So what was the last great Polish horror musical about mermaids that you saw? Tough competition, I know, but it was probably The Lure, Agnieszka Smoczyńska’s film that made a splash (no pun intended) at Sundance and Fantastia Fest a couple years ago and was released by Criterion in home release. Yeah, it’s that good. The filmmaker is back with her next film, Fugue, which is set to debut at Cannes during Critics’ Week.
The intriguing story tells of an amnesiac woman who begins to build a life of her own, and has no desire to remember anything that happened before. Of course, we can’t always get what we want. Here’s the synopsis:
Alicja has no memory and no knowledge about how she lost it. In two years, she manages to build a new, independent self, away from home. She doesn’t want to remember the past. So, when her family finds her, she is forced to fit into the roles of a mother, daughter and wife, surrounded by what seem to be complete strangers. What remains once you forget you loved someone? Is it necessary to remember the emotion of love in order to feel happiness?
No word on a U.S. date or if it has distribution. All of that will likely shake out after Cannes.
Is there a G.I. Joe fan out there who doesn’t love Snake Eyes? The ninja side of the Greatest American Heroes toy line and cartoon was always the most popular, perhaps because their skills set them so far apart. Even the first two live-action films focused heavily on the rivalry between Snake Eyes and his sworn enemy, Storm Shadow. And now we’re going to see that fight continue in a spinoff.
Paramount has hired Beauty and the Beast and Bright 2 writer Evan Spiliotopoulos to begin work on a Snake Eyes solo movie script. He’ll be in charge of writing the adventures of the Joes’ most popular member with the distinct look. The silent ninja is part of the Arashikage ninja clan along with Storm Shadow, and wears a full black body suit and mask to hide his disfigured face. In the comics and cartoon he had a romantic relationship with Scarlett, and had a number of apprentices who would join the G.I. Joe team.
Ray Park played Storm Shadow in both G.I. Joe movies, and was very good in the role. It’s unclear if he’ll be back for this film, though. Paramount had set a third G.I. Joe film for March 27th 2020, but that may be scrapped in favor of rebooting the franchise on the back of Snake Eyes. Honestly, that might not be such a bad idea. [THR]
In an age of transparency it’s a wonder how a hotel like The Carlyle has been able to keep such discretion over the years. It’s been the temporary home away from home destination for celebrities, politicians, journalists, British royalty, and pretty much anyone that finds themselves of a certain socioeconomic stature ever since its creation. Boasting quality paintings from renowned artists plastered on their infamous bar’s walls and decorative input from one of the first ever known interior designers, The Carlyle hotel has from its creation always meant to give off this air of elegant exclusivity that embodied New York aristocratic life while rivaling the style of European hotels.
The documentary Always at the Carlyle, while taking us behind the doors and giving us in depth look at the hotel itself really only provides a peek of the transient world within it, one filled with elegance, history, romance, and scandal, and I think that’s one of the biggest disappointments for the film. I understand that its discretion is one of the biggest reasons why higher ranking members of society continue to keep the hotel in business, but the documentary does at times give off this “Look at me, I’m rich; and because I’m rich I get to stay in this acclaimed hotel that was meant to highlight the upper echelon of New York’s finest, so it’s truly an honor to be able to stay (and/or work) here” vibe.
If you were to watch this documentary maybe you wouldn’t feel the same way and this isn’t to blame anyone that’s a part of it because they’re simply speaking on what they know and have experienced, but I couldn’t help but to feel like this entire documentary was a great way for the entity that is The Carlyle and everyone that feeds into it to just scratch its and their own egos.
It felt like they were going for some kind of substance with the interviews from dearly beloved employees ranging from the concierge to the maids, elevator operators, performers, and doormen (interviews that I did enjoy listening to); and also with little historical tidbits and mentions of pop culture moments; but, when you have a hotel that prides itself on its discretion and people that are unwilling to go into further details about their stories, it just all comes off as a bit too pompous leaving you wondering why you should even care in the first place. If the gap between the everyday people and the rich wasn’t already personally known and/or felt before watching this documentary, there’s a high probability that it will be after watching it.
