“SNL” has added four new players to the cast following the departure of seven cast members.
The new guys are Marcello Hernandez, Molly Kearney, Michael Longfellow, and Devon Walker. Season 48 begins October 1st.
Welcome to the cast, Marcello Hernandez, Molly Kearney, Michael Longfellow, and Devon Walker! pic.twitter.com/wWm0VhGziw
— Saturday Night Live – SNL (@nbcsnl) September 15, 2022
Another day, more destruction on CNN.
Don Lemon has lost his prime time show and is being sent to 7am along with Poppy Harlow and Kaitlin Collins. They will host a new morning show, replacing “New Day.”
“New Day” will be gone. John Berman, the only CNN anchor everyone likes, is losing his spot on that show and being sent to No One Knows. His morning co-anchor Brianna Kellar, who was trying to suck up to the regime by criticizing Joe Biden, is also now in the abyss.
New CNN chief Chris Licht is just to going to keep tossing all the pieces of his board game into the air. That’s his plan. He’s removed Lemon from his spot, and Harlow from hers, arbitrarily. CBS should scoop up Berman immediately. Harlow should go to Lester Holt. Escape, people!
What’s next? Nothing good. Every day Twitter is filled with stories from enraged viewers shutting off CNN after hearing crazy pro-Trump pro-MAGA comments. I know CNN is looking for ratings but this whole path is a mistake.
This is NOT CNN.
The first trailer is here for the Whitney Houston biopic “I Wanna Dance with Somebody.” It’s clear from what we see here that this will be a movie about Whitney, the singer, and her music — particularly the creative relationship with record company chief Clive Davis.
We’re not going to get the drugs, the romance with Robyn Crawford, Bobby Brown, or Whitney’s descent into madness. All the singing is from Whitney herself, and Naomi Ackie looks like she inhabits Whitney’s spirit before everything went south. Stanley Tucci is the perfect choice for Clive.
There really should be some kind of warning at the start of Andrew Dominik’s “Blonde” about Marilyn Monroe– “None of this is true.” You would hate to think the casual viewer would find this on Netflix and think most of these events ever happened. They didn’t.
“Blonde” is based on a 700 page novel from 2000 by Joyce Carol Oates in which the writer of many, many novels imagines the story of Monroe, the screen siren who died in 1962 at age 36 from a drug overdose. Born Norma Jean Baker, Monroe had a career that soared like a rocket, crashed and burned with her death and became a Hollywood legend.
The book was turned into a 2001 miniseries for TV, which makes sense since it is very long. There was no need to make this new movie, which runs two hours and 40 minutes and still manages to have big holes that are filled by a lot of artsy fartsy stuff. “Blonde” the movie is a miniseries stuffed into a film. It could easily have been three hour long segments.
The big revelation is that Ana de Armas, who charmed everyone in “Knives Out,” is spectacular as Monroe. Considering that Michelle Williams was so good in the more concise “My Week with Marilyn,” de Armas finds a whole new angle on the Hollywood icon. She holds this unwieldy, often bizarre project together because you just can’t take your eyes off of her.
The movie is rated NC-17 or as we used to say, X, because there’s a lot of nudity and quite a bit of simulated sex that kind of makes you feel bad for Marilyn. I guess Oates’s point is that the public thought of her as the eternal pin up, but in real life she was demeaned for her sexuality by terrible men. One of the few things I liked about “Blonde” is Marilyn often showing her intellectual side to men who just laugh at her. One of de Armas’s best scenes is Marilyn discussing Chekhov with a skeptical Arthur Miller (Adrien Brody, who’s excellent).
But “Blonde” is the kind of movie you need to Google or have a tip sheet handy to see what really happened and what didn’t. Oates just made up a lot of stuff that went into the first movie and is present here, which is too bad. The worst part of this is an imagined gay relationship between Charlie Chaplin, Jr. and Edward G. Robinson, Jr., who were good friends in real life and ladies men. There is no basis in fact for Oates’s story. In “Blonde,” they have three way sex with Monroe and impregnate her. She gets an abortion. And then that abortion — Dominik cuts to a Macy’s balloon style floating fetus a lot — haunts Monroe throughout the film. None of that happened. (If I were Chaplin’s or Robinsons’s descendants, I’d be livid.)
Dominik has also included Oates’s series of letters from Monroe’s long lost father, whom she never meets and never knew. In real life, Monroe’s father was known to her mother and has since been established through DNA. It’s unclear in the movie if Monroe is imagining the letters or if she’s actually receiving mail from him. Either way. it’s a fictional construct and like most everything else in the movie, never happened.
