The Morning Show - TV Review

Starring Jennifer Aniston, Reese Witherspoon, Steve Carell, Billy Crudup, Mark Duplass, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Nestor Carbonell, Karen Pittman, Bel Powley, Desean Terry and Jack Davenport.

An interesting timely approach. In the wake of Matt Lauer and Charlie Rose, this examines what it's like for a Today-like morning program that has to deal with the fallout when their main male anchor (Steve Carell) is fired for sexual misconduct. Jennifer Aniston plays the head female anchor who was barely holding it together when the scandal broke, and Reese Witherspoon is a small-town reporter who has one of her stories go viral and gets an opportunity to join the show. Made me think of what it was like for Savannah Guthrie, Gayle King, Norah O'Donnell, etc. 

Fantastic cast, with Billy Crudup the Emmy-winning stand-out as the network executive who seems to like the chaos and may or may not want Aniston to fail so he can fire her and get a clean slate of leads on the show. 

The genius of casting Carell for this part is that he has this lovable persona and he's famously one of the nicest off-camera guys around. So to see him as this character be accused of these things, it makes the viewers secretly deep down hope some of these accusations are false.

The pace of the season is expert. When I take it as a whole, you can see the creators had a grand idea from beginning to end how this was going to go. Some actors in there seem like they don't have a lot to do and then the episode comes where we see just how important their role is in the grand scheme of things.

I'm very interested to see where Season 2 goes from here. With COVID, production was delayed and the season was rewritten to incorporate that into the show, but it should be out before the end of 2021. It's on AppleTV.

It Movie Breaks September's Box Office Record

For the weekend of September 8-10, 2017, It had the third-highest opening of the year. It shattered box office records for September (previous record was Hotel Transylvania 2 at $48 million). and is the highest opening ever for a Stephen King adaptation. It also has the chance of breaking The Exorcist's record of highest-grossing R-rated horror film of all time.

(Would now be a good time for a Killer Klowns from Outer Space reboot?)

The other new wide release was Home Again, a rom-com paycheck for Reese Witherspoon. It's the lowest opening for her since 2010's How Do You Know.

Opens September 15
MOTHER! with Jennifer Lawrence, Javier Bardem, Ed Harris and Michelle Pfeiffer.
AMERICAN ASSASSIN with Dylan O'Brien, Michael Keaton, Taylor Kitsch and Sanaa Lathan.

Mud - DVD Review

Starring Matthew McConaughey, Tye Sheridan, Reese Witherspoon, Sam Shepard, Jacob Lofland, Ray McKinnon, Sarah Paulson, Michael Shannon, Paul Sparks and Joe Don Baker.
Directed by Jeff Nichols.

★★★★

Jeff Nichols is a rural poet, a director that just captures the middle and lower-class Bible Belt with an honesty and beauty like no one else.

Shotgun Stories was his debut, a modern Hatfield & McCoy about three older siblings feuding with their father's next generation of sons, the ones that he actually loved and raised.  Next he did Take Shelter, about a man who thinks he's seeing visions of coming disaster.  Both starred Michael Shannon, lately best known for Man of Steel or HBO's Boardwalk Empire.  Shannon's usually the bad guy or creepy guy, but in Nichols' world, he's allowed to play good three-dimensional characters.

He's a supporting part here.  "Mud" is the name of Matthew McConaughey's character.  Mud is a drifter hiding on an island, discovered by two friends, Ellis (Sheridan) and Neckbone (Lofland).  Ellis and Neck like to boat up and down the river by their town, exploring.  They find Mud living in a boat stuck in a tree, dropped there from some previous tornado.

People here are so poor I couldn't tell if this was a period movie or not.  The only radio song that we hear is from The Beach Boys, and Ellis and Neck would fit right in with the kids from Stand By Me.  It could be set in the 1980's, or present day.  Some of the residents would be just as comfortable moving in by Hushpuppy from Beasts from the Southern Wild.

I'm going to be bummed if this gets forgetten come award season.

Random Movie Stuff - 6/21/12

- Reese Witherspoon is going to star in a big-screen adaptation of Men Are From Mars Women Are From Venus. I'm assuming they're hoping for Think Like A Man business and not What to Expect When You're Expecting business. No word yet if Morgan Freeman's going to star in Chicken Soup for the Soul.

- Charlie Sheen will be playing the President of the United States in Machete Kills, Robert Rodriguez's grindhouse follow-up to Machete. The sequel will star Danny Trejo, Mel Gibson, Jessica Alba, Zoe Saldana, Sofia Vergara, Michelle Rodriguez, Demian Bechir and Amber Heard.

- Red Tails co-stars Cuba Gooding Jr. and Terrence Howard will reunite in The Butler, starring Forest Whitaker in the true story of Eugene Allen, who served as butler at the White House from 1952 to 1986. Oprah Winfrey, John Cusack, Alan Rickman, Jane Fonda, Minka Kelly, Alex Pettyfer and Lenny Kravitz co-star. Lee Daniels (Precious) will direct.

