NYPAA News

HBO gave fans a long parting look at the making of “Game of Thrones” on Sunday night in a two-hour documentary that focused on the Herculean efforts by the small army craft and technical experts who worked on the mammoth fantasy drama.

“Game of Thrones: The Last Watch” introduced viewers to the leaders of the below the line departments that breathed life into the “Thrones” milieu with costumes, hair, makeup, special effects, location managers, a fleet of extras and an entire department devoted to snow.

“Last Watch” gave a generous spotlight to Bernie Caulfield, the veteran producer who has been hailed by “Thrones” showrunners/exec producers David Benioff and D.B. Weiss as the linchpin of the execution of the most expensive and ambitious series ever produced for television. British documentarian Jeanie Finlay was embedded with the show for a year during its location shoots in Northern Ireland, Croatia and elsewhere for its final season, which concluded May 19 with record ratings for HBO.

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In discussing the enormity of the production, Caulfield likens the job of organizing season eight to figuring out an algebraic equation. “We keep messing with the puzzle. When that last piece fits, you’re like ‘Yeah, it worked.’ “

Here are six more things we learned from “The Last Watch”:

It appears Kit Harington discovered that Jon Snow would slay his love, Daenerys Targaryen, played by Emilia Clarke, during the table read for the final episode, “The Iron Throne.” Footage of the table read in “Last Watch” shows Harington having an emotional reaction during the table read. Harington let loose a few tears, and so did Clarke.

Production designer Deborah Riley illustrates all that was at stake in season eight, where the budget reached some $15 million or more per hour. “All we were doing in seasons 4, 5, 6 and 7 were training for season eight,” Riley explained.

David Nutter, who directed three of season eight’s six episodes, emphasized the importance of so many departments coordinating details down to the last second, in many cases. “I’m a conductor of fine musicians who basically waves his arms around,” he says.

The doc does a good job of demonstrating the sacrifices that the “Thrones” production crew members made in trekking around Europe to lense the show. Prosthetic makeup experts Sarah and Barrie Gower worked together on the show, which meant leaving their young daughter behind. Sarah Gower is seen tearfully talking to her daughter via Internet video.

The series production offices did in fact have entire shelves devoted to “shoulders” and other severed body parts.

Among the thousands of small details that had to be minded, one production staffer was assigned to keep an eye on the state of Daenerys’ blond locks. Clarke was also protective of Dany’s mane. “That is still the most beautiful hair I will ever have on my head,” Clarke says, looking at her braided wig while sitting in a makeup chair.

https://variety.com/2019/tv/news/game-of-thrones-last-watch-six-things-we-learned-1203226326/

SPOILER ALERT: This article contains spoilers for the entire second seasons of “Killing Eve” and “Barry.” 

I was dead certain that “Killing Eve” and “Barry” — two of my favorite television debuts of 2018 — should have ended after a single season. Both coincidentally starring unstable assassins, the shows were smart, propulsive, and extremely weird straight out of the gate. Their first seasons were unsparing and gutsy, telling wildly twisting stories of deceit and murder, temptation and morality with such enthusiasm that it seemed impossible that either could keep it up for too long.

As the second seasons of “Barry” and “Killing Eve” unfolded — on the same nights, even! — they became revealing inverses of each other. And now that both have aired their finales, I can confidently say that I was right to question a return — and also, that I was wrong.

On the disappointing side of things lies “Killing Eve,” which just closed out a frustrating, inert season that ended up confirming all my fears after creator Phoebe Waller-Bridge — a singularly sharp voice whose comedy “Fleabag” is an all-timer — handed over the reins. (Emerald Fennell took over as head writer this season; she will in turn pass it on to Suzanne Heathcote for season 3, for better or for worse.) After spending a solid three episodes trying to reconcile the catastrophic events of the first season finale, the show spun its wheels trying to find a marginally intriguing destination. The overarching mystery of shadowy syndicate “The Twelve” ran in boring little circles. Eve and Villanelle became single-minded obsessives prone to making extremely dumb choices — an evolution the season eventually acknowledged, but never truly sold.

