Author: rb809rb

Chloe Fineman has lined up her first big series regular credit post-Saturday Night Live.

The performer, who announced on Thursday that she is leaving the iconic NBC sketch comedy show after seven seasons, has been slated to join the upcoming Netflix show Myron Bolitar as a series regular, the streamer announced on Monday. The upcoming series, an adaptation of a Harlan Coben’s thriller series about an NBA star-turned-sports agent that started with 1995’s Deal Breaker, will be co-showrun, written and executive produced by TV legend David E. Kelley and Kyle Long.

Fineman is set to play Parker Quinn, a sports reporter for a top publication who’s known as a dogged reporter with a passion for her beat.

Netflix announced Fineman’s casting on the show alongside that of Jabari Banks (Bel-Air) and Jamie McShane (Task, 1923), who will also be series regulars. Ben McKenzie, the star of The O.C. and Gotham, was also announced as a recurring guest star.

They’ll be joining a cast including Colin Woodell (The Flight Attendant), who will star as Bolitar himself, KJ Apa (Riverdale) and Diane Guerrero (Doom Patrol). Matthew Tinker is executive producing for David E. Kelley Prods, Coben is executive producing for Final Twist Productions and Rick Muirragui is also executive producing.

Veteran TV helmer Greg Yaitanes (Lucky, Dutton Ranch) will executive produce as well as direct several episodes.

In an Instagram post announcing her departure from SNL, Fineman said, “It’s really hard to leave SNL but it does feel like the right time. I’m going to miss it a lot. But the people who work there are my family and that place is my home, and I know I’ll never be too far away.”

After joining the long-running comedy show in 2019, Fineman has also racked up an acting resumé in other projects, as a character in Freakier Friday, Babylon, Despicable Me 4 and Search Party, among other roles.

The fact that the top echelon of Netflix series and movies account for an outsized share of total viewing on the streamer is not a new phenomenon. The company’s data release, however, puts the trend in pretty stark terms.

The top 500 series and films on Netflix’s semiannual list of view counts for the entire service accounted for 47 percent of series views and more than 51 percent of movie views, based on a Hollywood Reporter analysis of the data. And while 500 shows or movies may seem like a lot, that’s only about 6 percent of the total titles Netflix streamed somewhere in the world between January and June. The streamer listed 17,370 titles — 8,193 shows and 9,177 movies — which is somewhat less than what actually was available. The series and movie categories also have an “other” line item for titles that didn’t clear 50,000 views (total viewing hours divided by running time) in the first half of the year.

Among series, just the top 20 shows — about 0.24 percent of the total — accounted for 889.5 million views, 8.5 percent of Netflix’s total in the first half of the year. By the 500th line in the spreadsheet — a German show called Murder Mindfully (Achtsam Morden) with 4.4 million views over six months — those shows totaled 4.94 billion views, 47.4 percent of the 10.44 billion for all 8,193. That means the other 7,693 shows, almost 94 percent of everything users could choose, had just 52.6 percent of the total.

The breakdown among movies is similar, though the top 500 have a majority of views while being a little under 5.5 percent of the total of 9,177 listed films.

This pattern likely holds true for other streaming platforms as well, but Netflix is the only one that releases this much data (though it will switch to just an annual report starting next year). The wildest stat from Netflix may be this one: The top two shows (His & Hers and Bridgerton season four) and top two movies (War Machine and The Rip) accounted for 2.1 percent of all views on Netflix for the first half of the year. Those four titles represent just 0.02 percent of what was available.

There are sex-positive films, and then there is My Friend the Porn Star, a movie that’s about as pro-copulation as possible without being an actual work of pornography. German director-star Rosa Friedrich keeps things just on the exhibitable side of NC-17 in terms of explicitness for this goofy but quite winning documentary about how she tried to make one kind of film and ended up making another.

The original idea was to record her friend Timo as he attempts to fulfill his own exhibitionistic desire by getting Rosa to film him having sex with assorted women. But the two have different artistic visions. When he suddenly ghosts her in the middle of production and just goes AWOL, like many a frustrated woman before her she finishes the project to her own satisfaction. She partly achieves this by using very obvious deep-fake technology to graft an actor’s head onto Timo’s body for the footage she’s already shot, so that we can see the real Timo from the neck down but with a pixelated box where the head should be of the actor she chose. (It’s not clear whose voice we’re ultimately hearing, the actor’s or Timo’s.)

Plus, she gets a very diverse group of women — including a dominatrix, a non-binary food-porn maker, three trans women in a polycule, and several others — to make little shorts about what they find erotic. All in all this makes for a sweet, funny and, yes, horny little package that should be very bookable for future festivals after its Karlovy Vary debut.

Although the film skips around Germanophone countries Germany and Austria while toggling between different time frames, Friedrich manages to get across how it all went wrong and then so very right for the end product we’re watching. I may be wrong, but almost in passing near the beginning it’s mentioned that Rosa and Timo were a heterosexual couple at one point, but now they are mainly just friends who are at ease with watching each other have sex with other people. Ish. At least Timo likes watching porn and sex in general while Rosa’s not that interested in it herself. Timo, however, is excited by the idea of people watching him, and feels like this is one way to get in touch with his feminine side, although his intellectual justifications change constantly, just as he can’t commit to what he wants to do with the film.

In the end, Friedrich makes this equivocation and self-questioning — not just Timo’s but that of other people too — a theme about how much we choose to reveal or conceal ourselves. In the end, she’s probably succeeded in making a more interesting film than what Timo seems to want to have made, the latter sounding for all intents and purposes like an exercise in narcissistic self-indulgence.

At any rate, before Timo ankled the project, he shot some scenes with several of the women he and Friedrich recruited at events like the Venus Expo in Berlin, a fair for “erotic and lifestyle.” Timo and Friedrich talk with Adrineh Simonian, a former opera singer who now produces porn and who’s full of sensible advice. The duo travel to Hungary to meet Donna, a well-known porn actor, but she decides not to take part in the shoot, for reasons not explained on camera but seemingly to do with the production’s lack of script and general professionalism.

Regularly inserted into the Timo sections are clips from the seven short films Friedrich ended up shooting with some of the people she met in the process, which explore what turns them on personally. Some of the footage is endearingly vanilla, some a bit more fruity — quite literally in the case of non-binary participant Alice Eric BigClit, who gets into a bathtub naked and has slices of fruit and whipped cream arranged artfully over their body.

The full spectrum of sexuality is discussed, if not quite shown, from BDSM to play with assorted gadgets to water sports and the like, but with much attention to why it all turns the subjects on, a focus on psychology more than anatomy. In the end, they show the package of shorts at an erotic film festival and Friedrich just holds on the faces of her cast as they watch the films, delighting in seeing themselves being seen. It’s that joyousness that really makes this such a relatable, kooky-kinky delight, along with Friedrich and editor Melanie Schmidt’s natural comic timing.