NEW YORK (AP) — Jordan Peele’s “Us,” his anticipated follow-up to “Get Out,” will make its world premiere at the South by Southwest Film Festival.
SXSW announced Tuesday that “Us” will open the 26th edition of the Austin, Texas, festival on March 8. Like Peele’s “Get Out,” ″Us” is a socially minded horror thriller.
The film stars Lupita Nyong’o as a woman returning to her beachside childhood home with her husband and two children. On the vacation, an unresolved trauma from her past is unearthed leading to an eerie confrontation for the family with doppelgangers of themselves.
“Us” will be released March 15 by Universal Pictures. Peele also produces along with Jason Blum of Blumhouse Productions. Co-stars include Winston Duke, Elisabeth Moss and Tim Heidecker.
SXSW runs March 8-17.
BET Networks announces premiere of its original comedy movie “FALL GIRLS.” Paige Davis played by Amara La Negra has just gotten promoted to President of Sales at her job, Wellington Tech. To celebrate, her boss Simone, played by Joely Fisher, invites her and her co-worker/best friend Tyra played by Erica Hubbard for a weekend getaway. After a night of partying with the boss, Paige and Tyra wake up to a dead boss. With it looking as if they killed their boss, Paige and Tyra now have to try their best to figure out who killed their boss without taking the “fall!”
Amara La Negra (Love & Hip Hop: Miami), Erica Hubbard (Let’s Stay Together), Erica Peeples (True To The Game), Paris Phillips (Love & Hip Hop: Hollywood), Tami Roman (Carl Weber’s The Family Business) and Joely Fisher (Last Man Standing) star in the world premiere of “FALL GIRLS” Saturday, January 12 at 9 PM ET/PT on BET and BET Her.
“FALL GIRLS” is Executive Produced and Directed by Chris Stokes. Marques Houston, Jerome Jones, Jarell Houston, Juanita Stokes, Brett Dismukealso serves as the film’s co-producer.“FALL GIRLS” is produced by Footage Films.
John David Washington comes from a strong acting lineage, but he has carved out his own identity as a powerful actor, earning a Golden Globe nomination and generating Oscar buzz for his standout role in Spike Lee’s “BlacKkKlansman.”
In his first starring role, Washington played a black police officer in Colorado who infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in the late 1970s. The actor received praise for his portrayal of the gigantic Afro-wearing undercover officer, who notably used a “white voice” during his racist exchanges in scenes with a KKK grand wizard over the phone.
Washington credits Lee for choosing him for his acting abilities, and not because he’s the son of Oscar-winning actor Denzel Washington and Pauletta Washington, his actress-mom.
“It’s just a compliment that (Spike Lee) believed in my ability,” said the actor, who is the eldest of the couple’s four children. “I didn’t feel pressured. I felt encouraged. (Lee) exemplified the true meaning of trusting your teammate. … It was so liberating as an artist. It gave me the confidence I didn’t realize I needed.”
Along with “BlacKkKlansman,” Washington made a few other big screen appearances in 2018, starring in “Monsters and Men,” a film where he played a conflicted police officer who witnesses racism among his colleagues. He also appeared in the drama “Monster” and “The Old Man & the Gun,” featuring Robert Redford, Casey Affleck and Danny Glover.
Washington’s success on the big screen comes while he continues to star as Ricky Jerret on HBO’s TV series “Ballers.” The 34-year-old actor said he is living out his “childhood dream,” but says the hard work must continue.
″(It’s) like go back to the gym and work on different aspects of your game. It’s like I’m on the right career path. This is what I should be doing for the long run,” he said. “I can’t wait to keep growing as an artist.”
He’s also proud to keep up the strong reputation of the Washington family name in Hollywood while striking out on his own.
“As their first born, my biggest fear was to disappoint them. I make mistakes, but I never wanted to disappoint them. I wanted to be a good son,” he said. “I have great parents, and great grandparents. It makes me emotional thinking about it. They were so proud of me. They’re happy for me because I’m trying to be my own man.”
