ReportWire

Tag: The Curse

  • The Evolutions of Emma Stone

    The Evolutions of Emma Stone

    [ad_1]

    Photo-Illustration: Lola Dupre/LOLA_DUPRE

    This article was originally published on December 22, 2023. Emma Stone has since won her second Oscar for the leading role in Poor Things and reportedly shaved her head for her fourth collaboration with director Yorgos Lanthimos, set to release in 2025.

    The quintessential Emma Stone acting choice comes near the end of Battle of the Sexes, a solid but unremarkable 2017 tennis bio-drama in which she plays Billie Jean King to Steve Carell’s Bobby Riggs. King is all nerves before their famous match; as attendants carry her down a hallway on a garish throne, preparing for a grand entrance, she is visibly fretful over the reputational damage of agreeing to this in the first place. She ducks her head as she enters the stadium — and looks up as she emerges into the light, smiling like a superstar.

    It’s a split-second reveal of the machinery behind preternatural charisma. Stone has always known how to let you in on a metamorphosis. Her best roles are those in which her character transforms and ascends: an unknown actress becomes a movie star, a newcomer to the queen’s court acquires power, a talented tennis player turns icon. She doesn’t disappear into her roles; she makes you aware of the games her characters are playing. In All About Eve terms, she’s Bette Davis and she’s Anne Baxter. With her giant eyes — which can project vulnerability or shift into unearthly confidence — and her raspy voice, Stone locates the star inside the striver and vice versa.

    More recently, though, she has expanded into roles that distort these tropes. This winter, she stars in both the Showtime series The Curse, as a deluded house flipper who yearns for basic-cable celebrity, and Yorgos Lanthimos’s film Poor Things, as a woman implanted with the brain of an infant who goes on a journey of steampunk self-discovery. In both, the actress seems to be winking at the narratives that defined her earlier work — and it’s clear that she is hitting a new, more experimental high.

    Stone, 35, made her name with a distinctly millennial kind of role: the sardonic yet earnest girl next door. For a while, her go-to interview anecdote was about how, as a teenager, she had made a PowerPoint to try to convince her parents she needed to move to L.A. to pursue acting. (As she later explained it, “I make presentations because when I feel strongly about something, I cry.”) After scattered roles in comedies like Superbad, her star-is-born moment was Will Gluck’s 2010 film Easy A, a twee teen update of The Scarlet Letter, in which her character, Olive, pretends to have sex with her gay classmate to help him convince everyone he’s straight. Then she pretends to do it with a bunch more people, too, for the social cachet and just for the hell of it. On paper, it’s an impossible role; she has to be an outcast and a smart aleck and a vlogger as well as charming enough that we believe her classmates believe she could hook up with half the school. That’s where Stone excels. When Olive decides to embrace her identity as a woman of ill repute, strutting down a walkway in Ray-Bans while she mugs and blows kisses, she’s doing an uncool person’s imitation of “cool and hot” in addition to being actually cool and hot. Stone makes Olive relatable: You get that she thinks high-school popularity is dumb and that she wants it anyway.

    With Nathan Fielder in The Curse.
    Photo: Richard Foreman Jr./SHOWTIME/Richard Foreman Jr./A24/Paramount+ with SHOWTIME

    Easy A took Stone to a new echelon. She was nominated for a Golden Globe (they love an ingénue), won an MTV Movie Award, and hosted Saturday Night Live for the first time. For a while, her career looked like an attempt to follow the path of early-’90s Julia Roberts, another star with megawatt charisma who knows how to let you in on the joke. Stone kept on doing comedies. She took a tiny role in Gluck’s next movie, Friends With Benefits. She starred opposite Ryan Gosling in Crazy, Stupid, Love. She was Gwen Stacy in the rom-comish The Amazing Spider-Man. Her role as the protagonist’s daughter in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman, from 2014, earned Stone her first Oscar nomination, but the performance, like a lot of that film, is pitched to 11, manic and attention-grabbing without being artful. Her most infamous role may be that of Allison Ng — whose father is supposed to be half-Chinese and half-Hawaiian — in Cameron Crowe’s directionless 2015 comedy, Aloha. (Stone has apologized for this informally: When Sandra Oh made a joke about it onstage at the 2019 Golden Globes, Stone shouted from her seat, “I’m sorry!”)

