In what we can only describe as “a pure and unadulterated expression of the foundational principles of punk,” John “Johnny Rotten” Lydon and his former bandmates in the Sex Pistols are currently engaging in a high-profile and public argument about which of them is currently being too disrespectful toward the late Queen of England.
At the crux of the argument, per Deadline, is the Sex Pistols’ “God Save The Queen,” a 1977 single that you may be surprised to learn is not, despite its clear pro-monarchial title, actually about how great the Queen is. (Sample lyric: “God save the queen / She’s not a human being.”) Lydon—who’s gone through a long series of estrangements and reunions with his former bandmates over the last 40-plus years—started the battle shortly after Elizabeth II’s death, firing what seems to have been a pre-emptive shot denouncing any attempts to license “God Save The Queen” in the aftermath.
To which the other members of the Pistols responded with, basically, “Wait, what?” Talking to Deadline through a spokesperson, the group stated “We cannot understand what he would be referring to. Other than a couple requests for use of imagery or audio in news reports on The Queen and her impact on culture, there’s nothing new relating to ‘God Save The Queen’ being promoted or released in any way.”
Lydon, though, has been adamant that “The musicians in the band and their management have approved a number of requests against John’s wishes.” In a Twitter thread on his official account—accompanied by a picture of Elizabeth that appears to be the un-defaced version of the image used for the single’s iconic cover—Lydon’s reps write:
In John’s view, the timing for endorsing any Sex Pistols requests for commercial gain in connection with “God Save The Queen” in particular is tasteless and disrespectful to the Queen and her family at this moment in time. John wrote the lyrics to this historical song, and while he has never supported the monarchy, he feels that the family deserves some respect in this difficult time, as would be expected for any other person or family when someone close to them has died.
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Lydon has stated, on more than one occasion, that he bears little or no animus toward Elizabeth or any of his family members, instead framing the “historical song” as an expression of distaste for the British monarchy in general. Really, though, it’s just nice that punk’s driving ethos, of being nice to very rich people in very secure positions of power, can remain so thoroughly intact, even in 2022.
Weyermann, the former chief content officer at Participant and former director of the Sundance Institute’s documentary film program, died last October of cancer. She was 66. In addition to an apartment in New York City, Weyermann owned a home in coastal Maine.
CIFF, run by Points North and concluding Sept. 18, is presenting several films Weyermann recently executive produced, including Laura Poitras’ Golden Lion-winning “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” Margaret Brown’s Sundance-winning “Descendant,” Steve James’ “My Compassionate Spy,” which recently premiered at Venice and TIFF, and Geeta Gandbhir and Sam Pollard’s “Lowndes County and the Road to Black Power.”
“It’s so meaningful to be in Camden screening the film we made with Diane,” Brown told Variety during a special reception held in Camden in honor of the new fellowship. “It’s so close to where she planned to spend time collaborating with filmmakers. I can so feel her presence here, and this Fellowship is the perfect way to honor and celebrate her life.”
Established to honor Weyermann’s legacy in the international documentary community, the Diane Weyermann Fellowship at Points North will champion filmmakers producing cinematic feature documentaries that take artistic risks. The program aims to empower a new generation of documentary directors and producers, building a community of support that will help them create significant works of art that connect with audiences worldwide.
“We are incredibly honored and grateful for the opportunity to recognize Diane’s tremendous impact on the world of documentary filmmaking through this new Fellowship,” said Ben Fowlie, executive director of Points North and founder-artistic director of CIFF. “Diane has been a beacon for so many throughout her career, and her fervent belief in documentary as a catalyst for social change has been our guiding inspiration. We hope to mirror Diane’s dedication to the community through the Diane Weyermann Fellowship, creating an environment where we can prioritize two of the most difficult challenges of getting documentary films made – early, significant, and unrestricted funding combined with long-term professional and creative support to enable both the creation of the work and the development of the fellows’ career.”
Up to three original, feature-length documentaries in production from global filmmaking teams will be selected to participate in an 18-month collaborative fellowship. Resources provided to each fellow’s project includes $100,000 in unrestricted, non-recoupable grants, mentorship from veteran filmmakers and industry leaders, festival retreats, and ongoing professional development – all designed to support the completion of their films and the advancement of sustainable careers as artists.
The fellowship is aimed at feature-length documentary projects that are between development and early to mid-production stages and have a producer attached.
In partnership with the Skoll Foundation and Participant, Points North established the Diane Weyermann Memorial Fund to help seed the fellowship program. Over the past year, Points North has been working closely with an advisory committee to design the initiative. Advisors include Ally Derks, founder of Intl. Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA); Laura Kim, executive VP, campaigns & engagement, Participant; Jonathan King, CEO, Concordia Studio; Elise Pearlstein, exec VP, This Machine Filmworks; Courtney Sexton, senior VP, CNN Films; Andrea Weyermann, Ph.D., Georgia State University.
“Diane Weyermann was a fierce advocate for artists and their stories, and we can’t think of a better way to honor her legacy than to collaborate with Points North on a vehicle to support up-and-coming filmmakers,” David Linde, Participant CEO, and Kim said in a joint statement. “The Camden International Film Festival was so special to Diane, so it’s the perfect place to celebrate her in this way.”
Applications for the inaugural Diane Weyermann Fellowship will open on Sept. 19 and will run through Jan. 13. Selected filmmakers and projects for the inaugural Fellowship will be announced in April 2023 and will be in attendance for their first residency at the 19th Camden Intl. Film Festival, taking place Sept. 14-17, 2023.
This fellowship expands upon Points North’s commitment to supporting the next generation of nonfiction storytellers. Established in 2016 and building on the success of the Camden Intl. Film Festival (founded in 2005, CIFF is the Institute’s largest program), the Institute manages five different fellowship programs that support nearly fifty filmmakers and 25 projects annually.
“Since launching Points North seven years ago, the majority of our Artist Program Fellowships have been specifically created to support emerging filmmakers with mentorship, retreats, and workshops designed to help them develop a stronger artistic voice,” says Fowlie. “The Diane Weyermann Fellowship is an opportunity for us to expand this support to more experienced, mid-career artists, furthering our commitment to develop our own internal pipeline of support.”
For the last three decades, Weyermann played a seminal role in supporting the documentary community and shaping the nonfiction landscape during stints at Participant and the Sundance Institute. Oscar-winning docus including Davis Guggenheim’s “An Inconvenient Truth” (2006), Laura Poitras’ “Citizenfour” (2014), and “American Factory” (2019), directed by Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert, are among the many projects that Weyermann helped shepherd.
Weyermann joined Participant in 2005 – one year after Jeff Skoll founded the socially conscious production company. For 12 years, she was responsible for the production company’s documentary feature film and television slate. In 2017, Weyermann was promoted to president and, in 2019, named chief content officer of the L.A.-based media house, where she was responsible for Participant’s documentary, feature film, and television slate.
During Weyermann’s time at Participant, the company produced more than 100 feature and documentary films. Collectively, Weyermann’s Participant projects have earned 10 Academy Award nominations and four wins; eight Emmy nominations and three wins; three BAFTA nominations and one win; and five Spirit Award nominations and three wins.
At least ten people have been killed and four others are missing after 16 inches of rain hit the central Italian region of Marche in just two hours, causing catastrophic floods.
Local authorities said they did not expect such a sudden ‘water bomb’, as around 16 inches of rain fell within two hours on Thursday night, inundating the streets of several towns in the Ancona and Pesaro-Urbino provinces.
‘It was like an earthquake,’ Ludovico Caverni, the mayor of the town of Serra Sant’Abbondio, told RAI state radio.
Dozens of locals scrambled onto rooftops or up trees to await rescue as the powerful floods knocked down doors and swept through buildings and garages.
In one town, the powerful rush of water pushed a car onto a second-flood balcony, while elsewhere parked vehicles were crumpled on top of each other in the streets.
Today, residents were seen clearing mud from the streets, while firefighters struggled to remove toppled tree trunks and branches as they searched for people who could have been buried by debris.
The overnight flooding left at least ten people dead, Premier Mario Draghi said, while four people are still missing as of Friday afternoon. Some 50 people were treated in hospital for injuries.
Among those missing are two children, with one little boy being swept out of his mother’s arms by rushing waters in the town Barbara.
A girl, aged about eight, and other mother are also missing in Barbara after they tried to escape the flood waters, the local mayor Riccardo Pasqualini told the Italian news agency ANSA.
More than 300 firefighters were deployed to the region, with footage showing them waiting through waist-high water in flooded streets, while others operated rubber dinghies to scoop up survivors along their path.
A man helps an elderly woman to walk in the mud after heavy rains and deadly floods hit the central Italian region of Marche, in Cantiano, Italy, on Friday
People help an elderly woman after heavy rains and deadly floods hit the central Italian region of Marche, in Cantiano, Italy, on Friday
A woman wearing wellies tries to scrape mud away from her door steep following the flooding in Cantiano, Italy, on Friday
Partially submerged cars are seen on a flooded street after heavy rains hit the east coast of Marche region, Italy, on Friday
In one town, the powerful rush of water pushed a car onto a second-flood balcony, while elsewhere parked vehicles were crumpled on top of each other in the streets
An overturned car is seen after heavy rains and deadly floods hit the central Italian region of Marche, in Cantiano, on Friday
A family takes a rest after their house was flooded after torrential rain in Pianello di Ostra, Ancona province, Italy, on Friday
People clean mud from a street in Senigallia, Marche region, Italy, on Friday following the torrential rain on Thursday night
This picture released by the Italian firefighters shows an aerial view of the Senigallia area, with farms submerged in water, after floods hit Marche region, central-east Italy, on Friday
Firefighters said that dozens of people who had been trapped in cars or had climbed up to rooftops or trees to escape the rising floodwaters had been rescued. Helicopters were also deployed to pluck people to safety in the more remote towns of the Apennine Mountains.
Police in the town of Sassoferrato, unable to reach a man trapped in a car, extended a long branch to him, which he grabbed before being pulled to safety.
Some of the worst flooding struck the seaside town of Senigallia, while small towns in the hills near the Renaissance tourist town of Urbino were also deluged when fast-moving rivers of water, mud and debris rushed through streets.
Footage released by fire brigades showed operators navigating the streets of Senigallia on rafters to rescue people and evacuate them, while others attempted to clear an underpass of debris.
In the town of Ostra, a father and his adult son were found dead in the flooded garage of their apartment building where they had gone to try to remove their car, and another man who tried to remove his motorcycle from a garage also perished, state TV said. Elsewhere, a man was found dead in his car.
‘As it (the flood) played out, it was far, far worse than forecast,’ said Civil Protection chief Fabrizio Curcio. A bad weather watch had been issued on Thursday, but not at the highest level.
Hundreds of people fled or were evacuated from their homes until the premises could be checked for safety and mountains of mud cleared away.
‘It was an extreme event, more than an exceptional one,’ climatologist Massimiliano Fazzini told state TV.
He said that based on his calculations the amount of rain that fell, concentrated over four hours and in particular in a 15-minute period, was the most in hundreds of years.
Stefano Aguzzi, head of civil protection at Marche’s regional government, said the downpour was far stronger than had been forecast.
‘We were given a normal alert for rain, but nobody had expected anything like this,’ he told reporters.
A summer of virtually no rain meant hillsides were unusually hard and dry, so the water ran faster down the slopes, increasing its impact, meteorologists said.
In a space of a few hours, the region was deluged with the amount of rainfall it usually receives in six months, state TV said.
People work to clear the way after heavy rains and deadly floods hit the central Italian region of Marche, in Cantiano, on Friday
The inside of a building flooded and damaged in the aftermath of flash floods caused by an overnight rain bomb, in Pianello di Ostra, Ancona province, central Italy, on Friday
The overnight flooding left at least ten people dead, Premier Mario Draghi said, while four people are still missing as of Friday afternoon. Some 50 people were treated in hospital for injuries. Pictured: People work to clear way after heavy rains and deadly floods hit the central Italian region of Marche
In one town, the powerful rush of water pushed a car onto a second-flood balcony, while elsewhere parked vehicles were crumpled on top of each other in the streets. Pictured: Cars are stuck in mud and debris as after flash flooding in Senigallia, Marche region, Italy, on Friday
Italian firefighters work to clear debris near a car that crashed following the flash floods in Senigallia, Ancona province, Italy
An aerial view of flooded areas following an overnight rain bomb in Senigallia, Ancona province, Italy, on Friday
Houses were surrounded by water following the torrential rain in Senigallia, Ancona province, Italy, on Friday
Rescue services were still searching for survivors on Friday, authorities were quoted as saying in local media.
The head of the national civil protection agency Fabrizio Curcio was heading to Ancona to assess the damage, while party chiefs campaigning for Italy’s September 25 election expressed their solidarity.
Another video shows people waist-deep in water clutching umbrellas as the floods took hold of the Marche region.
There are cars around them submerged in muddy water as rain continues to pour down.
As they wade through it, the person holding the camera pans around to debris and nearby buildings dangerously close to the flooding.
Footage also shows a huge deluge of water carrying debris hitting a building in Sentino as people watch on and emergency vehicles are seen in the background.
Another video shows more fast-flowing downpours overtaking the streets of Senigallia as emergency services arrived on scene.
The flooding hitting the Marche region, is part of a wave of storms hitting the country.
Other regions experiencing storms are Tuscany, Umbria, Abruzzo, Fruili Venezia Guilia, Lombardy, Liguria and Molise.
Rescue workers rescue people on a dinghy boat on a flooded street after heavy rains hit the east coast of Marche region in Senigallia, Italy, on Friday
Elderly women are rescued from their homes and placed on a dinghy boat by authorities after heavy rains hit the Marche region on Friday
Rescue workers arrive on a dinghy boat on a flooded street after heavy rains hit the east coast of Marche region in Senigallia, Italy, in the early hours of Friday
It is the latest in a long series of extreme-weather events which have happened in Italy this summer.
The total number is 1,642 this summer which farmers association Coldiretti yesterday said is five times the amount of a decade ago.
Coldiretti released the figures on the basis of data from the European Severe Weather Database.
The ESWD database regards events such as tornadoes, heavy rain, large hail and lightning strikes.
Coldiretti said that the long hot summer in Italy which had drought was interrupted by violent rainfall.
It added that the amount of extreme weather events has caused more than six billion euros of damage to agriculture in 2022- 10 per cent the value of national production.
The farmer’s association added: ‘We are before the clear consequences of climate change, where exceptional atmospheric events are now the norm in Italy too, with a tendency towards tropicalisation manifest in more frequent violent events, seasonal shifts, short, intense precipitations, the fast passage from sunshine to bad weather, with significant changes in temperature that compromises crops, with the loss of production and damage to structure and infrastructure in the countryside’.
Meanwhile, the leader of Italy’s centre-left Democratic Party (PD) wrote on Twitter that it would stop its campaign in the region ahead of the September 25 national election.
EXCLUSIVE: Here is a resurrection of a DC character worth getting excited over. Warner Bros will develop another installment of the 2005 supernatural thriller Constantine, and the studio is re-teaming star Keanu Reeves and director Francis Lawrence, who made his helming debut on the original.
Akiva Goldsman will write the screenplay and produce the project through his Weed Road Pictures, alongside Bad Robot’s J.J. Abrams and Hannah Minghella.
When it opened 17 years ago the Reeves- starring pic based on the intricate DC character, Constantine grossed over $200m in 2005 box office dollars worldwide. It opened a world of potential, and fans have long been hot on a sequel. Reeves will reprise as supernatural exorcist and demonologist John Constantine who in the original is dying but stays around to save his soul by keeping demons from hell from breaching earth. He also gets between a battle between the archangel Gabriel and Lucifer.
