Movies
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The Amy Winehouse biopic Back to Black will hit theaters on May 10, 2024. Focus Features announced on Tuesday (Dec. 12) that the movie directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson (Nowhere Boy) with a script from Matt Greenhalgh (Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool) will offer a “never-before-seen glimpse into Amy Winehouse’s early rise to fame and […]
Renaissance: A Film By Beyoncé took a major tumble during its second weekend in movie theaters. The tour doc easily topped the box office tally on opening weekend, but in its second frame it is expected to tumble more than 77% from its initial peak. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the movie directed, written and […]
Donald Glover and Maya Erskine (PEN15) step into some major shoes in the first trailer for Amazon Prime’s upcoming reboot of Mr. & Mrs. Smith. The first look at the upcoming series adaptation of the spy vs. spy 2005 original starring Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie as married assassins after the same target — and […]
Fresh off being named TIME magazine’s Person of the Year, Taylor Swift hit the red carpet in New York on Wednesday night (Dec. 6) to support her old friend Emma Stone at the premiere of the actress’ new dark comedy, Poor Things. According to People magazine, Swift made the scene at the DGA Theater in […]
Renaissance: A Film By Beyoncé is expected to top the box office charts this weekend when the concert film by Queen Bey opens on screen across the world. According to Deadline, on what is typically a slow post-Thanksgiving period, the movie is aiming for a $30-$40 million global opening. The film is the second one […]
Rob Reiner is ready to turn it up to 11 again. The writer/director revealed on the RHLSTP with Richard Herring podcast this week that he will revisit one of his most iconic projects when he gets the band back together next year for a sequel to his legendary rock mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap.
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The beloved 1984 film that skewered all things rock is slated to begin filming in February with original stars/writers Christopher Guest (Nigel Tufnel), Michael McKean (David St. Hubbins) and Harry Shearer (Derek Smalls) repriseing their roles as the hapless metal band who once lost a drummer in a “bizarre gardening accident.”
Reiner said he will revisit his role as documentarian Martin “Marty” Di Bergi, telling Herring, “We’re making a sequel… everybody’s back.” Like the original — which featured cameos from Ed Begley Jr., Fran Drescher, Dana Carvey, Billy Crystal, Angelica Huston and Fred Willard — the reboot will feature some even heavier hitters making cameos, including Paul McCartney, Elton John and Garth Brooks, plus a “few other surprises.”
The original found Reiner filming a documentary on one of “England’s loudest bands,” in a film in which most of the dialogue was improvised, with some of the iconic catchphrases — including “turn it up to 11” — becoming part of modern rock parlance; not for nothing, radios in Teslas go to 11.
It follows the self-important rockers on a 1982 U.S. tour to promote their Smell the Glove album, which some retailers refuse to stock because of its sexist cover image. Along the way there is a scheming astrology-obsessed girlfriend, a ill-fated, accidentally, hilariously tiny Stonehenge stage prop and a classic scene where the band loses their way to stage that was inspired by a real-life video of Tom Petty getting mixed up backstage at a show in Germany.
The accompanying soundtrack album featured such ridiculously over-the-top metal anthems as “Hell Hole,” “Tonight I’m Gonna Rock You Tonight,” “Big Bottom” and early hit “Gimme Some Money,” all performed by the movie’s stars.
Though the film did modest box office at the time, it has since blossomed into a midnight movie must-see, even making it onto the Library of Congress’ list of culturally significant artifacts. “No, we never did,” Reiner said of whether he thought the comedy would have such long legs and garner such accolades as the Library honor and making the list of movies worth preserving from the National Film Registry.
In essentially creating the rock mockumentary genre, Reiner recalled screening the film in Dallas and having confused theatergoers coming up to him after and asking, “I don’t understand, why would you make a movie about a band that nobody’s ever heard of? And they’re so bad!”
In an interview with Deadline last year, Reiner hinted at the direction of the sequel. “I can tell you hardly a day goes by without someone saying, ‘why don’t you do another one?,’” Reiner said of the idea to revisit the film for its 40th anniversary. “For so many years, we said, ‘nah.’ It wasn’t until we came up with the right idea how to do this. You don’t want to just do it, to do it. You want to honor the first one and push it a little further with the story.”
At the time, Reiner said the second Tap would follow the band after a long break. “They’ve played Albert Hall, played Wembley Stadium, all over the country and in Europe,” Reiner said. “They haven’t spent any time together recently, and that became the premise. The idea was that Ian Faith, who was their manager, he passed away. In reality, [actor] Tony Hendra passed away. Ian’s widow inherited a contract that said Spinal Tap owed them one more concert. She was basically going to sue them if they didn’t. All these years and a lot of bad blood we’ll get into and they’re thrown back together and forced to deal with each other and play this concert.”
