Category: Uncategorized

Bond To Miss 2019?

On By outofdavesheadIn Film comment, film news, UncategorizedLeave a comment

bond

News just in via The Hollywood Reporter that the mightily-troubled new Bond film will not hit its original 2019 release date. Specifically:

“With the abrupt exit of director Danny Boyle, the next installment in the James Bond film franchise — the untitled Bond 25 — will miss its Nov. 8, 2019 release date in North American theaters, sources tell The Hollywood Reporter.”

This isn’t too surprsing, if true, given the sudden departure of director Danny Boyle from the franchise (as revealed here). Rumours are circulating that neither the producers nor star, Craig, were too thrilled about Boyle’s developing modern Cold War thriller, and a particular bone of contention seems to have been the casting of Tomasz Kot in a leading role. This will almost certainly mean that John Hodge’s script will be jettisoned and it seems unlikely that EON Productions would return to the already-completed script by regular Bond writers Neal Purvis and Robert Wade, which was dumped when Boyle came on board.

Going back to square one to find a new director and script also puts some doubt on the return of an already reluctant Daniel Craig, so this could also mean that Craig will finish his run with the less-than-perfect SPECTRE. And that’s something none of us want to see, right?

Whatever furious scrabbling is going down in the Bond offices right now (I’m picturing something akin to the From Russia With Love train fight), at least we know they won’t be rush-releasing a script into production – an act that’s never worked out too well for Bond films in the past. The down side is that it could cost us a suitable send-off for Craig.

James Bond Will Return… but when, and played by whom?

Second Suspiria Trailer Brings The Three Mothers… And The Shivers!

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suspiria-2018 2

Another day, another trailer for the new Suspiria. Turn on all the lights and feast on this:

There’s really not much to add about this latest slice on intensity since we talked about Suspiria just the other day (see here), but damn, Luca Guadagnino’s remake of Dario Argento’s classic of Italian gothic horror is looking more impressive with everything we hear about it and see from it. I couldn’t be any more sold on this baby.

Which means I’ve reached peak saturation point on PR for Suspiria, and this is definitely the final trailer I’ll be sharing. I want to go into this as cold as possible (especially considering my familiarity with the source material), but suffice to say I’m going to be first in line come November 2nd.

Boyle Bounces Bond

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To the surprise of literally no one, Michael G. Wilson, Barbara Broccoli and Daniel Craig today announced that due to creative differences Danny Boyle has decided to no longer direct Bond 25.

Announced via Twitter, this news, while sad, is probably the least surprising announcement to come down the wire on the latest Bond film, apparently Craig’s final outing.

As exciting as the announcent of Boyle coming onboard was (along with writer John Hodge – whose status on the project is unknown but doubtful, given his close links to the director), there was much suspicion that the idiosyncratic director would fit well within the finely honed Eon machinery.

Now we’re left with a great deal of creative speculation on just what a Boyle Bond would have been like. I, for one, am not surprised but very disappointed at the thought of what might have been, something special for Craig’s swan song.

The Deuce: Maybe It’s Time You Watched This Show

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The-Deuce-Season-2

HBO’s The Deuce is, as the good folk over at Birth.Movies.Death nailed it: “the best show nobody watches” and maybe it’s time to rectify that. Check out the season two trailer:

David Simon and George Pelecanos, two of the creators behind The Wire, have been quietly producing one of the most engaging and fascinating shows on TV and y’all haven’t been making much noise about it.

The Deuce is set around 42nd Street and Times Square in the 1970s and follows the lives of a disparate group whose lives are intertwined with the lights of the marquees and the sweaty trades that ply behind them: sex workers, junkies, hustlers, cops and those that pull their purse strings, and wraps around them the story of the emergence of the porn industry into its brief life as ‘porno chic.’

It has an ensemble cast to die for, brilliantly headed up by James Franco (doing superb work in double roles, as brothers Frankie and Vinnie) and Maggie Gyllenhaal (as sex worker Eileen “Candy” Merrell, who engineers a life behind the camera in porn), and features the same kind of measured, unwinding storytelling and sharp eye for character that made The Wire so watchable. It also shares with that show a certain tarnished poetry of the streets, making the criss-crossing lives of those who inhabit them beautiful and vivid, without ever glamorising or papering over their often harsh realities. You can practically smell the disinfectant from the peep shows.

The second season will jump forward some four of five years, to the late 1970s, and if we’re really lucky HBO will renew The Deuce for its third and final season, where Simon and Pelecanos plan to show the beginning of the end of the Times Square fleshpots in the late 1980s, before Disney moved in and made it the family-friendly, conglomorate branded tourist spot it is today.

