Home Box Office

Subterms

    Latest story

    113 Shares41 Views

    Review: ‘Dune: Prophecy’ Is Still Looking for Its Voice

    by

    A long-gestating prequel, about the women who seek to guide a galaxy, is splashy, somber and insufficiently spicy.“Dune,” the multi-novel, multi-movie saga, is in part about the battle for a precious commodity hoovered up from a desert planet to enrich the rapacious nobility. It’s called spice.“Dune: Prophecy,” the six-episode prequel series beginning Sunday on HBO, also concerns a valuable resource hoarded by empires and processed through machinery. It’s called intellectual property.Spice is a dangerous substance, controlled through violence, but at least the universe gets something out of it. Its mind-expanding properties make hyperspace travel possible and can induce prescience in the user.I.P., on the other hand, tends to simply give us lavish, lesser copies of things we already have. “House of the Dragon” is “Game of Thrones: Blonder and Blander”; “The Rings of Power” substitutes the mystic wonder of “The Lord of the Rings” with C.G.I. and metalsmithing.“Dune: Prophecy” is set 10,000 years before Timothée and Zendaya strode the sands. Its action unfolds shortly after an uprising against “thinking machines” that enslaved humanity. But the series itself is securely in the control of the I.P. machine.Its focus is the Sisterhood, the precursor to the Bene Gesserit of the films, now overseen by the ruthless and subtle-minded Mother Superior Valya Harkonnen (Emily Watson). A combination of deep-state apparatus and deadly yoga colony, this secretive society of female mentalists provides “truthsayers” (human lie detectors) to the ruling nobles while guiding history with a genetics program designed to breed ideal rulers. (Humankind may have faster-than-light spaceships, but the galaxy remains a patriarchy that women can influence only by stealth.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    More stories

    • 113 Shares112 Views

      in Television

      ‘Dune: Prophecy’ Faced a Pitiless Terrain: Adapting Anything ‘Dune’

      by

      The novels were famously tough to adapt until Denis Villeneuve came along. Can an HBO prequel about the origins of the Bene Gesserit follow suit?For over 50 years, Frank Herbert’s best-selling science-fiction novel “Dune” was a puzzle no one in show business seemed able to solve. Published in 1965, the book had inspired a shelf full of sequels and prequels — along with scores of imitators — yet it defied every attempt to turn it into a blockbuster film or TV series.In the 1970s, the beloved avant-garde filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky spent two years and millions of dollars developing a movie and never shot a single frame. David Lynch tried next, but the resulting film, released in 1984, was a personal and box-office catastrophe. The story’s vastness and exoticism proved as perilous to storytellers as the fictional planet Arrakis, whose hostile deserts inspired the franchise’s name.When the HBO series “Dune: Prophecy” was announced, in 2019, its prospects seemed just as murky. Indeed the production struggled to find its footing. By the premiere, it will have seen four showrunners, three lead directors and high-level cast changes — not to mention a pandemic and two crippling industry strikes.But then in 2021, the French Canadian filmmaker Denis Villeneuve, who was set to direct the pilot, released Part 1 of his two-part adaptation of “Dune.” Critics were ecstatic, and the film grossed over $400 million worldwide. Suddenly a “Dune” franchise looked viable. Villeneuve’s team had offered a blueprint for other creators to work from, tonally, aesthetically and narratively. (The studios behind the film, Legendary and Warner, which owns HBO, are also behind the series.)Perhaps more important, there was now a huge audience that had never read Herbert’s famously dense novels but had become invested in the story and characters. The resounding critical and financial success of “Dune: Part Two,” released in February, indicates viewers are still invested in the franchise.“I think Denis really unlocked this universe for people in a way that was relatable,” said Alison Schapker, a “Westworld” veteran who took over as the sole showrunner of “Dune: Prophecy” in 2022. “He grounded it. We wanted to tell a story that takes place in that universe.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 113 Shares98 Views

