Have you gotten stir crazy yet? It’s only been a couple of days of “social distancing”, with most major venues, restaurants, stores, and workplaces shut down due to the coronavirus. Being forced to stay indoors for too long can drive a person nuts, and the stuff in your home can begin to look very weird, even ominous. That makes the timing of the new trailer for Behind You perfect because at least you’re only dealing with a global outbreak and not an evil demon.
Behind You centers on a pair of sisters who discover the mirrors in their aunt’s home hold the key to unleashing a malicious demon. While all of them are covered, of course, the girls venture to the one place they are forbidden to go, and all Hell breaks.
Making their directorial debut is the duo of Andrew Mecham and Matthew Whedon, who also wrote the script. Addy Miller, Elizabeth Birkner, Philip Brodie, and Jan Broberg star.
Behind You hits theaters and VOD on April 17th.
SYNOPSIS: Two young sisters, sent to live with their estranged Aunt, find that all the mirrors in her house are covered or hidden. When one of the sisters happens upon a mirror in the basement, she unknowingly releases a malicious demon that had haunted her mother and aunt years ago.
With so many films moving their release dates it’s tough to figure out what the landscape will look like this holiday season. If a bunch of blockbusters get dropped into the fall and winter because of the coronavirus crisis we’re in now, it could cause a total reshuffling of release dates. For now, Steven Spielberg’s musical adaptation of West Side Story is unaffected, and a bunch of new photos are here to remind you that a reason to dance is on the horizon.
This new look at Spielberg’s remake of the stage classic arrives at a time when the lights are down all across Broadway. While adapted numerous times across many decades, Spielberg feels West Side Story means as much today as ever before. He tells Vanity Fair…
“This story is not only a product of its time, but that time has returned, and it’s returned with a kind of social fury. I really wanted to tell that Puerto Rican, Nuyorican experience of basically the migration to this country and the struggle to make a living, and to have children, and to battle against the obstacles of xenophobia and racial prejudice.”
Ansel Elgort is the biggest name leading the ensemble cast, telling a romantic tale set against warring gangs in 1950s New York City. Other co-stars include Rachel Zegler, Brian d’Arcy James, Corey Stoll, Ezra Menes, Ben Cook, and Rita Moreno who starred in the 1961 movie.
What’re the chances we’ll ever see Jesse Eisenberg as Lex Luthor again? Probably slim to none, and slim is quarantined somewhere with coronavirus. Eisenberg has never really sounded confident he’ll play the supervillain again, but that doesn’t mean he’s given up hope. While out doing press for his upcoming thrillerVivarium, Eisenberg said he’d be open to returning, because being the bad guy is where the fun is at…
“Oh yeah, I would love to because it’s such a cool character. To play a villain in a superhero movie is the fun part. The good guys are fine but the villain is the fun part cause you get to be more flamboyant. The hero usually gets to survive but the villain has all the funny lines.”
Eisenberg played Lex Luthor first in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, then reprised the role briefly at the end of Justice League. The latter movie’s very-public failure pretty much killed any future storylines involving Luthor, but it’s not as if the DCEU has ceased to exist. I suppose there’s always an outside shot he could return in another character’s movie, but it’s pretty unlikely.
If a movie doesn’t show in LA or NY, is it even really a movie? The global outbreak of COVID-19 aka the coronavirus has hit the two biggest cities for the movie industry. NY mayor Bill de Blasio and Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti have closed down cinemas in their respective cities due to the pandemic.
The spread of the coronavirus has led to the practice of “social distancing” all around the world, with the CDC recommending all gatherings of more than 50 people be canceled immediately. This has led to the cancellation of numerous events, sports seasons, and delays of film and TV productions. Movie theaters aren’t the only local businesses affected. Both NY and LA will see nightclubs, bars, restaurants, and more closed. Public schools have also been shut down for the time being.
AMC had announced a reduction in seating audience capacity by 50%, as their way complying with “social distancing” recommendations. But now, all of their 21 locations in NY will be closed to stay in compliance.