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Yes, the dynamic duo of Sandra Oh and Jodie Comer is still incredible; they still imbue their performances of Eve and Villanelle with such wit and raw intensity that they came as close to selling the scripts’ increasingly ridiculous turns as can be expected. But their chemistry is all season 2 knew to count on. Everything singular about Eve and Villanelle’s characters and relationship to each other dissolved into a muddled mess of hormones that ended with them in almost exactly the same position as before. (Seriously: The finale’s supposedly shocking last scene is basically the last scene of the first season finale, only less intimate and in reverse.) “Killing Eve” leaned so hard on the basics of its appeal that it forgot to do much of anything new at all.

And while this season might have made Eve and Villanelle’s attraction to each other even more explicit, it also made a bigger show of dangling it just out of reach. It’s one thing to play with the idea of forbidden queer desire, and quite another to endlessly tease it out without a tangible point in sight. Having loved the first season so much, I truly take no pleasure in being right about the second season flailing, but the fact is that the second Villanelle pulled her trigger on Eve, my response wasn’t the gasp that “Killing Eve” wanted, but a resigned shrug. A more daring choice for the show might have been the one Eve summarily rejected. What would the show look like in season 3 if she had gone on the run with Villanelle, torn but thrilled to have finally given in to her magnetic pull? At the very least, it would have been different.

“Killing Eve’s” failure to justify continuing into a second season makes what “Barry” did with its extended time even more impressive. While “Killing Eve” skated on the surface, “Barry” drilled deeper into what makes its characters tick, experimented with its own form, and found surprising things to say about its themes without becoming too repetitive. Barry (co-creator Bill Hader) and his girlfriend Sally (Sarah Goldberg) reluctantly dug into their pasts, unearthing revelations neither were quite ready for. Barry remembered the trauma of combat and the sickening thrill he felt when he first killed someone and became one of the guys. Sally faced the truth of her abusive marriage and her conflicted shame about never standing up to the husband who would choke and berate her. Gene (Henry Winkler) grieved the loss of his girlfriend, reached out to his estranged son (Andrew Leeds), and genuinely tried to become a more considerate person.

All of these character evolutions are firmly rooted in seeds the first season planted while consciously moving them forward. They also give the actors, each fantastic, new shades to flesh out their already distinct performances. Winkler gives Gene a visceral sadness that’s an awful punch to the stomach every time he reveals it; Goldberg calibrates Sally’s manic ambition with enough pathos to ground her; Hader’s extraordinarily expressive face makes Barry’s increasingly locked jaw an unfurling horror story. Even Alex Carrigan gets to play some different sides of Noho Hank, the insecure and earnest crime boss who would really much rather be running a chain of quaint B&Bs. “Barry’s” close attention to character detail made its willingness to eviscerate expectations in season 2 shocking in all the best ways. Even when it strayed farther afield of its established world in an episode like “ronny/lilly,” the show’s specificity held it together. Rarely did a scene go by without a point or payoff — not even Noho Hank’s, seemingly cast off into the margins with his insecurities and hapless crew.

Both “Barry” and “Killing Eve” were renewed for third seasons early in their second seasons; both ended on giant, dramatic cliffhangers. Going forward, I have far more confidence in “Barry’s” ability to rationalize its riskier choices and make sense of its characters’ fraying new realities. “Killing Eve,” however, will have to take a good hard look at the story it’s telling and figure out what, exactly, it wants to say beyond “these women are drawn to each other.” We’ve known that since day one. Now it’s time for the show to find something else to say, or else risk losing everything that made it special in the first place.