      in Television

      ‘Somebody Somewhere’ Is Going Out on a Bittersweet Note

      by

      Ahead of the final season, the creators discuss Midwestern humor, queer communities of faith and why they made a show “about people who aren’t very equipped to talk about their feelings.”Hannah Bos and Paul Thureen met at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., where they bonded over being displaced Midwesterners and began writing plays together. A few years later, in early-2000s Manhattan, they met a bawdy, big-voiced cabaret performer named Bridget Everett.“I played harp in a two-girl ukulele band, and we were often on the same bill as Bridget,” Thureen said recently. “Which kind of makes sense.”As the three became fast friends, Bos and Thureen came to believe there was more to Everett than her outsize stage personality, which is perhaps best exemplified by her tendency to rub her breasts in an unsuspecting audience member’s face. They saw a quieter, more vulnerable side, and they wanted to write something that honored both that and her rollicking stage persona.The series the three of them came up with (along with the executive producer Carolyn Strauss), “Somebody Somewhere,” premiered in 2022. Its third and final season debuts Sunday on HBO and Max.“We would keep on doing this show as long as we could, if it was up to us,” Thureen said. “But we also know that it’s not up to us and that in this landscape, more than three seasons of a show our size would be unlikely.”Set in Everett’s hometown, Manhattan, Kan., the series finds quiet drama and humor in a pocket of open-minded Midwestern tolerance, where Everett’s character Sam and her friends, including her best friend Joel (Jeff Hiller), deal with loneliness by creating a sort of found family. They’re all trying to have a good time and create meaningful relationships in their small town. “Somebody Somewhere” also, unassumingly, remains one of the most L.G.B.T.Q.-friendly series on television, a place where church, beers and queerness coexist with barely a shrug.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 100 Shares148 Views

      in Television

      ‘Somebody Somewhere’ Is Back for Its Final Season

      by

      The HBO dramedy about a Kansas woman finding love and community after tragedy returns for its third and final season on Sunday.Bridget Everett in a scene from Season 3 of “Somebody Somewhere.”Sandy Morris/HBO“Somebody Somewhere,” a perfect dramedy starring Bridget Everett as a Kansas woman finding love and community after her sister’s death, returns for its third and final season starting Sunday at 10:30 p.m., on HBO. The show is full of ecstatic tenderness and easy warmth, but it avoids pat tidiness.Sam (Everett) is ebullient and loyal, and over the course of the series, her life has stabilized a lot: The cold clutch of grief has loosened, her friendship with Joel (Jeff Hiller, fantastic) continues to blossom, and she’s more comfortable singing in front of everyone. But her battle between vulnerability and defensiveness wages on. As often as “Somebody” is a detailed taxonomy of love — platonic, familial, religious, romantic — it is also a portrait of loneliness. Perhaps there is no such thing as “enough” love, the show admits; things can be wonderful without being perfect, and they can be painful but still worth it. Even the seemingly simple love of a dog comes with complications.One of my favorite parts of “Somebody” is how often the characters laugh. They all find each other screamingly funny, for good reason, and they’re all able to laugh at themselves, too. Usually when we think about Big Acting Moments, they’re quivering, tearful monologues, sobbing or ranting. “Somebody” certainly has those, but its more cathartic scenes are ones of laughter — where the real bonding happens, the real changes, the real surrender. They are also where the ensemble shines the brightest.One of the primary arcs of the show is about Sam’s re-embracing her singing voice, and in the first episode of Season 3, she sings “Smalltown Boy” alone in her car. She moves through various harmonies but then backs off a big wail, sighing that she wishes she could hit that note. But it seems like she could hit it, if she could relax into it and be a little brave.“I’ve never been comfortable expressing my feelings in public, you know?” admits Brad (Tim Bagley), Joel’s prim and adoring boyfriend. “Yeah, I think I understand that,” Sam replies. “I think that’s what’s so great about singing: Somehow the music just makes it so much easier. It’s like you’re not doing it alone.” More

    • 125 Shares169 Views

      in Television

      ‘It’s Florida, Man’ Reveals the Lives Behind Bizarre News Stories

      by

      The HBO series uses familiar comedic actors in cheeky re-enactments of real Florida events, most of them subjects of past viral news reports.Simon Rex plays a man who survives an alligator attack in Episode 2 of “It’s Florida, Man.”HBO“It’s Florida, Man,” premiering Friday at 11 p.m., on HBO, takes a “Drunk History” approach to the intimacy and portraiture of “How To With John Wilson.” It uses familiar comedic actors in cheeky re-enactments of real events, but those events are all personal sagas; they are obscure and strange, sometimes disturbing and sometimes enchanting — and all very Florida.For example, a man named Eric had his arm bitten off by an alligator, but he believes the animal was inhabited by his dead mother’s spirit and maimed him to help set his life straight. Eric says he is indeed the “Florida man” the memes suggest.“I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed,” he says in the second episode. “But I’ll stab you with the sharpest tool.” He grins. Later, he offers some of the most sanguine enlightenment one can find on television.“Florida” is the latest show to come with a winky disclaimer about its veracity, that it’s “all true. Sort of.” It blends the docudrama format with a boppy documentary style in quick-hit, episodic tales that layer re-enactments and firsthand accounts on top of one another. The recreations highlight how much these stories, most of them subjects of past viral news reports, have taken on lives of their own. But the show’s beating heart is its real-life subjects.Each episode focuses on one wild tale. The variety is both an asset and a hiccup: The tone ranges from warmly mystical to uncomfortably blasé about domestic violence. In the four episodes (of six) made available to critics, the show’s melody is “Get a load of this!” But its harmony kicks in with cheerful depth, a curiosity about the loves and agonies that extend beyond a local news segment.Luckily, everyone seems pretty much in on the joke. The first episode, “Toes,” centers on a music lover who posts on Craigslist for odd — very, very odd — jobs. One client wants to arrange an extreme encounter and asks the man to bring a friend along, which poses a challenge. “Who is (1) free on a Thursday, and (2) is down to witness cannibalism?” the man wonders.There’s a tabloid, almost sideshow glee to some of the episodes, but then again, lots of people join the circus. One man’s Jerry Springer is another (Florida) man’s Studs Terkel. More

