Even if you didn’t love Chris Farley‘s movies or follow him enough during his time on Saturday Night Live, you have to recognize the tragedy of his death. As for the extent of why it’s awful that he hasn’t been with us now for nearly 18 years, the new documentary I Am Chris Farley should prove his talent as a comedian and worth as a human being.
As you may have learned from another documentary out this year, Misery Loves Comedy, the sad and funny go hand in hand (and as we learned from Inside Out, sadness and joy are a perfect team). I’m not sure if there are a lot of exclusive bits of humor in I Am Chris Farley, but the clips at least provide a balance with the somber anecdotes expected from people like David Spade, Adam Sandler, Christina Applegate, Bob Odenkirk, Molly Shannon and Dan Aykroyd, who likely relates Farley’s death to John Belushi’s at some point.
The doc is directed by Brent Hodge, who made the very enjoyable My Little Pony fandom doc A Brony Tale, and Derik Murray, who has produced quite a few films with similar titles (including I Am Evel Knievel, I Am Steve McQueen and I Am Bruce Lee) and mostly features interviews with SNL figures, such as Lorne Michaels, of course.
According to the official synopsis, “The filmmakers also speak to Farley’s four siblings, including his brother Kevin, a comedian and actor, and his brother Tom Jr., who wrote the biography ‘The Chris Farley Show: A Biography in Three Acts.'”
Here’s the rest of that synopsis:
I AM CHRIS FARLEY tells Chris Farley’s story, from his early days in Madison, Wisconsin, and at Marquette University, through his work at the legendary club Second City to his rapid rise to the top of the comedy world on Saturday Night Live and in hit films like Tommy Boy and Black Sheep.
I Am Chris Farley opens theatrically on July 31st before hitting VOD and DVD on August 11th.
"I Am Chris Farley Trailer: Remembering a Comedy Icon" was originally published on Film School Rejects for our wonderful readers to enjoy. It is not intended to be reproduced on other websites. If you aren't reading this in your favorite RSS reader or on Film School Rejects, you're being bamboozled. We hope you'll come find us and enjoy the best articles about movies, television and culture right from the source.
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The most wanted man in the world. Open Road has debuted a teaser trailer for Oliver Stone's Snowden movie, his retelling of the Edward Snowden story. Stone has been passionately and intensely working on this film for years ever since his Martin Luther King, Jr. project fell apart. As much as I'd love to say this is an exciting reveal, the teaser contains no footage - only some music and text and eventually an upside down American flag. Big deal. Aren't we all familiar with this already? Give us something, give us some footage, a single shot of Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Snowden would do. Oh well, we'll keep waiting for some footage.
Here's the first teaser trailer for Oliver Stone's Snowden, in high def from Apple:
Snowden is directed by Oliver Stone who co-wrote the script with Kieran Fitzgerald (The Homesman), based on both Luke Harding’s The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World’s Most Wanted Man and Time of the Octopus, the novel from Snowden’s Russian lawyer Anatoly Kucherena. The story follows NSA whistleblower Snowden (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) as he moves from Hawaii to Hong Kong where he met documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras (director of the Oscar-winning Citizenfour) and journalist Glenn Greenwald to hand over top-secret NSA documents, all before seeking asylum in Russia. Shailene Woodley, Nicolas Cage, Zachary Quinto and more star in the film Open Road Films releases on December 25th.
This week we celebrate the birthday of America. So, what better time for the arrival of a new Oliver Stone movie trailer? This one is perfectly derisive, too. It’s a teaser for Snowden, the JFK director’s upcoming biopic on NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, and what it lacks in footage of the actual movie it makes up for in facts about the subject’s life. “Army recruit at 20, joined CIA at 22, NSA contractor at 26. By 29, the most wanted man in the world.”
The visuals are limited to an upside-down American flag adorned with the following tagline: “One nation under surveillance for liberty and justice for all.” Hmm, I wonder what kind of angle Stone is taking on this story anyway. Could he be on Snowden’s side? I guess we’ll have to wait for the finished feature this fall to be sure. Maybe he’s being sarcastic in his wording here. Just kidding, it’s very, very clear what this film wants to say. Maybe even to the point that we don’t actually need to watch the movie.
Before this teaser, the marketing of Snowden had already been carefully selective. The first look we got in March of Joseph Gordon-Levitt as the title character specifically showcased Snowden’s military service. Stone wants us to know that this is a movie about a patriot, both in that service and the service he did for Americans by leaking top secret documents revealing the US government’s oppressive surveillance of its own people. The only thing missing in this campaign is a picture of Gordon-Levitt as Snowden wearing a Revolutionary War uniform — or at least a tricorne hat.
Snowden also stars Zachary Quinto, Tom Wilkinson,Melissa Leo, Nicolas Cage and Shailene Woodley. It opens in theaters on Christmas.
"Snowden Teaser Trailer: Oliver Stone’s Birthday Present to America" was originally published on Film School Rejects for our wonderful readers to enjoy. It is not intended to be reproduced on other websites. If you aren't reading this in your favorite RSS reader or on Film School Rejects, you're being bamboozled. We hope you'll come find us and enjoy the best articles about movies, television and culture right from the source.
As you may have noticed, today we are saying goodbye to one of our most tenured contributors, associate editor Kate Erbland. And before you jump into the comments to ask why we’ve now spent two full articles on one of our writers leaving, just know that we covered this week’s episode of True Detectivenot once, but twice. That’s professionalism right there.