This deal was shepherded by Warner Bros Pictures Group Co-Chairs Michael De Luca and Pam Abdy.
Lorenzo DiBonaventura and Erwin Stoff will executive produce the project.
Reeves is repped by WME, Sugar23 and Ziffren Brittenham; Lawrence is CAA, 3 Arts and Hansen Jacobsen.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who flew two planes full of immigrants from Texas and dropped them off in Martha’s Vineyard, has opened himself up to potential legal ramifications, with some experts suggesting he be charged with kidnapping.
But it has also opened him up to absolutely savage Twitter commentary.
While there have been some conservatives who have rushed to DeSantis’ (and Texas Governor Greg Abbott) defense, most have come to openly roast the right-wing politicians.
George Takei suggested giving DeSantis some of his own medicine, while Keith Olbermann took the more outraged stance.
Maybe we should put Ron DeSantis on a chartered plane to a far off island. Taking ideas.
As a Cuban American, I find it especially repulsive to see so many in my community celebrating Desantis relocating immigrants, Venezuelans, out of state. These are people fleeing the very same dangers that my family did and were welcomed with open arms. The hypocrisy is real.
Governor Newsom has asked the DOJ to look into what kind of crime was committed, while a legal expert reported directly from Martha’s Vineyard.
Read more of the reactons below.
Wow. An immigration attorney just exposed Ron DeSantis’ multi-million dollar human trafficking scheme and it’s even worse than it sounds. pic.twitter.com/ydFm8gnxht
“I do not know why treating brown people like unwanted garbage so titillates the Republican MAGA base,” writes @ElieNYC of DeSantis and Abbott’s ploys to score points by shipping migrants to blue states. The practice should be illegal. https://t.co/W1ysSKGV2r
Brendan Fraser is the gift that keeps on giving. After earning a standing ovation in Venice, his new film, “The Whale,” debuted at the Toronto Film Festival, where Fraser received a tribute honor for his performance. The Oscar buzz is real and his hunt for best actor is firmly underway, along with possibilities for his co-stars Hong Chau and Sadie Sink. Can he go the distance?
It wasn’t all about Fraser at TIFF, as three major world premieres also took place. “The Fabelmans” from Steven Spielberg, “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery” from Rian Johnson and “The Woman King” from Gina Prince-Bythewood. All three were big crowd pleasers and could do very well at the box office and with industry voters going into awards season.
The Primetime Emmy Awards took place this week, with “Succession” and “The White Lotus” from HBO, and “Ted Lasso” from Apple TV+ earning the top series wins. Some of the biggest moments included a dance from Jennifer Coolidge and a song from Sheryl Lee Ralph during their acceptance speeches. Quinta Brunson’s win for outstanding writing for a comedy series (“Abbott Elementary”) also got attention and was overshadowed by a comedic bit by presenter Jimmy Kimmel.
Hosted by Variety chief correspondent Elizabeth Wagmeister and senior awards editor Clayton Davis, Variety’s “The Take,” presented by Apple TV+, is a weekly series that navigates the week’s top stories from entertainment, pop culture and media, while providing expert analysis and exclusive insight on what’s buzzing in Hollywood. Filmed in Variety’s state-of-the-art studio in Los Angeles, new episodes are released on Fridays on Variety.com, YouTube and social media.
Jessie Reyez marked the release of her highly-anticipated sophomore album, “YESSIE,” by hosting an exclusive album release party at No Vacancy in Los Angeles on Thursday night (Sept. 15), which drew the likes of Drake, Diddy, Yung Miami from CityGirls, Cordae, Diplo, Murda Beatz, Ty Dolla $ign and many more.
While the Canada connection was immediately apparent as Drake made his entrance, the two Toronto artists connected on a leaked track by Drizzy called “Zodiac Sign.”
Reyez, whose album is out via FMLY / Island Records, has been making waves in the industry since first arriving on the scene, thanks to ger unique voice, intense lyrics and WYSIWYG personality. She was nominated for a Grammy for her sophomore album, “Being Human In Public,” and took home four Juno Awards for R&B/Soul recording of the year, best video and best new artist in 2019. Reyez also boasts a cameo in Beyonce’s “Black is King” visual album.
drake, diddy, yung miami, cordae, murda beatz, ty$ all popped out to jessie reyez’ album release party.
“YESSIE” clocks in at 11 tracks, with a lone feature from Atlanta rapper 6LACK. The title is inspired by her nickname, and alludes to the ultra-personal nature of the album, which delves into topics of love, loss, closure and happiness.
Upon entering the venue, guests were welcomed with a wall decorated with positive affirmations (including some in Spanish), curated cocktails, live art, and of course, Reyez herself. The whole evening was a rare occasion, because as the invite states, “Jessie is never outside.”
On the September 15, 2022 episode of /Film Daily, /Film editorial director Peter Sciretta is joined by /Film editor Brad Oman to have a spoiler-filled discussion about She-Hulk Episodes 4 & 5.
Opening Banter: Peter got his booster and flu shots.
In The Spoiler Room: She-Hulk Episodes 4 & 5
Feedback
Francisco writes in “when she hulk heard about taking the half elf’s power that gave her the idea of having Emil wear a power dampener in the next scene.”
Bob from Nashville writes in “During the discussion of episode 3, you were mentioning the comedic reveal of the show title each week and having not seen that before.I can think of a few shows that have done this… Saturday Night Live for example.But She-Hulk mostly reminds me of a sitcom from the 60s called “That Girl” staring Marlo Thomas. Each week a cold open would present the situation which would lead to a punch zoom on Marlo Thomas’ face with the show logo superimposed on top. Like… “Did you make this mess? No it wasn’t me, it was… (punch zoom to Marlo Thomas) THAT GIRL”.
Brief reactions
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You can find more about all the stories we mentioned on today’s show at slashfilm.com, and linked inside the show notes.
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After a failed boxing career and a near-fatal motorcycle wreck, a man finds healing in Catholicism and decides to become a priest. Based on a true story.
Certificate:R Language throughout
Year: 2022
Duration: 2hr 4m
Audio: English – Audio Description, English [Original], Spanish
The Gotham Film & Media Institute has added four high-profile figures to its board of directors, The Hollywood Reporter has learned exclusively.
The group behind the Gotham Awards has added actors Jonathan Majors and Stephanie March, entertainment marketing and PR executive Lisa Taback and entrepreneur and women’s advocate Dee Poku to its board.
The new additions join existing board members Nancy Abraham, Anthony Bregman, Jeb Brody, Gerry Byrne, Alina Cho, Dan Crown, Mark D’Arcy (director emeritus), Amy Emmerich, Philipp Engelhorn, Kai Falkenberg, James Janowitz, Franklin Leonard, Soledad O’Brien, Hanna Rodriguez-Farrar, John Schmidt, Teddy Schwarzman, Drew Wilson and Celia Winchester.
“We are thrilled that these four brilliant media and entertainment veterans are bringing their unique perspectives and expertise to The Gotham’s board,” Gotham executive director Jeffrey Sharp said in a statement. “As we find new and innovative ways to advance our mission and expand our impact, we know that Jonathan, Stephanie, Dee, and Lisa will be invaluable voices on our board.”
Majors is known for his roles in The Harder They Fall, which received the Gotham Awards’ ensemble tribute honor last year; Lovecraft Country; Da 5 Bloods and The Last Black Man in San Francisco. His upcoming movies include Devotion, Ant-Man and the Wasp Quantumania and Creed III.
March is known for her role on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, and her other credits include appearances on 30 Rock, Happy Endings, Rescue Me, Grey’s Anatomy and Mr. & Mrs. Smith.
Poku is the founder of The WIE Suite, a private membership community and peer learning platform for women leaders, creators and innovators. Her Black Women Raise initiative works to help black female founders grow capital, scale up and create pathways for the women behind them. She previously held senior marketing roles at Paramount and Focus Features.
Taback is known for Oscar campaigns for titles like The Power of the Dog, Don’t Look Up, Roma, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, My Octopus Teacher, Marriage Story, American Factory, La La Land, Moonlight, Spotlight, The King’s Speech, Lady Bird, Chicago and Shakespeare in Love. She also led Emmy campaigns for The Crown, Squid Game, Ozark, Stranger Things and This Is Us.
Marcus Mumford’s debut solo LP, (Self-Titled), dropped today and one of the standout tracks features Phoebe Bridgers on guest vocals. The song, “Stonecatcher,” was inspired by Just Mercy, a memoir by Equal Justice Association lawyer Bryan Stevenson. Listen here.
Mumford has spoken bluntly about the deeply personal album, which was informed by the musician’s experience with sexual abuse as a child. Speaking to GQ, Mumford said that “Cannibal” was written while Mumford confronted what had happened to him starting at the age of six.
“Like lots of people—and I’m learning more and more about this as we go and as I play it to people—I was sexually abused as a child,” Mumford told GQ. “Not by family and not in the church, which might be some people’s assumption. But I hadn’t told anyone about it for 30 years.”
In a new interview with The Guardian, Mumford reflected further on the experience, saying he never considered not releasing the songs.
“It felt like a natural and quite helpful part of my process, now I was less engulfed in shame,” he said. “Because of what I do and who I am, the natural extension of this process of handling and coming to terms with this stuff was to write a song about it.” He laughs. “Taking these intimate things, these really private moments and publicizing them as widely as possible — it’s just a fucked-up thing to do. But there’s a magic in it, I think, because you offer the opportunity for people to connect through it.”
He added that featuring musicians like Bridgers and Carlile on the LP was like “a trust fall,” with the female artists “standing behind” him. “I just think that women were a little more capable of shouldering the message,” Mumford noted.
Mumfordwill tour North America this fall in support of the album. His tour kicks off on Monday, Sept. 19 in Boulder, Colorado and continues through November, wrapping Nov. 10 at Massey Hall in Toronto. He will also appear at Austin City Limits in October.
“Moonage Daydream” explores the artistry of David Bowie through his music, paintings, acting and interviews drawn from his private archives. Filmmaker Brett Morgen creates a visual spectacle as bold as his subject.
While the head of the World Health Organization says the end of the COVID-19 pandemic is “in sight,” some Canadian experts warn it would be premature to declare the global health crisis over.
Their comments come after WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus announced Wednesday that the number of deaths attributed to COVID-19 worldwide in the last week reached the lowest point since the pandemic’s onset.
He also urged governments to stay vigilant so we don’t backslide at a pivotal moment.
Dr. Fahad Razak, who headed up the recently disbanded group of scientists advising Ontario’s government on COVID-19, says coronavirus variants have traditionally cropped up during the fall and winter, leading to a surge in cases and deaths.
COVID-19 study finds 80% of kids have been infected
COVID-19 study finds 80% of kids have been infected
He says it stands to reason that could happen again this year.
Razak says if we don’t see a new wave during the peak COVID season, then experts may be more willing to declare the end of the pandemic in the spring.
But Colin Furness, an assistant professor at the University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana school of public health, says the pandemic is still wreaking havoc, leading to excess death and a labour shortage that’s further stunting the already strained health-care system.
Both Ethan Hawke and Ewan McGregor are incredibly successful and incredibly respected actors in the fil industry. They have made their mark in some of the more serious side of the industry as well as the pop culture pictures as Ewan McGregor is a legendary persona among the Star Wars fanbase and Ethan Hawke recently made his debut in Marvel’s Moon Knight, delivering a performance that was loved by all.
Now the two actors are coming together for an Apply Film called Raymond and Ray, but while they were promoting the film, Ethan Hawke recalled that at one point during their careers, they went against one another for a particular part.
In 2001, both of the actors auditioned for Moulin Rouge! a romantic musical written and directed by Baz Luhrmann, director of The Great Gatsby, Romeo + Juliet and the 2022 film Elvis, on the life of Elvis Presley.
According to Ethan, he gave one of the best auditions of his life when he went up against Ewan for the leading part in that film but despite his very best work he was not given the part, which eventually was given to Ewan. Ethan recalled the story in the following words as he had a hearty laugh about it and also showed his respect for Ewan as an actor:
“Ewan doesn’t like this because he gets embarrassed, but I gave one of the greatest screen tests of my life for Moulin Rouge. I did not get the part. I crushed this audition. And it just goes to show you how much I like Ewan’s work. I still went to see the movie on opening day and loved it. So, I got over it.
But I will say, someday that audition will be seen and people are gonna rethink.”
The two are obviously good friends now and are excited for the world to see them together in their upcoming Apple film Raymond and Ray in which they will be playing to estranged brothers.
Leading web novel platform Wattpad will launch a series of podcasts created by popular Wattpad authors, exclusively on Spotify.
Some of the biggest names in web novels in Indonesia and the Philippines will bring their stories to life through a range of podcasts, with 20 titles available to Spotify listeners. Authors include Pit Sandi, whose story “My Ice Girl” has some 22 million reads on Wattpad, Ma. Cristina Lata, author of 321 million-read title “The Four Bad Boys and Me” and Ariesa Jane Domingo of “For Hire: A Damn Good Kisser,” which has 42.1 million reads.
These podcasts are not audio versions of the popular stories but rather an exploration of various topics from the authors ranging from discussions about the authors’ creative journey to personal musings on everyday life from the lens of the author and behind-the-scenes commentary on their stories.
For example, behind-the-scenes commentary on web novels from Ventre Canard, author of “Caught in His Arms” (56.2 million reads) and April Avery of “Titan Academy of Special Abilities” (55 million reads), among others, will be available.
Shows also include “Dy-dengar” by Indonesian author Dyah Ayu Arumsari Abdullah, where she will share details of her life as a GenZ, giving her fans a more intimate look at her hopes and dreams for the future; and Filipino author Ma. Cristina Lata’s “Love and Wander with Tina” that will discuss love and other topics, sharing letters from fans on the topic.
Kelly O’Mara, director of account management, Wattpad brand partnerships, said: “Southeast Asia is home to many of the most successful and influential authors on Wattpad. As Wattpad’s first major podcast deal in Asia, our partnership with Spotify will fuel our fans’ love for the literary world through audio. Wattpad’s authors have built enormous global fandoms for their work, writing stories that will continue to inspire a generation of readers.”
Carl Zuzarte, Spotify head of studios for Southeast Asia, said: “Indonesia and the Philippines are brimming with creativity and brilliant storytellers. This is why we’re thrilled to work with Wattpad to bring their authors to Spotify where they’ll have a chance to take listeners deeper into their craft, inspiration and lives. By adding podcasts to their Wattpad webnovels, it will allow the authors to engage with their fans in a unique way and reach new fans and listeners.”
The podcasts will premiere on Sept. 17 in the Philippines and on Sept. 30 in Indonesia. Each podcast will have 24 episodes and stream weekly on their respective Spotify Podcast pages.
As part of the partnership, Wattpad and Spotify will host two live panel discussions with creators at the Manila International Book Fair on Sept. 17 and the Indonesia International Book Fair on Nov. 12.
Smith, who previously starred as Prince Philip in the first two seasons of Netflix’s “The Crown,” revealed that he met Prince Harry once years prior at a polo match. “I met Harry once, at polo, which sounds a bit grand, but it wasn’t that grand,” Smith said during “The Today Show” (via Insider) on September 15. “And he walked up to me and went, ‘Granddad.’”
Smith added that Prince Harry shook his hand.
“He watched the show!” Smith continued. “Well, I can’t claim to know if he watches it currently, but he watched a bit of it then.”
“The Crown,” created by “The Queen” and “Frost/Nixon” Oscar nominee Peter Morgan, charts Queen Elizabeth II’s life and legacy. Claire Foy portrayed the Queen opposite Smith’s Philip; Olivia Colman and Tobias Menzies took over the roles for later seasons. Imelda Staunton and Jonathan Pryce will be the Season 5 royal rulers.
