A Big Day at D23!

Disney has the biggest toy box in town these days, and at this weekend's big D23 Expo in Anaheim, they opened the lid and gave us a glimpse into the future of all things Disney.

Yesterday we all learned a bit more about Finding Dory and Toy Story 4, plus a look at a myriad of other animated projects.

But today was all Star Wars. While we learned a bit more about Marvel's Civil War and Doctor Strange, there was a veritable avalanche of Star Wars revelations. 

Every Disney theme park will soon have its own "Star Wars Land," undoubtedly with a functioning cantina. 

We feasted our eyes on the new Drew Struzan poster art for The Force Awakens, as seen above.

We learned that Mads Mikkelsen (!) and Alan Tudyk will both be appearing in Rogue One.

And while news of the theme park presence was probably the biggest reveal  of the day, the most attention getting was certainly the announcement that Colin Trevorrow (Jurassic World) will be directing Star Wars: Episode IX, as previously rumored during last month's Comic-Con. "This is not a job or an assignment," said Trevorrow. "It is a seat at a campfire, surrounded by an extraordinary group of storytellers, filmmakers, artists and craftspeople. We’ve been charged with telling new stories for a younger generation because they deserve what we all had — a mythology to call their own. We will do this by channeling something George Lucas instilled in all of us: boundless creativity, pure invention and hope.”

D23 comes on the heels of a week that's seen lots of Force Awakens product leak well in advance of September 4th's Force Friday event, so we're really starting to get a sense of the feel and scope of this new era of Star Wars - and that scope is vast indeed.

HBO mulling a return to Deadwood!

This is one hell of a thing - HBO has confirmed that "preliminary talks" are underway to bring back the David Milch western series Deadwood as a movie for the cable network.

The series famously ended before wrapping up the stories of true-to-life characters Seth Bullock and Al Swearengen. News came out via the Twitter feed of actor Garret Dillahunt (who played character Francis Wolcott):

Incredibly exciting! Admittedly, it's pretty early and that's a huge cast to wrangle back together. But star Ian McShane is working on HBO's Game of Thrones now, and the network has plenty of old west sets for their reboot of Westworld... that's what Al Swearengen might have seen as "A bounteous passel of of signs and portents."

Stay tuned!

"Now We're Talkin'!" The Hateful Eight trailer in GLORIOUS 70mm!

If you love Cinema (capital C), Westerns, and the mayhem of Quentin Tarantino, this is a look at the fancy bow on the ultimate Christmas present. Widescreen wonder incarnate!

First Order Image du Jour

The Guest: Make up the spare room - and watch your back

In the mood for a good thriller with an unpredictable edge? Then you need to check out The Guest, the latest piece of mental mayhem from Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett, the team behind You're Next. A family is trying to put their lives back together after losing their soldier son in battle overseas, when there's a knock at the door - it's David, a soldier who was friends with their son in the war, who promised him he'd look in on their family.

And that's all your getting from me! No secret here, but The Guest stars Dan Stevens who is simply astonishing. If I didn't know this was the same guy who played Matthew Crawley on Downton Abbey, I'd never have guessed it in a million years.

Wingard really has a handle on that 1980's thriller vibe, and there are some strong echoes of flicks like The Stepfather and The Hitcher here. If you're ready for some twisty shocks driven by a hypnotic lead performance, you'll want to spend some time with The Guest, currently on Netflix.

Rooting for the Little Guy - Ant-Man

Like last summer’s Guardians of the Galaxy, Ant-Man is a more eccentric addition to the Marvel Universe than the more traditional heroic model.

It had a bit of a rough go in development, with the departure of writer/director Edgar Wright. But Ant-Man has two very strong things going for it: charm, and fun. 

 

It’s wild to see actors like Robert Redford and Michael Douglas appearing in these Marvel movies. Here, Douglas is inventor Hank Pym – the original Ant-Man – who’s been pushed into retirement, while the dynamic and ambitious Darren Cross (the ubiquitous Corey Stoll) takes control of his tech company. There’s a fantastic prologue scene of a younger Hank Pym looking 26 years younger that’s utterly convincing. Cross envisions legions of miniaturized super soldiers that will forever change the face of warfare, over which he would wield control. Hank’s been looking for the right man to don the Ant-Man suit and fixes his gaze on Scott Lang (Paul Rudd), a well-intentioned but unlucky thief who’s just released from prison, his wife and daughter now with someone new. 

 

Hank offers Scott a shot at redemption – the chance to make a difference and set things right. The miniaturization scenes are fantastic. When Scott first shrinks down in an empty bathtub, the sides swoop up above him like an alien landscape. Hank has learned to communicate with ants of all types, who quickly become Scott’s allies of infiltration. 

