Paul Schrader throws shade at fellow director Damien Chazelle and his new movie Babylon; A story about the making of A Christmas Story; A new trailer for M. Night Shyamalan’s Knock at the Cabin. All in today’s Movie News Rundown.
Paul Schrader Gets Sassy: The First Reformed director fired shots at Damien Chazelle’s new 1920s Hollywood drama Babylon, questioning its historical accuracy. “BABYLON is many things but well researched isn’t one of them,” Schrader wrote on Facebook. “After reading a number of planted articles about the filmmakers’ voluminous ‘research,’ I was scratching my head. Does any film historian agree [with] the film’s putative historicity?” Read the full story here.
A Christmas Story: The actor who played one of Ralphie’s bullies in the 1983 classic A Christmas Story says that director Bob Clark kept him and his co-star away from the other child actors on set in order to create a real sense of tension between them when they did their scenes. Zack Ward, who played Scut Farkus, told Insider that he and Yano Anaya, who played Grover Grill, were encouraged to become friends with each other but not to interact so much with the other child actors, like Peter Billingsly (Ralphie) and Ian Petrella (Randy) so that there would be an “innate nervousness” between the kids in the scenes.
Glass Onion Tops This Week’s Netflix Charts: Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery secured 82.1 million hours of watch time from Netflix subscribers between Dec. 19-25, making it the most-watched movie of the past week into the holiday weekend, according to Variety. All that math adds up to about 35 million households tuning in. And that’s after it had already spent a month in theaters.
However: We should note that, via The Hollywood Reporter, Glass Onion didn’t quite crack the list of Netflix’s top five best movie debuts since the streamer began releasing those numbers in 2021. Instead, it came in 6th place behind The Unforgiveable (5th place) The Gray Man (4th place) The Adam Project (3rd place), Don’t Look Up (2nd place), and Red Notice (1st place).
100 Greatest Movies: Variety has compiled a list of what, in their opinion, are the 100 greatest movies of all time. It includes some of my favorites, like A Hard Day’s Night and The Sound of Music, both of which I watched for the umpteenth time over Christmas. I’ll save you the scrolling and let you know that they ranked Psycho as the No. 1 greatest movie, with the runner-up going to The Wizard of Oz. In third was The Godfather, which I personally would have expected to get No. 1, but that’s just me. I can just hear Don Corleone now: You come to me, on the day of my daughter’s wedding, and you give me third place??
Knock at the Cabin Trailer: A new trailer is out for M. Night Shyamalan’s new thriller Knock at the Cabin. It stars David Bautista as a cult leader who breaks into a cabin with his followers, Rupert Grint, Nikki Amuka-Bird, and Abby Quinn, to demand that a young family played by Jonathan Groff, Ben Aldridge and Kristen Cui make a sacrifice in order to save the world from the apocalypse. I’m really excited to see this one. Watch the trailer below.
Main Image: A still from Babylon. Photo credit: Scott Garfield/Paramount Pictures.
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