    • 100 Shares109 Views

      in Television

      ‘The Franchise’ Review: Cutting Marvel Down to Size

      by

      A new HBO comedy takes a jaundiced look at the making of a second-rate superhero film.The new HBO series “The Franchise” satirizes the making of a superhero movie by a fictional movie studio that is Marvel in all but name. (The actual fictional name is Maximum Studios.) Warner Bros. Discovery, HBO’s parent, is Marvel’s bitter rival in the superhero field, so you might expect the show to offer an extra measure of savage mockery.But the eight half-hour episodes (premiering Sunday), while nominally dark and sardonic, do not have anything approaching the visceral pleasure that the genre they are spoofing can often provide. “When you make movies like this, but good, there’s nothing better,” the beleaguered first assistant director, Daniel (Himesh Patel), says in one of the show’s few moments of genuine feeling.The movie-within-the-show, a second-tier effort called “Tecto,” is clearly not one of the good ones. “The Franchise,” somewhat perversely, operates on the same tepid, clichéd level as the production it is supposed to be mocking.More could have been expected. The show’s creator, Jon Brown, wrote for “Succession” and, way back, for the barbed British comedy “Misfits.” And the list of executive producers includes the accomplished veterans Sam Mendes and Armando Iannucci. Mendes directed the first episode, and his touch can be seen in an early three-minute shot that follows Daniel as he walks through the cavernous set of “Tecto,” putting out fires (and encountering many of the other central characters). It is a virtuoso moment that nothing else in the show approaches.Iannucci, of course, is a specialist in the specific sort of satire “The Franchise” undertakes: the acidic depiction of institutional vanity, insecurity and ineptitude. But the vitality of Iannucci creations like “The Thick of It” and “Veep” is exactly what the new show is missing. It has more in common with Iannucci’s most recent show, the scattered outer-space cruise comedy “Avenue 5,” on which Brown worked as a writer and producer. (The sinking-ship metaphor that underlies “The Franchise” was explicit in “Avenue 5.”)“The Franchise” leapfrogs through the 117-day shoot of “Tecto,” named for its hero, an off-brand Thor (Billy Magnussen) who wields an invisible jackhammer. Each episode finds Daniel and the power-hungry third assistant director, Dag (Lolly Adefope), confronting crises drawn from the musty archives of the Hollywood backstage comedy and then tweaked to fit the world of contemporary big-money filmmaking. Bowing to commercial reality means product-placing Chinese tractors; last-minute rewrites are driven by protests over the studio’s “woman problem”; a temperamental director melts down because Martin Scorsese accuses the studio of killing cinema.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 75 Shares149 Views

