Hannibal seems lost on NBC, as odd as that sounds. The fact that it is on network TV may turn some viewers away from the series (my how times have changed on television). But it is worth watching. Mads Mikkelson is no Anthony Hopkins, but he is more that solid in the titular role.
Despite flying under the radar, which spells doom for just about every quality, unseen series out there, Hannibal has a third season coming. This new trailer may help to get a few new viewers on board.
Here is the season 3 trailer for Hannibal:
What might take Hannibal to the next level for NBC is the inclusion of Francis Dolarhyde, a.k.a. The Red Dragon (Richard Armitage) in the story. Gillian Anderson is also set o have an expanded role, and Laurence Fishburne and Hugh Dancy make their return as Jack Crawford and Will Graham.
Editor in Chief of Dark Horse Comics Scott Allie spoke with Matthew Sardo about how Fight Club 2 by Chuck Palahniuk and Cameron Stewart became a reality. Allie takes us through the whole process and gives you an inside look at an epic sequel.
Side note:
Kelly Sue DeConnick, Matt Fraction and Brian Michael Bendis are sitting at dinner trying to convince Palahniuk to write Fight Club 2 as a graphic novel.
The new adaptation of Macbeth, starring Michael Fassbender in the title role and Marion Cotillard as the all-important Lady Macbeth, is set to premiere at Cannes tomorrow. Ahead of that, two film clips have been released, showcasing a definite grasp of style. While there is almost no dialogue, definitely none of the iconic lines from Shakespeare’s play, this new Macbeth seems to have a good handle on the tone it is going for judging by these two brief glimpses.
Before I see anything else, just the thought of Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard in the lead roles feels absolutely perfect. Fassbender can display internal struggle just about as well as any actor in history, and it will be a thrill to see Cotillard’s dark side as the manipulative Lady Macbeth.
Macbeth, along with King Lear, is my favorite Shakespeare play. The Roman Polanski adaptation of Macbeth is a quality telling of a story steeped in macabre imagery, horror, psychological torture, and plenty of action. It was time for a new remake, however, and director Justin Kurzel, who’s Snowtown Murders is an excellent Australian thriller, looks to have a handle on the story he is trying to tell here.
While their is no U.S. release date for Macbeth yet, expect that to change shortly after it’s Cannes premier this weekend.
A new international trailer has been released for Eli Roth’s new thriller, Knock Knock. In the film, Keanu Reeves plays a loving husband and father who, one dark and stormy night home alone, makes a big mistake by letting two rain-soaked tarts into his house.
While most of Eli Roth’s films aren’t necessarily my cup of tea, I am intrigued by Knock Knock mostly because of Keanu’s involvement. As an actor, he always gets a bad rap, but I think he brings dedication to his roles. While he has hopped across genres gleefully in the past, I can’t remember him being in a straight horror film like Knock Knock. I am interested to see how he does.
Along with Reeves, Knock Knock stars Lorena Izzo and Ana de Armas as the sultry home invaders. The film hits theaters June 26 in the U.K. No Stateside release date has been given yet.
Updates for technology and relative pop culture celebrity of mediums and paranormal researchers are just about all that separate the new version of Poltergeist from the 1982 Steven Spielberg produced classic that inspires it. Oh, and the fact that aside from a few decent starts in the first 30 minutes, the new version just isn’t very scary. Entertaining? Sure, but that’s more thanks to the presence of Sam Rockwell doing his best to add some levity to the proceedings. But scary? Save for a few iconic moments redone faithfully from the original, not particularly, mainly due to the inescapable fact that quite literally you’ve seen all the rest of it before.
The details in the film’s setup have been tweaked a bit, as well: this time, it’s the Bowen family that’s moving into the nice, suburban two-story house with the gnarled and creepy tree in the backyard. Out of work dad Eric (Rockwell), stay-at-home mom Amy (Rosemarie DeWitt), eldest daughter Kendra (Saxon Sharbino), middle child Griffin (Kyle Catlett, FOX’s “The Following”), and the family’s youngest, Maddy (Kennedi Clements) all do their best to settle in, but clearly something’s not right in their new home, and the wrongness seems to be centered around Maddy. At first it’s only Griffin who notices, however, and his fears are dismissed because (as audiences learn through some brief exposition) he went through something traumatic not long before and he’s been nervous and fearful of everything ever since.
But Griffin’s fears become undeniable once, well, the entire house seems to attack the Bowens. The tree outside Griffin’s attic bedroom drags him outside and nearly swallows him. Kendra almost gets sucked down beneath the house when black ooze breaks through the garage floor and a hand grabs her leg. And Maddy … well, Maddy gets taken through the black void where her bedroom closet wall used to be.
