Marvel has done a damn good job keeping the secrets of Avengers: Infinity War, as we have no clear idea of what truly happens to our beloved heroes. With the film expected to rollout in sneak previews across the country in coming weeks, that has fueled fears of something major being spoiled. Fortunately Marvel, and Thanos, have a plan to keep that from happening.
A tweet by directors the Russo Brothers reveals that Marvel will only screen the first 30 minutes to fans during those previews. That said, the directors are pleading, with the help of hashtag #ThanosDemandsYourSilence, that those who see the film don’t spoil anything. They are then joined in that request by stars Robert Downey Jr., Tom Holland, and Jeremy Renner who is apparently in the movie, too. Just kidding, Hawkeye’s whereabouts are one of the many things we don’t want spoiled.
Avengers: Infinity War opens April 27th, and of course I will do my best not to spoil anything in my review.
There can never be enough Star Wars material, right? Depends on who you ask, really, and lately there has been a lot of discussion about the amount of Star Wars projects since Lucasfilm was bought by Disney. We’ve seen three movies over the last three years and another in Solo: A Star Wars Story arriving next month. Is there such a thing as too much? We already know Mark Hamill thinks so, but what about The Last Jedi director, Rian Johnson? What does he think?
Speaking with The LA Times, Johnson, who is working on a brand new Star Wars trilogy, says Lucasfilm needs to keep branding out and expanding the universe to keep audiences interested, otherwise the franchise’s future will be in doubt…
“When people ask me, ‘Don’t you think people are going to get sick of Star Wars movies?’ to me that question indicates that they’re thinking of Star Wars movies as a museum exhibit that is wheeled out once a year so you can say, ‘Oh, I loved that thing. Oh, I remember that thing!’ And yes, if Star Wars is that, people are going to get sick of it really quickly.
But if Star Wars are great new movies that are exciting and fresh, and that challenge you and surprise you and make you feel things and engage you the way that those original movies did—but always taking you to new places, both in the galaxy and emotionally—that’s never going to get old. That’s what it’s all about.”
That was something Johnson attempted to do with The Last Jedi, breaking free from the narrative confines these movies have been in for decades. The reaction was divisive, to say the least. But at least he did it, tweaking the Force and re-examining the Jedi’s place in the universe in a way that had never been done.
And that is what Johnson hopes to do even further with his trilogy, examining the Star Wars mythology far away from the Skywalker clan…
“It’s fun because it’s kind of thinking, ‘Okay, outside of the Skywalker story and outside of the recognizable iconography, what is this? What is “Star Wars?”‘ Or what do we need to retain from that, to pull forward for it to still be ‘Star Wars’ — and what can we leave behind?”
The next Star Wars film is Solo: A Star Wars Story, opening on May 25th. Johnson’s trilogy has no start or release date yet.
Last week Black Lightning dropped one hell of a bombshell. Gambi was taken hostage by his former ASA employers for turning his back on them in favor of protecting Jefferson and in the process, was taken hostage and went through some extreme torture. Lucky for him, Freeland’s best metahuman vigilante was there to bail him out, even though they are still not on good terms. Jefferson managed to use his Black Lightning powers to distract the guards for Gambi to finally show up just how much of a badass he really was. Unfortunately, that raised ASA head Proctor’s suspicion that Jefferson himself was Black Lightning. Proctor then called his “inside man,” Jefferson’s vice principal Kara was in fact, working with the bad guys helping flood the streets with Green Light in the hopes to study metahuman side effects on the community.
The episode begins with Jefferson and Anissa doing what they do best and raiding yet another ASA warehouse in the hopes of finding the missing children who were kidnapped once their powers manifested after taking the new drug Green Light. Instead of finding the children through, they find an ASA warehouse filled with “anti-Black Lightning” weapons. This has Gambi concerned as not only are they planning on killing Jefferson, but they also have found a way to evade Gambi’s tracking systems, meaning that eventually, Jefferson could fall into one of their traps.
Now that we know Kara is working with the ASA, some of her behavior seems to make a little more sense. Instead of us seeing her and combinative with Jefferson for what could be seen as career ambition, we now know that she has nefarious purposes. However, it does seem that she cares for Jefferson as her hesitation to carry out ASA orders happens in this episode. In the aftermath of raiding the warehouse and destroying the weapons, Kara bribes a few corrupt police officers to arrest Jefferson in the hopes that the ASA will get involved, take him into custody, and find out that he’s Black Lighting and deal with him once and for all. After paying off the cops, they tell her that they’ll have an arrest warrant for Jefferson soon enough.