The global box office hit a two-decade low over the weekend as coronavirus fears began to take root. The impact will continue to be felt now, with the closure of multiplexes and smaller venues in the two biggest domestic movie markets.
A typical movie has a runtime between 90 and 120 minutes. Most come in around 110 and what directors decide to do with that time can make or break a film. In the new film Tuscaloosa, director Philip Harder makes some really interesting choices on the film adaptation of W .Glasgow Phillip’s 1994 novel. However, when you adapt a book that was praised for its intricacies with heavy source material, such as race and mental illness, you need time to execute those things. Despite a well-meaning cast and innovative inclusion of music, Tuscaloosa struggles with its messaging amid a crowded script.
It’s 1973 in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Segregationist George Wallace is still seen as a hero to many of the white townspeople and there is unrest between the police and the town’s black citizens. Billy (Devon Bostick, Okja) is fresh out of school, working as a gardener at his daddy’s mental hospital (Tate Donovan). Disillusioned and hiding from the world with big sunglasses, Billy seems to be waiting for his life to begin when he meets Virginia (Stranger Thing’s Natalia Dyer), a sweet yet witty patient of his father’s. As they begin to spend time together, Billy’s desire for more out of life away from his father becomes clear. Meanwhile, Billy’s childhood friend Nigel is struggling with his own identity as a black man in a white town and starts to question his relationship with Billy despite their mothers’ closeness and mysterious deaths. All these elements reach a head at the end of the Summer when Billy has some decisions to make.
If this movie was made in the 90’s it would have been a hit. It’s got everything Oscar-bait movies in the ’90s had. A young white boy, about to step into his father’s legacy, racial tensions, a young pretty girl with mental health issues who borderline the manic pixie dream girl troupe without crossing it. Cliché dialogue, racial discrimination as a subplot, a love story between a young man and a mentally ill girl, coming of age. It’s all there and would have thrived with a nineties audience. However, in 2020, 25 years after the book was published, some of its ideas have been before. This is seen in the dialogue, with trite lines like “You’re either part of the problem or part of the solution,” and “Nothing will break you. Nothing will break you like loving a crazy person.” Daniel Craig received a lot of flack for his flamboyant accent in Knives Out last year. Imagine an entire movie, where every character talks like that and then says things like, “Sometimes you’ve got to destroy a town to rebuild it.”
The film is beautiful to look at and captures the warmth of the south, despite being filmed in the mid-west. Harder uses his past experience directing music videos to elevate the film’s score and as an immersive tool. Treating the soundtrack like a character itself, the pieces used feel timeless and build upon its mood flawlessly. Tate Donovan, a character actor known for The O.C. and Love Potion No. 9, is refreshingly subtle with his performance as the racist overbearing father. Natalia Dyer does her best to stray as far away from Nancy Wheeler in Stranger Things, as possible but ultimately overplays her, not giving the character the nuance she needs.
Overflowing with cliché Americana and overstuffed with ideas, the film has great potential. With a strong soundtrack and endearing performances from Bostick and Donovan, you keep watching even though you will ask yourself, “where is this going?” It’s a shame that they couldn’t focus on one or two threads instead of the whole sweater.
A few months ago one would’ve said True History of the Kelly Gang‘s biggest appeal was the presence of Assassin’s Creed and Macbeth director Justin Kurzel. A rising star until the video game movie derailed his career somewhat, it’ll be interesting to see how he makes a comeback. But now it’s another name that has given this Australian Western a new claim-to-fame and that’s George MacKay, who gave a riveting lead performance in 1917.
MacKay stars as the notorious outlaw and bushranger Ned Kelly, known for his brazen acts of criminality and thirst for revenge. The film sees MacKay paired up with a who’s who of Australian and English actors, including Russell Crowe, Essie Davis, Thomasin McKenzie, Charlie Hunnam, Sean Keenan, and Nicholas Hoult.
