We’re happy to offer our DC readers the chance to attend a free early screening of Gringo. The action-comedy stars David Oyelowo, Charlize Theron, Joel Edgerton, Thandie Newton, Amanda Seyfried, and Sharlto Copley.
SYNOPSIS: An exhilarating mix of dark comedy, white-knuckle action and dramatic intrigue, Gringo joyrides into Mexico, where mild-mannered businessman Harold Soyinka (David Oyelowo) finds himself at the mercy of back-stabbing business colleagues back home , local drug lords and a morally conflicted black-ops mercenary. Crossing the line from law-abiding citizen to wanted criminal, Harold battles to survive his increasingly dangerous situation in ways that raise the question: Is he out of his depth — or two steps ahead?
The screening takes place on Wednesday, March 7th at 7:00pm at Regal Majestic in Silver Spring. If you’d like to attend, simply register at the STX ticketing site here and download one Admit-Two pass for the event. Please remember that having passes does not guarantee entry and you will need to arrive early to ensure receiving a seat. Enjoy the show!
While so many of the Marvel movies struggle to differentiate from one another, that was never a problem for James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy. The oddball mix of characters was one reason, but I would argue the biggest was the eclectic rock and pop soundtrack, gifted to little boy Star-Lord by his mama’s Awesome Mix Vol. 1. The sequel kept the party goin’ with Awesome Mix Vol. 2, and presumably there will be more for Vol. 3 now that Peter Quill owns a Zune. But if you don’t want to wait that long for a playlist that captures the mood of the movies, Gunn is here to help.
The director has uploaded his personal Awesome Mix Vol. 0 to Spotify, assembling the tracks that helped put him in the right frame of mind on set. I’m not familiar with all of these but I dig that Gunn is apparently a fan of Aceyalone and Pigeon John.
Check out the playlist below, and expect to hear a lot more when Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 arrives in 2020.
So Marvel and Funko have decided that they want to take all of my money this summer, and the money of every other Funko Fanatic. As if they didn’t get enough with their wave of Black Panther figures, now the first wave of 18 (!!!) Avengers: Infinity War Pops are here.
Most of the main Avengers get a couple of figures, one in full costume and one unmasked, like Tony Stark/Iron Man, and Spider-Man in his sleek Iron Spider suit. There’s also Thor and a version where he’s lit up with electric energy. Interestingly, he’s got two eyes in both. You also get blonde Black Widow and two bearded Captain Americas. Most intriguing to me are Thanos’ “children”, the Black Order. We see Cull Obsidian, Ebony Maw, Corvus Glaive, and Proxima Midnight. The Thanos figures include a 10″ version that will be exclusive to Target stores. The version with Thanos sporting a glowing gauntlet will be a Walmart exclusive. A weaponized teenage Groot will be available, along with Vision.
And of course, there are plenty of characters not seen here, like Scarlet Witch, Black Panther, Ant-Man, and most of the Guardians of the Galaxy. Expect to find them in the next wave. My display case is going to need to double in size.
While not confirmed, it’s looking like these will start hitting store shelves on Friday. If so I’ll update this post with links to where you can get them.
*Update* Ahem, I’ve already begun pre-ordering them. And now you can do the same below courtesy of our friends at Entertainment Earth! You get the best prices of any place on the Internet, with special deals for bulk Funko ordering. Plus, you’ll be helping us out as we get a small percentage of each sale from our links, at no extra cost to you. Thanks!
Given the lukewarm response and icy box office for Nicolas Winding Refn’s The Neon Demon, heck, the icy box office for all of his movies basically, it may be a while before we see spy flick The Avenging Silence. Refn has instead settled himself for a run on the small screen directing Amazon’s Too Old To Die Young, a series that has been described as being in the vein of his gritty Pusher trilogy. With a superb cast led by Miles Teller, Jena Malone, John Hawkes, Nell Tiger Free, Babs Olusanmokun, and Callie Hernandez, we’re finally getting a look at what Refn’s streaming venture has to offer.
The series is co-written by Refn and crime novelist/comics writer Ed Brubaker, centering on “a grieving police officer who, along with the man who shot his partner, finds himself in an underworld filled with working-class hit men, Yakuza soldiers, cartel assassins sent from Mexico, Russian mafia captains and gangs of teen killers.”
