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Why Owl Post covers Entertainment

Entertainment coverage skews toward whatever the algorithm wants to surface this week. The shows nobody is watching that turn out to be the year's best television, the album that quietly reset a genre with no press cycle behind it, the film that earned its reputation through word of mouth rather than marketing spend: these are harder to find in a media landscape optimized for volume.

Owl Post reads entertainment with an eye toward what is actually worth your attention rather than what is loudest. That means tracking the streaming landscape critically, including which platforms are producing work that justifies the subscription and which are coasting. It means following music across genres rather than just chart activity. It means covering film with attention to what is in theaters and what is being overlooked. And it means following the business layer of entertainment, including the studio decisions, streaming economics, and industry shifts that determine what gets made and what does not.

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The beat spans film (theatrical and streaming), television across all platforms, music across genres, and the cultural conversations that form around all of them. Owl Post reads serious film and television criticism, music journalism with genuine editorial standards, and the entertainment business press that covers the industry economics behind the content.

Your digest adapts to your relationship with entertainment criticism. If you want the opinionated, take-a-position voice that tells you what is good and makes a case for it, that framing is available. If you want the recommendation-first approach that answers what to watch and what to skip without extensive argumentation, that works too.

A daily entertainment digest. What is worth your time, what the industry is doing, and what the culture is talking about.

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‘The crowd are there for the crashes’: how a play performed on a racetrack became a smash with banger racers

The Kneebone Cadillac is about a sport in which community is fostered yet collisions are encouraged. Actors, audiences and drivers explain the rush Lexi Crosbie was five days old when she went to her first ever banger race. “I grew up around the track,” the 14-year-old says. At nine, her racer dad gave her a chance at the Micro F2s, the junior league, and Crosbie has been racing ever since. “You’re so filled with adrenaline,” she says of the motorsport. “It’s the best feeling ever.” This month, Crosbie went to her local Cornish track, United Downs Raceway (also known as St Day), for a different kind of event. The Kneebone Cadillac, Carl Grose’s raucous play about a banger racer and her family, is set and performed on the track. For Crosbie, it was her first ever theatre show. “I really enjoyed it,” she says. “My whole family did.” Director Kyla Goodey has loved seeing how many racers have come along, when theatre isn’t part of their regular lives. “It’s been a bridging of worlds,” she says. “That’s exactly what we wanted.”

theguardian.comLeft

Confessions of a Shopaholic: a charming Isla Fisher romcom worth taking to the checkout

The PJ Hogan-directed film may not have the polish of The Devil Wears Prada but it has new relevance in the buy now, pay later era The year was 2009. The global economy was enduring the final throes of the worst financial crisis since the second world war and Isla Fisher, clad with an American accent and a shopping addiction, played a financially illiterate New Yorker with more than $16,000 in personal debt; an auburn-haired Marie Antoinette of the late oughts. Confessions of a Shopaholic was awarded a measly two stars by this outlet when it was released. The film, based on the Sophie Kinsella novel series of the same name and directed by the Australian film-maker PJ Hogan, was practically doomed from the start. Financially battered audiences weren’t exactly chomping at the bit to watch a plucky fashionista make terrible spending decisions for 104 minutes. It was also just as romcoms’ box office dominance was coming to an end, replaced by a new era of unsaturated and action-packed superhero franchises. But while Confessions of a Shopaholic isn’t exactly groundbreaking, it is charming now – and arguably ahead of its time in regards to its depiction of overwhelming personal debt.

theguardian.comLeft

‘A frightening piece to perform’: can Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece still shock?

Sixty years after its first staging, performance artist MPA is restaging the provocative piece in Los Angeles Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind, a traveling retrospective on view at Los Angeles’s The Broad museum, features black and white footage of Ono’s 1964 Carnegie Hall performance of Cut Piece projected onto one of its walls. It was a landmark event in performance art history, in which the artist, aged 31, sat motionless on the stage as strangers took turns with a pair of scissors to cut away pieces of her clothing. As an emblem of the Fluxus artistic tradition, Cut Piece “relies on the audience’s actions to complete the performance”, says Sarah Loyer, curator and exhibitions manager at The Broad. This is precisely the work’s inherent risk: it leaves the artist’s body totally vulnerable to the viewer’s unpredictable whims. Consequently, as Ono herself told the art historian Ina Blom in a 1992 interview, “It is a frightening piece to perform.” The tension in the footage is palpable, particularly as Ono struggles to retain her composure while a young man snips away at the straps of her undergarments. But as Loyer points out, “Looking at documentation of Cut Piece in the gallery, we are a step removed.” In order to convey the full impact of the piece, the museum is staging two Cut Piece live at the Redcat theater on 17 and 18 July to be performed by the Los Angeles based artist MPA.

theguardian.comLeft

‘Backrooms’ & ‘Longlegs’ Producer Chris Ferguson & His Oddfellows Ink First Look Deal With Warner Bros.

Chris Ferguson and his studio Oddfellows have signed a first-look pact with the Warner Bros. Picture Group. Ferguson’s Oddfellows were behind the Neon Oz Perkins’ horror hits Longlegs and The Monkey, and brings them back into business with that former studio’s execs Christian Parkes, Jason Wald and Spencer Collantes who are now at Warner Bros genre label Clockwork.

deadline.com

Walter Hill to Be Honored with Fantastic Fest Lifetime Achievement Award and Alamo Drafthouse Retrospective Screening Series (EXCLUSIVE)

“The Warriors” and “48 Hrs.” director Walter Hill will receive Fantastic Fest’s lifetime achievement award, followed by a nationwide retrospective of his work in January at select Alamo Drafthouse locations. Hill will be honored with the award as part of Fantastic Fest’s opening weekend festivities at the Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar in Austin, Texas, followed

variety.com

Frontières Juicy Vampire Comedy ‘Gro(ceries),’ Starring and Co-Written by ‘Sex Education’s’ Chinenye Ezeudu-Sterling, Adds French Co-Production Partners (EXCLUSIVE)

Paris-based production companies SCoT(T) and The Project have boarded ‘Gro(ceries),’ a vampire self-identity comedy starring ‘Sex Education’s’ Chinenye Ezeudu-Sterling, who is also the co-writer with director Sophie King. The news comes ahead of the project’s participation in Fantasia Festival’s Frontières Co-Production Market, held July 22–25 in Montreal. U.K.-based lead producers Rosanna Eden-Ellis (Five By Five

variety.com

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