 

Douglas is terrific and brings great energy to his role of the elder scientist. Losing his wife (Wasp) has left a big empty space between Hank and his daughter (Evangeline Lilly), who has less than zero confidence that Scott’s worthy to fill her father’s shoes.  Everything builds towards breaking into the Pym Corporation to stop Cross’s Yellowjacket weapons technology, aided by his former gang of ne’er-do-well thieves, with Michael Peña pretty much stealing the whole movie.

 

But it’s Rudd who has to carry the show and he really pulls it off. He’s an unlikely hero, and projects a naïve aw-shucks likeability that makes you get behind him and root for his success. Director Peyton Reed (Yes Man, Bring It On) may not have Edgar Wright’s overt style, but he gets terrific performances from the cast and lets veteran DP Russell Carpenter (Titanic, True Lies) capture Scott’s descent of scale in increasingly eye-popping fashion. Most importantly, he maintains a strong sense of fun. It may be one of the most family-friendly of the Marvel films and the audience I saw it with just loved it. More than anything else, Scott just wants his daughter’s love. The combination of laughs and thrills makes Ant-Man very hard to resist. Loved the Stan Lee cameo, and be sure to stick around for both of those end credits scenes. You’re okay in my book, Ant-Man. We’re glad you’re here!

 

Ex Machina: Alex Garland's A.I. Classic

As humanity falls ever deeper in love with our devices, science fiction continues to hold up a cautionary lens.                                                                                         

 

We’ve had an increasing amount of films dealing with the rising presence of artificial intelligence, with Her, Chappie and Avengers: Age of Ultron being the most recent. With Ex Machina, writer-director Alex Garland has given us a film that easily moves to the front of the line on the subject. A must for any list of the best films of the year.

 

Garland has written 28 Days Later, The Beach, Sunshine, Never Let Me Go and Dredd, among others. With Ex Machina, he moves to the director’s chair, and delivers a modestly budgeted, superbly realized and effective science fiction film that’s an instant classic – a film with a vision, driven by an airtight script, wondrous design and outstanding performances. 

 

Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) is a programmer at a gigantic Googlesque corporation, who learns he’s won the lottery that will allow him to meet the company’s reclusive founder, tech genius Nathan (Oscar Isaac), to assist in his research (curiously, both actors are featured in Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens). Nathan is a fascinating character, a supercilious hipster who’ll be his employee’s buddy, drink beer with them, calling them “dude,” while diving into their brain like a surgeon, assessing, probing, manipulating. Isaac creates a tremendously naturalistic character, deliberately casual and arrogant, his ego and hubris fueling his disregard for boundaries and sense of entitlement. Caleb arrives at his remote automated home in the wilderness (stunning locations in Norway) seemingly alone with Oz, the great and dourful. 

 

Nathan needs Caleb to undertake a Turing Test of his latest creation, Ava (Alicia Vikander) – an artificially intelligent android, made to resemble a striking young woman. Can Ava exhibit behavior that’s indistinguishable from a human? Caleb will interact with her, to evaluate her humanity. Nathan will scrutinize.

 

And let’s just leave it at that, shall we? Ex Machina’s a film you should just discover and be surprised by. The cast is small – giving the film a theatrical and contained feeling of claustrophobia among Nathan’s many sealed rooms. Garland restraint with budget and pacing is superb – $15 million and 108 minutes.

The cast is astonishing. Vikander is a wonder, playing a machine that’s playing a human – she deftly wraps layer over layer with superb control and enigmatic presence, while inhabiting truly amazing special effects (by Double Negative).

 

Garland is a phenomenal filmmaker who not only gives us an amazing visual experience, but who wants us to look at our notions of consciousness and self – and selfishness. If the example of humanity a being is exposed to is prone to taking what it wants – to exploit in order to satisfy – what lessons of ethics or efficiency will the still-developing being construe? Is intelligence what defines humanity? Ex Machina is one of the smartest and most involving science fiction films we’ve seen, and I can’t wait to see what Garland does next. A must-see.

 

"Oxfords, not Brogues" - Kingsman: The Secret Service

Those Scots, ya gotta love 'em. And I confess I love Mark Millar, the prolific and rather unhinged comic book mastermind who's authored everything from Civil War to Wanted to Kick-Ass. He has a cinematic style that's over the top, putting it mildly. He's also got a deep breadth of fond knowledge of the spy genre, so a movie like Kingsman: The Secret Service was inevitable. That it attracted a director of Matthew Vaughn's sensibilities might just be serendipity.

Going in, you should know that Kingsman is first and foremost two things - incredibly funny, and possibly the most violent film you can imagine. You're going to have to get some peanut butter on your chocolate, and that peanut butter - it's chunky.

