We’re happy to offer our DC readers the chance to attend a free advance screening of Annihilation, from Ex Machina director Alex Garland and starring Natalie Portman, Tessa Thompson, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Gina Rodriguez.
SYNOPSIS: Lena, a biologist and former soldier, joins a mission to uncover what happened to her husband inside Area X – a sinister and mysterious phenomenon that is expanding across the American coastline. Once inside, the expedition discovers a world of mutated landscape and creatures, as dangerous as it is beautiful, that threatens both their lives and their sanity.
The screening takes place on Wednesday, February 21st at 7:00pm at AMC Mazza Gallerie. If you’d like a chance to attend, simply complete the required steps in the Rafflecopter contest form below. Winners will be selected on Friday, February 16th and contacted by email. Good luck!
I don’t follow a lot of serialized TV, but I do follow actors. And following Carey Mulligan has never let me down yet, so it’s over to BBC Two and Netflix for Collateral, which has only been revealed today on the day its first episode is to air.
Directed by S.J. Clarkson (Jessica Jones,The Defenders) and penned by David Hare, the four-episode miniseries stars Mulligan as a dogged detective investigating a murder, and uncovering a larger conspiracy.
Collateral will hit BBC Two on February 12th and a Netflix release should follow soon after.
The Ellen Degeneres Show doesn’t seem like the ideal spot to reveal a horror movie’s new trailer, until you realize it’s for A Quiet Place and stars the totally couch-worthy duo of John Krasinski and Emily Blunt. Oh, now it makes sense.
Krasinski was a guest on the show and debuted the new footage, which he wrote, directed and stars in alongside his wife. The film co-stars Noah Jupe (Wonder) and Millicent Simmonds (Wonderstruck) and centers on an isolate family of four that must stay silent so as not to attraction the attention of a mysterious creature. This trailer expands the story a little bit, showing that there is life in the outside world, and maybe that’s what drives the family to venture out and find others. Doesn’t look like it goes very well.
While speaking with Ellen, Krasinski talked about how Blunt came aboard, which was by first suggesting other actresses for the role she ultimately took…
“[Emily] was actually recommending people to be in it. And she had all these names of people she thought would be great. And then she said, ‘Can I read it?’ We were on a plane… and she just leaned over to me… she was like ‘no one else can do this movie… I have to do it. It was the greatest compliment of my career.”
Depending on your perspective, this will come as good news for Stranger Things fans. While we’ve still got a long wait until the Duffer Brothers drop season 3 on us, what we do know courtesy of TV Line is how many episodes it will be. Season 2 gave us 9 full episodes, a slight increase from the first season .Well now things are going back to normal for season 3 as it will consist of only 8 episodes.
I see this as a good thing, but to be perfectly honest last season didn’t impress me much at all. But one problem I definitely had is that it overstayed its welcome just a little bit, and one less episode should help with that. They should make 8 episodes the mandate for virtually all Netflix series. And make sure that mandate is passed down to Marvel, too.
Otherwise it’s business as usual, folks. The action will move ahead slightly to 1985, with Winona Ryder, David Harbour, Millie Bobby Brown, Finn Wolfhard, Noah Schnapp, Caleb McLaughlin, Gaten Matarazzo, Cara Buono, Natalia Dyer, Charlie Heaton, Joe Keery, Dacre Montgomery, and Sadie Sink (the only new addition I care for) all coming back for more terror from the Upside Down. I wouldn’t expect to see Stranger Things’ third season until some time in 2019.
The most fascinating part of this news to me is the inclusion of Zendaya. The quickly-rising actress is set to star alongside Jake Gyllenhaal and Ansel Elgort in Finest Kind, a crime thriller from LA Confidential writer/director Brian Helgeland.
Helgeland will direct and wrote the script that follows two brothers who strike a dangerous deal with a crime syndicate that draws them into the Boston underworld. Details on the exact premise seem to be sketchy as different outlets have different info. Some say they are half-brothers raised separately by different brothers, reunited as adults only to get involved with the Boston underworld to save their estranged father who has only months to live.
Gyllenhaal is no stranger to crime flicks and neither is Elgort at this point thanks to November Criminals and Baby Driver. But Zendaya may be the hot addition here. She’s had a meteoric rise after Spider-Man: Homecoming and The Greatest Showman, but this is the kind of film that shows Hollywood wants to elevate her to the next level. [THR]
When Zack Snyder departed Justice League a year ago it was for a reason we could all sympathize with. In the wake of their daughter’s death, Zack and his producer wife Deborah stepped aside from DC Films to properly grieve. Nobody can blame them for that. Joss Whedon was brought in to finish up Justice League and the finished result was a sloppy mish-mash of their two styles, and nobody seemed completely satisfied. Now an outgoing journalist for Mashable has info that Snyder didn’t leave the job willingly, but was instead canned from DC Films entirely.
