If there’s one thing we can all agree on, it’s that we’re living in a very, very mad world right now. Listening to the lyrics of the song “Mad World,” it has perhaps never felt more fitting.
All around me are familiar faces Worn out places, worn out faces
You mean my family members? The only people I’ve seen for weeks? Yep.
Bright and early for their daily races Going nowhere, going nowhere
Umm, yeah. Going nowhere indeed. And it just gets more apropos:
Their tears are filling up their glasses No expression, no expression Hide my head, I want to drown my sorrow No tomorrow, no tomorrow
Oof. Le sigh.
Tears for Fears front man Curt Smith and his daughter, Diva, performed the the song on YouTube, and it’s gorgeous. Frankly, Diva is the one who steals the show, as it takes an immediately impressive turn when she pipes in with her perfect harmony.
Mad World performed by Curt Smith of Tears For Fears
Oddly enough, the version they sing is actually a cover of a cover of an original Tears for Fears song. The original Tears for Fears version from 1982 had a quicker tempo and techno beat. It wasn’t until the song was covered by Gary Jules and Michael Andrews for the 2001 movie Donnie Darko that the song became the haunting ballad we’re most familiar with.
Prior to the coronavirus shutting down all tours, Lana Del Rey was forced to cancel her own, which was in support of her 2019 album Norman F*cking Rockwell. The cancellation wasn’t about the pandemic; the decision was due to coming down with an illness that forced her to go on vocal rest for four weeks. Fans could still look forward to her forthcoming audiobook, Violet Bent Backwards Over The Grass, but after a pair of delays, it’s still unknown when it will arrive. To sate her fans, Del Rey shared another poem from the audiobook.
The latest snippet comes after Del Rey first shared a section back in early March, but since she only posted a written form of the poem — along with a still image of clouds — fans were still unsure of how the finished audiobook would sound. A little over a month later, Del Rey posted another section, this one with a video of clouds. The latest snippet is straight from the audiobook itself, so fans now have a better idea of what to expect.
In addition to the new poem, Del Rey also shared its cover art, which depicts a close-up painting of five lemons hanging from a tree. She also revealed that he audiobook’s music will be provided by Jack Antonoff.
Hollywood, and the audiences they sell to, love reboots and revivals, but not every one of them can be, say, Blumhouse’s The Invisible Man. Sometimes they’re like Doctor Sleep: pricey projects that wind up dramatically underperforming. Indeed, the failure of the belated sequel to Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, based on Stephen King’s own follow-up, scuttled what sounded like yet another bit of world building: In a new interview with Collider, director Mark Romanek said a Shining prequel he’d been working on has probably ceased to be.
IndieWire caught the exchange, which came in the middle of a conversation about Amazon’s new anthology sci-fi show Tales from the Loop, whose maiden episode was helmed by Romanek. (You know him from music videos like “Closer,” “Hurt,” and “Criminal” as well as the movies One Hour Photo and Never Let Me Go). The prequel, Romanek said, would have been based on a prologue King wrote for his classic 1977 novel, then scrapped, which was set at the turn of the previous century and focused on the robber baron who built the haunted Overlook Hotel. A script was written by The Walking Dead showrunner Glen Mazzara, and Romanek had punched it up after signing on to direct. But, barring a miracle, you’ll never see it.
“It’s a great script I think,” Romanek told Collider. “It’s based on Stephen King. It’s not just something somebody made up, and it’s more of an origin story on the, almost like a Western or a wilderness story, going back to the construction and the desecration of the Indian burial grounds, and the construction of the Overlook Hotel and its opening night.”
But there’s one hitch. “The problem is it’s really expensive,” Romanek explained.
“It kind of reads like The Revenant or Heaven’s Gate or something and I think they wanted to try Doctor Sleep to see if — my impression is they wanted to see if there was this sort of Shining universe that would have financial life through them or artistic life with the audience. And I think Doctor Sleep did just sort of okay, and given that our script is so costly, it’s a little dead in the water right now. But you never know, it’s a weird business. It’s a very good script. I’m proud of the script.”
So there you go. You didn’t go see Doctor Sleep, and now you can’t see a prequel to The Shining. But at least you’ll always have the Kubrick version that King famously hates.
