Is it me , I cannot stop looking at this guy with the pink frames & then at the poster . they might become a trend :P

 

 

@1880704695595114545

Edited January 19Jan 19 by Sydney11

@1880714613979029826

 

 

Review by Myranda

Better Man 2024

★★★★½

Watched Jan 18, 2025

 

Myranda’s review published on Letterboxd:

this was very f**king good

 

yes it has its tropes and its standard biopic fare but it’s really f**king good. the team who created this really knows how to put on a show.

 

and here’s my take on the cgi ape: I don’t 100% love it. I think it was harder to connect to the “character” when i’m looking at a monkey. I think it’s a tool that he uses to show us him without showing us him. throughout the movie he has trouble showing people the real him, so it makes sense we aren’t seeing the real him.

 

overall it’s fun, pacing is good, editing/ sound wasn’t my favourite. the Rock DJ sequence is amazing. I will be reading Robbie Williams entire Wiki page tonight.

 

https://letterboxd.com/mlevins/film/better-man-2024/

 

 

 

 

Better Man 2024

★★★

Watched Jan 16, 2025

 

Nick Salter’s review published on Letterboxd:

Better Man works as a kinetic piece of pop musical entertainment in the style of The Greatest Showman, which Michael Gracey also directed.

 

It’s as good as any music biopic, including this year’s awards darling A Complete Unknown. Those two movies work without doing the same thing. Better Man is about big flashy entertaining sequences first, while James Mangold’s film is about the nuanced acting performances. Both work and need to be appreciated for what each director is trying to do.

 

The movie’s protagonist, Robbie Williams, is played by a CGI chimpanzee, and we forget and get over that quickly as the story of his life progresses.

 

I liked several sequences. “Feel” is a powerful kickoff and sang sweetly by Carter J. Murphy, as a young Robbie Williams chimpanzee. “Rock DJ” is an absolute showstopper, performed by Williams’ boy band Take That. We literally applauded in the theater. “Angels” is perhaps his best known song across the pond in America and found a very emotional place to be used in the movie that got to me. These tunes are currently finding a place on my Spotify.

 

So why just 3 stars? After about halfway thru, the movie drifts into self-loathing and cocaine. I wish it had just gotten on with it. It stays a little morbid too long before finally arriving home with a cinematic crowd-pleasing performance in the end.

 

It’s pretty good, even though Robbie Williams is clearly not popular in the States. As of this writing, Better Man hadn’t even grossed $1.5 million at the domestic box office, which is insane for a wide release. It’s weird and British, but it works. And I know who I’m thinking of in my life when I hear “Angels” now.

 

@1880036052439896201

Thanks for the update on the numbers Laura 😊

‘But who is Robbie Williams?’: What’s up with the international star being a nobody in the United States !

 

Guillermo Alonso

JAN 19, 2025 - 05:45 CET

 

Robbie Williams (Stoke-on-Trent, England, 50 years old) is a star who nearly nobody knows about in the United States. Such is the short and sweet biography of the singer, who first rose to fame in the boy band Take That and went on to become one of history’s most successful solo artists, with nearly 60 million albums sold all over the world — except in the United States. The release of Better Man, a bizarre biopic in which he is played by a monkey, was his opportunity to put an end to this lopsided panorama. But for the moment, it doesn’t seem to be working.

 

Better Man has opened to excellent critical reception, with reviewers finding it both original and fresh following the avalanche in recent years of hagiographies of nearly every famous musician ever in the wake of the massive success of Bohemian Rhapsody (2018). Audiences have been barraged by films about the lives of Elton John, Amy Winehouse, Whitney Houston, Bob Marley, Pharrell Williams (rendered in Legos!) and Elvis and Priscilla Presley. Madonna’s was canceled, but Michael Jackson’s is in the works — we’ll have to see how that one plays out.

 

The trailer for Better Man opens with the phrase, “I’m Robbie Williams. I’m one of the biggest pop stars in the world.” The film’s potential U.S. audience, however, has taken to social media with questions like, “Robbie who?” Even in comments on the trailer itself, which has racked up eight million views, there’s no lack of such queries. For example: “The biggest pop stars in the world? Haha.” Responses vary from “Of course he is!” to “I had to look him up because I don’t know anything about him.” The crazy thing is, both sentiments are valid..

