It all started with a song about a tomato. That was the pitch presented to them by series co-creator Jeremy Konner, who’d worked with the two on the Comedy Central comedy “Another Period.” “He, at first, asked us to write a song when he was pitching the show; it was a concept,” Lindhome told IndieWire. “He called us and said, ‘Hey, can you do me a favor? Will you write me a song about a tomato?...
Billie Eilish is making her Disney+ debut with the concert film “Happier Than Ever: A Love Letter to Los Angeles,” which arrived on the streaming platform on Friday. Directed by Robert Rodriguez and co-directed by Oscar-winner Patrick Osborne, “Happier Than Ever: A Love Letter to Los Angeles,” features an intimate performance of every song on Eilish’s “Happier Than Ever” album (in sequential order) from the legendary Hollywood Bowl. “I knew that I wanted it [the album] to have some other life in some other dimension that I’ve never experimented in, and that’s Disney,” Eilish told The Hollywood Reporter....
Kumail Nanjiani transforms into Chippendales founder Somen “Steve” Banerjee for Hulu series “Welcome to Chippendales,” streaming November 22. Created by Robert Seigel (“Pam & Tommy”) and Jenni Konner (“Girls”), “Welcome to Chippendales” shows Somen’s rise and fall in the adult entertainment industry. Matt Shakman directs the series, with Nanjiani, his wife Emily V. Gordon, co-showrunner and writer Siegel, co-showrunner Konner, and writer Rajiv Joseph among the executive producers. Per the official synopsis, the sprawling true crime saga “Welcome to Chippendales” tells the outrageous true story of Somen “Steve” Banerjee, an Indian immigrant who became the unlikely founder of the world’s greatest male-stripping empire, and let nothing stand in his way in the process....
Earlier, June 30: It’s looking to be a big year for filmmaker Wes Anderson, whose “The French Dispatch” is finally set to open in theaters October 22 from Searchlight Pictures after a July world premiere in competition at the Cannes Film Festival. Now comes confirmation from Variety that Anderson will begin filming his untitled next movie before “French Dispatch” opens. Anderson’s 11th feature film begins shooting in Spain this September with Tilda Swinton starring....
In other words, the guy has been rehearsing for this moment since “West Side Story” was first adapted for the big screen in 1961. Now that he’s taken his own swing at the Sondheim and Bernstein classic more than half a century later, it’s poignant and perversely thrilling to find that his full-throated riff on one of the greatest musicals ever staged often feels like just another Steven Spielberg movie; a late period Steven Spielberg movie that’s been desaturated within an inch of its life and sealed inside a bubble of digital plastic, but a Steven Spielberg movie all the same....
As anyone familiar with Folman’s previous forays into animation (“Waltz with Bashir” and “The Congress”) can imagine, this is no ordinary cartoon rendering of the unimaginable. In the context of the director’s body of work, perhaps the strangest thing about “Where Is Anne Frank” is that it tries so hard not to traumatize kids for life. This project was first conceived in 2009, when the Anne Frank Fonds Basel — distressed by rising Holocaust denialism, and rightly concerned that its namesake’s story might need to be reinvented in order to reach young people of the digital age — commissioned Folman to make a film that would cut through the noise....
No amount of breaking news can possibly convey the impact of Russian warmongering creeping into Ukrainian society, but the eerie and often heartbreaking ramifications come to life in Sergei Loznitsa’s satiric anthology “Donbass.” Valentyn Vasyanovych’s post-apocalyptic “Atlantis” is suddenly prescient for the way it conveys a bleak vision of Eastern Ukraine circa 2025, “one year after the war.” In Natalyz Vorozhbit’s “Bad Roads,” Donbas is explored as a series of tense exchanges between pro-Russian separatists and Ukrainians at the mercy of propagandistic outbursts....