Desperate to get Maddie back, the Bowens turn to the paranormal researchers at a local university, who bring in lots of cameras and recording equipment a la “Ghost Hunters” more so to uncover a hoax the family is putting on rather than actually helping them. Once they’re rather violently convinced that what they’re dealing with is, in fact, a poltergeist, they call in help from Carrigan Burke (Jared Harris), a gifted medium turned TV paranormal reality show star, who may be the only person with the knowledge and ability to help lead the fight to get the Bowens their daughter back and free them from the curse of the house and the souls trapped within it.
This new Poltergeist is the latest “revisionist” take on a classic horror tale cranked out by Ghost House Pictures, the production studio founded by none other than Evil Dead creators Sam Raimi and Rob Tapert. Like their last horror remake, 2013’s Evil Dead, the new film plays the story straight and avoids camp, but they wisely cast Sam Rockwell in the Craig T. Nelson role of the original film to bring some much-needed comic relief throughout most of the film’s running time. Other noteworthy changes include shifting some of the dramatic emphasis away from the parents and onto young Griffin, played the talented Kyle Catlett, who is the audience’s initial viewpoint character for all the weird goings-on and ends up playing one of the most important roles in the film’s climax. Other changes are mainly cosmetic: the nasty spirits find they have far more ways than simply the TV to reach out and terrorize the Bowens, as they make their presence felt through the family’s smartphones and other home electronics. The production also injects some fun by updating the medium character for the 21st Century, with Burke’s status as a reality TV star making perfect sense considering the place that supernatural phenomena and its alleged observation and investigation currently occupy in pop culture.
But for all those changes, and the film making opportunities that newer technologies and better special effects afford in terms of making horror movies, the story progresses in more or less the same way that it does in the original, with very little new brought to the table in terms of actual scares. As strange as it might sound, the film gets less scary and suspenseful as the action intensifies, rendering the film’s final minutes, complete with the requisite “you didn’t think it was that easy, did you?” moment, almost devoid of any tension at all.
All that said, you should still avoid this movie if you’re creeped out by clowns, scary-looking trees, dark closets or kids staring at static on your TV and then making ominous pronouncements about unwanted guests arriving. The chills that come from the sights and sounds of those scenes must reach somewhere into our collective cultural unconscious to tap into fears that transcend time and medium, because somehow, though we’ve seen them before and we’ll no doubt see them again in some other film, they still manage to unnerve.
Poltergeist
Starring Sam Rockwell, Rosemarie DeWitt, Jared Harris, Jane Adams. Directed by Gil Kenan.
Running Time: 93 minutes
Rated PG-13 for intense frightening sequences, brief suggestive material, and some language.
Netflix Friday announced “A Very Murray Christmas” starring Bill Murray and friends. The Netflix special will be out in December. The streaming service would like you to use the hashtag #MurrayChristmas so they can track you and sell your information.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Reese Witherspoon is attached to star in and produce Tink, a live-action take on Tinker Bell, the classic Peter Pan character.
Witherspoon will produce with her partner Bruna Papandrea at Pacific Standard.
Victoria Strouse (Finding Dory) is on script duties for the project
Tink does not have a director on board and is still in development.
For all its ambition, its good intentions and many clever insights into the state of our world today and our collective inclination toward morbid and pessimistic views of our world’s future, Tomorrowland, Disney’s latest effort to bring to life on the big screen an adventure based on one of its signature theme park attractions, fails to thrill or inspire in all the ways it should. Rather than soaring and carrying with it audiences hearts and imaginations, it crashes hard, burdened by unwieldy exposition, questionable casting, and ponderous pacing. It should inspire you to dream, but instead, it’s much more likely to just put you to sleep.
The storytelling premise alone is convoluted, to say the least. In 1964, young Frank Walker (Thomas Robinson), an ambitious kid on the verge of inventing a working flying jet pack, brings his almost-ready-for-prime-time creation to the World’s Fair in New York, and presents it to the judges of a contest for innovations. He fails to impress the first judge he meets, the dour David Nix (Hugh Laurie), but he catches the eye of Athena (Raffey Cassidy), an unusual girl Frank’s age who has an eye for inventive talent. Against Nix’s wishes, Athena sneaks Frank a special pin that opens a doorway into a world beyond anything Frank has ever imagined, a Future World in the making led by the brightest, most inventive and artistic minds in all of humankind, all working together without the distractions of politics and bureaucracy, with the singular goal of creating a better tomorrow.
Fifty years later, that world still hasn’t come about. Casey Newton (Britt Robertson, The Longest Ride), the bright and inquisitive daughter of a former rocket engineer about to lose his job at Cape Canaveral as NASA dismantles and demolishes its now-obsolete launch platforms, notices how just about everyone knows things are bad in the world, but doesn’t seem to really do anything to try to fix it. One night, after her inventive and mostly-illegal efforts to keep her father employed land her in some trouble with the local authorities, she finds among her belongings a pin similar to the one Frank received from Athena. Upon touching it she gets a glimpse of the world Frank saw, tantalizingly close, but not close enough to reach.
