so much?

Would you all explain to me how removing content we expect to have access to is a "cost savings" measure?

The following is from the Willow Wikipedia page, which led me to the linked URL:

The series was removed from Disney+ on May 26, 2023, amidst a Disney+ and Hulu content removal purge as part of a broader cost cutting initiative under Disney CEO Bob Iger.

I've been abroad for a month and earned some time off afterwards. One of my kids reminded me that we never finished Willow, so I said "let's do it now!" The show wasn't perfect for many reasons, but I wanted to finish it for nostalgia's sake and my child legit found it interesting. Lo and behold, the series isn't on Disney+ any more!

A quick search later, I see the above referenced quote linking to the article associated with this post... which only made things worse. The Mysterious Benedict Society was something my whole family could watch and enjoy without arguments! Turner and Hooch was dorky, but something my youngest loved and it was a super safe and easy pick for us bond over.

This post isn't about whether the shows are good. And it isn't about how nearly every show I like ends up cancelled. The point is that I paid for access, they were then quietly removed (for various platforms), and I have zero understanding as to how this saves these companies money.

Would someone explain?

P. S. Yes, I know this is old news. However, this is just how I am. I'm not up to date with anything in the entertainment world. I intentionally wait a few seasons for things because I loath when shows are cancelled after a season. (I'm looking at you, Firefly.) I'm the same way with books, often waiting to read a trilogy after its published because I don't like the wait in between books. (Thanks, Rothfuss).

I just don't take cancellation wells, especially when I was on top of everything including summer podcasts and such. (Now anything with the names Abrams, Lindelof, or Cuse makes my skin crawl.)

I know. I'm weird and stuff.

Archive URL: http://archive.today/q8WGq

Season 1 concluded — after just five episodes, shortened from the originally planned six-episode run — on July 2. The decision to cancel the series was made recently after a lack of clarity for both viewers and cast members about whether the series had the potential to continue. In an interview with Variety, star Moses Sumney said that he signed on thinking it was a limited series, while star Da’Vine Joy Randolph told Variety she thought “everyone’s intention [was] to have a second season.”

Overall, “The Idol” was poorly received, with a 19% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Variety‘s review said that the series “plays like a sordid male fantasy.”

Ratings for the series were middling. It premiered with 913,000 viewers — 17% fewer than the 2019 launch of “Euphoria,” another HBO show hailing from Levinson that targeted a young adult audience, with fewer celebrity attached at the time of release. However, that number did grow to 3.6 million viewers after the episode’s first full week of availability, and now sits at 7 million. Episode 2 fell to 800,000 viewers on its first night.

Throughout the rest of the series’ run, HBO declined to share viewership data.

Archive link: http://archive.today/xQF1a

I'm Richard Brody. I'm a film critic at The New Yorker, and today I'm gonna talk about the best performances of the 21st century. I'm gonna highlight American performances today. Maybe the chance will come up soon to talk about international ones.

Number five is Mahershala Ali in Moonlight. What he does with his character and with his bearing in embodying this character sets the tone for the entire film.

[dramatic orchestral music]

Feel that right there? You in the middle of the world.

Ali plays the role with a wry, sarcastic, yet involuntarily vulnerable undertone. It's almost as if he's whispering, murmuring the role of Juan.

My mama. She do drugs, right?

[birds chirping]

Yeah.

[footsteps falling]

Yet at the same time, Ali's very presence is commanding, decisive. It's as if throughout the entire film, not just the first sequence, even when he's absent, his power dominates the entire movie.

Number four is Miranda July in The Future. She actually plays two roles in her movie. In one of them, she lends her voice to the character of a talking cat. But what I'm most enthusiastic about is her performance as Sophie, a 35 year old dancer, who feels that her best creative years are on the verge of slipping away, and that she needs to seize the day, take control of her life.

Well, 40 is basically 50, and then after 50, the rest is just loose change.

Loose change?

Like not quite enough to get anything you really want.

Oh, God!

As a dancer and even more as an essentially creative and imaginative person, Sophie has a kind of obsession with a shirt she calls Shirty, and when she has an affair with a man she meets by a strange series of coincidences, she creates a dance with, for, and because of Shirty.

That is, for me, one of the most profound and moving moments in the modern cinema.

[melancholy music]

Miranda July, well, she's a great writer, but it's her balletic grace. It's her performance as a dancer in her own movie playing the role of a dancer that, for me, makes this movie transcendent.

Number three is Anna Paquin in Margaret. Paquin stars as Lisa Cohen, an Upper West Side teenager. Lisa inadvertently causes a bus accident in which a woman is killed, and soon, this case takes over her life.

The entire point of the lawsuit was to get the guy fired so he doesn't kill somebody else.

Lonergan writes and directs the movie as a city symphony, filling it with the grand passions of urban life, and Paquin handles the intricate dialogue that Lonergan crafts for her with a deft, almost a rope dance-like precision that nonetheless is filled with the energy that expands to fill the city as the images do.

I think you're very young.

What does that have to do with anything?!

If anything, I think it means I care more than someone who's older because this kind of thing has never happened to me before.

No, it means you care more easily. There's a big difference.

And Paquin invests this character with a precocious authority and a preternatural sense of command that makes it one of the great teen performances in the history of cinema.

Number two is Helena Howard in Madeline's Madeline. The character of Madeline is a theater prodigy who has a significant role in a major theater company in Manhattan. Yet this very advanced young actress is also dealing with the regular problems of a teenager.

[kissing smack]

[Date] Where are you going?

Goodnight.