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Following Queen Elizabeth II’s death September 8, “The Crown” ceased production “out of respect” for the late monarch and grieving royal family. “‘The Crown’ is a love letter to her and I’ve nothing to add for now, just silence and respect,” Morgan said. The series is expected to premiere in November.
Meanwhile, actor Smith has been leading HBO’s “Game of Thrones” prequel series “House of the Dragon” as Prince Daemon Targaryen. Series co-creator Ryan Condal admitted that it was Smith’s performance in “The Crown” that led to the actor being cast in the fantasy series.
“I was a big fan of ‘The Crown,’ and the performance Matt put on in those two seasons told me everything you needed to know about the actor — he can disappear into those roles,” Condal told The Hollywood Reporter. “Oddly, Prince Philip shares some crossover traits with Daemon.”
Following the Queen’s death, Netflix’s “The Queen” saw a huge spike in viewership on the streaming platform, returning the series to Netflix’s weekly top 10. Season 1 of “The Crown” drew 17.57 million hours viewed for the week of September 5-11, according to Netflix, which was good enough to put it at seventh place.
One of my favorite things about The Criterion Channel is their lack of pretension. Yes, you read that correctly. While you can definitely get your fill of Godard and Rohmer and other proudly pretentious capital-A Auteurs there, the channel also consistently features largely unheralded selections like 1983’s Valley Girl, movies that are ripe for critical reassessment and/or reclamation. Viewed through the lens of 2022, Martha Coolidge’s 1983 comedy feels like time traveling: you cruise the Sunset Strip while it was still edgy (and not yet the capitol of hair metal cheese), you hang in a food court, you get your New Wave on, you revel in the vernacular that would come to define the ’80s (“ferrr shhhurrrrre!”). You also get to spend some QT with Elizabeth “E.G.” Daily, a bouncy, ultra-adorable presence who walked so Miss Flo could one day run.
Person who thinks they’re above love island: “I don’t know how people watch that mind numbing shite, I’d lose brain cells. I just think im a bit too intelligent. Anyway the new series of Rick and Morty is out do you get it he’s a pickle”
The series will follow the journey of the infamous Herbert West as he navigates through a universe of Lovecraftian lore.
Herbert West: Reanimator stars Zan Alda (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) as the title character with the core cast including Mike Ferguson (Amityville Uprising, Beyond the Law), Jed Rowen (Pretty Boy, The Ghastly Love of Johnny X), and Tasha Tacosa (Predator World). Actors slated for recurring roles include Rachel Riley (Amber Road, The Lighthouse Keeper), Steve Wollett (Jack Be Nimble), Jackson Everest (ShadowMarsh, Bermuda Island, Camp Pleasant Lake), BJ Mezek (Death Count, Demons at Dawn), Lisa Hinds (Night of the Tommyknockers), and others! Additionally, legendary special FX artist Joe Castro will be creating some of the core effects for the show.
The creator of Herbert West: Reanimator, promises that the story will not only revolve around the tale of Herbert West, but plant seeds for the future and branch out into many additional directions sure to please fans of H.P. Lovecraft. Barsuglia reveals, “Our goal is to embrace the stories and characters of Lovecraft in ways that will honor the original work, appeal to the millions of Lovecraft fans, and introduce a new generation to the mythos.”
With production starting in October, Herbert West: Reanimator hopes to find a home with one of the major networks or streaming services.
Koa Aloha Media is an independent production company based in Huntington Beach. They are currently running a crowdfund campaign to add to the production budget to increase the scope of the show.
Tracee Ellis Ross is busier than ever despite closing the chapter on “Black-ish.” The actor, producer, entrepreneur and CEO’s focus has turned toward a list of projects including the Hulu/ OWN/ Onyx Collective docuseries “Hair Tales” (which she’s producing through her production company Joy Mill Entertainment), voicing the lead character in MTV’s animated Daria-spinoff movie “Jodie” and launching the podcast “I Am America.” In addition, she’s celebrating the three-year anniversary of her hair care company Pattern Beauty.
During her keynote conversation at Variety’s Entertainment and Technology Summit presented by City National Bank, Ross explained how she keeps all these different pursuits in “harmony.”
“I don’t strive for balance because it’s impossible, but a sense of harmony,” Ellis Ross told Variety senior entertainment reporter Angelique Jackson. “One of the biggest things that I do is do my best to walk consciously from A to B. So instead of rushing between everything, it actually creates more space in my day. It requires military precision. I have a calendar that is just mapped out.”
She added, “I have discovered that I am not a micromanager. When I trust the people around me — and I have extraordinary people around me — the things they do, that’s their expertise.”
Just days before the summit, Ross was inducted into the Disney Legends Hall of Fame. In her powerful speech at that event, she noted that “the world’s view of Black women is not elastic in its ability to see us expansively and to see our joy.” She’s made it her mission to star in and create content that changes that.
“That word legend, that’s a whopper of a word. And so I really had to think about it beforehand what what it meant to me,” she said. “When I think of the people [for whom] that word feels appropriate, I think they are people that help others to feel more free for the world to be more safe. The truth is that Bow Johnson felt legendary in that she was a Black woman on television that was thriving, not just surviving, filled with joy … which has been the most important part of me and a really intentional part of how I played Bow Johnson.”
Ellis Ross added, “She was inhabiting the fullness of her life as a wife, as a mother, as a doctor, all of those things, joyfully and fully. It’s something that’s really important to me and I am intentional about in terms of the roles that I take, but then [also] keeping writers and producers accountable for those things.”
Status: Ended”Al Hayba” is a TV show produced by Cedars Art Production. The show was originally broadcast on MBC Drama (United Arab Emirates) and Shahid (United Arab Emirates) and premiered on May 27th 2017. “Al Hayba” ended after 5 seasons and a total of 150 episodes. The final episode aired on November 25th 2021.
The world premiere of documentary Selena Gomez: My Mind and Me will fire up the 36th AFI Fest on Nov. 2.
The film comes from the helmer of the cult 1991 doc Madonna: Truth of Dare, Alek Keshishian, and follows the gold album-selling, Grammy nominated artist and actress Gomez from the heights of unimaginable superstardom through the lows of a very personal crisis and back again.
“I had no interest in making a traditional pop doc,” says Keshishian. “I wanted to show something more authentic and Selena did, too. She has a raw vulnerability that captured me… I had no idea then that it would become a six-year labor of love.”
“AFI is proud to launch AFI Fest 2022 with Selena Gomez: My Mind and Me, a film as profoundly powerful as it is personal,” said Bob Gazzale, AFI President and CEO. “Selena is a global force in art and entertainment, and we are honored to partner with her, Alek and Apple to shine a light upon her journey in this beautifully crafted celebration of optimism, vulnerability and hopefulness.”
Gomez was recently nominated at the Emmys for Outstanding Comedy Series for her producing work on Hulu’s Only Murders in the Building in which she also stars. The series won three of its 17 Emmy noms: Sound mixing comedy series, production design for half-hour narrative and Guest Comedy Actor for Nathan Lane. Only Murders in the Building recently aired its second season.
The documentary is an Apple Original Film, produced by Interscope Films and Lighthouse Management & Media.
AFI Fest is taking place from Nov. 2-6. It was recently announced that Steven Spielberg’s auto-biopic, The Fabelmans, is closing the festival.
Brett Morgen went through a lot to make “Moonage Daydream.” It takes certain amount of obsession to capture on film the essence of the life of David Bowie, the shapeshifting music visionary, artist and actor. For Morgen, known for his work exploring another singular artist with “Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck,” as well as “The Kid Stays in the Picture” and “Jane,” crafting the first authorized Bowie documentary was a nearly seven-year process. Until it was time to create the encompassing sound mix with help from Bowie collaborator Tony Visconti, he worked mostly alone, weathering both the pandemic and a serious heart attack.
“Moonage Daydream” is like no other music documentary audiences have seen before. With no talking heads or Bowie 101 facts, it’s geared towards super-fans and possibly the Bowie-curious, with sonically-enhanced remixes of more than 40 of his hits and lesser-played songs interlaced with never-before-seen images of his artwork, interviews with the singer and rare concert and movie footage. That alone would be a sensory overload and enough for a feature documentary, but Morgen also layers in clips of films Bowie had referenced at some point, from “Metropolis” and “A Clockwork Orange,” from “Freaks” and “La Dolce Vita,” creating a mind-bending two hour and 15-minute aural and visual experience.
So how did Morgen, who wrote and edited as well as directing, manage to wrestle all these sounds and all this imagery into shape? A train ride helped, plus a trip to the “David Bowie is” archival exhibit in Brooklyn and some intensive sleuthing for rare footage.
“Moonage Daydream” opens Friday in an exclusive IMAX presentation, expanding Sept. 23 to more theaters.
Morgen detailed some entry points into his creative process for Variety ahead of the film’s theatrical release.
Did you ever get to meet Bowie or tell him about your idea for a film?
I met David in 2007 to discuss a potential collaboration on a hybrid nonfiction project – not “Moonage Daydream,” something very different that was going to be more performance-based. That film that I pitched him imagined that David never evolved after Ziggy and that we would find him in present-day Berlin, and he has been playing the same songs for the past 40 years at a dive bar in the middle of the night to the last four people on Earth who are paying attention. It was a kind of wild presentation. It was going to require a lot of shooting and David was in semi-retirement at that point.
The man who became his executor called afterwards and said, you know, “David enjoyed the pitch but he’s not at a place where he can do this right now.”
So how did you come back around to doing a Bowie project?
Around 2015 I had done the two music films — “Crossfire Hurricane” (on the Rolling Stones) and “Montage of Heck,” and I sort of arrived at a point that I wanted to explore other areas – non-biographical non-fiction.
I wanted to create a kind of Immersive musical experience for IMAX and for a theatrical setting with these larger-than-life heritage acts. Most of us are familiar with the Wikipedia of their careers, and I just wanted to create a space for audiences to have an immersive and intimate experience with their favorite artist — a theme park ride, if you will, built around The Beatles and Bowie, Hendrix, whoever it might be.
So I started going down that path with several artists. Then in January 2016, Bowie passed.
After his estate agreed to the project, what was your next step?
At that point they provided me the with full access to explore the archives. The only dictate was David is not here to approve or authorize the project, so it can never be Bowie on Bowie. It will always need to be Brett Morgan on Bowie.
What was the scope of the archive?
It took the better part of two years to get that material digitized and collated, and then two more years for me to screen through it, six days a week in 12-hour days. I had possibly the two greatest years of my career going to work every day to watch and listen to David Bowie.
The problem was by the time I got to the end, I couldn’t remember what I had seen two years earlier. Normally what happens by screening things chronologically is a through line will emerge.
So what was the through line or the theme for you?
In Bowie’s case it was it was pretty transparent. He stated it repeatedly throughout his career: Chaos and fragmentation and transience. These are themes that he explored from his first recordings to his final recordings.
How did you decide to structure the material?
Usually the script pours out of me after I go through the materials and it’s a three to five day process. So I had in my schedule, you know, finish screening, write a script, start editing in a week. Usually, I write before I get to the edit room and I lay down the narrative that’s written notes tracking the through-line.
And very quickly it was revealed that I don’t know how to write an experience. I didn’t have a biographical narrative to lock onto.
And one week turned into two weeks, turned into four weeks, turned into six weeks and nothing is happening. It took eight months – going to work every day and coming home empty handed. I would start to write ideas — not about scenes, but ideas about Bowie on spirituality, Bowie on the creative process, Bowie on aging. Not really helping me advance the plot, but it was an exercise.
What was your breakthrough in terms of cracking the script?
I drove to work one day and I didn’t want to go into my office. It was like a coffin. Nothing was happening in there. So I I flew to Albuquerque on a whim and got on an Amtrak and I said I’m not coming home until I crack this.
One of the great lessons from Bowie is get out of your comfort zone. And one of the things that the film deals with head on is how Bowie liked to be in transit, to create and be a kind of cultural anthropologist.
So I got to Albuquerque, I got on a train, and the second the train started moving, the floodgates opened. By the moment I had arrived I had settled on the through line — transience. And so I then said let’s take three songs from each album that relate back to that theme, and curate a playlist that is the foundation of them, almost like a jukebox musical.
So when the train pulled into L.A., I had something to operate from.
In addition to the pandemic, you faced another huge hurdle during production.
The other major thing that had happened during this period was I had a heart attack and so I was in a coma for several days. I was 47. I have three teenage children. The way that I’ve been going about my life had led me to this, working nonstop and not exercising and not living a healthy life, not living life in balance. And so I needed to learn how to create more harmony and equilibrium in my life.
It seemed that David was providing me with a road map or a guide, a blueprint for how to lead a balanced and fulfilled life in an age of chaos and fragmentation. So while I had set out to make a theme park ride, I ended up seeing an opportunity for something more life-affirming.
David Bowie in “Moonage Daydream”
How did you decide to integrate so many different film clips?
Bowie was a culture vulture. He was my cultural passport to the world, my introduction to William Burroughs. So I wanted the film to have almost no separation between Bowie’s own constructions and the work that inspired and influenced him. Any time he would reference something, I would write it down. When we started cutting, I had a huge folder of all of his reference points.
The clips that we see in the film, are they pretty much all based on something he’s mentioned? I didn’t realize that going into the screening.
Everything is based on something that he’s mentioned at some point. But here’s the thing — the same way you listen to Bowie songs and there’s no footnotes or Cliffs Notes. If you know what the reference is, that’s great. If you don’t know, that’s great too.
So how do you prepare the audiencefor the fact that they’re not going to receive a lot of biographical information?
If you’re opening with a quote about Nietzsche and about the search for meaning in life as the first thing, you’re probably not going to hear “the first time I heard my record on the radio.” It’s designed to be mysterious, designed to be enigmatic, designed to feel like there’s no compass.
It was amazing to see so much of Bowie’s own artwork, how did you get access to it?
I went to visit the David Bowie exhibit in Brooklyn. It felt like we were walking through the movie because the exhibit was equal measures David’s art and the art that influenced and inspired him.
But they didn’t have all of his paintings in the exhibit. The estate had transparencies that they provided us and some of it has been sold to collectors so we had to chase it down.
Was there anyone from his estate or elsewhere giving input during the process?
No, no.
This was really the the most difficult thing. So I have the heart attack. I was self producing. It’s just me, I had final cut, so the financiers weren’t involved in any creative discussions.
And I had no editor, there was no staff. And then the pandemic hit, and there was nobody in the building. So, other than my my wife, Debra Eisenstadt, who’s an incredible filmmaker who I could come home at night and throw ideas around to, I was completely isolated.
How did it work out to do it all yourself?
Through circumstances, some financial, some health-related because of the pandemic and because with my heart condition I can’t be around other people, it all worked. In a way I had to discover this on my own.
There probably was an easier path. I probably wouldn’t have been on the film for seven years. But I was kind of selfish and greedy and like, I wanted to be there. I wanted to make these mistakes, I wanted to figure this out.
It was a bit daunting, you know, it was like if I didn’t go to work, nothing was happening on the film. So the pressure to perform on a daily basis just so we can get through this was immense.
Did you always want to make it in in IMAX or when did that idea come about?
It was always there from conception. It was the idea of turning an IMAX space into a musical theme park and really turning on all of the speakers.
What were the most challenging parts to assemble?
I was limited to David’s voiceover, and I couldn’t get a phrase that I needed to get to the next scene. Right before, when he was making the turn to Iman, I didn’t have a transitional line. For each inch, it was like it was like trench warfare. But it was the most alive I’ve ever felt as an artist.
