“We’re representing the United States of America… Who are we?” Samuel Goldwyn Films has revealed an official trailer for an indie film titled Foxhole, the second feature from filmmaker / actor / composer Jack Fessenden. This premiered at a few small film festivals last fall, and will be out on VOD in the US this May. Unfolding over 36 hours in three different wars – the American Civil War, World War I, and Iraq. Foxhole follows a small group of soldiers who are confronted in a confined space with questions of their morality, the futility of their actions, and an increasingly unpredictable combat situation. Description from one of the fests: “There is no war, there is no patriotic goal, not even orientation in the most elementary sense. All there is, is a foxhole, a wall of fog and a desperate will not to die.” This stars Motell Gyn Foster, Alex Hurt, Cody Kostro, Angus O’Brien, James Le Gros, Andi Matichak, Alex Breaux, Asa Spurlock. It looks rough around the edges, but still seems to be worthy exploration of the futility and brutality of war.
Here’s the official trailer (+ poster) for Jack Fessenden’s Foxhole, direct from SGF’s YouTube:
Unfolding over the span of 36 hours in three separate wars – The American Civil War, World War I, and Iraq – Foxhole follows five soldiers confined in a foxhole as they grapple with morality, futility, and an increasingly volatile combat situation.Foxhole is both written and directed by young composer / actor / filmmaker Jack Fessenden (son of the actor / filmmaker Larry Fessenden), making his second feature film after directing Stray Bullets previously, as well as a few other short films. Produced by Jack Fessenden, Larry Fessenden, J. Christian Ingvordsen, James Felix McKenney, and Adam Scherr. This first premiered at the 2021 Oldenburg and Woodstock Film Festivals last year. Goldwyn Films will debut Fessenden’s Foxhole film in select US theaters + on VOD starting May 13th, 2022 coming soon. Who’s interested in watching?
Harry Potter is one of the film sagas most valued by fans and has been growing since the release of The Philosopher’s Stone, the first movie released and based on the books by J. K. Rowling.
For the 20th anniversary, the production has decided to celebrate this date with a competition that will test the knowledge of the fans.
In Episode 1, the two Houses that fought were Gryffindor and Hufflepuff. Three rounds of trivia were played, generated from a video board that featured clips from the movies, quotes, parts of the books, and other media that are part of the fan franchise.
Even some Harry Potter celebrities asked questions.
The rounds have a variety of unexpected elements that create exciting challenges for even the most knowledgeable Harry Potterplayers.
Every winning house will advance to the final.
The losing house will go to a wild card round. That means that, wherever the fans qualify, they can compete for the prize.
Recall that the competition involves four groups of fans within the four well-known Hogwarts houses: Gryffindor, Slytherin, Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff.
How to watch
The battle for the House Cup Championship will begin on November 28, 2021 at 8 P.M/E.T. The first episode of Harry Potter: Hogwarts Tournament of Houses will air on both TBS and Cartoon Network as part of its ACME Night.
When does Episode 2 of Harry Potter: Hogwarts Tournament of Houses air?
New episodes of Harry Potter: Hogwarts Tournament of Houses will air weekly on Sundays at 8 P.M/E.T. Here is a schedule for the pilot season of Harry Potter: Hogwarts Tournament of Houses.
Episode 1: Gryffindor vs. Hufflepuff November 28, 2021
Episode 2: Ravenclaw vs. Slytherin December 5, 2021
While Warner Bros.’ and Mattel Films’ upcoming Barbie movie is sure to have some level of self-awareness about its main character’s status as a real-world cultural icon, Mattel is taking a firm stance against featuring the iconic doll’s very unofficial anthem that basically everyone knows by heart.
The small tease of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie movie that Warner Bros. shared this week — a still image of Margot Robbie all dolled up and driving a dream car — singlehandedly put the project at the back front of people’s minds as something they might actually want to see. Partially because of the bright, colorful, “fun” vibes the image gave off, a number of fans began speculating what sorts of music Barbie might feature, and Aqua’s 1997 Hit “Barbie Girl” almost immediately began bubbling up in conversations. Though you could easily imagine Barbie having a bit of a laugh at itself by acknowledging Aqua’s song, Variety reports that people hoping to hear “Barbie Girl” on the soundtrack will be sorely disappointed.
Speaking matter-of-factly about “Barbie Girl,” Ulrich Møller-Jørgensen, manager to Aqua’s lead singer Lene Nystrøm, said “the song will not be used in the movie.” Møller-Jørgensen did not expand on why “Barbie Girl” won’t be in Barbie, but as Variety notes, it could have something to do with the 1997 lawsuit Mattel filed against the band for trademark violation. Along with its claims of copyright infringement, Mattel also argued that the sexual implications of Aqua’s song damaged the Barbie brand and the company’s marketing plans. Ultimately, Mattel’s initial suit was dismissed by a lower court, and its later appeal to the Supreme Court was rejected. It seems safe to say that the toy manufacturer’s feelings about the song have yet to change.