RELATED:

https://variety.com/2019/tv/columns/killing-eve-season-2-finale-barry-hbo-1203224853/

https://variety.com/2019/film/news/hugh-jackman-ian-mckellen-happy-birthday-one-man-show-1203226286/

In the May 24 edition of The New York Times, there was a column by Timothy Egan, entitled “The Comeback of the Century: Why the Book Endures, Even in an Era of Disposable Digital Culture,” that celebrated those things that come between two hard covers as a larger phenomenon than mere nostalgia. The column keyed off the surprising strength of books in the marketplace: the hours that people still devote to them, the proliferation of the independent bookstores that were supposed to be going the way of the dodo bird, the falling off of electronic reading devices like the Kindle. In the middle of the column, there was a shockingly extreme and revealing quote from the late Steve Jobs, who in 2008 said, “It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore.”

The reason that quote is so revealing is that 1) it was never really true, and 2), to the extent there was a small grain of truth to it (i.e., highbrow wags have been warning about declining literacy levels since the 1960s), you’d think that a cultural figure as dominant as Steve Jobs would have wanted to hold that glass up to the light and look for the part that was full. You’d think he would have wanted to be a guardian of reading. But no: He looked at book culture — and old media culture in general — and, in a few words, trashed it all, with staggering inaccuracy. What that should tell you, since Jobs was a brilliant man, is that he got the death-of-reading thing so wrong because what he was really expressing was his wish.

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I get that same feeling when I hear prognosticators of the pop-cultural landscape talk about the the waning of the motion-picture experience. If you believe everything you hear, then binge-watching is the key entertainment act of our time, and there are 4,379 good reasons not to bother going out to a movie theater anymore. (The ads before the trailers, the cell phones and the popcorn munchers, the general sticky rudeness of it all: We’ve heard the anti-theater litany a thousand times.) If you buy into the catechism of the new technology, movies are still good for spectacle, and will be for quite a while — otherwise, the new Disney-Fox behemoth wouldn’t be plotting out blockbuster universe sequel systems through the next four centuries. But surely the rise, rise, and rise of streaming will do movies in!

That’s what the war of words, at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, between the forces of Cannes and Netflix was really all about: not just the issue of whether Netflix films like “Roma” or “22 July” would be allowed to qualify as festival competition entries (they weren’t), but what the future was going to look like. After all, let’s assume that “Roma” had been part of the Cannes competition, and that it had won the Palme d’Or (which, in hindsight, doesn’t seem a farfetched scenario). What would it say to the world that even a Cannes Film Festival winner would then go out to be experienced, essentially, on a streaming platform? It would say that if they can beat the movies there, they can beat them anywhere.

But this year at Cannes, with Netflix literally out of the picture, all that dialogue seemed a distant memory. No one was sitting around debating the fine points of French government regulations about three-year windows, or whistling past the graveyard of America’s own inevitable streaming-vs.-theatrical, studio-vs.-exhibitor window war — a clash of capitalist–aesthetic forces so titanic it’s destined to make the battle between Hollywood talent agencies and the WGA look like a misunderstanding between friends.

What people were doing at Cannes this year was seeing movies that declared themselves, in dozens of different ways, to be movies. That was their power and allure. And the reason that no one was talking about Netflix very much — beyond the usual industry white noise of chatter about it — is that a number of the key films at Cannes this year owed their impact to the big screen in a way that was so potent and obvious and inevitable, so tied up with their molecular essence, that it literally went without saying.

There was no better example, to me, than “A Hidden Life,” Terrence Malick’s epic, enveloping true-life drama about one man’s journey into the darkness — and the light — of self-sacrifice. Visually, the film is extraordinary. Much of it was shot in the Austrian countryside, where Franz Jägerstätter (August Diehl), the farmer who refuses to enlist in Hitler’s army at the outset of World War II, works the land in a place that looks like the opening sequence of “The Sound of Music” as painted by Bruegel. But that’s because Malick uses his camera as a virtual sensory heightener, transforming this land of mountains and grass into the Garden of Eden as seen through a wide-angle lens.

And the film’s meaning is rooted in that splendor. This, “A Hidden Life” tells us — this beauty, this paradise, this heightened vision of what all of us call home — is the place Franz has been blessed with, and the one he will now leave, through his willingness to die. Every caress of Malick’s camera eye says (or, rather, forces the audience to ask), But how could Franz leave this place? The world that Malick presents is, in a way, too sublime for self-sacrifice. Yet that becomes the measure of Franz’s radicalism. He will leave this beauty behind because, and only because, he glimpses a mirror of that beauty on the other side. His life will end, but his love, like that land, is eternal.

