Good afternoon, everyone.
Today’s newsletter includes: Salt Hank got a big payday, Teddy Kim, MoMA PS 1’s new café, Carbone’s global expansion plans, Vox’s late-summer layoffs, and an Upper East Side walk-in acne clinic is expanding downtown.
“It’s solidly an HBO show, not a ‘Max’ show.” By Teddy Kim
Stay Tuned is a Feed Me guest column about film and entertainment, written by Teddy Kim.
Last week, I mentioned the upcoming premiere of Lanterns, which is taking over the 9 p.m. ET prestige slot from House of the Dragon for HBO. Just a couple months ago, everyone seemed ready to put superhero content to rest. And then Spider-Man: Brand New Day hit the box office and racked up $2 billion worldwide in 18 days, second-quickest to hit that milestone in movie history. So maybe the death of the comic book crusader was greatly exaggerated. What does seem over are the days of superhero slop, where you could throw out a B-tier superhero, maybe cast a promising but fairly unknown actor, play it relatively safe, and sniff $1 billion in box office: movies like Aquaman, Doctor Strange, Captain Marvel. These films launched names like Jason Momoa, Benedict Cumberbatch, and Brie Larson into the mainstream. In that era, you’d have seen the same for someone like this year’s Supergirl, Milly Alcock. Now, if you’re not a marquee name like Batman or Spider-Man, we’re going to need a little more.
So I was pleasantly surprised that Lanterns seems to be heeding that lesson, drawing less from its IP brethren and instead making references (sometimes a little desperately, I’m not like the other superhero shows) to the best works of its crime thriller, neo-noir genre. The three-timeline structure and the not-quite-buddy cop tension between Aaron Pierre’s John Stewart and Kyle Chandler’s Hal Jordan aka Green Lantern are clear nods to Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson in the first season of True Detective and its hallmark driving conversation scenes, although nothing in Lanterns quite matches the unique quality of McConaughey’s Rust Cohle dialogue so far. There’s also more than a bit of Training Day, as well as other little nods to classics of the genre, like an inspired casting choice in Kelly Macdonald (No Country for Old Men) as the small-town sheriff who’s fed up by the pair of interloping investigators and Garret Dillahunt (also No Country for Old Men, sensing a pattern?) as her father-in-law. And I was happy to see Chris Coy, who turned in a solid performance in Netflix’s Black Rabbit, with an important role in the pilot.
Really what’s refreshing about the pilot is the storytelling confidence to start things off where it does, right in the middle of things, and end with a great cliffhanger. We don’t get a boring episode full of DC exposition about how Jordan and Stewart met and paired up and what they’ve been doing since. The show has a certain self-assured but offbeat tone, not as quirky as co-creator Damon Lindelof’s Watchmen (an excellent show), but more personality than something like The Penguin. Which is to say, it’s solidly an HBO show, not a “Max” show.
New releases this weekend:
Alex Ullom’s debut, It Ends, opens limited for Neon in NY and LA before it goes wide on August 28. About four recent grads who get stuck on a road that never stops, it sounds a bit like an outdoors sequel to Backrooms. The film has had an interesting path since it premiered at SXSW last year. It was one of the first films on Letterboxd’s new rental store in December and ran for a month before Neon bought it. Curious if we’ll see more indie films try that route if they don’t immediately find a distributor at a festival. Tony and Camp Miasma both go wide after their limited runs. Tickets for Dune: Part Three (out December 18) dropped this week and site crashes have led to people lining up at theaters to buy tickets at physical kiosks. Reddit has been full of people outraged about scalpers buying dozens of IMAX 70mm tickets at a time. The Odyssey phenomenon was cool, but was it worth it if every big IMAX movie from now on is going to bring out the Sea People?
Here are some other screenings I’d encourage you to check out in the coming week:
🚄 Thursday 8/20 through Thursday 8/27 @ IFC — Train to Busan (2016) — One of the most entertaining action movies I’ve seen, about a group of travelers trying to survive on a Korean train full of zombies. With great pacing and characters, it’s just pure high-speed fun.
🥩 Friday 8/21 @ Metrograph — Raw (2016) — You may have seen director Julia Ducournau’s Titane five years ago when it won the Palme D’Or, making her the first solo female director to claim the prize at Cannes. Personally, I prefer Raw, Ducournau’s first feature, about a vegetarian girl who gets hazed at veterinary school and develops some strange eating habits.
🫖 Saturday 8/22 @ The Paris Theater — Alice in Wonderland (1951) — For Paris Theater’s Big & Loud series, they’re screening cinema’s most unforgettable sensory experiences for four weeks. I like that The New York Times review from 1951 writes, “Take haughty Caterpillar—he is a beautifully complicated snob who sits on a leaf, smokes his hookah and blows gorgeously multi-colored vowels.”