After getting past any jealousy and resentment that I may harbor for being a part of the have-nots, I can say that I still enjoyed learning about this celebrated hotel. I didn’t know anything about it before watching the documentary and even though the content does kind of leave you high and dry, I did leave it having a better understanding of what it is that the hotel represents for people among that world.
All of the people that they were able to get to be a part of this documentary was an impressive feat; it’s obvious that this hotel does carry with it a significant amount of meaning for them. I just wish that we, the people whose lives rarely if ever collide with The Carlyle, could have had more of an understanding as to what that meaning is outside of “a bunch of rich people have stayed here before.”
It’s time to start getting very excited about Jessica Chastain’s spy movie 355. The cast alone is worth it, with Chastain surrounded by Lupita Nyong’o, Penelope Cruz, Marion Cotillard, and Fan Bingbing. But now we’re learning more because the cast came together at Cannes, and they’ve released the most gorgeous cast photo ever. *swoon*
These ladies, including a pair of Oscar winners, in a Bourne-style espionage flick? Yes friggin’ please! This is a film that Chastain began hatching a year ago, enlisting Nyong’o to help bring it all together. Seriously, who would say no to those two??? Simon Kinberg, who Chastain is currently working with on X-Men: Dark Phoenix, agreed to direct the film about “international agents in a grounded, edgy action thriller that aims to alter a male-dominated genre with a true female ensemble, in the style of spy franchises The Bourne Identity, Mission: Impossible and James Bond.” Theresa Rebeck wrote the script, and it will feature two more things we can look forward to. The first is Nyong’o as an African female intelligence agent, which sounds a lot like the role she played in Black Panther. It will also include a fight scene between Chastain and Cotillard on motorcycles.
Deadline goes on to describe the plot as centering on “five accomplished secret agents from countries around the world. They have to overcome suspicions and political differences to form a spy sisterhood to thwart a common enemy.”
The film is being sold at Cannes now and already has a major French distributor. Expect more to follow because who wouldn’t want to be a part of this?
Another Kind of Wedding is an irritating indie take on the fairly tired “dysfunctional family hashes out dysfunction at a wedding” movie trope. There is a lot going on as far as how the family is dysfunctional: the bride is the groom’s brother ex-girlfriend, the mother of the groom who was cheated on by her ex-wife later had a thing with that ex’s assistant, the groom’s sister entertains romance with said assistant while her fiancé fanboys over her ex-boyfriend. And that’s just the drama relating to the characters directly related to the groom, who doesn’t get away without having spats with his brother and his fiancé, of course.
I thought the cast did a good job given what they were given to work with. It was a delight to watch Kathleen Turner and Francis Fisher play estranged mothers Barbara and Tammy to their three dysfunctional children and riffing with the other characters. My big problem with this movie was that there was a bizarre number of subplots that are under-explored and mostly unresolved: Barbara’s wedding date Albert (Wallace Shawn) flirting with a buxom woman who likes older men, Tammy’s disdain for her future daughter-in-law, and scorned son Kurt’s (Kevin Zeger) struggling acting career. Those are just some of the storylines that are not part o the drama I mentioned earlier. It felt like there were a lot of ideas of how this family could be made dysfunctional but too much indecision to axe any of them.
All in all, I would pass on this movie. It’s fun enough to watch, but I felt annoyed the whole time watching characters that I didn’t find terribly endearing be terrible to each other. I desperately wish there were way fewer random dysfunctional angles of storylines so that we could get more depth of the characters and their relationships. There was a lot of potential and it felt wasted here, especially as a take on a really old and tired movie trope.
I was nervous going into Anything. The story focuses on Early (John Carroll Lynch), who moves from Mississippi to Los Angeles after attempting suicide following his wife’s death, and his life changes when he meets his neighbor Freda (Matt Bomer), a trans sex worker. Not only was storyline rife with the potential for the manic pixie dream girl trope, but I’ve been hearing about the problematic nature of casting a man to play a trans character since the casting announcement was made. I want to see more trans actors playing trans characters in TV and film, and having men playing trans women does support inaccurate stereotypes about trans women. That being said, I think that Bomer did a great job playing Freda and bringing nuance to her character, even though she remains a bit of a stereotype as a tough-and-sassy trans woman.