- Development has stalled on the planned remake of The Thin Man. It was to star Johnny Depp and be directed by Rob Marshall (Chicago), but Marshall's moving for a big-screen adaptation of the play Into the Woods.

- Shawn Levy (Real Steel) is going to produce a big-screen Sesame Street movie. This would be the third time the Childrens Television Workshop gang graced the silver screen. There was also 1985's Follow That Bird and 1999's The Adventures of Elmo in Grouchland.

Random Movie Stuff - 4/21/12

- Guy Pearce (Memento, Lockout) is set to join the cast of Iron Man 3.  He'd play geneticist Aldrich Killian, who sells nanotechnology to terrorists to help them spread a virus.  Ben Kingsley's also on board, and returning are Robert Downey Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow and Don Cheadle.  It's scheduled to open May 3, 2013.  Pearce can be seen in this summer's Prometheus.

- Paul Feig (Bridesmaids) is in talks to direct Wish List, about a girl who makes ten wishes on a coin and throws it into a magical fountain.  Unbeknownst to her, the coin got tstuck and didn't make it to the bottom, but twenty years later it gets unstuck and hits the bottom, causing all ten wishes to suddenly come true and disrupt her life. It stars Reese Witherspoon.

- Sin City: A Dame to Kill For is finally moving forward, and the first two confirmed returnees are Mickey Rourke and Rosario Dawson.

- Jonathan Frid, who played vampire barnabas Collins on the original Dark Shadows sopa opera, has died at age 87.  He did film a cameo in Tim Burton's Dark Shadows, which opens next month.

Random Movie Stuff - 12/18/11

- Ben Kingsley may reunite with his Hugo co-star Asa Butterfield in Ender's Game.

- Reese Witherspoon will star in Devil's Knot, about the West Memphis Three. It's the true story of three young men who were convicted of killing three boys in 1993, but after several years and a couple documentaries made demonstrating their innocence, they were finally freed. Witherspoon would play the mother of one of the victims, who was sure they were guilty but over the years came to believe them and fought for their release.

- Rachel McAdams is in talks to reunite with her Sherlock Holmes 2 co-star Noomi Rapace in Passion for director Brian DePalma.

- James Frain (Water for Elephants) has joined the cast of The Lone Ranger, starring Armie Hammer, Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter and Tom Wilkinson.

- David Fincher (Se7en, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) is still working on developing an animated film based on the Dark Horse comic-book character The Goon. He's also still looking at doing an origin story of Captain Nemo, a prequel/reboot of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

Dark Knight Rises tidbits, etc.

- Empire magazine has more behind-the-scenes info on The Dark Knight Rises, but the most surprising revelation is that it picks up eight years after the events of The Dark Knight. The first six minutes will also air in front of Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol in IMAX theaters.


- Reese Witherspoon will star in Wish List. Written by Jonathan Aibel & Glenn Berger (Kung Fu Panda 2), it's about a child who makes ten wishes on a single coin. Unbeknownst to her, the coin never reached the bottom of the magical well. Then 25 years later, the coin jostles free and reaches the ground, and all ten wishes are granted in her adult life.


- ABC has cancelled Pan Am and Man Up.


- Wyatt Knight, who played Tommy in the Porky's movies, has died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Family members said he'd been suffering from stage 4 non-Hodgkins lymphoma and decided he was tired of the pain. He was 56.

How Do You Know - DVD Review

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Starring Reese Witherspoon, Owen Wilson, Paul Rudd, Jack Nicholson, Kathryn Hahn, Mark Linn-Baker, Tony Shalhoub and Lenny Venito.
Directed by James L. Brooks.

This is one of those rich-people-with-trifling-issues rom-coms more associated with Nancy Meyers than James L. Brooks. It's about people struggling to connect, but able cast and witty dialogue aside, it felt like it's written by someone who hasn't had actual human connection for a long time.

Reese Witherspoon plays a professional softball player who's about to learn she's been cut from her team. Owen Wilson plays a professional baseball player who makes $14 million a year who falls quickly for Reese, but he's trying to figure out how to be in a real relationship. Paul Rudd is a CEO who's about to learn his business is being investigated for securities fraud and that he might personally go to jail for it, even though he isn't sure what he did. Jack Nicholson plays his father, who also happens to be chairman at the same company.

Reese bounces back and forth between Owen and Paul, all the while each character seems to be waiting for the other to stop talking so they can talk about themselves and wonder aloud how to connect to people without ever doing so. Nothing about this movie ever feels real. I found Owen's huge well-furnished apartment more interesting. I could picture ten union workers furnishing it, putting everything in place, checking the lighting, measuring everything. The work they put in deserves to be in a better movie.