Box office of culture: Kendrick Lamar, rapper apart?

Welcome to the Box Office, the show’s weekly meeting place Soft Power. Every week, we peel the trends of the culture and the biggest successes of the moment. In partnership with the GfK study institute for books and video games and CBO Box Office for the cinema.

A “Mirror” all in poetry by Kendrick Lamar

We report this week the publication of an interesting musical biography of Kendrick Lamar signed by the French music critic Nicolas Rogès published by Le Mot et le reste. Born in 1987 in Compton, California, Kendrick Lamar is one of the kings of hip hop, but his influence was first ground and jazz. His new album addresses the great conflicting themes of the artist’s imagination: identity, spirituality, mortality, monogamy. But no title has sparked more debate online than “Auntie Diaries”, in which the artist explores the evolution of her relationship with her transgender relatives. “My aunt is a man now / I think I’m old enough to understand now.” Very strong, really very strong.

The rapper is more political, more poetic than many of his co-religionists (because rap is a religion) and above all he is less “gangsta” than many: “respect” is his mantra, his motto. All things that earned him a Pulitzer Prize, a great first for rap.
After 5 years of diet, Kendrick Lamar returns with this album Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers – who holds up a mirror to us…

Two literary monuments lead literary sales

In literature, it is unsurprisingly the unpublished novel by Céline, War, which arrives – by far – at the top of literary sales this week. A short, colorful text, scandalous in its own way – and moreover lewd. This jewel which has the “perfection of vulgar generosity” to speak as a poet dates from 1934. It is a first draft, slang and in rage, difficult to decipher, containing little punctuation but it is, writes Jérome Dupuis in The worlda real “miracle”. And a good deal for Gallimard, which has put 80,000 copies in circulation in bookstores and has just made a new print run. Celine’s other unpublished works, London and The Will of King Krogoldwill appear in the fall before a complete edition of pipe breaker in 2023.

Sales ranking of the week, literary fiction category.

Annie Ernaux tops “non-fiction” sales, according to our partner GFK, for her memoirs entitled The young man, a very (very) short text of 48 pages. Ernaux recounts the relationship with a man thirty years younger, an experience that rejuvenated him and allowed him to grow in his writing.

Ranking of sales of the week, essays and documents category.

Michel Hazanavicius returns to genre film

In the rooms, Dr. Strange in the multiverse madness remains the leader. The film once again attracted 614,000 spectators this week, enabling it to cross the bar of 2 million cumulative admissions in the second week. The film nevertheless disappointed by its length, its complexity and should be far from the historical success of Spider-Man, No Way Home last December, which brought together more than 7 million French people thanks to the multiverse precisely.
Another noteworthy release is that of the new film by Michel Hazanavicius, popular for its two OSS117. This time the film is called Cut!, and it’s a parody of the zombie movies, French sauce. This Wednesday, it made nearly 23,000 admissions for its first day of release, a score obviously less impressive than the director’s more mainstream productions (OSS17, The Forgotten Prince) but a little better than for “Le Redoutable” which returned to the New Wave made in Jean-Luc Godard. To see how this nice film evolves.

“The First Lady”: mixed returns on the new historico-political series from Showtime

On the series side, we put a break on the series The First Lady on Showtime, dedicated to the history of American First Ladies. This first creation was perhaps a little ambitious for Aaron Cooley, even if one could suspect it with a subject such as the institution that represents that of the place of the American First Lady.
Viola Davis as Michelle Obama, Michelle Pfeiffer as Betty Ford and Gillian Anderson as Eleanor Roosevelt constitute a solid cast, even if the English-language press was not subjugated. More generally, the series has received numerous criticisms related to the treatment of the subject and the quality of the dialogues, resulting in an interpretation perceived as very superficial. However, to judge seriously, French critics should in principle wait for its release in France on Canal+ by the end of the year.

“Nintendo Switch Sports” still in the lead, and the end of the FIFA-EA Games financial windfall

The FIFA franchise is doing well – but the sky is cloudy since the announcement, which upsets the video game sector, of the end of the contract between FIFA and the studio “Electronic Arts” last week. According to New York Times, the agreement that bound them until 2024 will not be renewed, the international federation having doubled the bids. Added to this was a reluctance to renew the exclusive nature of the agreement, with FIFA eyeing other video game partnerships. The franchise has brought publisher Electronic Arts more than 20 billion euros since 1993 – but the windfall is about to dry up… On the sales side of the week, Nintendo Switch Sports continue to please.

Sales ranking of the week, video games category.

THIS BOX OFFICE IS FROM THE SHOW “THE PUBLISHING WORLD IN 2022” OF MAY 22, 2022.
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