So what about the Kennedys and Peter Lawford? The screenplay is so disjointed that only JFK is seen, and in a very negative light. Bobby Kennedy and Peter Lawford don’t exist, and we have no idea how Marilyn even met the president. (Like a lot of things in this movie, it just happens. For example, we never get to see how Norma Jean — in the movie there’s an e at the end of Jeane — goes from being a tortured little girl to an overnight pin up star. I guess you have to just assume a lot to make it work.)
Real Monroe experts, like my friend Denis Ferrara, are just going to go batshit crazy when they see “Blonde.” But it has does have many fine qualities to offset its length and mishegos. The music by Nick Cave and Walter Ellis is excellent. The cinematography from Chayse Irvin, mixing black and white with fade colors, is arresting. Brody’s Arthur Miller and Bobby Cannavale’s Joe DiMaggio are pungent representations of Monroe’s famous husbands. Julianne Nicholson is frighteningly good as Norma Jeane’s brutal mother.
Oates’s novel may work on that level– a work of fictionalized history is different on the printed page. But after 60 years, you’d think we could get a movie that adhered to some facts. Monroe had friends — like Shelley Winters and Renee Taylor. In the movie she appears to be totally alone, isolated from all connection to normal life. It’s too bad they’re not shown. But “Blonde” is a concoction, Dominik’s self indulgent effort to paint a masterpiece over an already beautiful picture.
“Blonde” gets a very limited theatrical release starting tomorrow in NY and LA, begins on Netflix September 28th.
Eric Clapton’s coming to town. So far, no one cares.
Clapton has a show in Boston on the 16th, and then back to back shows in New York at MSG on Sunday and Monday.
Ticketmaster’s maps reveal seas of blue for all three shows. And not just in the resale market. This is the primary sales. The tickets are largely unsold.
At Boston’s TD Garden, they’re not even using a big chunk of the stadium. And then even, there are plenty of tickets left begging.
There are decent seats at reasonable prices for all shows.
What’s happened to Slow Hand? Well, his insistence on acting like an ass during the pandemic has hurt him. Clapton became outspoken against the vaccine and the lockdown. He issued singles with Van Morrison, who also came out swinging against science, health, and logic.
Despite Clapton being a guitar god and one of the all time great rock and roll artists, he obviously did damage to his image. His stand against the vaccine– he wouldn’t perform in any venue that checked for proof of vaccination — opened up another can of worms. Critics started looking for quotes from the 70s that suggested Clapton was a racist.
The result of all this is poor ticket sales in the most important markets in the US. By Sunday at 4pm, tickets for that night’s show should be very affordable. And considering that Clapton has Paul Carrack and Nathan East with him, and the pandemic has subsided, I’d say what the heck, why not?
Ozzy Osbourne is having a Renaissance.
His second solo album in less than two years, “Patient Number 9,” is a hit. Released last Friday, the album will sell 63,000 copies by Friday according to hitsdailydouble.com.
Ozzy’s last album. “Ordinary Man,” sold 77,000 in its first week back in February 2020.
The amazing thing about all this is that Ozzy’s last album before “Ordinary Man” was released back in 2010. His fans lasted a whole decade and never forgot him!
Ozzy, who suffers from neurological issues, is nonetheless on tour. He’s 73 and nothing will stop him. Last night he played the LA Rams season opener (see below) and killed it.
As has been previously noted, Ozzy, famous manager wife Sharon, and their family are moving back to the UK to film a documentary series. They know who their fans are, and those fans loved their old MTV show.
Ozzy’s place in the record biz is old school, too. Of those 63,000 copies, only 4,000 are coming from streaming. He’s selling CDs, LPs, and downloads. His audience wants to own the music, not just flip through it.
“Blonde” had its Hollywood premiere last night at the TCL theater. Writer/Director Andrew Dominik addressed the packed crowd.
“We’ve been chasing Marilyn’s ghost around Los Angeles. We got close to Marilyn. We shot in the actual apartment she lived in with her mother, we shot in the house she died in. Might be a strange thing to do in a film that is admittedly fictional but to me it’s all fiction. It’s very difficult to step outside of our fears and desires and sink into their own violation. All of us are telling ourselves the story of what’s happening, I’m doing in right now at this very moment, That is perhaps the real subject of this movie.”
Dominik then went on to thank “Netflix for supporting our vision. I want to thank Jeremy and Brad [meaning Pitt, their Plan B productions produced the film.]” He also paid homage to the author, Joyce Carol Oates; her book “Blonde” is which the film is based on. Oates was not there but Dominick remarked ” I spent years inside her head.” He ended with “I hope I make a believer out of you.”
Ana de Armas, who is sensational as Marilyn then told the crowd, that “this screening feels so special. We did the film three years ago. Finally you guys going to see it. This is why it is so beautiful to be here, where Marilyn had been so many times. Hopefully you’ll get to know Norma Jean even more, that you’ll love and respect her even more.”
