Monday, November 18, 2024
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Adele-Oprah Special Drew 10.3 Million Viewers, Closely Followed by “Yellowstone” on Cable

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UPDATE

The Adele-Oprah special on CBS was a big hit. The show hit 10.3 million viewers and was the top entertainment show for the night on broadcast TV. The only programming that beat it was NFL football and “60 Minutes” preceding.

“One Night Only” was closely followed by “Yellowstone” on cable’s Paramount Network with 7.4 million viewers.

Over on HBO, “Succession” rose to 584,000 viewers, a big leap from the previous three weeks. “Curb Your Enthusiasm” also really improved, up to 527,000 after a couple of weeks in the 300K range.

The Oprah-Adele special was kind of a doorstop the way it was set up, not really a concert but pieces of one broken up by insipid interview questions about Adele’s divorce. It was as if Oprah never met anyone who’d been divorced. Adele’s hits were great, and Ben Winston’s production made the Griffith Observatory glow. But Adele’s new songs are like sleeping pills.

Anyway, Mission Accomplished.

(Watch) Music Mogul Clive Davis, A Brooklyn Native, Receives Key to the City of New York from Mayor DeBlasio

RIGHT NOW Clive Davis is being honored by Mayor DeBlasio with the keys to New York city. It’s an amazing accomplishment for the 89 year old music mogul who was raised in Brooklyn and became a world known influence in the culture.

BOOM! Netflix Premiere Goes Awry As Ticketed Fans “Ticked” Off As They Were Turned Away After Waiting in the Cold

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We thought Netflix was just not nice to the press. Turns out fans who signed for up tickets are treated just as badly at their events.

Many fans who acquired tickets through the company 1iota to the premiere of Netflix’s “Tick Tick Boom” are pretty angry and disappointed.

Writing on Twitter, they say well over 100 fans who had tickets to the premiere at the Schoenfeld Theater were turned away after being held on line for over two hours.

One fan, writing under the Twiiter account @rachrach, recalled:

“Finally on my way home after spending my whole night on line, freezing cold just to be told there were no more tickets. I would have loved to go to the other theatre but I couldn’t feel my feet or hands. #thanksalot…”    They added: “The whole experience was very cold. There were people screaming at us in the beginning for our id’s and forms out then they disappeared and we were left waiting for over 2 hours with no information. It could’ve been handled in a much better way.”
@Rachrach wasn’t alone. Another Twitter account @oncerSM wrote:

Watch Adele Sing Four New Songs That All Sound the Same, Have No Hooks or Choruses

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I was an Adele fan the minute I heard “Chasing Pavements.” What an usual metaphor. How cleverly the record was produced.

The year that “Rolling in the Deep” came out, it was played on the red carpet at the Cannes Film Festival every night. It sounded like Janis Joplin had risen from the grave. We couldn’t get enough of it.

“Hello” at first sounded like a doorstop of a single. It still take a little work, but “Hello from other side” is a unique notion, and it’s a hook after all. I always thought “When We Were Young” was the standout song on “25.”

Now Adele performed new songs on last night’s CBS special with Oprah. They all sounded alike. They are long and laborious, preachy. They have no hooks or choruses. They’re diatribes. The arrangement are uninteresting. I’m struggling to stay awake during the clip below, 21 minutes of new material that will be on the “30” album this Thursday night.

If this is indicative of the material, “30” will become a cure for insomnia. There’d better be something livelier on there than this snooze fest.

Anti-Semite, Racist Mel Gibson Says He’s Directing “Lethal Weapon 5,” A Movie No One Wants

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Mel Gibson says he’s directing “Lethal Weapon 5.” Oh yeah?

Gibson says as reported in the Hollywood Reporter that he will direct, and that Richard Wenk, who wrote “The Equalizer,” came up with the script.

Danny Glover has represented himself as a principled person his whole career. I’ll be curious to see if he’ll be part of a movie made by a avowed Holocaust denier, an anti-Semite, and racist. Now we’ll see if Hollywood really is all about the money.

Lauren Shuler Donner is producing because her late, beloved husband, Richard Donner, has the rights to the series. Even though Donner was Jewish, he continued to stand behind Gibson despite heavy criticism. Gibson says before Donner died he told him he was working on a screenplay. Great. Hire some other actors, please. No self-respecting person is going to see Mel Gibson in “Lethal Weapon 5.”

