Charles Bramesco
Brad Pitt Looks Like a Counter-Terrorism Ken Doll in ‘War Machine’ Trailer
Unless your name happens to be Kathryn Bigelow (and if it is, then may I say that it’s a pleasure, Ms. Bigelow, big Point Break fan), Hollywood has had a lot of trouble figuring out how to portray the Global War on Terror. The odd movies that have succeeded critically or financially — Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper — take an ambivalent stance on a complicated and nuanced geopolitical situation, but many more have attempted the same and floundered. So it’s with memories of the high-profile failure of one-time Oscar hopeful Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk that we greet the trailer for War Machine, Netflix’s latest foray into this risky genre.
Beatty-Dunaway Beefing May Be Behind Best Picture Bungle
[Bonnie and Clyde trailer voice]: They’re old, they kind of hate each other, and they read envelopes.
Since Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway mistakenly announced La La Land as the recipient of the Academy Award for Best Picture on Sunday night, everyone‘s been looking for an answer as to how such a massive goof could come to pass. Blame has been passed around like a hot potato, with fault assigned to Beatty, Dunaway, some tweeting nitwit from the accounting firm that tabulates the votes, the person who lays down the envelopes, and just for good measure, a cold and uncaring god. But now the trenchant, Spotlightesque journalists at TMZ claim to have the full story behind just what went down.
Australian Movie Producer Mistakenly Declared Dead in Another Oscars Mix-Up
The big headline from last night was Warren Beatty’s colossal goof during the Best Picture announcement, in which he erroneously named La La Land the winner of the coveted prize, only to be corrected not a minute later with the news that the award would actually go to Moonlight. It was a classic mix-up, a reminder of the high-wire instability of live television, and an instant entry for the Oscar history books. But there was a second, less glaring gaffe in the telecast, so subtle that it went by without most viewers noticing. But the Australian producer who watched herself declared dead in the In Memoriam segment certainly did.
Wicked Pissah Tom Brady Movie in the Works
With the New England Patriots’ Super Bowl victory earlier this month, team captain and Gisele Bündchen spouse Tom Brady earned his fifth ring and hit a new professional high. He’s now won more Super Bowls than any quarterback in NFL history, having earned MVP status in four of the five to boot. While he’s begun to earn the ire of the sporting community for essentially turning the current-day Pats into the late-’90s Yankees (and for the business with the ball deflating and the Trump chumminess and the wearing Ugg boots in public and whatnot), Brady’s still an immensely popular athlete with an inspiring narrative behind his career. And that can mean only one thing: it’s time for a wicked pissah of a biopic.
Rumor: Ben Affleck May Want Out of ‘The Batman’ Completely
Like any job, writing about the latest news in the world of entertainment can wear on you after long enough, so you gotta appreciate the little pearls of amusement where you can get them. Personally, watching the latest solo Batman project fall apart in slow motion has been a perverse thrill over the past couple of months: star Ben Affleck was gonna direct (maybe) the film titled The Batman, then he was definitely gonna direct it, then he backpedaled a little bit, then he requested that people stop asking him about it, then he face-planted onto the sidewalk with the costly flop Live By Night, and then look at that, he wasn’t taking the director’s chair after all. The indignities kept coming, as Warner Bros. ordered sweeping rewrites to this floundering project before landing Planet of the Apes remake maestro Matt Reeves to fill the directorial vacuum.
Fox Has Been Promoting ‘A Cure for Wellness’ Using Fake News Websites
Fake news has metastasized into one of the day’s greatest scourges. Web sites perpetuating false information have destabilized the public’s trust in what is monolithically referred to as “the media,” and what’s worse, elected officials can now use the cry of “fake news!” to discredit any factual reports that they’re not pleased with. Truth has grown into a sadly scarce quantity these days, and just about everyone agrees that the last thing we need is even more misinformation spread around just for the sake of promoting a movie, even if that movie happens to be a visually sumptuous dive into insanity.
‘Mary Poppins Returns’ Reveals Plot Details, Full Cast as Production Begins
After months of rumormongering and speculating and debating over whether Lin-Manuel Miranda has what it takes to make the jump to the big screen from Broadway, sequel Mary Poppins Returns has finally begun shooting. Disney sent out an official press release yesterday announcing that the production was officially underway at Shepperton Studios in Burbank, California, with a project release date of Christmas Day in 2018. (Nothing gets people in the mood for a movie-musical quite like the holidays, it would seem, as director Rob Marshall’s last film Into the Woods found a release date in late December as well.) And along with the news that the gears are now turning, the press release provided a full cast list and more comprehensive description of the plot as well.
The Internet Is Terrifying in New Trailer for Tom Hanks Thriller ‘The Circle’
Google is a wonderful company! They manufacture high-quality products and provide a web-surfing experience unparalleled in its intuitiveness and user ease. They’ve made tracking down a specific page in the endless expanse of the Internet into a few simple clicks, drastically cutting down research time. They connect people. They make the world a better place.
The First Trailer for ‘The LEGO Ninjago Movie’ Has Bad Blood
Yesterday, a brief partial trailer for a full-length trailer (itself a partial-length version of the full-length movie) arrived online in promotion of The Lego Ninjago Movie, the latest spinoff of the Lego Movie franchise more recently expanded with The Lego Batman Movie. It gave us a brief preview of the design of the land of Ninjago, a block-built utopia wth Eastern influences that superficially resembles Tokyo. But today, we’ll get a fuller look at the new world in which this film takes place, and the scrappy little figurines that populate it as well.
Robert Englund Suits Up as Freddy Krueger Once Again for ‘Nightmares in the Makeup Chair’
Over the course of the eight Nightmare on Elm Street films, Robert Englund made dream stalker Freddy Krueger from a slasher-film specter into a major cultural icon. His sartorially questionable striped sweater/fedora combo, the pepperoni-like complexion, the razor-blade gloves — it’s all been enshrined in the horror hall of fame for years. He officially laid his signature character to rest with 2003’s Freddy vs. Jason, turning the role over to Jackie Earle Haley for the 2010 remake, but a new project indicates that Englund and Freddy can’t get rid of one another that easily.
Leonardo DiCaprio to Star in Period Gangster Film ‘The Black Hand’
Leonardo DiCaprio’s got quite a bit of experience when it comes to portraying characters on either side of the law. He was a dooly appointed federal mahshal in Shuttah Island, played the Boston mob against itself for Martin Scorsese in The Departed, and took on more dastardly roles in such films as Django Unchained and The Wolf of Wall Street. With an Oscar now under his belt, DiCaprio is on the hunt for new roles, and today brings the news that Paramount has given him one squarely in his wheelhouse.
Turns Out Ben Affleck Won’t Direct ‘The Batman’ After All, But Here’s Who Might
A story, told in headlines: Here’s us on December 18, reporting on Ben Affleck’s voicing of slight misgivings about his tentative gig as the director of the new Batman solo film: