During Microsoft’s “What’s Next for Gaming” virtual briefing this week, the tech giant revealed its plan to bring the Xbox app to Samsung Smart TVs.
Starting June 30, players can access the Xbox app through the Games Hub on a 2022 Samsung TV, pair a Bluetooth controller and be able to play over one hundred cloud-enabled games in the Xbox Game Pass Ultimate library — including titles from Xbox Game Studios — without needing a console.
Noting that streaming is starting to be a common thread through all offerings at Xbox, Microsoft Gaming’s chief marketing officer Jerret West said in a statement, “This is a scenario where with a premium partner, a 2022 Samsung Smart TV and going forward, you’ll be able to launch and have a streamed gaming experience via an Xbox app on the TV directly there.”
This new feature comes as part of the vision that Xbox shared in a Wire post last June to work with global TV manufacturers to embed the Xbox app directly into internet-connected televisions with no extra hardware required except a controller.
At the launch date, cloud gaming will be available on Samsung TVs in 27 countries.
“We’re building a platform that can reach billions of players — whether it’s on console, whether it’s on PC, whether it’s through Xbox cloud streaming— where players on any device they want to play on should be able to find the content they want to play,” said Phil Spencer, CEO of Microsoft Gaming, in a statement. “Whether it’s on a web browser, whether it’s in an app or whether it’s on a device that’s dedicated to playing games. That’s just fundamental to where Xbox is going: find as many players as we can, cultivate a community of amazing creators.”
EXCLUSIVE: Here’s a clip from Letitia Wright and Josh O’Connor-starring Aisha, which will premiere at Tribeca in three days’ time.
Wright plays the lead, a young Nigerian woman seeking asylum in Ireland floundering in a maze of social services and bureaucracy. As her situation becomes increasingly dire, she struggles to maintain hope and dignity against the looming threat of deportation.
Wright said of the clip: “This moment is a breaking point for Aisha, she has to hold it together during a time that’s incredibly difficult.”
The film, which will be given its world premiere in Tribeca’s Spotlight Narrative section, comes from Frank Berry (Michael Inside, I Used to Live Here) and also features The Crown breakout O’Connor.
Producers are Tristan Orpen Lynch, Donna Eperon, Aiofe O’Sullivan and Sam Bisbee. Cornerstone is selling U.S. and international.
Xbox Game Pass is already one of the best subscription deals in gaming, and Microsoft has a plan to level it up.
The Xbox maker revealed what it’s calling (for now) “Project Moorcroft” during a recent press briefing. Sarah Bond, VP of the Game Creator Experience and Ecosystem at Microsoft, laid it all out in the context of a larger discussion about trade shows like E3 and the challenges faced by game creators, and indies in particular, as they try to stand out from the crowd.
In Bond’s words, the goal of Project Moorcroft is to “take Game Pass and make it like the show floor.” So a developer would be able to “take a piece [or] level of their game, release it into Game Pass, generate excitement for what’s coming, and also get that really valuable feedback as they’re tuning and preparing their game for launch.”
It’s a solid idea. Even without the global pandemic, the advent of streaming video and cloud-based gameplay has kicked down the walls that previously set up press (and later, influencers) as the primary disseminators of information coming from game publishers and developers. Industry-centric trade shows like E3 were already facing a transitional period even before COVID-19 arrived.
So the basic premise of Moorcroft bringing that preview portion of the trade show experience into players’ homes is a natural step for any publisher to take. Microsoft already has the infrastructure in place for cloud-based gaming and this new program would put that technology to use in a new way.
Bond also revealed that the program is structured to provide participating developers with “financial compensation.” That’s important because it addresses one of the bigger pain points video game creators face when it comes to trade shows: Building demos for an E3 or a Gamescom is costly. The slices we see at these events aren’t simply copy-pasted out of a larger experience. They’re custom built and polished to run for (and, they hope, dazzle) show attendees.
Microsoft’s move to give development teams financial incentive to participate in Moorcroft is a more invisible feature of the program if you’re a player. But it’s a smart, creator-friendly decision that makes it much more likely that any given studio will want to participate. In other words, financial incentive for creators likely means more cool demos for you to check out at home. When the industry empowers creators to do what they do best, we all win.
Project Moorcroft is expected to launch in 2023, so we’ll have to wait and see if the reality matches up with the promise.
“Jurassic World Dominion” starts with a nod to “The Deadliest Catch”: A marine reptile snacks on king crabs in the Bering Sea before turning its jaws on a trawler and its crew. Yikes! Then a mock newscast swiftly brings us up-to-date on the global catastrophe that began to unfold almost 30 years ago in the first “Jurassic Park” movie. In case you need a refresher, how it started was with Richard Attenborough rhapsodizing about the wonders of life; how it’s going is that the big lizards are everywhere, generally bringing out the worst in people.
It would be nice if those reanimated monsters inspired better movies. The “Jurassic” brand, born in Michael Crichton’s 1990 novel, promises bone-rattling action and sublime reptilian special effects infused with pop pseudoscience and bioethical chin-scratching. The second trilogy, which started in 2015, hasn’t quite lived up to that promise. “Dominion,” directed by Colin Trevorrow, might be a little better than its two predecessors (“Jurassic World” and “Fallen Kingdom”), but in ways that underline the hectic incoherence of the whole enterprise.
However: Jeff Goldblum is back, as the “chaotician” Dr. Ian Malcolm, more seductively lizardy than the dinosaurs themselves. Ian is reunited with his “Jurassic Park” frenemies Dr. Alan Grant (Sam Neill) and Dr. Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern). Ellie has been married and divorced and made a name for herself in the field of genetic something or other. Alan is still carrying a torch for her. Yes, he’s in love with her, but what I mean to say is that he literally carries a torch, to light their way through an old amber mine deep in the Dolomites.
That rocky bit of Italy is where the fiercest, biggest ancient predators now live, in a preserve built and supervised by Lewis Dodgson, an evil tech/pharma billionaire played by Campbell Scott. He seems nice enough at first — his company, Biosyn, claims to be protecting the dinosaurs out of the goodness of its corporate heart, and also curing disease, feeding the world and so on — but nobody except a naïve scientist is likely to be fooled. There are too many tells. Lewis’s silver hair is combed flat against his scalp, and he wears collarless shirts and soft jackets in rarefied neutral tones like ecru, pewter and mother-of-walrus. His very speech patterns suggest libertarianism run amok.
As it happens, Lewis has bioengineered a plague of giant locusts, with the help of Dr. Henry Wu (BD Wong), another revenant from the earlier “Jurassic Park” movies. Biosyn has also kidnapped Maisie Lockwood (Isabella Sermon), the cloned avatar of a famous scientist.
To make a very long story as short as I can: For the past few years, Maisie has been in the care of Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) and Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard), who have been with the franchise since “Jurassic World” and who have less and less to do. Well, that’s not quite fair. It’s just that everybody else is more interesting, both the old-timers and the newcomers. Mamoudou Athie and DeWanda Wise are both better than they need to be in cookie-cutter parts. She’s Kayla Watts, a tough, cynical cargo pilot, and he’s Ramsay Cole, a smooth techie minion. They both end up pretty much where you expect they will. Kayla is someone you might hope to see in her own movie.
Pratt and Howard, bless them, are the designated action figures, who do a lot of the running and jumping and fast driving. There is a complicated chase through the narrow streets of a picturesque Mediterranean seaport, which is only tangentially related to dinosaurs but which might remind you, not unpleasantly, of a Jason Bourne movie. Other chases happen in mud, rain, snow and gloom of night, and also along the sleek, curving corridors of a high-tech research facility.
This is a very crowded movie — so many species of dinosaur, and I’m so bad at keeping track of them that my 8-year-old self is no longer speaking to me. They are variously menacing, ravenous, bizarre and kind of cute, but the frenzied live-action and digital special effects rarely produce moments of Spielbergian awe.
Within the world of “Dominion,” the dinosaurs are no big deal. The message seems to be that human beings need to learn to live with them, accepting the occasional pet-mauling or boat-devouring as the price of coexistence. Is this utopian or dystopian? A vision of ecological harmony or of genetically engineered apocalypse? A metaphor for Covid or just a sign of imaginative exhaustion?
Jurassic World Dominion Rated PG-13. Lizard-brain stuff. Running time: 2 hours 26 minutes. In theaters.
There are a lot of Black directors who influenced the culture that we need to talk about ASAP.
Don’t lie, if I asked you right now how many Black directors you could name off the top of your head you will say Spike Lee and Tyler Perry and think you nailed it. YES, they did big things for the culture but there are dozens more you probably didn’t even know directed your favorite movies.
For decades, Black filmmakers have challenged the status quo to create premium cinematic masterpieces that brought Black culture to the forefront. They deserve their flowers.
Juneteenth is about celebrating freedom and Black success and excellence. So, in honor of the holiday, here is my list of 50 Black directors that influenced the culture, and the world!
50.
Janet Mock
Jamie Mccarthy / Getty Images
Janet Mock is an activist and writer who is on the way to shattering expectations as one of the first Black trans directors for primetime television with emotionally driven episodes from FX’s Pose and the Netflix miniseries, Hollywood.
Peter Ramsey is a director with skills originally suited for the art department of major motion pictures, working as a storyboard artist. In 2018, his second animated feature Spiderman: Into The Spider-Verse made it a solid fact he’s meant to become a full-fledged director of his own productions.
Regina King started out a spunky teenager on the ’80s show, 227, followed up by appearances in several ’90s Black films alongside famous rappers like Ice Cube and Tupac. King stayed booked and busy only as an actress until 2013 when she began directing television episodes for shows like Being Mary Jane, Scandal, This Is Us, and Insecure, and her first feature film, One Night in Miami.
Eddie Murphy is another case that it doesn’t matter how many films he actually directed, it’s all about the impact on the culture. The accomplished comedian attributes his success to many of the greats that came before him, and as one of the highest-paid and most popular actors of the time, he became a household name for everyone. Believe it or not, he technically only has one directing credit with 1989’s, Harlem Nights, starring some of his major influences Richard Pryor, and Redd Foxx.
46.
Melina Matsoukas
Leon Bennett / WireImage
Melina Matsoukas’ name rose in popularity after her directorial debut for Lena Waithe’s 2019 drama, Queen & Slim. The mistake was underestimating her career before this debut since she is one of the industry’s most accomplished music video directors. Every major award-winning artist you can think of has worked alongside Melina, including Ludacris, Ne-Yo, Jennifer Lopez, Whitney Houston, Christina Aguilera, Beyonce, and Rihanna.
Chris Rock is one of the most successful comedians in the world getting his start in film as a small-bit player in many popular Black movies in the ’80s and ’90s. Once he moved into film production and earned starring roles, he took a chance at directing and captivated the audiences as per usual. His successful comedic turns at directing include Head of State (2003), I Think I Love My Wife (2007), and his unforgettable performance also starring in Top Five (2014).
44.
Amma Asante
David M. Benett / Dave Benett / Getty Images
Amma Asante is a British filmmaker who started as an actor and found her way into screenwriting and development like many other directors. After founding her own production company, Tantrum Films, she produced the BBC Two drama series Brothers and Sisters (1998). Under her production company, she made her directorial debut with A Way of Life (2004), a story of a woman’s struggle with her mother’s death and her broken childhood. Her filmography includes Belle (2013), A United Kingdom (2016), and TV episodes of The Handmaid’s Tale and Mrs. America.
43.
Justin Simien
Tasos Katopodis / Getty Images for Outfest
Justin Simien is making a name for himself as the newest generation of Black filmmakers stepping into the scene with his satirical love letter to Spike Lee’s and other Black directors’ earliest films. His first feature, Dear White People (2014), was a critically acclaimed dark comedy focusing on the lives of the very Black students at a prestigious Ivy League college. The show became a popular Netflix series setting him up for bigger and better things in the future, like the announced Disney+ series, Lando, based on the Star Wars hero.
42.
Lee Daniels
Dimitrios Kambouris / Getty Images for The Met Museum/Vogue
Lee Daniels is a writer, producer, and director who rose to notoriety after Precious (2009), starring Mo’Nique and Gabourey Sidibe. In the game years before, Daniels was a producer for films like Monster’s Ball (2001). Still, his turn in the director’s chair set him up for the success we see today with the 2013 historical drama Lee Daniels’ The Butler and The United States vs. Billie Holiday (2021).
Hype Williams is a permanent fixture in the hip-hop world as one of the most recognizable music video directors working with every major artist from the early ’90s to today. He only directed one feature film, Belly (1998), starring rappers Nas and DMX, but his videography spans over four decades.
40.
Victoria Mahoney
Jon Kopaloff / FilmMagic
Victoria was first known as a television director with episodes from shows like Queen Sugar, Grey’s Anatomy, Power, and Lovecraft Country. Her directorial debut with Yelling to the Sky (2011), starring Zoe Kravitz and Jason Clarke, earned her a spot at the 61st Berlin International Film Festival and award recognitions. She holds a place as a Black female director to watch with her friend and colleague, Ava DuVernay.
Denzel Washington followed in the footsteps of Sidney Poitier in every way. Washington stepped into movie roles that took his career into leading roles that transcended boundaries for Black actors in cinema. As did Poitier, Denzel’s turn at directing opened a new avenue for his acting career, appearing in most films he directed. These films include Antwone Fisher (2002), The Great Debaters (2007), Fences (2016), and A Journal for Jordan (2021).
38.
Forest Whitaker
Daniele Venturelli / WireImage
Forest Whitaker is an actor known for roles that call for a reserved intellectual. It’s surprising to find this calm and collected actor has a few directing credits under his belt in upbeat romantic comedies with his feature film debut Waiting to Exhale (1995), and other films Hope Floats (1998), and First Daughter (2004).
37.
Dee Rees
Rich Fury / Getty Images
Dee Rees makes films that specifically explore the identity of Black women. Her career began as a mentee of Spike Lee and evolved into a filmmaker unafraid to explore the taboo subjects of homosexuality for Black women, inspired by her own experiences. The stylistic LGBT must-see Pariah (2011) was the beginning of Rees creating a lane for more untold stories of lesbians in popular filmmaking. She continued female-forward storytelling with HBO’s Bessie (2011) and Mudbound (2017).
36.
Ossie Davis
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Ossie Davis is a household name in Black cinema known for starring alongside his equally talented wife, Ruby Dee, until his death. Many notable Black directors worked with Davis as an actor, revered amongst the community as an accomplished activist and pioneer. Like Melvin Van Peebles and Gordon Parks, he directed several movies that moved the culture forward, including Cotton Comes to Harlem (1970), Black Girl (1972), and Gordon’s War (1973).
35.
Tyler Perry
Danny Moloshok / Reuters
Tyler Perry is much more than a tall man, sometimes in a gray wig and floral mumu. Beyond playing the titular character Madea in most of his films, Perry wrote and produced stage plays for years before developing his feature films and television series. Now, he is one of the highest-paid men in entertainment with a 330-acre studio, one of the largest film studios in the United States. His most notable films include the Madea feature film series (2005–2022), For Colored Girls (2010), and television shows House of Payne (2007–2012, 2020–present), Sistas (2019–present), and The Oval (2019–present).
34.
Carl Franklin
Jeffrey Mayer / WireImage
Carl Franklin had a late start as a director, first getting into the acting business through theater, small films, and television. After returning to school in his late thirties, he went on to work with Roger Corman putting in the hours to become a notable crime thriller director. His best films include One False Move (1992), Devil in a Blue Dress (1995), and Out of Time (2003), both starring Academy Award winner Denzel Washington.
33.
Bill Duke
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Bill Duke by name might not ring a bell, but everyone will remember him as that guy who played a soldier or a cop. As an actor, Duke has portrayed many characters in film and television, most notably no-nonsense law enforcement or the military. As a director, Duke is responsible for several television episodes, including Cagney & Lacey, Dallas, and Miami Vice. For feature films, he directed crime dramas A Rage in Harlem (1991), Deep Cover (1992), and one of the best Whoopi Goldberg comedies, Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit (1993).
32.
Allen Hughes
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Allen Hughes is 1/2 of the sibling directing duo who made films about the Black experience at the height of ’90s Black cinema popularity. As a team, they focused on the actor’s experience and the technicality of filmmaking. Their first film together was Menace II Society (1993), which received great praise. Their following credits include Dead Presidents (1995), From Hell (2001), and TheBook of Eli (2010). As a solo director, Allen’s credits include New York, I Love You (2008), Broken City (2013), and the documentary, The Defiant Ones (2017).
Albert Hughes is the other half of the brother duo team focused on the Black experience with a few suspenseful depatures. As a team, they focused on the actor’s experience and the technicality of filmmaking. His solo credits include Alpha (2018), and The Good Lord Bird (2020).
30.
Tim Story
J. Countess / Getty Images
Timothy Story’s journey begins like many Black directors and then some. Not only was he a music video director, but he was also actually part of rapper Ice-T’s crew at one point. He sat at the helm for music videos for Jon. B, NSync, Jagged Edge, and India.Arie. His movies are quotable hits at the cookouts, including the original Barbershop (2002), Fantastic Four (2005), Think Like a Man (2012), Ride Along (2014), and the sequels for most of these movies.
29.
Reginald Hudlin
Jon Kopaloff / Getty Images for Amazon Studios
Reginald Hudlin is a game-changer for Black filmmakers, setting folks up across the board with his brother, Warrington Hudlin. Today, he is known for many films and productions, earning him some of the highest accolades, including producing the NAACP Image Awards, Primetime Emmy, and the 88th Academy Awards ceremony. The producer of Django Unchained (2012) had a directorial debut with the hilarious cult comedy, House Party (1990), Boomerang (1992), Bébé’s Kids (1992), and The Ladies Man (2000).
28.
Paris Barclay
Steve Granitz / FilmMagic
Paris Barclay is a heavyweight in the field of directing for television. The Emmy Award-winning director remains booked and busy with a new episode of your mama’s favorite binge-worthy prime-time TV show. Before he stepped over to the small screen, he first directed Don’t Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood (1996) for fellow Black director and producer, Keenen Ivory Wayans. To give you a taste of his TV credits, he’s directed episodes for, In Treatment, Sons of Anarchy, NYPD Blue, Cold Case, and Glee.
27.
Steve McQueen
Christian Mang / POOL/AFP via Getty Images
Sir Steve McQueen is a British filmmaker with the same name as that one actor who was like the Brad Pitt of the ’60s. This Steve isn’t an actor, but a master of the cinema known for the award-winning 12 Years a Slave (2013), a modern adaptation of Solomon Northup’s memoir, after being kidnapped and sold into slavery. McQueen has a wide range, telling gritty stories in his other films, Hunger (2008), Shame (2011), Widows (2018), and the TV anthology series, Small Axe.
Sidney Poitier reset the game when he temporarily exposed the broken system of award shows becoming the first Black man to win an Academy Award in 1964, and the only one until Denzel Washington almost 40 years later. Poitier was a successful comedy director working with comedians Richard Pryor and Bill Cosby in Uptown Saturday Night (1974), Let’s Do It Again (1975), Stir Crazy (1980), and Ghost Dad (1990).
25.
Malcolm D. Lee
Albert L. Ortega / Getty Images
Malcolm D. Lee might not be as well-known to the general public as his cousin, Spike Lee, but his films have established an exceptional standard in comedy in the Black community. Households everywhere ring out with laughter reciting iconic lines and unforgettable moments from movies like The Best Man (1999), Undercover Brother (2002), Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins (2008), and Girls Trip (2017).
Jordan was a household actor who took the reigns of Dave Chapelle along with his frequent collaborator Keegan-Michael Key and gave us years of comedic gold through the Key & Peele sketch comedy series. He shocked most audiences when he came out of nowhere with his directorial debut, Get Out (2017), earning four Academy Award nominations. All his directed films are written and produced by him, including Us (2019) and Nope, released in the summer of 2022.
Ryan Coolger is leading the charge of the newest generation of Black directors. As one of the youngest, he’s already on the radar of every prominent film critic and audience everywhere, beginning with his first feature-length film, Fruitvale Station (2013), starring Michael B. Jordan. He continued to work with Jordan in his following films Creed (2013) and Black Panther (2016), which became the highest-grossing films for a Black director.
22.
Ava DuVernay
Aude Guerrucci / Reuters
Ava DuVernay is the first Black woman nominated for a Golden Globe and Academy Award. As an award-winning filmmaker, DuVernay never shies away from reaching audiences with compelling stories that relate to the neglected stories of the Black community in a racist and unjust society throughout history. Her work spans film and television with Middle of Nowhere (2012), Selma (2014), the documentary feature film, 13th (2016), and When They See Us (2019).
21.
