Sopranos vets are working on a mystery project; a Banshees of Inisherin exclusive look behind the scenes; what happened with Halloween Ends; Machine Gun Kelly would like Hollywood’s respect. All in today’s Movie News Rundown.
But First: Margeaux Sippell is covering the fantastic Newport Beach Film Festival, where she met many cool filmmakers at a yacht party we were honored to host Friday. (Full disclosure: not our yacht.) She also wrote this story about rapper-singer Machine Gun Kelly (aka Colson Baker) and his quest to be taken seriously as an actor (he says he’s tired of being “laughed at”), and this piece about Michael Shannon’s tears-inducing performance in A Little White Lie. The festival continues through Thursday and we highly recommend attending if you can.
A Sopranos Mystery: Sopranos creator David Chase is writing a new project for Michael Imperioli and Steve Schirripa, aka Christopher Moltisanti and Bobby Bacala, and co-hosts of the excellent Talking Sopranos podcast. No details have been released, but it probably isn’t a Sopranos story, for reasons we delve into here.
Banshees of Inisherin: The new Martin McDonagh film, starring Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell, is about a friendship breakup and is at the top of my list of things to see. The following behind-the-scenes featurette is filled with Irishisms that seem meandering and poetic on the surface but in truth cut to right to the heart of things:
So… About Halloween Ends: The movie underperformed at the box office this past weekend, but was the most-viewed film on Peacock, leading to renewed questions about the benefits and drawbacks of releasing films simultaneously in theaters and streaming.
Speaking of, Um: As Freaky director Christopher Landon put it, in a gentle and heartfelt plea to film studios: “Stop trying to [expletive] two [expletives] at the same time.”
May I Editorialize? I watched Halloween Ends on Peacock, which was the best choice for everyone, as other theater patrons probably wouldn’t have enjoyed my snoring. But seriously, folks: I liked Halloween Kills a lot more. At least it had a ruthless single-mindedness I had to respect. This one felt like two different movies stitched together in a way that didn’t make thematic sense, at least to me.
Edgar Wright on Creative Procrastination: The director of Baby Driver, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World and Last Night in Soho seems like one of those endlessly creative people who never stop churning out ideas, but it turns out he gets stuck life everyone else. He says in a terrific new Collider interview that when he had writer’s block on Baby Driver, he would go to Starbucks and mine the L.A. Times crime pages for ideas.
Russell Crowe Is No Best Friend: The actor took to Twitter to deny a claim that he did a bad table read for My Best Friend’s Wedding, the Julia Roberts rom-com in which Dermot Mulroney ended up playing her best friend, and Cameron Diaz his fiancée. After the film’s director publicly alleged that the Gladiator star did “one of the worst table reads I’ve ever experienced,” Crowe tweeted that it was “pure imagination” and that he had never done a table read “with the actress mentioned,” aka Julia Roberts.
ICYMI: Here’s our interview with host and executive producer Rasool Berry about the doc Juneteenth: Faith & Freedom, which plays at the Dallas Film Festival this afternoon and is also available on YouTube in its entirety, for free.
Main image: Colin Farrell and a promising new actor in The Banshees of Inisherin. Photo by Jonathan Hession, courtesy of Searchlight Pictures.
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