Taron Egerton is Gary "Eggsy" Unwin, an orphaned London street tough who finds himself recruited by a beyond-secret group of British agents - The Kingsmen. Harry Hart (Colin Firth) might just as well be called John Steed - impeccably attired, Firth is the epitome of the English Gentleman spy, whose posh exterior belies the fact that he's a lethal master of combat that might cause James Bond to raise an eyebrow. Feeling a debt is owed, Harry recruits Eggsy as a candidate Kingsman - one of several young protégées who must vie for a job opening in a fantastic series of increasingly dangerous tests to see who's the last one standing. Meanwhile, a tech billionaire uber-villain (Thamuel L. Jackthon) is unrolling a scheme that threatens...the fate of the very world. Vaughn (Layer Cake, Kick-Ass, X-Men: First Class) is on familiar turf when it comes to sixties style and Brit cloak and dagger - he gets Millar's humor and charges toward the R-rating with unhinged glee. Some of the riffs may have you thinking, Is this Austin Powers? But Kingman takes the idea of style to an extreme degree - it's all Savile Row, not Carnaby Street.

The opening sequences of Kingsman are spectacular and attention-getting in a major way. The setup of Harry revealing the Kingsman universe and code to Eggsy make a superb, hilarious origin story.

But I ran into two significant issues with the picture, one of which is just poor timing. I had the bad luck to watch Kingsman shortly after this June's Charleston, South Carolina Church Massacre - and there's a sequence here that's going to be a severe deal-breaker for some. If I did not have the horrors of that real life event in mind, how would I have viewed this scene? Would I have just grinned at the Paul Verhoeven excess? So I felt tainted and that skewed me. It's going to go down as an infamous sequence, that's for certain.

The other thing's hard to talk about and stay non-spoilery. Let's just say that some impressions are so indelible and world-perfect that the world doesn't always survive their departure. I had a hopeful expectation about that, which unfortunately never materialized in the third act.

Still - Kingsman is fierce satire with a capital S. Millar and Vaughn are tweaking genre conventions, English society, violence, climate change, the aristocracy and everything in between. There's some meta-winking and wall-breaking that you just have to go with. Kingsman - and its characters - are unquestionably aware of self. But the characters and story really grab you, and while I probably sound vague and unsatisfied, I'm really not. Kingsman is terrifically entertaining - and very much in your face. Any action fan, and particularly any Bond fan, will not want to miss it. I suspect I'm going to overcome any speed bumps I had on a second viewing, which I'm definitely excited for. There's also one of the best cameos in Kingsman that I've ever seen - but there's no way I'm spoiling that for you here.

The spy genre is alive and well, ladies and gentlemen. Just take care not to get too much blood on your suit.

Rogue Nation: Choose To Accept It

If I'm Sam Mendes, I'm shitting a brick right about now. Because SPECTRE is going to have to be one hell of a spy film to come anywhere near the heights of Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation, easily the best film of the series, and along with Mad Max: Fury Road, one of the best pictures of the year.

Christopher McQuarrie has directed two previous films - The Way of the Gun and Jack Reacher - but he's written plenty, including The Usual Suspects, Valkyrie and Edge of Tomorrow - and with Rogue Nation, he's put together a rocket-propelled, smartly written love letter to everything cool about the spy genre.

This production is A-game, audience-enthralling every step of the way. That jaw-dropper of Tom Cruise hanging off the side of an Airbus? That’s just in the opening teaser sequence. Ethan Hunt’s Impossible Missions Force is under attack on two fronts – by the blustering head of the CIA (Alec Baldwin) who wants to shut down the IMF for running without oversight – while a shadowy organization known as The Syndicate aims to wipe them out of existence. Cruise is in nearly constant motion here, and he’s terrific. But the real story in Rogue Nation is Rebecca Ferguson as a spy playing both sides of a very dangerous game. Kudos to McQuarrie for casting an actor, because Ferguson has serious chops – she’s Ingrid Bergman with combat skills, a remarkable discovery.

 

Simon Pegg gets a lot more time in the field here, and he’s sensational. Funny, but keeping the humor in check and balanced with a hefty dose of genuine peril. The bad guys in Rogue Nation are scary and effective, led by Sean Harris

(he was the Mohawk-sporting Fifield in Prometheus) as a reptilian manipulator with a chilling whisper. One of the most refreshing aspects of the film is how spycraft is depicted as an intricate game of lures and false moves designed to mislead your opponent. It’s a great script that simply kept me on the edge of my seat (and out of it) the entire time. There are genre nods to everything from Three Days of the Condorto the original TV show, the theme from which Joe Kraemer channels with equal measures of fealty and freshness.

