A little less than a month ago we shared the trailer for Palm Springs, the Sundance darling from director Max Barbakow, starring Andy Samberg and Cristin Milioti. Their romantic comedy broke a Sundance sales record when it sold to Hulu and Neon for $17.5 million this past January. It looks as if the investment was worth it; Hulu confirmed to IndieWire that Palm Springs broke the streaming platform’s record for opening weekend views.
“A spokesperson for Hulu confirms with IndieWire the film broke the streaming platform’s opening weekend record by netting more hours watched over its first three days than any other film on Hulu during the same period,” IndieWire‘s Zack Sharf writes.
The gist of Palm Springs is that it’s an existential comedy of the time-honored time-loop variety. Think of a sunbaked Groundhog Day set at a wedding and you’re halfway there. The basic outline is this: Nyles (Samberg) meets Sarah (Milioti) at a wedding. She’s the maid of honor but a total black sheep. He’s a likable weirdo in that Sambergian way we’ve all come to love. They click. They head out to the beach at night, and…that’s when things get weird. Really weird. You can check out the trailer if you want a proper primer for the plot, but you’d probably enjoy Palm Springs even more by going into it knowing as little as possible. The most salient points—that it’s very funny, got rave reviews out of Sundance, has two stellar leads and a great supporting cast, and broke Hulu’s streaming record—are really all you need to know.
Hulu is having quite a ride as of late. They recently enjoyed their massively successful launch of Oscar-winning director Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite this past April. That masterpiece became Hulu’s most-streamed independent or foreign-language film in its first week, and the second most-watched film on Hulu overall. Hulu’s partnership with Neon, which co-distributed both Parasite and Palm Springs, has been going about as well as you could hope.
Variety‘s Peter Debruge wrote that “Palm Springs is to time-loop movies as Zombielandwas to the undead genre: It’s an irreverent take on a form where earlier iterations were obliged to take themselves seriously.” As we wrote last month, Palm Springs isn’t just a time-loop story, it’s also a romantic comedy, a genre that has been on life support for a while now. The fact that the film is a testament to what we love about both genres explains, at least in part, why it’s resonating with audiences in such a big way.
Featured image: L-r: Cristin Milioti and Andy Samberg in ‘Palm Springs.’ Courtesy Hulu.
Perhaps now isn’t exactly the right time to spend hours with Alfred Hitchcock, considering our reality has enough tension, anxiety, and dread? Or, maybe you’re one of those people who actually find solace in scary movies, which offer a chance to safely experience tension, anxiety, and dread within the comfort of your own sanitized home and in two dimensions? If you’re in the latter category, Universal Home Entertainment has some good news for you in the form of a brand new box set—The Alfred Hitchcock Classics Collection—which offers viewers in the United States their first-ever chance to see Hitchcock’s uncut version of Psycho.
The idea of an “uncut” version of a movie that seems just about perfectly cut might seem counter-intuitive, but there’s been talk of an uncut Psycho forever. You might also quibble with the term “uncut” here, as it sounds like what Universal’s new box set is offering is a chance to see a version of Psycho not seen in America since the film’s theatrical release in 1960, with some additional footage. Extended version? Original version?
Regardless of the semantics, The Alfred Hitchcock Classics Collection contains a ton of stuff for the Hitchcock enthusiast, including seeing four of his masterworks in 4K resolution. Spending an afternoon watching Rear Window, Vertigo, Psycho and The Birds would be a cinematic feast regardless of how, precisely, you describe this particular version of Psycho.
Here’s the box set description from Universal, with a portion we bolded for emphasis: “Universally recognized as the Master of Suspense, the legendary Alfred Hitchcock directed some of cinema’s most thrilling and unforgettable classics. The Alfred Hitchcock Classics Collection features four iconic films from the acclaimed director’s illustrious career including Rear Window, Vertigo, Psycho, and The Birds in stunning 4K resolution. Starring Hollywood favorites such as James Stewart, Grace Kelly, Anthony Perkins, Janet Leigh, Tippi Hedren, Kim Novak and Rod Taylor, this essential collection features hours of bonus features as well as the original uncut version of Psycho for the first time ever.”
Snooping around the web for more information on what the uncut Psycho entails, /Filmfound this useful bit of information on the box set’s Amazon page: “The extended version of the movie as seen in theaters in 1960 is exactly as intended by Alfred Hitchcock and now available with additional footage for the first time.”
If this is the exact version the Master of Suspense had intended, we’re game.
The Alfred Hitchcock Classics Collection will be available on September 8, 2020.
Featured image: View of actor Anthony Perkins standing beside the Bates Motel in a still from the film, ‘Psycho,’ directed by Alfred Hitchcock, 1960. (Photo by Paramount Pictures/Courtesy of Getty Images)
By now you’ve heard the tragic news that Glee star Naya Rivera died at the age of 33. She was boating with her 4-year-old son on Lake Piru in Southern California. It’s devastating news.
As a Grammy-nominated singer and actor, Rivera was best known for playing cheerleader Santana Lopez on Glee. Rivera recently starred in the TV adaptation of Step Up, which had recently moved to Starz for its second season. She also had a recurring role on Lifetime‘s drama Devious Maids.
Rivera wasn’t only an immensely talented performer, she was also beloved by her co-stars and many others in the industry for who she was off-camera. Following the news, many of Rivera’s co-stars on Glee, as well as folks from throughout the entertainment industry, took to social media to pay their respects. Here are a few of those posts.
Becca Tobin, who played cheerleader Kitty Wilde on Glee:
It’s not only the Glee family speaking about Rivera—Mandy Moore, Josh Gad, Viola Davis, and Lin-Manuel Miranda are just a few of the stars who have shared their heartbreak. This post from GLAAD offers yet another example of the type of person Naya Rivera was. She will be greatly missed:
Naya Rivera will be missed so much by so many. She was a friend of GLAAD and even hosted the GLAAD Media Awards twice. She was kind, gracious, and personally used her platforms and voice to tell LGBTQ youth that they are loved. Our hearts are with her loved ones.? pic.twitter.com/FBL2wy6PQm
Featured image: GIFFONI VALLE PIANA, ITALY – JULY 24: (EXCLUSIVE COVERAGE) Actress Naya Rivera poses for a portrait session at the 2013 Giffoni Film Festival on July 24, 2013 in Giffoni Valle Piana, Italy. (Photo by Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images)
Breaking news about upcoming shows and first-look deals involving streaming services seems to be moving at a breakneck pace, doesn’t it? The latest comes courtesy of Disney+, which has ordered the Lucasfilm animated series Star Wars: The Bad Batch. The series is slated to premiere in 2021 and expands the streaming service’s Star Wars-related projects.
One of the most prolific folks working in the Star Wars world, Clone Wars mastermind and The Mandalorianexecutive producer and director Dave Filoni, will help shepherd The Bad Batch for Disney+. He’ll work alongside Athena Portillo (Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Star Wars Rebels), with Brad Rau (Star Wars Rebels, Star Wars Resistance) serving as supervising director, and Jennifer Corbett (Star Wars Resistance, NCIS) serving as head writer. Also on The Bad Batch team are Carrie Beck (The Mandalorian, Star Wars Rebels) and Josh Rimes (Star Wars Resistance) as co-executive producer and producer, respectively.
The series will follow the hard-charging experimental clones of the Bad Batch who we first met in The Clone Wars.The Bad Batch will take place in the immediate aftermath of the Clone Wars. “Members of Bad Batch – a unique squad of clones who vary genetically from their brothers in the Clone Army — each possess a singular exceptional skill which makes them extraordinarily effective soldiers and a formidable crew. In the post-Clone War era, they will take on daring mercenary missions as they struggle to stay afloat and find new purpose,” a press release from Disney states.
Here’s what else fans can look forward to in the upcoming series:
“Giving new and existing fans the final chapter of‘Star Wars: The Clone Wars has been our honor at Disney+, and we are overjoyed by the global response to this landmark series,” said Agnes Chu, senior vice president, Content, Disney+. “While the Clone Wars may have come to its conclusion, our partnership with the groundbreaking storytellers and artists at Lucasfilm Animation is only beginning. We are thrilled to bring Dave Filoni’s vision to life through the next adventures of the Bad Batch.”
