Joaquin Phoenix is about to go HAM on a bunch of sex traffickers, and that’s pretty awesome. We’re going to see multiple Phoenix performances next year but the most intense, the most unrelenting, the most violent, is sure to be in Lynne Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here.
Phoenix, kinda looking like Mel Gibson during his wacko “ostracized from Hollywood” phase, plays a former FBI agent and PTSD-afflicted Gulf War vet hired to rescue a senator’s daughter from a sex trafficking right, and how the case sends him teetering over the edge. Let’s just say he’ll do anything it takes to get the job done. Here’s the official synopsis:
A traumatized veteran, unafraid of violence, tracks down missing girls for a living. When a job spins out of control, Joe’s nightmares overtake him as a conspiracy is uncovered leading to what may be his death trip or his awakening.
Also starring Judith Roberts, Ekaterina Samsonov, John Doman, Alex Manette, Dante Pereira-Olsen, and Alessandro Nivola, You Were Never Really Here opens April 6th 2018.
It’s the For Colored Girls reunion nobody was asking for ! Tessa Thompson and Whoopi Goldberg are to be reunited in IFC’s indie road trip movie, Furlough, starring alongside Melissa Leo. Laurie Collyer will direct from a script by Barry Strugatz.
The road trip comedy follows a woman (Thompson) who lives with and cares for her aging mother (Goldberg), while working part-time at a jail. At work, she is given a chance to show off her abilities when she is assigned to accompany an unruly prisoner (Leo) on an emergency furlough to visit her dying mother. Things don’t go as planned.
Also part of the cast are Edgar Ramirez, La La Anthony, and Anna Paquin. Beween Goldberg, Leo, and Paquin the film has a total of three Oscar winners. Pretty impressive. [Variety]
We already knew Sony’s sequel to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo would have a completely rebooted cast, and now we’re seeing the replacement process completed. Borg/McEnroe star Sverrir Gudnason has taken on the role of Mikael Blomquist, which was previously played by Daniel Craig. He’ll be starring alongside Claire Foy who has taken over as Lisbeth Salander from Rooney Mara.
Fede Alvarez will be behind the camera for the adaptation of The Girl in the Spider’s Web, based on the fourth Millennium novel. Sylvia Hoeks of Blade Runner 2049 will play Lisbeth’s twin sister, with The Square‘s Claes Bang as a villain. As for the plot, it will apparently deal with a mysterious part of Lisbeth’s past coming back to haunt her.
The Girl in the Spider’s Web opens October 5th 2018. [Variety]
Mary Elizabeth Winstead is joining Aaron Paul in The Parts You Lose, about the unlikely friendship that forms between Wesley, a young deaf boy, and a fugitive on the run. When the cops close in on his location, Wesley must decide where to place his loyalties. Newcomer Danny Murphy is also part of the cast, with Winstead playing Wesley’s mother. Darren Lemke (Jack the Giant Slayer) wrote the script for Christopher Cantwell to direct.
Barry Jenkins’ adaptation of James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk is putting together an incredible cast. Joining now is Narcos star Pedro Pascal, alongside Kiki Layne, Stephan James, Teyonah Parris, Dave Franco, Colman Domingo, Regina King, Brian Tyree Henry, Ed Skrein, Diego Luna, Michael Beach, and Finn Wittrock. The film follows a pregnant Harlem woman as she does whatever it takes to get her fiancé out of prison. [Variety]
In a day we’ll finally have the trailer for Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, but in the run-up to it we’ve been treated to a number of teasers that have revealed…well, that people really need to stop fuckin’ around with dinosaurs. Seriously, they could make an Idiocracy sequel out of all the stupid things man has done trying to keep dinosaurs around in these movies. Like…oh, I dunno…creating a dinosaur sanctuary near an active volcano.
Speaking with EW, Bryce Dallas Howard provides more plot details. She says the film takes place a few years after Jurassic World, Claire and Owen’s relationship seems to be in neutral, but she needs his help getting the dinosaurs she’s rescued off of Isla Nublar which is about to become the new Pompeii…
“Claire’s founded an organization, Dinosaur Protection Group, and they’re finding a way to get these dinosaurs off the island. She reaches out to [Chris Pratt’s character] Owen Grady to let him know this is happening.”