Correction April 30th, 7:40 AM: An earlier version of this post incorrectly stated that Ulrich Møller-Jørgensen, rather than Lene Nystrøm is Aqua’s lead singer.
Barbie is slated to hit theaters on July 21st, 2023.
A newly condensed, one-part production of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child has opened on Broadway, and the reviews are in. The play, penned by Jack Thorne, director John Tiffany, and original series author J.K. Rowling, takes place 19 years after the events of Deathly Hallows as the title wizard’s youngest son begins his first year at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.
The Broadway production stars James Snyder as Harry Potter and Diane Davis as Ginny Potter alongside James Romney as their son Albus Potter; David Abeles as Ron Weasley, Jenny Jules as Hermione Granger, and Nadia Brown as their daughter Rose Granger-Weasley; and Aaron Bartz as Draco Malfoy and Brady Dalton Richards as his son Scorpius Malfoy.
Playbill will continue to update this page as reviews come in.
Rounding out the company are Oge Agulué, Kevin Angulo, Chelsey Arce, Quinn Blades, Michela Cannon, Will Carlyon, Lauren Nicole Cipoletti, Judith Lightfoot Clarke, Ted Deasy, Kira Fath, Stephanie Gomérez, Steve Haggard, Ben Horner, Edward James Hyland, Jax Jackson, Jack Koenig, Spencer LaRue, Rachel Leslie, Sarita Amani Nash, Alexandra Peter, Dan Piering, Kevin Matthew Reyes, William Rhem, Antoinette Robinson, Stephen Spinella, Tom Stephens, Maya Thomas, and Karen Janes Woditsch.
The production features movement by Steven Hoggett, sets by Christine Jones, costumes by Katrina Lindsay, music and arrangements by Imogen Heap, lighting by Neil Austin, sound by Gareth Fry, illusions and magic by Jamie Harrison, and music supervision and arrangements by Martin Lowe. Patricia Dayleg is the newly appointed director of equity, diversity, and inclusion. U.S. casting is by Jim Carnahan. Sonia Friedman Productions, Colin Callender, and Harry Potter Theatrical Productions serve as producers.
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child first opened on Broadway as a two-part experience April 22, 2018. The production went on to be nominated for 10 Tony Awards, winning five, including Best Play.
Check Out New Photos of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child on Broadway
“Don’t be afraid to draw something a little more vulnerable.” Hulu has debuted the trailer for a high school romantic comedy titled Crush, marking the feature directorial debut of comedy filmmaker Sammi Cohen. This is landing on Hulu at the end of April. An aspiring young artist joins her high school track team and later discovers what real love feels like when she finds herself falling for an unexpected teammate. Another cute LGBTQ comedy for the streaming era that seems to be rehashing the same teen romance we’ve seen before so many other times. The first feature film from former Hollywood Darlings director Sammi Cohen, from a script written by Kirsten King and Casey Rackham. Crush features a comedic cast including Rowan Blanchard, Auli’i Cravalho, Isabella Ferreira, Tyler Alvarez, Aasif Mandvi, Rico Paris, Teala Dunn, Addie Weyrich, Michelle Buteau, and Megan Mullally. This look super cheesy and unoriginal.
Here’s the first official trailer (+ poster) for Sammi Cohen’s Crush, direct from Hulu’s YouTube:
When an aspiring young artist is forced to join her high school track team, she uses it as an opportunity to pursue the girl she’s been harboring a long-time crush on. But she finds herself falling for an unexpected teammate and discovers what real love feels like.Crush is directed by up-and-coming American filmmaker Sammi Cohen, making her feature directorial debut after a few other short films and plenty of TV work including episodes of “Kingpin Katie” and “CollegeHumor Originals” previously. The screenplay is written by Kirsten King and Casey Rackham. It’s produced by Jeremy Garelick, plus Will Phelps Ryan Bennett for American High, Natasha Lyonne, Maya Rudolph Danielle Renfrew Behrens for Animal Pictures, Andrew Miano Britta Rowings for Depth of Field, Katie Newman for 3 Arts, and Mickey Liddell Pete Shilaimon for LD Ent.. Hulu will debut Crush streaming on Hulu starting April 29th, 2022 this spring. Interested?
In July 2011, it ended. Adapting the final novel in rags-to-riches author J. K. Rowling’s generation-defining series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2 marked the eighth and final film at the core of the Wizarding World. For a full decade, fans aged alongside Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, and Emma Watson, starring as the heroic trio in the once-in-a-century, intergenerational, right-time-and-place story; a world that captivated Millennials, then grew up with them; a pop culture phenomenon to rival Star Wars; and now, it was over.
