Peacemaker (John Cena) is going through some changes when the HBO Max series bearing his name begins. A spinoff from James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad, Peacemaker finds the beefy brute who became that film’s villain questioning his entire worldview. That worldview is simple; peace, at all costs, no matter who Peacemaker has to kill. In the film, Peacemaker ended up in a duel with Bloodsport (Idris Elba), his ostensible ally, and revealed himself to be as broken as his belief system. As Peacemaker begins, our jacked proto-fascist isn’t so sure his way of doing things is the right way, but don’t tell that to his unwanted best friend, Vigilante (Freddie Stroma). In a new behind-the-scenes video released by HBO Max, Vigilante believes that he and Peacemaker are hardcore BFFs, and thinks everything Peacemaker does is the best. That makes one of them.
This new look at Gunn’s series offers plenty of clues as to its tone. It’s a violent comedy, much like The Suicide Squad, but one with a sneaky soft side, also like The Suicide Squad. Cena’s central character is sprung from jail after surviving the events of The Suicide Squad because the government expects him to start killing for them again. Yet, per the above, he’s not so sure. The realization that killing your way to peace might be a paradox he’s no longer comfortable with seems like it’ll be the emotional fulcrum around which the series will turn.
There are a few other faces from The Suicide Squad you’ll see in Peacemaker—Jennifer Holland as Emilia Harcourt and Steve Agee as John Economos. Newcomers include Danielle Brooks as Leota Adebayo, Chukwudi Iwuji as Clemson Murn, and Robert Patrick as Peacemaker’s father. There’s also a bald eagle. His name, of course, is Eagle-y.
This new behind-the-scene look suggests what the most recent trailer promised; that Cena’s beefy brute is ready to wise up. Yet his BFF Vigilante thinks he’s already perfect, and their dynamic will no doubt be one of the ongoing gags in the series.
Peacemaker arrives on HBO Max this January 13. Check out the new video below.
Adam McKay and Jennifer Lawrence are just getting started. The writer/director and the star of the upcoming film Don’t Look Upare re-teaming for Bad Blood, a feature film about infamous Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, for Apple Original Films.
McKay, ever the auteur, will write, direct, and produce the film, with Lawrence playing Holmes, a woman whose incredible ascension into the ranks of Silicon Valley’s most promising and successful young innovators was only outdone by her swift, spectacular fall. Holmes founded Theranos when she was a mere 19-years-old, and her company made a big, very exciting promise; it would revolutionize the health care industry with its bespoke, breakthrough blood-testing technology. The technology was an automated device that required only a very tiny amount of blood, which could then be tested rapidly, painlessly, and cheaply, promising colossal benefits for the entire world. The tech didn’t work, however. This came to light thanks to reporting in the Wall Street Journal, and Holmes went from being a billionaire to having virtually nothing seemingly overnight. But her problems were only just beginning, and most of those problems, it seems, were self-made. What followed were lawsuits and sanctions, and Theranos was eventually dissolved in late 2018. Holmes is currently standing trial on fraud charges.
Clearly, there’s a lot of dramatic potential here—so much so, in fact, there’s already been an HBO documentary, The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley, as well as podcasts and endless articles. McKay’s film will be based on investigative journalist John Carreyrou’s book “Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in Silicon Valley.” Carreyrou broke the initial story for the Wall Street Journal. Apple Studios and Legendary Pictures will produce. Bad Blood will join a few other big titles for Apple, namely, Martin Scorsese’s upcoming Killers of the Flower Moon, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, and Antoine Fuqua’s Emancipation, starring Will Smith.
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Featured image: HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA – JUNE 04: Jennifer Lawrence attends the premiere of 20th Century Fox’s “Dark Phoenix” at TCL Chinese Theatre on June 04, 2019 in Hollywood, California. (Photo by Rich Fury/Getty Images)
Buckle up, Shang-Chi fans—a sequel to Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings is officially happening, with director Destin Daniel Cretton returning to write and helm. Want more good news on this front? Cretton is also developing a Marvel series for Disney+.
For those of you who loved Shang-Chi (and we are legion), and are especially excited for what the future holds for the character after that post-credits scene with his equally potent sister, Xialing (played by the excellent Meng’er Zhang), the sequel was not only necessary but so, too, was bringing back Cretton to direct. Variety confirms that the director has signed a multi-year overall deal with Marvel Studios and Hulu’s Onyx Collective, which will give Cretton the chance to develop TV projects for Marvel Studios on Disney+ and the Onyx Collective for Hulu and other platforms.
Shang-Chi was the first MCU film to feature an Asian lead and a mostly Asian cast, with Simu Liu in the title role, Awkwafina as his best friend Katy, the aforementioned Meng’er Zhang as his sister Xialing, Tony Leung as his father Wenwu, and Michelle Yeoh as his mother Ying Nan. For those of you who watched the post-credits scene involving Zhang’s Xialing, you saw (spoiler alert) that after helping Shang-Chi defeat their father, it looks as if Xialing has taken up her father’s now empty throne at the top of the Ten Rings criminal syndicate. This means there might be a sibling battle coming in Shang-Chi 2.
“Destin is an amazing collaborator who brought a unique perspective and skill to ‘Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings,” said Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige in a statement. “We had a fantastic time working together on the film and he has so many intriguing ideas for stories to bring to life on Disney Plus, so we’re thrilled to expand our relationship with him and can’t wait to get started.”
For more on Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, check out these stories:
Varietyhas confirmed that Colin Farrell and HBO Max have made it official, with Farrell set to star in and executive producing a new spinoff series based on his The Batman character Oswald Cobblepot, better known as The Penguin. The series will explore The Penguin’s rise within Gotham’s murky criminal underworld, which is well-known for breeding some of the most legendary villains in the comics world. The series will be written by Lauren LeFranc (Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.) and will be produced by Farrell, The Batman writer/director Matt Reeves, and the film’s producer Dylan Clark. Warner Bros. Television will produce.
If the Penguin series ends up moving forward, this will mark the second The Batman spinoff in the works at HBO Max, with another series set within the Gotham Police Department already in development. That drama has Joe Barton (Giri/Haji, Encounter) attached as showrunner.
HBO Max currently has quite a few live-action DC shows in various stages of development. James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad spinoff Peacemakerstarring John Cena arrives on January 13, 2022, while projects based on the Green Lantern (via Greg Berlanti) and Justice League Dark (via J.J. Abrams and co.) are in the works.
Long before we see Farrell reprise his The Batman role, the main event comes first. The Penguin is but one of the villains in The Batman and doesn’t appear to be Bruce Wayne (Robert Pattinson)’s main adversary in the film. That honor goes to another iconic villain in Batman’s Rogue’s Gallery, The Riddler, played in the film by Paul Dano. The Batman is set to hit theaters on March 4, 2022.
Here’s the official synopsis for The Batman:
Two years of stalking the streets as the Batman (Robert Pattinson), striking fear into the hearts of criminals, has led Bruce Wayne deep into the shadows of Gotham City. With only a few trusted allies—Alfred Pennyworth (Andy Serkis), Lt. James Gordon (Jeffrey Wright)—amongst the city’s corrupt network of officials and high-profile figures, the lone vigilante has established himself as the sole embodiment of vengeance amongst his fellow citizens.
