MOVIE
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Joe Jonas and Khalid are honoring members of the military on Veterans Day (Nov. 11) with the premiere of the video for their ballad “Not Alone.” The sweeping song appears on the soundtrack to the upcoming Korean war drama Devotion (Nov. 23), which stars Jonathan Majors, Glen Powell and Jonas.
In a sneak peek of the Quran Squire-directed visual posted by People, the director explains that the shoot took place at Hangar 21 in Fullerton, California, where the singers lip synched their bits from the dramatic song co-written by Ryan Tedder and Harv in front of the actual vintage war plane used in the film.
“We definitely spoke about the idea of shooting this video as a separation of my two passions from music and acting,” Jonas told People. “I’m not playing a character in this video, I’m myself. But we wanted the video to speak to the raw emotion of the song, so everything from the clothing to actually having one of the planes we used in the film.”
“Another step on your own/ Another mile that you’ve flown/ And I’ve been right by your side/ There’s so much more than you see/ Like the wind that blows through the trees,” Jonas sings on the first verse, which swells into the sweeping chorus: “You are not alone/ I watch over you, ooh/ Won’t let you go, you gotta know, you’re not alone/ You are not alone.”
Jonas told the magazine that he was eager to collaborate with his friend Khalid on the song, explaining, “Having him part of this co-write and also his beautiful voice [being] part of this brought it to a whole new level.” Khalid said he felt the same way about being part of the credit sequence track from the biographical drama based on the 2017 book Devotion: An Epic Story of Heroism, Friendship and Sacrifice about two pilots who were among the most celebrated wingmen during the Korean War.
“I’m very thankful that Joe reached out to me to be a part of this. I think that the message is really special,” Khalid said. “The movie, he tells me, is incredible. I can’t wait to see it for myself. And this is just a beautiful experience all around. Good vibes, good people, good energy. And I can’t wait for you guys to hear the song and see the movie.”
Check out previews of the “Not Alone” video below.
If you caught a glimpse of Ryan Reynolds and Will Ferrell’s promo clip for their upcoming holiday movie musical Spirited on Monday (Nov. 1) and something seemed a bit off with their voices there’s a very good reason. “I’m excited for you to see our movie musical, Spirited,” Reynolds says in a halting, foreign-sounding voice as he lounges by a roaring fire with his co-star.
“Now, we want to dispel the rumors that we didn’t do all the singing ourselves. This is 100% pure Ryan and Will here,” Ferrell explains for the doubters out there who wonder how two comedic geniuses not known for their vocal abilities were tapped to topline the Apple TV+ original film that turns the beloved Charles Dickens holiday tale A Christmas Carol on its head.
Reynolds asks for a brief break just a few second in, during which he hops on his walkie talkie to speak with someone in the recording studio. “Get your act together, your lip synching is for s–t,” the Deadpool star berates the heavily accented voice-over artist who is clearly doing all the talking for the two actors. The camera then cuts to none other than Milli Vanilli singer Fabrice Morvan, who, along with late partner Rob Pilatus is best known for the lip synching scandal that resulted in the duo being forced to return their best new artist Grammy in 1990 after it was revealed that they didn’t sing in concert or on their hit records.
“Sorry Ryan, it’s been a long time since I’ve done this,” Morvan sighs. The full trailer for the film that also stars Octavia Spencer dropped on Wednesday morning (Nov. 2); Spirited hits theaters on Nov. 11 and premieres on Apple TV+ on Nov. 18. In the re-imagining, Reynolds plays Clint Briggs, who turns the tables on the Ghost of Christmas Present (Ferrell) in a remix of the Dickens tale of hope and regret that, for the first time, tells the story from the three ghosts’ perspective.
Spirited was directed by Sean Anders (Daddy’s Home) and features original songs by Oscar-winners Benj Pasek and Justin Paul (La La Land).
Check out the Morvan bit and the full movie trailer below.
Members of Duran Duran teased a 2023 tour, saying they would return to the U.S. and Europe, and lead singer Simon Le Bon revealed his favorite U.S. venue of all time.
In an onstage chat at Hollywood’s Dolby Theatre on Thursday (Oct. 27), before premiering their docu-concert film, A Hollywood High, the British new wave legends — Le Bon, keyboard player Nick Rhodes, bassist John Taylor and drummer Roger Taylor — confirmed they will be back on the road next year.
“We are going to be touring again next year,” John Taylor said. “Nothing is confirmed yet, but we will be coming back to the Los Angeles area. We are going to be in Europe, we are going to be in the U.K.”
Roger Taylor added that the band will hit “all the cities that we didn’t do in the U.S.”
