So, spoiler alert: Luke Skywalker makes a dramatic entrance in the Season 2 finale of The Mandalorian that absolutely melted Star Wars fans’ minds thanks to the series going to extraordinary lengths to keep the cameo a secret, which was no easy task. Now, Lucasfilm has finally pulled back the curtain on how they pulled off the impressive stunt, which essentially delivered a Return of the Jedi-era Luke Skywalker, despite the over 35-year gap between the classic film and The Mandalorian.
In a new installment of Disney Gallery: The Mandalorian released on Wednesday, the behind-the-scenes series focuses exclusively on the Luke cameo. The 40-minute episode is jam-packed with technical information, from commissioning fake concept art to the Deep Fake technology required to de-age Mark Hamill, who was actually on set for the finale. But despite Hamill’s presence, executive producer Jon Favreau revealed that the filmmakers used a very Star Wars-sounding app called “Respeecher” to voice Luke’s dialog, which was especially odd given Hamill is also an accomplished voice actor.
However, according to sound editor Matthew Wood, the creative decision leaned towards accurately recreating Luke’s voice from the ’80s, and Lucasfilm went to great lengths to accomplish that task. Via Collider:
“It’s a neural network you feed information into and it learns. So I had archival material from Mark in that era. We had clean recorded ADR from the original films, a book on tape he’d done from those eras, and then also Star Wars radio plays he had done back in that time. I was able to get clean recordings of that, feed it into the system, and they were able to slice it up and feed their neural network to learn this data.”
If you want to see more of how Lucasfilm painstakingly recreated the Luke Skywalker from your childhood, and somehow kept it a secret in an age of non-stop internet rumors, the new episode of Disney Gallery: The Mandalorian is now streaming on Disney+.
Halsey is just a few days away from the release of her fourth studio album, If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power. It’s slated for a release alongside a cinematic film in which she stars as a disenfranchised queen out for revenge. While Halsey hasn’t released any singles for this album cycle, the fact that it was produced by Nine Inch Nails‘ Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross may indicate a pivot from the saccharine pop heard on her previous releases.
In fact, Reznor and Ross aren’t the only rock stars who helped Halsey out with the project. According to Stereogum, If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power‘s credits note that Dave Grohl, Fleetwood Mac’s Lindsey Buckingham, and TV On The Radio’s Dave Sitek contributed to the LP. Apparently, Grohl recorded the drum track on “Honey,” Buckingham plays guitar on “Darling,” and Sitek contributed guitar for “You Asked For This.”
Though there are several well known musicians who worked on Halsey’s album, none of the songs include features from other artists. The singer recently explained her reason for this on Twitter, saying she wanted to make her voice the center of the project. “it feels very cool to have an album with no features again,” she wrote. “It felt like this had to be entirely from my voice, similarly to Badlands. I can’t wait for you to hear everything.”
If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power is out 8/27 via Capitol. Pre-order it here.
One of the few good things to come out of the 2020 pandemic forcing a near-shutdown of the entertainment industry was NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts series moving to its “At Home” format, which opened up the concept and allowed more artists who wouldn’t have normally been able to perform due to travel and other commitments to turn in some of the best shows in the series’ history. For instance, Vince Staples and Young Thug both recently put in performances that highlighted new and upcoming releases with utterly magnetic charisma and arrangements.
Migos, the Atlanta-based trio who built their brand with exuberant performances over the past five years, is the latest example, appearing on the latest Tiny Desk Concert from what looks like one of the guys’ living rooms. Playing a three-song set from their new album Culture III including “Avalanche,” “Straightenin,” and “Happy Birthday,” Migos assert their claim for “greatest band in the world,” starting out on the couch and eventually filling the room with palpable, infectious energy.
In 2018, Kanye West’s perpetual tardiness became kind of a joke after his GOOD Music releases came later and later. In 2021, no one is laughing — or even surprised, really — that West has now had two separate listening events for his new album Donda while the album itself has been pushed back over and over again. Originally, its release date was scheduled for sometime in 2020, but for obvious reasons, it was pushed back to early this year.
