Okay, can we call it a day on Fox’s Gambit movie now? The film, which rankled some fans by casting Channing Tatum as the Cajun mutant charmer, has been trying to get off the ground for years but has been met with one problem after another. Delayed from its original 2016 release date by a script nobody liked, it has already lost two directors in Rupert Wyatt and Doug Liman, but things seemed to be back on track when Gore Verbinski (Pirates of the Caribbean) was hired last year. Well, not so much because now he’s gone, too.
Verbinski has exited the project, and it’s hard to say he sets it back because it never really went anywhere, other than to cast Lizzy Caplan in a supporting role. Variety doesn’t have details on his departure, other than to say he “decided against” it, but you can bet there’s more to it.
So what now? The project had to be on shaky ground anyway with Disney purchasing Fox, and I think this is the final nail in the coffin. Or as Gambit would say in his native tongue, “C’est la vie. Je suis mort.”
The awards season has suddenly become very heated, with every apparent slight turned into some kind of proxy war. The current target? Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, which has a very vocal faction ripping the acclaimed film for its treatment of Sam Rockwell’s racist cop character, which some see as too redemptive. There has also been some uproar that Greta Gerwig and Jordan Peele aren’t quite getting the credit they deserve for Lady Bird and Get Out, respectively, with gender/racial bias the reason.
It’s into this climate that the Directors Guild of America have announced an incredibly diverse group of nominees for the DGA Awards in the Feature Film category. The nominees include Gerwig, Peele, Martin McDonagh for Three Billboards, Guillermo Del Toro for The Shape of Water, and Christopher Nolan for Dunkirk.
Greta Gerwig joins six other women previously nominated for the award, with Kathryn Bigelow the only one to ever win, while Peele is only the fourth African-American ever nominated.
All of those nominees are deserving for different reasons, and I have to say it’s a tough category to call. Any one of them could come away the winner in a very tough year. Just look at who got left out to see how strong a year for directors it has been: Luca Guadagnino for Call Me By Your Name, P.T. Anderson for Phantom Thread, Kathryn Bigelow for Detroit, Dee Rees for Mudbound, Steven Spielber for The Post, and Sean Baker for The Florida Project all missed the cut.
Also announced were nominees in the First Time Feature Film Director category. Peele was nominated there, as well, and wouldn’t that be amazing if he won both awards? Probably he’ll win this one and lose the other, but one never knows. Others in the field are Geremy Jasper for Patti Cake$, Aaron Sorkin for Molly’s Game, Taylor Sheridan for Wind River, and William Oldroyd for Lady Macbeth.
Winners will be revealed on February 3rd. The complete list of film nominees is below.
Outstanding Directorial Achievement in a Feature Film
Guillermo del Toro – The Shape of Water
Greta Gerwig – Lady Bird
Jordan Peele – Get Out
Martin McDonagh – Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri
Christopher Nolan – Dunkirk
Outstanding Directorial Achievement of a First-Time Feature Film Director for 2016
I never let a moment go by to praise Brad Anderson as one of today’s most underrated filmmakers. If you haven’t experienced his snowy mystery Transsiberian you are seriously missing out, but he’s done other great work such as The Machinist and Session 9. Next week he’ll be in Park City for the Sundance debut of Beirut, which sees him teaming up with Michael Clayton and ‘Bourne‘ writer Tony Gilroy for a political thriller with a hell of a cast.
Jon Hamm, Rosamund Pike, Shea Whigham, Dean Norris, and Larry Pine star in the ’80s set film about a U.S. diplomat who is sent in to Beirut on a dangerous mission by the CIA where it’s tough to tell the allies from his enemies. Here’s the synopsis:
A U.S. diplomat (Jon Hamm) flees Lebanon in 1972 after a tragic incident at his home. Ten years later, he is called back to war-torn Beirut by CIA operatives (Rosamund Pike) to negotiate for the life of a friend he left behind.
Not the typical movie you expect to see at Sundance, which is all the more reason to track it down. Hopefully I’ll have a review for you soon, but if not Beirut will be in theaters on April 13th.
We’re happy to offer our DC readers the chance to attend a free advance screening of Hostiles, directed by Scott Cooper and starring Christian Bale, Rosamund Pike, and Wes Studi.
SYNOPSIS: Set in 1892, Hostiles tells the story of a legendary Army Captain (Christian Bale), who after stern resistance, reluctantly agrees to escort a dying Cheyenne war chief (Wes Studi) and his family back to tribal lands. Making the harrowing and perilous journey from Fort Berringer, an isolated Army outpost in New Mexico, to the grasslands of Montana, the former rivals encounter a young widow (Rosamund Pike), whose family was murdered on the plains. Together, they must join forces to overcome the punishing landscape, hostile Comanche and vicious outliers that they encounter along the way.
The screening takes place on Thursday, January 18th at 7:00pm at AMC Mazza Gallerie. If you’d like to attend, register with the Gofobo ticketing site here. Please remember that all of our screenings are first come first served and you will need to arrive early to ensure receiving a seat. Enjoy the show!