Featured image: “Star Wars: The Clone Wars.” Courtesy StarWars.com/Lucasfilm/Disney+
Apple has added one of Hollywood’s biggest stars to its growing roster of boldfaced names. Idris Elba and his Green Door Pictures have signed a first-look deal with Apple TV+ to develop and produce a variety of projects for the streaming service. Elba started Green Door Pictures back in 2013 in order to develop projects with a diverse cast of talent in front of and behind the camera. Elba has starred in Green Door Pictures projects, including In the Long Run (which aired on Sky One in Europe and Starz in the U.S.) and Netflix’s Turn Up Charlie.
Elba joins a potent group of talent at Apple TV+, including Oprah Winfrey, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Simon Kinberg, and Alfonso Cuarón. The streaming service has not only supported intriguing projects focusing on diverse characters like their excellent series Little America, they’ve produced work from legends like Steven Spielberg, whose reboot of Amazing Storiesstreamed on Apple TV+ in early March, and inked deals with powerhouse studio A24 and Ridley Scott’s Scott Free Productions.
Elba has become one of Hollywood’s biggest stars and brings Apple TV+ not only his leading man ability, but his work as a producer, director, and musician. Elba’s charisma on screen is such that he can ably play the super Alpha male in a film lousy with Alpha males in both Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham (Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw), take on the role of a legend in Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom, and light up in the screen in director Cary Joji Fukunaga’s 2015 film Beasts of No Nation. His work on the small screen is equally impressive; he was phenomenal in the critically-acclaimed BBC series Luther, which earned him a Golden Globe Award and a slew of Emmy nominations, as well as his work as Stringer Bell in one of the greatest television series of all time (in our humble opinion) HBO’s The Wire.
Featured image: WEST HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA – MARCH 02: Idris Elba attends Netflix’s ‘Turn Up Charlie’ For Your Consideration event at Pacific Design Center on March 02, 2019 in West Hollywood, California. (Photo by Emma McIntyre/Getty Images)
Well, this looks delightfully silly. CBS All Access revealed the first trailer for Star Trek: Lower Decks, a new animated series that tweaks the formula of the legendary franchise in more ways than one. Lower Decks is focused on the support crew of one of Starfleet’s least important ships, the U.S.S. Cerritos. Your main characters are whatever the opposite of Vulcan would be (William Shatner?).
It’s the year 2038, and the support crew on the U.S.S. Cerritos (rhymes with “Doritos”) are not the usual Star Trek geniuses and courageous leaders you’re used to. These folks are, well, a lot more like the rest of us. The first trailer reveals the kind of gonzo vibe you’d expect from series creator Mike McMahan, a writer on the galactically insane Rick and Morty. There’s a lot of obvious love for the namesake franchise, and the rare opportunity for Trekkies and non-Trekkies alike to revel in some interstellar goofiness. We come to the flagship series and its spinoffs to watch deep moral and philosophical questions played out in an epic setting by great actors. Lower Decks promises to explore questions like, ‘What would happen if you were caught naked pretending to be a fleet captain? By your superior?’ Deep stuff!
The main cast is made up of ensigns toiling on the lower decks, far below the main deck where gallantry and brilliance are on constant display. These folks are Ensign Mariner, voiced by Tawny Newsome; Ensign Boimler, voiced by Jack Quaid; Ensign Tendi, voiced by Noel Wells; and Ensign Rutherford, voiced by Eugene Cordero. Your supporting cast includes Commander Jack Ransom, voiced by Jerry O’Connell; Captain Carol Freeman, voiced by Dawnn Lewis; Lieutenant Shaxs, voiced by Fred Tatasciore; and Doctor T’Ana voiced by Gillian Vigman.
The 10-episode first premieres on Thursday, August 6th on CBS All Access. Check out the trailer below:
Featured image: “Star Trek: Lower Decks.” Courtesy of CBS All Access.
Described as equal parts Liberace, Norma Desmond, and Oprah, the wildly popular, gender-bending Puerto Rican TV astrologer Walter Mercado was so larger than life that only a documentary could do him justice. The filmmakers behind Netflix’s Mucho Mucho Amor: The Legend of Walter Mercado, like millions of Latinx viewers around the globe, grew up watching Mercado deliver daily horoscopes on TV. Wearing his trademark bejeweled capes, Mercado’s flamboyance coupled with upbeat astrological predictions helped make him a beloved cultural icon.
“I have this nostalgia for him like most Latinos,” says Cristina Costantini who co-directed the film with Kareem Tabsch. “I watched him every day on TV [in Milwaukee] with my grandmother who is from Argentina and speaks Spanish. For me, he was a Mr. Rogers or Oprah. I was taken aback by what he looked like. I didn’t speak Spanish well so I didn’t get all that he was saying but I knew he made people feel loved. He would come on and tell us that tomorrow would be a better day.”
Tabsch, who grew up in Miami, recalls being captivated by Mercado’s androgynous appearance and over the top style.
“As a young queer person, it was very impactful. I’d never seen someone who looked so different and fabulous; that sense of ‘otherness’ was something I saw reflected in myself. I was a more discount variety of fabulous but I recognized that Walter was different in the way I was different,” he says. “When you see someone who looks the way you feel, it is incredibly validating.”
Costantini had been pursuing a film about Mercado when she heard that Tabsch and producer Alex Fumero were also planning a documentary. So the three of them teamed up. They visited Mercado, who was by then living quietly in San Juan, Puerto Rico, over the course of what ended up being the last two years of his life. Mercado died last year at age 87 of multiple health issues shortly after the film was completed.
“At first, we thought the film would be a comeback but it ended up being a swan song,” says Costantini. She says the team had grown close to Mercado and his family by the end of production. “Kareem and Alex were pallbearers in his funeral. Walter was very dear to us. He was a childhood icon but he also became a member of our family,” she says.
Mercado was agreeable to allowing the crew into his life and home but it took them some time to earn his trust and allow for more intimacy.
“It was a process of talking through what a documentary was. We’d start shooting and he’d say, ‘When am I going to get a script?’ We’d say, ‘No, Walter, this is not that kind of production.’ He just didn’t understand what a documentary was,” Costantini says.
“He was open with us. But he was very good at evading questions. He did not like talking about his age; whether he’d had [cosmetic] surgeries or not; and especially he did not like talking about his sexuality. As you see in the film, he dodged these questions with cute remarks and jokes.”
Using rich archival images and footage, the film traces Mercado’s rise from small town in Puerto Rico to his success as a dancer and an actor on stage and in telenovelas. When a TV producer asked the camera-ready Mercado to read horoscopes on a Telemundo program, a star was born. Mercado got his own show in 1969 and it was a sensation, running for decades. His television and radio broadcasts at once point reached 120 million viewers around the world.
Much of the credit for Mercado’s fame goes to his former business manager, Bill Bakula, who is interviewed in the film. Their partnership ended in a bitter legal battle after Mercado signed over the rights to his name and likeness into perpetuity. As the court case dragged on, Mercado was unable to work under his own name. Although he ultimately won back the right to his name and his likeness, he’d lost years of work and had fallen from public attention.
The filmmakers credit producer Fumero with persuading Bakula to appear on camera to give his side of the story. Fumero, they said, was also responsible for delivering one of the documentary’s most memorable moments, when Hamiltoncreator and longtime Mercado fan Lin-Manuel Miranda, who was starring in Hamilton in Puerto Rico, visits his childhood idol.
“Lin said, ‘I’ve turned down all press requests but I couldn’t pass this up.’ He was like a giddy schoolboy,” says Tabsch.
Mucho Mucho Amor: The Legend of Walter Mercado. Walter Mercado and Lin-Manuel Miranda in Mucho Mucho Amor: The Legend of Walter Mercado. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix/2020
In spite of the filmmakers’ passion and belief in Mercado’s enduring appeal, the film was far from an easy sell.
“We spent so long trying to convince people that this story was meaningful and had to be told,” say Costantini. “We had a lot of trouble finding the money. It was a hard film to raise money for because white executives had not grown up with him. It was a young Mexican executive who got it.”
She says the enthusiastic response to the release of Mucho Mucho Amor has been validating. “Walter was trending on Twitter all day. There have been thousands upon thousands of messages especially from Latinos for whom this story means so much. It makes us feel that we were not crazy all those years we worked and made no money trying to put this together.”
