Ever year you can count on at least a handful of Malick-esque dramas to pass through the Sundance Film Festival. This year it was Jeremiah Zagar’s surreal, lyrical adaptation of We the Animals that most captured the Terrence Malick mystique, captured in a mesmeric new trailer before the film’s release towards the end of summer.
Based on the 2011 book by Justin Torres, We the Animals centers on three brothers: Jonah, Manny, and Joel, whose childhood in upstate New York is shaped by their parents’ volatile relationship. Torres’ book follows the siblings from youth to adulthood, as two of the boys become mirror images of their irresponsible father, and the youngest brother looks for an escape.
Zagar took home the coveted NEXT Innovator Award at Sundance, and it’s easy to see why. The trailer strikes an impressive, haunting image, and it’s easy to see some of the Tree of Life visual cues. But Zagar has an energy that’s raw, less polished than Malick’s, almost like Benh Zeitlin’s masterful Beasts of the Southern Wild. And the performances by a cast mostly of unknowns look strong, as well.
Here’s the synopsis:
Manny, Joel, and Jonah tear their way through childhood. Their mother and father have a volatile relationship that makes and unmakes the family many times over, often leaving the boys fending for themselves. As their parents rip at one another, Manny and Joel harden and grow into versions of their father. With the triumvirate fractured, Jonah, who is the youngest, becomes increasingly aware of his desperate need to escape. Driven to the edge, Jonah embraces an imagined world all his own.
Starring Sheila Vand, Raul Castillo, Evan Rosado, Isaiah Kristian, and Josiah Gabriel, We the Animals opens August 17th.
For Anthony Scott Burns’ feature directing debut, Our House, he’s not content to stick with one genre, but to combine two of them to hopefully make something great. Paranormal horror and science-fiction merge with the IFC Midnight release, which stars Thomas Mann of Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, and Nicolas Peltz from Transformers: Age of Extinction.
Featuring a script co-written by Nathan Parker (Moon), Our House centers on a tragedy that forces an older brother to stay at home caring for his younger siblings. In his spare time he works on an invention that he hopes will generate wireless electricity, but instead it inadvertently raises the spirits of the dead, and that may include those of his dead parents.
This looks to me like your typical everyday indie chiller, but the thing that has me interested is the duo of Mann and Peltz. Mann appears seemingly everywhere, from Project X to Kong: Skull Island to last month’s Brain on Fire, and he’s always solid. Peltz gets flack for her Transformers role but we know how badly women are written in those. She did good stuff over on Bates Motel, so maybe horror is the genre that suits her best.
ScarJo just can’t win. Last year Scarlett Johansson took heat for her role in Ghost in the Shell, in which she played a character that is Asian in the source material, leading to a frankly overblown discussion on whitewashing. It was recently reported the actress would star in biopic Rub & Tug, a reunion with that film’s director Rupert Sanders, and the role called for her to play Jean Marie Gill, or as he would be later known as, Dante “Tex” Gill. Why is this a big deal and a headache for Johansson? Because Gill was transgender, and Johansson…well, she ain’t.
There’s more to this than just outrage that an LGBTQ actor hasn’t been hired to play the role of Gill, there’s the fact that Gill was misidentified in the original reporting. In reality, Gill is nearly always misidentified as a gay woman who cross-dressed as a man, when it turns out Gill had transitioned to male. It’s a mistake I made, as well, but to be fair EVERYTHING I’ve ever read on Gill has misidentified him, even official accounts of his crime activities running massage parlors that were a front for an illegal steroids ring.
Some of the backlash to Johansson’s casting has caught up to the actress and she issued this statement: “Tell them that they can be directed to Jeffrey Tambor, Jared Leto, and Felicity Huffman’s reps for comment.”
Damn, Widow! She pulled out the award winners on ya’ll! Leto won an Oscar for playing a trans woman in Dallas Buyers Club, while Huffman was an Oscar nominee for her role in Transamaerica. Tambor was the Emmy-winning lead of acclaimed Amazon series Transparent.