Duran Duran has kept up a busy touring schedule in 2022, playing 35 dates including Midsummer at Skansen near Stockholm and Sommerstemning Lillestrøm near Olso and headliner performances at Tuscany’s famed La Prima Estate Festival near Lido di Camaiore and a special one-night engagement at Caledonian Stadium in Inverness, Scotland.
The band spent August touring U.S. arenas, including a stop at Madison Square Garden in New York on Aug. 25, and an epic three-night run at the Hollywood Bowl for the release of their fifteenth studio album, Future Past.
The band is slated to perform a Halloween show on Monday at the Wynn Las Vegas’ Encore Theatre but would not reveal their costumes — though they did rule out dressing as Santa Claus (Rhodes), an M&M (John Taylor) or a jelly fish (Le Bon). Rhodes said his recent trip to a costume store left him “quite cross” because it was dominated with Christmas wear. “All the fabulous creatures were gone,” Rhodes said.
Responding to an audience member question, Rhodes said the band may also release their next album, Reportage, in 2023. “It needs a little work, but it’s possible,” he said.
On Thursday, Duran Duran celebrated Le Bon’s birthday (which is also his father’s) with the movie premiere audience — which sang happy birthday to him before the 75-minute film screened in Dolby Vision-Atomos. The film delves into the band’s early history and connection with Los Angeles to set up a performance earlier this year on the rooftop of the Aster, a private members club in Hollywood. While the group performs at sunset a drone captures sweeping shots in the background of the Hollywood sign and the Capitol Building, which at one point during the show was lit up in the yellow and light blue of Ukraine’s flag in a show of support for the nation’s effort to repel an invading Russia.
The band confirmed that in its four-decade history it had never performed a show on a rooftop, but that it made more sense during pandemic. “We kind of had to be talked into it,” John Taylor said, noting that the band initially planned to perform on a flatbed truck driving along Sunset Boulevard to promote their three-date Los Angeles swing. But that “started getting problematic,” Taylor said. “There was a point where there was a slope. And we were like, ‘How are we going to keep the drums on this?’”
Duran Duran said that the rooftop gig wasn’t intended initially to be turned into a film. “We document a lot of what we do, and it generally just goes into the archive and nobody every sees it,” John Taylor said. The show “was essentially a showcase to launch the American tour. And the fact that we didn’t know we were making a movie, you get an authenticity that you wouldn’t get if we knew we were making a film.”
Roger Taylor said that co-director Gavin Elder “kind of snuck up on us with this film. He didn’t’ really tell us he was making a movie … and [as a result] it’s very real.”
The film hits theaters in the U.S. and around the world on Nov. 3.
While the rooftop was a new special memory for the band, when asked by an audience member what was their favorite U.S. venue of all time, Le Bon enthusiastically endorsed Denver’s Red Rocks Amphitheatre. “You go there, and you look at it and it looks like some ancient alien, space-faring race had just dumped this spaceship there a million years ago,” he said, “and we turned it into a music venue.”
Additional Reporting by Dave Brooks
Four long years after the culture-shifting debut of Black Panther, its sequel, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, took over Hollywood on Wednesday night (Oct. 26) for its world premiere. There was one major piece missing, though, in Chadwick Boseman’s absence, as the cast and crew talked about moving forward without him.
Ryan Coogler, who returned to co-write and direct the sequel, rewrote his original premise following Boseman’s death in August 2020, noting that “the best way I got through was leaning on my collaborators.”
“Chadwick had people who were in his life creatively, as well as family, and we were in close contact with those people, very close specifically with his wife, Simone, and his creative partner Logan Coles,” Coogler — who wore a gold chain featuring Boseman’s image on the carpet — told The Hollywood Reporter of consulting the late star’s loved ones during that rewrite. “We were staying tapped in with them as much as we could, and it gave us the space to create, but obviously we were seeking out their opinion all the time. We’re looking forward to sharing it with everybody.”
The cast also came together to support each other on set, as star Danai Gurira noted that the grief particularly hit her when walking into T’Challa’s throne room, where Boseman sat in the first film. “I hadn’t seen that throne since we had lost him, so the last time I had seen that throne he had been sitting in it,” she said.
Angela Bassett, who plays T’Challa’s mother, Queen Ramonda, had to be the one to “sit on that throne and fill it. It was very daunting, it was very important. We all held it in great reverence,” she said, while also revealing that the cast visited Boseman’s resting place before they started shooting.
“We were able to do that to give love and feel his spirit and stand there with him before we did one frame of anything,” Bassett said. “That was such an important grounding for us because, as you can imagine, emotion was all over the place. People are on the verge — his [onscreen] sister, his love, his general, all of us. I’m getting goosebumps now. We were on the verge of tears, of ‘How are we going to do this, go on without him?’”