All of this hinges on our grand immersion in the world that “A Hidden Life” shows us. The movie is cinema at its mightiest and holiest. It’s a movie you don’t just watch; it’s a movie you enter, like a cathedral of the senses. Some, in fact, will prove resistant to it (it was not universally beloved), but “A Hidden Life,” as much as any film I’ve seen in the 21st century, is totally contingent upon the big screen. It needs to be bigger than you are, because it’s about bigger things than you — or anyone else. It’s about how the quietest acts of resistance are part of what save civilization.

The fact that Fox Searchlight paid $12 to $14 million to obtain distribution rights, in the U.S. and several international territories, to “A Hidden Life” may seem like a corporate folly, given that Malick’s “The Tree of Life,” which starred Brad Pitt, only grossed $13 million domestic. Yet that film made $61 million worldwide, and “A Hidden Life,” with its European vantage on Third Reich fascism (an unfortunately timely theme right now), has the potential to be a landmark event in foreign territories. That said, the audacity of the Fox Searchlight deal — $12 million for a three-hour Terrence Malick art film — is that it felt like more than just a deal. It felt like an act of faith, a vote for nothing less than the unique transcendent appeal of movies. (We’ll learn, later this year, if it is vindicated.)

There were other Cannes films, many of them, that needed to be bigger than you. Movies like “The Lighthouse,” Robert Eggers’ thrillingly atmospheric and tempestuous gothic face-off between a grizzled lighthouse keeper (Willem Dafoe) and his surly apprentice (Robert Pattinson), a movie that plunges you, with stunning authenticity, into the hardscrabble spookiness and mechanical ingenuity of the 19th century. Or another rapturous period piece that worked in exactly the opposite way: “Portrait of a Lady on Fire,” Céline Sciamma’s tale of the slow-burn dance between a budding artist (Noémie Merlant) in the late 18th century and the young woman (Adèle Haenel), about to be married, whose portrait she’s engaged to paint. Sciamma has made one of the rare romantic costume dramas that’s rooted in the creaky quietude of the era — it’s there in every inch of her delicate, hovering images, which the actresses undermine only with their eyes.

The films at Cannes that demanded, and earned, the big screen also included “Les Misérables,” Ladj Ly’s jagged propulsive tale of police brutality in a French housing project; “Little Joe,” Jessica Hausner’s stately trancelike horror film, with its armies of creepy red-tendril flowers and its sly skewering of psychotropic drugs as a conformist conspiracy; and the Palme d’Or-winning “Parasite,” Bong Joon-ho’s grand teeming scurrilous social thriller about an impoverished family of con artists who launch a scam so gnarly and chaotic that every mad detail of it needs to be writ large.

And then there was Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood,” a movie I saw close to a week ago, and what has stuck with me more than anything is the sense-memory of Quentin’s Los Angeles — not just the cars and fashions and pop songs, the sculpted mid-century neon kitsch of the restaurants and movie theaters (at one point, there’s a dazzling montage of fabled nightspots flipping on their lights at dusk), the TV-Western backlots that are like knockoffs of old movies that were themselves imitations. No, it’s the way they all combine in your head, the way Tarantino invites you to take a dip in his heightened vision of a Hollywood backwater that once was. I seriously doubt I’d be thinking about that movie in the same way if I hadn’t seen it on the big screen.

For a hundred years now, movies have been sparked by the art-vs.-commerce dialectic. How ironic it is, then, that in the movie-theater-vs.-streaming showdown, the old paradigm of going out to a movie (even a major commercial one) is now on the high-end/boutique/art side of the equation. The argument goes: People want what they want, at least where technology enables it, and what they want now is streaming. They want to belong to the Couch Potato Forever Club.

