Oh, the many faces of Josh Brolin. He has completely owned 2018 with epic performances in Avengers: Infinity War, Deadpool 2, and this week’s Sicario: Day of the Soldado. All have him playing tough guys of different kinds, but they don’t have anything on the character he plays next in The Legacy of a Whitetail Deer Hunter.
Brolin leads the latest comedy from Jody Hill, whose comedies Observe and Report, The Foot Fist Way, and HBO’s Eastbound & Down and Vice Principals all have a distinct voice. Not everybody digs Hill’s style, but with Brolin it’s an opportunity to win over an entirely new audience. The film centers on TV hunter Buck Ferguson who sets out on a very special episode with his trusted camera and estranged son by his side.
Along for the ride is frequent Hill collaborator Danny McBride, Montana Jordan as Buck’s son, plus Carrie Coon, Scoot McNairy, and Rory Scovel. Here’s the synopsis:
Buck Ferguson (Josh Brolin), famous for hunting whitetail deer, plans a special episode of his hunting show around a bonding weekend with his estranged son, Jaden (Montana Jordan). With trusted – but hapless – cameraman and friend Don (Danny McBride) in tow, Buck sets out for what soon becomes an unexpectedly epic adventure of father-son reconnection in the great outdoors.
The Legacy of a Whitetail Deer Hunter hits Netflix on July 6th.
You’ve probably heard a wave of critical praise for Nicolas Cage’s performance in Mandy, the ultra-violent horror that rocked Midnight audiences at Sundance earlier this year. Well, it’s richly deserved. A film that was like comfort food to the genre crowd, it not only featured Cage going full-on Bruce Campbell in Army of Darkness, but the whole thing was directed by fan-favorite director Panos Cosmatos of Beyond the Black Rainbow fame. Those quick to brush off the film as just another lousy Cage project headed to the DVD bin will want to think again and watch the newly-released trailer.
Also starring Andrea Riseborough (who had multiple films at Sundance this year) and Linus Roache, the story follows Red and Mandy, an outsider couple living on their own terms away from society. Unfortunately that also isolates them when murderous cult leader Jeremiah Sand takes a liking to Mandy and will do anything to possess her.
While I took issue with the film’s first half which is entirely too inscrutabable for me (Beyond the Black Rainbow fans will likely dig it), the sheer gonzo power of Cage’s performance in the second half is destined to become genre legend. If you ever wanted to see him at Maximum Cage then this is it, unleashed and raw, bathed in blood and grinning maniacally. And then on a dime he shuts it all down for one of the most devastating scenes of emotional vulnerability that I have ever seen, in particular from this kind of over-the-top film. It hits you dead in the chest and no matter how crazy things get afterwards you know it’s all powered by that one moment.
Basically, you want to see this movie. And you want to see it with a crowd. At night. Late, when the sonic score by the late Johann Johannson can really wash over you.
Mandy hits theaters on Septemer 14th. You can check out my interview with Cage, Cosmatos, and Roache here.
We heap a ton of praise on Marvel for their ten straight years of dominance and they deserve every bit of it. No studio has done anything close to what they’ve accomplished, turning B-list heroes into box office juggernauts and reinventing the way we all consume blockbuster movies. What we don’t do is give Marvel enough credit for their sense of timing. I don’t know about you, but after the doom ‘n gloom of Avengers: Infinity War and the dreaded Thanos Snap, I needed a break. Doubtful me or anybody else could have handled another heavy superhero film with heroes fighting heroes or entire universes being wiped out. It was time for something light and fun with stakes that are comparatively small, no pun intended.
Thank goodness Ant-Man and the Wasp arrived when it did. The sequel to 2015’s well-received Ant-Man is a step above, bringing more humor, a much better “villain”, and better action thanks to the kickass performance of Evangeline Lilly as Wasp. Together she and Paul Rudd’s Scott Lang are a dynamic duo of laughs and left hooks, making us wish they had been a team right from the very beginning. What the film does best, though, is entertain us with a kinetic romp through the Marvel Cinematic Universe without being held down by it. Of course if you’ve seen the other Marvel movies you get a better context for some things, but at heart this feels like a charming personal story for these particular characters.