Barry Jenkins
Jesse Grant / Getty Images
Barry Jenkins is part of the newest generation of directors establishing a lane for themselves in a profession dominated by people who don’t look like him. Jenkins is a master of staying true to his stories’ historical and realistic nature while adding elements designed for the culture not used in popular cinema. He started with Medicine for Melancholy (2008) and followed up with the Academy Award-winning Moonlight (2016), one of the first major motion pictures to depict the homosexuality of Black men. He directed If Beale Street Could Talk (2018) to more critical acclaim and praise a few years later.
20.
Kasi Lemmons
Rodin Eckenroth / Getty Images,
Kasi Lemmons originally started as a character actor appearing in supporting roles in major films like The Silence of the Lambs (1991), Candyman (1992), and School Daze (1988). She stepped behind the camera for her directorial debut, Eve’s Bayou (1997), starring Samuel L. Jackson, Lynn Whitfield, and Jurnee Smollett. She made a few lesser-known films until stepping back into the limelight with the 2019 biographical film, Harriet, starring Cynthia Erivo as the abolitionist and American hero, Harriet Tubman.
19.
Ice Cube
Tim Mosenfelder / Getty Images
Oshea Jackson, known as Ice Cube, is one of the most accomplished rappers in music history, but his work didn’t stop in the studio. In John Singleton’s directorial debut, Boyz n the Hood, getting in front of the camera opened doors for Jackson to crossover to film production. He continued acting and eventually dropped some of the most popular franchises, including Friday (1995), Barbershop (2002), and Are We There Yet? (2005). He technically only has one feature film directing credit to his name with The Player’s Club (1998), but his overall work is enough to earn him a shoutout.
18.
Mario Van Peebles
Stefani Reynolds / AFP via Getty Images
Mario Van Peebles is a prime example of the apple not falling too far from the tree. Peebles followed in his father’s footsteps and became a successful actor, starring in films with his father since he was a little kid. Now, you can catch Mario Van Peebles popping up in TV shows and movies every other year. The directing credits include New Jack City (1991), Posse (1993), Panther (1995), and Baadasssss! (2003), and Armed (2018).
17.
Antoine Fuqua
Tommaso Boddi / Getty Images for Heart of Los Angeles
Like many other great Black directors, Antoine Fuqua started directing music videos for artists like Toni Braxton, Prince, and Stevie Wonder. Fuqua’s talents in music video production crossed over into his film directing with high-octane action or thrilling stories of underdogs. His first feature films, The Replacement Killers (1998) and Bait (2000), starring Jamie Foxx, are lesser-known. 2001’s Training Day starring Denzel Washington in his Academy-award performance, put Fuqua on everyone’s radar. Following, he continued dropping hits like Tears of the Sun (2003), Shooter (2007), and 2014’s Equalizer and its sequel.
16.
Marlon Riggs
As revistas de programação de JUNHO nos Cinemas do IMS Rio/SP. Com Marlon Riggs Mantas Kvedaravičius Maria Augusta Ramos Radu Jean Xadalu Tupã Jekupé Everlane Moraes Daniel Bandeira Emily Jacir José Mojica Marins Pedro Costa Jorge Furtado Eliane Café https://t.co/UOVOf0LaYB
Marlon Riggs is a filmmaker and gay rights activist telling stories of the intersectionality of the Black experience and sexuality. During the height of the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s, Riggs challenged ridicule and ignorance to present positive images of Black culture and highlight the unfortunate taboo relationship of romance between Black men with his documentary filmmaking. Even today, the culture struggles to find a unified voice on topics involving the Black community and sexuality, as seen in response to artists like Megan Thee Stallion or Lil Nas X. His documentary work includes Ethnic Notions (1987), an examination of the struggles from the antebellum period to the Civil Rights movement, and Tongues Untied (1989), a portrait of the battle of Black gay men within the heterosexual and white gay society.
15.
Julie Dash
elenarossini.com / This Is What A Film Director Looks Like @ThisIsWhatAFilmDirLooksLike / Via giphy.com
Julie Dash is one of the many great Black filmmakers to study film at UCLA, along with directors like Haile Gerima and Charles Burnett, known as the LA Rebellion. Following several shorts, her feature film Daughters of the Dust (1991) was the first wide-released, full-length film directed by a Black woman. The movie told the stories of women in the southeastern Black community of the United States. She also directed movies for television, including The Rosa Parks Story (2002), Funny Valentines (1999), and the popular ’90s Tracy Chapman music video “Give Me One Reason” (1996).
14.
Gina Prince-Bythewood
Valerie Macon / AFP via Getty Images
Gina Prince-Bythewood spent years as a writer on popular TV shows like A Different World and South Central before stepping into the directing game with her debut feature, Love & Basketball (2000), a Black love story using the game of Basketball as the backdrop for tumultuous love and reconciliation. She went on to create a few more films and continued to direct and write for television shows like Felicity, The Bernie Mac Show, and Girlfriends. Her films include The Secret Life of Bees (2008), The Old Guard (2020), and the upcoming movie starring Viola Davis as the general of the Dahomey Amazons, The Woman King (2022).
13.
Ernest Dickerson
Kevin Winter / Getty Images for Deadline Hollywood
Ernest Dickerson is an accomplished cinematographer and frequent collaborator with director Spike Lee since their time as classmates at the Tisch School of the Arts. Lee’s films’ iconic dolly shots and cinematic style are a credit to Dickerson’s skill. Dickerson is known for his blend of action and horror films, including the Black ’90s masterpiece, Juice (1992), Demon Knight (1995), and many episodes of award-winning television like The Wire, Dexter, The Walking Dead, and Godfather of Harlem.
12.
Charles Burnett
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Charles Burnett is not as well-known as other Black directors in Hollywood, but his contribution to the art is nothing short of legendary. Getting his start as an amateur filmmaker with his UCLA classmates, he created feature films, documentaries, shorts, and TV movies, focusing on the emotional themes of the working class Black family and Black liberation. His most famous work includes Killer of Sheep (1978), To Sleep with Anger (1990), The Glass Shield (1994), and the made-for-TV Disney film Selma, Lord, Selma (1999), starring a young Jurnee Smollett.
F. Gary Gray might not be a household name outside Black neighborhoods, but everyone is familiar with his work. He began as a notable music video director, including “Ms. Jackson” by Outkast, “Waterfalls” by TLC, and “It Was a Good Day” by Ice Cube. He would team up again with Ice Cube for his directorial debut Friday (1995), which set off decades of successful films like The Italian Job (2003), Law Abiding Citizen (2009), Straight Outta Compton (2015), and one of the highest-grossing films of all time, The Fate of the Furious (2017).
10.
Keenen Ivory Wayans
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Keenen Ivory Wayans is the second oldest of the 10 Wayans siblings (who, for the most part, all work in entertainment), including his brothers Damon, Shawn, and Marlon, his nephew, Damon Jr., and his sister Kim. He is a master of comedy creating In Living Color (1990–94) a variety show similar to Saturday Night Live for people of color. Along with his friend Robert Townsend, he co-wrote Hollywood Shuffle (1987), beginning a legacy of some of the most popular comedies and spoofs in film history, including I’m Gonna Git You Sucka (1988), Scary Movie (2000), and Scary Movie 2 (2001).
Gordon Parks Jr. is the son of celebrated director and photojournalist, Gordon Parks. Jr directed a few films before his untimely death including Superfly (1972), Three The Hard Way (1974), and Aaron Love Angela (1975).
Robert Townsend is an established comedian who produced, wrote, and directed the satirical comedy, Hollywood Shuffle, with fellow funnyman and colleague, Keenen Ivory Wayans. It’s hard to believe that Saturday Night Live could reject a multi-hyphenate of such talent, but that didn’t matter because he went on to direct the iconic stand-up special for the man who got the SNL spot, Eddie Murphy Raw (1987). A few other Townsend gems that are must-sees include The Five Heartbeats (1991), The Meteor Man (1993), B*A*P*S* (1997), and the ’90s TV sitcom, The Parent ‘Hood (1995–99).
7.
Kathleen Collins
Kathleen Collins’ (1942-1988) film LOSING GROUND (1982) was one of the first narrative feature films directed by a Black woman to be released in the U.S.
@jasminprix interviewed Collins’ daughter, Nina Lorez Collins, about preserving her mother’s legacy: https://t.co/PN1py8SqHN
Kathleen Collins was a brilliant writer, filmmaker, educator, and civil rights activist who fought for Black voting rights. She authored many types of creative work, including screenplays, poetry, and stage plays, many of which found notoriety after she died from breast cancer in 1988. Collins’s work paved the way for the Black women directors of today. Her features The Cruz Brothers and Miss Malloy (1980) and Losing Ground (1982) will go down in film history as a stepping stone for the culture and women’s cinema.
John Singleton is a Los Angeles native director who adapted his own experiences as a Black man to tell a story of a community once ignored by popular cinema. At 25 years old, his first directorial debut with Boyz n the Hood (1991) earned him an Academy Award nomination making him the youngest and first Black person to be nominated. The late John Singleton’s legacy includes the films Poetic Justice (1993), Rosewood (1997), Baby Boy (2001), and the iconic 1992 Michael Jackson music video, “Remember the Time.”
5.
William Greaves
Bryan Bedder / Getty Images
Williams Greaves is a documentary filmmaker that once studied with the greats like Marlon Brando, Anthony Quinn, and Julie Harris. He wasn’t here to be put in a box, like most Black actors, and used his creative talents as a way to tell the stories of the Civil Rights movement and the Black community. Through his work, like Emmy-award winning Black Journal, he went from hosting to producing shows for the Black community by the Black community. His avant-garde, non-fiction work set the tone for many to follow with titles such as Wealth of a Nation (1964), Ali, the Fighter (1975), and Frederick Douglass: An American Life (1985).
4.
Melvin Van Peebles
Barbara Alper / Getty Images
Melvin Van Peebles could be considered one of the godfathers of Black cinema. He was in the game for over 60 years until his death in 2021. When it was a struggle for a Black director to be taken seriously, Peebles brought attention to the blaxploitation genre. He mastered the adaptation of literature and theater into a film. His decades of work include The Story of a Three-Day Pass (1967), Watermelon Man (1970), Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971), and Lilly Done the Zampoughi Every Time I Pulled Her Coattail (2012).
3.
Oscar Micheaux
John Kisch Archive / Getty Images
Oscar Micheaux is one of the first prominent Black filmmakers in cinematic history. Micheaux is the son of a Kentucky enslaved person, with his film work dating back to the silent film era. In a time critical to exist as a Black man, Micheaux wrote a series of novels speaking of his oppressive experiences in America. His groundbreaking work would become adapted into a film and tell stories of the Black experience commonly ignored or mocked in cinema at this time. His movies like Within Our Gates (1920), Body and Soul (1925), and The House Behind the Cedars (1927) created “controversy” in a time when the existence of Black people in America was at its worst and broke barriers allowing Black creatives to tell the truthful stories of today.
Spike Lee is one of the most prolific American directors who pulled no punches when discussing racism, crime, poverty, and colorism in the Black community. His stylistic filmmaking and culturally significant “Spike Lee Joints” became top-rated films in cinematic history. Through his production company, 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks, he has produced critically acclaimed films, including Do the Right Thing (1989), Malcolm X (1992), Inside Man (2006), BlacKkKlansman (2018), and Da 5 Bloods (2020).
1.
Gordon Parks
San Francisco Chronicle / Hearst Newspapers via Getty Images
Gordon Parks Sr. is a revered United States documentary photojournalist with a catalog of the most compelling photographs depicting Black life throughout the 1940s -1970s. Once Parks entered the game of motion pictures, it was over for the mediocre. As one of the first Black producers of motion pictures, he established what would be known as the “blaxploitation” genre. As a director, he is known for Shaft (1971), starring Richard Roundtree.
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Discovery+ U.K. has landed two of the most high-profile legal figures involved in the Johnny Depp vs. Amber Heard defamation trial for its next doc-series about the court battles between the former married couple.
Camille Vasquez and Benjamin G. Chew, who represented Depp, are set to appear in the second series of Johnny vs. Amber, which will feature extensive testimonies and interviews with the lawyers, alongside representatives from Heard’s side.
Commissioned by Discovery+ U.K. and announced late last month, the two-part doc series is a follow-up to the first Johnny vs. Amber, which explored Depp’s 2020 defamation trial in the U.K. High Court. This time, the focus will be on the recent defamation trial in Fairfax County, Virginia, which eventually would award Depp $10 million in compensatory damages and $5 million in punitive damages from Heard. Looking at extensive evidence and the testimonies of both parties, each episode will present one side of the argument through legal teams, friends, family and key witnesses.
Also unveiled as part of Discovery+’s vs. format are Coleen vs. Rebekah and Britney vs. Jamie. Coleen vs Rebekah will focus on the recent U.K. court battle between high-profile soccer players’ wives Coleen Rooney and Rebekah Vardy, which became known as the “Wagatha Christie Trial” in the British press and arose after Rooney publicly accused Vardy of leaking stories about her to the tabloids. Britney vs Jamie, meanwhile, will look at the suspension of the 13-year and highly controversial conservatorship held by Jamie Spears over his daughter Britney Spears, examining the truth behind the headlines, accusations and a very public family feud.
“When we commissioned Johnny vs. Amber for Discovery+, we knew that we were tackling a very sensitive case but one with huge global profile and interest that would resonate with our audience,” said Clare Laycock, senior vp planning and insights, head of Entertainment, Warner Bros. Discovery UK. “Since it premiered in December last year, Johnny vs. Amber has been one of the most successful unscripted discovery+ Originals, currently the number 1 acquisition driver in the UK as well topping engagement figures and traveling globally across the US, EMEA and our wider international markets.”
Another speedster has raced onto The Flash: Kausar Mohammed (4400), who this Tuesday night debuted as Dr. Meena Dhawan, is set to recur on the CW series, our sister site Deadline reports.
Mohammed made her debut at the tail end of this week’s episode, in which the mysterious new Central City speedster Barry was investigating turned out to be Dr. Dhawan, a “genius” scientist whom he instantly recognized after The Flash cornered her and led her to unmask herself. Meena explained that her recently acquired superspeed was not “natural” like The Flash’s but attained using sodium nitrate cells (or something). The Flash happily offered to be a mentor to Dr. Dhawan, whose speedster persona will be “Fast Track.”
Speaking of speedsters….
A promo for next Wednesday’s antepenultimate episode revealed that Arrowverse alum Matt Letscher will return as some form of the OG Eobard Thawne, who apparently is Dr. Shaman’s esteemed associate.
Letscher last visited the Arrowverse during Legends of Tomorrow‘s final season, when Sara Lance encountered Eobard in 1914 at the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. (Eobard explained to her that the Time Wraiths had stripped him of his powers and assigned him to protect a fixed point in history.)
Check out the promo below, then hit the comments with your theories!
Hugh Laurie is of course well known as a multi-Emmy-nominated actor, notably in long-running series House among other things. But he also is an increasingly accomplished force behind the camera too, and demonstrates that again in a new take on Agatha Christie’s Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? for which he wrote the screenplay, directed, executive produced and even appears as Dr. Nicholson. The Britbox show stars Will Poulter and Lucy Boynton and is full of the kind of things Christie fans flock towards; even if it is not as well known as say the Hercule Poirot books, it is still an example of why Christie never goes out of style.
Based on the iconic 1934 Christie novel, this limited-run mystery follows the local Vicar’s son Bobby Jones (Poulter) and his whip-smart friend, socialite Lady Frances “Frankie” Derwent (Boynton) on their crime-solving adventure after they discover the crumpled body of a dying man who, with his last breath, gasps the cryptic question of the title. Armed only with a photograph of a young woman found in the dead man’s pocket, the amateur detectives pursue, and are pursued by, the answer to the mystery.
Laurie and Boynton joined me for a screening at Deadline’s Virtual Screening Series on Tuesday night which was followed by a conversation that you can watch in the video above. Laurie explained why he warmed to the challenge of making this compelling entertainment for a new generation.
“I didn’t fully appreciate how much of a challenge it would be. I was just motivated by a sort of almost childish enthusiasm for the story, for the character that Lucy plays, for the devious puzzle at the center of the novel, and just the world of it. The world that Agatha Christie created, I think…I happen to think that this novel is unusual. Well, it’s unique, I think, in as much as the novel has a sort of lighter, comic spirit to it,” he said. “I don’t particularly detect as much in the Poirot stories, which were immensely successful, up to the point when she wrote this in 1934, and it must’ve baffled her…her publisher and her agent must’ve been tearing their hair out when she said I don’t want to do another Poirot. I’m going to leave that and do this, but I absolutely love the story for that reason. Actually, I think there’s something hip about it. I think it’s they’re hip characters, and it’s a hip story.”
Laurie also talked about the difficulty of actually taking this out to locations all over England and Wales, a rather herculean task for the crew to be sure, but right for the project.
“Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?” Madison Stevens
“Well, I think it added greatly to the story. I think it’s one of the…the movement of the story is very much a part of the atmosphere of it. They are actually…these two characters are following a trail, and they are literally following a trail. They’re actually going A, B, C, D, and going from place to place. Logistically, practically speaking, it made it an incredibly challenging thing to do because almost every day, we were moving location, and that’s incredibly hard on everybody,” he said. “They’ve got to set everything up every single day in a new place. I have absolutely no empathy at all for people working under me, so I didn’t care about that, but it did make it very hard for them, but whereas if, obviously, you’re making a single story in a single location, you know, you could settle down. You could park the gear. You know where everything is. You know, you have everything to hand. Whereas we were very much a traveling circus, which was…as I said, it was good and bad. It was hard to do, but I think good for the story.”
As for Boynton, who has a choice role in the project, she was particularly excited to work with Laurie and says being directed by someone who is also an actor is a plus.
“I think it kind of changes the way that you communicate about the project as a whole, but especially the characters, and what I loved was how much Hugh loves these characters, and so, immediately, you feel in safer hands because there’s this care and consideration for the accuracy of the portrayal, but also making sure that life and electricity that is so present in the character is constantly being brought, day to day, to each scene. And so knowing that that is being protected kind of allows you, as the actor, I think greater freedom to play within that,” she said. “And it changes the dynamic, as well, in that I think speaking to another actor, you kind of end up going from the inside out of a sense. So, rather than having the kind of external perspective that a director does of the entire tapestry, there is that, but also this intimate understanding of the way that you find a character in each moment in the scene, and that’s very much from the emotional core of them. So, to know that that was being covered was also, yeah, safe hands, but it was a lot of fun.”
Check out the interview in the video above. Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? is now streaming on Britbox.
For reviewers, it’s become a cliché when writing about a soft-pedaled, fan-service pop-star documentary to refer to it as an infomercial. The cliché isn’t always wrong. On occasion, I’ve used the I-word. But one reason that I stopped using is it seemed too easy — and also, I couldn’t help but notice that I was enjoying (and a getting a lot out of) certain music docs that were unabashed celebrations of their subject, even if they didn’t take the deepest dive or linger on the dark side. As a Billie Eilish fan, I went into “Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry” already knowing a lot about her; two hours and 20 minutes later, I emerged knowing a lot more, feeling closer to her process and her mystique. Ditto for “Gaga: Five Foot Two.”
So when I say that “Halftime,” the Jennifer Lopez documentary that opened the Tribeca Film Festival tonight (it’s being released June 14 on Netflix), truly does feel like an infomercial, I’m not using the term in a knee-jerk way. I’m using it because the film really is one.
Another thing a music doc will sometimes get called is a glorified “Behind the Music” episode. But if you watched a “Behind the Music” episode about Jennifer Lopez, it would probably deliver her backstory more vividly than Amanda Micheli’s movie does. From its first hanging-out-with-Jennifer-Lopez-as-she-self-actualizes scene to its very last, “Halftime” is a resounding celebration of J.Lo’s pride, her power, her tenacity, her wide-ranging talent, her Jenny-from-the-block grit, her commanding media image, her crossover passion, and her showbiz triumphs. These are things that should be celebrated, and Lopez, for all the fervor of her hard-won faith, has just enough flickers of self-doubt that the film’s spotlight on her achievements never becomes obnoxious. She’s got a right to crow and the charisma to make us want to crow along with her.
But the film’s obsession with her as an icon of success gives “Halftime” a naggingly unvarying, present-tense quality. There are no interviews with anyone but her family, friends, and closest associates — her producing partner Elaine Goldsmith-Thomas, her manager Benny Medina, her music director and choreographer. And while there are occasional dips into the past (her star-is-born moment with “Selena” in 1997, her debut as a beaming Fly Girl on “In Living Color,” the video for “Waiting for Tonight” — which, believe it or not, is about all we see of her as a pop star), “Halftime” mostly takes us behind the scenes of her recent career-capping highlights: the acclaim she received for “Hustlers,” after 20 years of featherweight comedies that were popular but critically derided; the awards-season train that “Hustlers” put her on; and, of course, her invitation to do the halftime show at Super Bowl LIV on February 2, 2020.