When a killer targets Gotham’s elite with a series of sadistic machinations, a trail of cryptic clues sends the World’s Greatest Detective on an investigation into the underworld, where he encounters such characters as Selina Kyle/aka Catwoman (Zoë Kravitz), Oswald Cobblepot/aka the Penguin (Colin Farrell), Carmine Falcone (John Turturro), and Edward Nashton/aka the Riddler (Paul Dano). As the evidence begins to lead closer to home and the scale of the perpetrator’s plans becomes clear, Batman must forge new relationships, unmask the culprit, and bring justice to the abuse of power and corruption that has long plagued Gotham City.
Featured image: L-r: LOS ANGELES, CA – MARCH 11: Actor Colin Farrell attends the World Premiere of Disney’s “Dumbo” at the El Capitan Theatre on March 11, 2019 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Jesse Grant/Getty Images for Disney); LIVERPOOL, ENGLAND – OCTOBER 13: British actor Robert Pattinson and Irish actor Colin Farrell pictured during filming of The Batman movie which is taking place outside St. George’s Hall, Liverpool, England this week. The Batman is an upcoming American superhero film based on the DC Comics character of the same name. Produced by DC Films and distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures, it is a reboot of the Batman film franchise directed by Matt Reeves. (Photo by Colin McPherson/Getty Images)
“We can’t see it, but we’re all trapped inside these strange repeating loops.” These words, spoken by Morpheus (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) in the opening of the second trailer for The Matrix Resurrections hint at the déjà vu that will haunt Neo (Keanu Reeves) and Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) in Lana Wachowski’s new film. The new trailer packs a punch, offering a more coherent look at the film’s plot and a ton of action.
We know now that Neo’s almost forgotten what he learned about the Matrix, but not entirely. He still has “dreams” he’s convinced aren’t actually dreams, a residue from his epic battle with and within the Matrix still haunts him. In Resurrections, Neo will be recruited once again into the fold of those red pill-taking rebels, led by a young Morpheus, new allies, and old friends like Niobe (Jada Pinkett Smith). It seems Neo’s quest will be centered on his relationship with Trinity. “She believed in me,” Neo says towards the end of the trailer, “it’s my turn to believe in her.” This is said over images of Neo and Trinity in a war against the A.I. that upholds the Matrix artifice and controls the lives all those sleeping, dreaming humans.
Another interesting reveal in the new trailer is that Jonathan Groff’s character appears to be the film’s main villain. There are several shots where he is juxtaposed against Agent Smith (played in the first three films by Hugo Weaving), the original bad guy, and the manifestation of the Matrix’s cruelty. The previous trailer hinted at Groff’s character’s sinister side, but here we see him fully inhabiting the villain persona.
Also of note is just how action-packed this trailer is. Neo isn’t just returning to the Matrix on a quest linked to Trinity, he appears to be joining a war effort. It’s been a long time since we’ve been inside the Matrix, but the impact of the original trilogy is such that we still use the vernacular from the film in our daily lives. A glitch in the Matrix could well describe the bizarre, timeless world we’ve been living in, where days bleed together and only the seasons, themselves no longer as distinct, hint at where in time we are.
Or perhaps that’s just the type of thought that watching this new trailer plants in your mind. It’ll be fun to take another head trip again with Neo, Trinity, and the gang. The Matrix Resurrections hits theaters and HBO Max on December 22.
Check out the new trailer here:
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Featured image: Caption: (L-r) CARRIE-ANNE MOSS as Trinity and KEANU REEVES as Neo/Thomas Anderson in Warner Bros. Pictures, Village Roadshow Pictures and Venus Castina Productions’ “THE MATRIX RESURRECTIONS,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
It’s official—Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige has confirmed that Charlie Cox will be reprising his role of Daredevil for the MCU. Speaking with CinemaBlend, Feige said if there’s a Daredevil inclusion in any future MCU project, it would be Cox again inhabiting the role. Only now, Cox would be moving from the small screen and Netflix into the MCU, whether that’s on a Disney+ show or a Marvel film has yet to be determined, however.
This news would seem to give some credence to the scuttlebutt that Cox will be appearing in the upcoming Spider-Man: No Way Home. Cox has been moderately cagey about his possible appearance as Daredevil in next Spidey flick, but he hasn’t gone out of his way to say that he’s not appearing in the film, either. Just look at what he told Forbes: “I don’t want to ruin anything for fans either way. My answer is, ‘No comment.’ I don’t know what’s going to happen, I genuinely don’t know.”
Not exactly shouting from the rooftops that it’s not happening, now is he? And then there’s Feige, a master of the non-comment, making (for him) a fairly revealing statement about Cox’s return as Daredevil:
“If you were to see Daredevil in upcoming things, Charlie Cox, yes, would be the actor playing Daredevil. Where we see that, how we see that, when we see that, remains to be seen.”
Cox played Matt Murdock in Netflix’s Daredevil for three seasons, from 2015 to 2018. Once Disney+ arrived, Netflix’s various Marvel series were all shuttered, and Cox’s run as Daredevil seemed to be over. Until now.
You could argue that the first nod towards this reveal actually took place on Hawkeye, when the big bad from Daredevil, Kingpin, was hinted at. There are already rumors afloat that the man who played Kingpin in Daredevil, Vincent D’Onofio, is reprising that role as well.
With the multiverse being unleashed in Spider-Man: No Way Home, as well as the upcoming Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, to say nothing of the revisionist magic that happened on WandaVision, there’s a slew of ways for Cox’s Matt Murdock to make his re-appearance in the MCU. But we only have to wait eleven more days to find out if he appears in Spider-Man: No Way Home—the film swings into theaters on December 17.
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At long last, we’ve got our first look at Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. Three years after the gangbusters release of 2018’s sensational Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse we have the reveal of Across the Spider-Verse, the two-part sequel that will track Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) as he reprises his role as Spider-Man—well, one of the Spider-Men in the abundant, gloriously creative animated world that revealed a slew of Spider-People (and a pig) spread across the multiverse.
This opening scene shows Miles in the bedroom he grew up in, listening to music and relaxing when an old friend appears through a portal. That’s Gwen Stacy (Hailee Steinfeld), one of the Spider-People Miles met in his previous adventure. She wants to know if he’d like to get out of his bedroom (and stop drawing pictures of her) and go on another adventure. Naturally, Miles can’t resist.
After Into the Spider-Verse burst onto the scene (and won Oscar for Best Animated Feature Film in the process), it showed how much fun can be hand in the multiverse. Now, three years later, we’ve got Spider-Man: No Way Home swinging into theaters in a few weeks, which will feature supervillains from franchises past unleashed on Peter Parker (Tom Holland) from across the multiverse. The multi-dimensional playground that Into the Spider-Verse made look so fun is now a big part of the larger Spider-Man universe.
Across the Spider-Verse is directed by Joaquim Dos Santos (Voltron: Legendary Defender), Kemp Powers (One Night in Miami), and Justin K. Thompson (Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs). They helm from a script by David Callaham (Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings), and Phil Lord and Chris Miller (The Lego Movie).
