Thomas Haden Church Talks War Dogs, More in Max
Here’s a little known fact about actor/director/writer Thomas Haden Church: Following memorable turns on television (Wings) and in film (Free Money), he stepped away from acting in late 2000 and left Los Angeles for his 2,000-acre cattle ranch in his native Texas. It was director Alexander Payne who lured him back to the screen with a plum part in 2004’s sleeper indie hit Sideways, which paired him with Paul Giamatti on an eventful road trip through the California wine country...
Feeling the Music of Fargo With Composer Jeff Russo
You would have been excused for wondering how in the world the folks behind FX's Fargo were going to take a classic Coen Brothers film and turn it into a viable television series. The challenge of adapting something beloved is hard enough when what you're adapting is a book, but to take an award winning and critically acclaimed film and turn it into a television series? That takes guts.
One of the ways in which ...
Dope Debuts in Theaters After Smashing Sundance Premiere
One of the buzziest crowd-pleasers to come out of Sundance, Dope tells the story of Malcolm, a 90s hip-hop obsessed geek from Inglewood with dreams of studying at Harvard. After a wild night there’s suddenly a backpack of drugs standing in his way and only his two nerdy friends to help him offload them. (Hint: their plan involves bitcoin).
We talk to writer-director Rick Famuyiwa, who grew up in Inglewood, about making his fourth feature film and how he recruited Pharrell Williams for the soundtrack...
How Inside Out Writer Meg LeFauve Created An Emotional Battle Inside The Mind
Inside Out comes with all the classic marks of a great Pixar movie. An all-ages storyline? Check. Beautiful animation paired with an unexpected, off-kilter premise? Check. Tears? Check and check.
The story takes place inside the mind of Riley, a pre-teen girl whose family moves from Minnesota to San Francisco, a transition that unleashes a flurry of upheaval among her five main emotions: Joy, Sadness, Fear, Anger and Disgust.
Before the move,...
Battle of the Titans: Robert Gordon on William Buckley vs. Gore Vidal in Best of Enemies
Playing at the BAMcineamaFest in Brooklyn and AFI Docs in Los Angeles tonight, Magnolia Pictures' Best of Enemies is a riveting behind-the-scenes account of the explosive 1968 televised debates between liberal Gore Vidal and conservative William F. Buckley Jr., where these two intellectual heavyweights clobbered each other over their views about God, sex, and politics.
We spoke with co-director and producer Robert Gordon about how this film came to be,...
Questions About Game of Thrones‘ Season Five Finale
The following speculation on what really happened in the season five finale contains sundry spoilers, and was written by someone who has not read the books.
In order to prepare for Game of Thrones season finale, I re-watched “Dance of Dragons” in an effort to prepare for what we all knew was going to be a bloody finale. I stupidly hoped that by purifying myself with the pain of Princess Shireen of House Baretheon’s death,...
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...
Katniss is Done Giving Speeches:The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2 Trailer
“Ladies and gentleman welcome to the 76th Hunger Games.” We just got our first look at the new trailer for Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2 and the word that comes to mind is payback. Of all the mega-jerks in the suite of dystopian films we've seen in the past few years, none are as sneeringly obnoxious as President Snow(Donald Sutherland).
The new trailer starts with an enormous, glamorous wedding filled with celebration, but the tension is immediately palpable with the rebellion lurking beneath the glittering surfaces of the capitol...
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,...
Getting Gut-Punched by Game of Thrones “Dance of Dragons”
If you haven't watched last night's episode, read no further.
Well, the moment fans have been dreading for two seasons finally came to pass last night, and it was even worse than we feared: Stannis Baretheon gave in to Melisandre and had his lovely, doomed daughter Shireen killed. And not just killed, but burned alive. In a show that’s had it’s fair share (and other show’s fair shares, really a ton of shares here) of brutal deaths, Shireen’s was,...
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,...
