Film
Jay Leno Cast as Ed Sullivan in Brian Epstein Biopic Midas Man
For the first time since the ’90s, Jay Leno will appear on the big screen playing someone other than himself. This particular casting choice is pretty meta, as the former Tonight Show host has been tapped to play another much-celebrated TV personality, Ed Sullivan, in Midas Man, a forthcoming biopic about Beatles manager Brian Epstein. Midas Man, which documents Epstein’s role in the career of The Beatles and the shape of pop music that followed, is currently in production. Jacob Fortune-Lloyd, known for his recent role in The Queen’s Gambit, will play Epstein. Leno is likely to make an impactful appearance in the film, considering the band’s February 1964 appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show marks one of the most important moments (if not the most important) in bringing ...
Gina Carano to Star in Hunter Biden Biopic
Embattled actress Gina Carano is set to star in an upcoming biopic about President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter. Directed by Robert Davi, My Son Hunter will tell a story of “the absurd life and party lifestyle of Hunter Biden and the dodgy dealings of his father,” according to producer Phelim McAleer. Carano will portray a fictional female Secret Service agent tasked with narrating the film’s plot. Dynasty actor John James will play President Joe Biden, while British actor and failed 2021 London mayoral candidate, Laurence Fox, has been cast as Hunter Biden. Advertisement Related Video “The story, the cast, the crew, the people, this is what makes art great and this is what we’re doing… The script was instantly intriguing and side achingly hilarious to me, especially after being newly exposed t...
Ghostbusters: Afterlife Went Too Far With Its Most Unsettling Cameo
[Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers for Ghostbusters: Afterlife.] Jason Reitman‘s Ghostbusters: Afterlife is packed with callbacks to the original 1980s films, not just drawing upon the iconography established by Reitman’s father but also bringing back much of the original cast, including Bill Murray, Dan Ackroyd, and Ernie Hudson. It also chose to pay tribute to the fourth member of the Ghostbusting team, actor and filmmaker Harold Ramis — but went too far in doing so. As Egon Spengler, Ramis was one of the original film’s most memorable characters, and Ramis also had a long and fruitful career as a director of films including Caddyshack and Groundhog Day; he died in 2014 at the age of 69 after an illness, and Afterlife is dedicated to his memory. Which is fitting, given that ...
R.I.P. Art LaFleur, Actor Who Played Babe Ruth in The Sandlot Dead at 78
Art LaFleur, the veteran character actor best known for playing Babe Ruth in The Sandlot, has died at the age of 78. According to TMZ, LaFleur passed away on Wednesday (November 17th) following a 10-year battle with Parkinson’s disease. In The Sandlot, after the boys lose an autographed Babe Ruth baseball over a fence and into the yard of the Beast, LaFleur’s character appears in the dreams of Benny and encourages him to use his speed to retrieve the ball. “Remember, kid. There’s heroes and there’s legends. Heroes get remembered, but legends never die. Follow your heart, kid, and you’ll never go wrong,” LaFleur’s Babe Roth famously tells him. Advertisement Related Video Aside from The Sandlot, LaFleur’s filmography included roles in Field of Dreams (as Black Sox player Chick Gandil), ...
Oasis Offer Fans a Free Month of Paramount+ to Watch Their Documentary
Who has the money to subscribe to each of the myriad streaming platforms that exist today? Oasis understand the struggle, and as Rolling Stone notes, they’re offering fans a month long free trial to Paramount+ to encourage them to watch their new documentary. Oasis Knebworth 1996, the new documentary immortalizing Oasis’ historic two-night residency at Knebworth House in Hertfordshire, England in 1996, hit Paramount+ today after premiering in theaters in September. Directed by Jake Scott, the film retells the story of the gigs: At the height of their fame following the release of (What’s the Story) Morning Glory, Oasis played to a crowd of 250,000 — at the time, the biggest in England’s history. From now until November 30th, new subscribers can use the code OASIS and access ...
Director Mike Mills on His Gentle Drama C’Mon C’Mon: “I Think I’m Always Writing About Love”
To see a Mike Mills film — Thumbsucker, Beginners, 20th Century Women — is to be steeped in a deep pool of empathy. He’s an acutely sensitive director, his works feeling less like didactic authorial statements than loose, open meditations that allow his actors to take the lead and guide him along gently interpersonal journeys. His latest, C’Mon C’Mon, is no different, though Mills focuses his eye this time on the electric, unpredictable relationships between adults and children. Here, we get something akin to the avuncular, A24 version of the Adam Sandler comedy Big Daddy: a childless thirty-something man (Joaquin Phoenix’s jocular but forlorn Johnny) suddenly thrust into a situation where he must unexpectedly look after a precocious young boy (the spectacular Woody Norman, playi...
