Culture

A few months after going on the lam in late 2019, the thirty-two-year-old wunderkind art dealer Inigo Philbrick sent his friend and colleague Orlando Whitfield a trove of documents. Philbrick wanted his old friend to write a sympathetic account of the misdeeds he stood accused of — since described as the biggest art fraud perpetrated in US history, for which Philbrick was later convicted and imprisoned. Whitfield has instead written All That Glitters, a memoir chronicling their friendship and dealings during a heady “gold rush” decade in the art world. Going through Philbrick’s correspondence and the court documents, Whitfield realized his friend was not the person he purported to be, certainly not the one his clients believed he was.

It’s been an unusually good year on TV, and the Emmy nominations reflect a quality of both breadth and depth. The likes of Shogun, Slow Horses, Ripley and, of course, Baby Reindeer don’t come along very often, but for them all to be competing against one another is going to give Emmy voters quite the headache. Obviously it’s all but impossible to compare many of these shows; the genre-bending black comic horrors of Baby Reindeer simply aren’t more or less deserving than the elegant noirish depravity of Ripley, both of which are up for Best Limited Series, but the nature of awards is that one has to be accounted the winner, and Richard Gadd’s none-more-hyped show is likely to walk away with several awards, and deservedly so.

“Did I just write the song of the summer?” twenty-seven-year-old Megan Boni, an aspiring New York-based singer-actress known on social media as “Girl on Couch,” asked her public a few weeks ago. Days before, she suggested that her TikTok followers set to music a thirteen-word satirical musing she had improvised about her undersexed Gen Z peeresses’ lofty romantic expectations. Known simply as “Man in Finance,” the song’s lyrics easily divide into four short verses that unfold like shallow ads in the “Personals” section of an old newspaper: “I’m looking for a man in finance/Trust fund/Six-five/Blue eyes.” Adaptations have gone viral on social media, gathering more than 80 million hits and earning Boni more than $300,000 in revenue.

Before the news of the assassination attempt on Donald Trump blew him off the front pages, the dramatic collapse of the trial of Alec Baldwin in a New Mexico courtroom was the most discussed story in American public life. Those attuned to cosmic ironies might note firstly that both the Trump and Baldwin stories revolved around the discharge of a firearm — accidentally and fatally in the case of Baldwin, deliberately and non-fatally in the case of Trump — and also in the abiding animosity between the two men, fanned by Baldwin’s continued impersonations of the former (and future?) president on Saturday Night Live. Yet the question now for Baldwin is what happens next.

The trailer for Ridley Scott’s new epic, Gladiator II, is undeniably impressive, but then it rather had to be. Rumors that its already massive budget had ballooned to as much as $310 million — which would mean it would have to be one of 2024’s highest-grossing movies just to break even, never mind making a profit — may have suggested that the film was in trouble, but an early screening of the preview at the CinemaCon convention in Las Vegas reassured exhibitors and studios alike, with the few journalists who had seen the footage rushing to extol its scale and grandeur. Now it’s been released online, and viewers have a chance to judge for themselves. (Its cinematic debut will come with Deadpool vs Wolverine.) Does it look like a worthy follow-up to Gladiator? https://www.

If you have a Netflix subscription, then you’ll quite probably be tempted to watch the new $150 million Beverly Hills Cop film. The movie is snappily subtitled Axel F — the name of the would-be iconic Axel Foley character, equally snappily embodied by Eddie Murphy, returning to play the part for the first time in three decades. In truth, the movie is an undemanding and entertaining watch that flies by in a couple of inconsequential hours. Directed by debutant filmmaker Mark Molloy, it brings Foley back to Beverly Hills — via some complicated plot mechanics that don’t need to concern anyone but the most anxious viewer — in order to become involved in a police corruption scandal.