Her search for a way to complete the journey back to that place of wonders leads her to the door of the now-reclusive and jaded Frank (George Clooney), who wants nothing to do with Casey, the pin she carries, or anywhere she wants to go. He soon learns, however, that he doesn’t have a choice as far as taking her there, as Casey’s search for Tomorrowland has drawn the attention of certain nefarious elements bent on keeping her and anyone else out.
But why would those in charge of Tomorrowland not want to open its gates to a world desperately in need of hope and optimism? Frank knows, and it’s why he’s so bitter. But Casey may be the key to changing it all, and in so doing change the course of the world’s future, and so the two unlikely friends join forces with an equally unlikely ally to force their way in, using every product of Frank’s gadget wizardry along the way to stay one step ahead of the bad guys and finally face their shared destiny.
It’s hard to deny that the ideas and the story behind Tomorrowland must have looked awfully good when laid out on paper. A film inspired by one of Disney’s most beloved and often-visited attractions at both of its signature theme parks in North America, a place whose spirit typified Walt Disney’s own inventiveness, ambition, and futurist vision of tomorrow, written in part and directed by Brad Bird, who after helming The Incredibles and Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol succeeded Gore Verbinski as Hollywood’s current go-to guy for inventive, visually exciting film making. Teaming Bird with Damon Lindelof, one of the masterminds behind “Lost” and the re-tooling of “Star Trek”, must have made even more sense in terms of creating a film full of bang-zoom and golly-gee-whiz that would excite the senses and thrill the imagination, everything that a visit to Tomorrowland the attraction once did and still strives to do among its youngest visitors.
However, the final product churned out by this meeting of the minds and the cast and crew they assemble rather resembles a visit to Tomorrowland where you stand in line to get on Space Mountain for two hours, enjoying all that signature Disney attention to detail, interactivity, and theming along the way, only to have the ride break down just as you’ve been locked into the seat. Without question, it’s gorgeous to look at — this is one you want to see in 3D or IMAX, given the opportunity, with all the gleaming white, shiny Jetsons-style flying machines and Rocketeer-resembling jet packs — but it gets so bogged down in all its set up, all its hypotheticals, alternative history, and exposition that the film never feels fun. There’s never a moment where you feel actually transported to that place and time; just as Casey the character struggles to get to Tomorrowland in the film, audiences may feel like they never really arrive there, that it all remains remote and unreachable, and they’re just watching it all from a distance, rather than being immersed in it.
Casting doesn’t do the film any favors, either, and as strange as it may sound, the problems begin with George Clooney. At this point in his life and career, you’d think Clooney wouldn’t have any trouble at all playing crusty and curmudgeonly — he certainly doesn’t have to do much to look the part, especially when allowed to not shave for a few days and walk around in clothes that he looked like he slept in. He certainly gives a go, too, practically scowling his way through the whole film, but like any Disney illusion, you can see that it’s a special effect, that he’s working hard to hide the charm and charisma that he simply exudes by breathing. Britt Robertson actually fares quite well, in comparison — the 25-year-old who earlier this year took a turn as a lead in a Nicholas Sparks romance effectively conveys eight years younger with convincing pluckiness and a little help from wearing a NASA ball cap, a hoodie, and jeans through the majority of her screen time. But unfortunately for them both, Raffey Cassidy, the 12-year-old British actress perhaps best known to audiences for her TV work in Masterpiece’s “Mr. Selfridge”, seems to struggle capturing the right tone for Athena, and her scenes with her co-stars lack any real chemistry or energy. As for Hugh Laurie, he seems to have been cast simply for his eye roll — he may not sound like Dr. House while using his native accent, but he certainly can look as exasperated as Laurie’s well-remembered TV character ever did.
Highlights, aside from all that beautiful production design? For the hardcore Disney fans, the film is quite likely a treasure trove for park-related Easter eggs and “hidden Mickeys”, those ubiquitous silhouettes of Mickey’s head that Disney designers and animators love to sneak into the background and scenery of everything the Mouse manufactures for public consumption. Oh, and there’s a great in-joke regarding the logical evolution of those animatronics that have inhabited “It’s a Small World” and other similar Disney rides — if you’ve ever thought those were creepy, just wait and see the spin the movie puts on them.
