Released in 2019 on Netflix, the version of Triple Frontier that we ultimately got was a far cry from where it had started. Originally a film reuniting The Hurt Locker duo of director Kathryn Bigelow and writer Mark Boal, it languished for years before being taken over by JC Chandor, while the cast also saw major fluctuations. While Tom Hanks, Channing Tatum, Johnny Depp, and Will Smith eyed the drug war thriller at different points, the final version was led by Ben Affleck, Oscar Isaac, Charlie Hunnam, Garrett Hedlund, and Pedro Pascal. Despite that, it was clear Netflix didn’t get a ton of viewership because it just sorta came and disappeared.
However, that could be about to change. Speaking with The Mary Sue, Hunnam says he’s working with Netflix on a sequel to Triple Frontier. The original movie centered on a team of ex-Special Forces soldiers who plan a heist of a drug kingpin in the dangerous “triple frontier” region of South America.
“Nothing guaranteed, but I just set up recently as the main producer on a potential sequel to ‘Triple Frontier’ at Netflix,” Hunnam said. “So we’re working on that. It’s in its absolute infancy, but I feel like I’ve got a lot more to say about the sort of after life of military personnel. I’m really hopeful.”
This is news I never would’ve expected to hear. Triple Frontier was my most anticipated movie for so long, that when it finally showed up and it wasn’t all I expected, it was a huge disappointment. Not a bad movie, it just could’ve been so much more. John liked it more than I did.
That said, it’s highly unlikely that Netflix will actually go through with this. Sure, they might want to keep Hunnam happy, he’s one of the stars of Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon, but Netflix also seems to be pulling back on the number or projects they greenlight. We’ll see how this shakes out, but I’m curious enough that I kinda want to see how this Triple Frontier sequel could work. That cast would definitely be tough to pull together again.
With acclaimed performances in Get Out, Judas and the Black Messiah, Nope, and more, it didn’t take long for Daniel Kaluuya to show he’s one of today’s strongest actors. Could he be just as effective as a filmmaker? We’re about to find out, as Kaluuya’s directorial debut, The Kitchen, is coming to Netflix next month.
Kaluuya’s debut is a dystopian sci-fi film set in a future London where the wealth gap has been stretched to the breaking point. The have-nots are relegated to a community called The Kitchen, where we follow two people struggling against a system that is stacked against them.
The film marks Kaluuya’s directorial debut, but he’s not alone. He co-directs alongside Kibwe Tavares, and co-wrote the script with Joe Murtagh. Kaluuya also produces the film, and it’s clear this is a story he has strong feelings about.
Leading the cast is Kane Robinson, joined by Jedaiah Bannerman, Hope Ikpoku Jr, Ian Wright, BackRoad Gee, Cristale, Teija Kabs, and Demmy Ladipo.
Here’s the synopsis: In a dystopian London, the gap between rich and poor has been stretched to its limits. All forms of social housing have been eradicated and only The Kitchen remains. A community that refuses to move out of the place they call home. This is where we meet a solitary Izi, living here by necessity and desperately trying to find a way out, and a 12-year-old Benji, who has lost his mother and is searching for a family. We follow our unlikely pair as they struggle to forge a relationship in a system that is stacked against them.
It was a delectable debut for Wonka, with the chocolatier musical topping all with $39M domestically, and a sweet $151M worldwide. Timothee Chalamet’s turn as Willy Wonka is earning positive reviews, as is the direction by Paul King. He might have another favorite to go along with his two Paddington movies. This being the season for family movie get-togethers, we could see Wonka leg this out for a number of weeks and into 2024.
2. The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes– $5.8M/$145.2M
After five weeks, The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes continues to hold strong, falling just 37%. It currently stands at $145M stateside and $289M globally.
3. The Boy and the Heron– $5.1M/$23.1M
Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron surprised everyone when it won the box office last weekend, but this week the Studio Ghibli fantasy fell back down to earth a little bit. The film is still doing exceptionally well, earning $5.1M and $23M domestic, $109M worldwide.
Yorgos Lanthimos’ raunchy Frankenstein-esque fantasy Poor Things broke into the top 10 with $1.2M after a slight theater expansion. The film is earning buzz for Emma Stone and her performance, which could lead her to her next Oscar.
Here’s a project I don’t think anyone could’ve seen coming. George Clooney and Adam Sandler are set to star together, for the first time I think, in a new Netflix comedy from Noah Baumbach. Deadline has news on the untitled film, which is part of Baumbach’s exclusive deal with Netflix.
