HBO
Dev Hynes Details New Score for Luca Guadagnino’s We Are Who We Are
Dev Hynes helmed the music for Luca Guadagnino’s new coming-of-age miniseries We Are Who We Are, which debuted on HBO last week. Now, Milan Records has announced that his score will be officially released next month. The Blood Orange mastermind has provided music for the screen in the past, including Melina Matsoukas’ 2019 film Queen & Slim. However, this We Are Who We Are project marks Hynes’ first-ever score for a TV series. The collection features 12 tracks written, produced, and performed by Hynes, alongside four previously shared instrumental pieces from composers Julius Eastman and John Adams. In an interview with Variety, Hynes said he and Guadagnino initially bonded over “quite similar tastes in more contemporary classic music.” He added, “I was talking to him about h...
Emmys So Black: Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Regina King, Zendaya & More Snag Golden Lady Statuettes
Source: ABC / Getty it was a fantastic night for Black Hollywood during the 72nd annual Primetime Emmy Awards. Despite the COVID-19 global pandemic still being a thing, the show went on as television’s brightest all converged on Hollywood virtually, while in the safety of their own watch party bubbles and homes. We not gonna lie, while watching Schitt’s Creek sweep all comedy categories, which meant that Insecure coming off its best season, nabbed one award out its 8 nominations, we were beginning to worry if it was gonna be a long night. BUT, it was refreshing to see Dan Levy, who won awards for writing, directing, and supporting actor shoutout of Issa Rae’s hit HBO comedy series in one his acceptance speeches. “I want to recognize Issa Rae and the writers on Insecure for writi...
Luca Guadagnino’s We Are Who We Are Lingers on the Limbo of Adolescence: Review
The Pitch: Adolescence is rough enough in the best of circumstances; hormones rage, rebellion rises, and you’re left wondering about the state of the world you’re growing into. But try growing up on a military base in a foreign country during the 2016 election — surrounded by conformity in a terrifying year for budding authoritarianism — with the promise of joy and freedom just one town over. That’s the world in which rebellious iconoclast Fraser (Jack Dylan Grazer) lives, his mother, Sarah (Chloë Sevigny), having just been promoted to the commander of a US military base in Italy. He bristles against the move, taking out that frustration in exasperated shrugs and outbursts at both Sarah and her partner, a fellow soldier named Maggie (Alice Braga), who tries to negotiate their dysfunct...
Last Week Tonight with John Oliver Renewed for Three More Seasons
HBO has announced a three-season renewal for its award-winning satirical news show Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. The new deal will keep John Oliver dissecting socio-political shortcomings and feuding with Connecticut towns through at least 2023. “We’re all extremely happy to be able to continue to do our show on HBO for another three years, or until the end of the world, whichever comes first,” said Oliver in a press statement. Since Oliver moved from The Daily Show correspondent to premium cable host in 2014, Last Week Tonight has earned two Peabody Awards and an astounding 16 Emmys. That includes four last year, including taking home the Outstanding Variety Talk Series trophy for the fourth year running. It will have a chance to extend that streak to five at this year’s ceremony, w...
That “Strange Case” in HBO’s Lovecraft Country We Can’t Stop Thinking About
Warning: This editorial discusses scenes depicting rape and sexual assault. HBO’s Lovecraft Country has been a wild ride so far. In just four episodes, we’ve seen haunted houses, vampiric monsters, and mysterious cults, along with the real world horrors of Jim Crow laws and white supremacy. The series’ fifth episode — this past Sunday’s “Strange Case” — manages to top all of that with one of the most disturbing scenes in recent memory. In a twist on Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Ruby (Wunmi Mosaku), a Black woman takes a potion and wakes up in a white body. At first, she’s shocked and horrified, but begins to see the value in this new “currency” of whiteness. The potion eventually wears off, causing Ruby to violently shed her new skin in bloo...
HBO’s Coastal Elites Feels Like a Carefully Curated Twitter Feed: Review
The Pitch: Amidst the backdrop of 2020 — the heady and often unpleasant mix of an impending presidential election and a worldwide pandemic that’s hitting the United States especially hard — five people deliver five different monologues (or, as they’re briefly dubbed, “unhinged rants”) about the Way We Live Now in the satirical HBO “special presentation” Coastal Elites. Look at the Camera: Because of the very nature of the coronavirus pandemic, Coastal Elites is a decidedly un-flashy glimpse into the lives of a quintet of Americans. From sly writer Paul Rudnick, the 90-minute special presentation (that’s what HBO is calling Coastal Elites, and although it’s movie-length, frankly, the descriptor fits) is meant as a mix of earnest sincerity and dry wit. How is this disparate handful strugglin...