Sure, the $8 billion box office revenue of the Potter films are really just a portion of the “Wizarding World” franchise’s $33 billion in earnings since The Philosopher’s Stone‘s publication in 1997 (with the remaining billions due to books, merchandise, video games, home video, and of course, theme parks)… but undeniably, the end of Harry Potter would signal the end of the Wizarding World’s annual billion dollar box office dominance.
Image: Pottermore
… Or would it? In 2013, J. K. Rowling and Warner Bros. announced that they’d begun pre-production on a new film that would serve not just as a new chapter, but a new story altogether in the Wizarding World franchise, set decades before and far from the events of Harry Potter. You have to remember that when Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them was announced, fans knew only that it would follow the exploits of explorer and “magi-zoologist” Newt Scamander on his international adventures that would eventually lead him to write the textbook of the same name that would one day end up on Hogwarts school supply lists – a subtle but spectacular connection to existing Potter lore.
Set in the 1920s and ’30s, images were conjured in fans’ minds of the Wizarding World’s Indiana Jones; an explorer and adventurer, braving ancient temples and magical jungles in search of the rarest, wildest, and most dangerous of the Wizarding World’s creatures; a fun, colorful, adventurous, pulpy, and low-stakes exploration of a corner of the Wizarding World we’d never seen. It stood to reason that the globetrotting exploits of Scamander and his research into fantastic creatures could even become a standalone franchise in its own right – a potential made all the more real when it was announced in 2014 that Fantastic Beasts was pre-approved for three films (revised in 2016 to FIVE films) set in – but exploring a vastly different corner from – Harry Potter’s world.
Sounds fun, right? Then, the troubles began.
Fantastic Beasts…
Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them made its debut in 2016. To be sure, the film earned positive reviews and earned a high-respectable $800 million. But at least for many, it wasn’t really what they’d expected.
Image: Warner Bros.
For better or worse, the Fantastic Beasts series follows Newt Scamander – not a rugged, Oscar Isaacs, Indiana Jones-esque explorer, but a timid, buttoned-up, and introverted worker for the Ministry of Magic played by the soft-spoken Eddie Redmayne. His adventures begin not in exotic jungles, but in New York City of 1926, where an enchanted suitcase of irridescent, unusual, CGI, Rowling-invented creatures (a divergence from the classic unicorns, dragons, mermaids, centaurs, and spiders of the Harry Potter world) accidentally, anti-climactically opens.
Scamander allies with Tina Goldstein (a former Auror caught in the bureaucracy of the Magical Congress of the United States, or MACUSA) as well as a “No-Maj” (apparently, the American equivalent to the British “Muggle”) New Yorker named Jacob Kowalski. From there… well… let’s ask: do you remember the plot of Magical Creatures and Where To Find Them?
Image: Warner Bros.
We’ll give you a hint: it involves an anti-witchcraft legion of puritans who live in a ramshackle old schoolhouse weirdly set in the middle of Manhattan, whose adopted child Credence (Ezra Miller, in the actor’s second high-profile Warner Bros. franchise after playing DC’s The Flash) has so much repressed magical potential, it turns into a violent force called an Obscurus. MACUSA weirdly sentences Newt and Tina to death because a creature killed a senator, but they escape. Also, there’s a detective played by Collin Farrel who’s actually using a Polyjuice Potion (hey, I remember those!) to disguise that he’s not Collin Farrel, he’s Johnny Depp, playing the “Voldemort” of early 20th-century Wizarding World, Gellart Grindelwald, who was remembered as a long-dead bad guy and one-time Dumbledore foe by Harry Potter’s time.
Look, Fantastic Beasts didn’t have an easy job to begin with in expanding the Wizarding World. It’s okay that the movie was (as reviews put it) “bogged down by exposition” or a bit of a “slog,” having to introduce so much new world-building.
Image: Warner Bros.
And even if viewers can get the strict sense that Rowling doesn’t know much about New York, American government, or America’s home-grown concepts of magic and magical creatures, a New York City of the 1920s is a setting no one would’ve expected from the Wizarding World’s next era. Sure, Fantastic Beasts is a little color-drained, and pretty CGI-heavy, and a little too in-the-weeds with worldbuilding. But even if it isn’t the general aesthetic so many fans pictured, it would be interesting to see how Scamander ends up writing that text book, and with two – er, I mean, FOUR – more movies to go, that was inevitable.