Baumbach is, of course, coming off his co-writing gig with Greta Gerwig on Barbie, which made a few dollars this year. As for this new film, it’s being described as a “funny and emotional coming-of-age film about adults”, directed by Baumbach from a script he co-wrote with actress Emily Mortimer. That descriptor could cover just about all of Baumbach’s previous work, which includes The Squid and the Whale, Greenberg, and While We’re Young. He last directed an adaptation of White Noise for Netflix. His other films for the streamer include Marriage Story and The Meyerowitz Stories.
Sandler is also under an exclusive Netflix deal. He most recently voiced the title lizard in Leo, and starred in Murder Mystery 2 and You Are So Not Invited To My Bat Mitzvah for them this year.
Coming up for Clooney is his rowing biopic The Boys in the Boat, which arrives this Christmas.
Dermot Mulroney has signed up for some interesting roles lately. One could argue he is officially in his “old man action film” with nine films released this year alone. Over the last couple of years, the quality of the parts he’s taken has varied from the well-liked Scream VI to the shaky Umma and Gone in the Night. His latest work in Ruthless doesn’t stray much from his last few roles on his IMDB page. This character is stoic with alternative ideals about moral justice which he demonstrates by protecting a young woman somehow connected to his life. While he tries to elevate the material, director, and co-writer Art Camacho’s take on this “ruthless” character comes off as more laughable than watchable.
Mulroney plays an everyday slightly disgruntled wrestling coach named Harry, though you wouldn’t know it from the first scene. While watching a movie, he admonishes a young man for groping his date without consent, something that escalates in the parking lot. Harry breaks the kid’s arm, and then asks him if he has health insurance before offering him a ride to the hospital.
From there, his daughter is killed by her abuser and he returns to the hallowed halls of a high school gym. There he reluctantly connects with student Catia (Melissa Diaz) who is being abused by her step-father and neglected by her mother. When she is eventually trafficked by her father to a criminal organization run by Dale Remington (Jeffy Fahey), Harry does whatever he can to bring her home from Las Vegas no matter the consequences.
I’ve said on this site before that when a film has more than three writers, be prepared for clunky dialogue. Four people are credited with this script besides Camacho, including James Dean Simington, Javier Reyna, and Koji Steven Sakai. With Ruthless, the dialogue is stale with an unnatural feel. There are comfortable pauses after statements and everything is said with serious sincerity. The plot feels like the low-budget version of Nobody but without any stable story structure.
While Mulroney’s commitment to the part is worth watching nothing else much is. What he chooses to do next remains unknown but here’s hoping it’s better than Ruthless.
Ruthless is in theaters and on-demand. Watch the trailer below.
As Americans, we love our meat. Hamburgers, hotdogs, bacon, and everything in between are a part of our daily lives. Sure, it helps contribute to the obesity epidemic and plenty of other poor health issues that plague our nation, but we have almost collectively come to accept that as a part of our lives. The taste (and convenience of that taste) is just something that we have agreed is acceptable. However, we sometimes don’t think about the actual cost of our food.
There have been countless documentaries about the conditions of animals that are on various farms and how it’s inhumane as well as contributes to animal diseases, which then contribute to human diseases. However, not often do we get to explore the human cost of the mass-produced, corporate conglomerate-controlled hog industry, which is what director Shawn Bannon’s latest documentary The Smell of Money explores the communities (mostly poor communities of color) that have to deal with the environmental impact of this industry.
Exec-produced by Kate Mara and Oscar-winners Travon Free and Martin Desmond Roe, The Smell of Money spends most of its time with Elsie Herring, a citizen in Duplin County, NC whose family has owned their land for more than 100 years. After becoming free from slavery, her ancestors purchased land and have been living there with no issues for that time. However, in the late 1990s North Carolina saw a massive boom in their farming industry and many Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFO) started popping up all over Eastern North Carolina, and for the past 30 years the industry has transformed that region, and the people who live there believe it’s for the worse.
In addition to Elsie, The Smell of Money interviews a wide range of people in Rural North Carolina communities as they detail how their lives have been affected by the hog industry and their legal battles. Everyone from water testers, lawyers representing plaintiffs, academics, Robert F Kennedy Jr., Corey Booker, and countless others. One very interesting subject is Don Webb a former hog farmer who saw the error of his ways by saying “A good American won’t intentionally stink up another man’s home” and then dedicated his life to fighting back against the hog industry.