What was the most satisfying footage to track down?
Early on, I came across a VHS tape of a 1984 movie that David released called “Ricochet,” that was like a travelogue film. It was fairly dismissed at the time. It was David walking around Southeast Asia. I saw an awful VHS copy. There wasn’t anything on YouTube.
There was like nowhere to access this thing and I was like, oh my God, it’s the Holy Grail. It’s a stranger in a strange land. It’s the visual metaphor that I’ve been I need to anchor this film. And I called the estate and I said I need to get it because it wasn’t in our inventory list.
We looked for a year and a half. No one could find it, and then our archivist, Jessica Berman-Bogdan, stumbled across it by accident, filed under the wrong name. That to me was more valuable than any unseen, never-before-released stuff because I just knew how integral it was to the experience I wanted to present.
I was also able to see the complete Diamond Dogs show for which David had made a tape for himself. When David got to L.A. with the Diamond Dogs tour, he decided to abandon his sets and go back on the road as the Soul Tour with Luther Vandross and Mike Garson as the musical director. I had never seen or heard of any material from that and I came across two tapes of that tour.
How do you want viewers to watch it at home after the theatrical run?
Folks, whether you’re watching it on your phone, or you’re watching it in your living room, watch with headphones on.
What was it like to leave the editing room and finally go out into the world with the film?
It was mostly just me sitting here on a laptop. And then next thing you know, you’re at the Cannes Film Festival, in the Palais, with 2300 people. And it’s like, I can’t believe this happened, this is so weird. It’s like an arts and crafts project that’s now being presented in IMAX – around the world.
You mentioned thinking of doing a similar treatment for other music artists – who would be next on your wishlist?
One of the takeaways from my work with Bowie was the need to continue to challenge myself and move out of my comfort zone. I have decided to step away from archival filmmaking for a while and am developing something that’s more rooted in direct cinema.
It’s an unlikely string of words: “Samurai Frog Golf.” But the newest original short film from Marza Animation Planet delivers exactly that, and more, all with a unique 3D CG look.
The film recently made its world premiere at the annual international computer graphics conference and trade show the Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques (SIGGRAPH) and is heading for a general release on YouTube September 15th.
“Samurai Frog Golf (SFG)” follows a gruff retired samurai frog, who gave up his life of conflict and melted his sword into a driver. But after one bad swing on the golf course, he and his caddie, a flying squirrel, find themselves the guardians of a baby turtle. The story is set to scenery that blends the traditional Japanese art of woodblock printing with the whimsical imagery of Van Gogh for a completely new look.
“Seeing and hearing the film up on the big screen, surrounded by thousands of people – the energy, the unexpected laughs, the culmination of all our hard work in one shared spectacle – that’s one hell of a feeling,” said director Brent Forrest of the experience at SIGGRAPH’s Computer Graphics Festival Electronic Theater. SFG was one of 25 works chosen this year from a pool of over 300 entries.
The Film’s Journey
The film is his first with Tokyo studio Marza Animation Planet, Inc., a CG animation film and series production house under Sega Sammy Group Holdings, Inc. The creative and technical support director has worked at numerous studios in his home country and in Japan, and is in his ninth year in Tokyo. But his relationship with golf began in his hometown of Toronto, Canada, where he even lived next to a golf course.
“As a young kid I remember my dad being obsessed with golf. Golf jokes, golf stories, golf lessons, they were drilled into me from childhood,” Brent explained. “I’m a huge fan of samurai serials, I love a good adventure, and there are dozens if not hundreds of parallels between the way of the samurai and the ‘Zen of golf.’”
What was the most important lesson he learned? “In golf there are a million different things you need to remember…one of the most important lessons I’ve learned is that it’s important to pick just three things and focus on those – otherwise you’ll drive yourself insane. I think that applies to the business as well.”
Brent first drew the protagonist of the film for a character design contest held by magazine Character Design Quarterly. Then he was struck with a question for the ages: What was better, a samurai who fought with a golf club or a golfer who played with a sword? Seeking input from an online forum, the former was the clear winner.
Designing the Look
Next was developing SFG’s unique look. From the beginning, Brent knew he wanted something like Japanese woodblock prints, but not simply moving ones. He wanted something that had never been done before. “With the rough idea in hand and the drive to make a new film, finding a unique and appropriate style became the top priority,” he said. That led him to bring the production team to a woodblock print shop Mokuhankan in Tokyo’s Asakusa district run by Dave Bull. There, the team learned the history of the art. The finished product was one carved from the opinions of the whole team.
Now, SFG is releasing a series of YouTube shorts “Mini Golf” ahead of the film’s premiere on the platform. All the animators at Marza were given access to the entirety of SFG’s resource library and music samples by SFG score composer David Arcus. The animators were free to make whatever they wanted as long as it was under one minute. But the most important rule was to have fun.
“What we got in the end was a grab bag of animated content that expand the world of SFG. Some shots are funny, some action packed, but all are tied together with one of the ‘Nine Iron Laws of Golf.’ The film is kind of heavy in tone, and Mini Golf helps us explore the heart and funny bone of the concept.”
Upcoming Projects
What’s next for SFG is a full series continuing the story of the retired samurai, his trusted caddie, and some unexpected company as they travel the “18 lands” of the course.
“There’s an idea I have for the finale of the show that I’m really excited to tell…There’s a mystery behind all of this, an origin to the lore that ties all the themes of golf, animals, and the absence of humans together,” said Brent. But the game only gets harder from here as Marza works to secure a co-production deal for the series.
“Putting a deal like this together is no small feat, and I’ve tried and failed many, many times over the course of my career.” Still, he and the team are hopeful. “A task like this requires a huge leap of faith, but with help from the right people, this froggy might stick the landing.”
Born in Montreal, Brent Forrest started his animation career at Red Rover studios in Toronto as a co-op student in 1999. There he learned the craft of animation from some of Canada’s finest draftsmen. He has won awards for both his animation and special effects work including a Gemini nomination for title design. Today he works as a Technical Director in one of Tokyo’s top animation studios.
Tobias Schlage
Born in Hamburg, Germany. In his years as a character animator and 3D generalist he worked in all areas of production creating extravagant visuals for film and television. Moved to Japan in 2015, to explore a new film making landscape, Tobi combined both German and Japanese film making techniques to create a unique style of grounded, emotional storytelling.
A huge mass burial site with more than 440 graves was found in the newly liberated city of Izyum as police work to gather further evidence of suspected Russian war crimes.
The chief police investigator for the region of Kharkiv, Serhii Bolvinov, has said that the bodies will be exhumed and taken away for forensic examination.
It is part of a huge police effort in which the officers are working with prosecutors and other investigators on uncovering atrocities.
Mr Bolvinov told Sky News about discovering the mass burial site: ‘For me, it was especially shocking and horrific and this is a crime against humanity. It shouldn’t be like this in a civilised world in 2022. This is such a horrendous story and unpleasant from any angle.’
Mr Bolvinov was asked how the victims had died and explained that some were shot dead, some died because of artillery fire and some died in airstrikes.
He added that further investigations will be done to establish other causes of death as a lot of the bodies have not been identified yet.
At least 1,000 civilians have died in Izyum alone, according to multiple Ukrainian officials, while others were left to suffer from wounds inflicted by Russian troops who destroyed all the hospitals and looted medical supplies.
A huge mass burial site with more than 440 graves was found in the newly liberated city of Izyum as police work to gather further evidence of suspected Russian war crimes. Pictured: Yevdokia, 65, hugs her son Alexander in front of their house, which was heavily damaged by an attack
The chief police investigator for the region of Kharkiv, Serhii Bolvinov, has said that the bodies will be exhumed and taken away for forensic examination. Pictured: Ukrainian soldiers look on debris of a damaged tank in Izyum
It is part of a huge police effort in which the officers are working with prosecutors and other investigators on uncovering atrocities. Pictured: People are given supplies in Izyum
Mr Bolvinov was asked how the victims had died and explained that some were shot dead, some died because of artillery fire and some died in airstrikes. Pictured: Locals walk past a debris of a damaged tank in Izyum
He added that further investigations will be done to establish other causes of death as a lot of the bodies have not been identified yet. Pictured: A destroyed building in Izyum
It comes as further horrifying tales of mass murder, torture, rape and mutilation at the hands of Russian troops are being uncovered in other newly-liberated parts in chilling echoes of their retreat from Kyiv.
Those who survived the occupation in places such as Balakliya and Kupyansk tell of torture chambers set up in basements, rapes and mutilations carried out by Putin‘s men – some indiscriminately, others while trying to root out those loyal to Ukraine.
The names of these cities will now live in infamy alongside the likes of Bucha and Irpin – suburbs of Kyiv where some of the first evidence of Russia’s bloody campaign of violence against innocent bystanders was first uncovered after the retreat in April.
More than 450 people are known to have died near Kyiv, meaning that the scale of atrocities in Izyum and across Kharkiv occurred on a much larger scale.
It comes as further horrifying tales of mass murder, torture, rape and mutilation at the hands of Russian troops in Putin’s invasion of Ukraine are being uncovered in other newly-liberated parts in chilling echoes of their retreat from Kyiv
Ukrainian war crimes investigators examine the body of a civilian discovered in the village of Zaliznychne, in the Kharkiv region, who locals say was tortured and killed by Russian troops
Ukrainian investigators exhume the remains of a young man who they say had his ear cut off by Russian forces before being shot in the back of the head
Maksim Strelnikov, president of the Izyum city council, said: ‘The occupiers here, as in other places, committed war crimes and tried to hide them.
‘According to the information that we have, 1,000 civilians at minimum were killed as a result of military actions.
‘Unfortunately, many more people have suffered because they lacked access to timely medical care.’
His words were echoed by presidential adviser Anton Gerashchenko, former presidential spokesman Iuliia Mendel, and Izyum mayor Valery Marchenko.
Mr Gerashchenko, on a visit to the region yesterday, added: ‘Right now, being in Kharkiv, I feel joy and anger.
‘Joy that hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians are now free. Anger that so many lives were destroyed, so many people were killed, tortured, raped.
‘That infrastructure and factories were destroyed. Russia must pay for it.’
1,000 civilians have died in the city of Izyum alone under Russian occupation, Ukrainian officials say
Ukraine’s state prosecutor has sent more than two dozen teams of investigators into the more-than 3,000 square miles of territory that Ukraine re-took from Russia in a lightning offensive that began last week.
So far, investigators have uncovered the bodies of at least six civilians they say were killed by the Russians.
In the village of Hrakove, locals led investigators to the graves of two young men they say they were forced to bury by Russian soldiers.
Investigators have exhumed the bodies and say they bear signs of torture and summary execution.
Each has a gunshot wound to the back of the head. Their ears had been cut off.
In the village of Zaliznychne, locals led Ukrainian troops to four graves they said contained the bodies of their neighbours who were killed by Putin’s men.
Three had been buried in their gardens, the fourth inside a tarmac plant opposite the local railway station. Prosecutors say all bear signs of torture.
Oleksii Kashporovskyi, a Ukrainian journalist-turned-soldier, told news site TSN of the atrocities he witnessed while liberating the town of Bohorodychne.
Kashporovskyi said he found the bodies of several Ukrainian soldiers who had been beheaded and were barefoot alongside the corpses of ten civilians.
The only two civilians left alive in the village were a 93-year-old woman and her 60-year-old son, who told how the Russians had shot another of her sons and his wife.
She showed Ukrainians to the spot behind her house where she buried the bodies.
A prayer scrawled on the wall of a jail cell where Ukrainians say Russian troops held people captive for weeks on end while torturing them
A Ukrainian man told how he was interrogated in this basement – forced to hold electric wires while Russian troops zapped him and ordered him to inform on any government collaborators
Yulia Petrova, a vet from the city of Kupyansk, told news site Meduza of her life under Russian occupation until she managed to flee last month.
She said Russian troops established torture chambers in the basements of buildings that ‘inhuman screams’ could be heard coming from – both men and women.
Villagers were encouraged to inform on anyone with pro-Ukraine views – including their family and neighbours – who were then kidnapped.
Some emerged from the basements unable to stand or walk after being tortured. Others were never seen again.
Local fishermen told how they found a body floating in a nearby river with its hands tied and its head in a sack.
They informed the local Russian commander, and soldiers took the corpse away without saying anything about it.
Other times, drunk Russian soldiers would approach civilians at random on the street and threaten to shoot them.
Yulia explained how she decided to flee after somebody informed on her for having pro-Ukraine views, prompting a visit from the occupiers.
She said troops burst into her house, searched it for Ukrainian flags or symbols, went through her phone and – when they couldn’t find anything – pointed a loaded gun at her nine-year-old daughter’s head in an attempt to extract a confession.
Yulia fled the next day, catching a ride in a friend’s car and bribing her way through checkpoints until she reached Ukrainian territory.
That account tallies with BBC reporters who went to the city of Balakliya and were shown what the Ukrainians say was a basement torture chamber.
The fresh atrocities echo those committed in Bucha and Irpin earlier in the war, when at least 458 civilians died under Russian occupation (pictured, a mass grave)
Russian troops used the lower floors of the police station to detain anyone they suspected of being part of the army or government, where they were brutalised.
Up to eight men were held for weeks on end in cells designed for just two or three people while they were questioned, often while being electrocuted.
Locals say the Russians turned off the building’s noisy ventilation system during the torture sessions so the screams of the victims could be heard outside.
The tactics are exact copies of atrocities inflicted on the towns of Bucha and Irpin, which were occupied by Russian forces between February and April.
Local investigators and international observers have documented summary executions, enforced disappearances and torture which amount to war crimes and possibly crimes against humanity.
In total, 458 people are known to have died in Bucha and Irpin – many of them rolled into mass graves that were later exhumed by Ukrainian forces.
The discovery of the atrocities sparked international condemnation of Russia’s war effort and a groundswell of support for Ukraine.
Zelensky and several other world leaders branded them crimes against humanity and called Putin a war criminal, vowing to bring all those responsible to justice.
Since then, Ukraine says it has identified many of the soldiers and their commanders who were in the area at the time and has published their details online.
Russia continues to deny that its forces are deliberately targeting civilians.
In the year prior to her death at age 53 on Aug. 14, Anne Heche had been writing a memoir called ‘Call Me Anne,’ which includes intimate details about her 1990’s romance with Ellen DeGeneres, 64. After meeting at a Vanity Fair Oscar party, the two women became one of the first openly gay couples in Hollywood. The Hollywood Reporter published excerpts from the book, and, among other claims, Anne wrote that she was “labeled outrageous” at the time because she “fell in love with a woman.”
“I did not, personally, identify as a lesbian. I simply fell in love! It was, to be clear, as odd to me as anyone else. There were no words to describe how I felt. Gay didn’t feel right, and neither did straight,” Anne wrote in her upcoming book, which is a sequel to her 2001 memoir ‘Call Me Crazy’ and is set to be released in January 2023.
This is a sad day. I’m sending Anne’s children, family and friends all of my love.
“Alien might be the best fit, I sometimes thought,” Anne wrote before adding. “What, why, and how I fell in love with a person instead of their gender, I would have loved to have answered if anyone had asked, but as I said earlier, no one ever did. I am happy that I was able to tell you in this book — once and for all.”
As a result of her relationship with Ellen, which lasted from 1997 – 2000, Anne wrote in the book that she was blacklisted by Hollywood during, what was to be, the peak of her budding career. After Anne was declared brain dead on Aug. 12, as a result of the injuries she sustained in a fiery car crash in L.A. one week prior, Ellen expressed her condolences on Twitter, writing, “This is a sad day. I’m sending Anne’s children, family, and friends all of my love.”
