Charles Bramesco
‘Star Wars’ to Survey Female Heroes Across the Galaxy With ‘Forces of Destiny’ Animated Shorts
Star Wars is great, everyone’s pretty much on the same page about that one, but the problem is that it’s just so dang long. Eight movies, with more on the way? And they’re all two-plus hours? And there are TV shows?! It would take a viewer days if not weeks to wade through all of that action, and so the minds at Lucasfilm and Disney have done us all the service of condensing Star Wars into segments a little closer to bite-size. In the future, everyone will be world famous for 15 minutes; likewise, in the future, new Star Wars content will be between two and three minutes long.
Seat-Kicking Incident Leads to Stabbing at Los Angeles Movie Theater
A few years ago, I wrote up a brief item about an incident taking place at Los Angeles’ AFI Film Festival wherein an irate woman maced a man in the face for having the gall to ask her to turn off her cell phone during a screening of Mike Leigh’s J.M.W. Turner biopic Mr. Turner. “Wow, being at the movies sure makes people do crazy things!” I thought to myself. “I wonder how long it’ll be until the next time I get to write about a violent movie theater conflict over petty nonsense.” That day has come at last, and this time [beat to let the moment breathe] the stakes are even higher.
Yet Another Adam Sandler Movie Coming to Netflix, Except This One Will Be Good
Netflix, for all their diverting original series and Bong Joon-ho subsidization, has also been responsible for the introduction of a great evil into the world. I am referring, of course, to their seemingly infinite-picture development deal with chronic Phoner-of-It-In Adam Sandler. Netflix signed Sandler to a four-movie deal back in 2014, which has been going decidedly less-than-great so far — his Western spoof The Ridiculous Six was a big pile of donkey turds, and the trailer for his upcoming Sandy Wexler has not inspired much more confidence. When the news hit a few weeks ago that Netflix would re-up their deal with Sandler for four more movies, our coverage of the notice contained the words “oh no.”
Tupac Shakur Takes on the World in New ‘All Eyez on Me’ Trailer
Tupac Shakur was a complicated man: he had the world at his feet while carrying its weight on his shoulders, he was a thug menace to some and an inspirational poet to others, a commercial titan who chafed at the notion of bringing money into a white-owned record label system. The legendary rapper’s life was marked by inner conflict until it was tragically cut short in a 1996 drive-by shooting, leaving him dead on the pavement at 25 years old. Though the gifted M.C. was taken from us far too soon (god, imagine what Tupac’s midlife-crisis album would’ve sounded like) he left behind a stirring life story just begging for a biopic.
‘Baywatch’ Trailer: More Intentional Comedy, Same Amount of Slo-Mo Running
It’s weird — with every new trailer, the upcoming big-screen reboot of beloved ‘90s TV series Baywatch appears to get a little bit better. The first trailer promised a lightly amusing clone of the smart-alecky 21 Jump Street reboot, the second trailer advertised a competently-produced action tentpole with a healthy sprinkling of meta humor, and now, the so-called “official” trailer (does that make the first two unofficial?) teases what appears to be a sincerely funny comedy. At the very least, whoever cut this thing made it abundantly clear that stars Zac Efron and Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson have more chemistry than an eighth-grade science class.
Faster Than a Speeding #2, the ‘Captain Underpants’ Trailer Is Here
There’s no arguing that superheroes currently own the cineplex, but in a slight change of pace, one of this upcoming summer’s cape-clad defenders won’t hail from the pages of Marvel or DC. Kids (and nostalgia fetishists in their mid-to-late twenties) will get a colorful crimefighter of a different stripe with Captain Underpants, the computer-animated adaptation of Dav Pilkey’s long-running line of sophomoric chapter books about a delusional elementary school principal’s adventures in doo-doo derring-do. The first trailer hit the internet today, and if you were wondering if it contains the same Steve Aoki club banger as the War Dogs trailer, then have I got some good news for you!
