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aion-rsa · 4 years ago

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Tina Documentary Directors Talk About Making an Artist’s Final Statement

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HBO’s feature documentary Tina is an intimate overview of Tina Turner, the person behind the musical icon. It is also a final statement, as the singer is moving on from the performance part of her life. The documentary tells Tina’s story the way the singer wanted it told: honestly.

Some of Turner’s musical highpoints are skipped, like her scene-stealing role as the Acid Queen in Tommy or her appearance on the bulk of Frank Zappa’s Overnight Sensation. But the story of her early rise to fame, and the oppressive influence her musical mentor, husband and onstage partner Ike Turner had on her personal and professional life is deftly explored. As is her fight for independence, recording the monumental Phil Spector production “River Deep, Mountain High,” and her 1980s global resurgence.

Tina was directed by Dan Lindsay and T.J. Martin, whose sports documentary, Undefeated, won the 2012 Oscar for or Best Documentary Feature. The duo spoke with Den of Geek about Tina Turner, the artist, person, and one of music’s most public private dancers.

Den of Geek: I really enjoyed the film. Did Tina?

Dan Lindsay: Yeah. Tina has seen the film. She saw it once we finished it. Unfortunately, because of the pandemic, we weren’t able to go and screen it for her. She saw it in a theater in Zurich and the way the timing was, we were fast asleep here in the States. She spoke with our producer Simon Chinn afterwards, and she really was happy with the film and was, I guess, for us a big compliment was she just said that we got it right. That she remembered, it was interesting for her to relive some of that stuff and that she felt like it was an accurate portrayal.

And I think the other thing is obviously you’ve seen the film. So, you know that we, as you might understand, we had some anxiety about showing her the film because we didn’t want to play any part in re-traumatizing her or triggering anything that would be difficult for her. She said that it was, ultimately, not as difficult to watch as she may have expected. So that was an encouraging sign. I think it maybe speaks a bit to the notion at the end of the film, when she talks about kind of coming to a place of acceptance.

When did you find out that the documentary was going to be a final statement from her?

T.J. Martin: That’s a good question. It’s funny. Even in the process of making it, she talked a lot about the question that’s posed in the film, this notion of: how do you bow out slowly? And we started recognizing, she’s retired from the stage, but she’s really speaking to her participation in anything that has to do with the rehashing of the story of Tina Turner, right? The way we thought about it in the film is there are two characters. There’s Tina, and then there’s the narrative of Tina. A lot of it’s about trying to get her POV and explore her relationship with the character of the narrative of Tina Turner. I don’t know if it started becoming a little bit more clear that this may be one of the last times that she actually participates in something like this until we went and filmed with her, for the premiere of the musical.

It’s not featured in the film. But we did some on-the-fly interviews with her. There was a very palpable anxiety from her about wanting to go to the premiere and continue to relive this story that is very much her, but she has moved on, and she’s in a totally new different chapter of her life. I think, at least for me, that was the time where I was like, “Oh, this might be the last true closure,” I know it’s featured in the film where Erwin says, this’ll be a closure, but it was the first time I actually felt honest that she’s hanging up the narrative of Tina so that he can actually be at peace and hang out at her castle by a lake and relax and process on her own and not in the public eye.

Lindsay: It was definitely hinted at, I guess in our first interview that we did. With Martin saying, like Irwin kind of brought up like, “I think this is it, this is like a closure.” And then doing interviews with her, she was clear that she’s like, “I don’t want to do this kind of stuff anymore.”

Does that make it easier because she knew this was going to be a final statement, that she would give one last full immersion?

Lindsay: I don’t know that there was that any of us were that conscious of it to a point where it would have made things easier or not. I just think she came into this, she’d been living her life and then the decision to do the musical, I think spurred this idea of: “Okay, well, if I’m going to talk with them for the writing of that, why not. If I’m revisiting and why not do this thing.” But I don’t know that it was like, “Okay, this is it.” Like Martin said, it’s just something that slowly evolved. And only Tina can answer this. I mean, whether she’s going to issue some public statement and be like, “Leave me alone.”

I don’t know. But yeah, I think it became clear to us as the more we filmed that it was like, “Oh yeah, she doesn’t have an interest in it.” Sorry to go off on a tangent, but the thing about Tina that’s really interesting, and I think it was something we wanted to make sure we explore at least textually in the film is that Tina’s not an activist. She didn’t come forward because she had a political message, right? She had goals in her life. She had things she wanted to do. And she was born into a society that wanted her to do certain other things. And she said, “No, I want to do this.”, and she was going to take the steps necessary to do the things she wants to do. Now that she is retired from the stage, she wants to do the things she’s doing and not be responsible for being Tina Turner anymore.

Were you fans of hers?

Martin: No. We grew up in the ’80s being very conscious of who she is, how can you not? I think there was always a tremendous amount of respect for Tina. They came to ask us to do the film. Part of her hesitation was, why us, why are two men the right people to voice Tina’s story or to author Tina’s story? And then also the other one was us talking to each other like, “Were you a Tina fan?” Neither of us really being like deep Tina super fans, which probably lent itself to being advantageous when we started that deep diving into the story and everything became a little bit more of a proper discovery.

Speaking of proper discoveries while you were talking to her – a lot of artists when they leave or when they say farewell, there’s a vault of unreleased material. Is there a vault of unreleased material?

Lindsay: No, I think as the easy answer, especially in her solo years. I think a lot of that stuff has been released. We did come upon a couple things that I think haven’t really made their way out to the public. The one thing that’s in the film that has never been heard before is, we use it to demonstrate the first time that she sang with Ike. And that is a recording of a song that Ike wrote, and it was recorded in 1962 or ’61 or ’62. Ultimately, it was recorded by Mickey and Sylvia. But the recording of it was on an old reel that a collector in St. Louis had. He had met Ike in the ’80s at some point. And Ike had given him these different reels. He had never had them digitized before. We brought them into a studio, got the multitracks, and well, I guess at that point it’s two tracks. And there was a ton of stuff on that. The early demos of songs that ultimately got recorded, but just the demo version of them. And it’s really interesting.

Is she on a lot of it?

Lindsay: Oh yeah. It’s all her, Ike and Tina doing demo stuff and there’s the original recording, or the original tracking of “I’m Blue” was on there. The Ikette’s song. Most of the stuff that we found that were rare things, were from the Ike and Tina days.

How do you choose which stories are the most representative of her?

Martin: As I’m sure you well know, Tina’s story is vast and this probably should be a 10-part series. And then on top of that, it embodies so many different storytelling genres, right? It’s a coming-of-age at 40 years old, that’s wholly unique, especially in pop music. It’s a rags-to-riches story. For us, it was a huge challenge to try to figure out how to synthesize that. But once we had our early meetings with Tina and we started recognizing how much of the trauma of her past still is omnipresent. It’s always bubbling under the surface. It’s always kind of there, we couldn’t really shake that.

And that is really what determined the POV and the lens of the film and everything was a ripple effect from there. So how do you create a space where it’s Tina looking back on the story of Tina and what is her relationship with that? And she happens to be an amazing performer, musician and musical icon. By sticking in that lane, that was our North star, to know what stories were necessary for the particular story in the particular lens of this film.

As you’ll notice, we don’t have the Rod Stewarts and the Mick Jaggers and the Beyonces talking about her artistry, but we are going to set you on the narrative of Tina and we’re just going to drop you into a performance. That’s the part where you get to experience her artistry. We don’t need someone reminding you of that. It was really about casting people that have somehow embodied or lived her story. And so that’s why you have all the scribes, Carl [Arrington] who wrote the 1980 People magazine article; Kurt Loder, who wrote I, Tina; Angela Bassett, who embodied Tina and that started giving shape and voice to this particular facet of Tina’s story that we wanted to explore.

Ike doesn’t seem like he ever really knew anything about what was bothering Tina. At one point he says he thinks the suicide attempts were because he was sleeping around. Did he ever, ever get it?

Lindsay: That interview was from 2000, I think. And I think that was probably the beginning of coming to some understanding. We’ve had footage, you only see it visually at the end, he’s by a keyboard. And it’s his house in Southern California. And that’s near the end of his life. I mean, I think he died a month or so after that stuff was filmed. We didn’t end up putting it in the film, but he talks about a letter of apology that he wrote to Tina, that there’s some kind of discrepancy whether or not Tina got the letter or not, but it’s mentioned in the musical as well.

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But he did. Yeah. He did come to a point where he did apologize to her. I think he somewhat understood. It’s hard to know, without talking to him. But as Tina says, Ike was obviously a very complicated and disturbed man and he had his own traumas of his life that led him to see things in a certain way. I don’t know, but we do know that he wrote her a letter of apology near the end of his life.

In the documentary, her son talks about a particularly brutal incident that made him hate Ike, but did he keep in touch with Ike until his death?

Martin: Craig specifically? I don’t think Craig did. Craig was her first child from Raymond Hill, the saxophonist. I think Craig, true to his word in the film, as he came of age and once he saw the reality of what that relationship was like. I think he stuck by his mom, his mom’s side pretty much, and really didn’t want Ike in his life.

Were you surprised to find the explicit racism from the record executive?

Lindsay: No, I don’t think we were surprised at all. It falls in line with the history of our country. Especially in the record industry, we were just talking with somebody earlier, one of the things that really stood out to me the first time we went to Tina’s house, we were looking at her Grammys and awards and stuff. She’s got several American music awards from 1985 and the award is for Best Black Video.

You go on Wikipedia now and look at the history of the American Music Awards. They don’t categorize that stuff. They’ve cleaned that aspect of that. But it just speaks to this inherent segregation in the record industry, I don’t think we were surprised. It’s disturbing to hear that stuff. And just to be aware of what did we lose in terms of things, artistry that could’ve been brought to the public because of these gatekeepers? That stuff is sad to think about, but I don’t know, Martin, I don’t think you were surprised.

Martin: No shock. I mean, I think we were really fortunate to have had that recording and good on the record executive Carter to have the courage, to kind of rehash that story and be honest about it. And to have that recording, to prove some of the things to pull the curtains back a little bit on some of the things, some of the anecdotes that we had heard about the systemic racism within the record industry, but by no means was, it was not a surprise.

Did Tina talk about any particular relationships she had with songwriters?

Lindsay: Well, Terry Britten is definitely one. He went on to write a lot of songs for her, we didn’t have the time in the film to really dive into that as much as maybe again, the 10 part series would, that was a very close relationship. And in fact, Terry in his interview got very moved and just talking about what Tina meant to him in his life and how that partnership really brought him to a level as a songwriter that you would have that, he’s unsure would have, whether it would have happened or not

Martin: We have to remember the first band Tina ever saw was Ike Turner and the Kings of Rhythm. And then she joined that band and that was kind of the beginning of her entire career. And she spent the first 20 years, 14 years with Ike, that was the dominant songwriting relationship. Obviously critically important to put the story of “River Deep, Mountain High,” because that was the first time she got an opportunity to work with a different composer songwriter producer. And that kind of liberated her. Outside of that, in terms of the narrative that we’re exploring, those would be the dominant, predominant collaborators that would actually have molded and inspired and influenced her spot.

Dominant, predominant. It’s interesting that those figures are Ike and Phil, though, isn’t it?

Martin: Totally.

Lindsay: Tina’s history and story is littered with encounters with horrible men.

Does she feel vindicated by how “River Deep, Mountain High” is now a classic, where at the time, people just shrugged it off?

Lindsay: She would never articulate it like that. I think she is very proud of it. She thinks of that song in particular as a really defining moment for her. When she went on her own, there were only a few songs from the Ike and Tina days that she continued to perform and “River Deep” was one of them. I guess probably should feel some sort of vindication, but even in some of the archive tapes, in her conversations with Kurt Loder specifically, when they talk about the recording of that song, Tina wasn’t looking at her career like, “Oh, did this pop off or not?” For her, it was just like, “I loved that song and I loved performing it.”

Whether it was successful or not, that wasn’t the way that she was thinking. And part of that is because of the relationship with Ike and the way that he controlled her.

Martin: To your last question, she did talk about, obviously another critical relationship with her was her relationship with Roger [Davies, Tina’s manager] and that transitioned into the solo years in collaboration with Roger. Obviously, it’s not a writing partner, but she did have to start to learn to trust this other vision of how to merge the strength of her performance and the strength of her voice into this new pop world. Roger’s not a writer, it’s not as featured in the film, but Roger spent a considerable amount of time calling together tapes and demos for her, for them to curate the future of her sound together.

Lindsay: I think you’ll appreciate this, to Martin’s point. And it’s, again, just because we didn’t have time to film, but one of the first songs that Roger brought to Tina was “Let’s Get Physical.” Tina was like, “Are you kidding me? I’m not going to, that’s so obvious. I’m not going to do that song!” Roger was working with Olivia Newton John. So, he gave it to her. It became a number one hit, and Tina’s response was that’s fine. I don’t care. I wasn’t going to do that song.

And have to sing it a thousand times on stage. Mick Jagger had said that he got his stage moves from watching Tina dance, and your documentary brings out that she wanted to be as big as Mick Jagger. Does she see herself as a rock artist or an R&B artist or just an artist?

Martin: My sense is that she considers herself a rock artist, but her association with rock is a type of energy, right? It’s not the way in which I think the industry or the public categorizes it, she defines rock in her own way. I think she defines herself as a rock artist.

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Tina debuts Saturday, March 27, at 8:00 p.m. on HBO and will be available to stream on HBO Max.

The post Tina Documentary Directors Talk About Making an Artist’s Final Statement appeared first on Den of Geek.

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fymagnificentwomcn · 5 years ago

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Leyla Feray was a perfect "Ayşe Sultan", Farah Zeynep is not that pretty plus the role of a sultana didn't suit her and of course Farya as a character sucks ! Still bitter about Tims's casting for Turhan Hatice and for how they portrayed her and she only appeared in 3 episodes Ibrahim's reign deserved its own season

I agree Anon. Harem didn’t play an important role during Murad’s reign, so to be honest I would be satisfied with having only Ayşe as a developed character. Harem during Ibrahim’s role played a HUGE role and the fact that we didn’t get all the harem dynamics of that period explored properly is my huge regret and I can bet show’s creators feel the same because they obviously planned for Season 3 devoted wholly to Ibrahim’s reign.. but such is Turkish TV market now and they still delivered a story of Kösem’s life that made sense, which is more you can tell of many TV shows nowadays, even those with huge budget and safe position like Game of Thrones that HBO would have likely prolonged as much as they could, but D&D were certain they had enough time to wrap everything up properly lol. So in those conditions,not knowing when they may get axed (and Turkish shows are filmed like two weeks in advance only), I still appreciate what they did… Now that my initial expectations about whole season of Turhan/Kösem rivalry, Ibrahim’s harem, Turhan of my dreams are more in past, I’m more able to appreciate what we got in that conditions eh.

Devoting so much time to Farya and Murya was HUGE mistake, since it didn’t save the ratings by bringing FZA’s fanbase etc., and it truly stole a lot of precious screentime later. The pacing issues are in MYK from start – back in S1 they introduced Beren earlier than planned and then rushed to end S1 with Kösem becoming regent because they weren’t sure they would get renewed. Maybe it’s crying over spilt milk now, especially since they are obviously aware that they had made a huge mistake – Farya’s screentime was clearly strongly reduced after 10 episodes and after she was removed, she was practically never mentioned again, like they pretended she had never existed lol.

Mhm I don’t think actresses’ appearance is of importance here, sultanas were normal girls, I know it is often assumed that they had to be pretty to captivate the padişah, but it was not always the case - Hürrem apparently wasn’t that conventionally pretty, but managed to charm Suleiman so much regardless. And each sultan had his own preferences. There isn’t something like “a sultana look”. I hear people talking “this actress is too pretty to play a subject, not a sultana” and I’m like ???? Royal blood doesn’t make you pretty either.

I think Leyla was absolutely fine. I liked her cutesy image in contrast to Murad’s violent nature. You can see why this girl “brought him peace” and why he ultimately destroyed her… just episode before she makes the big mistake and helps Gülbahar out, Murad threatens her to become her nightmare after Farya told him about her suspicions. She was soo scared, she was willing to do everything just not to face Mu/rat’s /spelling intentional/ wrath. And then she regretted what had done so much when she heard about people who suffered in the fire and wanted to fight Gülbahar as mother of Murad’s kids and his woman… and poor thing ultimately got exposed for wanting to fix things… #AyseDeservedBetter

I’m not satisifed with the Turhan we got, but after reading more stuff about Kösem vs Turhan conflict I’m now against the “Turhan was innocent cookie, who only jumped to her son’s defence” thing – it’s a clear example of “history being written by winners” thing. Turhan was definitely very good at propaganda – relationship between her and Ibrahim was surely tense and full of mutual dislike, and Mehmed ascending the throne and Ibrahim being dethroned surely was a good thing for her – yet in correspondence to statesmen that she wanted to bring to her side she described herself “as poor suffering widow, who just wants to punish those who killed her beloved husband”, among which she meant Kösem. There was even an occurrence when one of statesmen supporting Turhan went to Kösem to accuse her of killing Sultan Ibrahim and putting all blame on her, which reportedly shook Kösem very much. While Kösem likely did make moves to dethrone Mehmed, it’s very possible that the poisoning thing was invented by Turhan and her people to rally support. Reports put blame on “misinformation” on Suleiman Aga, who was treated as person inciting the showdown, but we know Suleiman Aga served Turhan, and it was a natural thing that servants of Imperial figures were blamed because nobody dared to accuse the actual Valide.