This could still be a ways off. While these images would suggest an arrival some time this year, we may not actually see it until 2019. [IndieWire]
Don’t be fooled, while the trailers for Red Sparrow may suggest Jennifer Lawrence in her first true action vehicle, the film is closer to Bridge of Spies than Atomic Blonde. Sexual power and international intrigue are the heart of this spy thriller by director Francis Lawrence, reuniting with the other Lawrence after a handful of Hunger Games movies. He doesn’t immediately strike anybody as the type to pull a John Le Carre, and his inexperience with the genre is the film’s greatest weakness, but his star makes for a compelling Russian femme fatale even as the story gets muddier than a bowl of borscht.
Lawrence has made a career of playing strong-minded women in empowering roles, from Winter’s Bone to perhaps her defining one as the defiant Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games. In Red Sparrow she plays Russian ballet dancer-turned-spy Dominika Egorova, another woman seeking to reclaim her life and identity from a bunch of powerful, corrupt men. All her life the state has pretty much owned her; they allow her to dance, they own the house she lives in with her mother (Joely Richardson), and take care of her mother’s mounting medical bills. So when a crippling accident ends Dominika’s career, she’s desperate to find another way to remain valuable to her country. Matthias Schoenaerts, looking slicker and more polished than his usual ruggedness, plays her uncle Vanya, a high-ranking Intelligence official who has a plan to help Dominika out. Recognizing a little too closely just how alluring his niece can be, Vanya recruits her for an assignment that allows Dominika to use her sex appeal. When the mission goes south, she’s forced to become a Sparrow, and sent off to what is literally referred to as “whore school”, run by Matron (Charlotte Rampling), where Dominika learns how to use sex as a deadly weapon to force information from Russia’s enemies.
Of course, Dominika isn’t as malleable as the others in her class. She’s killer when it comes to using a person’s need for human connection against them, but she also has her own agenda that runs counter to what her superiors demand.
“Don’t give them everything, not every piece of you,” warns her mother, who knows all too well how becoming a Sparrow can strip away one’s humanity.
Meanwhile, Matron has other words of advice…
“You must inure yourself to what you find repellent,” she commands, after yet another demand for her charges to strip and do something lewd at a moment’s notice. Let’s just say the curriculum doesn’t include Algebra or Classic Literature. Date Rape Survival 101, that might be a thing, though.
Red Sparrow is most engrossing when focused purely on Dominika as she makes one compromise after another to achieve her goals. As such, the best parts of the movie involve her training, which finds her weighing which parts of herself to give up, how much of her soul she’s willing to part with. The screenplay, adapted by Justin Haythe from Jason Matthews’ novel, could have dug deeper into what makes her tick. There’s the suggestion that Dominika is out for more than self-interest and vengeance, that perhaps a part of her likes the power she has over men. But it’s, sadly, never followed up on in any recognizable way. Lawrence gives a performance that is sexy and as complex as she can make it, but we leave thinking there was more about Dominika that could have been explored.
Less compelling is just about everything that has to do with U.S. spy Nathaniel Nash (Joel Edgerton), a CIA operative who has blown his cover to protect a top-level source within the Kremlin who has been feeding them intel. He and Dominika cross paths when she’s assigned to ferret out the mole by shadowing Nash, a man she comes to trust. But can he trust her? And where do her loyalties truly lie? With the country she loves that has used her all of her life? Or with the Americans who don’t know whether the Sparrow is playing them? Deception is what she knows best, after all.
There’s the expected tension between Dominika and Nathaniel, but the biggest problem is the lack of palpable chemistry between Lawrence and Edgerton. Not much can be done with that, but it doesn’t help a plot that is twisty yet predictable at just about every turn. The film unfolds in every way you expect it to, and Francis Lawrence isn’t skilled enough with the genre to craft a properly murky atmosphere that could cover for it. In more experienced hands the pace would be described as deliberate and aloof, but under Lawrence’s direction it’s just slow and occasionally dull during its bulky 139-minute runtime.
Red Sparrow is at least an attempt to offer the kind of mature espionage film audiences are frequently denied, and overall it’s a solid effort for fans of the spy genre. Others expecting more than just a by-the-numbers effort may find that this Sparrow never soars as high as it should.
Bruce Willis is making the press rounds to promote his Death Wish reboot, a film that may have you wishing for the actor’s Die Hard heyday. Well, those days are never coming back; you know this is you suffered through A Good Day to Die Hard, but the long-developing Die Hard 6 is apparently still happening. Or at least Willis is going to check and make sure that it is.
“I’m about to wing out to California to start to see what the script looks like. So yeah, I think so, yeah.”
