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Pixar has been the focus of headlines over the past month as its original comedy Hoppers made a splash with a great critical response and pleasing box office results, offering optimism for the Disney-owned animation studio’s ability to launch an original property on the cusp of Toy Story 5 becoming a likely behemoth this summer.

But Pixar has also been the subject of recent debate surrounding the revelation of a planned movie that is unlikely to ever come to life. On the day Hoppers opened last month, the Wall Street Journal published a story looking at the future of the company and confirmed that a feature called Be Fri (styled as BeFri) had been in development for years until it was scrapped in late 2023. The article noted that Pixar employees were stunned that a project that involved 50 people and was three years in the making would be killed — becoming perhaps the longest-developed Pixar movie to receive such a fate — given that the studio had been previously adept at reworking troubled films, as it did with 2012 release Brave.

This decision to stop progress on Be Fri came in late 2023, months after Toy Story prequel movie Lightyear was a box office misfire in light of right-wing pundits causing commotion over its same-gender kiss. This was also around the same time that Pixar boss Pete Docter and the studio’s team decided to reconfigure their original sci-fi feature Elio, stripping away the queer-coded characterization of the titular lonely boy who longs to visit space. Shortly after these internal decisions, Docter spurred public debate when he noted in a 2024 interview that the studio should make the “most relatable films” possible, which some social media users perceived as pushing to shift away from underrepresented characters and voices.

“When they canceled the film itself, it was devastating,” says the former staffer, who recalls employees coming together for a memorial of sorts to honor Be Fri. “They had what amounted to a funeral for Be Fri at the studio. They had a little place where you could put notes or things that were really special to you. There was art all over the place that was really memorializing the film, and there was this outpouring of love for a project that everybody really wanted to see come to life.”

Mr. Herzog began his Rogue Film School in 2009, in Los Angeles, where he has lived since the late 1990s. The densely scheduled four-day course cost participants $1,500. The purpose was not to learn how to make films, but to listen to Mr. Herzog, who makes clear that he doesn’t teach filmmaking — that belongs in film schools, of which he has long been a vocal critic. Filmmaking, he said, is about managing chaos or “wrangling.”

According to the Rogue Film School website, the workshop was “about poetry, films, music, images, literature.” “Censorship will be enforced,” it warned. “There will be no talk of shamans, of yoga classes, nutritional values, herbal teas, discovering your boundaries and inner growth.”

The workshop sessions were so popular, Mr. Herzog made them longer and more elaborate. He started working with the Barcelona-based production company Extática Cine, which held them in Cuba, the Peruvian rainforest and Las Palmas in the Canary Islands. They chose São Miguel for 2026, because its moody, mythic winter landscape was ideal for cinema.

Mr. Herzog announced this year’s workshop via his new Instagram account, which Simon, his youngest son, had set up for him. Also new was the high price tag — 8,800 euros (about $10,200) — which shocked a lot of his Instagram followers, who left comments about privilege and trust funds.

In December, applicants had only six days between being accepted into the program and depositing the money to secure their places. They crowd-funded, dipped into their savings and applied for artist grants and loans. One person was rumored to have sold their car. “The time span between getting the invitation and wiring the money felt like a shotgun wedding,” said Lucas Ackermann, 28, a writer-director from Berlin.

There was an overwhelming feeling among those accepted into the workshop that they had earned a prestigious prize, or were being anointed by the master himself. It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for these filmmakers, who swallowed the price tag for what they were receiving in return: a close mentorship with Werner Herzog, contacts with other filmmakers and an impressive addition to their CVs.

I'm not really sure how entertaining this will be, but it didn't seem to fit anywhere else.

Film-making effects change. Director Rachel Dretzin, a former investigative journalist for Frontline, will testify to that.

“These films that I’m making,” says Dretzin, “that other documentarians are making, are often more effective than the legal system at effecting change; psychological change and also sometimes systemic and criminal change.”

But the impact film-making has in Trust Me: The False Prophet feels more immediate. The riveting four-part series follows a pair of documentary film-makers, turned FBI informants, who helped take down Samuel Bateman, a polygamous Mormon cult leader currently serving a 50-year sentence for luring minors into criminal sex acts.

Cult expert Christine Marie and her husband, Tolga Katas, embedded themselves among Utah’s Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (FLDS) community. They earned the trust of typically guarded followers, and were eventually invited into Bateman’s home, where he presided over 20 “wives”, many of them underage.

