Latest news with #PaulThomasAnderson
The Guardian
26-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Post your questions for John C Reilly
John C Reilly is the master actor who brought comic idiocy to Step Brothers, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story and more, as well as dramatic performances for directors including Martin Scorsese, Paul Thomas Anderson and Jacques Audiard. Now, as he makes a foray into vaudevillian music as Mister Romantic, he will be answering your questions. Reilly's screen career stretches back to 1988 with the rather inauspicious role of Thug in Bar in Steven Seagal thriller Above the Law, but by the early 1990s he was in the thick of starry ensembles in Days of Thunder, Hoffa, What's Eating Gilbert Grape and The River Wild. An early lead role came in Anderson's directorial debut, Hard Eight, one of numerous films the pair would eventually make together including Boogie Nights, Magnolia and Licorice Pizza. Channelling an endearing dopey naivety, he became one of the 00s best-loved comic actors in collaborations with Will Ferrell, and Walk Hard, a brilliant lampooning of music biopics. He's added zing to megabucks blockbusters such as Guardians of the Galaxy and Kong: Skull Island; been in premium indie fare such as We Need to Talk About Kevin, Carnage and The Lobster; and was the voice of a new-school Disney hero, Wreck-It Ralph. In 2022 Reilly began a musical stage show under the name Mister Romantic, with songs about the titular character's search for love: 'I looked at our weary world a few years ago and tried to think of a way I could spread love and empathy,' he said. 'I decided the most fun way to do that was through performing and singing and telling people I loved them.' He has now recorded the songs – previously performed by Tom Waits, Louis Armstrong, Frank Sinatra, Jo Stafford and more – and interweaved them with 'cinematic audio' for an album release on 13 June. Ahead of its release, Reilly will answer your questions about his foray into music, as well as his screen career. Post them in the comments before 7pm BST on Wednesday 28 May, and his answers will be published online and in the Film & Music print section on 13 June.
Yahoo
12-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
West End cinema listed as asset of community value
One of London's most famous independent cinemas has been listed as an asset of community value (ACV). The Prince Charles Cinema, in Leicester Square, announced the news that Westminster City Council had bestowed the title months after it revealed concerns about its future as a result of its landlord seeking to impose new terms. The cinema's current lease is due to expire in September and the building's owner wants to raise the rent. The listing provides the local community with the right to try to raise funds and bid for the building first if it is put up for sale. The cinema described the recognition as "a huge honour", but added "the fight continues to secure a long term lease". If a building is listed as an ACV, its owner must notify the council if it is put up for sale. A six-month moratorium on the sale can then be invoked by the local community to give them the chance to raise finance and make a bid to buy it on the open market. However, it does not require a landowner to sell their property to a community group and does not mean a landowner has to continue any existing lease. In a statement about the listing, the cinema said: "Though this recognition is a huge honour, the fight continues to secure a long term lease that will enable us to invest in our future development and continue to bring the best of what we do to Leicester Place. "We believe that any truly great venue is built on the shoulders of those who work within and those who support it – and we couldn't have asked for a more passionate and vocal level of support from the many thousands of you who signed the petition, bought tickets, became members or simply just kept coming through our doors. "Thank you to every one of you who took a moment to support our cause." Beloved West End cinema fighting for its future London cinema drops AI-written film after backlash More than 160,000 people have signed a petition to save the venue. Paul Thomas Anderson, the director of Boogie Nights, There Will Be Blood and Inherent Vice, has previously spoken up for the Leicester Square cinema, which he described as "like tuning into your favourite radio station". Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs director Quentin Tarantino said it was "everything an independent movie theatre should be", adding that "for lovers of quality films, this is Mecca". The venue, one of the last remaining independent cinemas in central London, has accused the landlord, Zedwell LSQ, of trying to "bully" the business out of the building. Criterion Capital, Zedwell LSQ's parent company, said the terms of a new lease were standard practice and not unreasonable. Listen to the best of BBC Radio London on Sounds and follow BBC London on Facebook, X and Instagram. Send your story ideas to Westminster City Council Westminster City Council guidance on assets of community value
Yahoo
10-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Haim has something to tell you: Its tour is coming to Minneapolis
Haim, the indie rock trio of Alana, Danielle, and Este Haim, is embarking on a tour across the U.K. and North America that will have them popping into stadiums like Madison Square Garden and the United Center. The "I Quit" tour will also have them stopping by The Armory in Minneapolis on Sept. 14. The tour takes its title from the group's upcoming album, which will be released on June 20. Haim has already released a few songs from the record, including "Relationships," "Everybody's Trying to Figure Me Out," and "Down to Be Wrong." A video for the latter song was released last week. It's directed by Oscar winner Paul Thomas Anderson, who is a friend of the band — Alana Haim starred in his film Licorice Pizza — and has directed music videos for the band previously. Tickets for the Minneapolis show, which features Dora Jar as an opener, will go on sale at 10 a.m. on Friday, May 2. A presale will take place on Thursday.