The film opens at Lopez’s family birthday party in July 2019, when she turned 50, and then basically follows her over the next six months, as she puts the halftime show together. Along the way, will she succeed in winning her very first Golden Globe award? (She’s nominated, for the first time since “Selena,” for best supporting actress for “Hustlers.”) Will she finally get that Oscar nomination? And what about the fact that she has to share the 12-to-14-minute Super Bowl halftime slot with Shakira, as if the executives in charge had decided that one Latina superstar wasn’t enough?
If you’re a fan of J. Lo, or even if you’re just a casual observer, none of this is the stuff of high documentary drama. What we feel, instead, is the ongoing meshing of her talent and image and ambition — the dancer who became an actress who became a singer (though she’d always wanted to do all three). “Halftime” justly salutes Lopez’s pride in her achievements, but it’s every bit as much a salute to her brand management.
She’s accompanied, throughout the film, by her 14-year-old daughter, but if you want to know anything — I mean, really, just a crumb! — about the complexities of her personal life, you won’t find it here, because the film views that entire arena with the same distaste that it brushes off the subject of Lopez as a fixture of the tabloids. Yet her romance with Ben Affleck — or, more to the point, the way that it was covered — actually marked a change in the culture, a ratcheting up of gossip mania to the nth power. So it seems odd for her, and for the movie, to dismiss it as not worth talking about.
The sections of the film that deal with the awards circuit are inadvertently revealing, since the way to campaign for awards is to telegraph that you don’t want it too much — but J.Lo puts her desire for accolades on the front burner. She’s the new queen of “You like me, you really like me!” and also its dark twin: “Oh, God, you don’t really like me at all!” There’s something very Age of TikTok about how brazenly she confesses to wanting these kudos — though the fact that she’s “representing” is never far from the equation. A guru would say: She’d get awards more if she wanted them less. “Hustlers,” no doubt, was an ambitious drama that was daunting for the women who made it to push through the system, yet there’s still a stage-managed aspect to the way that Lopez sees her characters. She’s a powerful actress; if she allowed herself to go into free-fall with a director who tapped an unexpected side of her, there’s no telling what she could do.
The halftime show is, of course, a triumph. It was one of the most accomplished ever, because the Super Bowl halftime is a form that Jennifer Lopez was put on earth to rule. She acted through her dancing (and drew on her “Hustlers” pole-dancing iconography). The film also captures how she waged a battle with the network brass over whether she could, in the show, make an Age of Trump political statement about border immigrants kept in cages. They wanted the cages out; she fought to keep them in — and won. In “Halftime,” Jennifer Lopez fails to get an Oscar nomination, but apart from that she never doesn’t triumph. That’s her triumph. But it makes you wish that she’d leave room in her persona for something other than winning.
California-inspired restaurants and cuisine are blooming across the Atlantic. In London alone, several California chefs have planted roots in the last year. European cooks are also embracing California cuisine in their own ways by combining it with local tastes.
The Times spoke to cooks and restaurant owners in several European cities to get their takes on how California is influencing the food world.
Responses have been edited for length and clarity.
What is “California” when it comes to food?
Victor Garvey outside SOLA Soho
(Alice Zoo / For The Times)
Californian food is an ethos. It’s a philosophy. It’s about less butter, less cream, using produce only when it’s in season. It’s about lighter sauces, lighter preparations. It’s about delicate touch on things. It’s about bold, in-your-face flavors, but also balancing that with subtlety.
– Victor Garvey, owner and chef of SOLA Soho, a California-inspired tasting menu restaurant in London
—
California cuisine is the fluidity of cultures. Los Angeles has such an amazing amount of people coming from all over that have brought all of their secrets and passions for the food they grew up with. It’s not defined by one specific spice or type of food.
California cuisine is incredibly produce-driven. The access to produce year around is just breathtaking. In Los Angeles, I also learned a lot about fermentation and how to preserve foods. Even though you get access to beautiful produce year round, you might want the tartness of an unripe strawberry in November. How do you capture that moment?
– Mailea Weger, formerly of Gjusta in Venice, was the chef of Echo, a California-inspired cafe in Paris. She recently opened a pop-up with California and Southern influences in Paris at the Hôtel Grand Amour.
When I think of California, I think of healthy, good lifestyle food. Protein-rich, creative and delicious. But then, of course, also classic fast food, like In-N-Out’s burger, which I absolutely love.
– Pete Szymik, co-owner of Heppy Green in Frankfurt, Germany
Chef Nancy Silverton is behind Osteria Mozza and Pizzeria Mozza.
(Mariah Tauger)
Fresh, local and seasonal ingredients that are simply prepared to promote those ingredients — not to mask them.
– Nancy Silverton, co-owner of Pizzeria Mozza in Los Angeles and Newport Beach as well as Osteria Mozza, Mozza2Go and chi SPACCA in Los Angeles. Pizzeria Mozza recently opened in London while Osteria Mozza recently launched in Singapore.
Chef Kris Yenbamroong, owner of Night + Market, outside his art gallery next door to his restaurant in Venice.
(Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times)
As the late, great Jonathan Gold pointed out, L.A is the anti-melting pot. It has distinct communities that have food traditions that are true and traditional that are un-messed with. I always thought it was an interesting take.
There is also a feeling or mood or sensibility that is beyond food-specific. It’s so many things. It’s the proximity to the ocean. It’s the surf and skate culture. It’s the movie history. It’s Hollywood.
– Kris Yenbamroong, owner and chef of Night + Market restaurants in L.A. He also has a pop-up called Chet’s open in London, which will move to a permanent location in the city by the end of 2022.
Tom Kerridge outside of the Hand and Flowers in Marlow, U.K.
Over the years, certain areas of American cuisine have been driven by produce and terroir.
Britain has moved forward and has started really embracing outdoor style cookery with the increase in fire pits, use of coals and BBQ. It’s a skill set and flavor profile that has been honed to perfection in the USA, and many British chefs look to the U.S. for inspiration.
– Tom Kerridge, British chef and owner of several restaurants, including the Hand and Flowers, an upscale pub in Marlow, U.K.
—
It all goes back to two iconic restaurants: Spago in Los Angeles and Chez Panisse in Berkeley. Wolfgang Puck had and still has restaurants all over the world that can truly be called California cuisine. – S. Irene Virbila, former restaurant critic for The Times
—
Jesse Burgess, left, and Will Warr.
The U.S. and U.K. have this innate love and obsession for one another. We have shops here that sell exclusively American food. Shops from the U.S. that come here have a head-start. There is just a love of American restaurants and products in the U.K.
– Jesse Burgess and Will Warr, creators of Top Jaw, a popular London-based food series on YouTube
—
I love the color. All the light you have. It’s very bright. There’s an energy in L.A. To me, the food scene in Los Angeles is better than Miami and New York.
In Paris you have to spend a lot of money to eat well. The corner bistros are not great. Everything is frozen. Not very good products. Not very good cooks. Sure, you can go to some very fine bistros that will have amazing food, of course. But that is harder to find.
In L.A., I have a great lunch and dinner every day.
– Guillaume Guedj, founder of Mr. T, a bistro in Paris. He moved to Los Angeles and will open his first location of Mr. T outside France in Hollywood this summer.
What attracts you to California cuisine?
Montecito chef Nicolas Pastot
(Thomas Deron)
There is a growing demand for healthy, responsible and sustainable cuisine. This is even more true since the COVID-19 pandemic. People are more and more attracted to knowing what is in their plates and the sustainability of the ingredients.
As a chef, I deliver a sustainable cuisine that highlights the work of producers. A cuisine that puts the emphasis on raw products. It corresponds well with the idea of a Californian restaurant.
– Chef Nicolas Pastot of Montecito, which opened in Paris in 2021
I’ve had so many holidays in California. I love the California way. The palm trees, the sunshine, the people, the food. Everything about California is so, so nice.
So I decided to name my place California Bean. I just wanted to bring a California feeling — something light, something cool — into Germany.
– Evelyn Mueller, owner of California Bean in Munich. The restaurant serves pancakes, sandwiches and burgers inspired by Mueller’s travels to California.
—
In 2017, we decided to create something completely different from what was being offered in Slovenia at that time. We noticed that California already had a richly developed healthy food scene, so we decided we have to make something in that spirit.
Slovenian food is known to be heavy, based on potato dishes and meats. Knowing that California has a culture that is also influenced by Hawaii, we looked into what kind of foods are popular in both states. We took inspiration from that and added our own twist.
Since we’ve started opening franchises, our long term goal is to someday have a Tink Superfood restaurant open in California.
– Tina Rakus, cofounder of Tink Superfood in Ljubljana, Slovenia
In Italy, we have amazing food and are very attached to our tradition. But, especially in some big cities, people have become very curious about new tastes and new experiences.
Fancytoast has a California vibe — happiness and dynamism inspired by the West Coast. Focused on the concept of stuffed open toast, Fancytoast pays attention to details as San Francisco and L.A. bakeries do. People and taste first is our motto.
– Federica Sala, co-founder of Fancytoast, a restaurant in Milan offering its own take on avocado toast and more
—
In terms of produce, L.A. and California are second to none. I remember coming to L.A., and the produce was just mind-blowing. Why would you go anywhere else? Why would you need to fly things across the world if you’ve got this at your doorstep? Just the abundance was breathtaking.
But good food and good produce is not something that originates anywhere. It belongs everywhere to everybody. You can find that cuisine wherever you go.
– Jonathan Woolway, chef director at St. John in London, which had plans to open a Culver City location before the pandemic.
Amazon’s superhero series “The Boys” got a little more super(natural) in its Season 3 debut on Friday with the introduction of Jensen Ackles to the cast in the role of Soldier Boy. His arrival on the series marked a reunion for Ackles and “The Boys” showrunner Eric Kripke, as Kripke is also the creator of The CW’s “Supernatural,” which starred Ackles and Jared Padalecki as brothers Dean and Sam Winchester throughout its 15-season run.
So now that Ackles has made his way from one Kripke show to another, is there any chance we’ll see his on-screen brother drop by for a cameo either in the currently airing third season or the yet-to-be-picked-up-but-definitely-a-safe-bet Season 4?
“I would love a Jared cameo! He’s always welcome on the show,” Kripke told Variety. “Up to now, the guy is on a network show that has however many episodes — like, a lot more than eight. So he’s working all year and now he’s producing his spinoff and he’s got a whole empire going on over there. He’s been a busy man. And it’s been hard to even figure out any time that he’s free. But if he was free and found himself currently unemployed, I would put him on ‘The Boys’ in a heartbeat.”
Ackles is just as game as Kripke, and just like Kripke, notes that his longtime friend and former co-star is still pretty busy at The CW. Currently, Padalecki is starring on the network’s “Walker” and executive producing its prequel series, “Walker: Independence.”
“As I think we all know, Jared’s pretty busy starring in his own show, producing a spinoff of that show,” Ackles said. “He’s certainly got his hands full.”
Ackles also has a lot on his plate, with his part on “The Boys” Season 3, as well as an upcoming series regular role on ABC’s “Big Sky.” He’s also executive producing The CW’s “Supernatural” prequel series, “The Winchesters.” (Yes, neither Padalecki nor Ackles can escape the power of The CW.)
“He and I laugh,” Ackles said. “We were just talking about the fact that we thought after ‘Supernatural,’ things would be smooth sailing and we would just be sitting back with umbrella drinks. And it has proved to be the complete opposite of that. He and I thought we would be on a beach with our toes in the sand, and instead we’re both IndyCar racers just kind of gripping the steering wheel for dear life.”
While there won’t be a Padalecki cameo on “The Boys” for the foreseeable future, Kripke promises he and his team have found a few ways to work “Supernatural” nods into Ackles’ time on screen.
“There’s little ‘Supernatural’ Easter eggs in a bunch of Jensen’s scenes,” Kripke said. “When you think of the amount of people on this show on the creative team who come from ‘Supernatural’ — me, [executive producer and director] Phil Sgriccia, Jensen, [composer] Christopher Lennertz, we sort of couldn’t help but drop some stuff in because that show was such a huge part of our lives. We couldn’t resist just a few things here and there. Small things, but enough that the fans will see a little wink from us of what we’re doing.”
I think we’ve seen time and time again that when you have a company that has captured control over a key artery of commerce, that control can be used unlawfully. That was partly what animated the passage of the antitrust laws where Congress recognized that the dominance of the railroads and their control over key arteries of commerce was really allowing these small number of companies to pick winners and losers in our economy to shape the trajectory of innovation.
Those are the same types of principles that we are considering, and that’s animating our work now.
Instead of blocking or approving deals, you’ve sent some letters to companies saying if they close their deals, they are doing so at the risk of your agency coming back to block them later. Should we expect you to revisit deals that have closed?
We have 30 days after parties make a filing with us to determine if we’re going to do a deep-dive investigation. Thirty days is an extremely short amount of time when you have deals that are so large and that are so complicated. And so there are going to be instances, especially when you have the type of surge in merger filings that we did last year, that by the end of the 30 days our staff has not faithfully been able to come to a clear determination.
And so in those instances, we signaled the parties were needed, that our investigation is ongoing, and they shouldn’t take the lapse of that expiration period as a sign of somehow the F.T.C. approving the deal.
We retain the authority and the ability to challenge consummations after the fact. Our inaction is never signaling that we approve a deal.
Can your work really rein in tech, which often outpaces rule-making and policy?A lot of the work that we’ve done has really broadened the aperture for how we’re understanding and recognizing and diagnosing harm. We’re really trying to be forward looking, anticipating problems and taking swift action, rather than just, you know, 10 years down the line realizing, oh, there was a big problem and a big moment that we missed.
I think this goes back to being attentive to these next-generation technologies and next-generation innovations in nascent industries across sectors. Those can really help us tackle problems at the inception. What do you make of a recent survey of agency employees that shows lower morale?
That’s something that I take incredibly seriously. I’ll say as a general matter, you know, this is a moment of incredible change at the agency, and we know that moments of change can be difficult.
In May, Jeremy Strong and Anne Hathaway dazzled the Croisette as they appeared on the red carpet of the Cannes Film Festival to promote their roles in James Gray’s critically hailed new film “Armageddon Time.” Two weeks prior, though, they are together in New York discussing their small-screen work. Strong has reached new heights of acting as Kendall Roy, the abandoned and confused scion of a media dynasty, on the third season of HBO’s “Succession.” (He already has an Emmy on the shelf for his work on the series.) Elsewhere in the universe of broken-spirited corporate animals, Hathaway played Rebekah Neumann, first lady of a doomed co-working company, on Apple TV+’s “WeCrashed.” The pair, who first met on the set of the 2019 film “Serenity,” launch right into conversation about shared memories and their mutual passion for the craft on Variety’s “Actors on Actors,” presented by Apple TV+.
JEREMY STRONG: We’ve never sat down and talked about acting. Doing creative work and talking about creative work are separate universes.
ANNE HATHAWAY: I find talking about creative work to be something that I’m still not entirely comfortable with. I’m still in a place where I’m so focused on being an actor — getting the jobs, developing the material. Making the time to sit down and talk about the process, it feels intimate in a way that I’m still figuring out if I’m even comfortable doing.
STRONG: Me too.
HATHAWAY: So let’s figure it out together here.
STRONG: Preparing for this, I went back and watched a lot of your body of work.
HATHAWAY: I’m just trying to imagine you watching “The Princess Diaries.”
STRONG: I didn’t rewatch “The Princess Diaries.”
HATHAWAY: “Rewatch.” You’re good.
STRONG: I think we both feel that the virtues of commitment and courage are ones to be aspired to. And I see your work and I’m blown away by the versatility of it, but also the courageousness and the investment.
HATHAWAY: The thing that I’ve noticed as our friendship has deepened, and one of the reasons why I’m so grateful that it turned out that we’re pals, is it’s so wonderful to know that you do it with your whole soul. That you do it with everything that you have. I know how extraordinary your brain is and the way that you are able to recall quotes and verse seemingly effortlessly. It feels so much more exciting to know that right now, in this particular moment where there’s a lot of chaos going on, there’s somebody out there who just wants to be an actor and who takes it really seriously, and who has built their life in the exploration of what that means. And it’s really happening for you. You’re being revealed as one of our great actors. My first question is, what did you tell yourself during those years when you were building it, before you had this really beautiful cosmic explosion?
STRONG: It’s the central question. What keeps us going, despite any lack of evidence that we’ll have the chances to do the work that we want to do? I don’t know the answer. I think it was just the need to do this and the feeling that it’s something worth devoting one’s life to. I don’t know if it was apocryphal — if you really were the ninth choice for “The Devil Wears Prada.” But that ninth-choice feeling, whether or not it is the case, I find that it’s a great engine. I remember you saying something once about Vivien Leigh and how she would crawl across broken glass if she thought it would serve the scene. This character, this show is such a gift. It’s the mountain I’ve always wanted to climb.
HATHAWAY: We were shooting together when you found out that you’d gotten cast?
STRONG: Right, on “Serenity.” I think I had done the pilot and I found out that we were going to make the show.
HATHAWAY: You are known for your immersive process, and I remember seeing you while we were on the beautiful island of Mauritius, walking around so deep in character. And I remember one time sidling up to you and saying, “Listen, I completely respect what you’re doing, but I also want to be a human. So I’m going to just be wide open, if you ever want to talk.” And you just nodded, because you were so deep in your character. A few weeks later, I remember you just appearing next to me, and you said, “I think I need to come up for air.” And you came over for dinner and it was so fun. We talked about life. You remember what we drank that night?
STRONG: We drank Penny Blue rum.
HATHAWAY: A lot of it. And you told me about “Succession” and it sounded great. But it’s a show about the legacy of abuse. That is so much to carry, especially on a multiple-season series. How do you chart a character over multiple seasons when you don’t exactly know what’s coming? Do you crawl across broken glass? Now that you’ve done it three times, how does it work?
STRONG: Honestly, I don’t want to ascribe too much ownership over that. I think a performance is not a monolith. It’s a thousand imperfect attempts at a moment. I find personally that I feel always on the frontier of uncertainty and confusion and from that place making attempts based on intuition. In terms of charting it, I feel very fortunate to be working with Jesse Armstrong and the writers, who have such an incisive, forensic understanding of psychiatry, of interiority. So a lot of that needle is threaded for you. And like very powerful magnets just pulls out of you what it needs to. And this is the hardest part — you have to make yourself available to that and be a vessel for it. I feel like I’ve been sort of coerced through these whitewater rapids for a few seasons and I love it. The weight of it is heavy. There’s many moments in “WeCrashed” that I found completely heartbreaking. These are both people who try very hard. Rebekah feels sidelined and invisible. This thing of trying to push down negative emotions and imagine a golden light. There’s a moment where you blot your eyes — I don’t know many actors who can do those two things: that level of precision and that level of pathos and soul.
HATHAWAY: That specific moment that you’re talking about, it’s got a history. My very first job was on a TV show called “Get Real.” It was my senior year of high school. I was away from home. I was shooting in Los Angeles. I was 16. There were just a lot of feelings that I had that I didn’t really understand. I would have to go to set and feel really nervous and I would start to cry, but I would know that I couldn’t cry my makeup off. So I would take a tissue and fold it in half and I would cry into the tissue. After doing this a certain number of times, I remember thinking to myself, “This would be great to see on camera.” And I have tried to get that moment into a film on several occasions, and everybody always looked at me like I had three heads when I would suggest it. She has to cry without crying off her makeup, which is something that I think a lot of women understand. I just had a feeling that it would look really strong on camera to watch the tears just saturate the tissue but not fall.
STRONG: When we were in Mauritius, I had just started working on the show and I had read something that really struck me and has become something that I think about all the time. I’ve tried to put it into the work on “Succession,” which was something that Jung said: “Only that which is really ourselves has the power to heal.” Maybe there’s something about the fact that moment came from the ground of your being.
HATHAWAY: I remember when I was younger, an actor saying, “You can only ever really play yourself.” And I thought, “I don’t know that I fully agree with that. I’m trying to play as many different characters as I can.” I don’t necessarily work this way anymore, but in the beginning part of my career, I did connect to my characters through trauma. I would kind of search out parts in myself where I was broken and parts where they were broken and I would try to find my way into them through that way.
STRONG: I think my only goal at this point is to be as free as possible. … Here I go. I’m going to not censor myself and quote something.
HATHAWAY: This is one of your gifts. This is why I brought it up because it’s amazing.