It’s disheartening, really, that the film doesn’t work the way it should, because it really does have something to say about the direction our world has headed in terms of pessimism, apathy, and resignation due to the cynicism perpetuated by our 24-hour-news cycle and constantly being fed a steady audio and visual diet of humanity’s faults and failings. Like last year’s Interstellar, which actually showed us a possible future where looking to the stars for our future was actively discouraged and disparaged because of its impracticality, Tomorrowland points a not-so-subtle finger at the forces in our society that simply make it easier for most people to accept that the world is going to hell and there’s nothing anyone can do or even should do to try to fix it. It makes the case that too often in our world people are encouraged to give up on their dreams, to grow up and look down at the world around them rather than imagine the possibilities of what may lay beyond, and in so doing we’re more eager to embrace the inevitability of our doom rather than lifting a finger to do something about it. These are important ideas, and whether or not the these ideas actually resonate with mass audiences may itself be indicative of how resistant we have become to optimism in our entertainment, that things dark, dingy, and depressing just make more sense to us because it’s what we’re constantly surrounded with. It’s more familiar, and it takes less effort to digest.
But in the course of building a story, a script, and a film experience around these very important ideas, Bird, Lindelof, and the minds behind Tomorrowland the film fail to balance all that heady stuff with the fun that should come along with any Disney experience, animated, live action, or in real life.
After all, you don’t go to Tomorrowland at Disneyland or the Magic Kingdom to listen to a well-intentioned lecture on why it’s important that you keep dreaming and you never give up. You go there to be amazed and to have fun — the dreaming and inspiration comes after.
Tomorrowland
Starring George Clooney, Hugh Laurie, Britt Robertson, Raffey Cassidy, Tim McGraw, Kathryn Hahn, Keegan-Michael Key. Directed by Brad Bird.
Running Time: 130 minutes
Rated PG for sequences of sci-fi action violence and peril, thematic elements, and language.
I’m going to try and be fair to this new Poltergeist remake and not just compare it endlessly to Tobe Hooper’s 1982 original, a paranormal classic and the template for countless ghost stories these days. It will be hard to avoid, though, because this new version makes no bones about telling the same story in virtually every way. The structure and happenings are almost carbon copies. Scenes are basically the same, with similar ends, though they might be told in different ways from time to time. But they aren’t fooling anyone. We see what is happening.
In this new version, Sam Rockwell and Rosemarie DeWitt play Eric and Amy Bowen. In the opening scenes, the Bowen’s are moving into a bargain-price home in an old neighborhood next to some power lines. They needed a deal since Eric lost his job and Amy is staying at home to raise their three kids and write “her book.” (Side note: why do so many characters in movies like this take time off work to write their novel? It has become a lazy character trait.) Almost immediately, the house begins to show signs of its paranormal history. It seems to pulsate with electrical current, lights go on and off, electronics are fried. You know, the usual.
As the parents work to get on their feet and establish their lives, the entities begin to threaten the kids. The oldest, Kendra (Saxon Sharbino), stays mostly free of the apparitions, but middle son Griffin (Kyle Catlett) has a heck of a time with clowns and trees. I say clowns because there are several this time, and they all look menacing which misses the point of the innocent-looking clown from the original. Then, of course, there is the youngest daughter, Madison (not Carol Anne for some reason), played by Kennedi Clements. Poor Maddie bears the brunt of the ghostly invaders.
Maddie is snatched up by the ghosts through a portal in her closet, and it is time to call in a team of reinforcements, a trio of paranormal investigators from the local college led by Dr. Brooke Powell, played by the always interesting character actor Jane Adams. Powell and her team come in and their investigation leads them to realize they aren’t enough reinforcement; they must call in Carrigan Burke, a celebrity ghost hunter played by Jared Harris. This is perhaps the biggest departure from the original Poltergeist, as Harris replaces Zelda Rubinstein’s infinitely more interesting mystic, Tangina. Harris, on the other hand, is doing his best impersonation of Quint from Jaws.
The rest of the film moves briskly through the plot points everyone remembers from the original. This Poltergeist also has two endings, and the first ending has some impressive vibrance and crafty thrills. The second and final ending falls flat. Rockwell and DeWitt, both fantastic actors, are solid and believable as the parents, but they are nowhere near as entertaining and warm and, well, perfect as the Freeman’s (Craig T. Nelson and JoBeth Williams) in the original. Director Gil Kenan, making his first foray into live action filmmaking, handles the material well enough. That is to say, there are no glaring problems with the look or feel of the picture. It just kind of… exists.
There are no real scares here, mostly because we all know where the story is going, when, and how for the most part. The differences in individual scenes are different for the sake of being so, not because they are attempting anything new. No matter how hard everyone tries here, the new Poltergeist can never get out from under the shadow of its predecessor, thus never feeling necessary in any way. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and in that way everyone involved with the original Poltergeist should feel incredibly flattered. But they can rest easy knowing their original version has not been bested.
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