Lynch’s performance is really what sells this movie. Early is immediately endearing, from the moment we watch him set out clothes for his wife on the morning of her funeral, as he must have been doing for his entire marriage, to watching him explore Los Angeles as a fish out of water from the deep, deep South, to watching him read letters his wife sent to him when she was in high school and he was in college aloud. He brings an incredible amount of emotion to Early, who is grappling with grief and trying to figure out how to appreciate his sister’s neurotic brand of love and care and nurturing relationships with the eclectic neighbors in his LA apartment building. I haven’t seen much of Lynch’s work before but I am definitely looking forward to seeing more of it after his performance in Anything.
There’s a somewhat loose thread of a storyline revolving around Early’s new neighbor, Brianna (Margot Bingham), whose situation is unclear but has an addict musician womanizing boyfriend, a guitar, and a beautiful voice. She attempts to pass off a gives no f*cks attitude but earnest Early gets to her and she starts to admit to him and to herself that she does care about things and is unhappy. However, we don’t see much resolution with this storyline and I was sad about it. I would have liked to see more development here or have less time spent here; the in-between amount of time spent with Brianna and her boyfriend felt like a tease.
I wasn’t sure what to expect watching this movie, but it definitely exceeded expectations. There was a lot of potential to explore characters and their relationships and their pasts but I think that’s a testament to the storytelling done that I was so attached to these characters and wanted to learn more about them. But I do hope in the future, as we continue to make progress with portraying underrepresented groups better in the media, that we cast more underrepresented actors to play these characters.
Separately I wouldn’t even bother posting these rumors, but put together they are at least worth a mention. A couple of days ago a rumor surfaced that DC Films was looking to scrap the Flashpoint movie and go with a more traditional solo Flash movie starring Ezra Miller. This was based on a caption-less tweet by Umberto Gonzalez showing Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s Thomas Wayne evaporating ala the Infinity War memes that are everywhere right now.
Shit was hella thin, yo. But sites ran with it and jumped to the conclusion that Flashpoint was dead. Maybe it is, but if there were more to it we’d get something better than this image…
This rumor wasn’t too different from what we had posted about just a few weeks ago, that major changes were coming to Flashpoint which would include a title change but not necessarily a story change. So I didn’t consider it worth covering again. Now there’s been an addition to the story, from a less-than-credible source in Revenge of the Fans. They say the decision to scrap Flashpoint coincides with the plan to move forward without Ben Affleck as Batman. How are these two things connected? That requires going back to yet another rumor from early this year.
In case you haven’t noticed, we haven’t heard much of anything about Affleck’s future as Batman. Not even a drip drop of info. A few months ago a story surfaced that Flashpoint, which uses a heavy time travel mechanism to drive the plot, would have been used to reboot the DCEU, changing Batman in the process. No more Affleck. It would have been a convenient way of writing him out of the franchise, while doing something similar to what X-Men: Days of Future Past and J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek did for those movies.
So if Flashpoint is dead, so are the plans to use it as a means of sweeping out Affleck. That would most likely mean we’ve seen the last of him in the cape and cowl, and there will be somebody else as Batman next time the character shows up. Who knows when the Hell that might be.
Consider the sources for both halves of this rumor, but keep it in the back of your mind in case we get some official word soon.
Oh boy. Another rape/victimhood movie in the vein of I Spit On Your Grave? These movies, in which a woman is usually depicted as utterly powerless at the hands of male attackers before turning the tables on them, are usually raked across the coals. They have been for decades, even in the midst of the feminist movement, and releasing one now while at the height of #MeToo and #TimesUp seems like a bad call, Ripley. A bad call. But then Coralie Fargeat’s Revenge isn’t quite like those other movies. Well, it is but it isn’t. It’s all in how the story is told that makes the difference, and having the right filmmaker to tell it.
