Celebrity News

CELEBRITY NEWS

NATE BLOOM COLUMNIST

A POTENT SPICE, A COMEDY, A SLASHER, OPIATES & GOOP

Dune opens in theaters Oct. 22. The film will also be released on HBO Max Oct. 22 and stream for 30 days. Dune is based on a 1965 sci-fi novel of the same name by the late Frank Herbert that became a favorite of hippies and “New Agers” and still has something of a cult following.

It is a difficult novel to adapt for the screen. In 1973, Chilean-French director/writer Alejandro Jodorowsky, now 92, had a top-notch film cast lined up, but the potential costs soared and the movie was scrapped. In 1984, David Lynch made a film based on Dune, also called Dune, and it became the biggest critical and financial flop of his career.

The new Dune stars Timothee Chalamet, 25, as the overseer of a dry, very inhospitable planet with a valuable natural product, called “spice.” Spice can increase a user’s lifetime and enhance their mental abilities. Everybody wants “spice” despite the difficulties in obtaining it.

Dune has played several film festivals and has already opened in many other countries. Reviews are mainly positive, but a fairly large group of respected critics gave it a mild thumbs-down.

Also opening on Oct. 22 is Dispatch, a comedy with three different plotlines. These plotlines are all connected to the closing of a French newspaper’s Kansas office. Directed and written by the “quirky” Wes Anderson, the cast includes Timothee Chalamet (again), Adrien Brody, 48, and French actor Matthieu Amalric, 55.

CATCHING UP

I neglected to mention Halloween Kills in my last column. It opened Oct. 15 and, no doubt, will be in theaters until Halloween. It also began streaming on Paramount+ Oct. 15. Kills is the 12th Halloween film made since the original 1978 film. The original co-starred Jamie Lee Curtis, now 62. She also co-starred in three “direct” sequels to the first film.

Halloween Kills is the second film in a planned threefilm “reboot” of the slasher franchise. The reboot pretends that nine films in which killer Michael Myers seemed to die, and somehow survived, were never made. The reboot began with Halloween, a 2018 film co-starring Curtis. In this retelling, Myers was in a mental asylum from 1978 to 2018. After his release, he went back to his bad ways. At the end of the 2018 film, Myers is trapped in a burning house.

In Kills, we learn Myers survived the fire and Laura Strode (Curtis) organizes a mob to finally, for sure, kill him. The supporting cast includes Dylan Arnold, 27, and Kyle Richards, 52. Arnold’s first big role was in the 2018 Halloween film. In both pics, he plays Cameron Elam, boyfriend of Strode’s granddaughter, Alyson.

Richards appeared in the 1978 Halloween movie as Lindsey, a child Strode babysat, and she plays Lindsey again in Kills. Richards had a “middling” acting career that virtually ended in 2006. However, she became much more famous when she began appearing in the reality show The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills (2010-present). She married “high-end” realtor Mauricio Umansky in 1994 and converted to Modern Orthodox Judaism. Umanksy was born in Mexico and raised in the States. His mother, Estella Snieder, 71, a popular Mexican TV psychologist, frequently appears on Real Housewives.

Here’s another catch-up item: Dopesick, an eight-episode Hulu mini-series, began streaming Oct. 13. It focuses on the victims of the Oxycontin opiate addiction plague and, oy, the role of the (Jewish) Sackler family. The Sacklers are now notorious as the former owners of Purdue Pharma, the company that developed, marketed and “pushed” Oxycontin.

NINE STARS VIA WIKIMEDIA

Gwyneth Paltrow

ANDREA RAFFIN VIA WIKIMEDIA

MichaelStuhlbarg, 53, co-stars as Richard Sackler, 76, the former head of Purdue Pharma.

GWYNETH’S GOOP

Most of you have probably heard about the “touchyfeely/New Age” products on the pricey Goop website. The frequently satirized Goop company is the creation of Gwyneth Paltrow, 49. In 2020, Goop expanded to documentaries, with Paltrow hosting a six-part series (Goop Lab) which covered such topics as energy healing, anti-aging and psychedelic drugs. There were many complaints that the series contained a lot of medical misinformation.

On Oct. 21, the six-part documentary Sex, Love & Goop starts streaming on Netflix. Paltrow hosts reallife couples as they explore their bodies and try to enhance their relationships with a focus on understanding how people experience pleasure differently. The couples are aided by several sex and relationship experts.