The next day all seems well for Jefferson at school. He greets his kids and gets them ready for another productive day. Soon enough, a horde of police officers arrives at the high school. We see them go through their corrupt means as they first break into Jefferson’s car, plant drugs in his care and his office, then come with a search warrant identifying him as some sort of drug dealer. Both of his daughters are rightfully pissed. Anissa even gets ready to use her Thunder powers, but their father tells both of them to relax, be strong, and it will all sort itself out. For a chunk of the episode, we get to see that all too familiar tale of what many black people have to deal with when in police custody. The demeaning process of being booked including stripping naked, the abuse, and the very cold shoulder they receive at the hands of people who are sworn to protect them and uphold the law. Once again, this is a very honest and raw portrayal of being black in America all wrapped in a network TV show. If anyone tells a black man that “All Lives Matter” talking point, I present you with Black Lightning: exhibit A.
Inspector Henderson, one of the few good cops on the force, who knows Jefferson personally and knows that he’s not capable of all this, tries to assure his friends that something’s wrong and he will resolve it. He also launches his own investigation into his fellow officers and finds out that some of them are on the take and through threatening one of the corrupt cops, he is able to learn that the evidence has been planted.
Anissa and Gambi have their own ideas to get Jefferson out. If Anissa tries to break him out via her powers, it will confirm that Jefferson is Black Lightning and the ASA will kill him. Gambi assures Anissa that Jefferson could break himself out if he truly wanted to. Instead, they try to convince people that Jefferson is NOT Black Lightning. To do so, Gambi invents a hologram contraption that will make it look like Black Lightning is standing next to her when she’s Thunder. They make a public display having her jog through the city and with the hologram activated, it looks like Black Lightning is not in jail, taking the ASA’s suspicion of Jefferson invalid.
With Jefferson “not” being Black Lightning, and the revelation that Jefferson was falsely accused by the police department, he was released from prison. The family is reunited, and everything works out at the end. Henderson makes a press conference announcing the arrest of the corrupt police officers and announcing that it’s a new day in Freeland.
Next week, Tobias makes his return to take on Black Lightning.
Future World! Sounds like an awesome place, right? Like maybe something out of Tomorrowland? Well, no. Future World is decidedly not awesome, looking like a very poor man’s version of Mad Max: Fury Road, only with James Franco, Snoop Dogg, Lucy Liu, and a cast of stars way better than this acting like they’ve accidentally wandered onto the set. Somehow this thing is an actual movie, although I doubt anybody is eager to add this to their resume.
Unsurprisingly the film is co-directed by Franco, whose list of under-the-radar directing credits is suspect as shit, and I think he does it only to lend some cred (such as it is) to the other filmmaker’s project. For instance, Future World‘s co-director is his frequent cinematographer Bruce Thierry Chung, who began casting this thing way back in 2016, although it looks like a relic from 30 years ago and not in a good way. It’s hard to tell what the Hell is actually going on here because everybody is cranked up to eleven, either screaming, acting maniacal for unclear reasons, or laughing hysterically also for unclear reasons.
Here’s the synopsis to hopefully make some sense out of this: A young boy’s mother is dying and beyond the capabilities of any local medicine. Desperate for an answer, the boy travels across the barren future world wasteland, scavenging for a cure that is only rumored to exist. His will and perseverance will be tested as he strives to protect his family.
Nope, that didn’t help. The film’s lead is Suki Waterhouse (The Bad Batch, Assassination Nation), an android who appears to be on the run from Franco, who looks like he just took a dirt bath. I’m guessing her character’s name is Ash because Franco randomly tells us “Her name’s Ash” while the trailer seems occupied with other things. Then a bunch of goons in masks show up, get stabbed, Milla Jojovich arrives, so does Snoop (clearly high as a kite), and then my brain shut down for repairs. The film also features appearances by Method Man and Margarita Levieva, who Franco must have hired directly from HBO’s The Deuce, and Scott Haze who is in every Franco movie.
Future World opens on May 25th. Not sure where but I’m guessing it won’t be there long.
While we know Blumhouse for their vast array of hit horror movies, their portfolio is more diverse than many realize. Remember, they helped back that atrocious Jem and the Holograms movie from a couple years ago, and last year’s intriguing urban supernatural thriller Sleight. And now they’re venturing into revenge territory with Upgrade, which looks like John Wick with a sci-fi twist.