Joining Moore and Steinfeld in the sequel are Jake Johnson as Peter Parker and newcomer Issa Rae, joining the cast as Jessica Drew, aka Spider-Woman.
Check out the teaser below. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse hits theaters in October of 2022.
Here’s the official synopsis:
Miles Morales returns for the next chapter of the Oscar®-winning Spider-Verse saga, an epic adventure that will transport Brooklyn’s full-time, friendly neighborhood Spider-Man across the Multiverse to join forces with Gwen Stacy and a new team of Spider-People to face off with a villain more powerful than anything they have ever encountered.
For more upcoming films from Sony Pictures, check out these stories:
We are swinging seriously close to the release date of director Jon Watts’ Spider-Man: No Way Home, and that means fresh details are starting to pile up. For example, this weekend three of the film’s big stars, all reprising their roles as supervillains from previous Spider-Man franchises, gathered for a panel for CCXP. We’re talking about Willem Dafoe, who plays the Green Goblin, Alfred Molina, returning as Doc Ock, and Jamie Foxx, back as Electro. This is the first time these three have spoken publicly about their roles in the film. The panel is a hoot itself, but you’ll also want to catch the new footage, which offers a closer look at Dafoe’s Goblin and his new and improved suit. As Dafoe teases, his Norman Osborne, aka the Goblin, “have a few more tricks up their sleeves.”
In No Way Home, Peter Parker will give these iconic supervillains a new lease on their demented lives by accidentally conjuring them thanks to a spell from Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch). In an attempt to erase the memories of everyone who now knows that Peter Parker is Spider-Man (this is the first time in a film that Peter’s identity has been revealed to everyone), Strange accidentally unleashes and scrambles the multiverse, sending villains from previous franchises into our current Peter Parker’s world. This means Peter is now contending with not one or two supervillains, but at last count, at least five. Three of them, played by these excellent performers, will be a major draw for the film.
Yet these supervillains weren’t just sitting idly by in their respective universes, waiting for a chance to break loose. In fact, Dafoe muses about how his Norman Osborne has been busy, becoming even more technologically advanced since we last saw him. Ditto the suits the actors have to wear themselves, which Dafoe says have become more flexible, comfortable, and form-fitting.
Check out the panel and the new footage below. Spider-Man: No Way Home swings into theaters on December 17.
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Sony Pictures released a rousing, 3-plus minute scene from Morbius over the weekend, revealing the moment Jared Leto’s Dr. Michael Morbius goes from an emaciated, dying man into the superhuman antihero Morbius. The transformation is not without its victims, however. The set-up is this; Dr. Morbius is on a freighter at sea, being helped by fellow doctor Martine Bancroft (Adria Arjona) in a last-ditch effort to save his life. Using a serum that Dr. Morbius has created, Dr. Bancroft straps him into a chair and begins the transfusion. When a nosy security guy barges into the hold where the transfusion is being performed, things begin to go pear-shaped. Dr. Morbius appears to be gone. Closer inspection finds, however, he’s on the ceiling. The security guy doesn’t last a minute, and when the gunshots go off and the entire security detail descends on the lab, all hell breaks loose.
Morbius comes from director Daniel Espinosa, based on a script by Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless. The film will soon join the Venom franchise in Sony’s expanding Spider-Man Universe (once called Sony Pictures Universe of Marvel Characters), offering audiences a potential web of interconnecting stories starring Spidey and the gang of antiheroes.
Dr. Michael Morbius will definitely be the biggest brain among the supes in the Spider-Man Universe. Morbius is a Nobel Prize-winning scientist (compared to Peter Parker, who hasn’t graduated from high school yet, and Tom Hardy’s Eddie Brock, who’s an investigative journalist) who has a rare blood condition he’s been trying to cure himself of for ages. What Dr. Morbius ends up doing, however, evident in this scene, is turn himself into a “living Vampire,” imbued with superhuman abilities but, alas, some nasty tendencies to boot. In a previous trailer, we saw a bit of Dr. Morbius’s post-transformation life, including a glimpse of the “Daily Bugle,” that hometown paper that often covers the exploits of Spider-Man, showing that Morbius has been arrested for “vampire murder.” In this scene, however, we’re right there at the beginning when the good doctor becomes a very powerful, and conflicted, superhero of sorts.
Joining Leto and Arjona are Jared Harris, Matt Smith, Tyrese Gibson, and Michael Keaton, who is reprising his role as Spidey villain Vulture from Spider-Man: Homecoming.
Check out the scene below. Morbius hits theaters on January 28, 2022.
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Dwayne Johnson wants to send you into your weekend with some fresh Black Adam hype. Johnson tweeted an image of his titular character, a supervillain who promises to shake up the power hierarchy in the DCEU the moment he arrives, looking downright possessed. The image of Johnson as Black Adam is going to be the cover of an upcoming issue of Total Film, his firey eyes matching the magazine’s title design. Along with this tasty new look at one of the most hotly anticipated superhero films in 2022, Johnson added a very declarative quote, revealing just how different Black Adam promises to be from not just Shazam!, but the rest of the mainstays in the DCEU:
“You’re right.
Superheroes don’t kill bad people.
But I do.” ~ #BlackAdam
The hierarchy of power in the DC Universe is changing.
I’m pumped to share with you 🌎 our new @TotalFilm subscriber cover.
This is sure to excite not only Johnson’s legion of fans, but all the people who have been waiting for Black Adam to finally make it to the big screen. Heck, Johnson was cast in the role in 2014. Recently, producer Hiram Garcia shared his enthusiasm for the film. Speaking to Colliderabout his most recent film, Red Notice (also starring Johnson), Garcia revealed that he had seen director Jaume Collet-Serra’s first cut. Here’s what he had to say:
“Granted, the movie’s in a stage where there are no effects done. It’s so fresh after filming. But anytime the movie is that entertaining and good in that raw of a form, it makes us very confident. So [we’re] really excited with where the movie is. Jaume has done such a good job. The movie is big. It’s fun. DJ was born to play Black Adam — [I’ve] got to tell you, if there was ever anyone who is just perfect for this role, it’s him. Then seeing him with the rest of the JSA and all those characters and Pierce [Brosnan] and Aldis [Hodge] and Quintessa [Swindell] and Noah [Centineo], it’s a ‘Pinch me’ moment. It was one of the most fun movies we’ve ever made and also just the coolest to be making something on this scale and with a character who’s going to have this much of an effect on the DC Universe. It’s really been awesome, and I think you’re really going to dig it.”
We got our first glimpse of Johnson as Black Adam via this clip revealed at the most recent DC FanDome Event. As the quote Johnson shared in his tweet makes plain, Black Adam is not the guy you want to threaten. The clip revealed during the FanDome event proved that, and it also introduced us to members of the Justice Society—the aforementioned Hawkman (Aldis Hodge), Doctor Fate (Pierce Brosnan), Cyclone (Quintessa Swindell), and Atom Smasher (Noah Centineo).
