We’re happy to offer our DC readers the chance to attend a free early screening of horror A Quiet Place, directed by and starring John Krasinski along with Emily Blunt, Millicent Simmonds, and Noah Jupe.
SYNOPSIS: In the modern horror thriller A QUIET PLACE, a family of four must navigate their lives in silence after mysterious creatures that hunt by sound threaten their survival. If they hear you, they hunt you.
The screening takes place on Monday, April 2nd at 7:00pm at AMC Mazza Gallerie. If you’d like to attend, simply register at the Gofobo ticketing site here and download one Admit-Two pass. Please note that all screenings are first come first served and having passes does not guarantee entry. You’ll want to arrive early to ensure receiving a seat. Enjoy the show!
When projects fall through in a less than amicable manner, sometimes both sides take the high road. Other times they let the sour grapes trickle out over the course of months or even years. A couple of days ago we learned that Donald Glover’s Deadpool animated series, which had been ordered straight to series by FX, had been canned due to “creative differences”. We all know that term is a catch-all for a variety of things, but there was no reason to expect an airing of grievances. At least, not in the manner Glover decided to air them.
Glover hit Twitter last night and dropped a multi-page Deadpool script, titled “Finale”, that is basically one petty jab at Marvel after another. The only direct comment Glover made about the situation was in this tweet…
for the record: i wasnt too busy to work on deadpool.
As for the script, it’s super timely, hitting on Facebook, the last white African rhino, Black Panther, Beyonce, racism, and more. But the target is clearly Marvel execs, with Glover voicing his beef over the cancellation through Deadpool’s wacky exposition…
Clearly Glover wrote this in haste and in anger, but even so it’s obvious that his take on Deadpool would have been unlike any other, kinda like if the antihero passed through an episode of The Boondocks. Shit that sounds awesome. Oh well.
In the upcoming YA film The Darkest Minds, a group of teens mysteriously gain super powers and are then imprisoned the U.S. government who fear them as a threat. So what do these powerful kids decide to do? Fight back, of course. No, this isn’t a spinoff of the X-Men, but it sure as heck sounds and looks like it based on this new trailer. Oh, and it’s from 20th Century Fox, too. Shrewd move, Fox.
The film stars Amandla Stenberg, best known for playing Rue in The Hunger Games and other YA offerings like Everything Everything and As You Are, but the most intriguing aspects may be behind the camera. Jennifer Yuh Nelson is making her live-action directing debut after building her career as a director of animation, including Kung Fu Panda 2 and Kung Fu Panda 3, making her the only other female director of color (with Ava DuVernay) on a film budgeted at more than $100M. Producer Shawn Levy is one of the brains behind Netflix’s Stranger Things.
Stenberg is surrounded by a solid supporting cast, too. Skylan Brooks from Netflix’s The Get Down, Harris Dickinson who broke out with last year’s indie hit drama Beach Rats, Mandy Moore, and Gwendoline Christie as a bounty hunter tracking the runaway super-teens.
The Darkest Minds opens August 3rd and color me very interested.
We didn’t get to see a lot of Admiral Holdo in Star Wars: The Last Jedi, but she is probably the most popular of the many new characters in the film. Casting Laura Dern is a big part of the reason, but also because Holdo was someone who, like General Leia, commanded respect from those around her. She would go on to make a huge sacrifice to pull the Resistance away from certain doom. Was her decision motivated by more than just a desire to defeat the First Order, but by something beyond normal understanding?
According to Dern, Holdo was actually a Force-sensitive, despite her abilities not being shown on screen. Clearly, she wasn’t soaring through the vacuum of space like an Ice Age Mary Poppins the way Leia was, but Dern says you could see it in the way Holdo spoke to people and the wisdom she showed.
“In their minds, and in their understanding of the origin story, we know that she was a true rebel in the Resistance, and in our culture we might have called her a hippie,” Dern says. “But she was longing for peace, and a revolutionary in that way, and wanted to be trained by and led by Leia, who taught her everything she knew. She wanted to come up in the ranks to support Leia’s mission, but also had this otherworldly side that does involve the Force.”