    After Aloha, Stone’s prospects looked uncertain. Studio comedies were on the wane. She wasn’t an obvious choice for dramas, nor was she an indie darling. But Stone picked up a part in La La Land, Damien Chazelle’s reconstructed Hollywood love-story musical. As Mia, a barista and wannabe actress, Stone portrayed the apotheosis of a striver. Mia may cloak her ambition in wry self-deprecation, especially when she flirts with Gosling’s Über-serious jazz musician, but the movie depends on the idea that she deserves to be discovered. Stone’s Oscar win for the role seemed almost inevitable from the scene in which Mia auditions for a big Hollywood film. Over the course of one song, she goes from a shrinking unknown — who cites her aunt who “used to live in Paris” as the dreamer who imparted her love of art — to a star and back, her voice gaining power as she builds through the bridge. In a long take, Chazelle brings us close to Stone as emotion overtakes her face, her eyes glimmering; the camera circles her, and when it comes back around she’s suddenly someone else. Maybe it’s a trick of eyeline: A novice looks down and away from the camera; the star, just above and beyond it.

    Stone had her Oscar, but where do you go from there? She did Battle of the Sexes and Netflix’s Maniac, a curio of a series quickly buried by algorithmic churn. But it was during her first collaboration with Lanthimos, in 2018’s The Favourite, when she uncovered a fruitful new valence for her career. She played Abigail, the new girl in the 18th-century court of Olivia Colman’s Queen Anne, who uses her natural star power to scheme her way into the queen’s affections while trying to outflank Anne’s standby, Rachel Weisz. In her most memorable gambit, Stone monologues about her plans while jerking off a young nobleman played by Joe Alwyn. Lanthimos pushes the camera toward Stone’s face, the candlelight bringing out its shadows. Abigail thinks of herself as a victim — “My life is like a maze I continually think I’ve gotten out of,” she mutters — but it’s clear she’s also seizing control of her situation and, literally, of Alwyn.

    The Favourite unlocked a darkness in Stone’s performances. While she had always made her characters self-aware, she began to lean harder into deviousness and delusion. On repeat visits to SNL, Stone explored fully unleashed defensiveness as the mother of a sensitive boy in 2016 and, in 2019, as an actress obsessed with finding the truth of her minor character in a gay porno. When she announces, as the star of 2021’s Cruella, that she was “born brilliant, born bad, and a little bit mad,” she plays it cocky, comedic, and entirely heartfelt, pointing herself in a different, possibly freeing, direction: The dreamer becomes a villain. In an interview about that film — a 101 Dalmatians prequel that barely justifies its existence outside Stone’s go-for-broke performance — she admitted that she had been “asking myself a lot of questions about that charm offensive or ingénue idea in my own life.” She was excited by “this phase of playing these women who are much less concerned with what people think about them.”

    Now when she plays a woman obsessed with likability, Stone knows she can treat it like a joke — or a trap. In The Curse, her character Whitney’s belief in her own charm is just one of her many self-deceptions. She is the daughter of slumlords who, along with her husband, Asher (Nathan Fielder), runs a house-flipping operation in New Mexico. They build “passive homes” that are obvious rip-offs of other people’s designs and that Whitney tries to fill with work by a Native artist who finds her cringe-inducing. Whitney wants her show to be called Green Queen. She is convinced that she deserves what would amount to HGTV stardom.

    It’s a self-immolating role — not least because Stone is from Arizona and played a white savior in The Help. Whitney has all the obliviousness of someone who would take that part in Aloha. In a defining scene, she and Asher stumble into a genuinely sweet moment when he tries to help her out of a sweater and it gets stuck around her head. They collapse into giggles. “This is us, Ash,” Whitney says, then adds, “I wish the network could see this.” She scurries across the room, grabs her phone, and tries to get him to re-create the scene on-camera.