STRONG: There’s an amazing book about painting that I read last year about Edvard Munch. The writer says that painting must not merely reconstruct a moment; it must itself be a moment. It must not exist beforehand but come into being in the moment it is expressed.
HATHAWAY: That’s the aim.
STRONG: In a sense, every time somebody calls action — and I don’t like it when they call action; I like it when you just take your cue — but then you blindly follow a sense of truth and really rigorously do that. Then you discover what it is, and it reveals itself to you. But I don’t ever know where I’m going. If you prepare enough and have internalized enough, then you just know.
HATHAWAY: I’m so happy you brought up preparation because when we worked together in “Armageddon Time,” your character was a plumber. And you went to learn how to fix a refrigerator. It was a humbling moment for me as an actor to realize that you have more children than I do, and you were coming off of this huge lift. Plumber is a trade. It’s something that you can go and learn. With Kendall was there something you really went deep on?
STRONG: I think each time, you’re starting from nothing. Right? It tells you how to work on it and you follow the line of your intuition. With Kendall, there’s nowhere to hide. It feels like it’s calling upon something else, which is a bone-marrow honesty, for lack of a better word. It should always ideally be honest in that way, but without any embroidery and without any spin. Of course, I read everything possible to read on the media-industrial complex. So there’s a lot of well water to draw from, but nothing for character. Very little for character.
HATHAWAY: But there’s such a sense of him trying so hard not to drown.
STRONG: Yeah. It’s so funny you say that. So there’s a Stevie Smith poem called “Not Waving but Drowning.” The idea is that it’s imperceptible which one it is. I think that’s true of both of our characters actually. Which is one of the things I find so poignant about her. You can’t help but care about this person. You give such care and respect to who she is and the way that she is a student of life.
HATHAWAY: Your character in “Succession,” my character in “WeCrashed,” they line up in a very specific way, but yours is inspired by someone. I was playing someone very, very real. So there was a component where I had to sit there every single day and check in like, “You are playing a real person.”
STRONG: She’s going to watch that. She might.
HATHAWAY: Be fair. Be honest. I think about negative space a lot. I think that it’s so important when you find the balance of someone. We’ve all grown up on fairy tales. But we all know that reality is so much more complicated and that villains are never convenient. We’re also living through an interesting time where we’re going back and we’re reconsidering what we think about villains, period. It seems like the best way forward is empathy. So one of the books that I read about something that she believed very deeply in, I came across this phrase, which said, “Judge all persons favorably.” What that means is don’t not see the thing that they’re doing. You see someone — maybe they come in and they’re acting in a ridiculous way. You can either supply a generous reason or you can go up to the person and ask them if they’re all right. I found that was the only approach I could take to this, to playing this part, was a new level of compassionate curiosity.
STRONG: One of the things I love about being an actor is your only job is to have compassionate curiosity and try and empathically understand what this person’s struggle is. And you can’t be outside of a character or above, certainly, a character or enter into it with any judgment.
HATHAWAY: It’s no fun for the audience to watch someone that’s been prejudged. That story can be told in a minute.
The 2022 edition of the Formagination competition, open to anyone with a great format idea, has awarded first prize to Family Ties or Lies from Studio BRB’s , following the live presentation at the Realscreen Summit in Dana Point.
The judges praised the clarity of the concept, which sees pairs of siblings – some real, some actually strangers – competing in a house for prize money, with both other contestants and viewers at home trying to discern who’s really related and who’s faking. In a first for the competition, now in its 10th edition, Family Ties or Lies also won the Audience Favorite award.
Second place went to Pet Detective, an animal-focused series that tells stories about missing pets that includes true crime elements as investigators try to find the lost pets and return them to their owners.
The three prizes awarded at the live presentation of Formagination at Realscreen Summit were:
1st place: up to US$25,000, which shall be awarded in two stages ($5,000 for further development of the idea for the format, and up to $20,000 that may be invested by Armoza in further development of the idea for format), as well as one registration to Realscreen Summit 2023.
2nd place: an Entertainment Master Class module scholarship and one registration to Realscreen Summit 2023.
Audience favorite: one registration to Realscreen Summit 2023.
Actor, producer, singer, digital media star and television personality Kalen Allen hosted this year’s edition of the competition.
Launched in 2010 by the Israeli format house, Formagination focused for its first seven years on local talent in Israel. Over the span of the contest, winning formats have since gone on to air in various territories, including 2016 contender Sex Tape (which is now in 11 territories) and Marry Me Now, which was launched in the 2015 competition and has aired in nine territories. The 2019 winner, The Senseless Dating Show, was launched internationally in the fall of 2020.
Kevin Smith’s Masters of the Universe: Revelation was a successor to the original 1980s series and focused on some of the show’s unresolved storylines. During Netflix’s Geeked Week event, the streaming service announced that we’ll be returning to Eternia with a follow-up series, Masters of theUniverse: Revolution.
Check out the poster for Masters of the Universe: Revolution below!
Coming from Mattel Television and Powerhouse Animation, Masters of the Universe: Revolution will pick up where Masters of the Universe: Revelation left off as it finds He-Man and Skeletor facing off as you’ve never seen them before. Mark Hamill already teased his involvement in the new season earlier this year when he tweeted that he was back in the studio recording Skeletor voice-overs.
The first five episodes of Masters of the Universe: Revelation were released on Netflix last July, with the remaining five following suit in November. The series picked up where the original left off decades ago. After a cataclysmic battle between He-Man and Skeletor, Eternia is fractured and the Guardians of Grayskull are scattered. And after decades of secrets tore them apart, it’s up to Teela to reunite the broken band of heroes and solve the mystery of the missing Sword of Power in a race against time to restore Eternia and prevent the end of the universe.
Masters of the Universe: Revolution isn’t the only He-Man project being cooked up at Netflix. The streaming service is also developing a live-action Masters of the Universe movie with Kyle Allen (West Side Story) set to star. Adam and Aaron Nee (The Lost City) will direct from a screenplay they co-wrote with David Callaham (Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings). Were you a fan of Masters of the Universe: Revelation and are you looking forward to Masters of the Universe: Revolution?
Rockswriter Theresa Ikoko is creating a Channel 4 coming-of-age drama with ADiscovery of Witches scribe Lisa Holdsworth about an eclectic group of dance students.
Dance School (working title) will provide 10 industry training placements to individuals with no previous TV experience.
Produce by Channel 4 Growth Fund-backed indie Duck Soup Films and inspired by true stories from inner-city Leeds, the eight-part show will follow the students as they navigate the intense highs and lows of coming-of-age in today’s complex world. Teacher Jackie heads up the Saturday class and brings together the core friendship gang and dance ensemble: Puppy, Kobby, Liam, Tim, Francesca, Tash and Nohail.
Street casting and recruitment starts in the summer and the production will shoot in the Autumn in and around Leeds.
The show has shades of Ikoko and director Sarah Gavron’s approach to BAFTA-winning Rocks, which cast young non-actors in inner-city London in what was an extensive process. Ikoko is also writing BBC drama Wahala from Firebird Pictures.
Channel 4 Head of Drama Caroline Hollick said: “Dance School is a heart-warming portrayal of the hardships young people are increasingly exposed to, but it’s equally a celebration of inspiring and authentic stories that will resonate with our viewers.”
Executive producers are Rebekah Wray-Rogers, Jessica Brown Meek, Libby Durdy, Ikoko, Holdsworth, Kathryn O’Connor and Jessica Straker. Writers are Holdsworth, Dipo Baruwa-Etti, Kamal Kaan, Zodwa Nyoni, Phoebe Okeowo. Dance School will be produced by Lisa-Marie Russo and directed by Sara Dunlop. Choreography will be led by Sharon Watson and Dawn Holgate. The series was commissioned for Channel 4 by Hollick and Commissioning Editor Rebecca Holdsworth.
Twenty-one individuals took turns gracing the stage of Studio 1A to host a week of the long-running “Saturday Night Live.” The 47th season seemed to be middle-of-the-road compared to former years, but the dominant showing of male performers in contrast to the female ones seemed to stick out more so this time around.
The newest season kicked off in October with Owen Wilson, followed by Kim Kardashian. Eight celebrities took the “SNL” stage before Christmas break, and the only other woman to host during that period was Billie Eilish, who also served as the musical guest. Of the 21 guests this season, seven were women, two of whom played double duty as musical guests: Eilish and Lizzo.
In the season’s 21-person cast of regular and featured players, nine were women, two of whom exited at the end of the season — Kate McKinnon and Aidy Bryant. The last time the number of women hosting “SNL” cracked double digits, with 10 or more, was in 2009 (season 35), which came one year after one of its worst showings with three.
In the Emmy realm, when it comes to its submissions for guest actor in a comedy series, in the past decade an “SNL” host has won six times — Dave Chappelle (2021 and 2017), Eddie Murphy (2020), Jimmy Fallon (2014 and 2013) and Justin Timberlake (2012).
Women have won guest actress in a comedy series five times — Maya Rudolph (2020, 2021), Tiffany Haddish (2018), Melissa McCarthy (2017), Tina Fey & Amy Poehler (2016).
If you go by viewership, the submissions for NBC should be a no-brainer. Eilish had the season’s highest ratings when she hosted the Christmas episode. In order of the episode ratings, the next highest-rated hosts are Paul Rudd, Ariana DeBose, Willem Dafoe and Jonathan Majors (tied), Kieran Culkin, Jake Gyllenhaal, Will Forte, John Mulaney and Simu Liu.
Of course, you can argue that it’s not just about the ratings, as shown by the impeccable performances of Jerrod Carmichael, Lizzo and Oscar Isaac during their respective weeks. “SNL” doesn’t confirm which guests are being submitted until the Emmys release their official eligibility list when nomination voting opens — a tactical move that avoids any perceived backlash from critics and fans.
The sketch comedy series, in recent memory, never submitted all its hosts, typically leaning toward stand-up comedians or former cast members. Last year, 11 hosts were submitted, three of whom were women — Anya-Taylor Joy didn’t make the cut, Kristen Wiig was nominated and Maya Rudolph won. Chappelle won among eight male hosts, with Alec Baldwin, Daniel Kaluuya and Dan Levy receiving nominations.
When looking at the coveted “Five-Timers Club,” the group of performers that have hosted at least five times, 23 people are represented — 18 men and five women. The last even male and female split host year was the 2003-04 season.
So, who should the awards teams have submitted? On the men’s side, it would be nearly unforgivable not to have given a chance for the Emmys to recognize Carmichael and Isaac, with Benedict Cumberbatch also a worthy entrant.
It may seem like a cop-out for the women, but all delivered during their brief stints, and with only seven in the mix — a lineup that consisted of a majority of them would not be a poor showing in the slightest. Nonetheless, “SNL” needs to make more thoughtful measures to balance the scale with its iconic platform.
Most music industry memoirs are front-loaded with celebrity name-dropping. “The Islander: My Life in Music and Beyond” by Chris Blackwell, the founder of Island Records — whose success with Bob Marley, U2, Steve Winwood and Grace Jones would offer plenty to boast about — instead opens with a parable.
In 1955, Blackwell was a wealthy, 18-year-old Englishman whose family was part of Jamaica’s colonial elite. Lost and thirsty after his motorboat ran out of gas, Blackwell came across a Rastafari man — a member of what was then still an outcast group feared by Anglo-Jamaicans as menacing “black heart men.” But this Samaritan in dreads took Blackwell into his community, offering him food, water and a place to rest; the young visitor awoke to find his hosts softly reading from the Bible.
That encounter set Blackwell on a remarkable path through music, with Jamaica at its center. He is one of the people most responsible for popularizing reggae throughout the world, and as Island grew to a trans-Atlantic mini-empire of rock, folk, reggae and pop, it became a model for nimble and eclectic indie labels everywhere.
Yet it may be impossible now to not also see the Rastafari episode through the lens of race and colonialism, as the story of a privileged young man gaining access to the primarily Black culture that would make him rich and powerful. Blackwell, who turns 85 this month, acknowledged that debt in a recent interview.
“I was just somebody who was a fan,” he said, in a mellow upper-class accent shaped by his time at British public schools. “I grew up amongst Black people. I spent more time with Black people than white people because I was an only child and I was sick. They were the staff, the gardeners, the grooms. But I got to care a lot about them and got to recognize very early how different their life was from mine.”
When asked why he started the label, in 1959, he said: “I guess I thought I’d just have a go. It wasn’t about Chris Blackwell making a hit record or something. It was really trying to uplift the artists.”
ALTHOUGH HE IS from the same generation of music impresarios as Berry Gordy and Clive Davis, who have been tending their reputations in public for decades, Blackwell is perhaps the most publicity-shy and least understood of the so-called “record men.” As label boss or producer, he has been behind era-defining music by Cat Stevens, Traffic, Roxy Music, the B-52’s, Robert Palmer and Tom Tom Club, not to mention U2 and Marley.
Yet in his heyday Blackwell went so far to avoid the limelight that few photos exist of him with Marley — he did not want to be seen as the white Svengali to a Black star. Meeting last month for coffee and eggs near the Upper West Side apartment where he spends a few weeks a year, Blackwell had a thin white beard and was dressed in faded sweats and sneakers. Back in Jamaica, his preferred footwear is flip-flops, or nothing at all.
“It’s not an exaggeration to say Chris offered a role model to some of us on how to live,” Bono of U2 wrote in an email. “I remember him saying to me once standing outside one of his properties: ‘Try not to shove your success in the face of people who don’t have as much success. Try to be discreet.’ His perfect manners and plummy tremolo of a voice never came across as entitlement. He was himself at all times.”
Paul Morley, the music journalist who wrote “The Islander” with Blackwell, said it was only after Blackwell sold Island to PolyGram in 1989, for nearly $300 million — it is now part of the giant Universal Music Group — that he began to show any interest in claiming his place in history.
“Chris always likes to be in the background,” said Jones, who released her first Island record in 1977. “I’m even surprised that he’s done the book.”
BORN IN 1937 to a family that had made its fortune in Jamaica growing sugar cane and making rum, Blackwell grew up on the island around wealthy Brits and vacationing celebrities. His mother, Blanche, was friendly with Errol Flynn and Noël Coward. She also had a longtime affair with Ian Fleming, who wrote his James Bond novels at the nearby GoldenEye estate — though in the book and in person Blackwell goes no further than describing the two as “the very best of friends.”
By the late 1950s, Blackwell was involved in the nascent Jamaican pop business. He supplied records to jukeboxes and the operators of “soundsystems” for outdoor dance parties; “I was pretty much the only one of my complexion there,” he recalled.
Soon he began producing records of his own. In 1962, Blackwell moved to London and began licensing ska singles — the bubbly, upbeat predecessor of reggae — which he sold to shops serving Jamaican immigrants out of the back of his Mini Cooper.
In 1964, he landed his first hit with “My Boy Lollipop,” a two-minute slice of exquisite skabblegum sung by a Jamaican teenager, Millie Small. The song went to No. 2 in Britain and in the United States, and sold more than six million copies, though Blackwell was aghast at how instant stardom had transformed Millie’s life. Back in Jamaica, her mother seemed to barely recognize Millie, curtsying before her daughter as if she was visiting royalty. “What had I done?” Blackwell wrote. He swore to no longer chase pop hits as a goal in itself.
“The Islander,” which arrived on Tuesday, makes a case for the record label boss not as a domineering captain but as an enabler of serendipity. Shortly after his success with Millie, Blackwell saw the Spencer Davis Group, whose singer, the teenage Steve Winwood, “sounded like Ray Charles on helium.” In 1967, Blackwell rented a cottage for Winwood’s next band, Traffic, to jam, and seemed content to just see what they came up with there.
A little over a decade later, Blackwell put Jones together with the house band at Compass Point, the studio he built in the Bahamas. Jones said the results made her a better artist.
“I found my voice working with Chris,” she said in an interview. “He allowed me to be myself, and extend myself, in a way, by putting me together with musicians. It was an experiment, but it really worked.”
When U2 began working on its fourth album, “The Unforgettable Fire,” the band wanted to hire Brian Eno as a producer. Blackwell, thinking of Eno an avant-gardist, opposed the idea. But after talking to Bono and the Edge about it, Blackwell accepted their decision. Eno and Daniel Lanois produced “The Unforgettable Fire” and its follow-up, “The Joshua Tree,” which established U2 as global superstars.
“When he understood the band’s desire to develop and grow, to access other colors and moods,” Bono added, “he got out of the way of a relationship that turned out to be crucial for us. The story reveals more on the depth of Chris’s commitment to serve us and not the other way around. There was no bullying ever.”
BLACKWELL’S MOST FASCINATING artist relationship was with Marley, where he used a heavier hand and had an even greater impact.
Although Island had distributed 1960s singles by the Wailers, Marley’s band with Bunny Livingston and Peter Tosh, Blackwell did not meet them until 1972, after the group finished a British tour but needed money to return to Jamaica. He was immediately stuck by their presence. “When they entered they didn’t look broken down,” he said. “They looked like kings.”
Yet Blackwell advised them that to get played on the radio, they needed to present themselves not as a simple reggae band but as a “Black rock act,” and go after “college kids” (code for a middle-class white audience). Blackwell recalls that Livingston and Tosh were skeptical but Marley was intrigued. The three recorded the basic tracks for their next album in Jamaica, but Blackwell and Marley then reworked the tapes in London — bringing in white session players like the guitarist Wayne Perkins and the keyboardist John Bundrick.
The resulting album, “Catch a Fire,” was the most sophisticated-sounding reggae release of its time, though it also kicked off a debate that continues today: How much was Marley’s sound and image shaped by Blackwell and Island for the sake of a white crossover? That question comes into bolder relief when Blackwell recounts the origins of “Legend,” the hits compilation that Island released in 1984, three years after Marley died.
In the book, Blackwell writes that he gave the job to Dave Robinson of Stiff Records, who came to work at Island after Blackwell made a deal with Stiff. Robinson, surprised by the low sales of Marley’s catalog, targeted the mainstream white audience. That meant refining the track list to favor uplifting songs and limit his more confrontational political music. Marketing for the album, which included a video featuring Paul McCartney, downplayed the word “reggae.”
It worked: “Legend” became one of most successful albums of all time, selling 27 million copies around the world, according to Blackwell. And it did not erase Marley’s legacy as a revolutionary.
Marley’s daughter Cedella, who runs the family business as the chief executive of the Bob Marley Group of Companies, had no complaints. “You can’t regret ‘Legend,’” she said in an interview. “And if you want to listen to the loving Bob, the revolutionary Bob, the playful Bob — it’s all there.”
Throughout “The Islander,” Blackwell drops astonishing asides. He passed on signing Pink Floyd, he writes, “because they seemed too boring,” and Madonna “because I couldn’t work out what on earth I could do for her.”
Still, it is sometimes puzzling what Blackwell omits or plays down. Despite the centrality of reggae to Island’s story, giants of the genre like Black Uhuru and Steel Pulse are mentioned only briefly. Blackwell writes about former wives and girlfriends but not his two sons.
Even those who might take offense still seem in awe. Dickie Jobson, a friend and associate who directed the 1982 film “Countryman,” about a man who embodied Rastafarianism, gets little ink. “Chris’s best friend in life was my cousin Dickie Jobson, so I was a little disappointed in the book where Dickie is only mentioned three times,” said Wayne Jobson, a producer also known as Native Wayne. “But Chris has a lot of friends,” he said, adding that Blackwell as “a national treasure of Jamaica.”
The latter chapters of the book are the most dramatic, where Blackwell recounts how cash-flow shortages — Island couldn’t pay U2’s royalty bill at one point, so Blackwell gave the band 10 percent of the company instead — and bad business decisions led him to sell Island. “I don’t regret it, because I put myself there,” Blackwell said. “I made my own mistakes.”
In recent years, having sold most of his music interests, Blackwell has devoted himself to his resort properties in Jamaica, seeing it has his final legacy to promote the country as he would an artist. Each improvement or tweak to GoldenEye, for example, he sees as “remixing.”
“If you say it yourself it sounds soppy,” Blackwell said. “But I love Jamaica. I love Jamaican people. Jamaican people looked after me. And I’ve always felt that whatever I can do to help, I would do so.”
“Dear Mr. Brody” takes us back to 1970 when a 21-year-old heir to a fortune in Scarsdale, New York promised to give away his money – causing thousands of people to write him letters describing their needs. Filmmaker Keith Maitland explores the mystery of Brody and the contents of those letters.
