Young Pope

Hbo’s New Lineup Features An Old Ponzi Scheme And A Young Pope

... De Niro, Jude Law, Reese Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman, and Judd Apatow. The premium cable channel threw its support behind five main titles (especially since Game Of Thrones isn’t returning until the summer), leading off with The Wizard Of Lies, a dramatization of Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme scandal with Robert De Niro as Madoff, Michelle Pfeiffer as his wife, directed by Barry Levinson, and based on Diana Henriques’ book. De Niro admitted that he wasn’t sure he wanted to do the movie, but now “I’m glad I did it,” even if he remains confused by his subject matter. “What he did is beyond my comprehension. There’s a disconnect somehow in him.”. On the lighter side, HBO followed up with Judd Apatow’s new comedy Crashing, starring Pete Holmes in a slightly autobiographic look at the early days of his comedy career. As Holmes’ character, also named Pete, attempts to break into the New York comedy world, he comes across comedians like Sarah Silverman and Artie Lange, playing themselves. Apatow described, “On Larry Sanders, a lot of times celebrities were making fun of their own personas. This is different. We really did improvisations with these people.” The show ...

Without Game Of Thrones, Hbo Will Rely On The Young Pope And Murderous Moms

... from Allen Hughes about Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre and how they transformed the music business. "The day I met Dre and saw and heard what he does, he couldn't shake me with a stick," said Iovine, who talked about how much the industry has changed since he started out four decades ago. Now, the music companies are focused on hit singles, not albums: "People just want hits and quick. And what comes after 'quick' and 'hit' is 'disposable.'". Iovine is now at Apple Music, where "we're trying to create an entire cultural experience," which includes audio and video. In addition to these new shows, HBO will bring back Real Time with Bill Maher on Jan. 20, the night of the presidential inauguration, while Last Week Tonight with John Oliver returns on Feb. 12, the same night that Girls kicks off its final season. With this lineup, HBO hopes to move beyond pricey misfires like Vinyl, ...

Hbo’s The Young Pope Stars Jude Law As A Smirky Pontiff. It’s Sly, Sinister, And A Whole Lot Of Fun

... Pius replies. “They’re jokes.”. But not everything on The Young Pope, as it turns out, is a joke. Yes, the show wants to poke fun at the Young Pope’s handsome charisma and shed amusing light on some of the Church’s absurdity. But both of those seemingly ludicrous aspects of the Young Pope’s life quickly funnel into more disturbing trends — especially once it’s clear exactly how high the stakes become when an insecure narcissist gains absolute power. “One billion people will depend on what you say or do,” Sister Mary urgently tells her former charge at one point. But if she hoped that would make him sober up, she turns out to be dead wrong. As the season progresses, the show becomes less about the Young Pope’s ability to dazzle admirers with a smile than his willingness to compensate for his own insecurity by doubling down on extreme, conservative views. He doesn’t know if he believes in God, for example, but he’ll make sure to flush out all the obviously gay priests from the Church, the better to prove his piety. He’ll preach the value of being frugal and austere and selfless, but he’ll also put in a special request to get the papal tiara back in his own ...

Decoding ‘the Young Pope’ With The Films Of Paolo Sorrentino

... shot in Rome) while also underlining its essential, possibly apocalyptic ridiculousness. Fifty years after Pauline Kael famously ran down Antonioni’s great La Notte by reducing it to a “Come-Dressed-As-the-Sick-Soul-of-Europe-Party,” Sorrentino happily clad himself in exactly such togs; the fact that they were hand-me-downs didn’t take any of the shine off of his Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. The emperor was naked a couple of years later when Sorrentino unveiled his followup, Youth, which continued the director’s fetish for stories about aged artists mulling over their own faded greatness, stranding Michael Caine’s septuagenarian composer at a fancy alpine spa filled with nubile nude bodies and watching him squirm as he realizes he’s now on the wrong end of that old spirit-is-willing/flesh-is-weak equation. Whether it was mere miscalculation or macho hubris to make a movie insistently humanizing rich-and-famous horndogs in 2015 is up for debate, but Youth’s glossy photography and fatuously ...