He Won’t Be Back: ‘Terminator’ Franchise Reportedly Dead
Did you know that they apparently made another Terminator movie in 2015? Despite having seen it in theaters back during its original run, this still strikes me as new, hard-to-believe information. If there was really a new installment of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s popular sci-fi/action franchise as recently as two years ago, wouldn’t someone remember that? Wikipedia claims that the film (subtitled Genisys, which sounds fake but okay) attempted to launch Game of Thrones star Emilia Clarke’s big-screen phase of her career, included a clutch starring role from Ahnuld himself, and earned the second-most of any entry in the series. Call me crazy, but that seems like a pretty major occurrence to have entirely fled the public‘s collective pop-cultural memory. I’m skeptical — does this look like a real movie to you?
Twitch Runs 800-Episode ‘Power Rangers’ Marathon for Superfans Someone Should Probably Check On
When the mind thinks of the densest, most sprawling narratives realized over the past couple of decades, the kaiju-influenced action show Power Rangers usually doesn’t pop up first. But a quick scan online would reveal that the series has run for a mind-boggling 837 episodes (and counting!) over the course of 24 seasons since 1993. The series has assumed many forms since then, rebooting itself as a show about ninjas (Power Rangers Ninja Storm), samurai (Power Rangers Super Samurai) and dinosaur-themed warriors (Power Rangers Dino Thunder, Power Rangers Dino Charge, and Power Rangers Dino Super Charge — kids love their dinios). It is, by anybody’s measure, a lot of television.
Stephen King Has Seen – And Liked – the New ‘It’
Ever since the now-infamous photo of Pennywise the evil homicidal clown peeking out of a drainpipe surfaced online, fans of Stephen King’s seminal horror novel It have been concerned about Seth Graeme-Smith‘s upcoming film adaptation. There was fair cause for worry, too; it looked as if light was coming from several different sources, like a hasty photoshop job one might find on the box art for some direct-to-DVD cash grab. The only person who could really set the It devotees at ease would be Stephen King, who has seen dozens upon dozens of his works make the jump to the silver screen. And it would appear that he’s now done just that.
Dorothy Is Really, Really Not in Kansas Anymore With New ‘Wizard of Oz’ Horror Film
L. Frank Baum‘s fantasy novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz has proven a malleable property over the years. Of course everybody knows and loves Victor Fleming’s 1939 film adaptation, then came the urban-set musical revision The Wiz, the villain’s-eye-view retelling Wicked, Sam Raimi’s limp-noodle Oz the Great and Powerful, NBC’s crazytown new gritty-reboot series Emerald City, not to mention the dozens of films that have paid homage to the timeless scenes of Fleming’s film. (The bit in O Brother, Where Art Thou? when our heroes sneak into a KKK meeting like it’s a Winkie stronghold is a particular standout.) And today brings the news that the merry old land of Oz will get yet another new spin, and this time, there will be blood.
‘Transformers’ Spinoff ‘Bumblebee’ Lands ‘Kubo’ Director Travis Knight
Upstart stop-motion animation studio Laika hasn’t been doing so hot as of late. Though such early efforts as Coraline and Paranorman generated healthy grosses, the box-office receipts have been in a steady decline with The Boxtrolls and last summer’s Kubo and the Two Strings. Though their films have been marvels to behold across the board, their expenditures have increased as they’ve expanded and invested in new technologies, and Kubo ended up as their first flop when it needed to be their biggest hit. In what might seem like the most dire sign of all for the studio, Kubo director and Laika President/CEO Travis Knight has now taken high-profile work elsewhere.
115 Reviews In, ‘Get Out’ Still Has 100 Percent on Rotten Tomatoes
I was fortunate enough to attend a screening of Get Out earlier this week, and hoo boy, that right there is one fine motion picture. Our beloved Editor-in-Chief Matt Singer made as much clear in his ringing endorsement from Sundance, but take it from me: very spooky, very funny, has something to say, insanely well-cast and even more well-acted. It’s an easy movie to love, and while the box-office receipts from this upcoming weekend will rule on whether audiences agree, the critics of America have already made their voices heard. And those voices are ringing out in perfect unison, a harmony sounding out as if from an angelic choir: “THIS MOVIE RULES.”