Turhan as Valide Sultan did not only manage harem, but was involved in state matters and the double rule often made it harder for Kösem to stabilise Empire. Turhan wasn’t deprived of being Valide Sultan; Kosem’s position was simply new & unprecedented and allowed her to be regent. While mothers began to play the role of regent recently (Kösem for Murad, Halime unofficially for Mustafa, Handan as co-regent together with Ahmed’s lala, even Mehmed III leaving the affairs in Safiye’s hands when he went on campaign to Hungary), there was no law on this and previously e.g. there was more inclination for Grand Vizier in this role.

In the end, they were both morally grey because while Kösem likely didn’t plan to poison Mehmed, of course there was always risk of him losing his life if any problems ensued following deposition, as the Ibrahim case showed.

Still, the innocent cookie defender of her son Turhan vs. evil hag Kösem narrative is not the true one.

We also must remember that:

Discretion prevented Ottoman writers from criticizing royal mothers (they did not record the hostile barbs directed by Ottoman statesmen at queen mothers and favorites which made their way into European accounts), but they did not hesitate to employ invective in he case of lesser women of the sultan’s harem. Naima, so careful to defend the young queen mother Turhan, criticized other concubines of the “mad” İbrahim with relish.

Taken from: Leslie Peirce, The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Otoman Empire.

I’ve found some evidence for Turhan being groomed by Kösem and Turhan’s involvement in politics even during Ibrahim’s reign (namely in connection with the Crete war), so while we don’t know much about the relationship between the two women before Mehmed’s reign, there is some evidence supporting MYK’s direction. Leslie Peirce states that Kösem groomed Turhan and Thys-Senocak mentions that Atike chose and trained her.

However, as a new slave woman in the palace, a gift of Kör Süleyman Pasha to the valide sultan Kösem, she had been trained by Atike Sultan, a sister of Murad IV, and groomed by Kösem, who presented her to her son.

Taken from: Leslie Peirce, The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Otoman Empire. Peirce also reiterates that Kösem groomed Turhan in her short article entitled Gender and Sexual Propriety in Ottoman Royal Women’s Patronage.

Training by Atike could be also on Kösem’s request, though we cannot say for certain Atike was Kösem’s daughter, but yet again Kösem seemed to pretty much take care of whole dynasty, not only her own children. It is interesting because the position of the mother of eldest son’s gained importance due to switch to seniority and we know for certain Turhan wasn’t Ibrahim’s favourite consort – but maybe again he was attracted to her at first and the relationship deteriorated later. Due to her being mother of eldest son, Turhan had to be aware that being Valide is in store for her, and Kösem also had to accept the fact.

The fact is that with four episodes the showrunners decided to focus more on the already established characters and Turhan got pretty much sacrificed for it – after all, it was Kösem’s story. I get what they did for abridged story purposes, but what I saw on screen did not reflect my imaginations of historical Turhan.

In the end, MYK Turhan represented an extreme version of a person brought up in Ottoman harem. She was completely cold and almost entirely devoid of human emotions, save in some scenes with her children or her sadness upon Ibrahim preferring other concubines. She was truly unscrupulous and desperate to get to the highest top aka becoming regent for her son, which meant he had to become padişah while he was still a minor. She truly wanted to have it all, even if she had a lot compared to other harem girls – she was a chief haseki with high position given to her by her mother-in-law, who truly treated her exceptionally compared to other Valides we saw – she shared her power with her, taught her political stuff and introduced her to political world, involving her in her own affairs and even taking her to secret councils with her. Kösem was undoubtedly aware that in light of Ibrahim’s illness she had to keep the mother of eldest prince satisifed&feeling safe because padişah like Ibrahim was an easy target for deposition. Not only Turhan had safe position due to seniority succession rules – Kösem clearly supported her and wanted her to be her successor, e.g. backed her up in the Zarife conflict. Yes, Ibrahim had other favourites, but he was a weak sultan and he wasn’t interested in this stuff at all – he just wanted to have fun with other girls and ignored Turhan, but he wasn’t politically involved enough to try to prevent Turhan from becoming next Valide because he simply didn’t give a damn most of the time.

Turhan’s going against Kösem was a huge & risky gamble, also for her son. It’s one thing to never trust anyone fully and be on your guard, and another to go on removing everyone, so whole rule is in your hands. While we know that relations between Ibrahim&Turhan were tense, there wasn’t any repeated pattern of abuse against her or their son – Ibrahim’s outburst and throwing Mehmed justifiably shook Turhan up, but it was clear it was one-time incident that stemmed more from Ibrahim’s illness than any sort of malice or sadism. He mostly simply ignored Turhan and didn’t want to spend time in her company. Perhaps Ibrahim being a weak padişah was also why Turhan looked at him with contempt because she couldn’t accept how this man stood higher in hierarchy than her, which wounded her pride additionally. Thus said, if her primary motive had been as she said fear of Ibrahim, I don’t think she would have gone against Kösem. Kösem was after all the person who defended her to Ibrahim, tried to calm him down with regards to Turhan and she obviously supported Turhan as next Valide. Additionally, when Kösem actually controlled Ibrahim and his behaviour – later Atike didn’t care, people who were trying to use him and make him crazier for their purposes achieved their goal. Turhan purposefully wanted to make him crazier and crazier to dethrone him and now she was in the palace without her biggest former supporter. Ibrahim was definitely in far worse mental condition after Kösem’s exile and Kemankeş’ removal. We got the taste of the danger when Ibrahim threatened to strangle Mehmed during the coup – and then we finally saw fear in Turhan’s eyes. But it was she who allowed the situation to boil down to this. Turhan’s backstabbing to Kösem wasn’t only a betrayal to a person who always supported her&did a lot to her (and it was something even Ibrahim highlighted after Kemankeş’ “execution” and since he also had beef with his mother at that point, it’s hard to take his words as biased), but also her sacrificing whole nation due to striving to make Ibrahim’s reign fail so much that he would be undoubtedly deposed.

Turhan’s final win isn’t so much a triumph of very well-thought-out long-term strategy, but luck, totally unscrupulous nature, not taking into account that any bystanders might be harmed, and Kösem making a fatal mistake in the end. Until the last stand, Kösem always managed to ultimately outsmart her, and Turhan’s final victory is only due to raw force, Kösem making a fatal mistake&Kuşçu’s betrayal for reasons Kösem didn’t deserve.

In the end, Turhan and her people represented raw power which adheres to no rules or honour. Not only did they kill so many innocent people, but also showed no rules in the final stand – Kösem is strangled on the harem floor and her body is plundered (a historical fact, sadly), and Turhan only stays on balcony with devilish smile over the slaughtered palace. Köprülü does not face the elderly Kemankeş himself, but waits until his people defeat him to slice his throat. Haci is also murdered in unnecessarily cruel way by having his neck twisted in front of Tuhan bearing her stone cold face as she usually does. Turhan was presented as pretty much extreme product of that system – someone who is always coldly calculating, showing little human emotions (maybe only towards her kids) and only focused on achieving one’s goal without any scruples, and is unable to bond with anyone other than her kids. Same with people surrounding her, there are no strong, touching & genuine relationships like in Kösem’s team, which is based on loyalty that may mean even paying with death for it. There’s strong friendship between Haci & Kösem, same with Kemankeş and Deli Hüseyin, Kösem and Kemankeş deeply and truly love each other until the end, Hüseyin also prefers to die than to support Turhan. Even Lalezar’s “betrayal” is only about not letting an innocent child die, not wanting to support Turhan or switch sides for her personal gain. In a way, Turhan functions as some symbol of end of Empire, same with the depressing final shots, which is also accentuated in Kösem’s final monologue: ‘The lights have gone out, no right, no left, no death, no back, no forward, no top, no bottom (…) ” . I can see the rationale – it was first and foremost Kösem’s story, moreover a story that needed to be abridged.

However, as I said, Turhan is a real-life historical figure that actually did good things for the Empire, continued Kösem’s legacy and had her achievements, that’s why historical Turhan can never be simply a destructive force in my mind, and it’s probably the highest divergence between historical figure and show figure I have in my mind as far as MY&MYK are concerned.

We see some glimpses of Turhan actually taking her responsibilities seriously in the final episode – she decides to spare Mehmed’s brothers (which actually serves pretty much as plot twist taking into account how her character has been portrayed) and declares she intends to take care of the state. Ironically, while Kösem paid for politically training Turhan & introducing her to political world with her life, at least even her ultimate enemy wanted to honour her legacy & obey anti-fratricide law & was prepared for ruling. It was a posthumous win for Kösem here.

Of course the way historical Turhan took power from Kösem was questionable – it was full of brutality, purges, and it’s hard to imagine it was all without knowledge of her and her closest associates. /Still we know that Turhan likely didn’t kill harem girls that served Kösem, but got them married off instead as Kumrular writes in her Kösem biography/. However, she also proved capable in taking care of state and dynasty and since Mehmed was pretty much an obedient momma’s boy, she had much easier task than Kösem to for example persuade him not to kill his brothers.. honestly, try to control someone like Murad, it was a huge success Kösem managed to save Ibrahim.

I think that the portrayal of Turhan and her people may stem from not only brutal purges that followed Kösem’s death, but also from the period after Turhan appointed Köprülü the Grand Vizier – Peirce compares some of his methods to Murad’s and this period to Murad’s reign. While it was Köprülü who used bloody methods, we can guess that Turhan would have not let him stay GV if she had not accepted it. It is curious how Turhan/Murad emerged a pretty popular crackship in MYK… I was always like “they gave us Turhan who seems like a perfect match for Murad”.. just that her ruthlessness does not stem from anger, but more from cold detachment (fire and ice LMAO). I know some like to refer to Turhan as “Iron Lady”, so I suppose it was what MYK creators intended. /There is of course some anger in her too - when Ibrahim told her that she was just a coward hiding under his mother’s skirts… you just knew she would NEVER let it slide and prove to him & the rest of the world she didn’t need Kösem to stay on top./

The more I think the more I’d really love to see Müge Boz as Turhan, since Turhan wasdescribed as pretty unassuming and that was also why she was able to rally supporters. It would be cool to see Kösem facing a girl looking like young her, but not innocent… yet using her innocent image. And again we should have seen more of her showing care for state. I’m actually glad we didn’t get the simple Kösem turns into Safye and encounters an innocent Anastasia that we all expected. Now I think we needed something more complex, and as I mentioned it Kösem truly didn’t turn into Safiye, while many of Turhan’s actions (like mass slaughter in harem) resemble Safiye more – yet later her son is truly in danger, so there’s some rationale in that and we see some of Kösem’s legacy in her declaration to spare Mehmed’s brothers and take care of the state.

Likely it was intentional to make Turhan so much like the opposite of innocent Nasya.

But in the end, while there are hints of Kösem legacy being preserved (Turhan clearly wants to obey anti-fratricide law), Turhan pretty much served as a symbol of future fall of Empire because the final images of slaughtered people and her smirking on balcony in her slay kween (pretty pretentious) attire, accompanied by the above mentioned monologue, pretty much give a glimpse of apocalypse. /And LBR she claimed she had started the whole conflict for her son… then why the fuck she stands shouting to “bend the knee or die” & “show no mercy” or grins on the balcony instead of sitting with her son or at least checking up on him?/

It’s kinda fitting end for Kösem story, where she was the protagonist, especially when we see how yellow filter & fairytale elements from first episodes of MYK (which gradually become less bright) to the total darkness and atmosphere of doom of final episode. Still, as I said, Turhan Sultan is a historical figure that deserves more.

In a way, we were by default robbed of a satisfying depiction of Turhan by the mere fact that Ibrahim’s regin was abridged to 4 episodes – we should have got her early days in harem, her growing up etc., but I think at this point I decided to stop crying over spilt milk, I think, even though the mere fact that some fake princess got 22 episodes and Turhan 4 is always gonna hurt.

- Joanna

#turhan hatice sultan #magnificent century kosem #muhteşem yüzyıl kösem #muhtesem yuzyil kosem #ottoman history #kosem sultan #history #answered #mods opinions

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justgotham · 6 years ago

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SPOILER ALERT: This story contains details of tonight’s Gotham series finale.

“I just think the DC Universe is so incredibly deep and vivid, and I’m a big fan of it all,” says Gotham executive producer Danny Cannon of the world that spawned the inspiration for the Fox series that came to a Dark Knight conclusion tonight. “I don’t think there’s any limitations for what DC can do right now. I really don’t.”

In that vein, “The Beginning …” episode penned by showrunner John Stephens on Thursday brought the Bruno Heller-developed Batmanbackstory show to its logical end with a 10-year time jump from last week and bumping right up against the canon of the Caped Crusader.

Bruce Wayne is back in town, a collection of villains have broken out of the dreaded Arkham Asylum including a certain killer clown and Detective Harvey Bullock (Donal Logue) has been framed for murder in tonight’s almost stand-alone ender. Add Gotham Police Commissioner James Gordon (Ben McKenzie) pledging retirement as his family are under threat and you’ve got yourself an episode that either ends the Gotham tale or sets it up for a whole new run.

To that end, I spoke with Cannon and Stephens about the Rob Bailey-directed finale, how they got to this end after five seasons and whether it was part of the original plan. Currently working on another Batman story, the July 28-debuting Pennyworth for Epix, Cannon also revealed what reaching 100 episodes tonight with the Gotham finale means to him in the Peak TV era.

DEADLINE: So we’ve finally seen Batman in Gotham, literally and figuratively. Was how it all played out in the series finale how you envisioned it all those years ago?

CANNON: When we pitched the pilot, we very much pitched that the show will end when we see Batman, that’s it. We always knew this was the show in which Gotham the city was the star. Early on, we were talking about what would a city have to do to deserve a vigilante such as Batman? So when he arrived, we’ve told our story.

DEADLINE: Fox has been marketing the end of Gotham as a two-part finale, and yet coming off last week’s conclusion of the Bane story in “They Did What?” which felt like a season finale, this “The Beginning…” episode that you wrote John was something very different …

STEPHENS: Well, we had told all these stories, Bruce had left the city, so it actually felt in a good way, for a while we were like, “Oh boy, what have we done?” But then it really gives us the chance to almost like, not reboot the show but tell a whole different chapter in the life of the city. That gave us the freedom and the courage to jump forward 10 years in the finale. You’re right in that last week also feels like a finale — but to the season, not to the show, I’d say.

DEADLINE: Was the time jump of a decade in the series finale the only way to bring Batman to the screen for Gotham?

STEPHENS: I’ll say that we initially had talked about the last act of the show might be 10 years in the future. But I would also note what Danny said about why does this city need a vigilante?

DEADLINE: How so?

STEPHENS: That you cannot actually tell that whole story in four minutes at the end of the episode.

So the reason it’s a full 10-year time jump for the entire episode is so that we can actually see where the characters are and also why the city in this point in time needs Batman to arrive. Also, we wanted to fully touch base with all those characters that we’ve known for all this time. We’ve become attached to them; the audience, we know, has become attached to them, so we wanted to follow them through.

DEADLINE: Danny, you and I had spoken a number of times about Gotham’s trajectory, about the ideas that Bruno and yourself had, and the way you guys planned to carry it forward. So did this pan out the way you envisioned?

CANNON: Yes, but it took on a life of its own, and that was always due to the stellar cast we had.

We just kept writing for them because their talent was just exceptional. It kept stretching the writing, and we kept giving them more things to do.

So, I’d say, yes, things grew, for the better, but we always from the beginning of every year, had a plan. That plan was always fulfilled, I think, and always played out. I’m glad that you said that this last episode is a reboot, because it is. If you wanted to start a Batman series, you could do it right now.

DEADLINE: That something you’re thinking of doing?

CANNON: (laughs) I never do just one thing at a time, you know that. And there’s only 10 episodes of Pennyworth, for now. But no, I’m not saying there is going to be another Batman show. I think the movies have that market cornered, for him and the Joker, as they should. I just think the DC Universe is so incredibly deep and vivid, and I’m a big fan of it all. I don’t think there’s any limitations for what DC can do right now. I really don’t.

That said, I’m incredibly proud of the 100 episodes that we did. I mean 100 episodes of television — which, quite honestly, is some of the best-looking, cinematic television around, with some of the best actors and some of the best-written stuff I have ever been a part of. It’s been great.

DEADLINE: Certainly, the way you left it with Batman now in town, the Joker in the game and Ben McKenzie’s Jim Gordon staying on the job, there is more story hanging there …

CANNON: Perhaps, but I think Donal Logue put this best, when Fox picked us up for 22 episodes, when he said this may be one of the last aircraft carriers leaving the harbor. On network television and big dramas like this, I think we’re going to see less and less of them now.

DEADLINE: Really?