James Gunn’s upcoming The Suicide Squad spinoff series Peacemaker‘s release is nigh, and now HBO Max has released the official trailer. When we last saw John Cena’s titular character in The Suicide Squad, he’d miraculously survived a duel with Bloodsport (Idris Elba) after becoming the film’s villain. Peacemaker is a character at war with himself (and, unfortunately, everybody else) because he’s a man who will pursue peace, no matter who he hurts in the process, including children. Well, we should say that Peacemaker seemed okay with his role in The Suicide Squad, but in the official trailer for Peacemaker, he seems to be increasingly conflicted about his mission.
Peacemaker will track its central hero’s journey after he’s been patched up in the hospital and sprung from jail by the U.S. Government. The reason he was released was because of his profession—as he tells his buddy, Vigilante (Freddie Stroma), he kills people for the government. Yet our muscle-bound doofus in the shiny helmet no longer seems so sure pursuing peace at all costs makes sense, and that realization seems like it’ll be the emotional fulcrum around which the series will turn.
There are a few other faces from The Suicide Squad you’ll see in Peacemaker—Jennifer Holland as Emilia Harcourt and Steve Agee as John Economos. Newcomers include Danielle Brooks as Leota Adebayo, Chukwudi Iwuji as Clemson Murn, and Robert Patrick as Peacemaker’s father. There’s also a bald eagle, named—wait for it—Eagle-y.
Gunn pitched HBO the concept for the series in the midst of working on The Suicide Squad, believing there was more story to tell around Cena’s living paradox of a character. The trailer suggests that Peacemaker will be seriously wild, but there’s something soulful about seeing Cena’s beefy brute wise up. One of the strongest elements of The Suicide Squad was the way the characters bonded during their psychotic mission, with Peacemaker being the bad guy they all learned to loathe. Maybe in his own series, he’ll be somebody worth fighting for, too.
Peacemaker arrives on HBO Max this January 13. Check out the trailer below.
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The buzz is building for Guillermo del Toro’s Nightmare Alley, the visionary director’s plunge into a world that seems tailor-made for his particular skill set. Set in a mid-20th-century second-rate carnival filled with schemers, dreamers, hustlers, weirdos, and femme Fatales, Del Toro gets to play carnival barker (that role in the movie actually belongs to Willem Dafoe), taking us on a tour of the lost souls plying their various trades in this shadowy world. Adapted from William Lindsay Gresham’s novel of the same name, Nightmare Alley is entered on Stan Carlisle (Bradley Cooper), a gifted carny who can manipulate people with nothing more than a few perfectly chosen words. Carlisle meets his match in Dr. Lillith Ritter (Cate Blanchett), a psychiatrist who possibly surpasses his gift for manipulation. These two will make for a sinister pair.
So how’s the film being received? Before we turn to the critics, why don’t hear from one of Del Toro’s contemporaries, writer/director Edgar Wright, who just recently released his own twisted tale of madness with Last Night in Soho:
‘Nightmare Alley’ contains single shots that are better than some other director’s entire filmographies. You don’t doubt a @RealGDT film will be darkly exquisite, but this is one to luxuriate in. You can tell that he & @SunsetGunShot were in noir heaven (hell) cooking it up x 1/2
Del Toro is one of the best in the business at world-building, and nobody has more genuine love for the weirdos and wicked. Sure, Del Toro delights in the icky, sticky business of creating these worlds and the horrors they contain, but he’s equally drawn to the humanity he finds there. From his Oscar-winning turn with Shape of Water to his masterpiece, Pan’s Labyrinth, Del Toro is a director who loves his characters, the more bizarre the better, and this affection crosses across all his work, regardless of the genre. Yet unlike many of his previous films, Nightmare Alley boasts no supernatural elements. It’s a pure pulp movie. The most terrifying things here are conjured and created by human beings—and we know how scary they can be.
Joining Cooper and Blanchett are a slew of great performers—Rooney Mara, Willem Dafoe, Mary Steenburgen, Richard Jenkins, Toni Collette, Ron Perlman, and David Strathairn to name a few.
Check out the early reactions below. Nightmare Alley hits theaters on December 17.
Nightmare Alley is all round brilliance. guillermo del toro has made an unbelievably beautiful and incredible film. The production design is breathtaking. The performances are a spectacle with Bradley Cooper delivering one of the best of the year.
Guillermo del Toro’s #NightmareAlley is haunting & seductive in the way it draws you into its story about a man lost in his own long con. Steadily unsettling & wildly gripping by the end – the scenes between Bradley Cooper & Cate Blanchett are fantastic. Deliciously old fashioned pic.twitter.com/pcyYSGZX3U
Guillermo del Toro continues to wow as a filmmaker. Nightmare Alley is brilliantly constructed & a much different kind of film than what we are used to seeing from del Toro. He takes a iconic classic and makes it anew. Terrific performances across the board too. #NightmareAlleypic.twitter.com/W8nmDcDnuu
#NightmareAlley is stunning. A beguiling slow burn that lands a breathtaking sucker punch of a third act. The ensemble cast turn in awards worthy powerhouse performances. The flawless cinematography and del Toro’s direction combined delivery up a rich and intoxicating treasure. pic.twitter.com/0RTzNWBBRi
NIGHTMARE ALLEY rules. A film full of dark and stormy nights, freak shows, con artists, and Cate Blanchett seductively blowing cigarette smoke. Style out the wazoo here.
‘Nightmare Alley’ Review: Bradley Cooper And Cate Blanchett Are So Good Playing Bad In Guillermo del Toro’s Vivid Film Noir Remake https://t.co/tIJokoF4bh
The first Tom Holland-led Spider-Man trilogy (there will be a second) is about to come to an end with the release of Spider-Man: No Way Home, and unsurprisingly, people are very excited to see it in the theater. The demand for advanced tickets, which went on sale on November 29, has been such that the rush of would-be buyers crashed a few of the online sites selling tickets. Hundreds upon hundreds of theaters sold out more or less immediately. Theater owners across the country are scrambling to add as many screenings as their venues can handle. This, folks, is called major movie enthusiasm.
Fandango has reported that Spider-Man: No Way Home has broken its pre-sale records for 2021, besting Marvel’s Black Widow. It’s also doing remarkably well against films that came out before COVID-19, notching the best first-day advance ticket sales since the Russo Brothers’ Avengers: Endgame in 2019. Fandango currently has No Way Home beating Avengers: Infinity War, Spider-Man: Far From Home, Star Wars: The Last Jedi, and Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. While first-day advance ticket sales don’t always equate to record opening weekends, these numbers are a very good sign.
It’s also hugely welcome news for a theater industry that was hit incredibly hard by the pandemic. The final months of 2021 have seen a welcome surge of big movies bringing in big audiences, with Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings starting things off in September, and then that historic October, with No Time To Die, Venom: Let There Be Carnage, Halloween Kills, and Dune all bringing in huge crowds.
There is, of course, a new threat to the movie business—Omicron, the newest strain of COVID-19, which has the potential to create a new spike in cases. The little known about this new variant makes it harder for people to make decisions about whether to continue doing the things they’ve longed to resume, like going to the movies. As for now, it seems vaccinated people are choosing the movies over their fear of the new variant.