How promising does that sound? The film has been in the works for years with Len Wiseman attached to direct. The story looks to be both a prequel and a sequel, possibly based on the Die Hard Year One graphic novel, which takes place mostly in the 1970s as we follow a young John McClane in becoming “a Die Hard kinda guy.” Ugh. The other part of the story would take place in the present as McClane investigates a case tied to his rookie year, which would give Willis something to do to earn his paycheck.
It’s been a long time coming for an adaptation of Charles Burns’s beloved graphic novel, Black Hole. The whole thing began way back in 2005 before this site even existed, and that was when Alexandre Aja (Horns) was attached to direct. Nothing came of it, so Neil Gaiman (American Gods) and Roger Avary (Pulp Fiction) took a stab at the script for David Fincher, who was interested in directing. It sat in limbo for years despite his continued interest, but now the project has been revived with Dope director Rick Famuyiwa at the helm.
Black Hole was a 12-issue graphic novel published as a collected edition in 2005, although Burns released each issue over the course of 10 years. The story is set in the 1970s and centers on Seattle teens who contract a plague through sexual contact that manifests itself in a number of strange and grotesque ways.
This should be a nice pivot for Famuyiwa, who was briefly attached to direct DC Films’ The Flash movie before dropping out. He recently directed HBO film Confirmation and Showtime’s pilot for The Chi. [THR]
With the #MeToo movement in full swing, now seems the perfect time to modernize one of the great feminist comedies of all-time, 9 to 5. The original movie gave us the awesome trio of Dolly Parton, Lily Tomlin, and Jane Fonda as three ladies who got revenge on their sexist boss, played by Dabney Colman. The timing is right for a remake, and 20th Century Fox agrees because they’re looking to hire Rashida Jones to co-write the script.
Even better, a lot of the principle players from the 1980 movie are coming back. Jones would be co-writing the script with original writer Patricia Resnick. And Deadline reports we could even see a reunion of Parton, Tomlin, and Fonda as they are all game to do it. This version of the story would “focus on three young women dealing with sexism and chauvinism in the workplace, who turn to the original trio for help in navigating and getting even with the course male higher-ups.”
So basically a passing of the torch situation played out around the water cooler? Here’s hoping they get a good director for this one, and add some diversity into the casting.
A few days ago fairly obvious rumors surfaced that Wonder Woman 2 would feature the villain known as Cheetah. This was unsurprising since Cheetah is arguably Wonder Woman’s most well-known foes, and has been seen in cartoons, comics, and video games for decades. Part of that story was Warner Bros.’ hope to snag a big star for the role, first approaching Emma Stone who turned it down. Well now they may have found their gal, as Kristen Wiig is reportedly in talks to join star Gal Gadot.
Wiig would be playing Barbara Ann Minerva aka Cheetah, who in the past was best recognized by her campy cheetah costume. In more recent versions she’s more of a cat/human hybrid. Her origin has undergone some changes, but she was originally a neurotic British archaeologist who discovers a lost tribe in Africa and becomes the avatar of the cheetah god, nursing an unhealthy obsession with Wonder Woman and the Amazons.
I can see Wiig having great fun with a role like this, but can anybody see her getting into a fight with a badass like Gadot? Here’s hoping she has some henchmen, or henchwomen, to do her dirty work.
Patty Jenkins is returning to direct and Chris Pine is expected back, as well, despite the film being set during the 1980s Cold War. Wonder Woman 2 opens November 1st 2019.
Brad Pitt doesn’t agree to do your movie if it’s in jeopardy, so I think it’s a safe bet that Quentin Tarantino’s Manson era film is happening. There had been some rumors to the contrary lately, but today comes word that it is speeding ahead with Pitt officially on board, and newly revealed title of Once Upon A Time In Hollywood.
Pitt joins Leonardo DiCaprio in the film which is set in the 1960s with the Charles Manson murders looming large in the background. DiCaprio plays TV star Rick Dalton, who along with his sidekick/stunt double Cliff Booth (Pitt) seek their big break into movies. Tarantino described the film to Variety as “a story that takes place in Los Angeles in 1969, at the height of hippy Hollywood.”
Margot Robbie is still in the running to play murdered actress Sharon Tate, while an actor to play Roman Polanski has yet to be named. Expect an A-lister for that role, too.
Once Upon A Time In Hollywood is due to open on August 9th 2019. When it does it will pair up the stars of Tarantino’s two biggest box office hits, Django Unchained and Inglourious Basterds.