Basically answering the “Where was Ant-Man during Infinity War?” question, Scott Lang has been holed up in his house for two years on house arrest for his part in that whole Civil War thing. Remember that? Big superhero battle at an airport? BIIIIIGGGGG Giant-Man appearance? Yeah, that. Civil War seems like a millennia ago. Anyway, he’s going stir crazy but has managed to muddle through by creating Avengers-esque adventures for his daughter Cassie’s regular visits, and helping his old thieving buddies (including Michael Pena as the mouthy Luis) launch X-Con Security. Get it, ex-con? Meanwhile, Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) and his daughter Hope (Lilly) are also on the run from the government, but they’ve managed to find time to investigate the Quantum Zone, the microscopic world Scott escaped from. It’s also the place where Hope’s mother Janet (Michelle Pfeiffer) went missing, and now they think they can get her back.
But for that, they’ll need Scott’s help, except they hate his guts and he’s not exactly been honest with them about everything that he did. That puts Scott in the awkward position of playing the hero again while trying to mend fences with Hank and Hope, and avoiding being caught by dogged but pathetic FBI agent Jimmy Woo (Randall Park). Most of the tug of war Scott’s going through is played comically, as it should since that’s when the film is strongest. Rudd excels in the heartwarming scenes shared with Abby Ryder Fortson as Scott’s daughter Cassie (lots of rumors about her lately), and in playing the goofball opposite Lilly’s refined, strategic combatant.
The first movie’s villain Yellowjacket was so generic he’s barely worth a second thought, but the sequel gets an upgrade with Hannah-John Kamen as Ghost, a mysterious young woman with a strange phasing power and some connection to the Quantum Zone. Marvel die-hards should be pumped for the addition of Laurence Fishburne as Bill Foster, aka the former hero known as Goliath. He plays a crucial role that helps broaden the Ant-Man/Giant-Man legacy, which has become surprisingly rich through two movies. No other MCU character has the heroic lineage of Ant-Man and we’re seeing it used to build a deeper story. Walton Goggins and his toothy grin also impresses as Simon Burch, a low-level criminal/obstacle who wants the Quantum technology for himself. He’s no Thanos, but as a pest nuisance he fits with the movie’s lower stakes.
Credited to a whopping five screenwriters, Ant-Man and the Wasp occasionally feels like pieced-together comedy sketches connected by exposition. It takes a lot to explain Scott’s house arrest and the Sakovia Accords, Janet’s disappearance, Ghost’s backstory, Bill Foster’s past with Hank…and that doesn’t even begin on all the techno-babble. “Do you just put Quantum in front of everything?‘, Scott asks after one particularly nonsensical exchange about subatomic particles or whatever. And we kindof agree with him on that. Fortunately, Reed doesn’t let things get bogged down too much, leaning on his experience as a comedy director to always be setting up for the next big joke. Reed, who prior to joining Marvel was best known for the cheerleading comedy Bring It On, has vastly improved as an all-around filmmaker. The action setpieces are exciting and hilarious, usually involving some unexpected use of Pym Particles to expand atypical items like a salt shaker or Pez dispenser. While I spent the first movie wondering what Ant-Man would have been like if Edgar Wright had stuck around, Reed has now come into his own.
Ant-Man and the Wasp works because it doesn’t get too big for its britches. Whether it’s dealing with Scott’s home life or his heroic and romantic misadventures, there’s never a moment when you wish it had larger, world-threatening ramifications. For that, you’ll have just to stick around through the end credits, but you already knew to do that.
One of my favorite films at Sundance this year was, undoubtedly, also among the most divisive among critics. Assassination Nation is an ultra-violent satire of our social media age, but it’s also a fierce and funny look at the #MeToo and #TimesUp culture. I couldn’t stop raving about it, and the buzz it generated was enough to attract NEON and the production company started by Joe and Anthony Russo to pick it up for a cool $10M. Now the first teaser is here and TRIGGER WARNING is in full effect.
Written and directed by Sam Levinson and starring Odessa Young, Suki Waterhouse, Hari Nef, and Abra, the story takes place at a high school where a hacker has started revealing all of the most private secrets of the students, and eventually the entire town of Salem. In this social media haze four best friends have their lives turned upside down by the fallout, and must band together to survive one deadly night. The rest of the cast includes Bill Skarsgard, Anika Noni Rose, Maude Apatow, Colman Domingo, Joel McHale, Bella Thorne, and Kelvin Harrison Jr.
You know how I feel about set photos, but this is Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time In Hollywood. And it’s official, not a snap from some jabronie on the street corner. Plus, it’s Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt radiating some serious ’70s swagger. Look at them, there isn’t a nightclub that could hold these two…
A post shared by Leonardo DiCaprio (@leonardodicaprio) on Jun 27, 2018 at 6:00am PDT
If only they had found a way to get Margot Robbie in there, too, but her role as Sharon Tate is likely to be much smaller. This is DiCaprio and Pitt’s show, playing Western TV stars navigating the movie business during the time of the Manson Family murders.