 

Many British artists and groups have triumphed in the United States. The 1960s and the 1980s were considered the first and second waves of the British invasion of the U.S. charts, from the Beatles to Duran Duran, the Rolling Stones to Phil Collins, Elton John to George Michael. While it’s less and less accurate to say that the country’s sales dominate the world (Latin and Asian superstars have started to create their own, lucrative markets and superstardom is no longer limited to pop and rock icons from New York and L.A.), the United States is still the biggest music market and the one on which every artist eager to make it big has their eye. But for every performer who has managed to cross the pond and transfer their success in Great Britain to a country as big, difficult and complex to break as the United States, there are many more who have remained suspended in an odd position: pop stars in Europe, Asia and Oceania, but nearly unknown on the U.S. market. Among them, Robbie Williams is patron saint.

 

Following the release of Better Man and the film’s promotion and presence on red carpets like the Golden Globes (where the movie’s main theme, Forbidden Road, was nominated for Best Original Song), several U.S. publications have penned explainers for their readers as to who, exactly, Robbie Williams is. They are nearly always written by British journalists. “I, a lonely Brit in L.A., have a sharp desire to teach this country about the Robster,” states an article in Vulture. “Here’s An Explainer On Robbie Williams For The Americans Baffled By ‘Better Man,’” runs a title on Buzzfeed. All share the same biographical facts already familiar to those who grew up listening to European radio: with nearly 60 million albums sold, Williams is one of the most successful solo artists of all time. Seven of his songs and 14 of his albums have hit the top of the United Kingdom charts, and he’s a true pop idol in his home country. In 2002, he signed the most lucrative contract in British music history at nearly $131 million, and his private life — with all its alcohol, drugs and various relationships with women both anonymous and famous — has been the subject of every tabloid and society magazine in the country and beyond.

 

There was an attempt to raise Williams’ profile in the United States in 1999 with the album The Ego Has Landed, which contained a selection of songs from his first two albums, including the mega-hit Angels, which has become the most-played song at British funerals. But for various reasons, it didn’t stick. Williams has spoken of this moment several times, but perhaps the definitive, institutional statement can be found on his own official website: “Outside America — a country and a market destined never to quite appreciate his quirkily English combination of hilarious and heartfelt, sentimental and sardonic, silly and sublime — Robbie was now perhaps the biggest pop star in the world.” In the Netflix documentary Robbie Williams, which debuted in 2024, an archival image shows him in a van in New York in 1999, while audio plays in which he explains that the only reason he was looking to make it there was that, “America kind of scares me because it’s so f***ing big. I’d really love to break it here and sell a lot of records and piss a lot of people off back home. That’s what I want to do.” In the documentary, he makes it clear that the United States wasn’t a fan of his self-lacerating humor, that they didn’t understand why he loved flashing his butt, smoking so many cigarettes and swearing so relentlessly. It was all a bit much for U.S. tastes, which at the time were focused on classic, white teen pop that seemed more inspired by Swiss precision than British laxness.

 

Williams kept it moving, focusing on his superstardom in the rest of the world. He went through highs and lows, reunited with Take That, split again with Take That. He settled down with actress Ayda Field, had four kids, turned 50 and one day, to the confusion of many, decided that it would be a good idea to invest $110 million in producing a film about the life of a singer in which he is played by a monkey. On an artistic level, it appears to have been a good idea: the film has its fair share of critic-enthusiasts. “The biggest cinematic surprise of the year,” says Empire. “A fun, bombastic, brilliantly choreographed and totally enthralling film,” according to Time Out. “Fabulously entertaining and touching,” comments The New York Times. But when the film failed at the end of December in box offices in the United Kingdom, the country in which Williams is a shooting star, its fate seemed sealed. In the United States it has earned little more than $1 million. The movie is considered the first flop of 2025, even if in time, it could become a cult classic.

 

In any case, Williams has always dealt well with failure, owning it with his particular, defeated sense of humor. His solo career started with a flop (his first album, Life thru a Lens, took a long time to be a hit), followed by the fiasco in the United States during his imperial era. In 2006, he was met with another failure in the form of his strangest and riskiest album, Rudebox. Two years later, it was reported that one million unsold copies of the Rudebox CD had been sent to China, where they were used as recycled material to reinforce sidewalks. Williams’ failures hint at some kind of amusingly jovial anecdote, if not cruel fable, regarding fame. And all have contributed to the personality of a singer who has always felt the breath of others’ disapproval on the back of his neck. Who is Robbie Williams?, they keep asking in the United States. Well, he’s the one who failed with a movie about himself in which he was played by a monkey, of course. Perhaps this, better than any song, sums up Williams’ personality and career. (Besides the fact that he is a multi-millionaire author, producer and singer. But that seems less literary, somehow.)

 

https://english.elpais.com/culture/2025-01-...ted-states.html

Edited January 19Jan 19 by Sydney11

It's done a million in a day ^_^

 

This article which is veery interesting but is pages & pages long . To view the fill article click on link at the bottom :)

 

 

Yep, Wētā FX did it, they turned Robbie Williams into a chimpanzee

 

December 23, 2024

by

Ian Failes

 

 

Behind the scenes of ‘Better Man’.

