Movies
Netflix adds another 10 million subscribers
Getty Images Netflix is still growing as people continue to shelter in place around the country, but the company is now seeing the slowed subscriber growth executives predicted would arrive three months ago. On top of announcing that longtime chief content officer Ted Sarandos would join CEO Reed Hastings as co-CEO, the company made a few impressive announcements. Netflix added 10.2 million subscribers in its second quarter, beating the company’s own estimates that it made in its first quarter, which suggested it could add around 7.5 million. Netflix noted that it added 26 million paid new subscribers in the first two quarters of 2020 alone; in 2019, the company added 28 million subscribers in total. The company’s revenue grew 25 percent year over year, but missed its revenue goals for the...
KiKi Layne Is Bringing Blackness To Blockbusters, And It Begins With The Old Guard
When KiKi Layne was cast as Tish Rivers, a lead character in Barry Jenkins’s quietly profound indie drama If Beale Street Could Talk, the choice may have been a mystery to some. Then a relatively little-known, 26-year-old actress who had spent her post-graduate years working the Chicago theater circuit, she beat out over 300 other hopeful performers for a part that, as the followup to Jenkins’s best picture-winning Moonlight, couldn’t have been more desirable. Yet there she was, with the opportunity of a lifetime, wowing audiences with her tender film debut in the lush adaptation of James Baldwin’s novel about race, family, and dreams, which went on to receive its own roster of accolades. But Layne is eager to surprise, and she has dedicated her rising career to, as she puts it, “breaking ...
Kelly Preston, Actress in ‘SpaceCamp,’ ‘Jerry Maguire,’ Dies at 57
Kelly Preston, the actress who starred in such movies as Jerry Maguire and, most recently, opposite husband John Travolta in Gotti, has died. She was 57. Preston died Sunday after a two-year battle with breast cancer, Travolta wrote on Instagram. “It is with a very heavy heart that I inform you that my beautiful wife Kelly has lost her two-year battle with breast cancer,” he wrote. “She fought a courageous fight with the love and support of so many. My family and I will forever be grateful to her doctors and nurses at MD Anderson Cancer Center, all the medical centers that have helped, as well as her many friends and loved ones who have been by her side. Kelly’s love and life will always be remembered. I will be taking some time to be there for my...
Ennio Morricone, Legendary Composer for the Movies, Dies at 91
Ennio Morricone, the Oscar winner whose haunting, inventive scores expertly accentuated the simmering, dialogue-free tension of the spaghetti Westerns directed by Sergio Leone, has died. He was 91. The Italian composer, who scored more than 500 films — seven for his countryman Leone after they had met as kids in elementary school — died in Rome following complications from a fall last week in which he broke his femur. A native and lifelong resident of Rome whose first instrument was the trumpet, Morricone won his Oscar for his work on Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight (2015) and also was nominated for his original scores for Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven (1978), Roland Joffe’s The Mission (1986), Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables (1987), Barry Levinson’s Bugsy (1991) and Giuseppe To...
Seal Remembers Joel Schumacher, Says Director Turned ‘Kiss From a Rose’ Into a Hit
Seal on Monday (June 22) told a story he said was not well-known about his classic song “Kiss From a Rose,” which Joel Schumacher helped make a huge hit. The director died Monday. He was 80. In a video that was more than five minutes long, the musician sang a few bars of his song before telling the story of how it was a flop in 1994 before Schumacher fell in love with it and used it on the soundtrack for Batman Forever in 1995. “It was the fourth single from my second album. It went into the charts at No. 60 and dropped to No. 80-something the next week and that was the end of it. It was over,” Seal explained. While he was in the studio working on his next album, he got a call from Schumacher who said he was seeking a song to use during the love scene in his Batman ...
Queen Latifah Wants ‘Gone with the Wind’ to be Gone Forever
While some have criticized HBO Max’s removal of Gone With the Wind from its streaming service — including those who wonder if it hurts the legacy of Hattie McDaniel, the first African American woman to win an Academy Award — Oscar nominee Queen Latifah says good riddance. “Let ‘Gone with the Wind’ be gone with the wind,” said the Emmy, Golden Globe and Grammy winner in an interview last week. Latifah, who portrays McDaniel in Ryan Murphy’s Netflix Hollywood series, says the story behind McDaniel’s Oscar win is not as shiny as the golden trophy. “They didn’t even let her in the theater until right before she got that award. Someone came outside and brought her into the auditorium. She wasn’t even allowed to sit in there. And then she had to read a speech that was written by a stud...
