Aligning Past, Present & Future in Terminator Genisys
Director Alan Taylor and writers Laeta Kalogridis and Patrick Lussier had a lot to juggle when they went to work on Terminator Genisys. With the four previous Terminator films and their corkscrewing stories, the filmmakers had to find a way to honor the universe the franchise has already built while setting off on their own, singular path. At what part of the saga of man's battle with machines would they pick up, when the travails of Sarah and John Connor and the Terminators sent to both destroy and protect them have been so thoroughly intertwined over the course of those four films,...
The Real Science Behind Matt Damon’s Troubles in The Martian
In Ridley Scott’s new film The Martian, Matt Damon plays Mark Watney, an astronaut who is marooned on Mars after a brutal storm separates him from the rest of his crew. (This is the second film in two years that has seen Damon marooned on a hostile planet—it happened to him in 2014's Interstellar). He is presumed dead, considering the soonest his comrades could possibly return to save him is in four years,...
Jurassic World & the Science Behind Making a Dinosaur
C’mon science, it’s more than 20 years since the first Jurassic Park came out, why don’t we have dinosaurs running amok yet? The movies, based on Michael Crichton’s sci-fi novel of the same name, basically laid a road-map for you to bring the huge, prehistoric creatures back from extinction. You just need a dino-blood loving mosquito trapped in amber for at least 65 million years and boom, there’s your genetic material right there. Clone away!
Well,...
Meet the Crew That Worked on Both Jurassic Park & Jurassic World
Universal's new Jurassic World is being heralded as a proper folllow-up to Steven Spielberg's 1993 classic Jurassic Park, the film that raised the bar for what CGI could accomplish and blew the minds of kids and adults alike. When director Colin Trevorrow took the helm of Jurassic World, the first film in the franchise in 14-years, both he and executive producer Steven Spielberg wanted to recapture the magic of that first film...
A Look at the Career of Brian Eno, Me and Earl and The Dying Girl‘s Composer
Tell me about a new Brian Eno record – one he recorded, wrote and/or produced – and yeah, I’ll hear it. What, he made a mobile app? Hold the phone. He has a new art installation? Take me. A deck of cards? A published diary?
You get it: I’m pro-Eno, 24/7.
This week another Eno project arrives in the form of an indie film score...
Broadway Meets Hollywood at the Tony’s
On Sunday night the American Theater Wing celebrated the Tony Awards. This star studded celebration showcased Broadway’s best with larger than life performances from this year’s top musicals, plays and revivals. But the Tony’s are also a celebration of film as the two are inextricably linked, both currently and historically.
The connection between Broadway and film dates back the first “talkies.” The musical film, The Jazz Singer, released in 1927 is considered the first motion picture with synchronized dialogue sequences,...
Me and Earl and The Dying Girl Director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon
Director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon has faced rejection before in the movie business. In 2014, his horror film The Town that Dreaded Sundown was only released in a few theaters nationwide and then went straight to video on demand. He wanted a chance for that film to build an audience but never had the opportunity. The Texas born filmmaker had steadily worked his way up through the ranks, starting as a personal assistant for some of Hollywood's biggest stars (Nora Ephron,...
Listen to the Work of American Horror Story: Freak Show‘s Composer
It’s not like composer Mac Quayle got into this line of work exclusively to score seriously demented moments, but the Grammy® nominated musician has done just that for one of TV’s most wild shows. Quayle has written music for more than 30 films and television shows, and has made a name for himself as a dance re-mixer and multi-instrumentalist, but you might have encountered his work most recently on FX’s hit series American Horror Story: Freak Show...
Is Tom Cruise’s Plane Stunt in the new Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation his Craziest?
Tom Cruise’s stunt exploits are legendary, and in Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, he might of completed his most insane stunt ever. Cruise hung off the side of a an Airbus A400M as it rose 5,000 feet in the air above the British countryside. Is this Cruise’s stunt masterpiece, and can it ever be topped?
Previously, in Mission: Impossible 2 (in which he tore a shoulder muscle jumping between rocks), and with the help of some wires and upper body strength,...
Melissa McCarthy Continues Tradition of Screwball Spy Comedies in Grand Fashion
In writer-director Paul Feig’s Spy, Melissa McCarthy takes the reins as the latest bumbling protagonist in that tried and tested movie genre: the spy comedy. McCarthy plays CIA desk-jockey Susan Cooper who is unexpectedly called up to go undercover in the field. (See our interview with stunt coordinator J.J. Perry here about turning McCarthy into a proper, butt-kicking spy.)
Unlike the slick, womanizing James Bond, who navigates his way through each world-saving assignment improbably unruffled,...
