‘Something Beautiful' Trailer: Miley Cyrus Makes Her Directorial Debut with Pop Opera Feature
'Something Beautiful' will feature 13 original songs from Cyrus' ninth studio album of the same name. The film is mixed by Alan Meyerson ('Dune Part One,' 'The Dark Knight') for a theatrical release. 'Mandy' breakout filmmaker Panos Cosmatos produces along with Cyrus and XYZ Films, in collaboration with Sony Music Vision, Columbia Records, and Live Nation. Benoît Debie is the cinematographer.
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''Something Beautiful' is my dream project come true — fashion, film, and original music coexisting in harmony,' Cyrus said in a press statement. 'My co-creators are all geniuses in their own right: from the masters of sound, Shawn Everett and Alan Meyerson, to one of cinema's most unique directors, Panos Cosmatos serving as a producer. Each collaborator has used their expertise to make this fantasy a reality.'
'Something Beautiful' will have its world premiere June 6 at the Tribeca Festival. The film follows the trend of visual albums with feature accompaniments: The Weeknd recently debuted 'Hurry Up Tomorrow' starring Jenna Ortega and Barry Keoghan to coincide with his album as well.
As for the 'Something Beautiful' team, producer Cosmatos has his own feature in the works starring another first-time female director, Kristen Stewart, whose 'The Chronology of Water' wowed at Cannes. Stewart will star alongside Oscar Isaac in Cosmatos' '80s-set vampire rave drama 'Flesh of the Gods,' written by 'Se7en' screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker. The film centers on married couple Raoul (Isaac) and Alex (Stewart) who descend each evening from their luxury skyscraper condo and head into an electric nighttime realm of '80s Los Angeles, per the official synopsis. When they cross paths with a mysterious and enigmatic woman and her hard-partying cabal, Raoul and Alex are seduced into a glamorous, surrealistic world of hedonism, thrills, and violence. 'Flesh of the Gods' will be the fourth collaboration between Cosmatos and XYZ, including 'Something Beautiful.'
'Something Beautiful' will be released in theaters for one night only on June 12 from Trafalgar Releasing and Sony Music Vision. Check out the trailer below.
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Boston Globe
11 hours ago
- Boston Globe
Danielle Spencer, child star on ‘What's Happening!!,' dies at 60
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Los Angeles Times
13 hours ago
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L.A. jazz legend Bobby Bradford lost his Altadena home to wildfire. At 91, music is ‘all I have left'
Fifty years ago, L.A. free-jazz titan Bobby Bradford moved into a rambling, verdant house in Altadena. The cornet and trumpet virtuoso, who performed in Ornette Coleman's band and taught jazz history at Pomona College and Pasadena City College for decades, chose the neighborhood partly because it was bustling with artists. He finally had enough bedrooms for his young family to thrive in a bucolic corner of the city with deep Black roots. In January, Bradford's house burned down in the Eaton fire, alongside thousands of others in his cherished Altadena. At 91, he never imagined starting his life over again in tiny rented apartments, with decades of memories in cinders. Despite it all, he's still playing music. (He said that while he did not receive grants from major organizations such as MusiCares or Sweet Relief, a GoFundMe and others efforts by fellow musicians helped him replace his cherished horn.) At the Hammer Museum on Thursday, he'll revisit 'Stealin' Home,' a 2019 suite of original compositions inspired by his lifelong hero — the baseball legend and Dodgers' color-line-breaker Jackie Robinson, a man who knew about persevering through sudden, unrelenting adversity. 'That's all I have left,' Bradford said, pulling his horn out of its case to practice for the afternoon. 'I'm [91] years old. I don't have years to wait around to rebuild.' For now, Bradford lives a small back house on a quiet Pasadena residential street. It's his and his wife's fifth temporary residence since the Eaton fire, and they've done their best to make it a home. Bradford hung up vintage posters from old European jazz festivals and corralled enough equipment together to peaceably write music in the garage. 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But he draws resilience from his recent music, which evokes the gigantic accomplishments and withering abuse Robinson faced as the first Black player in Major League Baseball. As a child in 1947, Bradford remembers listening to the moment Robinson took the field, and while he has always admired the feat, his understanding of Robinson has evolved with age. 