Flying Lotus is already a Grammy Award-winning musician, record producer, DJ and composer, but the multi-talented artist is beginning to make a splash a filmmaker. Following the weird experimental film Kuso and the Ozzy’s Dungeon segment of V/H/S/99, Flying Lotus is embarking on the biggest project yet, the sci-fi thriller Ashstarring Eiza González (Hit Man) and Aaron Paul (Breaking Bad).
With Ash set to hit theaters in March, a new trailer has been released. Flying Lotus aka Steven Ellison directs and scores his sophomore effort, which centers on a woman who wakes up on a distant planet to find that the entire crew of her space station have been murdered. Now she must decide who can be trusted, including the man sent to save her.
Also in the cast are Iko Uwais, Kate Elliott, Beulah Koale, and Flying Lotus himself.
Ash will have its world premiere at SXSW, followed by a theatrical release on March 21st by RLJE Films.
Synopsis: On the mysterious planet of Ash, Riya (González) awakens to find her crew slaughtered. When a man named Brion (Paul) arrives to rescue her, an ordeal of psychological and physical terror ensues while Riya and Brion must decide if they can trust one another to survive.
A newly married couple is detained in a small European country’s police station. It doesn’t seem like they’ve been there long. They seem like every other American couple, talking about their neighbors and dreaming of tropical vacations. As a one-eyed officer comes in, you realize they are being questioned for smuggling — not drugs — but cabbages. The officer (Steven Yeun) explains that because the vegetable was the only thing its citizens could eat during a recent war, they have outlawed it due to psychological torment. As he walks the couple through the punishment for smuggling a cabbage (including paperwork, a fine, fingertips being cut off, and the offender being shot), they insist that he must be mistaken and the American couple they are looking for cannot possibly be them. When the officer leaves to bring back the man who will start the process, the couple argue about whether they should escape through an unlocked window. As the husband insists that they should, the wife refuses to move. When she finally does, she stands to reveal her pants are filled with small lumps.
If this premise sounds absurd to you, it’s supposed to be. Written and directed by first-time director Evan Twohy, Bubble & Squeak follows said newlywed couple, Delores (Barry’s Sarah Goldberg) and Declan (Yesterday’s Himesh Patel), as they try to flee the country and evade Shazbor (a fun yet underused Matt Berry from What We Do In The Shadows), the obsessed tyrannical head of the police force hellbent on catching them. Along the way, Delores starts questioning their relationship as they meet creepy children, other cabbage smugglers, and a stingy nun.
Twohy knows how to make a movie. Inspired by Wes Anderson, Yorgos Lanthimos, and even Taika Waititi, he thrives on color, symmetry, and visual comedy. The costume design is whimsical yet practical for their time in the woods. Editing, done by Sara Shaw is tight and fast paste. The score, composed by relative newcomer Brad Oberhofer, is the best thing about the film bringing a menacing frivolity to the action.
What Twohy lacks that the aforementioned directors have is an emotional throughline. Not only does Bubble & Squeak lack that, but its absurdity prevents any real character growth from happening. Both Delores, despite Goldberg’s earnest delivery, and Declan feel one note. These characters are almost too grating to spend 97 minutes with. This is solidified in the epilogue, the only scene set in America, where any resolution created in the final act is undone.
The production value is there. Twohy clearly has a developed visual style that is rare for a first-time filmmaker. A former playwright, maybe Bubble & Squeak would work better on the stage? With all of the care that went into it, you’d think a cohesive story would be smuggled into the plot.
Bubble & Squeak premiered at Sundance and competed in the U.S. Dramatic Competition. It has yet to be picked up by a distributor.
Two actors known for playing iconic villains are coming face-to-face in Locked. Anthony Hopkins channels his Hannibal Lecter performance in the film as he squares off against Bill Skarsgard, known for his chilling role as Pennywise the Clown.
Locked is directed by David Yarovesky best known for the Gunn brothers’ dark Superman thriller, Brightburn. The screenplay is by Turistas writer Michael Arlen Ross, with Sam Raimi as a producer.
The film stars Skarsgard as Eddie, a down-on-his-luck thief who breaks into the wrong luxury SUV and finds that it is a well-orchestrated trap laid by Hopkins’ self-professed vigilante, William, who has a thing about good manners and people not stealing things. That would be rude.