    In Poor Things.
    Photo: Searchlight Pictures

    In Poor Things, Stone performs the most literal kind of becoming. She is Bella Baxter, a once-dead woman who has been zapped back to life but with the brain of a baby and must now grow into a worldly, self-actualized individual. The film has its surreal and twisted qualities as well as its obvious ones; the script and direction tend to overemphasize their points about misogyny. As Bella, though, Stone progresses through this strange personal growth without judgment in a performance that has made her an Oscar front-runner. She works with technical precision: As Bella’s brain ages inside her adult body, her gait changes from stilted lumbering to a posture of confidence and control. Her face, which she can spread open with wonder, scrambles with confusion and interest at new ideas and experiences, especially once she heads out to traipse across Europe in search of enlightenment. She’s gloriously uninhibited in the bedroom or while scarfing down her first pastel de nata. On the dance floor with Mark Ruffalo, she cavorts like a Victorian Raggedy Ann. Although Stone has always been good in close-up — and she’s especially good here, those watery irises offset by that jet-black hair — Bella’s discovery comes through her whole physical being.

    The film invites allegorical readings. You could interpret it as a comment on what it can be like to chart your own way as a woman in Hollywood or how to find some sense of self even when forced into a role. But it’s also, of all Stone’s metamorphoses, one of the simplest — and the most internal. Olive, Mia, Abigail, and even Whitney long for social acceptance. Bella’s hunger, in the end, isn’t social. What she wants from life is pleasure and knowledge, especially of her body’s forgotten history. She’s trying to become herself.


    See All



    [ad_2]

    Jackson McHenry

    Source link

  • “Passive” Living Has A Price (And It’s Called White Guilt): The Curse

    “Passive” Living Has A Price (And It’s Called White Guilt): The Curse

    [ad_1]

    Consistently talked about as the weirdest, most unclassifiable thing that has ever aired on television (obviously, those who say that have never seen Twin Peaks), The Curse’s series finale left viewers feeling more unsettled than ever. And, to be sure, it was probably one of the strangest, most unpredictable conclusions of a TV show in the medium’s history. But that’s what one should have expected from the likes of Benny Safdie (whose brother, Josh, acted as one of the co-producers). And yes, one supposes, “oddball” Nathan Fielder. An “actor” whose inherently annoying personality translates easily to the role of Asher Siegel, the playing-second-fiddle husband of Whitney Siegel (Emma Stone). Formerly Whitney Rhodes, her maiden name before she likely married Asher to free herself of it, thereby freeing herself of ties to her parents, Elizabeth (Constance Shulman) and Paul (Corbin Bernsen), who are notorious throughout Santa Fe for being slumlords. 

    As Whitney has been trying to cultivate a “different” kind of real estate brand (while still using her parents’ blood money to do so), Asher has been her devoted minion in helping her achieve that goal. Even if she doesn’t seem to fully realize he’s guilty of having skeletons in his own faux-noble closet. In fact, it doesn’t take a psychologist to comprehend that Whitney has sought out her parents in Asher’s form. Especially, as we learn during the first episode, “Land of Enchantment,” in terms of Asher’s micropenis. A trait that her father also shares with him—and has no problem discussing with Asher when the couple comes over to visit. While pissing on his tomato plants to “nurture” the soil, he tells Asher, “Break the illusion in your mind. ‘Hey, I’m the guy with the small dick.’ I tell all my friends. They know.” Paul then adds, “Be the clown. It’s the most liberating thing in the world.” This little piece of advice foreshadows how Asher will soon be referred to as the “jester” to Whitney’s “queen.” Green queen, that is. A term Whitney comes up with as the name for the show in lieu of the mouthful that is Fliplanthropy. 