Source: Associated Press
The first wide release of a calendar year is traditionally an undemanding popcorn palate cleanser to soothe (or numb?) the mind after the ambitions–or, more accurately, pretensions–of the year-end flurry of would-be and wannabe awards bait, and 2019 is no exception, with Sony Pictures kicking the year off with the thriller <i>Escape Room</i>. The no-frills title reflects the straightforward premise: a group of six disparate strangers are recruited into a deadly escape room game under circumstances that prove to be as deadly as they are mysterious. There are no real surprises here on the script level credited to Bragi F. Schut and Maria Melnik. On the page, the scenario progresses at a basic programmatic level: as the group moves from potential deathtrap to the next, the ranks are thinned out one by one, as are revealed little key biographical details about each participant, gradually building to unifying design, rather than chance randomness, behind the madness.
Director Adam Robitel, however, appears both keenly aware of the built-in limitations and all-in committed to them, recognizing how studio escapism (bad pun intended) can be by-the-numbers yet still be fun for both himself and the audience. The Rube Goldberg-esque, one-thing-leads-to-another progression of each room does have its puzzle-box style and suspense that effectively puts the viewer vicariously in the characters’ shoes as they negotiate through them; that each room has its own distinctive flavor adds to the fun. The characterizations, such as they are, aren’t fleshed out on the page beyond stock types, but given the nature of the piece, they don’t have to be too much more than be individually recognizable. Yet to Robitel’s credit, he has assembled a talented and charismatic ensemble, led by Taylor Russell, Jay Ellis, and Deborah Ann Woll, that give more than they’re given and whose commitment make it easier to buy into the preposterous scenario.
And does it ever get preposterous, and in a less fun, more labored, and wholly predictable way, in the final stretch, where the obvious eagerness to set up a continuing series is perhaps the film’s biggest cliché. But getting there is undeniably the enjoyable ride one expects from such a film, however ultimately disposable it may be.
Grade: B-
“The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” star Alfonso Ribeiro is suing the creators of Fortnite and NBA 2K for using his famous dance on the popular video games.
In separate lawsuits filed Monday in federal court, Ribeiro alleges that Fortnite-maker Epic Games and 2K Sports-creator Take-Two Interactive used his dance dubbed “The Carlton Dance” without permission or credit.
Ribeiro’s dance was popularized through his character, Carlton Banks, on the 1990s sitcom.
Ribeiro says North Carolina-based Epic Games and Delaware-based Take-Two used his dance he first performed on a 1991 “Fresh Prince” episode. He’s asking for a judge’s order to stop both games from using his moves.
Ribeiro says he is currently in the middle of copyrighting the dance.
Epic Games and Take-Two spokesmen didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Source: Associated Press
Penny Marshall, the nasally and good-natured Bronx native who starred on the ABC ratings sensation Laverne & Shirley before shattering records as a top-grossing female director in Hollywood, has died. She was 75.
The younger sister of the late writer-director-producer Garry Marshall and the first wife of actor-director Rob Reiner, Marshall died in her Hollywood Hills home on Monday night from complications from diabetes, her publicist Michelle Bega told The Hollywood Reporter on Tuesday. She was diagnosed with brain and lung cancer in 2009.
Marshall earned fame — but, incredibly not even one Emmy nomination — for playing the wisecracking Laverne DeFazio on the Happy Days spinoff created by her brother. Laverne & Shirley, which aired for eight seasons from 1976-83, centered on the escapades of two romantically challenged Milwaukee brewery workers, with Cindy Williams co-starring as Marshall’s idealistic roommate, Shirley Feeney.
She directed a handful of episodes of the sitcom, then was approached to step in as a last-minute replacement for Howard Zieff to helm the feature comedy Jumpin’ Jack Flash (1986), starring Whoopi Goldberg.
For her next film, she hit comedic pay dirt with Big (1988), the magical Tom Hanks starrer about a boy who wakes up in the body of an adult. Co-produced by James L. Brooks, who brought the script to her, it was the first film directed by a woman to gross more than $100 million (about $198 million in today’s dollars) domestically.
