Today is Juneteenth, the holiday that commemorates the ending of slavery in the US, two years after the Emancipation Proclamation. It’s a day for the Black community to recognize and celebrate the lengths, challenges, and successes they have overcome since June 19, 1865. Festivities often include cookouts, street fairs, and family get-togethers. In Fort Worth, Texas the holiday is celebrated through the Miss Juneteenth Scholarship Pageant. This real-life pageant becomes the backdrop in writer and director Channing Godfrey Peoples’ aptly titled film Miss Juneteenth, exploring what Black excellence and legacy really means.
Turquoise Jones is a former Miss Juneteenth winner, who despite winning the crown and a scholarship to boot, hasn’t made the strides in her life that she expected to. She works at a BBQ and bar-joint and part-time at a funeral home. What she brings home, she puts toward her fourteen-year-old daughter, Kai (Alexis Chikaeze), and her future pageant career. Her on and off again husband helps out when he can but is unreliable. Her personal life comes to the surface when she enrolls Kai into the Miss Juneteenth Pageant. Kai is resistant to her mother’s wishes, instead wanting to join the dance team and not do the pageant. There she is faced with her past, her failures, and whether or not she wants to pass on that trauma to her own child.
Nicole Beharie gives a captivating and controlled performance as Turquoise Jones. She brings dignity and a new dimension to the beauty pageant mom trying to fulfill unfulfilled dreams through her daughter. You feel her strength and pain trying to appease the upper-middle-class Black community of the pageant world and the poorer reality she lives in. Her quiet struggle and full composure through her financial struggles and raising her child on her own pulls you in and allows you to empathize with her even when she is pushing her wants on her child. Beharie’s performance is the beating heart of this film and without it, it would have fallen flat.
Some of the supporting cast can’t compete with Beharie’s performance though. Some seemingly acting in a satire and others in a melodrama. This ultimately adds to the uneven tone. While Peoples’ story is compelling and new, at times the action drags and the film’s meaning is hidden in the aftermath. Premiering earlier this year at Sundance, People’s direction is overflowing with passion and that indie quality audiences crave but her tone is not always even and often dark. Certain songs on the soundtrack don’t exactly fit where they are and it feels like there’s levity missing from the story.
Ultimately Miss Juneteenth is a story of maternal love, understanding, and resilience, Despite some directorial missteps, Nicole Beharie’s performance catapults this film into a higher caliber, leaving a quiet but powerful aftershock in its wake.
You can watch Miss Juneteenth on on-demand, iTunes, and Amazon. Watch the trailer below.
The term “parasocial relationship” is one that is not thrown around much. If I was to approach some random person on the street and ask them the definition, chances are I wouldn’t walk away with the right answer. Despite its ambiguity, it’s a concept that most of us have experienced through out our lives. A parasocial relationship is one sided, where one person is spends emotional energy, time, interest, money etc. on someone who has one idea they exist. Think of your favorite actor, musician, or comedian. Everyone one has had that one celebrity in their lives that they follow their career, seem to know everything about, or will spend a large amount of time and effort investing in, yet to them you just a fan. But now, as social media rises and the creator has access to see comments, likes and follows, the line where the between the one-sided and two-sided relationship starts to get more blurred.
This is where Polish filmmaker Magnus von Horn’s Sweatcomes in. The new film takes the idea of the parasocial relationship and applies to the social media fitness influencer. We follow Sylwia (Magdalena Koleśnik), a thin, blonde up and coming wellness guru hell bent on spreading good vibes and showing her truest self to her 600,000 instagram followers. After she posts a video of herself breaking down, more and more people start to hound her online and in real life. Her already established relationships with her mother and friends run from distant to frosty and her only means of true human connection is with her followers. Over the course of three days leading up to her first morning show appearance and an encounter with a stalker, Sylwia examines her own relationship to social media and to her perceived persona.
Instead of viewing Sylwia with a critical eye, one that would question why she would be exposing her emotional self for all to see, von Horn is completely sympathetic to Sylwia’s story. To borrow a phrase from Bo Burnham, von Horn seamlessly syncs audiences heartbeat to Sylwia’s. Burnham wrote and directed Eigth Grade, a film that also examines the realities of social media and a piece Sweat was conincidentally compared to.
Von Horn knows exactly when to throw in a closeup verses a wide shot, when to use a handheld and when to use a mounted camera. The effect brings the audience in and pushes them back to the uncomfortable, completely on von Horn’s whim. Only his second feature, his control over Sweat’s visual emotional arc is exquisite. Shots that feel claustrophobic and intrusive at the beginning feel like a lifeline by the film’s end as we are stripped from our own facades along with Sylwia.
