The Weekend Read: Oasis & ‘Bond 26’, Who Wrote The Who’s Songs, ‘Elsinore’s Devastating Truth, Digger Deconstructed & Is ‘Artificial’ A Horror Movie?

• What Do Oasis Have In Common With The New Bond?

  

  Abbey Road — long seen as the spiritual home of The Beatles, who practically lived there during their comparatively short-lived recording career — was the scene of a fan event held by Disney+ earlier this week to launch the home-ent debut of a new documentary starring The Beatles’ most famous protégés. Titled Oasis: Don’t Look Back in Anger, the film hits streaming with added extras pulled from hours of footage, from Cardiff to South Korea and beyond, including the songs “Half the World Away” and “Do You Know What I Mean?”

  Though brothers Noel and Liam Gallagher were absent, the film’s two directors — Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace — were present with writer Steven Knight, on whom there will be more later. Like the band’s 2025 reunion tour, which this 2hr-plus film documents, Oasis: Don’t Look Back in Anger debuted to high demand, taking taken £2.66 million at the UK and Irish box office during its opening weekend, making over £4 million gross since its premiere less than a month ago, comfortably taking the number one spot for a doc.

  Said Knight, “The whole point of doing the thing was to explore why this music, these words, and the poetry of these words have this effect on so many different people around the world, to the point where it makes them emotional, where they feel as if the songs are about their lives. You see that unfailingly happen every single time, no matter what you do, no matter how you put it together — somehow those songs have that effect on people. So, [the film] is about the power of the music, but also about the fact that they are bulletproof, somehow, as a band.”

  Read the full story here.

• Who Wrote All The Who’s Songs?

  

  The British invasion of the mid-1960s was a multi-pronged attack, an assault led above all by The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and The Who. Their seismic impact on American and world culture has been well documented. But of the leaders of those three mega-bands, perhaps the most mysterious remains Pete Townshend, The Who’s songwriter and enigmatic eminence, thrashing chords and smashing guitars while Roger Daltrey handled lead vocals.

  His sheer brilliance and rock innovation is captured in the documentary Pete Townshend: Behind Blue Eyes, which held its world premiere at the Telluride Film Festival. It’s directed by Frank Marshall (The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart) and Nigel Sinclair (producer, Billy Preston: That’s the Way God Planned It). Despite the enormity of The Who’s success – the rock operas Tommy and Quadrophenia, songs “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” “My Generation,” “Love Reign O’er Me” and so many others – somehow the band’s primary creative engine can remain obscured.

  Read the full story here.

• The Tragic But Triumphant True Story Behind ‘Elsinore’

  

  There was a hush when Ian Charleson appeared on the National Theatre’s Olivier Theatre stage as Hamlet, having taken over the role from Daniel Day Lewis in Richard Eyre’s 1989 production.

  I had known that the Scottish-born actor was ill. I was aware of the rumors spoken of quietly in various West End hangouts: that the Chariots of Fire star was sick with an incurable disease.

  It’s difficult to convey how different those times were. Loved ones were dying. People were scared. Few people understood what HIV/AIDS was.

  Heroically, Charleson was using art — in this case Shakespeare — as a way of feeling alive. That’s what Andrew Scott, as Charleson, captures unbelievably powerfully in Elsinore, as he depicts Charleson’s dogged determination to play Hamlet, even as his own life was ebbing away. As Beresford puts it, Charleson would “rather die from performing Hamlet than AIDS.”

  Read the full story here.

• ‘Digger’: Deconstructing The Disaster

  

  Tom Cruise will not be jumping on any couches this weekend.

  This as the star of blockbusters Top Gun: Maverick and Mission: Impossible posts his lowest opening in 19 years, that being the reported $160 million net-priced Digger, which didn’t find an audience with an $8 million domestic debut, a $20M global start and a C+ CinemaScore.

  Myriad sources tell us Digger stands to lose around $150M, and that’s if it’s lucky to get to a global box office of $50M. Post-pandemic, pricey fall disasters such as last year’s Dwayne Johnson-starring The Smashing Machine and the 2022 Margot Robbie-Christian Bale-John David Washington absurdist period title Amsterdam had similar single-digit domestic openings, and finaled lower with respective global grosses of $21.1M and $31.2M, Both had respectively smaller budgets of $50M and $80M.

  Read the full story here.

• The ‘Artificial’ Review

  

  Artificial, which had its world premiere Monday at the New York Film Festival, certainly comes in with a bit of controversy attached. Produced and made under Amazon MGM Studios, the Luca Guadagnino film about the origin of OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman and key creative Ilya Sutskever, was shopped around after Amazon decided maybe a tech company was not appropriate to release the finished film. Could it be the fact that Jeff Bezos with his own AI ambitions pumped $150 billion into OpenAI? Just sayin’.

  After screening for a number of distributors in late spring, all of which passed, Neon, the scrappy indie with two Best Picture wins to its credit, decided it would take it on and scheduled a release for Christmas Day. The initial plan reportedly was to skip the festival circuit, but that clearly changed and is how NYFF — which is having a banner year for nabbing world premieres (not its usual status) — wound up with the honor of first showing what Guadagnino hath wrought.

  Read the review here.

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