The third season of Netflix’s Ozark sees Marty and Wendy Byrde (Jason Bateman and Laura Linney) dig into their life in Mississippi, where they now own one casino, and a sticking point in their marriage is the risk associated with acquiring another. With the Byrdes still laundering money for Omar Navarro (Felix Solis), the head of a Mexican cartel, and working alongside bloodthirsty lawyer Helen Pierce (Janet McTeer), the series’ third season retains the cool blue and green tones of earlier episodes but adds new aesthetic dimensions via a deeper look at the Navarro compound and flashbacks to Marty’s youth.
Pushed along by its id-driven characters, Ozark’s plot is a complicated puzzle, but the show’s cinematographer, Armando Salas, ASC, tends to approach the series’ many different locations individually, with an eye to how they contrast with one another in order to offer an immediate sense of time and place. In the season’s fourth episode, “Boss Fight,” for example, we get two new locations: a circular, top-lit jail cell under the Navarro compound where the cartel kingpin holds Marty, and a 1980s-era hospital where a young Marty’s sick father is being treated.
With warmer colors and a more noticeable grain bridging the look of the cell, the grand interiors of Navarro’s estate, and the hospital, the color scheme and tonal range in these locations “are distinct from the Ozarks, from Marty’s family scrambling to deal with his disappearance, but weave those other elements together,” Salas explained.
For a stronger sense of texture and grit in these new locations, the DP and his team used live grain, a hardware-software solution that accurately mimics film stock. Back in the Ozarks, Salas relies on a more modern-looking film stock and treats viewers to some stunning wide-angle photography. Seemingly simple conversational scenes — Ruth (Julia Garner) and Ben (Wendy’s newly arrived brother, played by Tom Pelphrey) on a broken-down sofa outside her trailer at dusk, Marty and Ben on the shore, a getaway boat bobbing on the sparkling water at their backs — call to mind the masterful tableaux of photographer Gregory Crewdson.
The beauty of these scenes looks incidental but isn’t. “Although sometimes we get lucky, that’s something that we plan out weeks beforehand,” said Salas of the season’s most arresting masters. “A lot of the more successful images are designed well ahead of time, and then require this amazing unit of crew members and craftspeople to execute on the day,” he explained, with extreme precision helping a particular scene, like Ben and Ruth sharing an end-of-day beer outside the Langmore trailers, land at just the right hour. The effect is deliberately beautiful but meant to appear effortless. “Hopefully, as people watch it, they just think, oh look how lovely, they just happened to shoot at this really nice time,” said Salas.
However, getting these scenes just right is an immense amount of work, starting from the script phase. “Blocking, staging, and camera placement is a big part of the show. We don’t have a lot of time to shoot, so we sacrifice the number of shots and coverage in order to fine-tune the shots that we are able to get,” Salas explained. “We really prioritize quality over quantity.” In this season, Wendy’s brother Ben is introduced only to go off the rails, hard-nosed little Ruth finally rejects the Byrdes, and the Byrdes themselves get twisted into another set of seemingly intractable messes, but it all goes down across eerily still and lovely settings. Ozark is one of Netflix’s most compulsively watchable dramas, first and foremost for the wild lives of the Byrdes and their friends and foes, but more subtly so, for drawing viewers into this alternately verdant and ramshackle universe, which either way, is always seductively aesthetic.
Featured image: Jason Bateman, Laura Linney. Photo by Steve Dietl/Netflix
The Old Guard, premiering today on Netflix, is a completely engrossing female-fronted action film that just might blow the doors off your summer. Helmed by director Gina Prince-Bythewood, it also marks the milestone of the first major superhero film directed by a Black woman. Prince-Bythewood, who first made her name as writer/director of the classic Love & Basketball, has become one of the most thoroughly interesting directors working in Hollywood. Whatever the genre, be it romantic comedy, a coming-of-age-story, or an epic action flick led by immortal beings, Prince-Bythewood seems exuberantly alive to her characters’ plights. Ask any young female filmmaker coming up, and they will likely name the quiet, steadfast woman as an inspiration.
Her new film is about a team of mercenaries headed by Charlize Theron who are unable to die. They must welcome new immortal Nile, played by an excellent Kiki Layne, into a tightly knit group that hasn’t seen any new members since 1812. The Credits spoke to Prince-Bythewood about The Old Guard’s aesthetic, believability, and the importance of diverse audiences seeing themselves reflected onscreen.
In this film, killing has moral meaning and weight, as does how the Old Guard interact with each other and the world. How does that resonate with you as a filmmaker?
The thing that drew me and moved me about these characters, especially Andy [Theron] and Booker [Matthias Schoenaerts], is the fact that they’ve lost their sense of purpose. They’ve been given this gift that they see as a curse because they don’t know why. Certainly, at times in my life, I was struggling to find my purpose. It felt like such a human thing, and the fact that I connected so strongly made me think that the audience would connect as well. I really wanted to delve into that, about what it would mean to be immortal. I wanted to talk about the tragedy of living past everyone you love, and the loneliness that would be part of your existence, and how hard that would be if you didn’t know why.
How did you build this world into something that felt so raw and real, despite the fact immortal beings inhabit it?
One of the things I was excited about was making these characters grounded and real, and having that permeate everything. It really did start with the casting. I wanted to cast great actors for every role, actors that we could believe were alive for thousands of years. It’s not just about being a great actor. Do you have that soulfulness, that depth that I can believe? I felt so fortunate in terms of everyone that we cast. They truly embodied that.
In terms of the stunts, and the way I approached shooting them, I wanted it to always feel real, so I usually shot at eye-level. There was very rarely a shot from down below, or way up high, or where the eye doesn’t naturally go to. I didn’t want to have the camera whipping around, but to have the camera right there capturing these fights as opposed to dictating exactly what the eye can see.
In terms of the production design, we used so many natural locations as opposed to building them. There’s just something to being in a real space, the natural history of it, the look of it, the feel of it. We had an amazing production designer, Paul Kirby. Then we had our director of photography, Tami Reiker. She and I had two phrases we used; ‘intimately epic’ and ‘pretty gritty.’ The story starts in the details, it starts in the connectivity in the relationships between these characters, and then we broaden it to having this beautiful scope of these real locations that we’re in. ‘Pretty gritty’ was showing the world as it is, but kicking it up just a notch, given that we wanted to show the beauty within all these locations, like the alleys of Morocco, or a village in South Sudan. Finding that beauty in every area that we shot was essential.
The cast and characters are global, and that adds to the depth of the story.
There are so many things I love about the story, but one of the things is it just felt so organically diverse and global. We have this group of warriors from different cultures, backgrounds, sexual orientations, and genders, that have come together to protect humanity. I love what that says, the fact that we are all connected globally, but we don’t always feel it or see it. I wanted the cast to reflect that as well. I wanted them to reflect the world out there. You see that in the cast, particularly Nicky (played by Italian actor Luca Marinelli). I wanted a man really from there. It’s interesting because Luca asked me if we should get a dialect coach to help him because his accent is so thick, but I said, ‘I love your voice. I love your accent. I want that. That’s what Nicky would sound like.’ I love the fact that they all speak each other’s languages. That started off-set, because everybody came from a different place in the world, and they started sharing their languages. I said, ‘Let’s put that in the film. Let’s add that element because that’s absolutely who these characters would be. They would respect each other’s cultures, and share each other’s cultures, and live within each other’s cultures. Let’s establish that through dialogue and action.’
It’s not often—it’s close to never, really—that we see we get to see two strong male leads in an action movie this epic who also happen to be lovers, in this case, played by Luca Marinelli and Marwan Kenzari as Nicky and Joe.
The cast is great. Luca is wonderful. I love what he brought to his character, and what Marwan Kenzari brought to Joe, what they brought to that relationship. It’s certainly a relationship we haven’t had the opportunity to see in the genre like this. It was in the graphic novel, and in the first script that I read. When I say the script continued to surprise me, it wasn’t just the story, but what was in it. With that relationship, I didn’t see it coming, it just came in so easily and naturally, and I just embraced it. The same way I’m excited about the fact that we are putting Nile [Kiki Layne], this young Black female hero, into the world. We don’t get to see that enough. We all deserve to be heroes. We all deserve to see ourselves reflected heroically.
Well, the good news is we’ve got a brand new glimpse of the upcoming Halloween Kills, the next installment in the legendary franchise from co-writer/director David Gordon Green and writers Danny McBride and Scott Teems. The not so good news is we won’t be seeing Halloween Kills this Halloween. Universal has announced that the sequel to Green’s smashing 2018 hit Halloweenwill be delayed a full year, from October 16 2020 to October 15, 2021. This bumps back the final film in Green’s new trilogy, Halloween Ends, a year as well, to October 14, 2022.
