Behind the Sets of Saturday Night Live with Veteran Designer Eugene Lee
78-year old Eugene Lee skipped out on his MFA from Yale (they later awarded him the degree) to design the Tony award winning set for Candide on Broadway. Lee humbly recalls that his sets caught the eye of “some guy” from NBC who requested a meeting. “You know, I thought, ‘Well, I don’t know anything about television, but what’s the harm?’” Lee said. “So I made the appointment, went to New York, knocked on the door. Nice young guy,...
Check out the Nasty Alien in This Life “Restricted” Trailer
Intended for restricted audiences, the new trailer for Sony’s Life isn’t holding back. Veering away from the film’s first official trailer, this one is decidedly less optimistic, and much more terror-inducing, speaking to screenwriters Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick's love of Ridley Scott's Alien.
Starring Ryan Reynolds (Deadpool, Green Lantern), Jake Gyllenhaal (Donnie Darko, Brokeback Mountain) and Rebecca Ferguson (The Girl on the Train,...
SXSW 2017: The Strange Ones Directors Play With Your Perceptions
Christopher Radcliff and Lauren Wolkstein’s feature-length debut The Strange Ones is a slow burning, twisted coming-of-age story co-starring Alex Pettyfer and 14 year old James Freedson-Jackson, who won SXSW’s Special Jury Prize for breakthrough performance. He’s immensely deserving of the accolade, delivering a performance of almost unnerving poise for a 14-year-old actor. It had begun its life as a short six years ago.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K86nhhNV058
The feature film opens with two brothers on the run...
The Music of the Emotional First Season of This is Us
This is Us was this year’s break out show that everyone can’t stop crying about. The first season came to its heart-wrenching conclusion last night, but fans didn’t witness the death of Jack Pearson (Milo Ventimiglia) as previous episodes hinted they might. What could be an overly saccharin family melodrama becomes a tightly woven emotional power punch thanks to sincere performances and a thoughtful score by Siddhartha Khosla. Founder of the band Goldspot, Khosla’s music navigates each episode through every dramatic twist over the span of the show’s four decade setting...
Rogue One Director Gareth Edwards on Getting Away With That Ending
If you haven’t seen Rogue One: A Star Wars Story by now, well, we hope your return from the International Space Station is a safe one. We’re about to talk about the film’s ending, so please, look away.
Okay, for the rest of us, SlashFilm has an interview with Rogue One’s director, Gareth Edwards, in which he discusses the film’s literally explosive ending...
Pixar Unveils Trailer for Upcoming Feature Coco
Amidst a climate where sequels and revivals are all at once safe, enjoyable and profitable, Pixar is getting original, in more ways than one.
Disney released the film’s first delightfully-vibrant teaser trailer Wednesday. Coco follows the story of Miguel (newcomer Anthony Gonzalez), a 12-year-old boy living in a Mexican village, who grows up in a family of shoemakers but yearns to be a musician. He discovers a hidden link between himself and his favorite late singer,...
Warner Bros. Eyeing The Matrix Reboot
Here’s the pitch: your life and indeed the entire world around you is a simulation. All of the bad, awful stuff (and the good, even great stuff) that you experience is simulated, while your actual body is encased (entombed, really) in a pod, and your actual life is about nothing more than providing energy to a vast, brutal regime. This, of course, is The Matrix, which became one of the most original films of a generation (and is now often bandied about as having been a possible documentary,...
SXSW 2017: Mark Weber’s Genre-Defying Stunner Flesh and Blood
In his label-defying fourth film as director, actor/writer/director Mark Weber (Green Room, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World) has delivered a subtly powerful shot to the heart with Flesh and Blood. Calling the film “reality cinema,” Weber has turned the camera on his mother, Cheri Honkala, his half-brother Guillermo Santos, and himself, turning his unconventional upbringing and tight-knit, highly atypical family into a moving portrait of a uniquely American story. In fact, the only person in the film who doesn’t play a version of themselves is Weber’s real-life partner,...
SXSW 2017: Karen Skloss on her Mind-Bending Prom Thriller The Honor Farm
Prom. For some kids, it’s the night of their young lives. For most everybody else, it’s kind of a let down, a bunch of hype for what turns out to be a fairly forgettable dance, rented tuxedos and dresses you’ll never wear again, and the realization that riding around in the back of a limo can be a nauseous affair. For the characters in writer/director Karen Skloss’s The Honor Farm, however, prom is the beginning to a trippy,...
Fans Rejoice Over Doctor Who Season 10 Trailer
For Doctor Who fans, the trailer for season 10’s premiere is like manna from outer space. One of the most popular sci-fi shows ever created, with more than 53 years of Doctor Who absurdity and delight, Doctor Who is beloved by generations of fans. For the new season, BBC teases the new villains and the far-out adventures awaiting the good doctor, played by the beloved Peter Capaldi, who reprises his role and is joined by a host of new companions...
