You can soon watch your favorite shows or movies without ads — but only if you have friends. The streaming platform is testing out a Hulu Watch Party feature, allowing viewers to watch titles on the streaming platform together and chat in groups of up to eight people or more. And best yet, the feature will get rid of Hulu’s most defining (and annoying) quirk: its ads.
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In the wake of the fantastic Michael Jordan-centric documentary series The Last Dance, which broke viewership records for ESPN, the sports network is hoping that its slate of 30 for 30 documentaries is able to keep audiences’ attention. They’re currently airing Lance, a multi-part look at the life and controversy of cyclist Lance Armstrong, but coming up next month, they’ll tackle a subject that seems likely to attract the attention of folks outside of sports fandom: martial arts legend Bruce Lee. Check out the trailer for Be Water below. Read More »
Palm Springs, the delightful time-loop romantic comedy produced by The Lonely Island, was acquired for more money than any other film in Sundance Film Festival history after it premiered at the festival earlier this year. The movie, which stars Andy Samberg (Brooklyn Nine-Nine), Cristin Milioti (Fargo, Black Mirror), and J.K. Simmons (Whiplash), finally has an official release date and a summer-friendly poster to go along with it. Read More »
Leigh Whannell‘s fantastic sci-fi-action-horror pic Upgrade is headed to the small screen. The Upgrade TV series won’t be a remake of the movie but will instead be set a few years after the events of Whannell’s 2018 flick that saw Logan Marshall-Green play a paraplegic who is given the ability to walk again – and seek revenge against the people who murdered his wife – with the help of an A.I. implant. Read More »
Despite his reputation as a director of groundbreaking and mind-bending films, Christopher Nolan is a stickler for tradition. Just as he passionately fights for the practice of shooting on film, Nolan pushes the casts of his films to appreciate the classics — gathering up his cast and crew before each of his productions start to screen movies that serve as inspirations for their respective projects. Before filming The Dark Knight, Nolan made everyone watch Michael Mann’s Heat, while the cast of Dunkirk was given the homework of All Quiet on the Western Front and The Battle of Algiers. But Nolan broke his own tradition for the first time by avoiding all Bond films before and during the filming of his upcoming movie, Tenet.
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“Did you ever smell sadness?”
Films may not be able to give off scents (yet), but 12 Hour Shift, with its washed out yellow walls and harsh fluorescent lighting, practically reeks of anesthetic and musty hospital bedsheets. And a little bit of sadness. But that sadness is quickly overtaken by the bizarro bloodbath that unfolds in Bea Grant‘s stylish, darkly comic thriller.
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Back in April, we found out Martin Scorsese was again having trouble locking down funding for Killers of the Flower Moon, an adaptation of David Grann’s book of the same name with Leondaro DiCaprio and Robert De Niro on board to star. At the time, the filmmaker was hoping that a streaming service like Neflix or Apple would come through and help Paramount Pictures pay for the production, and it sounds like he got his wish.
Apple will be teaming with Paramount Pictures to make Killers of the Flower Moon, as long as the deal that’s currently in the works gets finalized. The project will be labeled as an Apple original movie, and Paramount will handle distribution around the world. Read More »
(Welcome to Ani-time Ani-where, a regular column dedicated to helping the uninitiated understand and appreciate the world of anime.)
The romantic-comedy, much like its cousin the horror-comedy, more often than not ends up sacrificing the romance for the comedy. Or the comedy for the romance. But where there are plenty of romantic anime shows, few end up being as sweet and as hilarious as Kaguya-sama: Love is War.
Looking from the outside in, Kaguya-sama seems like a traditional slice of life high school romance. In a prestigious academy for Japan’s brightest students (and those from the wealthiest and most influential families), student council president Miyuki Shirogane and vice president Kaguya Shinomiya excel at everything they do and are revered by everyone in the academy. Oh, and the entire academy thinks they should be together.
The good news is that they also very much have feelings for each other, and know that the other is in love with them. The problem? They are too damn stubborn and prideful to admit their feelings. In love, there’s a winner, and a loser (or so says the narrator), so neither Shirogane or Shinomiya want to lose. What ensues is a brilliant and hilarious battle of the wits, a game of psychological warfare where two stellar minds try to out-scheme the other to confess their love first.
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Following the release of Vader Immortal: A Star Wars VR Series (which is coming to PlayStation VR sometime this summer), the creative minds at Lucasfilm’s immersive entertainment studio ILMxLAB are working on another Star Wars VR project, this time centered around the Black Spire Outpost locale at the center of the Disney theme park land Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge. Read More »
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Too many female-led comedies focus on the romance of it all. The chick flick, the rom-com – they’re terms that are interchangeable. But there is so much more depth of emotion that women feel, so many more nuanced relationships that women have, that are rarely show on the big screen. Only a handful of so-called “rom-coms” dig into them, but they’re often mislabeled because it’s less about the romance, or even the comedy, then it is about the women at the center of them.
One of the more recent films to nail the complexity of female relationships was Nisha Ganatra‘s 2019 dramedy Late Night, which followed Emma Thompson and Mindy Kaling as a reluctant late-night show employer and employee pairing who become close friends. Ganatra seeks to repeat this formula with The High Note, a flashy comedy/drama that stars Tracee Ellis Ross and Dakota Johnson in those roles, but now set in the glamorous music industry. But with newcomer Flora Greeson on the script and none of Kaling’s winking humor to drive the drama, Ganatra’s attempt to recapture the success of her previous female-led workplace dramedy unfortunately falls a bit flat.
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