SYNOPSIS: Set amidst the grueling badlands of 19th-century Australia, legendary outlaw Ned Kelly (George MacKay, 1917, Ophelia) grows up under the bloody and uncompromising rule of the English. Food is scarce, survival is filled with daily strife, and every opportunity the colonizers take to make their victims feel powerless is inflicted with searing brutality. In a desperate attempt to prime him for rebellion, Ned Kelly’s mother (Essie Davis, The Babadook), sells him off into the hands of the notorious bushranger Harry Power (Russel Crowe, Cinderella Man, L.A. Confidential), where the young bandit discovers he comes from a line of warriors called the Sons of Sieve. Fueled by his roots and a voracious appetite for revenge, Ned Kelly leads an anarchist army to wreak havoc on their oppressors in one of the most audacious attacks the country has ever seen.
MacKay has been great in pretty much everything he’s done, but 1917 has put him on a different level that can be solidified by playing a legendary figure like Ned Kelly. True History of the Kelly Gang opens April 24th.
The sex comedy is nothing new. A bunch of guys trying to lose their virginity before some big life event happens has been done a lot. Think pretty much every comedy in the late nineties to early two-thousands. Come As You Are, a new dramedy from Richard Wong takes that concept and tries to transform it into something endearing and more realistic: a road trip comedy about three friends with disabilities traveling to a brothel to lose their virginity.
A remake of the 2011 Belgian film Hasta La Vista, the film follows three young men all with some sort of disability keeping them from having sex. Scotty (Grant Rosenmeyer) suffers from paraplegia and uses a wheelchair. He spends his days in physical therapy and messing with Mo (Ravi Patel, Meet The Patels, Long Shot), a man with severe visual impairment that works at the therapy center. There they both meet Matt (Hayden Szeto, Edge of Seventeen), who just broke up with his girlfriend and uses a wheelchair, his disability evident but not said outright. Scotty, tired of pent up sexual frustration, hears about a brothel in Canada that was made for and by people with disabilities. Intrigued by the concept he slowly convinces his friends to come along on a road trip with him to get laid. They hire Sam (Gabourey Sidibe, Empire, Precious) to drive them and off they go without telling their parents.
This actually happens. Sex, like most other bodily functions, is natural and human and, for many people, needed to feel healthy. In 2016, Vice released a documentary chronicling people with physical disabilities on their quest for sex through sexual surrogates in Vancouver. Shying away from the “prostitutes and brothel” idea into “medically assisted sexuality,” the documentary showed the benefits that this kind of sex work can have on those with disabilities. 2012’s The Sessions starring Helen Hunt and John Hawkes delved into this concept and how sexuality can intersect with disability. Come As You Are’s narrative doesn’t really do that. It plays up the concept of the brothel. Scotty is depicted as a sex-crazed young man, a depiction I might add that many able-bodied characters have encompassed. This doesn’t mean that the film lacks heart, it has plenty of it, it just means that its representation of a sex-positive story is lacking.
Because of the politically correct times we live in, it is worth noting the actors playing Scotty, Matt and Mo are not actors with disabilities. While each actor plays the character as a real person and not caricature, the question arises, “Why couldn’t the filmmakers use actors with disabilities within the film?” It’s not a matter of whether its right to do so, but I wonder how many acting opportunities actors with those disabilities get. Plenty of films and shows are starting to cast actors with disabilities in those roles, so why not this one?
The film is not as nuanced as it needs or wants to be. It’s missing the subtly that made its predecessor a hit. It could be the source material doesn’t match up fully with an American sense of humor. It could be the lack of empathy you feel for the characters. Despite this, there are some funny and moving bits within the piece. Janeane Garofalo stands out as Scotty’s mom Liz, who is such a pro at being a mom to Scotty that she’s not fazed by anything and not held back by it either. Ravi Patel is very sweet and hilarious neurotic as the visually impaired Mo. Not everything lines up or pays off in this film, but it’s still worth seeing for its charisma and unique take on the sex comedy.