The Smell of Money explores the conditions of these “factory farms” that in addition to the inhumane treatment of the hogs on these farms, it spends a great deal of time exploring the (lack of) hog waste treatment on these farms. Instead of using the environmentally friendly (and more expensive) way of cleaning and disposing of hog carcasses and their waste, they instead opt to save a few bucks by creating “lagoons” to store the waste in as well as “recycling” the wastewater for fertilizer for their farms. However, this causes problems for the people who live near these factory farms as there is not only a permanent stench in their communities, but sickness in the residents in those communities that’s often ignored.
And not often do many documentaries explore environmental racism. It’s another weird thing we collectively have just accepted. Corporations that pollute often do their polluting in communities of color. Poor black, brown, and Indigenous people don’t have a lot of political power or their own lobbyists to advocate on their behalf. That’s why The Smell of Money spending so much time with Elsie Herring and many activists is so refreshing. We get to see on a local level the damage the hog industry does, but we also get to see the activism, organization, and resilience of the people on the ground level as they wage a decades-long fight for accountability.
The Smell of Money did reach out to Smithfield Foods (the corporation that ran the factory farms), but of course, they declined to comment. In fact, only one hog farmer was even brave enough to be the subject of the documentary. So as a result, the film is very one-sided regarding what is wanted to discuss. But truth be told, this issue is very straightforward and doesn’t need to be a “both sides” issue.
The Smell of Money is also a very organic documentary as it follows the subjects in real-time. Many of the plaintiff’s court cases are filmed as well as their reactions and frustrations. Another aspect of the film that really hits hard with it being a real-time filmed film is that a few of the interview subjects succumb to illnesses they developed because of the hog industry and pass away. Because we get to spend some time and learn about these people, it’s heartbreaking when they pass away, and you can get just as emotional as their family members are. The Smell of Money also gets impacted by the COVID pandemic as many of the interview subjects remind the camera crew that the Swine Flu outbreak was a result of factory farming in Eastern North Carolina so they weren’t surprised that a global pandemic could happen.
The Smell of Money is an emotional, honest, and wonderful exploration of people often neglected and taking it upon themselves to fight for their rights and the rights of their community: to exist. They aren’t asking for anyone to lose their jobs, they just don’t want to die and dedicate their lives to improving their communities, and that’s one of the worthwhile causes.
The Smell of Money is currently available in select theaters and On Demand.
It’s like the recent strikes never happened at all, because studios are happily throwing down big money to land superstar projects. Ryan Reynolds is particularly in demand, it seems, with Deadline reporting that Calamity Hustle, the action-comedy he’s in with Channing Tatum, going to Warner Bros. after another bidding war. This follows on recent news of Netflix out-bidding other studios for an untitled Reynolds heist flick directed by Shawn Levy.
Calamity Hustle reunites Tatum with directors Adam and Aaron Nee, who he worked with on The Lost City. The tone is being described as similar to Lethal Weapon and Die Hard. Reynolds plays a cop estranged from his brother, a criminal played by Tatum. When Tatum’s character gets involved with a holiday diamond heist, Reynolds must find his bro before those he ripped off do.
Add Calamity Hustle to Reynolds’ busy slate of projects, which include the aforementioned heist movie, John Krasinski’s imaginary friend comedy IF, and something called Deadpool 3. Actually, there’s a chance you’ll see Tatum in that last film, too, finally playing that Gambit role he was meant to years ago. The two previously came face-to-face in a funny Free Guy scene that Tatum made a cameo in.
Have you ever heard of the movie trope of the “magical Negro” character? An example would be Will Smith in The Legend of Bagger Vance or Michael Clarke Duncan in The Green Mile. They are Black supporting characters, always unnaturally good and pure, who come to the aid of white protagonists and impart valuable lessons. Well, that trope gets parodied in a fun way in The American Society of Magical Negroes, which is sure to be one of the biggest titles debuting at Sundance next month.
Writer-director Kobi Libii’s film stars Justice Smith as a young man who is recruited into a secret group of magical Black people whose lives are dedicated to the sole purpose of making white lives better. And that becomes all the more important when you’re Black and living in a world of extreme white fragility.
As one character played by David Alan Grier says, “What’s the most dangerous animal in the world? White people when they feel uncomfortable.”
Also in the cast are An-Li Bogan, Drew Tarver, Michaela Watkins, Aisha Hinds, Tim Baltz, Rupert Friend, and Nicole Byer.