Sweat is really a two hander between von Horn and star Magdalena Koleśnik. Able to capture nuance in the character’s quiet moments and still be a loud and boisterous presence is challenging. Koleśnik has to create a character likeable enough to have such a large following but also naive, vulnerable and desperate enough to realize that she has a parasocial relationship with her own audience.
The film’s final act feels rushed and the impact of one major ending event is lost in translation. But what Sweat does really well is to turn the mirror back on us not in a Black Mirror dystopian way, not in a gimmicky satire like the recently released Mainstream, but in a “Sylwia could be any of us” kind of way.
Sweat is available in select theaters and coming to the independent movie app Mubi soon. Watch the trailer below. You can catch our interview with director Magnus von Horn and Magdalena Koleśnik here.
In news that makes this Julia Stiles super fan extremely happy, the 10 Things I Hate About You star is set to make her feature directing debut on Wish You Were Here. Deadline describes the film as centering “on Charlotte, a woman who finds herself in a rut, searching for a spark that seems just out of reach. After she has a whirlwind night of romance and imagining a future with a man named Adam, he ghosts her. When Charlotte finally discovers that Adam is terminally ill, she helps him spend his last days living life to the fullest.”
Sounds like the kind of role Stiles would be perfect for in front of the camera. However, she’s not expected to take an acting role. Instead, she will focus on directing. The script was co-written by Stiles and author Renée Carlino, based on the latter’s book.
Stiles isn’t a complete novice to directing. She helmed episodes of the short-lived series Paloma back in 2013-2014.
From the earliest stages of her career it was clear to me that Stiles was ahead of other actresses her age. Performances in 10 Things I Hate About You, Save the Last Dance, and State and Main established a pretty high bar, and led to roles in the Jason Bourne franchise, Hustlers, Mona Lisa Smile, and more. She’ll be seen next inThe God Committee, which premieres at Tribeca tomorrow and opens on July 2nd.
It’s about time! Loki is a sensation over on Disney+, not only bringing the Asgardian god of mischief more into the spotlight than ever before, but introducting a wealth of awesome new characters in the TVA. But if there’s going to be a breakout character from this show it’s going to be Miss Minutes, the TVA’s chatty little clock mascot. And it was only a mattetr of time before she got her own Funko!
Funko has revealed a new Pop! Vinyl figure for Gugu Mbatha-Raw’s Ravenna Renslayer, and she isn’t alone. The figure comes with a miniature Miss Minutes, as well! It’s unfortunate she’s not a full-sized Pop, but I think that will change in the coming months.
Previously-revealed were Funkos for Tom Hiddleston’s Loki and Owen Wilson’s Mobius. Also announced is an Amazon exclusive Funko for the tough-as-nails Hunter B-15, played by Wunmi Mosaku.
All of these are available for pre-order now. We highly recommend our friends at Entertainment Earth and Amazon for your Funko Pop! buying needs! Any commission that we earn from purchases through our affiliate links goes back into the site. We are a small group and every little bit helps. Thank you so much for all of your support!
The fitness influencer has become its own branch of celebrity and Sweat director Magnus von Horn knew that going into his second feature. Well, not enough to know it would make good movie. Before starting production, the polish filmmaker was fascinated by an Instagram fitness influencer who would share every bit about her life with total strangers over an app. At first he watched with disturbed fascination. Then he questioned his own reaction.
That exploration led to writing a screenplay,which then led to the brilliant casting of Magdalena Kolesnik. Fresh from drama school, Koleśnik plays a fitness influencer struggling to connect and find balance with the outside world. Both von Horn and Koleśnik brilliantly explore what’s it like to be on the other side of a parasocial relationship in the digital age. I got to sit down with both director and actor to chat about Sweat’s philosophy and the true emotions that emerge while working out.
I just watched Sweat yesterday and was very much blown away. It’s such an intimate portrayal of a social media influencer who struggles to connect with everyday people in her life. Magnus, talk to me a little bit about how that dichotomy came about, somebody who is so good at connecting with somebody over the screen, but then just cannot form intimate relationships in their own life.
Magnus von Horn: For me it was never in the beginning about wanting to prove something or to make a film about some kind of idea about social media that I have. That would be something you know, like “Oh, she has so many followers, but she has no one in her private life.” It becomes a punchline that is maybe used to market the film in a way, but in the beginning it was never important to me. It was more about my own fascination with an influencer I started following maybe five years ago and the access she gave me to her private life or what she wanted to show and share, which was a lot and a lot of normal everyday things. That kind of got me hooked, but I was also very judgmental in the beginning and thought it was very shallow and I was quite provoked by it, but I kept coming back and kept watching for more.
