Who needs neat little boxes? Well, usually first-time filmmakers do, especially the ones pulling writing and directing duties by themselves. Mixing genres leaves you with a messy or nonexistent blueprint to follow, and striking out into this unknown territory is risky even for seasoned veterans.
Maggie’s Plan is a Woody Allenish movie starring a Woody Allenish actress, but you don’t need me to tell you that. This trailer never looks away from its neurotic New York bumbling, a world populated by professors and writers trying to bend life to their will. Allen has rode this formula through a long career, paving the way for offbeat performers like Maggie’s Plan lead Greta Gerwig.
This week in nothing ever dies, the sporadically running television series Absolutely Fabulous gets a movie after twenty years of being relegated to the small screen. Lead characters Edina and Patsy would certainly be thrilled by this development, if not a little miffed that it took this long to upgrade. All they want is to live the high life, which is put into jeopardy here when they bump Kate Moss into the River Thames.
The hit of this year’s Sundance Film Festival, The Birth of a Nation took home the Audience Award, the Grand Jury Prize, and the largest deal in the history of the festival. Worldwide rights went to Fox Searchlight for $17.5 million, a financial risk that Variety claims isn’t quite as big as it would seem (read about that here).
Strong opinions abound for writer/director Nicolas Winding Refn’s work, which is to be expected when you make the kind of bold choices that he does. There’s not much middle ground when you drench things in violence and style, as people are either going to go with the heightened sensibility or not. The Neon Demon certainly won’t be changing that aspect of his M.
Janeites unite, because here’s a Jane Austen adaptation that’s not another Pride and Prejudice or Sense and Sensibility! Writer/director Whit Stillman delved into Austen’s deep cuts for the epistolary novel Lady Susan, a piece she wrote before her major novels that remained unpublished until after her death. As you can see from the trailer for Love & Friendship, the source material is a bit of a standout from Austen’s other work.
The juvenile humor of a man named Weiner getting caught in a sexting scandal is almost impossible to resist, as you either give in to the giggles or smile at the you-can’t-write-that-shit feel of the situation. For those unaware, this happened in America (twice) to former U.S.
With the spy genre in full resurgence, audiences may not be salivating for another entry. Don’t sleep on Our Kind of Traitor, though, because it’s based on a John le Carré novel (same name), which comes with the promise of a different kind of espionage. Carré generally avoids a lot of action, preferring to keep his spies stuck in the murkiness of the real world.
There’s something timeless about Roald Dahl’s children’s stories that always made me assume they were older than they were. The effect likely comes from their blend of weirdly dark situations and moralistic underpinnings, which feels very much like old fairy tales. Most modern pieces for children are toned down or bland, but Dahl didn’t speak down to kids.
The man with two gunshots wounds and no memory has come a long way since The Bourne Identity, which is what led star Matt Damon to back away from the series after three installments. When the fourth movie, a spin-off featuring a new character played by Jeremy Renner, stumbled with critics and audiences, the lucrative franchise suddenly needed a resurgence to maintain its commercial appeal. In a move that surely made distributor Universal Pictures very happy, two-time series director Paul Greengrass and Damon agreed to come back for another film, and the Renner sequel was bumped to make room for the returning duo.
Quirky family dramas are a dime a dozen, so in addition to handling complex relationships and a mixed tone, they must do something to distinguish themselves from the pack. Some projects respond by amping up the quirk while others go for a big emotional payoff. The best manage to do both, which is precisely what people praised the best-selling book that The Family Fang is based on (same name) for doing.
Equals feels so familiar because its setup has been in heavy use since the post-World War I era of science fiction. A totalitarian government that controls people’s emotions? That’s Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, George Lucas’s THX 1138, Kurt Wimmer’s Equilibrium, and a litany of other stories far too vast to name off.
I have a sneaking suspicion that every actor wants to be in a western, but box office results prove that audiences don’t want to see all those westerns. Sure, slinging on a holster and leaning against a fence looks cool, as one of the promotional photos for The Magnificent Seven proves, but without some sort of twist, people are not buying tickets. True Grit (2010) and Django Unchained are perhaps the only pure westerns to crack $100 million at the U.
Not much is given away in the trailer for The Wait, the first feature from Italian director Piero Messina. A mother connects with her son’s girlfriend before he is due home, and Sicily is given a quality that can be interpreted as either dreamlike or feverish depending on the individual moment. The extra bit of information I’ll give away is that the film takes place over Easter weekend, which adds some hefty religious symbolism to the idea of waiting.
The overbearing mother is like a cartoon to me, something I’ve seen portrayals of but never experienced in real life. My own mother barely comments on my steadfast single life and accepts both what I wish to tell her and what I choose to play close to the vest. It’s always been that way and hence is comfortingly familiar, which I assume is exactly how those on the opposite end of the mother-daughter spectrum describe their relationship like, too.