Remember going to the movies? It’s been about a month since movie theaters have closed as a result of the novel coronavirus. And while people are still watching new movies — Troll World Tour just dropped PVOD for 20 bucks! — there’s a lot of anxiety in the industry about what moviegoing will look like in a post-pandemic world.
One person who’s been very vocal about how it will change has been super-producer Jason Blum, whose company Blumhouse currently leads the market on inexpensive but profitable horror movies. Previously he’s speculated about how movie exhibition will change post-COVID-19, while acknowledging it’s still early to go into specifics. But one thing’s for sure: You won’t be seeing a glut of pandemic movies from his company.
Blum was on Friday’s The Bill Simmons Podcast to talk some more about how the industry is trying to deal with this unprecedented shift, and at one point his host asked a big question of the man whose company is responsible for Paranormal Activity, The Purge, Get Out, and the latest iteration of The Invisible Man: How many virus movies is he being pitched over Zoom these days?
“We’re not doing a virus movie,” Blum said bluntly. “We made two: We made The Bay, with Barry Levinson, and we made Viral. That’s two virus movies, and that’s enough.”
It’s a bold move, if perhaps not from an economic standpoint, to not capitalize on something that’s already destroyed untold lives. Both those films, too, are relatively old, and were not big hits: The Bay, a found footage frightfest from the director of Diner and Rain Man, came out in 2012, while Viral, from Catfish and Paranormal Activity sequel helmers Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, received a limited release in 2016. And of course, there’s always the chance that, down the line, when things have lifted, he may change his mind.
Blum spent the majority of his time on Simmons’ podcast on industry talk. Blumhouse had two movies affected by the COVID-19 outbreak: The Invisible Man, which was released in late February and made a pretty penny before the outbreak stepped up, and The Hunt, which came out a week before quarantining became a thing and did not make bank. Both were subsequently made available on PVOD, and Blum says they did well. But he worries that the industry’s pandemic pause might amplify something that was already a problem in modern movies: Non-tentpole movies may be squeezed out of theaters and wind up only on PVOD.
“What moviegoing is going to be like post-COVID is going to be different that it was pre-COVID,” Blum told Simmons. That said, it’s too early to tell how different it will be or in what ways. “I think tentpole movies might still be in the theater for three or four months, but maybe The Hunt might be in the theater for two or three weeks. Or they’re just not in the theater at all.”
Simmons wondered if a new trend might emerge in which movies play theaters then go PVOD immediately after their run, maybe costing around $15. “I think that’s very possible,” Blum said, saying that could be a “compromise” between studios/exhibitors and audiences. He generally thinks that this seismic shift in the industry may result in studios and exhibitors learning how to better serve (or at least get more money from) viewers. “It may not be better for exhibition, it may not be better for producers, it may not be better for the studios. But the audience, which is the most important, will be better served after this crisis.”
Of course, there’s another major problem to contend with: Right now no one’s making movies (or scripted television). Yes, a number of major titles — from Black Widow to A Quiet Place II — have been rescheduled for later dates, while others are simply going to PVOD (or even to streamers like Disney+ or Amazon Prime). But there will still be a lack of content.
“The problem is the movies and the hole in production don’t line up,” Blum said. He says the movies put on hold will be “sprinkled” over the next 18 months, but there will also be all those movies that simply never happened. “For six months we won’t have made anything. The consumer’s not going to feel that for six months.”
But he reiterated something he said before: Going to the movies will definitely come back. “We have the memory of fleas,” Blum said. “Our habits will go back really fast. I may be totally naive about that, or maybe that’s wishful thinking. … But I think people are going to go back to going out to eat, going to Disneyland, going to the movies.”
You can listen to the entire podcast on The Ringer. Blum’s segment begins at the 47-minute mark.
Cops and robbers have been some of the most durable subjects for TV since the inception of broadcast television: Jack Webb’s Dragnet was the original docudrama. And Netflix is no exception, with great shows like Orange Is The New Black, Breaking Bad, and Peaky Blinders tackling everything from the emotional connections between gang members to the struggles of surviving prison. But, when you’re done with those, there are thousands of hours of mysteries, questionable crimes, and dangerous criminals, but we’ve narrowed it down to the fifteen best crime shows on Netflix to binge on.