Listen to Reiner talk Spinal Tap sequel here (movie talk begins around 2:00 mark).
Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour concert movie has crossed the $250 million mark in worldwide ticket sales according to distributor AMC Theatres. The Hollywood Reporter said those impressive numbers mean the three-hour-plus musical extravaganza that has found Swifties singing and dancing in the aisles across the planet ranks among the top 20 biggest films of […]
Howard Stern revealed on Monday morning (Nov. 27) that he almost had a role in Bradley Cooper‘s hit A Star Is Born remake. The old friends got together to discuss Cooper’s new Leonard Bernstein biopic, Maestro, but talk soon turned to Stern’s fascination with Cooper’s singing in the 2018 Oscar-winning film in which the actor co-starred with Lady Gaga.
Cooper has become a regular on Stern’s SiriusXM show — with both now saying that they are also friends off the air as well — which might explain why Howard spent several minutes berating Cooper for not going out on the road for a proper tour in support of Star while further heaping praise on his friend’s singing ability.
“It’s really good,” Stern said of the Star film’s music, which included the hit “Shallow.”
The notoriously picky Stern — whose first, and so far only, starring role in film is as himself in the beloved 1997 biopic Private Parts — said that he’s only told a handful of people in his private life about the Star offer from Cooper. “And they look at me like, ‘what the f–k?! You didn’t do it?’,” Stern said of the role that Cooper clarified was eventually written specifically for the person who ended up playing the part.
“This was early-early things swimming in my head when I offered it to you,” Cooper said of his initial thought of including Stern in the mix on the film that also featured Sam Elliott, Anthony Ramos and Andrew “Dice” Clay. Stern said the initial offer was for him to play the brother of Cooper’s troubled singer, Jackson Maine.
“And I went, ‘whoa! You must think I’m a lot better looking than’… they’re gonna be like… what is this movie gonna be like Twins?’ I’m Danny DeVito and he’s Arnold Schwarzenegger?,” Stern joked. The plan was for Stern to play Maine’s older brother/manager, a role Stern said he found intriguing. “I said I’m going to go full-on into it. I’m gonna shave my head, I’m gonna change my whole look,” Stern recalled thinking of what would have been the unthinkable method actor act of buzzing off his signature flowing curly hair.
Cooper said the radio veteran –who often spends large segments of his SiriusXM show lamenting anything and everything he has to do that does not concern the broadcast — did not, as longtime fans might expect, immediately turn down the offer. “You really contemplated this,” Cooper said of the three weeks he waited around for Stern’s answer.
“Man, I would have won him an Oscar too!” Stern joked about the awards that would have surely rolled in thanks to his participation; the film scored eight Oscar nominations and won best original song for “Shallow.”
“But when we started talking about you shaving your head that was very exciting,” Cooper said of the role that was then reworked to fit veteran actor Sam Elliott, who played Cooper’s cantankerous older half-brother/manager Bobby Maine. “Oh it would have been amazing.” And though it did not end up coming together, Cooper said he’s confident he will eventually find the right project to lure Stern back to the big screen.
Cooper is currently out promoting Maestro, a six-years-in-the-making biopic depicting the relationship between American composer Leonard Bernstein and wife Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan).
One of the most multifaceted — and busy — artists working today, Jon Batiste sometimes seems like a superhuman — a seemingly inexhaustible bundle of exuberance, creativity and energy. The New Orleans-bred, Juilliard-trained pianist, singer, songwriter and composer. With his band Stay Human, he spent seven years gaining a huge audience as bandleader on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert; he’s led “love riots” through the streets of New York, playing melodica literally among the city’s inhabitants; he’s won an Oscar and a Golden Globe as co-composer of the score for Pixar’s Soul; and he’s of course won Grammys, five last year alone, including album of the year for his We Are.
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But as the moving new documentary American Symphony shows, Batiste, like so many artists, has a complex private life that his public rarely glimpses. Capturing an especially high-and-low-filled year in Batiste’s life, it interweaves Batiste’s experience as he composes the ambitious titular orchestral work for a Carnegie Hall debut, with the harrowing journey he and his partner, the author-artist Suleika Jaouad, find themselves on when, after a decade in remission, her cancer returns — all shortly before his astounding 11 Grammy nominations arrive.