The time we are putting into saying goodbye to Kate and allowing Kate to say goodbye to Film School Rejects is indicative of how important Kate Erbland’s work has been to us over the last 4 years. And it’s not often in this business that a site, an audience and in this case, a family of hard working people, get to say a happy goodbye to one of its own. These sort of things usually end unceremoniously. But in the case of Kate Erbland, her moving on to become the Managing Editor of IndieWire is something that fills us with great pride.
I’m not entirely sure if she knows it, but Kate was on my radar long before she joined us in July of 2011. For a number of years, she was an editor at the plucky little film blog Gordon and the Whale. We’d met at a South by Southwest, I believe, and had hung out with the entire GATW crew at a Sundance (or two, my memory is fuzzy). And when I learned that Gordon and the Whale was about to close down for good, I remember texting founder Chase Whale with a simple request: “I want Kate and Allison for FSR.” Much to my own surprise, both Kate and Allison Loring had similar thoughts on the matter. It was destined to be a great fit.
In the almost exactly four years since that text message, Kate has been a driving force behind some of our best content. I love stats, so here are a few. In four years, she has published 1,712 articles on this site and been read by over 8 million readers. That’s just her articles alone.
As you can see below, she also laughs a lot, which has always brought a special energy to our team:
This is when Kate “borrowed” all the remaining freebies from a film festival party.
This is the time Kate found the remnants of her first byline in her high school newspaper.
She’s also never been shy about delivering strong opinions within her reviews. Her review archive is littered with wonderful work, all evidence of her very nuanced taste. We’ve had a lot of fun watching her give the very rare ‘F’ grade to a few films over the years, including hardcore takedowns of InAppropriate Comedy, the Adam Sandler/Andy Samberg film That’s My Boy and the stunningly tone-deaf Vivi Friedman film The Family Tree. She has also delivered high praise along the way. While she has understandably never given a movie our highest grade of ‘A+’, she has given a wide variety of films big, beautiful ‘A’ grades, including the creepy Jake Gyllenhaal film Nighcrawler, DisneyNature’s adorable film Bears, the Oscar-winning 12 Years a Slave, the indie darling Sound of My Voice and yes, even the blockbuster sensation The Hunger Games.
For Kate Erbland, it’s been a great run here at Film School Rejects. As her boss, I’ve enjoyed working with her immensely. She is one of the hardest working, sharpest and most thoughtful human beings working in the film blogging world today. And while we are going to miss her desperately, we can’t wait to see what she does next over at IndieWire. And we’ll be reading, for sure. Because even though she’s moving on, she will always be part of the FSR family.
This is where I was going to place the Sarah McLachlan song, “I Will Remember You.” Instead, plot twist! This song is far more appropriate for a goodbye to Kate. Because Erbland 2016!
Thanks to our own Allison Loring and our friend Katey Rich at Vanity Fair for helping find some of the most fun photos of Kate during her time here at Film School Rejects. I’m sure it won’t be embarrassing at all.
"Queue Up That Sarah McLachlan Song" was originally published on Film School Rejects for our wonderful readers to enjoy. It is not intended to be reproduced on other websites. If you aren't reading this in your favorite RSS reader or on Film School Rejects, you're being bamboozled. We hope you'll come find us and enjoy the best articles about movies, television and culture right from the source.
Juan Jose Campanella’s The Secret In Their Eyes won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 2010. That should have been a good enough sign that it didn’t need to be remade for American audiences. But, whatever, we can’t make all the moviegoers read, right? So, Hollywood went and produced an English-language version of the Argentine drama. They could have also just made it a cheap, dumb effort for those subtitle-hating jerks. Cast Kevin James, Ashley Judd and Katherine Heigl in it.
Instead, as you can see in the above trailer, they’ve attempted to make another good movie out of the material. They cast Oscar nominee Chiwetel Ejiofor, Oscar winner Julia Roberts and Oscar winner Nicole Kidman. They got Oscar-nominated screenwriter Billy Ray (Captain Phillips) to adapt the original and direct the remake. They even removed the word “the” from the beginning of the title, because we all know the shorter the title the better the movie. Maybe that’s not true, but it does make it look streamlined.
Also on board are a couple representatives of favorite TV series, Breaking Bad‘s Dean Norris and Michael Kelly of House of Cards. But Roberts is the one to watch for, it seems. She’s doing the thing where she goes all non-glam for the role of an FBI agent whose daughter is murdered, and it’s almost enough for her to be unrecognizable (at least as herself, as opposed to, say, Melissa Leo). I wouldn’t want to jump the gun with just a trailer or anything, but maybe Secret In Their Eyes will be up for at least one Oscar, too.
The original version received some backlash when it won the Academy Award over such contenders as The White Ribbon and A Prophet, but it shouldn’t be dismissed, especially now that its replacement is coming. Check out Rob Hunter’s review for FSR, in which he grades the film an ‘A-,’ if you really need convincing.
Then see the remake when it opens on October 23rd.
"Secret In Their Eyes Trailer: An Unnecessary Remake Made Necessary" was originally published on Film School Rejects for our wonderful readers to enjoy. It is not intended to be reproduced on other websites. If you aren't reading this in your favorite RSS reader or on Film School Rejects, you're being bamboozled. We hope you'll come find us and enjoy the best articles about movies, television and culture right from the source.
Those are our three reasons. What are yours?