So how much damage can William do to Eddie from the inside of a car? Quite a lot, as you’ll see in the footage. Air conditioner as deadly weapon? Sure, why not.
The Avenue will release Locked in theaters on March 21st.
SYNOPSIS: From producer Sam Raimi (Evil Dead, Drag Me to Hell) comes a relentless horror-thriller where luxury becomes deadly. When Eddie (Bill Skarsgård) breaks into a luxury SUV, he steps into a deadly trap set by William (Anthony Hopkins), a self-proclaimed vigilante delivering his own brand of twisted justice. With no means of escape, Eddie must fight to survive in a ride where escape is an illusion, survival is a nightmare, and justice shifts into high gear.
Eddie Murphy is eager to jump back into the action, following last year’s long-awaited release of Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F. Deadline reports Murphy will star in Blue Falcon, an action-comedy from London Has Fallen writer Chad St. John.
Sony Pictures acquired the script by St. John that centers on a retired superspy who goes to his estranged son’s destination wedding, and ends up squaring off with his archenemy.
Blue Falcon is still in need of a director so it’s still in the early stages of development. Along with London Has Fallen, St. John was the writer of action flick Peppermint, and the Keanu Reeves sci-fi film Replicas. Next for him is the Alan Ritchson/Shailene Woodley actioner Motor City.
Murphy has a lot on his plate. He’s got a reunion with Dreamgirls director Bill Condon for a biopic of Parliament Funkadelic’s George Clinton. He’ll also return as the voice of Donkey in Shrek 5. A big part of Murphy’s comeback has been reprising his most popular roles with the occasional family comedy. Blue Falcon doesn’t seem to fit in either camp at this point. Don’t be surprised if the film ends up at Netflix or Amazon, streamers Murphy has a good working relationship with.
Sundance is often a place of experimentation, and that’s one of the great things about it. The quite experimental sci-fi romance Love Me was one of the most intriguing titles at the festival because the premise is so out there: a buoy and a satellite fall in love. Okay, how’s that work? And why does the promo image feature beautiful, and very human, stars Kristen Stewart and Steven Yeun? The answer is the problem. First-time filmmakers Sam & Andy Zuchero take a home run swing with an ambitious post-apocalyptic romance that never reaches the emotional heights or originality the filmmakers believe they have achieved.
Let’s get the praise out of the way first because there’s some good stuff to say about Love Me. Technically, this is a marvel of production for an indie film, utilizing multiple mediums including motion capture, animation, and live-action, and it all looks studio quality. Even the score is sweeping and romantic, whisking the audience across eons and into a rollercoaster romantic relationship. Sam & Andy suggested that movies like this will be the way of the future, and maybe that’s true on a visual front, but storytelling still matters and that’s where this film gets a failing grade.
In a clever sequence that reminds of Pixar’s Wall-E, we see the creation of our galaxy and that of Earth itself. Rapidly sprinting across millions of years, we see the Big Bang, the arrival of humans and the world today, then another flash, humanity is wiped out, then an Ice Age. It all happens in seconds and it’s pretty funny. Then, the sun returns. An ice thaw reveals a digital smart buoy (voiced by Stewart) that is eager to find something to communicate with. Looking into the sky, it sees a satellite (Yeun) tasked as a storage space for all of humanity’s collective knowledge. The satellite’s main charge is to inform any lifeform it encounters about Earth and what happened to humanity.
Desperate to not be alone anymore, the buoy reaches out to the satellite and their initial conversations through broken digital dialect is one of the movie’s cutest aspects, a rom-com of broken ones and zeroes. But the buoy misrepresents itself in order to trick the satellite, using the social media videos of vapid influencer Deja (also Stewart) to create an entirely new persona. The buoy is now Me, and the satellite slowly begins to accept its role as I am, a digital version of Deja’s real boyfriend Liam (Yeun). Drawn into a virtual world that replicates the couple’s apartment, they begin sharing a “life” together, crafting Blue Apron recipes for an audience that doesn’t exist, planning “Date Nights” that don’t actually lead to anyplace. Over the course of thousands of quesadilla nights, ice cream desserts, and episodes of Friends, they begin to act out the contours of a real human relationship. And as humans, we know that those happy moments aren’t forever. Eventually, he begins to bristle at the tight constraints of their union, while Me is unsure, knowing herself to be a fraud who is only playing at being human. If I am evolves, he’ll learn that Me is really just a buoy floating out in the water all by itself, with little to offer. Eventually, things get so awful that a split has to occur, giving both sides time to discover who they truly are without the other. We’ve all been there, right?
