‘You Can Call Me Bill’ Review: A Fun Documentary Meditates on the Shatnerness of William Shatner

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” gives you a wholesome prankish druggy chameleonic video-game buzz; it’s also a nice, sweet confection for 6-year-olds. Historically, the proverbial problem with live-action movies based on video games — and “Super Mario Bros.,” a leaden dud released 30 years ago, had the dishonor of being the very first one — is that they jam-pack the screen with tropes and fights and characters and landscapes right out of the game, but when it comes to molding all that gimcrackery into, you know, a story, they lose the electronic pulse that made the game addictive. Digital animation is, and always should have been, the true cousin of video games (which are essentially computer fantasies that you control). And “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” takes full advantage of the sculptural liquid zap of the computer-animation medium. Yet it also has a fairy-tale story that’s good enough to get you onto its wavelength.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Carl Nargle (Owen Wilson), the amusingly ironic hero of “Paint” (ironic because, as we discover, he’s about as far from heroic as you can get), hosts a one-man instructional painting show that gets broadcast live out of the PBS station in Burlington, Vermont. Each afternoon, Carl appears on camera for one hour, puffing on his pipe, holding his brushes and palette as he dashes off an oil painting of a local wilderness setting (snowy mountains, twilight vistas, trees), explaining all the while, in the unruffled monotone of a stoned hypnotist, how you too can get to a “special place” just by painting what’s in your heart. Carl himself seems nearly as much of an art object as his canvases of Mt. Mansfield, the Vermont peak he has begun to paint with OCD frequency. He wears the same denim Western shirts, fuzzy beard and ash-blond Afro that he’s been sporting since 1979. He’s a relic: the landscape painter as Fred Rogers for adults, a kind of soft-rock guru from the age when men were Mellow. The biggest TV celebrity in Burlington, he thinks he’s on top of the world, but he’s about to come tumbling down.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic In “Spinning Gold,” a sketchy but adoring if not outright devotional biopic about Neil Bogart, the upstart ’70s music-industry mogul who founded Casablanca Records, there’s a pivotal moment that spins around the story of how Bogart, at a party he was throwing, played the 3-minute-and-20-second single version of Donna Summer’s “Love to Love You Baby.” He played it over and over again because his guests kept asking for it. That’s when the lightbulb went on. Bogart realized that the song needed to be longer, much longer — long enough to have sex to. (It ended up being 16 minutes and 50 seconds.) This is a rather famous anecdote (in the new documentary “Love to Love You, Donna Summer,” which just premiered at SXSW, there’s a clip of Bogart telling it on a talk show). So we assume that we’re going to see Bogart meet with Giorgio Moroder, the song’s composer and producer, and change music history.

Since the earliest days of Twitter, the social media platform has used a blue checkmark to verify the accounts of celebrities, journalists, politicians and other notables, serving as proof that they are who they claim to be.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic “Murder Mystery,” a cheeky pasteboard detective thriller-meets-middle-aged-romance that became a huge hit for Netflix four years ago, had the inspiration to team Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston as Nick and Audrey Spitz, a dweeby-sweet New York couple — he was a cop trying, and failing, to get promoted to detective; she was a hairdresser — whose marriage-on-auto-pilot needed a dose of shock therapy. They got it when they went on the European getaway that Nick, a compulsive cheapskate, had been promising Audrey for 15 years. The two wound up on a yacht, at a geezer aristocrat’s party, which turned out to be his death sentence as the moment he cut everyone there out of his will.