But let’s stick with the positive! There’s a lot to feel good about it when it comes to the reboot of this franchise, which Green, McBride, and franchise star Jamie Lee Curtis brought back with such oomph two years ago. This short teaser gives us a little bit of what happened after the end of the last film, which involves one very insistent Laurie Strode (Curtis) and a couple of fire trucks just trying to do their jobs.
Have a look:
“Let him burn!” Strode screams, and hoo boy you have to feel for her. After everything she’s been through with Michael Myers, the thought that a bunch of firemen just doing their jobs might once again keep Michael in the game is infuriating, to say the least.
And let’s give a shout out to Jamie Lee Curtis, who has now made Strode the all-time most indomitable character in a horror franchise. Strode has seen a shocking amount of carnage and horror thanks to that lumbering super-killer Michael Myers. Over the years, she’s become Michael’s main obsession and pluckiest adversary. It was only last October (roughly 450-years ago, of course) that Curtis shared this photo from the set of Halloween Kills:
The photo, like the teaser, reveals that, once again, Laurie will be going through hell. We’re bummed we’ll have to wait an extra year to see her in action, but we’re confident it’ll be worth the wait.
Featured image: In “Halloween,” JAMIE LEE CURTIS returns to her iconic role as Laurie Strode, who comes to her final confrontation with Michael Myers, the masked figure who has haunted her since she narrowly escaped his killing spree on Halloween night four decades ago. Photo Credit: Ryan Green
When we spoke to Batwoman composer Sherri Chung, she expressed excitement over where the CW show would head in the upcoming season. Despite losing the talented Ruby Rose as Kate Kane/Batwoman, Chung was confident in the show’s approach to finding a new lead. “What I think is great is that it sounds like they’re going to treat this as Kate Kane leaving Gotham, and a new character comes in to carry the torch as Batwoman,” Chung told us. “I’m excited to meet the new Batwoman, whoever she’ll be, and discuss whether we’ll have new sounds for her.”
How excited must Chung be now? The new Batwoman is God Friended Me star Javicia Leslie, who becomes the first Black woman to ever land the role. Here’s what Leslie had to say in a statement:
“I am extremely proud to be the first Black actress to play the iconic role of Batwoman on television, and as a bisexual woman, I am honored to join this groundbreaking show which has been such a trailblazer for the LGBTQ+ community.”
This is fantastic. So too is the specific role that Leslie will be playing. Here are the details from Warner Bros. Television:
“Ryan Wilder is about to become Batwoman. She’s likable, messy, a little goofy, and untamed. She’s also nothing like Kate Kane, the woman who wore the Batsuit before her. With no one in her life to keep her on track, Ryan spent years as a drug-runner, dodging the GCPD and masking her pain with bad habits. Today Ryan lives in her van with her plant. A girl who would steal milk for an alley cat and could also kill you with her bare hands, Ryan is the most dangerous type of fighter: highly skilled and wildly undisciplined. An out lesbian. Athletic. Raw. Passionate. Fallible. And very much not your stereotypical all-American hero.”
So there you have it. Leslie joins Batwoman as a totally new character—Ryan Wilder was not pulled from DC Comics stable, she’s an entirely new creation. The CW and Batwoman have given fans of the former show a reason to come back, and have likely just intrigued a whole bunch of folks who might not have made the show a priority before. Gotham just got more interesting.
Featured image: NEW YORK, NEW YORK – FEBRUARY 10: Javicia Leslie attends the Alice + Olivia By Stacey Bendet fashion show during February 2020 – New York Fashion Week: The Shows on February 10, 2020 in New York City. (Photo by Steven Ferdman/Getty Images for NYFW: The Shows)
Filmmaker Courtney Jamison entered a contest set up by Women In Film LA, ReFrame and IMDbPro called CURBSIDE SHORTS Two-Minute Film Challenge. The challenge invited “female and non-binary filmmakers from North America to create and submit for free a short film inspired by life while sheltering in place.” Jamison, originally from Richmond, Virginia, had been sheltering in place in Los Angeles for months. She entered the contest with four friends.
“I saw the announcement on Deadline, and was like, okay, let’s just make something,” Jamison says. “Things were calming down in LA, it was just starting to open, and I reached out to three good friends from Yale and one I met in New York who lives in LA. We got on Zoom and FaceTime and we were racking our brains on how we wanted to tell a story during quarantine.”
“Day 74” Zoom collab. Courtesy Courtney Jamison
They ultimately landed on the plan of making a film about the way the constant consumption of news stuck in their minds. “Whether it was true or false information about COVID-19, the idea was how this information sticking with us,” Jamison says. “Our original plan was to use news clippings. Then we realized we needed the rights to those, so we went back to the drawing board and came up with a script. We follow this woman [played by Amandla Jahava] during an afternoon, and we see her ritual, and how each day the ritual may change, whether it’s a zoom date or an actual ritual to meditate, or having to leave the house to go get groceries.”
“It was four black women and a Samoan woman coming together, collaborating,” Jamison says. “We used my DSLR camera and my sound equipment and we just did our thing.”
L-r: Courtney Jamison, Moses Ingram, Amandla Jahava, Ava McCoy, and Patricia Fa’asua. Courtesy Courtney Jamison
Jamison’s road to filmmaking began in Richmond. “I got into all this wanting to tell stories because you’ve seen the unrest going on in Richmond, specifically with the monuments, so I felt my art was born out of this desire to make sense of what’s going on, and figure out my own authenticity, my own voice, and how to heal people,” she says. Jamison attended James Madison for musical theater and was planning on continuing along that route until she auditioned for the Yale School of Drama and got in. Her older brother Jai, a writer/director, is currently working on the CW’s Superman and Lois, and Jamison says the two of them have grown their artistry in tandem. They made a short film together, Slave Cry, set in their hometown.
For Day 74, Jamison was learning on the fly. “It was my directorial debut as far as film goes, as well as my first time mixing sound,” she says. “I didn’t think that would happen in quarantine. I directed theater in undergrad, so most of what I learned, making a beat sheet, thinking about shots, was from watching my brother direct. This film was the first time I’d seen anybody since going into quarantine. We socially distanced while filming, figuring out how to take all the necessary precautions and also make something that was really fascinating.”
The poster for “Day 74.”
Jamison and her collaborators—Moses Ingram (co-writer), Amandla Jahava (actor), Ava McCoy (producer), and Patricia Fa’asua (co-writer)—saw their film win the challenge just as the country was undergoing massive, unprecedented protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. “We’d just gathered together as friends who just wanted to make something, and in our desire to make something it just happened that our lead is a Kenyan American Canadian woman,” she says. “Now in the context of what happened, it’s further a reminder of what the result is when you give opportunities to Black and brown bodies, in front of and behind the camera.”
After winning the contest, Jamison began hearing from people who saw her film. “The biggest takeaway was all the people who were telling me how seen they felt, how universal our main character’s experience was,” she says. “If we had more representation, more Black women, more Black trans women, more Black trans men, then these roles wouldn’t need to be solely focused on their Blackness or sexuality. It’s not erasure, it’s just if you see the person and they’re just going through their daily lives, it humanizes them. I’m interested in humanizing Black people, Black women specifically, so what you see on screen isn’t us going through trauma for you to then understand that we’re human.”
Jamison also contended with the fact that she and her collaborators are around the same age of Breonna Taylor, the young woman shot and killed while in her bed in Kentucky. “We had this opportunity to make art, and that was taken away from her,” Jamison says.
Jamison and her collaborators wanted Day 74 to show not only the anxiety and insecurity of living life in a pandemic but the ability to find ways to feel a connection. “It’s also about finding joy, finding breath, finding laughter at the end,” she says. “In times like this, we have to do work on the inner life as much as we do on the macro. You can dismantle a system, you can defund or abolish the police, you can have all these systematic changes, but what do we want to fill the world with. What sacrifices do I have to make to enact change?”
Slave Cry, the film she and her brother made, is especially poignant in our current moment.
“It’s about, among other things, taking down the Confederate monuments,” Jamison says. “We finished it early 2019. Growing up in Richmond, my artistry was born out of a desire to make sense of driving down Monument Avenue. I drove down that street every single day. As a kid, you were wondering, who were these people? They must have been really great. Then you learn the truth of what they represent. The monuments are reminders to stay in your rightful place, that you don’t actually belong here, and you’re not valued as a Black person. Imagine if we had a monument to Ida B. Wells or Harriet Tubman? Instead, they’re uplifting these people as heroes. It wasn’t uncommon to see a Confederate flag every day.”