But then, it was pushed back again — and again. Kanye now has a third listening event booked for this Thursday but there doesn’t seem to be anywhere near as much buzz as there was for the first or even the second. This is after neither listening event drew the sort of response that Kanye was able to generate in 2016 with the rollout for The Life Of Pablo. Maybe his antics just don’t resonate anymore or maybe he’s finally burned through all of the goodwill he generated with My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy and his 2010 GOOD Fridays campaign, but it feels like excitement dies down with each new release date he announces.
The diminishing returns for each new announcement remind me of another much-hyped hip-hop release that never came to fruition: Dr. Dre’s long-rumored, but as-yet unsubstantiated masterpiece, Detox. Referred to throughout the years as “rap’s Chinese Democracy, Detox held near-mythical status among hip-hop heads for over a decade following its announcement shortly after the release of 2001, Dre’s anachronously-titled sophomore “solo” album — which itself dropped nearly 10 years after his debut, The Chronic.
Billed as Dre’s final album and tentatively scheduled for release in 2004, Detox not only never materialized, but it also frustrated rap fans endlessly with every tantalizing detail hinted at by one of its seemingly endless list of collaborators. Names attached to the project included 50 Cent, Anderson .Paak, Busta Rhymes, Eminem, Kendrick Lamar, and even Golden Era pioneer Rakim. On Dre’s collaborations with proteges like 50 and Kendrick, he continued to tease fans to “Look Out For Detox.” Interviews and features described the high-concept theme of an epic crime thriller, Dre’s ultimate goodbye to the rap game.
And yet, with each successive year, the reality of Detox seemed further and further away. Where once artists’ hints that they had been in the studio prompted excitement from hip-hop fans, by the mid-2010s, such tidbits only inspired derisive dismissal. By then, everyone had been in the studio with Dre. If he were to release even a fraction of the collaborations that were rumored to be sitting on some hard drive somewhere, it could only spark waves of lamentations that the other rumored records hadn’t dropped as well, or that the buzzy alliances would only result in music that fell short of expectations.
Single releases like 2011’s “I Need A Doctor” felt like forward movement, only for Dre to again go dormant by the end of that year. Four more years went by before Dre released a full project and it wasn’t even Detox. 2015’s well-received but short-lived Compton seemed to put paid to the concept of the swan song, which was possibly Dr. Dre’s only way out of the prison of expectations he’d built around himself. By moving on from Detox, he freed himself from the constraints of releasing an all-time, game-changing classic and let fans engage with the music itself instead of their disappointment at missing pieces.
While Donda hasn’t quite reached that level of hype just yet, there are some pretty obvious parallels. His extensive list of potential collaborators on the project includes everyone from newcomer Baby Keem to classic New York battle rappers The LOX to the slippery trap rap royal Young Thug. So far, two entirely different versions of the album have been played for fans, including one with a Jay-Z reunion record, and yet, the quality of the music has been washed out by the spectacle of the events themselves, with snack menus going more viral than any of the songs and news coverage of the third event focusing heavily on what appears to be the publicity stunt of Kanye building a house inside Soldier Field stadium.
Meanwhile, should another projected release date pass by without a listenable version of the album hitting streaming services, it’s a safe bet that whatever goodwill Kanye has left will be spent in its entirety. Sure, there’s a subset of Yeezy diehards on Reddit who have convinced themselves that what he’s doing is the next big idea in album rollouts, but the rest of us will probably finally admit to ourselves that the emperor has been parading about in his underwear for the last few years. Maybe the constant delays really are a sign of his perfectionism, just like Dr. Dre’s were for Detox — but in the end, unless they actually release the products they’re pushing, it won’t matter how good they are, if they only exist in the artists’ imaginations.
As Impeachment: American Crime Story prepares for its debut this fall, executive producer Ryan Murphy has been adamant about making sure Monica Lewinsky has been deeply involved in the show’s development, even going so far to make sure that she’s consulted on every script. However, that process has understandably been an emotional minefield for Lewinsky who is essentially reliving what one of the traumatic and defining moments of her life.
