NYPAA News

Disney’s “The Lion King” has pounced on the China market — a week ahead of its U.S. release — with a $53.8 million three-day debut that gave it pride of place at the Chinese weekend box office. But the win came against a field of competitors so dismal that the fourth top-performing title hasn’t even had its official premier yet, and amid a drop of nearly 5% in the country’s total year-to-date box office compared to last year.

The downward slide in theatrical earnings is part of an increasingly sluggish overall economy, with official data revealing Monday that Chinese economic growth slowed to its weakest pace in nearly three decades in Q2. Chinese GDP expanded by just 6.2 %, down from 6.4% in Q1 and from 6.6% in 2018.

“The Lion King” saw a China opening day of $13 million (RMB89.5 million) and $490,000 (RMB3.4 million) in midnight screenings, according to the Maoyan data app — exceeding the Friday openings of both 2017’s “Beauty and the Beast” and 2016’s “The Jungle Book,” which earned $12.4 million and $11.6 million in China, respectively.

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That means that, in 72 hours, “The Lion King” has already out-earned Disney’s other two live-action remakes released in China this year, pushing past “Aladdin’s” $53.5 million in May and “Dumbo’s” $21.9 million in March. Maoyan forecasts that the Jon Favreau-directed film will go on to earn $166 million (RMB1.14 billion) over the course of its China run. This would make it Disney’s most successful live-action title in the territory.

The original movie was the first animated film to receive a wide release in China, and the country’s first imported animated title, when it hit theaters there in 1995. Given the nascent state of the Chinese box office at that time, it made just $5 million. While perhaps less familiar to viewers in China than elsewhere, the property still is nostalgic for many Chinese moviegoers, especially those born in the 1980s and 1990s, for many of whom it was the first film they saw in theaters.

“The theater was full of 30-something adults acting like kids,” one user wrote on the Douban review platform, where the film is currently rated just 7.5 out of 10. Scores are a bit higher on the more populist Maoyan and Tao Piaopiao platforms, where it has earned 8.9 and 8.8 out of 10, respectively.

“The Lion King” has hit theaters at a time when local Chinese titles have all but dried up, with the lineup over the past month essentially decimated by Chinese censors on the lookout for content that could be considered problematic ahead of the country’s celebration of the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic. China’s year-to-date box office is $4.87 billion, down 4.9% from the $5.12 billion it was at this point last year.

Second at the weekend box office was holdover Hong Kong title “The White Storm 2: Drug Lords,” which grossed $33.3 million, according to data from consultancy Artisan Gateway. The Herman Yau-helmed film stars big shots Louis Koo and Andy Lau, who also produced.

Sony’s “Spider-Man: Far From Home” netted $9.5 million to come in third in its third weekend in theaters, and has now grossed $192 million overall.

Curiously, in fourth place was a local astronaut-themed drama about fatherhood, “Looking Up,” which has earned $5.6 million in pre-screenings ahead of its July 18 debut. In hopes of becoming this summer’s realist drama breakout title in the vein of last year’s “Dying to Survive,” the film’s team has gone on a multi-city promotional tour around the country to generate good word of mouth, releasing promo clips of audiences laughing and weeping as they watch. Some 76,000 people have already rated the film on the Maoyan platform, giving it 9.4 out of 10.

It is co-directed by Yu Baimei and actor Deng Chao (Zhang Yimou’s “Shadow,” “The Mermaid”), and also stars the latter.  The two last collaborated on directing the 2015 romantic comedy “Devil and Angel,” which grossed $94.3 million.

In fifth place was Japanese animated title “Fate/Stay Night Heaven’s Feel,” which grossed a mere $3.2 million. It nonetheless outperformed Illumination’s “The Secret Life of Pets 2,” which brought in only $2.4 million in just its second weekend in theaters.

https://variety.com/2019/film/news/china-the-lion-king-looking-up-1203267371/

Sydney Australia is to be home to Industrial Light & Magic’s fifth production hub. The Disney-owned special effects company currently has facilities in San Francisco, Vancouver, London and Singapore.

The decision to open the Sydney outpost was announced on Monday local time by executive creative director and head of ILM Rob Bredow, ILM executive Luke Hetherington, and New South Wales premier Gladys Berejiklian.

ILM will make its home in Entertainment Quarter in Moore Park, adjacent to the recently Fox Studios Australia recently acquired by Disney.

The government said that ILM Sydney would create 500 jobs, though it was unclear how many would be directly employed by the new facility.

It is expected to contribute services to the next “Star Wars” film, “The Rise of Skywalker.” Job advertisements have already been posted.

The green light for the Sydney facility follows less than a week after NSW announced that it will create a PDV incentive that rebates 10% of in state spending on post-production, digital and visual effects, above a threshold of A$500,000 ($351,000). Bredow confirmed that the state’s new subsidy had been a deciding factor in locating the unit in Sydney. The NSW rebate is additional to and cumulative with Australia’s federal PDV incentives.

Additionally, ILM will provide a digital effects learning program. And the state government invest A$6 million ($4.22 million) in skills training.