But just as books made a “comeback,” not the way vinyl made a comeback, as an analog-geek so-old-it’s-new-again novelty fetish object, but because books never went away, since it turned out people had a primal and timeless love for them, the motion-picture experience isn’t going away, because people have a primal and timeless love for it. Yet the essence of that love is that it refuses to be measured only by numbers. Going to the movies, as the key films at Cannes proved this year, is a sacramental experience. It cannot be replaced. It cannot be reduced. It cannot be streamed without a loss of some of that essence. In reminding us of that, Cannes got back in touch with its glory.

https://variety.com/2019/film/columns/at-cannes-2019-cinema-came-roaring-back-1203226087/

Just as CBS News is pushing to turn a corner on a more than a year of internal turmoil, veteran anchor Scott Pelley shone a light back on to its recent past.

The anchor, a veteran of CBS News’ “60 Minutes” and “CBS Evening News” alleged Sunday that he was taken off CBS’ evening-news broadcast in 2017 after raising complaints internally about the news division’s workplace culture. “We’ve been through a dark period of the last several years of incompetent management and sort of a hostile work environment within the news division,” Pelley said during a segment on the CNN program “Reliable Sources.” He added: “I lost my job at the ‘Evening News’ because I wouldn’t stop complaining to management about the hostile work environment.”

Pelley alleged he took his concerns to senior management at CBS News as well as the chairman of CBS Corp.

“Scott was expressing his own opinion. We disagree,” CBS News said in a statement. “CBS News has been working hard to advocate for an inclusive, safe and dignified workplace for everyone at CBS News and Scott has been a supporter of these efforts.”

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David Rhodes, former president of CBS News, did not respond immediately to a message seeking comment.

The remarks are the latest to indicate the troubled culture that incubated at CBS Corp. and CBS News over a period of time. Tensions at the unit first came to light after former “CBS This Morning” co-anchor Charlie Rose was ousted in the wake of several women claiming he had made unwanted sexual advances on them, predominantly under the aegis of his long-running PBS program, “Charlie Rose.” Other allegations were made against the work environment at “60 Minutes” as it was run under former executive producer Jeff Fager. Fager has denied claims made against him, and left CBS News last year. CBS Corp. ousted longtime CEO Leslie Moonves last year after a New Yorker article detailed multiple allegations of sexual harassment and unwanted behavior. Moonves has denied the claims.

Pelley, who is slated to be honored by CBS News with a book party celebrating his new memoir, “Truth Worth Telling,” on June 12, alleged he visited several top CBS News executives to warn them of a “hostile work environment” for women and men. Pelley said on CNN that he went to the “president of the news division” — Rhodes served as president between 2011 and early 2019 — and was told he ought to stop “agitating” about the matter. He also alleged he had a substantial conversation with the “chairman of CBS,” who would have been Moonves, about his allegations.

Pelley never mentioned any of the former CBS executives he cited by name.

Rhodes told The Daily Beast Sunday, “That simply never happened,” and added: “And if he had those conversations about this with anybody, it wasn’t with me.”

People familiar with the internal workings of CBS News have long maintained that Pelley and Rhodes had a strained relationship, evidenced by Pelley’s abrupt decamping to “60 Minutes” before a successor at “Evening News” had been named.

Pelley also said he felt CBS News had made strides under Susan Zirinsky, who took the reins of the news division in March. He said Zirinsky, a presence at CBS News for decades and the first woman to lead the unit, “has CBS News DNA.” He also praised CBS CEO Joe Ianniello and Bill Owens, a longtime Pelley colleague recently named the new executive producer at “60 Minutes.”

“I’m very excited. I know these people,” Pelley said on “Reliable Sources. ” I know we’re on the right track.”

https://variety.com/2019/tv/news/scott-pelley-cbs-evening-news-work-environment-1203226229/

Disney’s “Aladdin” is showing plenty of worldwide drawing power with $121 million overseas for the weekend, opening in first place in nearly all international markets.