Despite surviving the events of the last movie, Claire and Owen don’t seem to be on the same page romantically at this point.
“When you see them at the beginning of this story, you get caught up as to what’s going on. But it’s not what you would necessarily expect.”
Nah, I think we get it. Romantic tension and all that.
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom opens June 22nd 2018. Check out some new photos below, including our first look at the newly-introduced Baryonyx!
The Knights of the Old Republic video games are simply incredible. Screw that Star Wars Battlefront stuff, they’re just shooting games with cool skins. But KOTOR were deep RPGs that took you way back into the history of the Star Wars universe, introducing characters whose actions would have major ramifications on the world we were familiar with. The games are so popular that when Rian Johnson was revealed to be launching a brand new trilogy, fans hoped he would adapt KOTOR for the big screen.
Well, no dice. Speaking with Mashable, Johnson admits his love for those games, too, but says he has other plans for his trilogy’s story…
“Oh, [the fans] love Knights of the Old Republic. I played that game when it first came out and it was like, god, I loved it. Yeah, that’s a fantastic game. And I understand it, the instinct to automatically go to something that you know and love, that you’ve already seen. To me, what’s really fun is the notion of what new stuff are we gonna see, what new stories can we tell?”
While that’s disappointing, Johnson is right. He’s already said his story won’t have anything to do with the Skywalkers, and that opens up a wealth of potential story ideas worth getting excited over. I think the best we can hope for, and I mean it we should really hope for this, is that we get a new KOTOR game sometime in the future. Pretty please?
This is really happening, ya’ll. Bah gawd, it’s happening! Reports that Disney was looking to purchase the movie and TV assets from Fox, basically everything that makes 20th Century Fox what it is, began last month. Since then the buzz died down with stories that negotiations had stalled. But then suddenly they perked up again, and now that deal is closer than ever to become real.
According to CNBC, Disney is close to shelling out $60B for Fox’s assets, which would include all of the things you’re thinking about right now. The X-Men, Alien, Avatar, and perhaps the biggest of them all, the original Star Wars trilogy which Fox has been holding the rights to for years. Think you’ve seen every possible Star Wars home release? Well, wait until Disney can put out a whopping 9-movie Bluray set featuring the theatrical cuts of the original trilogy (no stupid “Special Edition), prequels, and current trilogy. And then, wait until they put out a new set with all 9 movies, plus Star Wars Rebels, the live-action spinoffs like Rogue One, and The Clone Wars animated series. It may cost $1000 but dammit we would buy it.
More importantly this would be more content for Disney’s upcoming streaming network when it launches in 2019. That may be what they are really in this for. The library is where the real money is at. Fox is a historic studio with so many current and dormant properties that the possibilities for Disney are endless.
So yeah, Disney is close to owning every single thing you hold dear. Fox is said to be favoring Disney above all other suitors, and an announcement of some kind is expected within a week. At what point do we start calling Disney a monopoly? Is that even possible in the entertainment industry?
A bunch of people showed up for a 20-year anniversary screening of Wag the Dog, and a tense discussion about sexual harassment broke out. The panel was attended by Dustin Hoffman, who was hit with sexual harassment and assault charges by Anna Graham, who says she was a 17-year-old intern on the set of a 1985 TV movie with Hoffman when the misconduct occurred. Panel moderator John Oliver wasn’t about to let this opportunity to confront Hoffman slide by.
“This is something we’re going to have to talk about because … it’s hanging in the air,” Oliver said.
Hoffman retorted, “It’s hanging in the air? From a few things you’ve read, you’ve made an incredible assumption about me,” he noted, adding sarcastically, “You’ve made the case better than anyone else can. I’m guilty.”
When Graham released her account of events, Hoffman did issue an apology in which he said that it is “not reflective of who I am”. It’s that last part Oliver took issue with…
“It’s that kind of response to this stuff that pisses me off. It is reflective of who you were,” Oliver said. “If you’ve given no evidence to show it didn’t [happen], then there was a period of time for a while when you were a creeper around women. It feels like a cop-out to say, ‘It wasn’t me.’ Do you understand how that feels like a dismissal?”