ILM is expected to deliver A$333 million ($234 million) in post-production business in the first five years and an annual A$100 million ($70.3 million) thereafter.

“This isn’t just about the 500 jobs, but it means Sydney cements itself as really the movies capital of Australia,” Berejiklian said on Monday. “The jobs here in digital and visual effects post-production will make us a leading light around the world.”

https://variety.com/2019/film/asia/industrial-light-magic-ilm-effects-australia-sydney-1203267367/

Can you go home again?

Veronica Mars (Kristen Bell) certainly seems to fit back in Neptune, Calif. The long-awaited fourth season of “Veronica Mars,” Rob Thomas’ once-teen noir is finally debuting on Hulu. And while it can’t capture the lightning of the original, which aired on UPN/The CW from 2004-07, it’s been nurtured with such love, camaraderie and snark that fans (who go by “Marshmallows”) should be more than satisfied — and newcomers might find a new series obsession.

Quick recap: Veronica, the daughter of Keith (Enrico Colantoni), a private investigator, spent her high school years working as a teen detective, including probing the murder of her best friend. She continued the gig at college, then left to become a lawyer in New York; in a 2014 movie, she returned to her hometown to solve a new case. Now she’s living there with — squee! — longtime love and former Neptune High “obligatory psychotic jackass” Logan Echolls (Jason Dohring) when he’s not traveling the world as a naval intelligence officer. Whew.

In a glorious turn of events, the director of the fourth season’s pilot, “Spring Break Forever,” is Michael Lehmann; sly shout-outs to his first movie, 1988’s cult comedy “Heathers,” were all over the 2004 show’s initial seasons. The episode begins with a bombing in Neptune during spring break, the fallout of which inevitably ends up pulling in Veronica and Keith to nose around.

It’s hard not to be nostalgic for the younger Veronica, who narrated each episode with hard-boiled cool as she juggled murder cases and the everyday angst of high school. But the show wisely appreciates that she’s in a very different place — while bringing in an echo of her former self, a teen bombing witness named Matty (Izabela Vidovic) who gets herself into trouble looking for clues.

So many “Mars” cast members are back, and why wouldn’t they come? Ryan Hansen’s doofy Dick Casablancas has, of course, become an actor; Darran Norris’ smarmy lawyer Cliff shows up to chase the recovering victims of the bombing, and Percy Daggs III as bestie Wallace Fennel is now a dad (more faves look likely to show up down the road). New arrivals, like JK Simmons as a shady ex-con friend of Dick’s dad, blend right in. Patton Oswalt joins as a pizza-delivery guy and “murderhead” — a.k.a. true crime hobbyist — who’s obsessed with the bombing case, in what feels like an homage to his late wife Michelle McNamara, whose journalism recently helped find the Golden State Killer. True-crime amateur sleuthing has taken off since the show’s initial run and the show smartly works that into the plot.

So much care has been taken to recapture the look and feel of Veronica’s world that endless Easter eggs abound; my heart was immediately warmed to see she’s still got the iconic black studded handbag she carried all through the original.

Hulu also allows wider license with sex and swearing, the latter of which is a running joke between Veronica and Keith, wagering to see who can go the longest without saying the f-word. As for the former, Veronica and Logan have a couple of steamy scenes in the first two episodes that recall the best of their early clinches — with a distinctly more adult feel.

Bell, who stars on NBC’s “The Good Place,” is a masterful narrator, and to hear and see her return to the scene of, well, many crimes, is a thing of beauty.

https://nypost.com/2019/07/15/veronica-mars-review-series-still-slinging-sass-in-superb-return/

https://variety.com/2019/biz/asia/spackman-buying-korean-film-producer-simplex-1203267357/

Drama film, “Dad’s Suit” was named the best narrative feature at the Taipei Film Awards. “Last Year When the Train Passed,” directed by Huang Pang-Chuan, was the winner of the overall grand prize and the best short film award.

The awards were presented at Taipei’s Zhongshan Hall, on Saturday.

A story of deteriorating health, hope and family relations, directed by Hung Po-hao, “Suit” also collected awards for best cinematography, best actor and best supporting actress. It premiered last year at the Golden Horse festival and had its commercial release in Taiwan in March this year. The awards jury acknowledged the film’s “very limited budget. But said that the picture managed to “convey exquisite and authentic emotions that linger in the mind.”

There were joint winners in the best actress category. The 82-year-old veteran Lily Yin-shan split the prize with relative youngster the 26-year-old Lee Yi-shieh, for their respective roles in “A Trip With Mom” and “Wild Sparrow.”

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Art-house star Tsai Ming-liang collected the best director and best documentary prizes for his “Your Face.” His film also earned Ryuichi Sakamoto the best composer prize. “Abstract sounds across the boundary between music and sound effects expand our perspective through ears, enrich our imagination, extend psychological time, and elevate visual works to another level,” said a jury statement.

Mickey Chen, a pioneer of gay cinema who died in the past year, was posthumously honored.