On this week’s show, we’re basically talking about the only major flicks that’ll be out for a few weeks. Why? Coronavirus. That’s why. So we’ve got Vin Diesel’s superhero movie BLOODSHOT, and the controversial action-comedy THE HUNT. Was the political firestorm this movie created really necessary? Was it?
Plus, we’ll talk about the impact the coronavirus has had on the movie industry, with all of the major releases delayed because of the global outbreak. Is 2020 just a lost year for Hollywood? Or can it bounce back?
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Bruce Wayne has decided to sit out this Coronavirus thing in his Batcave. Don’t disturb him. Matt Reeves’ The Batman is just the latest blockbuster film to be delayed over the outbreak of COVID-19. According to THR, production on the Robert Pattinson-led Bat-film has been suspended for two weeks, ahead of a move to Liverpool. “The studio will continue to monitor the situation closely”, Warner Bros. said in a statement. They’ve kept moving forward on The Matrix 4 and the latest Fantastic Beasts, however.
Meanwhile, it turns out the thing to finally shut down Jurassic Park is the coronavirus, not rampaging dinosaurs. Production on Jurassic World: Dominion, which just started shooting a couple of weeks ago, has been shutdown by Universal. This shouldn’t be a surprise given their recent year-long delay of F9. The studio will determine a new course of action “in the coming weeks.”
Netflix isn’t immune to the outbreak’s effects, either. According to Deadline, production has stopped on the fourth season of Stranger Things, as well as the Dwayne Johns/Gal Gadot/Ryan Reynolds film Red Notice. That’s a helluva lot of star power to keep on the bench. Curious to see how that could impact future scheduling.
Marvel’s Falcon and the Winter Soldier was just the first Disney+ show to be put on the blocks because of coronavirus. Loki and WandaVision are also on ice, according to Variety. Whether this will impact their eventual release is unclear, but the MCU is all connected so if one thing moves the rest may be forced to follow.
With the Coronavirus forcing major theater chains to either shut down outright or limit capacity, this weekend’s box office looks to be a two-decade low. Effected most were the holdovers, including Pixar’s Onward, which opened soft last weekend and tumbled 68% this week for just $12.5M. That drop is a record for the studio, and with everything going on we are probably looking at the lowest-grossing Pixar movie yet.
Surprisingly, the top new film of the week was I Still Believe, the biopic on Christian rocker Jeremy Camp (Riverdale‘s KJ Apa) and his relationship with his terminally-ill first wife (Britt Robertson. We’ve seen a number of faith-based dramas perform well opposite major blockbuster releases, and this one has even been playing in some IMAX theaters since Wednesday. Perhaps with everything going on in the world, the few audiences that ventured out wanted something wholesome and uplifting, rather than the violence and cynicism of Bloodshot and The Hunt.
As I said in my review of Sony’s Bloodshot, it’s likely to come, go, and be praised only by Vin Diesel’s hardcore audience. The superhero film, based on Valiant comic, was projected to earn about $10M so its $9.3M debut isn’t too steep of a disappointment. That said, Sony will be hard-pressed to turn this into the cinematic universe they’d been staging for years. This wouldn’t have been such a big deal if the overseas markets had held, but virtually all of them are on lockdown. Much like the Resident Evil and Underworld films, Bloodshot was going to lean very hard on the international haul and that’s just gone.
4. TheInvisible Man– $6.2M/$64.6M
The 59% drop for The Invisible Man is the best hold of the week, which goes to show hard the box office was hit.
The red-hot debate over The Hunt ends with a whimper. After the controversial film became part of a political firestorm when its “liberals hunt deplorables for sport) premise was revealed, it brought in a pathetic $5.7M. I’m sure there will be some who will cheer this on as an owning of the libs, but those people are stupid and clearly didn’t see the movie. The problem is nobody else did, either. I guess that’s one thing liberals and conservatives could agree on is that neither wanted to leave the house for The Hunt.
