While the quality of Drake Doremus’ films has remained high, one could argue that they have been receiving steadily less attention since his 2011 breakout, Like Crazy. His latter films Breathe In, Equals, and last year’s Newness were met with solid reviews but mostly flew under the radar despite boasting strong casts. Now Doremus is lining up his next film and hopefully it will put him back on the map.
Doremus will direct Aurora, a romantic drama with supernatural elements. Penned by Salvador Paskowitz, the story follows ” a widower who, 25 years after his wife’s death, continues to live alone in Iceland. When a young man comes into his life with a mysterious connection to his past the two develop an uneasy relationship, causing them to question their identities and their past lives.”
Paskowitz is best known for writing another supernatural love story, The Age of Adaline, which starred Blake Lively and proved to be a sizable hit. Doremus just recently premiered his latest film, Zoe, at the Tribeca Film Festival but the reviews haven’t been great. Amazon Studios acquired it beforehand and we’ll probably see it released later this year. [Deadline]
The beauty of the Marvel Cinematic Universe is that it’s surprisingly welcoming to veterans actors who aren’t typically identified with the superhero genre. Glenn Close, Robert Redford, Cate Blanchett, and others have suited up to play various heroes and villains within the MCU, and now you can multi-time Oscar nominee Annette Bening to that list.
Bening, who you can see give another terrific performance in The Seagull this week, has joined the Captain Marvel cast. I will shut down hopes of a potential reunion with her The Kids Are All Right co-star Mark Ruffalo. For now. While her role is said to be that of a scientist, Variety’s Justin Kroll claims she will actually play Marie Danvers, the mother of Brie Larson’s Carol Danvers. We’ll see if that pans out or not. I’m just hoping she gets a chance to go toe-to-toe with Samuel L. Jackson, that’s all. And are we completely certain she won’t be the one to finally put Thanos down for the count? Did you see 20th Century Women? I’m convinced she can do anything.
Captain Marvel opens March 8th 2019.
True news: Annette Bening joining CAPT MARVEL; being told she would be playing Danvers’ mother
I think it’s been proven by now that the cast of Avengers: Infinity War and its upcoming sequel are not good at keeping secrets. They’re terrible at it, and a couple of weeks after the movie secrets are still spilling out. Only they’re about next year’s Avengers 4 which is problematic for obvious reasons. This is what happens when movies shoot back-to-back. The culprit this time is Gwyneth Paltrow, who may have just spoiled something huge about Tony Stark and Pepper Potts’ relationship.
There is simply too much press material out there, apparently, because Paltrow was quoted in the Official Avengers: Infinity War Magazine (Why does that exist??) about Potts and Starks’ future as a couple, and I have to believe she revealed way too much…
“Pepper and Tony have had a real long journey together. She obviously starts as his dutiful assistant, and then the relationship evolves, and now this decade later they’re married, and they have a child. Their relationship has evolved in all of the ways that great romances evolve.”
Awwww, there’s going to be a baby Stark! Unless they cut that subplot out of the movie now. The timing makes sense given that Tony predicted she was pregnant early on in Infinity War, only to have her crush his dreams. However, it’s possible that she knew and was looking for a better time to tell him. She was desperately trying to tell him something before being cut off while Tony was on Thanos’ ship.
So get ready for the birth of Iron Lad! Wonder if he’ll be born with nanites in his blood? Hmmm…
Peter Berg’s Friday Night Lights was a great movie, one of the best modern sports films. It then became a beloved TV series that ran for five seasons and launched a number of careers. You’d think all of the field had been covered at this point but there’s a new version of the story headed to the big screen, and it’ll be directed by David Gordon Green.
Variety reports that Green will direct a different take on Friday Night Lights, one that will be non-fiction and pull directly from H.G. Bissinger’s bestselling book chronicling the 1988 Permian High School Panthers out of Odessa, TX as they vye for the state championship. It’s about more than football, though; Friday Night Lights has always been about how sports can hold a community of people together through trying times.
It’s an unexpected move for Green who is currently working on his Halloween remake/sequel. Does Friday Night Lights really need another adaptation, though? What else is there to say?
Class Rank is quirky. Quirky is its defining characteristic.