CANNON: Yes, I do believe we were on the end of the big network drama. If this were to go again, would it be a Netflix show, or an Amazon show, or a HBO show? I often wonder what we would have done differently or how the story telling would have unfolded differently. It’s a good question to ponder. However, we don’t get to really ponder that now, as we are both on to other things.

DEADLINE: John, you were the showrunner, and you wrote this final episode. Was there any part of the Batman story, the Batman canon, or even the greater DC canon, that you didn’t explore that you wished you had?

STEPHENS: You know, I’ll be honest with you, not really.

To me, if I had more time I would have liked to follow those characters more, to follow Donal’s Harvey Bullock or to follow Oswald and Laura on their journeys, to find out what they’re doing, when there’s times when we didn’t see them. I didn’t feel like there are any parts of the Batman story that we weren’t able to tell. To me the only parts that I missed overall are the stories that we weren’t able to tell with the characters that we did have, just because we didn’t have all the time in the world.

DEADLINE: You did spend a lot of time over the seasons with Cameron Monaghan and his Joker-ish Jerome Valeska character. In the series finale it looks like the Joker has come to town after a breakout at Arkham Asylum …

STEPHENS: (laughs) Well, I wouldn’t say that he’s the Joker, I still wouldn’t go on record saying that, even though he sure looks like the Joker, I have to admit (laughs again)

DEADLINE: Yes, he does.

STEPHENS: I think when we first started talking about it, and we wanted to do what we were calling the Proto-Jokers, the idea was if we can’t do the Joker, maybe there’s a character who existed before him. A character that seeded those ideas, like in the subconscious of Gotham.

So what we started to do was to parse out all of the qualities of the Joker, and just dole them out, one by one, through various iterations of Cameron’s character.

DEADLINE: Of which, there were, up until the finale, a number of iterations.

STEPHENS: Well, yes, because you want to give him the anarchy that the Joker sometimes had. Once he played that out, you want to give him the funhouse-like ringleader that he would sometimes be. Then you would want to make the character simply terrifying, the way the Joker is sometimes terrifying. So it was singling out various qualities, and then when he’s reborn, we take all those characteristics together. Cameron brings them forward. Also with his performance, which is really just transcendent — he took it and went to an entirely different level.

You know, with Valeska and with all of our characters, we were playing with the idea that a character can exist on a spectrum. That people can move along that spectrum to be good or bad, to be dark or light.

DEADLINE: So Danny, is this the end of Gotham you wanted?

CANNON: That’s an interesting question. I mean, I wanted to direct it like I did the pilot, but I didn’t get a chance. But Rob Bailey did a great job. But yes, there was disappointment in me that I couldn’t direct it. Beyond that, yes, this is the Gotham finale I wanted.

STEPHENS: It’s very bittersweet for me watching the show end. I’m incredibly proud of it. It is the best version for the ending of the show, but also, I’m always going to look at and go well that was it, that was the last one. So, yes, there’s that but I’m a little sad about it being over.

#Gotham

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bbclesmis · 6 years ago

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The Telegraph: Dominic West: 'Colette's husband smoked and had sex three times a day – it makes our vegan times look dreary'

When Dominic West was cast opposite Keira Knightley in Colette, to play the limelight-stealing first husband of the not-yet-famous French novelist, it was during his stage run of Dangerous Liaisons at London’s Donmar, playing a wicked libertine of quite another époque.

“I tend to get villains these days,” West muses, sinking back affably in a hotel armchair. To viewers of the BBC’s new Les Misérables, the remark may seem puzzling: after all, it’s not the obsessive Javert he’s playing in that six-hour, song-free version of Victor Hugo’s novel, but Jean Valjean, one of the most unambiguous heroes in world literature.

The 49-year-old Yorkshireman admits it was a refreshing change – if probably a one-off – to be offered such a morally upstanding assignment. Willy in Colette and Valmont in Liaisons are more like bread-and-butter characters; throw in his small-screen infidelities in The Affair, which has one last season of grubby intrigue to shoot, and he’s the actor most likely to be glared at on the street as an incorrigible philanderer.

Beyond turpitude, though, he spots something else these parts have in common: we watch him outmanoeuvred by the women he assumed he could possess.

“That does seem to be a theme in my career – being matched by stronger women. Which is probably the theme of my life, too. I've got five sisters, and three daughters! I’m the go-to guy for playing the male foil, I suppose.”

When did this shift to bad guys occur, if it was even really a shift? “You reach certain waypoints in your career – well, I played lovers, and now I play villains, and dads! A while ago, I played Iago, Fred West and some other horror, all in the same year. I must have a funny look in my eye? I don't know what it is. But I suppose the Devil's always got the best lines. They're more interesting to play, really, especially if you can play against the evil.”

Colette is being marketed around Knightley, by and large. This seems eminently fair: as a writer and actress in turn-of-the-century Paris, Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette spent way too much of her career living in the shadow of her ruthless, slave-driving publisher – also her husband, known to the world as “Willy” – to be co-credited on her own biopic with anyone else.

Still, it’s West who snuck his way into a BIFA nomination, for best supporting actor, while Knightley was crowded out. The film relies for nuance on his refusal to monster the character. He concedes that it’s not the most flattering role. “I had three different fat-suits and an appalling walrus moustache!” But in West’s hands, an odd sympathy emerges for Willy, despite all his terrible behaviour – locking Colette in an upstairs room to write, cheating on her incessantly, and eventually selling off the rights to her novels.

“I thought he was obviously an exciting guy to be around,” West says. “And a total shit, and a narcissist, and an exploiter. But she was with him because he was this incredible force of nature, really, and a sort of bon viveur catalyst to quite a lot of very good writers. I did, even at the end, have a sympathy for this Salieri figure, who realised, having been so famous, that he would only ever be remembered as Colette’s former husband. Which is ironic – no one's ever heard of him now. And if they have, that's the only reason.”

First hatched as an idea 15 years ago, Wash Westmoreland’s film has been an arduous one to get made. West mentions this slow gestation to explain how tentatively the dial moves, in terms of getting stories told about women’s creative achievements. Just five years ago, Knightley was essentially playing sidekick to Alan Turing in The Imitation Game; now it’s her turn to play the genius.

West sees it as “rather serendipitous” that so much discussion about women’s agency – not to mention male abuse – started to happen as the film got made. There’s a striking parallel, I point out, with the role Glenn Close plays in The Wife – as the true brains behind the operation in another literary marriage. “I bet that’s a commonplace story,” he agrees. “Misapplied acclaim. It’s interesting that George Eliot had to change her name to a man's to get published. But then, so did JK Rowling. Doesn't change much, does it?”

As a true-blue fan of The Wire, I couldn’t possibly interview West without touching on his lead role in that series. You could argue David Simon’s Baltimore-set, 5-season HBO epic changed everything for the actor in 2002, but you’d be wrong, because it took about five years before anyone even saw it.

West, a dabbler in Hollywood back then, was deep into his “lovers” phase – he’d been an alcoholic boyfriend to Sandra Bullock in 28 Days, a jazz-age lothario shot dead by Renée Zellweger in Chicago, a caddish colleague to Julia Roberts in Mona Lisa Smile. He was usually the debonair party animal you had to get out of the way so the film could carry on.

And then a tape he’d recorded as a joke fell into Simon’s hands. “It was just an astonishing piece of luck,” he reflects, “because in spite of myself, I landed the lead part in the best TV show of all time!”. This casting fluke lets him lampoon himself so perfectly it’s hard not to laugh. “I spent an awful lot of time trying to get out of it! I was always saying, ‘Oh gawd, not another season.’ Mainly because I was away from home, from my young daughter. And also because no one seemed to be watching it.”

Jimmy McNulty, an alcoholic cop struggling with child support and unstable relationships, was the show’s weary constant. West’s crumpled humility gave the show a relatable centre, but it finally paid him back: the slow-trickle recognition of Simon’s sensational achievement has let everyone involved live in its afterglow.

“I wouldn’t have watched it, had I not been in it,” West admits. “My daughter told me the other day, ‘Yeah, I watched it, it's very dated, dad.’ I don't think it is, though! It's been the gift that keeps on giving.” Michael B. Jordan, now a superstar after the Creed films and Black Panther, got his break there as a tragic 16-year-old drug dealer called Wallace. “I directed him in the last season, now he’s the king of Hollywood,” West remembers.

And there was Idris Elba, as kingpin-cum-politician Stringer Bell. “What happened to Idris? I don't know what happened to Idris. Has anyone heard of him since?! It was perfect. I think he knew it was perfect. He came in, blazed it, and got out. The rest of us felt slightly like journeymen, supporting these celebrity cameos.”

West socks over this kind of self-deprecation with reliable verve. He gallantly assumes it was his dancing, not Knightley’s, which led to a polka sequence being cut from Colette. “She’s pretty easy to spark off,” he says of his co-star. “And she's certainly easy to fall in love with. I had one particular scene where I'm in despair because she's leaving me, and that was a piece of cake.”

Colette was just a 19-year-old Burgundian country girl when she met Willy, 14 years her senior, and was swept off her feet. When West talks about their vigorous sex life, which branched out to multiple partners in Paris – and some they shared – there’s a hint of performative envy to his routine. “Considering what he drank and ate and smoked every day, he was also having sex three times a day. I mean, people did that, in those days. They make our vegan times look so dreary!”

Meanwhile, his approach to tackling the almost dauntingly virtuous Jean Valjean was to find the weakness in the man. “He's so obviously someone overcoming his shortcomings. Which is the only chance any of us get to be heroes. Quite apart from all the acrobatic saving of kids that he does, his great thing is redeeming his flaws, or his dark past.”

It’s an effort for us both not keep calling it Les Miz. Wasn’t he at all disappointed that he never got to belt out “Two-four-six-oh-OOOOONE!!” in his beefiest Old Etonian baritone?

“I was disappointed, but I think everyone else was relieved! I wondered where the songs were, actually. I kept trying to sing and they kept stopping me.”

Les Misérables continues on BBC One on Sunday at 9pm. Colette is out in UK cinemas from January 11 (x)

#les mis bbc #bbc les mis #dominic west #interviews #articles #the telegraph

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weekendwarriorblog · 4 years ago

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The Weekend Warrior 3/19/21: SXSW, Zack Snyder’s Justice League,The Courier, City of Lies, Happily and More!

Remember a couple weeks back when I stated the plan was to bring back the Weekend Warrior as a regular weekly series again? Yeah, well if you looked for a column last week and wondered what happened, I just didn’t have time to write one. And I also just haven’t been able to get back on the ball in terms of writing reviews. It just takes a lot of time to watch all the movies let alone review them the way I did last year. I honestly have no idea how I did it last year, but things have been busier than ever at Below the Line, which does throw a bit of a spanner into any extracurricular plans.

The big event this week is the annual SXSW Film Festival, which I’ll be taking part in virtually, and somewhat tangentially, watching as much as I can while still doing other things. It’s been a while since I’ve attended SXSW in person, but it tends to have great docs, especially music docs. In fact, this year’s Opening Night Film is the documentary, Demi Lovato: Dancing with the Devil, about Demi Lovato’s drug overdose from 2018 and its aftermath. Other music docs of interest include Poly Styrene: I Am A Cliché, about the late frontwoman from early punk band X-Ray Spex through the eyes of her daughter; Mary Wharton’s doc Tom Petty, Somewhere You Feel Free made from archival footage of the late singer making his 1994 record “Wildflowers”; Alone Together about Charlie XCX’s pandemic record; Under the Volcano about George Martin’s AIR Studios Montserrat; and it gives another chance to see Edgar Wright’s excellent, The Sparks Brothers, which was picked up by Focus Features after Sundance. There’s also an amazing doc about Selma Blair’s fight with MS, Introducing, Selma Blair, which is equal parts heartbreaking and inspirational.

SXSW also has pretty solid Midnighters, and there’s a number of those I’m also looking forward to, including Travis Stevens’ Jakob’s Wife, starring horror legends Larry Fassenden and Barbara Crampton, who were so great in my buddy Ted Geoghegan’s We Are Still Here. (No coincidence since Stevens produced that movie.) And I hope to watch a few others like Lee Haven Jones’ The Feast, Jacob Gentry’s Broadcast Signal Intrusion, and Alex Noyer’s Sound of Violence. We’ll see how much I get to see this week, cause it’s a lot of movies over only a couple days, basically from Tuesday through Saturday.

Closer to home at the Metrograph, the still-closed movie theater is doing a virtual series called “Bill Murray X6” which has already shown Lost in Translation and What about Bob? With Rushmore screening until Thursday, and then The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou available through Friday. Become a digital member for just $5 a month! This past weekend I saw a really amazing 7-part doc series called Untitled Pizza Movie by David Shapiro. In fact, I stayed up late on Sunday to watch the whole thing since it was leaving the digital screeners, but it’s a very entertaining, intriguing and personal story about the director, his friend and partner in crime Leeds, who he went around to different NYC pizza shops in the ‘90s trying to find the perfect slice, and then they come across pizzaman Andrew Belluci at the world-famous Lombardi’s in Soho. The project that took over 20 years to make follows what happened to the three men, but mainly Leeds and Belluci as they have ups and downs that ultimately leads to Belluci starting his own pizza joint in Queens. Everything that happens in between is quite fascinating.

I saw a couple other movies this past weekend including Robin Wright’s Land, which I quite enjoyed, and the rom-com Long Weekend, which came out last Friday but I totally missed. Land is a pretty amazing directorial debut that’s mostly a one-woman show with her character alone in the wilderness until she runs into trouble and meets Demian Bichir’s kindly Samaritan and they become friends. Directed by Stephen Basilone, Long Weekend stars Finn Wittrock and Zoe Chao in what starts as a meet cute rom-com and turns into something much deeper with a couple sci-fi-tinged twists, a bit like Palm Springs, but much more grounded. I loved the two leads and how Basilone made a romantic comedy that actually was romantic and very funny, as well. Both movies I recommend.

Getting into some of the streamer offerings this week, ZACK SNYDER’s JUSTICE LEAGUE will hit HBO Max on Thursday, so we can finally see whether or not that extra money and work paid off. I’ll be reviewing this over at Below the Line, so won’t spend too much time here. I figure that anyone who has been waiting for this will watch it, as will anyone who has been curious about it. As you can read from my review, I was quite impressed by the film as an achievement in finishing what is clearly a far superior film to the 2017 theatrical release. Some of the highlights include great stuff between Ray Fisher’s Cyborg and his father, a far more fun introduction to The Flash that was cut from the 2017 release and just some insanely crazy good action. I can’t wait to watch the movie again.

Kicking off on Friday is the anticipated Marvel Studios series, THE FALCON AND THE WINTER SOLDIER (Disney), bringing back the title characters played by Anthony Mackie and Sebastian Stan, who were introduced in one of the MCU’s better movies, Captain America: The Winter Soldier. I was sent the first episode and unfortunately, there’s an embargo until Thursday afternoon, but I do think that MCU fans are gonna be thrilled with the first episode, especially with the Falcon’s opening action sequence, which is like something right out of the movies.

Okay, fine, so let’s get to some new movies and some real reviews…

Probably the movie with the widest release this weekend will be THE COURIER (Lionsgate/Roadside Attractions), starring Benedict Cumberbatch, which I’m guessing will be in 1,000 or so theaters. The movie premiered at Sundance way back in 2020 under the significantly worse title of “Ironbark” with plans to release it later in the year, but then COVID happened. I’m not sure if Roadside Attractions planned for this to be an awards movie, but after a few delays, releasing it in mid-March just days after the Oscar nominations, I’m guessing probably not?

Directed by Dominic Cooke (On Chesil Beach) from a screenplay by Tom O’Connor (The Hitman’s Bodyguard… wait, WHAT?), this Cold War spy thriller set in the early ‘60s stars Cumberbatch as Greville Wynne, a British businessman who is coerced by agents from MI6 and the CIA (repped by Rachel Brosnahan) to smuggle Russian secrets from military man Oleg Penkovsky (Merab Ninidze). Greville’s trips to Moscow start getting more and more dangerous under the shadow of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and his wife (the always great Jessie Buckley) wants him to stop taking the trips. It all leads up to a pretty exciting second act as the KGB starts to figure out what Greville and Oleg have been up to and work to put a stop to it.

I have to admit that as much as I enjoy a good spy-thriller, a lot of this reminded me of Cumberbatch’s earlier film Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy – yes, the John Le Caree adaptation, which I was never a particularly big fan of. This has similarities in that it starts out fairly slow, making me think this might be one of those well-made, well-acted movies that are just plain boring cause the subject doesn’t interest me. I’m sure when this was greenlit, there was probably more relevance to the situation between the U.S. and Russia, although this is obviously a British production and maybe something better to watch on the Beeb than in a movie theater.

In general, the stuff with the two men and their families tends to be the best part of the movie. I wasn’t familiar with Merab Ninidze beforehand, but he’s a really good actor who holds his own in scenes with Cumberbatch. Although Cumberbatch’s performance is significantly better here than in The Mauritanian, that’s definitely a better movie, so even in the last act which sees Wynne in a Russian jail, it just doesn’t compare. This is the second film with Rachel Brosnahan in which she didn’t really impress me much after hearing how great she is on Mrs. Maisel. Even so, the movie did make me want to go back and rewatch the beginning again to see if maybe I wasn’t as focused on it, as it should be.