Dern adds to Entertainment Weekly that Holdo’s ultimate sacrifice was also motivated by her connection to The Force, possibly as a parallel to a similar sacrifice made by Luke Skywalker?
“There’s something about her that longs to protect it, and holds that with great care,” Dern says. “There’s a sort of a light on and a wisdom that she speaks about in the film, and speaks to Oscar Isaac’s character briefly about it…Yeah, her primary goal was to protect the light, to protect the Force, and to keep the revolutionaries alive. And I think the film speaks so beautifully to that with this last image of the next generation of the Resistance, you know?”
Not sure I totally buy into her theory, but it makes as much sense as anything I suppose. Here’s hoping we can maybe see Holdo again in flashback or something.
Emily Blunt’s performance as the rugged future soldier Rita in Edge of Tomorrow was so good she nearly stole the entire movie away from Tom Cruise. We liked her so much, me and my colleagues in the BFCA gave her a Critics Choice Award for Best Actress in an Action Movie. Fans have been waiting a few years for that sequel Cruise and director Doug Liman have been talking about, but now we learn from Blunt herself that she’s the reason for the delay. So send your cards and letters to her.
Blunt tells ScreenCrush…“It’s a lot for all the stars to align for everyone to be free at the same time and available to do it at the same time,” Blunt said. “They asked me to do [it] two months before I started ‘Mary Poppins.’ Tom was like, ‘Can you go this autumn?’ and I was like, ‘No, I can’t go, I’m playing Mary Poppins for like a year, dude! I can’t do Edge of Tomorrow.’ Doug Liman has got an awesome idea and he’s excited and they just need to write it. There has been a script, but now I gather there’s another one in the works.”
Basically, Mary Poppins Returns better be hella tight for making us wait so long. The excitement generated by Blunt in Edge of Tomorrow caused a big push for her to land other major action roles, including the lead in Captain Marvel. It would ultimately go to Brie Larson but Blunt’s name surfaced as a contender and there was a lot of fan support for it. However she says it was all a bunch of smoke and no fire because she was never called about it.
“Oh, no, nobody ever called me about it. [Laughs] It was all untrue!”
She would still dig the chance to play a superhero someday, but thinks Mary Poppins is pretty close already. She says, “I mean, I think Mary Poppins is a superhero, so I’ll just say that she’s my superhero …. I think I’ve fulfilled that. I’ll say it’s her. Listen, she can fly, she has superpowers, she’s magical. I’ll just go with Mary Poppins.”
But does she have adamantium claws and heat vision? Didn’t think so. Blunt will be seen next in the horror film A Quiet Place, opening April 6th.
The Edge of Tomorrow-esque action flick Boss Level is starting to sound potentially great. Directed by The Grey‘s Joe Carnahan, the film already has Mel Gibson, Frank Grillo, Naomi Watts, and Annabelle Wallis in the cast, and now you can add Super Bowl champion Rob Gronkowski, because obviously.
Gronkowski, who I fully expect to make an in-ring appearance at WrestleMania in a couple of weeks, joins the film about a retired special forces officer (Grillo) who is forced to relive the moment of his death in an endless timeloop. The only way out is to find the one responsible.
No word on Gronk’s role but would it be too much to have him play someone other than himself? He’s appeared in two movies previously, the Entourage movie and Dito Montiel’s The Clapper, and never had a chance to be a fictional character. [TheTrackingBoard]
In one of the wildly nostalgic, riveting sequences in Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One, a T-Rex right out of Jurassic Park goes stomping through a Twisted Metal-esque racecourse. In another, the Delorean from Back to the Future comes skidding onto the screen, just as you remember it. Later, the beloved metal hero from The Iron Giant stomps his way onto a massive digital battlefield. The jaw-dropping homages to the pop culture moments that defined many of our childhoods are so vast they can be easy to miss, but when you spot that one thing that you cherished (or still cherish to some of us grown-up nerds) it’s like all of the good memories come flooding back. Ready Player One is a movie designed to be embraced by the geekiest among us, and on that level it earns a high score.
