The Bold Adaptation of Cheryl Strayed’s Wild for the Screen
There is a moment in Cheryl Strayed’s memoir “Wild” where she has it out with her mother while hiking in Crater Lake National Park, Oregon—only by this point, her mother is dead, and the reckoning is with Strayed's own grief and anger on what would have been her mother's fiftieth birthday. Strayed catalogued some of the worsts things her mother had done, with dying at forty-five being the worst of the worst. These included occasionally smoking pot in front of her and her siblings,
Extreme Personalities: Four Fall Films About People on the Edge
Sociopaths, addicts, battle fatigued soldiers trying to hold onto their humanity—yup, summer blockbuster season is just about over. The fall is packed with films everyone's excited about, from Christopher Nolan's Interstellar to David Fincher's Gone Girl. Here are four films we're looking forward to that involve people dealing with extremes, internally and externally.
Whiplash – October 10
“There are a lot of movies about the joy of music,”
BK 101: How International Cast & Crew of The Drop Studied Brooklyn
A Belgian, a Brit and a Swede walk into a Brooklyn bar. This is either the beginning of that rare joke involving Belgians and Swedes, or, it's exactly what was happening when the cast and crew behind The Drop were working their butts off to become credible Brooklynites while prepping for the crime thriller. Directed by the Belgian Michaël Roskam, and starring Tom Hardy (British) and Noomi Rapace (Swedish), much of the cast and a good number of the crew are from outside the U.S.,
Saying Goodbye to James Gandolfini in The Drop
James Gandolfini’s final film performance can be seen this September 12 in The Drop, directed by Michaël Roskam. The script, the first by master crime writer Dennis Lehane, is based on his short story “Animal Rescue.” Gandolfini plays Cousin Marv, a once formidable Brooklyn heavy who now runs his namesake bar, a place that does a little more than provide drinks to thirsty locals. Cousin Marv’s place is a also a ‘drop bar,’
Agent Knox vs. Eli Thompson:Boardwalk Empire’s Brian Geraghty on Season 4 Finale
Spoiler alert. For those of you not caught up with Boardwalk Empire, do not watch the video or read the below.
In one corner, you've got Agent Warren Knox (Brian Geraghty), the young comer at the Bureau of Investigation whose clean shaven baby face belies a murderer's malice. In the other corner stands Eli Thompson (Shea Whigham), little brother to Atlantic City's crime boss Nucky Thompson (Steve Buscemi), a former police chief,
The Cast of The Giver on Bringing the Book to Life on Screen
The film adaptation of The Giver has been a long time coming. In fact, it has been in the works for 18 years since Jeff Bridges found out about the Newbery Medal winning book while searching for a part for his dad, Lloyd Bridges, to play. Unfortunately, his father since passed away in 1998, but Bridges was already engaged with the book and the idea of a movie.
“I said,
International Cast & Crew Cook Up The Hundred-Foot Journey
Sitting in the theater of the Museum of the Moving Image, everyone eagerly awaits the arrival of Bollywood icon Om Puri. Located in Astoria, Queens, the recent renovations at the museum added this 267-seat theater for events such as this, where locals and tourists alike can take in great films and sit for interviews with legends they likely have never heard of. Om Puri is here to be interviewed by Indian actress and author,
Fall Films Show Family Affairs Gone Bad (and Beyond)
As we look ahead to fall, we see several intriguing films coming out that focus, in one way or another, on family. While every year brings plenty of movies that focus on family matters, this year boasts what might be the single most astonishing film about a family ever created—Richard Linklater's masterpiece Boyhood. This gorgeous, meditative dance with time exposed the beauty, love, hardship and turmoil of one single family over 12-years, a feat of filmmaking that is all the more breathtaking for being in the service of a film that actually moves you. This fall’s family-centered films are a touch darker,
Space Creators: Building the Guardians of the Galaxy
James Gunn's Guardians of the Galaxy opens on Earth, where a young Peter Quill sits alone in a hospital corridor, listening to his walkman. Prop master Barry Gibbs lead the search for the perfect cassette player, which took four months of internet searching and yielded only 16 cassette players in various states of disrepair that would be suitable for the film. Every detail in the film was chosen on purpose, often at great effort. In our opening scene,
Playing With Fire: Chadwick Boseman is James Brown in Get On Up
Some lives seem almost too perfectly suited to be portrayed on the big screen. The larger-than-life figures whose existences seem endlessly dramatic, enjoying the highest highs—success, adoration, fame, fortune, romance, and the lowest lows—shame, disgrace, and the specter of death. These individuals often turn out to be nearly impossible to portray successfully on screen. For every winning portrayal of an icon (Denzel Washington as Malcolm X, for example), there’s a dozen or more than seem to suffer from the responsibility of plausibly portraying an outsized personality,
Comic-Con 2014: A Snapshot of Films, Panels & Events
Comic-Con and its overflowing abundance is upon us once again. We’ll help guide you through the costumed chaos with a selection of offerings from top movie studios, the “only at Comic-Con” events, and our own wish list of events.