Jamison recalls watching The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Living Single, and A Different World as a child, and what a huge impact these shows made on her. “Even if I didn’t necessarily see myself all the time growing up in Richmond, I at least saw myself represented on the screen. Here were people who reminded me of my aunt, my cousins, and these shows were some of the earliest things I fell in love with. I wanted to write a fantasy show about a Black girl who is the lead.”
As for our current reality, Jamison feels like major, fundamental change is required. “I don’t want this moment to be like, ‘Let’s just hire Black people.’ No, we have stories to tell, we’re skilled, we’re interesting, you don’t have to do this as a course correction or to just open the doors. Let’s actually knock down the whole house and rethink everything and see what happens.”
A few days after our conversation, Jamison emailed me some photos to use for this profile and provided me a fitting coda to this story. “Not sure if you saw the news,” she wrote, “but they officially took down the Stonewall Jackson monument in Richmond today! We watched it live.”
“I’m not ready to go to restaurants,” Insecure editor Nena Erb told me while we were on the phone discussing her career, and, of course, life in the midst of a global pandemic. Yet for Erb, whose career has conditioned her to solitude, she’s making the most of her forced isolation by helping bring up the next generation of young editors. “I was able to work at home for about the first month of the pandemic, and I finished up Insecure, and I’ve been doing a lot more mentoring. I took up baking, but that only takes up a small amount of time.”
While the pandemic has made amateur bakers out of a frankly shocking number of people, Erb’s career has been rising steadily like a well-made sourdough (apologies). She’s worked on the last two seasons of Issa Rae’s fantastic HBO comedy Insecure, she cut for CW’s beloved Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and Apple TV+’s ambitious Little America, and won an Emmy for her work on Project Greenlight in 2016. Once the pandemic hit and her work slowed down, Erb spent more time mentoring young editors.
“I’m currently a mentor in ACE (American Cinema Editors)’s Diversity Mentoring Program. I had been doing it on my own for years prior to joining the organization,” she says. “I mentor production assistants or assistant editors who want to do this full time. For the last three or four years, I’ve been doing it a little more publicly. It’s mostly being available for anyone who has questions, like later today I’ve got a student from New York who wants to discuss Insecure and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, so I do that a bit every week.”
Her mentoring work began when she started working on Insecure in 2018. HBO profiled her in this video, and once it was posted, the response from would-be editors was great.
“One woman said it was her goal to be an editor, and there are so few women editors in this business, so I told her to hit me up when she was out of college,” Erb said. “It’s really rewarding. I recently got my assistant editor a co-editor credit on Insecure. I pretty much have an open-door policy, so any scenes you want to cut, go for it, and if you feel confident, I’m happy to put it in the show and screen it with the producers. If they love it, I’ll give you the credit, if not, I’ll take the hit. Because I have a relationship with the producers, if they don’t like a scene they won’t jump down my throat. I’m not going to lose my job, at least I don’t think (laughs), but for an assistant, it would be a little tough.”
This help that this kind of support provides to an assistant from someone as successful as Erb is hard to overstate. If she feels like a showrunner is supportive of her mentorship, she’ll have her assistant “jump in the seat and let them roll with it.”
That seat is not an easy place to be; it’s where an editor showcases the work she’s done to the showrunner and various other decision-makers, and where she’ll have to make quick adjustments based on the feedback. “Usually, the showrunners are in there, some producers and directors, and sometimes they like to watch the whole episode, while others will just stop you right then and there and ask you to explain your decision or explain what’s not working for them,” Erb says. “It’s up to you as the editor to very quickly solve the problem on the fly. For me, when I was doing that for the first time, with all those eyes on you, the pressure is intense, and it takes a while to get used to that.”
This is why she’s been helping her assistants, bit by bit, get comfortable with it. “I feel like it’s gone really well,” Erb says. “Once they get a bit more confident, they’re happy to jump in there. That experience is so invaluable, and when you’re in the hot seat, it’s hot. I’d never had a chance to ease into it before I was in the hot seat, and it was really stressful, so if I can help someone else ease into it, I’m happy to do it. The number of women editors, especially women of color, should grow. Hopefully, this will make a little bit of a difference.”
Her work on Insecure has utilized all the skills she’s built up over her career, which includes finding the perfect moment in a scene even if it was never intended to make the cut. “Typically on Insecure, they shoot the scenes out of order, so I’ll read the script for that scene a couple of times to refresh my memory of what it’s about, then the second time to catch the screen directions and what the writer is hoping to convey,” she says. “Then I watch the dailies. I like to watch from the minute the camera rolls to when it shuts down. I don’t stop when they say cut, because sometimes they’ll run the camera a bit after and I’ll watch what’s being said during the re-sets. It helps me understand what the director is going for, and I’ve actually used shots of the actors as they’re listening to the directors. There are moments when a joke has been said or dialogue has been said, and a reaction is missing. So I’ve found a lot of that between takes.”
Point of view is also something Erb has learned to play with. “Sometimes I’ll ask myself what would this scene look like if it started from Issa’s point of view, or Molly’s (Yvonne Orji), and I do that to see what jumps out and pops for me,” she says. “We’ve had entire episodes from a specific point of view, so in that case, I’m coming up with alternate ways of coming in and out of a scene to figure out what’s the most dynamic version. There are times where I’ll start at the end of a scene and work backward. This takes you out of any preconceived notions you may have about the scene, breaks you out of your rules and habits.”
When Erb started on Insecure in season three, she was already a fan of the show and knew the signature style of the series. “What was interesting about season three was I was paired up with young and up-and-coming directors, and people who hadn’t directed Insecure before,” she says. “Issa’s concern for my episodes were that I was new, we had a new cinematographer and a new director. So I’m sure it caused a little bit of anxiety for the executive producers, but I hope it worked out well. I think it did because I stayed on for the rest of the season and was asked back.”
Erb prefers working on a mix of comedy and drama, which she says are more similar than they are dissimilar. “I read somewhere comedy is tragedy plus time. I like shows that are in the middle of drama and comedy, like Insecure or Crazy-Ex Girlfriend, which was a comedy-drama musical. Really, it has to do with the story. If the story is powerful or interesting or engaging, I’m on board.”
Featured image: Nena Erb working on HBO’s “Insecure.” Photo by Merie Wallace. Courtesy HBO.
Laverne Cox serves as the guide of director Sam Feder’s crucial new documentary Disclosure: Trans Lives on Screen. The film offers a vivid, frankly startling history of the portrayal of transgender lives on screen, and Cox (also an executive producer) captains a compelling cast of influential trans creators, cultural critics, and thinkers. They include The Matrix creator Lilly Wachowski, Pose star Mj Rodriguez, Transparent stars Trace Lysette and Alexandra Billings, Chaz Bono, and more. Using footage spanning more than 100 years of media, Disclosure reveals how American culture has dehumanized the transgender community in show after show, film after film. In one of the film’s gasp-out-loud moments, we watch Billings die of testicular cancer on an episode of ER and breast cancer in an episode of Grey’s Anatomy. Both aired in 2005. Her experience of being cast to die on screen is hardly rare; we learn that actress Alexandra Grey died twice on screen in 2016—on the medical dramas Chicago Med and Code Black—roles she booked on the same day.
We were then lucky enough to have Cox take part in our recent Film School Friday virtual panel, in which she joined Feder, Amy Scholder (Disclosure producer), and Nick Adams (GLAAD’s director of transgender representation and a Disclosure consultant) to discuss the documentary and talk more broadly about the experience of trans people all over the country. Like the film itself, our conversation was as joyous as it was serious, and we were left wanting more.
To that end, Cox joined us for a follow-up conversation to discuss the film, her career, and to hone in on a point she made during our discussion about the intersection between attraction and violence that costs trans people their lives. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
One of the things Disclosure does so well is crystallize how often trans characters are victimized on screen. Was the extent of this reality a surprise at all to you?
I was personally aware of how we often were cast to play the victim—I’ve auditioned for these parts. I’ve also consumed a lot of television, so I filled in a lot of Sam’s TV gap in some of our early research. I’ve seen these stories over and over again, as a trans person I look for them. I was familiar with GLAAD’s work on how trans folks have been represented, but I do think seeing these tropes back to back—seeing Alexandra Grey auditioning for the same part in two different shows on the same day, or to look at Alexandra Billings’ reel and see three or four different parts where she’s a patient whose hormones are killing her—is startling.