Times
09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Magnolia (1999) review — Mackey's absurd sexism pre-empted Andrew Tate
How special is Magnolia? There hadn't been a Hollywood film as creatively unfettered since Citizen Kane. The movie's writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson, after the success of his porn industry extravaganza Boogie Nights, was simply handed carte blanche by the Hollywood studio Warner Bros (owners of New Line Cinema). Whatever he wanted, and however he wanted it, they'd pay, no script needed, no ideas required. Capitalising literally on that offer, Anderson made an aching, yearning three-hour epic about lost souls in LA's San Fernando Valley, culminating in a nutty, biblical-level frog deluge. The characters are exquisitely crafted, none more so than Tom Cruise's motivational speaker and professional pick-up artist Frank T J Mackey. Decades before the arrival of the 'manosphere' and toxic Andrew Tate,
Telegraph
28-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Leonardo DiCaprio versus Thomas Pynchon: How a baffling book became the craziest film of 2025
On the face of it, Paul Thomas Anderson's next film, One Battle After Another, represents one of the least likely commercial prospects for American cinema this year, if not this decade. Not only is Anderson a director who firmly shuns the mainstream, but he has never had a true hit film. His most praised picture, 2007's There Will Be Blood, grossed a total of $76 million at the international box office (by way of comparison, the Coens' No Country For Old Men, which beat it to Best Picture at the Oscars, earned nearly $100 million more) and his last film, 2021's excellent Licorice Pizza, was a considerable commercial flop. It lost as much as $30 million despite being deservedly Oscar-nominated for Best Film, Best Director and Best Original Screenplay. It takes guts, therefore, for any studio to offer Anderson a mega-budget of $140 million for his next project, but that is exactly what the much-maligned David Zaslav's Warner Brothers has done. The studio has already giant risks on Bong Joon-Ho's lunatic sci-fi Mickey 17 and Robert De Niro's Alto Knights (both of which flopped), but neither are as curious – or potentially fascinating – as One Battle After Another. Not only will this film test the box office earning power of its star Leonardo DiCaprio to the limit, but is also based on some of the least likely existing intellectual property for a mainstream blockbuster imaginable. The newly released trailer for Anderson's new picture promises that this will be something deeply unusual and original. DiCaprio is playing Bob Ferguson, a dishevelled former revolutionary who was part of a gang called 'The French 75', which appears to include Benicio del Toro and Teyana Taylor. They are now on the run from Sean Penn's bleach-blonde antagonist, Sgt Lockjaw, a military man and ruthless white supremacist. Ferguson is desperately searching for his daughter, and the trailer hints at action scenes far bigger and more elaborate than anything Anderson has ever tackled before in his work. The film's official synopsis reads: 'When their evil enemy resurfaces after 16 years, a group of ex-revolutionaries reunites to rescue one of their own's daughter.' This could equally be said of The A Team or Mission: Impossible, meaning that the film will continue to remain mysterious until its September release, were it not for an intriguing, and decidedly Andersonian, nugget. In 2014, Anderson wrote and directed an adaptation of the American author Thomas Pynchon's 2009 novel Inherent Vice. The film was commercially unsuccessful, despite a star-studded cast that included Joaquin Phoenix, Josh Brolin, Reese Witherspoon and Owen Wilson, but it was nonetheless a watershed of a kind in mainstream cinema, as it was the first time that its creator's work was put on film. Pynchon is widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th and 21st centuries, despite or perhaps because of a commitment to privacy that made the similarly reclusive JD Salinger look