There are aspects of Love Me that feel shockingly real and true, and others that are like a thought experiment gone awry. Its commentary about our social media age and the corrosive effect it has on our sense of self is scattershot at best, and also feels strangely out of date? But the film also goes off on wildly uninteresting tangents, like when I am discovers how to create water (a lot of this stuff is never explained; shit just happens) and goes on a taste-testing binge. Enraged breakdowns allow both Stewart and Yeun to scream a lot, cry a lot, and dance a lot, but they don’t add anything substantive or say anything truly original. A big problem with the film is that, despite its unique premise, the romantic conflict has been done before and done better elsewhere. Strip out the sci-fi elements, the buoy and the satellite stuff, and what you have is one person whose lack of self worth leads to controlling behavior, and another who struggles to break free from it. Ultimately, the filmmakers have put a lot of the burden of blame on Me, which makes her grand epiphany hollow and unearned.
There are some interesting avenues that could’ve been explored to greater depth, such as humanity’s lasting legacy and impact. Me figures out who she wants to be by exploring Youtube videos, searching through Google, and more. What she finds is a wildly complex humanity that does everything for show, to get Likes and Follows. In a funny little exchange, the buoy and satellite try to impress one another with memes, in order to secure the only Like they could ever achieve from the other. When the satellite, saddened that the buoy didn’t offer a Like to his silly meme of a dog with a Cheetos bag on its head, it says “You didn’t like it, so you don’t like me.”
Love Me offers another challenge for Stewart and Yeun, two actors who have made taking on challenging roles a common thing. Both show vulnerable sides to themselves here, and occasionally have moments that burn raw with passion drawn from a personal place. Ultimately, they aren’t the film’s problem. It feels like a great idea for a short that people might’ve actually loved, but grew out of control into a curious experimental failure.
Bleecker Street releases Love Me in theaters on January 31st.
*This review was originally part of our Sundance 2024 coverage.*
Released in 1993, Ang Lee’s The Wedding Banquet was an Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Language Film, but it was also a culturally significant film for its depiction of the LGBTQ community. So much so that in 2023 it was added to the Library of Congress for its cultural significance. But like all things, it could use an update for a new generation. Earlier this week at the Sundance Film Festival, a new version of The Wedding Banquet had its world premiere, led by stars Bowen Yang, Lily Gladstone, and Kelly Marie Tran.
Directed by Andrew Ahn (Driveways, Fire Island) and co-written by Ahn and James Schamus, The Wedding Banquet‘s plot is mostly the same although some of the characters have been tweaked. Yang plays a gay man in need of a green card, with Gladstone as the lesbian woman who marries him for the financial support. When his grandmother shows up and disrupts their plan for a secret wedding, all hilarity ensues.
Also in the cast are Han Gi-Chan, Joan Chen, and Youn Yuh-Jung. Ahn and Yang worked together previously on Fire Island. This is a chance to see the SNL star in a more dramatic role than we’ve seen before. Gladstone, best known for her Oscar-nominated performance in Killers of the Flower Moon, is also taking on a role that’s different from what we’ve seen from her thus far.
Bleecker Street will release The Wedding Banquet in theaters on April 18th.
From Director Andrew Ahn comes a joyful comedy of errors about a chosen family navigating the disasters and delights of family expectations, queerness, and cultural identity. Angela and her partner Lee have been unlucky with their IVF treatments, but can’t afford to pay for another round. Meanwhile their friend Min, the closeted scion of a multinational corporate empire, has plenty of family money but a soon-to-expire student visa. When his commitment-phobic boyfriend Chris rejects his proposal, Min makes the offer to Angela instead: a green card marriage in exchange for funding Lee’s IVF. But their plans to quietly elope are upended when Min’s skeptical grandmother flies in from Korea unannounced, insisting on an all-out wedding extravaganza.
This is so incredibly random that it might also be incredibly awesome. The InSneider reports that Jake Gyllenhaal will star in a supernatural romantic thriller from M. Night Shyamalan! Not only that, but it’ll be from an original story by writer Nicholas Sparks. Yep, that guy who wrote The Notebook.