 

In Michael Gracey’s Better Man biopic film, pop singer Robbie Williams is portrayed as a chimpanzee. Wētā FX was responsible for the digital character, which ranges in ages and also goes through 250 different costume changes and 50 separate hair styles (and, yes, even sports Williams’ trademark tattoos).

 

On set, actor Jonno Davies performed the role of Williams through the use of performance capture, largely following the workflow Wētā FX has employed on the Apes films and, of course, from its long history of bringing various CG creatures to life.

 

Befores & Afters got to chat to Wētā FX visual effects supervisor Luke Millar and animation supervisor David Clayton to walk through, step-by-step, the making of ambitious project, which includes several dazzling musical numbers and perhaps the most f-bombs by a CG character in the history of film.

 

It started with a huge previs effort

 

The musical moments—which include an ever-increasing dance number around London’s Regent Street, a 100,000+ audience-filled Knebworth Park concert, and a performance at Royal Albert Hall—were previsualized by Wētā FX before any other visual effects work commenced, and even before the film was fully greenlit.

 

“Michael Gracey was very keen to previs the musical numbers, time them all out to the music, and really get the details of all the transitional shots and how the ebb and flow of the visuals and sound would work together, to really chase down that emotional connection,” explains Clayton, who oversaw the previs. “It was really fun work because we already had the template of the soundtrack. They’d also story-boarded some moments and used video-vis of others to piece together the sequences. We were then able to layer on more detailed previs and explore camera design compositions and action.”

 

Wētā FX utilized its own motion capture stage as part of the previs process. Gracey also visited the studio in Wellington during this stage of production, where he was able to help block out action and iterate on the all-important virtual camera and lighting cues. “That previs was the first step of showing people what this movie could be,” observes Millar. “It was definitely a catalyst that helped with getting the movie funded and advancing to shooting and production.”

 

The performance capture methodology

 

Armed with a previs of the key parts of the film, Wētā FX then helped Gracey establish how it would be shot. “The most important thing for me was to shoot this like a regular picture,” says Millar. “I said to the team, ‘We shoot it like Jonno is in the movie. We light it like Jonno’s in the movie. We frame up like Jonno’s in the movie. We pull focus like Jonno is the person who will be in the final picture.’”

 

 

 

 

 

All images: © 2024 PARAMOUNT PICTURES

 

I thought this piece was funny

 

When your VFX supervisor becomes a ‘star’ of the film

 

For several scenes requiring digital extras, Wētā FX happened to place visual effects supervisor Millar into, well, a lot of them. In fact, Millar served as a digital extra 767 times in the film. “It wasn’t for any sort of narcissistic tendencies,” he protests. “It was literally because we had two distinct needs for digital people. One of them was the underwater fans in ‘Come Undone’, and the other one was the paparazzi in ‘Come Undone’ as well. It just so happened that throughout principal photography, whenever we had paparazzi extras, we were always on location, so we weren’t able to scan any of them. We’d get back to the studio and go, ‘We need a paparazzi!’ And the requirement would be someone who’s average build male, middle-aged, and a bit of a creep. And I was like, ‘Oh, I can do that.’” :P

Millar brought into the studio a collection of different clothes, whereupon he was scanned in different outfits. “Whilst the intention was to just put me in that one scene, once I existed, I ended up everywhere. Normally I’m the security guard or a bus driver or, motorcyclist, or paparazzi. I’m in the movie about 700 times.”

 

“What’s really funny is,” adds Clayton, “sometimes the extras would be my motion capture, but Luke’s digital double body, merged together. Our powers combined!”

 

 

 

https://beforesandafters.com/2024/12/23/yep...o-a-chimpanzee/

Edited January 20Jan 20 by Sydney11

I agree with this poster & a lot of the comments underneath . All the talk was about the Rock DJ sequence in the movie but I just loved the Come Undone & the She's The One scenes , there are so many to choose from. The cinematography / visual storytelling at the funeral scene was just mesmerising . The whole film was totally emotive & that is why I know I will watch is again , it is very special. I look forward to it being available to stream next month.

 

 

@1881078068997238934

 

The CGI monkey really does work in ‘Better Man

 

Image - Paramount Pictures

 

If you were on the fence about seeing the Robbie Williams monkey biopic, don’t be! Better Man tells the story of Williams’ rise to fame but uses a CGI monkey version of Williams, played by Jonno Davies, to do it. And it’s brilliant.

