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Commentary: What Netflix's 'Maria' gets so wrong about Maria Callas

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Commentary: What Netflix's 'Maria' gets so wrong about Maria Callas

Here we go again.

In Hollywood’s ongoing cheerless attempts to contest the joy of music by cutting stellar classical musicians down to size, “Maria” joins the curt parade of “Tár” and “Maestro.” The new biopic of Maria Callas follows the takedowns of fictional conductor Lydia Tár and larger-than-life Leonard Bernstein with a dramatization of the most compelling singer I’ve ever encountered — live, on recording, on video anywhere. (I’m hardly alone in this estimation.) All three films have this in common: Over-the-top musicians are tragically brought down by their own hubris and turn monstrous. Each is a victim of her or his celebrity — something celebrity-incubating Hollywood happens to be pretty good at.

“Maria,” which began streaming on Netflix this week, focuses on Callas’ reclusive last years when she was, if you care to believe this account, pitifully self-destructive. She had lost her voice and her lover, and she had nothing to live for. She could not recapture the mythic La Callas nor make peace with the woman, Maria. It’s an ignominious tale of woe and quixotic temperament.

The gloomy film begins and ends with Callas’ solitary death. In typical flashback fashion, we witness her decline and delusions as she tries to recapture her voice, the attentions of Aristotle Onassis and the adoration of the public. Flashbacks mix in bits and pieces of documentary footage, glimpsing a few highlights of her life.

Throughout, the improbable Angelina Jolie captures Callas’ style in her dress, her public manner and her movements. She sports to glossy perfection sensational ‘50s and ‘60s hairdos. She’d make a great plastic doll of Callas.

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The real Callas was striking in a different way. Her face didn’t have Jolie’s spectacularly exact proportions. In fact, Callas made herself out of what she considered to be an ugly duckling. When she first appeared onstage in the late 1940s, she immediately demonstrated a voice to be reckoned with and a fervent vocal theatricality. But she was a large woman and said to be somewhat awkward onstage. Director Franco Zeffirelli described her as big in every way — big eyes, big nose, big mouth, big body — and compared her to the Statue of Liberty.

Seeing the 1953 film “Roman Holiday” made Callas determined to look like its diminutive star, Audrey Hepburn. Callas lost 80 pounds in a single year. She had already been working with great directors, especially Luchino Visconti, but now she had the physical means to go much further and invent the modern concept of opera as drama. Her voice had lost some of its sheen, and those who disliked her blamed the weight loss, which wasn’t the case. It was, instead, her compulsion to put all of her being into a raging theatrical intensity.

On the surface, Callas had become an icon of elegance, but now she could make her big eyes, big mouth and big voice penetrate like nothing anyone in opera had ever experienced. She transformed not just herself but the art form.

Callas’ career in opera lasted less than two decades and was over by 1965. She was only 42 when she sang her last staged opera performance, a production of “Tosca” at Covent Garden in London. People came up with all kinds of reasons why her voice went so early. Only after her death 12 years later did we learn that she suffered from dermatomyositis, which causes muscle weakness that can affect the vocal chords and likely also led to her heart failure at age 53.

Jolie’s voice has been slightly mixed with Callas’ in such a way that it ever so slightly sanitizes Callas’. Joile’s speaking voice sounds almost like Callas’ but without the hint of Callas’ New York accent. She lacks, crucially, Callas’ disarming smile. None of this might matter so much had director Pablo Larrain concentrated less on supplying glamour shots of Jolie.

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The film is called “Maria” for a reason. Callas’ was, indeed, a life of conflicts between the artist who grandly became La Callas and the woman who was Maria. But you need to understand both. She undoubtedly stopped singing because of her physical condition. Still, her greatness gave her a remarkable capacity for transcending biology. Yet her need to become more of the woman she wanted to be drove her obsession with the ultimately toxic Onassis.

