Charles Bramesco
Seat-Kicking Incident Leads to Stabbing at Los Angeles Movie Theater
A few years ago, I wrote up a brief item about an incident taking place at Los Angeles’ AFI Film Festival wherein an irate woman maced a man in the face for having the gall to ask her to turn off her cell phone during a screening of Mike Leigh’s J.M.W. Turner biopic Mr. Turner. “Wow, being at the movies sure makes people do crazy things!” I thought to myself. “I wonder how long it’ll be until the next time I get to write about a violent movie theater conflict over petty nonsense.” That day has come at last, and this time [beat to let the moment breathe] the stakes are even higher.
Dwayne Johnson Will Go Down-River with Disney’s Latest Ride-to-Film Adaptation ‘Jungle Cruise’
Over the years, Disney’s made a rich tradition out of refashioning their amusement park rides as feature film attractions. There have been successes (Pirates of the Caribbean and its many demon-spawn sequels, and Eddie Murphy vehicle The Haunted Mansion), flops (the Tomorrowland movie, the horrifying Country Bears picture) and whatever Brian De Palma’s Mission to Mars movie was. But the massive entertainment conglomerate has not given up hope on its cross-vertical synergy potential. Today brings the news that yet another of Disney’s thrill-a-minute rides will soon make the jump to the big screen, and let me break it to you now that a hideously insensitive It’s a Small World movie remains, for the moment, an impossible dream/nightmare.
Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Steve Carell All Want In on Adam McKay’s Dick Cheney Biopic
Adam McKay’s establishing a reputation as Hollywood’s foremost chronicler of the biggest hot-button issues... of ten years ago. He made blackly satirical mince meat of the subprime lending crisis with The Big Short, stepping back into our recent past to expose the avarice still at play in the world of macroeconomics today. And for his next project, he’s going to take aim at a West Wing political player loathed and feared by liberals as a power-mad despot intent on destroying America. No, not him, we’re referring to a different wannabe fascist with the public graces of Darth Vader. To be specific, Dick Cheney.
Michelle Williams, Mark Wahlberg, Kevin Spacey Lining Up for Ridley Scott’s Getty Kidnapping Drama
Even as stories about high-profile kidnapping go, the yarn of John Paul Getty III’s abduction is pretty out-there. In 1973, the 16-year-old was taken while vacationing in Rome and ransomed for $17 million. Getty’s father asked his father — the moneybags in the family — for the sum in question, who refused on the grounds that if he paid off this ransom, then all of his other 14 grandchildren would expect him to pony up when they inevitably got kidnapped. (This, like everything else in the paragraph to come, is real and not a joke.)
Beyoncé In Talks to Run the Animal Kingdom as Nala in ‘Lion King’ Remake
You may remember pop star Beyoncé Knowles from her stint in the late-’90s/early-’00s R&B girl group Destiny‘s Child with “Pretty Girl Rock” singer Kelly Rowland and Michelle Williams (not the one from Manchester by the Sea). But did you know that the celebrated performer has cultivated an active solo career in the years since the group that made her famous broke up? Believe it or not, Knowles released a string of successful studio records over the past decade, starred in the music-video-compilation film Lemonade last year, and wed rapping man Jayson Z in 2008. And with that, I have completed my impression of someone who only heard of Beyoncé when scanning her Wikipedia page just now. We all know who Beyoncé is. She‘s Beyoncé.
Hollywood Studios Considering Early Home Releases for New Films
Almost exactly a year ago, tech entrepreneur Sean Parker (better known as the guy who correctly identified a billion dollars as cooler than a million dollars in The Social Network) fronted a proposed business venture called The Screening Room, a potentially game-changing set-top box through which Hollywood studios would offer their biggest new releases to stream at home the same day they premiered in brick-and-mortar theaters. (With an astronomical price tag, naturally.) Though it gained some traction and support from significant voices in the film community, it ultimately sputtered and spun out. But with the rebirth of spring, so comes a rebirth for this impractical, frightening, cineplex-annihilating idea. (Kinda.)
Latest ‘Smurfs: The Lost Village’ Trailer Pits Smurf Against Smurf
It was established last week that we may all have to do quite a bit of waiting before we get a peek at James Cameron’s many Avatar sequels. Who’d have guessed that the best thing to tide us over until then would be the latest film featuring the Smurfs? The latest trailer for Smurfs: The Lost Village looks rather familiar, as a search party goes on an expedition to a land filled with bioluminescent wildlife, weird and mighty beasts, and peaceable blue-skinned natives. As one Smurf so elegantly puts it, “It‘s like a workout for your eyes!” Indeed, those viewers looking for a lush vision of a hidden world may be in luck.
‘Hurt Locker’ and ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ Writer Mark Boal Prepping 2016 Election Script
As a lifelong journalist, Mark Boal has always been an accomplished chronicler of modern American war, but he only got famous for it when he took his act to the movies. Boal earned an Academy Award for writing The Hurt Locker and then scooped up a nomination a few years later when he re-teamed with Kathryn Bigelow for Zero Dark Thirty. The partners-in-war-crime will reunite for a film set during the 1967 riots in Detroit, but you can’t keep Boal away from hot-button geopolitical issues for long. Today brings the news that for his next trick, Boal will tackle what’s shaping up to be one of the greatest crises in American history.
The Internet Is Terrifying in New Trailer for Tom Hanks Thriller ‘The Circle’
Google is a wonderful company! They manufacture high-quality products and provide a web-surfing experience unparalleled in its intuitiveness and user ease. They’ve made tracking down a specific page in the endless expanse of the Internet into a few simple clicks, drastically cutting down research time. They connect people. They make the world a better place.
Daisy Ridley Will Test Her Spy Skills for ‘A Woman of No Importance’
Daisy Ridley’s coronation as the next major movie star is continuing right on schedule. She got her big break as the face of the new trilogy of Star Wars sequels, parlayed that into a couple of quick but low-profile voice acting gigs as the narrator of The Eagle Huntress and a character in the English dub of Studio Ghibli’s Only Yesterday, and landed a prospective prestige role in Kenneth Branagh’s Murder on the Orient Express remake. All that’s missing is the star vehicle independent of a major pre-existing franchise, something a studio can build specifically for her from the ground up.