Elon Musk has defended his Twitter subscription plan after it was criticised by Star Trek actor William Shatner.After acquiring the social media platform in late 2022, the billionaire introduced Twitter Blue, a service that allows anyone to purchase a blue tick/verified account for a monthly subscription fee.Previously, blue ticks were typically given to notable accounts, such as high-profile figures, celebrities, major companies, politicians and members of the media.However, as part of his new plan, Musk has warned that these “legacy accounts” – those who received blue ticks before his takeover – will lose their verified status unless they pay the monthly subscription fee.“Hey @elonmusk, what’s this about blue checks going away unless we pay Twitter?” Shatner tweeted Musk on Saturday (March 25).“I’ve been here for 15 years giving my [time] & witty thoughts all for bupkis. Now you’re telling me that I have to pay for something you gave me for free? What is this-the Colombia Records & Tape Club?”In defence of his new program, Musk wrote: “It’s more about treating everyone equally.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Imagine an on-the-road concert documentary shot in the anything-goes days of 1970 — a hurly-burly vérité jamboree like “Mad Dogs & Englishmen” or “Elvis on Tour.” It’s about the biggest rock band in the world. It encompasses 11 shows in 26 days, with headlines and controversies and a film crew out to capture it all. We see the band members backstage, on planes, in their nightly lodgings, and onstage. The crowds are rapturous. “What the Hell Happened to Blood, Sweat & Tears?” is, in a way, that movie. The band that’s on tour, the mighty but fraught Blood, Sweat & Tears, was full of great musicians who most people didn’t know by name. Yet as fronted by the intoxicating huskiness of lead singer David Clayton-Thomas, they emerged from the embers of the counterculture to become one of the first true supergroups. By the time their 1970 tour arrived, Blood, Sweat & Tears were the most popular rock band in America, with a number-one album and a trio of hit singles that remain iconic: “And When I Die,” “You’ve Made Me So Very Happy,” and the joyfully bombastic and lurchy ear worm that was “Spinning Wheel.”

$44 billion has been to even the playing field between verified and unverified users, believing that the blue check that traditionally comes with accounts belonging to public figures sets a left-leaning, elitist hierarchy on the site that he wants to do away with. While the fix to that hierarchy has seen its fair share of hiccups along the way, including a period of time when anyone could go blue and impersonate a celebrity, Musk announced last week that he’s doing away with unpaid verifications altogether.

Todd Spangler NY Digital Editor Is Elon Musk’s move to grant verified blue check-marks only to paying Twitter users designed to prop up the company’s revenue — or is it supposedly to democratize the social network? After actor William Shatner groused about Twitter’s plan to revoke legacy blue check-marks as of April 1 and force users to pay for the privilege, the multibillionaire tech baron claimed the subscription-based verification program is about fairness, not lucre. “It’s more about treating everyone equally,” Musk tweeted Sunday evening in replying to Shatner. “There shouldn’t be a different standard for celebrities imo.”

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic The drama of addiction and recovery, as it takes place in the movies, tends to come at us like a series of rituals. There’s the rule-by-rule, day-by-day protocol of 12-step programs (the meetings, the showing up, the sharing, the calls to sponsors); a lot of us may feel we know it well from movies, even if we’ve never personally undergone the experience. There are the deeply engraved patterns of addiction itself: the highs, the lows, the cravings, the exploitation of friends and family members, the descent to the bottom, the grasping for the drink or the pill or the fix (or the one that isn’t there) and, in some cases, the criminal behavior. The reaching out to save oneself is also a kind of ritual — one that some addicts would say God built into us.

Naman Ramachandran New York-based film and TV studio and streaming network FilmRise has acquired North American distribution rights to true-crime documentary feature film “The Thief Collector.” Directed by Emmy winner Allison Otto (“The Love Bugs”), the film follows one of the most audacious and puzzling art thefts of a generation. In 1985, Willem de Kooning’s seminal work, “Woman-Ochre,” was sliced from its frame and stolen off the walls of the University of Arizona Museum of Art, disappearing into the desert. Over 30 years later, in a remote town in New Mexico, the $160 million dollar painting was rediscovered in the unlikeliest of places – the home of an eccentric married couple, both schoolteachers, with a keen eye for great works but a very unconventional method of collecting them. The film features Glenn Howerton co-creator, director, writer and star of “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.”

William Shatner enjoys using NSFW language and isn’t afraid to admit it. After delivering a keynote speech at the South by Southwest festival, Shatner spoke with producer Tim League about where his fondness for a certain four-letter word originated. When asked what he thought about disruptive electronic gadgets, the 91-year-old "Star Trek" star said, "Shut the f--- up.