Here’s the official synopsis: THE AMERICAN SOCIETY OF MAGICAL NEGROES is a fresh, satirical comedy about a young man, Aren, who is recruited into a secret society of magical Black people who dedicate their lives to a cause of utmost importance: making white people’s lives easier.
We hear all of the time about certain books that are unfilmable; they were not designed to be made into movies. At first blush, Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents would be one of those. The author’s in-depth look at caste systems throughout the world and how they relate to our understanding of racism would seem to be better as a documentary. But leave it to Ava DuVernay to turn Wilkerson’s intellectual endeavor into a deeply personal story that mustn’t be missed this awards season.
Unfortunately, Origin is getting overlooked as critics groups start handing out awards. Discussion has turned towards NEON and their handling of the film, which pales in comparison to the work they did on films such as Parasite and Portrait of a Lady on Fire, which you couldn’t get away from in previous years. To be fair, I think Origin is a more difficult film to promote because its story isn’t something that can be easily summed up. Frankly, the movie is too good, perhaps even DuVernay’s best yet, to get overshadowed just because some studio execs aren’t creative enough to know what to do with it.
The film stars Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor as Wilkerson, who faces her share of personal tragedy while researching the link between caste systems in America, India, and Hitler’s Germany.
Also in the cast are Jon Bernthal, Niecy Nash, Audra McDonald, Nick Offerman, Vera Farmiga, Blair Underwood, Connie Nielsen, Finn Wittrock, Jasmine Cephas Jones, and Emily Yancy.
Here’s the synopsis: While investigating the global phenomenon of caste and its dark influence on society, a journalist faces unfathomable loss and uncovers the beauty of love and human resilience. Inspired by the New York Times best-seller “Caste” and starring Academy Award nominee Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor (“King Richard”), ORIGIN explores the mystery of history, the wonders of romance and a fight for our future.
Hopefully, this new trailer helps drum up the buzz that DuVernay and Origin deserve. The film expands nationwide on January 19th 2024. You can check out my review here.
Mark Wahlberg continues to occupy just the weirdest space for middle-aged action stars. He could probably be commanding his own blockbuster franchise, like Tom Cruise does, but instead he’s given his career over to playing the hot dad with great biceps and ripped abs, domesticated dudes who used to have thrilling lives but have settled for changing diapers and meal prep. A big part of it is that he’s just such a natural comedian, and still gifted enough as an action star, that he’s indispensable to the action-comedy genre and movies like The Family Plan, which arrives today on Apple TV+ streaming and is destined to be forgotten by tomorrow.
Wahlberg plays Dan, who is in perfect wedded bliss to Jessica (the always-reliable Michelle Monaghan, also a victim of action-comedy pigeonholing). They have three kids total: college-aged feminist Nina (Zoe Colletti), amped-up gamer Kyle (Van Crosby), and the baby, who gets more screen time than anyone cooing gleefully everytime something goes off-the-rails. A used car salesman and overprotective patriarch, Dan nonetheless is hiding a secret: he used to be an elite government assassin in his former life but got out of it when the missions got sketchy. When his past catches up to him, Dan decides to take the family on a road trip to Las Vegas where they can start a new life.
Of course, they have to get there alive first. And Dan will have to break the news to everyone that dear ol’ Dad isn’t the man they think he is. Hey Dad, kinda hard to tell the kids to behave when you’ve been lying to them for eighteen years!
But that’s sorta the point of The Family Plan, as Dan navigates the dangerous, reckless life he used to have with the boring, but ultimately more rewarding one he built with Jessica. The film, penned by David Coggeshall and directed by British helmer Simon Cellan Jones, takes great pains to point out that all of us have different versions of ourselves out there. For Jessica, she was a world class athlete before she met Dan, but had to give it up due to injury. When the two got together, they had moved on from their previous lives and settled easily into starting a family.
There are spurts of action and a few chuckles as Dan engages in car chases while the family sleeps, only the baby seems to be up for all of it. As the walls start closing in the antics get more ridiculous; there’s a stop at a college so Nina can confront her boyfriend and Jessica can relive her drunken glory years. In keeping with the outdated freshness of the material, the whole gamer storyline culminates at a Valorant tourney as esports in general is facing a downturn in popularity. The Family Plan is well-executed content, good for a few laughs and some distracting violence but not much else. Its biggest crime might be wasting the talents of Maggie Q and Ciaran Hinds, both deserving of more than the meager moments they get saddled with as shady supporting players to Wahlberg.
