Category: media

The “euphorically reviewed” movie hasn’t opened in China or Japan yet, but may be headed for one of the best box offices of any movie, not just any Marvel movie.

As Game Night opens, the history of the screwball comedy has become the history of the chaos comedy, often with the word “Night” in the tile. Basically: “Two or more characters who’ve hit a roadblock in their (sometimes platonic) relationship get wrapped up in craaazy-wild frolics, forcing them to work together to escape the scenario. No matter the nature of their connection, they are seeking to reaffirm their value to one another’s lives. Instead of Hepburn wooing Grant away from his fiancée in a battle of the sexes, these characters are wooing one another away from the monotony of adult routines, marital discord or corporate greed.”

One of the showrunners for Netflix’s remake of One Day at a Time says that the writers’ room is basing a lot of plot details on real life – for instance, the time post-election when someone told her Cuban-American brother to “go back to Mexico,” and that made it on to the show. “It’s like, ‘What’s happening?’ We try on the show to show many points of view. Obviously, the show has a liberal bent, but we try to show all sides of an issue so all sides of the conversation can start. This is something we thought would affect this family, so how would they talk about it? What would that look like?”

And at first he didn’t want to be on the show at all. “I was offered the job and I said, ‘You’re out of your minds — I will ruin your show!’ … They said, ‘No you won’t, we know how to cast. From what we know, there’s never been a gay, Muslim, British immigrant on a global platform before.’” Indeed.

If anything can save movie theatres, it might be MoviePass – but after that, it might be luxuries that entice people back to the movies (actual ticket sales dropped 6 percent in 2017).

Critic Monica Castillo notes that it’s not the fault of the 2017 movie that the Academy didn’t recognize the 2002 movie. “Real Women didn’t receive a single nod from the academy, though it won a handful of awards in the run-up to the Oscars. That might look as if the industry were praising the movie with the white protagonist when it ignored the movie with a Latino one — that Real Women Have Curves lacked the familiarity the traditionally white, older Oscar voters would reward. … This should be a time to re-evaluate how the entertainment industry missed a remarkable movie.”

That’s right, they’re nominated for both Beauty and the Beast and Darkest Hour – one for costume design and two for production design. The women often work together. Who should win the Oscars? “Personally you know which you think you did your hardest work for. … But that doesn’t necessarily translate into which is the best film.”

The number of female protagonists in the 100 highest-grossing films fell five percentage points last year, according to a new report from San Diego State University’s Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film. Women made up 24 percent of featured protagonists, defined for the study’s purposes as characters from whose perspective the story is told. It’s an odd occurrence, given that the three most popular films of last year’s domestic box office list each featured a woman in a lead role: Rey in “Star Wars: The Last Jedi,” Belle in “Beauty and the Beast” and Diana Prince of “Wonder Woman.”

A nearly century-old radio station like WNYC swooping in to save a group of sites that helped write the rules of online journalism does contain a hint of irony. But when you consider these radio stations have managed to weather technological changes from the transistor to the television, the idea that they might be able to help younger newsrooms navigate the choppy waters of the digital revolution—while benefiting from their digital native audiences—doesn’t sound so crazy after all.

“David Zindel, son of American playwright Paul Zindel, filed the complaint Wednesday alleging that [Guillermo] Del Toro’s critically acclaimed film, which has more Oscar nominations than any other this year, has ‘exploited’ the play Let Me Hear You Whisper and should have credited and licensed his father’s work.”