2019 Taipei Film Awards Winners
Grand Prize: “Last Year When the Train Passed By”
Best Narrative Feature: “Dad’s Suit”
Best Documentary: “Your Face”
Best Short Film: “Last Year When the Train Passed By”
Best Animation: “Where Am I Going?”
Best Director: Tsai Ming-liang, “Your Face”
Best Screenplay: Lin Hao-pu, “3 Days 2 Nights”
Best Actor: Xiao Hu Dou, “Dad’s Suit”
Best Actress: Liu Yin-shan, A Trip With Mom; Lee Yi-chieh, “Wild Sparrow”
Best Supporting Actor: Lin Ho-hsuan, “Secrets in the Hot Spring”
Best Supporting Actress: Phoebe Huang, “Dad’s Suit”
Best New Talent: Tsai Jia-yin, “Heavy Craving”
Best Cinematography: Chou I-wen, “Dad’s Suit”
Best Editing: Hshih Meng-ju, “The Devil Fish”
Best Music: Ryuichi Sakamoto, “Your Face”
Best Art Design: Hhuang Yun-sian, “Where Am I Going?”
Best Makeup & Costume Design: Eleven Chen, “Secrets in the Hot Spring”
Best Sound Design: Tu Duu-chih, Chiang Yi-chen, “Cities of Last Things”
Best Visual Effects: MoonShine VFX, “The Scoundrels”
Award for Outstanding Artistic Contribution: (Action Choreography) Scott Hung, “The Scoundrels”
Yang Shih-chi Outstanding Contribution Award: Mickey Chen.

https://variety.com/2019/film/asia/taipei-film-awards-dads-suit-and-last-year-top-prizes-1203267351/

If it’s even possible to feel sorry for the most celebrated actress of our time, then the second season of “Big Little Lies” has made me feel a bit bad for Meryl Streep.

In the season’s early episodes, the actress seems to have intended to continue what she began with Steven Spielberg’s “The Post” in 2017 — to work once again alongside a director willing to push her and to create a character who pulses with real life, one whose actions have the power to surprise us and yet that feel consistent throughout. In much of her 2010s work, Streep has had a tendency to default to “doing Meryl,” to uncorking a comforting and familiar suite of tics in playing outsized types in projects she dominates through force of persona. Here, though, as Mary Louise Wright, a character whose mousy passive-aggression is unfamiliar in her recent oeuvre, Streep had begun the process of showing us, somehow, a side of her we hadn’t yet seen, cleverly deploying reticence and a strangeness that felt human-scale. With determination and grit, she was pushing against a show whose first season was so precision-crafted that it seemed likely to push back. 

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And then the show gave in, and let Streep win a game she may not have been trying to play. She is now the defining creative force on a show whose writing and direction seems loose and chaotic, leaving its new star at the reins. Mary Louise has, by the end of the season’s penultimate episode, proved herself practically omnipotent, able not merely to perpetually insert herself into the lives of characters she keeps — oops! — just bumping into but also to wage a slow-burn campaign against her late son’s widow Celeste (Nicole Kidman) that seems expertly designed to take both Celeste’s children and her extant scraps of self-worth. 

None of the plot mechanics, seemingly building to Mary Louise and Celeste cross-examining one another in a bizarrely libertine courtroom presided over by beloved character actress Becky Ann Baker, make even a generously-defined sort of sense. Nor do they serve the performance Streep had built, to say nothing of the legacy of Kidman’s Emmy-winning and justly acclaimed Season 1 performance. But the 2019 iteration of “Big Little Lies” seems unbothered by that, with its eye on a different goal: To deliver viewers exactly what they seemed to have wanted. The Streep we’re ending up with, despite her work against precisely this, is Streep in grande-dame diva mode; the Kidman we get is suffering for her sins in a high-camp manner that has its pleasures but that runs up against the meaty and substantial story Season 1 told. Her scenes are given no air, no room to unfold, but rush from offense to offense — tellingly, the engine for the first season’s most compelling scenes, Celeste’s therapist (Robin Weigert) has become an insult machine, having given up pushing Celeste through dialogue in favor of just telling her off. Celeste’s story, of mourning the husband (killed in the Season 1 finale) whose abuses she hated but whom she nonetheless loved, is among the many that could work; here, it tends to flicker away without narrative oxygen. 

Season 2 of “Big Little Lies” seems, more even than most second seasons of fast-burning sensations, to be an example of the monkey’s paw parable — the notion that one can get what one wishes for, but that it will likely come out warped by one’s own desire. The show’s first season depicted a group of women in coastal California whose lives were inflected by wealth and by the politics of their environment. Its second pushes the issue with a disco-birthday party thrown by the ever-more-hapless Renata (Laura Dern) and with an elementary school whose morbid curriculum seems drawn from “The Uninhabitable Earth.” (Writer David E. Kelley has lost a step as regards social commentary since “Ally McBeal” — or, perhaps, he’s applying that show’s 1990s view of politics as a game played by the idle for fun to a more fractious time.) That the first season’s climax occurred at a school-fundraiser “Trivia Night” at which the limousine-liberal stars attended in couture costume was a sly bit of fun, a nibble of candy with a sharp and bitter aftertaste. The second season has foregrounded the excess, granting Renata increased real estate even as her character’s avarice and rage show us less and less each time. We already know Renata can shout at those she sees as functionaries, and each subsequent iteration shows us both that Laura Dern is good at yelling (which we already knew, too) and that there may not be much of an idea behind Renata.