Major Studio Showings:
Thursday, July 24
11:15am Toy Story That Time Forgot (Disney)
If the words “you’ve got a friend in me” set your heart aflutter,
Summer’s Pleasant Surprises
For those in the film prognostication business, this summer’s been a bit baffling. Many people assumed Tom Cruise’s Edge of Tomorrow would be a bust, and, regardless of it’s box office numbers, the film has been a critical smash. And Emily Blunt, Cruise’s ass-kicking co-star, is perhaps the most unexpected action hero of the summer.
It wasn’t terribly surprising that X-Men: Days of Future Past would be so good,
Evolving Man into Ape: Simian Choreographer & Actor Terry Notary
This summer’s most highly anticipated sequel, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, packs a serious blockbuster punch: it has state-of-the-art digital effects, sweeping apocalyptic scenes, and a cast and crew of thousands. But one man alone is responsible for the most crucial element of the film—teaching actors to convincingly portray apes.
Actor and movement coach Terry Notary is Hollywood’s resident go-to ape expert,
Comedy Power Couple: Ben Falcone & Melissa McCarthy Make Tammy
The Groundlings, the legendary improv group based in Los Angeles, recently celebrated their fortieth anniversary. This milestone coincides nicely with today's release of Tammy, a film created by two of their alums, Melissa McCarthy and Ben Falcone. The two met in the group (subsequently married), and are now poised to become the new power couple of comedy, joining Judd Apatow and Leslie Mann in the funny and married pantheon.
McCarthy and Falcone’s history of hysterical chemistry that began in the Groundlings and has carried on through the years in smaller projects,
From Stage to Screen: Adapting Jersey Boys
Jersey Boys is the story of the rise and fall of The Four Seasons, the “clean-cut,” all-American rock band that actually had two ex-cons and enough mob connections to satisfy a Scorsese film. Yet in the early 1960s the band sold themselves as the (Jersey) boys next door, and created some deathless tunes in the process.
Jersey Boys began it’s life, of course, as the Tony Award-winning juggernaut that became the 13th longest-running show in Broadway history when it played its 3,487th performance this past April 9th.
Father’s Day With the Lannisters: Game of Thrones Thrilling Finale
An absolute ton of spoilers below. Just a ton. Don't read if you're not caught up.
The end of the penultimate episode of Game of Thrones, “The Watchers on the Wall,” saw Jon Snow leaving Castle Black after surviving the first onslaught of Mance Rayder’s Wildling army. Giants, mammoths, Wildlings and Crows were strewn inside and outside the wall, dead and soon to be burned. Jon was leaving, alone, without his sword and,
Chatting With Greer Grammer of MTV’s hit Series Awkward
Greer Grammer knows a thing or two about multitasking. The young actress, currently shooting the fourth season of MTV’s breakout scripted drama Awkward, is also making her way through her junior year at the University of Southern California. This sometimes means being on set until 5 a.m., returning to her apartment for two hours of sleep and then heading off to class. The theater major’s not complaining, however. Having nabbed a regular role on the critically acclaimed Awkward,
Sticking the Landing: 22 Jump Street‘s a Sequel Worth Seeing
21 Jump Street, directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (the duo behind this year’s The LEGO Movie), came out in 2012 and was something of an unlikely smash hit. Unlikely in its odd couple lead pairing (comedy vet Jonah Hill and action-Adonis Channing Tatum), and unlikely in that there seemed to be little reason to reprise Stephen J. Cannell’s television series from the late 80s, remembered mostly as an early vehicle for Johnny Depp.
Damon Lindelof Returns to TV to for HBO’s The Leftovers
“Two percent doesn’t sound like much, but, two percent of the entire planet, of every person on it, that’s more than the world’s ten largest cities combined. That’s more than every death from every war in the 20th century. If every one of those people joined hands, they’d wrap around the world six times. It’s one hundred and forty million people. And like that…they were gone.”
The above quote comes from one of the clever,
Comedy Central’s Growing Roster of Female Showstoppers
If you haven’t watched any of Inside Amy Schumer on Comedy Central, you should start doing so immediately. Far from coming out of nowhere (Schumer’s been on Comedy Central in several capacities over the years, and finished fourth on NBC's Last Comic Standing), there are still many people in the country who haven’t heard of her, so watching her show can feel like witnessing the sudden birth of the total comedy package—like a foul-mouthed,