I do feel like Johansson is being singled out here, because she’s such a high-profile star and due to the controversy stirred by Ghost in the Shell. Her agents probably should have warned her this would happen. As trans stories are being told more and more, and we are seeing a slight increase in the appropriate actors starring in those productions, it’s only going to draw more attention when they are passed over for a cisgender star. [Bustle]
I don’t know if Sony will ever reach the heights of Marvel Studios, but they’re going to give it a go. Not only do they have their growing Spider-Man cinematic universe, they’ve begun to establish a franchise around the Valiant Comics characters including Bloodshot, Harbinger and the newly-acquired Faith. And now they’re adding another comic title, an adaptation of Image Comics series Skyward brought to the big screen by Rampage director Brad Peyton and Lucifer showrunner Joe Henderson.
Variety confirms Sony has acquired the film rights to Skyward, which Henderson co-created with Lee Garbett and launched in April. Henderson will adapt the script himself and exec-produce, with Peyton directing. The concept behind the comic is pretty cool, taking place in a world where gravity has become a fraction of what it is now, due to an event called G-Day. Years later, the world has adapted to the change in gravity and many have come to love it. One of those is Willa Fowler, a young woman born the day after G-Day, but has uncovered a dangerous conspiracy to restore gravity to what it was.
I don’t know much about Skyward, but I do know Brad Peyton is a filmmaker given to making big, crowd-pleasing action movies. His most successful ones, Journey 2: The Mysterious Island, San Andreas, and Rampage, have all starred Dwayne Johnson. Makes me wonder if there’s a role that could fit the superstar actor.
Well, the casting agents for Top Gun: Maverick were showing a need for speed on this one. It was only a few days ago we learned Miles Teller, Glen Powell, and Nicholas Hoult were up to play the son of Nick “Goose” Bradshaw in the long-awaited sequel. And already we know who won the gig, and it’s the guy with an inside track the others didn’t have.
Variety confirms Teller for the role, making this a reteaming with director Joseph Kosinski who he worked with on last year’s firefighter film Only the Brave. He joins Tom Cruise, returning as Peter “Maverick” Mitchell, and Val Kilmer as Tom “Iceman” Kazanski. While we don’t know how Goose’s son will factor into the plot, the character seems like an obvious choice to be the central focus. Teller has been in some prominent films already; Fantastic Four, Divergent, War Dogs, and of course Best Picture contender Whiplash, but this could be the one that really gets him noticed. Assuming he gets any time with Cruise still around taking up all the oxygen.
You can’t keep a good killer doll down. The Child’s Play franchise has been going strong for 30 years, and MGM plans to keep it alive for 30 more. Lars Klevberg (Polaroid) is to direct a new reboot from a script by Kung Fury‘s Tyler Burton Smith. Hoping to score another horror hit will be It producers Seth Grahame-Smith and David Katzenberg.
So how will Chucky be brought back to kill this time? Well, that’s where things get a little complicated. The reboot is expected to feature a “technologically advanced’ version of the murderous doll, and when I hear that I get thoughts of Chucky flying weaponized drones or something. He’ll be terrorizing a group of kids said to be in the Stranger Things mold. That said, it’s not clear this new film will even have Chucky in it, or if Brad Dourif will be providing his voice as he has since the beginning. Also, series creator Don Mancini may not have anything to do with it as he just confirmed a Chucky TV series is in the works.
There’s also some boring legal stuff going on with the franchise’s rights. Universal has control over the home release market, while MGM seems to have found a way to work around that and do this new thing. That means there’s a greater likelihood of a totally different creative team to give this Child’s Play reboot a fresh spin. Collider, who broke this news, speculate MGM wanted to pull a fast one on audiences in the same way The Woods was suddenly revealed to be a new Blair Witch. Didn’t they get the memo those cheap gimmicks don’t work anymore? Speaking of gimmicks, the entire Chucky franchise turned into one, getting dumber and more over-the-top as they went along.
The most recent Child’s Play film was last year’s Cult of Chucky. There have been seven movies total centering on a young boy who receives a Good Guy doll possessed by the malevolent spirit of serial killer Charles Lee Ray.
Production on the reboot is expected to begin in September, so we should start hearing more details soon.
Is there such a thing as a good overtly right-wing Hollywood movie? I mean the ones that seem to only exist to speak to their particular audience and shame another? I don’t think so, and it’s almost a guarantee that the “secret” pro-life Roe v. Wade film directed by Sofia Vergara’s ex Nick Loeb (he of that whole frozen embryo debacle) and starring a bunch of anti-choice conservatives is going to be awful.
