Hollywood

TAOS, N.M., Jan 6 (Reuters) – New Mexico authorities on Thursday said they were working with police in New York state to obtain material from actor Alec Baldwin’s cellphone relating to a probe into the fatal shooting of a cinematographer on the set of Western movie “Rust.”

The Santa Fe Sheriff’s Office and New Mexico First Judicial District Attorney’s Office are “actively working” with the Suffolk County Sheriff’s Department, New York, and Baldwin’s lawyers to get any materials on the phone pertaining to their investigation, according to a press release.

Hollywood humiliated itself in scandals both shocking and silly in 2021 as left-wing celebrities paid the piper for their hubris, falling from public grace in spectacular fashion.

Stars including Jussie Smollett, Alec Baldwin, Chrissy Teigen, and rapper Travis Scott face professional shame in ways that could permanently damage their careers. Of course, redemption is in the cards for any star who can parlay wokeness into a rehabilitation tale spun by a compliant entertainment media.

Don’t Look Up is a preposterous movie that is wrong about everything.

Don’t Look Up is the least subtle allegory of modern times. It is a mallet of a metaphor. It is the bluntest of parables, smashing through TV and tablet screens across the globe and screaming at viewers: ‘This is a film about a comet but REALLY IT IS ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE.’ They really do scream, especially Leonardo DiCaprio, who plays the clever, sexy scientist Dr Randall Mindy, who, unlike the dentally challenged rednecks he has the misfortune to call his fellow citizens, knows that the comet is real and that it really will hit the Earth. Poor Mindy is in a constant state of apoplexy at fickle, dim mankind, on one occasion bellowing: ‘YOU ARE ALL GOING TO FUCKING DIE.’ Leo, being a green nut himself, really hams it up, revelling in this mad, morally infantile script that gives free rein to his fire-and-brimstone eco-beliefs. Next time you see The Revenant, you’ll root for the bear.

Audiences may never leave their couches again — unless it’s for Spider-Man 7

The box office news from earlier this December was mixed. The stupendous success of the latest Spider-Man sequel, No Way Home, indicated that fears of the Omicron variant have not deterred audiences from coming out in the millions: it grossed $260 million at the US box office and $600 million globally.

But it also trampled other less franchise-friendly films. Guillermo del Toro’s new picture Nightmare Alley debuted to a dismal $3 million, and Steven Spielberg’s version of West Side Story will be one of the director’s greatest flops, having grossed a mere $18 million in the US so far. The chances of either film — expensively mounted period pieces from A-list directors — recouping their production budgets at the theater, let alone their advertising costs, is zero.

In the West vs. East battle of entertainment industries, manga, anime and Korean dramas are steadily gaining ground

Be it films or comics, audiences seem to be growing tired of what the Western entertainment industry has to offer and many are turning their attention to the East.

For a long time, Hollywood and the American comic book industry have been seen as international media behemoths. It used to be that they never even faced any serious competition. But lately, they seem to be losing that grasp. The last decade of film and comics has seen a sharp decline in quality. And while, of course, there have been some HUGE successes like Marvel’s MCU films, raking in billions of dollars, nevertheless, it seems evident that audiences are growing tired of the same old formulas being rehashed over and over again.

Since cutting the cable and subbing to a couple of Streaming platforms I have had the chance to watch fare such as “Squid Game” which I enjoyed and also dull witted PC pap like “Designated Survivor.” The latter was so bad I could not finish it.

“Everything woke turns to shit,” former President Donald Trump said this year. Nowhere is this more true than in Hollywood, where the public’s rejection of woke movies can be measured in the tens of millions of dollars that studios are losing at the box office.

Hollywood knows how to send a message, but it sure can be slow reading them.

The industry cranked out a volley of anti-war movies during President George W. Bush’s presidency. The movies slammed the Iraq War, the president and even the U.S. soldiers fighting overseas.

Each bombed at the box office, some in spectacular fashion.

… Somehow, in August 2021, there was still a show (Freeform’s grown-ish) not only defending the looting and rioting that broke out from BLM protests, but also claiming that “choosing to focus on the looting and rioting is a part of a longstanding history of racist thinking”