like a fun-loving extrovert. From his first novel, 1963's V., up to his most recent book, 2013's Bleeding Edge, Pynchon has built his literary reputation on a relatively slim canon – he has published seven novels, one short story collection and one novella – which have received considerable recognition for their allusive, tricksy, post-modern qualities. His most famous and respected publication is probably 1973's Gravity's Rainbow, 780 pages long and every one of them stuffed with self-reflective wit and invention. Nominally about the creation of the V2 rocket in WWII, the book abandons conventional chronology or characterisation in favour of a Joycean display of intellectual prowess that led both to comparisons to Moby-Dick. The Pulitzer Prize jury that year called the book 'unreadable,' 'turgid,' 'overwritten' and in parts 'obscene'; one critic suggested that he had only managed to get a third of the way through. It would be fair to call Pynchon a Marmite novelist, were it not for the fact that, if you described him as such, he would probably lead you on a 10,000-word digression through the global history of breakfast condiments before ending with an apposite quote from Nabokov. Or, indeed, The Simpsons. Amusingly, this most highbrow of writers has appeared twice on the show, voicing himself, although he refused to deliver a line calling Homer Simpson a 'fat ass' because 'Homer is my role model and I won't speak ill of him.' In his life and work alike, Pynchon revels in confounding expectations and leaving breadcrumb trails for his most obsessive admirers to follow, a quality that he shares with Anderson. It is therefore inevitable, and fascinating, that rumour and scuttlebutt – as yet formally unconfirmed – have suggested that One Battle After Another is, in fact, a renegade quasi-adaptation of Pynchon's 1990 novel Vineland. Anderson has form in taking the bare bones of existing novels or literary works and creating something entirely different from them. There Will Be Blood was very loosely based on Upton Sinclair's 1920s book Oil!, about a tyrannical oil millionaire, and The Master took inspiration from everything from the life stories of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard and Magnolia actor Jason Robards to Pynchon's novel V. Yet the film-maker's only 'straight' literary adaptation to date has been Inherent Vice, which duly saw Anderson Oscar-nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay, and set him on a path to another reckoning with the hitherto unadaptable Pynchon. Anderson has been candid about his feelings for Vineland. He told Time Out in 2014, around the time of Inherent Vice's release, that 'I'd wanted to adapt Vineland, but I never had the courage. It seemed to be a great way to translate [Pynchon] into a movie.' Yet he recognised that to do so would be, in his words, 'borderline pathological'. He has even hinted that Inherent Vice was a trial run of sorts for his truer passion project. Anderson told Los Angeles Magazine in early 2015, when asked about upcoming ideas, that 'Vineland is really near the top for me. I got bogged down with certain things, but the characters still stick with me, the ideas stick with me, the girl Prairie sticks with me, trying to figure out what happened to her mom and dad.' He concluded, apparently jokingly, 'I mean, either I'll do it or just rip a lot of it off.' Amidst persistent rumours that One Battle After Another adapts – or rips off – Vineland, necessitating Anderson's production company buying the rights to the novel before filming, it is looking increasingly likely that Warners' largesse has finally given Anderson the chance to make a suitably fast-and-loose version of his beloved book. Certainly, he has taken on an impressively difficult task. When Vineland was published in 1990, 17 years after the hugely successful Gravity's Rainbow, it was greeted with a mixture of respect and faint confusion. Its narrative, set in the appropriately Orwellian year of 1984 – Ronald Reagan's re-election – initially focuses on the hippie Zoyd Wheeler, who is