I wondered, “Why do I have this reaction? Why can’t I just embrace her? Be as happy as she is? Why do I have to sit and kind of quietly criticize her and think that what she does is silly.” I felt that was a problem in me and it was something I wanted to kind of overcome in a way. I thought that could maybe be similar to someone watching the film, or I felt like it was a process for me. And I was thinking that maybe in a film, it can be similar for an audience who start watching a film with an influencer and during the course of the film, we change our relationship to her because we get to know her more and we see the human being. I think that was the beginning, but then it took many different turns and I’m not going to say it was so articulate and aware as I’m saying it now, back then it was a much more intuitive process.
Social media seems to becoming the focus of so many films now. The health and fitness influencer seems to be that is sort of an area that film hasn’t really touched upon yet. Obviously you have films like Eighth Grade, which explores social media through the lens of the middle schooler. And then you also have Mainstream which just came out with Andrew Garfield. Why do you think that this topic is attracting so many filmmakers now?
MVH: When I started writing Sweat, I was thinking just the opposite, like why aren’t more filmmakers doing films about this? That was also a reason in the beginning because this was some years ago, it was not yesterday. Social media is everywhere and was everywhere yet it was difficult to find a film that would portray it in a serious way or use it in a serious way. It was always a gimmicky kind of a way or conceptual way, or some elevated horror or very stereotypical way of portraying it or to prove a point or moral. I never thought that was interesting or it doesn’t interest me in general in life. What is interesting is to take something that I think causes so many emotional reactions in people. You can you just say influencer and people already have a reaction. So it’s good material to put in a film because it’s kind of it self serves. The audience is very good at filling the gaps and making the story and what it’s about themselves. The film doesn’t need to do that for them because the audience already has so many ideas and feelings about social media and influencers. At least to me, why it’s interesting to put on the screen.
Magdalena, you play said influencer, and I found it really interesting that you didn’t have much of a social media presence before making the film. Talk to me a little bit about diving into that world and that year process that you took in order to play Sylwia.
Magdalena Koleśnik: It was my task to work on social media because, in the beginning, I was not able to play this character because I didn’t have a presence on Instagram and I knew nothing about it. I wasn’t natural in recording myself because it was so artificial for me. So my work was to do it every day, lots of videos and to fight with my ambitions. I wanted to record very interesting movies, short movies, and it took me whole days to do it. And then I realized that it’s impossible and that showing something normal is also sufficient and it could be interesting. For me, it was also my private fight with a thing that I don’t like about myself – my ambition,
Is there anything about doing that every single day that you learned about yourself besides kind of fighting with your ambition? Is there anything that you like didn’t like about the social media world?
MK: Social media is, for me, a quite dangerous field because when I post something, I realized that I’m checking how many likes I have. It began to be an ego trip. So for me it’s quite dangerous. It’s so pleasant to have all these likes and comments and to be the center of attention. Is it the most important thing for me to have those likes? I prefer to just like myself without those likes. I think there’s quite a dark side of Instagram for me, for sure.
And we see that a little bit in the film. You look like you’re having so much fun during the workout scenes. Talk to me a little bit about how those routines came about and what the training was like for you.
MK: I worked mostly with weights because that’s how you could build muscles. That’s the quickest way to change your body into toned and muscled. So I was working with kettle bells and first it was so boring for me, doing these simple movements, but then I found very interesting things in it. Small details if I wanted to improve my techniques and also emotions started to appear during workouts and very deep emotions even. Emotions lives in the body and when you have a hard workout, you somehow wake it up. It happens many times I was crying or screaming or something like that. So it was really interesting.
That scene when you’re working out with your personal trainer and you let out this yell of emotion, was that real you or did you channel that from past work outs?
MK: It was real because it was so hard! My trainer put on so many weights and it was really hard to do it. But also I had an image or memory in my head of my experience of how my workouts looked like. So you never know how it will flow through your body and how you will act sometimes. It was honest and also it was kind of controlled.
For both of you, what is one thing that you hope the audience takes away from watching Sweat?
MK: I didn’t think about it during the process. It appeared after shooting, not long time ago. For me, it’s about responsibility that we as viewers have. When we follow this kind of person who shares intimate things from her life, in this case, it’s about my responsibility as a viewer. What I want to do with this, fragile content with this figure with this human being. Do I want to judge her or just treat her very gentle? I think that it’s the most important thing for me that I would want to tell with this movie, like to focus on us as the viewer on this responsibility.
