Here’s all you need to know about Disney’s “Cars” spinoff, “Planes.” Pixar – which had no problem signing it’s name to both of the wholly-disposable “Cars” movies, is letting Disney take sole credit for this one.Dane Cook stars as a cropduster who dreams of competing in an airplane race against an elite gathering of broad ethnic stereotypes.
Ma vie en rose
Huh. Well, this will be interesting.
The Hub, which is still looking for an original kids’ series that people will watch other than “Friendship is Magic,” thinks it’s found a winner in an Australian animated series called “Shezow.” I hadn’t heard of it until the (week old) trailer for it’s U.S. premier started making the rounds, but the premise is interesting: The (magical) mantle of a female superhero with decidedly female-gendered accoutremants (sparkly miniskirted costume, Barbie-esque pink car, etc) is accidentally passed to a teenaged boy.
Okay, so it’s kind of a single-joke premise parody wise re: male superhero uniforms are considered “unisex” but heroines’ are not, but I’ve seen a lot more made from a lot less. I don’t recall ever hearing if anybody freaked out about this in it’s native Australia, but as you’ll expect the usual gang of idiots is already apoplectic about what they see as another assault on children by The Gay Agenda.
Even without their “help,” of course, if the series catches at all that it’ll be roped into the debate(s) surrounding LGBTQ children is inevitable; though it’s hard for me to get a read on what those communities will/do actually think of this: The premise appears mostly played for laughs, i.e. Shezow is alternately thrilled with his powers but annoyed/embarassed at the form(s) they take (I haven’t tracked down an episode, but I’m assuming that, by the law of teen heroes’ powers usually being learning-opportunities, the hero has some sort of overcoming-his-own-assumptions-about-girls’-abilities character-arc going on?), and I’m not 100% clear as to whether the transformation (his “By the power of GraySkull!” is “You go girl!”) makes him biologically female or just puts the costume/hair/makeup on; but my sense is that any kid-targeted series that – even humorously – says “dressing outside gender-roles is cool/acceptable” has to be a step in the right direction, yes?
Well, we’ll see. “Shezow” makes it’s U.S. debut Saturday, June 1st.
Big Picture: "Dumping Irony"
Controversial "Blue" Scores Big At Cannes
And we now have our customary first big Awards Season Frontrunner (for awhile anyway) as the voting concludes at the Cannes Film Festival. The jury – this year headed by none other than Steven Spielberg – awarded the Palm d’Or (top prize) to “Blue Is The Warmest Color” (aka “La vie de Adele Parts 1 &2”); a French romantic drama that was already one of the most buzzed-about and controversial entries in this year’s festival.
Based on a French graphic novel (apparently unavailable in the U.S.), the story follows a young woman’s (Adele Exarchopoulos) awakening to an intense attraction to another woman in her teens and into early adulthood over the course of a lengthy relationship with said woman (Lea Seydoux,) whose blue-dyed hair is the source of the title. The film runs an impressive 3 hours, the majority of which is simply conversational scenes between the two women and a small supporting cast.
However, the element that had the festival talking early were sex scenes described as “frank” – which is arthouse-movie speak for “actual fucking” – one of which allegedly goes for a full ten unbroken minutes (Cannes audiences are being reported to have applauded the – literal – climax of said scene as though a monument had just exploded in a Roland Emmerich movie.) There are already questions as to whether or not the film will require major editing to be viewable in certain countries, and a skeptical backlash painting the film as being over-praised by lesbian-fetishizing male critics and jurors (the director is a man, Tunisian-born Abdellatif Kechiche.) Meanwhile, it’s victory will almost certainly become a talking point in it’s native France; which just legalized gay marriage in the face of major opposition from conservative and religious organizations: The nutcase who shot himself in Notre Dame Cathedral last week did so in protest of legalization.
In any case, the film is now slated for an October release in France followed by a year-end rollout in the United States in anticipation of Oscar nominations.
The Hard Stuff
Below, the trailer for this year’s movie the “endurance cinephile” in your life (the guy who prides himself on having “made it through” notoriously heavy/violent/controversial works) will be going on about this year: “The Act of Killing.” The good news? It indeed looks/sounds kind of amazing.
The premise? In Indonesia, the government that operated the country’s notorious Death Squad killings of communists and suspected communists that are said to have numbered at least 1,000,000 is still effectively running the show, and while the vestiges of a modernizing nation are all present the perpetrators of this genocide have gone largely unpunished – rather, many live as lionized national celebrities. In “Act,” filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer documents the life of a (mostly) unrepentant death squad leader named Anwar Congo, now a grandfather, who claims to have personally killed 1,000 men himself.