Since I’m shifting into DGAF mode, here’s a hot one for ya: Zack Snyder was fired from the DCEU just over 1 year ago. Couldn’t write it ~quite~ that way at the time, but was able to tapdance around it [clumsy/oblique headline not mine] https://t.co/7cht70rCaG
At the time, there were rumors that Snyder had been fired, and I’ll say that at Comic-Con it was kind of an open secret. The relationship between Snyder and Warner Bros. seemed strained right from the start. It never felt like they wanted him to direct Justice League, only that they felt like he should since he did Man of Steel and Batman v Superman. Now, another person might say those were two reasons why he should never have been directed another DC movie, but I always saw the studio’s continuity logic in naming him. But there were reports early on of creative struggles, and that may have made it easier to cede control over to Whedon later on.
Ultimately I guess this doesn’t matter too much. It might explain why we’ve seen zero movement on a “Snyder Cut” of Justice League, and since he’s still listed as an exec-producer on upcoming movies like Aquaman and Wonder Woman 2 he will be a part of the DCEU for a while longer. We just won’t be seeing him with the level of creative input that he’s had in the past, and I think that’s probably for the best.
Despite all of the politicking by a certain segment of Zack Snyder fans out there, chances are we’ll never the director’s full vision for Justice League. Before he left and Joss Whedon stepped in for a bunch of extensive reshoots, rumors were everywhere that we’d see Superman’s black suit, just as he wore in the comics for a while after his rebirth. Obviously, that didn’t happen. I mean, Justice League had its issues, but it wasn’t so flawed the black suit appeared and none of us could find it.
Well, we now know for a fact that at least one version of the movie had the black super-suit in it. A newly-released deleted scene shows Henry Cavill’s Superman, freshly resurrected after his death in Batman v Superman, trying to clear his head by walking through his Kryptonian ship. And what do we see in the background? Yep, the black costume.
It’s not much of a scene, otherwise. I can see why it would be cut since it’s kind of a drag. That said, maybe we’ll see more of it in the home video release. We’ve known from cinematographer Fabian Wagner that multiple scenes with the black costume had been filmed, although it’s unclear if they were ever intended to be part of the theatrical cut. Doesn’t really matter in the end, does it?
We’ll see if there’s more to this when Justice League hits Blu-Ray on March 13th. The digital version arrives in two days.
1. Fifty Shades Freed (review)- $38.8M Fifty Shades Freed whipped up $38M in its opening weekend, which is less than the previous two movies. I don’t think anybody expected the finale to match their numbers, though, since the novelty and curiosity has long since worn off. That said, the pairing of Dakota Johnson and Jamie Dornan as the couple that plays BDSM together has proven remarkably lucrative. The final film in the trilogy already has $136.9M worldwide and I expect it will make the most of the upcoming Valentine’s Day holiday.
2. Peter Rabbit (review)- $25M
Leaping higher than I would have expected, Peter Rabbit opened with $25M. The live-action/animated hybrid adaptation of Beatrix Potter’s novels stars James Corden as the titular bunny, who in the trailers looks like a total jerk terrorizing Domhnall Gleeson. The rest of the starry cast includes Margot Robbie, Rose Byrne, Daisy Ridley, and Elizabeth Debicki, which could help the $50M feature stick around for a few weeks and perhaps lead to sequels? I have a feeling this isn’t the last we’ve seen of Peter Rabbit’s antics.
3. The 15:17 to Paris (review)- $12.6M
Not that Clint Eastwood needs to show his movies off to critics at this point, but something felt odd about his latest docudrama, The 15:17 to Paris, when it wasn’t screened for press and wasn’t released in time for awards season. And sure enough, the film, which stars the three U.S. servicemen who thwarted a terrorist attack/robbery aboard a train a few years ago, has been panned across the board. And yeah, some of it does have to do with the non-professional actors, who were noticeably terrible just in the promo footage, but a lot of the blame seems to have fallen on Eastwood himself. The good news for Warner Bros. is that Eastwood keeps his productions as barebones as possible, so the $30M budget shouldn’t be too hard to recoup in the long run.
4. Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle– $9.8M/$365.6M
5. The Greatest Showman– $6.4M/$146.5M
6. Maze Runner: The Death Cure– $6M/$49M
7. Winchester– $5M/$17.1M
8. The Post– $3.5M/$72.8M
9. The Shape of Water– $3M/$49.7M
10. Den of Thieves– $2.8M/$40.9M
You know how at the Oscars when they announce Best Picture,
it’s never the people you know from the movie who get up to accept the award?
It’s always the producers, who are responsible for overseeing the whole
production, including the actors, writers, and directors. The producers take
the responsibility and ownership of the movie. Considering how sharp a producer
has to be when going into production on a new project, I could only assume that
the producers of the new film The 15:17 to Paris are, in fact,
cats who have no idea what a movie even is, because they’re cats.
On closer inspection, the film was not overseen by cats, but
rather produced by actual conscience people, somehow. Clint Eastwood, it turns
out, is both a producer and director on the film, leaving him predominantly
responsible for how bafflingly incompetent it is. Oh sweet god, The
15:17 to Paris is a real mess.
