3 Best TV Shows Similar to Winter Cicada
Good Omens
The 2019 adaptation of Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett’s 1990 novel Good Omens was a charming show that succeeded in translating the book’s strengths and weaknesses to the small screen. It was clever like the book, with an ingenious plot (what if there had been a mix-up at the hospital and the Antichrist went home with the wrong family) that parodied The Omen while conjuring an apocalyptic tale all its about an angel and demon whose millennials-long rivalry grew from mutual antagonism, to grudging respect, and finally admiration and even a kind of love. But it also carried over the book’s weaker elements, its wonky pacing, plurality of uninteresting characters, and the fact that the first two thirds of the story is essentially table setting for the final third. Continue Reading →
PSYCHO-PASS サイコパス
For acclaimed actress turned first-time writer-director Rebecca Hall, her debut feature Passing is more than her first furtive steps into another facet of her expanding career. It's a deeply personal odyssey, one rooted in her own questions about her racial identity: Hall, whose grandmother is part-Black and whose mother has Black, Native American, and Dutch ancestry, has presented as white for much of her career. With this, her adaptation of the 1929 novella of the same name by Nella Larson, Hall gets to explore those myriad facets of herself, as well as the broader implications the phenomenon of 'passing' has for all of us in our respective negotiations with our identity. Continue Reading →
ブッチギレ!
Will Smith & Martin Lawrence beat Guy Ritchie's latest handily in a robust-for-January weekend. Two new wide releases were no match this weekend for those Bad Boys, who continued to top the domestic box office. Bad Boys for Life dropped only 45% this weekend, a better second-weekend hold than fellow Martin Luther King Jr. weekend box office hit Ride Along. Bad Boys for Life grossed another $34 million this frame for a ten-day domestic total of $120.6 million. Having already nearly doubled its $62.5 million opening weekend and without a barrage of competition over the next month, the sky really is the limit for how high Bad Boys for Life could go at the domestic box office. At the very least, it’ll end its run in the neighborhood of $175-180 million, a significant improvement over the $138.6 million domestic total of Bad Boys II. Thanks to the lack of noteworthy new titles this week, holdover movies saw small weekend to weekend drops this frame. This included 1917, which dipped just 28% in its third weekend of wide release. Charging into battle with another $15.8 million, 1917 has now grossed $103.8 million domestically. Fellow Universal holdover Dolittle actually didn’t hold terribly this frame as it dropped 42%, not too far off from the 37% second-weekend drop of The Nut Job. However, that second-weekend hold still only yielded $12.5 million for all those talking animals. Dolittle currently has amassed a disappointing $44.6 million ten-day domestic haul and is headed for an anemic $65-70 million final domestic total. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqNYrYUiMfg The Gentlemen, meanwhile, opened to $11 million, a result that’s neither dismal nor exceptional. Struggling distributor STX Films could have used the latter type of box office player right now but at least The Gentlemen wasn’t far off from the bows of far more expensive Guy Ritchie directorial efforts like The Man From U.N.C.L.E. or King Arthur: Legend of the Sword. Plus, STX apparently paid just $7 million for U.S. rights for this film, so they’ll make it out alright. Part of the reason The Gentleman didn’t become a breakout hit like past January STX action title Den of Thieves was that its marketing lived and died on its director alone. The trailers and commercials gave no indication to a broader plot or specific characters, they were just evoking prior Ritchie movies (and also, in the posters at least, the Kingsman films). That limited appeal marketing is a key reason why The Gentleman will likely end its domestic run between $30 and $35 million. Continue Reading →