As far as box office, I don’t have much hope for this making more than $2 or 3 million this weekend, since it seems more like a prestige platform release that would have to build audiences from rave reviews or positive word-of-mouth. Coming out so long after its festival debut (kinda like that Thomas Edison movie a few years back) may have helped people forget about the midling festival reviews. Even so, this movie just doesn’t have much buzz or interest from #FilmTwitter who has had its tongue so far up the superhero movie ass this week between Zack Snyder’s Justice League and Marvel’s The Falcon and the Winter Soldier to pay much attention to this. (Hey, facts is facts!)

Johnny Depp and Forrest Whitaker star in Brad Furman’s crime-thriller CITY OF LIES (Saban Films), which is about the real-life search for the killer of the Notorious B.I.G. aka Biggie Smalls with Depp playing Detective Russell Poole, who ended up on the case in 1997, and Whitaker playing reporter Jack Jackson, doing a story on Smalls for the 20thanniversary of the unsolved murder.

Based on the book “Labyrinth” (the movie’s original title), it’s a story that takes place in two time periods, Los Angeles in the ‘90s after the Rodney King beating and L.A. riots and how it’s made the criminal element that surrounds rap mogul Suge Night. It begins with Poole investigating the death of a black police officer named Gaines, shot by a white police officer (Shea Whigham) in what is seemingly a road rage incident. As Poole investigates, he learns about police corruption in the force including a number of officers tied directly to Knight.

As Jackson interviews Poole to try and find out who killed Biggie, we flashback to Poole’s investigation and interaction with some of those corrupt cops and being put into extremely dangerous situations. The movie isn’t bad, especially the scenes between Whitaker and Depp, who gives a far more grounded performance than we’ve seen from him in recent years. Even so, the performance that really impressed me was Toby Huss as Poole’s superior, who just brings something new to the tough head detective role we haven’t really seen.

Regardless of what you think of Depp’s activities off-camera, this is a fairly solid crime thriller (as was Scott Cooper’s Black Mass), and though you never actually get to see Biggie, Tupac or Suge Night, it’s an interesting examination into a period in L.A. that seems so long ago but still rings true to what’s been going on in the last year.

BenDavid Grabinski’s HAPPILY (Saban/Paramount) is a dark comedy-thriller starring Joel McHale and Kerry Bishé as Tom and Janet, a happily married couple who annoy their friends by still having sex on the regular whenever they possibly can. In fact, their friends decide to uninvite Tom and Janet to their planned couples’ weekend because they’re so annoyed by them. One day, a mysterious man (played by Stephen Root) shows up at Tom and Janet’s house, one thing leads to another and they kill and bury him. Thinking that the man’s visit might be part of a friend’s prank, they go to the planned couples’ trip, trying to figure out if the prankster has gotten suspicious about what they’ve done.

For the sake of transparency, I met Grabinski at my very first Sundance ever as he was friends with some of my colleagues, but I never spent a ton of time talking to him. This film impressed me, since it’s a prtty strong debut from him, one that benefits greatly from a strong cast that includes Paul Scheer, Breckin Meyer (who I didn’t even recognize!), Charlyne Yi, Natalie Morales and more, making for a really solid ensemble dark comedy that reminded me of the tone of last year’s The Hunt or Ike Barinholtz’s The Oath or a great lesser-seen movie from last year, Robert Schwartzman’s The Argument. Dark comedy isn’t for everyone, and this is definitely a little mean-spirited at times, but more importantly, it’s very funny and tends to get crazier and crazier as it goes along.

More importantly, I loved Grabinski’s musical choices from Devo’s “Working in a Coal Mine” to not one but two OMD songs, and great use of Public Image Limited as well. The way Grabinski puts this together comes across like a hipper and fresher Hitchcock, and while it might not be for everyone, I could totally see this killing at a genre fest like Fantastic Fest or even this week’s SXSW. It’s clever and original and rather intriguing how Grabinski puts all the various pieces together.

Hitting Shudder on Thursday is Elza Kephart’s horror-comedy SLAXX (Shudder) about a possessed pair of jeans brought to life to punish the practices of a trendy clothing company, which it does by terrorizing the staff locked in overnight. Didn’t get to watch this before getting bogged down in SXSW but definitely looking forward to it.

Another horror film coming out this week is the horror anthology PHOBIAS (Vertical), exec. produced by the filmmaking team “Radio Silence” (Ready or Not) with segments directed by Camilla Belle, Maritte Lee Go, Joe Sill, Jess Varley and Chris von Hoffman. The stories follow five dangerous patients suffering from extreme phobias at a government facility with a crazed doctor trying to weaponize their fears.

Jeremy Piven stars in Paolo Pilladi’s LAST CALL (IFC Films) playing real estate developer Mick, who returns to his old Philly neighborhood and must decide whether to resurrect his family bar or raze it. I actually watched a few minutes of this, but apparently, IFC Films isn’t allowing reviews, so I have nothing more to say about the movie beyond the fact that it’s coming out on Friday.

Opening at the newly reopened Film Forum – currently doing a hybrid of in-person and virtual cinema – is Chris McKim’s doc WOJNAROWICZ: F**K YOU F*GGOT F**KER (Kino Lorber), premiering virtually on Friday. It’s about David Wojnarowicz, one of the loudest voices in the ACT-Up movement during the ‘80s who died of AIDS himself in 1992. (Correction: Film Forum actually isn’t reopening until April 2.)

A few other things this week include Aengus James’ doc AFTER THE DEATH OF ALBERT LIMA hitting Crackle about Paul Lima, a son obsessed with capturing his father’s murderer who has remained at large in Honduras due to a failed legal system. Because of this, Paul travels to the Honduras with two bounty hunters to find and capture the killer.

Lastly, streaming on Topic Thursday, there’s Parliament, directed by Elilie Noblet and Jeremie Sein, about a young man named Samy who arrives in Brussels after the Brexit vote trying to get a job into the European Parliament without really knowing how it works.

That’s all for this week. It might be a while before I can get The Weekend Warrior back into some sort of fighting weekly shape, but I’m doing the best I can right now, so let me know if you’re reading any of this.

#TheWeekendWarrior #TheCourier #Movies #Reviews #BoxOffice #ZackSnyderJusticeLeague #Happily #CityOfLies

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shirlleycoyle · 4 years ago

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The Movie Theater as We Know It Is Dying. We Can Make Something Better

One of the things this pandemic has taken from us is the summer blockbuster. The summer months came and went, and throughout that time movie-goers largely stayed home. For people like director Christopher Nolan, whose movie Tenet released in theaters after a delayed launch and performed below expectations, this is a sign of the end of cinema. Outside of the strict confines of Hollywood, though, small theaters and distributors are seeing new ways to show movies and create community. Along the way, they're redefining what it means to be movie theaters.

The blockbuster is a relatively new invention. Although the early days of cinema had movies that were huge hits—like the 1927 movie It, which turned Clara Bow into a star and smashed box office records at the time—one movie dominating theaters for an entire summer wouldn't happen for another 30 years. Steven Spielberg's Jaws and George Lucas's Star Wars ushered in the age of the blockbuster in the 70s, in a time when the landscape of cinema was moving away from the studio system and into uncharted waters.

Cinema is at another crossroads now, in the age of the pandemic. In New York and Los Angeles, two of the biggest cities for movies, theaters are not allowed to open, and haven't been since March. Rather than a Marvel movie topping the charts at the end of the year, Sonic the Hedgehog has dominated by virtue of just being able to come out. The success of Trolls World Tour had studios scared back in April; it made over one hundred million dollars premiering as a digital rental. In response, AMC threatened to stop screening movies from Trolls' studio, Universal. One movie theater chain, Regal, has closed all of its 536 theaters in the US, blaming New York's pandemic rules for the closure.

Tenet | Image Source: Warner Bros.

From the start, Nolan has made it a personal mission to continue to support movie theaters. Not only has he refused anything except a traditional, theater first release for Tenet, he has written op-eds about keeping theaters open and made a point to see movies in theaters himself. But the very real threat of COVID-19 has gotten in the way of seeing movies in theaters—by December, the movie had only grossed around $57 million domestically, though the international gross has been higher, at $300 million. The movie cost $200 million to make.

Tenet's dismal performance seems like the final nail in the coffin. Some of the movies that were supposed to open concurrently with Tenet, like the new Wonder Woman movie, have changed their strategies so that they're available to watch at home at the same time as they're available in theaters. Theater chains like AMC have struck deals to shorten the window between theatrical runs and movies becoming available on video on demand services. Even more recently, Warner Bros. has announced that their entire slate of movies for 2021 would premiere on HBO Max as well as in theaters.

The pandemic has forced movie theaters to change a system of distribution that has been in place for over half a century. This doesn't just mean figuring out how to show movies online, but how to serve the communities that rise up around theaters themselves.

When the pandemic started, Spectacle Theater was a 35-seat, volunteer-run theater in Williamsburg that showed movies from way, way off the beaten path. It immediately complied with the order to close in March, but it was difficult for the volunteers who run the theater to know what to do next. After one of the volunteers started streaming movies on their Twitch channel, the members of Spectacle decided to have Twitch streams of their own.

Spectacle Theater is a microcinema, with about 30 seats. Its space in Williamsburg, Brooklyn is so small that I have walked past it every day when I used to commute to the VICE office without noticing it once. Caroline Golum, a programmer from Spectacle who said they were speaking in their capacity as a member of the non-hierarchical, volunteer-run theater and not as its leader, said that some of its screenings would have as little as five people in the audience before the pandemic.

"We like to say that if we had a dollar for every person who was like, 'I love Spectacle,' but hasn't actually shown up, we would be on fucking easy street," Golum told Motherboard.

On Twitch, it's a different story. They got viewers in much, much higher numbers than their theater would have been able to seat, as well as attracting people from all over the world who had only been to their theater once, if at all.

“Christopher Nolan is encouraging theaters to open up in the middle of the pandemic. This was the wrong thing to be crusading for right now.”

"In May or in April, we did a series of screenings with Matt Farley and Charles Roxburgh who are two regional filmmakers from New Hampshire who make these shoestring budget genre films. They've been doing it for like 20 years. In an alternate universe, those guys would be famous and Kevin Smith would be a fucking nobody, and you can print that," Golum said. "They were in the chat and people were asking them like, 'Where'd you film this? What were your favorite influences?' all this stuff. And they loved it."

"I think for filmmakers who don't have an avenue for public exhibition but make work that should be viewed collectively, it's nice for them to have an opportunity to know that their work is being seen," they continued.

Spectacle has worked with organizers and programmers from all over the world, giving them an international reputation. Programming on Twitch has allowed the people who have always wished they could have gone to Spectacle a chance to actually attend. Spectacle now has over 2,000 followers on Twitch, several hundred times more than would fit inside the theater. Spectacle is now offering a membership to their out of state and international fans so that they can support the theater monetarily from afar.

"I was just surprised by the number of people that were like, 'Oh, I've always wanted to go to Spectacle and I never got to,' or someone that lived in London was like, 'I've been following your programming and can never got to catch anything,'" Golum said.

Spectacle Theater | Image Source: Spectacle Theater

For Aliza Ma, director of programming at Metrograph, a renowned art house theater in Lower Manhattan, not being able to show movies meant a chance to reevaluate what a theater can be. For starters, opening a theater at this moment in time is not the right approach, she said.

"Christopher Nolan is encouraging theaters to open up in the middle of the pandemic. This was the wrong thing to be crusading for right now. It felt like a sort of misguided or misplaced machismo almost," Ma said. "Maybe the better thing to do would be to ask for some subsidies to get all these artistic institutions through this time of hardship instead of asking for the normalcy that we were used to, when that's just going to endanger our lives."

There are ways that a theater can serve its community without showing movies, and Metrograph has explored some of those options. Ma said that during the Black Lives Matter protests, Metrograph was able to open as a space for protesters to get water, charge their phones, and rest.

"When the protests were breaking out, we were in between having closed and trying to launch a new website," Ma said. She said that it felt wrong not to say anything about the mounting unrest in New York; protests against police brutality would march through Lower Manhattan, where Metrograph is located. Ma and the rest of the staff at Metrograph also wanted to take physical action.

"So we got together on a meeting and we said, 'We know so many people who are organizing in that neighborhood or who could be in that neighborhood, and you know, all we would need to do is get power strips for people to be able to charge their phones. We could get water bottles for people. We can just open up the bathrooms for people,'" she said.

Ma said that the approach that other theaters have taken, where they have tried to crunch the numbers on how many staff they can have on site and how little money they can charge for a ticket in order to break even, was not what Metrograph wanted to do.

"It's really sad. I mean, it's not really gonna make much of a difference at the end of the day. There's no thinking outside the box here. Movie theaters are an important social institution that could be reappropriated at this time…. I was really glad that, you know, when the protest started in April, that we were able to open our lobby to protestors. Just because we couldn't show movies doesn't mean we couldn't be another sort of support pillar for that neighborhood."

Pivoting to Twitch was an easy move for Spectacle not just because members of the organization already knew how to use it. The moviegoing experience isn't just about sitting in the dark in front of a huge screen—it's also about being with other people who love movies, and Twitch's chat function is an easy way to replicate that part of the experience. While geared towards games, at the end of the day, Twitch is a service where anyone can broadcast whatever they'd like; Spectacle is simply using the service in the same way one would use public access television.

Metrograph, for its part, built their own proprietary streaming service in order to make this work. Though there are video hosting services that they could have used, Ma said that they don't have all the features necessary to replicate the essential aspects of seeing a movie in a theater. Metrograph recently launched a new website, along with its own proprietary streaming service which functions very differently from buying a movie on demand, or watching one through a streaming service like Netflix.

Metrograph's online screenings have a pre-show that begins ten minutes before show time, as well as introductions, question and answer sessions, and sometimes a panel discussion. The actual movie starts later, and the archive of the entire screening remains as a VOD for 72 hours.

“Why are we relying on these corporate-backed streaming platforms when we are very vehemently opposed to corporate media?"

"A nice thing that I miss about showing up early to a film and is then being able to sit in the theater and just kind of watch upcoming trailers or whatever other ephemera ends up being shown in the pre-show," Ma said.

"Even though you're not in the same building, there's a collective sense that everyone's tuning in at the same time to watch something which is kind of comforting right now," she added.

Exploring these new avenues has also led to some dead ends. When I spoke with Spectacle Theater, it had just been served its first strike on its Twitch channel for nudity for showing the 1973 satirical French film Themroc. To get around this, Spectacle is now building its own streaming platform, similar to Metrograph, but with a couple of differences that would better suit its audience. For example, Spectacle's experiences with Twitch have led it to include a chat feature in its streaming platform, because it found that people watching its programming enjoyed being able to talk about the films without disturbing other people.

"I think we had a lot of reservations about the chat function because you rightly hear so many horror stories about the nature of these chats on gaming platforms. You know, obviously hashtag not all gamers, but it can be a bit of a cesspool," Golum told Motherboard. "At the end of the day, we don't really have to do much moderation because our audience is predominantly pretty chill. It's just people who like weird movies and want to hang out, it's a really good vibe in there. It's also really interesting to see how people engage with the chat when the filmmakers are in there too."

Golum also said that they would make their code open source, allowing other theaters to develop their own streaming video services with the backbone they developed.

Movie theaters are the site of a community, a place for people to not just see a movie, but engross yourself in the culture of cinema with your friends and family.

"The impulse behind that was: why are we relying on these corporate-backed streaming platforms when we are very vehemently opposed to corporate media and our whole programming ecosystem is designed to go against the grain of what you're seeing in movie theaters and festivals?" Golum said. "That was kind of the impetus was to build something that's, if you'll pardon the expression, for us by us, that will allow us to kind of control the narrative around what we stream and not have to worry about takedowns."

Across the country, some independent theaters are making some of the same pivots to online screenings as Metrograph and Spectacle.

The Roxie Theater in San Francisco is now offering an online membership similar to Metrograph, for example. Chicago's Music Box Theater started an online movie rental service called The Music Box At Home, where proceeds from the rentals go towards keeping the theater in business. Some cinemas, like Seattle's Northwest Film Forum, are screening ticketed movies through sites like Eventive, taking advantage of video hosting sites like Vimeo to give the viewer access to the film in question for a limited time. All of these are attempts to do more than just get people to watch movies, but to recreate what we like about going to the movies when we're all stuck at home.

While Twitch and bespoke streaming services are decent stopgaps, it's clear that the technology necessary to create an industry where more kinds of movies are accessible outside of major cities has just not been invented.

Hollywood has existed in a system where a major blockbuster could buffer the loss from an arthouse indie movie that plays on only a few screens in Los Angeles and New York. It's a system that is controlled and defined by film distributors like Universal or A24, which set release dates and make the films available to theaters. As that system collapses, it's easy to see not just how it's done a disservice to those films, but also to people who would have loved them.

