As a director, Jason Reitman has had a tough few years. After directing two best picture nominees — Junoand Up in the Air — and one film that should have been nominated (Young Adult), Reitman stumbled a bit with both Labor Day and Men, Women, & Children.
However, this year, it appears that he may be making a bit of a comeback. Earlier this year, he reunited with Charlize Theron for Tully and directed her to some of the best reviews that she’s gotten in a while. (The critical reaction to his directing was a bit more mixed.) Now, with The Front Runner, Reitman is returning to screen just in time for the Oscar season.
The Front Runner is a film about a presidential candidate (Hugh Jackman) who gets wrapped up in a scandal. Jackman has been getting some Oscar buzz. To be honest, most films about political campaigns tend to fall flat, largely because filmmakers always seem to get too caught up in their own biases to actually craft a compelling film. (Remember The Ides of March?) Hopefully, this film won’t get bogged down in ideology because I’d like Reitman’s comeback to continue.
And a few of you are going crazy over the remake of Suspiria.
But, for me, the movie that I’m most looking forward to seeing is Orson Welles’s The Other Side of the Wind!
That’s right. After a 40-year production period that saw the death of almost everyone involved with the film (including director Orson Welles and star John Huston), The Other Side of the Wind is finally going to be released! It’ll be premiering on Netflix on November 2nd and it better get a helluva an Oscar campaign.
Yesterday was James Baldwin’s birthday so it was also the perfect day to release the trailer for Barry Jenkins’s upcoming film, If Beale Street Could Talk. If Beale Street Could Talk is based on a 1974 novel by Baldwin.
Jenkins, of course, previously directed Moonlight, which won the Oscar for best picture. Interestingly enough, Moonlight defeated Damien Chazelle’s La La Land for the prize. This year, not only is Jenkins back but so is Chazelle with First Man.
So, could we be looking at another Jenkins vs Chazelle Oscar race? Maybe. Who knows, to be honest? That is what a lot of people are hoping for, of course. Jenkins vs. Chazelle: The Rematch!
Check out the trailer and try to guess what will happen for yourself!
When this trailer started, I was excited because I was thinking it was going to turn into a horror movie.
Then I saw that it was from the director of Like Crazy and I was like, “Oh, never mind.” I would probably be more enthusiastic about this particular trailer if I hadn’t already recently seen about a hundred movies and television shows that all deal with the exact same premise.
That’s right, it’s red band! That mean that it has cursing and blood and the middle finger and everything and it can only be shown before R-rated films. There’s nothing more dangerous than a Red Band Trailer!
So, here’s the Super Dangerous Red Band Trailer for The Predator, which will probably be really good because it was directed by Shane Black:
This trailer dropped last week but, somehow, I missed it until today.
Leave No Trace appears to be yet another film about an irresponsible and/or unconventional father raising his daughter in the woods. On the negative side, this is literally my least favorite genre of film. After sitting through both Captain Fantastic and The Glass Castle, I’ve pretty much reached my limit as far as screwed-up cinematic fathers are concerned.
On the plus side, however, is the fact that the father is played by Ben Foster and he seems like the type of actor who could actually do something interesting with the role. Also, the film is directed by Debra Granik, who did such a great job with Winter’s Bone.
So, perhaps against my better judgment, I will give this one a shot.
Somehow, I failed to share this trailer for The Night Eats The World when it was released earlier this week.
So, I’m sharing it now!
Now, this does look like it’s yet another zombie movie. I love zombies but I’m afraid the whole living dead genre is getting a bit over exposed. I mean, everyone is making zombie jokes now. Even insurance companies make jokes about zombie apocalypse insurance. Zombies were never supposed to go mainstream.
That said, this trailer is actually pretty effective. So, who knows? Maybe The Night Eats The World will live up to all of that potentially deadly hype.
When it comes to Robert Zemeckis, there seems to be two different types of film lovers.
There are those who feels that, as a director, Zemeckis makes films where relatively thin and sentimental stories are used as an excuse to show what he can do with CGI.
And then there are those of us who love Zemeckis’s brand of sincere, effects-driven storytelling. I was in tears by the end of The Walk and, as much as I tried to resist, the trailer for Welcome to Marwen brought tears to my mismatched eyes as well.