Moment orangutan GRABS screaming teenage zoo visitor through cage and refuses to let go of his leg after boy jumped over safety rail to get a closer look
Hasan Arifin, 19, leapt towards an ape cage at Kasang Kulim Zoo in Indonesia
Zoo workers say he aimed a kick at orangutan Tina before she easily grabbed him
Horrified Hasan screamed as Tina clung to his t-shirt and tried to bite at his foot
After finally being pulled free by a friend, Arifin apologised for his actions
This is the moment an angry orangutan teaches a teenager a lesson he’ll never forget after he jumped too close to her at a zoo in Indonesia yesterday.
Hasan Arifin, 19, leapt over the safety rail at Kasang Kulim Zoo to confront the normally gentle great ape called Tina and began filming himself while dancing in front of her.
Zoo workers told local news outlet Riau Saura that Hasan had previously aimed a kick towards the ape before the recorded incident in the Indonesian province of Riau, on June 6.
As the clip begins, Hasan prances close to the bars full of confidence but is horrified when the normally docile Tina grabs hold his shirt.
He cries out for help as the orangutan effortlessly pulls him towards her, while a friend struggles to free him.
As the clip begins, Hasan prances close to the bars full of confidence but is horrified when the normally docile Tina grabs hold his shirt
After letting go of his t-shirt, the primate next grabs hold of the teenager’s leg – sending him into fits of panic
As the ape drags him in closer with its powerful arms, Hasan is heard to scream: ‘No, no, no!’
Even with his friend trying to help him, the pair are no match for Tina’s strength.
After releasing Hasan’s T-shirt, she grabs his leg with a vice-like grip and pulls it right up to the bars.
As the teen stats to wriggle free, Tina pulls his foot towards her mouth and tries to bite it before he eventually makes his escape.
An unnamed zoo worker told local media: ‘The incident happened on Monday afternoon (6 June), when the visitor jumped over the guardrail of the orangutan enclosure to take a video without the keeper’s permission.
‘The visitor violated the rules by jumping over the guardrail and kicking the orangutan.’
Hasan has since issued an apology for his actions.
Veteran British actor Timothy Spall (Mr Turner) is to lead The Sixth Commandment, Sarah Phelps’ BBC factual drama about the deaths of Peter Farquhar and Ann Moore-Martin in the village of Maids Moreton, Buckinghamshire, and the extraordinary events that unfolded over the following years.
Filming has begun on the four-parter and Spall, who plays lead Farquhar, is joined by Anne Reid (Last Tango in Halifax), Éanna Hardwicke (Normal People), Annabel Scholey (The Split), Sheila Hancock (Unforgotten), Ben Bailey Smith (The Split), Conor MacNeill (Industry), Adrian Rawlins (Baptiste) and Amanda Root (Summerland).
The show from Banijay-backed Wild Mercury Productions and True Vision Productions tells the story of how the meeting of an inspirational teacher and charismatic student Ben Field (Hardwicke) set the stage for one of the most complex and confounding criminal cases in recent memory. It also focuses on how suspicions around Field’s relationship with Ann Moore-Martin (Reid), Farquhar’s deeply religious neighbour, unlocked a series of chilling revelations.
The show is being made in full cooperation with Farquhar and Moore-Martin’s families and filming is taking place in and around Bristol and Bath.
Spall is a twice-BAFTA-nominated British actor who has featured in a wealth of Mike Leigh films along with Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street and Vanilla Sky.
The BBC’s Agatha Christie writer Phelps said: “I wouldn’t have been able to write this without the help, support and insights of Peter and Ann’s families. I’m so appreciative of the trust they placed in me to tell the stories of their loved ones.”
The show follows similar BBC factual dramas including Stephen Merchant-starring Four Lives and 2017’s The Moorside.
The Sixth Commandment is directed by Saul Dibb (The Salisbury Poisonings, NW) and produced by Frances du Pille (The Outlaws, The Watch). It is executive produced by Phelps, Derek Wax for Wild Mercury Productions, Brian Woods for True Vision Productions and Lucy Richer for the BBC. The Sixth Commandment is being distributed internationally by Banijay Rights.
Netflix has revealed its first look at Entergalactic, a new animated series starring Kid Cudi, Jessica Williams, and Timothée Chalamet – and it looks absolutely beautiful.
The Netflix show, which is due to be released later this year, is billed as an adult animated music TV series that’ll tell the tale of two young New York-based artists who meet and fall in love.
Okay, so the series’ brief plot synopsis makes it sound fairly unoriginal, but there’s plenty to get excited about over Entergalactic. Not only does the animated show have an absolutely stacked cast, its visual style and tone irresistibly gorgeous. In fact, I’d go as far as to say it’s as stunning as Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (and its upcoming sequels) or another Netflix animated series in Arcane.
Yet to be convinced? Take a look at the Netflix series’ teaser trailer, which was revealed during Day 3 of Netflix Geeked Week 2022:
See what I mean? It’s got that summery, zestful, and painterly-style aesthetic that Into the Spider-Verse and Arcane are renowned for. It looks like a comic book brought to life, with a likely blend of rotoscoping, a hand-drawn style, and animating on twos – a process where every image is held for two frames (per second of footage) instead of one – giving Entergalactic an unusual but highly satisfying art design.
This combination of techniques was pioneered by Sony Pictures Imageworks for the award-winning Into the Spider-Verse, but it’s clearly had a huge impact on the animation industry. Arcane’s unique mix of 2D and 3D anime-like animation, plus the hand-painted-CGI style used for Netflix movie The Mitchells vs The Machines, prove that Netflix wants studios to experiment with different forms of animation to distinguish its projects from its competitors. Both projects went on to win numerous prizes on the 2022 awards circuit, with both securing major honors at the 49th Annie Awards.
Entergalactic has been co-created by Cudi alongside Ian Edelman (How to Make it in America), with first-time director Fletcher Moules helming the project.
As well as Cudi, Williams (Fantastic Beasts 3), and Chalamet (Dune), Entergalactic will star top talent including Laura Harrier (Spider-Man: Homecoming), Vanessa Hudgens (Tick, Tick… Boom!), Christopher Abbott (Catch-22), Jaden Smith (After Earth), Keith David (21 Bridges), and Macaulay Culkin (Home Alone, American Horror Story). Hip-hop and rap artists including Ty Dolla $ign and 070 Shake will also appear in the series.
Entergalactic doesn’t have a confirmed release date yet, but it’s slated to arrive in Fall 2022. For those outside of the US, that’s this autumn (in the northern hemisphere) and spring (in southern climes).
As Michael Keaton prepares to return as the Caped Crusader in upcoming DC installment “The Flash,” the former “Batman” star revealed what co-star Jack Nicholson told him decades ago.
While on set in London for the 1989 Tim Burton-helmed comic book film, Nicholson imparted words of wisdom to take every success as a greenlight for a little leeway.
“In the old days, I remember I was in London with Jack Nicholson, we were doing ‘Batman,’ and he was going somewhere, and he said, ‘Come along with me,’ which is an experience in and of itself,” Keaton explained during The Hollywood Reporter Drama Actor Emmy Roundtable alongside Oscar Isaac, Tom Hiddleston, Samuel L. Jackson, Brian Cox, and Quincy Isaiah.
“So, we’re in the car and he’s talking about the movie. And we all knew it was a huge risk, and if it goes down, [I’d be] going down in flames and that’s going to be a big, hard recovery. But I also knew if it worked, it could change my landscape,” Keaton continued. “So Jack says, ‘Keats, if this thing’s a hit, you can go out and do four or five flops and not even worry about it.’ And maybe it wasn’t four or five, but it used to be you got away with three and it didn’t matter.”
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However, Keaton warned that such advice will no longer work today: “Not now, man,” the “Dopesick” star said. “You’ve got one miss, which is fucked up.”
During the conversation with fellow actors, Keaton said it’s “impossible” nowadays to say “I’m going to cruise on this one” when it comes to even the smallest of projects and deny that actor instinct to perform to the best of your ability.
“You get there and the work’s the same, man. Even if you’re going to do a 15-second ad for Vaseline, you say, ‘OK, man, I’m all in,’” Keaton added. “Because for that minute, I don’t know how to not be all in, not because I’m so fucking groovy, because I probably have a fear of lying down, of going, ‘Well, don’t be a dick. Do the work.’ You know what I mean? Every time I think I’m going to cruise on this one, I can’t. You can fight it all you want, but it’s in you somewhere.”
And Nicholson’s advice has been passed along to the next generation of actors as well, including “Barry” creator and “Saturday Night Live” alum Bill Hader. Keaton revealed he opted for a career pause and “laid low” when he became a father, and told Hader to do the same.
“I thought, ‘Man, if I lose money, I’m good with it,’” Keaton said of turning down projects. “I was having this conversation with Bill Hader the other day, he was going through something and I said, ‘Dude, trust me. Hang out with your kids as much as you can for as long as you can. You will never regret it. You’re going to lose some jobs. It’s OK. In the long run, that’s the thing [that matters].’”
The hits keep coming forToddand Julie Chrisley — their recent convictions for bank fraud and tax evasion are jeopardizing the future of their reality TV show.
Here’s the deal … Todd and Julie’s show, “Chrisley Knows Best,” was picked up for a 10th season back in May, a week before their federal trial began … but that’s up in the air now that a jury’s found them guilty on a laundry list of charges.
Sources familiar with the situation tell TMZ … it’s unclear when the Chrisleys will begin production for a 10th season. We’re told the situation is very fluid because the network is awaiting the sentencing.
The problem with that is … sentencing isn’t set to go down until October, when they’ll face up to 30 years in federal prison. That puts USA Network, the family and Todd and Julie’s attorneys in a bind.
Obviously, they could start shooting now, but Todd’s lawyer says they plan to appeal the guilty verdict — and, let’s face it, legal strategizing doesn’t make for great TV … nor would any attorney recommend it: Anything Todd and Julie say could be used against them.
USA Network had no comment on the couple’s guilty verdict.
Todd and Julie will still be on TV, though … season 9 filmed and wrapped before the trial started, and new episodes start airing June 23rd. We are told “Chrisley Knows Best” was not in production during the trial, so neither the trial or the verdict were filmed.
Keep in mind, Todd and Julie are on home confinement until sentencing — so, IF they wanted to shoot a potential 10th season, camera crews won’t have too far to range.
If your idea of having a good time at the movies is Viduyt Jammwal flexing his muscles and breaking bones, then, you’re in for a blessed treat at the movies this week. For the rest, I guess, it’s better to enjoy the long weekend bingeing on a web series. Sanak is loaded with action but is completely devoid of perspective.
Vivaan (Vidyut Jammwal) is treating his ailing wife Anshika (Rukmini Maitra) at a hospital who is recovering from a life-threatening surgery. The hospital becomes the target of a few terrorists, lead by Saju Solanki (Chandan Roy Sanyal), plan to rescue a fellow criminal Ajay Pal Singh (Kiran Karmarkar) from the premise.
A hostage drama set against the backdrop of a hospital, the plot was really unique and had all the potential to keep the audience engaged. But it’s the shoddy screenplay, wafer-thin plot and poor writing makes Sanak another clichéd action film.
The setting of the hospital allows action director Andy Long Nguyen along with Vidyut to come up with some unique action sequences which includes a MRI machine and a Swiss ball. The 117-minute film has only one song, which works in favour of the makers. The action sequence are the biggest USP of the film. They are totally convincing and one can digest the fact that one man can kill so many bad guys.
It is difficult to root for the characters even as the actors gave a decent performance. Vidyut’s back flips may make you cheer and his stunts have gotten better over the year, but that’s about it. He does his best to bring forth the rage of an impassioned lover but clearly he romances action more than Rukmini Maitra, the Bengali actor making her Hindi debut and is earnest in the film.
As usual, Vidyut in top form, doing full justice to the job at hand. Chandan as a terrorist is menacing and does a fine job. Neha Dhupia who plays the role of police officer in charge of the situation hardly gets anything to do.
This is by no means a terrible film but the actioner, that attempts to find support in a threadbare story, is far from riveting. Sanak blooms only during the fights but by the time the clock ticks towards the climax, you are exhausted. How much can you hoot for broken necks and crushed bones? You could try finding thrill in Viduyt’s kicks but the film has nothing more to offer.
Masami Takahashi is appointed country manager, head of studios, Japan, and be based in Tokyo. He will continue to oversee all theatrical activity, local production, content licensing, games and consumer products.
Glen Kyne is appointed head of networks, Japan and Australia & New Zealand. Based in Auckland, he will oversee all networks activity in all three markets across pay-TV, free-to-air and BVOD.
Sydney-based Michael Brooks continues as MD of Warner Bros. International Television Production Australia [WBITVP], where he will, just like WBITVP NZ, continue to report directly into the global WBITVP organization. Brooks is additionally appointed as head of studios, Australia & New Zealand, responsible for content licensing, and optimizing studio-related activities across both markets, for which he will report to Gibbons.
Robi Stanton is appointed head of franchise development & affiliate relations, Australia & New Zealand, based in Sydney.
Andrew Brommel continues in the role of VP, consumer products, Australia & New Zealand, based in Sydney.
In addition to the above appointments, David Macdonald is named VP Networks, Japan, based in Tokyo. He will continue to manage network activity, reporting to Glen Kyne, while Singapore-based Lynn Ng will continue to lead content operations for the APAC region. Additionally, she has been appointed head of factual & lifestyle – South East Asia, for which she will report to Schwebig.
“These appointments reflect the strength of leadership from both legacy companies, bringing an impressive track record and deep knowledge of our diversified Warner Bros. Discovery portfolio,” said Gibbons. “Benefitting from a combination of market oversight and functional expertise, I look forward to working together with this team to optimize our businesses and build further scale across Japan and ANZ.”
Prolific actor, director, and producer Adam Arkin directs four episodes of The Offer on Paramount+, including the upcoming penultimate episode and the finale.
We had a chance to chat with him about his work on The Offer and his other work just before he began shooting a series in Vancouver.
Catch his latest work with the final two episodes of The Offer Season 1 on June 9 and June 16 on Paramount+.
You have directed, starred in, and produced some of the best shows on TV over the decades. How have you managed to keep such a vibrant career going in so many different directions?
Oh, well, first of all, thank you. I wish that I could list some kind of divine plan that I came up with about doing any of it. I’ve generally tended to put one foot in front of the other and act on those opportunities that were opening up to me at any given time.
The decision to make the move into directing was one that really had to do with a sense that the kind of the acting roles I was getting a lot of the time felt like they had a certain amount of repetition to them; not that they were not good roles, but it felt like variations on things that I had played before.
And so, as a result of that, I just found that I didn’t feel like I was being pushed to grow, and directing felt like the next logical step to try and broaden my skill set, and it’s continued to be that. And I’ve just had the good fortune of working with very good people.
The first directing job I ever did was on Northern Exposure. And as you said, I’ve just been lucky enough to be associated with some really talented people and some very good material and good shows, and it’s kind of unfolded the way it has.
I think at this late in the game, I’m just learning that there may be ways in which I have to become more proactive in terms of developing my own material, which is something I’m engaged in now.
Are there any roles or shows that you’ve directed that you think exemplify Adam Arkin and that you would like to aim towards as you go into producing your own shows?
I don’t know that they’ve exemplified me in total, but there are certainly shows that exemplify a kind of quality and commitment to originality that I would love to keep associating with. There are certain roles I’ve played that have felt very, very connected to a part of myself that I’d like to see dominate who I am.
The West Wing was one. While I did only a few episodes on that show, I loved that character, a guy engaged in trauma therapy and an expert in that field, somebody who just had that level of understanding about stuff; I really enjoyed playing him.
And then there have been certain roles that don’t necessarily embody me, but they were so freeing and fun to play. The role that I played on Northern Exposure was incredibly liberating because he was just like a walking id.
And in terms of directing, there’s been a wide variety of shows that I’ve really loved the experience of getting to be on — Succession. Get Shorty.
That production felt like a real home base the entire time I was working on it, both the tone of the show, the quality of the writing, the humor of it, and the incredible cohesiveness of the company of people that we were working with.
That was a show I could have done for years and been very happy being involved with. And then, I have to say The Offer was a true highlight of an experience to work on. It was the subject matter that was very near and dear to me for a lot of reasons, and a phenomenal group of artists to get to work with.
Right. It essentially has everything you’ve done all your life, and now you’re directing a sum total of all of your different pieces — acting, directing, writing. You’ve done movies, and it’s a TV show. So it was really perfect for you.
It was lovely. And it had strong personal connections too, in terms of just a kind of nostalgic connection. Bruno Kirby, who was not in Godfather 1 but played Young Clemenza in Godfather 2, was my dearest friend for decades.
And so, getting to be involved in anything that had that association automatically had a strong personal sense for me. Yeah. It was a great experience.
My approach to directing all the episodes on The Offer that I was involved in was, first of all, to honor the template that had been created by Dexter Fletcher, who directed the pilot episodes, and Sal Totino, the cinematographer. I very much had no desire to reinvent the wheel.
I wanted to be true to the spirit of what had been started by them and bring my own perspective on the material and work collaboratively with the people there.
I very much wanted to find ways to honor the original film and even give nods to it sometimes in ways that wouldn’t necessarily be consciously noticed but were little acknowledgments of the style of the film or choices in even the framing of certain shots that I thought might be evocative of the original.
There’s one shot specifically in episode nine that we suddenly realized there was an opportunity to mirror the framing of a very iconic shot in the original film, and we jumped at the chance to do that.
Beyond that, it was just a matter of doing what I always try to do, which is just use my own inner Geiger counter towards what was clicking and what worked, and try to frame that in the best way possible.
Do you have a favorite episode or favorite scene out of the two that have already been shown, which would be Fade In and The Right Shade of Yellow? I’m sure you probably have favorite scenes from the last two too, but we don’t want to talk about those before it airs.
I loved the whole sequence involving Joe Colombo coming to Gulf and Western and reading the script. I had a great deal of fun staging that, the whole cat and mouse game of hiding his presence there and getting him into the office without people seeing him, without Charlie Bluhdorn seeing him.
And then the sort of comedic beats that Giovanni Ribisi found in the reading of the script, Miles Teller’s playing of his anxiety about the possibility that Colombo realized that the script wasn’t there in its entirety.
And I love the scene where we introduced Brando. I thought Justin Chambers did such a remarkable job embodying Marlon Brando. And I loved staging that and working with the cast, all of them. Both Justin and everybody else in the scene who was dealing with their overwhelm at meeting the legend. It was fun.
I loved the drawn-out nature of that scene as they awaited Brando and sat before him agog before viewers saw him.
There was also the scene where Bob Evans talks about how sacred going to the movies is. And he evokes sitting in the film Robin Hood. And I thought Matthew Goode just did a phenomenal job of conjuring those images and the power of that. He’s a really superb actor, and it was great watching him do his thing.
Yeah, he’s amazing in this. And he gets some really great soliloquies to prove to everybody how much he has to offer. And without spoiling anything, how would you describe the final two episodes and your touch on them?
Well, I don’t think I’ll be giving anything away if I say that the movie does, in fact, get made, and it does, in fact, open.
And it is, in fact, extraordinary.
Yeah. I think there are some surprises involving some of the choices that Al Ruddy makes with his own career and the path he takes.
And I think there’s a tremendous payoff and satisfaction in seeing the impact that the opening has on all these characters that we’ve gotten to know so well and how that all unfolds.
And the resolution of some relationships that I think also have some surprising turns to them. People you may have written off as being shallow or not good guys end up showing some surprising colors.
And my last question is, obviously, you’re working, but your IMDb page is empty. I know you have a lot of stuff coming up. Is there anything you can talk about?
But my IMDb page is kind of empty?
Empty for 2022 and on.
Oh, you mean upcoming projects?
Yeah. [laughs] No, it’s very full otherwise.
I was like, “What happened? Did somebody hack it? What’s going on?” [laughs] Five decades of work up in smoke; I can’t believe it.
I’m working right now on a show that I think will be very exciting for Netflix, a new Shawn Ryan, a political thriller called The Night Agent.
Oh, that sounds fun.
Yeah, it’s been a lot of fun. And I just had to sign an NDA agreement about something that I don’t know if I’m doing, but I’m in serious contention for that. I hope it works out, and hopefully, we’ll be able to talk about that in the coming weeks, but right now, I’m supposed to keep quiet about it.
No, that’s fair. That’s fair.
Beyond that, I want to get back home. I was supposed to be coming home at the beginning of the month, and because of various delays in production and a couple of COVID positives, my return has been pushed back to at least June 10th now, and I’m kind of missing home.
Oh, okay.
But I will remain a moving target. There’ll always be something else coming down the pike soon.
Yes. It looks like you haven’t had a break in years, so it doesn’t surprise me that you have a whole bunch of stuff lined up.
As I said before, I’ve had the good fortune of working with my wife a couple of times. She ended up being an associate producer on Get Shorty, and she’s worked with me on several projects.
