April 2022 – Below the Line

Dear Mr. Brody Director Keith Maitland on His Fascinating Documentary and the Fate of All Those Unopened Letters

April 29, 2022 Jeff Sneider Comments Off

Those who read my Top 10 list last year might recall that my #2 movie of 2021 was the documentary Dear Mr. Brody, which told the incredible story of Michael Brody Jr., a 21-year-old hippie millionaire who in 1970 promised to give away his $25 million inheritance in an effort to usher in a new era of world peace. Naturally, thousands upon thousands of people were all too eager to write him […]

NAB 2022: Pandemic Turbo-Charges Trends in the Industry at Smaller But Still Energetic Show

April 29, 2022 Debra Kaufman Comments Off

By every measurement, NAB 2022 was smaller than the last such convention that took place before the COVID-19 pandemic. After two years, enough companies and people flocked to Vegas to congregate, confab, and make deals. NAB reports that 52,468 people flocked to Vegas to examine the gear and catch up with friends from afar, whereas approximately 90,000 attendees attended NAB 2019. Fewer attendees didn’t rattle exhibitors, who enthused over the quality […]

The Accidental Turitz: In Need of an Identity, Netflix’s Collapse Has Been a Long Time Coming

April 29, 2022 Neil Turitz Comments Off

If you’ve been paying any attention whatsoever to this space over the last year or so, you will recall that there have been a few mentions of Netflix and the inevitability of its decline. From the start, I never believed that its business model was sustainable, simply because it called for an ever-increasing number of subscribers to feed the multi-billion dollar beast. Subscribers that don’t exist, primarily because there is […]

Everything Everywhere All at Once Editor Paul Rogers on the Importance of Experimentation

April 28, 2022 Edward Douglas Comments Off

Continuing our coverage of Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All at Once, the absurdist sci-fi action comedy starring Michelle Yeoh that has been doing impressive business at the box office despite one of the oddest premises of any movie to hit theaters this year. The intricate concept for the film thrusts Yeoh’s Evelyn Wang (and the rest of her dysfunctional family) into a number of alternate universes where we see how things may have turned […]

Tokyo Vice Creator/EP/Writer J.T. Rogers on Learning the Essentials of Showrunning

April 28, 2022 Robin Milling Comments Off

In HBO Max’s new crime thriller Tokyo Vice, which is loosely based on investigative journalist Jake Adelstein‘s 2009 memoir Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan, J.T. Rogers paints a gritty picture of the seedy Japanese underworld, where dirty dealings between crime bosses and shady cops are uncovered in each of the series’ eight episodes. As the creator, writer, and executive producer of Tokyo Vice, Rogers served as a triple […]

CinemaCon: Sony and Warner Bros. Deliver the Goods But Neon Comes Up Short

April 27, 2022 Jeff Sneider Comments Off

This year’s CinemaCon is well underway in Las Vegas, where Warner Bros. and Sony already made a splash inside the Coliseum at Caesar’s Palace. Though it has been a tumultuous year for movie theaters, to say the least, the exhibition business ended the year in a good place thanks to the super-strength of Spider-Man: No Way Home, which grossed $1.9 billion at the domestic box office to become the third-highest […]

Union Roundup: Disney vs. DeSantis Intensifies as Elon Musk Takes Over Twitter

April 26, 2022 Mark London Williams Comments Off

The Walt Disney Company has a creeping neo-fascism problem, one that won’t always be restricted to Disney, either. As readers already know, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis found himself cornered by his own rhetoric, signing the “Don’t Say ‘Gay’” bill into law after taking larger umbrage at Disney’s umbrage on behalf of its LGBTQ+ employees (and heck, people everywhere) as the move to strip the Mouse House of its special jurisdictional […]

Pachinko Composer Nico Muhly on Creating the Emotional Choral Score for Apple’s Korean Series

April 26, 2022 Robin Milling Comments Off

The sweeping saga of the new Apple TV+ series Pachinko begins in 1920s Korea, where a young girl named Sunja (Minha Kim) must explore her adolescence while under the colonial rule of Japan. She spots a wealthy, white-suited stranger across a crowded market, the dashing Hansu (Lee Min-ho), from which an epic story of forbidden love blossoms, as originally told in the 2017 New York Times bestseller by Min Jin Lee. Meanwhile, in […]

Downton Abbey: A New Era Review: A Nostalgia-Filled Exploration of the Ever-Changing Nature of Showbiz

April 25, 2022 J. Don Birnam Comments Off

The Crawley family dynasty returns at the turn of another decade (the beginning of the 1930s) in the historical dramedy Downton Abbey: A New Era. The period referred to in the title is a very specific one — the moment in which the motion picture industry switched from silent movies to “talkies,” came with many consequences, some expected, others unforeseen. The title may also refer, more subtly, to the changing […]

Everything Everywhere All at Once DP Larkin Seiple on the Intricate Dance of Working With Daniels

April 22, 2022 Edward Douglas Comments Off

Everything Everywhere All at Once, the second feature film from Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, who are collectively known as Daniels, has been making waves since it first premiered at the SXSW Film Festival in March. The absurdist action-comedy stars Michelle Yeoh as Evelyn Wang, a laundromat owner whose life is slowly unraveling, as her husband, Waymond (Ke Huy Quan), wants a divorce, she’s at odds with her daughter, Joy […]