Of course, it helps to know something about the true story that this film is based on. Welcome to Marwen was inspired by a documentary called Marwencol. Here’s the description of Marwencol‘s plot, which I lifted from Wikipedia because I’m lazy:
On April 8, 2000, Mark Hogancamp was attacked outside of a bar by five men who beat him nearly to death. After nine days in a coma and forty days in the hospital, Mark was discharged with brain damage that left him little memory of his previous life. Unable to afford therapy, Mark creates his own by building a 1/6-scale World War II-era Belgian town in his yard and populating it with dolls representing himself, his friends, and even his attackers. He calls that town “Marwencol,” a portmanteau of the names “Mark,” “Wendy” and “Colleen.”
Mark was initially discovered by photographer David Naugle, who documented and shared his story with Esopus magazine and then his work was shown in a New York art gallery. But having the label of “art” applied to his intensely personal work forces Mark to make a choice between the safety of his fictional town and the real world he’s avoided since his attack.
It’s hard to think of any actor that embodies wounded humanity quite as well as Steve Carell. (You even felt kinda sorry for him in Foxcatcher.) Welcome to Marwen (which was originally announced as The Women of Marwen) has been mentioned as one of two Oscar contenders featuring Steve Carell, the other being Beautiful Boy.
Way back in 2015, Creedwas a huge surprise, a Rocky spin-off that paid homage to the films that came before it while, at the same time, establishing its own identity. After their acclaimed work in Fruitvale Station, Creed made a star out of Michael B. Jordan and definitely led to Ryan Coogler getting the chance to direct Black Panther. It also brought an Oscar nomination for Sylvester Stallone, something that, before the film’s release, nobody thought would ever happen.
Well, we all knew that there would inevitably be a sequel. Today, the trailer for Creed II was released and … well, to be honest, its looks pretty conventional. Coogler did not write or direct the sequel. Instead, the directing was handled by Steve Caple, Jr. while the script was written by Stallone himself. In this one, Creed steps into the ring to fight the son of the man who killed his father. It looks like the film is designed to be crowd pleaser but you have to wonder if it will have any of the attention to detail and the subtle wit that distinguished Coogler’s film.
Oh well. At least it’s always enjoyable to watch Michael B. Jordan did his thing.
First Man is Damien Chazelle’s follow-up to La La Land. In this one, Ryan Gosling plays the first man to ever step on the moon. Many critics, including me, expect this will be a definite Oscar contender. (Chazelle may even find himself competing once again with Barry Jenkins, whose If Beale Street Could Talk is also considered to be a possible contender.)
Here’s the trailer for the third installment in the beloved How To Train Your Dragon franchise, The Hidden World!
Here’s the trailer for Bad Times At The El Royale, which is either going to be brilliant or totally suck. I don’t really see any middle ground here.
Normally, I would be tempted to roll my eyes at something like The Old Man & The Gun. I mean, didn’t Robert Redford say that he wasn’t going to make another movie until climate change was defeated or something like that? However, this film was directed by David Lowery, who was also responsible for the best film of 2017, A Ghost Story! So, I will definitely give this one a chance. Here’s the trailer:
Here’s the trailer for Operation Finale, a dramatization of the 1960 intelligence operation that led to the capture of Nazi war criminal Adolph Eichmann. Why do we need this movie? Go to YouTube and read some of the comments left under this trailer. With anti-Semitism on the rise and more and more people buying into the despicable BDS movement, this is a story that needs to be told. Hopefully, Operation Finale will do it justice.
Damn, Bradley Cooper’s got a pretty good singing voice! Check out the trailer for A Star is Born if you need proof.
And lastly, here’s the trailer for The Girl In The Spider’s Web.
Hilariously, there’s a lot of people bitching about the fact that Rooney Mara will not be playing Libseth in The Girl In The Spider’s Web. Folks, there’s only one Lisbeth Salander and it’s not Rooney Fucking Mara. Noomi Rapace was, is, and always will be the only Libseth Salander who really matters!
Through the Shattered Lens 