We have a couple of things that we are in the process of developing and trying to see get made. So, hopefully, one of those will come through in the next few months here as well.
Carissa Pavlica is the managing editor and a staff writer and critic for TV Fanatic. She’s a member of the Critic’s Choice Association, enjoys mentoring writers, conversing with cats, and passionately discussing the nuances of television and film with anyone who will listen. Follow her on Twitter and email her here at TV Fanatic.
Tribeca: The global icon may only be showing what she wants in Amanda Micheli’s Netflix documentary, but even that’s often fascinating enough.
It’s easy to smirk during the opening moments of Amanda Micheli’s “Halftime.” We watch Jennifer Lopez, global icon and multi-hyphenate talent, ready to perform at the eponymous halftime show of the 2020 Super Bowl — perfect makeup, big hair, shiny costumes, cheering crowds — as her voiceover narration bemoans her lifelong quest to be seen, to be heard, to be taken seriously. Seen? Heard? Taken seriously? Girl, you’re a massive superstar!
The documentary also wants to tell us, as Lopez once said, that’s she’s still just Jenny from the block. The great surprise and joy of Micheli’s straightforward narrative is, thanks to intimate access and clever editing, we have sympathy for Lopez’s apparent case of imposter syndrome. For the performer — and, at some point, for her audience — it’s very real. Even with her current run of accolades and successes, Lopez has the never lost the desire to succeed (or, it seems, gained the ability to settle into the feeling of that success). If someone as talented and driven as Jennifer Lopez thinks she’s not up to snuff, we’re all screwed.
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The documentary’s title refers to the gobsmacking show the icon put together for the 2020 Super Bowl, but of course it’s also about her life as she celebrates her 50th birthday during the film’s opening credits. She tells her loved ones that she “feels like her life is just beginning.” Or, perhaps, it’s only half over? Here’s hoping! Micheli’s film tracks Lopez through a seminal year, kicking off in July 2019 before zipping forward six months when Lopez found herself juggling an awards campaign for “Hustlers” and fast-tracked prep for the halftime show.
There’s no question the problems that Lopez faces are of the champagne variety — “will I get an Oscar nomination?” is truly the height of high-class worries — but Lopez so deeply feels the need to prove herself that eventually her concerns become real drama. Micheli’s film is less than artful, scattered with limited talking heads (mostly Lopez’s business partners and her mother, briefly), random flashbacks, occasional archival footage, and a series of short sequences that could frame their own films (particularly quick-cut segments about Lopez’s early years, her treatment by the press, the obsession with her body, the constant tabloid attention), but none of that is the draw: it’s Lopez.
There’s never a moment when Lopez isn’t on-screen, from interviews to behind-the-scenes footage that track everything from costume fittings to dance practice, her trying to juggle being a mother with her massive career, even a revelatory visit to a doctor who all but begs her to slow down. Lopez’s halftime prep looms large, but nothing is as central as her protracted awards campaign for her work in Lorene Scafaria’s wonderful “Hustlers” (which Lopez also produced), which many believed would garner her an Oscar nom. You know where this ends. Hard to smirk at that imposter syndrome now, huh?
It’s hardly a warts-and-all production — even moments in which Lopez gets a little snippy are in service to her pursuit of doing good work, and will likely leave the audience screaming, “Yaaaas, queen!” — but there are brief flashes of revelation. From the bruises that line her legs while learning how to pole dance for “Hustlers” to the gentle way she teaches a routine to a pack of young dancers, the real Lopez seems profoundly human. A brief scene in which her beaming friends and staff send a glamorous Lopez off to the Golden Globes, where we all know she will lose, really stings.
Anyone looking for J-Lo gossip will be disappointed — while the film covers a period in which the star was engaged to Alex Rodriguez, he only appears briefly in a zippy montage in which Lopez pointedly says the only thing she’ll share about her love life is that she’s had to learn to be there for herself first, to become her own home before seeking out another. (Lopez’s current fiancé, Ben Affleck, does pop up as a talking head for just one segment, sharing his experience in understanding why the press could be so vicious to Lopez: “She said, ‘I’m a Latina. I’m a woman.’”)
More spicy are Lopez’s experiences putting together the halftime show, a major event that seems, frankly, cursed from the start. Lopez’s superpower (well, one of them) is her awareness of what people think of her — or perhaps more pointedly, what people think they can get out of her. When the NFL needed to show off its alleged care for people of color after a number of controversies (Colin Kaepernick appears early on, as do clips that address then-President Trump’s adoration for building! that! wall!), they tapped J-Lo for their halftime show. And then they also tapped Shakira, presumably thinking that having two Latinas was even better.
Lopez sees through it. It’s cheap, it hamstrings both of them, it’s never been done before, and it means neither star is getting the full time previously allotted to other headline acts. Screw it. Lopez puts together an eye-popping show — even when she splits the time equally with Shakira, who comes and goes throughout the doc — that has a major political message (admittedly, very new for her) when she decides to flood the field with little girls in cages. It’s not subtle, but when has Lopez ever been subtle?
The film ends, both hysterically and appropriately, with a listing of Lopez’s current accomplishments, from her record sales to her current philanthropic endeavors. She deserves those flowers — and more.
Grade: B-
“Halftime” premiered at the 2022 Tribeca Film Festival. It will start streaming on Netflix on Tuesday, June 14.
We don’t know about you, but we’re feeling 2022…as an interesting year for Hollywood celebrity engagements. The highs are high, the lows are low, and some of the most famous longtime couples are finally putting a ring on it. In an era when we need joy (or, at the very least, distractions) more than ever, I will happily live through these Tinseltown love stories—especially while I’m very much single. Oh, two of my favorite singers got engaged? Let me celebrate that from my bed with a box of Reese’s Pieces and and absolutely zero dating prospects.
But really: If you’re interested to see which celebrities popped the question this year, we have you covered. We’ll be using this gallery to keep track of the biggest celebrity engagements in 2022. So check back often—something tells me we’ll have a few shockers.
London’s Raindance Film School Introduces a new BA Programme that is delivered across 3 continents, over 3 years
Raindance offers filmmaking and Acting courses to students all over the world.
Raindance, founded by Elliot Grove in 1992, was established to provide a platform for independent filmmakers through a simple thought experiment; can you make a film with no money, no training and no experience? Today, the organisation operates one of the largest independent film festivals in Europe and has set the standard for professional training courses and promoting independent filmmaking across the world.
Raindance delivers short courses through 10 international hubs; Berlin, Brussels, Dubai, London, Los Angeles, New York, Paris, Toronto, Vancouver and Guadalajara.
The Raindance Film School, the organisation’s higher education institute offers accredited qualifications such as HND, BA and MA programmes in Filmmaking and Performing arts through its London and Dubai campuses. With the launch of a new campus in Guadalajara, Mexico, Raindance Film School is now introducing a brand new BA programme for candidates who wish to travel and experience new cultures throughout their study. The programme will offer two pathways, Filmmaking and Screen Acting, and will lead to students achieving a BA Hon’s Degree in Film and Performing Arts Practices, validated by De Montfort University after completing the three-year study programme.
Students will start their journey in London or online, where they will be inducted into the programme and their chosen pathway. They will then travel to Dubai where they will study towards the Level 4 Certificate. After completing the first year, students will travel to Guadalajara, Mexico where they will progress onto the Level 5 Diploma. Upon successful completion of the second year, students will return to London where they will complete the final year to achieve a BA Hon’s Degree in Film and Performing Arts Practices. For students who speak Spanish as a first language, the school offers an alternative programme whereby the first year is delivered in Mexico and is combined with English classes. This prepares students to progress to the Dubai campus in the second year followed by London for their final year.
The school provides a full relocation package for each year to students which includes visa costs and the first month’s accommodation at each destination. After this, students have options to relocate depending on their requirements.
Despite the unique structure of the course and the opportunities that it presents, The Raindance Film School has set the tuition fees for this course to be extremely affordable, to ensure the school remains inclusive and accessible to all, following the philosophy Raindance was founded upon 30 years ago. The International BA is considerably cheaper for international students than studying all three years in London.
“Our courses, classes and workshops are some of the most popular in the world, spanning disciplines and crafts such as screenwriting, directing, producing, cinematography, special effects, editing, lighting, sound and short filmmaking, to name just a few. Over the last 30 years, we’ve had the honour of teaching the art of film to students in cities around the world, including London, Toronto, LA, Berlin and Paris, as well as online”, said Elliot Grove, the founder of Raindance.
Zulfiqar Choudhry, Principal at Raindance Film School said “Filmmaking is a global industry, and over the duration of this unique course, our International BA students will experience filmmaking and acting in three vastly different cultures that will greatly enhance their learning experience and employment opportunities. In their final year, they will return to London to join the Top-Up BA (Hon’s) in Film and Performing Arts Practices, where they will have the opportunity to apply everything they have learned. This is a practical, hands-on course that builds upon the skills you develop as you progress each year. It is a full-time University-level course and is eligible for student finance for UK applicants.”
Apart from offering students a unique study program, Raindance Film School provides its students with a thorough and detailed curriculum, covering the whole three-year journey. The BA program prepares students for a range of roles and employment opportunities within their chosen field of study.
The program is perfect for people who have a keen interest in filmmaking and love to travel.
To get more information about the course visit the website.
Raindance promotes and supports independent filmmaking and filmmakers.
From new and emerging to industry pros, Raindance connects, trains, supports, and promotes visual storytellers through every step of their career.
The Raindance Film Festival runs each Autumn in London’s Leicester Square.
Logan Dowhaniuk scored with just four seconds left on the game clock, gifting the Edmonton Oil Kings a pivotal 3-2 victory and a 3-1 series lead over the Seattle Thunderbirds in the Western Hockey League championships on Wednesday.
Josh Williams scored twice in the second period for the Oil Kings and added an assist on the game winner. Edmonton’s Carson Golder and Jakub Demek had two assists apiece.
The Thunderbirds proved potent on the power play, going 2 for 5 with goals from Lucas Ciona and Jared Davidson.
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Edmonton was 0 for 2 with the man advantage.
Sebastian Cossa made 32 saves for Edmonton and Seattle’s Thomas Milic stopped 20 of 23 shots.
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The Oil Kings will look to close out the series Saturday in Edmonton.
Michael J. Fox, 60, is known for both his award-winning career as an actor and for being a leader in Parkinson’s disease research. In addition to starring in the 1980s sitcom Family Ties and the iconic Back to the Future films, he opened up The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research in 2000, nine years after he was diagnosed with the disease at the age of 29. Michael has been open about his struggles with the disease, and even wrote in his 2020 memoir, No Time Like the Future: An Optimist Considers Mortality, that he is well aware he may never act again. “There is a time for everything, and my time of putting in a twelve-hour workday, and memorizing seven pages of dialogue, is best behind me,” he noted. “I enter a second retirement. That could change, because everything changes. But if this is the end of my acting career, so be it.”
Michael has not dealt with his changing career and Parkinson’s disease alone. In 1988, he married his former Family Ties co-star, Tracy Pollan, 61, who has supported him ever since his diagnosis, which occurred three years into their marriage. Keep reading to learn all there is to know about their sweet love story and partnership.
Tracy Pollan and Michael J. Fox met on the set of ‘Family Ties,’ but their romance would not begin until years later (Photo: Broadimage/Shutterstock)
Michael And Tracy Got Engaged Less Than a Year After Their First Date
Tracy and Michael met on the first season of Family Ties. Tracy was cast as Ellen Reed, who played the love interest of Michael’s character, Alex P. Keaton. While Alex and Ellen’s relationship ended, the show proved to be just the beginning for Tracy and Michael. While the two enjoyed a strictly professional relationship at the time, as Tracy was in a committed relationship with actor Kevin Bacon, sparks would fly by the time the pair teamed up for 1988’s Bright Lights, Big City.
Apparently, Michael hit up his former co-star as soon as he found out she and Kevin had broken up. “It sounds really horrible, but it was one of those things,” the young actor told Peoplein 1989 about the start of their romance. “Someone goes, ‘Did you hear that so-and-so aren’t together anymore?’ and you go, ‘Hmm, that’s too bad. Where’s the phone?’” Tracy agreed to go on a date with Michael and the rest is history. They dated for about seven months and then got engaged on Dec. 26, 1987. Fox noted he was not at all concerned that Tracy would decline his hand in marriage.
However, they both had one problem. At the beginning of 1988, the year they would marry, Tracy began receiving death threats from a seemingly obsessed woman who said she would kill both Tracy and her husband-to-be if they went through with their nuptials. According to Michael, the woman sent more than 12 letters each day, which drove him to take legal action against the woman. She was eventually charged and sentenced to three years of probation for making terroristic threats.
Despite the hiccup, the pair were able to walk down the aisle at the West Mountain Inn in Arlington, Vt. The wedding was one of the hottest events of the time, and paparazzi swarmed the picturesque location by foot and helicopter. That didn’t stop the lovebirds from having a grand time, though. “Inside, it was like anybody else’s wedding. It was a house party. We rolled back the rugs and danced the night way,” Michael told People.
Tracy Pollan and Michael J. Fox pose on the red carpet (Photo: Broadimage/Shutterstock)
Tracy Gave Birth To Four Kids With Michael
Tracy and Michael went on to have four kids together: Sam Michael, who entered the world one year after the lovebirds said “I do” in 1989, twin daughters Aquinnah Kathleen and Schuyler Frances, who were born in 1995, and daughter Esmé Annabelle, was born in 2001. “Tracy had a really good pregnancy, and it was a good delivery. Thank God, she was healthy and Sam was healthy,” Michael recalled to People in his 1989 interview after the birth of his and Tracy’s first child.
In 2019, Esmé turned 18 and went to college. “Our youngest is going off to college, so we are going to be empty-nesters, so… we are going to do some traveling!” Michael revealed to Peopleat the A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Cure Parkinson’s Gala.
Tracy Has Always Stood By Michael’s Side, Through Thick and Thin
Tracy has certainly been there by Michael’s side “for better or for worse, in sickness and in health.” In a 2020 interview to promote his memoir No Time Like the Future: An Optimist Considers Mortality, Michael gushed about how much of a rock his wife has been for him over the years. “She puts up with me,” Michael joked to Entertainment Tonight. “She doesn’t cut me any slack, which is great. She’s honest, affectionate, kind, smart and she’s just there in a pinch. She’s beautiful and I love her and she’s sexy and gorgeous.” He added that Tracy is “a great mother, great cook, and great bodyboard surf junkie beach babe” with his infectious sense of humor.
Michael shared a similar sentiment while speaking about his wife with Sunday Today host Willie Geistin 2020. “She’s there in the front lines with me every single day. She never pretends to know as much as I know. And the other thing Tracy does is, if there’s something funny, let’s get to the funny. We’ll deal with the tragic later,” he noted.
Of course, it hasn’t all been easy for Tracy. “Any time I would say to myself, ‘This isn’t what I bought into,’ it wasn’t about Michael being sick. It was about his doubting and the behavior that came out of that fear,” she explained to Oprah Winfrey in 2002 about the doubts they both would sometimes have. However, she credited Michael’s positivity with helping her see things in a different way. “A lot of my adjustment has been dictated by Michael’s point of view,” she recalled. “He’s so relaxed and so accepting of where he is, and that makes it easier for me, the kids, and everyone around him.”
Michael And Tracy Have A Few Pointers For A Successful Marriage
Michael and Tracy make more than three decades of marriage look easy. So, how do they do it? “Big families, middle children. Sense of humor. Both our families had that,” Michael explained to Peoplein 2018. Tracy added, “It was us against the world. That’s exactly what we’ve created.” Later on, she said, “Just give each other the benefit of the doubt. He assumes I’m doing the best I can.”
Michael gave a more NSFW response to the same question during a 2019 appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon alongside Tracy. “Well, as the glib one would say, I just feel funny saying ’cause my daughter’s in the audience, but keep the sex dirty and the fights clean,” he frankly stated. Now we know!
Sony Pictures is adding plenty more “Ghostbusters” to its production plans, announcing a new animated feature film based on the 80s sci-fi film series and revealing the upcoming sequel to last year’s “Ghostbusters: Afterlife” will take the franchise back to NYC.
The announcement was made on the Sony Pictures lot by “Ghostbusters: Afterlife” director Jason Reitman and his writing partner Gil Kenan Wednesday as part of “Ghostbusters Day,” a special event commemorating the anniversary of the original 1984 “Ghostbusters” release.
As teased by the post-credit sequence in “Afterlife,” the sequel will see the series return to the Ghostbusters’ original headquarters in a New York City firehouse, where Winston Zeddemore (Ernie Hudson) is seen driving the Ecto-1 back to its first home. The plot is still under wraps, so it is unclear whether the film will center more around the original Ghostbusters team minus the late Harold Ramis or around the young cast of “Afterlife” led by McKenna Grace with Finn Wolfhard and Logan Kim.
Also entering development is an animated “Ghostbusters” film from Sony Pictures Animation that will be unrelated to “Afterlife” and its sequel, with Jennifer Kluska and Chris Prynoski directing. The film will be developed alongside an animated Netflix series that Reitman and Kenan will be executive producers on.
The two feature film “Ghostbusters” projects will be the first done without the involvement of series creator Ivan Reitman, who died this past February at the age of 75. As part of Ghostbusters Day, a street on the Sony lot where Reitman’s Ghost Corps production company is located was renamed after him. Reitman served as a producer on the 2016 “Ghostbusters” reboot with an all-female cast as well as on “Afterlife,” which his son directed.
“Ghostbusters: Afterlife” was a modest box office success last November with $204 million grossed worldwide against a $75 million budget, but was part of a successful winter for Sony Pictures that was topped by “Spider-Man: No Way Home.” The expansion of the studio’s plans for “Ghostbusters” signals a move by Sony to build out more franchises beyond “Spider-Man” as it tries to keep its late 2021 box office momentum going.
ABC’s Wonder Years reboot is the latest recipient of a 2022 Peabody Award, The Hollywood Reporter can reveal.
Presenter Sheryl Lee Ralph points out how the 1960s-set sitcom — now set in Montgomery, Alabama, where audiences follow the Black, middle-class Williams family — highlights some of the “awful truths” she experienced growing up as a child of the ’60s.
Accepting the honor, showrunner Saladin K. Patterson says he’s proud to continue the prestigious lineage of being part of a Peabody-winning show.
“The Peabody means something special to me because myself, some of our other writers, department heads, we all come from other shows that have been honored by the Peabody before, shows such as the original Wonder Years, Frasier, the Bernie Mac Show, Black-ish, The West Wing, Insecure,” he explained. “For us to be able to say we are part of that lineage now is such a great honor.”
He then added, joking, “But now, more importantly, we can finally say to them, ‘Stop bragging about having a Peabody because you know what? We got one too y’all!’”
Watch Patterson’s full acceptance speech in the video below.
Sonam Kapoor and Anand Ahuja are all set to embrace parenthood. The actress who is also celebrating her 36th birthday on Thursday, is currently residing in London. Sonam and Anand kept their romance hush-hush for a long time, but when they went public the duo never shied from expressing their love for one another. The duo quite often shares mushy pictures along with love-filled captions on social media. While fans adore their romance, many want to know what prompted Sonam to marry Anand. In an old interview, the actor called herself “lucky” to have married someone like him.
Talking about the moment, which prompted her to marry Anand, Sonam told Filmfare in 2020 that Anand loved her ‘even though she was nuts’. The actor said that he knows exactly who she is, so she is able to say whatever comes to her mind with no filter. “He saw the person in me and not some glamorous heroine. He saw me as Sonam, someone who’s extremely naïve and moohfat (frank),” she said.
Sonam further added that Anand Ahuja is made of ‘great moral fibre’ and he sees things in ‘black or white’, not in shades of grey. “I’m not saying this because Anand’s my husband but because of the person he is. I call him Gautam Buddha. I tell him if you hadn’t met me, you would have left everything and gone off to the forest,” she said. Referring to him as a ‘sadhu’, who is extremely idealistic, and herself as his ‘apsara’, Sonam mentioned that she pulled him out of his ‘tapasya.’ “He’s so black and white that to an extent it’s annoying. Like we cannot do this and we cannot cut the queue… and things like that,” Sonam added.
Meanwhile, Sonam and Anand are expecting their first child. The actress announced her pregnancy on March 21 this year. Back then, she took to social media and dropped a picture in which the actress was seen flaunting her baby bump. “Four hands. To raise you the very best we can. Two hearts. That will beat in unison with yours, every step of the way. One family. Who will shower you with love and support. We can’t wait to welcome you. ❤️❤️❤️ #everydayphenomenal #comingthisfall2022,” she wrote.
