Film
William Hurt’s Former Partner Comes Forward with Domestic Violence Claims
Days after the death of William Hurt, the actor’s former long-term partner Donna Kaz has shared her response to the news and opened up about the abuse she suffered at the actor’s hands. In a guest column for Variety, Kaz looked back at her relationship with the late actor, which began in 1977 and officially ended in 1980 — though they would still see each other a few times per year until 1989. “Bill would snap, physically shove, punch and beat me, followed by tears, apologies and him offering me expensive gifts,” she wrote. “When the battering began I sloughed it off. He said he was sorry. Perhaps I instigated it. I only had to visit the ER once. It was only after many, many years I admitted to myself that I was the victim of domestic violence.” The author of 2016’s Un/Masked: Memoirs...
Windfall Review: Netflix Thriller is a Thin Exercise in Hitchcockian Style
The Pitch: A man (Jason Segel) breaks into a well-furnished California vacation home; he rifles through the drawers for cash and valuables, eats fruit from their lush orange grove, and pisses in their shower. But just as he’s about to leave, the couple to whom the house belongs — a snotty tech CEO (Jesse Plemons) and his wallflower wife (Lily Collins) — return home early and catch him in the act. Rather than break out into violence, though, a curious game of negotiation begins: What does the man want? Why did he pick this particular guy’s home to rob? And just what will it take to make him go away? This One Goes Out To…: We’re two full years into the COVID-19 pandemic now, which means we’re still dealing with the surfeit of small-scale, isolated thrillers facilitated by the restr...
Pearl Jam’s 10 Best Needle Drops
Pearl Jam famously abstained from making music videos for a few years in the 1990s, when they were one of the biggest bands in the world. But their music has regularly graced television and the big screen in other ways, appearing on the soundtracks of films like Judgment Night, The Basketball Diaries, and Reign Over Me. And Pearl Jam songs have popped up all over television, sometimes in surprising places like over a dozen episodes of the CBS procedural Cold Case. Here’s a look back at the 10 best Pearl Jam needle drops in film and TV. 10. “Man of the Hour” – Big Fish (2003) Advertisement Related Video [embedded content] In 2003, Tim Burton adapted Daniel Wallace’s Big Fish: A Novel of Mythic Proportions, a story of a man’s reconciliation with his dying father. Burton sought out Pearl Jam ...
Channing Tatum Teases Magic Mike 3 Plot: “It’s a Reverse-Role Pretty Woman”
Grab your stash of one-dollar bills, because Magic Mike 3 is officially underway: In a recent New York Times sitdown, Channing Tatum offered an update on the third film in the dramedy stripper series. Titled Magic Mike’s Last Dance, its plot takes inspiration from another famously salacious rom-com: Pretty Woman. “I leave for London tomorrow, and it’s going to be pretty bonkers,” Tatum said. “We’re kind of swinging for the fences — there never needs to be another stripper movie after this one. We’re trying to do a fish-out-of-water story where it’s a reverse-role Pretty Woman story that ends up with a lot of dancing in it.” In case you haven’t seen the 1990 rom-com classic, Pretty Woman follows a Hollywood prostitute (Julia Roberts) who is hired to be an escort by a wealthy ...
Amazon Closes $8.5 Billion Deal to Acquire MGM
Amazon has officially brought yet another company under its wing. Jeff Bezos’ empire announced today that it has closed its $8.5 billion acquisition of MGM. The deal, which was first announced back in May 2021, adds more than 4,000 movies and 17,000 TV shows to Amazon’s Prime Video catalog. This merger means that giant franchises like the James Bond series, as well as Silence of the Lambs, Rocky, and The Hobbit, now belong to Amazon. The company now owns the rights to some storied TV classics, such as The Apprentice and the fabled racist Donald Trump tapes. With their ownership of MGM’s studios now in effect, Amazon plans to use the acquisition to boost Prime Video and Amazon Studios’ growing catalog of new originals. Advertisement Related Video “The storied, nearly century-old studio — wi...
SXSW Review: Richard Linklater Goes to the Moon, But Keeps Things Grounded in Apollo 10 1/2
This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 SXSW Film Festival. The Pitch: Anyone and everyone who was alive in the summer of 1969 likely knows where they were when they saw the first men landing on the moon on their television screens. But for young Stan (Milo Coy), his experience was a li’l different. Turns out, months before the iconic trip, the suburban Houstonite was approached by a couple of NASA suits for a once-in-a-lifetime mission. You see, due to an engineering blunder, they’d built the lunar module juuust a bit too small for an adult astronaut. So they needed a kid. And Stan, of course, is the perfect candidate. Related Video This didn’t happen, of course; it’s the stuff of childhood reverie, and adult Stan (Jack Black), who narrates, establishes early that he was a “fabuli...
