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Monday, 2 April 2018

Final Trailer for John Krasinski's Excellent Horror Movie 'A Quiet Place'

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A Quiet Place Trailer

"If they hear you, they hunt you." Paramount has revealed one final trailer for the sci-fi horror thriller A Quiet Place, from director John Krasinski, who also stars. This movie opens in theaters at the end of the week and it's an excellent, near-perfect horror thriller (read my full review), I can't recommend it enough. The film is about a family living quietly on a farm, keeping to themselves. Some kind of monsters have taken over the world but they only hunt by sound, so if you stay quiet they can't find you. Emily Blunt also stars, along with kids Noah Jupe and Millicent Simmonds (who you may recognize as the deaf actress from Wonderstruck). I had a chance to see this recently, and I loved it, really loved it - lives up to the hype yet knows exactly what it is and doesn't try to be more than that. This is definitely worth seeing in the cinema.

Here's the third & final trailer (+ new banner) John Krasinski's A Quiet Place, direct from YouTube:

A Quiet Place Teaser

You can still watch the teaser trailer for A Quiet Place here, or Super Bowl TV spots + second trailer here.

A family lives an isolated existence in utter silence, for fear of an unknown threat that follows and attacks at any sound. A Quiet Place is directed by American actor-turned-filmmaker John Krasinski, director of the films Brief Interviews with Hideous Men and The Hollars previously. This is his third feature film after two other. The screenplay is written by Scott Beck, John Krasinski, Bryan Woods. This was produced by Andrew Form & Bradley Fuller, along with Michael Bay for his horror production banner Platinum Dunes. Paramount Pictures will open John Krasinski's A Quiet Place in theaters everywhere starting on April 6th coming up. This first premiered at the SXSW Film Festival earlier this year. Who's planning to go see this?

Pixar’s ‘Bao’ is Further Evidence That Profit Awaits the Culturally Conscious

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Disney is looking to find universal truths in specific life experiences.

After the negative reaction Disney received from planting the never-ending short that was Olaf’s Frozen Adventure in front of Coco, the Mouse House is hoping to regain audience favor with their latest Pixar mini-adventure. Scheduled to play before Incredibles 2 (after premiering at the Tribeca Film Festival), the 7½-minute Bao looks to achieve universal emotional response by embracing Chinese culture. This food fantasy tackles a mother’s depression after her children have flown the coop. She finds new love in the form of a handmade dumpling that springs to life from her care, and the film details the precarious nature of parenting.

Looking at recent successes like Moana and Coco, Disney has discovered that there is plenty of monetary value in supporting culturally conscious storytelling. Not only do we want to see our own culture depicted on screen, but we are ready to see other cultures celebrated as well. Universality is found through specificity.

Storyboard artist turned director Domee Shi (Inside Out, Incredibles 2) is the first woman in Pixar’s history to direct one of the studio’s short films. Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, she explained how her relationship with her mother shaped the story:

“Often times it felt like my mom would treat me like a precious little dumpling, wanting to make sure I was safe, that I didn’t go out late, all that stuff. I just wanted to create this magical, modern-day fairy tale, kind of like a Chinese ‘Gingerbread Man’ story. The word ‘bao’ actually means two things in Chinese: Said one way, it means steamed bun. Said another, it means something precious. A treasure.”

From Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs to Sausage Party, we’ve had a full smorgasbord of food-based fantasy films. The dinner table is often a playground for morality stories. Children have always found empathy in what’s in the fridge. Central messages surrounding snacks like that of “The Gingerbread Man” have involved friendship, acts of kindness, and bullying.

We’re ready to broaden our palate in the classroom. No more bland moralizing from the “Let’s Go To The Lobby” concession stand parade. Through the steamed bun, Shi can knock two birds with one stone. She can present a life lesson and represent a culture rarely exposed to a blockbuster audience.

The challenge will be in portraying a dumpling that is precious and adorable without making it look absolutely munchable. Using her own mother as a cultural consultant and “dumpling master,” Shi could fall into dangerous territory by stoking our appetite for the title character. That delicious treat sure is cute, but my stomach is rumbling.

Producer Becky Neiman-Cobb discusses the effect of the intense research process the animators have partaken in to bring Bao to life:

“One of the biggest challenges, and what brought our effects department to their knees, was Dumpling’s pork filling. That was hard. We learned there’s a very fine line between looking delicious and appetizing and looking wrong or gross. Making our food look delicious was a big triumph.”

Will it be better to watch Bao on a full stomach? Maybe we should all pre-game Incredibles 2 with a full-course meal, or at least line up a dinner date afterwards to satiate any resulting pangs of hunger.