Ryan Murphy has made a name for himself on TV thanks to his nightmare-inducing anthology series, but this mini-series, which chronicles the events leading up to and following the murder trial of O.J. Simpson, proved the showrunner can do drama like no one else. Employing an award-winning cast (including Sarah Paulson, Sterling K. Brown, Courtney B. Vance, Cuba Gooding Jr., and John Travolta), Murphy charts the fall of one of the most beloved sports stars in a case that gripped the nation. The events are well-known, but it’s the meat added to the behind-the-scenes details, particularly Paulson’s portrayal of Marcia Clark, that make this a worthwhile watch. In its second season, the show moves focus on the assassination of design legend Gianni Versace by Andrew Cunanan. While not as strong as the amazing ensemble in Season 1, Season 2 boasts memorable portrayals of conflicted, complex figures by Darren Criss, Penelope Cruz, Édgar Ramírez, and (surprisingly) Ricky Martin.
The UK’s most popular new drama has made its way across the pond. The procedural thriller stars Game of Thrones’ Richard Madden as David Budd, a military vet turned police officer tasked with protecting a high-profile politician during a particularly dicey time. There’s plenty of suspense and action to string you along, coupled with a vulnerable performance by Madden, who ditches his King of the North swagger to play a man conflicted by his past and his present duty to his country.
This is one of Netflix’s most popular documentary series, and you’ll understand why after one episode. The show follows the case of Steven Avery and his nephew Brendan Dassey, who were arrested for the murder of photographer Teresa Halbach. But what initially appears to be a clear-cut case becomes much more questionable once filmmakers Moira Demos and Laura Ricciardi take you inside a system that seems designed to generate guilty verdicts rather than discover the truth. The show’s second season, perhaps its strongest, follows Avery’s appeal process led by a tough-as-nails attorney who digs past the red tape to expose corruption at the highest levels of our judicial system. If the first season is a whodunnit, the second explores how such a crime was pinned on what very well could be an innocent man.
Director Ava DuVernay’s limited series about the wrongfully accused men in the Central Park Five case is an emotionally heavy reimagining of a truly tragic event in our history. The series sheds light on racial profiling and corruption in the NYPD as a group of young Black men are targeted for a heinous crime and put on trial with little evidence. It’s a gripping, heartbreaking retelling, but one that feels sadly relevant.
Based on the book by John Douglas, the real-life FBI agent who made “criminal profiler” a job Hollywood thought every FBI agent had, David Fincher’s moody procedural series is less focused on the whodunit, as usually that’s solved by the time they show up, and more about the psychological wear and tear that comes from trying to explore the minds of people compelled to murder, or do it because they’re bored, or any of a host of other reasons. It’s a fascinating character drama about crime and how some crimes eat at us.
Ozark, from part of the team behind Ben Affleck’s The Accountant, is an example of what I call stress-watching television. A combination of Breaking Bad and Bloodline, Ozark sees a money launderer (Jason Bateman) and his wife (Laura Linney) move from Chicago to backwoods Missouri in an effort to clean $8 million in three months, lest their entire family be killed by a Mexican drug cartel. It’s not a fun show, and it’s barely entertaining, but like Bloodline, it’s the kind of series where the viewer is anxious to binge through it just to see if the antagonists will survive and how. It’s a seedy, well-written, well-acted series, and Bateman is terrific, but the entire point of Ozark is to put the viewer through the wringer: It’s tense and stressful, and we don’t watch for resolution; we watch for relief.
This ironically titled show follows beat cop Catherine Cawood (Sarah Lancashire) as she juggles her job, her complicated feelings about a local man, and the brutal crime that drove her daughter to suicide. As she methodically assembles the case against who she thinks the perpetrator is, a tragedy begins to come into focus. Happy Valley can be a tough watch, but the focus on day-to-day policing, and Lancashire’s rich performance makes it a show we’re glad Netflix tracked down.