Former Fox News pundit and GOP congressional flameout Stacey Dash will star as Mildred Jefferson, the first black woman to graduate from Harvard and the former president of the National Right to Life. Playing Supreme Court justices are a veritable who’s who of conservative actors such as Jon Voight, John Schneider, and Robert Davi, along with Corbin Bernsen, William Forsythe, Steve Guttenberg, Wade Williams, and Richard Portnow. Loeb says to expect some surprising cameos from “controversial figures” in the news, too. Would anybody be surprised if Neil Gorsuch or Clarence Thomas does a walk-on? This has Ann Coulter or Dinesh D’Souza written all over it.
The film centers on the landmark Supreme Court case, but it takes a decidedly anti-abortion stance that has made production a headache. See, Roe v. Wade is incredibly popular and especially so right now when it’s under greater threat than ever before. So people don’t want to have anything to do with a movie that attacks the decision. That’s forced Loeb to basically shoot the film in secret, even keeping aspects of its plot away from the people making the damn thing. Still, he’s had stars walk out, even crew such as electricians leaving in disgust, and he was barred from shooting at Louisiana State University. They were protested at Tulane, even though Loeb is an alumni.
Some of the shooting was done here in Washington, DC, and when the location manager found out what the movie was, promptly sent an email quitting the project.
Also leaving the film was the actress who reportedly “begged” for the role of Norma McCorvey aka Jane Roe when she found out it was taking a pro-life perspective.
Did I mention the original director also quit on the first day of shooting? Yeah, that’s how bad this is. It’s the only reason why Loeb and Cathy Allyn are co-directing when they were meant to just co-produce and co-write the script.
So why is this movie happening at all? Loeb says his feud with Vergara over frozen embryos informed his outlook..
“I have my own pro-life issue going on with my fight over embryos, but no one has really told the whole truth about Roe v. Wade in a film. When I delved into this, I discovered conspiracy theories, fake news, made-up statistics and a whole lot of people involved who switched their positions from pro-choice to pro-life, including Norma.”
Loeb insists that despite losing some investors he has enough notable ones, although he won’t say who they are. That’s fine, they deserve their privacy. A January release date is being negotiated with distributors now, and we’ll see where that goes and who it ends up with. They’ll hope for the God’s Not Dead marketing package, not the Atlas Shrugged one, I’m guessing.
I’m sure conservatives will look at this as an example of the stranglehold the “liberal elites” have over Hollywood, but that’s not what this is. I don’t see any “elite” anything working on this, and people are within their rights to not want to be part of it. Those who protest don’t appear to have done so violently, they also just don’t want to have anything to do with it. This strikes me as a broader example of the civility argument going through political circles right now.
I believe anything with Stacey Dash in it deserves some form of protest, and that goes double for Jon Voight. Not necessarily because they’re conservative, but because they’re both nuts. And they’re bad at their jobs. [THR]
We know the Fast and the Furious movies are all about “family”, Vin Diesel always tells us so. Little did we know that also meant the bad guy’s family, because we’re getting a new member of the Shaw clan in the Hobbs & Shaw spinoff film. Joining the fam is The Crown‘s Vanessa Kirby, who will star alongside Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham.
Kirby, who has earned acclaim for her performance as Princess Margaret on Netflix’s royal drama, will play an MI-5 agent and the sister to Statham’s Deckard Shaw. Shaw started out as a criminal mastermind directly responsible for the death of Dominic Toretto’s friend, Han, but in films since he’s been refashioned into an antihero and partner for Johnson’s Luke Hobbs. Presumably screenwriter Chris Morgan will keep Shaw’s evolution going. So far we’ve met two other members of the Shaw crime family; Luke Evans as villain Owen Shaw and Helen Mirren as their matriarch, Magdalene.
For Kirby, this is her latest action flick since ending her run on The Crown. She also has a role in this summer’s Mission: Impossible-Fallout.
Directed by Deadpool 2‘s David Leitch, Hobbs & Shaw opens July 26th 2019. [Variety]
It’s only been a few months since word broke that HBO’s classic mob drama The Sopranos was getting a prequel movie, and in that span of time I’d already forgotten about it. Perhaps it’s because I didn’t think it would actually happen, but color me stupid because not only is it moving forward but now has a director in Alan Taylor.