Lewis Howes’ The School of Greatness podcast has reached a multiyear advertising and distribution deal with SiriusXM.
The satellite radio giant’s ad sales group, SXM Media, will have the exclusive ad sales rights to the show, while SiriusXM’s Stitcher platform will distribute the podcast across all major platforms.
Howes is a former pro football player who has become a major podcast creator and inspirational speaker. Since launching in 2013, The School of Greatness — which brings on leaders across business, entertainment, sports and health for conversations meant to inspire listeners — has been downloaded more than 500 million times, according to SiriusXM. As of Thursday, the show ranks among the top 10 shows on Apple Podcasts and Spotify in the health and fitness category.
In a statement, Howes pointed to his company Greatness Media’s mission to create a “positive impact on 100 million lives every single week” and described the audio giant as aligning with his “core values.”
“We’re confident teaming up with an organization as prolific and respected as SiriusXM will support us in achieving our mission — and I couldn’t be more excited for the journey ahead,” Howes said.
The SiriusXM deal with The School of Greatness, brokered by UTA, comes a few months after Conan O’Brien sold Team Coco, his podcast and digital media business, to SiriusXM in a deal valued at $150 million. Last year, the podcast and radio giant also struck a major ad sales and content deal with Audiochuck, the production company behind the hit true-crime podcast Crime Junkie.
SiriusXM, the audio home of the shock jock Howard Stern, brought in $2.25 billion in revenue and reported 32 million in self-paying subscribers during the second quarter.
The Anti-Defamation League, a nonprofit focused on antisemitism, received an unusual invitation from YouTube in early 2017: come meet our biggest influencer. The ADL agreed, and its staff logged onto a video conference call with YouTube’s policy chief, Juniper Downs, and the platform’s biggest star: Felix Kjellberg aka PewDiePie.
The megastar’s career was imploding.
PewDiePie had become famous over the past seven publishing video game play, mastering the YouTube artform and netting more subscribers than anyone on the platform. More recently, he enjoyed wading into the meme culture and edgelord humor that accompanied Donald Trump’s ascent. That February, shortly before the ADL meeting, The Wall Street Journalpublished a damning story on the fandom of PewDiePie’s new shtick in neo-Nazi circles, highlighting Kjellberg videos with Hitler salutes and Nazi imagery, and one where the YouTuber paid two men to unfurl a banner reading, DEATH TO ALL JEWS. Kjellberg replied that these were clearly jokes, content “trying to show how crazy the modern world is.”
Disney, which owned a digital network that contracted with Kjellberg, decided within days to drop PewDiePie after being alerted by the Journal.
“They moved too slowly and ineffectively.”
YouTube, however, moved less swiftly. PewDiePie had fiercely loyal fans and embodied the irreverent, freewheeling spirit many YouTubers held dear. Google’s video division had certainly seen creators misbehave or court controversy before, but it had no protocols in place for a mess this big. For years, YouTube had kept creators at arm’s length, letting networks, agents, or YouTubers themselves deal with firestorms. Yet, starting in 2014, YouTube rushed to embrace the commercial potential of its creator class, funding a slate of original programs featuring YouTubers. Kjellberg’s show, Scare PewDiePie, was in the first batch.
He was filming the second season when the Journal story hit. Initially, YouTube defended the star, arguing to the newspaper that Kjellberg was known for pushing the envelope. But the controversy didn’t end and a flurry of news outlets picked up on the story. Only then did YouTube reverse course, canceling Scare PewDiePieand pulling Kjellberg from its premium advertising tier. Publicly, the company said little else.
Privately, Susanne Daniels, a former MTV executive that ran its Originals program, expressed frustration with Kjellberg’s antics and the delay YouTube took in acting. “They moved too slowly and ineffectively,” she recalled years later.
YouTube did quietly attempt to salvage any damage to its brand with the ADL summit. During the call, ADL staff explained that the extremists they tracked used antisemitic humor online to justify real violence, an simply casting such material as memes disavowed any responsibility. The organization suggested Kjellberg make a public donation or apology to Jewish groups, perhaps a video about tolerance.
One person on the call remembered Kjellberg staying mostly silent, like a bored schoolboy at the principal’s office. Nothing came of the meeting.
Around 2014, as YouTube began to invest more deeply in creators, the company developed a classification system for its stable of stars. Either they followed the SNL model, using YouTube to springboard into TV or film, or they took the Oprah path, building empires of fervent audiences right on YouTube.
PewDiePie was one of the best Oprahs. He lived and breathed YouTube. Kjellberg worked with Maker Studios, a network founded to let YouTubers flourish free of the shackles of Hollywood agents, producers, and scripts. After Maker signed Kjellberg, the company threw him a party in Los Angeles to celebrate PewDiePie crossing three million subscribers. They had to tear up the invites twice because his channel grew so fast. (Ultimately, the party celebrated six million subscribers.) Comedy Central came calling with an offer to bring PewDiePie to TV, but Kjellberg declined. He preferred YouTube.
In 2014, Disney paid more than $600 million for Maker, giving a stamp of validity to the nascent online creator economy. Kjellberg, normally press shy, sat for an interview with the Journal and posed wearing a flower crown. “It’s cool to have this kind of influence,” he said, “but at the same time it’s kind of scary.” Still, the headline irked him: “YouTube’s Biggest Draw Plays Games, Earns $4 Million a Year.” Rubbernecking at just how much YouTubers earned felt disrespectful. Much of traditional media treated YouTubers as novelty acts, even if they pulled in bigger audiences than TV. When the early YouTube phenom MysteryGuitarMan appeared on CNN, Sarah Penna, his manager and spouse, told producers not to ask how much money he made. No one asked George Clooney that. CNN still did.
This sort of attention certainly pleased YouTube
In 2015, Kjellberg appeared onThe Late Show with Stephen Colbert. The Swede wore a crisp blue suit, slicked-back hair, and a genuinely nervous look. “I want to thank the internet for letting their emperor be here for the evening,” the TV host began, before asking Kjellberg to explain why people watched him play video games. “I have the best job in the world,” Kjellberg replied. Colbert reminded viewers that Kjellberg made an amount the prior year “that rhymes with schmeven schmillion dollars.”
YouTube never acknowledged it, but this sort of attention certainly pleased the company. Just a few years earlier no one had seen it as a viable business, let alone a home for professional media. Now here was a YouTuber with a schmeven-schmillion-dollar career. PewDiePie was a gifted performance artist, the embodiment of a new media. YouTube placed posters of him around its office and included him in a small cadre of stars that would receive dedicated business managers at YouTube. Once, when European officials were grilling Google about the prevalance of terrorist content on YouTube, a Googler higher-up proposed that regulators support the creation of anti-terrorism videos, and suggested working with PewDiePie to do so. (That never happened.) In 2015, Kjellberg appeared in “YouTube Rewind,” a schmaltzy year-in-review video the company made, to give his signature bro-fist bump to the company logo.
By the next year, the love affair was over.
Kjellberg appeared in a scruffy beard in a video in December of 2016 to rant about YouTube. “I feel like YouTube is a toddler playing with knives,” he griped. “Let’s just take the knife away from that baby!” He complained about comments and a malfunction keeping subscribers from seeing his videos. He threatened to quit. This was, in fact, a promotional stunt for his Originals show. But the content grind had worn him thin. He was filming for Scare PewDiePie, his own channel, and Revelmode, a gaming network he had started with Maker and other creators. Later, Kjellberg would tell fans that he developed a daily whiskey-drinking habit to cope with the stress. A person who worked with him described the months before the holidays in 2016 the “darkest” they had seen.
Some of his gripes in the video had merit. A glitch had screwed up the way YouTube showed subscribers videos, but the company didn’t bother to tell anyone. YouTube was also trying to expand its audience beyond hardcore YouTuber fanboys (the platform skewed mostly to male viewers), so it began tilting algorithms to favor videos that drew daily viewers, higher engagement (more likes and comments) and cleaner “ad-friendly” fare. This tended to give late-night TV and big media an upper hand over regular YouTubers.
No one searched for poop candy or ways to drink piss
Kjellberg’s response was to tilt PewDiePie further in the other direction. He produced vlogs that mixed earnest schmaltz (video title: “ANNIVERSARY!”) with inanity (“DRINKING PISS FOR VIEWS,” “I TRY POOP CANDY!” “I’M SO DONE”), displaying a disregard for YouTube’s algorithmic logic. (No one searched for poop candy or ways to drink piss.) He mocked boorish YouTubers, filming one video flailing around his house shirtless, shouting “Smash that Like button!” For a brief moment while assuming this histrionic character, he threw up what looked like a Nazi salute.
Kjellberg embraced edgelords, a web subculture of touching taboo topics to make some point or simply because they could. He reviewed “dank memes” and the topsy-turvy viral internet of Trump’s candidacy. “YouTube at that time was at a place where no one really knew where the limit was,” Kjellberg later told The New York Times. “A lot of channels were just pushing it as far as possible because there were no restrictions at the time.” Kjellberg worshipped South Park, a show with a running gag about a Jewish character that managed (debatably) to satirize cultural undercurrents of antisemitism. One person who worked with Kjellberg recalled how he would often tease them in person for being Jewish.
Yet many close to Kjellberg insisted that he had no animosity or hateful beliefs. They describe him as steadfastly loyal to his YouTube audience. (One person called him “a little spectrumy” in this monomania.) “He’s a very kind person,” said David Sievers, the early Maker Studios official. “Like many artists, he has an art. And like comedians who are practicing an art, not everyone gets it.”
At first, YouTube seemed fine with his art that tested the limits of the internet’s absurdity. In January 2017, PewDiePie began paying freelancers on Fiverr, a gig-worker-for-hire site, and capturing the results on film. In one video, he hired “Funny Guys,” two young men from rural India, to pull of a stunt about Jewish genocide. Kjellberg filmed his reaction in real-time. “It was a funny meme,” he said on camera. “I didn’t think it would work.”
PewDiePie “underestimated the responsibility he had as the platform’s most popular ambassador”
Within weeks, a still frame from the video appeared in the Journal, he would be dropped by Disney, and YouTube had canceled the second season of his show. YouTube would go on to remove that footage but not others that the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer had praised as coded fascism. At the time, YouTube explained that videos “intended to be provocative or satirical” were allowed while those inciting violence or hatred were not. YouTube representatives did not detail how it distinguished between the two. For many at YouTube, this line was never clear.
In a follow-up video, PewDiePie assigned blame on the newspaper, not Disney or YouTube. “Old-school media,” he told his audience, “does not like internet personalities because they’re scared of us.” (Kjellberg would delete this video after the Journal reporters were bombarded with threats.) Employees at YouTube were well aware that PewDiePie’s provocations scared people for a different reason — a social media star was fueling, unwittingly or not, a hateful brand of politics on the rise. But the company didn’t want to address this directly. The closest it came was in a book published later in 2017 from Robert Kyncl, YouTube’s chief business officer. Kjellberg, Kyncl wrote, “underestimated the responsibility he had as the platform’s most popular ambassador, even if he himself is not a hateful person.” He compared the episode to Ted Danson’s blackface routine from 1993.
Others who worked at YouTube attributed its reluctance to a corporate culture that prized caution and consensus over decisiveness. “It’s ridiculous. Everyone needs to agree,” recalled Daniels, the former executive who left earlier this year. “It’s a company that was not and still isn’t wholly prepared to react to the potential negative consequences of hosting an open platform.”
The rest of 2017 would only get worse for YouTube. A month after the PewDiePie incidents, advertisers began boycotting YouTube over extremist videos. Just as YouTube coaxed them back, another scandal erupted over troubling, traumatizing content aimed at kids, pushing advertisers to flee again. On the last day of 2017, YouTube influencer Logan Paul filmed a dead body hanging in Japan.
Graham Bennett, Paul’s manager at YouTube, was on holiday when Paul’s video appeared on the company’s Trending page. The ten-year YouTube veteran later described that moment as “the scariest time” in his career. “It seems kind of naive now, but it was the first time we realized that YouTube creators were legit global stars,” Bennett confessed a few years later. “And that meant that if they did something out of line or crazy and newsworthy, it will be news everywhere in the world.” YouTube would soon tighten rules for monetization and behavior off its platform, an attempt to tame irascible creators. YouTube declined to comment for this story.
An internal document soon circulated inside YouTube about PewDiePie
Kjellberg, meanwhile, had gone wilder on-screen. He started a new format, “Pew News,” riffing on media critics and fellow YouTubers, raging like Network’s Howard Beale. He grew his beard out to Tolkien-dwarf length. He dropped the n-word on a video game livestream off YouTube, prompting an apology, on YouTube (“I’m an idiot”), and another critical news cycle. In one “Pew News” clip, he dissected Logan Paul’s apology tour: after his Japanese forest debacle, Paul went on daytime TV and made a doe-eyed video on suicidality. People had advised Kjellberg to do the same, but that felt “very disingenuous,” he told viewers. “I would rather just show people that I’ve changed through my videos and time.” Representatives for Kjellberg didn’t respond to requests for comment.
While YouTube still ran ads on PewDiePie’s channel, it kept him out of its premium tier and promotional efforts. Still, this didn’t seem to dent his audience. By the fall of 2018 PewDiePie had more than sixty million subscribers, fans whose loyalties had cemented during his publicity woes. When T-Series, an enormous Bollywood channel, looked poised to take the YouTube subscriber crown in the summer of 2018, fans and fellow YouTubers rallied around Kjellberg, starting a viral meme — “Subscribe to PewDiePie!” — that ricocheted around the world. His popularity surged.
The company’s willful detachment from its biggest star looked untenable.
An internal document soon circulated inside YouTube about PewDiePie. In it, Ina Fuchs, Kjellberg’s partner manager, made the case for a closer corporate tie. Fuchs praised his newfound success with meme reviews, listing his collaborations with “top creators” “such as jacksepticeye and Elon Musk.” (Musk, the Tesla CEO, appeared often on YouTube but did not have a channel.) It favorably mentioned how Kjellberg inveighed against Europe’s copyright measure, a top priority for YouTube then. It also listed his metrics: in a seven-year stretch, PewDiePie’s videos were watched for more than 130 billion minutes, earning him over $38 million from YouTube. The star, the document read, wanted the company “to recognize him more again since he feels that he has been publicly ignored.” Susan Wojcicki, YouTube’s chief executive, was convinced and ordered her marketing team to find ways to “re-engage” with the creator.
After a terrorist in Christchurch used the “subscribe to PewDiePie” rallying cry, Kjellberg called for the meme’s end and decried the “unspeakably vile” mass shooting. YouTube felt he handled the tragedy well. Staffers had drafted a series of plans to brace for any backlash once T-Series toppled PewDiePie in subscribers, but it happened that May without incident. PewDiePie was well behaved.
On July 25th, 2019, YouTube invited Kjellberg and eleven other European creators to London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, for a private reception and tour of a Christian Dior exhibit. Wojcicki flew in. The advanced schedule listed the following meeting from 5:00 to 5:30PM: “Susan and PewDiePie.”
In the months that followed, Kjellberg would stay out of headlines. He started bleeping out profanities in his videos and even posted footage playing Minecraft, a return to his earliest form. By the next spring, he would sign a contract with YouTube for gaming livestreams with little fanfare, his first official business tie with Google in more than three years. Back in the fold.
Isabel May, the breakout newcomer star from Paramount+’s Western 1883, has signed on to star opposite Casey Affleck, Marisa Tomei and Keke Palmer in indie thriller, The Smack.