Suffragette: “We Don’t Want to be Lawbreakers, We Want to be Lawmakers”
"All my life I've been doing what men told me. Well, I can't have that anymore."
So says Maud (Carey Mulligan), a laundress who joins an activist group bravely agitating for women's right to vote. The recently released trailer has action, violence, bombs, politics, power, and a thumping score…the stuff of female focused movie trailers? Yes; director (Sarah Gavron Brick Lane) and writer (Abi Morgan, The Iron Lady) are bucking convention in the trailer for their historical drama ...
Down the Rabbit Hole: Why Inside Out is Unlike Any Other Pixar Film
Their story creation process at Pixar is notoriously labor intensive and exacting. The men and women behind these films craft their narratives for years (and years), until they are satisfied they are telling the best version of that story possible.
Pete Docter, the director of Pixar’s latest, Inside Out, knows better than anyone what it takes to pass Pixar muster. Docter was the co-writer of the original treatment of Toy Story, along with Andrew Stanton and John Lasseter,...
Where to Watch Great Films Outdoors Around the Country
It is going to be a beautiful late spring/summer week. We can’t think of a more amazing way to enjoy the intersection of art and astronomy than by watching a film under the stars. Many cities and towns have wonderful outdoor movie programs (many of which are free). For example, if you were in NYC last Friday, you could have taken the family to see Space Jam at Frederick B Judge Playground in Queens. This Friday in New York,...
Summer is Here, so are the Hot, New Flicks
The official start of summer may be June 21st (summer solstice), but we've already had our engines revved and our worlds destroyed at the cinema recently. This past weekend we were treated to the release of two very disparate but entertaining films, Warner Bros. San Andreas, starring perhaps Dwayne Johnson, our reigning action king (it was only this past April Johnson co-starred in the critical and commercial darling, Universal Pictures' Furious 7) and Sony Pictures' ...
Spy’s Stunt Coordinator on Melissa McCarthy’s Butt Kicking
A chance introduction to Jean-Claude Van Damme in the late ‘80s led to Spy’s stunt coordinator J.J. Perry’s long career in the movies. Perry, who was on the Atlanta set of Ang Lee’s latest film Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk when we spoke, has worked on countless films, including Divergent, Transformers: Age of Extinction and Warrior. He tells The Credits about how he battled to make sure he sent Spy’s star Melissa McCarthy,...
5 Ideas on Andy Serkis’s Stars Wars: The Force Awakens Character
The internet was aflame with fresh news about Star Wars: The Force Awakens—the reveal of Andy Serkis’s character, one Supreme Leader Snoke, and the Vanity Fair photo by Annie Leibovitz of Serkis in his performance capture gear.
There is really no more information about Serkis’s character, but of course that hasn’t stopped people, including us, from speculating. Take the featured image above—might that figure on the stage behind the Stormtroopers be Serkis's character?...
From Rolling Stone To Aloha: The Odyssey of Cameron Crowe
The story of Aloha is, to grossly simplify it, about a man torn between a woman he thought he had moved beyond and a woman who might be his future. Military contractor Brian Gilcrest (Bradley Cooper) returns to Honolulu, Hawaii, which is the site of his greatest career triumph, and reconnects with a former love (Rachel McAdams). Because he’s at a military site, he’s assigned an Air Force minder (Emma Stone), who he begins to fall for. Because this is a Cameron Crowe movie,...
How’d They Film That? Inside the Fault Lines on San Andreas
When your film is about the San Andreas fault giving way and a magnitude 9-plus earthquake turning California into so many dominoes and sinkholes, decimating cities and their historic landmarks, you’re going to need some serious CGI. Yet you’d be surprised how much of San Andreas was shot in camera, using practical stunts and a lot of old fashioned movie magic (and a whole lot of chutzpah from the stunt professionals). The film may be about a natural disaster,...
10 Deadly Design Flaws in Jurassic World‘s Theme Park
Ever since the first park opened its' gates 22 years ago in Steven Spielberg's classic Jurassic Park, a part of the appeal of the series is predicting how the dinosaurs are going to break out of their enclosures. In the original, it was the hubris of park creator John Hammond (Richard Attenborough), a bad storm, and the treachery of the park's computer coder Dennis Nedry (Wayne Knight, Newman!) that sprung the T. Rex and the raptors...
Details on Jurassic World, Questions About Game of Thrones & More
A few things on our minds that we'd love your feedback on, including excitement over Jurassic World, frustration with a certain awful someone on Game of Thrones, and hope for an upcoming comedy. Let us know what we've missed and what you think on the below.
Jurassic World's Indominus Rex is not only a crazy hybrid dinosaur but also a sly jab at our insatiable appetite for the next big thing...