“We did with our full hearts, our full effort and really seeking to honor our brother,” Gurira added. “We can just hope and pray that it’s received that way and that people have an experience with it as a result of that.”
Another major story surrounding the film is that Rihanna will debut new music on its soundtrack, marking her first recording since 2016 with single “Lift Me Up.” Coogler said for this film they were “looking for artists who would embody it thematically,” similar to the success he had with Kendrick Lamar on the first Black Panther. Rihanna, who will be headlining the Super Bowl Halftime Show next year, was at the top of the list.
“Rihanna, man, we knew she was at a point in her life as well where she was focusing on different things — focused on business, motherhood, which is a big theme in our film. We were holding out hope that maybe it could work out and boy did it for this song,” Coogler teased. “I can’t wait for people to hear it.”
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever sees the return of stars Letitia Wright, Lupita Nyong’o and Winston Duke, in a story of Wakanda following the death of King T’Challa and the crowning of a new Black Panther. Michaela Coel and Tenoch Huerta join as newcomers to the world, with Huerta as Marvel mutant Namor.
With a character who spends much of his time underwater, Huerta had to learn to swim for the role and has been flattered to see the internet’s (frequently thirsty) reaction to his shirtless appearance. “It feels so good. The people are giving their love and their passion,” he said. “All of them are embracing the character and are embracing all the narratives behind it.”
And while Black Panther broke box office records and made history with a best picture Oscar nomination, Bassett and husband Courtney B. Vance have some bold predictions for the sequel.
“He says the second is going to be better than the first, it’s going to be greater than the first,” Bassett said of Vance, though he hadn’t yet seen the film. “Reading the script, the attention to detail that Ryan as director and co-writer with Joe Robert Cole put into this and just trying to get it right — What is the story that we want to tell? Where do we want to go? Who is carrying this world on when your heart is destroyed? The mothers. I think they did an excellent job.”
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever hits theaters Nov. 11.
See some of the red carpet interviews below.
This article originally appeared on The Hollywood Reporter.
Three weeks after Apple debuted Antoine Fuqua’s Emancipation in Washington D.C., the Will Smith-starrer screened for an intimate crowd in Los Angeles that included Rihanna and boyfriend ASAP Rocky, Tyler Perry, Kenya Barris, music producer Corey Smyth, celebrity stylist Fawn Boardley and writer-producer Esa Lewis, among others.
Perhaps the most notable guest in the room — aside from Smith himself — was Dave Chappelle.
The superstar comedian recently finished a sold-out European arena tour opposite co-headliner Chris Rock, who was slapped by Smith on stage at the Oscars. The slap seen round the world led eventual best actor Oscar winner Smith to being banned from the show for 10 years.
During stand-up sets in the months since the Oscars, Rock hasn’t shied from addressing the slap though he’s kept most of his comments relatively brief. Just last month at a show in the U.K., however, both Rock and Chappelle broached the subject with Rock saying, “the motherf—er hit me over a bull—t joke, the nicest joke I ever told.” Chappelle also took aim at Smith saying that he “did an impression of a perfect man for 30 years.”
While it’s unclear how they came together for this special screening, several attendees took to Instagram to share how special it was, with Smith calling it an “EPIC night!!” Barris opened up a bit more, posting that “this night was truly one for the books! An amazing and brilliant group of friends got together and witnessed TRUE ART.”
He continued: “The conversation after was the effect of what anything and everything we as creatives do in this industry hope for.” He credited Chappelle for hosting and the comedian is seen in one of the images speaking to the other guests presumably during the post-film dialogue.
“I’m still haunted by Emancipation,” wrote Perry. “It’s truly powerful, moving and captivating. And the conversation afterwards with this group was legendary. Thank you Will Smith for the preview!” Based on a true story, Emancipation follows Peter (Smith), an enslaved man who runs away from his plantation in search of his family, outwitting cold-blooded hunters and surviving Louisiana swamps along the way.
Fuqua directed and executive produced Emancipation from a script by William N. Collage. The film is produced by Smith and Jon Mone through Westbrook Studios, Joey McFarland through McFarland Entertainment and Todd Black through Escape Artists. Chris Brigham, James Lassiter, Heather Washington, Cliff Roberts, Glen Basner and Scott Greenberg served as executive producers. The film is due to be released in select theaters on Dec. 2, before it hits Apple TV+ on Dec. 9.
Check out Smith’s post about the screening below.
This article originally appeared on The Hollywood Reporter.