The 25 Most Anticipated Movies of Fall 2020
“New year, new decade, new films, right?” That was January, back when we were still looking ahead at 2020 with blind optimism and ill-fated excitement. Sigh, hindsight is 20/20 they say, right? Who knew. At the time, we had 50 exciting new titles we were anticipating, most of which have since been either postponed, dumped to VOD, or relegated to a limbo state. It’s been an unnerving year for the film industry, to say the least. A year fraught with shutdowns, furloughs, layoffs, bankruptcies, and re-evaluations. All of that change has prompted a seismic shift in how everything’s run across the media landscape, and no one truly has a grip on things just yet. Odds are they won’t for quite some time. Because of this, anticipating anything right now — let alone anything in pop culture — seems l...
Spike Lee Shares First Teaser for David Byrne’s American Utopia: Watch
Spike Lee has revealed the first teaser trailer for David Byrne’s American Utopia. The HBO production premieres Saturday, October 17th. Lee’s latest joint is based on Byrne’s 2019 Broadway show of the same name, which is itself inspire by Byrne’s most recent album American Utopia. The trailer shows off Lee’s kinetic camera work, capturing the movement of the 11 singers, dancers, and musicians accompanying Byrne. Choreography was provided by Annie-B Parson, and Lee portrays her movements from every angle — front, sides, above, and even behind, taking in the rears of the cast and the faces of the live audience. Check out the trailer below. Byrne had hoped to get in a second run of shows on Brodaway, but that’s been pushed back since the Great White Way went dark in response to the ongoi...
Danbury, Connecticut Renames Sewage Plant in Honor of John Oliver
For the last several years, John Oliver has been in a tiff with the city of Danbury, Connecticut. It’s not entirely clear what prompted his war of words, but on at least two occasions in the last three years, HBO’s Last Week Tonight host has ruthlessly mocked the New York metropolitan suburb. In 2017, he took aim at Danbury for going to absurd lengths in hopes of winning a bid to be Amazon’s headquarters. In a more recent episode, in which he explored racial disparities in the jury selection process of two Connecticut cities, Oliver again singled out Danbury. “If you’re going to forget a town in Connecticut,” Oliver remarked, “why not forget Danbury? Because, and this is true, fuck Danbury!” “I know exactly three things about Danbury,” Oliver added. “USA Today ranked it the ...
Dan Deacon Releases Original Score for HBO’s Well Groomed: Stream
This past January saw Dan Deacon drop his first album in four years, Mystic Familiar. The Baltimore-based musician is back now with his second project of 2020: his original score for HBO’s Well Groomed. Well Groomed is a documentary about the colorful and wonderfully absurd subculture of competitive dog grooming. The film premiered on HBO in late 2019, but today marks the official release of Deacon’s accompanying soundtrack. Much like the doc, the music is playful and fun in nature. Its 14 arrangements also find the electronic music producer Deacon expanding his sound palette by dabbling with more earthy and organic instrumentation. Previous collaborators like pianist M.C. Schmidt of Matmos, vibraphonist Rich O’Meara, and guitarist Steve Strohmeier assisted Deacon in creating the soni...
Get Your Ass Up!: The Blackest Moments From HBO’s ‘Lovecraft Country’, Ep. 1
Source: Eli Joshua Ade / HBO HBO is once again winning with another unapologetically Black, sci-fi-filled drama—Lovecraft Country—and we love to see it. The top-notch storytelling smartly intertwines fantasy amidst the all too real segregation of America in the 50’s, and has already lead to some amazingly dope visuals and moments after just one episode. The series is based on the eponymous novel by Matt Ruff and finessed by Misha Green and we’ll be following the adventures of Atticus Freeman (Jonathan Majors) his childhood friend Letitia (Jurnee Smollett) and his Uncle George (Courtney B. Vance) on a road trip from Chicago across the Sundown Town reality of Jim Crow USA. Atticus, a military veteran, is looking for his missing daddy Montrose (Michael Kenneth Williams). But racist cops, crea...