The remarkable achievement of “Big Little Lies,” when it emerged in 2017, was its use of previously published material, Liane Moriarty’s novel of the same name, to seed from its earliest going ideas about the power of female cooperation and friendship. Those who read the show, from its setting, styling, and stars, as a show about the silly problems of vapid people found their rebuke as the story built in power, impact, and vision. But without that material and attempting a story with an ambitious lack of structure — the ambient mix of grief, relief, and suspicion in the wake of cataclysm — the second season’s plot has felt dithering. It’s opened the show up to those once-misplaced criticisms, foregrounding setting more assertively in the absence of detail. It’s marooned the more-than-able performers Zoë Kravitz and Shailene Woodley in storylines that seem lost and sidelined. And it’s given Reese Witherspoon new notes to play as Madeline, but those moments’ cruelty — as when she chastises Kravitz’s character for being self-centered in the wake of her mother’s stroke — jangle and jar. Discomfort is welcome in art, but inconsistency isn’t, and I found it hard to believe a character whose general motivation has been to build unlikely allegiances might be quite so unkind. The impulse comes, perhaps, not from Madeline’s character but from a show that seems hell-bent on upping even the antes that already seemed pretty high.

In aspects, though, the show seems to be attempting not to outdo or even develop upon but simply to recapture the first season’s achievement. Even without Jean-Marc Vallée helming episodes, for instance, Andrea Arnold’s direction seems to try for his particular tone of rapid-cut flashback and close-up emotional intensity. That Vallée’s is still the guiding vision, and that the season-one director remains credited among the show’s producers and editors as Arnold’s contributions have been less publicly heralded or even noticeable, suggests that the show was more intent on reclaiming what was widely seen as successful about season 1 than on finding a way forward. (Reporting about Arnold’s diminished role as production continued supports this notion.)

Season 1 of “Big Little Lies” was intended as a limited series, and as such, the show went for broke, burning through story and commentary at a pace that shocked and exhilarated. Perhaps the issue with season 2 is that it, once again, has been announced as conclusive, our last looks at Celeste, Madeline, and their milieu — and as such, it goes for baroque, amping up conflict with the serene knowledge that consequence matters little. These characters won’t, necessarily, have to live on. And in giving us another look at their world, the show is less complicating them than mortifying them. 

For all this, “Big Little Lies” is still enjoyable. Indeed, it’s often the most purely fun hour of TV in a given week. I’m mortal; I succumb to Kidman announcing that actually, she’ll do the cross-examination herself, or to Kravitz leading a beyond-belief group-sing yoga class to cure sleep apnea, as much as any other viewer squarely in the demo. The glam individualized suffering of these characters has a pull. But it’s not the most powerful pull the show has proven it can exert — making, in a time that seems increasingly far away, shrewd and careful points about bridging divides of class and prejudice to assert the power of community. That, I suspect, is the show Streep thought she was joining. That she ended up on one that has made her into a demon queen, one hounding a victim as various transmogrified characters we used to know look on, has given her juicier stuff to play. But it’s hard not to miss a show whose vision felt new, and not determined by a perceived audience interest that turned out, just maybe, to have been misinterpreted.

https://variety.com/2019/tv/columns/big-little-lies-season-2-column-1203262944/

Dodger Dogs were doing a robust business Saturday night during Paul McCartney’s appearance at the stadium that shares the delicacy’s name. He is not one of those performers who tries imposing dietary restrictions on the venues he plays, if that were even possible on the rarefied stadium tour circuit. Nor did food or any kind of health regimen arise as a subject as he bantered with the crowd. Nonetheless, it was the best 170-minute commercial that going meatless ever had, implicitly, as 57,000 mostly younger attendees scratched their heads in shared wonderment at how they, too, might be able to pull off a pretty unassailable three-hour show — or whatever its commoner equivalent would be — when they get to 77, seeing the superstar in all his vegetarian fighting trim.

It wasn’t just McCartney that was paunchless. That could be said for the 38-song set itself, which flew by as if it were dashed off in a half-hour — something we promise to never say about anybody else’s 38-song set, should we ever come across another one, because it won’t be true. The food and merch lines were so ridiculously long ahead of showtime because anyone who’d done any kind of recon at all knew this would be three hours without potty breaks built in — that is, without any costume changes (McCartney joked, as he always does, that taking his jacket off constituted the only one), but also without any duff tracks. If anyone had written the equivalent to one of those “When can you go to the bathroom during the new “Avengers’ movie?” articles… well, they might have written in “Come On to Me,” or one of the five other 21^st century songs sprinkled in among the classics, but they would have been wrong. When you have the fellow who is the singularly most multi-talented artist in the history of popular music passing through town, as Steven Tyler would say, you don’t want to miss a breezy thing.