Hopefully we get similar shots of Robbie and the supporting cast of Burt Reynolds, Al Pacino, Timothy Olyphant, James Marsden, Michael Madsen, Tim Roth, Scoot McNairy, Damian Lewis, Luke Perry, Emile Hirsch, Dakota Fanning, and Clifton Collins Jr. Once Upon A Time In Hollywood opens August 9th 2019.
In 2013 lifelong bicep buddies Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger teamed up for the prison thriller Escape Plan. Not your typical action flick we’d expect from them, and really its only purpose was to play off the nostalgia of its stars. Nothing wrong with that; Stallone’s Expendables movies are all about that. The funny thing was, it wasn’t us here in the U.S. who had a fondness for these aging action stars. The film did middling business here but was huge in China, and that’s largely why we have the unexpected sequel, Escape Plan 2: Hades, which brings Stallone back for a story that draws only loose connections to the original.
Stallone is back as security expert Ray Breslin, but that’s about the only thing that’s familiar here, other than the addition of a second huge American action star for co-branding purposes. Schwarzenegger is out and Guardians of the Galaxy star Dave Bautista is in….barely. In truth neither he or Stallone is in the film all that much, with the lead role going to Chinese actor Xiaoming Huang. What had been a gritty tale of incarceration has now been given a sci-fi franchise remodel. Breslin now runs Breslin Security, which runs high-tech security operations for various “black sites”. In their opening mission, team member Shu (Huang) is kidnapped along with his genius cousin Yusheng (Chen Tang), and dumped into an impenetrable facility known as Hades, so that Breslin’s competition can force information from them about a special satellite system. I guess this is what corporate espionage has come to?
So it’s up to Ray and his team to break Shu free, but there’s no hope for him to escape. That means…you guessed it, they’ll have to find a way to break IN rather than out. While Ray sits up in his Atlanta headquarters he relies on team members played by Jaimie King (Abigail), Jesse Metcalfe (Luke), and the returning 50 Cent as Hush. Bautista provides occasional muscle as Trent, an old friend with a very Drax-like disposition.
Escape Plan wasn’t great, but at least it gave Stallone and Schwarzenegger a chance to share the screen in something that was at least marginally dramatic, almost like a feature-length episode of Prison Break. There’s none of that in Escape Plan 2, which mostly finds Stallone taking a backseat while Huang scurries around a bizarre facility we can barely fathom. Huang isn’t bad but he doesn’t command the screen and you find yourself really wishing it were Stallone or Bautista using brute muscle to survive the prison’s many dangers.
Speaking of which, the prison itself doesn’t make a lot of sense. Director Steven C. Miller, he of many bland straight-to-VOD action movies with titles like Extraction, First Kill, and Arsenal (most starring either Bruce Willis or Nic Cage) creates a Pandora’s box of sci-fi weirdness ill-fitting to this franchise. Artificial intelligence, drones, and Titus Welliver as a brutal warden known as “The Zookeeper” threaten Huang on a regular basis. It’s like he’s trapped in a futuristic Smart Prison, one where the inmates must fight and kill one another in order to earn time in a VR room known as “Sanctuary”. There’s even a trio of bald, albino hackers known as Legion, who look like druids sent back from the 22nd century. What in the world is going on? Maybe we could look past this if the characters had any personality, but the script co-written by original writer Miles Chapman offers little. Miller isn’t the type of director to have much visual flair, either; Hades looks like it was shot in a warehouse or a parking garage and the action sequences aren’t choreographed to impress as much as to get them done.
On a budget of just $20M there’s every chance Escape Plan 2 makes a mint in foreign box office, and sure enough a third movie has already been confirmed. While it’s too much to say there’s a hope for a rebound, clearly diminishing Stallone’s role wasn’t the best way to go and maybe Escape Plan 3 will put him back in the driver’s seat. It would be a disservice to his career to have him as a figurehead in such a mediocre series of action movies. He deserves much better than this.
It’ll be tough for Timothee Chalamet to match the career year he had in 2017 with Call Me By Your Name and Lady Bird, but he’s got a couple of projects that will keep him part of the conversation. First up is the coming of age film Hot Summer Nights which has some good buzz around it, but his role in the addiction drama Beautiful Boy is the one that could lead to more awards, and now there’s a new trailer so we can get a better look at it.