South African Government Working on Plans to Re-Open Cinemas Across the Country
A new set of regulations gazetted by the SA government on Thursday shows that movie theatres might be opening again across the country sometime soon. Cinemas are currently closed, not allowed to operate during Level 3 of the national lockdown. For it now it seems that the new government regulations have included theatres and cinemas in an arrangement that allows competitors to negotiate amongst each other, and with their landlords in order to lower rent and allow for rent holidays. In normal times, these negotiations are restricted by South Africa’s competition laws. /* custom css */ .tdi_3_eae.td-a-rec-img{ text-align: left; }.tdi_3_eae.td-a-rec-img img{ margin: 0 auto 0 0; } “The Department (of trade and industry) has received representation from stakeholders in the cinema exhibition ind...
Will Ferrell & Rachel McAdams Play an Icelandic Music Duo in ‘Eurovision’ Film: Watch the Trailer
Will Ferrell and Rachel McAdams are taking on Eurovision in Netflix’s upcoming comedy, Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga, and the first trailer dropped today (June 11). The clip shows Ferrell and McAdams, who play Lars and Sigrit of budding Icelandic musical duo Fire Saga as they haphazardly work toward their dreams of winning of the world’s biggest song competition. Demi Lovato is also involved in the movie and will perform “In the Mirror,” an original song for the movie’s soundtrack. The David Dobkin-directed film, which also stars Dan Stevens, Lovato, Pierce Brosnan and more, will be available for streaming on June 26. Watch the trailer, and the hilarious music video for Fire Saga’s “Volcano Man” below. [embedded content] [embe...
AMC Plans To Open Theaters In July, Moviegoers Still Uneasy
Source: Noam Galai / Getty When COVID-19 effectively shutdown Hollywood, the movie theater chain giant, AMC also saw its locations shutter. As the world begins to slowly open up, AMC hopes its theaters will be back in business as well. July, that’s the target for AMC if things go as plan. During a recent earnings call, the company’s CEO Adam Aron boldly revealed that he expects that 97 percent of the company’s locations to be opened by next month The Wall Street Journal reports. AMC had to close all of its theaters back in March due to the COVID-19 global pandemic being that going to the movies falls under the mass gathering’s category. That sounds good, and all but surveys suggest that people are saying aht aht aht when it comes to heading back to the theater to watch a flick. A recent st...
Ennio Morricone and John Williams Honored For Film Scores
A Spanish foundation on Friday (May 5) awarded one of the country’s most prestigious awards to composers Ennio Morricone and John Williams for their film work. The jury that decides the Princess of Asturias Awards said the Italian and American composers “have enriched hundreds of films with their talent.” The pair “demonstrate complete mastery of composition as well as narrative, building emotion, tension and lyricism at the service of cinematographic images.” Williams, 88, has scored movies such as “Star Wars,” “Jaws,” the “Indiana Jones” series and the first three “Harry Potter” films. Morricone, 91, has over the past seven decades created more than 400 scores for cinema and television. The €50,000 award ($56,700) is the first of eight prizes, including in the arts, social sciences and s...
Why The Half Of It‘s Leah Lewis Will Never Stop Growing Up
By Crystal Bell Less than a minute into our conversation, Leah Lewis tells me how she’s been taking care of herself — “mentally and physically” — while quarantining in her Los Angeles home. It’s late April, and the usually benign question of “how are you doing?” is now a loaded phrase that means, in essence, “how are you coping?” The 23-year-old star of The Half of It assures me she’s been eating a lot (she and her boyfriend challenge each other to cook-offs in the kitchen), reading a lot (she’s currently in the middle of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood), calling a lot (she talks to her best friend and co-star Alexxis Lemire at least “five times a day”), and painting her toenails a lot. She journals every day, a ho...
The Half Of It Star Daniel Diemer Will Try Anything Once
By Crystal Bell Daniel Diemer spruces up a small area of his Studio City apartment for a full day of Zoom interviews in promotion of the new Netflix film The Half of It, but he only keeps things professional from the waist up. A sartorial mullet, of sorts. “I’m wearing sweatpants,” the 23-year-old actor says matter-of-factly over the phone. He’s sitting in front of the television in his living room, where his roommates are currently prohibited from snacking too loudly, telling me about his days as a teenage gig worker in his Canadian hometown, British Columbia’s Brentwood Bay. In no specific order, he coached ping pong, picked blueberries, published a children’s book about a penguin detective, did some low-level accounting work, coached tennis at the same summ...
