This weekend marks the 50th anniversary of the first Northern Soul all-nighter, an event that defined a generation in the UK and beyond.
08.09.2023 - 09:01 / variety.com
Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic What are the odds that two openly gay cut-ups doing a raunchy half-hour musical comedy routine in a Gristede’s grocery store would somehow convince “Borat” director Larry Charles to turn their show, “Fucking Identical Twins,” into a feature-length A24 movie? You’d stand a better chance playing the lottery than predicting the path “Dicks: The Musical” took to reach the big screen — which is exactly why this twisted cross between “The Parent Trap” and “Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy” seems destined for cult status. The absurdist brainchild of Aaron Jackson and Josh Sharp, “Dicks” is an unapologetically puerile, hard-R novelty that’s just lo-fi enough to maintain its underground cred.
If any other distributor were backing it, “Dicks” might shrivel into home-video obscurity. Considering A24’s bizart-house cachet, however, the hipster boutique should be able to leverage the buzz from the movie’s opening (mid)night berth at the Toronto Film Festival — plus the legitimizing involvement of real-deal Broadway stars Megan Mullally and Nathan Lane — to box office success.
With God (Bowen Yang) as its narrator, the movie centers on a pair of tall but otherwise dissimilar-looking twins, Craig Tittle (short-haired Sharp) and Trevor Brock (Jackson, with the free-flowing Fabio ’do). These two didn’t know one another existed, despite living next door and being top-earners for the same company, Vroomba, which sells replacement parts for vacuum cleaners.
According to the first couple songs, these big-city studs are exceptionally well-endowed, but unfulfilled in their search for someone who really gets how they feel. Plucking every trope they can from cornball separated-at-birth stories — including that
.This weekend marks the 50th anniversary of the first Northern Soul all-nighter, an event that defined a generation in the UK and beyond.
There’s a Chopped marathon happening tonight and we have some info that fans of the Food Network show might want to see.
Elizabeth Wagmeister Chief Correspondent As rehearsals for “Dancing With the Stars” are being picketed by the WGA, the other union currently on strike — SAG-AFTRA — is backing the “DWTS” cast members. In a firm statement to Variety, a spokesperson for SAG-AFTRA says that performers on the ABC competition series are not only not violating the strike rules by participating in the show, but that they are required to fulfill their contractual obligations with the show.
Clayton Davis Senior Awards Editor “Poor Things” can win things. That’s a nugget of information we gleaned at the conclusion of Venice, Telluride and Toronto, the three major fall festivals. For starters, Yorgos Lanthimos’ sci-fi dramedy collected the Golden Lion at Venice.
A trio of new shows joined Broadway last week to mostly decent box office figures as the fall season begins to take shape.
Dancing With the Stars is a phenomenon – and it’s also a major money-making franchise!
Hollywood, by and large, portrays bars as the most fun and chummy places on earth. At “Cheers” and “Coyote Ugly,” everybody knows your name and you can grow into a better person by sexy dancing.Even Moe’s Tavern from “The Simpsons,” with all its seasoned boozehounds, has a base level of respectability and camaraderie.
In this week’s episode of The Discourse, host Mike DeAngelo brings back directors Adil El Arbi & Bilall Fallah to discuss the film “Rebel.” The dramatic musical thriller follows a Muslim Belgian family as they are slowly ripped apart by Islamic extremists through various devious radicalization techniques. The film stars Aboubakr Bensaihi, Lubna Azabal, Tara Abboud, Amir El Arbi, and more.
Numerous clips have been shared online regarding how self-importantly Aaron Sorkin and company took themselves while they were making “The Newsroom,” a show that practically announced itself as the last stand for human rights and journalistic decency in the world. Holding that impossible standard high in its third season is Apple TV+’s expensive hit “The Morning Show,” a program that makes it feel like if morning news in America falls, then the apocalypse is just around the corner.
In 2019, Australian documentary filmmaker Kitty Green made her first narrative movie, a piercing almost cinéma vérité-style movie focused on an office assistant in a Tribeca film company run by a not-so-thinly disguised Harvey Weinstein. The male culture there and the sexual acts of the boss made it almost a modern horror story at the height of the #MeToo movement. For Green’s second narrative film she has changed up the filmmaking style considerably, but with The Royal Hotel which premiered last week at Telluride and now premieres tonight at the Toronto Film Festival, she is taking an even deeper look at the dark side of men as seen through the female gaze in a broken down hotel bar in a desolate part of the Australian Outback.
