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Cheryl Hines had better curb her enthusiasm. So far her book tour isn’t working.
Hines is out there trying to drum up advance sales for “Unscripted,” her ill timed book about not answering questions about husband Robert Kennedy Jr.
The book is coming on November 11th. So far, with all of Hines’ publicity, “Unscripted” is number 19,793 on Amazon. The public is not clamoring for it, that’s for sure.
See the clip below. Hines takes so long to not answer a question about RFK Jr’s “digital affair” with reporter Olivia Nuzzi that she almost falls asleep. I almost did, too.
I hope Hines is happy with her life choices. She’s destroyed her career, her good will, and any respect anyone had for her. I also hope the publisher hasn’t printed up too many copies of “Unscripted.”
There’s a reporter who’s trying to monetize herself over @RobertKennedyJr.
She’s thrown away her job, her reputation and her fiancé.
“Chainsaw Man — The Movie” brought in $3.4 million last night in previews.
It’s an anime film coming from a TV series you can also watch on Disney Plus. “Chainsaw Man” is a niche release. Does it have legs? Or are they chain sawed? I guess time will tell…
“Deliver Me from Nowhere,” the absolutely great Bruce Springsteen movie, opened soft last night with $850,000 in previews.
Jeremy Allen White and Jeremy Strong are outstanding in Scott Cooper’s movie. Also today, Bruce released “Nebraska 82,” the box set including the long awaited “Electric Nebraska.” That’s the E Street Band version of his famous acoustic album.
Music fans — not just Springsteen fans — won’t want to miss this film.
Last Friday’s “Boston Blue” was missing a couple of things.
Mostly. the Reagan family from “Blue Bloods.”
Donnie Wahlberg stars in a “Blue” spin off that’s a shadow of the original 14 year run series.
The result? Last Friday, numbers were 4.6 million, down from the 5.3 million average of ‘Blue Bloods” final season. And that was with heavy promotion.
That’s a loss of 600,000 viewers.
Tonight is the second episode. Will more old “Blue Bloods” fans tune in? Or do they small a rat, a runaround to get rid of Tom Selleck and the original cast in order to cut costs and move on?
Sequels or spin offs of hit TV shows rarely work. “Frasier” was the notable exception. Back in the day there was “Lou Grant” and “Rhoda.” But shows like “Joey,” born out of “Friends,” died quickly. We’ll see how Blue Boston gets pretty soon.
Hey– maybe “Boston Blue” will revisit Mark Wahlberg’s long ago arrests, conviction, and jail time from the 1980s for racially motivated attacks in Boston. Mel Gibson could play his lawyer. Now, that’s a storyline!
Julian Schnabel is not only a world famous classic artist shown in the best museums and the most important galleries. He’s also a respected filmmaker of award winning movies like “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” “Before Night Falls,” and “Basquiat.”
Schnabel showed his newest film, a much anticipated passion project called “In the Hand of Dante,” at the Venice Film Festival recently. Top critics on Rotten Tomatoes loved it. Bloggers weren’t so sure. Soon more critics will see it, and “Dante” will probably open early next spring.
I got to see “Dante” this week, and it’s magnificent. The movie is based on a literary thriller by the late great author Nick Tosches in which he casts a fictional version of himself — played by an all encompassing Oscar Isaac — on the hunt for a previously unknown manuscript of the famed 13th century poet Dante Alighieri’s “The Divine Comedy.” (FYI Dante’s other great work, “The Inferno,” presented the author as a fictionalized version of himself.)
The Nick character — innocent and earnest at the beginning and something 180 degrees away by the end — is enlisted by a shady mob guy (a perfectly squirmy and sinister John Malkovich) to find the manuscript and authenticate it. Of course “Nick” falls in love with a beautiful associate (Gal Gadot), who’s also in on the effort. He’s also tailed by a psycho mob goon (a surprisingly pungent Gerard Butler in maybe his best work ever). The film proceeds on two levels — Nick’s investigation in black and white, and the imagined “real” story of Dante, which is told in a saturated color palette.
That’s a lot of movie right there but that’s not all: Al Pacino sets the story up, and later director Martin Scorsese has an extended and memorable not-to-be-missed cameo in the Dante plot as a wizened oracle. Jason Momoa — freed from comic book movies — plays a dark, menacing character following “Nick.” Among others in the large cast are the excellent Louis Cancelmi from “Billions” and Sabrina Impacciatore from “The White Lotus.”
