UrLogicFails

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.

Following the success of its debut feature, Nimona, Annapurna Animation is ready to launch its next phase of movies.

Multiple projects are now in the works as key creative positions have been put in place, including a new project from Nimona co-director Nick Bruno and the next title from Ice Age director Chris Wedge, EW can exclusively report.

Among other intriguing items on the agenda for the division are plans to adapt video games from Annapurna Interactive, the gaming branch of the indie studio. First up is Stray, the award-winning adventure game from the developers at BlueTwelve Studio.

Baird went on to say that there's "something so emotional" that the creators are trying to capture when adapting the game to film. BlueTwelve, he explains, described the game as having a "sort of 'hopepunk' vibe," a narrative concept that optimism is a form of resistance. "I love that term, hopepunk," he says. "I think, if we are going to do this adaptation justice, this is going to be the first and greatest hopepunk movie that's ever been made."

Though the division heads won't reveal what other games they're considering for adaptation, Millstein does explain why Stray was the title they went to first.

"First off, it is just wildly popular," he says. "People engage in the game for a variety of reasons, and I think for us at Annapurna, working with different creative people, it's a puzzle. What is it about this game that is so popular? Then the question is, how do you adapt a game into longform storytelling that is incredibly respectful to the game itself and the audiences, but then also is film worthy? The process of that is always part of the challenge."

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.

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“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.

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With one strike already underway, SAG-AFTRA announced Friday that it will seek authorization for a second strike against the major video game companies.

The union has a separate contract with the major video game makers, including Activision and Electronic Arts. The contract was originally due to expire last Nov. 7, but was extended for a year to allow for further discussions. The talks are due to resume on Sept. 26.

In a statement, SAG-AFTRA’s president, Fran Drescher, blasted the video game companies for their “greed and disrespect.”

SAG-AFTRA went on strike against the video game companies in October 2016. The strike lasted 11 months.

This time around, the union is seeking rest periods and safety protections, in addition to the wage increases and AI provisions. The union wants an on-set medic for video games, similar to current provisions in TV and film, and a prohibition against stunts during self-taped auditions.

Ballots are due at 5 p.m. PT on Sept. 25. The union will also hold informational meetings for affected members during the voting period.

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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.”

Great Scott! Back to the Future is coming to PowerWash Simulator! We'd love to reveal more but we don't want to disrupt the space-time continuum. 💦

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More than three months ago, my buddy Adam Aron, the C.E.O. of AMC Theatres and former winner of the coveted What I’m Hearing “Villain of the Year” honor, got a call from a friend who also happened to know Scott Swift. Per sources, this mutual friend informed Aron that Mr. Swift, the father of Taylor Swift, had a “crazy idea” and wanted to chat. It seemed the Swifts had been disappointed in their discussions with a couple Hollywood studios about distributing a planned concert film of Taylor’s current tour show.

The stickers were drawn in Procreate and touched up with text rendered in Illustrator.

I tried printing them on glossy vinyl sticker paper, but it seems that using a laser printer makes the printed sections more matte anyways.

I have more testing planned down the road.

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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.

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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.