The Twilight movies, based on author Stephenie Meyer‘s novels, helped lay the groundwork for a new generation of teen fantasy blockbusters.
Clayton Davis Senior Awards Editor Lyrics that include the words “dick,” “fuck” and “pussy” are not the typical wholesome, family content the Academy’s Music Branch tends to recognize. But occasionally, they have allowed a couple to slip through. A24’s “Dicks: The Musical,” the opening night Midnight Madness at TIFF, has an onslaught of hilarious and catchy tunes that I wish the Oscars would be brave enough to nominate.
Guy Lodge Film Critic Frank Marshall’s film “Alive” has never exactly been a classic, but for a certain bracket of moviegoers who saw it in 1993, it remains a vivid memory. A heart-in-mouth recreation of the 1972 Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 crash — from which 16 people eventually survived 72 days stranded in a remote, snowy stretch of the Andes in western Argentina, while 29 perished — it visualized the events past the remit of worldwide news reports and magazine stories.
EastEnders star Lacey Turner has teased that a soap legend could be making a return to Albert Square later on this year. Lacey, who is known for playing Stacey Slater on the hit BBC One soap, is currently at the centre of a dramatic flash-forward storyline which has seen six characters in The Queen Vic left dealing with a dead body on Christmas Day 2023. With the murder mystery plot gradually unfolding having kicked off back in February, viewers at home have been busy speculating what they think could’ve happened as well as who the unknown victim and perpetrator could be.
Flesh-eating sewer monsters, genitals with wings, grave robbing, two confused “identical twins” and 90 minutes of sexual innuendo is what you can expect from comedians Aaron Jackson and Josh Sharp’s stage show-turned-movie. Directed by Larry Charles and written by and starring the duo, the film also features Nathan Lane, Megan Mullally, Megan Thee Stallion and Bowen Yang. As a viewer, I often wondered how the hell this got turned into the movie because it is so outrageous. Thankfully, it succeeds at being fun and funny because anything less would have amounted to torture.
TORONTO: Does “Dicks: The Musical” even need a review? If you’ve seen the trailer you know exactly what you’re getting into, but we’re gonna give it our best shot. Already a cult movie musical before it even hits theaters (not a bad thing), this A24 production is adapted from UCB veterans Josh Sharp and Aaron Jackson‘s two-person stage show “F**king Identical Twins” which used to play in the basement of a New York City Gristedes supermarket before the pandemic.
Rebecca Rubin Film and Media Reporter A raucous, deliriously madcap midnight premiere of “Dicks: The Musical” closed out the first day of the Toronto Film Festival. A24’s first-ever musical, which leans hard into its R-rating and puts an irreverent, queer spin on “The Parent Trap,” played to laughs, cheers, audible gasps and shrieks and, yes, a few groans from the Royal Alexandra Theatre.
Numerous clips have been shared online regarding how self-importantly Aaron Sorkin and company took themselves while they were making “The Newsroom,” a show that practically announced itself as the last stand for human rights and journalistic decency in the world. Holding that impossible standard high in its third season is Apple TV+’s expensive hit “The Morning Show,” a program that makes it feel like if morning news in America falls, then the apocalypse is just around the corner.
Travel blog by Travels of Adam (Hipster Blog) – Travels of Adam (Hipster Blog) - Travel & Lifestyle Hipster Blog Hell’s Kitchen, a vibrant and dynamic neighborhood nestled in the heart of Manhattan, has earned its reputation as one of the best gay neighborhoods in the city for a multitude of compelling reasons. This lively enclave just a short walk from Times Square and Broadway has evolved into an inclusive haven that warmly embraces the LGBTQ+ community and fosters a sense of belonging and acceptance. Hell’s Kitchen wasn’t always my favorite gay neighborhood in NYC, but the gayborhood has definitely grown up.
Thanks to science fiction, we all have a basic grip on the theory of the multiverse: the idea that there are innumerable parallel worlds in which the chances and choices of the past – the roads not taken, whether by ourselves or the dinosaurs – have split off into alternative stories, endlessly bifurcating into other pasts, other futures that must be peopled, most provocatively, with other versions of ourselves. It is an idea that has proved rich pickings for comic-book adventures, where peril can come from any available universe and there is always a chance of confronting a doppelganger, but German director Timm Kröger has returned to the theory – which dates back to the 1950s – to explore how mysterious, sinister and terrifyingly vast a proposal it really is. This is a theory of everything where everything – that familiar word – is infinite. Where nothing, in fact, is ever going to be “everything.”