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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
youtu.be
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.
Just beautiful.
“It’s all I want to do, just one little fun thing for myself!” — Every parent ever.
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.
You can listen to the poem in the audio above.
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.
(Via Collider and IndieWire)
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.