There are also several reasons that No Way Home is such a strong draw for superhero-loving audiences—Spider-Man is a known and beloved quantity, whereas audiences were just meeting Shang-Chi (Simu Liu) and the entire cast of new superheroes in Chloé Zhao’s Eternals. Then you can add the fact that No Way Home is kind of a super-sized Spider-Man movie, with villains from previous franchises, including Alfred Molina’s Doc Ock and Jamie Foxx’s Electro, bursting back into the scene.
We’ll see how this all plays out in the weeks ahead as more is learned about the new variant, but for now, Spider-Man is swinging high.
Spider-Man: No Way Home opens on December 17.
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In the Matrix franchise, déjà vu isn’t just a curious but ultimately harmless experience of something you’re experiencing for the first time feeling like a memory. It is, rather, a glitch in the Matrix itself, and one of the early lessons that Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) taught Neo (Keanu Reeves) in the original film. In a new teaser for The Matrix Resurrections, we get to revisit the importance of déjà vu in the franchise, with hints at how strange of a journey Neo has ahead of him.
The teaser is a seriously mind-melting trip down memory lane, as we see images from Matrix‘s old and new, showing us moments when Neo’s world was ripped from the lies of the blue pill to the terrifying reality of the red. In Lana Wachowski’s new feature, Neo will be venturing back into the Matrix on a quest that seems centered on Trinity. He’ll meet new allies that feel like old friends, like Yahya Abdul-Mateen II’s young Morpheus and Jada Pinkett Smith’s Niobe. He’ll have to find not only Trinity but his old self, as it seems he’s almost forgotten everything he’s already been through. As he tells Neil Patrick Harris’s shrink in the film’s official trailer, “I have dreams that aren’t just dreams.” No, my friend, those are memories, and that’s the Matrix.
Through it all, the journey back into the Matrix will present Neo with no shortage of moments he feels he almost remembers. The Matrix will change things—that’s how it keeps its dreaming captives hostage—and it’ll be up to Neo to figure out what’s real, and what he needs to change himself.
Wachowski directs from a script she co-wrote with Aleksander Hemon and David Mitchell. Joining Reeves, Moss, Abdul-Mateen II, Pinkett Smith and Harris are Jessica Henwick, Jonathan Groff, Priyanka Chopra Jonas, Christina Ricci, Telma Hopkins, Eréndira Ibarra, Toby Onwumere, Max Riemelt, and Brian J. Smith.
The Matrix Resurrections hits theaters and HBO Max on December 22. Check out the trailer below:
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While MCU fans have had already their hands full in 2021 with new films (Black Widow, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, Eternals) and new series on Disney+ (WandaVision, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Loki, and now Hawkeye), there’s still a big premiere left—Spider-Man: No Way Home. That’s a lot of Marvel madness for a single year, so much, in fact, Marvel Studios has pared back their release schedule just a little bit to three new films a year. For 2022, the three films are Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (March 25), Thor: Love and Thunder (July 8), and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (November 11). While we’ve understandably heard next to nothing about any of them, per Marvel’s usual protocol of extreme secrecy, the one consistent refrain we’ve heard about Thor: Love and Thunder is that it’s totally insane.
These rumblings about the film’s go-for-broke lunacy have mostly come from writer/director Taikia Waititi himself—several times—promising that it’s the craziest movie he’s ever done. Now you can add Marvel’s Director of Visual Development Andy Park to the list of people hyping Love and Thunder‘s insanity.
Speaking with Screenrant, Park, who has been working with Marvel since 2011’s Thor, knows what he’s talking about. His responsibilities are vast, helping design costumes, settings, and more, on a huge variety of projects for Marvel. Waititi completely reinvigorated Thor with 2017’s Thor: Ragnarok, turning Chris Hemsworth’s formerly brooding Asgardian god into one of the MCU’s funniest superheroes—and also gave us a talking Hulk, Tessa Thompson’s ferociously capable (and hard-drinking) Valkyrie, and beloved aliens Korg (voiced by Waititi himself) and Miek. As wonderfully weird as Ragnarok was, Park says Love and Thunder is next-level ludicrous. “This movie is crazy wild,” Park told Screenrant.
“I think [Waititi] said it in some interview where he’s just like, he’s surprised that he’s even, he shouldn’t be allowed to make a movie like this. And I get it. This movie is crazy wild. It’s so much fun. And I simply cannot wait for everyone to see it. Because it was so much fun to work on and design so many characters and do keyframes for. It’s going to be a good one. It’s going to be fun.”
Part of the fun in Love and Thunder will be seeing Natalie Portman return as Jane Foster, only now, she’ll be wielding Mjolnir herself as the female Thor. Then there’s the fact that a slew of Guardians of the Galaxy characters will be on hand, including Karen Gillan’s Nebula, who Waititi has already promised has a big role to play. And then there are the newcomers—Russell Crowe as Zeus and Christian Bale as Gorr the God Butcher. God only knows what Waititi will have them up to here, but you can be sure it’ll be weird, and wonderful.
Featured image: SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA – JULY 20: (L-R) President of Marvel Studios Kevin Feige, Director Taika Waititi, Natalie Portman and Chris Hemsworth of Marvel Studios’ ‘Thor: Love and Thunder’ at the San Diego Comic-Con International 2019 Marvel Studios Panel in Hall H on July 20, 2019 in San Diego, California. (Photo by Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images for Disney)
Auteur writer/director Jane Campion is known for being one of the few female filmmakers to garner a Best Director Oscar nomination, for 1993’s The Piano, which won her an Oscar for Best Screenplay. Fans have been anxiously awaiting her first feature film release since 2009’s Bright Star, and she’ll do them proud with The Power of the Dog, an intense period drama starring Benedict Cumberbatch as bullying 1920s rancher Phil Burbank. Phil’s comfort is threatened when his brother George (Jesse Plemons) brings home his new wife Rose (Kirsten Dunst) and her effeminate son Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee), all of whom he emotionally torments with his menacing presence. The film is getting Oscar buzz for its powerful ensemble cast and exquisite production design and cinematography.
The Credits spoke to the film’s cinematographer Ari Wegner about lensing the film, and how working with Jane Campion, one of the best directors of her generation, changed her.
Ari Wegner and Jane Campion. Credit: KIRSTY GRIFFIN/NETFLIX
The Power of the Dog, in one respect, feels like a battle of light against dark. The terrain can be bleak and harsh. but also the characters face inward struggles of rising above or giving into their shadow selves. There are many moments where that is expressed in the lighting. What were some of the discussions around that?
When I first read the book, being Australian, I was attracted to this concept of a very bright exterior with interiors that are very dark. Because the outside is so bright, coming inside feels really dark, and I think both Jane and I really loved the juxtaposition of this brutal, harsh outside, where you see everything, then coming back inside where everything’s a lot more shadowy, and maybe you only see glimpses of light. I think that’s in the characters as well. They’ve got an exterior that they project, which is clear, and then their interior world is a lot more nuanced, and, at times, quite dark. We worked a lot with the production designer, Grant Major, who is a wonderful collaborator and an amazing artist with what he does, to make sure that the house we were designing had a dark interior, with floorboards and timber panels on the wall that are dark, to create a kind of claustrophobic grandeur. It is also a space where, especially for Rose, she’s always hyper-aware of where Phil is. Within that darkness, you sometimes feel like he may be somewhere you can’t see. There is a thriller or horror aspect to it, of this monster in the house where there’s no escape.