 

The setpieces and stuntwork are nearly all devoid of computer assists and these sequences are simply phenomenal. There’s an amazing underwater heist, a Hitchcockian opera house assassination (stunningly edited by Eddie Hamilton) and a car/motorcycle chase that threatens to out-Frankenheimer Frankenheimer. The great Robert Elswit lenses everything to squeeze maximum havoc and threat out of every environment. 

 

Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation is one of the best action films in ages, and surpasses your summer movie expectations at every turn. Audiences hungry for intelligent, thrilling entertainment will find nothing better in theaters, period. It’s an absolute must-see. 

Heady Concepts: Inside Out

It's an attention-getting premise: The characters of Inside Out are the actual emotions within the mind of a young girl: Joy, Fear, Anger, Disgust and Sadness. When the girl’s family moves from their reassuring home in Minnesota to a new life in San Francisco, the emotions run riot. 

The emotions are the caretakers of young Riley’s memories, golden orbs, the most profound of which are identified as Core Memories, which help shape the internal free-floating Islands that make up a different aspect of the girl’s personality. Joy (Amy Poehler) is the dominant emotion, keeping all the other emotions in check through unbridled cheerleader perkiness, with Sadness (Phyllis Smith) being the biggest threat to harmonious well-being.

If Sadness touches a happy memory of the past, it becomes irreversibly sad. As new memories and potential Core Memories are made, Joy has a harder time keeping Sadness from influencing things, until both Joy and Sadness are accidently hurled into the deep recesses of Riley’s mind, leaving Anger, Fear and Disgust in charge, with Riley’s Islands of personality in peril of disintegration.

It’s an ambitious and lofty conceit, and Inside Outhas reaped an incredible avalanche of rave reviews. It’s been ranked among Pixar’s very best, and I was excited to experience the inventiveness of this unique premise. Pixar just wows me, and I really have to hand it to Pete Docter and the team here. It’s a truly inventive and dazzling film that actually has a lot to say. It’s challenging and ambitious and kudos to everyone at Pixar for their work here. I have to think that Inside Out is capable of being tremendously helpful to any young person who’s felt overwhelmed at the prospect of getting a grip on their feelings, and by making abstract emotional states like Anger and Sadness into tangible beings, it’s easy to imagine the film being useful as a therapy tool. The quality and effort and substance on display is of the highest caliber.

Unfortunately, there’s just something about Inside Out that just never clicked for me. While I admire it like crazy, I can only do so from a  distance, because by the very nature of the film’s premise, the characters were just too abstract to resonate. I felt really detached from them – even Joy – and never felt invested in what they were struggling to achieve. While the story is designed with high-minded purpose, the environment of the mind is too often depicted as a bleak, nearly apocalyptic wasteland. With elements like “The Abyss” of obsolete memories, and an abandoned, clown-like imaginary friend (Richard Kind), there’s a real melancholy that saturates Inside Out’s plot to the point where the cumulative mood is more depressing than uplifting. Sadness is definitely a drag, and the images of crumbling personalities sinking into darkness is a bleak one that the film’s admittedly upbeat ending never really succeeds in purging.

While the film is an amazing achievment on many levels, it’s just not one I was able to genuinely enjoy. It’s so conceptual and rife with allegory that I always felt like an obsever, eager for the story to wrap it up so I find some emotional rescue back in the real world. There were moments of gloom and sadness in WALL-E, but you always felt completely immersed and enchanted, and the characters felt alive, despite their mechanized natures. Inside Outis ultimately too abstract and maudlin to be counted among Toy Story, Finding Nemo, Wall-E, Up and The Incredibles as Pixar’s best. For me, it’s one those films that while I’m happy to acknowledge as great, I just couldn’t enjoy. 

House Swearengen: Ian McShane joins Game of Thrones

Now this is some great casting news. Ian McShane of Deadwood fame, is returning to HBO to appear on their colossal phenom series Game of Thrones. 

 

According to HBO, the role calls for a relatively small amount of screen time, but one that's considered pivotal. Theories can now commence, but it's worth considering that one of the season six casting breakdowns was for a role called "Father," described as  “Aged 50’s to 60’s, one of the greatest soldiers in Westeros- a humorless martinet, severe and intimidating. He demands martial discipline in the field and in his home. It’s described as “a very good part” for next year and that he’s “centrally involved” in a protagonist’s storyline.” 

Which has got more than a few enthusiasts thinking this part will turn out to be Sam's father, Randyll Tarley. The head of House Tarley is said to be a fierce, iron-willed battle commander and keeper of Heartsbane, an ancestral sword of Valyrian steel. He could also easily be one of the Greyjoys. 

At this point it's anyone's guess, but if you're a Deadwood fan, you're likely jumping up and down with glee. McShane is a tremendous actor and will bring a tremendous presence and weight to any character he inhabits. What a superb addition to a mysterious and uncharted new season!