06/17/22
This week: Happy CHA CHA REAL SMOOTH day, to all who celebrate!
TRENDS THIS WEEK:
Youtube THIS WOULD CHANGE NBA HISTORY
Letterboxd TOP GUN: MAVERICK
Spotify As It Was - Harry Styles
Netflix HUSTLE
Shopify It’s Been A Week
Life & Culture
The day has come! Our movie CHA CHA REAL SMOOTH is out on AppleTV+ as of today (or technically, last night). It’s also playing in a few hundred theaters across the country, so check out your local listings if you love seeing great movies on a big screen. My colleague Alicia wrote a wonderful rec on the film below, if you wanna know a little more about it before watching. And when you do watch, you’ll notice that the film is filled with some very special music. We talked to Rob Lowry, the person behind all those music choices, and the conversation was illuminating. Check out our Q&A with Rob here.
Drake hit fans with a surprise album drop last night, his 7th studio album, HONESTLY, NEVERMIND. The album is full of vibey dance tracks like MASSIVE, CURRENTS and STICKY, and came with a music video for the song FALLING BACK, which clocks in at over 9 minutes and sees the musician getting married to 23 different women at once. Drake dedicated the album to late fashion, art, and culture icon Virgil Abloh in a letter along with the album on Apple Music.
Speaking of music, Spotify just made a pretty interesting new acquisition: AI voice platform Sonantic, which creates extremely realistic computer-generated voices from text. If you’ve seen the new TOP GUN, you enjoyed some of its work, as filmmakers used this same tech to bring Val Kilmer’s voice to life after he lost it through a battle with throat cancer. (Here’s an interesting blog post on how the platform worked with the actor, who typically uses a voicebox to talk). Spotify announced the acquisition on Monday, sharing that it has “identified several potential opportunities for text-to-speech capabilities across [its] platform.” The music and podcast streamer also announced a star-studded new show this week, in its new scripted time-travel-based audio series CASE 63, starring Julianne Moore and Oscar Isaac.
And to cap things off: Internet Explorer was officially retired on Wednesday. It was launched 27 years ago in 1995 and was the most-used internet browser for over a decade until Google Chrome overtook it in the late 2000s. RIP.
My favorite internet moments this week were this (v powerful) picture of a cow, this surprising reveal of how cows get taken to the vet (sensing a theme?) and this impressive remake of a classic early-internet video.
—Darlene Kenney, Digital Strategist
This week, we asked our extremely talented CHA CHA REAL SMOOTH cinematographer, Cristina Dunlap, to recommend five movies with incredible cinematography. Read on for five films that are each visually beautiful in their own way.
Watch it for: the visual poetry.
Watch it for: the perfect use of exaggerated colors existing in real life.
Watch it for: the visuals only, probably with the sound off.
Watch it for: feeling like you just visited a museum of renaissance paintings.
Watch it for: its masterclass in knowing when to move the camera and when to keep it still.
Film
It's time to get funky. CHA CHA REAL SMOOTH (trailer here) is finally streaming on AppleTV+, and any fan of writer/director Cooper Raiff's SHITHOUSE is bound to fall in love all over again. Raiff plays Andrew, an ambivalent recent college grad who stumbles into a job as a bar mitzvah party starter. When he forms a bond with single mom Domino (Dakota Johnson) and her daughter Lola (Vanessa Burghardt), he starts to realize that figuring out who the hell you are, where you belong, and who you belong with is never easy. It's a movie about how love is simultaneously the simplest and messiest thing in the world—whether you're a recently-dumped 22-year-old, or a 13-year-old with braces mustering up the courage to ask your girlfriend to slow dance. Let CHA CHA be your Friday movie night for some laughs, some adorably awkward prepubescent nostalgia, and even some tears—especially if you're me watching that one scene between Andrew and his mom (Leslie Mann). You'll know the one.
