Owen Gleiberman Chief: Last News

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All news where Owen Gleiberman Chief is mentioned

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‘Wham!’ Review: Chris Smith’s Netflix Doc Is an Irresistible Pop Nostalgia Trip, but It’s Also a Serious Portrait of George Michael’s Ambition
Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Unabashed pop groups with fervid teenage followings tend to get trivialized, at least in the media. They’re dismissed as being slick and calculated and superficial. But there’s a story in “Wham!,” the new Netflix documentary about the quintessential pop duo of the 1980s, that testifies to what a chancy and audacious artist George Michael was even back in his teen-idol days. The year is 1983. Michael and Andrew Ridgeley, coming off their first album, “Fantastic” (which had a few hits, though none of them were great), have established Wham! as an effective lightweight pop machine, with its two young stars prancing around the stage in sexy sportswear. The time has come to record “Careless Whisper,” a song they’ve had in their back pocket for several years (we hear the super-early demo version of it that they recorded in 1981 in Ridgeley’s living room on a TEAC 4-track Portastudio). Michael has become enough of a powerhouse to hook up with Jerry Wexler, the legendary producer of Aretha Franklin and Ray Charles. He heads down to Muscle Shoals Sound Studio to record the track, with Wexler producing. What more could a 20-year-old budding pop star want?
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‘Stan Lee’ Review: A Tasty Documentary About the Visionary of Marvel Makes the Comics Look Better Than the Movies
Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic There’s a moment in “Stan Lee,” David Gelb’s lively and illuminating documentary about the visionary of Marvel Comics, that’s momentous enough to give you a tingle. The year is 1961, and Lee, approaching 40, is burnt out on comics. It’s a form he has never taken all that seriously, even though he’s been working at it since 1939, when he started, at 17, as a gofer for Timely Comics. (Within two years he’d become the company’s editor, art director, and chief writer.) The comics he creates get so little respect that he tries to hide his profession when asked about it at cocktail parties. In 1961, though, Lee receives a directive from Martin Goodman, the publisher of the company that’s about to be renamed Marvel. He is ordered to devise a team of superheroes that can compete with DC’s Justice League (who have become the fulcrum of the so-called Silver Age of Comics). Lee, weary of superheroes, is ready to quit the business. But his wife, the English-born beauty Joan Lee, suggests that he create the kind of characters he has always been talking about — a more realistic brand of comic-book figure, one that ordinary people could relate to.
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‘Money Shot: The Pornhub Story’ Review: A Netflix Documentary Explores the World’s Reigning Porn Site and the Clampdown On It
Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Pornography, as a visual medium, has long followed the lead of technology. First it was drawn by hand. Then it was photographed. Then it was shown in back rooms on 8mm one-reelers. Then it was shown in movie theaters. Then it moved to video cassettes and DVD. Then it arrived on the Internet. Then, in the age of Pornhub, it exploded on the Internet. That’s when porn-on-the-computer innovation became the all-porn-all-the-time revolution. “Money Shot: The Pornhub Story,” a documentary that drops March 15 on Netflix, is not a movie about the cultural prominence or significance of porn in our time. Someone should really make that documentary. It’s a story that, like so much else about pornography, is totally out there yet hidden in the shadows. “Money Shot,” directed by Suzanne Hillinger and produced by Alex Gibney’s Jigsaw Productions, does touch on key aspects of how porn today is manufactured and consumed — notably how technology has helped to blur, if not obliterate, the distinction between the porn professional and the elevated “amateur.” But the movie explores this mostly in the service of telling the story of how Pornhub, the largest porn site in the world, became a lightning rod of controversy when it was accused of being a place that abetted sex trafficking and the sexual abuse of children.
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