I can’t imagine how the rest of the panel guests, Robert De Niro, producer Jane Rosenthal, and director Barry Levinson, must have felt watching Hoffman and Oliver go at it. From most accounts both men gave as good as they got, but one part of the exchange really turned out ugly for Hoffman. And it’s something he says that dismissive men today still say in response to sexual misconduct allegations, “Why now?”
Hoffman asked, “Do you believe the stuff that you read?”
“I believe what she wrote, yes,” Oliver said. After Hoffman asked him why, Oliver stated simply “Because there’s no point in her lying.”
Hoffman then shot back with the unfortunate reply, “Well, there’s a point in her not bringing it up for 40 years.”
And that went over like a fart in a crowded elevator.
So yeah, that did not paint Hoffman in the best light. You should really watch the brief video provided below to get a sense of how uncomfortable the whole thing was. While it may have been rough for those on stage and in the audience, I do think conversations like these are important right now. [WashingtonPost]
The third film in the hit animated franchise, Despicable
Me 3 sees villian-turned-good-guy Gru (Steve Carrell) return to his
roots, setting aside his Minions and his former life of crime to return home to
his twin brother. Together, the pair set out to put a stop to the evil Balthazar
Bratt (South Park’s Tre Parker), a former 1980s child star seeking revenge,
out to destory the world.
We Said: “Not only were [the
Minions] the only characters anybody cared about after the smash 2010 film,
they went on to have their own Minions spinoff, which did bigger
business than any Gru-led movie, but they now occupy a huge amount of space in
the Despicable Me films. Despicable
Me 3 sees the Minions have their own subplot yet again, while all of
the time spent with Gru feels like filler. […] Unfortunately, it looks like the
next film will pick up a lot of what Despicable Me 3 lays down. I guess
we’ll have to count on Minions 2 to play hero and save the
day.” Rating: 2 out of 5
Based on the best selling novel of the same name, Americna
Assasin stars Dylan O’Brien as a young CIA black ops recuit determined
to bring justice to the world at any cost, and Michael Keaton as the veteran
spy tasked with mentoring him and keeping him in line. When the pair discover a
growing pattern in a series of recent
terrorist attacks, they’re forced to team up with a dangerous Turkish spy to
bring down the rogue agent resposnible for the violence.
We Said: “Who knew The
Maze Runner’s Dylan O’Brien could out-Bourne Matt Damon’s Jason
Bourne, but he does in Michael Cuesta’s American Assassin. Granted, the last Bourne
film was pretty terrible in its awkward attempts to adapt to the new cyber age
of counter-terrorism. American Assassin on the other hand is strictly old
school, Tom Clancy-type stuff with a contemporary flair and O’Brien, while not
the most credible action star the genre has ever seen, has the presence to grow
into a believable boogeyman terrorists can quake in their boots over.” Rating: 3 out of 5
The long awaited revival of David Lynch’s beloved surrealist
drama adds more intensity and mystery to the small town of Twin Peaks. Set 25
years after the original series, Agent Dale Cooper finds himself returning to
the titular town when new information about the murder case he was attempting
to solve imerges. Just as strange as ever, 2017’s Twin Peaks is 18 new episodes
of pure mind-bending Lynchian madness.
We’re happy to offer our DC readers the chance to attend a free advance screening of the new animated film, Ferdinand, featuring the voices of John Cena, Gina Rodriguez, Kate McKinnon, Daveed Diggs, and more!
SYNOPSIS: FERDINAND tells the story of a giant bull with a big heart. After being mistaken for a dangerous beast, he is captured and torn from his home. Determined to return to his family, he rallies a misfit team on the ultimate adventure. Set in Spain, Ferdinand proves you can’t judge a bull by its cover.
The screening takes place this Saturday, December 9th, at 11:00AM 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 remember that having passes does not guarantee entry, and you’ll want to arrive early to ensure receiving a seat. Enjoy the show!