Encanto Composer Germaine Franco on the Magic of Collaboration: “We Felt Like We Had This Amazing Gift”
A Zoom malfunction meant we had to restart midway through our conversation, but Oscar-nominated composer Germaine Franco was more than understanding — because Encanto was a COVID production. “Usually you want to be in the same room so everybody’s listening to the same mix, the same speaker, the same environment,” she tells Consequence via Zoom. “But I was presenting cues on Zoom, and everyone had different headphones. It was so tricky to say, ‘Okay, I’m going to play this. I have no idea what it sounds like on your end.’” Prior to Encanto, Franco’s film work included The Book of Life, Dope, Tag, and Coco — her Oscar nomination this year, for the lively Colombian-influenced score of Disney’s latest animated feature, makes history, as she’s only the sixth woman ever to be nominated for...
Puss in Boots Uses Up Eight Lives in New Trailer for The Last Wish: Watch
Puss and Boots is down to his ninth and final life in the new trailer for DreamWorks’ The Last Wish. This is the long-gestating sequel to 2011’s Puss in Boots, which itself was a spinoff of 2004’s Shrek 2. Antonio Banderas returns as the titular fearless feline, who begins the trailer by defeating a giant, but who lingers in his victory speech a little too long and finds himself crushed to death. That’s nothing new to Puss in Boots, who, as he soon recounts, has died a number of times. There was the bull-fighting incident, the time he didn’t land on his feet, the mix-up with seafood, and the whoopsie in a cannon. He’s a bit slow to count it up — “I’m not really a math guy,” he says — but to his horror, he soon realizes he has already perished eight times. “What do ...
AMC Entertainment Buys Stake in Literal Gold Mine One Year After Flirting with Bankruptcy
With the energy of a person who becomes newly engaged two days after leaving rehab, AMC Entertainment — a company that nearly went bankrupt less than a year ago — has spent $27.9 million on the troubled gold and silver mining company Hycroft, despite having zero experience in the excavation of rare metals. The Hycroft Mining Holding Corp. owns the 71,000-acre Hycroft Mine in northern Nevada, which is thought to possess “some 15 million ounces of gold deposits and some 600 million ounces of silver deposit,” according to The Hollywood Reporter. AMC Entertainment has purchased a 22% stake in the company, and Adam Aron, the chairman and CEO, sounds positively manic about the decision. “To state the obvious, one would not normally think that a movie theater company’s core c...
Benedict Cumberbatch Plans to Host Ukrainian Refugees
Actor Benedict Cumberbatch plans to open up his inner sanctum to Ukrainian refugees in the wake of Russia’s unprovoked invasion. The London resident and star of The Power of the Dog shared his intentions to take part in the UK’s new “Homes for Ukraine” initiative on the red carpet for the 2022 BAFTAs on Sunday, March 15th. “It is a really shocking time to be a European two-and-a-half hours’ flight away from Ukraine and it’s something that hangs over us,” Cumberbatch told Sky News. “We all need, as we know, to do more than wear a badge. We need to donate, we need to pressure our politicians to continue to create some kind of refugee safety and a haven here for people who are suffering and figure that system out. I know it’s ongoing, I know that’s happening. Everyone need...
SXSW Review: Under the Influence Interrogates the Addictive Escalation of David Dobrik
This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 SXSW Film Festival. The Pitch: Out of the great, grand entertainment experiment that is YouTube, David Dobrik is easily one of the platform’s greatest successes. Leveraging his devil-may-care attitude and penchant for increasingly ambitious or invasive stunts, Dobrik quickly became a multi-millionaire on a level most non-movie stars would never enjoy, with six-figure sponsorship deals, 18 million subscribers, and a cadre of fellow sex-and-booze-loving daredevils (colloquially known as the Vlog Squad) whose boats his rising tide would also lift. But the same sensationalism that fueled Dobrik’s success would also be his downfall (inasmuch as one of the richest kids on YouTube, with a cultish zoomer following, can fall). In 2021, he suffere...
SXSW Review: Tony Hawk Keeps His Distance in Skate Doc Until the Wheels Fall Off
The Pitch: The secret to Tony Hawk’s success is his willingness to fail. When we first see him in the opening minutes of Sam Jones’ doc Until the Wheels Fall Off, we see exactly why: The skateboarding titan, still the face of the sport even in his fifties, tries and tries again to pull a 900 — the borderline-impossible skate trick he miraculously pulled off at the 1999 X Games — only to eat shit on each attempt. His body slams into the wood with concussive force every time, occasionally hurting enough to make him scream in pain. And yet, he gets up and tries again. What fuels someone like Hawk to keep sacrificing his body for the chance at a twice-in-a-lifetime flip? Over the course of two hours, Jones interrogates this question, charting Hawk’s youth as a child skating prodigy, his d...