S5E90- Line of Duty show summary (with Allan McPherson)
June 8th, 2022
The acclaimed BBC procedural does so many things right but what does it slip up on occasionally? Guest Allan McPherson helps highlight this show but where does it rank alongside the many other hits like The Wire, The Shield, Bosch and Law & Order types? Does this do anthology series better than True Detective (besides the fact that it absolutely does)? Who gives the most scene-stealing performance? Why is this such a frightening take on the whole police state propaganda currently rocking the U.K. now? And more intensity and well-grounded speeches!
Netflix’s Farzar trailer opens with a prescient (and gleefully self aware) question: “Is this gonna be more like Futurama or Rick And Morty?” To that, Farzar’s ruler Renzo (Lance Reddick) has a simple response: “Shut the fuck up.”
The history of the planet, according to unreliable narrator Renzo, goes like this: “This is Farzar. It was a peaceful planet before the evil aliens invaded. But Renzo protected his people from the aliens and their diabolical leader Bazarack. …Then Renzo married queen Flammy, totally for love, not just to gain power, even though she’s a slightly older woman.”
But Renzo’s son Prince Fichael (Dana Snyder) may soon discover that “all is not what it seems and he may be living a lie.” Fiachel believes it’s his “destiny to rid this planet of evil,” so his dad assigns him a “quote-unquote team” to help him do so. Leaving their domed human city, the ragtag squad will find more than just “evil aliens that want to kill and/or eat them,” according to the series’ synopsis, per Deadline.
The gang is in for some very obscene adventures, which find them popping in and out of the orifices of multiple giant creatures. The comedy promises the kind of intergalactic “nasty shit” you can’t find anywhere else (even Futuramaor Rick And Morty).
Farzar is written and executive produced by Roger Black and Waco O’Guin, who created Netflix’s Paradise PD and Comedy Central’s Brickleberry. “We couldn’t be happier that Netflix finally ‘put a ring on it,’” the duo said in a statement when the series was announced in 2021. “It’s an awesome network full of nice people and a great place to work! Now we can finally get those matching cherry red PT Cruisers we’ve had our eyes on.”
Reddick and Snyder are joined in the voice cast by David Kaye (Eternals), Jerry Minor (Brickleberry), Kari Wahlgren (Rick and Morty), Grey Griffin (Loud House) and Carlos Alazraqui (Kamp Koral).
Reality is overrated. Take a break and nestle up to the genre of television that’s the best escape: science fiction! The best new sci-fi shows to watch right now include new takes on classic franchises and wholly original stories, and our list has added Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Love, Death + Robots. All three of those shows are completely different from each other, which is part of why sci-fi is so great, right? For more variation, don’t miss Apple TV+’s Severance and Amazon Prime Video’s Undone.
Below you’ll find plenty of shows across various streaming platforms that are about future societies, clones, robots with feelings, galaxies far, far away, and even immortality. Our list of all the best sci-fi shows to watch right now covers several streaming services, including Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, HBO Max, Apple TV+, and more.
The Newest Sci-Fi Shows
Ewan McGregor, Obi-Wan Kenobi
Disney+
What it’s about: Star Wars’ Obi-Wan Kenobi gets his own series that bridges the prequel films with the original trilogy Why it’s worth watching:Obi-Wan Kenobi picks up with the titular Jedi master (Ewan McGregor, reprising his role) 10 years after the events of Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, and it also marks the return of Hayden Christensen as Anakin Skywalker. Rupert Friend stars as the Grand Inquisitor, the latest franchise villain with elaborate face makeup, and Moses Ingram plays Reva Sevander, another Jedi-hunting Inquisitor who uses her own methods to accomplish her goals. How many seasons: 1
Love, Death + Robots
Netflix
What it’s about: Animated sci-fi shorts go all over the place Why it’s worth watching: David Fincher produces this collection of animated shorts that cover everything from sentient robots to massive man-eating sea crabs. Each short, which runs less than 20 minutes, features a unique animation style and original story. It’s perfect for short attention spans. How many seasons: 3
Anson Mount and Ethan Peck, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds
Marni Grossman/Paramount+
What it’s about: A prequel to the Original Series follows Captain Pike on the USS Enterprise Why it’s worth watching: It’s always dangerous to dip into one of sci-fi’s most revered franchises for a new take, but Paramount+ has had good success launching new Star Trek franchises, and Strange New Worlds might be the best of the bunch. Set a decade before Star Trek: The Original Series and emulating it, Strange New Worlds sees Kirk predecessor Captain Pike (Anson Mount) at the helm of the Enterprise with a young Spock (Ethan Peck), a total noob Nyota Uhura (Celia Rose Gooding), and the rest of his crew as they explore the universe in standalone episodes. How many seasons: 1
Angelique Cabral and Rosa Salazar, Undone
Amazon Studios
What it’s about: A woman with unique powers helps her deceased dad solve his own murder Why it’s worth watching: This utterly unique animated series from the producers of BoJack Horseman stars Rosa Salazar as Alma, who discovers she has the power to move through space and time, an ability her dead father (Bob Odenkirk) helps her hone to find out how he was killed. It’s animated through rotoscoping, where film is drawn over so the animation preserves actors’ work, which it also uses to achieve Alma’s glorious travels through the continuum. Emotional, funny, and mind-blowing, Undone is one of those rare gems that deserves to be on more people’s watchlists. How many seasons: 2
Halo
What it’s about: A cybernetic super-soldier realizes he may not be a weapon for good Why it’s worth watching: The long-awaited Halo adaptation finally arrives after wearing out its tires on a long, bumpy development road, but the end result is better than naysayers say it is. Pablo Schreiber suits up as Master Chief, uncovering an ancient alien weapon (the titular Halo), a human military using him as a pawn, and a group of hostile aliens that want him and all humans dead. It’s got action AND butts. How many seasons: 1
Adam Scott, Severance
Apple TV+
What it’s about: A company makes its employees divide their consciousnesses into their work selves and their home selves Why it’s worth watching: The idea of a solid work-life balance gets taken to the max in this trippy, unique, and funny series in which workers at a strange company voluntarily have their minds severed so that their work-life is unaware of their personal life, and vice versa. Naturally, the company is up to no good, and as the employees begin to wonder more about their outside lives, things get very weird. The spectacular cast includes Adam Scott, Patricia Arquette, John Turturro, and Christopher Walken. How many seasons: 1
More recommendations:
More Great Sci-Fi Shows
Abubakar Salim and Amanda Collin, Raised by Wolves
Coco Van Oppens
What it’s about: A pair of androids are tasked with saving humanity by raising children on a barren planet, but some religious fanatics have other ideas. Why it’s worth watching: Ridley Scott added his touch — he executive produced the series and directed the first two episodes — to this out-of-this-world-and-any-other-world drama that asks big questions about parenting and religion — “Is a robot having kids an affront to God?” comes up more than once. It’s extremely weird, in a very good way, creating a universe unlike any other you’ve seen, and though its initial episodes appear to be pretty self-contained, there are hints pretty early on that there’s a lot of story to tell. Plus, Vikings‘ Travis Fimmel does some pretty good impressions of ducks. Did we mention that it’s weird? How many seasons: 2
Alan Tudyk, Resident Alien
James Dittinger/Syfy
What it’s about: An alien visits Earth, assumes human form, and is mistaken for the town doctor… but his plan is to kill all humans. Why it’s worth watching: Alan Tudyk. The science-fiction mainstay (Firefly, Doom Patrol) is at his most charming as an extra-terrestrial in disguise in this mystery comedy that’s part small-town mystery, part procedural comedy. Based on a graphic novel series, Resident Alien runs on the threat of Harry (Tudyk) getting exposed as an invader, as well as the strange lessons he learns about these oddball humans. How many seasons: 2
Oats Studios Vol. 1
Netflix
What it’s about: A collection of short science-fiction films from filmmaker Neill Blomkamp Why it’s worth watching: Blomkamp (District 9) is one of sci-fi’s great directors, combining raw action with desolate landscapes to create a moody atmosphere that jumps off the screen. This collection of shorts that span anywhere from 8 minutes to 30 minutes and genres from black comedy to doomsday apocalypses show off Oats Studios’ tech and Blomkamp’s ability to tell a tight story. It’s like Black Mirror. How many seasons: 1
Lou Llobell, Foundation
Apple TV+
What it’s about: In the future, a galactic empire struggles to hold on to its power when a mathematician predicts its demise and a descent into dark ages. Why it’s worth watching: An adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s novels, Foundation is Apple TV+’s big-budget swing to get a genre drama to the masses, and it looks great. The story is a big task as well, as different characters are stationed on different planets and various ambitions create conflict with others. It’s a sort of Game of Thrones in space, if you will. How many seasons: 1
Tom Hiddleston and Wunmi Mosaku, Loki
Disney+
What it’s about: What Loki got up to while Avengers: Endgame was going on Why it’s worth watching: Tom Hiddleston‘s God of Mischief is back, and free from that pesky conscience, in Marvel’s latest Disney+ series. This one is a crime thriller that follows the alternate version of Loki who stole the Tesseract in Avengers: Endgame, an event that basically broke reality. Now he has to fix it. He’s recruited by Owen Wilson‘s Mobius M. Mobius at the mysterious Time Variance Authority (TVA) to travel through history and correct the timeline he messed up. Forgive me for the blasphemy of comparing a Marvel series to a DC one, but it kinda sounds like Loki’s Legends of Tomorrow. How many seasons: 1
Michael Dorman, For All Mankind
Apple TV+
What it’s about: America and Russia race to be the first on the moon… to establish a moon base, in this alternate history drama. Why it’s worth watching: If you want to watch some historical fiction but also have an itch for science-fiction, For All Mankind is your one-stop shop. The show posits what would happen if Russia landed on the moon first, and the great space race never ended as the U.S. and Russia tried to one-up each other for the decades that followed. Full of politics, social issues, and tons of what-ifs for space geeks, For All Mankind is for anyone who wants some grounded science-fiction. How many seasons: 2 (Season 3 out Jun 10)
Elizabeth Olsen and Paul Bettany, WandaVision
Marvel/Disney+
What it’s about: The Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Scarlet Witch and Vision find themselves… trapped inside classic TV comedies? Why it’s worth watching: Better late than never, WandaVision is the first television show from the MCU, and represents the future of Disney+, which is kind of a big deal. For fans of Marvel, it’s a must-see, soft-launching Phase 4 of the MCU and affecting the events of the upcoming movie Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. As for the show itself, it adds comedic dimension to stars Elizabeth Olsen and Paul Bettany while a slowly unfolding mystery keeps things captivating. How many seasons: 1
The Mandalorian
Disney+
What it’s about: A bounty hunter zips about the post-Return of the Jedi Star Wars universe with some very precious (and adorable) cargo. Why it’s worth watching:The Mandalorian is arguably one of the best Star Wars products to be released… ever. As a story that’s only slightly connected to the rest of the franchise’s canon, it’s easy for anyone to jump into right away and enjoy the episodic stories of Mando (Pedro Pascal) and Baby Yoda, the most legit pop culture icon we’ve been blessed with in years. The real reason to tune in is that The Mandalorian is the TV equivalent of candy; it’s throwback, swashbuckling television that looks absolutely incredible, with flecks of tiny Star Wars Easter eggs sprinkled in. It’s pure entertainment of the highest degree. How many seasons: 2
Nick Offerman as Forest, Devs
Miya Mizuno/FX
What it’s about: A woman investigates the disappearance of her boyfriend, who was working on a top-secret project at a powerful tech company in San Francisco. Why it’s worth watching: After movies like Ex Machina and Annihilation, Alex Garland is proving to be one of sci-fi’s most exciting creators, and his TV debut features all his trademarks. Devs is packed with philosophy and intellectual discussions about existence, technology’s place in society’s advancement, and the dire consequences of tinkering with fate, almost to the point that it’s too cerebral. But take it slow and you’ll find a beautifully filmed single-season series that has big points to make about the dangerous precipice advanced computing has us inching toward. How many seasons: 1
Abigail Spencer, Malcolm Barrett, Matt Lanter; Timeless
Darren Michaels/Sony/NBC
What it’s about: A team of three travel throughout time to save the future from a mysterious organization that wants to change history Why it’s worth watching: Time travel shows can become messy affairs of paradoxes, brain-busting theories, and plot holes, but Eric Kripke’s Timeless used time travel simply and splendidly in this throwback, swashbuckling adventure series. A historian, an engineer, and a soldier are sent back in history to prevent the villainous organization known as Rittenhouse from altering history in order to change the future to their advantage, meeting famous overlooked figures from history — often minorities and/or women — along the way. In that sense, Timeless is almost as educational as it is exciting. But the real strength of Timeless comes from its characters and their relationships, like the epic romance between Lucy (Abigail Spencer) and Wyatt (Matt Lanter). Timeless is a real crowd-pleaser, the kind of sci-fi series for people who usually shy away from the genre. How many seasons: 2
Tatiana Maslany, Orphan Black
What it’s about: A woman discovers that she may not be the only one of… her Why it’s worth watching: Orphan Black burst onto the scene in 2013, coming out of nowhere to stun critics and viewers with its crafty premise: a con artist witnesses the suicide of another woman who looks just like her, leading her down a rabbit hole of clones and conspiracies. The BBC America series combines action, science-fiction, and humor extremely well, creating characters you’ll adore (Alison Hendrix is a legend) and anticipate venturing into each others’ orbits. Chameleon Tatiana Maslany won an Emmy for her roles as the many different versions of the same woman, though she really should have won at least three. The first seasons are the strongest, but Maslany and the great cast stay great throughout its run. How many seasons: 5
Battlestar Galactica
Syfy, NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images
What it’s about: A reimagining of the 1970s classic in which alien robots threaten to wipe out humans Why it’s worth watching: Battlestar Galactica is considered one of the all-time great sci-fi series, and when it was released in the mid-2000s, one of the best TV shows period. Ronald D. Moore’s take adds a wrinkle that increases the paranoia tenfold; the Cylons can impersonate humans, meaning the crew of the Galactica realizes that some of its members could be Cylons in disguise, even if the Cylons don’t know it themselves. Watch the miniseries that launched the series first, then dive into the next two seasons, which is some of the greatest sci-fi television ever made. Later seasons tail off a bit, and the ending wasn’t well-received by all, but the show is still well worth the journey. How many seasons: 4
Adrianne Palicki, The Orville
What it’s about: In the far future, the crew of a space ship explores the galaxy to bring alien cultures into the Planetary Union, while also sometimes manufacturing pot brownies in the ship’s food synthesizer. Why it’s worth watching: The Orville is an homage to Star Trek and Star Trek: The Next Generationfrom Family Guycreator Seth MacFarlane, who fawns over all things Trek while also not afraid to make fun of it. It’s hard to tell what kind of show The Orville wants to be at some points because it’s really trying to be all of them: an interstellar stoner comedy, a sci-fi swashbuckler, a workplace drama, a futuristic Twilight Zone. But that’s part of the fun. Season 1 has some bumps, but Season 2, especially the midseason two-parter “Identity” is an improvement. Though the first two seasons aired on Fox, Season 3 is a Hulu exclusive. How many seasons: 3
David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson, The X-Files
Fox
What it’s about: A pair of FBI agents investigate the paranormal and inexplicable — UFOs, ghosts, and even cannibals. Why it’s worth watching: It’s a classic for a reason. The X-Files set the mold with Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) — the definitive believer and skeptic, paired up to investigate the unexplained. But the Fox procedural was always too smart to draw a clean line between faith and science; even Mulder wanted proof, and even Scully had her religion. This is the most scientific thing about the science fiction of The X-Files (which is otherwise not all that sciency): The show’s heroes are two people willing to upend their entire belief systems to get the truth. Mulder and Scully asked the messy questions, and it changed genre television. –Kelly Connolly How many seasons: 11 Bonus:9 Shows Like The X-Files That You Should Watch Next
J.K. Simmons, Counterpart
Starz
What it’s about: A government desk jockey (J.K. Simmons) an an office in Berlin learns that an event split the world into two parallel universes, and the two sides are slowly approaching an all-out war against each other. Yikes! Why it’s worth watching: The gimmick gives its wonderful cast (which includes Olivia Williams and Harry Lloyd) the opportunity to play dual roles as each universe has a “counterpart” in the other. Simmons leads the way as his counterpart is a superspy, and watching him play against himself is incredible. Fans of espionage and science-fiction will have their heads full with the intricately plotted and twisty story. How many seasons: 2
Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Mackenzie Davis; Black Mirror
Laurie Sparham/Netflix
What it’s about: This anthology series tells different tales each episode about the dangers of technology and the depravities people will use it for. From digital worlds to dark dystopias, Black Mirror will have you second-guessing whether you should cut every cord you own just to be safe. Why it’s worth watching: If you’re in the mood to start hating the human race, Black Mirror is the sci-fi show for you. While most of these stories are a little bit depressing (and some are borderline horrific), a few are uplifting enough to cleanse your palate (check out Season 3’s “San Junipero” or Season 4’s “Hang the DJ” for some heart eyes). The best part about this binge is that while you’ll definitely get hooked, the fact that it’s an anthology series means you won’t necessarily find yourself powering through episodes at 3 a.m. since each episode is a standalone story. How many seasons: 5
Brian J Smith, Elyse Levesque, David Blue, Alaina Huffman and Jamil Walker Smith, Stargate Universe
Syfy, NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images
What it’s about: A group of scientists, military personnel and a few civilians accidentally find themselves transported onto an ancient ship, thousands of lightyears from Earth. While stranded in strange galaxies, tensions run high as they attempt to explore the unknown universe and find a way back home. Why it’s worth watching: Out of all the Stargate series that could have made this list, we picked Stargate Universe because it combines all of our favorite sci-fi elements: a brilliant group of stranded strangers, space, time travel, political infighting and terrifying aliens. It’s literally a one-stop shop for every nerd-tastic fantasy you’ve ever had with the bonus of great performances and top-notch storytelling. We do warn you, however, Stargate Universe was canceled after Season 2 and ended on a pretty huge cliffhanger, so you should go into this binge knowing that when you get to the end, you’ll want to pull your hair out wishing there was more. You’re welcome for the heads up. How many seasons: 2
Fringe
What it’s about: A team of experts led by a kooky old scientist (John Noble), his son (Joshua Jackson), and an FBI agent (Anna Torv) investigate strange occurrences around the country, X-Files style. Their work leads them to discover something entirely new that will change the world forever. Why it’s worth watching: The J.J. Abrams-produced series is one of the best broadcast science-fiction shows of all time, particularly in its first three seasons, and perfected the art of the serialized procedural by weaving the show’s deep mythology and excellent character work into weekly standalone stories, making it easy to binge or watch in spurts. And by the time the end of Season 1 starts, you’ll have a hard time stopping. How many seasons: 5
Aaron Stanford and Amanda Schull, 12 Monkeys
Syfy, Dusan Martincek/Syfy
What it’s about: After a deadly virus kills 7 billion people, the survivors living in 2043 send a scavenger named James Cole (Aaron Stanford) to the past to stop the virus from being released in the first place. Naturally, time loops and even forbidden romance get in the way of his mission to save the human race. Why it’s worth watching: 12 Monkeys is a show you have to pay close attention to in order to keep track of the changing timelines and loops, but ultimately the mythology and the world-building are just too good to pass up! Plus, this show has some of the most kick-butt women on TV, which is harder to find than it should be in the sci-fi genre. With the fourth and final season come and gone, you’ll be able to binge the whole thing start to finish! How many seasons: 4
Peter Capaldi, Doctor Who
Ray Burmiston, BBC
What it’s about: The Doctor, a humanoid alien of an extinct race called the Time Lords, travels the universe in his (or her!) Tardis, a time-traveling spaceship that takes that shape of a phone booth. Together with his (or her!) human companions, The Doctor regularly saves the world from destruction with his (or her!) quick wit and timey-wimey adventures. Why you should watch: If you’re looking for something a little less intense and more whimsical, Doctor Who is the show for you. Typically, each episode travels to a new time period or galaxy (often both) where the Doctor and companions of the moment have wild adventures while escaping the evil clutches of the Daleks and Cybermen. Although, when you least expect it, the show knows just how to hit you where it hurts. So although it’s a show of whimsy, be prepared to cry your eyes out too. Jodie Whittaker joined the series as the first female doctor in Season 11. How many seasons: 13
What it’s about: Far in the future, scientists have found a way to digitize and save human consciousness, allowing people’s minds to be copied and transported from one body to another, essentially making humans immortal. When one of the richest men in the universe is murdered — though his copied consciousness obviously survives — he hires, Takeshi Kovacs, a mercenary hundreds of years old to figure out who “killed” him. In Season 2, Kovacs, in an entirely new body, searches for his long lost love while investigating a series of new murders. Why it’s worth watching: This futuristic series will have your head spinning with awesome technological advancements and a mystery that’s almost too tangled to unravel. The kicker, though, is the flashback portion of the saga that not only ties well into the overall narrative but will have you begging for a spin-off based completely in the past. How many seasons: 2
Marie Avgeropoulos, The 100
DIYAH PERA, DIYAH PERA/THE CW
What it’s about: Nearly 100 years after nuclear war wipes out the human race on Earth, the only survivors are the members aboard a joint-space station called The Ark circling the globe. When overpopulation becomes a problem, The Ark decides to send 100 teenage delinquents to the ground to see if the Earth is habitable, but these misfits find more than bargained for when they arrive. Why it’s worth watching: Assuming the words “apocalypse” and “teens” didn’t get you, The 100 is worth a binge simply for the dynamic storytelling alone. Rather than focus on hot teens running a community, the show hones in on the lengths to which humans will go to stay alive and whether that survival requires you to lose what it is that makes you human. It’s a pretty insightful look into the future, and with seven seasons under its belt, it’s a good, long binge. How many seasons: 7
Nathan Fillion, Alan Tudyk, Gina Torres and Adam Baldwin, Firefly
What it’s about: Space cowboys. Enough said. Why it’s worth watching: What list would be complete without the cult classic Firefly? This short-lived series took fans by storm back in 2002, though it was canceled after only 14 episodes. That makes it a quick binge full of shoot-outs and smuggling that will leave you begging for more. If you want an end to the story, you’ll have to find the wrap-up movie, Serenity, which is currently streaming through Starz. How many seasons: 1
Louis Hofmann, Dark
Julia Terjung / Netflix
What it’s about: Thanks to a wormhole in the underground caves beneath the local power plant, strange things start happening in the small German town of Winden. Time travel, disappearing children, and family secrets intertwine in a thrilling mystery that spans three generations. Why you should watch: Dark is Netflix’s first German-language Original, meaning you’ve either got to watch with subtitles or the English dub. Though it may take you a minute to get into it, once you do, you’re in for a wild ride. Tangled webs of time travel and family secrets pair well with the show’s odd sense of humor, making for a cool mystery that will keep you binging late into the night. How many seasons: 3
The Expanse
Kurt Iswarienko/Syfy
What it’s about: Set in a future where humans have colonized the solar system, prejudices have divided humanity into three camps: Earth, Mars, and The Belt (an asteroid belt). But when a mysterious alien technology is discovered and a political conspiracy spanning the solar system begins to unravel, it becomes up to the idealist James Holden to try and save humanity from the potential alien weapon — and themselves. Why you should watch: The most intriguing part of The Expanse is the intricate world-building and political machinations that underscore the cool sci-fi stuff like space battles and even gravity torture. The interplanetary conflict at the core of the show’s story creates a ton of juicy arcs that all build toward some seriously unpredictable reveals. How many seasons: 5
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President Joe Biden was Jimmy Kimmel’s guest Wednesday night on “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” and during their conversation, Kimmel asked Biden something that quite a lot of frustrated people have been asking themselves: Why isn’t Biden issuing executive orders to deal with the epidemic of gun-related mass murders the way Donald Trump used that presidential power for his priorities?