But what if you don’t care about seeing a Battletoad or Gundam appearance as much as some of us do? Ready Player One, for all its digital gloss and too-cool pop culture references, isn’t the most fully-formed rebellion story ever. And those expecting a note perfect adaptation of Ernest Cline’s cherished 2011 novel may want to steel themselves for a completely different beast. Set in a dystopian future version of Cleveland, OH, it and the rest of the world’s population escape from a hopeless reality by venturing into a virtual reality world known as the OASIS. Think of it as the ultimate online multiplayer game, where users can literally be anyone, go anywhere, and do anything they please. For anime fans it’s like the movie Summer Wars brought to vivid life. Designed by uber-dork James Halliday (Mark Rylance), the OASIS is littered the nostalgic references he loved most. When Halliday dies, he leaves behind a massive Easter Egg hunt, a virtually unbeatable quest that will award the winner full control of the OASIS and his company, basically making them the richest and most powerful person in the world. To win, you basically need to know Halliday inside and out, to a disturbing degree. Like that friend of yours who can recite every single line from The Breakfast Club backwards and forwards.
This sparks an all-out war to find the three keys left behind by Halliday, and one of those in search of it is our hero, Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan). He lives in the towering ghetto known as “The Stacks”, and we know immediately that he’s a kid who knows his ’80s rock bands because the film opens to the tune of Van Halen’s “Jump”. Wade practically lives in the OASIS, slipping into his tiny corner of the neighborhood dump to suit up and dive in, becoming his avatar Parzival. He wants to win Halliday’s prize, he and the other Gunters (Easter Egg hunters) need to win it otherwise the villainous Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn, always villainous) and the corporate entity he runs will win and destroy everything that’s pure about the OASIS. Along with fellow Gunters Artemis (Olivia Cooke) and Aech (Lena Waithe), they dig obsessively through Halliday’s life, play his favorite video games, and more to figure out how to find the treasured keys.
You’ll notice changes from the book right away. An eyeball-searing race kicks off the hunt for the first of Halliday’s keys, a far cry from what Cline, who helped co-write the script with Zak Penn, originally envisioned. It’s the kind of swap that makes sense from a visual standpoint; much of Cline’s novel revolves around the Gunters playing through a bunch of pre 8-bit video games and nobody wants to see that. This gives Spielberg a chance to overload our senses with the visual wizardry we’ve come to expect from him. Everything about the OASIS is designed to capture your eye, and it does without detracting from the story Spielberg is trying to tell. Other changes are more questionable, though, and they revolve around the characters. To put it bluntly, Wade and Artemis aren’t supposed to look like prettied-up Hollywood stars like Sheridan and Cooke. That’s okay, but we also see character motivations shifted to suit a story that is less about the quest and more about the fight. This is especially true of supporting figures like Aech and I-R0k (TJ Miller), with the latter becoming more of an outright bad guy with a much larger part to play.
Another change, and this one is pretty major, has to do with Halliday. In the book, the plethora of cultural references were because he was the ultimate ’80s fanboy. He had a love of the rock band Journey, so many of the clues had to do with them. The film version, understandably, has to expand to make these callbacks about ALL of the characters, not just Halliday, so the references don’t fit in any specific era and don’t always make sense. The Iron Giant, cool as it is to see, is one of those. They sap just a little bit of the story’s personality away.
Another spell-binding sequence is always right around the corner, from an amazing stretch inside Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining to the hilariously random appearance by Chucky, Ready Player One keeps you plugged in for the long haul. Spielberg stays constantly on the move, charging ahead from one awesome setpiece to the next. While this is great for keeping up the momentum towards an epic finale where thousands of your favorite video game and movie characters fight for control over the OASIS (when killed they explode into coins), the stakes are never made as clear as they need to be. We don’t spend enough time in the dull, grey outside world to get a sense of how bad things really are. To be fair, the brief stretches we do spend in reality only make us want to go back into the OASIS, so I guess we are just as addicted to it as the Gunters are.
Nostalgia is a precious thing, and nobody nurtures it better on the big screen than Spielberg does. From the jukebox soundtrack to the John Hughes-esque love story, Spielberg manages to inject just enough heart into all of that spectacle. Ready Player One probably isn’t going to sit alongside E.T. as one of Spielberg’s all-time greats, but what if E.T. could cross paths with Donkey Kong? Now that would be something.
