Innholdsfortegnelse for 2/2/2022 i Variety

When Neil Young pulled his music from Spotify over the audio streamer’s continued support of Joe Rogan, whom he accused of spreading “misinformation and lies” about COVID via his podcast interviews, there were some nasty “who cares?” tweets directed at the folk-rock icon. But the haters should care that this deadly pandemic has been raging for nearly two years and it ain’t over yet. Young has been adamant for some time that artists shouldn’t be touring because of COVID; he even pulled out of a Farm Aid benefit, a charity he co-founded. “He has clearly been thinking about all of this every day, and really has been the foremost artist in the industry advocating for safety over a return to business as usual,” our music aficionado Chris Willman tells me.…

“Ghosts” may be the unlikeliest comedy hit in recent CBS history. It’s a single-camera half-hour, adapted from a cult U.K. series, and it’s not from Chuck Lorre. Yet the show, which was just renewed for a second season, has already become a breakout for the Eye network, averaging 8.1 million viewers season-to-date, and improving its time period 15% from last year. And that’s just on linear, where “Ghosts” is the No. 2 comedy on broadcast, behind only CBS’ “Young Sheldon.” It is also performing well on Paramount Plus, which reports that it’s the No. 1 comedy on the streamer. “It’s the most pleasant kind of surprise,” says CBS Entertainment president Kelly Kahl. “We have to take it as a compliment that a lot of people are saying, ‘I can’t believe…

While Andy Cohen appreciates that being added to Hollywood’s legendary Walk of Fame on Feb. 4 is certainly a major milestone in the increasingly multi-faceted career of the Bravo reality television producer and host, he says from the moment he began working in media he felt like a shining star. “There’s never been a point in my career where I haven’t felt like I made it, because I just felt like getting in the door meant that I made it,” Cohen tells Variety. His journey began as an intern at CBS News and he rose through the network’s ranks, ultimately heading up reality programming at Bravo, where he delivered brand-defining mainstays including “Project Runway,” “Top Chef” and, of course, the ever-juicy “Real Housewives” franchise. Along the way his palpable passion…

As awards season goes into full swing, a lot of attention will be put on the above-the-line contenders and winners, but film crews are essential to turning what audiences see into magical experiences. Here Variety’s Jenelle Riley, Carole Horst and Jazz Tangcay pick one of their favorite film moments from below-the-line pros. “So May We Start?” from “Annette” There are so many wonderful songs by Ron and Russell Mael, but the one that opens Leos Carax’s bold musical is on the Oscar shortlist, and it makes perfect sense. Not only is it a catchy number, but it perfectly sets the tone for the bold, surprising film that lies ahead: You know from the first lines if you’re in or not. And not for nothing, the scene in the film is…

• CALL JANE Distributor: N/A Set in 1968, Phyllis Nagy’s timely drama tells the story of the Chicago-based network of activists who called themselves the Jane Collective — a clandestine group of women committed to helping others find a safe way to get illegal abortions. But Nagy’s not being entirely true to the underlying situation, stripping “Call Jane” of much of the conflict that would have made it dramatically interesting: the cops, doctors, husbands and other bad guys are either absent or one-dimensional. — Peter Debruge • DUAL Distributor: RLJE Films Turns out, it is easier to create a human clone than it is to destroy one. In Riley Stearns’ morbidly satirical, grimly absurd parallel version of the world as we know it, Sarah (Karen Gillan) has herself copied, then…

AWARDS CIRCUIT Ballots are in, and the nail-biting portion of Oscar season has begun. Nominations for the 94th Academy Awards will be revealed on Feb. 8. Another jam-packed phase one offered plenty of twists and turns, along with much speculation and reading of tea leaves. Now that many of the guilds have weighed in, we’re predicting Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune” will lead the way with 10 nominations, while Jane Campion’s “The Power of the Dog” is expected to be right behind with nine noms. Kenneth Branagh’s “Belfast,” the presumed front-runner for best picture, and Steven Spielberg’s “West Side Story” are expected to score a healthy seven mentions. The former could tack on two more if cinematography comes through and Jamie Dornan makes it alongside co-star Ciarán Hinds. With an increasingly global…