In a new profile on Impeachment for The Hollywood Reporter, Lewinsky revealed that she hired a therapist to be there with over Zoom while she worked on notes for each script. “Because it’s hard,” she said. “It’s really hard, especially with the dramatic license that needs to be taken.” Told through her perspective, Impeachment will tackle Lewinsky’s infamous affair with Bill Clinton, which has hung over her head for the past two decades even after the headlines ended:
“You go to bed one night a private person, and the next day you’re a public human being and the whole world hates you. And you might go to jail. And you’re going to bankrupt your family. And, and, and …” she recalls over Zoom in late July. “And just because I wasn’t on the news every night for 20 years in the same way that I was in 1998 doesn’t mean that this story ended. Ten years on, I still could not get a job. I couldn’t support myself.”
Playing Lewinsky in the series is Beanie Feldstein, who unlike other biopics, became close with Lewinsky who had seen her work in Booksmart and thought, “God, she reminds me of me at that age.”
As for why Lewinsky agreed to work with Murphy and offer her blessing to the series, she’s extremely straight-forward. “Of course I have a number of selfish reasons for wanting to participate,” Lewinsky said, “but a big goal for me is that this never happens to another young person again.”
Impeachment: American Crime Story premieres November 10 on FX.
Hard Knocks is spending this summer in the Lone Star State. The annual HBO behind-the-scenes docuseries with an NFL team tabbed the Dallas Cowboys as the franchise it’ll spend a few weeks following around, and while the Cowboys always manage to attract eyeballs, they’re especially interesting this year as they attempt to bounce back from last year’s 6-10 campaign.
There are some reasons for optimism — Dak Prescott is back and healthy, head coach Mike McCarthy is now in his second year at the helm, first-round draft pick Micah Parsons looks like a potential gem in the middle of a defense that was quite bad last year — but with how high expectations perpetually are for the Super Bowl-starved franchise, optimism can turn into a full-blown meltdown pretty easily. Still, Hard Knocks is giving a look into the calm before the storm with the franchise, and on Tuesday night, this included a wonderful piece of drone work in which viewers got the chance to see the Star District in Frisco.
How the person navigating this drone did not crash approximately 500 different times is really admirable. Anyway, it turns out putting tons of cash into a 91-acre campus designed to go all-out in celebration of an NFL team leads to some impressive results.
Selena Gomez stars in Hulu’s Only Murders in the Building with Steve Martin and Martin Short (that’s Steve Martin Short for, well, short), but this is by no means her first television show. She was a Disney Channel mainstay in the late 2000s on Wizards of Waverly Place and episodes of Hannah Montana, The Suite Life of Zack & Cody, and Sonny with a Chance. Earlier this month, Gomez said that she “signed my life away to Disney at a very young age and I didn’t know what I was doing,” but she was joking.
When asked by reporters if she had any reluctance about returning to TV now that she’s a Billboard chart-topping pop star, Gomez replied, “No, definitely not. I was looking for another show to do. And by the way, I’m beyond proud of the work that I did with Disney as well. It kind of shaped who I am in a way.”
Martin added, “I have to jump in because I was there when Selena said that and it was said in the most light-hearted, funny, jokey way. And then I see it gets interpreted – sometimes they’ll say she was joking and sometimes they have it as an ominous headline – but it was completely just all in fun. I’ve signed my life away to Marty Short, you think I like that?” That sounds like a good idea for a movie, actually.
Only Murders in the Building premieres on August 31.
Eleanor and Matthew Friedberger — aka Chicago indie-rock favorites The Fiery Furnaces — are back with an eerie new song, “The Fortune Teller’s Revenge,” which follows last year’s “Down At The So And So On Somewhere,” which was their first new song in over a decade. “The Fortune Teller’s Revenge” is actually the B-side to last year’s song, but it’s being released digitally today. It’s a bone-chilling track, playing out slowly over what sounds like organ and accordion.
Likewise, the Friedberger siblings have announced three new November tour dates with special guest Fred Armisen. “We’re very excited to be playing again, to get a chance to do new things with old stuff, or old things with new people,” the band said in a press release. “And we’re very happy to have Fred opening the shows. We’ll be six on stage, joined by: Brian Betancourt, Noah Hecht, Emily Lee and Cameron Wisch.”
