The Irishman – Our Editor’s Cut

Spoilers. (Duh) In November 2019, Martin Scorsese returned to the gangster flick with The Irishman. Based on the book I Heard You Paint Houses by Charles Brandt, this Netflix original chronicles the nearly 50 year timespan of Frank Sheeran’s time in the Bufalino crime family and his alleged role in Jimmy Hoffa’s Disappearance. The film reunites Scorsese with Robert De Niro as hitman Frank Sheeran. This was also a first time collaboration with Al Pacino as famed union president turned racketeer, Jimmy Hoffa. The biggest standout was Joe Pesci who came out of a 20-year retirement to play the reclusive

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Hamilton 2.0: We Tell Their Story

You’re reading part 4 of our 4-part series on adapting Lin-Manuel Miranda’s “Hamilton” for television. Read part 1 here! Finally, with format (part 1), cast (part 2), and production (part 3) figured out, it’s time to figure out how our own Hamilton: the Musical Miniseries will be structured. To sufficiently cover the characters over both the revolutionary and congressional eras of the play, we feel the appropriate duration to aim for will be roughly 7 episodes, varying from 45min-70min in length. The big goal to aim for is that each episode begins and ends with one of the bigger musical

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Hamilton 2.0: The Style, the Look, and the Feels

You’re reading part 3 of our 4-part series on adapting Lin-Manuel Miranda’s “Hamilton” for television. Read part 1 here! Continuing our adaptation of Hamilton as a miniseries, we can finally turn our attention to production – How do we want our show to look and feel? The inspiration for our wacky vision draws heavily from both HBO’s John Adams with the stylized spectacle of CGI-filed scenery of The Greatest Showman. In the pro-shot performance of the Hamilton stage production, the set design makes brilliant use of a rotating “Lazy Susan” floor to depict characters on the move, transitions to locations,

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Hamilton 2.0: Balancing Diversity, Accuracy, and Style

You’re reading part 2 of our 4-part series on adapting Lin-Manuel Miranda’s “Hamilton” for television. Read part 1 here! Continuing our discussion on how to film our version of Hamilton, this article will focus on our approach to casting. As a history buff, I would normally want a film adaptation to visually represent a time period and setting as much as possible. This no doubt leads to a big question that concerns me, do I want our characters to actually look like their historical counterparts or should they reflect the theme of the play? Part of Hamilton‘s genius on stage

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The Cult Comes Home – Far Cry 5: Our Dreamcast

Far Cry 5 is the most recent entry in the Far Cry series – an open-world shooter where you play a nameless protagonist fighting against a militant religious cult. Previous games have it focused on more exotic locations such as the Pacific Islands (Far Cry 3) and the Himalayas (Far Cry 4), with the upcoming 6th game being set the Caribbean. Far Cry 5 took a more domestic approach, setting its fictional “Hope County” in the very not-fictional state of Montana – complete with its own local populace of American cultist caricatures. It is here in America’s wilderness that the

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Remaking BBC’s Walking with Dinosaurs

Part 1: The Elevator Pitch It’s been over 20 years now since the BBC debuted the legendary miniseries: Walking with Dinosaurs. Since then our knowledge of these magnificent creatures has grown exponentially to the point where the science in the series can be considered dated. Nevertheless, Walking with Dinosaurs [WWD] and its spinoffs have helped to spawn a new generation of dinosaur lovers such as myself. We are now living in a golden age of dinosaur discovery with more species having been identified and studied in the past decade alone than the entire past century. With the BBC launching sequels

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