Disclosure. Alexandra Billings in Disclosure. Cr. Ava Benjamin Shorr/Netflix.
The film gets at these grim realities, but it’s also funny and hopeful, too. Do you feel optimistic at all about where we’re headed as a society?
What I’m heartened and encouraged by is my industry. Over the past few years, I’ve noticed that there is a willingness from a lot of my colleagues to tell trans stories, to hire trans writers. There’s a willingness and openness to get this right, and a willingness to learn. Television is coming along faster because it’s more collaborative. You’ve got a writers’ room, for one thing, and there’s a different kind of accountability that happens with television that doesn’t maybe happen for a lone filmmaker working on a story and then releasing it to the world. I’m excited that my colleagues are willing to grow.
Disclosure is not only novel in its subject matter, but it’s novel in the way it was produced with a primarily trans crew. How would you like to see the industry evolve?
What Disclosure feels like is the next level of the awakening. We want to do better, but we didn’t even realize how bad it was. Over the years, Nick [Adams] talks about it all the time, I’ve gotten scripts with the best of intentions, but they’ve got all the same trans tropes. So you explain that to them, and then they do a rewrite and they still don’t get it right. Disclosure feels like a major disruption to how people see trans lives on screen. There’s finally a clarity about our humanity, and we can begin to see and understand our humanity and how to not participate in the dehumanizing process. I’m excited and hopeful about that, I really am. We have a long way to go, of course. For the majority of Black and brown trans folks experiencing violence and homelessness and unemployment, just getting from point A to point B is fraught. I get that, and I hope that with what we can produce in our industry, we can begin to make inroads into hearts and minds, to get people to stop killing us and stop seeing us as a threat as to their existence.
You mentioned during our virtual panel that one thing straight men need to figure out is their attraction to trans women and their violent reaction to that. I was hoping you could speak more to that.
Their attraction to trans women is my lived experience. So often, particularly in New York where I lived for 23 years, I was being catcalled ferociously. It was a daily occurrence. And sometimes one of these men would realize I was trans, and the catcalling would turn into transphobic harassment. Suddenly there were jokes and laughter and derision. These are the moments that can turn violent, that have turned violent. You were just attracted to me, you were just catcalling me, I’m still the woman you were catcalling. It’s that tension between the attraction and the realization of my trans-ness, that intersection of attraction and misogyny, where trans women are losing their lives.
And we see this in the news all the time, with killing after killing of trans people.
That tension between attraction and fear is killing us. Take, for example, the trans woman from Mississippi [Mercedes Williamson] who was murdered by a man she was dating, a Latin King, allegedly. They were dating, her friends knew, but then he was afraid his friends would find out so he murdered her. He denies that’s the reason. When I’ve posted about a trans woman getting murdered, I’ll get comments that claim we’re fooling people and we deserve to be murdered, as if there aren’t tons of men seeking us out. A lot of them are on dating apps. I’ve had thousands of straight men come onto me on those apps. Straight men are seeking out trans women. I think that tension between attraction and whatever these men are thinking about themselves, this internalized homophobia, it comes down to their relationship to themselves. Two boyfriends ago, the guy I dated didn’t care if people thought he was gay because he was comfortable with himself. I’m a woman and he’s a man, and he was so comfortable with himself he thought it was funny that people thought he was gay. He was just secure. If a man is secure with himself, it shouldn’t matter if someone thinks he’s gay. What’s the issue? But there is an issue because people are dying. This is the work that men need to do on themselves.
It brings to mind the end of I Am Not Your Negro, where James Baldwin says one of the saddest things about America was how few people seemed to know themselves.
That’s the reckoning around race, gender, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia—they’re all linked. As a trans woman of color, I need to get from point A to point B and I don’t want you to kill me.
Disclosure: Trans Lives on Screen is streaming now on Netflix. Cox can be next seen in Justin Simien’s horror-comedy Bad Hair, which premieres on Hulu this October.
Featured image: Disclosure. Laverne Cox in Disclosure. Cr. Ava Benjamin Shorr/Netflix.
If you were to name the most influential athletes of the last decade, Colin Kaepernick must be on your list. The former San Francisco 49ers quarterback has become one of the most crucial voices in America demanding and working towards social justice. He started this journey in the public eye with a simple gesture and, perhaps more importantly, a sustained commitment thereafter in the face of injustice against himself personally. Colin Kaepernick became a known quantity to NFL fans in 2012, but he became a household name all throughout the country for what he’s done on and off the field since 2016.
You probably know the rough outline of his story, but a quick refresher is in order to grasp just how strange a ride Kaepernick has had in the past 9 years. He was drafted by the San Francisco 49ers in 2011 to be the backup quarterback to their franchise star Alex Smith. Kaepernick ultimately became the Niners starting quarterback in 2012 after Smith suffered a concussion, and led them to their first Super Bowl appearance since 1994. The next season, Kaepernick was the 49ers full-time starter, and he led them to the NFC Championship Game. He had his ups and downs following 2013, but he was a potentially great QB with the skills to lead a team to the big game.
Then came 2016, when Kaepernick’s life would change dramatically. He was looking for a way to respectfully protest what he saw going on in America, so in the 49ers’ third preseason game in 2016, Kaepernick sat during the national anthem prior to the game, a quiet but clear protest against racial injustice, police brutality, and systematic racism. After this, Kaepernick was advised by the former Seahawks player and a former U.S. Army Green Beret Nate Boyer that the most respectful way to protest was to kneel rather than sit. So, the next week and throughout the entire season, Kaepernick kneeled during the anthem, and this simple, clear gesture sparked a wider protest movement across the league. Kaepernick had his supporters and his detractors in the league and at large. A fellow QB and one of the NFL’s biggest stars, New Orleans Saints QB Dree Brees, was not a fan of his “method.” All of this came to a head in September 2017, when President Trump took the stage at a rally for Alabama Republican Senate candidate Luther Strange and told the crowd, and the world at large, that NFL owners should fire any player who kneels during the anthem. “Get that son of a bitch off the field right now,” Trump gloated, adding, “he’s fired. He’s fired!” The crowd cheered.
Kaepernick became a free agent after the 2017 season. He was never picked up by another team again. For those who don’t follow the sport, Kaepernick’s inability to find a home in the NFL made zero sense unless you accepted the truth right before your eyes; he was being punished for peacefully protesting. The stat wonks and quants at the website FiveThirtyEight wrote that “it’s obvious Kaepernick is being frozen out for his political opinions.” Adding that “no above-average quarterback [measured by the total quarterback rating] has been unemployed nearly as long as Kaepernick this offseason.”
If Donald Trump and the NFL were trying to silence Kaepernick and dilute his power by keeping him off the field, they significantly miscalculated the man and the country’s mood. He has become one of the most visible, tireless advocates for reform, donating his time and money towards social justice causes. He co-founded the Know Your Rights Camp, which this year launched a relief fund for individuals impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic (to which Kaepernick donated $100,000.) The Colin Kaepernick Foundation connects all his work for social justice, cementing him as one of the most visible, influential activists working in America.
Which brings us to the news that Kaepernick has signed a first-look deal with Disney via his Ra Vision Media company, which will produce “scripted and unscripted stories that explore race, social injustice and the quest for equity, and will provide a new platform to showcase the work of Black and Brown directors and producers.” The first thing we’ll see from this deal is an ESPN documentary that will track Kaepernick’s journey. We already know how good those ESPN docs are—giving Kaepernick the same detailed treatment they’ve recently given Bruce Lee and Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls is a great opening project. Yet that’s but the start of the scope of Kaepernick’s deal; he will help produce projects across all of Disney’s platforms, including Walt Disney Television, HULU, Pixar, ESPN, and ESPN’s The Undefeated.
“I am excited to announce this historic partnership with Disney across all of its platforms to elevate Black and Brown directors, creators, storytellers, and producers, and to inspire the youth with compelling and authentic perspectives,” said Kaepernick in a statement. “I look forward to sharing the docuseries on my life story, in addition to many other culturally impactful projects we are developing.”
“During this unprecedented time, The Walt Disney Company remains committed to creating diverse and inclusive content that resonates and matters,” said Bob Iger, Disney’s executive chairman. “Colin’s experience gives him a unique perspective on the intersection of sports, culture, and race, which will undoubtedly create compelling stories that will educate, enlighten and entertain, and we look forward to working with him on this important collaboration.”