Olaf’s Frozen Adventure aside (which was a Disney proper production), I always anticipate the short before a Pixar movie. The studio has mastered the art of eliciting intense emotional response in the briefest of windows. Whether it’s the first 10 minutes of Up or the technical wizardry seen in the Oscar-winning Piper, Pixar storytellers are capable of plucking the heartstrings without the whole orchestra. Give them a single violin and they’ll get the job done.

The post Pixar’s ‘Bao’ is Further Evidence That Profit Awaits the Culturally Conscious appeared first on Film School Rejects.

‘Ready Player One’ is Spielberg’s Most Crowd-Pleasing Hit in Over a Decade

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The combination of its reviews, audience ratings, and box office success ranks the movie among the filmmakers’ most favored works.

The fact that Ready Player One had Steven Spielberg‘s best opening in 10 years isn’t surprising. The sci-fi movie isn’t the filmmakers first aim at a blockbuster since 2008’s Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull — both The Adventures of Tintin and The BFG could be considered in the same batch, even if their modest screen counts didn’t show as much confidence in their releases. Ready Player One is only Spielberg’s seventh feature as a director since the Indiana Jones sequel, and this era has been mostly filled with dramatic, Academy-favoring fare. His latest was sold more as the kind of classic Spielberg movie that entertains in a mainstream fashion and makes big bucks as a result.

Not that Ready Player One‘s weekend domestic take of $41.2 million — or four-day holiday debut of $53.2 million — is huge. Back in early February, Box Office Pro foresaw the movie as making $54 million just in the three-day frame. However, tepid reviews and buzz for the future-set Ernest Cline adaptation held its expectations back. Last week, Box Office Pro’s prediction was for only $36 million over the weekend, with $47 million guessed for the opening including Thursday’s first-day figures. Still, these days it’s enough of a hit for this sort of non-sequel release, even from the biggest name in moviemaking. And it might just be Spielberg’s most all-around crowd-pleasing effort in more than 15 years — and one of the most for him for all time.

Besides Kingdom of the Crystal Skull‘s $100 million bow ($128 million, adjusted for inflation), and his 2005 War of the Worlds redo kicking off with $64.9 million ($92.9 million adjusted), Spielberg’s last truly comparable opening came with Catch Me If You Can. Given its mix of popularity and acclaim, the spiffy biographical crime film is one of Spielberg’s biggest successes (alongside such early Best Picture-nominated hits as Jaws, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial). And when it arrived at the end of 2002, Catch Me If You Can debuted with a gross of $30.1 million ($47.5 million adjusted). Given its Christmas release, though, its first four days amounted to $39.9 million ($63 million adjusted). The movie wound up with a total domestic take of $164.6 million ($251.7 million adjusted), ranking it Spielberg’s 14th highest grosser out of 33 titles.

Of course, Catch Me If You Can cost a lot less. Its production budget was just $52 million (about $71 million today), while Ready Player One‘s reported price tag is $175 million. And Catch Me If You Can wasn’t just a hit in North America, despite its lack of big special effects a la Ready Player One. The Leonardo DiCaprio-led movie grossed $352 million worldwide. Spielberg’s latest is already at about half that amount (of course worldwide grosses aren’t ever adjusted for inflation). The two films are comparable as the director’s most noteworthy efforts of this century for more than financial reason, too. And I’m not talking how they’re both about a young man spending most of the time as someone else while trying to elude capture.

With a 76% Rotten Tomatoes score, Ready Player One is just barely “Certified Fresh.” In fact, its ranking on that site, with about the same amount of reviews posted, is below Kingdom of the Crystal Skull — same goes for its 64 score at Metacritic being one point below the Indiana Jones sequel’s 65. But beyond the oft-forgotten critical favor, Kingdom of the Crystal Skull shows less popularity in user-rating arenas. At Rotten Tomatoes, its audience score is just 53% compared to Ready Player One‘s current 80%. The new movie also has better reviews and audience reaction than War of the Worlds, The BFG, and Tintin.

Ready Player One also ranks higher via IMDb user score than all of those titles. Actually, as of this writing, with an 8.0 score (albeit from only 39,000 votes), it’s tied with Jaws for Spielberg’s seventh most popular, behind only Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Jurassic Park, and Catch Me If You Can (yes, it’s above E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind). Of course, user ratings and scores are not fixed, and those for Ready Player One could fall as more people see the movie.