Brett Kashmere, executive director at Canyon Cinema, a distributor of 16mm films and experimental and avant garde cinema said that on their end, demand for work from their collection is still huge, especially from libraries, which is their primary audience. They just don't have the technology to deliver it.

"We're in the process of reviewing all of our artists contracts and figuring out if we need to put any language for licensing of work to a library for like three years," Kashmere said. "That's what libraries are increasingly interested in, is not actually purchasing a physical media copy of something, but they're also not really capable of actually dealing with digital files. So they don't want to buy a digital file and they don't want to buy a physical copy, but they want us to be able to stream."

Canyon Cinema's small size compared to much larger, more corporate distributors, is an advantage. It might not have the same capital backing, but it's able to make these pivots very quickly, allowing Canyon to catch up with the changing market during the pandemic much faster than Disney or Universal can. Similarly, both Ma and Golum said that their small sizes as organizations have allowed them to make decisions on the fly during a time when the future of the industry is uncertain.

"I think we were in a really privileged position being a small team that we could all just executively decide [open our doors to protesters], being on, you know, a similar political wavelength and having this camaraderie between coworkers," Ma said regarding Metrograph's choice to support the Black Lives Matter protesters. "I don't think this would have been possible with a bigger nonprofit institution, even if the personal political desire was there."

A scene from Made In Hong Kong, currently screening at Metrograph's wesbite | Image Source: Made In Hong Kong

In comparison, the solutions being rolled out by large movie chains like AMC and Regal seem untenably slow and ill-suited to the task. While Regal has permanently closed all its locations, AMC is now allowing potential movie goers the opportunity to rent out an entire theater to see a movie. Though new movies are coming out in a slow trickle, it's been clear that audiences do not want to go to movie theaters as the pandemic still rages, making this venture a questionable idea at best.

But going to the movies is about a lot more than just putting your butt in a seat. They are the site of a community, a place for people to not just see a movie, but engross yourself in the culture of cinema with your friends and family. As Spectacle and Metrograph demonstrate, there's still a need for that kind of community space among movie lovers.

These theaters are not just attempting to solve the problem of showing movies in a pandemic. They're trying to find a new space for the lobby where you talk about the movie with your friends, the exclusive showings with director Q&As, and the smart screening series put together by film scholars as well. Their success is an indication that the heart of cinema lies with these endeavors, and not necessarily the relatively new phenomenon of the blockbuster.

Before there's a widespread vaccine for Covid-19, movie theaters are either going to have to find ways to pivot to digital, or close their doors. Nolan tried his absolute hardest, but Tenet was not able to bring moviegoers back to theaters in a way that could stave off that reality. Nolan has said that people are "drawing the wrong conclusions" from Tenet's performance at the box office, saying that the movie has grossed a lot more money than most people thought possible during the pandemic. He went so far as to say that the decision to stream new releases on HBO Max on the same day they premiere in theatres "makes no economic sense."

Nolan isn't exactly wrong about this, but he's also not quite right. His own adventure in premiering Tenet in theaters despite the pandemic appears to prove him wrong. That big-budget studio blockbuster did not save movie theaters. If movie theaters are going to survive, they need to save themselves.

The Movie Theater as We Know It Is Dying. We Can Make Something Better syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

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matthewwilliamcharles · 4 years ago

Link

Had a very nice interview with Zo Magazine about my latest album,”Love What You Do”! You can follow the link to the article.

I’m also just cutting and pasting the text below. Interviews hang around for a while, but I’ve noticed some of my old interviews and write ups have been erased, websites disappear and that stuff is lost into the ether.

There isn’t a Boomer who hasn’t uttered, “If you love what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life,” or some version of that but aside from Boomers screwing up the world for most, they’re right about that. Having a passion for what you do is key to wanting to wake up every day and making it through those days with a smile on your face. It’s a concept that’s easier said than done for many, but for Matthew William Charles, he’s doing his best to live that life…which is likely why his 2020 release is ‘Love What You Do.’ We talked about just that, the record at hand, and I even introduced him to the world of ‘Sex and the City’ in this back and forth between creatives.

Kendra: Noting the release date of ‘Love What You Do,’ it seems like a lifetime has passed. March 2020. Looking back, were you like many in thinking that the pandemic wasn’t going to last this long and that you’d be out playing by summer?

Matthew William Charles: Yes absolutely, I thought that I was going to be out and playing by summertime when the pandemic first hit. A good portion of my summer had already been planned out. I had a UK tour lined up for July, tickets purchased, and shows booked. I was planning a small music festival for August in Philadelphia, PA. I had planned the release of “Love What You Do” to coincide with a couple of tours that I had scheduled for March and April. It was a day by day realization. Every week there were more and more cancellations. I had held on to hope until the last minute in most cases, not wanting to deal with the airline and car rental cancellations, and ultimately the disappointment of not getting to do what I love most, which is traveling and playing music. It was going to be an awesome summer for live music, needless to say, I was bummed out, but I dealt with the situation the best that I could.

Kendra: One thing I have admired about artists this year is their ability to keep pushing forward and finding ways to make their presence known in new ways. How do you feel these adaptations made this year will affect musicians in the coming years? Do you feel like we could be in for some sort of major shift in the industry as a whole because of 2020?

Matthew William Charles: Yes, it is interesting how musicians are adapting to the current situation. What I’ve seen is that many of us are becoming great at putting together online content. Many musicians that I know personally started live streaming performances for the first time at the start of the pandemic and have now set up mini studios and have been putting together really good quality live content.

In the future, It would be great to see people combine live-streamed concerts with actual live shows with people in attendance. I think it would be great to have an option for people who want to attend a live show but can’t, but still could watch the live stream from their home. Maybe they wouldn’t have to pay as much as the live ticket but could pay a lesser amount or contribute to a virtual tip jar for the musicians. As far as the music industry as a whole it’s hard to say, it has already changed so much in the last several years as far as how people consume music. I still prefer purchasing records, CDs, and tapes from bands after a live performance. I don’t think that you will ever be able to replace that experience, but I think the shift to a more digital music world is inevitable.

Kendra: Speaking of admiration, ‘Love What You Do’ is a great title and life mantra to have. Was music what you’ve always done or were you in another career and finally realized, nah…not for me?

Matthew William Charles: I had wanted to be in a band since I was a little kid, and I finally got my first band together when I was 15-years-old. I started playing shows at the local youth center, and in a couple of years, I was booking my shows at local bars and venues. I’ve always had a passion for music and have found a way to fund and maintain my habit. In other words, I’ve always had a job. I’m a working-class musician; get off of work and go to band practice, or drive straight to the show, get home at 2 am and wake up in a couple of hours to go back to work. I’ve always found jobs that would be flexible and let me tour, and if they said I couldn’t go on tour I would quit and find another job when I got back.

These past several years I’ve started my own screen printing business here in Philadelphia, PA. I make band merch for a living, and I can take time off for music whenever I want. It’s a lot of hard work and dedication but it’s rewarding. I’ve always had a do it yourself mentality and one of my main goals in life was to be in a position where nobody was able to tell me what to do.

Kendra: There are a lot of styles going on on this record, but the base seems to have a punk spirit. Did you grow up with that punk mentality, going to the likes of Warped Tour?

Matthew William Charles: I discovered punk music when I was in my early teens and it changed the trajectory of my life. I grew up with a lot of different influences, but when I heard bands like Black Flag and The Descendents it changed my perception of what a song could be. I didn’t realize that you could write songs that could hit you like a blunt object, intimately describing whatever personal angst and general unhappiness that you might have. That influence has followed me every step of the way through my various musical progressions. Looking back, surprisingly I only made it to one Warped Tour back in 98’, but I was never a really big fan of festivals and preferred the more intimate setting of a local venue.

Kendra: Anyone in a creative career can attest to “Living in Debt.” Despite what Carrie Bradshaw was pimping, freelance doesn’t allot every writer to live in Manhattan. What do you feel aspiring musicians should know about the financial side of making music before they jump in?

Matthew William Charles: Full disclosure I just had to look up to see who Carrie Bradshaw was, and seeing that she was part of the HBO series ‘Sex And The City’ I can understand why I don’t. Also “Living In Debt” is specifically about the problems associated with college debt, but I can see how that can be applied to musicians.

Before I could give any financial advice, I would first ask yourself,” Why do you want to play music?” The answer for me and I can only imagine this is the answer for most people is that you love music, you enjoy the way it makes you feel, or that you enjoy performing for people and being on stage. You can’t forget the reasons why you started. Being a career musician is hard, and most musicians have jobs or some sort of side gig to make ends meet. The percentage of musicians who make a lot of money is really small, but those people are most likely working all the time and many become physically and mentally drained. Financially, you need to have realistic expectations. You need to make a plan, plot out goals and understand what you need to do to make those things happen. You need to live within your means, many times that means living uncomfortably so you have more time and money to invest in your music. When you start, if you make money, save it. Put it in a bank account or some lockbox that you will not touch even in an emergency. Only reinvest that money into your musical project. If you’re going that extra mile to become a career musician you have to think about your music as a business. That doesn’t work for a lot of people because it sanitizes the experience. Again you have to ask yourself those important questions to figure out what is going to work for you.

Kendra: With all that has transpired this year, how do you feel 2020 has shaped your creativity and drive moving forward?

Matthew William Charles: 2020 has been a huge reality check. It’s made me realize, even more so than ever that I can’t take anything for granted. My drive is the same, and I’m going to continue to be positive and write music and try and share my music with as many people as possible. The landscape has changed and I’m trying to adapt the best that I can. Nothing can replace live shows, interacting with people face to face, and making new friends and fans. The silver lining is that I can learn some new ways to share and promote my music, and hopefully, if things return to normal I can use those new techniques in tandem with traditional touring and live performances.

Kendra: Usually, this is where I ask people what they have planned in the coming months but with the world in a strange place right now, plans aren’t as concrete as they typically are. You can go ahead and let us know what you have tentatively planned but can you also share a song that never fails to get you through when the world around you feels like a mess?

Matthew William Charles: It has been a struggle to make plans and be productive. I’m currently working on some home recording projects and I plan to release some of those songs periodically over the next several months. I’m working on making some music videos and I have been making more use of my video streaming accounts like YouTube and LBRY. I’ve done some live streaming events and plan to do some more in the future, it’s honestly not my favorite thing but it helps fill the void.

A song that never fails to inspire me and gets me through tough times is “Superhuman Coliseum” by the band I Farm. It’s an obscure, thrashy punk rock track off their album, ‘Sincerely Robots.’ The main refrain is “Live again, and start all over ” which I think is a good piece of advice, if not a necessary action if our world continues on its current course.

#mu

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theseventhhex · 5 years ago

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Claire Cronin Interview

Claire Cronin

‘Big Dread Moon’ by Claire Cronin is a record of spiritual urgency. Cronin's lyrics and melodies draw on the stranger aspects of early American musical tradition, revealing the genre’s ties to “folk horror,” wherein supernatural and mundane worlds merge. Quietly sinister ballads like ‘Tourniquet’ and ‘Wolfman’ arise from the weird logic of dream, myth, and half-forgotten memories. Suburban homes, TV screens, and city landscapes are haunted by saints, beasts, ghosts, seers, and a “calm and decisionless” god. Lyrics which implore or command act like prayers or spells embedded inside Cronin's fever dream stories and personal confessions. These are devastatingly spare, delicate, emotionally intense songs, arranged around electric guitar, viola, and Cronin’s singular voice… We talk to Claire about her natural songwriting style, orange wine and mystery walls…

TSH: As you readied ‘Big Dread Moon’, were you drawn towards certain types of expressions and perspectives?

Claire: I didn’t have a message going into making this album; I just sort of proceeded intuitively and wrote the songs over several years. At the end of it, I realised that I had records worth of songs and that a lot of them had very similar themes and images. I generally let the songs guide the way. I soon realised that the songs were extremely gothic and that there was a lot of horror imagery and recurring moods coming into play. From then on, everything fell into place so naturally.

TSH: It must have been pleasing to have a range of personal interests like your PhD, poetry and horror films bleeding into this album...

Claire: Yes, all these factors definitely informed parts of the album. It was just nice to see things come together so naturally with my songwriting. With other forms of writing like an essay or a non-fiction prose I generally have to have an indication as to what I’m doing. However, songwriting is much more intuitive and it just has its own intelligence - I feel like if I step in too much and try to mess with it, it makes the songs worse.

TSH: In what ways does reciting ancient prayers feature on this album?

Claire: I think that’s just to do with my background and my current spirituality. I come from a very devout catholic family on both sides, but I’d say they are both superstitious Catholic types that pray to dead people and saints a lot, ha! However, I’m interested in the occult and I’ve done some different things in relation to this. I just have the kind of mind that no matter how sceptical or nihilistic I’ve been at different moments in my past, I still tend or want to see things in religious terms as though there’s this invisible battle going on and if I say the incantations then I can protect myself, haha.

TSH: You recorded the record at Figure 8 studios in Brooklyn with Shazad Ismail. What was it like to have him on your side?

Claire: Shazad was great and so helpful. My husband who plays viola and some other instruments with me when we play shows is friends with him and that’s how we set that up. It was all very fast and we were only there for one weekend. We flew in from Georgia with all that we could afford in terms of money and time. I think it worked so well because the songs were so sparse and I didn’t want to make a big studio album. I didn’t look to add a million things and the record was pretty close to the live sounds.

TSH: In terms of sequencing for this album did you identify ‘Tourniquet’ early on as the album opener?

Claire: Not initially, but once all the songs were recorded I thought it was one of the strongest songs and so did Owen, who runs the Orindal record label. That song is very stark and straightforward, I feel like it sets me up as a sort of speaker or a character and the rest of the songs proceed from there. So it’s like you know who's talking to you.

TSH: What do you recall in bringing together the song ‘Six Guns’?

Claire: That was a really hard song to write. I went back and forth with the verses but I loved the bridge and how the timing changes so I couldn’t give up on the song. There was something about the rhythm that reminded of an old Irish fight song or an Irish step-dance. I was trying to feel a little bit of those styles with the instrumentation but not in some obvious way.

TSH: Do your vivid and mundane dreams still seep into your songwriting?

Claire: Yeah, I guess so. I mean I don’t have a specific example, except that songwriting itself is very dreamlike and when you’re in the right state of mind - which is rare - it’s a bit like a trance or a dream. You become sort of passive and you give yourself over to these images from dreams or things that you’ve seen or that have happened to you, but you barely remember them and they form new stories.

TSH: You also admire some current gifted songwriters such as Aldous Harding and Adrienne Lenker (Big Thief) too...

Claire: Yeah, they are both so gifted and talented. I don’t think I could ever write songs like either of them and they write totally different songs from each other. Nonetheless, there’s something so unusual about both of their songwriting styles - it feels very emotional but also a little abstract. I really enjoy their music because there’s something else going on with their songwriting besides the traditional diary entry.

TSH: You recently moved from Georgia to California. Are you still having to deal with having no internet?

Claire: Ha! Well, the internet came today - thank goodness. Also, I made the crazy choice to adopt two dogs - now I have new issues to deal with…

TSH: Leaving them behind whilst touring is going to be quite the hassle...

Claire: I know! I’m really going to miss them. First things first though, I need to get them to stop peeing on the furniture!

TSH: Being a fan of crime style TV series like True Detective, have you delved into any other notable TV shows lately?

Claire: I mainly watch a lot of the HBO series - they have all the classics and highly rated stuff. Also, I’ve been watching a lot of old Unsolved Mysteries too.

TSH: Speaking of True Detective, you made a crime/mystery type wall in Georgia - have you put one up in your new place?

Claire: I do need to create one! But first I need to find out what the mysteries are in my new area. I actually went to this sort of block party and met a bunch of neighbours last night. I was trying to ask what the mysteries of the street and area were, but nobody wanted to tell me. I’ll wait, ha!

TSH: How valuable and beneficial is it for you to have your partner Ezra on board and so closely attached to your musical ventures?

Claire: It’s so great to have him on board and I really appreciate the support both emotionally and logistical. Ezra is a talented musician with his own background. He’s played in a bunch of bands and done some solo stuff too. He has really good taste and he makes really smart choices. I most definitely value the input that he adds to the songs, even though the songwriting still has to remain a private endeavour for me.

TSH: Is orange wine a strong preference for you to choose to unwind with when you’re not immersed in music?

Claire: Haha! I love orange wine! I wish I could find some more out here. Outside of music I like the regular things that people do. I mostly like taking walks and having drinks with friends. Oh, and I really like to exercise.

TSH: Do you have certain goals with your artistic choices as you look ahead?

Claire: The main goal is honestly to just keep writing songs, making music and recording a new batch of songs. Essentially I’m just trying to spread the word to more people. I’ve really appreciated the reviews in the press for ‘Big Dread Moon’, it means a lot to me - the positive reactions have been so pleasing. Heading forward, I just want to play more shows and I’d love to go over to Europe too. I’m taking things in my stride and just enjoying the ride for now.

