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There are two more hours of the Janet Jackson documentary tonight on A&E.
The first two hours last night were a little more revealing and revelatory. Tonight’s first hour is more like an “E! True Hollywood Story,” which is still fun and worth watching especially since we’re all snowed in.
The most interesting part of tonight’s first episode is video of Janet and brother Michael Jackson writing the song “Scream” together. Unfortunately, A&E gave that clip to “ET” so it’s been available for a few days. But seeing Michael at work and in a normal, human give and take with his sister is refreshing.
There’s also footage of Janet and husband Rene with advertising people and Coca Cola execs at a conference table getting ready to sign a deal for commercials. But Janet says when Michael’s 1993 child molestation accusations came out, the deal was quashed. “Guilt by association,” she says. (Not ‘guilty by association’ which is how the press came out recently. There’s a difference.)
Janet lost the Coke deal, but she persevered. She released her fifth hit album, got a lot of press for her “scandalous” Rolling Stone coverage, and made the movie “Poetic Justice.” There’s footage of Tupac Shakur smiling and laughing on “Arsenio Hall.” talking about kissing Janet. Poor Tupac: a cloud of violence hovers over his memory. But he was very engaging.
By the end of this segment, Janet ditches and divorces Rene. He sued her for $10 million and they settled. But we have Rene to thank for a decade of videography. He was smart enough to chronicle and keep everything. (I’m sure he charged these documentary people an arm and a leg for the rights.) Now Janet is on her own, dating Jermaine Dupri, and about to have her Super Bowl debacle. That’s in the last episode, which we may all have to watch together since the press doesn’t have it yet.
There’s a lot missing from this four hour extravaganza. That’s what happens when the subject has editorial control. But the Janet documentary on A&E is breezy entertainment for a bad weekend. You get the gist of the situation if not the gory details. You could do worse.
Now that Joni Mitchell has thrown in with Neil Young, the question is: who’s next?
Which legacy rockers will join Neil and Joni and remove their music from Spotify in protest of Joe Rogan.
Rogan, an anti-vaxxer who’s tested positive for COVID, continues to disseminate misinformation on his Spotify radio show/podcast. He’s paid millions by the streamer to do it, and they don’t censor him in any way.
Pulling music off Spotify isn’t easy, especially when many artists have sold their rights to corporations for big payouts. Neil and Joni each control their own catalogues.
But who will join them? Jackson Browne? Bonnie Raitt? David Crosby, Stephen Stills, and Graham Nash? Bruce Springsteen? Paul Simon? Stevie Wonder? Bob Dylan? All of these people are very principled and have stood up for causes in the past like No Nukes. But this means taking a hit in the pocketbook. Not a big hit, because legacy artists do not have big streaming numbers. But if more join the cause, Spotify will have a huge PR headache. They’ve already seen their stock price fall by $20 since the beginning of the week.
I’ve decided to remove all my music from Spotify. Irresponsible people are spreading lies that are costing people their lives. I stand in solidarity with Neil Young and the global scientific and medical communities on this issue. Joni Mitchell
Neil Young’s old friend and fellow Canadian, Joni Mitchell, has come out swinging in solidarity with him. Joni says she wants all her music off Spotify, too. Forget Barry Manilow! Joni is incensed by Joe Rogan’s disinformation campaign on the streaming service and won’t stand by idly while it’s promoted.
Joni has also offered up a link today to a letter from dozens of scientists addressed to Spotify called
I’m reprinting this review from September 2020. Don’t hesitate to seek out “Rifkin’s Festival” and “Rainy Day In New York” which are now on Amazon Prime, other streaming services, and on DVD. Of course there are also 45 or more other Woody Allen movies to see including two dozen classics from “SLeeper” and “Bananas” to “Annie Hall” and “Manhattan,” “Zelig” and “Broadway Danny Rose,” “Broadway Danny Rose,” “Hannah and Her Sisters” and “Radio Days” to “Crimes and Misdemeanors,” “Match Point,” “Vicki Cristina Barcelona,” “Midnight in Paris,” and “Blue Jasmine.”