    The show’s producer, Dougie Schecter (Safdie), is all for the name change, assuring her that HGTV will love it. One of the final cuts of an episode he plays for Whitney, however, is not something they’re likely to “love.” Mainly because of how utterly banal and lacking in “tension” it is. Whitney, prepared to do whatever is necessary to ensure her show is a hit, decides to take Dougie’s advice and give voiceovers to certain “subtle” moments she shares with Asher that play up the reasons behind her vexed expressions. After all, as Dougie points out in episode six, “The Fire Burns On,” “Look, what we have here is a frictionless show. There’s no conflict, there’s no drama. And that’s not something people want to watch. And I get that you’re trying to kind of put this town out there, put it on the map and you can’t talk about any of the racial tensions, or the crime, stuff like that. So what’s left? You and Asher.” But there won’t be anything left of them if Dougie has his way about amplifying the drama and getting Whitney to commit to it. Which of course she does—because there’s nothing she wouldn’t do to ensure the “reality” show is a success. That word, “reality,” being, needless to say, a total fabrication that’s manipulated for the very specific purpose of “audience entertainment.” Because, as Dougie said, no one really wants to see unbridled reality. It’s, quite simply, too dull. And all a viewer ultimately wants out of any show, no matter the genre, is to be taken out of their own lives for a while. 

    This has become more and more the case as the TV-guzzling masses seek to distract themselves from the horrors splashed all over the news like pure entertainment itself. But for those who would rather see chaos that has more of a “narrative”—while also seeking to believe they can learn something about “helping the planet”—a series like Green Queen could certainly deliver on that dual level. Or so Dougie and Whitney want it to. Asher, on the other hand, is just a stooge who would like to believe he has any idea what’s going on. In the end, though, it’s apparent that he was always just a worker bee carrying out orders for his hive queen. Not green queen. And, talking of that color, it does apply to the general green-with-envy aura that both Asher and Whitney have (though more the former than the latter). They’re so concerned with their perception, after all, that it’s easy for them to become jealous of anyone who is perceived as more genuine (and actually is) than they are. The way local Native American artist Cara Durand (Nizhonniya Luxi Austin) is—not just for her art, but her entire “aura.” This is precisely why Whitney and Asher glom onto her like leeches as they parade her artwork in their passive home. As though owning one of her pieces makes them as “brilliant” by proxy.

    Throughout The Curse, Whitney and Asher do their best to convince the rest of the town (and, hopefully, the rest of America) that they are as beneficent as someone like Cara. Though, naturally, a show like The Curse presents the more recurrent dilemma regarding white people of late: can any white person really be “good” no matter how hard they try if their inherent privilege is at the root of most of the world’s suffering since the beginning of civilization? What’s more, is there really any “goodness” at all in a person when their motives are always grounded in self-aggrandizement. As Joey Tribbiani (Matt LeBlanc) on Friends (the whitest show you know) put it, “Look, there’s no unselfish good deeds, sorry.” Because the vast majority of them serve, in some way, to make the “do-gooder” feel better about themselves. To boost that person’s own ego. 

    With the white ego being rattled more and more every day (resulting in the current neo-Nazi political response), there’s been an according uptick in over-the-top displays of “concern” and “allyship.” For the last thing most white people (save for the MAGA ilk) want to be accused of is villainy. And what’s the easiest way for a blanco to boost their “goodness” cachet? The eco-friendly trend. Which is, in fact, a trend rather than a genuine way of life that anyone wants to endure long-term. But so long as Whitney and Asher can cursorily (no “curse” allusion intended) parade how great they are for making “real change” in the community and, therefore, the world, they don’t have to feel too guilty when they do totally hypocritical things like put an air conditioner in the passive house (that’s supposed to naturally moderate its temperature “like a thermos”) they live in. 