Directed by Academy Award-winning director Matthew Heineman — who followed Batiste and Jaouad for seven months, filming over 1,500 hours of footage — and coproduced by Barack and Michelle Obama’s Higher Ground Productions, American Symphony opens in select U.S. theaters today before arriving on Netflix Nov. 29 (the film features a poignant new song, “It Never Went Away,” which Batiste wrote with Grammy-winner Dan Wilson, out now on Verve Records/Interscope). On Feb. 4, he could potentially make another significant showing at the Grammys, where he has six nominations, before heading out on his Uneasy Tour: Purifying the Airwaves for the People Feb. 16, supporting his latest album World Music Radio.
In the days leading up to his film’s premiere, he spoke to Billboard about opening up his and Jaouad’s lives to Heineman’s cameras, the importance of artists’ mental health, and why at this point he has to “chuckle” at the Grammy chatter around him.
In the film, we see your composing process up close, and it looks much more collaborative than the usual symphony composer’s may be. Is that your typical process? I’m always composing, and it’s not so different actually with a large-form but also longform piece. It was more about thinking about the form, from point A, B, C, D all the way to Z before starting, and then composing into a form that could shift and change depending on what discoveries I made along the way. When I’m writing songs or instrumental music or just a tune, it can happen in the moment, it doesn’t have to happen before I start. [For a symphony] there’s a lot more pre-planning, and then figuring out symbolically with American Symphony how I wanted to use the music as an allegory for certain values, the philosophy that was underpinning it.
If you think about the term classical music — which I love and has probably the biggest influence on my artistry, besides American music and jazz and New Orleans — every composer that comes from that tradition was drawing on the folk musics and traditions they grew up with, the country and time they lived in. The core quest with American Symphony was: if the symphony orchestra and symphonic compositions were to address America today, if they were invented today and I was the inventor, what would I be drawing from, what would I see in my culture and in the American landscape and the milieu I come from? That was really exciting.
Growing up in the generation where streaming music became the norm, electronic music and all the different technological advancements that we’ve come to now see as the norm — all these different approaches to collaboration and music in general that didn’t even exist back when Beethoven was making the seventh symphony or when Duke Ellington was around, but we can still use the lessons of those compositions. Duke, who’s one of my heroes, if he knew a certain musician in the orchestra had a specific approach to playing high notes, or playing ballads, or leading a section, he’d lean into that and compose toward that, and that’s something I always have a voice for. There’s so much you can speak to that many composers before me were speaking to, but I had a unique opportunity here to do a lot.
Creativity and creating art is clearly an important part of your relationship with Suleika, but at the premiere of American Symphony, it almost seems like a real surprise to her. When you’re at work on new music, do you play it for her?
She’ll hear pieces of things and I’ll play things for her typically in fragments, or in a state where the grandeur of what it will be isn’t obvious yet. As you saw in the film there’s a process of it coming to life that can only happen when I’m in the room with the other musicians. So it’s kind of hard to show that to Suleika in full before it happens, it just has to become what it is through a process of constant listening, refinement, composition. A piece like American Symphony is never meant to be completely finished, it’s meant to be a vehicle that evolves over many many years with different folks who can take ownership of all the themes of the piece, and the form and structure. Fifty years from now, if this is played in another part of the world by different musicians, it would be its own unique version.
Jon Batiste in “American Symphony.”
Courtesy of Netflix
We see a lot in the film how you have to constantly navigate between the public face you show the world and what you’re contending with privately, with Suleika’s illness. Especially when the public seems to expect you to be this joyful person at all times, that seems really challenging.
It’s really something that I’ve struggled with for awhile. And I value parts of it as well — the idea of being able to bring folks a sense of uplift-ment in dark times, as a performer, an entertainer, an artist is something I value. But in general it’s been a struggle to navigate the humanity of being all those things. A lot of times I think that’s the case, which is one of the reasons why such an invasive film like this, and the vulnerability required of our family to share what you see, is something we wanted to move forward with. Sometimes pulling the curtain back is an opportunity for us all to tap into our humanity and not only see me in a certain way and realize, “Wow, these are things we all go through.” We can all grow from seeing it and have a deepened respect for this person we admire.
Suleika Jaouad and Jon Batiste in “American Symphony.”
Courtesy of Netflix
You’re incredibly open in the film about therapy, and about the mental health aspect of being an artist on the level you are. What was behind your decision to be open about this?