Revenge is exactly what the title suggests, and chances are you can predict every single beat the story throws at you. Its greatest shocks aren’t narrative but in the sheer amount of gore and violence on display. This movie is tough, bloody and often hard to watch because of the sheer amount of grotesque damage that’s inflicted. Where Fargeat’s debut feature veers away from expectations is in the depiction of its protagonist, Jen (Matilda Lutz), who we first meet as the plaything for Richard (Kevin Janssens), a successful and very-married man who has whisked her away for a weekend sex romp at his desert vacation house. Both are gorgeous; he’s powerful and handsome, she’s practically dripping with sexual energy while seductively sucking on a lollipop. Jen is utterly irresistible, an enticing piece of eye candy that we can’t look away from. Nor can Richard or his two heavily-armed friends, Stan (Vincent Colombe) and Dimitri (Guillaume Bouchede), who have shown up early for a hunting trip. Jen doesn’t seem to have much of a mind of her own. She wants to move to L.A. so she can get noticed, but getting noticed soon turns out to be the last thing she needs.
Fargeat spins what had been a light-hearted evening, in which Jen teases the men with a very provocative dance number, on a dime into something far more dangerous. The men are practically salivating over her, and it becomes clear if left to their own devices she would be in some trouble. And then she is. It takes until morning, but Stan, emboldened by the previous night’s performance, rapes her while Richard is away. The dim-witted Dimitri sees it happening and does nothing, preferring to turn up the volume to drown out the sound. We aren’t permitted to see the act being committed and that somehow makes it worse, Fargeat using a combination of differing camera angles and sound mixing to relay the horror Jen is going through. When Richard returns he tries to diffuse the situation, “I got you a job…in Canada”, but when Jen refuses he and the others dispatch her in a way that seems quite final, and every bit as penetrating as the prior violence exacted on her.
But like any good vengeance movie, the protagonist proves stubbornly hard to kill. Everything about the movie changes at this point. The candy-coated hot pink colors fade, along with Jen’s bubbly blond hair, replaced by caked-on blood, dirt, and sand. She no longer resembles a perky bimbo but a warrior straight out of Mad Max, but what is surprising, at least to me, is that this transformation doesn’t suddenly empower her. She was powerful all along.
In most of these movies the woman is defined solely by her attackers. She is both a helpless victim, and then a merciless crusader for revenge. In the beginning, Fargeat lets us see Jen through the male gaze we’ve come to expect. Her camera leers over her every curve, sliding lower to give us just the barest peek underneath her skirt. But Jen isn’t out of control even then; she is asserting a dominance over these men through her sexuality and it’s embarrassing to them, in particular Stan, which is why he lashes out with violence. The power she wields is something very different later on as she stalks her male attackers one by one with increasing bloodlust. By contrast, Fargeat doesn’t shy away from the barbarity of the assault on the men, and they too find themselves getting skewered in ways that nobody should have to see. And yet cinematographer Robrecht Heyvaert forces us to see them; every shard of glass in an open wound, every knife through the eye, every bloated and stinking corpse in the stale water.
It’s a demanding physical performance by Lutz, best known for her starring role in Rings. She doesn’t say much in the movie, but she doesn’t really need to. What she has to say is written all over her scarred body. The ferocity of the character she evolves into reminded me of Sharni Vinson’s killer vengeance-seeker in You’re Next, and I’d love to see those two pair up in a kick-ass action flick someday.
Revenge‘s story doesn’t reinvent the rape/vengeance genre all by itself, it’s Fargeat’s choices as a filmmaker that set this film apart from the rest. Brutal and uncompromising, Revenge wears its feminism like a bloody badge of honor.
There may be only one more film in this latest Star Wars trilogy, but this is a franchise that is still growing by leaps and bounds. Tonight was the red carpet premiere of Solo: A Star Wars Story, a spinoff telling an early adventure of the most famous rogue in the galaxy. And after that we have a new series of films by Rian Johnson and another by the creators of Game of Thrones. On top of all of that is Jon Favreau’s live-action TV series, which has been dogged by questions regarding the timeline it will be set in. Well tonight Favreau let the Porg out of the bag.
