Entertainment Express: TIFF, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Bullets over Broadway, Jack White, The Beatles

Hello! Thanks to Slate, I’m making my way through the best of the New Yorker mag, before its new paywall goes up in 3 months. You can too.

* The Toronto International Film Festival – TIFF – announced the first slate of films its bagged to premiere in September. They include two featuring Reese Witherspoon, one of which is Wild, which I cannot wait to see. A lot of the line-up seems to be filled with meaty roles for men –  the likes of Richard Gere, Michael Douglas, Chris Rock, and Adam Sander, who’ll be offering something a little different in playing a porn-addicted father.

* “You know I got your back, just like a turtle shell…” The upcoming Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie now has a theme song, courtesy Wiz Khalifa, Juicy J and Ty Dolla $ign. A video for Shell Shocked is due to be released next week, while the movie comes out in August. It’s no Vanilla Ice, but then again nothing will ever etch itself in my mind quite like the theme song from the cartoon. “Heroes in a half shell! Turtle power!”

* Another Broadway musical is having to close early, this time Bullets over Broadway, Woody Allen’s first venture into the Great White Way. It’ll close on August 24th. Saul Williams makes a few interesting points about why his musical, Holler if Ya Hear Me had to close early too, in an interview with Rolling Stone, and while they may be different subject matters, it seems both suffered from theatre-goers thinking the show is still going to be there in September and October, so they put off seeing it until then.

* When he’s not covering Jay Z’s 99 Problems or Lorde’s Royals, Jack White is putting his weight behind a new venture, Third Man Books, following on from Third Man Records, which he started in 2001. The first book out next month is a 321-page hardcover book of poetry and art called Language Lessons: Volume I, accompanied, naturally, by an LP compilation. 

* There are many things I fault BuzzFeed for, but in giving us Ethan Hawke‘s Black Album of purposefully and carefully-arranged solo songs from the Beatles, as seen in the movie Boyhood, they have won my eternal gratitude.

[Pic: TIFF]