“In the Hands of Dante” was shot by Roman Vasyanov alternately like a trip to the Louvre and another to a downtown Italian social club. Because he’s such a gifted artist, Schnabel knows images. Almost every scene of this movie is frame-able. Filmed in photogenic Italy, the production is alive in every scene. It’s a two and half hour movie but there’s nary a slow spot. You can’t take your eyes off of it.
The movie also has a knockout score by Benjamin Clementine, who also has a startling cameo. Schnabel wrote the screenplay with his wife, Louise Kugelberg.
Schnabel still has some slight tweaking and trimming to do, which is no surprise considering this huge undertaking. (There’s a particularly gruesome torture scene that needs a lightening up. Also, the ending is wild, but maybe appropriate for this Italian opera.) He can do it.The director has made complex movies before, like the excellent “At Eternity’s Gate” about Vincent van Gogh. In “The Diving Bell,” most of the movie was from the point of view of the eye of a paralyzed man and received four Oscar nominations.
But in the hand of Schnabel, Tosches’s material comes alive in brilliant and unexpected ways. This is the kind of movie we used to see from the great auteurs of the 70s like Scorsese, who is also executive producer of this film. “In the Hand of Dante” is the kind of exciting work we see infrequently now — like “The Brutalist” — and need so much for cinema to survive.
Rob Schneider is failed ex cast member from “Saturday Night Live.”
He’s also in every Adam Sandler movie. The only reason could be that he’s got incriminating pictures of the Sandman in a vault.
Yesterday, on Twitter, Schneider posted: “FYI… There were NO Children’s Hospitals when I was a kid. Because kids weren’t sick.”
This guy is an idiot, something we all knew. He’s not joking. He really believes this statement.
Children have always been sick. They’re human beings. Schneider wouldn’t know since he abandoned his daughter, singer Elle King, of “Exes and Ohs” fame, and didn’t raise her. She’s spoken out about it often.
Children’s hospitals began opening since before the Civil War. The first one was in 1855 in Philadelphia. The most prominent, St. Jude’s, in Memphis, opened in 1960.
Funniest response among the scathing attacks on Schneider comes from California Republican Jack Kimble. He wrote: “It wasn’t that there were no children’s hospitals. They have been around since before the Civil War. It’s that nobody cared about you enough to take you to one.”
And they say Republicans have no sense of humor!
Schneider has never been acknowledged by “SNL” since his departure, and wasn’t even noticed at this year’s 50th anniversary celebration.
I really miss Norah O’Donnell on The CBS Evening News and apparently, I’m not alone.
The replacement show, with Maurice DuBois and John Dickerson, is down 37% in the demo ratings from a year ago according to Adweek.
The DuBois/Dickerson newscast is also down 17% in total viewers from this time last year.
Not surprisingly, the people at CBS News who made the switch, like Wendy McMahon, are gone from the network.
The word now is that Bari Weiss, the conservative blogger with no TV News experience, may be ready to make yet another change. Reports suggest she’s thinking of hiring Fox News’s only moderate anchor, Brett Baier, to take over the news desk.
Will that work? Walter Cronkite is rolling in his grave over what’s happening with The CBS Evening News. One by one new producers come in and make stupid changes, frustrating the audience.
The current iteration has the double anchors narrating a feature like magazine instead of a hard hitting show a la number 1, ABC. On that show, David Muir — who’s no Peter Jennings — arrives on the air at 6:30pm exclaiming “Breaking News!” and “What we just learned” even if it’s five hours old and a story about a cat up a tree.
Meantime, NBC’s Tom Llamas — for whom NBC Lester Holt forced into semi-retirement — isn’t doing much better. His show is down from last year at this time. Lester was beloved and had no reason to make an exit. NBC thought Llamas, 20 years younger, would grab a new crowd. Instead, 9% of the key demo audience of 25 to 49 year old viewers left the peacock.
Where did all these people go? To Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and so on, where they’re picking up clips of stories and not sitting for a whole half hour to find out if Donald Trump has replaced the Lincoln Memorial with a Steak n’ Shake.