Woody Allen‘s “Rifkin’s Festival” opens the San Sebastian Film Festival in Spain on Friday night. Woody won’t be there because of the pandemic travel restrictions. The stunning Gina Gershon (her best work, brava) will be on hand but Wallace Shawn, Richard Kind, Douglas McGrath, Tammy Blanchard and Steve Guttenberg can’t make the trip. It’s too bad because they would have been lavished with applause and a standing ovation. I hope Gina really enjoys herself. She deserves it.
It seems impossible but Woody Allen will be 85 in December and he can still do it, he can still make a trenchant, absurd, fantastically funny comedy that is on its face improbable but altogether winning. Almost from the very beginning of this story about an unhappy couple who travel to the very same San Sebastian Film Festival you are laughing from down deep. And of course, all the big Woody themes are in place: why are we here? what’s the meaning of life? And what about death?
The age difference between 76 year old Wallace Shawn‘s Mort and 58 year old Gina Gershon‘s Sue shouldn’t rouse much ire among Woody’s critics. Neither should the involvement of Spanish beauty Elena Anaya, who is 45. There’s no “robbing the cradle” here. All the characters are adults and they know what they’re doing, or at least it seems like it until they become lost in Woody’s inevitable cat’s cradle of relationships gone awry.
Gershon is a movie publicist who’s married to a neurotic film teacher and failed novelist (Shawn). Her client at the film festival is a hot young French director played by Louis Garrell, who of course is handsome and shallow. Mort loathes him. Shawn stands in for Woody: a hypochondriac questioning life and death who seeks out a local doctor who happens to be beautiful and married to a mad man Picasso-like painter. As Sue becomes more involved with the director, Mort is set loose in San Sebastian to find and make trouble.
The film is punctuated by Mort’s black and white dreams, partially based on his teaching classic foreign films but a throwback to Woody’s parodying of Ingmar Bergman and Jean Luc Godard, among others, in his own early films. Is Woody repeating himself? Hardly. I think he’s starting to close the circle from the beginning to the end of his long, illustrious career. This won’t he his last film, god willing, but he’s at a point where he’s revisiting some old themes and poking fun at himself as much as the fabled directors who influenced him.
(I’ll stop here just to tell you that two time Oscar winner Christoph Waltz makes a long cameo toward the end which, for Woody Allen fans, as well as those of Max von Sydow and “The Seventh Seal,” is a spectacularly funny surprise.)
The setting of the festival is perfect for Woody, who can then move his eccentric and self involved characters through all the machinations one finds in such a place. The background stuff is not to be missed– the junkets, the publicists, the promotion of the films. For anyone who’s ever been to a film festival, these touches are the rainbow sprinkles on a delicious dessert. Listen for the quips, they fly by before you can finish your guffaw.
And then of course supporting characters emerge to further along the main quad’s inevitable collisions. I loved seeing Steve Guttenberg, of “Cocoon” and “Police Academy” fame, rise to this occasion. And Emmy winning Tony nominee Tammy Blanchard is a wonderful surprise herself — someone please add her to the imdb page for this movie.
As usual three time Oscar winner Vittorio Storraro gives a Woody Allen film its sumptuous look, and this might be my favorite so far. He certainly made me want to visit San Sebastian ASAP.
And this Mort: Wallace Shawn is a character actor. He’s a spice, never the main course. At 76, he’s made so many films and plays and TV shows better by his presence but I don’t recall him every carrying a whole movie. He’s the anti-lead, anti-sex symbol, a kind of proud gopher burrowing his way blissfully through this mess. He never once second guesses himself despite being called a grouch and a curmudgeon. He believes in himself almost to distraction. He’s his own comic relief. And that’s why his performance works.
Will Americans ever see “Rifkin’s Festival”? This film, like “Rainy Day in New York,” should have been at the New York Film Festival. We still haven’t officially seen “A Rainy Day in New York,” although today I’ve reported it finally has a distributor. Twenty years from now, film fans will think people of this generation lost their minds. Here are two terrific comedies that rank up there with the best of this important auteur’s work, and they’ve become weirdly banned in his home country. This is an egregious mistake and should not go on any longer.