When Brian Robbins, CEO of Paramount Studios, addressed the company in a town hall meeting on Tuesday, he was not in celebratory mood. Amid the grim and downbeat words he had to utter — “We know what a difficult and disruptive period it has been. And while we cannot say that the noise will disappear, we are here today to lay out a go-forward plan that can set us up for success no matter what path the company chooses to go down” — the news that the studio’s profits have declined by 61 precent over the past five years was described by Showtime CEO Chris McCarthy as “simply unacceptable.” Paramount is in big trouble. The only questions now are why, and what can be done to ameliorate the situation?

When the news of the Canadian actor Donald Sutherland’s death at the age of eighty-eight was announced yesterday, it was greeted with a sigh and a shout by his peers. A sigh, because every great actor’s death, even at a grand old age, is a sad loss, and a shout, because there will now be the niggling feeling that Sutherland never quite got his due treatment when compared to his peers. Yes, he won an honorary Oscar in 2017, and yes, he appeared in his fair share of hugely acclaimed and iconic pictures, from M*A*S*H to Pride and Prejudice. But Sutherland’s tendency to appear in a lot of undistinguished B-movies, especially in the Eighties, has counted against him.  This is deeply unfair. He was an actor who, even in the weakest films he appeared in, brought class and dignity.

Early on in her entertaining account of five years immersed in the New York art scene, author Bianca Bosker is informed that, as far as the art world is concerned, because she is a journalist, she is the “enemy.” Given that the job of a journalist is to find things out, then explain and communicate those findings, it is unsurprising that a hermetic, deeply self-protective society like the art world would be resistant to journalistic inquiry. In reality it’s not just Bosker’s profession that makes it difficult for her to get past art’s gatekeepers, but a whole litany of personal and social failings that are gleefully enumerated by an art dealer early on.

If you were standing somewhere around Hollywood today, you would hear a long, deep exhalation. The new Bad Boys film, snappily subtitled Ride or Die, has indeed ridden, rather than expired, at the US box office. It grossed $56 million in its opening weekend — and not only is this the highest opening for an R-rated film since Oppenheimer nearly a year ago, but it indicates that in a summer where blockbusters have been routinely un-performing (Furiosa and The Fall Guy may have been critically acclaimed, but it looks unlikely either will cover their considerable production costs), there is still hope for a crowd-pleasing action film that appeals to a wide audience. Yet the film’s success was also a quasi-referendum on the pulling power of its leading man.

Alec Baldwin is a family man through and through. The poster for Baldwin’s eponymous new TLC show — featuring the actor surrounded by his wife and gaggle of kids — is proof. The heartwarming scene almost made Cockburn forget that Baldwin accidentally shot and killed a crew member for the film Rust back in 2021.   On Tuesday, Baldwin and his faux-Spanish wife Hilaria announced their upcoming show via Instagram, inviting viewers into their home to see the “ups and downs, the good, the bad, the wild and the crazy.” The fifty-second promo features the couple's seven kids, all under ten, screaming in their sterile, white New York City apartment — music to Cockburn’s ears.  https://twitter.

The much-anticipated new Benedict Cumberbatch series on Netflix, Eric, initially sounds as if it could have been made at any point in the past four decades. Bankable leading man whose character is battling substance abuse issues and mental instability; check. Diverse supporting cast including at least one character who is not only struggling against racial prejudice but homophobia too, check. Gritty-yet-faintly exotic setting, in this case the pre-Giuliani New York of the Eighties, check. But there is another element in Abi Morgan’s psychological thriller that throws a spanner in the works, in the form of the eponymous Eric.

It must be nice to be Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos. Not only is he paid a truly eye-watering amount of money to be in his job (roughly $50 million a year, according to reports), but because of his company’s pre-eminent position in the streaming market, he is interviewed, largely uncritically, by major news titles, even when he says things that are obviously either wrong or deeply stupid. Thus it has proved in a recent conversation with the New York Times, in which he announced, of last year’s hits Barbie and Oppenheimer, “Both of those movies would be great for Netflix. They definitely would have enjoyed just as big an audience on Netflix.” To add insult to injury, he declared that the size of a screen was all but irrelevant, saying, “My son’s an editor.