—Alicia Devereaux, Development Assistant
Whether you were glued to every minute of the NBA Finals (Go Dubs!) or you think a triple-double is just an order off the secret In-N-Out menu, you’re in luck—Adam Sandler’s new Netflix film HUSTLE (trailer here) is a delight for basketball fans and non-fans alike. Because the film doesn’t require any prior knowledge of the sport to enjoy it, but basketball die-hards will love the wall-to-wall barrage of incredible basketball star cameos (Shaq, Dirk, Kenny “The Jet”, A.I., Luka, Trae, and Dr. J to name a few). Plus, it’s a legitimately compelling story.
The film follows Stanley Sugerman (Sandler), a long-time NBA scout for the 76ers, as he circumnavigates the globe seeking the next big NBA international star. While on a scouting trip in Spain, Sugerman discovers a raw unknown streetball phenom in Bo Cruz (Juancho Hernangomez, real-life NBA forward for the Utah Jazz), and we follow the two men as they bet on one another’s potential and risk everything in the process. The filmmakers masterfully craft a depth of character for each of Sugerman and Cruz that is rare in sports cinema, which is why labeling HUSTLE as a “sports film” mis-classifies it—it’s a beautifully-written, inspiring, feel-good dramedy with incredible performances by the entire cast (actors and NBA stars alike), including warm and heartfelt performances from Queen Latifah as Sugerman’s wife and Jordan Hull as their daughter. Watching HUSTLE, I couldn’t help but reminisce on the beauty of the original ROCKY films and the timeless trope of “lovable underdog takes on the world”. Bo Cruz versus Kermit Wilts (Anthony Edwards, real-life NBA forward for the Minnesota Timberwolves) evokes memories of epic cinematic David & Goliath clashes a la Rocky Balboa versus Apollo Creed. At just under 2 hours, HUSTLE is the perfect summer evening couch flick—check it out!
—Ben Ryzak, Director, Business & Legal Affairs
Short Film
This week I watched EXPLOSIONS, a short written and directed by Christopher Frey. Coming in at just under seven minutes, this is an incredibly well shot and contained short that explores a woman’s last moments alive. The opening shot is breathtaking, and fully captures the chaos that slowly forms over the next few minutes. Emphasis on slowly, as the film unfolds in slow motion, capturing the disturbing horror of a neighborhood of people losing gravity. EXPLOSIONS captures a fear that can’t be outrun, only embraced until the end. The music ties the phenomenal VFX together into one seamlessly enthralling experience. Take the seven minutes to contemplate the dread of the end of the world, cinematically!
—Jackson Ingraham, Executive Assistant
Music
I fell down a rabbit hole on TikTok this week when I came across singer-songwriter Joji, and have been exclusively listening to his discography ever since. He’s the artist behind viral TikTok sounds you’ve definitely heard before such as SLOW DANCING IN THE DARK, which has amassed over 800K videos using the sound, or GIMME LOVE, which has been used almost 400K times. I jumped on the Joji train in the nick of time, as just last week he released a new single, GLIMPSE OF US. This marks his first release after an almost two-year hiatus, and this track makes it clear that the break did him well. I love his melancholic tones, soulful vocals, and surprisingly cinematic music videos; check him out!
—Marisa Harris, Executive Assistant
This is only really news because it’s Beyoncé, but the queen has (vaguely) announced her next album titled ACT I RENAISSANCE, which will release July 29th. She also dropped new merch on her website, but with a twist. It’s invisible merch, as in you can’t see what you're buying, but the item descriptions are for a collectable box, t-shirt, and CD. It seems like Bey’s been taking notes from the NFT community, from the style of the merch site to the use of the word “collectable”—and who knows, maybe there’s a digital aspect to it, too. To me, the best part of all of this is the irony of Beyoncé bringing back the classic album rollout (over a month in advance of release), when she’s the one who started and popularized the sudden digital drop. It’s almost like she’s showing us she can do whatever she wants, whenever she wants because she’s…Beyoncé.
—Eden Bekele, Digital Associate
Anything that you're currently loving that we didn't cover? Just reply to this email and let us know.
Have a great weekend! And as always, be kind, stay healthy, and stay creative. ツ