After having explored George Lucas, David Lynch, Hitchcock, and even William Friedkin in previous documentaries, Alexandre O. Phillippe turns his attention towards an unlikely subject, William Shatner, in his newest film, “You Can Call Me Bill.” Framed around a free-associative conversation with the famed actor, Phillipe’s new documentary might be catnip for any Trekkie but also represents something of a regression after the filmmaker’s probing “Lynch/Oz” last year.  Continue reading ‘You Can Call Me Bill’ Review: Alexandre O.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Why did they give Zachary Levi a haircut for “Shazam! Fury of the Gods”? Four years ago, in the first “Shazam,” Levi played a kid in a superhero’s body, and the movie was smart and witty enough to be a caped version of “Big.” Levi’s look was a major part of it. Shazam, with that cheesy lightning bolt and gold belt and white Italian-restaurant tablecloth of a cape, didn’t resemble other recent comic-book-film heroes; he was more like something out of the ’40s. And Levi sealed the deal was his big popping eyes and ingenuous gee-whiz grin (he was, after all, playing a 14-year-old inside), as well as the hair that topped off his boyish spirit. It was dark and shiny and stood up an inch-and-a-half from his head — a ‘do as superhero stylized, in its way, as the old Superman’s.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Sometimes, when a documentary has a great subject, it can explore that subject with an intimacy that’s arresting, only to treat other aspects of the story with a kind of cavalier casualness. “Love to Love You Donna Summer” is that kind of documentary. Co-directed by Roger Ross Williams and Brooklyn Sudano (who is Summer’s daughter), it’s full of home movies and photographs and archival footage of Donna Summer, and it creates an eye-opening portrait of the ambitious yet deeply disconsolate woman she was. We see her when she was growing up in Boston, where she sang gospel in church and felt a gift passing through her, knowing that she was going to be famous, or when she moved to Munich in 1968, at 19, to be in the German production of “Hair” (there’s a startling clip of her onstage, in long dark pigtails, singing “Aquarius” in German), or later on, after she’d become a pop star, at home with her daughters, lost in the empty mirror of fame.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic In “John Wick: Chapter 4,” the epic culmination of the flamboyantly brutal death-wish-meets-video-game-meets-the-zen-of-Keanu-Reeves action series, our hero finds himself in a Berlin nightclub that resembles a pulsating Bauhaus Eurodisco by way of “Fellini Satyricon.” The place is like a concrete cathedral, with giant mosh pits of dancers throwing their arms up to the heavens as waterfalls cascade down the side walls (it almost looks like it’s raining). But Reeves’ John Wick, as he makes his way through the neon wetness, isn’t dancing. He’s getting ready to start shooting — which, for him, is more or less the same thing. As he skulks forward, oily hair hanging down the sides of his face, the camera glides just ahead of him, framing him like the renegade action demigod he is. We might be in the middle of the world’s most cutting-edge cologne commercial.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Just as the Coca-Cola company, after smudging a perfect product in 1985 with the New Coke, brought that product back and called it Coca-Cola Classic, the 95th Academy Awards telecast made a game attempt to rectify the mishaps of the past few years — the ratings slippage, the pared-down-like-a-skeleton-in-a-train-station 2021 edition, the debacle of The Slap — by bringing back something that we might call Oscar Classic. It was safe, it was familiar, it was tasteful, it was reassuring. It didn’t rock the boat, it didn’t overstay its welcome (actually, that marks sort of a break from Oscar Classic), and it left you feeling that the world’s preeminent awards show, all doom-saying punditry to the contrary, is still, on balance, a very good thing.

Star Trek star revealed his reasoning behind the documentary was far more solemn than it may seem. The Golden Globe winner has enjoyed a lucrative and sensational career over the last 72 years. He originally became a household name through the globally renowned series Star Trek but has also since become a best-selling science fiction author and holds the title of the oldest person to fly in space.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Introducing “Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves,” the lavish hyperkinetic popcorn fairy tale that kicked off SXSW this evening, the film’s co-directors, John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein, told the audience that they had designed the movie to appeal to hardcore D&D players — and also to those who know absolutely nothing about the game. This came as a relief to me, since what I know about Dungeons & Dragons you could put on the head of a…well, I know so little that I can’t even come up with a proper D&D reference with which to spin that cliché. The filmmakers were being honest. “Honor Among Thieves” is built on the edifice of D&D lore, packed with totems and characters and Easter eggs that fans of the legendary role-playing game will drink in with a connoisseur’s delight. But for those, like me, who have spent their lives avoiding anything to do with Dungeons & Dragons, the film is eminently comprehensible and, in its you’ve-seen-it-before-but-not-quite-this-way fashion, a lot of fun.

William Shatner has no regrets over skipping his Star Trek co-star Leonard Nimoy's funeral. The 91-year-old sparked controversy when he decided to keep his prior commitment to attend a Red Cross fundraising event in Florida instead of going to his co-star's funeral in Los Angeles in March 2015. During an interview with Variety, Shatner was asked about the backlash and if he regretted not attending the service.