I saw just how exceptional the transcendent part of this complex equation could be in her 1974 ill-fated comeback tour with tenor Giuseppe di Stefano. A graduate student at the time, I had a top balcony seat at War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco. The acoustics are best up there, and I bought a pair of opera glasses just to see her.

She sounded pretty bad. The voice was gone. But not the intensity, not the presence. This became, in fact, some of the greatest singing I’ve ever encountered. She seemed at the same time superhuman and a super-suffering human. You cannot possibly experience the wizardry of Callas and the music becoming one on the awful underground recordings of the concert found on YouTube and elsewhere.

Better to watch Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1969 film “Medea,” in which Callas stars in a purely acting role. Like Larrain with Jolie, Pasolini was fascinated by Callas’ face, particularly her nose. He scrutinizes her expressivity, its extraordinary power. She no longer needs opera, it’s inside her. Pasolini uses music as though he were filming a Noh play but with masks off. The fact that this film has so little regard in the opera world and even among Callas fanciers demonstrates how, if you pay close enough attention, she remains ahead of her time.

Her radical sophistication and courage were in further evidence in 1974 when she addressed a Verdi musicology conference in Chicago. She appeared dignified, eloquent, unsentimental and downright revolutionary. She had no need to waste her time with musicologists and their talk of neglected early Verdi masterpieces. Knowing what mattered and what didn’t, she suggested that they take the best bits from those operas and make something modern and meaningful. She also blamed Puccini for making singers and audiences lazy, because he wasn’t challenging enough.

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A year later, Onassis died, which it is said to have caused Callas to lose interest in life. He had left Callas, whom he never married, to wed Jacqueline Kennedy, but the flame burned in Callas to the end. Her last two years were obviously very difficult, what with drugs, depression and dermatomyositis, all of which come across as tawdry in “Maria.” I wonder whether she became a recluse in part because patients suffering from dermatomyositis are supposed to stay out of sunlight. Her body was failing her.

A more affectionate and fanciful portrait of Callas in those years is the basis of Zeffirelli’s 2002 biopic, “Callas Forever,” starring Fanny Ardant and Jeremy Irons as her agent. Zeffirelli had worked with Callas and knew her well. To best understand Callas, turn to Tony Palmer’s 2007 documentary “Callas,” in which Zeffirelli is particularly illuminating.

All the adoration, the glamour, the high life was, for Callas, a purposeful life of bread and roses. Rather, her art had always been the way she boldly filled such emptiness with incredible meaning. “Maria,” on the other hand, offers little more than pathos and poses.

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Roll On 18 Wheeler: Errol Sack’s ‘TRUCKER’ (2026) – Movie Review – PopHorror

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Roll On 18 Wheeler: Errol Sack’s ‘TRUCKER’ (2026) – Movie Review – PopHorror

I am a sucker for all those straight-to-video slasher movies from the 90’s; there was just a certain point where you knew the acting was terrible, however, it made you fall in love. I can definitely remember scanning the video store sections for all the different horror movies I could. All those movies had laughable names and boom mics accidentally getting in the frame. Trucker seems like a child of all those old dreams, because it is.

Let’s get into the review.

Synopsis

When a group of reckless teens cause an accident swroe to never speak of it.  The father is reescued by a strange man. from the wreckage and nursed back to health by a mysterious old man. When the group agrees to visit the accident scene, they meet their match from a strange masked trucker and all his toys with revenge on his mind.

Roll on 18 Wheleer

Trucker is what you would imagine: a movie about a psychotic trucker chasing you. We have seen it many, many times. What makes the film so different is its homage to bad movies but good ideas. I don’t mean in a negative way. When you think of a slasher movie, it’s not very complicated; as a matter of fact, it takes five minutes to piece the film together. This is so simple and childlike, and I absolutely love it. Trucker gave us something a little different, not too gory, bad CGI fire, I mean, this is all we old schlock horror fans want. Trucker is the type of film that you expect from a Tubi Original, on speed. However, I would take this over any Tubi Original.

