What, you didn’t think Tom Cruise would blast off into space without his buddy Christopher McQuarrie, did you? When this outer space film Cruise is working on with Elon Musk was announced, my speculation was that only a few people would be trusted to work on it. Two of those people are definitely on board: one is director Doug Liman, and now we know the other is McQuarrie, who will have a key role to play.
Deadline has provided an updated on the untitled movie, which will be the first to shoot in outer space with the help of NASA and Elon Musk’s SpaceX. The last we heard, Universal had picked up the rights and were ready to drop $200M+ on the project. We now know that McQuarrie, who will act as story adviser and producer, was part of an enthusiastic ZOOM meeting that got Universal to sign on the dotted line.
Also involved is relatively-new producer PJ van Sandwijk, best known for docs Citizen K and American Dharma, so this is a big step up.
Liman is currently writing the script, but don’t be surprised if McQuarrie has a hand in that, too. He’s had a part to play in pretty much every Cruise film since they first worked together on Valkyrie in 2008. The two are inseparable at this point, and Cruise trusts him completely. A project of this magnitude isn’t going anywhere without McQuarrie’s deep involvement.
Cruise and McQuarrie are currently shooting two back-to-back Mission: Impossible movies, the last one opening in 2022. There won’t be any leaving orbit until those are done and in the can, and with no script it could be a long wait.
It’s a double dose of good news for fans of Kill List and Free Fire director Ben Wheatley. Not only do we have the first look at his upcoming remake of Alfred Hitchcock thriller, Rebecca, but Netflix has announced a release date that is only three months away.
DailyMail have dropped the first images from Rebecca, featuring stars Armie Hammer, Lily James, and Kristin Scott Thomas. The film is based on Daphne du Maurier’s 1938 thriller about a newly-married woman who finds she is haunted by the specter of her aristocrat husband’s dead wife.
Adapted numerous times, the most well-known is Hitchcock’s Oscar-winning 1940 film with Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine. Wheatley teamed up with The Woman in Black writer Jane Goldman to pull more from the book than Hitchcock’s movie.
Netflix will premiere Rebecca on October 21st. Hopefully we’ll find some unwatermarked images soon.
Six-time Oscar nominee Amy Adams has landed on her next film, and in it she may be turning into a canine. Deadline reports Adams will star in Nightbitch, based on an upcoming novel by Rachel Yoder which Annapurna Pictures has already acquired.
The synopsis seems particularly of-the-moment given all of our forced domesticity in the time of coronavirus. Here’s how Yoder describes it on her website:
“In ‘Nightbitch,’ an unnamed woman and former artist, thrust into stay-at-home domesticity after the birth of her son, becomes worried she’s turning into a dog. Her husband, who travels for work five days a week, easily dismisses her fears from hotel rooms. Meanwhile, the mother is forced to contend with the very real physical manifestations of her solitary anxiety, with only her two-year-old son for company. As her symptoms intensify, she struggles to keep her alter-canine-identity secret. Finally jolted to action after an impulsive and disastrous encounter with the family cat, she seeks a cure for her condition in an herbal multi-level marketing scheme, a group of mommies all inexplicably named Jen, and Wanda White, a mysterious academic specializing in ‘mythical ethnography.’”
Oh yeah, this shit is going to be weird. I love it.
The novel comes out in summer 2021, which means we won’t see the movie until some point after that. Adams, who hasn’t starred in a film since 2018’s Vice, has a couple of big ones on the way. She has Joe Wright’s eagerly-awaited The Woman in the Window, plus Ron Howard’s adaptation of Hillbilly Elegy. She will also be seen, probably for the last time, as Lois Lane in the Snyder Cut of Justice League. Remember that?
I really loved Anna and the Apocalypse. Director John McPhail’s teen zombie Christmas musical was a breath of fresh air for the holiday season, and now he’s coming back with another YA effort that will be bringing the tunes. Only this time, his cast will be rockin’ out to some Shakespeare.
McPhail will direct a YA musical based on Shakespeare’s Macbeth, centered on a teenage girl “who grapples with her own morality as she contends with the dreadful consequences of her ambition.” The film is being set up at Amazon Studios.
That poses a very interesting prospect for the movie, as Shakespeare’s classic tale of deadly ambition was about a Scottish general prophesied by three witches that he would one day be king. With the conniving support of his wife, Macbeth begins murdering his way to the throne, until he is eventually consumed by his own actions. How that plays out in a high school setting, I think we can all guess. I’m already seeing visions of Texas Cheerleader moms and wannabe high school presidents.
Another intriguing component of this is the involvement of Magic Mike duo Channing Tatum and Reid Carolin as producers. I wouldn’t be surprised if Tatum shows up as a teacher or something. It can’t be totally out of the realm of possibility, right? He did have a role in another twist on Shakespeare, 2006’s She’s the Man alongside Amanda Bynes. Nothing has changed since then, right?