    As the couple goes about the process of filming their episodes centered on selling Whitney’s “passive” (and cartoonishly mirrored) homes in the little-known (though not anymore) ​​Española, a dark and ominous pall seems to be cast over everything. Or so Asher tells himself after being “cursed” by a little girl in a parking lot named Nala (Hikmah Warsame). At Dougie’s urging, Asher approaches her to buy one of the cans of soda she’s selling so Dougie can film him doing “good person” shit. Alas, Asher makes the mistake of handing her a hundred-dollar bill solely for the shot, then telling her he needs it back. Something to the effect of this exact scenario is what inspired the idea for The Curse in the first place, with Fielder recounting to IndieWire how “on a routine trip to pick up a new cell phone, [he] was stopped by a woman asking for spare change. He didn’t have any, told her as much and she responded by looking him straight in the eye and saying, ‘I curse you.’” Almost an exact replica of what goes on between Asher and Nala (minus the can of soda). And, just as it is in The Curse, in real life, “Fielder went on his way, but couldn’t stop thinking about the stranger’s sharp words. So he went to an ATM, got twenty dollars and handed it to her. Just like that, she lifted the curse. When Safdie heard the story, he asked Fielder, ‘What would’ve happened if you went back there and she wasn’t there? Then your whole life would be ruined because the curse would just be on you. It would be something that you had to think about forever, and you’d never know for sure whether or not something happened to you because of that or not.’” With both men so openly giving such credence to the woman’s words, well, talk about giving more people a reason to say “I curse you” as a means to extract money. 

    Yet Fielder insisted, “I don’t believe in that stuff, but I can’t get those things out of my head. Sometimes if someone says something to you, even conversationally, where you feel like you messed up something, it can linger in your mind and grow and consume you. Then we just started riffing on that idea, like, ‘Wouldn’t it be interesting if that vibe was hanging over an entire show?’” And there is a large element of The Curse that promotes the idea that if you put thoughts or intentions out into the world, they can have an eerie tendency to, ugh, manifest. That overly-used-by-white-people word. Particularly white people in L.A. But were it not for L.A. and its Lynchian vibe, it can be argued that Fielder and Safdie might never have created The Curse. For it began with Fielder riffing on “trying to encapsulate odd experiences I had since I moved here. L.A. sometimes feels like… there’s something off” (Mulholland Drive anyone?). 

    New Mexico stands in for that “off” feeling easily enough. Though one can imagine the passive living houses Whitney is trying to shill doing quite well on the real estate market in L.A. Where Whitney might also have been tied to her slumlord parents in one way or another. Though she is initially convinced, “There is nothing on Google that ties me to them,” she later demands of her father, “Why does the city keep calling me and telling me my phone number is associated with units in the Bookends?” Worse still, if she Googles “Whitney Rhodes,” there’s a picture of her standing next to her parents at a “ribbon cutting” for the Bookends Apartments. A detail that proves just how much harder is to live in denial about one’s self and one’s “goodness” in the modern age, where the internet never lets anyone forget all of the shady things they might have done in the past. In other words, to quote Dougie berating Asher, “Doesn’t this get exhausting? Cosplaying as a good man?”

    The answer, for white people, is: never. What’s more, the sardonic irony of a phrase like “passive living” applies precisely to how most white people live/engage with the world. Nevertheless, we are all (regardless of color) living pretty goddamn passively as we watch the present destruction unfold around us. Because, in truth, none of us knows how to stop it. Or, more to the point, none of us knows how to truly and profoundly disengage with the behavior that capitalism has furnished and indoctrinated humanity with for centuries. To that point, The Curse is as scathing about faux beneficence as it is about the oxymoron that is “sustainable capitalism.” 

    As for whether or not Asher’s eventual fate at the end of the final episode was really a result of Nala’s “curse” or a phenomenon grounded in the “science” of the passive house causing a reverse polarity of gravity in Asher (episode two was, funnily enough, titled “Pressure’s Looking Good So Far”), that depends on the viewer’s interpretation. Though it’s pretty clear that Asher no longer gave weight (again, no pun intended) to the “curse” theory. A “theory,” quite honestly, that is peak white privilege in and of itself. Think about it: how white is it to assume a curse has really been put on you just because a few things don’t go your way (e.g., not getting any chicken in your chicken penne order)? Perhaps this is why Asher can at last admit to Whitney in the penultimate episode, “Young Hearts,” “I’m a terrible person, don’t you see? There’s not some curse. I am the problem.” Ah, that Swiftian admission. The one that white people, more and more, love to declare because, so long as you acknowledge what you are, you don’t actually have to do anything to change it. 