I found some parts that were definitely a shout-out to the slasher humor from all those movies. Another good point that made the film shine was the sets. I guess what I can say is the film is everything Joy Ride should have been. While most modern slashers are trying to recreate the 1980s, the film stands out with its love for those unloved 1990’s horror films. While most see Joyride, you are extremely mistaken, my friend; you will enjoy this film much more.

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In The End

In the end, I enjoyed the entire film. At first, I saw it listed as an action thriller; I was pleasantly surprised, and Trucker pulled at my heart strings, enveloping me in its comfort from a long-forgotten time in horror. It’s a nostalgic blast for me, thinking back to that time, my friends, my youth, and finding my new home. Horror fans are split down the middle: from serial-killer clowns (my side) to elevated horror, where an artist paints a forty-thousand-year-old demon that chases them around an upper-class studio apartment. I say that a lot, but it’s the best way to describe some things.

The entire movie had me cheering while all the people I hated suffered dire consequences for their actions. It’s the same old story done in a way that we rabid fans could drool over, and it worked. In all the bad in the world today, and my only hope for the future is the soon-to-end Terrifier franchise. However, the direction was a recipe to succeed with 40+ year old horror fans like me. I see the film as a hope for tomorrow, leading us into a new era.

Trucker is set to release on March 10th, 2026

 

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Review: In ‘American Classic,’ Kevin Kline and Laura Linney deliver a love letter to theater

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Review: In ‘American Classic,’ Kevin Kline and Laura Linney deliver a love letter to theater

The lovely, funny “American Classic,” premiering Sunday on MGM+, is a love letter to theater, community and community theater. Kevin Kline plays Richard Bean, a narcissistic stage actor. He’s famous enough to be opening on Broadway in “King Lear,” but he has to be pushed onstage and is forgetting lines. After he drunkenly assails a hostile New York Times critic — caught on video, of course — he’s suspended from the play, and his agent (Tony Shalhoub) advises him to get out of town and lay low until the heat’s off, as they used to say in the gangster movies.

Learning that his mother (Jane Alexander, acting royalty, in film clips) has died, Richard heads back to his small Pennsylvania hometown, where his family — all actors, like the Barrymores, but no longer acting — owns a once-celebrated theater. To Richard’s horror, it has, for want of income, become a dinner theater, hosting touring productions of “Nunsense” and “Forever Plaid” instead of the great stage works on which he cut his teeth.

Brother Jon (Jon Tenney), running the kitchen at the theater, is married to Kristen (Laura Linney), Richard’s onetime acting partner, who dated him before her marriage; now she’s the mayor. Their teenage daughter, Miranda (Nell Verlaque) — a name from Shakespeare — does want to act and move to New York, as her mother had before her, but is afraid to tell her parents. Richard’s father, Linus (Len Cariou), is suffering from dementia, though not to the point he won’t actively contribute to the action; every day he comes out again as gay.

Across the eight-episode series, things move from the ridiculous to the sublime. Richard’s attempt to stage his mother’s funeral, with her coffin being lowered from the ceiling, while “Also sprach Zarathustra” plays and smoke billows toward the audience, fortunately comes to naught; but he announces at the ceremony that he’ll direct a production of Thornton Wilder’s 1938 play “Our Town” at the theater, to “restore the soul of this town.” (His big idea is to ignore Wilder’s stage directions, which ask for no curtain, no set and few props, with a “realistic version,” featuring a working soda fountain, rain effects and a horse.) Fate will have other plans for this, and not to give away what in any case should be obvious, the title of the play will also become its ethos, with a cast of amateurs, including Miranda’s jealous boyfriend, Randall (Ajay Friese), and ordinary people standing in for the ordinary people of Wilder’s Grover’s Corners.