David M. Rosenthal, who directed thrillers The Perfect Guy and the remake of Jacob’s Ladder, is helming the feature that start shooting in LA beginning October.
Keith Kjarval and Sam Rockwell are producing.
Affleck is playing Rowan Petty, a down-on-his-luck conman who gets an opportunity to make a real score. He teams up with Jade (Palmer), a woman looking to escape her life just like him, and the pair make their way to LA where they get caught up in a dangerous scheme involving a multi-million dollar score. Deception and double crosses ensue. The project is based on the 1979 novel written by Richard Lange.
May is playing the conman’s estranged daughter, a young woman with a severe medical issue. Tomei is the conman’s ex-wife.
The acting gig follows May’s very recent signing with Gersh after a rabid chase involving multiple agencies, including some of the majors, to nab May’s rapidly ascending comet’s tail. She ultimately chose the Wilshire Boulevard-based rep company for its personal feel.
Starting as a child actress, May starred in Netflix comedy Alex & Katie for three seasons and recurred in CBS sitcom, Young Sheldon. She also appeared in the Amazon Studios rom-com, I Want You Back, with Charlie Day and Jenny Slate.
However, it’s her turn as the narrator and lead in 1883, the prequel to Western series Yellowstone, that made Hollywood stand up and take notice her dramatic chops.
May is additionally repped by Coronel Group and lawyers Patti Felker and Eric Suddleson.
Radhe: Your Most Wanted Bhai Cast: Salman Khan, Disha Patani, Randeep Hooda, Jackie Shroff Director: Prabhudeva
Salman Khan lives in his own universe, quite literally. With Radhe: The Most Wanted Bhai, he brings back the memories of 2009 hit Wanted that, in a way, started his second innings to superstardom. With Prabhudeva back behind the megaphone, Khan has the license to go back to chequered shirts and his famous bracelet. Needless to say that at least 500 people must have been harmed in the process. Of course, we are not counting the sensitive audience and non-Salman Khan fans.
So, encounter specialist Radhe (Khan) has been brought back from suspension because the Mumbai Police is determined to eradicate the drug menace plaguing the city’s schools. However, the task isn’t as simple as Khan’s signature dance steps, mostly because of the lousy script and patrtly due to the menacing villain Rana (Randeep Hooda), who despite being shadowed by Khan’s mega-stardom manages to make his presence felt.
Prabhudeva has pulled out all the stops and given Bhai the freehand to mouth Eid oriented one-liners and back them with punches. He is faster than a flash and mightier than a mountain, and confronting him is not going to fetch you good results. So, just relax, sit back and see him making mockery of science and logic. You can also cheer if you want to, simply because the makers never promised it to be anything other than what it is: a celebration of Khan’s projected super human abilities around Eid.
You also have Disha Patani breaking into a dance right in the middle of a fight sequence and delivering such unconvincing dialogues that would put even Mithun Chakraborty at an election campaign to shame. I am not even talking about Jackie Shroff who dances in a sleeveless dress.
Radhe is a collage of high-pitched songs and slow-motion shots that made us cringe even five years back. You need to have a high appetite for Khan’s antics to enjoy this one.
Jonas Rivera, the Oscar-winning producer and Pixar suit behind Inside Outand Toy Story 4, has been promoted to executive vp film production at the famed animation house.
In the new position, Rivera will oversee all film and streaming production at the studio, guiding projects toward their creative and operational milestones.
With the promotion, producers, associate producers and directors of production will continue to report to Rivera. Directors will continue to report to chief creative officer Pete Docter on creative matters but will now report to Rivera on operational issues.
He is also a key member of the Pixar executive team.
The promotion is reflective both of Pixar’s ramping up of production on movies and TV shows for theatrical and streaming and the important contributions Rivera has made over his long tenure at the studio.
Rivera is a homegrown Pixar talent. He joined the animation studio in 1994 to work on Toy Story as the studio’s first and only production intern. He advanced roles on almost every subsequent Pixar feature film: art department coordinator for A Bug’s Life, marketing and creative resources coordinator on Toy Story 2, art department manager on Monsters Inc. and production manager on Cars. He became a full-fledged producer with the studio’s 2009 film Up, which was nominated for a best animated feature Oscar.
In 2015, Rivera reteamed up with Up’s director, Docter, for Inside Out, which won an Academy Award for best animated feature and was nominated for best original screenplay. He most recently produced Toy Story 4, which also won the Oscar for best animated feature in 2020.
Currently, he is overseeing the completion of Pixar’s latest original feature, Elemental, working with director Peter Sohn and producer Denise Ream ahead of a planned June 16 release.
He is also mid-production on Win or Lose, a series for Disney+, and shepherding Pixar’s spring and summer 2024 feature film releases, Elio and Inside Out 2.
Studio Dragon is busy working on Netflix’s next smash hit k-drama series, the adaptation of the popular webtoon The Girl Downstairs. Starring Bae Suzy as Lee Doo Na, the exciting new k-drama is still filming, but we’ll be keeping track of everything you need to know about the first season of The Girl Downstairs on Netflix.
The Girl Downstairs is an upcoming South Korean Netflix Original romantic k-drama and adaptation of the popular webtoon of the same name. The series is directed by Lee Jeong Hyo, who previously worked on the extremely popular k-dramas Crash Landing on You, Romance is a Bonus Book, and Life on Mars.
Studio Dragon is the production team behind the k-drama who have previously made shows for Netflix such as Love Alarm, My Holo Love, Sweet Home, and more.
When is the Netflix release date?
Netflix has yet to announce a release date for the K-Drama, however, we would expect to see it arrive on Netflix by Spring 2023.
What is the plot of The Girl Downstairs?
The synopsis for The Girl Downstairs has been sourced from the webtoon:
When Joon moves into his new apartment on his first day of college, he wasn’t expecting beautiful ex-celebrity Duna to be living downstairs. Joon tries to avoid her at first but finds himself growing more and more curious about her mysterious life.
Who are the cast members of The Girl Downstairs?
Former Miss A member Bae Suzy, who has previously acted in two Netflix Originals Start-Up and Vagabond, has been cast in the lead role of The Girl Downstairs as Lee Doo Na.
Picture. Bae Suzy
Yang Se Jong has been cast in the lead role of Lee Won Joon. Prior to being cast in The Girl Downstairs, Yang Se Jong has only starred in one Netflix Original series, My Country: The New Age. He is also well known for acting in popular dramas Thirty But Seventeen and Dr. Romantic.
Picture. Yang Se Jong
Lee Yoo Bi’s casting as an unnamed supporting role means the actress will make her Netflix Original debut. Her previous lead roles have been in dramas such as Somehow 18, Pinocchio, and A Poem a Day.
Picture. Lee Yoo Bi
What is the production status of The Girl Downstairs?
Current Production Status: Filming (Last Update: 15/09/2022)
Filming was ongoing for the drama as recently as September 14th, 2022.
The Nielsen data for the 2022 Emmys on NBC is in and its not looking good for TV’s biggest night.
The awards show was down 25% from last year in total viewers and hit a new record low in ratings.
On Monday, the Kenan Thompson-hosted 74th Emmy Awards had a 1.0 rating among adults 18-49, the lowest-ever key demo stat for the Emmys. The previous record low was set by the 2020 show, which aired on ABC, and settled for a 1.3 rating. The following year, the Emmys rebounded to a 1.9.
Last night’s show drew 5.9 million total viewers compared with last year’s outing on CBS, which netted 7.9 million. That’s a new low and in stark contrast to the 2021 show, which marked a reversal in the Emmys’ steady decline in audience size. Last year’s Emmys saw a 16% gain of viewership over 2020’s historic drop-off of 12% with 6.37 million viewers.
The 2022 Emmys aired live from 5 p.m. PT/8 p.m. ET until 8:03 p.m. PT/11:03 p.m. ET and were also available for live-streaming on Peacock.
This year’s top Emmy winners included HBO’s “Succession” for drama, Apple TV+’s “Ted Lasso” for comedy and HBO’s “The White Lotus” for anthology series. The No. 1 network for the 2022 Emmys was HBO/HBO Max with 38 wins.
Produced by Done+Dusted in association with Hudlin Entertainment and directed by Hamish Hamilton, the Emmys were broadcast from the Microsoft Theater in Los Angeles.
See the complete winners list from Monday night’s 2022 Emmy Awards here.
Following the death of Queen Elizabeth II, the United Kingdom has entered a “national period of mourning,” observed to various degrees around what’s known as the “Commonwealth” (colonized or formerly colonized nations that still honor, however symbolically, the monarch as a head of state…it’s very complicated).
Out of respect for the queen, many businesses and organizations have been cancelling or postponing events, while others simply observea moment of silence, or wear black armbands, in Her Majesty’s honor. Some of the disruptions to daily life or random and, respectfully, a little funny, while others call into question how much of a national priority a funeral should be.
Here are some of the ways the mourning period is impacting life in the UK:
Go to Center Parcs (a resort chain). The “holiday villages” will be closed on Monday, September 19, the day of the funeral, leaving travelers to make other accommodations for their previously booked vacations, per the BBC.
Use certain bike racks. In Norwich, a sign was posted on a bike rack saying that it was “closed” from September 9 to 21 (see the unintentionally funny sign on MSN). A spokesperson for the city council explained that the area around City Hall was expected to become a site for tributes, and they didn’t want people trampling on flowers to get to and from their bikes.
Attend some soccer games. Because of the number of police needed to control crowds the weekend of the funeral, there might not be enough to also control crowds at certain sporting events; at least one game has been cancelled and another is TBD, per The Mirror.
Strike. In this case, things are slightly more normal as a result of the mourning period. The railroad workers union in England had planned a strike for September 15 and 17, but leadership announced a postponement both out of respect and because a large number of people will probably be traveling via train to pay their respects, per The Independent.
Avoid paying for the funeral. Look, I don’t know exactly how much the royals increase taxes on…whoever all pays into their…salaries? But someone’s gotta foot the bill for the funeral, which will cost a reported nine million dollars. (It’s worth noting that while the below tweet makes an excellent point, giving each hungry person $4.50 will not exactly fix the issue.)
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NOW ON DISNEY+! There’s no stopping the Dream Factory machine. Having almost entirely run out of original ideas, it’s shamelessly regurgitating classics, shot-by-shot, adding woke themes to make the old seem new, eradicating any semblance of the magic that made the original a classic in the first place. Disney leads the charge with its fourteenth remake in a dozen years, Robert Zemeckis’ Pinocchio. Zemeckis lost his own magic touch a long time ago (circa 1997’s Contact, arguably his last great film), but he’s still Zemeckis. This shameless excuse for children’s entertainment would be a blemish on any hack’s resume, much less the man behind Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
The story remains the same… too much so. The filmmaker, along with co-writer Chris Weitz, lazily rehash all the highlights from the original. Geppetto (Hanks) crafts Pinocchio (Benjamin Evan Ainsworth) out of fine pine. The old man wishes upon a star, which brings about the Blue Fairy (Cynthia Erivo), who turns Pinocchio into an “almost real boy.” She also knights Jiminy Cricket (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) as his conscience. In come the sly fox, Honest John (Keegan-Michael Key), and his dumb, silent feline sidekick Gideon, coaxing the wooden lad into performing for a puppet show. Pinocchio escapes, briefly ends up at Pleasure Island, where naughty boys get turned into donkeys, then miraculously stumbles upon Geppetto before getting swallowed by a whale sea monster. The rest is history.
There’s not much I can say about the $150-million travesty that hasn’t already been said by my fellow critics: using clever puns like “wooden,” “a lifeless chunk of wood,” “wood for brains,” and so on. Hanks has rightfully been criticized for yet again playing an eccentric puppet master with a terrible accent after Elvis. But as Geppetto, he spends most of the time by himself conversing with a bunch of pixels. He was more believable chatting up Wilson the volleyball in Cast Away. Perhaps the aptest description I’ve heard was by my Film Threat colleague editor Alan Ng, who called it “a great film to show your daughter what a horror film looks like.”
“Pinocchio escapes, briefly ends up at Pleasure Island, where naughty boys get turned into donkeys…”
Pinocchio is frightening for more than one reason. First is its utter soullessness. Where the original classic evoked wonder, joy, and fear in every meticulously hand-drawn frame, this digitized replica, and its detached, wide-eyed hero who never seems to belong in the real world, is bound to cause the wee one’s nightmares. Where the original dazzled with its boldness and imagination, the few new touches here either feel forcefully inserted to pander to the new generation of young filmgoers (Honest John casually references influencers) or are just plain off-putting (“I guess it’s the best he can do with the tools he’s got,” Jiminy says in reference to Geppetto’s impotence.)
Questions that never occurred to me while watching the OGnow haunt me. How is Figaro a real cat while Sofia the seagull (Lorraine Bracco), Gideon, and Honest John (and that damn goldfish, Cleo) are anthropomorphized? How does Cleo survive getting eaten and then spit out by the sea monster, among other things? Why is the entire Pleasure Island sequence reduced to a negligible side-note with no discernible resolution? Why are the themes spelled out so glaringly? What happened to the director of the Back to the Future trilogy? Why am I eating Cheetos again?
It’s not all terrible, I guess. The special effects, when not stepping into the uncanny valley, are appropriately impressive, as is the colorful set design. From the cast, Gordon-Levitt perhaps fares best as the narrating, wise-cracking cricket. But Pinocchio feels manufactured to appease everyone, with nary an original bone in its wooden body (there, I did it too). Will the tidal wave of negative feedback stop Disney from milking these cash cows? With Peter Pan & Wendy, The Little Mermaid, and Snow White on the way, the answer is not as long as audiences keep guzzling it.
In its latest housing market outlook, the association says it expects 532,545 properties to trade hands via Canadian MLS systems this year, down 20 per cent from the 2021 annual record.
The national average home price is forecast to rise by 4.7 per cent to $720,255.
The outlook is down from CREA’s forecast in June that predicted a 14.7 per cent decline in sales this year and a 10.8 per cent increase in the national average home price.
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The updated forecast came as CREA says home sales in August were down one per cent compared with July and 24.7 per cent lower than August last year.
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The national average home price was $637,673 in August, down 3.9 per cent from the same month last year.
Still mourning. Prince William and Prince Harry are riding a wave of emotions as they deal with the death of their grandmother Queen Elizabeth II, a source exclusively reveals in the newest Us Weekly issue.
“This is such an intensely difficult time for the princes,” the insider says. “They both adored their grandma and it will take some time to process the reality of her passing.”
The Prince of Wales, 40, and his younger brother, 37, both “consider themselves proud and fortunate beyond words” to have had the late monarch’s “wisdom and unwavering support throughout their entire lives,” the source explains.
Queen Elizabeth II, Prince William, and Prince Harry.Shutterstock(3)
“There’s still this horrendous sense of loss and emptiness thinking that she’ll no longer be around,” the insider tells Us, noting that the brothers “console themselves with the fact she’s at peace with their grandfather in heaven and watching over them and in their hearts forever.”
“For William, there’s a steadfast determination to now serve the king and prepare himself for the destiny that will one day see him be fortunate enough to serve as sovereign,” the source adds.
Following the queen’s death earlier this month, the siblings reunited alongside their respective wives, the Princess Kate and Meghan Markle, for their first joint public appearance in years. The foursome stepped out on Saturday, September 10, in Windsor, England, to greet well-wishers who were there to pay their respects to the late royal.
“For all of their differences in the past, many of which still linger, this was what The Queen would have wanted and William knew very well that it was no time to be holding onto grudges or distancing himself from his brother,” a source exclusively told Uson Wednesday, September 14. “They needed to put on a united front and pay their respects for her sake as well as the monarchy as a whole and the people she served so tirelessly during her reign.”
