Well, hello Jennifer Garner, it’s good to see you again. I know, she hasn’t gone anywhere and can be found in a handful of family dramas every year. But for me, her upcoming turn in the action film Peppermint is a welcome reminder of how much of a badass the former Alias star can be. There was a time when Hollywood thought her the next great female action star, so maybe she’s due for a Liam Neeson-like career renaissance?
Pepperment is directed by Pierre Morel, who could also use a career reinvention. The Luc Besson disciple made a splash with District B13 a little film you might have heard of called Taken (*ding ding ding*), but has bombed with his last two movies, From Paris with Love and The Gunman. And this movie looks pretty great, with Garner playing a mother who transforms herself into a killing machine after her husband and daughter are murdered. Here’s the synopsis:
“Peppermint” tells the story of young mother Riley North (Garner) who awakens from a coma after her husband and daughter are killed in a brutal attack on the family. When the system frustratingly shields the murderers from justice, Riley sets out to transform herself from citizen to urban guerilla. Channeling her frustration into personal motivation, she spends years in hiding honing her mind, body and spirit to become an unstoppable force – eluding the underworld, the LAPD and the FBI – as she methodically delivers her personal brand of justice.
Penned by Chad St. John (London Has Fallen) with John Gallagher Jr., John Ortiz, Method Man, Richard Cabral, and Annie Ilonzeh co-starring, Peppermint opens September 7th.
We’re happy to offer our DC readers the chance to attend a free advance screening of Hotel Artemis, starring Jodie Foster, Dave Bautista, Sterling K. Brown, Sofia Boutella, Jeff Goldblum, and more.
SYNOPSIS: Set in riot-torn, near-future Los Angeles, HOTEL ARTEMIS is an original, high-octane action-thriller starring Jodie Foster as The Nurse, who runs a secret, members-only hospital for criminals. Jodie Foster is joined by an all-star cast that includes Sterling K. Brown, Sofia Boutella, Jeff Goldblum, Bryan Tyree Henry, Jenny Slate, Zachary Quinto, Charlie Day, and Dave Bautista.
The screening takes place on Wednesday, June 6th at 7:30pm at AMC Mazza Gallerie. If you’d like a chance to win, simply complete the required steps in the Rafflecopter form below. Winners will be selected on Sunday, June 3rd and notified by email. Good luck!
It’s been a month since Dreamworks began to lift the veil on How to Train Your Dragon 3, revealing the official synopsis and the title, ‘The Hidden World‘. With a trailer finally due to arrive next week, they’ve decided to whet our appetite with the first poster, which reveals that Toothless has found himself a potential mate.
How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World takes place after Hiccup (Jay Baruchel) has risen to lead Berk, while his dragon pal Toothless discovers that he isn’t the last of his kind. The poster is very telling, as it shows Hiccup standing between Toothless and a female Night Fury, clearly teasing a break in their friendship. The official synopsis hints at a fraying of their bond, as well…
What began as an unlikely friendship between an adolescent Viking and a fearsome Night Fury dragon has become an epic trilogy spanning their lives. In this next chapter, Hiccup and Toothless will finally discover their true destinies: the village chief as ruler of Berk alongside Astrid, and the dragon as leader of his own kind. As both ascend, the darkest threat they’ve yet faced—as well as the appearance of a female Night Fury—will test the bonds of their relationship like never before.
The previous film was an Oscar nominee for Best Animated Feature and really helped take Dreamworks Animation to the next level. I’m curious to see if franchise director Dean DeBlois will wrap up the story here or if he’ll leave the door open for more sequels. I think we know what Dreamworks would like to see happen.
How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World opens March 1st 2019 and includes the voices of America Ferrera, Cate Blanchett, Kit Harington, Kristen Wiig, Craig Ferguson, and F. Murray Abraham.
Tom Cruise is feeling the need…the need for speed. We haven’t heard much about a Top Gun sequel since Cruise set his Oblivion director Joseph Kosinski to helm the project, but clearly work has been taking place behind the scenes. Cruise has dropped a new photo heralding the start of production on Top Gun: Maverick, and it looks like the flight suit still fits. Dude’s still got it.
Originally it was to be Tony Scott returning to helm the picture before his death in 2012. Cruise kept pushing forward, however, and has done a pretty good job of keeping plot details under wraps. He’ll reprise his role as Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, and previous statements have teased the impact of drone warfare on old ace fighter pilots like him. We don’t know much else, other than Cruise’s intention to maintain the tone of Top Gun, which should mean plenty of high-flying action. Despite Val Kilmer’s confusing comments from a few years ago we don’t know anybody in the supporting cast. I’m guessing Kelly McGillis is out.