Claire Cronin - “Saint's Lake”

Big Dread Moon

#Interview #Claire Cronin

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spotlightsaga · 8 years ago

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Kevin Cage of @spotlightsaga reviews... Big Little Lies (S01E07) You Get What You Need Airdate: April 2, 2017 @hbo Ratings: TBA (VERY SOON!) Score: 9.5/10 **********SPOILERS BELOW********** I doubt there was a single audience member that didn't guess the ending of 'Big Little Lies'. I'm actually elated to see that fact didn't discourage viewers in any way... Because sometimes, even when you see something coming from a mile away, it's how it's presented that can take a certain precedence over the actual 'mystery reveal'. Many viewers had reached out to me and vice versa as we talked about the main point that Jane Chapman had yet to run into Perry, that the violence in Celeste and Perry's home had to have had some profound effect on the children. Kids are like sponges, they emulate things they see and hear and even feel, most of the time it's in a playful manner... Especially if those topics are addressed. But when there's a giant, blood red, emotional elephant in the room they can take that energy and express it through the most curious of means... After all, we teach our children empathy. I think that there are some of us that are born sensitive to it, but without proper guidance and understanding of 'cause & effect' and what essentially breaks down to something as simple as 'treat others the way you want to be treated', a child can stray in the most bizarre paths. As humans, we are strange creatures... Strange, strange creatures... And I really loved the fact that the school bully was just one of the twins, reminding us that even when we are as close as two in the same, we all react differently to the stimuli in our environments... As Connor Oberst of 'Bright Eyes' would say, 'Every heads a different world...' And though Celeste was sure she was the one who took the beatings for her family and absorbed her husband's rage, so sure that the monster he was with her was much different from the playful monster character he chased the children around during his more tender moments... She failed to realize that those monsters were one in the same... And that type of monstrous venom effects us more than just physically. When people talk about 'Big Little Lies' today, tomorrow, or even weeks or years from now... People will be talking about the performances of the cast. There wasn't one woman or man that didn't deliver in one way or another. I think about all the talent that was piled into this project and ask myself, 'How did any casting director manage an ensemble like this?' This is quite possibly one of the best overall cast ensembles we have ever seen put together for a single project and besides some brilliant direction, cinematography, and extremely slick and glossy editing; I can honestly say that the sheer star power and performances they each turned out were elevated by each and every one of them and ended up taking 'BLL' to the next level. It's as if one person's performance was so strong, it inspired the next person to deliver even more, and on and on as each of them raised the bar for each other, one by one. These are some of the finest actors & actresses of our time and to see so many powerhouse performances bounce off each other is an incredible honor. They all deserve recognition and if they don't win multiple awards as an ensemble cast it would be a dirty shame. Yet out of all these incredible turn outs, for me it was Nicole Kidman who really just burned the house down, Shailene Woodley coming in a close second, and of course Alexander Skarsgård who gave them an ubiquitous character that seemed to somehow creep into every scene in some form or another without the man even being on the screen... While Reese Witherspoon's Madeline helped connect all the women in a way that would not be possible without her heavy presence... And that's no disrespect to any of the other performers, they truly all deserve a standing ovation. Without them all, 'Big Little Lies' would have not been the same. I did find it a bit odd that a good chunk of the cast felt like they should get a recording deal... Making it seem like Monterey is just so rich, talented & powerful that every record producer should be at their fundraiser gala scouting talent... But hey, as crazy as it is to think that any affluent mom or dad in Monterey missed their calling in life and should be a rock star with a spot at Coachella, Bonnaroo, or Glastonbury Festivals... Really, it fit the 'everything is perfect/just don't look too hard or too long' theme we saw recurring throughout the series. It's a cover that is somewhat of a phenomenon really... Human beings put on their faces, step into their personas, carefully place their hats made of egos and stitch together their perfect lives on Facebook and polish ourselves on Instagram for all to see... But underneath it all we are all fighting for our lives... The rich, the poor, the 'once upon a time' middle class... The black, the white... The gay, the straight... We face our prisons of haunted figures that loom over us from the past, domestic abuse, rape, depression, isolation, addictions, mental illnesses, our grasp of what we can and cannot control within our lives, the walls of mistakes we made ourselves that we can't seem to tear down no matter how hard we try... And even though this phenomenon seems to be all part of the human condition, we find solace through the helping hands of others, a hug, an unexpected act of kindness, and empathy. We all have the power to both tear each other apart and lift each other up... And I'll be damned if it isn't the hardest thing in the world to find that middle ground. HBO has done it again and really hit a home run with this one... It's like they just can't lose. Apparently this was a one and done scenario for 'Big Little Lies' as a series (which isn't hard to believe considering none of us are quite sure how they put a cast like this together)... And even tho I believe series like HBO's 'The Night Of' are better left the way they are, as a single season entity, if somehow HBO, Jean-Marc Vallée, and David E Kelley were able to get this group together again, I'd be more than willing to watch them give it another go. It's not easy to get lightning to strike in the same place twice, but without a doubt 'Big Little Lies' was a slow-rolling storm that swept into the town of Monterey and into all of our homes and struck TV lightning down on all of us. Just incredible!

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demondeanismybaby · 8 years ago

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Has it Been Another Year?

Pairing: Dean x reader

Word Count: 1593

Warnings: A little spoilerish for season 12, but nothing major. Nothing else mainly fluff

Summary: Reader requested Could I request a dean x reader with fluff or smut or angst or whatever works for the story where dean and the reader have been dating but dean has been really distracted by everything going on this season from his mom to the lucifer baby. But for their anniversary dean pulls out all the romance to show the reader how much she means to him, especially with everything going badly... no pressure if you don't want to write it but thanks!

A/N: Anon requested this so I wrote some good old fashion fluff. It was just enough to help me break my dry spell with writing. So thank you anon I owe you one, hope you enjoy it :) @jensen-jarpad I am actually pretty proud of this one and have seen your appreciation posts, so I am tagging you.

You could hear Sam and Dean muffled through the wall, though you didn’t need to guess what was going on between the two of them this time. It was the same basic tension that was constantly going on these days. You had thought when Dean had come home with Mary that night, and the darkness and God were no longer in the picture that things might go back to just hunting down evil.

He couldn’t catch a break.

Now it was constant distractions. First Mary had seemed off from the minute you met her, and you blew it off as being dead for almost three decades probably wasn’t as simple as waking up from a nap, but still she had this look in her eyes you couldn’t shake. Then she was off doing her own thing, hunting, but you doubted it. Of course, then, letting the devil hang out on Earth had back fired, go figure. Now you were all faced with what having a living anti christ might entail. All the while the British Men of Letters were skulking around, doing who knows what, which after the tortured Sam you knew wasn’t going to end well. It made sense that Dean was distracted.

Pulling the covers up to your chin you took a deep breath, the smell of Dean’s mint soap hitting you and reminding you of him being in lockdown, it seemed for a while you were going to lose this forever. It had been so hectic you were not all that surprised that Dean had forgotten your anniversary. After all it wasn’t like he didn’t show you constantly how much he loved you. Though as you heard footsteps coming down the hall you wished it would be one of those movie moments where he would walk in carrying a tray with breakfast made and a little rose in a cup, then after setting it down the food would go cold as you both got so caught up in making love. Something cheesy.

The door smack against the wall and Dean was wearing his classical scowl and you stifled your laughter knowing that now was not the time to have him sniping at you.

“Can you believe him?” As he paced around the room he started digging inside the closet, pulling out random clothes, and alarming you noticed he was grabbing your stuff too.

“No,” you figured agreeing was best, “but is the punishment for Sam being a dick is to force him to wear our clothes?”

“What?” He spun around and you noticed that he was clutching a pair of your sexiest underwear.

Hopping out of bed, you walked over to him appreciating that even in his anger his gaze still raked over your body like when you first met him, you pried open his fist and pulled out your panties and held them up to get his attention.

“Why are you grabbing all of this?”

“Were going on a hunt.” He turned back around and pulled out the suitcase. He never folded anything when you were leaving so everything you wore was constantly wrinkled and you watched as he flung the luggage on the bed and started heaping everything inside.

You were skeptical, “and what is Sam going to do while we hunt this whatever?”

A huff was his only response and you started to sulk. It was bad enough Dean was clearly too busy to even remember your anniversary but now you couldn’t even spend the day in bed but instead you would probably be waist deep in a grave in a few hours.

After he had zipped the bags, it was clear the matter was settled, he had loaded up the impala in record time pausing in his activities only long enough to give Sam a pointed look before hitting the road.

If him being all cranky had been a little alarming it was nothing compared to how he started acting once the two of you were alone. He never mentioned the fact that this date marked three years of being together, which would have been nice, what was much stranger was how when he turned on the music you noticed your iPod was hooked up and something other than classic rock was playing. He rubbed his thumb against your wrist while he drove and hadn’t even mentioned the case at all.

“So tell me about this monster were tracking,” you were trying to get sense of what was going on with Dean, “does it have to do with Lucifer’s love child?”

He just smiled a little, the edges of his eyes crinkling, and shook his head. You couldn’t understand what would have so quickly changed his mood, this was a guy who knew how to brood over things.

“Alright so no demon spawn, why don’t you just tell me so we can stop playing 20 questions.”

There was something in the way he was glancing over at you, it reminded you of the time you first met him when things were simpler, or at least relatively so. With the sudden influx of bigger badder evil things he always seemed so heavy, the way he squared his shoulders and his jaw ticked, you missed this relaxed demeanor. Not that you didn’t understand, you loved Dean no matter how complicated things were, in fact you seemed to love him more in spite of it.

“Were here.”

The hotel was huge, rustic but modern, this wasn’t some small town sleaze bucket place. The timber which made up the outside of the place was richly stained with green accents making it look perfectly suited for the woods it was nestled in. It wasn’t the kind of place you typically stayed on hunts, maybe it was just stage one of the investigation, some spirit haunting the high paying customers.

It wasn’t the abode that had you jaw springing open however, Dean had gotten out of the car while you were musing silently and was standing next to the now open passenger door, he was holding out his hand to you.

“What are you doing?” You were lost. “Is this like, part of the hunt?”

He threw his head back, and a fit of deep laughter left his whole frame shaking, you didn’t get what was funny.

As he got himself under control he looked at you with a serene expression, “no hunt babe.”

Then it hit you, “you weren’t actually fighting with Sam this morning, were you?”

“For once, no. I was telling him that I wanted to do something special for our big day and that it should be a surprise.”

You jumped out off the car, and completely ignored the way your head smacked against the frame as you wrapped him in a giant hug, standing on your tip toes to kiss him deeply. “You Dean Winchester are a great man.”

“Happy anniversary sweetheart.”

He grabbed the luggage and went and checked you into the hotel, he had reserved a huge room with a jacuzzi and there were flowers sitting on the nightstand, it was so ritzy that the giant flat screen T.V. even had HBO for once. You gazed out the window, the back of the place stood over a incline and you could see the way the forest pines stretched back for miles. It was beautiful. Even though you were busy taking in how amazing everything was you could feel the way Dean was only watching you.

“Do you like it?” His arms wrapped around you waist and his chin rested on your shoulder.

You spun in his grasp, “it’s wonderful, you are so good to me, I can’t believe this.”

“There is one more thing alright.”

Something about the way his eyes looked almost like he was going to cry scared you, and even though you knew it was crazy you thought maybe he was going to drop some terrible news on you and this was all just an attempt to soften the blow. He dug through the suitcase and when he walked back over to you there was something in his balled up fist.

Then you were about to cry as he got down on one knee, and suddenly you realized that Dean totally had the ability to do something cheesy for an anniversary.

“No,” your hands shook.

He was looking up at you, “might want to wait before you start throwing the word no around,” and even though he was trying to lighten the moment you could tell he was actually nervous.

“Y/N, I think I knew from the minute I saw you behead that vamp that someday I would be here asking you this,” he kept gauging you reaction, “then I got to know you as a person how strong, and thoughtful, how beautiful you are inside. I was so lucky when you finally picked me.”

“I love you,” and even though you own voice was barely audible you saw his smile get bigger.

“Now I want to lock this down, Y/N, will you marry me?”

As he slipped the tiny emerald on your hand you did start crying but it was the easiest thing in the world to answer him now.

“Yes.”

He hopped you and kissed you, your tears were slick against his face and you had never felt more excited about the future good and bad with this man.

“Happy anniversary baby.” He had never looked this happy. Apparently there were things that made everything evil out there seem a little less terrible when the two of you were together.

#dean x reader #dean x you #spn #spn fanfiction #spn season 12 #spn reader insert #my writing #reader request #for anon

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newyorktheater · 5 years ago

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The 65th annual Obie Awards will be streamed on June 4th, with host irreverent and scrawny comedian Cole Escola. “I am honored the American Theatre Wing made the mistake of asking me to host the Obies,” said Escola. “I am so excited to celebrate the great work Off- and Off-Off-Broadway, and to see my name on the Obies Wikipedia page on a list of hosts that includes Elaine May and Shelley Winters.”

#Stageworthy News of the Week.

Ten weeks after the governor shut down all theaters in New York City, signs point to widespread expectation that they won’t reopen until Spring 2021. Some of these signs are subtle, such as the announcement that, on June 7th, the night that had been reserved for the 74th Annual Tony Awards before it was canceled, the Broadway League and the American Theatre Wing have decided to go ahead with an hour-long “event” – a celebration and a fundraiser – that will be streaming on TonyAwards.com and the new platform BroadwayonDemand.com — as if to acknowledge that it is not plausible for the actual Tonys to be rescheduled in 2020.

(In other award news, the American Theatre Wing just announced that the Obie Awards will be a pre-recorded ceremony that will stream on the Wing’s YouTube channel on June 4th.)

Another sign of a delayed reopening of physical theaters in New York is the interview that Broadway League president Charlotte St. Martin gave to The Daily Beast, declaring that her “optimistic” date for Broadway’s reopening is January 2021 – which is four months later than the League’s latest official end-date of September 6 for the Broadway shutdown (announced earlier this month.) And the phrasing heavily implies that the more realistic date is at least a year after the March shutdown. “We can’t socially distance the cast and crew in these 100-year-old-plus buildings,” St. Martin said. “And we can’t afford to socially distance the audience.”

This is more or less the assessment (with just a few exceptions) of the concert promoters, theater presenters, heads of orchestras and of dance companies who talked to the New York Times (The Fall of Autumn: Live Performance Producers Are Giving Up on 2020)

Online Theater IS Theater

Meanwhile, the redefining of theater is proceeding apace. Symbolic of the advances is the announcement just now that Play-Perview, a platform created during the shutdown which has been presenting original, live one-time-only readings online, will present Will Arbery’s Pulitzer finalist play “Heroes of the Fourth Turning” online June 13. And it’s not alone in suggesting what online theater can be (See reviews below, especially of “Mad Forest” and “The Sentinels.”) Just the fact that so many more theater companies are scheduling original plays online in advance is a

Itamar Moses

sign of changing attitudes.

As playwright Itamar Moses told me earlier this week: “Sure, people are trying to figure out ways of presenting theatre, remotely, over screens right now, but it isn’t the absence of a screen that makes something theatre. “Theatre is when something is performed, in real time, for an audience that is also watching it in real time, while gathered in the same space — and all that’s really happening right now is an expansion of the definition of what we mean by ‘space’ to include virtual space….It’s our awareness of the aliveness and presence of the actors and our fellow audience members that makes something theatre and if being present together in a virtual space is the form this moment demands then we will, by necessity, develop techniques for maximizing the power of that form, maybe allowing it to become a legitimate off-shoot of theatre in its own right.”

Week in Online Theater Reviews

Is This a Play Yet by Marco Ramirez performed by Utkarsh Ambudkar

Homebound Project 2

Mary-Louise Parker introduces us to the second edition of The Homebound Project, an hour-long online collection of 11 new short plays, by explaining that the theme this time is “sustenance,” and lists “the many ways we sustain and fortify ourselves…. shelter, our vocations, charity, activism, and also food.”

She doesn’t mention the arts.

And, honestly, this second batch of plays in the series, with just a couple of exceptions, didn’t generally provide as much sustenance for me as the first edition. In place of the first edition’s frequent sense of playfulness, as well as relatively straightforward stories of connection and longing, there are darker and less accessible works reminiscent of the spare and despairing plays of Samuel Beckett. Mad Forest

Bard’s splendidly glitchy production of “Mad Forest,” Caryl Churchill’s fascinating avant-garde drama about the 1989 Romanian Revolution, is the first live play I’ve seen since the shutdown that attempts a full staging via Zoom. Rather than just reading the stage directions, the twelve actors enact them – a mother slaps her son; friends share a piece of chocolate, and lie down together on a lawn; a couple hug one another; the members of a wedding party get into a massive group brawl — although each of the actors, all undergraduates at Bard, are performing remotely from locations across the country where they are sheltering. Presented live and free Theatre for a New Audience in collaboration with Fisher Center at Bard (with another one scheduled for Wednesday at 3), the show was a revelation, and something of a revolution itself, suggesting new paths forward for online theater.

Love Letters

Bryan Cranston and Sally Field performed live on May 21, 2020 in A.R. Gurney’s two-character play about a man and woman writing to one another over half a century, starting at the age of seven. This was the third in a series of new live-streamed productions of old plays produced by Broadway’s Best Shows.