WWE fans have been watching John Cena make a fool of himself on TV the last few weeks in an attempt to lure the Undertaker out of retirement, giving us the “Part-Timer vs. Retiree” match we’ve been dying for. Between movies like the upcoming comedy Blockers, his attempts to become the new Blue’s Clues host, and hosting Nickelodeon awards, Cena is almost entirely a Hollywood actor now, and it looks like he’s confirmed for his latest major gig: Duke Nukem.
“Yeah, that’s what we’re working with now. He is. Yes,” Form said. “We don’t have a script yet, so that is confirmed at this point but if he reads the script and he doesn’t like the script I’m sure there’s ways that he could pull out, but right now he’s our guy.”
Cena definitely looks the part, but he has a squeaky clean image that runs counter to the brash, misogynistic Nukem. Form admits that one of the film’s major hurdles will be finding a way to retool the character so that he fits in a #MeToo and #TimesUp environment, while still maintaining the edginess that fans dig about him. Basically, they want to turn Duke Nukem into Deadpool.
“You know that having a misogynistic guy in today’s world, how do you make that fun and lovable and at the same time he’s got to be an incredible badass, so those are the things that we’re struggling with and we’re going to try and come out with what I hope is a really fun ride. That’s the goal, is for it to be a really fun ride…It’s going to be about tone. That’s about tone. How do you nail that tone in the way that Deadpool nailed the tone? I think we have to do that and if we don’t get the tone right then we’re not going to make the movie.”
The last major film based on a first person shooter video game was 2008’s Doom, which starred another WWE veteran in Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. It was a terrible movie that bombed at the box office. Maybe if Duke Nukem succeeds Cena can use it to launch a WrestleMania match with Johnson in a few years.
There is a certain level of schlock you find over and over
again if you dive deep enough into the indie horror movie scene. I, personally,
am a fan of this campy, scuzzy, neo-grindhouse genre. I watch new horror movies
like this as soon as they’re released. I’ve been to conventions celebrating it.
Hell, I’ve even made short films in this style myself. So I get pretty excited
when I get to see a new take on the same old clichés we fans love so dear. The
new horror movie Against the Night raises these tropes up yet again, having a
blast playing around in the sandbox of deep-genre, straight-faced goofiness.
The film begins with a bunch of 20-somethings having a Cloverfield-style
“we’re young and will totally never die” party. They’re being recorded by one
friend who’s the “I film everything and goof around about it” horror character
architype. I suppose these characters have names and identities, but honestly
they don’t really matter. And the movie knows that too. There’s a big enough
group of young people that they can all break off into groups when things get
spooky, and that’s all that matters. The videographer friend suggests breaking
into an abandoned (and supposedly haunted) prison to film a fake ghost hunting
video. They arrive, and immediately split up in Scooby-Doo fashion to go
explore in pairs. One by one, they mysteriously disappear.
It’s half found footage, half conventional narrative
filmmaking, and all 100% cheese.
If this type of thing sounds tired and overdone, that’s
because it is, and this movie doesn’t care. If you’re already part of the fan base
for this sort of film, then you probably already know that Against the Night is
right up your alley. For everyone else expecting a critical analysis of a movie
like this, you’re kinda coming at it from the wrong angle.
Low budget horror like this doesn’t really lend itself to
conventional film criticism. This is a well shot movie, and it’s fun, and a
good use of the genre, but it isn’t necessarily a “good” film. In fact, it
absolutely isn’t. It is a mess. Its plot has been seen a thousand times. The
characters are indistinguishable. Every female character takes their top off
for seemingly no reason. Its plot twists are absurd as all hell. I could go on
and on nitpicking the things that normal movies wouldn’t do, but that’s the
thing: this isn’t a normal movie. This is a low budget, schlocky, VOD horror
movie. When you get that deep into the genre, these types of things are to be
expected, and, in a way, celebrated.
Against the Night is such
polished nonsense. It looks good. The acting is well done. The effects are
almost impressive. It’s just that the plot and dialogue and everything else
about it are cheesy as can be. As the genre nerd that I am, I enjoyed it because of all those issues, not in spite
of them. Again, it’s not for everybody, but there’s a strong base of horror
nerds out there who eat this type of genre stuff up, and they’ll really enjoy
this fun little mess of a movie.