With Narcos, Netflix takes on the rise and fall of Colombian kingpin Pablo Escobar and the Medellín drug cartel. Splicing together dramatized scenes and actual news footage, Brazilian filmmaker José Padilha (Elite Squad) combines Scarface and Goodfellas to track the life of Escobar. However, the real story here is not the characters as much as it is the Colombian drug trade and the spread of cocaine from South America into the U.S. in the 1980s. Escobar is used as a vehicle to illustrate the futility of the American drug war and the toll it took on both the criminals in Colombia and the authorities in the U.S. The show’s fourth season, billed as an entire separate entry, gives us a stylish re-imagining of the early days of Mexico’s drug war with Diego Luna playing the new big bad, a drug lord looking to expand his reach, while Michael Pena plays the fed tasked with busting his operation.
Originally airing on A&E, and adapted from a popular mystery series, Longmire follows the sheriff of the title as he solves murder mysteries in and around the Wyoming county he’s elected sheriff of, while battling with local tribal authorities, the county government, and powerful families. What makes Longmire such a fascinating series is that what could just be Law & Order: Wyoming quickly becomes a series about aging men struggling with their feelings, their choices, and the truth hollowing out the comfortable world they’ve built for themselves, often looking squarely at the tropes of the Western and how they do and don’t hold up in the modern world. Anchored by Robert Taylor in the title role (you might remember him as one of Agent Smith’s sidekicks in The Matrix) and Lou Diamond Phillips as Henry Standing Bear, Longmire’s good friend and a man often stuck between his native heritage and the “white” world he’s expected to blend into, it’s a thoughtful, unexpectedly engaging series.
Ted Bundy is one of the most infamous serial killers in American history so you’d think we’d know the whole of this sociopath’s exploits by now, but this docuseries manages to find a new angle on the story of Bundy’s descent into madness. Through confessional recordings, victims’ testimonies, and investigative reporting, the short series charts how Bundy, a handsome, educated white man, was able to deceive so many for so long, murdering young women along the way. What’s even more interesting about this series is that, while the show explores how Bundy’s crimes made him an idol for some, it also does justice by his victims, detailing their backstories and interviewing their surviving family members.
Jessica Biel stars as a woman with a dark past in this mystery series with Bill Pullman and Christopher Abbot. Biel plays Cora, a wife and mother who commits a horrific act of violence during a family beach trip for no apparent reason. It’s only once a detective (Pullman) begins looking into her life before the murder does he discover a conspiracy plot as tangled as it is gruesome.
It’s the question every TV fan hears sooner or later: “Have you seen The Wire?” Sadly, The Wire is over at Amazon, but on Netflix, there’s a sometimes overlooked spiritual sibling worth looking into. Irish novelist and screenwriter Ronan Bennett’s series follows Ra’Nell, a boy struggling to survive in public housing when his mother is committed to an institution, and two young drug dealers find themselves working their way up the food chain to the top of a questionable heap. Bennett’s warmth and humanity helps bring into focus the very real struggles preteens at the bottom of Irish society and makes for a series you won’t soon forget.
There are stories to bizarre, too mind-boggling to be true… and then there’s this seven-part docuseries. Cults, queer romance, exotic cats — this true crime binge has it all. Is Joe Exotic, a gay, gun-loving conman running an exotic zoo out of his home in Oklahoma, a criminal or an American hero? Did animal rights activist Carole Baskin murder her husband and feed him to her tigers? Why are so many zoo employees missing limbs? These are just a few of the questions you’ll ask while watching this train wreck. Have fun, kids.
Ostensibly a story about the city of Batman while Batman is still just young Bruce Wayne, Gotham quickly became the kind of sprawling, bizarre campy drama that shows like Law & Order: SVU and NCIS can only wish they were. While the show has recognizable Batman villains and even makes characters like Jim Gordon and the Penguin central to the plot, in the end it’s a grandiose melodrama about an utterly corrupt city and the one man at its center hoping to change it one case at a time. Also a character is kidnapped by pirates. No, really. That happens.
Sometimes the justice system fails, and the wrong person is punished for a crime they didn’t commit. Rectify follows Daniel Holden (Aden Young) as, after spending half his life with a death sentence hanging over his head, is cleared by DNA evidence and has to adjust to life as not just a free man, even as many around him seek to undo his release.
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