If you aren’t watching this show you’re missing out on one of the single best pieces of drama on TV. Time to buy a ticket to The Deuce now…

The New Suspiria Trailer Arrives

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Susperia-2018

Take a look at the brand new, long-awaited teaser trailer for the remake of Dario Argento’s classic horror, Suspiria:

So let’s be clear on this from the outset: this one is going to divide people. On one hand, the film has tremendous word of mouth: early reaction to just a preview scene of the film, at Cinemacon in Las Vegas, saw viewers outraged, traumatized and, allegedly, vomiting (of course, that could just be a piece of classic old ballyhoo), it has a very intriguing director, Luca Guadagnino, lauded for his previous work including the Oscar-nominated Call Me By Your Name, and the writer is the showrunner of the superb AMC series, The Terror, David Kajganich. Plus the film has a killer (pun intended) cast headed by Tilda Swinton, Dakota Johnson, Chloë Grace Moretz and Jessica Harper (star of the original).

Alongside this we have the reported reaction of one Quentin Tarantino who, according to an interview with Guadagnino in the Italian publication, La Repubblica, had an emotional response to his film:

“I showed it to Quentin Tarantino. We’ve been friends since our jury duty at the Venice Film Festival. I was nervous but eager to hear his advice. We saw it at his place and his reaction warmed me. He was enthusiastic about it, in the end he was crying and hugged me.”

Well, that’s not too shabby.

Finally, we have a trailer which, is nothing else, is suffused with a peculiar and mysterious atmosphere and some genuinely creepy imagery, and at the very least it certainly isn’t trying to copy Argento’s colour palette, as this is all about your wintry browns and greys. I mean, this thing has a lot going for it, right…!?

On the other hand, these guys are messing with a much-loved, bona fide classic of Italian horror cinema (in fact, of just cinema). Dario Argento’s colour-splashed 1977 original, co-written with the great Daria Nicolodi, has wormed (pun intended again, sorry… if you’ve seen the original) its way into the affections of cinema-lovers for its outrageous visuals, sound and dread-drenched atmosphere.

I held a showing of the original at one my regular Dave’s Music & Movie Nights screenings, here in Norway, a few years back and the reaction of viewers to Argento’s unsettling masterpiece was palpable.

I’ve kind of made peace with the fact that Hollywood is never going to stop with its obsession for remakes, and so long as the originals aren’t hidden from view I’m of the mind that it can be of genuine interest to see artists take a new spin on much-loved favourites. Without this kind of thinking we wouldn’t have John Carpenter’s The Thing or David Cronenberg’s The Fly, and aren’t we all grateful for those!? Of course, the downside to that thinking gives us Gus Van Sant’s Psycho, about which, the less said the better (don’t @ me, okay!?)…

Either way, the new Suspiria from Amazon Studios is a bold move that’s bound to be divisive and might just be something special. Personally, I’m ready to have the shit scared out of me. So, show us what you’ve got come November 2…

 

Your Dream Or Nightmare Just Came True: HBO Make Watchmen TV Series

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watchmen

Prepare to scream with delight or grind your teeth in furious indignation: HBO announced today that their Watchmen TV series is a go, following recent production of a pilot episode.

To further find your bliss/fuel your anger, writer/producer Damon Lindelof has warned not to expect another direct adaptation likeZack Snyder’s incredibly faithful 2009 movie. Lindelof wrote on Instagram that his version is the “New Testament” to the original’s “Old Testament”. HBO also released the following logline via Indiewire:

“Set in an alternate history where “superheroes” are treated as outlaws, “Watchmen” embraces the nostalgia of the original groundbreaking graphic novel while attempting to break new ground of its own.”

Lindelof has also said of the show:

“This story will be set in the world its creators painstakingly built…but in the tradition of the work that inspired it, this new story must be original. It has to vibrate with the seismic unpredictability of its own tectonic plates. It must ask new questions and explore the world through a fresh lens. Most importantly, it must be contemporary. The Old Testament was specific to the Eighties of Reagan and Thatcher and Gorbachev. Ours needs to resonate with the frequency of Trump and May and Putin and the horse that he rides around on, shirtless. And speaking of Horsemen, The End of the World is off the table…which means the heroes and villains–as if the two are distinguishable–are playing for different stakes entirely. Some of the characters will be unknown. New faces. New masks to cover them. We also intend to revisit the past century of Costumed Adventuring through a surprising yet familiar set of eyes…and it is here we will be taking our greatest risks.”

The show is sure to raise the ire of many fans of Watchmen, who think the Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons’ story should not be continued (both for moral reasons – as Moore notoriously has disowned anything produced by DC or Warner Bros beyond their original work – and creative reasons – seeing the graphic novel’s story as sacrosanct), and Lindelof’s CV is also filled with divisive productions (Prometheus and Lost among them).

Personally I’m cautiously intrigued by this and with a cast headed up by Tom Mison, Jeremy Irons, Regina King, Don Johnson, Tim Blake Nelson, Dylan Schombing, Lily Rose Smith, Adelynn Spoon, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Louis Gossett Jr., Adelaide Clemens, Frances Fisher, Jacob Ming-Trent and Andrew Howard, this promises to be, if nothing else, a major talking point when it hits HBO in 2019.