Top Gun 2 is slated to take off on July 13th 2019.
This is almost too funny at this point. Or pathetic, I guess. The Crow remake, which looked like it was finally going to take flight with Jason Momoa and director Corin Hardy, has crashed and burned yet again as both have exited the film. This comes not long after Sony had dated the film for October 11th 2019. So much for that.
And this looks like the kind of departure that could doom the film for good. As Deadline notes, not only did Hardy and Momoa formally withdraw from the film “this morning”, but Sony Pictures was “close to exiting as the film’s worldwide distributor” due to creative and financial issues with the rights holder. Production would have kicked off in just a few weeks, too.
So what does this mean for the cursed project that has been years in the making? Honestly, who cares? Let it die. An attempted remake has been in the works since 2008 (!!!), with multiple directors and stars passing through, all in hopes of bringing the story of vengeful Eric Draven back to the big screen. Even with huge names like Mark Wahlberg and Bradley Cooper attached at different stages none of them got off the ground.
Now it may be done for good, which would be exactly what Alex Proyas, director of the cult classic 1994 movie, has always wanted. He didn’t think a remake should happen because it would diminish the legacy of deceased star Brandon Lee. Maybe now is a good time to bury this movie once and for all.
Part High Fidelity, part Earth Girls Are Easy, the intergalactic punk rock rom-com How to Talk to Girls at Parties springs forth from the fertile mind of author Neil Gaiman (full disclosure: my favorite writer), whose bizarro world sensibilities find a kindred spirit in Hedwig and the Angry Inch director John Cameron Mitchell. Together they’ve created the most daft teen romance to ever take place during an alien invasion, or the most offbeat alien invasion to ever have a teen romance? There’s no simple way to categorize this maniacal misfit love story, which, like the counter-culture icons it champions, is exactly what makes it so endearing. Who wants another bland, “normal” romance movie, anyway?
It’s 1977 in the hard-scrabble London suburbs of Croydon where three rowdy punk-obsessed friends spend their time and limited resources looking for trouble, girls, and their latest punk rock fix. Enn (Alex Sharp, too old at 29 years of age) is the group’s straight-arrow, although he’s something of a square and at first he seems like the kind of guy Matthew Lillard would have ripped in SLC Punk!. His buddies are bad boy Vic (AJ Lewis) and amiable sidekick John (Ethan Lawrence), who join him at an underground club run by punk mistress Boadicea (Nicole Kidman), her resembling the lovechild of Andy Warhol and David Bowie.
After rocking out they are drawn by exotic sounds to a mysterious after party that resembles, all at once, a Coneheads skit, a Russ Meyer retrospective, and a human zoo of spandexed oddities. Into this spaced-out den of weirdos Enn connects with Zan (a luminous Elle Fanning), who turns out to be a member of an extraterrestrial clan/cult sent to Earth to consume as much of its culture as possible. But they have very strict rules on…well, everything (you should see their “mating” ritual. Hint: it involves anal probing and cell division), and Zan is only allowed 48 hours to run off with Enn so he can show her “the punk.”
As someone who wouldn’t know the Sex Pistols from the Ramones if quizzed on it, I’ve still always loved the rebellious attitude of punk rock at peak popularity. While the film only scratches the surface of the music scene, which may be disappointing to those seeking more, the constantly roaring soundtrack and anarchist spirit hit like a bass boom to the chest. Gaiman’s gift for creative detail mixes with Mitchell’s glam rock sensibilities like a Molotov cocktail, exploding in an array of wild colors, costumes, dance numbers, and the occasional psychedelic mind trip. It can be tiring to keep up with so many off the wall antics but Enn and Zan’s romance, which blooms out of his innocence and her extreme curiosity about the world (“Show me the punk!”), is so charming that you just sit back and go with it. Their unusual, interspecies bond solidifies in an adrenaline-fueled display of impromptu harmonizing that’s like Once if everyone was tripping on acid. Not only is it the film’s most intensely satisfying moment but it serves to pump up what had been a sagging narrative. For all of the film’s many bursts of energy it occasionally gets bogged down in its own weirdness. In expanding on Gaiman’s short story, Mitchell and co-writer Philippa Gosett sometimes struggle to make this more than just one great idea. That said, it’s tough to deny watching Zan discover the wonders of jam or make socially awkward sexual references.
How to Talk to Girls at Parties is many wonderfully peculiar things all at once, but it finds a certain rhythm that will be music to the right listener’s ears. Zan, while trying her alien best to figure out this punk thing that Enn loves so much, captures it best: “There are contradictions in your metaphor. But I am moved by it.”