Where its popularity shows more firmly in comparison to the other Spielberg films is with its CinemaScore grade. Every one of his movies since Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, which received a ‘B’ from opening-night polling, has earned either an ‘A’ or ‘A-‘. Ready Player One has the lower grade, matching that of The BFG, Tintin, and War Horse. Before Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, the last Spielberg movie to please audience expectations so high was Catch Me If You Can, which earned an ‘A-‘ (The Terminal, War of the Worlds, and Munich all received a  ‘B+’, as did Minority Report the same year as Catch Me If You Can ).

Such positive word of mouth could give Ready Player One the kind of legs to give it a final domestic total comparable to that of Catch Me If You Can, but maybe just its unadjusted gross. Beyond that, the new movie’s legacy is hard to imagine. Despite being on the mainstream entertainment side of Spielberg’s output, it’s unlikely to at least garner awards favor in even technical categories, which would make it a rare non-Oscar-contender for the filmmaker. Meanwhile, further scrutiny and critical backlash could hurt its overall interest and approval from the general audience as well.

From the reactions I’ve personally encountered and seen in online discussion, I could see Ready Player One being the most divisive of Spielberg’s movies since 2001’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence and similarly one of his most debated efforts ever. That much darker, more cynical sci-fi movie debuted with a similarly divided critical reception and modest opening but was stamped with a disappointing/disappointed ‘C+’ grade via CinemaScore (Spielberg’s worst) and wound up sort of stalling at the box office, finishing with less than $100 million (unadjusted). Now it’s often ranked among Spielberg’s best films by critics (though some critics still put it as one of his worst). But Ready Player One won’t have such esteem. More likely it will fall in the middle for a majority of critics and fans even as it’s being defended and disparaged with equal measure.

In other new release box office news, Tyler Perry’s Acrimony gave the filmmaker one of his worst openings ever with just $17.1 million, while the religious film sequel God’s Not Dead: A Light in Darkness underperformed and gave the franchise its worst debut. As for non-new titles, fellow Christian movie I Can Only Imagine made the most of the holiday weekend and added a few hundred extra screens and made another $10.8 million, giving it the lowest weekend-to-weekend drop for a wide release, again. And Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs expanded and remained the per-screen-average champ (with $17,000), nearly entering the top 10 despite playing at just 165 locations.

Here is the weekend’s estimated top 20 with new titles in bold and total domestic box office in parentheses:

1. Ready Player One – $41.2M ($53.2M)
2. Tyler Perry’s Acrimony – $17.1M ($17.1M)
3. Black Panther – $11.3M ($650.7M)
4. I Can Only Imagine – $10.8M ($55.6M)
5. Pacific Rim Uprising – $9.2M ($45.7M)
6. Sherlock Gnomes – $7M ($22.8M)
7. Love, Simon – $4.8M ($32.1M)
8. Tomb Raider – $4.7M ($50.5M)
9. A Wrinkle in Time – $4.7M ($83.3M)
10. Paul, Apostle of Christ – $3.5M ($11.5M)
11. Isle of Dogs – $2.8M ($5.9M)
12. God’s Not Dead: A Light in Darkness – $2.6M ($2.6M)
13. Game Night – $2.5M ($65M)
14. Peter Rabbit – $2M ($110.7M)
15. Midnight Sun – $1.9M ($7.7M)
16. The Death of Stalin – $1.5M ($3.9M)
17. The Greatest Showman – $0.69M ($172.1M)
18. Red Sparrow – $0.68M ($45.6M)
19. Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle – $0.65M ($402.7M)
20. Strangers: Prey at Night – $0.63M ($23.5M)

The post ‘Ready Player One’ is Spielberg’s Most Crowd-Pleasing Hit in Over a Decade appeared first on Film School Rejects.

‘A League of Their Own’ Will Get Its Own Amazon Series

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Another modern classic is getting the reboot treatment, but will this one age well on the small screen?

Penny Marshall‘s quintessential sports film A League of Their Own is about to get a second shot on the small screen thanks to Amazon. The buoyant early-1990s comedy-drama that tells the fictionalized account of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL) struck out on television once before, back in 1993. But depending on how you look at it, the triumphant display of camaraderie between women could be a great addition to a current TV landscape that’s overstuffed with grumpy men and their grit. Still, exactly how could a simple ’90s feel-good film successfully find life in the general self-awareness of 2018 comedy?

The Hollywood Reporter announced that Mozart in the Jungle‘s Will Graham and Broad City‘s Abbi Jacobson will be co-writing and executive producing the half-hour comedy series. Rather than traditionally rebooting the property, Amazon’s take on A League of Their Own is said to have a modern twist to it, despite the show still being set in 1943. The official synopsis gives us an inkling of the themes that the new series will explore::

The show will begin with the formation of the league in 1943 and follows the Rockford Peaches season to season as they struggle to keep the team alive through close games, injuries, late night bar crawls, sexual awakenings, not crying, and road trips across a rapidly changing United States. The series dives deeper into the issues facing the country while following a ragtag team of women figuring themselves out while fighting to realize their dreams of playing professional baseball.