The siblings again stood together on Wednesday as they walked behind the queen’s coffin when it was moved from Buckingham Palace to Westminster Hall. The coffin will lie in state for several days in London before the late monarch’s funeral on Monday, September 19.
Watch the video above for more details on how William and Harry are processing Elizabeth’s death — and pick up the latest Us Weekly issue on newsstands now.
A better view for your widgets in Windows 11 is finally happening thanks to a recent Insider build that’s available to download.
If you’re a member of the Windows Insider program (opens in new tab) on the Dev Channel (which allows you to install Windows 11 updates that are made up of features that are in testing) you can try out a new view of widgets where they cover your desktop in build 25201.
Widgets are in fashion currently, with Google and Apple also implementing them in new and different ways to help us manage important information at a glance. At the moment, the iPhone 14 line showcases them as a headline feature on the Lock Screen, but there’s plenty of untapped potential on desktop PCs, something that Apple has yet to do in macOS Ventura.
This is most likely why we’re seeing widgets be improved in Windows 11, to not only get there first but to do it in a way that makes sense for the operating system on desktops and laptops.
Widgets on Windows have been around since Windows Vista, when they were called ‘Gadgets’. They were slow, locked to the right-hand side, would crash constantly on my laptop, and barely any were useful; Eventually, they were abandoned by Microsoft once Windows 8 arrived.
Fast forward to Windows 11 and the upcoming major update and widgets are making a comeback. It’s telling that Microsoft is already working on improving how widgets work and how they look. With macOS Ventura scheduled to launch in October with no improvement to widgets on the Mac, it’s an opportunity for Microsoft to set the standard for how widgets can work on a PC.
This expanded view will be a big help to further prove this, especially how the improvements to the Game Pass widget will show you the latest games available to play.
Granted, we may see this feature be delayed for a future update, such as the ‘Moment’ release, but it’s encouraging to already see progress for widgets, and that Microsoft isn’t prepared to leave them by the wayside again.
In this episode of Over/Under, Arooj Aftab, Dry Cleaning, the Linda Lindas, Japanese Breakfast, and more rate mosh pits, stage diving, green rooms, and pyrotechnics at Pitchfork Music Festival 2022.
EXCLUSIVE: Rhona Mitra (Underworld: Rise Of The Lycans), Famke Janssen (X-Men) and Stefani Martin (The Last Kingdom) have been set to star in sci-fi action horror movie The Experiment, which is underway at Rebellion Studios in the UK.
Set in 2080 in a world recovering from catastrophic nuclear war, The Experiment follows an elite spec-ops team, led by Captain Ava Stone (Mitra), sent on a rescue mission into a top secret military research facility after a rogue employee takes a group of scientists hostage.
The project marks the first for action label Action Xtreme, the genre division of UK arthouse producer-distributor Sovereign Media (Triangle Of Sadness).
Chee Keong Cheung (Redcon-1) is directing. Producers are Andreas Roald, Chee Keong Cheung and Ioanna Karavela and executive producer is Derek Rogers. Script comes from Alistair Cave, Matthew Thomas Edwards and Oliver Morran (Every Last One of Them) from a story by Chee Keong Cheung.
Crew includes Director of Photography Derek Rogers (Resident Evil: Apocalypse) and editor Martin Hunter (Full Metal Jacket). Creature design is by Josef Rarach (Solomon Kane) and his company FX Creator. Casting is by Dan Hubbard and Rory Okey.
Rounding out cast are Raz Adoti (Resident Evil: Apocalypse), Roxanne McKee (Game of Thrones), Michael Parr (Ocean Deep), Ryan Olivia (Angel Has Fallen), Tim Fellingham (Final Destination 5) and Simon Dutton (The Saint).
Sovereign recently helped produce Palme d’Or winner Triangle Of Sadness. The company also produced and distributed Memoria from Palme d’Or winner Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Previous credits include The Tree Of Life while upcoming productions include Inside starring Willem Dafoe and Eureka with Viggo Mortensen.
Mitra’s recent credits include the action feature Hounds of War with Frank Grillo and The Other Me with Jim Sturgess. Janssen’s recent credits include the upcoming Boy Kills World with Bill Skarsgård and Sharlto Copley, action adventure Knights of the Zodiac with Sean Bean and Now You Run, the limited series for Sky from executive producer Ben Chanan. Martini starred in the lead role in Prime Suspect: Tennison and more recently starred in series The Last Kingdom.
The UK’s Rebellion Studios in Didcot is a dedicated 12-acre complex which includes a 25,000 square-foot soundstage. Co-founded by brothers Jason and Chris Kingsley in 1992, the venue has hosted video game projects including Sniper Elite, Zombie Army and Alien vs. Predator. Rebellion is the publisher of the comic book catalogue 2000 AD, home of Judge Dredd and Rogue Trooper.
Chee Keong Cheung, director-producer, said: “I am proud and excited to begin production on The Experiment with Action Xtreme, thanks to the support of Sovereign and Andreas Roald. With an incredible cast, strong characters, captivating story, heart-pounding action and an amazingly talented team, I cannot wait for audiences to experience this epic thrill ride. I am delighted to also have the opportunity to work with Jason Kingsley and film at the truly unique Rebellion Studios as the principal location for The Experiment and to utilise the superb facilities on offer. I’m grateful to Jason who is an incredible supporter of independent talent and who was pivotal in making the filming at Rebellion possible.”
Andreas Roald, Producer and CEO of Sovereign, added: “The Experiment is Action Xtreme’s inaugural feature film project and Sovereign are thrilled to support director Chee Keong Cheung’s atmospheric and unique action-packed vision and bring his film to a worldwide audience.”
Derek Rogers, Director of Photography and executive producer, noted: “Chee Keong Cheung is one of the UK’s brilliant new horror/action directors. His work is visually expressive, artful and filled with purpose. It’s what draws DPs like me to his productions. The Experiment, with its delightful and unique blend of horror and action, promises a visual feast to the senses and a sheer audience pleaser.”
Jason Kingsley, CEO of Rebellion Studios, commented: “Chee is one of the UK’s most talented and exciting action film directors, and Rebellion is delighted to be working with him and Action Xtreme on The Experiment. We’ve been talking for a while to find the right project to collaborate together on and I’m very pleased we could make this one work, with hopefully many more to come. Our expansive and varied locations are the perfect setting for projects such as this. We have no doubt that it’s going to be a thrilling action-packed experience for audiences and we look forward to showcasing our unique location and extensive facilities to the world through The Experiment.”
Rhona Mitra is repped by Buchwald, Untitled Entertainment and Accelerate Management. Famke Janssen is repped by The Artists Partnership, Agency for the Performing Arts and Link Entertainment; and Stefanie Martini is repped by 42 and Luber Roklin Entertainment. Raz Adoti by Daniel Hoff Agency and Elixir Entertainment; Roxanne McKee by Curtis Brown Group and Brave Artists Management; Michael Parr by Revolution Talent; Ryan Oliva by Patrick Hambleton Management; Tim Fellingham by Revolution Talent; and Simon Dutton by Gardner Herrity.
Ayan Mukerji drops a pic from his Somnath temple visit with Ranbir Kapoor. (Photo: Instagram)
Ayan Mukerji visits Somnath Temple in Gujarat to seek blessings after Brahmastra’s success. He was also accompanied by Ranbir Kapoor.
Ayan Mukerji is currently enjoying the success of his recent film Brahmastra which starred Ranbir Kapoor and Alia Bhatt in the lead. While the film is getting an overwhelming response from all, the director visited Somnath Temple in Gujarat to seek blessings and thank the lord. He was also accompanied by the film’s protagonist Ranbir Kapoor.
In the picture that Ayan shared on his official Instagram handle, the director-actor duo can be seen posing in front of the temple. They wore traditional outfits as they posed for the lens, Ranbir sported a plain white kurta pyjama and layered it up with a blue jacket. On the other hand, Ayan wore a yellow and white kurta pyjama.
“My Third Jyotirling Visit this year ? Had told myself I would come here after Brahmāstra releases, and am so happy and energised that we made it here!” Ayan wrote in the caption.
Talking about Brahmastra, the film was the first time that Alia Bhatt and Ranbir Kapoor shared the screen. The film also starred Amitabh Bachchan, Nagarjuna and Mouni Roy in key roles. Shah Rukh Khan also made a special appearance in the film. Brahmastra collected Rs 225 crore worldwide after its opening weekend.
Recently, in an exclusive interview with News18 Showsha, Ayan talked about the sequel — Bhramastra- Part Two: Dev and shared that he plans to release the film in three years. “The basic storyline of part two and part three has always been in place. The entire concentration so far was on Brahmastra – Part One: Shiva as that was the foundation film in the trilogy. Our goal is to make the film in a much shorter period. The idea is to come out with the film in three years. We have understood the process of filmmaking and I am confident that we can achieve our goal of releasing Bhramastra- Part Two: Dev in three years,” he said.
In “Raymond & Ray,” Ewan McGregor and Ethan Hawke play half-brothers journeying together to attend the funeral of their father, from whom they both were estranged.
The movie, which had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival prior to an Apple TV+ release, opens with Raymond (McGregor) driving through the rain to the cabin of Ray (Hawke), because an unannounced in-person visit is the only way to tell Ray that their father, Harris, has died. The funeral is scheduled for the next day, and Harris’ final wishes include both sons attending the funeral, digging the grave and putting Harris in the ground together.
Having been a serial philanderer and physical abuser, Harris does not exactly stir up the warm fuzzies for the siblings. Ray has zero interest in going, but the more staid Raymond apparently yearns for closure and can’t afford to drive himself 200 miles to Richmond, Va., on a suspended license. He pleads for Ray to take him.
Upon arrival, they make the rounds to the morgue, the funeral home, the attorney’s office, Harris’ ex-girlfriend’s house, etc. Much to their dismay, not only did women find Harris irresistible, but former associates have nothing but glowing things to say about him. Yet when the visitation begins, only two paid seat warmers are waiting at the door. Harris apparently alienated just about everyone during his lifetime, so it’s unclear why everyone has chosen to gaslight the brothers this way. Or perhaps writer-director Rodrigo García simply hasn’t thought it through.
García has drawn up an ensemble of complex and interesting characters who have the potential to make decent protagonists. This explains why the film has attracted McGregor and Hawke. But the filmmaker doesn’t know what to do with the characters or how he might get them to gel with one another. The screenplay starts out strong, but then it becomes a slog. It’s impossible to discern which scene, if any, García has designated to be the climax, because the plot remains flat throughout. It continues to drag quite maddeningly even after the burial.
While it’s clear Harris has alienated his sons, we don’t get a real sense of how the brothers have drifted apart over the years or if this trip does anything to mend the rift. García does not dig deeper into their schism to arrive at a cathartic epiphany. He exhausts this premise early on and then splits up the siblings to have them interact with other characters.
The second half gets pretty contrived, as García methodically assigns each brother a love interest. He pairs Raymond off with Lucia (Maribel Verdú, “Pan’s Labyrinth”), Harris’ ex-lover, and Ray with Kiera (Sophie Okonedo), Harris’ nurse. Lucia is sort of fascinating on the surface, and we can even overlook her inability – possibly caused by a language barrier – to articulate her attraction to Harris. Kiera is more of an enigma. Perhaps that’s the whole point, but it just comes off as her being an underwritten love interest. These romantic tangents sidetrack the ending so far away from the original premise that the strained kinships that have set everything in motion become an afterthought. New characters show up for the burial; while we won’t spoil the surprise here, suffice it to say that at this point García appears to have depleted his ideas and is flailing.
Hawke is one of the few bright spots here, managing to eke out a soulful performance. Ray is a recovering addict, a trumpet player and, among other things, a womanizer like Harris, and Hawke somehow brings everything together into one cohesive performance. One supposes that a positive about the film is that it gives Hawke much more to work with than did “The Black Phone.”
McGregor, who previously starred as both Jesus and Satan in García’s “Last Days in the Desert,” has the less showy role, though he holds his own in scenes shared with Hawke.
Another highlight is Jeff Beale’s jazzy score. It’s always refreshing to hear anything other than the generic indie-film trance music, which has become sort of an auditory cliché. While Beale’s compositions aren’t nearly as transcendent as, say, Dave Grusin’s, they are at least a nice touch. Director of photography Igor Jadue-Lillo has captured one exquisite still shot, but the rest of the film’s visuals don’t stand out enough to warrant a theatrical run along with the Apple TV+ launch.
García has directed films that include “Mother and Child” and “Albert Nobbs,” and he has an accomplished career producing and directing TV (“In Treatment,” “Blue”); he has no problem attracting major talents and landing a premiere spot in a prestigious film festival. On top of that, “Raymond & Ray” counts Alfonso Cuarón as one of its producers.
The project probably sounded like a winner in a pitch meeting, but middling doesn’t even begin to describe the finished product; it’s not even Lifetime movie caliber. Simply put, this is “content” with recognizable stars. It’s a bit bewildering that the streaming wars have kind of devolved to Apple TV+ racing Netflix to the bottom.
The end is near. Has the Queen Sugar TV show been cancelled or renewed for an eighth season on OWN? The television vulture is watching all the latest cancellation and renewal news, so this page is the place to track the status of Queen Sugar, season eight. Bookmark it, or subscribe for the latest updates. Remember, the television vulture is watching your shows. Are you?
What’s This TV Show About?
Airing on the OWN cable channel, the Queen Sugar TV show stars Rutina Wesley, Dawn-Lyen Gardner, Kofi Siriboe, Nicholas Ashe, Tina Lifford, Omar J. Dorsey, and Bianca Lawson. Guest and recurring players include Glynn Turman, Tracie Thoms, Sharon Lawrence, Greg Vaughan, Vanessa Bell Calloway, Amirah Vann, Brian Michael, Kaci Walfall, Lamman Rucker, Reagan Gomez, Ann Nesby, Tanyell Waivers, McKinley Freeman, and Vivien Ngô. Based on the Natalie Baszile novel, the story unfolds in the fictional Louisiana town of Saint Josephine. It chronicles the lives and loves of the Bordelon siblings who try to save the family sugarcane farm, after a family tragedy. Season seven picks up six months after we last saw the Bordelons. They continue to strive to honor the legacy of their father and preserve their land and community.
Season Seven Ratings
The seventh season of Queen Sugar averages a 0.07 rating in the 18-49 demographic and 437,000 viewers. Compared to season six, that’s down by 32% in the demo and down by 32% in viewership in the live+same day ratings (including DVR playback through 3:00 AM). While these numbers don’t include further delayed or streaming viewing, they are a very good indicator of how a show is performing, especially when compared to others on the same channel. There can be other economic factors involved in a show’s fate, but typically the higher-rated series are renewed and the lower-rated ones are cancelled. Find out how Queen Sugar stacks up against other OWN TV shows.
Telly’s Take
We don’t have to wonder if Queen Sugar will be cancelled since it’s already been announced that season seven is the end. Could the show be revived someday? Subscribe for free alerts on Queen Sugar cancellation or renewal news.
Queen Sugar Cancellation & Renewal Related Links
What do you think? Do you think that the Queen Sugar TV show should have been renewed for an eighth season?
Check out our status sheets to track new TV series pickups, renewals, and cancellations. You can find lists of cancelled shows here.
Kyle MacLachlan, Marcia Gay Harden, John Slattery, Roy Wood Jr., and Annie Mumolo round out Greg Mottola’s dopey James Bond riff.