    Asher, however, vows to Whitney that he’s a changed man at the end of “Young Hearts,” assuring, “If you didn’t wanna be with me, and I actually truly felt that, I’d be gone. You wouldn’t have to say it. I would feel it and I would disappear.” To many, that seems like the obvious foreshadowing to what becomes of him in the finale. But there was foreshadowing long before that at the end of episode five, “It’s A Good Day,” when Asher and Whitney are shown going to bed together only for the scene to later reveal that Asher is no longer sleeping next to her. Could it be that he had already floated up toward the ceiling that night—and many other nights before? Calling her his “angel” as she falls asleep, maybe the truth is that Asher amounts to her angel. By coming across as more devilish than she does (thanks to the privilege of white womanhood). This allows her to more fully believe and invest in her delusions about herself as the real do-gooder of the operation despite knowing, fundamentally, that she’s probably even more narcissistic than Asher. A narcissism that has evolved and grown stronger as a “chromosome” in los blancos over many centuries of enjoyed hegemony.

    Thus, Safdie and Fielder challenge us to ask: is “the curse,” at its core, simply karma catching up to white people after centuries of employing various forms of subjugation and colonialism? After all, it’s not anything new to say that gentrification is the new colonialism. What is new, however, is the idea that the Earth might actually finally be having a visceral reaction to white people’s bullshit and therefore forcibly ejecting them from its atmosphere. Which, in all honesty, means Whitney might be next if there ever happens to be a season two.

    [ad_2]

    Genna Rivieccio

    Source link

  • Watching the Internet Try To Understand Nathan Fielder Is Genuinely Hilarious

    Watching the Internet Try To Understand Nathan Fielder Is Genuinely Hilarious

    [ad_1]

    Trying to understand Nathan Fielder’s brand of comedy the first go-round is hard, especially if you don’t understand his vibe. But catching it in the wild? That has to be rough, and that’s what’s happening with the promotion for his new show The Curse.

    Fielder is promoting the series with Emma Stone, and we’re getting to see a unique thing: Nathan Fielder having to actually promote something and do press. What would be normal for most actors is decidedly not that for him, which is par for the course if you know Fielder and his brand of comedy. Prior to the release of The Rehearsal, it’d be understandable for people to not really get what he’s doing, but that series (which was released on HBO) kind of set the tone for how odd and out there he can be.

    Those who watched Nathan for You knew what Fielder was willing to do, but The Rehearsal put him on a more national level. What The Curse is doing, by having him work with Stone and Benny Safdie, is forcing people to embrace Fielder’s comedy who might have never done so before. That’s why this press tour is … well, chaotic. Social media has been filled with people who don’t know what he’s doing and who can’t quite tell where the bits start and end, which has been delicious.

    It started with Fielder and Stone working harder than the devil to parody the Anybody but You trailer intro the day it came out.

    It has since become Fielder going on to talk shows with a persona that is not who he is in real life, talking about the show and dragging Jimmy Kimmel in the process.

    What’s been fun is to see social media trying to figure out what is real and what isn’t when it comes to Fielder.

    Don’t try and figure him out. Just let him cook.

    This is truly a hilarious way to get to know Fielder as a comedian because if you already know what he’s known for and his satire, you know when he’s joking around and how he pokes fun at things. If The Curse is your introduction and you’re tuning into something like Jimmy Kimmel Live to get to know him? Godspeed to you.

    Sure, there are people who can probably put two and two together to figure out what a bit is, but with the way of the world and how people don’t understand basic comedy as it is, I just feel like Nathan Fielder is going to end up being lost on so many if they try too hard. What’s even better right now is that people are coming to The Curse for Emma Stone, not getting it, and leaving, or they are coming to the show because they do understand what they’re getting into and they’re making fancams of Nathan Fielder set to boygenius songs.