Whether you’re a big-shot Hollywood helmer or hankering to pretend you’re one, the brand-new Director Suite at Four Seasons Hotel Los Angeles at Beverly Hills (300 Doheny Dr.) will set you up in high-flying style. The 10th-floor luxury accommodations, modeled after the famed hotel’s residences, are awash in shafts of soft California sunlight, with three step-out balconies providing sweeping views of the rolling Hollywood hills and downtown Los Angeles in the distance. At night, with its twinkling lights and flashing neon signs, it’s a vista sprung from a classic 1940s film noir. The spacious one-bedroom suite comes equipped with a dining room area, a custom walk-in closet and a full kitchen stocked with Fortessa Bone China flatware and Gaggenau refrigerator and stove. Along with unlimited complimentary in-room TV entertainment, guests…

Interscope is celebrating its 30th anniversary with an exhibit of 50 works by 46 visual artists inspired by the music label’s all-star roster. Standouts include Damien Hirst’s mixed media work inspired by Eminem, and Kehinde Wiley’s portrait of Dr. Dre. “Thirty years — that’s a long time,” Interscope co-founder Jimmy Iovine told Variety. “Walking into the gallery, it felt like a giant capsule collection of 30 years of a lot of people’s hard work. And at that moment I realized the exhibition nailed it.”…

Organizers of the upcoming Berlinale continue to plan for a physical festival under strict safety measures, but with the EFM already moved online due to rising COVID-19 cases, this year looks set to be another gloomy gathering, not only for Germany’s dispirited film sector, but also for Berlin businesses bracing for more lost revenue. Local cinema operators and distributors have welcomed the move, but the condensed event and ongoing Omicron scare is likely to keep attendance on the low side. “This is such an important signal for the entire culture and film industry,” says Christian Bräuer, chairman of independent cinema association AG Kino – Gilde and managing director of Berlin’s Yorck-Kino group. “Of course, as social venues, we are aware of our responsibility. Especially in the pandemic, however, the special…

When it comes to sparking outrageous, sharable, replay-worthy on-camera moments on his “Real Housewives” reunion specials and nightly “Watch What Happens Live” installments, are there any further heights left for host Andy Cohen to scale? “I mean, gosh — I’ve been slapped by Cher; I’ve been spanked by Martha Stewart,” he says, chuckling. “What more could a guy dream of?” Cohen has seen his share of the eyebrow-raising, the jaw-dropping and the gut-busting during his long stint conducting live and largely unfiltered chats with both reconvened cast members of the various “Housewives” locales. Many of whom are inherently catty, dramatic and deeply grudge-holding. And then there are the of-the-moment Hollywood players who visit him and, sometimes with the aid of a little liquid courage and Cohen’s impish gift for lowering…

TV REVIEW Drama: Hulu (eight episodes; all reviewed); Feb. 2 Starring: Lily James, Sebastian Stan, Seth Rogen The Pamela Anderson of “Pam & Tommy” idolizes Jane Fonda. Early in Hulu’s new limited series, Pam is mired on “Baywatch,” where the camera leeringly gazes at her red-swim-suited frame. She needs a rebrand. Meeting with a new publicist, Pam (played by Lily James) describes her role model: “When she first started out, she was just this girl next door, and then she did ‘Barbarella’ and she became this huge sex symbol. And then she turned around and she started doing all these serious Oscar roles.” Pam runs through a few more of Fonda’s highlights as an actor and activist as the camera pushes in, adding, “She was all these totally opposite things,…

“It was kind of wonderful to escape to another era.” Christine Baranski’s career is so vast and varied — from starring roles in “The Good Wife” and its spinoff “The Good Fight,” to decades of theater, to the “Mamma Mia” franchise’s resident siren — that it’s genuinely shocking when she points out that she’s never been in an on-screen period piece “with wigs, corsets, language, the whole thing.” HBO’s “The Gilded Age,” a glamorous new post-Civil War-era drama from “Downton Abbey” creator Julian Fellowes, embodies that “whole thing” and then some. So when Fellowes reached out to offer Baranski a part that occupies what many “Downton” fans will recognize as the Dowager Countess role (i.e., the grande dame with the most cutting glares and one-liners), she didn’t hesitate. “I mean,…

