We’re happy to offer our DC readers the chance to attend a free advance screening of Fifty Shades Freed, the scorching hot finale to the Fifty Shades trilogy. The film reunites Dakota Johnson as Anastasia Steele and Jamie Dornan as Christian Grey.
SYNOPSIS: Believing they have left behind shadowy figures from their past, newlyweds Christian and Ana fully embrace an inextricable connection and shared life of luxury. But just as she steps into her role as Mrs. Grey and he relaxes into an unfamiliar stability, new threats could jeopardize their happy ending before it even begins.
The screening takes place on Wednesday, February 7th at 7:30pm at AMC Mazza Gallerie. If you’d like to enter, simply complete the required steps in the Rafflecopter form below. Winners will be selected on Sunday, February 4th and notified by email. Good luck!
The Clapper is about a man named Eddie Krumble (Ed Helms)
who has a job as an infomercial audience member. He’s basically paid to clap, look
interested, laugh and more on these things. Pretty down on his luck, things turn
sideways with unexpected and wanted fame when he becomes the focus of an ongoing
joke on a popular late night talk show. The rest of the movie is just him
dealing with how this turns his life upside down with no real benefits. So at this point, it leaves one wondering what’s this movie about? Is it
saying fame is bad and that Hollywood is inherently evil to everyday working
Americans?
It’s questioned to be asked by how it portrays the
characters in this film. Eddie and his friend Chris (Tracy Morgan) seem pretty
naive and not fast on the uptake to things in society. It feels like they are
constantly out of their depth in the world the whole time in the story. The same
with Amanda Seyfried’s Judy, a young woman who Eddie falls in love with who
works at the gas station he shops at. A young woman that doesn’t have TV or
watches it, while not a bad thing or weird, it’s just in the way she reacts to things
going on that is perplexing. How don’t they understand the way showbiz works when they all live in LA close to the studios? The whole film
makes the showbiz people look very manipulative or cruel and while that isn’t
new in stories it does make me wonder what the point is in the two very
different portrayals of these characters. Is Eddie supposed to be good and a
hero we empathize with just because he doesn’t understand what’s going on and
how his action contribute to problems? Are we supposed to just hate the late
night show producers and host because while they are manipulating Eddie and
Chris for ratings that Eddie and Chris don’t ever really think about what’s
going on?
These things ran through my mind constantly at
times overtaking what I was watching on screen. The cinematography wasn’t
amazing or notable in the slightest. The film did have some funny jokes thanks
to the charisma of Ed Helms and Tracy Morgan. They were able to make some
pretty questionable jokes work with just their expressions and having an air
of honesty to the performances. They weren’t playing these roles
condescendingly but with a care to these people. Ed Helms and Amanda Seyfried
were okay together but it’s getting tired to see a man of that age in a
relationship with a woman that much younger again. The film was better when
just focusing on that relationship more than the stuff with his interactions
with the late night show. The Clapper is a comedy that doesn’t totally know
what it wants to be, a commentary on fame and class or a romantic comedy. What
we end up with is something that never really does both well and ends up
hampering each theme.
We’re only a few months away from Avengers: Infinity War, which is why I’m surprised we haven’t seen more of any toy merchandise Marvel will be pimpin’ out. But we may have one. A leaked image reveals what looks to be Funko’s version of Thor, complete with a scar over his eye rather than the eyepatch he was wearing in Thor: Ragnaork, and a brand new weapon by his side. The axe resembles his weapon from the Ultimates line of comics, although there’s a big part of me that wishes they’d used Jarnbjorn.
Who knows if this image is real or not. There are some pretty impressive custom Funkos out there (You should see my Gambit and Psylocke customs) that are indistinguishable from the real thing. But I’m inclined to believe this one because we are so close to the movie’s release on May 4th.
Meanwhile, Marvel Funko has dropped another of their terrific animated short films, this one titled “Submarine Showdown”. It features an underwater battle between Captain America and Red Skull that I’m going to call an unofficial sequel to Captain America: The First Avenger, although if you ask me which one I’d rather watch it would easily be this. Shorter and more fun. Check it out below!
We’ve been waiting a long time to see Brie Larson in her Captain Marvel getup. The Oscar-winning actress landed the role back in 2016, and while there have been details dropped here and there we’ve yet to see her as the first female hero to have her own solo movie. Well, that’s now changed thanks to set photos snagged by Page Six.