Another great Marshall comedy, A League of Their Own (1992), a fictional account about the real-life All-American Girls Professional Baseball League organized during World War II, also starred Hanks (as well as Geena Davis, Rosie O’Donnell and Madonna) and broke through the $100 million barrier as well.
In between those films, the director dramatically changed course with the fact-based Awakenings(1990), which starred Robert De Niro as a middle-aged man who has been catatonic for 30 years and Robin Williams as a painfully shy doctor determined to “awaken” him.
With Awakenings, Marshall became the second woman ever to helm a best picture Oscar nominee. She also is only one of seven to achieve that without landing a directors nom as well.
“I had friends who said, ‘Why do you want to be in a hospital for four months?’ I said, ‘I was depressed in a toy store, what difference does it make?’ ” she told the Los Angeles Times in 1990. “I’m a depressed person. People said it was so brave to do a drama. I didn’t think it was bravery. I figured I had an excuse: If it didn’t work, I could say, ‘Well, that’s not my strength.’ ”
Carole Penny Marshall, named after actress Carole Lombard, was born Oct. 15, 1943, and her family lived on the Grand Concourse, a major thoroughfare in the Bronx. Her father, Anthony, made industrial films, and her mother, Marjorie, was a dance instructor who taught her youngest kid how to tap.
Marshall often noted that Garry, 10 years older than she, and her sister Ronny, six years her senior, were planned, while she was a mistake. As a teenager, her mother told her, “You were a miscarriage, but you were stubborn and held on.” Her parents did not get along with each other.
(Garry died of complications from a stroke on July 19, 2016. He was 81.)
Following high school, she fled to the University of New Mexico to study psychology, got married in 1961, dropped out and had a daughter, Tracy, her only child (who later was adopted by Reiner). Divorced after two years, Marshall supported herself with an array of jobs, including a stint as a choreographer for the Albuquerque Civic Light Opera Association, before heading to Los Angeles in 1967.
“I didn’t know my brother that well,” she told Tavis Smiley in a 2012 interview. “So I went and said, ‘Let me go meet him.’ He was doing well. He was writing for Dick Van Dyke and Joey Bishop and every show, so why not to meet him?
“He’s a great guy. I wouldn’t have a career without him. He told me go have lunch with this person, go take acting classes from this person. I said, ‘Mommy wants me to change my name.’ He said, ‘Why?’ ‘Because she doesn’t want me to embarrass the family.’ (Laughter.) ‘He said, ‘Don’t listen to her, she’s nuts.’ ”
Supporting herself as a secretary while studying acting, she appeared in commercials. Her first was a Head & Shoulders spot opposite the gorgeous, blond and then-unknown Farrah Fawcett; Marshall played her plain roommate.
After appearing on such shows as That Girl and Love, American Style, she and Reiner — mere months before they were to marry — auditioned for a new CBS sitcom. But while Reiner was cast as Michael Stivic, it was Sally Struthers who ended up playing his wife, Gloria, on All in the Family.
Marshall, though, soon joined her brother’s ABC comedy, The Odd Couple, as Oscar Madison’s flighty secretary, Myrna Turner. It was Jack Klugman, who played Oscar the sloppy sportswriter, who insisted she get the job.
Guest stints on such series as The Bob Newhart Show and The Mary Tyler Moore Show and a regular role on the short-lived sitcom Paul Sand in Friends and Lovers (created by Brooks and Allan Burns) followed.
In 1975, she and Williams — who had met on a double date years earlier during a Liza Minnelli performance at L.A.’s Ambassador Hotel — were working on a satire for Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope magazine when Garry Marshall hired them for an episode of Happy Days.
Portraying “fast girls” recruited by Fonzie (Henry Winkler) for a double date with Richie Cunningham (Ron Howard), the two displayed an immediate comic rapport. So when ABC entertainment chief Fred Silverman asked the Happy Days creator if he had any ideas for a new show, he mentioned one starring his sister and Williams as Milwaukee’s best.