There is an inevitable sense of disappointment that accompanies any McCartney tour, though, maybe especially now that we might reasonably wonder how many more he has left in him. That’s right, disappointment. (Put the pitchforks away.) He fosters it by populating the hours leading up to showtime inside a stadium with a DJ set of his other greatest (and some not-so-great) hits — literally hundreds of songs beloved by somebody, if not the world, that he is not going to play later that night. And so the hardcore fan sits there thinking, “Damn  — I guess ‘Big Barn Bed’ over the PA means he’s not going to celebrate the recent deluxe re-release of ‘Red Rose Speedway’ in this show?” That is exactly what it means, and the odds of our ever getting the full-album “Back to the Egg” tour we’ve been waiting for also diminish by the day. The less hardcore fan may also notice that not only does McCartney’s show not have much room for truly deep cuts, but it also doesn’t leave space for some of the less deep ones that are being rotated out, like, on this tour, “Yesterday.” But they probably aren’t noticing till the next day. Three assaultive hours of pop greatness has a way of making you forget an expectation or two.

So much of the show did fall along the lines of what McCartney buffs have come to expect that, although big surprises aren’t necessary, it was a joyful occasion when they arrived. Nothing was deviated from in the actual set list, but McCartney is building up a pretty good track record now for who might show up to help out on “Helter Skelter” in the encore segment. In Las Vegas June 28, it was Tyler, taking a night off from Aerosmith’s residency to sit in. At Dodger Stadium, it was Ringo Starr, taking a night off from not being a Beatle so that he could help half-reform the band by playing drums on both that and “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise).” It was difficult to actually hear whatever had been mic-ed up on the drum kit that was rolled in for Starr over the steady beat that tour drummer Abraham Laboriel Jr. was kicking up, but we could at least see Ringo, grinning up a storm and seeming to want to renew the blisters he’d worked up when first recording “Skelter,” despite his limited time to do so. There were at least a few folks on hand, going up into the eightysomething fan division, who’d seen Ringo and Paul the last time they played together at Dodger Stadium, in 1966, at what turned out to be the Beatles’ next-to-last show. You didn’t have to be there, then, of course, to find this reunion deeply sentimental — and to get a thrill out of the fact that it was expended on two rockers as unsentimental as the “Pepper’s” reprise and “Helter Skelter.” Bono stole (okay, borrowed) that song, and finally the freakin’ Beatles were stealing it back. (For more about Starr’s appearance, including video, read our account here.)

The other guest was Ringo’s brother-in-law, Joe Walsh, who came out as one of the three guitarists recreating the part of “The End” where McCartney, John Lennon and George Harrison took turns doing two-bar guitar solos. There was a bit of tentativeness in who actually was going to shred when, for, as McCartney admitted right afterward about the possibly unrehearsed cameo, “We didn’t have a clue what we were doing.”

That wasn’t something he could have said of any other moment in the show. McCartney’s Southern California fans who saw him at Desert Trip in 2016 or right here at Dodger Stadium had maybe an even better idea of what stories to expect that what songs to expect. At one point, introducing “Back in the USSR” with a recollection of meeting Russian military brass when he and his band played the country for the first time, McCartney even acknowledged that “some of you have heard this before” but he figured most were newcomers. You could debate those demographics, although certainly there was a strong “Take your son (or grandson) to Beatlechurch!” turnout. But if you’re a fan, you’ve probably learned to love the reiteration of these anecdotes almost as if they were 45s you want to put on again: the Russkie general who thought he’d learned “Hello, goodbye” as a real American greeting; how George’s love of ukulele led Paul to work up a uke-driven cover of “Something” for these contemporary tours as a tribute; how George Martin asked him to sing the refrain of “Love Me Do” instead of John and he can still hear “the quiver in my voice” in the recording; how he saw Jimi Hendrix cover “Sgt. Pepper,” and detune his guitar doing so, just a couple days after it came out; how “Blackbird” was a covert civil rights anthem; how “Here Today” was written as the I-love-you-man statement that he should have had the presence of mind to say to Lennon before his death. That last lesson really doesn’t get old, for an audience now old enough to have experiences a lot of loved ones pass away in less tragic circumstances than Lennon’s.

Some other things don’t get old, either, like the amusing brief history McCartney gave of “In Spite of All the Danger,” a song he recorded pre-Beatles with the Quarrymen (performed here as part of a mostly acoustic full-band interlude). He spoke of how there was one copy of the tape that had to be circulated among the band members, and the last guy to get it “held onto it for 20 years” and then finally sold it to McCartney at “a very inflated price.” Speaking, in these Swift-ian times, of a long history of not having control of one’s masters.

By the way: “In Spite of All the Danger” — now there’s a deep cut (recorded in 1958!). So maybe we were a bit misleading about the lack of less ubiquitous material in McCartney’s set. Although there was nothing else that could really half-count as an obscurity, Wings buffs had reasons to be pleased with how front-loaded the set was with ‘70s picks like “Junior’s Farm” and “Letting Go,” the latter of which brought about the introduction of a frequently used three-man horn section, spot-lit from a position way off in the rafters of the stadium before they were somehow herded onto the stage later.