The reboot of the 1992 animated classic has received strong family attendance with a significant gain on Saturday and Sunday. China leads the way with an estimated $18.7 million for its three days for a first-place finish.

Disney said that in Europe, “Aladdin” is tracking ahead of “Maleficent” and “Cinderella” for the same markets. The U.K. is the top European market with $8.4 million ahead of openings of both “Rocketman” and “The Secret Life of Pets 2,” which both debuted ahead of their US launches. The “Pets” sequel opened with $4.1 million.

Italy generated $6.6 million for “Aladdin” in its second highest opening weekend to date in 2019, behind only “Avengers: Endgame” with a 52% market share. “Aladdin” also posted the second highest opening weekend to date in 2019 in Spain, 37% ahead of “Maleficent” with a 60% market share.

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Mexico generated the top opening in Latin America with an estimated $9.2 million for three days, 121% ahead of “Cinderella” with a 65% market share. Aladdin is the top release this year in Indonesia as well as the second highest in India and Vietnam. It also scored the third highest opening weekend to date in 2019 in Australia, New Zealand and the Philippines.

The original 1992 animated movie generated $502 million at the worldwide box office. The reboot stars Mena Massoud as Aladdin, Will Smith as the Genie, Naomi Scott as Jasmine and Marwan Kenzari as Jafar. Guy Ritchie directed “Aladdin,” produced by Dan Lin and Jonathan Eirich.

“John Wick: Chapter 3” grossed $24.8 million from 74 markets this weekend, pushing the international total to $74.4 million. Warner Bros.’ “Pokemon: Detective Pikachu” pulled in $24.3 million this weekend on 17,225 screens in 72 markets, lifting the overseas total to $236.8 million and the total worldwide gross to $352.9 million. China led the way with $7.2 million for an $84 million total after three weeks.

Disney-Marvel’s “Avengers: Endgame” took in $15 million internationally over the weekend to lift its total to $1.88 billion. China is the top international market by far with $629 million as the final gross, making it the third highest film in that market behind only “Wolf Warrior 2” and “The Wandering Earth.” “Avengers: Endgame” has crossed $110 million in the UK, where it is all-time highest grossing movie.

“Avengers: Endgame” took in $32 million globally over the weekend, including $16.8 million in North America through Sunday. The mega-tentpole has hit $2.68 billion in worldwide box office as of Sunday, leaving it about $110 million behind the final $2.79 billion for the current champion “Avatar.”

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https://variety.com/2019/film/news/aladdin-box-office-international-1203226159/

Disney’s live-action “Aladdin” is flying high with an estimated $105 million in North America during the four-day Memorial Day holiday weekend.

It’s the sixth-highest Memorial Day weekend total ever, topping the 2011 mark of $103.4 million for “The Hangover Part II.” The top total came in 2007, when “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End” took in $139 million in its first four days. “Aladdin” is also dominating moviegoing internationally with $121 million in 56 markets.

“Aladdin” has outperformed Disney’s pre-opening domestic projections, which were in the $75 million to $85 million range, taking in $86.1 million in its first three days. The reboot of the original 1992 animated movie — which generated $502 million in worldwide box office — stars Mena Massoud as Aladdin, Will Smith as the Genie, Naomi Scott as Jasmine and Marwan Kenzari as Jafar. Guy Ritchie directed “Aladdin,” produced by Dan Lin and Jonathan Eirich.

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Comscore’s PostTrak general audience survey found that 67% of patrons said they would “definitely recommend” the film to their friends. Notably, 39% said their affection for the original was their primary reason for seeing the film, a high percentage that reflects moviegoers’ love for the “Aladdin” brand and the characters in the film.

“A very strong 22% said they would see the film again in theatres — much higher than the norm of 14%,” noted Paul Dergarabedian, Comscore’s senior media analyst.

Comscore estimated that total domestic business for the four-day weekend was $226 million. That was about $1.8 million shy of the total for the same frame last year, when “Solo: A Star Wars Story” launched with $103 million. The top Memorial Day weekend took place in 2013 when “Fast and Furious 6” launched and North American moviegoing totaled $314 million for the four days.