I’ve been passionately interested in film for a little while
now, and to my recollection, Clint Eastwood hasn’t made a single good movie
within the last decade. That may be a controversial opinion, I’ve never been
Eastwood’s biggest fan, but the evidence feels undeniable. Consider his
lifeless Jersey Boys adaptation, where he took a box office
record-breaking (and pretty fun) Broadway musical and made it into a joyless,
wordy drama. Or look at American Sniper,with its dead-eyed baby
doll and absurd bullet time sequences. Eastwood has made increasingly bad
decisions with each passing film. This trend seems to have hit a climax with 15:17,
a fictionalized, narrative film with the real-life, non-actor people involved
playing themselves. If someone who’s still in the game, like Spielberg for
example, decided to make a film this way, it might have turned into an
interesting experiment. Under the sleepy direction of Eastwood, however, this
movie is painfully awkward to watch. Even the talented professional actors in
the piece, like Judy Greer, Jenna Fischer, and Tony Hale, come off as stilted
and confused. That’s no doubt due to the
direction and the fact that their scene partners literally don’t know what
they’re doing.
The film attempts to tell the story of three young men who stepped
up and stopped a mass-shooter from attacking the titular train they happened to
be on, and the lives they led that brought them to that moment. Casting the
actual men is an interesting idea, and to their credit, I did enjoy the
friendship the three of them shared. Unfortunately, you can feel how
uncomfortable and unnatural they are at acting in all their scenes. As a
result, every potentially impactful moment that the movie has is just destroyed.
The awkwardness oozes onto the screen, and you wind up feeling bad for these
heroic men that their story is being botched so badly, with them on board as
participants.
The film jumps back and forth through time, showing how the
three friends met as kids, and the choices that led to their fateful trip to
Europe. If the parts where regular men star as the leads in a studio drama are
uncomfortable to watch, just wait until you get to the scenes where Clint
Eastwood has to direct children!
One scene features them playing with their airsoft guns and
laughing. “I don’t know, there’s just something about war, man,” one kid says
dreamily. The line seems to suggest that he enlisted because going to war
sounds like a fun time, a motivation I would doubt is 100% accurate. Seriously,
screenwriter Dorothy Blyskal has written one of the worst things I’ve seen in a
long time, and the kids’ dialog is especially painful and stilted. That being
said, I do have to give credit to child actor Paul-Mikél Williams, whose
natural abilities manage to shine through this garbage script and direction.
Another feature of the nonsensical nature of the writing is
the characters’ seemingly supernatural abilities. They monologue several times
about how they need to board the train because the universe is calling to them
to do so, as if they already know what’s about to happen. The movie also
transcends the typical depiction of prayer in film by having the characters
literally talk to God and explain that they’ve received answers. I’m sure
they’re attempting to show the power of their faith, but when you add that to
the prophetic feeling that God wants them on the train, it really makes a case
for the movie quietly featuring magical realism. This is maybe the 48th
most upsetting problem that this movie has, but it deserves to be discussed
nonetheless.
Overall, The 15:17 to Paris is boarder-line
unwatchable. It’s awkward, messy, boring, and most of all incompetent. It’s
honestly astonishing to see a movie this troubled be released by a big studio
like Warner Bros. Mr. Eastwood, it’s really, really time to stop.
Netflix has been on the ball recently. Not only are they the
masters of high profile TV, but they’ve also been acquiring big movies left and
right. Their formlessness is their power. On Netflix, a story teller can focus
on an individual plot for a 30 minute one-off anthology episode, a two hour
movie, or a nine part miniseries depending on how much time the story needs to
breathe. I’m afraid with their most recent release, The Ritual, they might
have picked the wrong form.
The Ritual tells the story of a group of British bros who go on
a hiking trip in the memory of their recently deceased friend, who died in a convenience
store robbery while the one friend (Rafe Spall) watched in hiding. Their hike
takes an unexpected shortcut through the woods, and from there on, we’re in
pretty generic horror territory. It starts to rain. They stay in a secluded
cabin. They hear unexplained spooky noises, etc, etc., etc. Horror ensues.
I don’t mean to suggest that this isn’t a good movie because it is, it’s just uninspired. Anyone who’s seen or even heard of Blair Witch already knows
nothing good comes from staying in the cabin in the woods. Taking away the
first-person aspect just makes this an even more straight forward horror movie
with no real style of its own.
What I did find interesting about the movie is the use of
the main character’s guilt over his friend’s death. He hid instead of fighting
back and now his friend is dead. Without crossing into spoiler territory, I
feel it safe to say that, as a horror movie, this point gets revisited a couple
of times throughout the film. Focusing on the feeling of survivor’s guilt is an
interesting new perspective to show us. I just wish we had more time to fully explore
the extent of his grief, which is probably my biggest problem with the whole
film.
Since The Ritual premiered on Netflix, it’s
hard to overlook the missed opportunity to work this plot into a format that
better suits it. This could have been a miniseries, and allowed for more time
to explore the character’s motivations in addition to the spookiness of being
lost in the woods. It also could have been a short, or an episode of an
anthology show. Perhaps less horror filler would have benefitted the
storytelling. Regardless, a 90 minute runtime cluttered with jump-scares just didn’t
do these themes justice.
Ultimately this is a decent movie. It’s just disappointing
that it had such a fresh perspective mixed to such a paint-by-numbers
storyline.