The 1988 play seems ideal for online theater. Even when it was on Broadway — as it was twice, the last time in 2014 (my review)– there was no scenery or costumes, and the actors stayed seated at a table the whole time and read from scripts without ever looking at each other. It still managed to be terrifically entertaining and surprisingly moving.

The Sentinels

“The Sentinels,” a new 9/11 play by Matthew Lopez, was worth your time — well-acted, touching, appealing in part because of its very modesty — and it demonstrated a few things to me. A play can be well-directed, in this case by Rebecca Taichman (Tony-winner for Indecent) even when presented neck-up via Zoom.

Megan Hilty and the Yankees

Watch Bombshell the Concert The first-ever streaming of the 2015 concert of “Bombshell,” the fictional musical about Marilyn Monroe that the characters were putting together in the first season of “Smash” plus a Zoom reunion of the cast.

Watch Covenant House Concert Highlights

Book Review: Playwrights on Television: Conversations with Dramatists.

Hillary Miller, an assistant professor of theater at Queens College, City University of New York, has put together 18 Q and A transcripts, arranged alphabetically, from interviews she conducted between October 2018 and April 2019. The playwrights she selected reflect “a broad definition of diversity” – including in the balance between their onstage and onscreen experiences and identity, from Madeleine George, who at the time of Miller’s interview with her in December 2018 had been a playwright for 25 years ( The Curious Case of the Watson Intelligence, Hurricane Diane), and a TV writer for ten weeks, to Tanya Saracho, showrunner for Starz TV series “Vida,” who tells Miller “ I have left the theater, consciously” (or Tanya Barfield, who tells Miller: “Maybe after my kids go to college, I’ll go back to playwriting. That’s a while off.”) Surely, a few of them would have something to say about our sudden era of online theater. In one way, then, Miller’s book is the victim of unlucky timing. But in another way, some of the issues that the author does explore are as good a prompt as any to thinking about the current crossbreeding of media and what may be in store.

Other Theater News

Off Broadway Alliance Award Winners: A Strange Loop, Life Sucks, Unsinkable Molly Brown

The First Annual Hal Prince Lifetime Achievement Award, newly created by The Drama Desk, , will go to….Hal Prince, posthumously. when the Drama Desk announces the winners of its competitive awards on May 31

Jeremy O. Harris and The Bushwick Starr are partnering to give $500 each to 152 U.S. playwrights. Applications start May 29

This from @RealmTheatre Instead of funding productions, they will give “at least $750 to each Realm playwright who has expressed financial and professional need…” pic.twitter.com/yCOa5licay

— New York Theater (@NewYorkTheater) May 21, 2020

A musical based on Smash TV series is aiming for Broadway, with Steven Spielberg one of the producers, Shaiman and Wittman the songwriters, Bob Martin & Rick Elice the book-writers. File this under Department of Exciting News, Division of Grain of Salt.

HBO plans to turn Martyna Majok’s play “queens” –– about struggling immigrant women sharing a house — into a series.

How to Caption Shows on Zoom, Instagram, Audio Theater, Facebook, YouTube etc.

.@CharlesMcNulty asks 25 theater people to imagine post-pandemic landscape. Some can’t. Others say “streaming is the new normal”@LynnBrooklyn: we’ll rethink how & where we bring theater to audiences@PattiLuPone: cleaned, sanitized and fumigated. https://t.co/YLKj3iQPbS

— New York Theater (@NewYorkTheater) May 19, 2020

Rest in Peace

List of NYC healthcare workers who have died because of COVID-19, updated on Memorial Day

Celebrating Theater (Obies on June 4th, “Tonys” June 7th.) Redefining Theater. Aiming To Reopen in Spring 2021 #Stageworthy News of the Week. Ten weeks after the governor shut down all theaters in New York City, signs point to widespread expectation that they won’t reopen until Spring 2021.

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weekendwarriorblog · 5 years ago

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The Weekend Warrior Home Edition May 29, 2020 – I WILL MAKE YOU MINE, THE HIGH NOTE, HBO MAX and more!

Before we get to any potential theatrical releases – there aren’t many (if any?) this week – today is the day that HBO MAX launches! I hope to add it to the streaming section below, but since it’s a newborn baby launching today, it will get the lead in this week’s column…

Some of the HBO Max original programming at launch will include On the Record, the new doc from The Hunting Ground and The Invisible War directors Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering, which looks at the story of music exec. Drew Dixon and her decision to be one of the first women of color to come forward about being sexually assaulted by Russell Simmons. I’ll freely admit that I haven’t watched this yet, but my friend/colleague Candice Fredrick did this amazing interview with Dixon and the other subjects for Shondaland, which you can read right here, and it’ll make it obvious why (like Dick/Ziering’s previous docs), this one NEEDS to be seen, even if you don’t have a horse in this race.

Anna Kendrick will be starring in new romantic comedy anthology series called Love Life from Sam Boyd, each season which will follow a different person from their first to last romance. I hope this is better than Kendrick’s Quibi series.

On a lighter night, there’s a new series of Looney Tunes Cartoons, a series of 11 to 12-minute cartoon collections featuring all your WB favorites. While I was mildly dubious about new cartoons, apparently WB has been making these for a few years although they’ll now be migrating over to HBO Max. Some of the first toons will include a couple Porky Pig-Daffy Duck shorts: “Curse of the Monkeybird” and “Firehouse Frenzy”; another one called “Harm Wrestling,” pitting Bugs Bunny against long-time nemesis Yosemite Sam, and another Bugs one called “Big League Beast.” These new toons definitely have their own identity and charm and are pretty clever with wackier modernized cartoon violence ala “Ren and Stimpy” or maybe Adult Swim would be a more current reference. The series is exec. produced by Peter Browngardt, and I don’t think regular Looney Tunes fans (or cartoon fans in general) will be too disappointed by these offerings.

There’s also the Not Too Late Show with Elmo, which looks cute, but it’s definitely veering more towards the TV side of things than movies, at least for now.

Something rather strange and interesting happened leading up to this week’s “Featured Movie,” but it involves an introductory story: Just before the lockdown on March 12, I went out to see Emily Ting’s great new comedy, Go Back to China on its very last day in New York theaters. One of the actors in the movie, Lynn Chen, seemed vaguely familiar but I couldn’t figure out where from. Sometime after that, I started seeing a few tweets about Alice Wu’s 2004 film, Saving Face, which I thought I was one of the only people who knew about it, having covered it 15 or 16 years ago. This led to a Twitter conversation about Wu’s new Netflix movie, The Half of It, which made me realize that Chen was one of the two leads in Saving Face. One thing led to another and besides learning about Wu’s new movie, I also found out that Chen’s own directorial debut would be coming out soon. That movie, I WILL MAKE YOU MINE (Gravitas Ventures), is now available digitally and on DVD/Blu-ray. Got all that? Good. So that’s what I’m going to write about next.

Chen’s directorial debut is an interesting black-and-white romantic dramedy, but you really need to go into it knowing that it’s also the third part of something being labelled, “The Surrogate Valentine Trilogy,” based on two indie comedies directed by Dave Boyle. I did not know this the first time I watched Chen’s movie, which may be why I was so confused about the relationships between three Asian-American women with a musician named Goh Nakamura (who plays himself in the film). Once I watched the previous movies, Surrogate Valentine from 2011 and Daylight Savings from 2012, things became a LOT clearer.

Both those movies were quirky comedies mostly based around Nakamura’s day-to-day, but they also had romantic undercurrents with three different women over the course of the two movies: Lynn Chen’s best friend Rachel, “the professor” Erika (Ayako Fujitani) and fellow singer-songwriter Yea-Ming (Yea-Ming Chen, also playing a version of herself). It’s immediately clear that Chen’s movie is going to focus on the three women, but it my not be as evident who these women are or their relationship to Nakamura without having seen the previous two films.

The movie takes place five years after the previous one, so Chen is taking the Linklatter “Before” trilogy approach, at least in concluding the overall story with a few players from earlier movies also making apperances. Erika and Yea-Ming are still polar opposites with Erika’s moodiness being increased by the death of her father and having to care for her five-year-old daughter (Ayami Riley Tomine). Yea-Ming is still single and ready to mingle, while Rachel is now married but she is still reminiscing about Goh, who she long ago put in the friend zone despite his feelings for her.

Both the previous movies were left hanging with no real answers, so it’s quite respectable for Chen to take the reins in trying to answer some of the unanswered questions. The general idea is that all these women are still thinking of Goh, and you’ll have to watch the movie to see which one he ends up with, if any. (Not too sure how I feel about all these beautiful women chasing after the mopey Nakamura, but like the “Before” movies, you’ll be quite invested after seeing the other two movies.)

Nakamura is an incredibly talented musician, songwriter and singer (as is Yea-Ming) but not a particularly expressive actor, especially in comparison to a seasoned pro like Chen. As a director and co-star, she does a better job getting a performance out of him than Boyle did, although her character’s arc is more about dealing with her cheating husband Josh. Chen maintains the quirky humor of the earlier movies without involving as much of the bro-ness of the characters around Nakamura. Putting the focus on the three women trying to discover themselves and figure out what they want in life just makes her film a far more enjoyable experience as a whole, especially as we get to see them interacting with each other.

I particulary like this movie on its own merits due to the very funny and talented Yea-Ming Chen (whose own musical project is called DreamDate). She clearly has the best chemistry with Nakamura, but I Will Make You Mine gains so much more knowing the characters’ history together, even if those relationships were not necessarily the focus of the previous two films. There’s no question Lynn Chen has a solid future as a filmmaker, as she takes the ideas and characters introduced by Boyle’s films to a far more emotional level. I recommend watching the entire trilogy, which hopefully Gravitas Ventures will put all in one place (like a collection of all three movies with a soundtrack CD?) someday soon. In the meantime, you can find out where you can watch I Will Make You Mine on the official site, so do check it out!

I had been pretty interested in Focus Features’ new film, THE HIGH NOTE, which will be available via PVOD this Friday, mainly because it was directed by Nisha Ganatra, who did such an amazing job with last year’s Late Night. This is a very different movie, maybe more commercial but also not quite as much my thing, which is odd since it’s set in the music business, which is almost definitely my thing.

Dakota Johnson stars as Maggie, personal assistant to legendary soul singer Grace Davis (Tracee Ellis Ross from black-ish), but she would rather be a record producer. Maggie hs been practicing by doing an edit on a live album for Davis who is being drawn by her manager (Ice Cube) to take up a Vegas residency ala Celine. Soon after, Maggie meets Kelvin Harrison Jr’s David Cliff, an aspiring singer and songwriter who she decides to take under her wing, without letting him know she’s actually a personal assistant.

Written by Flora Greeson, her first produced screenplay, it’s almost immediately apparent this movie came about due to the success of the 2018 remake of A Star is Born, which did so well despite winning only a single Oscar for song. There are a few hurdles the movie had to overcome right away, the first being my general “eh” feelings about Johnson as an actor, but then there are also serious credibility issues of a Hollywood personal assistant getting away with HALF the things Maggie does in the movie. There is definitely an aspect of the movie that reminded me of Working Girl, one of the movies that made Johnson’s mother (Melanie Griffith) a household name, but this sort of “everything works out for the white girl” just seems kind of stale and played and maybe a bit out-of-tune in this day and age.

The High Note is barely a drama and more of a romantic dramedy and while the songs are decent, there’s very little way that this can be deemed any sort of “musical.” There’s also the whole “white savior” thing in play where Maggie is there not only to save Grace’s flagging career but also trying to help David make it big. Harrison is as good as he’s been in almost every role, and that seems almost wasted among the other okay performances.

The thing is that The High Note did eventually win me over, oddly with a pull-the-rug-out twist that for some reason I didn’t see coming. There is a cuteness aspect to it that makes it palatable, if not always entertaining, but I definitely expected more and better from Ganatra for her second feature. It makes it that much more obvious what Mindy Kaling brought to the table as the writer/producer on Late Night.

Next up is John Hyatt’s documentary SCREENED OUT (Dark Star Pictures), which is probably rather apropos right now as it deals with something very prominent and timely: our addiction to our devices. The movie follows Hyatt and his family who go through their own journey of dealing with screen addiction. It will be available in the US and Canada this Friday. I really couldn’t get too far into this movie, since I generally hate docs where the filmmakers turn the camera on themselves, and I’m not talking about Morgan Spurlock or Michael Moore so much, as those who make these movies about themselves without having too much to offer the viewer.

Film Forum’s Virtual Cinema adds two new repertory films this week: Philip Borso’s 1982 film, The Grey Fox, starring Richard Farnsworth (in a new 4K restoration) and Andrei Ujică’s 1992 film, Videograms of a Revolution. Film at Lincoln Center’s own virtual cinema adds Mounia Meddour’s Papicha (Distrib Films) about a university student during the Algerian Civil War who is studying French with an interest in fashion so she defies religious conservatism to design dresses for her peers. The film won the César Award for Best Female Newcomer and Best First Film, and was a selection for the recent “Rendez-Vous with French Cinema.”

STREAMING AND CABLE

Netflix’s big launch this week is the new series from The Office (American version) creator Greg Daniels (his second new one in the last month!), SPACE FORCE, a comedy based on the Trump military initiative that reunites Daniels with Steve Carell. He’s joined by John Malkovich, Jimmy O. Yang, the late Fred Willard, Ben Schwartz, Noah Emmerich and more, so we’ll see if I like it more than the Amazon series, Upload. (Granted, I’ve only seen one episode of that.)

I’m semi-flattered that Hannah Gadsby named her second Netflix comedy special, Hannah Gadsby: Douglas, after me, but honestly, I’m one of the few people who never really understood the appeal of her as a comic. She just seems like a snarky Australian who just happens to also be a lesbian, but I dunno, maybe I’ll like this one more?

Fernando Frias’ Mexican teen drama, I’m No Longer Here (also on Netflix), is about a young street gang in Monterrey, Mexico who get into a feud with a local cartel, forcing the leader to migrate to the United States.

Also, I’ve heard good things about Andrew Patterson’s THE VAST OF NIGHT, which will be available on Amazon Prime, this Friday. It stars Sierra McCormick as Fay Crocker, a switchboard operator in 1950s New Mexico, who discovers an audio frequency that can change their small town forever. It sends Fay and a radio DJ named Everett (Jake Horowitz) on a scavenger hunt into the unknown. This movie played a lot of genre film festivals last year after debuting at Slamdance, and I generally enjoyed it, since it has a very different vibe of other thrillers, even period ones. The two leads are so cute together in the film’s opening scene, you’ll definitely want to see where things are going, and the dialogue is particularly good. Maybe the movie isn’t as direct in its genre elements as others, but it goes to interesting places for sure.

Also, the We Are One: A Global Film Festival is supposed to start this week, running for a week from this Friday to June 7 with proceeds going to benefit COVID-19 relief funds with programming curated by a number of film festivals including Tribeca, the New York Film Festival, Berlin and others. You can see some of the programming here, and the festival will run starting Friday on the YouTube channel.

Next week, more movies (mostly) not in theaters!

By the way, if you read this week’s column and have bothered to read this far down, feel free to drop me some thoughts at Edward dot Douglas at Gmail dot Com or drop me a note or tweet on Twitter. I love hearing from readers … honest!

#TheWeekendWarrior #TheHIghNote #IWillMakeYouMine #Movies #Reviews #Digital #Streaming #HBOMax

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mrmichaelchadler · 6 years ago

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The Best TV of 2018

It may perhaps merely be a product of our times that consensus gets further and further away with so many options for entertainment, but even a casual perusal of Twitter produces wildly different opinions on the state of television in 2018. Some notable critics believe we’re still in the Golden Age of TV. Others believe we’re far from it. Has the non-stop market saturation of streaming services reduced the overall quality? Or do we just have to try a little harder to find it? There does seem to be a sense that we’re all overwhelmed by the variety of options out there, and that it’s going to be increasingly difficult for shows to transcend all of the choices to become true phenomena. Would “The Sopranos” or “Breaking Bad” make the impact they did today? Probably not. By that same token, it does feel like TV has become more of a Big Box store—something for everyone—than the creator-driven medium it was five or ten years ago. But look at the quality below. We had little problem putting together lists of dozens of shows we liked this year, and we still had to cut a few that we think you should be watching. These are the ones that we feel most broke through the Target-ization of TV. Watch em all.