The protagonists, the plot, the visual style, everything about it is whimsical
and strange. And that’s not a bad thing. I actually really enjoyed its odd
sensibilities, the only problem is that at times it felt like I had seen them
before.
The film follows ridiculously eccentric and formal high
school student Bernard (Skyler Gisondo), and his campaign to run for a seat
with the school board of directors. Fueled by his preppy classmate Veronica (Olivia
Holt) and her drive to look exceptional on her college transcripts, the pair
form an unlikely alliance and shake up the world of local government.
Circling back to the quirkiness of the film, Class
Rank is very clearly inspired by the early films of Wes Anderson,
particularly Rushmore, with its borderline inhumanly quirky central characters making mountains out of molehills in
terms of the small town’s school board election. It’s a very Anderson quirk,
which is again, not to say there’s anything wrong with that, I love Wes
Anderson’s films, but they’re very unique to his voice, whereas Class
Rank felt somewhat familiar. There are ways to be reminiscent while of
another artist’s work while still being your own thing. Wrinkle in Time for
example, felt very similar to the early fantasy films of Steven Spielberg, and
yet was still able to have its own identity unique to itself. During Class
Rank, I couldn’t get the comparison out of my head.
I did appreciate this movie’s strangeness however. I found
the characters both incredibly weird and endearing at the same time, and fully
enjoyed spending 90’s minutes in their unusual world. This is a very charming
film. I loved the dynamics between the various characters, none of whom would
naturally be friends. I particularly liked the subplot concerning Bernard’s
grandfather (Bruce Dern) and his attempts to get back out into the world. It’s
a movie about finding your voice while also adapting it to suit the widest
possible audience. A coming of age movie about politics. If you like your
movies cute and offbeat, you’d really like Class Rank.
The only thing that didn’t land for me with the film was the
beginning of its third act. It played into a trope that a lot of comedies do,
where the third act gets tense and heavy, with characters revealing secrets and
getting angry at each other. While I understand the necessity of these types of
plot beats, to me it always seems like the film would have been better suited
to stay with its initial tone and keep the laughs coming, and I felt that here
too. I wish there was a way to hit the necessary plot beats covered in the
section of the film without bringing the pacing down.
Past that I fully enjoyed this weird little movie. Much like
its main characters, it lives in its own strange little world, which is
ridiculously fun to go visit. Class Rank is proudly the quirkiest
thing I’ve seen all year.
This will come as a surprise on two fronts, I’m sure, but Disney is planning new franchises after Avengers 4, although that film shouldn’t be considered the end of the Avengers. Well, no shit. Disney CEO Bob Iger addressed the future of the MCU during an earnings call where he talked about the future while praising the massive box office of Avengers: Infinity War...
“We meet on a regular basis with our Marvel team, and we’ve plotted out Marvel movies that will take us well into the next decade,” said Iger. “I’m guessing we will try our hand at what I’ll call a new franchise beyond ‘Avengers,’ but that doesn’t necessarily mean you won’t see more ‘Avengers’ down the road. We just haven’t made any announcements about that.”
We’ve always known Avengers 4 wouldn’t be the end of anything, but a “new beginning” of sorts. I expect there will be plenty of new franchises beyond the ones we already know about like Captain Marvel and Black Widow. The only films confirmed for Marvel’s Phase 4 are a sequel to Spider-Man: Homecoming next year, Black Panther 2, and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 in 2020.
So what do we think this new franchise might be? My guess is it’s something like New Avengers, which would be what Marvel did in the comics and would make sense in this situation, too. [THR]
After more than two decades, Terry Gilliam’s passion project The Man Who Killed Don Quixote is finally seeing the light of day at Cannes. For real. And while that’s good news, it wouldn’t be a normal day for this film without a healthy dose of bad news, too.
On the other hand, the film’s long-term prospects are in question. Amazon Studios has pulled out and won’t be giving it a domestic release. Given all of the problems it has had one can hardly argue with them, and as I’ve said before it was unlikely to earn much here. Fortunately the international release is still on, and if it has a strong premiere maybe another distributor will want to bring it stateside.
It’s conveniently timed the release of Dominic Savage’s emotionally raw drama The Escape, coming just a week after Charlize Theron’s Tully. Both films form what could be looked at as a twinbill on postpartum depression and maternal anxiety, featuring stunning lead performances. Gemma Arterton excels as a shattered mother of two in Savage’s absorbing and uncompromising film, which doesn’t have any problem-solving night nannies coming to the rescue.