Although this year’s Cannes Film Festival hasn’t concluded yet (it runs until this Saturday), there is a general sense that the true talking-point pictures have been frontloaded into the opening week, both in competition and out of it. Without doubt, the one that has attracted the most attention is Francis Ford Coppola’s sci-fi epic Megalopolis, which premiered last Thursday to a mixture of outright scorn and bemused but respectful appreciation, all of which suggests that, although it still lacks a US distributor, it will keep making waves upon its release later this year — although the chances of Coppola regaining anything like his $120 million investment are slim, to say the least.

If modern America were ever to have its own “the Great God Pan is Dead” moment, it would arrive in the form of Popeyes and KFC celebrating 4/20 as a marketing boon. After all, what better way is there to signal the end of counterculture than by chomping down on some discounted fried chicken? Devotees of the “4/20” marijuana festival, commemorated globally each year, have bemoaned a string of corporate sponsorship deals which are, they sniff, at odds with the event’s hallowed “hippie” origins. So when San Francisco decided earlier this year to cancel its annual 4/20 celebrations on Hippie Hill in Golden Gate Park, citing city-wide budget cuts and a lack of lucrative brand deals, the whole affair was a little on the nose. Come on, man!

This Friday sees the Cannes premiere of a film that, by rights, really ought not to exist. As the likes of its stars Adam Driver, Giancarlo Esposito, Dustin Hoffman and Shia LaBeouf all assemble on the Croisette, it will be its now eighty-five-year-old director, screenwriter and producer, Francis Ford Coppola, who will be the most closely watched figure of the night, if not the entire festival. Megalopolis, the movie that they are all gathering to promote, has been Coppola’s great passion project all through his career. He first came up with the idea in 1977, began to develop it in 1983 and, finally, sold part of his wine empire a few years ago to raise the film’s $120 million budget.

The fourteenth series of Doctor Who returns to international screens imminently — and this time there’s a twist. Thanks to the heavy financial investment of Disney+, who have become co-financiers with the BBC, the show now has a considerably higher budget than it has done before, of around $130 million per season. Little wonder that the BBC’s director-general Tim Davie commented, only slightly tongue in cheek, that “we’ve got to thank – a lot – our partners, Disney+, who came on board so that the Doctor can travel even more widely across the planet in a slightly flashier Tardis.

Live long enough and everything you love will be remade by Hollywood. If you vaguely remember some film or show from your childhood, expect a grey-suited producer to rip it from the vault, spruce it up for “modern audiences” and shove it onto multiplex screens or one of the endless streaming services, where it’s likely never be seen and instantly forgot. There have been four modern Predator remakes.  When it was announced in 2018 that FX would be adapting Shōgun, the epic bestselling 1975 novel of medieval Japan by James Clavell, I heard myself audibly groaning. The 1980 mini-series starring Richard Chamberlain and Toshiro Mifune was already a stone-cold classic.

It was once the case that, if a planned film in a two- or three-movie series came out and wasn’t very good, the remaining films would be scrapped. The world has changed with the advent of streaming, and even though Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon — Part One: A Child of Fire was greeted with critical contempt, its sequel Part Two: The Scargiver has slid onto Netflix, only to be met with, you guessed it, yet more dismay and horror.

If you make the mistake of following journalists on Twitter, you would think that Civil War is the most talked about film of the year. It's not — and the over-coverage it's been receiving isn’t because it's particularly amazing or outrageous or riské or inflammatory. It did reach number one at the weekend box office, but on a quiet weekend, competing with third-week tickets for Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire. No, all the attention has come because Civil War is about journalism and there are few things we like talking about more than ourselves, despite few others being that interested. And so, here I am. But more interesting than the film is the release strategy behind it, because it represents A24 taking a punt on far more expensive films than usual.