How does the light and dark inspire you as cinematographer?
On a personal level, I really love dark photography, because it allows you to really focus the eye where there is light. If you’ve got a very dark frame, and then a little pool of light or a little twinkle in the eye, it’s just natural human instinct that that’s where you look. It allows an elegance and minimalism, in a way, because your eye is really only focused on one particular part, usually the eyes. Basically, the actor’s face becomes your sole focus, and the rest of the world drops away.
Some of the influences referenced in the film are Andrew Wyeth’s color palette and the photography of Evelyn Cameron. What specifically did you take from Wyeth and Cameron that we see in the finished film? How did Cameron’s work help you bring the spirit of 1920s Montana alive like it’s another character in the film?
When we discovered Evelyn Cameron’s work, it was a real revelation, actually, because when you start any period film, the first thing you do is start researching and finding photographs from the time. There’s some amazing photography, but her work in particular, and her diaries, actually, which I read and just lapped up, felt a lot more nuanced and specific. She is an English woman, so she had a foreigner’s eye on this world. She’s a woman who is a photographer. Reading her diary meant discovering the extreme effort she went to, to do her art. It’s incredible in the context of today, let alone at the time. When you look at the actual photos, they’re incredible observations. They stand apart from other photography of the time, because they’re really delicate, and the things that she’s interested in are not stock standard kinds of things that we know of the time. It’s not just landscapes. It’s really her personal observations and personal relationships.
Jane Campion is spectacular at articulating desire cinematically. The scene with Benedict Cumberbatch bathing in his secret place at the creek is a perfect example of that, and it must have taken a lot of trust to work as well as it does. What was the collaboration between you, Jane, and Benedict for that scene?
We always knew that the scenes in what we call ‘The Sacred Place’ were an exception to the rest of the film. I think of them as kind of an exhale from this tension that you’ve been experiencing as a viewer. We knew they would require a special kind of attention. You finally get to understand Phil, suddenly, in a lot more of a complex way. In a film that I think is a lot about first impressions, it’s a scene where your impressions are forced to shift. We also knew that for it to feel authentic and resonate with an audience, there would need to be a level of trust, vulnerability, and freedom in the process of actually shooting it. Jane and Benedict had to be incredibly comfortable together and to be incredibly comfortable with a camera being present. What’s so wonderful about Jane, one of her many amazing qualities, is she has a real ability to make people feel safe about being vulnerable. That scene seems really like the culmination of that. On the day we were shooting, it was just Jane, Benedict, and myself, shooting 15 or 20 minutes at a time. It was really just a dance between the three of us, with our ideas feeding off each other in a very vulnerable way.
How did making The Power of the Dog with Jane Campion change you as a filmmaker?
Before I started working with Jane, several people had described to me that working with her would be a life-changing experience, but I don’t think I really was able to get that at first. You can never understand a statement like that until you’ve been through it. I think I was expecting to learn a lot specifically about filmmaking or directing a film, but I realized with her, in making a film, it’s not compartmentalized in her life. That is just the way she lives. She lives her life the same way she makes films, which is incredibly vulnerable, open-hearted, and honest, and also incredibly strong. With a lot of directors, their director/producing teams are stuck inside a model that doesn’t work for them, but there’s an idea that it just has to be the way it’s always been. The rules are the rules, and there’s no flexibility. A director can really shine when the process works for them, and equally, they can be hampered when something about the process goes counter to how they think. Jane is just incredible about, from the very early days, being upfront about what works for her, and in a very gentle, respectful, but strong way, advocating for herself as to what she needs to do her job. That is something I learned a huge amount from for myself, both professionally and personally.
The Power of the Dog is in theaters nationwide and streams on Netflix starting December 1st.
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Featured image: THE POWER OF THE DOG (L to R): BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH as PHIL BURBANK, COHEN HOLLOWAY as BOBBY in THE POWER OF THE DOG. Cr. Courtesy Of Netflix
From the second she enters the frame, Xialing radiates a younger sibling’s mixture of hurt and defiance at the brother who abandoned her. Yet Xialing is no longer a little girl, and as the daughter of the crime boss and formidable, superpowered martial arts master Wenwu, she’s become everything her older brother—Shang-Chi—was meant to be. Only unlike her brother, she wasn’t handpicked as Wenwu’s successor, and her training to become an unparalleled martial arts expert and assassin was done on the sly. Getting to play in Marvel’s massive, ever-expanding sandbox is the opportunity of a lifetime for any young performer, but for actress Meng’er Zhang, the opportunity arrived shrouded in secrecy.
“I had no idea,” Zhang says about the role she auditioned for in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. “I just saw an audition in a group chat that said they needed a girl who can speak Chinese and English at the same time, so I thought, ‘Well, I could be that girl.’”
Zhang sent in her audition tape, and rather quickly, she got a callback. She was then told she’d be flown out to do a test screening with Simu Liu, the titular star of the film, and director Destin Daniel Cretton. “That’s when I realized, ‘Okay, I was auditioning for a Marvel movie.’ [Laughs].”
Rather than be overwhelmed by the opportunity, especially considering Zhang had never acted in a major film before, she focused on her character, the sister Shang-Chi left behind as a little girl when he refused to follow in his father’s footsteps. “I really got connected strongly with the character, and I just felt like, ‘I’ve got this.’”
Once she was officially cast, Zhang, a seasoned stage performer, had to get up to speed on the vastly different techniques required when performing on film. “It’s really different, and everyone helped me a lot. Destin was really great with me, he helped me to understand how the camera works,” she says. “It was really funny that on my very first day on set, it was my bedroom scene with Katy (Awkwafina). I’m revealing my childhood bedroom after so many years away, and to me, it’s like okay, after I hear ‘Action!,’ my performance begins, right? So I started my performance, and then Destin told me I wasn’t actually in the frame. It’s not like the stage where everyone can see everything. You have to go into the frame, so it was that kind of thing.”
Cretton wasn’t Zhang’s only source of support and wisdom—she had a master of both stage and screen, Ben Kingsley, on hand as well. Kingsley was reprising his Iron Man 3 role as the drunken actor Trevor Slattery, who was hired to pretend he was the supervillain the Mandarin—Wenwu (Tony Leung)’s actual identity—in that film. In Shang-Chi, he essentially Wenwu’s court jester, plucked from prison to provide entertainment. For Zhang, he provided sage counsel.
“I loved talking to him, he also has a theater background, so I always asked him questions, and he’s great,” Zhang says of Sir Ben. “He told me that when we’re on the stage, we’re landscape artists, and when we are in front of the camera, we’re portrait artists. This just gave me a very clear picture of the difference. I’m really grateful to him.”
Zhang wasn’t only tasked with learning her lines and figuring out how to perform for the camera—she also had to train to become a credible martial arts expert.
“The training was really intense. I didn’t have any martial arts background before this, so they flew me over four months early to train,” she says. “You could really hear me and Simu screaming on the stunt stage. I learned MMA, I learned Tai Chi, and I learned this cool weapon which you can see in the film, called a rope dart.”