The NFL might have frozen Kaepernick out of the league in his prime, but all they’ve done is help make him an icon, a man who gave up his career to speak truth to power and will continue to do so on the largest platform possible.
Featured image: SANTA CLARA, CA – OCTOBER 23: Colin Kaepernick #7 of the San Francisco 49ers walks in to the stadium prior to their NFL game against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers at Levi’s Stadium on October 23, 2016 in Santa Clara, California. (Photo by Ezra Shaw/Getty Images)
Director/producer Dawn Porter’s documentary John Lewis: Good Trouble is an inspirational look at the life and career of the legendary Georgia Democratic representative and civil rights activist John Lewis. Congressman Lewis, now 80 years old, has been instrumental in creating foundational change in the United States, from voting rights to equal rights for all Americans. To this day, he continues to be a voice for positive change.
The Credits spoke to Porter about the film, and why John Lewis is a man who represents the very best of what this country can be. The film is available for digital download now.
You followed Congressman Lewis for a year. There must have been a lot of footage. How did you carve out the story we ultimately see as viewers?
Having an abundance of footage is usually the case, but that’s true even more so the case with a person like John Lewis, who has led such a long, productive, and public life. With any film, my goal is to ask, ‘What is the animating question of this story?’ For Congressman Lewis, I was interested in who he is today, and how his past has shaped his present. I was also interested in making the point that, while we all know that John Lewis is brave, because of the iconic, inspiring footage that we’ve all seen, I’d like to also point out that he is strategic.
I included things like the training videos of those students. They weren’t only brave, they were calculated, concentrated, and committed to making a lasting change. Those protests did not just spring up overnight, they were planned really intentionally. That’s why John Lewis has such a long, rich legacy. I very much agree with President Obama’s recent comment that it’s not only politics or only protest, we need both. We need people to identify issues, and then we need people rolling up their sleeves and solving those issues. The animating question for a John Lewis film is, ‘How do you make a great leader? What were some of the formative moments for him that we see playing out today?’ As a young man, he was speaking out to authority. As a congressman, he’s still doing the same thing. There’s a reason why Nancy Pelosi calls him ‘The Conscience of the Congress.’ There’s a reason why she and so many others were happy to make time to talk about his importance in Congress. I hope that comes through in the film.
John Lewis was integral to the Voting Rights Act, but much has changed recently in terms of voter access and he’s still at it. His lasting tenacity feels like a very crucial thread.
That was a goal with the film. People who know Congressman Lewis know that he was a historic Civil Rights activist when he was young, but that has continued today. He did a sit-in for gun violence. In every conversation he has, he always talks about rights for LGBTQ citizens. He was co-sponsor of the Violence Against Women Act. His advocacy is on behalf of the human race. The conversation we’re having right now, this false dichotomy between Black Lives Matter and All Lives Matter, that’s a false construct, and Congressman Lewis points us to the fact that we are all one family, the human family, which does not mean you don’t see differences, it means that you don’t discriminate against people because of those differences. You protect people for their whole selves, whichever particular identity group they prefer to be associated with.
The film really highlights the balance of his fearlessness and hopefulness. What is your experience of that, having gotten to know him?
I’ve been thinking about that a lot. I’ve spent a year filming him, traveling with him, and hearing him talking to people. A lot of what documentarians also do is listen. You start to hear certain themes. That’s how you figure out what’s important to him. One of the most important things he said was about how he was living a fearless life. That fearlessness is not just confronting bayonets and billy clubs, it’s also a fearlessness about speaking truth to power. I think about that a lot in my own life. All of us can think about that. I don’t have to have a podium or a platform to speak uncomfortable truths. I’m thinking about how I can live fearlessly. How do I call out people when they say something that’s racist or offensive. How do I not become part of the problem? If we are silent, we become complicit. That’s one of the most important components of John Lewis’s fearlessness: it’s the fearlessness to say what you believe.
I see his America so clearly. It is an America that has respect for human life, a country of compassion and empathy, where there’s intelligent, thoughtful leadership, but also where there is art, music, and family. It is not an America without problems, but it is one that is always trying to be better. It is trying to look for ways of getting closer to that beloved community. That is his objective. When so many of us are casting about, and looking for a hopeful sign or hopeful circumstance, understanding John Lewis’s life and what he stands for, and still today optimistically believes, I think it’s reflective of the better part of America, and an America that he is absolutely positive exists. He would love for people to amplify that better nature of America, rather than the darker side, which is so often focused on today.
To watch John Lewis: Good Trouble, visit the film’s website here.
Featured image: John Lewis in JOHN LEWIS: GOOD TROUBLE, a Magnolia Pictures release. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.
There was and will only be but one Ennio Morricone, the man affectionately known as “The Maestro.” The legendary Italian composer, an Oscar-winner whose singular sound changed the way we listen to movies, passed away at 91. Morricone’s career spanned six decades and more than 500 films and generated some of the most beloved scores ever created. His work on Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns (Leone didn’t care for the term) alone would make a career, but Leone was sought after by directors from all over the world. His work helped shape Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven, Roland Joffé‘s The Mission, Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables, and Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight, for which he won an Oscar, to name but a few. (He received an honorary Oscar in 2007 and 11 David di Donatello Awards, Italy’s highest film honors.)
Morricone and Leone had met as children in elementary school. Morricone was a lifelong Rome resident, and his scores felt inextricable from Leone’s spaghetti westerns. Just think about Leone’s early films, including A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and the beloved The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. All three of these films starred a young Clint Eastwood, and all three are impossible to imagine with Morricone’s ripe, pliant scores.
“The music is indispensable because my films could practically be silent movies, the dialogue counts for relatively little, and so the music underlines actions and feelings more than the dialogue,” Sergio Leone said. “I’ve had him write the music before shooting, really as a part of the screenplay itself.”
Morricone inspired an entire generation of composers, becoming one of the few maestros in the business to become a household name. Take the soundtrack for the Netflix series Luke Cage, in which composers Adrian Younge (Something About April) and Ali Shaheed Muhammad from A Tribe Called Quest combined forces to create a “genre-bending blend of orchestral score and 90s hip-hop beats, filtered through the sonic lens of the works of Ennio Morricone.”
To celebrate Morricone’s astonishing career, check out this hour-long compilation of some of his greatest songs, including “The Ecstasy of Gold” from Leone’s The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, perhaps one of the most iconic songs ever written for the screen.
Featured image: ROME – OCTOBER 27: Ennio Morricone attends the Concert Directed By Ennio Morricone on day 10 of the 2nd Rome Film Festival on October 27, 2007 in Rome, Italy. (Photo by Franco Origlia/Getty Images)
The relationship between Zack Snyder and HBO Max keeps on getting more fruitful for both the man and the new streaming service. This past weekend, Snyder revealed this new poster for Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice Ultimate Edition, which is now streaming exclusively on HBO Max. It was quite the July 4th treat for fans of Snyder’s robust vision for the DC Extended Universe (DCEU):
Excited that Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice Ultimate Edition is now streaming exclusively on @HBOMax. pic.twitter.com/9t6L7UBXIH
Snyder’s Batman v Superman Ultimate Edition arrives a month ahead of the hotly anticipated DC FanDome—the huge virtual event where Snyder will reveal a glimpse of his Snyder Cut of Justice League, the director’s long-awaited vision for the 2017 film he had to leave halfway through due to a family tragedy. That film isn’t due to hit HBO Max until sometime in 2021.
As for the Ultimate Edition of Batman v Superman, what we can glean from the poster is that we’ll finally get to see more of the very intriguing “Knightmare” scene, in which Ben Affleck’s Batman confronts a deadly, decidedly fascist Superman (Henry Cavill). With the Ultimate Edition boasting a three-hour runtime, it means Snyder has likely included a ton of the stuff he wanted fans to see but cut for length before the film’s original 2016 release.
We also know from the glimpse Snyder revealed of Justice League that the Snyder Cut will utilize never-before-seen sequences from Batman v Superman. The new Justice League teaser deployed dialogue from Batman v Superman, as we heard Jesse Eisenberg‘s Lex Luthor essentially confirming what Snyder already hinted at; the villain of his Justice League is Darkseid. In the brief teaser, we see Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman checking out a depiction of Darkseid, followed by the flashback to the battle that explained the Motherboxes that were so integral to Justice League‘s plot and a glance at the supervillain.