Directed by Felix Van Groeningen, who is making his English-language debut after The Broken Circle Breakdown and Belgica. The film is an adaptation of the complementary memoirs by David Sheff and his son Nic, which chronicle the father’s attempts to understand and help his drug-addicted child. Playing the father is Steve Carell, and along with Chalamet it looks like this film could be a dramatic powerhouse this fall as awards season comes around.
Here’s the synopsis: Based on the memoir “Beautiful Boy” by David Sheff and “Tweak” by his son, Nic Sheff, Beautiful Boy chronicles the heartbreaking and inspiring experience of survival and recovery in a family coping with addiction over many years.
Also starring Kaitlyn Dever, Andre Royo, Jack Dylan Grazer, Maura Tierney, and Amy Ryan, Beautiful Boy opens October 12th.
I don’t know if Sony’s Venom movie will be any good. I hope so. The first teaser was pretty lame, but the second one, the one that actually had the symbiote in it, showed some real potential. What I do know is that people are interested in the movie and that’s pretty much the whole damn point of trailers, isn’t it? Sony can be happy then because Venom is now the most watched trailer of the entire Spider-Man franchise.
The second Venom trailer has gone over 64 million views, besting the 37 million views for The Amazing Spider-Man and the 28 million of Spider-Man: Homecoming. It even managed to beat non-Spidey blockbusters like Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom‘s 55 million views, and The Last Jedi‘s 50 million views. Those movies went on to make a lot of money, didn’t they?
Maybe people were curious to see how badly the Venom symbiote might look, or perhaps a large chunk of those watching were Honest Trailers-type folks picking the thing apart with a fine-toothed comb. I don’t know, and it doesn’t matter, because those views mean people are invested in this movie and want to see how it turns out. That’s a good sign, I think.
Now, let’s see if it can reach the 200 million views of Avengers: Infinity War! Sorry, ain’t nothin’ beating that except maybe Avengers 4 next year.
I don’t know anybody who has Spectrum cable, but apparently you’ve got a new Bad Boys TV series coming. Hope that makes whatever you’re paying worth it! Today it was announced that LA’s Finest, the Bad Boys spinoff starring Gabrielle Union and Jessica Alba will be exclusive for Spectrum customers, making it their first crack at the original content game.
NBC originally gave the show a pilot order but declined to pick it up to series, but Spectrum has swooped in and given the all 13 episodes a straight-to-series order. It will debut next year as part of Charter’s Spectrum Original Content platform which I really hope is just a working title. Union reprises her Bad Boys II role as Special Agent Sydney Barrett, who has now left Miami (and presumably Will Smith’s character) to join the LAPD. Here’s the synopsis:
The series follows Burnett (Union), who last was seen in Miami taking down a drug cartel. She now has left her complicated past behind to become an LAPD detective. Paired with a new partner, Nancy McKenna (Alba), a working mom with an equally complex past, Burnett is pushed to examine whether her unapologetic lifestyle might be masking a greater personal secret. These two women don’t agree on much, but they find common ground when it comes to taking on the most dangerous criminals in Los Angeles.
Hard to complain about the pairing of Union and Alba, and this show is likely to be the closest thing we’ll get to Bad Boys 3 until it hopefully opens in 2020. I still have my doubts about that. [TVLine]
The new thriller from writer/director Tyler Perry follows the
life of a woman (Taraji P. Henson), who is tired of standing by her unfaithful
husband (Lyriq Bent). When it becomes clear to her that she’s been betrayed,
she becomes a perfect storm of vengeance.
A star-studded sprawling neo-noir, Terminal stars Margot
Robbie, Simon Pegg, Dexter Fletcher, Max Irons and Mike Myers as a group of
people with seemingly nothing in common, who find their lives intertwined at
the hands of a mysterious criminal bent on revenge.
We Said: “ the film is stunning to look at, colorful and surreal
like if Dick Tracy stumbled into Alice in Wonderland, but not even
Robbie and stylish visuals can prevent this film from being a retread of just
about every trope of the hitman genre.”
When a local young woman goes missing, a distinguished philosophy
professor (Guy Pearce) suddenly finds himself pinned as suspect when his wife (Minnie
Driver) begins to question what he does with his time off-campus. Further
suspicion is cast when a meticulous police detective (Pierce Brosnan) discovers
crucial evidence suggesting he is the prime suspect in the disappearance.