Taylor, who might be familiar to fans of the show for directing numerous episodes, will be at the helm of The Many Saints of Newark. Series creator David Chase co-wrote the script with Lawrence Konner, and will take place decades earlier during a war between Italian and African-American residents of New Jersey. Characters from the show are expected to appear, although the same actors probably won’t because of the obvious time difference.
The last few years Taylor has been having one lousy experience after another on Hollywood blockbusters. He essentially had control of Thor: The Dark World yanked from him in post-production, and Terminator: Genisys was just plain lousy and killed the franchise. That said, his TV work is actually quite good. Besides The Sopranos he also directed episodes of Six Feet Under, Mad Men, Game of Thrones, and Deadwood.
No word on a start date but now that Taylor is in place expect things to move swiftly.
Through what are now four wildly successful movies, The Purge franchise has been plugged into the raw anger being felt in this country like nothing else before it. There’s no coincidence that the previous film, The Purge: Election Year, dropped in 2016 during the most “deplorable” political campaign ever. Its premise of an annual event in which all violent crime is legal for 12 hours highlighting the split between the defenseless poor and the bloodthirsty one percent who both created the Purge and use it to advance their agenda. And now we have The First Purge, which takes us back to the night of murder’s origins, and the biggest surprise isn’t how the Purge was started, it’s how the first one ends.
Franchise writer/director James DeMonaco handles scripting duties only this time, passing the directorial reins over to Gerard McMurray (Burning Sands), but you’ll never know the difference. Dumpster fires still litter every street corner while masked killers stalk their prey, while rich white politicians in ivory towers plot the downfall of the less fortunate. As these movies have become scarily timely, DeMonaco’s digs at our so-called democracy have become more overt. The marketing campaign for The First Purge featured prominently a red “MAGA” style Trump hat, and depending on who you ask these movies are the current Presidential administration cranked up to 11. In a sense they could be seen as a warning of what could happen if the most extreme, hardline strain of conservatism is ever allowed to go unchecked. There’s undoubtedly an audience out there who see The Purge as the one good idea ever to come from Hollywood. They probably won’t like the most blatant shot taken at Trump, a “Grab ’em by the pussy” moment that had the crowd howling.
No matter where you fall on the ideological spectrum, The First Purge will scratch your itch for politically-charged ultra-violence. The least complex and thus least creative film in the franchise since its debut, the inaugural Purge rolls out almost exactly as one might expect. With the economy in a shambles and crime at an all-time high, a third political party known as the New Founding Fathers of America (NFFA) get elected into office with the support of the NRA and other shadowy organizations. Newly-elected President Bracken, with the help of psychologist Dr. May Updale (Marisa Tomei, Aunt May created the Purge!!!?), decide Staten Island is the perfect test vehicle for the first Purge, taking advantage of the poor by paying residents to stay in town through the evening’s killings. Or in other cases, paying residents to go out and do the dirty deeds themselves.
The city’s residents rise up in opposition once the government starts taking steps to escalate the body count. There’s local drug kingpin Dmitri (Insecure‘s Y’lan Noel) who is forced to reconcile his criminal activities with the love he has for his ‘hood and the people in it, like Nya (Lex Scott Davis), his ex who has always stayed on the straight and narrow path. She fights to protect her brother Isaiah (Joivan Wade), who may be following too closely in Dmitri’s footsteps. All of that gets pushed aside when there are roving packs of KKK members with military grade weapons, and entire squads dressed like members of Hitler’s S.S.
The First Purge feels all too familiar until the final act when suddenly it starts to resemble an old school Blaxploitation flick. This gangbangers vs. Nazis riff is when DeMonaco is most inspired, and Noel does his best Wesley Snipes impression. There’s something about a badass black action hero cutting a path through a bunch of Nazi assholes. It’s a genius move both as a statement against those who foment the kind of racist hatred that gave birth to the Purge, but also just as a tonal change of pace for the franchise which could go on forever, shifting as the political winds so often do. It’s funny to think back to how different these movies felt five years ago in the time of hope and change. And now they are the eerie reflection in a mirror. With a new TV series coming up this fall, it’s a reflection we may be forced to look at a lot more, at least until DeMonaco gives us the inevitable Final Purge.