Eight years after his breakout film and David Michod’s claim-to-fame is still Animal Kingdom. Granted, it’s an amazing movie and the cream of the crop of Australian crime thrillers, but his latter films The Rover and War Machine have proven forgettable at best. His ability to put together an A-list cast continues with his latest, The King, and joining the Shakespearean adaptation are a couple of familiar faces, Robert Pattinson and Ben Mendelsohn.
Pattinson, who starred in The Rover, and Animal Kingdom‘s Mendelsohn are joining the previously-cast Timothee Chalamet and Joel Edgerton, along with Lily-Rose Depp and Sean Harris. The film is based on Shakespeare’s Henry the IV and Henry V, and follows the young prince Hal as he inherits the throne from his brother during one of England’s most turbulent periods and must lead a successful conquest of France.
With Chalamet as Hal and Edgerton as Falstaff, Pattinson is set to play the the Dauphin, French prince The Dauphin, Mendelsohn as King Henry IV, and Depp as French Princess Catherine. Netflix has confirmed production is underway but as of now they have not set a release date. Probably in 2019, though.
Angelina Jolie is currently working on Disney’s Maleficent sequel, but if you thought she was done with the fairy tale reimaginings, think again. Deadline reports she and David Oyelowo are in talks to star in Come Away, a prequel both Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland. How exactly does that work?
Glad you asked, because it sounds really strange. First of all, the film will be directed by Oscar winner Brenda Chapman, who you may recall as the first director on Pixar’s Brave before she was let go over creative differences. She’ll be making her live-action debut this time, on a story that would center on young Peter and Alice, who happen to be siblings (!?!?) in this story. When their older third sibling dies in an accident, they “seek to save their parents (Jolie and Oyelowo) from their downward spirals of despair until finally they are forced to choose between home and imagination. This will set Peter and Alice on a course that will eventually lead him to Neverland and her to Wonderland.
Still, I’m not quite sure how that works, but that’s up to screenwriter Marissa Kate Goodhill to make clearer. I get it in one sense; kids using fantasy worlds to escape real-life pain is a common story thread (You should see I Kill Giants for a great recent example of it), but what do the works of JM Barrie and Lewis Carroll have to do with it?
Shooting could start in the fall once Jolie wraps on Maleficent 2, so we’ll just have to see how this develops.
I don’t know if this Sonic the Hedgehog story contradicts yesterday’s rumor about Paul Rudd leading the film or not, but Variety is now reporting Westworld‘s James Marsden is set to star. They don’t mention Rudd in the piece at all. Paramount picked up the rights to SEGA’s iconic video game character last year and set Oscar-nominated filmmaker Jeff Fowler to direct. Deadpool‘s Tim Miller will exec-produce.
Unclear in the story is exactly what Marsden will be doing. Will he be voicing Sonic in the CGI/live-action movie? Or will he be taking one of the main human roles? Rudd was said to be playing a cop who helps Sonic defeat the evil Dr. Robotnik. The only additional details are that Robotnik is imprisoning animals in robots and stolen chaos emeralds, which is basically the plot of the first Sonic video game from 1991.
While this will be Sonic’s first big screen movie to himself, he could be seen briefly in Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One and also appeared in Disney’s Wreck-It Ralph. Paramount has set Sonic the Hedgehog to open on November 15th 2019.
At this point it’s probably a good idea to take any news regarding the DCEU with a grain of salt, but grab a double handful when it comes to The Batman. Matt Reeves has revealed absolutely nothing of his movie, and we don’t even know if Ben Affleck’s role as the Caped Crusader is secured. Variety’s Justin Kroll urges caution with his latest rumor that Oswald Cobblepot aka Penguin could be the movie’s villain, or he may turn up in Harley Quinn spinoff Birds of Prey.
Reeves is still working on the script, so that could always change but of the multiple BIRDS OF PREY scripts submitted, one does have the Penguin as the main heavy. Either way, it seems WB wants this character cast in the universe sooner rather then later.
Penguin has been prominent of late thanks to Robin Lord Taylor’s enthusiastic performance in Gotham where he is a central figure. But on the big screen we haven’t seen Penguin in a live-action film since 1992’s Batman Returns portrayed memorably by Danny DeVito. So the timing is right for Penguin to get his due, although to me it sounds like Reeves has done next to nothing with his script. You mean to tell me he still doesn’t know who his villain is after all this time? If Penguin instead shows up in Birds of Prey, it’ll be up to director Cathy Yan and screenwriter Christina Hodson to figure out what to do with the infamous Bat-foe. There have been really silly versions of Penguin and some in which he’s very cruel and deadly, so it really could go anywhere.
There was a time last year when Josh Gad was lobbying hard to play Penguin and reportedly even met with DC brass about it. He’d be perfect for it, and something tells me if he still wants the role it will be his.
