‘American Dreamer’ Film Review: Peter Dinklage Real-Estate Comedy Requires Major Repairs

Barbara Charone, and I have to smile when he praises it for capturing her “unmistakable voice”. Charone worked at WEA Records for nearly 20 years, before setting up the independent PR company MBC – still active today – with Moira Bellas; along the way representing Madonna, REM, Guns N’ Roses, Foo Fighters, Rufus Wainwright, Rod Stewart and many more. As for the voice, most who’ve worked in the music industry (I was on NME for a while) will be acquainted with Charone’s signature booming rasp, and how – warm, friendly, but also formidable – she protects her starry clients like Cerberus at the gates of Hades.

Vince Staples has been cast in a comedy pilot for Showtime based on the 1999 film The Wood.According to Variety, Staples, Xavier Mills (Legacies), Karen Obilom (Doom Patrol), Melvin Gregg (Snowfall) and Essence Renae (Bosch: Legacy) will star in the pilot.Original stars Richard T. Jones and Tamala Jones will also reprise their roles as Slim and Tanya respectively in the show.The film’s original director and writer, Rick Famuyiwa, will return to direct and executive produce the pilot.

EXCLUSIVE: WME has signed Eric Warren Singer, one of the screenwriters behind Paramount’s summer smash Top Gun: Maverick.

Before Legendary Entertainment Godzilla franchise scribe Max Borenstein became attached as showrunner to Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty series, it took co-creator Jim Hecht some years after optioning Jeff Pearlman’s 2014 book, Showtime: Magic, Kareem, Riley, and the Los Angeles Lakers Dynasty of the 1980s, to get HBO to sign on.

“The Black Phone” take full advantage of the movie’s basic setup: a suburban teen gets abducted and then struggles to escape his captor’s sound-proof basement. That scenario, co-adapted from a Joe Hill (“NOS4A2”) short story by director Scott Derrickson (“Doctor Strange”) and co-writer C.

If there hadn’t been a body count, Chris and Jeff George’s escapades might have made for a divinely trashy TLC reality show. The brothers had gargantuan appetites, a habit of breaking the law without consequences, a flair for exaggeration, and a knack for spending money as fast as it came in on all the things that would keep a certain kind of viewer coming back: strip club visits, firearms, McMansions, and jacked-up trucks.

EXCLUSIVE: BCDF Pictures has acquired film rights to Elena Armas’ 2022 New York Times bestseller The Spanish Love Deception, tapping Peter Hutchings (The Hating Game) to adapt it for the big screen.

Writer/Producer/Director Theodore Melfi has a different take than those who think independent filmmaking is becoming an endangered species, and in fact he tells me right now we are in “a golden age of independent film”. That may be one of the reasons he is bullish about both films he has at this week’s Tribeca Festival in New York City – independently produced movies he is helping shepherd along. On Corner Office which stars Jon Hamm he is an Executive Producer, and on American Dreamer he is the screenwriter as well as a producer of the comedy that stars Peter Dinklage, Shirley MacLaine, and Matt Dillon. Both are for sale and the bottom line is Melfi truly believes the audience will dictate whatever the perfect form of distribution is, whether it be theatrical, streaming, digital VOD, or a combination of all three.

Pizza Planet? What about a jokey reference to the “Woody’s Roundup” TV show for viewers the age of Andy’s mom? And let’s face it: as admirable as it is that Pixar has created an LGBTQ character that can’t easily be dubbed over in foreign markets (the ones that demand that sort of thing will certainly find a way), there was no such thing as a mainstream studio kids’ movie of 1995 — not even an adult-aimed studio movie — progressive enough to pair a white male protagonist with a Black lesbian confidante.The most 1995 aspect of “Lightyear” comes from Evans’ performance, but only if you imagine he’s intentionally impersonating George Clooney for the entire movie; that’s how it sounds, anyway. The laughs generally come from Sohn, Aduba and Taika Waititi as an inexperienced member of the Space Ranger reserves who gets pressed into service.

“American Dreamer” is a mess of a movie, in which scenes of startling wit and emotional truth co-exist alongside entire subplots that are utterly inexplicable. It’s all over the damn place; its good ideas in near equal proportion to its bad ones, feeling less like a polished production than a filmed first draft, released as a rough assembly.

The horrors of opioid addiction, greed, corporate interests, and the exploitation of the drug and patients are nothing new, and shows like “Dopesick” have done a great job of putting the epidemic in a great cultural, capitalistic and political context. But a new true-crime documentary, “American Pain” is showing one specific slice of the story that’s almost too unbelievable to believe.