The Ravishing Teaser for Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma

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roma 1

A huge tip of the hat to the fine folk at Birth.Movies.Death for alerting me to one of the most beautiful looking teasers for a film I’ve seen in, well, forever. Feast your eyes on Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma…

I’m a big fan of the Mexican director’s work, not only has he made one of the stone-cold classics of science-fiction cinema (or indeed, of just cinema) with Children of Men, but he also made one of the only Harry Potter films I can actually recall anything about (and I’ve seen them all, at least I think I have), with Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. He’s also made excellent movies such as Y Tu Mama Tambien and Gravity (which won him Academy Awards for both Best Director and Best Picture).

Co-edited, co-photographed, written, co-produced, and directed by Cuarón, Roma is an autobiographically inspired film that chronicles a year in the life of a middle-class family in Mexico City in the early 1970s. And if this powerful and sumptuous trailer is anything to go by, it will be best experienced in a cinema.

Ironic then, that most viewers will probably see it on Netflix as part of an impressive slate of movies the streaming channel has lined up by filmmakers including Martin Scorsese, the Coen Brothers, Paul Greengrass and Gareth Evans, along with the insanely tantalising promise of Orson Welles’ legendary The Other Side of the Wind finally being completed. Of course, for viewers without easy access to cinemas that screen more than studio blockbusters, this kind of line up is a godsend.

Here’s the official synopsis for Roma:

“A vivid portrayal of domestic strife and social hierarchy amidst political turmoil, Romafollows a young domestic worker Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio) from Mixteco heritage descent and her co-worker Adela (Nancy García), also Mixteca, who work for a small family in the middle-class neighborhood of Roma.  Mother of four, Sofia (Marina de Tavira), copes with the extended absence of her husband, Cleo faces her own devastating news that threatens to distract her from caring for Sofia’s children, whom she loves as her own. While trying to construct a new sense of love and solidarity in a context of a social hierarchy where class and race are perversely intertwined, Cleo and Sofia quietly wrestle with changes infiltrating the family home in a country facing confrontation between a government-backed militia and student demonstrators.”

Roma has its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival on August 30, and I hope to bring you more news soon.

The Star Wars TV Series Will Cost Big Bucks (And Other News)!

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Details have been thin on the ground since the announcement late last year that Disney’s new streaming service will feature a live action Star Wars TV series.

But a new report by the New York Times has revealed a couple of interesting titbits about the show, currently being developed by Iron Man’s Jon Favreau.

First up is the news that the show, running to ten episodes, will cost around 100 million dollars. That’s, um… about ten million dollars an episode, according to my trusty financial advisor, which might sound like a lot of moolah to you and me, but actually comes across as kind of cheap when you consider the final six episodes of Game of Thrones will cost a staggering $15 million apiece.

Secondly, Favreau has confirmed that the series will take place after the events of Return of the Jedi, (also the timeframe for the upcoming animated series Star Wars Resistance – why, it’s almost like there’s such a thing as corporate synergy in the world). According to a comment made by Favreau back in May, his series will take place seven years after the fall of the Empire, while Resistance will cross the bridge in the timeline and depict the rise of the First Order, which leads towards The Force Awakens.

It’s entirely possible we’ll be hearing more about the Star Wars live-action TV series and I’ll bring you more news as it lands.

Ruby Rose Is Batwoman – DC’s First Onscreen Gay Hero

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batwoman

In a very welcome piece of news, Orange Is The New Black star, Ruby Rose, has been cast as Batwoman in the CW’s annual crossover event and for her own series next season.

In recent years Batwoman has been at the forefront of LGBTQ+ representation in comics. Originally created in 1956, as a love interest for Batman in order to combat the allegations of Batman’s homosexuality arising from the controversial book Seduction of the Innocent (1954), the character disappeared from comics in the mid-1960s but was reintroduced to the DC comic universe in 2006, when she was established as a Jewish lesbian, becoming the first-ever lesbian superhero title DC character.

The CW’s series, written by Caroline Dries based on the DC characters, sees Batwoman armed with a passion for social justice and a flair for speaking her mind. Rose will star as Kate Kane, soaring onto the streets of Gotham as Batwoman, an out lesbian and highly trained street fighter primed to snuff out the failing city’s criminal resurgence.

Rose’s casting comes on the heels of Monday’s statement from The CW that the network anticipates a pilot for the Batwoman series as early as midseason, but we will get our first glimpse of the character in the big Arrowverse crossover event this December (teaming up The Flash, Arrow and Supergirl, but not Legends of Tomorrow).

Rose, who identifies as gender fluid, has already starred in Pitch Perfect 3, XXX: The Return of Xander Cage and John Wick: Chapter 2, and will soon be seen punching giant sharks alongside Jason Statham, in The Meg.

This sounds very exciting to me, taking a very important step towards more inclusive characters in media, and since Rose has already shown herself to be an intriguing actor, Batwoman would appear to be in safe hands.