I hope it’ll be a beacon for a lot of artists. I fear that when people are successful, especially in a public sense, it creates an illusion of ease. I don’t ever want to make anyone feel lesser, or any artist feel like because they’re struggling in this crazy business with their mental state and fortitude that they’re not just like everybody else. Especially folks who are successful, you never know what somebody has given up or decided to do to get to where they are. We’re all just human beings dealing with the same set of things. It’s better if we show it more, rather than hide it away in a curated social media presence.
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Your stunning performance of “Freedom” at the 2022 Grammys is in the film — contextualized with a very clear picture of what you and Suleika were going through at the time, which makes seeing its exuberance especially astounding. Watching it now, what do you see?
It’s tough to watch the film. I don’t have a good barometer because I’ve only seen it a handful of times over the course of the edits. I do have a sense of what the film is like, and living through those moments, the Grammys performance was very much a lot of catharsis, and also a lot of vindication. Just being present in the moment was a difficult thing for me to do given where Suleika was and how much I wanted to be there with her, but also knowing how much she wanted me to be in the moment I was in. So the performance was a great way of zeroing into the moment and, as it always is for me, just channeling and trying to lift the present to a place of transcendence to what we do on the stage. And that moment in particular was more like that than winning the awards we won — it was just a real manifestation of what I do, and what all those artists in there, what I imagine drives them: the performance, not the awards.
Jon Batiste accepts the album of the year award for “We Are” onstage during tat the 64th Annual Grammy Awards held at the MGM Grand Garden Arena on April 3rd, 2022 in Las Vegas.
Christopher Polk for Variety
We hear in voiceover some of the detractors who were rather loud in the wake of your big Grammy wins. How aware were you of that narrative in the moment, and how did you approach including it in the film, which I assume wasn’t easy?
I’m at a point, to be frank, that I don’t really care. These are things I’ve gotten used to in terms of creating music and doing things that are speaking to the culture, doing things that are counterculture, things that are perceived to be one way when they’re completely the opposite of that. I’ve been perceived to be an institutionalist, and to be not institutional enough. To be a person who is too sophisticated, and to be someone who is dumbing down what they do too much. To be a person who is a part of a fix in the system, someone who comes out of nowhere, and also as the industry darling or the vet or the favored one, who’s constantly had privileges. What that tells me overall, since I’ve been doing this from the age of 15 in New Orleans, is just that I have longevity and I have impact.
Even the fact of the symphony upon its performance at Carnegie Hall — which I unabashedly will say was a cultural moment, if not just for New York then for our country, for music — for there to be no critical review or discussion that was remotely intelligent discourse, with so many firsts [achieved with it that] I’ve lost count? I’m just so used to it. Twenty years in, you just kind of chuckle about it. Eventually, maybe, people will catch on, but I don’t really do it for that. Ultimately it’s just a matter of doing what I’m doing and doing what I love.
Disney boss Bob Iger spilled some super chilly tea on Good Morning America on Thursday morning (Nov. 16), revealing that on the heels of the announcement earlier this year of a third Frozen movie, another Elsa, Olaf, Kristoff and Anna adventure could be in the works as well.
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Speaking to co-anchor Michael Strahan, mouse house CEO Iger said, “Well, I’ll give you a little surprise there, Michael. Frozen 3 is in the works and there might be a Frozen 4 in the works too.” And while Iger didn’t have a ton of information the hint of a fourth chapter in the series that already owns the second and fourth spots on the list of highest-grossing animated films of all-time.
“But I don’t have much to say about those films right now,” Iger added. “But Jenn Lee, who created Frozen, the original Frozen and Frozen II, is hard at work with her team at Disney Animation on not one, but actually two stories.”
Frozen II grossed more than $1.4 billion in 2019, while the 2013 original pulled in more than $1.3 billion, while spawning a universe of beloved characters, Halloween costumes, Disney theme park attractions, video games, a Disney on Ice show, hit soundtrack albums, a Broadway musical and this year’s Disney Frozen: Forces of Nature podcast.
After Iger revealed in a February earnings call that sequels to Frozen, Toy Story and Zootopia were in the works, in June, Tony-winning singer/actress Idina Menzel — who voices Elsa in the films — confirmed that she is definitely on board for the third chapter in the Frozen story. At the time, though, she told Billboard that she was in the dark about what it would look, or sound, like.
“I don’t know a lot,” she said at the time. “To be completely honest, they teased it to us, and I have no idea. They don’t show you a script. They don’t show you anything. All I know is, yeah we are gonna make one, and that’s it. So, I’m like, ‘Cool! I will be able to pay my bills.’”