Directed by Leigh Whannell, who has been integral to the Saw and Insidious franchises, the film stars Tom Hardy lookalike Logan Marshall-Green as a guy whose wife is murdered, and in the process he becomes a paraplegic. To get revenge for her murder he’s implanted with experimental AI that gives him use of his legs and some other badass upgrades. It looks silly but kinda fun, too, so count this as another Blumhouse flick high on my list of things to see.
OF COURSE!!! I consider myself one of the few defenders of the Warner Bros./DCEU movies but even I have to admit these jokers have no clue what the Hell they are doing from moment to moment. Hence, we get a bunch of random projects revealed out of the blue, projects that don’t seem to make any sense, and so forth. One of those was Flashpoint, revealed last summer to be the title of The Flash’s standalone flick. Forget all of the troubles they’ve had finding a director for it, titling it Flashpoint was dumb because that is the title of a crucially important Flash story that the DCEU is simply not set up for.
And so it’s not surprising to learn that, hey, the movie might not be titled Flashpoint after all! The news was buried in another THR piece about writer Dan Mazeau who has been hired to adapt Ernest Cline’s Armada. The 2015 novel by the Ready Player One author is basically a riff on The Last Starfighter, centering on a video game champ who discovers the game he’s best at is really a recruiting tool for pilots to stop an alien invasion.
The report then casually drops that Mazeau previously worked on “the Warner Bros.’ Flash movie project when it was titled Flashpoint.”
Oh, okay. While this may seem minor, it really isn’t. Warner Bros. revealed a full logo for the movie, so they were ready to move forward on it. Perhaps they realized that Flashpoint, which features the Flash going back in time and mucking up the timeline in drastic ways, was just too much too soon. Or maybe they’ve decided to title it The Flash: Flashpoint so that audiences know who the heck is in the movie? I don’t know. That does seem to be what THR’s Borys Kit is suggesting in this tweet…
I didn’t say they weren’t adapting Flashpoint. All I said was that it wouldn’t be titled Flashpoint. But maybe I’ve said too much. ?
But remember, there was also speculation that the complicated alternate timeline narrative in the film might be a way for them to write out Ben Affleck’s version of Batman. If the storyline is being changed then that idea is likely out the window.
I don’t know. A big part of me thinks this Flash movie never happens at all, or at least not for a very long time. Why wouldn’t incoming writers/directors John Francis Daly and Jonathan Goldstein want to make the story their own, the same way Matt Reeves has done with The Batman?
Eight years have passed since John Cameron Mitchell’s powerful drama, Rabbit Hole, which at the time was a severe departure from his previous films Hedwig And The Angry Inch and Shortbus. Now he’s back with the punk rock oddity How To Talk To Girls At Parties, which looks bizarre in all of the best ways.
“Bizarre in all of the best ways” is often how one could describe the works of author Neil Gaiman (American Gods, Sandman), whose short story inspired the movie. An interstellar rom-com of sorts, it centers on a London teen (Alex Sharp) who sparks a romance with a beautiful and rebellious alien (Elle Fanning), introducing her to his passion for the punk rock scene. Nicole Kidman plays the alien’s leader who isn’t so fond of what she sees happening.
John Krasinski is receiving the best reviews of his career for this week’s acclaimed horror, A Quiet Place, which finds him directing and starring alongside his wife, Emily Blunt. The response already has Krasinski eyed for bigger things, like maybe a new Fantastic Four reboot with him as Reed Richard and Blunt as Sue Storm? Screenrant caught up with Krasinski and asked if he were interested, and he sounded pretty enthusiastic!
“Oh yeah, the Fantastic Four. I would love that! I mean listen, I’m still getting into the whole superhero thing. I didn’t read comics as a kid, not as many, I read some but not as much, but I’m a huge superhero fan so yeah, I’d love to do something like that. If they’re are any left, a lot of these have been taken but the ones that are left, yeah, I would love to do something like that. And listen, I’d love to work with her again so any chance I got would be great.”
If the Fantastic Four makes its way over to Disney/Marvel they might want to ask Krasinski to direct the reboot, too. Keep in mind that Krasinski was one of the finalists for the Captain America role before it went to Chris Evans, so this is an itch he’s been wanting to scratch for a while. And who doesn’t think Blunt would absolutely kill it as the Invisible Woman?