I spoke with Ana at the after party at Musso & Frank Grill and she told me she but her total trust in Dominick. “I put myself in his hands. It was difficult. I did all the research I could, and tried my absolute best.” Dominick told me that it is indeed a horror film about Marilyn. “It had to be. She was in unbearable fucking pain all her life.” Adrien Brody, who plays Arthur Miller, was there with significant other Georgina Chapman. Bobby Cannavale is a stand out as Joe DiMaggio, he wasn’t able to attend.
The film is NC-17, with nudity and a couple of jaw dropping scenes. De Armas gives a truly brave, powerhouse performance. Dominik’s vision puts together the most known parts of her life in a collage that’s trippy combined with despair. At two hours and 45 minutes, “Blonde” is most definitely ambitious, Dominick goes all in. The photography and production design are tremendous and artful. It’s uncomfortable to watch, but engaging and mesmerizing at the same time. Sure to be divisive, but definitely worth seeing.
Here comes “Babylon” from “La La Land” director Damien Chazelle. The trailer features Margot Robbie, Brad Pitt, Jean Smart, and if you look closely, Tobey Maguire.
The much anticipated film has a huge cast and a strong pedigree, with lots of award winners above and below the line. Paramount is releasing it with strong hopes for Oscar gold. I’m psyched. After “The Fabelmans” and “Empire of Light.” we need some Best Picture contenders.
The 2022 Emmy Awards, you may have heard, were a gigantic ratings disaster.
The NBC show on Monday night scored just 5.924 million viewers, the smallest ever audience. But what did anyone expect?
Monday Night Football was shown not just not on ABC but over at ESPN as well. Their totals came to almost 17 million fans. That didn’t leave much room for the Emmys.
And the Emmys, sorry, looked bad to begin with. The list of presenters was unremarkable. The list of nominees was predictably all from cable and streaming. There was no nod to anything mainstream, network, or otherwise unique. The most praised presentation came from Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Selena Gomez, from the cult “Only Murders in the Building” from Hulu. The best speech was from Sheryl Lee Ralph, but that couldn’t have been promoted because no one knew it would happen.
Did they think giving Geena Davis, not a TV star, an award for promoting gender equality would make anyone tune in? What, are you kidding? If I had been watching TV Monday night (I was in Toronto seeing cool films), I would have flipped over to baseball or football immediately. How about tributes to popular people? Anniversary reunions of beloved TV casts? Something for the people who actually watch TV?
Indeed, the Emmys ignore the shows that get the 3 to 5 million viewers a night per show, like “Ghosts” and “The Conners.” Or even “This is Us.” The cable shows they honor, all high quality and “in,” get less than a million viewers, some less than half a million.
So, you know, NBC was lucky to get 6 million people. You reap what you sow.
Just when you thought Fox Searchlight would just be a legacy, Disney Searchlight is back in the Oscar race.
Yesterday, the now slimmed down to one name– just Searchlight-debuted back to back hits at the Princess of Wales Theater in Toronto.
“Empire of Light” directed by Sam Mendes has been a little divisive so far on Rotten Tomatoes. But I’ll fight anyone who didn’t like it. Starring Olivia Colman, Toby Jones and incredible newcomer Michael Ward, “Empire of Light” is exceptional filmmaking. I had no qualms about it. Maybe it’s because it’s set in 1981 Britain by the sea and features ska hits from the Specials and others. But it’s also about the restorative power of films, a moment 40 years ago when theaters still meant something.
Colman plays Hilary, a damaged character, an older woman who suffers from schizophrenia and goes off her meds to feel alive. It’s Ward’s Stephen, a much younger man who is also Black, whose love, attention, and friendship save her. Roger Deakins’ precisely lush cinematography and a gorgeous art deco set of the Empire Movie Theater underscore this film’s beauty. Colman is set for an Oscar nomination, the whole film is awards worthy.
Searchlight’s second film of the day is the already much ballyhooed “Banshees of Inisherin” from writer-director Martin McDonagh. Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson are pals on a remote island off the coast of Ireland. Gleeson suddenly “ghosts” Farrell, dropping him for no apparent reason after a long friendship. Both actors are sensational although it’s Farrell who outdoes himself with a brilliantly textured performance. They should each get Oscar nods. McDonagh, whose “Three Billboards” was an awards favorite just three years ago, is a stellar playwright who creates memorable characters. Some of “Banshees” is a little grisly — be warned — and things take a bad turn in the third act, but this is lovely work and not to be missed.
And, you know what? It was great to hear the old 20th Century Fox theme music before each film. It warmed the heart!