Also on board to produce is Scooter Braun, the guy credited with inflicting Justin Bieber on all of us. Perhaps he’s hoping to cast a new discovery? Rising star writer S.J. Inwards (Her Better Self) penned the script. [THR]
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Our idea of dystopian society is largely formed by Aldous Huxley’s 1932 novel, Brave New World. A series adaptation is currently running on NBC’s Peacock service, which is why you’ve seen Alden Ehrenreich so much lately. But Huxley’s final novel, Island, presented the polar opposite view, and Leonardo DiCaprio wants to give that its time in the spotlight.
DiCaprio’s Appian Way is producing a TV series based on Island, Aldous Huxley’s 1962 book which reads a little bit like The Beach, the Danny Boyle adaptation which DiCaprio starred in way back in 2000.
Here’s how Variety describes Island: “[The story] follows a cynical journalist shipwrecked on the fictional utopian island of Pala in the Indian Ocean. Originally tasked with exploiting Pala’s natural resources, he uncovers an independently developed society and embraces the people, their culture and traditions — including psychedelic adventures and alternative social structures. His experience alters the course of his mission.”
DiCaprio will serve as an exec-producer, alongside his father George, a producer on several documentaries focused on climate change. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.
Huxley deliberately used similar themes and story points for Island as he did in Brave New World, only taken from the opposite view. I’m curious to see the talent DiCaprio and Co. enlist for this. More news on that soon, hopefully.
Before we dive in today, I’m going to tell you a bit about how the film critic thing works. When we get an assignment for a film or tv show, we sometimes get what is called an embargo/screener letter. In it, the studio will include the embargo date, which is the earliest date the review can be made public, and sometimes we get a list of plot points and details the studio absolutely does not want us to include in our writing. Most of the time it’s up to our discretion and judgment to determine what we include in our review and sometimes the studio will tell us directly what spoilers they want us to keep secret. This seems to happen more with television reviews than film ones, with Netflix always being very careful, diligent, and detailed with what they want press to say or not say about their content. This is ultimately to ensure that you get the best viewing experience, but in turn, can affect a review. Something about the show might have heavily impacted the critic’s opinion of it, but without being able to talk about it, their critique might seem one-sided or unsupported or even contradictory to their reasoning. A good critic will find a way to convey how they feel around the restrictions but this is an important thing to keep in mind with reading any review.
With the new season of The Umbrella Academy, I am not allowed to talk about major plot points. Not just how the season ends or Easter egg details, but huge chunks of plot and character that impact the entire season from early on. My view of this season is very much entwined with these redacted spoilers, but overall it boils down to an overstuffed plot with very little attention given to the emotional arcs of these seven superhero siblings.
Last season, we left the Hargreeves kids in dire straits. Despite thinking she was powerless, Vanya (Ellen Page) discovered she was the most powerful member of the Umbrella Academy and unintentionally sent a shockwave to the moon, blowing it up, causing its remnants to hurl towards Earth and bringing about the end of the world. Five (Aidan Gallagher), who can jump through time and space, huddled his family together and transported them back to their childhood. Supposedly.
Five’s time jump takes us to the beginning of this season, where the siblings are all scattered throughout the early ’60s in Dallas Texas. With their time alone, each tries to make the most of their situation, Klaus (Robert Sheehan) starts a cult using his ghost brother Ben (Justin H. Min) to trick his followers, Allison (Emmy Raver-Lampman) gets married and get involved in the Civil Rights Movement, Diego (David Castañeda), full of anger and daddy issues, is committed to a mental hospital obsessed with the idea that President Kennedy is going to be assassinated. Vanya doesn’t remember anything and is working as a nanny on a farm and Luther (Tom Hopper) is working as a body man and boxer for a local club owner. When Five finally gets there he figures out that if he doesn’t do something, he and his family are going to cause the end of the world… again.
As you can probably see, there’s a lot going on this season and because the siblings are initially separated from each other, we have at least seven major plotlines we need to follow. At times, it feels like too much for a show’s second season, and certain actors are given the short stick. Ellen Page is an Oscar-nominated actress and yet she is given a storyline that is predictable and that we’ve seen before from her. Justin H Min’s Ben, who Klaus can only see, spent last season being the moral voice for Klaus’s character isn’t given much more to do this season and it’s a shame, as he seemed to have the most to prove.
The season is fun though. More quippy than the previous season, the cast seems looser this go-round, shedding any stiffness from last year. The music hits very similarly to the first season, perfectly complementing the action. Not only does it visually capture the comic well, but tonally it captures the chaos of Gerard Way and Gabriel Bá’s comic. This season just fails to reach an emotional peak.