“Nineteen Hundred and Eighty-Five” gave McCartney another chance — besides “Lady Madonna” — to show how he can do that funky piano thing, in this instance putting Fats Domino through a minor-key blender. The two mid-‘70s “Let” songs — “Let ‘Em In” and “Let Me Roll It” — were nearly back-to-back highlights, although the most fun aspect of “Let ‘Em In” might have been the combination of marching-band footage and marauding silent-movie crowds on the big screens, whereas “Let Me Roll It” really sounded like a band in slow-jam discovery mode, working out the changes as if they were figuring out the tune in the studio for the first time instead of playing it live for maybe the 500^th.

It’s nice, too, that McCartney hasn’t forgotten every other album from the current century besides the new one, as superstars of his ilk tend to do. And so we got “Dance Tonight” from 2007’s “Memory Almost Full,” maybe just because Paul really likes to bust out the mandolin, and who’d want to stop him? “Queenie Eye” and “My Valentine” more served as an opportunity to play back their respective MTV clips in full, and to make you wonder if Johnny Depp has actually been in more Paul McCartney videos than “Pirates of the Caribbean” movies.

As for the 2018 material, “Who Cares” was the strongest of the lot, with or without the anti-bullying message attached. (Not to be flippant, but does being bullied by Lennon and Harrison fans who insist their guy was the only really enlightened one of the Beatles count?) Let’s not talk about the ageist bullies who think “Come On to Me” is age-inappropriately sensual for a man of McCartney’s years; live, as on record, it was a charming lark in the loud “Hi Hi Hi” spirit. The Ryan Tedder-cowritten “Fuh You” will always be more polarizing for his fans, but he found a way to make it more special than it might have been. “We reckon we know what songs you like, because when we do an old Beatles song, your phones all light up,” McCartney said in introducing it. “It’s like a galaxy of stars. And then when we do a new song it’s like a black hole. But we don’t care, we’re gonna do ‘em anyway.” This was bait of the highest order, as a plurality of 56,000 fans lit up their phones during the song. “Okay, you fooled me. I got a galaxy of stars. Beautiful,” McCartney said afterward, not mentioning that this gambit has worked on tour nearly every night. We may be suckers, but it’s in a worthy cause.

With the most tried-and-true oldies, a McCartney show offers the chance to find something new in them — and it’s always there to be found, for students of pop. Like, did you ever think about how pretty the bass part is in the quiet opening stretch of “Band on the Run”? Maybe you did for the first time, seeing his hands at work on the big screens. And there were plenty of moments to admire his particularly melodic turns on his trademark Hofner. But mostly, of course, it was his vocals that were going to come up for scrutiny. Has he still got it? Could any rocker who modeled so much of his early style on Little Richard, but who also aspired to the heights of the great pre-rock balladeers, possibly still have it at 77?

No one really wants to grade a McCartney show — or, correspondingly right now, a Rolling Stones show — on the age curve, or to offer a senior citizen discount when it comes to handicapping performing greatness. But some of that, or a lot of that, is inevitable, as we head into new territory for how long into the years when any reasonable person of wealth has retired it’s possible to still carry off ridiculously energetic and epic shows. We’re getting more accustomed to the bar being moved now, but it doesn’t hurt to remember that, having just turned 77, McCartney is just two years away from the point at which the leading contender for greatest singer of the 20^th century, Frank Sinatra, had to quit the stage because he could no longer remember or carry the tunes. And with that bygone standard in mind, what we’re seeing is a miracle. A miracle fueled by whatever vegetables the world’s greatest chefs and dieticians have to offer, maybe, but a miracle nonetheless.

So it pleases the court to find that McCartney remains a show-stopping entertainer of the highest order without any “well, for a man of his years…” qualifications. At Dodger Stadium, when it came to his performance level, the crowd was in the ‘70s, not his 70s. You could seek out signs of the vocal thinning that is inevitable at a certain point and find it, in isolated spots. But he also sounded better than he did at Desert Trip three years ago. And even if you had that radar on for how he might be protecting his voice at the end of a tour, there was very little sign that McCartney was half-assing anything, as a singer who likes to get on stage and howl. There were growling asides and upper-register coos that he could have left out without anyone complaining… and instead he just seemed to add more. Detractors of his live presence can point to the silly mannerisms he favors between songs in concert as he waits for the applause to die down. (What the hell ishe miming with those little goofball, go-go moves? All these decades later, we still can’t figure it out, either.) But his dominant performing personality is above all a generous one — from being generous with his set lists, probably to the point of paying for curfew overtime once things stretch past 11, to his refusal to give it anything less than his all as a singer, while making it look effortless in the process.

You had to love the simple little moment in “Maybe I’m Amazed” when McCartney’s longtime keyboard player, Paul “Wix” Wickens, moved his hand through the air as if he were conducting his boss’s vocals through a “whoo-whoo-oo” falsetto passage, which he probably does for fun every night. Maybe some night Wix will “conduct” McCartney’s falsetto and a croak will come out. But that night wasn’t Saturday, and it sure seemed a lot of years far off.