The Odds are Rough in new Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 TV Spot
We’ve got some fresh footage from Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2. Walt Disney Pictures and Marvel Studios have released a new TV spot.
The new spot looks at the tough odds always up against our Guardians, and, with the trouble some folks are having (cough Nebula cough) with the team’s name in the first place. The humor’s there, per usual, and once again Drax (Dave Bautista) steals snippet of a scene we see him in...
Chatting With Beauty and the Beast Director Bill Condon
Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, which opens this week, is a many-splendored thing. The studio’s latest supersized live-action 3-D rendering of an animated classic is a digitally gilded feast for the eyes. It’s also a family blockbuster that provides Emma Watson with her best acting showcase since the Harry Potter franchise. And this brand-name fairy tale about a romance that blossoms between spirited bibliophile Belle and a rage-filled prince turned into a hulking creature by a curse is poised to become a box-office record breaker if pre-sales and trailer views are any indication...
SXSW 2017: Charlize Theron Goes Off in Atomic Blonde
Stunt coordinator and John Wick director David Leitch might have found an even more perfect vessel for his hyperstylized, ingenuously crafted action films than Keanu Reeves in Atomic Blonde’s ferocious Charlize Theron. Having already proven her mettle as a credibly kick-ass heroine in George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road, Theron cements her status as the current era’s greatest female action star, a status once enjoyed by Angelina Jolie,...
SXSW 2017: Bill Pullman Takes Charge in The Ballad of Lefty Brown
Bill Pullman (Independence Day) thrilled SXSW fans as the title character of The Ballad of Lefty Brown. Director Jared Moshe’s full fledged western adventure was tender, complex and beautifully shot. Lefty is (ironically) the right hand man to the seasoned and confident Senator Johnson (Peter Fonda.) Johnson is the old school John Wayne-esque hero you would expect to take the lead. However, when Lefty becomes the only witness to the Senator’s assassination,...
SXSW 2017: Edgar Wright’s Baby Driver Delivers
Edgar Wright's Baby Driver opens with one of the best action set pieces in years. Baby (The Fault in our Stars' Ansel Elgort) sits behind the wheel of a super powered Subaru. We stay with Baby as he listens to Jon Spencer Blues Explosion’s “Bellbottoms,” while inside the bank only a few feet away, the crew of bank robbers he’s driving getaway for are doing their work. When they come bursting out of the bank and hustling back into the car,...
Wonder Woman‘s Official Trailer Packs a Mean Punch
Warner Bros. released our first glimpse of baby Wonder Woman and she’s an adorable, pint sized badass. As she is taught the ways of her Amazon culture, baby Diana is told that she’ll never be great, but her smirk reveals she won’t listen to the naysayers. The trailer shows an intense all female battle training that culminates in her first super display of power. Director Patty Jenkins’ and star Gal Gadot are delivering the first major film to feature Wonder Woman,...
SXSW 2017: Sam Elliott Shines in The Hero
Last night we caught The Hero, and couldn’t help but feel that the film’s star could be a patron saint to the festival. Even though Sam Elliott was born in California, the lanky, golden-voiced icon oozes the kind of subtle, thoughtful masculinity that seems in short supply these days. And The Hero was written for specifically for him. You can feel the respect that the filmmakers and his fellow costars have for him throughout the movie...
SXSW 2017: Terrence Malick’s Song to Song
Much has been made about writer/director Terrence Malick’s two-decade break from filmmaking. Those years were largely spent in Austin, where his latest stunner, Song to Song, is set. There is no one quite like Malick, from his very first film, Badlands, starring Sissy Spacek and Martin Sheen as two young killers on the run, Malick took a story that we’d heard before (a road trip movie with killers—think Bonnie and Clyde),...
Michael Fassbender’s Robot Takes Center Stage in New Alien: Covenant Featurette
Ridley Scott’s Prometheus had several things going for it (most crucially, the director’s return to one of his signature franchises), and one of those Michael Fassbender’s robot David. Brilliant, cunning, and programmed for treachery, David was arguably the prime mover in Prometheus, and only one of two characters still standing (sort of) at the film’s end. The last we saw of him, Noomi Rapace’s Elizabeth Shaw was sipping his severed head (still talking) into a duffel bag as the two take off to find the Engineer’s home planet...
SXSW 2017: 5 Narrative Features We’re Excited About
We’re once again down in Austin for South by Southwest, bringing you news, interviews and reactions. SXSW is arguably the most film geek friendly of all the major fests, giving everyone from auteur-loving AFI grads to horror fans (and everyone in between) something to enjoy. In fact, most of the folks who flock to Austin are polyamorous when it comes to their film tastes, and SXSW’s programming has always been open to high brow, low brow, and chainsaw-in-the-brow—their midnight horror movies are some of the bloody best...