Green? Yeah, the costume is green, which goes against type for the character and different from the concept art we’ve seen. Now, this probably isn’t, and shouldn’t be, a very big deal. I don’t think there’s any real obligation to her color scheme, is there? Carol Danvers has sported red and blue, or black when she was Warbird…basically she’s had a ton of outfits. Maybe the colors represent the alien Kree, who play a major part in her origin? It could be anything. Maybe she’s secretly a member of the Green Lantern Corps?
The scene Larson is shooting is likely for the still-untitled Avengers 4 and not for Captain Marvel which films in March and opens in May 2019. Remember, Captain Marvel is a prequel set in the ’90s, so I think when that film arrives she will be wearing a costume we are more familiar with.
Nowadays the KKK aren’t dressed in hoods burning torches on front lawns; they’re in boardrooms and college universities carrying tiki torches. So Andrew Heckler’s comically overwrought drama Burden, which is set in 1996, feels old fashioned right from jump street. And given the real-world events it depicts some may be willing to forgive that, certainly these kinds of message heavy movies about southern racism were more prevalent some years ago. But in execution it still needs to do something new to make this particular story feel unique, and despite a couple of winning performances that fails to happen.
One of those performances does not belong to Garrett Hedlund, who as KKK member Mike Burden mumbles and sways through each scene like a drunk with a mouthful of old paper towels. The ironically-named Mike Burden (His name immediately recalls the film White Man’s Burden) is part of a small Klan group in Laurens, South Carolina that bought an old movie theater and opened The Redneck KKK Museum. Yeah, that’s what it was actually called. Led by his father figure Tom Griffin (Tom Wilkinson, a terrific heel), Mike is a loyal foot soldier. The film begins by showing Mike and the little family of Klansmen he runs with, not as racists stoking societal fires, but as everyday folks who do normal things. Then they pull the rug out; Oh…these guys are a bunch of bigots. Got it. Guess that’s one cookout I won’t be attending.
The short hand for this movie could read as such: “KKK member finds a better way thanks to the love of a good white woman.” That’s the wrong perspective for this movie to have. Nevertheless, Andrea Riseborough, who has four movies at Sundance this year, gives the film’s strongest performance as Judy, a single mother who rejects the racism she see’s around town. But she has an interest in Mike, and they fall in love despite his beliefs going against hers in such an extreme way. Much of the film is spent navigating their relationship, and most of it is utterly ridiculous. Too often she’ll reject Mike for something horrible he’s done or said, like use the N-word, laugh at obviously racist jokes, or beat up a black man, while holding him in her arms and allowing him to stay in her home and influence her child. It never makes sense, and her protestations, at least for me, fell on deaf ears.
More compelling than Mike’s eventual evolution is that of Reverend Kennedy (Forest Whitaker), who finds his faith tested while rioting against the museum. As a man of God who repeatedly preaches the value of forgiveness towards one’s enemies, he’s forced to put words to action when Mike, who eventually runs afoul of Tom and leaves the KKK, is in desperate need of help. At that point the Reverend must do more than put his faith in God, he must put it in men to do what’s right. It’s a choice that doesn’t necessarily sit well with his family or other members of the community.
Heckler would have been wiser to center this story around the Reverend, rather than Mike who is so distasteful that we don’t care much about his transformation. Hedlund’s unconvincing performance doesn’t help, either, which is unfortunate because Whitaker and Riseborough really do some fine, sensitive work here. But the script doesn’t allow for much beyond what the actors are able to bring on their own. Unable to really differentiate his film from others, Heckler artificially raises the stakes so often that we become numb to it. If tensions are boiling, something terrible will definitely happen. We’re meant to be “shocked” by the brazenness of the racists with such regularity (In one scene they urinate on a random girl just walking home) that they become hard to take seriously.
Heckler means well, and he makes a valiant effort to show that love can overcome hate if given room to grow. He’s also keenly aware how much economic hardship factors into bigotry, as poor white men feel compelled to exercise power over the one group worse off than them. Or worse, they act violently out of jealousy towards blacks who have succeeded where they haven’t. But Heckler makes these points without much style or grace, something the story told in Burden desperately needs.
After finding Oscars success with Whiplash and La La Land, Damien Chazelle has taken a pretty sharp turn into peak TV. Last fall he signed up to exec-produce The Eddy, an 8-episode musical series for Amazon. And now he’s made a move to Apple for something new.
Variety reports Chazelle will write and direct every episode of a new series, but details on it are unclear. What we do know is that Apple must smell what Chazelle is cookin’ because they’ve already ordered it straight to series.
Next up for Chazelle is the astronaut drama, First Man, which reunites him with Ryan Gosling and opens this October.