Last week on Black Lightning, the Jennifer was finally let in on the big family secret. Unlike her older sister Anissa, Jennifer really isn’t all that interested in becoming a superhero. After all, she is a teen, and unlike how most of us would want to be like Peter Parker if we got superpowers, she just wants to go to prom and live out the life of a regular high school kid. Learning that her father has been a superpowered vigilante her whole life also made her feel lied to. Meanwhile, her father and older sister still have a city to save as the city is still flooded with the highly addictive drug (that is also giving kids superpowers) Green Light is on the street, so they do their best to shut down the supplier and the mysterious government agency behind the drug.
The episode begins with the local “CD Man” Two-Bits on the street peddling his wares. Being a local bootlegger, the man is able to see what’s going on in the street, where he sees a young child getting Green Light from a drug dealer. The kid has the superpowered reaction to the drug and starts to glow. Before the weirdness can even register to the guy, some blackhats from the ASA kidnap the child and take the child in a large white van. The child was taken to a storage room, the same one Gambi told Anissa about. As she goes to investigate, she sees countless children in this area all in some sort of suspension but kept alive. Anissa realizes that she needs to include her dad in on this and leave the warehouse.
Meanwhile, a resurrected (and talking to ghosts) La La is trying to get back into the game. In Tobias’ absence, he’s trying to get back to the top of the food chain at The One Hundred. With the sole supply of Green Light taken out, La La figures that old school drugs will need to make a return and want to flood the streets with it. His dealers are second-guessing him, especially because he’s always talking to what they perceive as “nobody.” This week, the ghost he speaks with is his relative Will (who he killed). One of his lieutenants second-guessed ad challenges him, to unfortunate results as he rips the guys ear off and shoots him. La La may be strange, but he’s still La La. After negotiating with a distributor (he gives his own mother up as collateral), he’s going to have some drugs to sell.
After Anissa tells her father of Gambi’s tip (and tells him to work through their differences) they investigate the warehouse, which has become empty. They realize that some ASA soldiers are there waiting for the two of them trying to shoot them down. Of course, a couple soldiers are no match for Black Lightning and Thunder, and they easily take care of them.
Because Two-Bits told Jefferson about the kidnapped kid (and that drugs are flooding the school), he tells Jennifer to not go to school. The frustrated Jennifer accidentally unleashes her power while arguing with Anissa, prompting Jefferson and Lynn to want to train and test her. Her father tells her that she needs to learn how to control her powers and Lynn takes her to her lab. At the lab while getting an MRI, we discover that her cells are made of pure energy, meaning that Jennifer’s powers are indeed powerful.
Meanwhile, Gambi has his own problems. His former boss Martin Proctor and a few ASA people come into his shop wanting to have a conversation with him. Gambi is ready for them and gets the drop with his guns, but after local people outside are threatened, Gambi goes with them to leave the store. There Proctor tells Gambi that he knows that Gambi knows who Black Lightning is since Black Lightning and Thunder found the warehouse after Gambi found out, meaning Gambi told them. Because Gambi is unwilling to tell the truth, it’s torture time. Even after getting his face pummeled in and being waterboarded, his lips are still sealed. Proctor then had Jefferson picked up by ASA operatives. Of course, Jefferson being Black Lightning, he’s able to turn the power in the safe house off, allowing Gambi to kill them. An injured Gambi tells Jefferson that Proctor still has a spotter, someone who reports to Proctor about any new metahuman children in Freeland.
The reveal of Proctor’s spotter was a welcome one. I thought it would have been Two-Bits as his ear was to the street. However, instead, it’s his own vice principal. Proctor meets with her where he reveals that Jefferson is Black Lightning, based on the power outage and Gambi’s escape after he arrived. Jefferson’s own second-in-command at his school has been working with the ASA and could end up being a formidable opponent to him.
Next week, it looks like the tides will turn against Jefferson as the law will be coming for him and the ASA will need to find out if he’s Black Lightning. Looks like Anissa and Jennifer will come and save their father!