There’s no word in the THR story if Warner Bros. is attached to this very bad idea. They released the other ones and must have the rights also. I can’t see Toby Emmerich or anyone else there supporting this plan. It will, as my friend DA Pennebaker used to say, end in tears.

Review: In “Licorice Pizza,” Paul Thomas Anderson Marries “Almost Famous” to “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood”

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Paul Thomas Anderson is our Robert Altmanesque auteur, beloved for “Boogie Nights” and movies I’ve really enjoyed like “Magnolia,” “The Master” and “Phantom Thread.” For me, his creme de la creme is “There Will Be Blood,” which gets better on every viewing.

For “Licorice Pizza,” PTA, as he is known, gets sentimental for an era he didn’t live through, the early 70s. He was only born in 1970, but certainly has an affection for it that is palpable. He’s modeled “Licorice Pizza” on a good combo: “American Graffiti,” “Almost Famous,” and “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.” You can’t do better.

His stars are an unlikely couple. Cooper Hoffman, son of the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, a PTA regular, is outstanding as 16 year old precocious hustler and sometime child actor Gary. Alana Haim (pronounced Hay-yim) is the 25 year old girl (they were girls then) Gary has a crush on also named Alana. They each give the breakthrough performances of the year. Despite the age difference, Gary (who is modeled on real life Tom Hanks producer Gary Goetzman) and Alanna (from her sisters’ rock group), have an undeniable sweetness that cements quickly and carries the film through some rough waters later.

There is no actual reason the movie is called Licorice Pizza. The title comes from a record store chain in Southern California that existed in the 70s and early 80s. No one in the move refers to it or mentions it, there isn’t even a background shot of the storefront. PTA just liked the words.

But there are other stores, one for waterbeds, and a pinball arcade. They are 16 year old Gary’s businesses that he implausibly creates instead of going to school. How does he do it? Like a 45 year old used car salesman on the make, which is to Cooper Hoffman’s credit that he pulls it off. He’s like the kind of kid who sells elevator passes to high school freshman in a one level building. He’s a sweet talker, and all he really wants is Alana.

Haim is a marvel. It’s her first acting job, and she’s a pro. She’s everything PTA wanted out of Katherine Waterston in “Inherent Vice” but didn’t get. Haim reveals herself slowly as the star of this movie, proudly and without fuss. She reminded me of a number of Robert Altman’s “natural” finds, who just meld into the film. Think Shelley Duval, or Geraldine Chaplin. Every critics group will be lining up to do something for her.

PTA, like Quentin Tarantino before him, is nostalgic for this period in L.A. history as it revolved around Hollywood. So Gary and Alana get involved with some real or real-like people. Bradley Cooper plays hairstylist Jon Peters, boyfriend of Barbra Streisand and not yet a film producer. Cooper is over the top and fun. The whole episode is imagined by PTA but a not so ridiculous scenario as “Peters” awaits installation of a waterbed from Gary, Alana, and their Little Rascals game of helpers.

Alana is courted by an older actor named Jack Holden, inspired by William Holden, with a spoonful of Even Knievel, and played with some nice subtlety by Sean Penn. It’s another digression, but it gives Alana a chance to wander into the adult world away from Gary’s fantasy of adulthood. Are the two that different, PTA is saying? Holden brings with him into this fantasy a self-possessed action director of note called Rex Blau, who might be a stand in for Sams Peckinpah or Fuller. Whatever he is, he’s played by gravel voiced singer Tom Waits, who almost steals the movie during his sequence.

“Licorice Pizza” is long, of course, and often repetitive. There are lots of characters– a la Altman — who you need a scorecard for. There are some leaps to make, but if you’re invested in Gary and Alana you’ll make them just to see how this will all turn out. The film is not as coherently focused as “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.” It’s more like lying down on a the waterbeds Gary sells: it leaks sometimes but it has unexpected thrills. One of those, PS, is a running gag of Harriet Sansom Harris as Gary’s agent. You could almost imagine her ordering a real licorice pizza.