The 2022 Sundance Film Festival prizes have been awarded.
The US Audience Award went to “Cha Cha Real Smooth,” starring Dakota Johnson. It was sold to Apple Films, which has to do a better job with it than they did with “CODA” or “The Tragedy of Macbeth” or I will file a class action suit against them!
The other awards are as follows:
U.S. Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic
Nanny
U.S. Grand Jury Prize: Documentary
The Exiles
World Cinema Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic
Utama
World Cinema Grand Jury Prize: Documentary
All the Breathes
Audience Award: U.S. Documentary
Navalny
Audience Award: U.S. Dramatic
Cha Cha Real Smooth
Audience Award: World Cinema Dramatic
Girl Picture
Audience Award: World Cinema Documentary
The Territory
Audience Award: NEXT,
Framing Agnes
The Directing Award: World Cinema Dramatic was presented to Maryna Er Gorbach for KLONDIKE / Ukraine/Turkey (Director and Screenwriter: Maryna Er Gorbach, Producers: Maryna Er Gorbach, Mehmet Bahadir Er, Sviatoslav BulakovskyI)
The Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award: U.S. Dramatic was presented to K.D. Dávila for Emergency / U.S.A. (Director: Carey Williams, Screenwriter: KD Davila, Producers: Marty Bowen, Isaac Klausner, John Fischer)
The Directing Award: U.S. Documentary was presented to Reid Davenport for I Didn’t See You There / U.S.A. (Director: Reid Davenport, Producer: Keith Wilson)
The Directing Award: U.S. Dramatic was presented to Jamie Dack for Palm Trees and Power Lines / U.S.A. (Director and Screenwriter: Jamie Dack, Screenwriter: Audrey Findlay, Producers: Leah Chen Baker, Jamie Dack)
Tom Cruise’s church of Scientology is invoking Hitler for a new staff recruitment video.
Thanks to Tony Ortega’s Underground Bunker, we know that Scientology thinks Hitler was some kind of visionary. Cruise, John Travolta, Kirstie Alley, Jenna Elfman, Anne Archer, Elizabeth Moss and some other deluded celebrities are major contributors to the dangerous cult.
Meantime, read Leah Remini’s Twitter posts from last night. The avowed former member and now adamant award winning critic spells out how Scientology has been working to undermine her podcast.
1. For the past year and a half some of you may have been listening to our podcast on a YouTube channel you thought might be our official Scientology Fair Game: The Podcast channel.
But we’ve never had an official YouTube channel…
Fans of “Yellowstone” won’t be happy with this news.
Despite being a runaway success, season 5 of the popular horse opera on Paramount’s cable channel will be delayed even more.
It seems that star and producer Kevin Costner is getting to shoot not the next season of the show, but a movie.
Costner, according to reports, will direct and produce a film he’s written called “Horizon,” about settling the American West before the Civil War. Pre-production begins next month, and shooting starts at the end of August.
Even if there were time to wedge in a season of “Yellowstone,” Paramount still hasn’t officially renewed it. It’s telling that Paramount Pictures hasn’t swooped in on “Horizon.” Costner is financing the picture independently. You’d think that Paramount, which needs hits desperately, would be all over the “Dances with Wolves” Oscar winner to stay in business with him.
“Yellowstone” remains a home viewing phenomenon. The DVDs are selling like crazy, occupying four of the top spots on the home viewing charts — among movies, not other TV shows. A lot of people are probably catching up with earlier seasons, that sort of thing. It’s no “Dallas” or even “Succession,” but “Yellowstone” has found a spot in the culture.
This morning the Spotify stock sagged a bit but now it’s recovered and going up actually. Spotify stock is down $20 or so since Tuesday when Young first demanded that Spotify remove his music over Joe Rogan’s misinformation disseminated on his podcast.
There was some talk of other artists joining in with Young, but so far no one has taken a side. A rumor started that Barry Manilow, of all people, was pulling his music off the streamer in solidarity with Young. But Manilow never said a word, and no one knows where that started. Plus, Manilow sold his catalog in 2020 to Hipgnosis Music. He probably doesn’t have the right to yank it anyway.