Sam Hoffman’s feature debut Humor Me is a gently funny and endearing comedy featuring Jemaine Clement as Nate, the struggling playwright who is forced to move into his father’s (Bob, played by Elliott Gould) retirement community after his wife and producer both leave him when he is unable to finish writing his second play. If the movie feels familiar, it’s because it doesn’t stray very far from a lot of tried and true tropes: a strained father-son relationship, a more-successful and well-liked brother (played by Erich Bergen), a manic-pixie dream girl (played by Ingrid Michaelson), an intellectual and/or creative doing menial and/or annoying tasks to prove to himself and others that he can finish things. Even though the story is so familiar, there isn’t much added nuance to set the story or characters apart from other movies that follow a similar formula.
That being said, the performances in Humor Me are what make the characters and their stories endearing for viewers who feel too familiar with the premise. Previously, I was primarily familiar with Jemaine Clement’s work with Flight of the Conchords (and yes, he also voiced the crab in Moana) so it was nice to see him play Nate as a more grounded character that you find yourself liking and sympathizing with and rooting for. Elliott Gould really hams up the dorky dad using his dorky jokes to cope. While I was actually surprised by how little the father-son dynamic featured in this movie, given that it seems to be the emotional core, the performances by Clement and Gould were great and I loved their scenes together. Priscilla Lopez as Bob’s girlfriend, Connie, was also a standout as a role that wasn’t given a lot to work with but still managed to bring a lot of heart to the character and the story.
The writing was a bit weak for a lot of the other character profiles and interactions, which was ultimately super disappointing for me. It got to the point where I felt some scenes and characters entirely could have been omitted. I enjoyed the short bits where a few of Bob’s jokes, featuring a protagonist named Zimmerman, would get played out in black and white with Bob narrating, but as a device in the movie, these interrupted the flow of the story in a way that wasn’t justified to show us how Bob relies on these jokes.
Humor Me still managed to get me to smile and laugh and feel for the characters, despite being thin and maybe too-familiar. It’s still a joy to watch the actors bring so much heart to their characters and to the story, and to get a chuckle from some of the jokes.
The last time Jason Reitman, Charlize Theron, and writer Diablo Cody teamed together it was for the abrasive comedy Young Adult, considered by many to be one of the director’s most successful films creatively. I prefer Juno, also penned by Cody, or better yet Up in the Air, but if this reunion gets him back on track after the misguided Men, Women & Children, then all’s the better. The Oscar-nominated Reitman returns with Tully, which like Juno is a refreshingly pointed look at motherhood.
Theron stars as Marlo, a mother of three including a newborn, who is gifted a night nanny named Tully by her brother. While she’s resistant to it at first, the two form a surprising bond over the care of her children. Mackenzie Davis looks to have her biggest screen role yet as Tully, and hopefully this sees her breakout to even better things.
Mark Duplass and Ron Livingston co-star, but this really looks to be a showcase for Theron, who I feel we don’t get to see play these kinds of roles enough when she is so good at them. My favorite Theron performances aren’t in action movies or as femme fatales, but when she plays an ordinary person and dials down the glamour.
That image you see above? It isn’t just Tom Hardy leafing through his notes on how to look less like Logan Marshall-Green. It’s actually the first official look at him in Sony’s upcoming Venom film, as the symbiote’s host Eddie Brock. Exciting, right? Thanks, IGN. Can we get some giant teeth, a slathery green tongue or something? Hopefully better images will arrive soon.
The film is being directed by Ruben Fleischer as the opening salvo in Sony’s Spiderman-less cinematic universe of Spider-Man characters. It’s a big opening gambit, to be sure, could go a long way in redeeming Sony for their failed efforts on The Amazing Spider-Man. We previously learned the plot will be based on two popular Venom storylines, Venom: Lethal Protector and Planet of the Symbiotes.
In a recent panel at the Brazilian Comic-Con (seen below), Fleischer confirmed the two storylines being used. The important one, to me at least, is Lethal Protector, which finds Venom agreeing to a truce with Spider-Man and moving to San Francisco to become a hero. You can see why that particular story would be used. It takes the action away from New York where Spidey is based, so no “Where’s Tom Holland??” questions, and sets Venom up as a character audiences would follow for multiple movies, Sony hopes.
Also starring Michelle Williams, Riz Ahmed, and Jenny Slate, Venom opens October 5th.
Sometimes you just want to sit back and watch Liam Neeson beat people up and shoot things, right? I’ve heard it a million times as an excuse for whatever generic action movie Neeson is starring in, and there’s some truth to it. Ever since he rubbed some Icy Hot ™ all over his aching joints and became an unexpected action star with Taken, he’s delivered one easily disposable diversion after another, particularly alongside Spanish helmer Jaume Collet-Serra. That’s fine, they’re effective for what they are meant to be, but even so we deserve better than The Commuter, which is likethe dumb cousin to Murder On the Orient Express.