BRIAN TALLERICO

Runner-ups: “American Vandal,” “Big Mouth,” “Castle Rock,” “Everything Sucks!,” “GLOW,” “Legion,” “One Day at a Time,” “Ray Donovan,” “Superstore,” and “The Terror”

20. “Bodyguard”

19. “Brooklyn Nine-Nine”

18. “Billions”

17. “Dear White People”

16. “Westworld”

15. “Succession”

14. “Bob’s Burgers”

13. “Sharp Objects”

12. "Homecoming"

11. “The Americans”

10. “Maniac”

I’ve been saying this for so long that I’m starting to get bored with it myself: I’m stunned that the streaming revolution hasn’t led to more playfulness in terms of structure and genre. But maybe that’s changing? The reason we grew up with half-hour comedies and hour-long dramas was because of the structure of ad-supported television. So why are we still stuck with it? Why can’t we have short dramas and long comedies? Which brings us to “Maniac,” Cary Joji Fukunaga’s mesmerizing experiment in structure, genre, and length. Starring Emma Stone, Jonah Hill, and Justin Theroux, this mindfuck of a show is one of the few things I saw this year that truly felt like it was pushing the envelope of what television is capable of, paying homage to Stanley Kubrick, Joel Coen, and Terry Gilliam while also carving its own new ground. I get why some people were turned off by the tonal shifts and unique nature of the back half of this season, but that almost makes me like it more—sometimes the most interesting art provokes the most divisive responses.

9. “The Haunting of Hill House”

No single episode that I saw this year had quite the impact on me as the fifth episode of Mike Flanagan’s masterful horror drama, one that blended horror and heartbreak in equal measure. With an award-worthy performance by Victoria Pedretti, Flanagan and his ensemble paid off everything set up by the previous four incredible episodes. That the back half of the first season of this great show doesn’t live up to the first isn’t as important to me as some people. Taken as a 5-episode run, the first half is as good as any you’ll find in any series this year, and there’s enough to like in the second half that it doesn’t completely derail. I think the problem most people had was that after the towering emotional achievement of episode five and the technical one of episode six, anything was bound to disappoint. Again, and I’m going to get a little “broken record” here again if you've been reading me for the last few years, when you’ve been doing this TV thing for two decades, you increasingly embrace the new, and “Hill House” wasn’t like anything else on TV this year. It was so good, I watched it twice.

8. “Killing Eve”

One of the true honest-to-goodness buzzed-about hits this year (maybe the only one?), BBC America’s hit show did something virtually impossible and actually increased its viewership with each passing episode. It was a show that people were actually recommending to friends in a way that streaming/binge-viewing—where Netflix is dropping another show before you can actually talk about the first—has virtually eliminated. What got people buzzing? Incredibly smart writing and the magnetic performances from Sandra Oh and Jodie Comer as a cat-and-mouse duo in which neither would probably agree on which one was the feline. A shared obsession between a psychopathic killer and the woman tracking her is a great hook already, but Oh and Comer are so incredibly charming and fascinating that they instantly became a classic TV duo. More than any show this year, I can’t wait to see where this one goes next.

7. “The Good Place”

I’ll admit dear readers to being forking worried at a few points this season. This brilliant NBC comedy—so far and away the best show on network television that it’s almost unfair—completely upended its premise by delivering its protagonists back to the real world, a daring move for a show in which the setting was almost a fluid character of its own for two years. And I wasn’t sure where “The Good Place” was going for a few episodes, ones kept afloat by the stunning skill of the ensemble but missing a small degree of confidence when compared to the first two. And then they really stuck the landing. Even more importantly, this is an annual list, and the last five episodes of season two, which aired in January and February, were downright masterful. This show is funny, smart, moving, and insightful. And I never should have doubted it.

6. “A Very English Scandal”

Likely the least-seen entry in this top ten, I urge you to bookmark this page, drop what you’re doing, go to Amazon Prime and watch this, and then come back later. You won’t regret it. The best thing that Stephen Frears (“Dangerous Liaisons,” “The Queen”) has done in over a decade, this three-hour mini-series dramatizes the events around a notorious scandal in which a member of British Parliament tried to have his gay lover killed. Hugh Grant—having a career renaissance of late with “Florence Foster Jenkins,” “Paddington 2,” and this—stars as the politician and the great Ben Whishaw plays the sexual partner who wouldn’t go away to his liking. Biting, clever, and anchored by two fantastic performances, this is an entertaining reminder that truly dirty politics are not an entirely Trumpian trend.

5. “The Tale”

Does it belong on a film or TV list? I saw it on a big screen at the world premiere at Sundance, but most people only had the opportunity to see it on HBO, so I’m qualifying it as TV (although wouldn’t argue with those who put it on their film list…it’s a line that gets blurrier every year). However you see “The Tale,” see “The Tale.” One of our best living actresses, Laura Dern, stars in this semi-autobiographical story of a woman whose life is turned upside down when her mother (Ellen Burstyn) discovers what she believes is evidence of child abuse when her daughter was a pre-teen. How we compartmentalize and make excuses for traumatic events in our life, how monsters so easily prey on the vulnerable, and the very structure and purpose of biographical filmmaking are dissected here, anchored by great performances from Dern, Jason Ritter, Elizabeth Debicki, and more. It’s a tough watch, but it’s worth it.

4. “Better Call Saul”

The best drama on TV by some stretch works on so many levels simultaneously that I’m not even sure where to start. How about the fact that the writers of this brilliant show had the nerve, just when viewers were truly expecting more tie-ins to “Breaking Bad,” to make their latest season mostly about the arc of the non-“Bad” Kim Wexler? Rhea Seehorn’s performance here is my favorite on any show this year, in any genre, and I’m flabbergasted at the trust the writers placed in her to convey what is so often missing from the fast-paced world of TV—inner monologue. They trust that fans of this show know these characters well enough that they don’t have to explain every detail and twist. So much of television is about characters telling you what they want, how they’re going to get it, and then getting it. “Better Call Saul” completely bucks this trend by presenting us with characters uncertain about their own needs and desires, taking life as it comes to them, whether they’re starting a drop-phone business or stealing a Hummel figurine. And it’s got the best ensemble on TV. By far.

3. “America to Me”

Steve James’ latest project should be essential viewing for all school administrations around the country, and most city politicians as well. In spending a year with the students and staff at Oak Park and River Forest High School, James and his crew created a portrait of life in Chicago in the late ‘10s that will stand the test of time. “America to Me” is a show about listening. It’s made by a filmmaker who listens to his subjects and allows their stories to guide his process. It’s about listening to overworked staff members who may not know the best way to handle the problems in their schools but wake up every day trying to figure it out. Most of all, it’s about listening to the kids—the kids who channel their hopes and dreams into poetry, athletics, or even just trying to graduate. We can only possibly succeed as a country if we start to listen to all of them.

2. “Barry”

I can’t remember the last time that my best-of list was topped by two comedies, but both of these shows are barely comedies. The half-hour structure makes them easily categorizable as comedies and they have more funny beats than dramatic ones, but they’re both shows that do that thing I was talking about way back in the “Maniac” entry: Push the boundaries of genre expectations. HBO’s best show starts as a seemingly predictable fish-out-of-water comedy about a hitman finding friends in an acting workshop in L.A., recalling “Get Shorty,” but becomes something much darker and deeper as the season progresses, landing in a place that’s more Vince Gilligan than Elmore Leonard. This is also the part that Bill Hader was born to play—believable in both Barry’s menace and his likability. In a very strong year for new shows, this was the best.

1. “Atlanta”

What is “Atlanta” about? I’ve watched many of its episodes twice and I’m still not really sure how to answer that question. I do know that it’s not like anything else on TV. When I start on an episode of “Atlanta,” I’m never quite sure what I’m going to get, but I have literally never been disappointed. There’s no such thing as a bad episode of “Atlanta,” through two seasons, and there are several masterpieces. So much has been written about “Teddy Perkins” that I couldn’t possibly add more to that conversation but the thing that not enough people have noted is that this season would be brilliant even without that episode. I really like “Alligator Man” and I love “Helen.” More than most shows in 2018, I feel like people are going to be writing about and dissecting “Atlanta” for many years to come. It is a groundbreaking, daring, brilliant show. And TV critics wouldn’t be so divided on the state of the industry if there were more like it.

ALLISON SHOEMAKER

Runner-ups: “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” “Jesus Christ Superstar Live,” “Howards End,” “Ugly Delicious,” “Doctor Who,” “Superstore,” “Salt Fat Acid Heat,” “My Brilliant Friend,” “Lodge 49,” “Harlots”

20. “A Very English Scandal"

19. “The Terror"

18. “Succession"

17. “Wanderlust"

16. “American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace”

15.” America to Me”

14. “Barry”

13. “Sharp Objects”

12. “American Vandal”

11. “Vida”

10. “The Good Fight”

I was late to the party with “The Good Fight,” the smartest televised look at life after the 2016 election. The first season, which begins with “The Good Wife’s” Diane Lockhart (Christine Baranski) watching the inauguration of Donald Trump and promptly deciding to move to a vineyard in France (spoiler: that doesn’t work out), matches the series from which it spun (“The Good Wife”) in verve and wit. The second does something entirely new.

Creators Robert King, Michelle King, and Phil Alden Robinson didn’t plan to follow Diane under President Trump. Who among us planned on that? The break between seasons gave the show’s writers a chance to process and think about new ways to explore what it feels like to be alive—especially alive and black, female, or both—in this particular moment, and the results speak for themselves. “The Good Fight” has become not just TV’s best, most thoughtful procedural, but a cogent legal series laced through with heady surreality—visual, textual, metaphysical, political. Yet because of where we’re at, that surreality is heightened further. Is that office really full of balloons? Is there actually a pig in the white house? Is that camera still running, and did that person really just get shot? Can life possibly be like this, or am I just high?

9. “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend”

“Riverdale” can take a seat—”Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” is The CW’s most daring series. An almost impossibly bold musical comedy about mental illness that deconstructs the tropes of romantic comedies and explores the ways in which those things intersect, Rachel Bloom and Aline Brosh McKenna’s critical darling (and underseen gem) spent much of its third season in a place as tender and painful as a bruise. With the beginning of its fourth—and final— season, however, ”Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” began to dig into the complicated nature of recovery with undisguised relish. As Rebecca Bunch (Bloom) grows increasingly self-aware, her journey becomes mirrored by that of those around her, creating a throughline of meta-commentary that doubles as a collection of thoughtful, almost gentle character studies—an approach epitomized by the reintroduction of Greg, a recovering alcoholic who’s so changed that he’s now played by an entirely different person (Skyler Astin, taking over from Santino Fontana).

That’s ambitious enough, all by itself. But the musical portion of the proceedings has continued to dazzle, and it’s that element that lends “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” one of the largest visual palettes on TV. The show’s directors (to say nothing of choreographer Kathryn M. Burns and Bloom herself, who conceptualizes the “video” for every musical number on the show) jump into these segments like kids playing in a puddle, bringing us into a demented “Oklahoma” one moment and allowing a supporting character to decry his own profession via the muted colors and jaunty angles of New Jack Swing the next. It’s wild, ambitious, undeniably entertaining stuff. I’ll miss it terribly when it’s gone.

8. “DC’s Legends of Tomorrow”

“Legends of Tomorrow” was once the Arrowverse’s dull-as-stale-bread stepchild, a mess of contradictory elements that added up to a whole lot of nothing. Not so anymore. Nowadays, even the memory of that first season is so remote that it’s almost as if Beebo smashed it all to bits and scattered the pieces throughout the universe. There are more visually accomplished shows out there—”Legends” doesn’t have the luxury of “Game of Thrones” money—but there’s no as willing to throw caution to the wind and simply do whatever seems the most fun. A lot of what happens is familiar territory, but the self-awareness of the series ensures that even the mustiest tropes feel fresh. And sure, this is fluffy entertainment, but the writers’ commitment to character means that while you might call “Legends” a treat, you could never call it junk food. It’s silly, sometimes delightfully stupid, and there’s little to challenge the mind, but if I’m totally honest with you as well as myself, there’s no series I looked forward to with more eagerness than this one. You can keep “The Handmaid’s Tale.” I want the traditional timeloop fun montage.

7. “Atlanta”

I’m not even sure what’s left to say about “Teddy Perkins.” It’s a frankly astonishing episode of television, funnier than most comedies can ever boast of being, scarier than nearly any horror show could hope to be, and as layered as an onion (or an episode of “The Leftovers”). It does more in one scene than many shows could achieve in several seasons. And it’s my second favorite episode of “Atlanta” this year. Donald Glover’s remarkable series met and surpassed the high watermarks of its terrific freshman season, thanks in no small part to a series of stunning turns from Brian Tyree Henry (who’s having a pretty great year all around, not sure if you noticed.) Without “Teddy Perkins,” it would still be among the best things on television. With it? Holy shit.

6. “The Tale”

Behind the lens: Jennifer Fox, documentarian, working on her first narrative feature. Before the lens: Jennifer Fox, loosely fictional entity (Laura Dern), a documentarian unexpectedly in the position of interrogating herself. In her mind: Jenny Fox, age 13 (Isabelle Nélisse), turning her own trauma into a tale that she can bear, writing it down, word by word, until she finds herself believing it. When I first began watching Fox’s brave, shockingly intimate film, my initial response was one of disappointment about its home. A film this good deserves to be seen on the big screen, I thought. But when I’d paused it to walk away and catch my breath 20 minutes later, I reconsidered that notion. HBO’s acquisition of “The Tale” does more for the film than its proposed use as an educational tool would suggest, though that’s undeniably of great value. It allows the viewer to pause, walk away, catch their breath, let out a sob or two, and return to it when equipped to do so, like testing a wounded ankle to see when it will bear all that weight. Exquisite, unforgettable, and something I’ll never watch again.

5. “Pose”

In “Love is the Message,” the Janet Mock-directed, Mock and Ryan Murphy-written sixth episode of “Pose’s” remarkable freshman season, two people confront their own mortality, the painful future that awaits them, and the cruelty of the world in a moment of exquisite joy. They stand together, and they sing from the bottoms of their shoes. Created by Murphy, Brad Falchuk, and Steven Canals, “Pose” steps into the community of New York’s ballroom scene—and more specifically, though not exclusively, the trans women found therein—at a time in which any one of them could at any moment drop dead, the direct result of the AIDS crisis largely ignored by the American government. But while the pain and injustice of that time and place are clear, that’s not what dominates the series, or that scene. “Pose” is a series of joy, and as Mock’s camera captures every flicker of fear, so to does it observe the unbearable loveliness of being alive. Blanca (Mj Rodriguez) and Pray Tell (Billy Porter) breathe in, and it’s like a prayer. Then they stand together and sing, my god, they sing.

4. “The Good Place”

Much has been written about the almost casual manner in which Michael Schur’s thoughtful philositcom burns everything down. With some regularity, the denizens of “The Good Place”—once Team Cockroach, then the Soul Squad, and now, who knows what—see everything they know torn down, only to be rebuilt. Watching Schur, his writers, and the show’s (presumably very busy) production design team relaunch the adventures of Eleanor (Kristen Bell), Chidi (William Jackson Harper), Tahani (Jameela Jamil), Jason (Manny Jacinto), Janet (D’Arcy Carden), and Michael (Ted Danson) would be a thrill in any circumstance. But the show’s commitment to rooting all that tomfoolery in the exploration of what it means to be human and have a conscience at the same time makes it as personal and honest as it is ambitious and absolutely bonkers. That in and of itself is pretty honest—after all, you never know when you might be forced grab a lighter, yell “BORTLES,” and blow your situation up.

3. “One Day at a Time”

Rumors of the demise of the multi-cam sitcom have been greatly exaggerated, and “One Day at a Time” is living proof. The Norman Lear-produced reboot of his classic sitcom of the same name sees creators Mike Royce and Gloria Calderon-Kellett exploring the difficulties and pleasures experienced by the Latinx, immigrant, queer, and military communities with a greater sense of fun than one might think possible after reading such a list. While the contemporary feeling of its characters—played with irresistible panache by a top-flight cast, led by Justina Machado and Rita Moreno—might tempt one who hasn’t seen it to file it away from classics like “Cheers” and “All in the Family,” any viewer who has had the pleasure of witnessing its mastery of the multi-cam format will know better.

That expertise comes particularly in handy in “Not Yet.” The almost defiantly theatrical season finale, which takes place almost exclusively in the hushed hospital room of an ailing member of the family, draws viewers in one monologue at a time, achieving a sense of immediacy and intimacy that was, in this year, almost impossible to match. It’s back next month. I can’t wait. Cue the theme song.

2. “Killing Eve”

“Killing Eve” is the funniest murder show, the saddest black comedy, the most thrilling hangout series and the most casual spy story of the year, and it’s more than those things together. Sandra Oh is perfect. Jodie Comer is perfect. It does more storytelling with one piece of costuming alone than many other shows achieve in an hour, or more. It plays with tropes and plays off your expectation, defies classification while being every inch a cat-and-mouse story, and never stops being a damned good time, even as it explores love, lust, grief, trauma, fear, and the sometimes jarring reality of getting what you want.

1. “The Americans”

I’ve written about “The Americans” at length this year, both for this site and others, so let me just say this. In competitive figure-skating, each skater has a maximum score they can achieve, and that’s determined by the degree of difficulty of the routine they set out to perform. It’s possible to stumble, even to fall, and still to do well, because the essentials are perfect, or because another jump or two succeeds. “The Americans” had a bunch of crazy jumps in this season. Had creators Joel Fields and Joe Weisberg missed one or two, they’d still have medaled. But the trickiest jump of all—the series finale—could not have touched down more solidly and gracefully. The full 200 points are gratefully awarded.

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neal29neal-blog · 6 years ago

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The Leading Slates For Kid.

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