It’s tradition for the prior year’s Best Actor winner to present the current year’s Best Actress winner with her Academy Award. This year that would have presented quite the awkward scenario since that would mean Casey Affleck would have been handing out the statue, and in the current #MeToo/#TimesUp climate that wasn’t going to fly. Affleck has been gracious, or perhaps embarrassed, enough to stop this before it became a public spectacle.
Deadline reports Affleck has dropped out of his presenting slot at the Oscars, with the Manchester by the Sea star refusing to become a distraction. Good idea.
I’m still a bit salty over Affleck winning last year. Not that his performance wasn’t worthy, but the Academy and Hollywood in general overlooked charges of sexual misconduct filed against him by two women connected to his mockumentary, I’m Still Here. Both cases were settled financially. Meanwhile, Nate Parker was raked over the coals for not handling the response to charges made against him two decades earlier, charges of which he was acquitted. The backlash sank him, his film Birth of a Nation which had been an Oscar contender, and possibly destroyed his career. Heard anything from him lately? Nah, you haven’t. Affleck has been given a pass, and I could start a much larger discussion as to why. Here’s a hint: it ain’t got shit to do with his performance.
This is going to be a crazy Oscars, and I’m guessing this isn’t the only way the show will be affected. I’ll be hosting my usual Oscars Night shindig for DC Film Society and it might be a smart idea to keep some extra jokes in my pocket.
By all rights Charlie Kaufman should be one of the most sought-after filmmakers around. The writer of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Adaptation, Being John Malkovich and director of Anomalisa, and Synecdoche, New York is recognized as a remarkable talent, but it hasn’t translated into mainstream success or continued opportunities. Thankfully Netflix knows a good thing when they see it, and are handing the keys to Kaufman for his own project.
Kaufman will write and direct I’m Thinking of Ending Things, an adaptation of Ian Reid’s book about a suicidal woman who travels with her boyfriend to meet his parents, only to unravel when he deserts her.
I’m more than down to see where Kaufman goes with this. He’s a big fan of the book having provided a blurb for it, so we know he’ll try to do it justice. Next up for him is the odd diversion, YA adaptation Chaos Walking, which stars Daisy Ridley and Tom Holland.
Did someone declare this Meryl Streep Week and not tell the rest of us? The legendary actress scoredd her one billionth Oscar nomination, this time for Steven Spielberg’s The Post (Eh, she was alright in it, but come on!), which was followed by her joining the second season of HBO’s Big Little Lies. And now she’s here again in the new trailer for Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, backed by the dance happy sounds of ABBA.
Streep is back and joined by (deep breath) Julie Walters, Christine Baranski, Amanda Seyfried, Dominic Cooper, Pierce Brosnan, Stellan Skarsgård and Colin Firth join Streep in reprising their roles, with Lily James, Alexa Davies, Jessica Keenan Wynn, Jeremy Irvine, Josh Dylan, Hugh Skinner, Andy Garcia, and Cher for a sequel that wil take audiences back to where the love began. Check out the synopsis, preferably set to ABBA’s “Waterloo”:
As the film goes back and forth in time to show how relationships forged in the past resonate in the present, James will play the role of Young Donna. Filling the roles of Young Rosie and Young Tanya are Alexa Davies (A Brilliant Young Mind) and Jessica Keenan Wynn (Broadway’s Beautiful). Young Sam will be played by Jeremy Irvine (War Horse), while Young Bill is Josh Dylan (Allied) and Young Harry is Hugh Skinner (Kill Your Friends).
Streep’s presence is mostly felt in spirit, which has led to speculation that she may not be in the sequel very much, if you catch my drift.
Luca Guadagnino’s multiple Oscar-nominee Call Me By Your Name doesn’t seem like an obvious choice for a sequel. It told a standalone tale, an adaptation of Andre Aciman’s romance novel about a summer of love in 1983 Northern Italy. Guadagnino has felt differently, though, and for months he’s been chatting about a potential sequel, or series of sequels, and now he’s revealed to Collider one crucial detail: when it will take place.
“I think the next chapter it will be happening right after the fall of Berlin wall and that great shift that was the end of Russia, of the USSR, sorry. And we’ll see people leaving home and going in the world. That’s what I can say for now.”
The Berlin Wall came down in ’89, so maybe that same year or perhaps 1990? That’s great and all, but this still sounds like a very bad idea. There’s tremendous potential to completely miss out on what made Call Me By Your Name work. While the romantic chemsitry between Armie Hammer and Timothee Chalamet was key, the Italian setting was just as much a factor. To change that, which it sounds like Guadagnino would do, might lead to a disappointing sequel. But if all three principles remain involved we could a beloved series of films on par with the Before Sunset trilogy.