“Once I slip on that sneaker, it’s MY story.” Disney has revealed a full-length official trailer for a very fun new movie called Sneakerella, landing on Disney+ in May to kick off the summer movie season. Yes, this is the long-awaited, highly-anticipated Disney take on “what if modern Cinderella but in the NYC sneaker scene instead” and it’s even rated TV-G. You’ll understand why with this for-the-whole-family trailer. Set in the avant-garde street-sneaker subculture of New York, Sneakerella is Disney’s high-energy, music-driven movie that puts a contemporary twist on the classic Cinderella fairy tale. The story follows El, as played by Chosen Jacobs, an aspiring sneaker designer from Queens who works in a shoe store that once belonged to his late mother. This also stars Lexi Underwood, Devyn Nekoda, Bryan Terrell Clark, Hayward Leach, John Salley, Juan Chioran, Kolton Stewart, and Robyn Alomar. It looks much better than expected, really getting some Enchanted vibes from this trailer. I hope it has some superb musical numbers.
Here’s the main trailers (+ posters) for Elizabeth Allen Rosenbaum’s Sneakerella, direct from YouTube:
El is an aspiring sneaker designer from Queens, NY who works as a stock boy in the shoe store that once belonged to his late mother. He hides his artistic talent from his overburdened stepfather and two mean-spirited stepbrothers who thwart any opportunity that comes his way. When El meets Kira King, fiercely independent daughter of legendary basketball star sneaker tycoon Darius King, sparks fly as the two bond over their mutual affinity for sneakers. With a nudge from his best friend and a sprinkle of Fairy Godfather magic, El finds the courage to use his talent to pursue his dream of becoming a ‘legit’ sneaker designer in the industry. El is now ready to lace up and dream big.Sneakerella is directed by American filmmaker Elizabeth Allen Rosenbaum, director of the movies Aquamarine, Ramona and Beezus, and Careful What You Wish For, plus TV episodes of “Dead to Me” and “Spinning Out” recently. The screenplay is by David Light and Joseph Raso, Mindy Stern, George Gore II, Tamara Chestna; from a story by George Gore II and Mindy Stern. Disney will release Sneakerella streaming on Disney+ starting May 13th, 2022.
When Evatt died in 2018 aged 87 more responsibilities fell on Elizabeth who concedes that there is no alternative but to put everything under the gavel.
She says: “I have battled as a single person to keep this place going. In 2019 we had bush fires, people were told not to come to the Mountains and our numbers just sank. Then we had floods, more floods, COVID, more floods, bush fires again then a compulsory lockdown for six months. So many businesses in the Blue Mountains just bled out because it was too hard. It was a labour of love, but my love has just fallen through the cracks.”
Noddy original illustration by Beek.Credit:Rhett Wyman
Continuing our private tour from what was once the grand billiard room we take in toys of Ginger Meggs, Popeye, Biggles book first editions. Upstairs Barbie is here in all her many guises. She started out as a college girl in sensible clothes before becoming a hippie and Barbie as Twiggy and Marilyn Monroe and Barbie as a person of colour.
There are wartime propaganda dolls – the Mussolini “black shirt” doll and the Nazi ‘Hitler youth’ dolls. A cautionary sign on the glass cabinet states: “These historical toys are examples of pernicious Nazi propaganda aimed at indoctrinating German children. Ultimately, they contributed to war crimes and atrocities.”
Bill Murray on the set of “Being Mortal,” Searchlight Pictures has halted production on the Aziz Ansari led film, reports say.
According to reports from multiple outlets, including the New York Times and Variety, the film studio issued a letter to cast crew on Wednesday saying the suspension occurred because of a complaint, but did not go into further details.
“Late last week, we were made aware of a complaint, and we immediately looked into it,” read the letter, per The New York Times and Variety. “We are truly grateful to all of you for everything you’ve put into this project.”
The outlets report the complaint involves inappropriate behavior against the comedian.
A representative for Searchlight Pictures confirmed to USA TODAY that production on the film has been halted at this time, but no further information was provided. USA TODAY has reached out to representatives for Murray and Ansari for comment and further details.
“Being Mortal” also stars Seth Rogen, Keke Palmer and Ansari, who is also the film’s writer and director, according to IMDb. The movie is based on “Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End,” a 2014 non-fiction book about end-of-life care written by surgeon Atul Gawande.
In a July 2021 interview with the Los Angeles Times, Lucy Liu opened up about working with Murray on the 2001 film “Charlie’s Angels,” alleging the comedian started to “hurl insults” at her while filming a scene.
“Some of the language was inexcusable and unacceptable, and I was not going to just sit there and take it,” she said. “So, yes, I stood up for myself, and I don’t regret it. Because no matter how low on the totem pole you may be or wherever you came from, there’s no need to condescend or to put other people down. And I would not stand down, and nor should I have.”
Ansari took a break from Hollywood after he was accused of sexual misconduct by a former date in a Babe.net story from January 2018. In the Babe story, the accuser, who was identified by a pseudonym, said the two were at his apartment on a date when he undressed her and pressured her into oral sex.
Aziz Ansari steps out of the spotlight with Season 3 of ‘Master of None’: Watch the trailer
‘It’s deeply frustrating’: Emmys producers react to Seth Rogen’s COVID protocol jokes at show