      in Television

      ‘The Penguin’ Review: The Dark Blight

      by

      The HBO series starring an unrecognizable Colin Farrell is further proof that there is no fun in the Batman universe.When was fun banished from Batman’s world? Certainly the tide turned with “The Dark Knight Returns,” Frank Miller’s 1986 series of comics. As exciting as they were, Miller’s books enshrined a claustrophobic, dystopian approach that has smothered many subsequent screen treatments.In the immediate aftermath of the books, the Tim Burton films “Batman” and “Batman Returns” found thrills in the darkness. But when I sit through the subsequent Christopher Nolan blockbusters, or Todd Phillips’s “The Joker,” or even Matt Reeves’s recent reboot film, “The Batman,” I feel as if I were being punished for not being a serious enough (or depressed enough) viewer.Reeves (“Dawn of the Planet of the Apes”) is a very talented director, and “The Batman” was easier to sit through than some of its ballyhooed predecessors. But it was ruinously long at three hours, its small store of familiar ideas about revenge and social decay running dry well before the movie ended. And Reeves’s Batman was such a stone-faced mope that poor Robert Pattinson spent the whole movie looking as if he were wondering where the bathroom was, not that he would have been any happier had he found it.But the movie was beautifully shot, and Zoë Kravitz was the latest in a line (Julie Newmar, Eartha Kitt, Michelle Pfeiffer) of great Catwomen. And it had an odd, sideshow-like bonus: a beautiful movie star, Colin Farrell, rendering himself unrecognizable under a reported 50 pounds of latex to play a battered, ugly, all too human variation on a classic villain, the Penguin. The performance wasn’t fun, exactly, but it was definitely something to look at.Now Farrell and his latex are back in “The Penguin,” an HBO series spun off from “The Batman.” (It premiered on Thursday night; its second episode will not appear until Sept. 29.) Even though the show is set in the immediate aftermath of the film, and the story features large-scale chaos, Batman is nowhere to be seen; apparently he’s taking a long vacation. So “The Penguin” is not a superhero show.Instead, as developed by Lauren LeFranc (“Impulse,” “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.”) with Reeves as an executive producer, it is a particularly self-conscious gangster saga. Farrell’s Oswald Cobb (shortened from Cobblepot) is a midlevel mobster who sees an opportunity when his boss is killed and sets out to take over the Gotham City drug trade, peddling a new high called Bliss. Alternately opposed to him or allied with him is the boss’s daughter, Sofia Falcone (Cristin Milioti), recently released from Arkham Asylum with designs of her own on the top spot.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 63 Shares149 Views

      in Television

      ‘The Penguin’ Waddles Onto HBO

      by

      Played by Colin Farrell under pounds of prosthetic makeup, the character anchors the latest superhero series, a bridge between “Batman” films that aims to be more than a mere brand extension.When Matt Reeves was preparing his 2022 film “The Batman,” his sprawling, blockbuster exploration of crime-ridden Gotham City and its hometown vigilante, he would sometimes remark — half-jokingly and half-not — that it really needed to be an HBO series.Reeves, who directed and co-wrote the nearly three-hour movie, felt there were still stories to tell and characters to explore, like Oz Cobb, a midlevel mobster played with foul-mouthed gusto (and pounds of prosthetic makeup) by Colin Farrell.Though the character appeared in only a few scenes, Reeves said, “There was something electric about Colin. He just completely embodied a spirit that was so fresh and so powerful. You wanted to look at him under a microscope and understand, who is that guy?”That desire is fulfilled in “The Penguin,” an HBO series premiering on Sept. 19. Picking up immediately after the events of “The Batman,” its eight episodes return to Reeves’s grungy incarnation of Gotham while chronicling Cobb’s rise to his perch atop the city’s empire of organized crime.“The Penguin” is an unapologetic bridge to a planned “Batman” sequel, but it is also trying to use TV to provide something that movies cannot: a longform character study of its crude and wily title character, who is very different from the dapper, top-hat and monocle-wearing bad guy seen in decades’ worth of Batman comics.“The Penguin” is arriving amid a boom-and-bust cycle of cinematic superhero universes. “The Batman” was a $772 million-dollar hit for Warner Bros. at the worldwide box office. And while the summertime success of Disney’s “Deadpool & Wolverine” shows there’s still an appetite for the cinematic adventures of comic-book heroes, it’s not always a certainty that viewers want to follow these characters onto TV.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 125 Shares149 Views

      in Television

      How a TV Critic Navigates an Age of Endless Content

      by

      James Poniewozik, The New York Times’s chief television critic, discusses the state of modern television and the struggle to watch it all.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.James Poniewozik has a tough job: He gets paid to watch TV.“There’s a lot to keep up with,” Mr. Poniewozik, 56, the chief television critic for The New York Times, said in an interview. “But much of the time it is really interesting.”For nearly three decades, he has written about dramas, comedies, presidential debates, court hearings, interactive art installations and anything else that plays out on the small screen. Mr. Poniewozik began writing about television as a media columnist for Salon and later became the TV and media critic for Time magazine. He joined The Times in 2015, focusing his coverage on the intersection of TV, culture and society at large.Ahead of TV’s biggest night — the Emmy Awards — on Sunday, Mr. Poniewozik shared the TV trends he’s watching and how he decides what shows to cover in the seemingly infinite modern TV landscape. These are edited excerpts.Fourteen percent of American adults say they get their news from TikTok, up from 3 percent in 2020. Is TV still a force to be reckoned with?TikTok has certainly become more influential. But I was struck while covering the presidential debate between Biden and Trump that it was possibly the most politically consequential TV broadcast ever: Because of one or two hours of TV, a candidate for president changed. All of the reasons Biden dropped out were present before the debate, but once you had tens of millions of people focused on one performance at one time, it became an unstoppable force.How do you weigh how many people will watch a show against its quality when deciding what to review or cover?We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More