Let’s face it: tickets were probably at such a premium for this long sold-out show (on Saturday, the very worst seats in the stadium were going for $300, and anything in the front sections for $4,000 apiece and up) in part because fans believe it could be the last time he can tour at this level with this much gusto. That wouldn’t be an unreasonable hunch, historically speaking. But leaving Dodger Stadium, it was hard not to believe that McCartney won’t be back in three or four years, being the first pop great to continue being great in a massive, high-energy setting into his 80s.

If the passage of time over the next few years should demand he cut his set time to two and a half hours, so be it. In the meantime, we’ll all be eating our vegetables.

https://variety.com/2019/music/reviews/paul-mccartney-dodger-stadium-concert-review-1203267175/

https://variety.com/2019/tv/news/rahm-emanuel-abc-news-chicago-mayor-1203267162/

https://variety.com/2019/film/news/the-lion-king-london-premiere-meghan-markle-leicester-square-1203267003/

Like more or less everyone I know, I have no desire to see a single entertainment company take over the future, dominating what had been a movie industry of multiple entities, each one fighting for their slice of your attention span. Disney, the movie studio so powerful that it ate another movie studio, looks, to many, like it could be that company. The full impact of its absorption of 20th Century Fox has yet to be felt, but now that the smoke has cleared, the mega-corporation that was formed stands before us like an unprecedented colossus, looming over all other studios, maybe over the entertainment business itself.

Yet let’s be clear: It’s not just, or maybe even primarily, the size of the company that is giving people the shakes. It’s the fact that a single film corporation now seems to own everything worth having — at least, in stark capitalistic blockbuster terms. Disney owns Marvel, it owns “Star Wars,” it owns “Avatar,” it owns the fabled animated features that it has been using to mint live-action-remake megahits as if it were printing money. What’s still on the table — “Godzilla”? The shards of “Harry Potter”? The fumbling-out-of-the-vampire-gate Dark Universe? You can make the case that the merger of Disney and Fox, when you boil out of the feathers, really comes down to the merger of Marvel and “Star Wars.” That sounds like the merger of Christmas and the Fourth of July, with Halloween thrown in as a bonus.

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Viewed according to the logic of 21st-century fantasy culture, Disney doesn’t just suddenly own all the properties. It owns all the mythologies. Long ago, Hollywood was called the Dream Factory. The intimidation factor of the new bulked-up, bursting-with-franchise-moxie Disney is the suspicion that a single company has become the Dream Factory. And the anxiety this has provoked is about something beyond market share. What a lot of people are wondering is: Will Disney now have the power to control our dreams?

That power has long been implicit in the word “Disney.” Walt Disney started off as a hand-drawn rebel visionary, rooting his rise in the scrappy image of Steamboat Willie (i.e., Mickey Mouse), and starting in 1937, the animated films that became the foundation of the Disney empire (“Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” “Pinocchio,” “Fantasia,” “Dumbo,” “Bambi”) were, one after another, astonishing works of art.

It was with the opening of Disneyland, on July 17, 1955, that Disney began to take over our consciousness in a new way. Disneyland was more than a rollicking fun place to visit. It was the foundation stone of virtual reality, a place that turned amusement into “magic,” that made you feel like you were entering into the fantasies the movies had only shown you. It was more than a theme park — it was a looking glass, and you can make the case that as all of us passed through it, we began to enter the zone we’re now in, where everything in American life, from consumer shopping to social media to presidential politics, has become a form of entertainment. If it suddenly seems like the new Disney might own the future, maybe that’s because Walt Disney was so instrumental in creating the future.

To me, though, the fear of Disney is unwarranted in several ways. Make no mistake: I believe it’s possible, in any industry, for a company to get too big, and if it were up to me, the kind of antitrust, anti-monopoly consciousness that was, for a while, a pillar of American lawmaking, and that has gone out of style in our top-down age of corporate favor trading, would make a roaring comeback. Is the new Disney too big? Maybe it is. I’m sure there are metrics involved in the future of streaming that I couldn’t even wrap my head around, and that are all wired into Disney’s master plans. But in the concern over the new company’s monolithic import, a couple of key issues have been lost.

In case you hadn’t noticed, the Hollywood future that’s being fretted about, one that’s dominated in economy and in spirit by Disney, is already here. It’s called the New Fantasy Entertainment State. It started 42 summers ago, with the release of “Star Wars,” and to say that it has been growing ever since would be an understatement; it’s been metastasizing. It includes comic-book movies and space operas and violent action thrillers and immersive video games and theme parks that are like national capitals and fantasy conventions that are like Mecca with Chewbacca and Wonder Woman costumes.

More to the point, though, it includes the merger of all those things. The literal and psychological merger. The video games that are knockoffs of combat films that form the climax of space operas that create the paradigm of intergalactic superhero teams, and on and on. All consumed on the same devices! George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four” is the most prophetic novel of the 20th century, but the one thing Orwell left out is that in the cold gray überstate of Oceania, there’s a television in every room, and it’s used for surveillance, but it’s not used for entertainment, which — with apologies to religion — is the new opiate of the masses. (It’s what we’re now using to fiddle while Rome burns.)