The series has a comfortable, cushiony feeling; it’s the sort of show that could have been made as a film in the 1990s, and in which Kline could have starred as easily in his 40s as in his 70s; it has the same relation to reality as “Dave,” in which he played a good-hearted ordinary Joe who takes the place of a lookalike U.S. president. The town is essentially a sunny place, full of mostly sunny people, to all appearances, a typical comedy hamlet. But we’re told it’s distressed, and Mayor Kristen is in transactional cahoots with developer Connor Boyle (Billy Carter), who wants clearance to build a casino on the site of a landmark hotel. (Much of the plot is driven by money — needing it, trading for it, leaving it, losing it.) He also wants his heavily accented, bombshell Russian girlfriend, Nadia (Elise Kibler), to have a part in “Our Town.”

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As in the great Canadian comedy “Slings & Arrows,” set at a Shakespeare Festival outside of Toronto, themes and moments and speeches from the play being performed are echoed in the lives of the performers, while the viewer experiences the double magic of watching a fine actor playing an actor playing a part. Kline, of course, is himself an American classic, with a long stage and screen career that encompasses classical drama, romantic and musical comedy and cartoon voiceovers; the series makes room for Richard to perform soliloquies from “Hamlet” and “Henry V,” parts Klein has played onstage. He brings out the sweetness latent in Richard. Linney, who played against her sweetheart image in “Ozark,” is happily back on less deadly ground (though she’s tense and drinks a little). Tenney, who was sweet and funny on “The Closer,” and who we don’t see enough of these days, is sweeter and funnier here, and gets to sing. (All the Beans will sing, except for Linus.)

As a comedy, it is often predicable — you know that things will work out, and some major plot points are as good as inevitable — but it’s the good sort of predictability, where you get what you came for, where you hear the words you want to hear, ones you could never have written yourself. “American Classic” is not out to challenge your world view in any way but wants only to confirm your feelings and in doing so amplify them. Shock effects are fine in their place — and to be sure there are major twists in the plot — but there is a certain release when the thing you’re ready to have happen, happens, whether it brings laughter or tears. Either is welcome.

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‘Scream 7’ Review: Ghostface Trades His Metallic Knife for Plastic in Bloody Embarrassing Slasher Sequel

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‘Scream 7’ Review: Ghostface Trades His Metallic Knife for Plastic in Bloody Embarrassing Slasher Sequel

It’s funny how this film is marketed as the first Scream movie in IMAX, yet it’s their sloppiest work to date. Williamson accomplishes two decent kills. My praise goes to the prosthetic team and gore above anything else. The filmmaking is amateurish, lacking any of the tension build and innovation in set pieces like the Radio Silence or Craven entries. Many slasher sequences consist of terribly spliced editing and incomprehensible camera movement. There was a person at my screening asking if one of the Ghostfaces was killed. I responded, “Yeah, they were shot in the head; you just couldn’t see it because the filmmaking is so damn unintelligible.” 

Really, Spyglass? This is the best you can do to “damage control” your series that was perfectly fine?

I’m getting comments from morons right now telling me that I’m biased for speaking “politically” about this movie. Fuck you! This poorly made, bland, and franchise-worst entry is a byproduct of political cowardice.

The production company was so adamant about silencing their outspoken star, who simply stated that she’s against the killing of Palestinian people by an evil totalitarian regime, that they deliberately fired her, conflating her comments to “anti-semintism,” when, and if you read what she said exactly, it wasn’t. Only to reconstruct the buildup made in her arc and settle on a nonsensical, manufactured, nostalgia-based slop fest to appeal to fans who lack genuine film taste in big 2026. To add insult to injury, this movie actively takes potshots at those predecessors, perhaps out of pettiness that Williamson didn’t pen them or a mean-spirited middle finger to the star the studio fired. Truly, fuck you. Take the Barrera aspect out of this, which is still impossible, and Scream 7 is a lazy, sloppy, ill-conceived, no-vision, enshittification of Scream and a bloody embarrassment to the franchise. It took a real, morally upright actress to make Ghostface’s knife go from metal to plastic. 

FINAL STATEMENT

You either die a Scream or live long enough to see yourself become a Stab.

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