“Fred Silverman was in his spinoff days,” Marshall said in a 2000 interview with the Archive of American Television. “[I pitched the show as] two girls from the other side of the tracks. There are no shows about blue-collar girls on the air. He said, ‘It’s on! What’s its name?’ ‘I said, Laverne & Shirley.’ ‘Good, I love it!’ ”
“People were dying for someone that didn’t look like Mary Tyler Moore, a regular person,” Marshall added. “My sister looks like a regular person, talks like a regular person.”
The series, from Paramount Television, started out with the ladies living in a basement apartment and working as bottle cappers for the Schotz brewery in the 1950s. Marshall quaffed milk mixed with Pepsi and sported sweaters with a large, loopy ‘L’ on them, and she and Williams performed physical shenanigans not seen since the days of I Love Lucy.
Laverne & Shirley debuted No. 1 in the ratings on Jan. 26, 1976, and in its post-Happy Days spot at 8:30 p.m. on Tuesdays, went on to become the highest-rated series for the 1977-78 and 1978-79 seasons. (Reiner’s All in the Family was No. 2.)
“We [once] had a 60 share. That doesn’t happen except for the Academy Awards or things like that, like the Super Bowl,” she told the Huffington Post in May 2013. “We beat out Jesus once, I remember that. It was Easter.”
In mid-1979, Laverne & Shirley was sold into syndication for a record price, estimated to be $50,000 an episode.
Williams, though, was not with the writers on the show, and in 1982 she sued Paramount for $20 million in a dispute over wanting to get paid while missing episodes because she was pregnant. After a settlement, Williams was written out of the series, and Laverne & Shirley wrapped after 178 episodes in May 1983 with one Emmy nom ever — for costume design.
In 1978, Marshall starred opposite Reiner in the ABC telefilm More Than Friends, co-written by Reiner and based on the early days of their courtship. (Earlier, Reiner had played her fiance, named Sheldn (they forgot the “o” on his birth certificate, as the gag went), on The Odd Couple.
She and Reiner split up in 1979; afterward, she had a long romance with singer Art Garfunkel.
Marshall also had a minor role in the 1979 comedy 1941, directed by Steven Spielberg, and she did a cameo as a director in the 1995 movie adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s Hollywood satire Get Shorty!
After A League of Their Own, Marshall directed Renaissance Man (1994), toplined by Danny DeVito and featuring Mark Wahlberg in his feature debut; The Preacher’s Wife (1996), with Denzel Washington and Whitney Houston in what she once called “the first black Christmas movie”; and the Drew Barrymore starrer Riding in Cars With Boys (2001).
More recently, she directed a couple of episodes of Showtime’s United States of Tara and appeared on IFC’s Portlandia (series star Fred Armisen hilariously impersonated her to promote her sassy 2012 memoir, My Mother Was Nuts) and the Fox sitcom Mulaney.
Marshall was one of Hollywood’s most fervent Los Angeles Lakers fans. She regularly was seen courtside at the Forum and then Staples Center, with her trademark tinted glasses perched precariously on her nose.
Her daughter played left fielder Betty Spaghetti in A League of Their Own.
Duane Byrge contributed to this report.
Source: The Hollywood Reporter
After a serious breach of trust, will Juicy and Gary’s friendship come to blows? Tune into the season finale of RICKEY SMILEY FOR REAL and find out if Juicy and Gary eventually kiss and make up or if their friendship is at the point of no return.
watch Jennifer Lopez in her new comedy film titled Second Act. The film is a comedy in the vein of Working Girl and Maid In Manhattan, as Lopez stars as Maya, a 40-year-old woman struggling with frustrations from unfulfilled dreams. Until, that is, she gets the chance to prove to Madison Avenue that street smarts are as valuable as book smarts, and that it is never too late for a Second Act.
In Theaters December 21, 2018
Watch the trailer here;
Today, comedy history was made as Cedric The Entertainer (whose real name is Cedric Antonio Kyles) got a street named after him in his hometown of St. Louis, MO. The new name of the street is Cedric The ENtertainer Way.
Ced is currently on the new CBS hit sitcom The Neighborhood and he just currently wrapped touring with DL Hughley, Eddie Griffin, and George Lopez for The Comedy Get Down Tour. We here the tour will kick back off at the beginning of the year.
Pic by Kelvin Bland.