The popular show, Downton Abbey, has finally agreed on multiple requests of making it into a film. The film is confirmed to shoot soon.

A big-screen transfer for Downton Abbey has been rumoured for almost as long as the show has been on television. But on Friday the movie was confirmed, with creator Julian Fellowes scripting, The Book Thief’s Brian Percival to direct and Universal Studios to distribute. Production will start later this summer, with a release next year likely. Plot details remain under wraps, but it is expected the action will pick up directly from the last season’s finale, which was set in 1926.

“When the television series drew to a close it was our dream to bring the millions of global fans a movie,” said producer Gareth Neame, “and now, after getting many stars aligned, we are shortly to go into production. Julian’s script charms, thrills and entertains, and in Brian Percival’s hands we aim to deliver everything that one would hope for as Downton comes to the big screen.”

The show, which ran for six seasons on ITV in the UK and PBS in the US, won three Golden Globes and 15 Emmys from 69 nominations, which made it the most nominated non-US television show in the history of the awards. Its enormous following worldwide is credited with kickstarting a revival in period drama on both the big and small screen, and propelling stars including Hugh Bonneville, Dan Stevens and Michelle Dockery to international fame. The series was originally conceived as a spin-off prequel to Fellowes’ Oscar-winning 2001 film about a murder in a stately home, which also featured Maggie Smith as a waspish matriarch.

Documentary honours Robin Williams

When Marina Zenovich was an aspiring actor living in New York, taking on small roles to pay the bills, she was cast as an extra in The Fisher King, appearing in the scene where Parry, the madcap eccentric played by Robin Williams, imagines a spontaneous flashmob breaking out among enchanted commuters in Grand Central Station.

It’s “one of the most glorious cinematic moments”, Zenovich says, but she’d forgotten taking part in it until her new documentary, Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind, screened at the Karlovy Vary film festival this month. When asked if she ever had a chance to meet her subject, whose life she’d been poring over for four years, she recalled having waltzed in his close proximity.

Fashioned from archival footage, old audio tapes, interviews with Williams’ contemporaries, and clips of the comic’s stand-up, Come Inside My Mind is the first documentary to comprehensively examine Williams’ life and art since his suicide in 2014. It includes virtually no narration, save for Williams’ own, which can have an eerie, almost ghostlike effect (if only ghosts were as charming and exuberant as Robin Williams). “Every person is driven by some deep, deep, deep, deep secret,” he says in voiceover about half-way through the film.

It’s a question Williams scarcely addressed, preferring to bear his soul by way of performance. “Steve Martin says in the film, when Robin was on stage, whether it was theater or stand-up, he was in charge,” says Zenovich. “But in his life he was trying to hold himself together.”

Drake starts pop’s erotic comedown

Towards the end of his double album Scorpion, Drake confirms the sting in his tale; something that has defined him as the pop star of his age. Midway through the song Final Fantasy, in which he has imagined the luckless ways in which a hookup might turn out for him, he opines: “I hope that the apocalypse is the only thing that doesn’t come.” This is not an adroit turn for the artist. He has always equated sex with the chaos of the world, a notion that talks directly to fans. His sex is frequently tinged with the dolorous. The combination of ecstatic euphoria and introspective melancholy — the good, the bad and the ugly of sex — may yet turn out to be the defining cultural trope of our times. Let’s call it “sad and sexy”, to misquote the title of Lykke Li’s recently released fourth album. While baby boomers and Gen X-ers wrestle with the sexual catastrophes of yore (such as Yewtree and #MeToo), millennials are finding that, in popular culture, the joy of sex has been supplanted by the retelling of its nihilistic woes. In 2018, “sexy” does not necessarily equate to being turned on; it connects to more complicated behaviour and emotional states.

Writer and Courtesy: The Pioneer

The popular show, Downton Abbey, has finally agreed on multiple requests of making it into a film. The film is confirmed to shoot soon.

A big-screen transfer for Downton Abbey has been rumoured for almost as long as the show has been on television. But on Friday the movie was confirmed, with creator Julian Fellowes scripting, The Book Thief’s Brian Percival to direct and Universal Studios to distribute. Production will start later this summer, with a release next year likely. Plot details remain under wraps, but it is expected the action will pick up directly from the last season’s finale, which was set in 1926.

“When the television series drew to a close it was our dream to bring the millions of global fans a movie,” said producer Gareth Neame, “and now, after getting many stars aligned, we are shortly to go into production. Julian’s script charms, thrills and entertains, and in Brian Percival’s hands we aim to deliver everything that one would hope for as Downton comes to the big screen.”

The show, which ran for six seasons on ITV in the UK and PBS in the US, won three Golden Globes and 15 Emmys from 69 nominations, which made it the most nominated non-US television show in the history of the awards. Its enormous following worldwide is credited with kickstarting a revival in period drama on both the big and small screen, and propelling stars including Hugh Bonneville, Dan Stevens and Michelle Dockery to international fame. The series was originally conceived as a spin-off prequel to Fellowes’ Oscar-winning 2001 film about a murder in a stately home, which also featured Maggie Smith as a waspish matriarch.

Documentary honours Robin Williams

When Marina Zenovich was an aspiring actor living in New York, taking on small roles to pay the bills, she was cast as an extra in The Fisher King, appearing in the scene where Parry, the madcap eccentric played by Robin Williams, imagines a spontaneous flashmob breaking out among enchanted commuters in Grand Central Station.

It’s “one of the most glorious cinematic moments”, Zenovich says, but she’d forgotten taking part in it until her new documentary, Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind, screened at the Karlovy Vary film festival this month. When asked if she ever had a chance to meet her subject, whose life she’d been poring over for four years, she recalled having waltzed in his close proximity.

Fashioned from archival footage, old audio tapes, interviews with Williams’ contemporaries, and clips of the comic’s stand-up, Come Inside My Mind is the first documentary to comprehensively examine Williams’ life and art since his suicide in 2014. It includes virtually no narration, save for Williams’ own, which can have an eerie, almost ghostlike effect (if only ghosts were as charming and exuberant as Robin Williams). “Every person is driven by some deep, deep, deep, deep secret,” he says in voiceover about half-way through the film.

It’s a question Williams scarcely addressed, preferring to bear his soul by way of performance. “Steve Martin says in the film, when Robin was on stage, whether it was theater or stand-up, he was in charge,” says Zenovich. “But in his life he was trying to hold himself together.”

Drake starts pop’s erotic comedown

Towards the end of his double album Scorpion, Drake confirms the sting in his tale; something that has defined him as the pop star of his age. Midway through the song Final Fantasy, in which he has imagined the luckless ways in which a hookup might turn out for him, he opines: “I hope that the apocalypse is the only thing that doesn’t come.” This is not an adroit turn for the artist. He has always equated sex with the chaos of the world, a notion that talks directly to fans. His sex is frequently tinged with the dolorous. The combination of ecstatic euphoria and introspective melancholy — the good, the bad and the ugly of sex — may yet turn out to be the defining cultural trope of our times. Let’s call it “sad and sexy”, to misquote the title of Lykke Li’s recently released fourth album. While baby boomers and Gen X-ers wrestle with the sexual catastrophes of yore (such as Yewtree and #MeToo), millennials are finding that, in popular culture, the joy of sex has been supplanted by the retelling of its nihilistic woes. In 2018, “sexy” does not necessarily equate to being turned on; it connects to more complicated behaviour and emotional states.

Writer and Courtesy: The Pioneer