    There are two distinct sides of what is going on with Nathan Fielder and The Curse right now and I am loving every single second of it.

    (featured image: ABC)

    Have a tip we should know? [email protected]

    [ad_2]

    Rachel Leishman

    Source link

  • Emma Stone, Nathan Fielder Parody Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell’s ‘Anyone But You’ Intro in New ‘The Curse’ Promo

    Emma Stone, Nathan Fielder Parody Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell’s ‘Anyone But You’ Intro in New ‘The Curse’ Promo

    [ad_1]

    If it’s a marketing scheme, it’s an elaborate one.

    “The Curse” stars Emma Stone and Nathan Fielder parodied the trailer introduction to the Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell rom-com “Anyone But You” in a newly released promo. In an almost exact parallel to that of Sweeney and Powell’s, the intro features Stone and Fielder standing against a pale blue background, with Fielder wearing a white button-down and Stone wearing a peach-colored tank top.

    “Check out the trailer for my new show,” a beaming Stone says, to which Fielder counters, “My new show.”

    “It’s actually my show,” Stone retorts.

    Fielder scoffs, saying, “We’ll see whose show it is once people see it.”

    Stone lets out an incredulous laugh before amending herself: “Check out the trailer for our new show, ‘The Curse.’”

    “Better?” she asks Fielder, who states, deadpan, “Just play the trailer.”

    “Oh my god,” Stone says before rolling her eyes in amusement. “Enjoy.”

    Fielder then took to Instagram to clarify the similarities.

    “I’ve just been informed that the introductory clip leading into our trailer for ‘The Curse’ which I posted to social media earlier today has similarities to the trailer introduction for the romcom movie ‘Anyone But You.’ I want to be very clear – we shot this promo over six months ago, and I am seriously concerned that the marketing team at Sony Pictures somehow saw our promotional and copied it,” Fielder wrote in a Notes App statement posted on Instagram, adding that he would not be “pursuing legal action.”

    “As artists, doing these types of promos, we just read the scripts we are given with unyielding trust that the creative we are performing is wholly original and not lifted from competing projects or generated by AI (a continued fight that artists around the world are trying to put a stop to),” Fielder continued. “It’s unfortunate that Sydney, Glen, Emma, and myself have been put in this situation. But this will not stop us from supporting each others successes, and I know that both Emma and myself will personally be booking front row tickets to ‘Anyone But You’ on opening night.”

    It was unclear whether Fielder was joking or not, but the comedian is known for coming up with outlandish schemes to promote businesses in his reality comedy show “Nathan for You.”

    “Anyone But You” director Will Gluck later responded to Fielder, seemingly confirming that it was all pretend and playing along with the joke. Gluck admitted that the team “did indeed steal the trailer launch idea” and included a version of the “The Curse” poster, featuring Sweeney and Powell’s heads photoshopped onto Stone and Fielder’s bodies.

    “In today’s era of cancel culture, sometimes it’s better to just own your mistakes. We did indeed steal the trailer launch idea from ‘The Curse’ and for that, we deeply apologize to Paramount+, Showtime, Nathan Fielder, and Emma Stone. I know words are hollow, but please in the holiday spirit, try to forgive our missteps,” wrote Gluck, also in a Notes App statement on Instagram.

    “Unfortunately, this was not our only transgression. We also appropriated your poster for our campaign,” Gluck added, noting that the team had originally intended on debuting the poster next week, but “for obvious (and legal) reasons,” they would be releasing it along with the note.

    “Please again accept our heartfelt apology. We in no way intended to stand in the way of your success; indeed, we celebrate it. I know that we will also be watching ‘The Curse’ when it premieres in January,” Gluck said.

    “Anyone But You” is slated for a Dec. 22 theatrical release. “The Curse,” about a home-flipping show gone wrong, premiered last Friday, Nov. 10.

    [ad_2]

    Valerie Wu

    Source link