I empathize with Neil Young. We are living in a peculiar time when rednecks and lunkheads are interfering with public health and education. That a man waiting for a heart transplant refuses to take the vaccine for COVID really spells it out. There’s no basic sense of logic. Did these people always exist, or did Trump enable them? Everyday there are reports of anti-vaxxers dying and it seems to no impact on their fellow dolts. Go figure.
As for Neil, he streams his own music through the Neil Young Archives, which puts him a different position than most artists. Also, there must be some people listening to him on his defunct Pono player, right?
The most important movie at the Sundance Film Festival played out day before yesterday but I only got watch it tonight.
Daniel Rorer’s “Navalny” is the absolutely stunning account of what happened to Alexei Navalny, the Russian activist and self styled journalist who was poisoned on a flight on Vladimir Putin’s orders in 2020, nearly died, recovered in Berlin, and has now served a year in a Russian prison.
It’s a terrifying story, one that Robert Ludlum would have written. It sounds like “Gorky Park,” and if Rorer didn’t show the investigation into what happened step by step you’d say this is preposterous and could never happen.
But it did. Once Navalny recovered he joined forces with Christo Grozev, the chief investigator of Netherlands-based journalism outfit Bellingcat. Grozeev, who like everyone else here is on camera and very forthcoming, figure out that Navalny had been dosed with Novichok, a nearly undetectable nerve agent. Putin had already killed or nearly killed others with this drug. Grozev says he was shocked that Putin had been so brazen. “It was like leaving a signature,” he tells Rorer.
Using investigative skills to plumb the web, Grozev figures out that 12 scientists are working in a Russian lab that supposedly makes soft drinks. They also deduce through cross referencing that the scientists were flying the same route in Russia as Navalny just before his infamous poisoning. Grozev says: “It was a domestic assassination scheme on an international scale.”
Navalny became so violently ill on the plane so quickly that the pilots landed. Navalny was saved by quick thinking– and as one of the poisoners admits to Navalny in a kind of psychedelic phone call later–they had the antidote. As we all know, Navalny was rushed to Berlin with his wife, who he was traveling with, and recovered over several months.
But during the recovery Navalny and Grosev pieced together the whole conspiracy to kill the anti-Putin activist. They were able to get phone numbers for the 12 scientists and in that stunning, psychedelic phone call, with documentary cameras rolling in real time, Navalny gets one of them to admit to the whole thing and describe it in chilling detail. When they hang up, Navalny and Grosev are certain this man will be killed himself for being duped on the phone.
CNNFilms has bought this documentary and will show it sometime soon, no doubt. “Navalny” will blow your mind, if not for the whole uncovering of this scandal, but because Navalny returned to Russia, was instantly imprisoned and has not been seen since. Couple this with Putin’s looming threat to invade Ukraine, and believe me, you won’t be able to sleep. Everything we ever thought about Putin and Russia is true, and worse than imagined.
Rorer will win awards. But what will happen to Navalny will not be glamorous. I don’t even know if prayers will work.
Neil Young has now loudly pulled all his solo albums off of Spotify. He’s protesting the streamer’s loyalty to podcaster Joe Rogan, a right wing lunatic who dispenses false information about COVID and vaccines.
Gone from Spotify are Young’s beloved bestsellers such as “After the Goldrush” and “Harvest,” not to mention “Comes a Time,” and “Rust Never Sleeps” plus a couple dozen others.
But Neil Young is still available on Spotify because the prolific rocker has a lot of other music out there. His records with Buffalo Springfield and Crosby, Stills Nash & Young all remain, as well a plethora of guest star performances on other albums.
The result is that “Southern Man” is removed, but the live version with CSNY is still available. You can still stream “Mr. Soul” and “Expecting to Fly” from the Springfield, and so on. Besides the CSNY album “Deja Vu,” which people of a certain age know by heart, there’s a group album from 1999 called “Looking Forward” that I’ve totally forgotten but has some pretty good Young songs and vocals.
Spotify is like the Hotel California: you can check in but you can never check out!
