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Showtime Acquires Davis Guggenheim’s ‘From The Sky Down’ U2 Documentary

By NELLIE ANDREEVA | Tuesday September 6, 2011 @ 9:48am PDTTags: Davis Guggenheim, Showtime, U2
Nellie Andreeva

Showtime has acquired Davis Guggenheim’s upcoming music documentary From The Sky Down, about the creation of U2′s acclaimed 1991 album Achtung Baby. The docu, which will premiere Thursday at the opening-night gala for the Toronto International Film Festival, will make its Showtime debut Oct. 29 to tie in with the 20th anniversary of the album’s release.

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Is ‘Spider-Man’ Biggest Broadway Debacle?

By MIKE FLEMING JR | Wednesday June 15, 2011 @ 6:48am PDTTags: Bill Clinton, Bono, Broadway, Julie Taymor, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, The Edge, U2
Mike Fleming

Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark finally opened on Broadway on Tuesday night. There was a star-studded crowd that included Bill Clinton, a 10-minute standing ovation, and even deposed director Julie Taymor got up to take a bow. And, thank goodness, no actors fell from the rafters. A press release from the show’s reps reports that “critics and audiences cheer[ed] the opening,” and offered a few effusive blurbs from USA Today, MTV and NY1 News. Well, first of all, they weren’t reading the reviews I saw. In The New York Times (generally the review that helps a show fly or die), Ben Brantley compared its earlier incarnation to now as an “ascent from jaw-dropping badness to mere mediocrity,” but that isn’t a rave since he likened that earlier version to “watching the Hindenburg crash and burn.” The Wall Street Journal called the book “flabby and witless” and, as for the plot, “everything that happens is utterly familiar and utterly predictable.” To sum up, the WSJ offers that “$70 million and nearly nine years of effort, all squandered on a damp squib. … Never in the history of Broadway has so much been spent to so little effect.” The other Gotham papers basically said it was better than it was when Taymor was calling the shots, but essentially that its edge (not to be confused with U2′s The Edge) had been varnished away, leaving blandness and U2 songs that aren’t the catchiest that Bono and The Edge ever came up with. Read More »

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