MVH: Well, I agree with Magdalena. I hope it’s just very simple, that you really like Sylwia in the last scene. I think it’s great if you can just connect to her emotion at the last scene. It’s takes place on a morning show sofa. Sylwia is all dressed in pink. There’s going to be fitness. There’s so many kinds of things we need to get past, but when we get past these things, these kind of artificial things, there’s a true emotion there. And I think if we can just connect to that for a moment, then it’s great.
MK: Also maybe that you’re a superhero when you are just you. No matter if you, in this moment, if you’re the best version of yourself. You are more of a superhero when you are not in super mode, when you are just normal. That it’s a courage to be normal, to be vulnerable, to be just normal.
Sweat is available in select theaters and coming to the independent movie app Mubi soon. Watch the trailer below. Read our review here.
While she’s primarily known for her relationship with Machine Gun Kelly than her Transformers heyday, Megan Fox is still keeping very busy. She’s had a string of roles lately including Rogue, family film Think Like a Dog, and the upcoming crime film Midnight in the Switchgrass with Bruce Willis and her aforementioned beau. On top of that, Fox also has Till Death, a thriller that finds her handcuffed to a dead body.
Fox plays a woman who is stuck in a stale but comfortable marriage, only to wake up one day to find she’s been handcuffed to his dead body. That’s a Helluva wake-up call! She finds herself alone, dragging around his corpse with the killers on her trail.
The film is directed by S.K. Dale and co-stars Callan Mulvey, Eoin Macken, and Aml Ameen.
Till Death opens in theaters and VOD on July 2nd.
Emma (Megan Fox) is stuck in a stale marriage to Mark and is surprised when he whisks her away to their secluded lake house for a romantic evening on their 10th anniversary. But everything soon changes, and Emma finds herself trapped and isolated in the dead of winter, the target of a plan that gets more sinister at every turn.
You can have all of your endless Dracula movies; I think there are maybe a half dozen in the works right now. Just give me Blacula and everything will be alright. I’ve never found it enough to simply label the 1972 cult classic as “blaxploitation”, because it’s so bizarre and more creatively satisfying than the genre usually affords. And now a reboot is finally on the way and the perfect guy to direct it is attache: Fataledirector Deon Taylor.
Variety reports MGM is teaming up with Bron and Taylor’s Hidden Empire Film Group on a new Blacula film. Taylor, whose credits include not only Fatale but the recent Meet the Blacks 2, will direct from a script co-written by Micah Ranum.
The plot will stay practically the same, as well. Here’s the synopsis for the new film:
Blacula is an ancient African prince who is cursed by Dracula after he fails to agree to end the slave trade. Blacula is entombed and awakens 200 years later ready to avenge the death of his ancestors and of those responsible for robbing his people of their work, culture and heritage as they appropriated it for profit.
The original Blacula starred William Marshall, who also returned for the less-successful 1973 sequel Scream Blacula Scream, which co-starred Pam Grier. What people forget about Blacula is that it was a huge box office success for such a small movie, and inspired many horror aimed at Black audiences. It was also a real, honest-to-goodness horror movie despite the comedic title.
Color me excited for this, especially to see who they get to play Blacula himself. Might I suggest Jonathan Majors?
Not bad. The mix of bright red and blue is different from traditional versions of Supergirl’s suit, and the material looks to be the same as Flash and Batman’s. I’m curious to see the whole thing, and what they decide to do with the skirt Supergirl sometimes rocks. I kinda hope they stick with it.
The Flash is inspired by the Flashpoint storyline which finds Barry Allen messing up the timestream. That’s apparently how we’ll see Ben Affleck’s Batman written out and Keaton’s Batman return, and could also explain the appearance of Supergirl. The film opens on November 4th 2022.
Mark Wahlberg doesn’t get bullied. In his recent film Infinitehe pops out fully-formed as an action hero and never looks back. So he’s, I guess, an interesting choice to star in Joe Bell, based on a true story about one father’s journey to spread the word about the tragic cost of bullying.
Formerly titled Good Joe Bell, the film tells the true story of Jadin Bell, who was bullied mercilessly at school for being gay. He doesn’t face the warmest of treatment at home from his father Joe, either, who is unable to voice his acceptance of his son. When Jadin commits suicide, Joe sets out on a cross-country walk as part of an anti-bullying campaign.
Joe’s story made headlines back in 2013. He quit his job and helped launch Faces for Change, speaking in schools all across America. Unfortunately, even that part of the story ends in tragedy, so get ready for a real tearjerker here.
The film is directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green (Monsters and Men), and co-stars Reid Miller, John Murray, Connie Britton, Maxwell Jenkins, and Gary Sinise.
I’m not going to sit here and judge Wahlberg for starring in an anti-bullying film given certain indiscretions in his past back when he was young. Everyone deserves a chance to make amends, and this is, in part, a good way to do that.
