If your streaming service launches and it doesn’t have an original title that stars Anna Kendrick, does it really exist? In the case of Quibi, even Kendrick’s star power may not help. The Pitch Perfect star, who has managed to star in originals for Disney+, HBO Max, and Quibi, stars in Dummy, a comedy about Anna Kendrick befriending a sex doll. That’s it, that’s the premise. To be fair, you don’t really need more explanation than that, but Quibi has released a new NSFW trailer for Dummy, three months after the show first premiered.
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Sports fans can’t get enough of ESPN’s 30 for 30 sports documentaries. While the series was already popular before, there’s been a surge in interest recently due to the lack of new sports due to the coronavirus pandemic. The success of the 10-part documentary series The Last Dance about Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls certainly helped boost the network’s sports documentary profile, and ESPN Films is planning another multi-part sports documentary, this time looking to the 1986 New York Mets baseball team and their amazing comeback to win the World Series against the Boston Red Sox. Read More »
Ridley Scott and Kevin Macdonald are reuniting to show you what Life In A Day in 2020 is like. And it’s more than just quarantine videos, though the executive producer and director of the YouTube documentary want your quarantine videos too. A decade after the original Life In A Day crowdsourced documentary, Scott and Macdonald are teaming up yet again to create the new feature film Life In A Day 2020, which will collect footage from people around the world to tell the story of a single day on Earth. Which means, yes, you could be a part of a Ridley Scott-produced film.
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(Welcome to The Quarantine Stream, a new series where the /Film team shares what they’ve been watching while social distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic.)
The Series: Doctor Who
Where You Can Stream It: HBO Max
The Pitch: A hyperintellectual alien travels through time and space (though more often than not, to 21st century Britain) in a spaceship shaped like a 1960s British police box, going on wacky misadventures with his/her spunky human companions.
Why It’s Essential Viewing: Doctor Who is often described in reverent terms as the longest-running sci-fi TV series in history. But to categorize this wonderful, baffling, silly, stupendous show as science-fiction wouldn’t do it, or the genre, justice. Sci-fi is really just an umbrella for the famous BBC series to play with genre and structure — it can be a character drama one episode, a campy comedy the next, a mythic fairy tale, a Gothic horror tale. Sure, there’s a loose continuity that runs all the way back to the beginning of the show, but none of that matters. All that matters is that there’s a quirky alien who goes around battling monsters and saving the day with his big old brain and a whole lotta heart (two of them, in fact).
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Trailers are an under-appreciated art form insofar that many times they’re seen as vehicles for showing footage, explaining films away, or showing their hand about what moviegoers can expect. Foreign, domestic, independent, big budget: What better way to hone your skills as a thoughtful moviegoer than by deconstructing these little pieces of advertising?
This week we slip into something more comfortable, get weird in South Africa, get kicked out of our favorite watering hole, feel better about the future, and reminisce about a legendary rock mag.
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Want to get your kids a new Spider-Man graphic novel for young readers? Did you hear Black Panther and the Agents of Wakanda is canceled? Want some time travel tips from the cast of Agents of SHIELD? What does Ruby Rose have to say about the new Batwoman? How much is J.K. Simmons willing to do to help Zack Snyder’s Justice League? All that and more in this edition of Superhero Bits. Read More »
A few days before the coronavirus pandemic brought the world to a screeching halt, word came out that Disney+ was developing a live-action Beauty and the Beast spinoff series that would tell a prequel story about what the arrogant Gaston (Luke Evans) and his submissive pal LeFou (Josh Gad) were doing before they entered the narrative of the movie. And while the pandemic has thrown a wrench into many a project over the past few months, it sounds like this one is still chugging full steam ahead.
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Everyone, please wear a mask when you go out into the world. I know it’s inconvenient. I know you’d rather not. But it’s just common sense. And more than that, it’s necessary. But you don’t have to take my word for it. Instead, listen to America’s dad, Tom Hanks. Hanks was one of the first prominent figures to catch the coronavirus, and he’s fed-up with people shunning masks. And if the guy who played Sully isn’t enough to convince you, maybe you’ll listen to Bill Nye. He’s a science guy, after all.
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The Stephen King adaptation renaissance shows no signs of going away anytime soon. Since King is so prolific and pumps out approximately a bajillion books a year, there will always be material to adapt. Case in point: Mr. Harrigan’s Phone, a short story that appeared in King’s recently published collection If It Bleeds, is now becoming a Netflix film. Blumhouse and Ryan Murphy are producing the flick for Netflix, with Saving Mr. Banks filmmaker John Lee Hancock attached to write and direct.
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Cool Posts From Around the Web:
Batman Forever was already being discussed online more than usual this year thanks to the film celebrating its 25th anniversary. Then when director Joel Schumacher passed away recently, even more love was poured out for the goofy DC Comics sequel. Now the chatter has grown even more because there have been rumblings of a 170-minute “much darker, more serious” cut of the movie that’s just sitting somewhere waiting to be released to the masses. Read More »