Neeson is quickly running out of public transportation that he hasn’t had a life-threatening experience on. We’ve seen this movie before from Neeson and Collet-Serra, only then it was titled Non-Stop and was on a plane. What’s next? Hostage situation by rickshaw? Watch out for Neeson in The Balloonist, coming in 2019. The Commuter, which sounds like the name of a satirical villain from The Tick, finds Neeson as everyday joe Michael McCauley, an ex-NYPD detective turned financial planner with a wife (Elizabeth McGovern, good to see her again) and a son who is about to go to college. Syracuse, actually, and it ain’t cheap. But Michael finds himself canned from his job suddenly, and faced with the prospect of having nothing at the ripe old age of 60. It’s not a good look.
Michael’s daily routine includes the familiar faces he’s been meeting on the commuter train for years. He knows all the regulars, their patterns, even bits about their lives. That makes him the perfect target for a beautiful, mysterious woman (Vera Farmiga, always beautiful, always mysterious) who seems friendly enough. She proposes a hypothetical scenario as a means of testing human behavior. What would you do if you were asked to find someone and do something, which you’ll never know the ramifications of? And for doing it you’ll be paid $100K.
Is it hypothetical? Of course not. “Someone on this train doesn’t belong”, she tells him. Find that person, do something, get paid. Michael has a choice, but not really. He’s being watched by one of those omniscient villain-types who controls everything from afar and sees everything. With a phone call someone can be killed on any street block in the city. It happens. Michael is suitably terrified. His family is threatened, too. Better find this jabronie, , get paid, free the fam, and move on.
Like the aforementioned ‘Orient Express’, the train is full of many potential suspects, each with a defining personality trait for Michael to latch on to and analyze, but also to fool the audience. The jerkoff hedge fund manager? He seems like a likely candidate, plus we really want to see him get punched. The script, credited to three (!?!?) writers even teases our baser instincts by setting up a number of minorities as red herrings. The shady black guy with the guitar, the Slavic dude who looks like he probably took a beating from Neeson in Taken? Guilt written all over his beard.
With Collet-Serra’s camera swooping around the train’s tight confines, Neeson stomps up and down the aisles ridiculously. In a train full of likely suspects the only guy who comes off like a total creep is Michael, getting into fights, interrogating innocents, rifling through personal belongings, firing guns, all while the passengers look at him as a minor disturbance in an otherwise dull commute. It’s rather absurd, and if the film didn’t take itself so seriously there might have been some fun to be had with the schlocky B-movie premise. But that’s not the mode Neeson finds himself in (he only seems to poke fun at himself in cameos); although co-stars like Vera Farmiga, Patrick Wilson (How is this not a spinoff of The Conjuring??), and Sam Neill seem to recognize exactly what kind of movie they’re in. They’re chewin’ it up.
Michael doesn’t prove to be much of a detective, and the whole mystery plot never develops convincingly. It seems to exist solely so that we can watch Neeson go through the motions of what his fans expect. Awkwardly, a massive CGI train disaster is thrown into the mix like something out of the Denzel Washington film Unstoppable. It’s so laughably out of place that it actually pumps the brakes when it should be upping the stakes.
The Commuter is a lot like your average commuter going to work each day, best left alone.
The creative shakeup at DC Films rolls on following the departure of Jon Berg, the apparent demotion of Geoff Johns, and the hiring of Walter Hamada to lead the struggling studio. Nobody cares about that, or at least as movie fans we shouldn’t. That’s suit ‘n tie stuff, but what about the movies themselves? The landscape at Warner Bros. is shaky, throwing anything not far along in development into limbo. But one project that is apparently still on is Green Lantern Corps.
IGN caught up with writer David Goyer at the TCAs, and he confirmed the movie is “in the works”, although he doesn’t sound too firm on the details…
“I don’t know. Who knows, especially with what’s currently going on with the DC universe? There’s obviously a whole recalibration happening with that right now.”
There’s still no director attached, which leaves Goyer and Justin Rhodes’ script as the only real progress on the movie,which has been called a buddy cop comedy between Green Lanterns Hal Jordan and John Stewart. A release date in 2020 had been previously set but anything could happen between now and then.
Black Panther Day is real, ya’ll. You thought I was joking. Black Panther already looks like the coolest Marvel movie ever, but now we have numbers that say it could also be the biggest. Fandango reports first day ticket presales are the biggest they’ve ever had for a Marvel movie. Whoa. The previous record holder was Captain America: Civil War, which happened to be Black Panther’s screen debut. Coincidence? Probably not.
It’s proof that more than just black people are excited for this trip to Wakanda, where Chadwick Boseman and Michael B. Jordan will battle for the throne. Audiences not only want to see a reflection of themselves on the big screen, but a diversity of cultures, races, and gender. I think that’s a big reason why Wonder Woman got off to such a hot start last year. Men and women were eager to see something other than muscle-bound dudes punching one another.
To be fair, huge presales doesn’t always mean anything. Justice League’s advance sales were incredibly strong, too, and we know how that turned out. But this is Marvel, and we know from history that audiences flock to theaters for the opening weekend. I’m expecting Black Panther to be the second biggest debut of the year, behind only Avengers: Infinity War. Yep, think it’ll beat both Solo: A Star Wars Story and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. We’ll find out when February 16th comes around.