Joe Bell opens on July 23rd 2021.
Joe Bell is based on the powerful true story of a small town, working class father (Mark Wahlberg) who embarks on a solo walk across the United States to crusade against bullying after his gay teenage son, Jadin (Reid Miller) is tormented in high school. Joe makes his way along the breathtaking expanse heading from Oregon to New York City, delivering a simple message of tolerance from a father’s perspective, hoping to reach those who may be open to hearing it from someone like themselves. Confronting many hardships, Joe ultimately shows us all that you can make a difference if you just take it one step at a time.
Often it feels like Hollywood has a nepotism conundrum, where it just seems that there are pretty much dynasties nowadays of filmmakers/actors putting their kids (sometimes unwarranted) on in a never-ending cycle of churning them out, almost like a factory. Now with director Alexandre Rockwell’s latest film, Sweet Thing, that’s not necessarily a thing to criticize. The family dynamic that the film warrants almost requires everyone to be related as they go through their drama together as a family.
Billie (Lana Rockwell), who is named after singer Billie Holiday (which plays a significant part of Sweet Thing), and her brother Nico (Nico Rockwell) live a unique life with their father Adam (the always great Will Patton). After he and their mother Eve (Karyn Parsons) split, he’s a depressed alcoholic. As a result, Billie and Nico pretty much take care of each other. Living in dismal poverty, they try their best to scrape by. The film opens during Christmas time to showcase what happiness looks like for their family, even though it has its moments reminding them that their life is frustrating as their mother Eve is consistently inconsistent, even on Christmas Day.
Unfortunately, Adam’s alcoholism hits its peak, and their part-time mall Santa father has to go through mandatory rehab, forcing the siblings to stay with their mother and her textbook-douchebag boyfriend at his beach house. Now if you’re a fan of Hillary from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Karyn Parsons plays the exact opposite. She’s also alcoholic, abusive, and all around just doesn’t give a crap about her kids and prefers her physically abusive boyfriend over them. It’s not so bad in this beach town as Billie and Nico befriend Malik (Jabari Watkins), a local kid who also is wrestling with his own issues, and Billie and he easily become friends. After a few creepy private encounters with Eve’s boyfriend, Nico and Billie run away with Malik. Where? Nowhere really, they just all need to get away. Malik says his father is in Florida, so off they go from Massachusetts to Florida in a stolen car.
Here, Sweet Thing turns into a road trip film as the trio start to find themselves with their newfound freedom. While what they are doing isn’t exactly legal, there’s an excitement that fills them as they break into wealthy people’s vacation homes and try on other people’s clothes and raid their fridges. They aren’t excited about being “outlaws,” but instead, because they finally have found a sense of a normal family, which is mainly because they don’t have to deal with their incredibly unpredictable and unreliable parents. As they go on their adventures, they share details with each other about their lives and bond in ways they never had before. They even meet a couple hanging in a mobile home park that shows them that even strangers can feel more like family than their toxic family. As their journey comes to an abrupt end, they are forever changed for the better, and so is everyone else in their family
One thing that makes Sweet Thing feel timeless is that there’s no unique identifier for where or even when this story takes place. While much of the film takes place in a beach town in Massachusetts, it can feel almost like anywhere. Instead of dealing with touristy things like most films do, Billie and Nico meet a local person from that town to go on their adventure, making the film more homely, absent of all the glitz and glamour of such a location. Also, there are no identifiers as to when the film is, there wasn’t one cell phone spotted. It could be in the 70s, it could be last week.
Filming almost exclusively in black and white gives Sweet Thing a complete indie vibe (partially funded via Kickstarter). There are some scenes that are in full-color contrast, especially the scenes where Billie imagines the actual Billy Holiday on her adventures with her, but for the most part, the lack of color in the film gives it its own sense of character. The cinematography by Lasse Ulvedal Tolbøll is also outstanding. There are a few moments out of the blue where subtitles appear that are a little distracting, but overall, this is a beautiful film despite the subject matter.
Finally, the best part of Sweet Thing is the performances. Will Patton shines as their sad, alcoholic father Adam, and Karyn Parsons invites you to hate her as their ridiculously abusive mother Eve. It must have been hard for her to act to terribly towards her real-life children in many of the scenes. It’s clear that naming the parents “Adam and Eve” was done on purpose. But unlike their biblical counterparts, Billie and Nico are their siblings’ keepers. Both Lana and Nico Rockwell are completely awesome in their performances, especially Lana Rockwell as she’s the heart and soul of Sweet Thing. While Alexandre Rockwell kept this film mostly all in the family, it’s better for going that route.
