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Barry Manilow is taking the bitter with the sweet.
He has an unexpected hit with the remixed version of an old song. At 74, that’s pretty swell.
But Barry’s health remains an issue. He’s posted a message to fans on Instagram that his doctor will not let him do his big arena shows — yet. Barry is recuperating from lung cancer surgery and wants to get back in front of his fans.
Listen, he needs to heal! He says when he comes back he will COME BACK!
As for that single, “Once Before I Go,” Clive Davis got Babyface to remix it, and now Barry has a hit on what we used to call Easy Listening Radio. It’s a little schmaltzy, but you’ll see why people are singing along to it.
Nancy Guthrie was discovered kidnapped from her Tucson home on February 1st.
So today, three weeks later, the Pima County Police have finally blocked off her road, put up barriers, barricades, one way signs, and no parking signs.
You never want to be the victim of crime in this neighborhood!
Intrepid self described “gonzo” reporter Jonathan Lee Riches has been on the scene for all three weeks. His Twitter X account and website are full of updates that come constantly whether they pan out or not.
Sometimes JRL, as he likes to be called, gets ginned up because it looks the police are onto something. But as we all know, nothing of usefulness has materialized thus far.
It’s hard to an actual ZERO rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
But “Psycho Killer,” a horror movie, has achieved that status.
“Psycho Killer” is directed by Gavin Polone, whose credits in film are producing movies like “Zombieland” and movies with “dog” in the title. He also has TV production credits. If his name seems familiar it’s because you might have seen it on the credits for “Curb Your Enthusiasm.”
“Psycho Killer” is released by Disney’s 20th Century Studios. It’s made $760,000 over Thursday and Friday. They’ll be lucky to have a weekend take of $1.5 million.
Here’s the description from Rotten Tomatoes, whose Audience Meter has given the movie a robust 33%.
Following the brutal murder of her husband, a Kansas highway patrol officer (Georgina Campbell) sets out on a journey to track down the perpetrator. As the hunt progresses, she comes to realize the man responsible (James Preston Rogers) is a sadistic serial killer, and the depth of his mental depravity and his sinister agenda is more twisted than anyone could have imagined.
When you book a magazine cover, you’re making a bet on their new project being a hit.
Vanity Fair rolled the dice on Margaret Qualley in a movie called “How to Make a Killing.”
And now the movie is dead.
“Killing” had no Thursday previews. It was rated 56% on Rotten Tomatoes. So we knew what was coming.
Last night, Friday, the A24 flick took in just $1.67 million. With a massive snowstorm looming, the weekend take will be lucky to hit $5 million.
Even if the budget was $40 million — largely because of Powell’s salary — there’s no way “Killing” won’t be a write off. Straight to VOD and airplanes. It actually looks like a plane movie.
None of this is Qualley’s fault. Her cover should have been in conjunction with a hit. But now Vanity Fair is stuck with a cover story attached to a dud movie. Ouch!
They know it, too. The story itself doesn’t appear on landing pages of their website. It’s been buried somewhere in the search engine.
Should be a good topic of conversation at their Oscar party on March 15th.
PS! I missed a good joke. Now A24 is betting on a movie called “Pillion.” So I could have said, “How to Make a Pillion”! Thanks, I’ll be here all weekend!
This past week, from his Super Bowl appearance, Bad Bunny sold at least 220,00 albums.
Most of that was from his now number 1 album, “DEBÍ TIRAR MÁS FOTOS,” which sold 138,793 copies according to hitsdailydouble.com. Most of those sales were from streaming, as “Debi” took over the Spotify chart.
Donald Trump and the Republicans called Bad Bunny a “loser” and claimed no one understood what he was singing about, and so on. Well, you can see the result.
Meantime, there are no Kid Rock albums in the top 50. Kid Rock, who this week posed a sort of homoerotic work out video with RFK Jr, had a fleeting hit right after the Super Bowl which has dropped to number 19.
U2 and Mumford & Sons have the top 2 albums on iTunes, by the way. Number 3 at the moment is Hillary Duff’s sort of weak tea 80s sounding pop comeback album.
There’s a lot and a little going on with octogenarian publisher Rupert Murdoch.
Nis second wife, Anna, has died at 81. She was the mother of his “Succession” children Lachlan, James, and Elisabeth.
In the 1980s, Anna Murdoch was a “name” we knew mostly from Liz Smith’s column in the New York Post. Liz was constantly throwing in plugs for her boss’s wife and the “novels” she published.
Rupert, now 94, was thirteen years older than Anna. But that didn’t stop him from taking a lover and new wife in Wendi Deng, who was even younger after. Anna divorced him in 1999. (They’d been married 23 years.) The settlement was said to be 1.7 billion pounds sterling. (Some say it was only $100 mil, which ain’t bad either!) It was reported to be the largest divorce settlement ever at that time. Anna must have signed quite the NDA because no one heard about her again.
I guess we would know more if we’d read Gabriel Sherman’s book about Murdoch called “Bonfire of the Murdochs: How the Epic Fight to Control the Last Great Media Dynasty Broke a Family –– and the World.” Alas, no one read it. Published February 3rd, “Bonfire” is now at number 7,921 on amazon. Sherman’s book had almost no publicity. It feels like maybe Simon and Schuster killed it. Who knows?
Anyway, rest in peace Anna Murdoch (who married a couple more times after the divorce). You had your moment in the sun, that’s for sure.
I knew Billy Preston pretty well over the years. He never discussed his personal life, whether he was straight or gay or anything else. He was extremely private and everyone who knew him understood that.
So why for some reason would a filmmaker make an intrusive film about the “Fifth Beatle” call it a tribute? I don’t get. But that’s what Paris Barclay has done with “That’s the Way God Planned It,” opening in very limited locations today.
Billy was a rock star, yes. He was the first musical guest on “SNL” in 1975 after having massive hits like “Will It Go Round in Circles” and “Nothing from Nothing.” He played on Beatles sessions for “Let it Be” and “Abbey Road,” all of which you can see in Peter Jackson’s “Get Back” documentary. He’s the only artist credited with the Beatles, on “Get Back.”
There’s lots more music in Billy’s life. He gave Stephen Stills the title “Love the One You’re With.” Keith Richards credits him for the riff in the Stones’ “Miss You.”
You feel in the documentary that Barclay is less interested in all than whether Billy might have been molested as a child musician, or whether or not being secretly gay turned him into a drug addict. Billy would be mortified to see this movie, and to see people he thought were friends making wild guesses just to satisfy the director. That’s not a way to show respect to a great musician.
It’s not just that Barclay makes these points once, but he keeps circling back to them. I’d have rather seen more clips of Billy singing, and playing the organ, and dancing. His contribution to the Beatles’ stunning last albums was even more than just music. As they say, his presence in the studio made them straighten up and get work done, and not bicker or get sidetracked.
So take “That’s The Way God Planned It” with a container of salt. Don’t forget, Billy co-wrote “You Are So Beautiful” and “With You I’m Born Again,” two incredibly romantic, hopeful songs that represented him the way he wanted, not someone else’s concept of him.
