‘Taxi Driver’ screenwriter Paul Schrader went shopping during “really bad musical” ‘Joker: Folie à Deux’
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While the original Joker had been compared to Martin Scorsese‘s Taxi Driver, that film’s acclaimed screenwriter Paul Schrader wasn’t impressed with Todd Phillips‘ panned sequel, Joker: Folie à Deux.
In a chat in Interview magazine, Schrader said he got to the theater to see the movie, but “I saw about 10 or 15 minutes of it. I left, bought something, came back, saw another 10 minutes. That was enough.”
He added, “It’s a really bad musical.”
When pressed for details, he had some choice words for Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga, as well as their respective characters Joker/Arthur Fleck and Harley Quinn.
“I don’t like either of those people,” he sniffed.
“I don’t like them as actors. I don’t like them as characters. I don’t like the whole thing. I mean, those are people who, if they came to your house, you’d slip out the back door.”
The Oscar-nominated writer used to be a film critic, and it seems other critics agree with his review: Joker: Folie à Deux has a 33% from them on the aggregator Rotten Tomatoes.
Rebel Moon star Charlie Hunnam is sticking with Netflix for its third installment of its Monster true crime series.
The first of the Ryan Murphy-produced franchise, DAHMER: Monster – The Jeffrey Dahmer Story earned 13 Emmy nominations and one win for Niecy Nash-Betts in the Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Limited Series category.
The second, Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story, iscoming to Netflix Sept. 19. At the Los Angeles premiere of that installment, it was announced Hunnam will play Ed Gein and that production will get underway in October.
Gein was one of the country’s most notorious suspected serial killers, whose crimes — and fashioning clothing items from corpses — in the 1950s inspired the murderers Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs and Norman Bates in Psycho.
The Illinois Supreme Court has thrown out former Empire actor Jussie Smollett’s conviction for lying about a 2019 hate crime.
Smollett was found guilty in 2021 for faking a racist and homophobic attack and lying to the police. His lawyers said this violated his Fifth Amendment rights because, in 2019, Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx had already agreed to drop the charges if Smollett paid $10,000 and did community service. A special prosecutor later charged him again, leading to his trial and conviction.
In its decision, filed on Thursday, the court stated they are resolving a “question about the State’s responsibility to honor the agreements it makes with defendants.”
The court stated it did not find that the state could bring a second prosecution against Smollett after the initial charges were dismissed as part of an agreement and the actor performed the terms of the agreement, noting that Illinois case law establishes that it is “fundamentally unfair to allow the prosecution to renege on a deal with a defendant when the defendant has relied on the agreement to his detriment.”
“We are aware that this case has generated significant public interest and that many people were dissatisfied with the resolution of the original case and believed it to be unjust. Nevertheless, what would be more unjust than the resolution of any one criminal case would be a holding from this court that the State was not bound to honor agreements upon which people have detrimentally relied,” it said.
The Illinois Supreme Court’s decision cancels earlier rulings by Cook County and appellate courts. The court has now sent the case back to the lower court to officially dismiss the charges.
A jury convicted Smollett in December 2021 on five of six felony counts of disorderly conduct stemming from him filing a false police report and lying to police, who spent more than $130,000 investigating his allegations.
He was sentenced to 150 days in county jail, ordered to pay $120,000 in restitution to the city of Chicago, fined $25,000 and ordered to serve 30 months of felony probation.
While the hit film has been available to purchase or rent on digital since August, Twisters will be streaming for free on Peacock in November.
The movie starring Glen Powell and Daisy Edgar-Jones has made more than $370 million worldwide since its release on July 19, and if you have Universal’s sibling streaming service, you’ll be able to catch wind of it on Nov. 15.
The update of the 1996 hit Twister that starred the late Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt has Powell playing Tyler, a hotshot storm hunter, who finds a reluctant partner in a Edgar-Jones’ Kate, a climate scientist.
“As storm season intensifies with terrifying phenomena unlike anything seen before, Kate and Tyler realize they may need to work together if they are to have any chance of taming, and surviving, an unprecedented outbreak of destructive tornadoes,” according to the movie’s synopsis.