Esports is the biggest opportunity in TV that nobody’s talking about — yet. That’s the view from video game industry veterans who see esports — or the exploding world of live video gaming competitions, complete with crowds of virtual fans cheering them on — as poised to explode in the coming years. Riot Games and Activision Blizzard are among the gaming giants making big investments to juice the burgeoning market for esports TV rights deals. A new round of consolidation and fresh capital coming into gaming, as evidenced by Microsoft’s pending $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard, will raise the stakes, as esports content is a clear growth engine for gaming. “We don’t necessarily see obstacles in front of us — we see opportunity,” Brandon Snow, head of Activision Blizzard…

Actor John Bradley (1) is still defending the controversial “Game of Thrones” series finale against its very harsh critics, even more than two years after the show ended. “It is highly unlikely that we were ever going to please everybody,” the actor, who played Samwell Tarly on the long-running fantasy show, tells me on the latest episode of the “Just for Variety” podcast. “Chances are we were going to please a fraction of people…. We almost couldn’t win. It almost meant too much to people for them to really ever be satisfied.” Bradley is particularly irked that some naysayers argued that showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss and the cast “didn’t care anymore” by the time the finale came about. “If they didn’t care, they wouldn’t choose to be standing…

Channing Tatum loves a good costume. Just watch “Magic Mike” or “G.I. Joe” (or his Instagram account). In “The Lost City,” he adds to his ever-expanding look book with Dash — a model who graces the cover of a series of romance novels by a bestselling author (Sandra Bullock), the victim of a kidnapping scheme. In the upcoming Paramount Pictures comedy, Tatum dons an unbuttoned white linen shirt and acid-washed jeans as he shows off his golden locks. Tatum, 41, wanted the hairpiece to pay homage to a range of iconic hunks. “I definitely have a Fabio wig,” he says over breakfast one morning at a restaurant near his home in Los Angeles. “But my inspiration was the man himself that’s in our movie, Brad — from ‘Legends of the…

How did you and Michael come up with the idea for “And Just Like That…”? Actually, what happened was toward the latter part of March 2020, I was where we all were — at home, listening to podcasts. I heard a podcast with some actors talking about their work experience on a television series. And it occurred to me Michael and I had never talked about our experience producing the show all those years, not in a way that was intimate. So I called him. And in the midst of that conversation, we had started talking about the show and did it feel right [to bring it back]? By then, we were into April, and we’re all feeling nostalgic for our past. We put together a plan, and we called…

France’s Anamaria Vartolomei, star of Audrey Diwan’s Venice Golden Lion winner “Happening”; Ireland’s Clare Dunne, whose character in AMC’s Dublin-set series “Kin” has been dubbed “the female Tony Soprano”; and Croatia’s Gracija Filipovic, who made a splash in Alamat Kusijanovic’s “Murina,” winner of the 2021 Cannes Camera d’Or, are among the 10 young actors selected by European Film Promotion for the 25th anniversary edition of European Shooting Stars. Due to coronavirus concerns, EFP, which is the umbrella organization of national film agencies across Europe, will shine a spotlight on these standout talents with a hybrid event culminating with an in-person red carpet awards ceremony Feb. 14 in Berlin during the film festival. This year’s Shooting Stars roster — seven women, three men — was picked from a pool of nominations…

FILM REVIEW Director: Josef Kubota Wladyka With: Kali Reis, Daniel Henshall, Tiffany Chu “Catch the Fair One” is activist filmmaking at its most compelling. Before you run away from the notion, consider this: It doesn’t feel like this tough, relentlessly dark thriller is trying to push some kind of political point, even if so many of its creative choices succeed in doing exactly that. Collaborating with Native boxing champ Kali “KO” Reis on the script, director Josef Kubota Wladyka has made a riveting vigilante story that can hold its own alongside Paul Schrader’s most punishing payback fantasies. Imagine daughter-rescue drama “Hardcore” with a female fighter in the George C. Scott role. Such movies can sometimes feel overly nihilistic, as unflinching filmmakers set a self-destructive individual plunging into the darkest corners…