“A very solid Memorial Day weekend was led by the bigger-than-expected performance of Disney’s ‘Aladdin’ conjured up huge numbers of moviegoers looking for the perfect family-friendly treat over the extended holiday weekend,” he said.

Disney distribution chief Cathleen Taff told Variety that she’s particularly pleased that “Aladdin” has racked up a 93% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes and an “A” Cinemascore. The site recently revised its scoring in that measurement to limit responses to verified ticket buyers.

“‘Aladdin’ is performing exactly the way we were hoping,” Taff added. “We should see strong performance in the coming weeks as we get into the summer season.”

Sony’s launch of horror-thriller “Brightburn” should pull in about $9 million for the holiday weekend to finish fifth and United Artists-Annapurna’s teen comedy “Booksmart” will open in sixth at around $8 million. Both were positioned as counter-programmers to “Aladdin” and finished slightly below forecasts.

Lionsgate’s second session of “John Wick: Chapter 3” should be runner-up with $30.5 million following its surprisingly strong opening of $56.8 million. The actioner will wind up the holiday weekend with $107 million domestically.

Disney’s fifth frame of “Avengers: Endgame” will finish third in the $22 million range, increasing its haul to about $803 million domestically by the end of Memorial Day. “Endgame” trails only “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” in domestic gross, with the space saga having grossed $936 million.

Warner Bros.’ third weekend of “Pokemon Detective Pikachu” will follow in fourth with about $17 million. The family adventure will finish the weekend at the $120 million mark in North America.

Overall moviegoing for 2019 has hit $4.34 billion as of Sunday, down 10% from the same point last year. The lag is due to a dismal performance during the first two months of this year.

“Aladdin” is the third biggest launch of 2019, following the record-setting $357 million for “Avengers: Endgame” and $153 million for “Captain Marvel.”

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https://variety.com/2019/film/box-office/aladdin-box-office-brightburn-booksmart-john-wick-3-1203226129/

CANNES – An exploration of the ramifications of God, “Monster God,” from Argentina’s Agustina San Martín, took a Special Mention – an effective runner’s up prize – on Saturday night at this year’s Cannes Film Festival short film competition.

It’s not difficult to see why, especially when jury president Claire Denis own films’ power resists reduction to easy explanation.San Martin’s movie builds atmosphere by its association of disparate scenes: Foreboding grey clouds; the thrum of an electricity power plant; its fog-shrouded outline, huge cables like tentacles reaching down from on high; a distant siren’s wail; cows fleeing, jumping a fence;  a dark culture girl relete with chain collar, nose pin looks through shrubbery at the window of a gothic house, home to a religious sect.

Also written by San Martín, “Monster God” could be seen to deconstruct the facets of religious domination – fear-inspiring myth, the intoxication of song, the promise of happiness and apocalypse; or the monster God plant itself, which seem to possess an unintelligible intelligence of its own. “Monster God” does so as its spins a tale of a dark girl rescuing a much younger girl, maybe her little sister, from the maws of a religious cult. Yet another instance of the enriching incorporation go genre into films of artistic ambition at a festival which this year was full of that,“Monster God” comes across like a part horror film where the audience is invited to think about what’s the real horror.

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Variety talked to San Martín about the short and her first feature during the Cannes Film Festival.

What inspired “Monster God”?

The point of departure for “Monster God” is the hypothesis that God is an electrical power plant. God was always for me a very foreign, abstract and slightly whimsical concept. When I as a child, we never talked at home about God. Since my mother’s Jewish and my father Catholic, they decided to raise their daughters without imparting any religious ideas because they could not agree. If I asked about God at the table, everyone was silent, uncomfortable. God was taboo.

What kid of cinema are you interested in making?

With every one of my shorts, I’ve tried something new. With “Monster God” I was able to experiment to the maximum. I wouldn’t say I’m interested in a particular style. Maybe what I like most is the possibility of playing, here in fantasy short, an almost dreamlike sci-fi short about the existence of a God, turning on a dark [culture] girl and some cows.

