Days after Warner Bros. decided to shelve yet another completed movie, a new report says that all hope may not be lost.
Netflix’s Pain Hustlers crams Wolf of Wall Street and Erin Brockovich into one mismatched movie
27.10.2023 - 18:24 / polygon.com / Emily Blunt
How do you make a movie about the opioid crisis fun? Can you? Should you? The answer to these questions — as proposed by director David Yates (emerging from Harry Potter jail, where he’s been since the mid-2000s), screenwriter Wells Tower, star Emily Blunt, and Netflix — is Pain Hustlers, a fast-moving pharma drama that attempts to blend an earnest, relatable issue movie with the seductive excess of a Scorsese-lite true-crime roller coaster. It works, up to a point. Carried by a typically strong Blunt performance, Pain Hustlers is both watchable and eye-opening, even though its dramatic impulses do kind of cancel each other out.
Tower based his screenplay on Evan Hughes’ 2018 New York Times article and subsequent book about how, in the 2010s, a small pharmaceutical company played its way into the big leagues — and then into racketeering charges and bankruptcy — on the back of powerful, fentanyl-based opioid painkiller Subsys, which it effectively bribed doctors into prescribing. But Pain Hustlers is heavily fictionalized. Tower changes all the names and moves the action from Arizona to Florida, enabling Yates to summon scenes of trailer-park desolation and fluorescent sleaze. He also invents the character of Liza Drake (Blunt), a hard-up single mom. For Liza, a sales gig hawking a Subsys-like drug is a way out of her desperate economic situation, and straight into a moral quagmire.
Liza is brassy, passionate, street-smart, and empathetic, and she seems quite clearly inspired by real-life crusader Erin Brockovich, as played by Julia Roberts in Steven Soderbergh’s 2000 legal drama about a working-class woman battling a corporation that’s poisoning people at the bottom of the food chain. But Liza also serves as a Jordan Belfort type — Leonardo DiCaprio’s character in Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, perhaps the definitive movie about sales culture. Like Belfort, she’s designed to give us a vicariously thrilling insider glimpse at how this murky world works.
Working a shift at a strip club, Liza bumps into Pete Brenner (Chris Evans), a sales rep for Zanna, a pharma startup that’s failing to claw its way into the market with its fast-acting fentanyl formulation that users spray under their tongues (called Lonafen in the film). He spots her intuitive talent for giving people just what they want, and he offers her a job.
When she accepts, partly out of worry about paying the medical bills for her daughter, who has epilepsy, Pete juices up her CV with fake medical qualifications and presents it to Zanna’s eccentric founder, Jack Neel (Andy García). But first, he scrawls the letters “PHD” in the corner. Liza protests that she didn’t even finish high school, but it turns out this is code for exactly
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screenrant.com
11.11.2023 / 18:51
Marvel's Spider-Man 2 Brought Back One Character For No Reason But To Die
brought back an enduringly popular figure from the previous games in the series, but it did so only to almost immediately kill him off in one of the most unbearably emotional scenes in the entire game. weaves a dramatic narrative with numerous characters, and though this tug at the heartstrings of long-time fans of the series is quite cheap, it is devastatingly effective. Ultimately, brought back one character for no reason but to die — their death is not narratively important, nor does their death present a lingering point of conflict.
destructoid.com
10.11.2023 / 19:47
The dark horse candidates for The Game Awards 2023
As 2023 comes to a close, the games industry once again prepares for another ceremony recognizing the year’s line-up of adventures that made us laugh, cry, and everything in between. While we all have our personal lists, The Game Awards (TGA) packages that into something a little more formal.
blog.playstation.com
08.11.2023 / 03:51
(For Southeast Asia) Celebrating the holiday season with blockbuster games, new hardware products, and more PS5 console inventory than ever before
Next week marks the third year since PS5 launched and we wanted to take this opportunity to thank the more than 40 million players who’ve joined our global PS5 community. In these first three years, PlayStation Studios and third-party developers have introduced more than 2,500 PS5 games for players to enjoy, including fan-favorite titles in recent months like Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, Baldur’s Gate 3, and Final Fantasy XVI.
mmorpg.com
07.11.2023 / 14:07
BlizzCon 2023 Interview: WoW: The War Within's Encounters And Visual Teams Work Hand In Hand
World of Warcraft: The War Within is the next expansion set to release for the decades-long-running MMORPG. Touted as during the BlizzCon 2023 Opening Ceremony part of the culmination of nearly twenty years of Warcraft history, The War Within is the first of three chapters that will see the resolution to narrative threads that have been dangling for years. And like any expansion, it will feature new areas for players to discover, along with more than a handful of dungeons and encounters they can tackle at varying difficulties.
blog.playstation.com
07.11.2023 / 13:25
Celebrating the holiday season with blockbuster games, new hardware products, and more PS5 console inventory than ever before
Next week marks the third year since PS5 launched and we wanted to take this opportunity to thank the more than 40 million players who’ve joined our global PS5 community. In these first three years, PlayStation Studios and third-party developers have introduced more than 2,500 PS5 games for players to enjoy, including fan-favorite titles in recent months like Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, Baldur’s Gate 3, and Final Fantasy XVI.
screenrant.com
03.11.2023 / 16:53
Secret Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 Mode Puts One Spider-Verse Character In The Spotlight
has a variety of suits for Peter and Miles, from original designs to classic comic styles. Insomniac Games' sequel has also aimed to include many suits from the heroes' cinematic adventures, with Peter's suits from the Tobey Maguire, Andrew Garfield and Tom Holland iterations all included. Miles and Peter also have suits inspired by from the Academy Award-winning animated film and its acclaimed sequel .
videogameschronicle.com
02.11.2023 / 17:21
Podcast: Control 2, Insomniac’s Wolverine, and how slim is the new PS5?
The latest episode of VGC: A Video Game Podcast is now available for listening.
amazongames.com
01.11.2023 / 18:03
GamesBeat NEXT Celebrates and Explores the Career Paths of Women in Gaming
Women make up just between 24% and 30% of the video game industry’s workforce, depending on the research source. However, year after year, from players to developers, female representation has been growing throughout games at all levels of experience.
polygon.com
01.11.2023 / 16:45
The best movies on Max right now
Max has gone through quite a transformation since the days of its initial launch in 2020. Following the unprecedented day-and-date release of the studio’s entire film slate in 2021, Max’s reach has continued to grow thanks to its direct-to-streaming releases and ongoing TV series like House of the Dragon, Succession, Westworld,The Rehearsal. And, thanks to the merger of WarnerMedia and Discovery, it’s also courted controversy.
gameranx.com
30.10.2023 / 16:37
Marvel’s Wolverine Title Will Be In Same Universe As Spider-Man Series
When you have a team like Insomniac Games working on a set of Marvel Comics characters, you might feel they would “connect” the two titles in various ways. With the release of Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 and the very positive reaction to it, many expected a hint of what might come next with Marvel’s Wolverine, a game that we haven’t gotten any new details on in some time. To that end, there are no direct crossovers or “hints” of where Wolverine might be in this world or what his game might entail. According to the creative director for the projects, that was by design, but they are still “connected.”
tech.hindustantimes.com
28.10.2023 / 08:55
What's streaming now: '1989 (Taylor’s Version),' Emily Blunt and 'Five Nights at Freddy’s'
Taylor Swift's “1989 (Taylor's Version),” a Paramount documentary on the duo Milli Vanilli examining one of music's biggest lip-syncing scandals and the horror movie “Five Nights at Freddy's” are some of the new television, movies, music and games headed to a device near you