'It was such a revelation to me as a kid, but later I was more interested in who the person was that would agree to be the sacrificial lamb,' Bradford said. 'How do you turn that into flesh-and-blood music? I began to think about him being called up, with a kind of call-and-response in the music.' The challenge Bradford gave himself — evoking Robinson's grace on the field and fears off it — caps a long career of adapting his art form to reflect and challenge the culture around him. With Coleman's band in the '50s and '60s, and on his own formidable catalog as a bandleader, he helped pioneer free jazz, a style that subverted the studied cool of bebop with blasts of atonality and mercurial song structures. He played on Coleman's 1972 LP 'Science Fiction,' alongside Indian vocalist Asha Puthli. 'Ornette played with so much raw feeling,' Bradford said. 'He showed me how the same note could be completely different if you played it in a different chord. I had to learn that to play his songs.' His longstanding collaboration with clarinetist John Carter set the template for post-bop in L.A., charged with possibility but lyrical and yearning. He's equally proud of his decades in academia, introducing young students to centuries of the Black American music that culminated in jazz, and the new ways of being that emerged from it. At both Pomona College and Pasadena City College (where Robinson attended and honed his athletic prowess), Bradford helped his students inhabit the double consciousness required of Black artists to survive, invent and advance their art forms in America — from slavery's field songs to Southern sacred music, to Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, Sarah Vaughan and into the wilds of modernity. 'You always had that one kid who thinks he knows more about this than I do,' he said with a laugh. 'But then you make him understand that to get to this new Black identity, you have to understand what Louis Armstrong had to overcome, how he had to perform in certain ways in front of white people, so he could create this music.' He's been rehearsing with a mix of older and younger local musicians at Healing Force of the Universe, a beloved Pasadena record store and venue that reminds him of the makeshift jazz club he owned near Pasadena's Ice House in the '70s. 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January's wildfires proved to him, very intimately, that the most fixed points in one's life and community are vulnerable. Even Jackie Robinson, whose feats seemed an indisputable point of pride for all Americans, had his military career temporarily scrubbed from government websites in a recent purge against allegedly 'woke' history. 'I thought we had rowed ourselves across the River Jordan,' Bradford said, shaking his head. 'But now we're back on the other side again. We thought we had arrived.' Who knows how many years of performing Bradford has left. But as the sound of his melancholy horn arced through a sweltering Pasadena afternoon, one couldn't help but be grateful to still have him here playing, even after losing everything. 'You know, in his first game, in three times at bat, Jackie Robinson didn't get a hit,' he said. 'Folks said, 'Oh, it's so sad. We told you he couldn't play on a professional level.' 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Boston Globe
13 hours ago
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The profound irony of Trump's Kennedy Center honoring LGBTQ icon Gloria Gaynor
Gaynor is best known for her 1978 megahit 'I Will Survive,' which became an anthem for those dancing the night away in New York discos during the '70s. Disco itself remains widely misunderstood. It wasn't about 'Saturday Night Fever.' It was an after-hours scene of cultural and social tolerance, where everybody – Black, white, Latino, gay, straight – was welcome as long as they liked to dance (and, at some of the harder doors, as long as they were dressed well enough). Disco was multi-ethnic, pansexual, and progressive in nature. This, as much as anything, helps explain the white working-class backlash that reached its apotheosis with Disco Demolition Night at Comiskey Park in 1979. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Advertisement In other words, disco represented much of what the Trump administration abhors. So it makes sense that this iteration of the Kennedy Center, which Trump has pledged to remake in his own image and name, would honor a socially conservative disco queen, even if her biggest hit still makes the playlist at just about every pride parade. This is Trump's disco counter-narrative: disco wasn't about celebrating diversity. It was really Ready the Kennedy Center dance floor. Chris Vognar can be reached at