Are you goin' home? I mean, can I get a kiss without the hair in it?

[Madeline laughing]

The movie pivots on the relationship between art and life, between creative drive and personal problems. It's as if the continuity between Helena Howard as a teenager off screen, and Helena Howard as a prodigious young actress on screen is itself the essence of the dynamic that Decker captures in the movie.

Evangeline is gonna-

[liquid splashing] [Regina gasping]

And what Howard does as an actress in the life of Madeline and in the stage presence of Madeline reminds me of the great Gena Rowlands, who in John Cassavetes' film Opening Night, delivers the most remarkable performance of acting on stage in a movie that I've ever seen.

My hand! [screaming and wailing]

[Madeline sniffing]

This troubling, unsettling, ambiguous dynamic between life onstage and life offstage, between family life and creative life gives the movie, and above all, gives Howard's performance a terrifying power.

The best performance of the century is by Leonardo DiCaprio in The Wolf of Wall Street, which for my money, is also the best film of the century so far.

[lively big band music]

Do I look like the cat who caught the canary?

[people offstage laughing]

When Scorsese won his Best Directing Oscar for The Departed, his 2006 film, I felt that it liberated something in him, that some of the crazies that came out in Shutter Island went on full blast in the Wolf of Wall Street.

[Jordan and Mark pounding and humming]

[whistling] Yeah. [Jordan chuckling]

It's one of the great outpourings of creative energy, from a director and from an actor, in the history of cinema.

It's a story of greed as, essentially, a form of original sin. And Jordan Belfort has the unique skillset to make that greed seem eminently desirable.

[Donnie] Excuse me.

Yeah?

Is that your car on the lot?

[Jordan] Yeah.

[Donnie] it's a Jag? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

How much money you make?

I dunno. $72,000 last month.

You show me a pay stub for $72,000 on it, I quit my job right now, and I work for you.

Hey, Paulie? What's up?

No. Yeah, no, everything's fine.

Hey, listen, I quit.

What's more than two sides of his character, hedonism and a kind of consummate, slick professionalism, come together in an absolute fury of destructive, yet completely appealing energy.

And it's that very appeal that lends the movie its heart of emotional and intellectual, and even religious authority.

An interview with Ayo Edebiri, Rachel Sennott, and Emma Seligman.

A couple of personal highlights from interview:

Inside, the woman behind the ice-cream counter looks at Sennott with obvious delight as she orders a cup of vegan peanut-butter brownie honeycomb. “Oh my God! I love you on The Idol,” she says. Sennott looks briefly startled, then launches into a cheeky assessment of her performance on the series as Depp’s beleaguered assistant. “I am rocking that blazer,” she says. “Just wearing that blazer every day.”

The same woman turns her gaze to Edebiri. “You’re in …” she trails off, waiting for an assist, her mouth hesitantly forming a B — The Bear? Edebiri stares back at her, not unpleasantly but not helping to jog her memory, either.

Outside, Sennott sighs. “I feel like everyone hated us,” she says. She’s perpetually aware of and concerned about the feelings of everyone in her blast radius. Edebiri, while not exactly comfortable with being publicly perceived, doesn’t seem to adjust to her audience. She raises an amused eyebrow. “No, they literally loved us,” she says.

She also struggled to figure out how to be taken seriously by the crew, many of whom were older men.

“I’d never worked with that many men — that’s not a bad thing,” she says, carefully. The three start talking over one another.

“No, but it’s — ”

“They weren’t all — ”

“Some of them were very lovely, but it was just like — ”

“Yeah, and all of the women were — ”

Edebiri takes a breath. “Asserting authority to these 40-, 50–year-old Teamsters, who, again, many were truly lovely and wonderful, but there’s certain things about power and how power appears that they gave you a hard time for,” she says. “Honestly, it’s also you, your nature and your style, you don’t want to yell at people. Some of those men, or people in general, did not respond to it.”

The article does a pretty good job looking at the offer from AMPTP and explaining why it's not up to par with the WGA's expectations but I thought one of the more interesting parts was this:

Netflix's Ted Sarandos seems to be concerned with agreeing to terms that will used to set a precedent for other territories where Netflix has heavily invested in local production.

Some more details on the AMPTP offer include:

There are a number of problems with the AMPTP proposal, including the fact that leaving the decision [of the size of the writers' room] in the showrunner's hands [instead of making it mandatory] means that inevitably the studio will pressure some showrunners to opt against bringing in two more writers. And then there is the problem with the definition of "showrunner" itself. Some streamers have already begun making the showrunner position a non-writing one, instead making a producer or director the default showrunner and simply hiring a "head writer" to run the writers room. Which would take the writers out of the decision-making process entirely. And as several WGA members have suggested to me, the main thrust of the AMPTP proposal seems to be an effort to normalize the idea of a standard writing room size of a showrunner and two full-time mid-level writers. Which ducks most of the complaints the WGA members have had about the size of writers rooms.

Also, the proposal does offer up to 20 consecutive weeks of work, but only during the duration of the writers' room. Which doesn't address the problem of the current disconnect between the span of the room and the production of the show.

“Instead, on the 113th day of the strike – and while SAG-AFTRA is walking the picket lines by our side – we were met with a lecture about how good their single and only counteroffer was,” the Negotiating Committee led by Ellen Stutzman, David Goodman and Chris Keyser said of the off-site sit-down with the CEOs and AMPTP chief. “But this wasn’t a meeting to make a deal. This was a meeting to get us to cave, which is why, not 20 minutes after we left the meeting, the AMPTP released its summary of their proposals.”