 

Watch the Memorial Service for “Sex and the City” Star Willie Garson Including Elvis Costello’s Touching Performance

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You can watch the memorial service for :Sex and the City” star Willie Garson here. It features an especially touching performance from Elvis Costello.

Most important, please donate to the Willie Garson Fund for foster kids. The link is here. So far the Discovery Channel has donated $300,000 to give it a start. There are some donations as much as $10,000 or more. And some as little as a few dollars. Every penny is needed.

Adele Oprah CBS Special Ratings Whopping 9.5 Mil in Overnights, Will Excede 10 Million

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The Adele Oprah special scored a whopping 9.5 million in overnight ratings. The number will increase slightly with delayed viewing. That’s a big number these days for a music special. And it increased CBS’s Sunday numbers without football.

Adele Places 10 Older Songs on iTunes Top 100 Following Oprah Special, All Three Albums in Top 10 As Well

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Last night’s Adele special on CBS has yielded at least one kind of success: the charts.

The British pop diva has yielded 10 hits on the iTunes top 100 over night. They include all the songs she sang on the special including her current hit, “Easy on Me,” plus “Rolling in the Deep,” “Hello,” and “Skyfall.”

All three of Adele’s albums, “19,” “21,” and “25” are now in the top 10 Album Chart as well.

Adele’s new album, “30,” is poised for a massive launch on Thursday night at midnight. First week sales will be over 1 million copies. How “30” will fare in the long run is anyone’s guess. So far the new album doesn’t sound like it’s loaded with top 40 singles, but Adele fans don’t care. This album release is about the cult of personality not singable songs.

Last night, Adele sang several songs from the new album, none of them were catchy but they were long and talky. They’re pitched lyrically to the idea of empowerment and freedom for women, a traditionally popular genre.

 

Surprise Winner “Summer of Soul” Picks Up Critics Choice Doc Awards at Swanky Brooklyn Ceremony

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The 6th annual Critics Choice Awards at Brooklyn’s BRIC Center had a lot of surprises. The biggest was the overall winner, ‘Summer of Soul,” from Questlove, which is really an archival doc and not topical at all. “Summer of Soul” won several awards, including Best Archival Documentary, and tied for Best Director with “The Rescue,” which the Academy may be more agreeable to come next spring.

But Questlove was thrilled, saying it was the best night of his life, and no one could argue with the good feeling around the leader of the Roots and Jimmy Fallon’s bandleader.

Still, the evening moved quickly and there were some other happy surprises including actresses Dana Delany and Jessica Hecht among the presenters. Comedian Roy Wood Jr. was an excellent and humorous emcee.

Much awarded filmmaker Chris Hegedus presented the Pennebaker Award for lifetime achievement to R.J. Cutler, who produced Chris and DA Pennebaker’s 1992 Oscar nominee “The War Room,” and has gone on to make such other docs as “The September Issue” about Vogue magazine.

The next Critics Choice Awards for narrative films and TV series will be broadcast on TBS and the CW networks on January 9th from Hollywood. Kudos to Joey Berlin for pulling off a well-attended event despite COVID restrictions (everyone had to show proof of vaccination and interest in documentary films).

Winners of the Sixth Annual Critics Choice Documentary Awards

BEST DOCUMENTARY FEATURE

Summer Of Soul (…Or, When The Revolution Could Not Be Televised)

BEST DIRECTOR (TIE)

Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson – Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)

BEST DIRECTOR (TIE)

Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin – The Rescue

BEST FIRST DOCUMENTARY FEATURE

Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson – Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY

David Katznelson, Ian Seabrook and Picha Srisansanee – The Rescue

BEST EDITING

Joshua L. Pearson – Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)

BEST SCORE

Daniel Pemberton – The Rescue

BEST ARCHIVAL DOCUMENTARY

Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)

BEST HISTORICAL OR BIOGRAPHICAL DOCUMENTARY

Val

BEST MUSIC DOCUMENTARY

Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)

BEST POLITICAL DOCUMENTARY

The Crime of the Century

BEST SCIENCE/NATURE DOCUMENTARY

Becoming Cousteau

BEST SPORTS DOCUMENTARY

The Alpinist

BEST SHORT DOCUMENTARY

The Queen of Basketball

BEST NARRATION

Val