Biden’s answer: He thinks Trump abused the constitution and doesn’t want to “emulate” him. You can watch the exchange below in a preview of the interview posted ahead of the show’s broadcast, and read the transcript after if you’re unable to watch now.
“Can’t you issue an executive order? Trump passed those out like Halloween candy,” Kimmel asked.
:I have issued executive orders, within the power of the presidency, to be able to deal with these, everything having to do with guns, gun ownership, all the things within my power. But what I don’t want to do,” Biden said, “and I’m not being facetious, is emulate Trump’s abuse of the constitution and constitutional authority.”
“I mean that sincerely, because I often get asked, ‘Look, the Republicans don’t play it square, why do you play it square?’ Well, guess what? If we do the same thing they do, our democracy would literally be in jeopardy. It’s not a joke,” Biden continued.
“I understand that argument,” Kimmel responded, “but also it’s like you’re playing ‘Monopoly’ with someone who won’t pass go, who won’t follow any of the rules. Then how do you ever make any progress, if they’re not following the rules?”
“You gotta send them to jail,” Biden said.
The full interview will be online later. “Jimmy Kimmel Live” airs at 11:30 p.m. Eastern and Pacific on ABC.
Speaking of jail — or more likely, not jail — Biden’s appearance on Kimmel comes one night before the start of prime time congressional hearings investigating the deadly Jan. 6 insurrection stoked by Donald Trump in order to overturn the election and install himself in a second term illegally. Biden, however, is in Los Angeles for the 2022 Summit of the Americas.
In the decade since Caribou’s Dan Snaith launched his Daphni alias with a flurry of DJ edits, it has evolved from a clearinghouse for club tools into an amorphous side project where the only constant is a focus on moving bodies. “Cherry” is the first new Daphni production in three years, and it’s by far the heaviest thing Snaith has released in that guise. Where classic disco and house have formed the foundation of many Daphni tracks—his last outing, 2019’s “Sizzlin’,” sped up a giddy horn riff from an obscure 1981 Bermudian funk record—“Cherry” tips its hat to the perennially futuristic sounds of Detroit techno.
The track is built around bright, glassy FM synths that chime like tiny bells, and across the track’s six-minute run, Snaith carefully teases the balance between chaos and control. The bell-tone riff moves in seasick syncopations, periodically tripping over the edges of the rhythmic grid; roughly halfway through, he brings the song to a full stop, indulging in a second-long fakeout of pure silence. Pity the poor DJ who isn’t yet familiar with the song’s twists and turns and, confronted with that heart-stopping moment of dead air, thinks that the song is over. For dancers, of course, that precarious moment will be simply thrilling, like the seas parting at 134 beats per minute. But for all that slipperiness, the rounded synth chords that occupy the track’s midrange are rich and reassuring, and the drums interlock like clockwork. Out of the collision of those opposing impulses emerges the track’s spirit: giddy and anarchic but also strangely determined. It’s a summer anthem with sunrise raving written all over it.
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COMING TO THEATERS! I’ve spent my fair share of time in underground Asian video stores perusing the multiple shelves and bins of imported martial arts movies. So it’s not lost on me that the genre has a massive following in the States. I just didn’t think the Midwest was a significant hub of that fandom until I experienced Ryan Harrison’s WTF comedy, Ninja Badass. Running at over 100 minutes, the film has a simple plot, which should say a lot about it.
Writer/director Harrison stars as Rex, a useless white guy who lives in a small redneck town and makes out with a plastic doll on his mother’s couch. By mistake, he uncovers a sinister underground cult known as The Ninja VIP Super Club. It’s led by the menacing Big Twitty (Darrell Francis), who over the years has become a powerful supernatural entity by drinking the blood of hot women and cute puppies.
Rex is thrown into the mix when he falls hard for a hot chick, who then is kidnapped by a team of Ninja VIPs. After a futile effort to rescue her, Rex is saved by a sensei in army fatigues, known as Haskell (Steven C. Rose). Unfortunately, Haskell’s arm is ripped off trying to stop Big Twitty. Not to worry though, Haskell uses his ninja power to grow it back, but for now, his arm is a long sausage with a tiny hand attached at the end. In the meantime, he vows to train Rex to become a ninja, like him, and save the town’s hot chicks and cute puppies.
“…vows to train Rex to become a ninja, like him, and save the town’s hot chicks and cute puppies.”
On first impression, I’d describe Ninja Badass as a silly and insane homage to the over-the-top karate films of the 1970s and 80s (my favorite being The Flying Guillotine). But, I’ll say this, Harrison is clearly a fan of these old martial arts films and has put massive effort into making a faithful parody of the genre while incorporating his midwestern life. Even better, I see no indication whatsoever that Harrison has ever taken a martial arts class at any point in his life. Yet, as chaotic as the plot gets, we have a cohesive narrative that goes off in several directions while still feeling focused.
As a comedy, Ninja Badass serves up one hilarious joke after the next. Harrison lampoons everything and everything, including h***y rednecks, corrupt town leaders, ninja henchmen, and a complete lack of knowledge of Asian customs and cultures. I’m still laughing at Haskell’s dubbed dialogue and his not-even-close-to-fluent Japanese.
But here’s the real reason to watch the film. It’s a visual feast of rotting food for the eyes. I’m pretty sure the lion’s share of the budget went to the practical gross-out gags and make-up, plus a plethora of violent visual effects. The film is loaded with ample amounts of decapitations and dismemberments. Gallons upon gallons of blood are sprayed, thrown, and dumped in this gory mess. There are also plenty of CG effects for a half-dozen explosions, various training segments involving dangerous farm animals, and a room full of cute puppies.
Ultimately, this uber-low-budget production is about a bunch of losers ripping each other to pieces. If that’s not a reason to see Ninja Badass, I don’t know what is. The humor is sophomoric at best, and again if that’s not a reason to see this film… Finally, I’d like to mention my favorite scene involves both boobs and bacon. I love this movie, and it will make the perfect palette cleanser for the uptight Hollywood dreck in theaters now (I’m talking about you, Downton Abbey).
Ninja Badass comes to theaters and VOD on Friday, June 10, 2022.
Yaroslava Sushko holds a photo of her son, Serhii V. Sushko, during a funeral for 27 Ukrainian servicemen who died fighting the Russians, in Dnipro, Ukraine, on June 3. (Wojciech Grzedzinski/For The Washington Post)
DNIPRO, Ukraine — The mourners arrived well before the military funeral was to begin, entire families crowding around a single coffin, side by side on a warm, sunny morning with other families and coffins.
Two lines of soldiers, perhaps 100 in all, stood at attention as the Rev. Dmitro Povorotny and several other Ukrainian Orthodox priests entered the small cemetery, signaling that the mourners should step back from the caskets so the ceremony could begin.
But one woman, overwhelmed with grief, could not. She sat on a bench crying as relatives comforted her. When a military band began playing Ukraine’s national anthem, she wept harder.
“Glory to Ukraine,” an officer called out.
“Glory to the heroes,” mourners responded.
To visit Krasnopilske cemetery during a military funeral is to experience the brutal sweep of Ukraine’s war with Russia and the terrible intimacy of a family’s loss. Twenty-seven soldiers were laid to rest last Friday. Of those, 12 were buried as unknowns in a military section that grows larger almost by the day.
For Povorotny, the small cemetery on the outskirts of Dnipro speaks to the sacrifice his people have paid in blood since Russian President Vladimir Putin launched the invasion on Feb. 24. In just three months, the cemetery’s military section has added 293 graves, compared with 175 in the previous eight years,since war broke out with Moscow-backed separatists in the eastern Donbas region in 2014.
“You can see how the war changed. And this is just one cemetery, one of thousands of cemeteries in Ukraine,” said Povorotny, a military chaplain and archpriest in the Orthodox Church of Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk region’s diocese.
Povorotny has conducted about 10 mass burials at the cemetery since the war began, he said in an interview following Friday’s ceremony. Every week, he conducts one or two individual funerals, too. He estimated that more than 700 members of the military have been killed in the Dniepropetrovsk region alone.
But when he looks into the faces of the mourners, he said, he’s convinced he can see their faith in ultimate victory, despite their losses and pain.
“Putin called it a special operation. Before that, they called it a civil war,” Povorotny said, holding a hand over the wooden cross hanging from his neck. “For us, it’s a real war of independence.”
The funerals that occur daily around Ukraine are also unfolding with new protocols that have been rewritten to reflect Western customs, such as those followed by the United States, and uniquely Ukrainian traditions, instead of those inherited from Russia and the Soviet Union.
And they come as the nation discusses creating a new national cemetery in Kyiv that would serve Ukraine as Arlington National Cemetery has served the United States. Volodymyr Vyatrovich, a member of the Rada, the Ukrainian parliament, and a former head of the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory, said in a Telegram post last month that parliament had agreed to create a national cemetery somewhere in or around Kyiv.
To develop new military funeral practices, the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory looked at the country’s history of funeral rites, from the short-lived Ukrainian National Republic in the early 20th century to the burial practices among Cossacks, the bands of warriors who roamed Ukraine’s steppes hundreds of years ago. The institute also analyzed the modern military funeral rituals of Belgium, Israel, Poland, Turkey and the United States and visited U.S. military cemeteries.
Their work culminated in a 2019 video by the Ministry of Veterans Affairs that shows in detail how a military funeral should be conducted. Some of the rituals would be familiar to anyone who has attended a funeral with military honors at Arlington National Cemetery, including a new practice of draping the casket with the Ukrainian flag before folding and presenting it to the family. The new protocols also stipulate that up to six soldiers may fire three volleys in salute.
At Friday’s services, some of the new rituals were on display, such as the folding of the Ukrainian flag — though perhaps with less spit-and-polish precision than one might find where the custom has been conducted for generations.
The 27 coffins — each draped with a blue-and-yellow Ukrainian flag — were laid out before the ceremony in three neat rows with only enough room to walk between them. A wooden cross was laid atop each, with a sign bearing the soldier’s name in ornate script. And on the coffins containing unidentified remains, the sign said, “Here rests an unknown soldier forever to be remembered.”
Many mourners were dressed in black, including several older women wearing kerchiefs, but others wore T-shirts and shorts. Many were in uniform, including a young soldier whose military-green T-shirt was neatly folded and pinned over the stump of his missing right arm. Another mourner laid her cheek on a coffin, stroking thepolished wood with her hand amid a hush so profound that the faint fluttering of the flags could be heard.
“When I look at the flags, it’s like looking at the souls of angels — and there are lots of them, you know?” said Tetyana Kaikova, 34, who attended Friday with family members from around the country for the funeral of her cousin, Serhii V. Sushko. His tank was destroyed on his birthday, May 11, in fighting near the front lines in Donbas.
Though he was pulled from the wreckage, he suffered severe burns and died three days later at a hospital in Dnipro. Sushko, who lived in Kherson and served in a tank crew in the 57th Motorized Brigade, was 49.
When her cousin wasn’t fishing, Kaikova said, he was often in the kitchen whipping up a delicious pot of borscht. Kaikova said she hadn’t seen him in a year or so, but they talked on the phone often about getting together at her dacha, or countryside retreat, for a cookout.
“He was always smiling, always,” said Kaikova, who works in an international trade firm.
Sushko’s once and future wife, Angela Pavluk, was also there to lay him to rest. After 18 years of amicable divorce, she and Sushko were making plans to marry again.
Sushko was proudly self-reliant, self-effacing and patriotic, she said. A firefighter and paramedic, he refused to use a government pass that allowed him to ride public transit free and enlisted in the army soon after war with Moscow-backed separatists broke out in 2014. He didn’t even bother to tell anyone about two military commendations that he had received since February.
“He wasn’t afraid of anything. He went there from Day 1,” Pavluk said.
Marrying again was a decision that came from staying in touch all those years, and sharing in the lives of their three children and a granddaughter, Pavluk said.
“He was a really good father,” Pavluk said. She even set aside coins and stamps that he might like to add to his beloved collection.
In recent months, Sushko became so eager to wed that he offered to renew their vows online, Pavluk said.
“And I said that I do not want to do it that way,” she recalled. “We’ve already had a wedding before, so I just wanted to have a small family gathering. This is something that we wanted to do, but now, well … we just didn’t make it there.”
Instead, there would be a large family gathering, but of a different and terrible kind — to mourn, not celebrate.
During the funeral ceremony, as Povorotny and the other priests intoned the names of the dead and chanted, and the incense smoke drifted through the crowd with thesweet aroma of myrrh and balsam, a thunderous sound rolled over the ceremony as an antiaircraft missile was fired skyward somewhere south of the city.
The rocket cut across the sky, leaving behind a plume of white smoke that rose, twisted and began to dissolve.The priests continued their chanting, uninterrupted, as mourners turned their eyes upward, searching the sky.
Serhii Korolchuk, Wojciech Grzedzinski, Ievgenia Sivorka and Kostiantyn Tatarkin contributed to this report.
Remembering her love. Sophia Bui, the longtime girlfriend of General Hospital star Jack Wagner’s son Harrison Wagner, is opening up about his death the best way she knows how — through a “love letter to [her] babe.”
“Seven years, on and off, round and round we loved each other. For better or for worse,” the Minx star, 27, wrote via Instagram on Wednesday, June 7, under a photo of herself with her late beau. “In sickness and in health. Sorry, I missed yr calls in the middle of the night these last few days. I miss sleeping in yr polar bear arms, curled up. I miss sending you silly animal videos. I miss you sending gorgeous songs that made me cry.”
Bui, who called Harrison “the balm that soothed my soul,” shared that she was “so brokenhearted” but the California native would always be “my guy.”
“I was never alone in this world with you. You were the balm that soothed my soul,” the Texas native gushed, adding, “I will always choose to love you in this world and in any other life.”
The Top Gun: Maverick actress concluded the post with a trail of broken heart emojis.
Harrison Wagner/Instagram
In addition to the touching tribute, Bui also posted a handful of Instagram stories of herself and Harrison throughout the years, including one of Harrison kissing her cheek as they smile for the camera.
Earlier on Wednesday, Harrison’s older brother Peter Wager broke his silence in memoriam of his younger sibling’s memory. “Always with you,” the actor, 31, captioned a handful of throwback photos of the two via Instagram.
The heartfelt dedications come just one day after Harrison was pronounced dead in North Hollywood, California, at 5:14 a.m. local time, according to the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner-Coroner report obtained by Us Weekly on Tuesday.
The DJ’s body was found in a parking lot in North Hollywood on Monday. Following the autopsy, the medical examiner deferred the cause of death and more investigation has been requested. According to the filing, once the tests and studies come back, the doctor will evaluate the case again.
Harrison’s father Jack, 62, has yet to speak out about the sudden loss of his son, who he shares with ex-wife Kristina Wagner. The former soap opera stars, who met on the set of General Hospital, tied the knot in 1993 before calling it quits 13 years later. (The former couple also share son Peter and the Melrose Place alum is dad to daughter Kerry from a previous relationship.)
Prior to his death, Harrison faced a long battle with addiction that led to his disappearance in 2016. His dad Jack, 62, turned to social media for help finding his son at the time, writing via Twitter, “I fear for my youngest son’s safety. Harrison has struggled w drugs & alcohol just as I did when I was younger. He’s relapsed & is MIA 5 days.”
Luckily, the music producer was found five days later following the scare. Harrison, for his part, became increasingly vocal about his attempts to turn his life around.
“It is NEVER TO LATE TO MAKE A CHANGE IN ONES LIFE Let alone, if u are struggling believe me … I’ve been there. But we come out on the other seeing the world through a different Lens ❤️☀️,” he wrote via Instagram in September 2021.
Harrison’s final post, shared on May 22, was also one of optimism. “Focus. YOU are left with YOU and your thoughts. ?,” he captioned a picture of himself in Los Angeles.
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Elon Musk may be about to get more data from Twitter than he knows what to do with.
Twitter’s board of directors, after resisting Musk’s demands for data backing up its claims about spam and bot accounts representing less than 5% of daily active users, has decided to change course, the Washington Post reported, citing an anonymous source “familiar with the company’s thinking.”
Now, in an effort to close the deal, Twitter will offer Musk and his team access to its full “firehose” of raw data from the social platform, which includes 500 million-plus tweets posted daily, as early as this week, the Post reported.
When Musk inked the deal in April to buy Twitter, he waived his right to conduct deep due diligence on the company’s operations. Musk is on the hook to pay a $1 billion breakup fee if he walks away from the deal (and could be the target of lawsuits by Twitter shareholder or Twitter itself) unless he can demonstrate that Twitter significantly misled him about factors related to the company’s value. Wall Street has viewed Musk’s saber rattling over the spam/bot percentage as an attempt to drive down the deal price, or to give him a pretext to nix the acquisition.
Third-party researchers have lent credence to Musk’s skepticism about Twitter’s sub-5% claim about spam and fake accounts. For example, a recent study by data analytics provider GlobalData estimated that about 10% of Twitter’s active users post spam content, although the firm acknowledged that it’s challenging to determine what represents a “spam” account.
Asked for comment, a Twitter spokesman pointed to the company’s previous statement issued Monday.
“Twitter has and will continue to cooperatively share information with Mr. Musk to consummate the transaction in accordance with the terms of the merger agreement,” Twitter said in the June 6 statement. “We believe this agreement is in the best interest of all shareholders. We intend to close the transaction and enforce the merger agreement at the agreed price and terms.”
In another development, Twitter shareholders will vote in late July or early August on whether to approve Musk’s bid for the company, company lawyer Vijaya Gadde said in a staff meeting, Bloomberg reported.
