Once Upon a Time & The Farewell are wins for adult programming, thank god.

What did you see this weekend? 

Weekend Box Office Estimates July 19th-21st  🔺 = New or Expanding / ★ = Highly Recommended
W I D E	PLATFORM / SPECIALTY TITLES
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood	The Farewell
1 The Lion King  $75 (cum. $350.7) REVIEW	1 🔺 The Farewell $1.5 (cum. $3.6) PERSONAL & UNIVERSAL, INTERVIEW ★
2 🔺 Once Upon a Time in Hollywood $40.3 *NEW* REVIEW  ★	2 Art of Self Defense $311k (cum. $2) REVIEW
3 Spider-Man Far From Home $12.2 (cum. $344.4)  TOM HOLLAND, REVIEW	3 🔺 Maiden $204k (cum. $1.1) REVIEW ★
4 Toy Story 4 $9.8 (cum. $395.6)  PODCAST, REVIEW	4 Super 30 $189k (cum. $2.1)
5 Crawl  $6 (cum. $23.8) REVIEW	5 🔺  Pavarotti $135k (cum. $4.2)

numbers on that chart are pulled from boxofficemojo

Unless you wanna talk about The Lion King (why? it's bad!) the big story this weekend was the strong opening of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Making movies for adults is now an endangered business so we're happy that the film had such a healthy opening, the best ever for a Tarantino picture. (Given the movie's defiantly leisurely pacing, though, we have trouble imagining great word of mouth to keep it going for a long time.) Meanwhile The Farewell continued to do great business, so much so that it entered the regular top ten this weekend despite being at only 135 theaters. Go Lulu Wang and Awkwafina! Next weekend continues the annoying trend of Hollywood refusing to compete with itself with the third straight weekend with only one new wide release: Fast & Furious: Hobbs & Shaw. After that the floodgates open with lots of new films per week as the summer movie season begins to wane. 

Review: Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood

This review was originally published in Nathaniel's column at Towleroad...

We want you... to see this movie so we can talk about it.

[Spoiler-free review] Here’s the best way to know that you’re inside an auteur’s movie. It’s impossible to imagine it having been made by anyone else. Quentin Tarantino’s 10th feature film (creatively referred to as his 9th, presumably to give him a retirement out after his various “I’ll quit after 10 films!” proclamations) is a fable about Hollywood. The movie begins in 1968 and ends in the summer of 1969 when the very pregnant actress Sharon Tate, Roman Polanski’s new wife, and her house guests were all brutally murdered by the Manson family. Any number of filmmakers could have made a movie about that infamous year in California, but only Tarantino could have made Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood. 

Historical events, real ones at least, have never been as sacred to Tarantino as the history of the movies. Whenever he’s dipped into “history” -- Django Unchained, Inglourious Basterds-- it’s been as emotionally loaded prefab worlds from which to spin his own idiosyncratic yarns.  In this regard Once Upon a Time is no exception. To this viewer, though, his latest movie feels closer in spirit to Pulp Fiction...

Click to read more ...

Once Upon a Link in Hollywood

• Variety intereesting news about Disney's alternate compensation plan for TV creatives (the television landscape is changing but pay structures haven't and are essentially still based on the old and outdated 22 episodes per season model)
• Vulture HBO has denied the IndieWire charges of what went down on Big Little Lies season 2 in terms of Andrea Arnold and the final edit
• The New Yorker another piece on Big Little Lies and its prescient season 1 finale and season 2 as a metaphor for the Hollywood fallout from #MeToo

After the jump Jennifer Lawrence, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, motion smoothing, Lord of the Rings casting, and more...

Click to read more ...

Take me to the link

• NYT Which Cannes films and performances will factor into the Oscar race. Kyle Buchanan thinks Parasite and Pain & Glory are the biggest foreign threats but Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is the big one.
• Hugh Jackman singing Happy Birthday to Sir Ian McKellen with a whole staidum backing him. Awesome
• Variety Owen Gleiberman surveys his Cannes experience and how well the movies filled the big screen
• Variety Chris Hemsworth is the coverboy at the moment so here's the big profile
• The Sheila Variations on Joseph Cotten's active listening in Gaslight (1944) 

• Variety so far Netflix is the only studio to speak out on Georgia's attack on abortion rights which could threaten the massive amount of filmmaking that goes on in that state.
• Out for a blu-ray release of To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar, John Leguizamo is talking about his character Chi Chi Rodriguez
• Town & Country we missed this news during Cannes but congrats to Jennifer Lawrence who is now engaged
• IndieWire surveys critics on the best movies that played at Cannes. Parasite comes out on top just as it did with the jury, but Portrait of a Lady on Fire (which only took Screenplay at Cannes) was the runner up.
• Variety more Cannes prizes. FIPRESCI chooses The Lighthouse (from the director of The VVitch)
• /Film a piece on Quentin Tarantino's female characters  in light of a tense moment at Cannes when he was asked about Margot Robbie's lack of dialogue in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

Tony Season
• NYT fun piece on "mysteries" of this Broadway season including how tall is the tall man in Hadestown, how does Santino Fontana sing like a woman in Tootsie, and how does one do partner dances while in a wheelchair? As for that 'tall man' in Hadestown. We first noticed him in Frozen and we ran into him on the subway over the weekend and he was as sweet and gorgeous as can be while towering over us.
• ... Timothy Hughes is his name and you can follow him on Instagram 
• Stagecraft Rosemary Harris will get a lifetime achievement at this year's Tony Awards. But her previous Tony has a typo on it!
• Playbill Wesley Taylor (Smash) who recently won the Chita Rivera Award for Outstanding Male Dancer is engaged to marry Isaac Powell (last seen in Spongebob Squarepants) 
• Playbill Fresh out of high school, Renée Rapp, who won this year's Jimmy Award (that's the highest honor for High School students in musical theater) is stepping into the role of Regina George in Mean Girls for her Broadway debut this summer.

And look here's a video about Dianne Wiest's latest play Off Broadway. It's a monologue play from Samuel Beckett

April Foolish Predictions #5: Visual Categories

[drumroll] Our annual April Foolish Oscar Predictions continue

"Nomadland" was shot by the cinematographer of "The Rider"

We always mention at the start of all this that we call them April Foolish predictions because it's foolish to assume we know anything at all quite yet. Oscar buzz begins the day of announcement for projects with "pedigree" but the reality of the Oscar race is much more complex than that as the quality of films, size of campaigns, box office results, media pets, and public perception all end up weighing in later in the year. So consider these early bird predictions as "what ifs"... we do not pretend to have the year figured out just yet as we're going on hunches...

Click to read more ...