Mexican pop icon Thalia has a new album, “A Mucha Honra”, in which she incorporates contemporary sounds such as corridos tumbados, a trap-style take on more traditional corrido and sierreño sounds. American pop can sound very same-y, but every time I’ve gone to Mexico I’ve been struck by the wide variety of sounds and rhythms that play on generic pop stations on the radio. I’m super curious to hear Thalia’s new musica Mexicana and dip my toe in what the contemporary Mexican pop scene sounds like. I haven’t been to Mexico since the pandemic, I need to get my ass in gear and go back. (Popsugar)

 

The Great Gatsby is now a musical and, apparently, a comedy. The cast had a wide range of opinions on how to adapt Jazz Age style to a contemporary red carpet. (Go Fug Yourself)

Breaking news: rich people with lavish estates throw drug-fueled benders in the country. Apparently, there’s a “Saltburn-esque narco-toff” scene among Britian’s young, rich, and titled set. Quelle shock. Also not shocking—they’re trying to make it about Prince Harry. People say Harry & Meghan need to move on from everything that happened with his family and the press, but, well, the press needs to move on, too. (Celebitchy)

 

Good news! The Onion has been bought by a group of buyers called Global Tetrahedron (a reference to a book by an Onion writer) that includes NBC reporter Ben Collins and Twilio co-founder Jeff Lawson. They’ve pledged to keep on the existing staff, keep the home base in Chicago, and they have a “profound love for The Onion and comedy based content”. They plan to revive the Onion News Network, which I am THRILLED about. I think about Jessica Rothe in this video about a missing girl all the damn time. Her delivery is perfect! (The Daily Beast)

 

 

In a new profile in GQ, Jerry Seinfeld said the movie business is “over”, and that films don’t have the cultural significance they once did. I 100% get where he’s coming from, but this is a little bit bonkers to say one year after the phenomenon of Barbenheimer, which was one year after Top Gun: Maverick saved the cinemas, which was right after Spider-Man: No Way Home made almost $2 billion, and Elvis reestablished R-rated adult-oriented dramas as blockbusters, never mind Dune being a franchise hit, proving people have a taste for epic-scale hard sci-fi once again.

The film industry is in upheaval and has been ever since the advent of streaming, this is a moment akin to the arrival of sound in cinemas, an era that saw careers end overnight and many studios go out of business. But movies survived. And movies will survive again. More specifically, I think what Seinfeld is getting at is that so many film executives now aren’t “movie people”. Accountants are truly running the show, and while the world needs accountants, creative industries need creative people to steer the ship. 

 

A HUGE issue with the industry navigating the streaming upheaval is that there are so, so few people with backgrounds in entertainment in charge. This is actually a moment to put the inmates in charge of the asylum, let the people who know how to entertain figure out how to effectively incorporate streaming into entertainment. That golden era of cinema in the 1970s everyone is always so nostalgic about? The inmates were running the asylum. After the old studio system collapsed, corporations snapped up movie studios as subsidiaries, but executives from Coca-Cola didn’t actually want to run the studio, so they hired movie people to do it. The problem with the most recent round of corporatization is that the parent companies aren’t hiring movie people to run movie businesses. They’re planting their own bean counters at the top, and it shows in the work. Just let the clowns put on the clown show. (GQ)