Also: morning network news shows are still in the same order, although the Today show is nipping at the heels of Good Morning America. Today actually beat GMA in the key demo, an and almost tying them in total viewers. CBS Mornings is always third. Adweek says all three shows are in overall ratings decline.
Netflix has a New Year’s gift for “Stranger Things” fans.
They’re putting the final episode and series finale into theaters. The episode will go simultaneous to the unveiling on Netflix.
Netflix releases the first four episodes of “Stranger Things,” episode 5 on November 26th, followed by three episodes on Christmas Day. The final episode comes on New Year’s Eve.
This is the culmination of five episodes of monster chasing for the people of Hawkins, Indiana. You’ve got bet that the final episode will be off the wall.
“Stranger Things” features existing stars like Winona Ryder (Joyce Byers) and David Harbour (Jim Hopper), plus a slew of young people who are now known arond the world: Millie Bobby Brown (Eleven), Finn Wolfhard (Mike Wheeler), Gaten Matarazzo (Dustin Henderson), Caleb McLaughlin (Lucas Sinclair), Noah Schnapp (Will Byers), Sadie Sink (Max Mayfield), Natalia Dyer (Nancy Wheeler), Charlie Heaton (Jonathan Byers), Joe Keery (Steve Harrington), and Maya Hawke (Robin Buckley).
It’s hard to believe Matthew Modine won’t make an appearance as Dr. Brenner, but I have no information on that.
Donald Trump has demolished part of the historic White House, just like he did back in 1979 when he violated an agreement to save architecturally important parts of the old Bonwit Teller store in New York.
Trump is building his $300 million ballroom which he will no doubt name for himself. According to his plans, the ballroom will be full of gold ornaments, like cavity fillings. And like those fillings, they can be removed by future presidents and donated to charity.
The names of the donors, released today, are all the villains in the Trump saga. Billionaire donors, etc. including the Adelsons, Harold Hamm, Apple, Meta — in other words all his cronies and people he’s shaken down. All the usual suspects. A rogues gallery of hideous people.
In the interview, Middleditch said: “To be honest, swinging has saved our marriage. We have different speeds, and we argue over it constantly, but it’s better than feeling unheard and alone and that you have to scurry in the shadows. By the way, it’s now called being “part of the lifestyle.” The term swinging is old.”
He was almost immediately written out of a CBS series called “Plan B” and never heard from again. His wife divorced him and got $2.65 million in a settlement.
Since then, Middleditch has occasional one-offs on prime time, and even appeared in a short lived Broadway play.
Now Middleditch is swinging back into action, kind of, in a low rent sex comedy from success-challenged Vertical Pictures. It’s called “Messy,” and it’s about “a promiscuous love addict who moves to New York City following a tough breakup and sets out on a string of dates in the hopes of finding the right match.”
Sounds about right.
The star and director is Alexi Wasser, whose father the late Julian Wasser, was a famous Hollywood photographer of rock stars and artists. His legendary shot of writer Eve Babitz, naked, playing chess with artist Marcel Duchamp, is one for the records. Julian Wasser was also the photographer who shot pictures of Robert F. Kennedy moments before he was assassinated.
“Messy” also stars Jack Kilmer, Ruby McCollister, Adam Goldberg, Mario Cantone, Ione Skye and Merlot (not Chablis). It will start playing on video on demand and streaming services on Halloween.
PS Playboy has since deleted the full interview, but if you search around you can probably read the rest of.
The old TV series starred Don Johnson as Sonny Crockett and Philip Michael Thomas as Ricardo Tubbs.
The show was created by Michael Mann, who then went on to make a movie version with Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx. It was not a hit.
But you know, “Miami Vice” is a known brand, so why not try again? There are reports today that Michael B. Jordan is signing on as Tubbs for the movie directed by Joseph Kosinski (“Top Gun Maverick”).
So who will play Crockett? I’m hearing that Glen Powell — who’s gone from zero to 100 in the last 18 months — is who everyone wants. It makes sense since Powell lit up “Maverick” and is subsequently everything everywhere all once.
“Miami Vice” is set for release on August 6, 2027 and will still be set in 1980s Miami with all the drugs, pastels, and flamingos.
Jordan and Powell? Box office gold. That would be an event movie.
Dan Gilroy is co-writing the screenplay. How about the music? Look for new versions of “In the Air Tonight” and “You Belong to the City” for starters.
