Charles Bramesco
Watch Zack Snyder’s Trailer Mashup of ‘Batman v Superman’ and ‘Star Wars’
If you think Zack Snyder’s on the outs after the critical shellacking and box-office underperformance of this spring’s Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, then think again. For one, Bats v Supes (as we showbiz types call it) still made an unholy crap ton of money, and moreover, Snyder has another prospective mega-blockbuster coming down the pike in the form of April’s Justice League. Snyder’s pretty much unstoppable, in the same way that a mudslide or water cyclone is unstoppable. And now he’s struck again, this time with a faux trailer that mashes up his own Batman v Superman with elements of the Star Wars series.
American Heroes at TCM Bringing ‘The Godfather,’ ‘Casablanca,’ ‘E.T.’ to Theaters in 2017
One of the greatest advantages of living in or around a major metropolitan area, at least for cinephiles, is the abundance of repertory screening options. Independently run theaters will run older, foreign or rare movies to impassioned audiences who may not have had access to the material otherwise, balancing their filmic diet with a healthy balance of new releases and classics. Sure, pert near everything can be found online if you’re willing to investigate some shadier torrenting sites. But the experience of seeing a movie in a dark theater on the big screen, especially a nicely lived-in celluloid print and all its endearing pops and scratches — that makes a difference.
Slow-Motion Run, Don’t Walk, to the First ‘Baywatch’ Trailer
It has become increasingly apparent that the best thing a revival of a tired ‘80s pop-culture artifact can be is the neo-21 Jump Street, judging by the new trailer for the Dwayne Johnson-fronted Baywatch. The parallels are striking: we’ve got the central odd couple in the Rock’s bombastic beach hero and Zac Efron’s hard-partying young gun, light meta touches about “reviving the brand,” some playful winks to the core goofiness of the source material (the “why does she always look like she’s running in slow motion?” line may be the best of the clip), even a scene where our heroes are dressed down by a furious black cop. You may call it derivative, but I call it a good start.
As If We All Haven’t Been Through Enough Already, Paramount Delays ‘Baywatch’ One Week
2016 has already been a bastard of a year: beloved public figures died, Nazis became a thing again, America began its slow skid into fascism, and Bones got cancelled. When do the hits stop coming? Is there no respite from the barrage of tragedies that this monstrous year has heaped upon us? No, no there is not. Because throughout the seemingly unending cluster-F-word of 2016, one light on the horizon has held us up, both as a nation and as a human species. From indignity to indignity, we’ve always been able to pin our hopes on the glorious day of May 19, 2017 — known to you and I, of course, as the release date for the Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson-led reboot of beloved ‘90s lifeguard soap opera Baywatch. But even after this year’s parade of tragedies, [Don LaFontaine voice] there is one tragedy more.
Fort Worth PD Enlists Empire Stormtroopers for New Recruitment Video
Over the past couple of years, policemen have fallen pretty far out of favor with the American people. The U.S. police force is in dire need of a little PR management, something that shows their sense of humor and gives a more human, relatable slant to the boys in blue.
T-Minus 11 Days to ‘Rogue One,’ So Here’s a Featurette and TV Spot
Eleven long days separate the general public from the wide release of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. I dreamt last night that in their efforts to continue to stoke the eternal flame of hype, Lucasfilm unknowingly released the entirety of the film piecemeal over dozens of spliced-together promos. Some ambitious fan isolated each snippet of footage and stitched it back together into the competed feature and released it on his own under the title Not Rogue One. Other Star Wars aficionados, out of respect for the effort, then started to edit fan videos devoted to the DIY film that pretty much resembled the original promos from Lucasfilm. If Borges was alive today and far worse at writing, this would be his latest novella.
Schedule Shuffling at Fox May Have Just Outed the ‘Avatar 2′ Release Date
Big things are a-happenin’ over at Fox, per The Hollywood Reporter. The studio made a slew of scheduling changes on the night before Thanksgiving as a sort of special edition of a Friday dump. (That term refers to the PR practice of burying bad or otherwise uninteresting news on a Friday afternoon, when coverage will be minimal.) Big-name projects have all been shuffled around, and that’s all fully detailed below, but the most eye-catching item on Fox’s docket happens to be an unnamed project from James Cameron’s production company Lightstorm Entertainment.
Sacha Baron Cohen to Further Test Limits of Bad Taste with ‘Klown’ Remake
Whether he’s handing a plastic bag full of feces to a dinner party host, trying to coax Ron Paul into a hotel-room gay sex scandal, or getting face-raped by the massive phallus of an elephant while hiding inside the cavernous vagina of a second elephant, Sacha Baron Cohen’s a born button-pusher. His unending search for shock value has now led him to Denmark, the home nation of the excruciating comedy of discomfort Klown. A new item from Deadline notes that the prank-happy provocateur will bring his talents for awkwardness to a remake of the taboo-busting Danish cringe-fest, and more specifically, that foreign distribution rights have been snapped up by Annapurna International.
‘Minecraft’ Strikes Gold with Steve Carell as First Cast Acquisition
Minecraft, an open-space computer game in which players can build and create anything their heart can desire, has amassed a gigantic following among youngsters who use their imaginations to give birth to expansive worlds. Universally beloved among the world’s middle-schoolers, the game has spawned every merchandising tie-in under the sun, from pixelated foam swords to T-shirts with snappy slogans to lunch boxes. And now, the youth phenomenon will permeate the mainstream even further through a feature film adaptation. The project was announced in 2014, they landed a director in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia creator Rob McElhenney in 2015, and this year, they’ve made moves to lock down their first star.
‘Why Him?’ Red-Band Trailer Touts Family, Christmastime Togetherness, Moose Testicles
The entertainment industry has done Bryan Cranston dirty. His award-hoarding turn as mild-mannered meth kingpin Walt White on Breaking Bad should have cracked Hollywood wide open for him, with high-power producers lining up to cast him in the next big prestige release. But for every Trumbo (which earned Cranston an Oscar nomination, despite plenty of shortcomings), there is a Why Him?, and the soggy prosthetic moose scrotum that goes with it.
Try to Make It Through the ‘Beware the Slenderman’ Trailer Without Freaking Out
Even for a case in which a 12-year-old girl gets stabbed nearly 20 times, it was particularly heinous: young Payton Leutner of Waukesha, Wisconsin was recovered bleeding out in the woods near a slumber party she had been attending in 2014. Her attackers were two of her good friends, fellow middle schoolers. What could have possessed a couple of innocent kids to suddenly turn psychopath without warning and leave their pal for dead in the middle of the night?
Director Shawn Levy Sees Your ‘Uncharted’ Fan-Casting, But Says No Thanks
Uncharted will attempt to break new ground in late 2017, early 2018 as the first not-bad film adaptation of a video game, but the road there is long and the production has only just embarked. They’ve got director Shawn Levy (esteemed cineaste behind such films as Date Night, The Internship, and Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb), but now Levy has to find himself a leading man for the role of box-jawed hero Nathan Drake. As is so frequently the case with fan-cherished entertainment in recent years, the hordes of devotees decided to take matters into their own hands and ply the director with plenty of suggestions for casting.