The Young Pope' Recap

... lame – "Time for your snack, Holy Father" – that he laughs out loud. That's the beauty of The Young Pope: Like all truly great television shows, it trusts its audience enough to risk alienating us. What will people make of this episode's most bizarre scene, in which Pius supernaturally soothes a savage … kangaroo? It's so truly, madly, deeply odd, and showrunner Paolo Sorrentino has no interest in softening the blow. You make your peace with an exquisitely campy series about a chain-smoking homophobic tyrant who looks to the band behind "Get Lucky" and "One More Time" for stylistic inspiration; who was raised by a nun who thinks he's a saint but wears a t-shirt reading "I'm a Virgin, but This Is an Old Shirt" to bed; and who can calm rogue Australian wildlife like, as Voiello puts it in his thick Italian accent, "Saint Francis of-a Sydney." Or ...

So, How, Exactly, Is The Pope Chosen? A Young Pope Primer

... This is the fancy name for all the cardinals of the Catholic church. They range in age, but only cardinals under 80 years old are eligible to vote for the pope. Currently, there are 227 cardinals, but because a lot of them have been around since the era of Mussolini, only 120 could vote if a papal election were held today. For the past 700 years, the pope has been a cardinal, so it’s very likely that one of these bros is going to be your next papa. Where and when does the electing take place. Here is where the process gets a bit Skull and Bones. After the death or resignation of a pope, the College of Cardinals descends upon the Vatican to participate in what’s called a papal conclave. This is a secret meeting held in the Sistine Chapel where the cardinals can cast their ballots for whom they think should be the pope. There’s even an oath of secrecy. The voting can go on for days, but once a two-thirds majority is reached, we have a new pope. How do we know ...

The Young Pope,’ ‘twin Peaks’ And More ‘star Wars

... in the case of Singer, come back). Characters who seemed perfectly cast — like Stewart as Professor Charles Xavier and Ian Mc Kellen as his friend/nemesis Magneto — have been recast (enter James Mc Avoy and Michael Fassbender, respectively). But the one constant has been Jackman’s Wolverine — the mutant with a spotty memory and unbreakable claws. For 17 years, Jackman has held down the center of the X-Men world, until now. After “Logan,” Jackman will hang up his claws. So it’s fitting that “Logan” — Wolverine’s real name — looks to be something of an “Unforgiven” with superpowers. A one-last-ride story that finds an aging Logan looking after a young mutant (Dafne Keen) who might be his clone. This will be the third standalone Wolverine movie, after 2009’s not-at-all-good “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” and 2013’s much better ...

The Fate Of A 'keanu' Kitten And Jonathan Banks' Burns

... keeping so busy. "My schedule is busy, because my plan is to take over the world one funny joke at a time, and things have been really good," she said. Damn straight. * HBO offered a star-studded panel for its miniseries Big Little Lies, topped by stars/executive producers Reese Witherspoon and Nicole Kidman. The most powerful moment of the panel came when Witherspoon explained her passion for supporting projects driven by women. "I’m passionate because things have to change. We have to start seeing women as they really are on film. We have to. And not just in movie theaters on a tiny budget," she said. "We need to see real women’s experience, whether it involves domestic violence, whether it involves sexual assault, whether it involves motherhood or romance or infidelity or divorce. We need to see these things because we as human beings need to we learn from art. And what can you do if you never see it reflected? I feel like, you know, the constant, you know, women of incredible talent playing wives ...

Young Pope,' Mandel's 'comedy Gala

... The Young Pope, this gorgeous, strange and strangely inert series from Oscar-winner Paolo Sorrentino starring Jude Law as the first American Pope, is that it’s unlike anything else on TV. And that includes how this 10-episode show will air on HBO, which is running it twice a week, Sundays and Mondays at 9 ET/PT. In this second outing, we meet the Vatican’s marketing director, who is in for a shock — as are the people waiting in St. Peter’s Square for the Pope’s first public address. Oh, and the Pope gets a pet kangaroo, a twist that, like the show itself, is absurd without being entertaining. NBC, 10 ET/PT. This time-travel adventure returns from its winter break with an unwilling Lucy still traveling with Flynn, who has taken her to the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. That sounds like a fun date, though odds are that’s not what Flynn has in mind. Read or Share this story: __link__ j OXRFI. NEVER MISS OUT. Be a pop culture maven. Get the news, reviews and the juiciest celebrity stories that ...