The Fiery Furnaces have been mostly dormant over the last decade; their last full-length release was 2009’s Take Me Round Again. Still, Eleanor has been actively releasing solo work since then, with her most recent release being 2018’s Rebound.
Listen to “The Fortune Teller’s Revenge” above and check out the tour dates below.
09/10 — Chicago, IL @ Pitchfork Music Festival
11/13 — Brooklyn, NY @ Brooklyn Steel *
11/15 — Chicago, IL @ Thalia Hall *
11/17 — Los Angeles, CA @ El Rey Theatre *
Kanye West may have delayed his anticipated album Donda, but he’s getting his fans involved in the album more than ever. He’s been hosting a few Donda listening events, which give select fans a way to hear the album before its released. The rapper is also giving his listeners a way to interact with his music on a more personal level by releasing a stem player, which will give fans an easy way to remix his music.
Kanye unveiled his Donda stem player on his website Wednesday. According to the product description, the stem player ships with the purchase of Donda and will allow listeners to “customize any song.” It includes features that control vocals, drums, bass, and samples, it can isolate certain parts of a song, and add effects. Staying true to its name, the device can even split a song into stems, which is an individual audio file for each instrument used on a track.
Kanye previously mentioned his stem player in a 2019 interview with Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. It seemed as though the rapper’s original plan was to release the stem player alongside his Jesus Is King album in order to “spread the gospel.” But the device was delayed nearly a year and a half, and will instead be released alongside Donda.
When you’re the badass director behind movies like Training Day (2001), Brooklyn’s Finest (2009), The Equalizer (2014), and the remake of The Magnificent Seven (2016), you’re not going to let something like a deadly pandemic come between you and your vision. Not even if it means you need to direct your movie in quarantine, and have your director’s chair be a van parked a block away from where your star is filming, Matt Foley-style. But that’s exactly how filming went down on The Guilty, Antoine Fuqua’s upcoming psychological thriller starring Jake Gyllenhaal as a 911 dispatch operator.
In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Gyllenhaal—who is both a producer on the project as well as its star—explained how The Guilty (a remake of a 2018 Danish film) was actually the perfect movie to make during COVID. Which makes sense, given what /Film reports as its official synopsis:
The film takes place over the course of a single morning in a 911 dispatch call center. Call operator Joe Baylor (Gyllenhaal) tries to save a caller in grave danger—but he soon discovers that nothing is as it seems, and facing the truth is the only way out.
Putting aside the fact that there probably aren’t a lot of 911 dispatchers who look like Gyllenhaal, that the film unfurls over just a handful of hours on one day, in mostly one location, and with Gyllenhaal largely interacting with his fellow actors via telephone (think Locke, but with Tom Hardy as a 911 dispatcher—not a philanderer who impregnated Olivia Colman), the production requirements do seem conducive to social distancing measures. And Fuqua planned to shoot it all in just 11 days. Then, as Entertainment Weekly reports, just 48 hours before he was scheduled to call “action,” Fuqua learned that he had been exposed to COVID-19 and had to quarantine, which put the project in jeopardy. As Derek Lawrence writes for EW:
“What seemed advantageous at the time ended up being a bit of a curse,” Gyllenhaal tells EW of the late 2020 shoot that was already in jeopardy due to the rise of COVID cases. “They were talking about shutting Los Angeles down almost every day. So, because Antoine subsequently tested negative for days afterwards, we decided to get a van that was outfitted with screens and park him a block away, hardwired to the stage where we were shooting. We’d FaceTime each other after these 25-minute long takes. He’d give me direction, I’d take it down, we’d do another take. We never saw each other in-person the entire shoot.”
Fortunately for both Gyllenhaal and his director, the two had previously collaborated on Southpaw, so had developed a sort of shorthand. For his part, Fuqua found the prospect of directing from afar kind of exciting, telling EW:
“I had to have eyes on set [and] our main cameras, and a way to communicate with my actors via Zoom and phone, when it needed to be private. Jake and I would only physically see each other from behind the studio wall. Jake would climb on a ladder and I would open the door to my van, and we would communicate. I definitely missed the close contact with my crew, but everyone stepped up and we found a way.”
The Guilty will premiere on Netflix on October 1, 2021.
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