Zhang’s appreciation for what she was learning was such that she began to understand why they’re called martial arts. She also learned an appreciation for how hard being a stunt performer is, and she learned it the hard way.
“I did punch Simu in the face in the very first fight scene that we had,” Zhang says. “That was an accident! I was nervous, that was my very first fight scene with him, and he was like, ‘There’s no way you can hurt me, just go for it!’ I was like, ‘Okay, okay, I’m going to go for it,’ and I just went pow, and I punched him in the face. [Laughs]”
The fight scenes were particularly challenging for Zhang because she’s a gentle person by nature, but Xialing is a ferocious fighter. “My character is really tough and is really good at fighting, and those stunt people who I trained with every day? I have to punch them in the face and kick them. I was like, ‘I don’t want to hurt you guys!’ And they would just tell me there’s no way I can hurt them, they’re professional and know how to take a kick and a punch. They told me if I did hurt them, it would be their fault, but for me, that was the biggest challenge.”
Zhang’s Xialing ultimately joins Shang-Chi and Katy in their quest to take down Wenwu, becoming an invaluable ally. Yet in a post-credits scene (belated spoiler alert), Xialing’s future, and therefore Zhang’s future in the MCU, gets a delicious potential twist—she’s seen on her father’s throne, ostensibly the new leader of the Ten Rings syndicate and a potential adversary for her brother. I asked Zhang if she was told from the beginning about her character’s potential villainous turn.
“No, I had no idea,” she says. “That was a really cool scene, but when we were in the process of shooting the film, I didn’t even know if the scene would make it into the movie. I’m really excited for whatever is next for my character Xialing, and whatever is next is going to be great.”
In real life, her friendship with Liu and Awkwafina is real and poignant.
“Working with them was so great,” Zhang says. “They are really like family to me. The screen test was only with Simu, that was also the first time I met him, and I think the sibling chemistry between us was so natural. I also got married on this film, to one of the action designers, and we didn’t plan anything ourselves, but Simu took us to Disneyland to surprise us, and Awkwafina threw a big karaoke party to celebrate.”
The complexity of bringing a thematically laced film like Passing to the screen isn’t a simple one. For Rebecca Hall, who makes her directorial debut, it was also a personal journey, “an extended catharsis” that allowed her “to get to the bottom of a lot of mysteries” in her family.
The story, which is adapted by Hall from the 1929 novel by Nella Larsen, follows two Black women, Irene (Tessa Thompson) and Clare (Ruth Negga), both of whom can “pass” as white while living in 20th-century Harlem.
Hall, now 39, first connected with the material over thirteen years ago for reasons that may not be obvious to fans of her tremendous acting career that includes roles in Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige, Ron Howard’s Frost/Nixon, and Steven Spielberg’s The BFG, among others.
Born in London, Hall’s mother, Maria Ewing, was raised in Detroit during the 1950s by a white mother and a father of mixed race. Her grandfather “passed” as white and unfortunately died when Maria was only a teenager, creating confusion around Hall’s racial identity. The novel helped her find some answers. “The book was such an access point and historical content for me and it also gave me a chance to feel compassion for my grandfather and the choices he made out of extreme fear and complication,” the writer-director shares with The Credits over the phone.
Adapting the script didn’t take long–a mere ten days to write her first draft, but Hall had reservations before moving forward with the project which took another seven years to obtain financing. What pushed her was the love and compassion she has for her family and those who form their identities today in a society that may reject them.
What became evident in prep was developing a visual style that resonated with the material. Teaming with cinematographer Eduard Grau, they referenced lithographs, period photos, and Hitchcock films like The Night of the Hunter and Strangers on a Train to create a luminous monochromatic palette digitally shot using the old Hollywood standard (4:3) – the square frame being a catalyst to focus our attention on the characters while the black and white imagery aided in concealing skin tones.
Ruth Negga and Tessa Thompson appear in “Passing.” Courtesy Netflix.
“We spoke a lot about the look,” admits Hall. “Everyone is ‘passing’ in this movie and, in a way, everything in the film has to be too. There has to be a performative element to the film itself. The painterliness of it isn’t a love out of excessive beauty but a comment on the heightened artifice of the world.”
In the story, Irene and Clare are childhood friends who reunite under unexpected circumstances and we learn they chose two separate paths. Irene, with her doctor husband (André Holland), had two sons, while Clare is married to a rich, racist husband (Alexander Skarsgård) who has no idea she’s Black. The film not only brings up questions about racial identity but explores marriage, repressed homosexuality, and self-exploration – all complex topics that can’t be answered during its one-hour and thirty-eight-minute runtime.
To balance the subtext on screen, Hall chose not to muddy the frame. “The film has a bit of a manifesto. Complexity through simplicity and we always wanted to pare it down. Keep it minimal and let the complexity shine through while not over characterizing,” she says.
Immersing us in the world is a carefully considered opening sequence. “I kept thinking about the first three minutes figuring out a way to make the audience lean in and keep watching,” she says. “The idea was to introduce the city and the jazz age, which is usually loud, in silence and hold on the image of feet so you’re already thinking beyond that and imaging. You’re honing in on what you have to pay attention to.”
Showing the dichotomy of the characters was another task which the director embraced subtlety, mood tone, and sometimes, used foreshadowing. “With Irene, whose inferiority is so complex and not even available to her, some of that had to be externalized – playing with the idea of what she’s seeing is not clear or becoming increasingly blurry. Sometimes she doesn’t see what’s really there and we tried to let the audience in on that. But also the symbolic things and gestures like the first time Irene sees Claire. She’s looking at her legs crossing and it’s kind of sensual.” The director took it a step further, finding a visual language to show how potentially volatile Irene is despite the one being stable and secure. In doing so, we see Irene literally breaking things in different scenes before the climactic ending.
While the atmosphere of the book guided Hall, she admits that directing Passing ultimately boiled down to the frame in front of her. “There’s a lucid, dreamlike quality in the book that’s quite enigmatic. That was what I was looking for every time I looked at the frame or went into a scene. If I’m sniffing that then it’s working, but at a certain point, you have to let everything fall by the wayside and listen to your gut and say, ‘do I like what I am looking at and what I am feeling’.”
When her second film Memoryland held its world premiere at the Busan International Film Festival’s New Currents competition last month, Vietnamese director Bui Kim Quy had to give it a miss due to her health conditions.
“I was diagnosed with lung cancer after the shoot wrapped in late 2018. Since then I have been undergoing treatment (which also explains why we had a drawn-out post-production). This pre-existing medical condition prevented me from getting the vaccines. I live in Hanoi and can’t even travel by plane or by car to other places in Vietnam, let alone traveling abroad,” says Quy.
While she is now nursing herself back to health, at one point she was even making arrangements for her own death, including getting a traditional in-ground burial plot for herself and one for her mother – not unlike the elderly couple in Memoryland who hire a funeral planner to make sure their burials will be handled in the traditional way after their death.
A still image from “Memoryland.”