Bateman’s so-called wives were (and some still are) so heavily indoctrinated that they believed their spiritual husband was a prophet, a gateway to heaven and the heir apparent to Warren Jeffs. The latter is the notorious FLDS leader whose 2007 imprisonment for similarly abhorrent sex crimes left a vacuum Bateman was eager to fill.

cross-posted from: https://startrek.website/post/37765690

This Salon feature from two weeks back provides a good overview of the 70+ year Godzilla franchise and its relevance to current audiences. There’s an analysis of where Monarch: Legacy of Monsters fits in the franchise’s themes.

Our relationship with Godzilla changes from movie to movie and age to age. Some films cast the King of the Monsters as a protector unconsciously joining humanity – and occasionally, King Kong – to fend off some mammoth existential evil. More often, he is a reckoning, reminding us of how puny we are in nature’s schemes...

…each springs from the same mutated DNA, mapping the source of Earth’s monster problems to mindless warfare, along with the intellectual vanity compelling man to seek an upper hand over nature instead of figuring out how to coexist.

Godzilla and the other Titans stampeding in his wake are post-World War II creations; Ishirō Honda, who directed the OG “Godzilla,” was a veteran of that war marked by his travel through the ruins of Hiroshima after the United States bombed its civilians and Nagasaki to force Japan’s surrender. The Geneva Conventions’ protocols made such acts illegal, but as we’re discovering with alarming frequency and force these days, laws are only as effective as our willingness to abide by them…

cross-posted from: https://startrek.website/post/37747635

cross-posted from: https://startrek.website/post/37747581

An interesting and thorough reflection on how the original Godzilla (1954) was adapted to make Godzilla: King of the Monsters (1956), with a framing story starring Raymond Burr, for the franchise’s introduction to American / English language audiences.

cross-posted from: https://startrek.website/post/37528189

An interesting analysis of GvK’s place in the industry’s recovery as the COVID-19 pandemic emergency wound down sufficiently that theatres reopened.

Godzilla vs. Kong eventually earned $470 million worldwide, making it a true, unqualified success. It was the first sign that en masse moviegoing could still exist in whatever our new normal would look like.

cross-posted from: https://startrek.website/post/37146192

cross-posted from: https://startrek.website/post/37146040

While those of us who were already fans of the Monsterverse extended Godzilla universe continuity have been watching Monarch: Legacy of Monsters on AppleTV, it turns out that Amazon Prime has had a licence to stream it until March 31st.

Currently, the second season of this popular action epic is rolling out on Apple TV, but season 1 is one of the most-watched Prime Video shows on the planet at the moment. This brief stint on Prime Video will be short-lived, however, since the series will be removed from Prime Video less than 2 weeks on April 1, 2026. Don't miss your chance to binge this celebrated series before it's gone.

If you’re thinking of giving Monarch a try, and don’t have AppleTV, this may be a good opportunity.

This just in

cross-posted from: https://startrek.website/post/36996137

A comprehensive perspective on the Guinness Book of World Records longest running screen franchise from The Irish Examiner.

Having a the perspective of an Irish fan and media critic is interesting - Monarch: Legacy of Monsters and other Godzilla media do consistently less well in English speaking countries other than the United States.

From the piece:

But why are giant monsters enjoying a resurgence in 2024, when big franchises such as Marvel are going through a slump? How is it that we have gone cold on men and women in spandex costumes, while we embrace kaiju laying waste to our cities?

“Kaiju have become the new superheroes. Much like anime, after years of blossoming in its niche fandom here in the West, kaiju have expanded into mainstream popularity,” says Nathan Marchand, host of  The Monster Island Film Vault podcast.

cross-posted from: https://startrek.website/post/36900956

Reading through speculation about what the **Monsterverse’s new kaiju Titan X aka Le Gran Dios de la Mar may be (such as the article linked above), it sounds increasingly as though she may be a new protective mother figure, impacted or possibly even responding to the effects of global heating on the oceans.

If so, this season’s Titan threat may put Monarch: Legacy of Monsters in a unique position among current major science fiction streaming shows in directly taking on a Climate Change/Emergency scenario with no gloss of allegory.

It is nonetheless absolutely in keeping with the long tradition of the broader franchise in critiquing the consequences of human actions on the planet.

The 70+ year Godzilla franchise is unique in embedding the impact of humanity on the Earth’s environment from its outset.

The narrative of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as later nuclear weapons testing and nuclear power plants, calling up kaiju, literally “strange creature”, is a constant within the franchise.