The hook? Oppenheimer asks (and provides the resources) for Congo and his surviving co-killers to make a movie about their death-squad exploits. Not a documentary or a historical-recreation, mind you, but a narrative version of the events from their point of view. As it turns out, Congo’s particular outfit were gangsters specializing in movie-piracy before they were conscripted to help with the slaughter… and they’re big movie buffs. So not only does their version feature death squad killings (with them directing the amateur actors playing the victims and killers) recreated by the guys who did them with low-budget special-effects makeup and gore, it also ends up featuring “arty” setpieces, elaborate costumes, fantasy-sequences and (apparently) a musical number.
Yes. A documentary about mass-murderers directing, staging and acting-in a lavish, “visionary” movie about their own mass-murders. Holy. Shit.
Does The "Carrie" Remake Now Have The Stupidest Marketing Campaign Ever?
Pop Quiz, hotshot.
You’ve got a horror movie to sell. It’s a remake of one of the genre’s modern-day classics, a film that damn near everyone has either seen or at least is familiar with the plot and iconic moments thereof. One of the small handful of genuine horror (as opposed to “suspense” or “thriller”) entries alongside “Exorcist” and “Rosemary’s Baby” to be recognized as great, important films even outside their often-disregarded genre. Based on a book by easily the most famous living author of horror or anything else on the planet.
What’s more, said book (and original film) are absolutely loaded with button-pushing themes and imagery about evergreen Important Subjects like female sexuality, bullying, child-abuse and religious extremism.Your cast? Headlined by Julianne Moore, one of the most lauded actresses in the business, and superstar child actress Chloe Grace Moritz on the cusp of her “I intend to still be doing this as an adult!” step into the teen stardom maelstrom. Your director? Kimberly Pierce, best known for the critical and awards darling “Boys Don’t Cry.”
So! Given all that, how would you choose to market this film, which, by all accounts and evidence, is primed to be a serious, perhaps even noteworthy work?
Well, if you answered “Unfunny reference to a tired, ancient Internet Meme,” you might have a future working for MGM/ScreenGems, which has unveiled the below-pictured, head-slappingly stupid “motion poster” for the remake of “Carrie.”
http://ec2-75-101-134-239.compute-1.amazonaws.com/carrie-on/image.php?width=400&locale=en_GB
“Keep Calm And CARRIE On.” Because the prom, and because there’s a crown on that old British WWII poster that was hanging up next to “The Kiss” on every other college dorm wall a decade ago.
I’d love to know what the logic was in deciding that making your own movie into a joke was the best way to sell this; though I suspect it’s something like the resident overpaid Social Media Strategist opining that it would be good for them if Tumblr got on a “Carrie on” viral kick and deciding to start it themselves. Self-meme-ing famously failed to make “Snakes On A Plane” happen at the boxoffice, but at least that was always going to be a throwaway movie. I can’t really see deciding that this was the way to go for something that was previously being pitched as a serious film.
Shazbot!
We cannot stop Robin Williams, we can only contain Robin Williams.
Below, the extended trailer for CBS’s fall sitcom offering “The Crazy Ones,” which appears to compress the entirety of it’s pilot episode into five minutes. The premise? Somebody though “Y’know, people seem to love ‘Mad Men,’ but maybe they’d love it more as a wacky-father/serious-daughter workplace comedy with Robin Williams and Sarah Michelle Gellar:”
Escape to The Movies: "Furious 6"
The Fast & The Europiest
Something Interesting Is About To Happen In The "Avengers" Biz
So. A week after Joss Whedon surprisingly confirms that X-Men/Avengers shared-custody kids Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch are being planned for “Avengers 2,” apparently enabled by a contract loophole that lets them use these specific characters from the X-Men family (the movie rights to which are owned by Fox) so long as nobody says the words “Mutant” or “Magneto” (he’s their dad); Fox and director Bryan Singer have now out-of-nowhere revealed that Evan Peters will be playing Quicksilver in the currently-shooting “X-Men: Days of Future Past.”
This is interesting. Maybe.
First things first: Marvel/Disney would have absolutely zero problem with casting a different actor for the part in their movie, so the idea that this automatically means this guy will be showing up in “Avengers 2” is a non-starter to begin with. Besides, “DoFP” is a time-travel movie (supposedly involving lots of time-skipping and alternate-history in the service of cleaning up series continuity and presumably further deleting “Last Stand” and “Origins: Wolverine” from happening) so… yeah, likelihood that we’ll see two different actors play a fast-running guy named Pietro in two different movies? Pretty damn high.