Death serves as the central theme that weaves three interconnected stories together in Memoryland, which also include a young man who chooses to cremate his mother in the city instead of a traditional burial in her village and a young widow who brings the ashes of her construction worker husband back to the village of his ancestors.
The film is partly based on Quy’s personal observations of death. In a letter her father wrote before he died in 2012, he opted for cremation to make it simple for the family. But the family decided to follow the traditions. “After the burial, we could feel that my father’s departure from this world was a happy one,” says Quy.
A still image from “Memoryland.”
“Birth and death come in a cycle, which will only be complete with burial. Old people don’t wish to have their bodies burnt through cremation,” Quy says. “But burial land is becoming scarce because of modernization and traditional burial practices are vanishing. Preparing for death and worshipping the dead are essential in Vietnamese culture. I love these aspects of our culture and will continue to tell stories about them in the future.”
As a child, Quy took to funerals rather than weddings. She vividly remembers funeral processions, including how family members sent the deceased to the afterworld through a symbolic bridge – and how she liked to run alongside them. But this once common funeral rite is now almost a rarity, as traditions have been made simplified.
Quy was born and grew up in the 1980s in a small village in the suburb of the capital Hanoi. Surrounded by paddy fields, it had a pond in front of the communal house and a temple right in the middle of a rice field, with lots of centuries-old trees around it. This seems like the perfect rural setting for Memoryland, but her village has lost much of its character due to rapid development.
“Modernization has brought on a great sense of loss. Many trees were cut down to make way for roads and the communal house area has become smaller, so has the cemetery,” Quy says.
In the end, Memoryland was filmed in Thanh Hoa province, northern Vietnam, the home province of producer Nguyen Mai. Mai is now based in Munich after moving to Germany 15 years ago. She was able to travel to Busan and attended Memoryland’s post-screening Q&A with a live audience.
Filming “Memoryland” in northern Vietnam.
“The Korean audiences raised many interesting questions. Many of them noticed the similarities between Vietnamese and South Korean funerary customs. The elderly audiences felt that a part of their lives was reflected upon in the film,” says Mai.
Quy has enjoyed a strong relationship with the South Korean film festival. Memoryland is supported by Busan’s Asian Cinema Fund for script development, while her feature debut The Inseminator received the same fund for post-production and had its premiere at the festival’s A Window on Asian Cinema section in 2014.
Mai produced both films alongside Dang Xuan Truong, Quy’s husband, who also served as cinematographer and production designer. Truong won the best cinematography award at the ASEAN International Film Festival in 2015 for The Inseminator.
After Busan, The Inseminator went on to play in Rotterdam, Gothenburg, Taipei, and Munich, and most recently in Locarno this year. But the film, about a dying old man who takes extreme measures to find a bride for his son to continue the family lineage, was banned in Vietnam.
“My film has violated the Cinema Law, which forbids any incestuous behavior onscreen,” Quy says. “I could have got away with it if I changed the daughter’s character: to make her an adopted daughter of the old man, rather than his biological daughter. But that’s not my vision and what’s depicted in the film did happen in real life. By keeping to my story, I’ve fulfilled my duty as a filmmaker, just like the censorship regulators have fulfilled theirs by banning the film.”
Going forward, Quy hopes that the new Cinema Law will allow films to be rated for different audiences, making it possible for films like The Inseminator to be screened in film festivals and for academic purposes.
It came as a big relief to Quy and her team that Memoryland has passed the local censors, with an NC-16 rating. It has just screened at the Vietnam Film Festival, which ran from November 10-16. However, Quy says that it is very hard for low-budget, independent films to get a theatrical release, as the distribution system is mostly for commercial films.
As her health is improving, Quy has a couple of new projects in development, one of which is set in the same village as Memoryland. She is also producing an experimental project for seven of her students at the Hanoi Academy of Theater and Cinema. She has full confidence in the future of contemporary Vietnamese cinema.
You might have heard that a young, upstart director named Steven Spielberg was attempting to adapt one of Broadway’s most iconic musicals of all time, West Side Story. Well, now the first reactions to Spielberg’s take on the late, great Stephen Sondheim and Leonard Bernstein’s original 1957 Broadway show are pouring in, and they’re effusive enough to make you want to break into song. Spielberg’s version, based on a screenplay by his Lincoln collaborator and legendary playwright himself, Tony Kushner, is the first time West Side Story has graced the big screen since Robert Wise’s adaptation in 1961, which danced and sang its way to 10 Oscars. While it’s too early to tell whether Spielberg’s West Side Story will mop up that many awards, the buzz thus far is extremely strong.
West Side Story was originally inspired by the doomed, iconic romance at the heart of Shakespeare’s deathless “Romeo and Juliet,” with the Capulets and Montagues replaced here by the rival gangs the Sharks and the Jets. The original musical was written by the aforementioned Bernstein, Sondheim, and Arthur Laurents. Spielberg marshaled an incredible crop of musical talent to harness the play’s legendary music while delivering something new. Conductor Gustavo Dudamel took on Leonard Bernstein’s famous score, Tony-winning composer Jeanine Tesori got the cast’s vocal chops in order, and composer David Newman arranged the music.
The story is centered on two star-crossed lovers, Rachel Zegler as Maria and Ansel Elgort as Tony. Zegler and Elgort are joined by a phenomenal cast, including one crucial addition—Rita Moreno. Moreno won an Oscar for her performance as Anita in the 1961 version, and now she’s back in a new role, playing Valentina, a character previously known as “Doc” in the 1961 version (played by Ned Glass). Valentina offers guidance to the young pups now taking center stage—or, screen. Moreno, Elgort, and Zegler are joined by Ariana DeBose, David Alvarez, Mike Faist, Corey Stoll, and Brian d’Arcy James.
West Side Story hits theaters on December 10. Check out the early reactions below:
I was hoping that WEST SIDE STORY (2021) would sate my decades-long desire for Spielberg to do a musical. Alas, it is so beautifully shot and staged, such an absolute schooling of the usual musical directors, that I fear I now want him to make two or three more.
Steven Spielberg’s #WestSideStory is stunning. His first musical is without a doubt superior to the 1961 film. The cinematography, music and dancing are amazing, and most importantly, it treats Puerto Ricans & Latinx community with the respect they deserve. Spielberg delivers. pic.twitter.com/3tb7eSvbzM
WEST SIDE STORY is *phenomenal.* Steven Spielberg has been talking about making a musical for almost his entire career, and this was worth the wait. This is top-tier Spielberg.
I saw the new West Side Story tonight and WOW it is spectacular. Sweeping, emotional, remarkable staging, each shot looks like a painting, and I swear I didn’t breathe until the credits.
Steven Spielberg’s #WestSideStory is a TRIUMPH! It’s beautiful & brilliantly photographed – a real love letter to NYC w/ a tremendous ensemble cast who truly redefine this classic story for a new generation. Shout outs to @rachelzegler & @ArianaDeBose who CRUSH it in this film. pic.twitter.com/9wJbUJclnV
Tonight we give @WestSideMovie to NY. I am filled with butterflies. This film is a triumph for every single person who worked on it. I cannot fully express my love for our cast and crew. Forever grateful for this life changing experience🙏🏾 pic.twitter.com/WYL8h6qmHg