pursued, along with his daughter Prairie, by the implacable federal agent Brock Vond. The FBI is attempting to bring down a counter-cultural collective that Wheeler and Prairie's mother Frenesi used to belong to, the aptly named 'People's Republic of Rock and Roll' or 'PR³' for short. Unfortunately, Frenesi is a government informer, selling out her fellow hippies to her on-off lover Vond. Interspersed with copious flashbacks to the Sixties, the novel can be interpreted as a eulogy for the free-thinking and open-minded attitudes of a bygone age, compared with the near-fascistic contemporary era. Yet although the book is a comparatively snappy 384 pages, it is so full of digressions, eccentric supporting characters – step forward Weed Atman, an academic who is treated somewhere between a god and a guru – and cultural allusion that it's a dense, slow read, albeit fascinatingly so. Nonetheless, when it was published, most critics did not see it as the equal of Gravity's Rainbow. Salman Rushdie, then in the midst of the Satanic Verses fall-out, was respectful in the New York Times, calling it 'free-flowing and light and funny and maybe the most readily accessible piece of writing the old Invisible Man ever came up with', but also acknowledged that it was not the book that most readers had expected from Pynchon. As he wrote: 'We heard he was doing something about Lewis and Clark? Mason and Dixon? A Japanese science-fiction novel? And one spring in London a magazine announced the publication of a 900-page Pynchon megabook about the American Civil War, published in true Pynchonian style by a small press nobody ever heard of, and I was halfway to the door before I remembered what date it was, April 1, ho ho ho.' April Fools aside, the Mason and Dixon book would eventually materialise in 1997, and attracted the plaudits that Vineland did not. That novel was criticised by the New York Review of Books' Brad Leithauser in a largely negative review that began 'The further I ventured into Thomas Pynchon's new novel, Vineland, the more pressingly I found myself wondering: For whom is this intended?' Although he acknowledged Pynchon's 'quick intelligence and quirky invention', Leithauser went on to say, sorrowfully, 'one must note that in view of our expectations the book is a disappointment.' This swiftly became the consensus, especially after the publication of the far more popular – if longer – Mason & Dixon seven years later. Even Rushdie, its greatest champion, recognised that the book 'either grabs you or it doesn't'. Most of its readers seemed resolutely ungrabbed. Thirty-five years on, Vineland has yet to undergo a wholescale reappraisal, which may or may not occur in the unlikely event that One Battle After Another both acknowledges its source material and becomes a commercial success. Still, there have been murmurings. In 2010, the Guardian's Andy Beckett wrote that, after Pynchon's 2006 novel Against the Day was published, to exhausted and even dismissive reviews, 'the relatively modest and heartfelt Vineland began to look more of an achievement: not 'a breather between biggies', but perhaps Pynchon's last fully realised novel.' Appropriately enough for a counter-cultural novel, it is much lauded on Reddit, where one commentator breathlessly wrote that Vineland 'is so f_____ unbelievably good its [sic] like he took all the insane complexity of his earlier novels & took the insane pain to write something like 49 or GR & instead wrote a novel where every sentence & paragraph are flawless, it's Nabokov on LSD 25, while Surfing.' Just as Inherent Vice – novel and film alike – may not have been for the mainstream but were ardently welcomed by the aficionados whom Pynchon and Anderson were surely aiming at, so the prospective reunion of elusive author and allusive film-maker promises to be one of 2025's most exciting – if commercially risky – creative marriages. And if Anderson has given the seldom seen Pynchon a cameo, as he was rumoured to have done in Inherent Vice, then that will be all the more reason to head down to the cinema in September.