Speaking with Nerdist, Favreau revealed that Star Wars Resistance will be set between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens, specifically seven years after the Battle of Endor. Hopefully by then the Ewoks have been erased from existence, but I digress.
The Battle of Endor is one of the most critical moments in the Star Wars canon, as it’s when the rebels blew up the second Death Star, defeated the Empire once and for all, and redeemed the soul of Darth Vader, turning him into a very awkward Anakin Skywalker Force ghost. They were very busy that day.
There is big gap of time between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens, approximately 30 years, so there are a wealth of stories to be told. Favreau also promises brand new characters and groundbreaking CGI similar to his gorgeous adaptation of The Jungle Book. While he doesn’t say it for obvious reasons, we can probably expect to see a few familiar faces pop up. There aren’t any further details at this point, and chances are we won’t hear anything for a while. With Favreau working on The Lion King and a sequel to The Jungle Book, it could be a while before Star Wars Resistance kicks into gear. It will be part of Disney’s streaming service which doesn’t launch until 2019.
Ignoring everything that happened at the end of Avengers: Infinity War, things are looking up for anybody involved with Black Panther. That obviously includes director Ryan Coogler, who is at Cannes right now talking about the experience of making the most successful black superhero movie ever, and one of the most successful superhero movies, period. He also talked about the possibility of a spinoff featuring just the female characters from Wakanda, who proved nearly as popular as Black Panther himself.
During the course of the film, there comes a stretch of time when T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman) is no longer present. It’s during that time when the women in his life step up and take over, and that’s when Coogler realized he may have something special just with them…
“There is a whole section of the film where T’Challa [Chadwick Boseman] is out of the movie and you are just following the women,” Coogler says assuming everyone in the theater has seen the movie by this point. “And thats one of my favorite parts of the movie when I watched it. And I didn’t expect that.”
“Everybody thinks he’s dead and there is a good chunk of time left in the movie and the women actually save him and bring him back and that part of the movie you feel like you’re watching something fresh and new. That part of it was exciting. We have these actresses who could easily carry their own movie. Some of them have before. We had an embarrassment of riches with Lupita, Letitia [Wright], Danai [Gurira], Angela [Bassett]. And we were so fortunate. So when that part of the movie happens I’m like, ‘I wanna watch this movie. I’d watch this movie with just them.’”
Of course, that led to the question of whether Coogler would direct a female Black Panther spinoff, to which he replied, “That would be amazing if the opportunity came up. They did it in the comic-book version.”
Coogler is referring to Shuri, who takes over as Black Panther in the comics. There have been other stories that follow members of T’Challa’s royal guard, the Dora Milaje.
Black Panther is, for the time being, the #1 movie in the world with $1.33B. A sequel is already in the works and you can bet Marvel is going to do everything possible to get the most out of this franchise. It’s a business, after all, a fact that hasn’t escaped Coogler in the least…
“At the end of the day it’s a business and the business is informed by all these things that life is informed by. Colonization, institutional, bias, racism. All these things. The business was built amongst all these things, but the truth is what I kept telling myself is because I was an athlete. I’m not anymore. There was a time. Now, I’m like ‘Can I make it up that ramp without falling?’ [Laughs] But, there was a time not that long ago that my dad would tell me that owners of American baseball teams would say ‘I don’t know if we put black and hispanic players on the field that people would still come to the games.’ There was a time in basketball where there were no black people in the NBA and it’s because people thought people wouldn’t come to the games. I was born in ’86. I came up in the ’90s I think in the NBA everybody’s black. Everyone in the stands is usually mixed bag, but mostly white but they have on the black players jerseys. That’s the world I grew up in. So, for me, it was ‘Why can’t film have more black movies?’ People say maybe these films don’t travel but for us it was like, ‘I don’t know if that’s the case.’ And it was great to have partners in Marvel and Disney who were excited about that as well. We didn’t feel like we were the only ones banging the drum.” [Variety]