In a highly thoughtful piece about the new Disney empire, entitled “For the Sake of Cinema, Disney Needs to Be Broken Up,” my colleague Guy Lodge, writing in The Guardian, argues that the company’s dominating might now poses an existential threat to the art and innovation of motion pictures. Sounding a bit like the Bernie Sanders of cinephilia, Guy exquisitely articulates the threat, yet where I disagree with him is that the threat transcends Disney, because it was already here. The movie studios of Hollywood ruthlessly compete, but where they’ve colluded is in the creation of a brash hypnotic fantasy-based theme-park movie culture that’s the enemy of organic cinematic intimacy.

And the ultimate colluder, of course, is the audience. We the people. It’s become de rigueur for film critics to grouse on a regular basis, in their reviews, about the state of blockbuster cinema. And while I’m as guilty as anyone, what I don’t share is the left-wing perception that the movie industry has become the aesthetic equivalent of an oppressive political force, jamming all these junk sequels and reboots and fantasy narcotics down our throats. To a degree, I blame them, but I really blame us, the moviegoers, who vote, week in and week out, with our ticket dollars. We exist in a democratic landscape of entertaining ourselves to death. We have chosen the post-“Star Wars” universe we now live in. To blame the studios seems, to me, a fundamentally misplaced sentiment.

But none of this is the real reason that I think we don’t have to be scared of the new Disney. I said earlier that Disney now owns the key mythologies: Marvel, “Stars Wars,” the roster of animated glory. The company itself surely thinks so; I’m certain, once the merger happened, that there was a feeling among Disney executives of “We’ve got it all!” But the reason they’ve “got it all” isn’t that Disney owns the future. It’s that it owns the past. And if you look closely, you’ll realize that the crucial power surge of the past is already looming up behind it.

This may sound wildly counterintuitive, but the properties that Disney has made the foundation of its new empire have already, to a large degree, been strip mined. Don’t get me wrong: We’ll be seeing “Star Wars” movies and Marvel movies for a long time, and some of them are going to make a lot of money. But take the properties one by one. This December will see the release of “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker,” the ninth and final installment of a four-decade-old saga. It’s the last film whose narrative DNA will be tied, in a fundamental way, to the revolutionary film that George Lucas released in 1977. For some of us (and, I believe, for many fans), this series has already dragged on too long, feeding on fumes of nostalgia. After eight movies, if you asked me to name the great “Star Wars” films, my response would be as easy today as it would have been in 1985. I’d say “Star Wars” and “The Empire Strikes Back.” (Okay, I beg your pardon. I’d say “Star Wars: Episode IV — A New Hope” and “Star Wars: Episode V — The Empire Strikes Back.”)

But why can’t it all just…go on? That’s been the premise of all the prequels and sequels. Yet the audience response to “Solo: A Star Wars Story” was not encouraging. The box-office grosses were downright earthly. Those numbers poked a hole in the “Star Wars” mythology. They didn’t bode well for the spinoffs, the divergent byways, the new sagas to come. “Star Wars,” now that it’s fully severed from the soul of George Lucas, may turn out to be more like any other blockbuster movie series than you think.

As for Marvel, with back-to-back “Avengers” sequels that have each grossed $2 billion worldwide (“Avengers: Endgame” has made close to $3 billion), and with “Captain Marvel” and the first post-Avengers film, “Spider-Man: Far From Home” (both of which I liked), each looking at $400 million domestic, how could the future be anything but supernova bright?

Yet the end of the “Avengers” saga is no small thing. These characters — Captain America, Thor, Iron Man, The Hulk — possess an iconic mojo that’s been rooted, from the start, in just how far back they go. There are many other Marvel characters for Disney to tap, and Black Panther and Captain Marvel are off to fantastic starts, pointing to a comic-book movie future of triumphant diversity. But if there’s an eternal truth in the film industry, it’s that all genres fade. I’m sure Disney is already planning out their reboots (who will be the new Magneto?!), but the magic of the MCU, rooted in multiple overlapping generations of collective comic-book memory, has gone on for a quite a while, and it’s my feeling that it will be a challenge for Disney to sustain it on that level.

And the animated remakes? Disney is going through them like chocolate-covered peanuts. “The Lion King” is the first of them that I think totally works (I agree with every word of Peter Debruge’s rave), but after “Mulan” and “The Lady and the Tramp” and “Snow White,” there won’t be a lot of them left, which makes you wonder: What’s next, live-action versions of the Pixar films? Disney, even before the merger, had already proved itself a master of pillaging its own past, and you could argue that that all really began with Disneyland. Disney’s premise is: Our brands will never get old. But if there’s one thing you can count on, it’s that the future is always unpredictable. That’s especially true in the realm of movies. To be scared of the new Disney is really to fear a future that’s probably less than accurate, because it’s a 20-20 reflection of the rearview mirror.

https://variety.com/2019/film/columns/why-is-everyone-scared-of-disney-1203267038/