In addition to atomic/nuclear radiation, films such as Godzilla vs Hedorah (1971), with its smog monster, and the more recent Monsterverse film Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019), which ends with Godzilla leading an ecological recovery, the franchise continues to underscore its deep theme that humanity shares the Earth and will bear the consequences for its actions.

cross-posted from: https://startrek.website/post/36676851

For those interested in creature models — both practical physical models and vfx — as well as anything Monsterverse or kaiju in general, this new AppleTV official featurette is a ‘must see.’

When to see it will depend on your interest in or willingness to be spoiled as it does give some things away about what’s upcoming in season two of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters.

It seems to make clear that Le Gran Dios de le Mar aka “Titan X” is a wholly new creation for Monarch: Legacy of Monsters. There remains nonetheless much to speculate about.

We haven’t had a new film from Gore Verbinski for nine years. But the director who brought us the first three Pirates of the Caribbean movies, the nightmare-inducing horror of The Ring (2002), and the Oscar-winning hijinks of Rango (2011) is back in peak form with Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die. It’s a darkly satirical, inventive, and hugely entertaining time-loop adventure that also serves as a cautionary tale about our widespread online technology addiction.

(Some spoilers below but no major reveals.)

Sam Rockwell stars as an otherwise unnamed man who shows up at a Norms diner in Los Angeles looking like a homeless person but claiming to be a time traveler from an apocalyptic future. He’s there to recruit the locals into his war against a rogue AI, although the diner patrons are understandably dubious about his sanity. (“I come from a nightmare apocalypse,” he assures the crowd about his grubby appearance. “This is the height of f*@ing fashion!”)

The fact that he knows everything about the people in the diner is more convincing. It’s his 117th attempt to find the perfect combination of people to join him on his quest. As for what happened to his team on all the previous attempts, “I really don’t like to say it out loud. It’s kind of a morale killer.”

I'm not often a fan of direct reboots, but this review suggests "Season 10" may be the exception that proves the rule.

It is possible to believe contradictory things. For instance, I believe TV’s reliance on reviving old shows is a risk-averse, creative regression. On the other hand, I love it. I particularly love it when fictional characters have visibly aged. There’s a broken humanity that you don’t get with flawless, collagen-rich skin. You sense you could talk to them about your sciatica and they’d get it.

I got that feeling with the new series of Scrubs (Disney+, from Thursday 26 February), a show I once mainlined on E4. Scrubs was as comforting as tea and toast. Surprisingly malleable, too. In its bones, it was a coming-of-age workplace bromance between junior doctors JD and Turk, played by then newcomers Zach Braff and Donald Faison. Their chemistry was the show’s anchor, balancing sassy racial harmony with irreverence and heart, as they bore witness to universal human drama. But is it healthy enough to survive resuscitation, more than 15 years after its last episode aired?

Sensibly, the writers have shaken things up. JD has grown into complacent early middle age, working as a private doctor for the affluent and elderly. “You write scripts in the suburbs” is Turk’s withering appraisal. (For a hot second, I thought he was beefing with Braff’s indie film-making.) Braff directs the first episode, in which a problem with one of JD’s pampered patients takes him back to Sacred Heart, the training hospital where he earned his wheels.

🎶Repeat to yourself it's just a show, I should really just relax! 🎶

Longtime fans of the cult TV show Mystery Science Theater 3000 know that the series’ one constant is change (well, that and bad movies).

The show’s cast and crew were in a near-constant state of flux, a byproduct of the show’s existence as a perennial bubble show produced in the Twin Cities rather than a TV-and-comedy hub like New York or LA. It was rare, especially toward the middle of its 10-season original run on national TV, for the performers in front of the camera (and the writers’ room, since they were all the same people) to stay the same for more than a season or two.

Series creator Joel Hodgson embraced that spirit of change for the show’s Kickstarter-funded, Netflix-aired revival in the mid-2010s, featuring a brand-new cast and mostly new writers. And that change only accelerated in the show’s brief post-Netflix “Gizmoplex” era, which featured a revolving cast of performers that could change from episode to episode. Hodgson leaned into the idea that as long as there were silhouettes and puppets talking in front of a bad movie, it didn’t matter much who was doing the talking.

But the other thing longtime fans know about the original show is that many of its casting changes were extremely controversial, causing long-running old-school flame wars in the Usenet group that served as the fandom’s online hub back in the day. In retrospect, the original show’s quality and the hit rate of its jokes remained remarkably consistent from season 3 or 4 onward, but people watching it could be incredibly proprietary about their preferred performers and which of the show’s three or four major epochs they considered the best. Some blamed a combination of crowdfunding fatigue and frustration with the revived show’s constant changes for the failure of its third crowdfunding campaign in 2023.