Details on the mysterious project are slim, but the original story was co-created by Shyamalan and Sparks, who are also working independently to expand the idea into their chosen formats. So Shyamalan will turn the story into a movie, while Sparks is writing a novel. They must really like this concept they came up with.
This will be Gyllenhaal and Shyamalan’s first time working together. Shyamalan has been veering away from big-name stars for his last few projects. His most recent film, Trap, starred Josh Hartnett. Before that, it was Dave Bautista in Knock At the Cabin and Gael Garcia Bernal in Old.
Gyllenhaal most recently starred in Doug Liman’s Road House remake and Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant. He’ll reunite with Ritchie for action flick In the Grey alongside Henry Cavill, followed by his sister Maggie Gyllenhaal’s horror The Bride!
Expect this to be next on Shyamalan’s list, so we could see it sometime in 2026.
If Jonathan Majors hadn’t derailed his career with domestic abuse charges, and Magazine Dreams had been released as originally planned, where might he be right now? Majors’ star was set to take off like a rocket after the film debuted at Sundance 2023, with many proclaiming him a future Best Actor winner at the Oscars. He had a key role in the MCU, starred in Ant-Man 3, and also had a showy role in Creed III. But things did not go as intended, and Majors has largely been written off by Hollywood. In just over a month, Magazine Dreams will finally hit theaters, but will that be enough to change his career trajectory?
As seen in the new trailer for Magazine Dreams, Majors stars as Killian Maddox, a man driven by an obsession to be the best bodybuilder in the world, with little care to the damage his extreme workouts and steroid use are having on him and the body he’s attempting to perfect.
Haley Bennett, Taylour Paige and Mike O’Hearn co-star. The film was written and directed by Elijah Bynum.
Majors underwent an insane physical transformation, working out for hours a day and changing his diet, to bulk up and get shredded at a pro level. The film was showered with accolades, many of them aimed at Majors who is extraordinary. There was some controversy surrounding the story and the toxicity of Majors’s character, but that won’t be what holds this film back, if anything.
I think it’s telling that Briarcliff Entertainment has chosen a March 21st release date. That will likely keep it out of the Academy’s line of sight, so any hope of it being an awards season factor is slim.
SYNOPSIS: Killian Maddox lives with his ailing veteran grandfather, obsessively working out between court-mandated therapy appointments and part-time shifts at a grocery store where he harbors a crush on a friendly cashier. Though Killian’s struggles to read social cues and maintain control of his volatile temper amplify his sense of disconnection amid a hostile world, nothing deters him from his fiercely protected dream of bodybuilding superstardom, not even the doctors who warn that he’s causing permanent damage to his body with his quest.
While many films arrived at Sundance with distribution deals already in place, many were still seeking acquisition. It’s been pretty quiet over the last week, but now it appears the first major acquisition is nearly in place, and it’s for the crowd-pleasing body horror, Together.
Deadline reports that NEON has won a days-long bidding war to acquire Together, the Michael Shanks-directed Midnight film starring Dave Franco and Alison Brie. I was in attendance at the January 26th world premiere and I can tell you the crowd had a Hell of a time with the film as it’s funny, scary, and even a bit romantic. It’s clear that studio heads were in the house, too.
It’s unclear what the final number will be, but the report estimates somewhere in the realm of $20M, which is great for a Midnight genre film. The deal could also set the bar for future acquisitions from the festival as there are a lot of crowd-pleasing titles left out there with a few days in Park City left.
Here’s the synopsis: With a move to the countryside already testing the limits of a couple’s relationship, a supernatural encounter begins an extreme transformation of their love, their lives, and their flesh.
We’re happy to offer our DC readers the chance to attend a free early screening of Heart Eyes, Sony’s upcoming horror starring Olivia Holt, Mason Gooding, Jordana Brewster, and Devon Sawa.
SYNOPSIS: For the past several years, the “Heart Eyes Killer” has wreaked havoc on Valentine’s Day by stalking and murdering romantic couples. This Valentine’s Day, no couple is safe…
The screening takes place on Thursday, January 30th at 7:00pm at Regal Majestic. If you’d like to attend, RSVP at the Sony Pictures site here. Please remember all screenings are first come first served and you’ll need to arrive early to ensure seating. Enjoy the show!