For the record: It also wouldn’t surprise me at all for Quicksilver to have a really, really small walk-on role in “DoFP” – so small, in fact, that you’d think they perhaps very quickly wrote him into the movie once it was announced that he was to be an Avenger so they could benefit from the free-marketing of fan speculation. (Also, I expect they’ll be casting young for the Avengers version of Wanda and Pietro; positioning them as the “unpredictable kid members” of a mostly adult-to-middle-age team.)
That having been said, the logistics of all this are kind of fascinating. My own pet theory (not supported, I stress, by any kind of special “insider info”) is that “The Conversation” between Marvel/Disney and Fox about allowing The Avengers and X-Men to be seen holding hands in public is already taking place on some level (likely in the form of a childish staring-contest, but still). If nothing else, QS & SW are a strange choice for the first-announced new addition to The Avengers lineup, re: they aren’t particularly popular, non-fans have never heard of them, their powersets aren’t all that special and while it’s true it gives the team one more woman it’s still just two more white people on a team everyone seems to agree could use some diversity.
BUT! If they were allowed to be Mutants, with everything that entails? Suddenly it makes some kind of sense. Part 2 of a genre series is typically “the dark one,” where things get complicated and awkward as the post-victory party winds down (“Yay! We blow’d up the Death Star!” “Crap, The Empire is resilient and this universe is actually pretty fractious and complex.”) The sole non-upbeat undercurrent of “Avengers” was the idea that S.H.I.E.L.D. is willing and ready to play dirty as a response to a world “filling up” with superhumans, and it’s important that the big “coming together” of the good guys happens in-tandem with them rejecting working “for” Nick Fury – even though he kinda sorta manipulated them into it, anyway.
If “Avengers 2” was to (or was able to, rather) explicitly say that the “filling up” of problematic individuals includes the “The Mutant Problem?” (They’ve already been floating the idea that Thanos won’t be the “main” antagonist until Part 3, so there’s also that.) Well, that’s a really easy road to a darker scenario – the separation of The Avengers as the “good,” accepted super-beings versus The Mutants as the “bad” ones people are worried about – and suddenly makes Wanda and Pietro interesting for the team.
The thing of it is, this is all on Marvel/Disney. Fox (and everyone else who owns Marvel movie-rights) would likely kill for their franchises to be declared even tangentially part of the Marvel movie-verse. “Avengers” was bigger than a hit, it was (and remains) a world-wide cultural phenomenon. Basically everyone saw it, the reception was overwhelmingly positive and it’s absorption in the common language of pop-culture has been so immediate and all-encompassing that it’s third-tier non-costumed supporting characters can now headline television series. If you’re running a studio making superhero movies and there’s some chance you could connect your movies to this juggernaut in the public eye, it’d be worth almost any price. Fox in particular should be salivating at the idea of being able to knock out a cheapjack X-Men tie-in and score a profitable weekend because it might be part of the “Avengers” story.
The trick of it is, while Fox (or Sony, if we’re talking about Spider-Man) would probably meet any reasonable price to “share” the X-Men, it’s Marvel/Disney that’s in the position to A.) make the offer and B.) say yes or no; and there’s really no (financial) reason for them to not just wait out the clock on the other studios running low on cash and just buying the franchises back wholesale so they don’t have to share anything. The Avengers are, after all, already worth billions with “just” the six guys they already have – it’s not like they stand to lose money if Spider-Man and Wolverine (lets be clear: Wolverine is the only reason the X-Men franchise is worth any money to any studio) aren’t in the lineup.
In any case, it’s a long way to “Avengers 2’s” 2016 projected release date, and Marvel is (in)famous for making a lot of their movies up on the fly while shooting; so there’s plenty of time for the situation to change on this. Right now it’s a game of chicken, Fox saying “We’re using Quicksilver first, so maybe start dealing with us or put up with fansites complaining about an ‘actor switch’ for your movie” and Marvel likely thinking “Yeah, because everyone was soooo mad that Edward Norton wasn’t in Avengers;” but the math probably gets different if “The Wolverine” rescues it’s franchise in a few months: Marvel is all about the money, and they know exactly how much of it a hairy forearm rising into the foreground in front of the assembled Avengers* and popping out claws to a familiar “snikt!” before a hard cut to black would be worth as the last shot of an “Avengers 2” trailer.
*Of course, like everyone else I’d LOVE to see the “Wolverine vs. all the Avengers” fight scene – with the caveat that Captain America ultimately knocks him on his ass, then gives him a hard time about how he remembers him being a lot tougher.
MOVIEBOB CENTRAL 