“There are only so many minutes in an episode (more on HBO than on the network shows I once wrote for), and only so many episodes in a season … If ‘House of the Dragon’ had 13 episodes per season, maybe we could have shown all the things we had to ‘time jump’ over… though that would have risked having some viewers complain that the show was too ‘slow,’ that ‘nothing happened....
In a new Twitter thread, the hyphenate director highlighted a technically intricate shot from Spielberg’s musical remake, and used it as a jumping-off point to discuss the complexities of directing film. Del Toro described the sequence as “extremely hard to execute. Pure, masterly clockwork precision and a lot more complex than ‘seamed’ shots or Steadicam-to-crane ‘relay’ shots. Baffling, virtuoso- but one of so, so many shots that make the camera ‘dance’ with each musical number....
The layoffs represent 14% of Chief Content Officer Casey Bloys’ staff, and the eliminated positions are primarily focused on reality content, though other departments including casting and acquisition will also be impacted. Such a move has been expected for quite some time, given Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav’s plan to combine HBO Max and Discovery Plus into a single streaming service. The two services are a natural fit, considering HBO Max’s prestigious scripted shows and Discovery Plus’ highly profitable reality content....
It’s not quite as retrograde as it might sound from its logline, or as flimsy as it might look from the American Typewriter font used for its opening credits. In a film where several of the major story beats fall somewhere between far-fetched and Tolkien-level fantasy, it’s impossible not to appreciate the raw human texture that Haddish brings to her under-written role. Ditto the unforced chemistry that she and Crystal spark together, which maintains a natural stability even when the low-stakes narrative around it veers towards melodrama down the home stretch; for better or worse, “Here Today” more closely resembles a James L....
Netflix’s official synopsis for “Hillbilly Elegy” reads: “J.D. Vance (Gabriel Basso), a former Marine from southern Ohio and current Yale Law student, is on the verge of landing his dream job when a family crisis forces him to return to the home he’s tried to forget. J.D. must navigate the complex dynamics of his Appalachian family, including his volatile relationship with his mother Bev (Adams), who’s struggling with addiction. Fueled by memories of his grandmother Mamaw (Close), the resilient and whip-smart woman who raised him, J....
But you wouldn’t know it looking at some of them. There are characters who look unrecognizable from Episode 1 as well as new ones who have been introduced and recast faster than you can say “Which Aegon?” Still others are seemingly untouched by the passage of time. While certain recasting decisions make sense for the show’s timeline, others feel rushed and arbitrary, distracting from the central story. Not only are characters aging rapidly and inconsistently, but the actors portraying them aren’t always the same age as the character, adding another layer of potential confusion for the audience....
The concept of human-robot love has provided fertile ground for sci-fi storytelling, from Data in “Star Trek” to the disembodied voice of “Her” all the way through “Ex Machina” and “Wandavision,” because it presents an obvious paradox: No amount of engineering genius, it seems, can design the perfect mate. “I’m Your Man,” the winsome, somewhat listless but often insightful new romance from German director Maria Schrader, inverts that formula: A machine may provide the ideal companion, but that very question for perfection is part of the problem....