The original League of Their Own starred Tom Hanks as the disgruntled over-the-hill manager of the Rockford Peaches, while Geena Davis, Madonna, Lori Petty, and Rosie O’Donnell (among others) are all part of the team of female baseball players (Petty’s character eventually gets traded). None of the original cast members is expected to return for the reboot. In fact, even the characters themselves may be getting an entire makeover: the iconic Dottie (originally played by Davis) and her little sister Kit (Petty) — who are key opponents in the movie — will be notably absent from the Amazon series. This isn’t necessarily bad news, as it wouldn’t throw off the specific reimagining of the film that Graham and Jacobson are reportedly after anyway.

A League of Their Own definitely zooms in on a subject whose story could easily be adapted for the screen in compelling ways, even if the overall effect of the film is rather light and fluffy. It’s a movie that could and should be viewed in a self-contained fashion — regardless of historical context — as it only focuses on a single (and obviously fictionalized) facet of this group of women.

But women — including women of color — were struggling to find their place in a traditionally male-dominated space in the real AAGPBL. This fact is especially important to highlight in a story that’s set during World War II, a time which brought women into the workforce very prominently after the enlistment of many American men. Obviously, I don’t expect a generally cheerful comedy-drama from the ’90s to get all of that right, even in the undertones of the film. That said, simply shifting the focus of the serial version of A League of Their Own towards some differing perspectives among the rest of the Rockford Peaches and other teams of the league would make the material carry more weight as a whole.

That could make the show extra relevant in 2018 without sacrificing its comedic premise either. As demonstrated in Graham and Jacobson’s existing work, they’re fully capable of being subtle in their writing when it comes to creating fleshed-out female characters with personality and humor to boot.

That said, the contained nature of their respective shows could prove a bit troublesome when it comes to encompassing the broader themes in A League of Their Own. Mozart in the Jungle is about a philharmonic orchestra while Broad City greatly focuses on two 20-somethings just trying to live their lives in New York. Those are certainly some niche premises, but it doesn’t mean that Graham and Jacobson can’t ever branch out. Here’s hoping that they’ll be able to find a balance between their respective eccentric shows and the subtlety needed in introducing new female characters to the fictional AAGPBL.

The post ‘A League of Their Own’ Will Get Its Own Amazon Series appeared first on Film School Rejects.

‘The New Mutants’ Isn’t a Lost Cause Yet

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Despite all the storytelling reshuffling, including adding Antonio Banderas as a new villain, there’s hope for this ‘X-Men’ spin-off yet.

Blockbuster fans have basically been trained to fear the word “reshoots.” The mere idea that an initial vision wasn’t executed with 100% accuracy the first time around could send fandoms into a flurry of worry at the click of a mouse. For good reason, because sometimes reshoots result in something like Rogue One or the Fantastic Four reboot.

When news broke recently that The New Mutants is being pushed back a second time — the film is now slated for release in the back half of 2019 as opposed to February (originally it was due this month) — and that director Josh Boone and Fox execs have been butting heads on set, it was admittedly easy to be pessimistic. From the film’s promising first trailer, The New Mutants already feels like a step in a different direction for the X-Men brand, at least genre-wise. But based on the rumors, the horror tinge was an experiment the studio was unwilling to invest in.

The Tracking Board has some new information about what’s purportedly really happening behind the scenes of the film. While this may just fuel the fires of journalistic speculation that will ultimately be compounded by the aforementioned incessant nature of fan culture, several nuggets do stick out from their latest report. And they actually give us hope rather than more cause for concern over the fate of The New Mutants.

To begin, it’s a huge relief that Boone and Fox haven’t reached the point of “irreconcilable” in their “creative differences.” It’s true that the studio wasn’t keen on Boone’s initial horror ideas in the first place because the scares would mean giving up a PG-13 rating. However, both parties came to a kind of happy medium by shooting a creepy version of a YA movie; something like “a cross between Stephen King and John Hughes.”

In theory, such an X-Men film would’ve been fine on its own, given Boone’s experience in the YA genre — he helmed The Fault in Our Stars, and that film is perfectly functional. But this actually reined in more of Boone and co-writer Knate Lee’s original ideas than we’re comfortable hearing. A writer’s room was also brought together to re-conceptualize the New Mutants script multiple times until the horror element was sufficiently suppressed to Fox’s liking.

The post ‘The New Mutants’ Isn’t a Lost Cause Yet appeared first on Film School Rejects.

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