The thing I love about the first season was that show used the sci-fi genre as a vessel to talk about family trauma and how to deal with it as a sibling unit. The first season set up many of these conflicts without solving them, insinuating that season 2 will provide some of the answers How will they learn to forgive Vanya? Will they learn to forgive themselves for their neglect of Vanya? Will they let go of their daddy issues? How will they move forward as a family unit? But season two is so plot-heavy that a lot of the emotional and family themes established in the previous season seemed to be bulldozed over. Now that can be very true to life and how sibling relationships actually work, but it doesn’t provide the viewer with a much needed emotional catharsis.
That being said, the way season 2 ends, leaves the door open for a more in-depth exploration into the inner workings of this family. If they do it right, the siblings will have to work together causing themes and plot to play off each other, giving us a hopefully near-perfect season of television. If only we could jump in time like Five, past this pandemic and election cycle, and into the third season of The Umbrella Academy.
You can watch The Umbrella Academy on Netflix. Watch the trailer below.
The Hargreeves siblings are literally dropping into their second season in the newly released clip of The Umbrella Academy opening scene. In it we see Five (Aidan Gallagher) dropping into Dallas, Texas on November, 25th 1963. The place looks like a war scene and we quickly learn that Soviet soldiers have attacked the US.
As shots are literally fired, each sibling gets to display their respective power, with Allison (Emmy Raver-Lampman) blowing minds, Klaus (Robert Sheehan) summoning a ghost army, and Ben (Justin H. Min) reeking tentacle havoc from the dead. All of this over Frank Sinatra’s version of “My Way.”
Comedy, action, and slow-mo combine in the fast-paced opening scene until an old looking Hazel (Cameron Britton) grabs Five’s shoulder and says those classic words: “You wanna live, come with me.”
Though I believed the second season had its qualms, I did thoroughly enjoy it. Have I been jamming to that Sinatra banger for the last two weeks because of it? The world may never know, but you may find out what happens to The Umbrella Academy’s world when it premeres tomorrow on Netflix.
Twelve banks in seven states. That’s how many banks Liam Neeson has robbed in the new film Honest Thief. The trailer, which dropped today, features Neeson as a bank robber who has fallen in love and wants to go straight. However, when he comes clean, two crooked FBI agents frame him and take the money for themselves.
The trailer gives us some classic Neeson one-liners, including the Taken-esque line, “My girlfriend had nothing to do with this. Agent Nevins, I’m coming for you.” Nothing would make me happier than some old man action movie Liam Neeson right now.
Joining Neeson onscreen are Hamilton stars Anthony Ramos and Jasmine Cephas Jones, Jai Courtney (Suicide Squad), Kate Walsh (Grey’s Anatomy, The Umbrella Academy), Robert Patrick (Perry Mason), and Jeffery Donovan (Burn Notice). The film was written by Steve Allrich and Mark Williams, who also directed. As of now, Honest Thief is set to premiere on October 9th.
Well, that didn’t take long. Mere hours after Regina King’s feature directing debut One Night in Miami was announced as part of the TIFF lineup, Amazon Studios has swooped in and bought the film. The plan is to release it during the “awards corridor”, and it’s easy to see why based on the historical significance of the plot, the star-studded cast, and King’s hand behind the camera.
One Night in Miami is based on the stageplay by Kemp Powers, which tells a fictional story of a real-life meeting between Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, Sam Cooke, and Jim Brown.
Here’s a synopsis: “Set on the night of February 25, 1964, the story follows a young Cassius Clay (before he became Muhammad Ali) as he emerges from the Miami Beach Convention Center the new World Heavyweight Boxing Champion. Against all odds, he defeated Sonny Liston and shocked the sports world. While crowds of people swarm Miami Beach to celebrate the match, Clay – unable to stay on the island because of Jim Crow-era segregation laws – instead spends the night at the Hampton House Motel in one of Miami’s historically black neighborhoods celebrating with three of his closest friends: activist Malcolm X, singer Sam Cooke and football star Jim Brown. The next morning, the four men emerge determined to define a new world for themselves and their people.”
King has assembled an incredible cast, who have the challenge of embodying these impactful figures. Kingsley Ben-Adir as Malcolm X, Eli Goree as Cassius Clay, Aldis Hodge as Jim Brown, Leslie Odom, Jr. as Sam Cooke, Lance Reddick as Brother Kareem, Jasmine Cephas Jones as Barbara Cooke, and Michael Imperioli as boxing trainer Angelo Dundee. Beau Bridges and Joaquina Kalukango have roles, as well. Oscar-nominee Terence Blanchard composed the score.
There has been very little territory that King hasn’t already conquered, which makes this new turn towards directing even more interesting. She won an Oscar for her performance in If Beale Street Could Talk, and two Emmys for American Crime. Earlier this week she earned another Emmy nomination for HBO’s Watchmen.