What directors have been crucial for your career?

I could mention many directors, without ever being able to do anything similar to their films: Pedro Costa, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, David Lynch, Carlos Reygadas, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Luis Buñuel, Lucrecia Martel, Nuri Ceylan, Alice Rohrwacher…. All of them build powerful, authentic and highly suggestive universes. For “Monster God.” I studied how Lynch creates atmosphere, disturbing stillness in particular. The film’s imagery was inspired by horror movies: the power plant is shot like Dracula’s castle. the young dark girl is inspired by ‘90s horror.

You’ve just finished shooting your feature debut, “The Abysses”….

Yes, I’m now editing. It tells the story of a teenager who travels to the jungle to look for a relative, but ends up getting involved in the daily life of an insane tribe. It’s a slightly fantastic, queer, coming of age story with family agreements and disagreements. Or as I like to say: it’s like “Jurassic Park” but without dinosaurs.

How would you describe its tone or genre? 

It’s a similar tone to that of “Monster God,” regarding its humor and darkness. It is very exciting to achieve the balanced union of conflicting elements. For instance, the foggy nocturnal scenes beside others with electronic music dance and Jesus Christ. “The Abysses” is also a work tackling the mystical and inexhaustible. It is anchored in the story of a young woman, Emilia, who “throws herself into the void”. At the same time, all the characters are on the verge of something. The story is set on a border where the language is the portuñol [a hybrid between Spanish and Portuguese]. People are looking for people, children are looking for a dog. All the characters are immersed in the abyss. A disturbing, sensual and ridiculous world.

And the visual approach?

It’s tightly linked to my previous works. It’s funny, because I’ve directed three shorts and a feature and only now can notice some pattern in my fetishes or aesthetics: The gloomy darkness, the moving lights, the mirrors, the different angles on the bodies in the same shot— Pedro Costa was a master of that— as if there were always similar elements with different masks.

https://variety.com/2019/film/global/agustina-san-martin-cannes-special-mention-monster-god-1203226123/

Posh Spice chose not to be included, but there was a lot of other inclusivity to go around as the four other Spice Girls opened their reunion tour in Dublin Friday night.

“We welcome all ages, all races, all gender identifies, all countries of origin, all sexual orientations, all religions and beliefs, all abilities,” they said in opening the show at Croke Park Stadium.

“Like a king or a queen, we celebrate you. But I’ve got to say, there are a lot of queens here tonight,” Geri “Ginger Spice” Halliwell Horner said later (“winking hard enough to cause a hernia,” noted the Guardian) to the 71,000 fans on hand.

The missing Victoria Beckham was referenced only briefly, as the lyric “Easy V don’t come for free” in “Wannabe” was amended by Halliwell Horner to add, “Where is she?”

Sound was an issue for some at the concert, with numerous tweets attesting to the fact that the songs were nearly indistinguishable from one another in same parts of the stadium. Melanie “Scary Spice” Brown addressed the issue in an Instagram post afterward, writing, “Thank you for attending our show tonight in Dublin. We will see you in Cardiff and hopefully the vocals and sound will be much, much better… Pfft.”

The group has reunited for the first time since 2007 for a tour of the UK and Ireland that wraps up with a three-night stand June 13-15 at Wembley Stadium. The Spice Girls originally split in 2000. No new recordings have been released; all of the material being performed date back to their late ’90s heyday.

SET LIST:

Spice Up Your Life / If You Can’t Dance
Who Do You Think You Are?
Do It
Something Kind Of Funny
Military Cadence / Sound Off
Holler
Queer Tango
Viva Forever
Let Love Lead The Way
Goodbye
Car Wash
Never Give Up On The Good Times
We Are Family
Love Thing
Lady Is a Vamp
The Last Waltz
Too Much
Say You’ll Be There
2 Become 1
Stop
Mama
Wannabe

https://variety.com/2019/music/news/spice-girls-open-reunion-tour-dublin-1203226095/

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