Tara (Arterton) spends most of her days attending to everyone but herself. Living in a bland suburban neighborhood in England, Tara finds herself increasingly disconnected from everyone and everything around her. She can’t find passion for her workaholic husband Mark (Dominic Cooper), who wakes up every morning aggressively seeking a quickie before shuttling off for the day, an act that leaves Tara in tears. There’s no pleasure to be found in the caring of her children, either, as she believes they love her husband more than her. The only sliver of joy Tara can find is in her love of art, which she desires to take a greater role in but can’t. To those observing from the outside Tara would seem to have everything, even her unmarried mother (Frances Barber) seems to think so.
“You’ve got it made — two cars and a conservatory”, she says when Tara, whose name is barely mentioned for most of the film, tells her of the discontentment she feels. The lack of disregard for her feelings stretches to her husband, who isn’t a bad guy just woefully clueless. He genuinely wants for her to be happy again, but is dismissive of her pleas for something more than the life she currently has. He practically takes offense when she starts making plans to take art classes in Paris, just for a few days, to get some time to herself. After a particularly nasty blowup Tara grabs her things and bolts out of the house for the first bus to Paris she can find.
Savage pours over every excruciating detail of Tara’s stifling existence for the film’s first hour, with Arterton painting a sad portrait of a woman who sees her life reduced to nothing but temper tantrums, laundry, and kitchen cleanups. She appears to have fallen out of love with the very idea of being a mother and wife, although it’s unclear if she ever had those instincts. Her downward spiral is gradual, devastating, and gets more captivating by the moment.
Once Tara engages in her journey of self discovery the film is on less solid ground. While Savage softens the tone considerably and understandably, her story also becomes more generic, like an unshapen Eat Pray Love minus the whimsy. The specificity that had such an impact before is gone, but even as it rounds to a surprisingly tidy conclusion there is some emotional authenticity to be found. Again it boils down to Arterton, who is so natural in carrying the bulk of the The Escape‘s dramatic weight that we can’t take our eyes off of her.
French director Olivier Assayas is back at the Cannes Film Festival, but unlike previous years bringing films Personal Shopper,Clouds of Sils Maria, and others he’s not there to premiere anything new. Instead he’s there inking deals for his next project, the spy drama Wasp Network, which will reteam him with star Edgar Ramirez.
Assayas directed Ramirez in his Carlos the Jackal miniseries a few years ago, and now they’re back together again for the true story of Cuban spies that infiltrated a Florida-based terrorist network in the 1990s. Joining along with Ramirez is Game of Thrones‘s Pedro Pascal.
No word on when filming might kick off, but this sounds hella promising. Ramirez recently signed up to join Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt in Disney’s Jungle Cruise, while Pascal agreed to be part of the Wonder Woman 2 cast. [Deadline]
If Girls Trip taught us anything it’s that the ladies can be just as vulgar and juvenile as any man, if not more so. First time director Augustine Frizzell took that idea and ran with it in Never Goin’ Back, a filthy comedy led by rising stars Maia Mitchell and Camila Morrone. A24 swooped in and picked up the rights after it made a splash at Sundance and SXSW, and now we’re getting a look at what may be the comedy of the summer.
The premise for this one is simple. Mitchell and Morrone play Angela and Jessie, two wildly irresponsible high school dropouts who just want to put their lousy waitressing job behind them so they can spend the summer on the beach getting high. And that’s pretty much the whole movie based on this trailer, which is perfectly okay with me.
At first glance it looks like a combination of Spring Breakers and The Florida Project, which may explain what A24 saw in it, too. They found a lot of mainstream success with both of those movies and I think Never Goin’ Back has the same kind of potential.
You may recognize Mitchell from her leading role on The Fosters, but this looks like quite the change of pace for her. She’ll have another summer film in a few months with Hot Summer Nights opposite Timothee Chalamet. Morrone is even more under the radar but you might recognize the name of her stepfather: Al Pacino. She had a small role as Bruce Willis’ daughter in Death Wish.
Also starring Kyle Mooney and Joel Allen, Never Goin’ Back opens August 3rd.