Don Draper may have been the role of a lifetime, but Irwin Fletcher is the role Jon Hamm was born to play. Equal parts goofy, charismatic, boozy, and clever, Hamm is firmly in his element in Greg Mottola’s entertaining art heist romp “Confess, Fletch” (Fletch being our hapless hero’s preferred moniker). Swashbuckling through the fast-paced action like a clumsy James Bond (with far less combat training), he finds himself at the center of a high-stakes art theft with a family fortune at stake. Surrounded by an eccentric ensemble of fabulously suspicious characters played by a deep bench of fantastic comedic actors, Hamm heads up a bona fide charmer that serves up the intrigue of “Knives Out” as a full-blown comedy. It doesn’t break the mold, but it’s an unmitigated delight.
The movie is based on the “Fletch” novels by Gregory McDonald, a popular mystery series published between 1974 and 1994. The character, an ex-marine turned journalist who stumbles into PI work, was first dramatized onscreen by Chevy Chase in the box-office hits “Fletch” (1985) and “Fletch Lives” (1989). Hamm fans are well aware of the actor’s versatility, and while his take on the laid-back lothario is less flat-out comedic than Chase’s, he is well-endowed with straight man charms. Hamm’s dramatic chops add a touch of intrigue to the character, and he keeps the audience guessing his loyalties as he plays all sides.
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Combining storylines from a few different books, “Confess, Fletch” opens with Fletch wasting no time bedding a new client, fiery Italian Angela (Lorenza Izzo), who has hired him to find her father’s stolen paintings, including a rare Picasso. He is soon on a plane to Boston, known for its high-end art dealers (and tax incentives for film productions). Arriving in the apartment Angela has arranged for him through a friend, he is surprised — though not alarmed — to find a woman’s dead body among the impeccable decor. Knowing he will be a prime suspect, he sets about aiding the detectives in solving the case. Much to the chagrin of slow-moving Monroe (Roy Wood Jr.) and eager rookie Griz (Ayden Mayeri), an odd couple who are alternately flustered and stymied by Fletch’s insertion into the investigation.
With a short fuse and a newborn baby at home, Monroe lets Griz handle most of the staking out, and the novice spends most of the movie on various wild goose chases. She follows Fletch to the meticulous townhome of art dealer Ronald Horan (Kyle MacLachlan), a fussy germaphobe who’s the key to buying back the stolen paintings. The stakes escalate when Angela’s father is kidnapped, with the missing paintings demanded as ransom.
“Confess, Fletch”
Robert Clark
Apparently short on cash, Fletch is still staying at the crime scene, and trying to track down the home’s owner Owen (John Behlmann), in hopes that the cops will shift their suspicions onto him. His search leads him to wacky neighbor Eve (Annie Mumolo), an absent-minded stoner who’s full of silly anachronisms and is prone to starting house fires. A natural scene-stealer, the “Bridesmaids” scribe and “Barb and Star” actress elicits some of the film’s most slapstick laughs, exemplifying the movie’s parody roots when she asks, in all seriousness: “What is this, Woodburn and Bernstein?”
“Knives Out” isn’t the only influence on display, and thankfully writer/director Mottola isn’t shy about airing them. A dash of Bond and “All The President’s Men,” with “Ocean’s 11” and “Austin Powers” thrown in, “Confess, Fletch” is a veritable grab bag of Hollywood’s most satisfying investigations and silliest action spoofs. That it somehow all comes together in the end without feeling jumbled is a testament to Mottola’s (along with co-writer Zev Borrow) love of old school entertainment and keen sense of comedy. As he did with “Superbad” and “Adventureland,” Mottola has an innate sense of what gives even the silliest comedies staying power.
There are many inspired performances supporting Hamm’s hamminess; Marcia Gay Harden as Angela’s heavily accented stepmother gives Hamm a run for his money in more ways than one. Her seduction of Fletch, as she both doggedly pursues him and seems entirely unbothered by his rejections, is a delight to behold. MacLachlan is just shy of total caricature as the persnickety art dealer, and has the gravitas to sell his pivotal turn. Wood Jr., long a fixture in the stand-up world and on “The Daily Show With Trevor Noah,” makes a confident showing as the beleaguered cop and new dad. Though it’s the only extraneous role, fans will enjoy seeing Hamm reunite with “Mad Men” co-star John Slattery, who fumes as a cranky newspaper editor.
The threads of the story all come together wildly enough, with only a few minor plot holes to scratch heads. (It’s hard to believe Fletch would be allowed to sleep at an active crime scene, no matter who he’s sleeping with.) Though the original novels were written in the ’70s and ’80s, at times “Confess, Fletch” feels like a ’50s farce, with good old-fashioned misdirection and mistaken identities doing the leg work. Unlike James Bond, Fletch doesn’t need gadgets or fast cars to untangle this mystery, just a few Negronis and heaps of charisma. The formula works.
Grade: B+
“Confess, Fletch” opens in theaters and on digital on September 16, 2022.
Gilla Band songs are claustrophobic rooms with a door to enter and no way out: tense scenarios seen through the eyes of someone with suffocating anxiety and paranoia. On “Post Ryan,” the closing track from the band’s forthcoming album Most Normal, the Irish noise rockers deliver one of their most unnervingly even-keeled examples to date. Centered around a warped interpolation of the beat from Flock of Seagulls’ hit “I Ran (So Far Away),” “Post Ryan” is a soliloquy run amok. As if scrambling to ground himself, vocalist Dara Kiely describes things he sees—a balding barber, a snail’s crushed shell—before caving to “inevitable depression.” “I’m in between breakdowns/Constantly in recovery/I’m just the same prick,” he deadpans. “Gonna end up homeless/I hid behind the surreal.” The self-exposure is so raw that Kiely had to step away when he initially played the vocal demo for his bandmates.
But instead of leaving Kiely to squirm in the spotlight, the rest of Gilla Band amplify his mental spiral: a droning bassline rises and falls like a sine wave, mimicking the queasy motion of a Music Express carnival ride; guitar wails oscillate through space, giving the illusion of something sharp and tinny narrowly missing your head; the bouncy pop drumbeat devolves in tone and volume, like it’s one loose screw away from collapse. As the song swells with noisy dissonance, Kiely starts berating himself. “Inevitable depression when I do nothing,” he sings repeatedly. You can practically hear his head spinning. Suddenly, “Post Ryan” comes to an abrupt end. It’s time to get off the ride, the acidic taste of bile tingling at the back of your throat.
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The aftershocks from the multitudinous compounding crises of this squishy first third of the 21st century continue to linger, and the world can’t quite decide at the moment if it wants to be really, really good or really, really bad. And if you narrow the focus down to just our humble corner of industry, the jury is similarly in recess. You might think that all of this uncertainty and upheaval might threaten our resolve to continue serving Film Independent’s mission, but in reality such challenges only strengthen our passion to nurture and champion visual storytellers. But in providing help, we occasionally must ask for it as well.
You may have spotted that we just launched our Board Members and Friends Matching Challenge! Through September 29, all donations in support of Film Independent will be doubled, dollar-for-dollar, with a generous $75,000 matching gift provided by Film Independent Board Members and Friends: Randy Barbato and Fenton Bailey, Rodrigo García, Matthew Greenfield, Dawn Hudson, Sue Kroll, David Linde and Felicia Rosenfeld, Gail Mutrux, Edward Rada, Mary Sweeney, Jenifer Westphal and Joe Plummer, and Jamie Wolf and Nathalie Seaver. We hope you’ll agree, not bad company to be in!
Every single dollar donated will not only be 100% tax-deductible, but will also provide essential support for our year-round programming; from our screenings and education series, to our filmmaker labs, youth programs and international initiatives. Join us in the challengeand double your impact today! All new Arts Circle Memberships can also be put towards the challenge.
But we’re not here to give you the hard sell (no, really). We’ll leave that to some of the great filmmakers—Film Independent Fellows and Spirit Award winners—who have so greatly benefitted from passing, in some way, through our doors. And rest assured, these stories are just a few of many…
‘Fire Island’ (2022, dir. Andrew Ahn)
“Now more than ever it’s so important that we support stories told by and about communities that are marginalized, that we tell stories about immigrants, muslims, women, people of color, trans and queer folk. Film is such a powerful tool in humanizing these communities so that we can’t be pushed aside and labeled as other. We are part of this great country, and we are undeniable. Thank you so much to Film Independent. Thank you, thank you, thank you—I couldn’t have done this without your support.” Andrew Ahn, Director, Fire Island
‘NOPE’ (2022, dir. Jordan Peele)
“We in a renaissance right now, where stories from the outsider, the same stories that independent filmmakers have been telling for years, are being honored and being recognized and celebrated. And I’m so honored and so proud to be here with this group of people [at the Spirit Awards] Thank you, everybody in this room. Our truths are the most powerful weapons we have against the lies in this world… Thank you, Film Independent.” –Jordan Peele, filmmaker, NOPE
Iesh Tharpar
“I have nothing but admiration for the kind, funny, supportive, and ridiculously talented group of people who work at Film Independent. They genuinely care. The purity of intentions, the spirit of generosity, and the palpable sense of community is what I left this lab with. Film Independent’s continuous support is overwhelming. Having been a Project Involve Directing Fellow and now also a Fast Track Fellow, I cannot thank them enough for believing in my work, and for trusting me with the opportunities.” –Iesh Tharpar, 2021 Screenwriting Lab Fellow
The team behind Lysette Urus’s film ‘Wild Animal’
“In 2021, I was selected to participate in the Film Independent Producing Lab cohort with four other talented and like-minded producers with projects at different phases of development. This allowed us to reflect and meditate on the many angles of getting a film made. It’s been invaluable having access and support from such a community. The Producing Lab emphasizes our role as a creator and how to advocate for ourselves. I cherish the support of Film Independent to help navigate the pitfalls of indie filmmaking. It is safe to say, I’ll never be the same.” –Lysette Urus, 2021 Producing Lab Fellow
Lulu Wang at the 2020 Spirit Awards (photo: Getty Images)
“I was at the Spirit Awards in 2014. It was my first time at an awards ceremony; I was in Project Involve, I was part of Film Independent—an amazing program, you should definitely apply—I was getting an award from the Chaz and Robert Ebert Foundation. I had made a first feature that had gone nowhere I didn’t know if I would ever make films again, I was so inspired by everyone on stage. And it hasn’t been that long, maybe five years, and now I’m up here [accepting the Spirit Award for Best Feature. So for all of the filmmakers out there, you can do it.” –Lulu Wang, Project Involve Fellow, Spirit Award winner
Adam Sandler in ‘Uncut Gems’ (2019, dir. Safdie Bros.)
“If you’re wondering why I have an extremely hip beard now, it wasn’t intentional. Last year after I won Best Male Lead for [my] incomparable Uncut Gems performance, this beard just appeared on my face. Was it magic, or was it the Film Independent Spirit Awards that did it? Yes, my wife and kids haven’t looked at me without cringing in over 12 months, but Lars von Trier gave me a bag of CBD coffee for my birthday and Bon Iver does transcendental yoga with me every morning, so its all good—independently speaking of course.” –Adam Sandler, Best Male Lead (2019), Uncut Gems
Film Independent promotes unique independent voices by helping filmmakers create and advance new work. To become a Member of Film Independent, just click here. To support us with a donation, click here. Your donation – and impact – will be doubled through our Board Members and Friends Matching Challenge, available through September 29.
ANNAPOLIS, Md. — Baltimore prosecutors asked a judge on Wednesday to vacate Adnan Syed’s conviction for the 1999 murder of Hae Min Lee — a case that was chronicled in the hit podcast “Serial.”
Baltimore’s state’s attorney filed a motion in circuit court, saying a lengthy investigation conducted with the defense had uncovered new evidence that could undermine the conviction of Syed, Lee’s ex-boyfriend.
“The motion filed today supports a new trial for Syed based on a nearly year-long investigation that revealed undisclosed and newly-developed information regarding two alternative suspects, as well as unreliable cell phone tower data,” State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby’s office said in a news release.
Syed, 42, has maintained his innocence for decades and captured the attention of millions in 2014 when the debut season of the “Serial” podcast focused on the case and raised doubts about some of the evidence, including cellphone tower data.
“Serial” podcast creator Sarah Koenig attends the 2015 Time 100 Gala in New York City on April 21, 2015.
Taylor Hill—Getty Images
Prosecutors on Wednesday said they weren’t asserting that Syed is innocent, but they lacked confidence “in the integrity of the conviction” and recommended he be released on his own recognizance or bail.
“We believe that keeping Mr. Syed detained as we continue to investigate the case with everything that we know now, when we do not have confidence in results of the first trial, would be unjust,” Mosby added.
The state’s attorney’s office said if the court grants its motion it would effectively put Syed in a new trial status, and his convictions would be vacated, but the case would remain active.
“Whether the State ultimately continues with a trial in this matter or dismisses the charges will depend on the outcome of the ongoing investigation,” the state’s attorney’s office said.
Prosecutors said a reinvestigation of the case revealed evidence regarding the possible involvement of two alternative suspects other than Syed. The two suspects may be involved individually or may be involved together, the state’s attorney’s office said.
One of the suspects had threatened Lee, saying “he would make her (Ms. Lee) disappear. He would kill her,” according to the filing.
A collage of photographs of Hai Min Lee and her friends were on display at Lee’s memorial service in Baltimore, Md., on March 11, 1999.
Elizabeth Malby—Baltimore Sun/Tribune News Service via Getty Images
“Given the stunning lack of reliable evidence implicating Mr. Syed, coupled with increasing evidence pointing to other suspects, this unjust conviction cannot stand,” said Assistant Public Defender Erica Suter, who is Syed’s attorney and director of the Innocence Project Clinic. “Mr. Syed is grateful that this information has finally seen the light of day and looks forward to his day in court.”
The suspects were known persons at the time of the original investigation and were not properly ruled out nor disclosed to the defense, prosecutors said.
The investigation also found a separate document from the original trial file, in which a different person relayed information that can be viewed as a motive for that same suspect to harm the victim, prosecutors said. The information about the threat and motives to harm could have provided a basis for the defense and was not disclosed to the trial nor the post-conviction defense counsel, the state’s attorney’s office said.
Prosecutors also said new information revealed that one of the suspects was convicted of attacking a woman in her vehicle, and that one of the suspects was convicted of engaging in serial rape and sexual assault.
The state’s attorney’s office declined to release information about the suspects, due to the ongoing investigation.
Prosecutors also noted unreliable cellphone data used during Syed’s court case to corroborate his whereabouts on the day of the crime. The notice on the records specifically advised that the billing locations for incoming calls “would not be considered reliable information for location.”
“Evidence proved that the State should not have relied on the incoming call evidence,” the state’s attorney’s office said.
Syed has served more than 20 years in prison for the strangling of Lee, who was 18 at the time. Her body was found weeks later buried in a Baltimore park.
More than a decade later, the popular “Serial” podcast revealed little-known evidence and attracted millions of listeners, shattering podcast-streaming and downloading records.
In 2016, a lower court ordered a retrial for Syed on grounds that his attorney, Cristina Gutierrez, who died in 2004, didn’t contact an alibi witness and provided ineffective counsel.
But after a series of appeals, Maryland’s highest court in 2019 denied a new trial in a 4-3 opinion. The Court of Appeals agreed with a lower court that Syed’s legal counsel was deficient in failing to investigate an alibi witness, but it disagreed that the deficiency prejudiced the case. The court said Syed waived his ineffective counsel claim.
The U.S. Supreme Court declined to review Syed’s case in 2019.
– English Audio Description
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The end is near. Has the Queen Sugar TV show been cancelled or renewed for an eighth season on OWN? The television vulture is watching all the latest cancellation and renewal news, so this page is the place to track the status of Queen Sugar, season eight. Bookmark it, or 