David Bowie Film Coming from Director Brett Morgen
Brett Morgen, director of immersive, collage-like documentaries including Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck and Jane, is working on a movie about David Bowie based on thousands of hours of unseen concert footage of the late musician. While a lot of information about the project remains under wraps (no titles or release dates yet), Variety quotes a source who describes the film as “neither documentary nor biography, but an immersive cinematic experience.” This makes sense, given Morgen’s history: his Cobain film utilized home footage and animations of the musician’s own art, which proved much more compelling than the talking heads featured. Plus, Bowie’s widow, the model Iman, has long rejected authorization requests for a traditional biopic. “It’s always a no. We always ask each ...
Trailer for Jennifer Lopez’s Marry Me Is So Bad It Ruins Marriage for the Rest of Us: Watch
The holidays are a time for overeating, reconnecting with loved ones, and watching so-bad-they’re-good movies about rich people marrying poor people. But the charm of this genre is that the flicks are campy and cheaply made. Throw in a big budget and serious attitude and you get Marry Me, the new film starring Jennifer Lopez and Owen Wilson, which looks awful enough to make even Lifetime lifers cringe. J. Lo leads the way as Kat Valdez, a pop star set to marry her longtime boyfriend on stage, only to realize moments before that he’s cheating. On an impulse, she picks single dad Charlie Gilbert (Wilson) out of the crowd and marries him instead. In the three-minute trailer, we see the supposedly level-headed dad Gilbert make so many baffling decisions it’s a miracle nobody has called DC...
Ghostbusters: Afterlife Is Too Haunted By the Past to Feel Fresh: Review
The Pitch: Trying to tell a really good 21st century Ghostbusters story seems to be an enterprise guaranteed to make absolutely no one happy. Which already makes Ghostbusters: Afterlife a depressing venture right out of the gate; one can almost sense director Jason Reitman screaming from the sidelines, “Are you nerds happy now?!?” Unfortunately, as much as Afterlife openly seeks to draw upon nostalgia for the original, a lot of fans may find the taste of their youth to be curdled by the level of pandering involved. Things begin with the reveal that one of the original Ghostbusters (the movie gets a bit coy about this, but it’s Egon Spengler, who was played by the recently deceased Harold Ramis) had left his friends and moved to Summerville, Oklahoma in the years before his death. Following...
Joshua Malina on Why He Wants to Offer Unnecessary Commentary on His Past Aaron Sorkin Projects
The relationship between those who make TV shows and those who watch said TV shows has become, thanks to the Internet, an increasingly complicated one over the years. But before stars from Gilmore Girls, Scrubs, and The Office started making podcasts to fuel the pandemic-era thirst for vintage television, actor Joshua Malina and his friend, composer Hrishikesh Hirway, were talking The West Wing on the weekly. The West Wing Weekly, which launched in 2016, featured regular deep dives into every episode of the Emmy-winning NBC drama, with much of the original cast — as well as creator Aaron Sorkin — participating in the discussion. Now, after years of digging into the complexities of DC political drama, though, the pair have teamed up for a new enterprise entitled Unnecessary Commentary, whic...
Miramax Sues Quentin Tarantino over Pulp Fiction NFTs
To paraphrase the Bible and one Bad Mother Fucker, the path of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish, the tyranny of evil men, and bizarre legal bullshit. As Deadline reports, Quentin Tarantino is trying to auction off Pulp Fiction NFTs, but the film’s distributor, Miramax, is hoping a new lawsuit will shoot that plan in the face. Tarantino launched his blockchain bombshell earlier this month, promising to auction off seven never-before-seen scenes, scans of the original script, and exclusive commentary offering “secrets about the film and its creator.” However, Miramax contends that all of that potentially valuable property is not his to sell. According to the lawsuit, Tarantino “granted and assigned nearly all of h...
Spider-Man: No Way Home Trailer Rips Apart the Multiverse: Watch
Come on, Marvel and Sony: We know there’s going to be more than one Spider-Man in the next movie, so why the play it so close to the web? Whatever game the studios are playing, the new Spider-Man: No Way Home trailer has arrived, and while neither Tobey Maguire nor Andrew Garfield appear, a ton of multiversal madness does. As revealed in the previous No Way Home preview, Alfred Molina and Willem Dafoe are back as Doctor Octopus 2004’s Spider-Man 2 and Green Goblin from 2001’s Spider-Man, respectively. We’ve also had hints that Thomas Haden Church’s Sandman (Spider-Man 3), Jamie Foxx’s Electro (The Amazing Spider-Man 2), and Rhys Ifans’ Lizard (The Amazing Spider-Man) would all be bursting through the cross-dimensional rift created by Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch), an...