In sum, HBO Max has given Snyder a platform to unveil his grand vision for his last two DCEU films, and let us imagine what might have been if Snyder had retained control over the entire extended universe.
Featured image: Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. Courtesy HBO Max
Critics have gotten a look at the film version of Miranda’s Broadway phenomenon and they’re in agreement—t’s better than a front-row seat. So without further ado, here’s a round-up of what some of them are saying.
Variety‘s Justin Chang has good news for us newbies: “For those of us who have never seen the stage show…it’s a particular pleasure to be figuratively ushered into the live Richard Rodgers Theater audience.”
Solzy at the Movies‘ Danielle Solzman agrees: “For those who do get to experience Hamilton for the first time with the original cast, you really couldn’t have a better experience.”
CinemaBlend‘s Sean O’Connell speaks to all us cynics out there: “Against all odds, lives up to its hype. Breaking news, I know. But…I’d convinced myself that Hamilton couldn’t be nearly as good as the rest of the world was proclaiming.”
For folks who have seen the Broadway show, Mashable‘s Angie Han says the movie “emphasizes the individual performances, albeit sometimes at the expense of the show’s staging and choreography. Still, it’s an effective way to capture the show’s emotions, if not its sweep.” Variety‘s Chang adds: “Due to the abundance of long shots and smooth cutting, the intermittent closeups are all the more striking in their intimacy. And sometimes their comedy.”
The Chicago Sun-Times‘ Richard Roeper writes: “The filmed version of the Broadway sensation makes for immersive, exhilarating, magnificent cinema.”
Fresh Fiction‘s Courtney Howard says of the overall movie experience that it “captures the widely-beloved show’s infectious vigor and electrical charge, spinning it into a renewed powerful, affecting, and immersive experience.”
Indiewire‘s David Ehrlich writes succinctly: “Hamilton is as monumental a thing as ever.”
Hamilton streams on Disney+ on July 3.
Featured image: NEW YORK, NY – JUNE 12: Lin-Manuel Miranda and Christopher Jackson of ‘Hamilton’ perform onstage during the 70th Annual Tony Awards at The Beacon Theatre on June 12, 2016 in New York City. (Photo by Theo Wargo/Getty Images for Tony Awards Productions)
Few westerners took notice in 2016 when the Russian republic of Chechnya began persecuting gay, lesbian, and transgender citizens. But after Oscar-nominated documentarian David France read a New Yorker article detailing how Ramzan Kadyrov’s regime has tortured, imprisoned, and executed LGBTQ residents, he traveled to Moscow. There, France and his crew documented the Russian LGBT Network and Moscow Community Center for LGBTI+ Initiatives as they provide temporary sanctuary for refugees eager to gain asylum in friendly countries. The resulting film, Welcome to Chechnya, debuts tonight, June 30 on HBO, and presents a harrowing group portrait of activists who risk their own lives to combat state-sponsored homophobia.
Welcome to Chechnya editor Tyler Walk, who earlier collaborated with Chase on the Oscar-nominated How to Survive a Plague (streaming on IFC Films Unlimited), recently joined the producer Alice Henty (One Day in September) to talk about their immersion in hard truths, stressful footage and the face-swapping technology used to protect the subjects of Welcome to Chechnya.
The people in Welcome to Checnnya face torture, imprisonment, or the possibility of “disappearing” entirely, like Zelim Bakaev, the gay pop star who vanished in 2017. It must have been nerve-wracking to participate in such a high-risk project.
Alice: Our primary concern was that David would inadvertently lead the authorities to the victims, for lack of a better word, since he was going in and out of Russia. And we didn’t want to blow the cover of the important work these activists were doing.
Welcome to Chechnya begins with an explanation that people in the film have been digitally disguised to protect their identities. Was that security measure baked into the project from the get go?
Tyler: When David shot in Moscow, he promised everybody that he would make them unrecognizable to their own mothers.
The face-swapped LGBTQ asylum seekers look every bit as real as activists David Isteev and Oleg Baranova, who appear as themselves. How did you pull that off?
Tyler: Early on, we tried out Rotoscope animation used in The Tower and Waking Life, which basically turns actors into graphic novel-style caricatures, but it made the characters seem obviously not human. Our priority was to disguise the activists and people on the run, but we also wanted the audience to read the emotional nuances on their faces and connect with the characters emotionally. So we started exploring deep fake technology which we knew has been used for sinister purposes on the Internet. We were told time and again there was no way to do it for a feature-length documentary shot vérité style with low light and un-stabilized camera. We finally found [effects animator] Ryan Laney, who’s worked on big superhero movies [including Spider-Man 3]. He was game for doing Welcome toChechnya at a much smaller scale out of his own home. It took much longer than planned, nearly 10 months, but I’m glad we stuck with it because Ryan came up with a tool that I think could be a model for other documentaries where people want to come forward with their stories but are afraid [of being identified].
Photograph: Courtesy of HBO
How did you protect the un-edited footage that revealed the victims’ actual faces?
Alice: All the footage was put onto drives with long, complicated passwords that weren’t known by the person carrying the drive. If the drives were seized, there’d be no way for the authorities to see the footage. Once the footage got back to the states, the hard drives, which were stored in safes, would be plugged into air-gapped edit systems.
Tyler: I had to rip out the Bluetooth card and rip out the Wi-Fi card just to make sure there was no possible way the computers connected to the Internet.
To block Soviet hackers?
Exactly. We got advice from [CITIZENFOUR documentary maker] Laura Poitras and worked with three different security advisors to very carefully put protocols in place. Again, we didn’t want to put David in danger or lead authorities to our subjects.
Alice, you worked on One Day in September about the 1972 Olympics terrorist attacks. Tyler, you edited the Oscar-nominated AIDS crisis documentary How to Survive a Plague. But Welcome to Chechnya‘s set in the present. How did that impact your approach?
Tyler: How to Survive A Plague chronicled a story that was already in the history books whereas, with this film, we had no idea what rushes were going to come next. The big difference is that we needed to prove that this [persecution] was real. When the purge started happening, the news got buried very quickly, partly because we have a Commander in Chief who tweets and that sets the tone for the whole day.
Photograph: Courtesy of HBO
Victims describe their abuse in gut-wrenching detail. The film also includes graphic footage secretly shot in Chechnya on cell phones and surveillance cameras. Which of these scenes impacted you the most?
Alice: The rape. It’s a trophy video posted on the dark web and the sound is so horrifying I just have to close my eyes and my ears. I think everyone who worked on the production has some kind of PTSD from watching these clips over and over. But the people on the ground are obviously in a much more perilous position and they can’t shy away from it so you have to keep facing [the violence] for them.
Tyler: When new footage comes in, my job as the editor is to cut something together that makes sense logically but gets deeper into the story, so we wanted moments with an emotional punch. Whenever it got to that point in the edit, I’d break down with David and we’d just have to cry together for a good 10 minutes. So yeah, it’s hard to keep that air of professionalism in the editing room, but it’s also important to be in touch with how the footage makes you feel.
What role does Chechnya leader Ramzan Kadyrov play in the story?
Tyler: Ramzan is kind of an easy villain. You just let the man talk and he digs himself a grave. There’s so much footage of Ramzan giving these bullshit interviews saying how Chechnya has no homosexuals — all we needed was one of those clips.
Alice: We didn’t want to give Ramzan a platform. The less of him the better.
Welcome to Chechnya includes the story of a Chechnyan gay man who successfully emigrates to Canada, but overall the film doesn’t exactly feature a happy ending.
Tyler: We didn’t want the story to feel resolved: “Okay problem solved, move on to the next thing.” We want audiences to understand that this is not a chronicle of something that happened, but something that is happening. The story kind of got swept under the rug and now we have a chance to rise up and help other people.
For more of our Pride Month coverage, take a seat on the Queer Eye casting couch with casting director Danielle Gervais, check out our look at director Tom Shepard‘s Unsettled, covering the plight of the LGBTQ+ refugee, our conversation with Disclosure director Sam Feder about the depiction of the trans community in film and TV, our talk with director Daniel Karslake on the shifting battle for LGBTQ+ equality in For They Know Not What They Do, and director David France on the terror facing the LGBTQ+ Community in Welcome to Chechnya.
Featured image: Grisha with his boyfriend, Bogdan. Photograph: Courtesy of HBO