 

You might be thinking that a movie with a CGI monkey feels like something you won’t enjoy. The reality is that the movie itself uses the monkey to its advantage. Davies does a great job bringing Williams to life behind his monkey persona but what works for me is that the monkey represents how we look at celebrity and fame.

 

No matter where these people are or what they’re doing, we ask them to perform for us. It is, a lot of times, like going to the zoo and expecting the monkeys to perform. People think that everyone should be able to turn it on depending on the situation. Performers are people too. They have their bad days and they have time when they don’t want to engage with people. That’s fine. It is a fact of life.

 

So what I loved about the use of CGI in Better Man was that this movie doesn’t use it to say some grander thing. It is just simply that performers are often seen as a performing monkey. There isn’t a scene in the film that makes this point clear, it wasn’t heavy handed. It was simply just the reality of using that CGI monkey.

Sure, the point could have been even simpler. It could have just been a “well, why not” decision but even so, I do think that it highlights our issues with celebrity and how we interact with those we love.

 

A celebrity is not at your disposal

 

We often hear stories of a celebrity being “rude” to a fan. Personally, I ask what the situation was surrounding it. Was this person at an event for their work? Or were they at their home, with friends, out with family, and you were bothering them? Was this a situation where they were supposed to meet someone or did you force a meeting to happen? All of those things matter because you may or may not have respected boundaries. Further more, when a performer isn’t working, they don’t really owe you anything. It is a common misconception that a celebrity must always be open for fans because fans feel like they are owed. Yes, you support them and watch their work but that doesn’t mean they owe you a meet and great when they’re eating dinner.

 

The idea that a celebrity is a performing monkey is one that has been widely discussed and it is why I think the subtle use of it within Better Man is so fascinating. Yes, on the one hand, we have the simple excuse of people talking about the movie because of the CGI monkey version of Williams but I do think the conversation can and should go deeper into celebrity and what we expect of them.

 

https://www.themarysue.com/the-cgi-monkey-r...-in-better-man/

Edited January 20Jan 20 by Sydney11

:lol:

 

@1881139204501205011

:wub:

 

@1881127627869786128

Fab drawing by Steve McGarry cartoonist and illustrator

 

@1881425000915505493

 

 

Some great illustrations on link https://t.co/LS56vJquqN

Edited January 20Jan 20 by Sydney11

£192K in Russia Alex ^_^

 

 

 

 

I wonder how long more it will remain in cinemas :unsure:

£192K in Russia Alex ^_^

 

 

 

Laura. Is Germany included in these figures, they seem to be behind with the data for some countries so not sure if they are included in the worldwide gross , not that it makes much difference tbh but at the the figures are climbing instead of falling but how many more weeks will they keep it in the cinemas :unsure:

 

 

@1881727518631416037

 

 

Link to podcast https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/revie...i=1000684864241

Edited January 22Jan 22 by Sydney11

UPD 21.01.2025

 

WW Box Office

 

Better Man vs. The Brutalist

$14,091,888 vs. $5,875,094

 

--------------------------------------------------------------

 

International Box Office (without US/Canada)

*comparison of the countries with any known figures*

 

Better Man vs. Taylor Swift - The Eras Tour

 

Australia: $2,822,222 vs. $5,957,183

Czech Republic: $67,696 vs. $227,405

Germany: $1,571,780 vs. $3,911,805

Hungary: $31,000 vs. $141,648

Italy: $606,759 vs. $1,123,831

Netherlands: $524,810 vs. $474,456

New Zealand: $251,132 vs. $884,104

Portugal: $26,283 vs. $356,645

Slovakia: $32,217 vs. $79,575

Spain: $317,914 vs. $1,909,337

UAE: $82,979 vs. $697,076

UK: $7,084,402 vs. $15,159,422

Went to see it again tonight with my daughters. ^_^

 

They both really enjoyed it but were a bit irked by the timeline jumping about.

 

They kept asking me "did that really happen? Did this really happen?" :lol:

 

My favourite scene is Knebworth. Both to enjoy in awe the size of the crowd and the surreal moment where he slays his demons.

 

Both the Rock DJ and She's the one scenes are amazing too.

 

Also the girls thought the movie should have included his meeting Ayda -which I do agree with to a certain extent.

 

Glad I saw it again. :cheer:

Laura. Is Germany included in these figures, they seem to be behind with the data for some countries so not sure if they are included in the worldwide gross , not that it makes much difference tbh but at the the figures are climbing instead of falling but how many more weeks will they keep it in the cinemas :unsure:

 

 

Yes - they did include Germany Tess. ^_^

 

I'm sure in the UK it won't be around much longer which is a shame because it is making slow but steady numbers each day around the world