We need to talk about Lynne Ramsay, I think. The Scottish director behind Ratcatcher, Morvern Callar, and We Need To Talk About Kevin doesn’t make a ton of movies. She’s exceedingly choosy; even when she does choose a project she doesn’t always see it through, like the recent western Jane Got A Gun. So when she does follow choose and then follow through it’s a special kind of occasion because, clearly, the film has special merit in her eyes. One can see why she would set her gaze on You Were Never Really Here, which presents itself as just your run of the mill revenge thriller, but as a character study of a killer it is anything but run of the mill.
Adapted from the book by Jonathan Ames, the film is led by an exceptional Joaquin Phoenix who is simply firing on all cylinders right now. Joe, with his heavy beard, bodily scares, and thousand yard stare, looks like walking death and that’s a pretty apt description of him. Ramsay knocks us off balance right from the beginning with a series of images, quick flashes, each more disturbing and confusing than the next. It’s a technique she will return to frequently to flesh out Joe’s backstory; we come to learn he’s a military vet who went through some seriously bad stuff as a child. Now he’s a contract bruiser, or killer if that’s what is called for, and he specializes in finding and rescuing young girls from perverted freaks. Joe’s got issues. He still lives in his childhood home with his ailing mother, and makes frequent attempts to suffocate himself.
This guy isn’t happy, and when he’s on a job committing gruesome acts of violence they only force a recall to his past trauma. Joe’s latest job finds him tracking down a kidnapped girl (Ekaterina Samsonov) with ties to powerful political forces, and when the job is done a conspiracy comes crashing down on his head that threatens everyone he cares about.
You Were Never Really Here is a lean, intense, beautifully edited and acted film that goes far beyond its simple plotting. Ramsay plays with our sense of time and space to keep us disoriented and in the shoes of her wary antihero. Phoenix barely says a word but he doesn’t need to. The depth of sadness and emotional fatigue are written all over his face, just as visible as the scars etched over his bulky frame. Along with Ramsay’s technical precision, it’s Phoenix’s performance that elevates this beyond just another vengeance tale. Watching him as a character this tortured yet driven for retribution, it reminded me of Terrence Stamp in The Limey, another great, economical movie following similar story threads. Jonny Greenwood’s electric, ultra-violent score is the perfect accompaniment to the brutality on screen. The poor girl next to me, far too young to be attending tonight’s Sundance screening, was either covering her face or plugging her ears throughout.
If there are missteps it’s only in that I could have done with fewer callbacks to Joe’s troubled past. The flashes of murder and domestic violence that constantly race through his memory are more confusing than informative. The film works best when stripped down to its barest essentials, and in the case of Joe’s past less is definitely more.
You Were Never Really Here is a knockout film and a welcome dose of art-house flair to the vengeance movie genre. Here’s hoping Ramsay doesn’t keep us waiting quite so long the next time.
Rating: 4 out of 5
NOTE: This is a reprint of my review from the 2018 Sundance Film Festival. You Were Never Really Here opens April 6th.
For most people all they’ll really need to hear about Night School are that it stars Kevin Hart and Tiffany Haddish. Hell, count me as one of those folks. There’s no denying the comic potential of such a duo. Hart is coming off the meteoric success of Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, while Haddish is red hot after Girls Trip, securing projects left and right. Now in the upcoming comedy’s first trailer we see the combination if literally explosive.
The premise is pretty simple. Hart plays a BBQ grill salesman who sees his favorite job go up in smoke, so he goes to night school to get his GED and land a high-paying financial gig. Haddish plays one of his teachers. The film reunites Haddish with Girls Trip director Malcolm D. Lee and super producer Will Packer, the latter also behind most of Hart’s biggest hits. Here’s the synopsis:
Star Kevin Hart and producer Will Packer, who partnered for the hit Ride Along and Think Like a Man series, bring their signature style to Night School. The comedy from director Malcolm D. Lee (Girls Trip) follows a group of misfits who are forced to attend adult classes in the longshot chance they’ll pass the GED exam. Co-stars Tiffany Haddish, Rob Riggle, Taran Killam and Romany Malco join Hart on-screen for the film that Hart produces for his Hartbeat Productions, and Packer via his Will Packer Productions.
Also starring Rob Riggle, Taran Killam, Ben Schwartz, Romany Malco, Megalyn Echikunwoke, Mary Lynn Rajskub, Keith David, and Jacob Batalon, Night School opens September 28th.
