movies

Star Trek: Section 31 will debut in January.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/18963399

When Godzilla Minus One hit theaters, no one could have seen just how big the movie would become. The project ushered in a new era for Toho as the Japanese company took Godzilla back to basics. With director Takashi Yamazaki at the helm, the movie has gone on to become one of the best in Godzilla’s history. Much of its success came on the back of its director, and now, it seems like Yamazaki is interested in revisiting the IP so long as he can remake a classic Godzilla film.

The confession comes from Yamazaki directly as the director appeared at New York Comic Con. It was there guests like Kaiju United got to learn more about movie monsters, and Yamazaki admitted he is interested in remaking Godzilla vs Hedorah.

“I think that for its time, Hedorah was a very cutting-edge kaiju. Thinking about the type of visual expression we can do with technology and how far it’s come today – I’m imagining how it would move, and I think that would be a really cool remake,” the director shared. And as you can imagine, the Godzilla fandom is now begging for Toho to greenlight such a movie for Yamazaki.

What is the most cherished movie from your early childhood? Probably not The Warriors, Walter Hill’s fierce thriller about New York gang battles. But as Lin-Manuel Miranda says with a grin: “Our friend’s older brother had the VHS …” Which is how four-year-old Miranda found himself watching the film that, 40 years later, the Hamilton composer has turned into a musical concept album with playwright Eisa Davis.

He describes the nefarious mood in the room as the video played. “Here’s something you’re not supposed to be seeing. But let’s watch it. This is what New York is really like at night.” The cult 1979 film follows a Coney Island clan on a hair-raising journey home from the Bronx after being falsely accused of killing the leader of the city’s biggest gang. They encounter “every fear you’re supposed to have as a New Yorker” says Miranda. “Falling into the train tracks. The wrong cop on the wrong night. Stepping into the wrong neighbourhood at the wrong time when some shit that has nothing to do with you pops off.”

The film is propelled by a rock soundtrack with suspenseful synths, as well as songs like Nowhere to Run – played “for all you boppers out there” by an enigmatic DJ. It was adapted from Sol Yurick’s 1965 novel (itself inspired by Xenophon’s ancient epic Anabasis, about a Greek army’s homeward odyssey) and Yurick referenced rock’n’roll, the Beatles and pachanga music throughout his tale.

The album was created in the same mould as Jesus Christ Superstar and the Who’s Tommy, which were both released as LPs before becoming stage musicals. The former was “a north star for us”, says Miranda.

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Miranda’s chief change was to make all the Warriors female, a decision inspired by the Gamergate incident in 2014, which he sums up as “terminally online dudes doxing women who dared to like video games”. That misogynistic behaviour reminded Miranda of the “malignant chaos” in the film that’s caused by Luther shooting Cyrus, the city’s almighty gang leader who was proposing a truce among the tribes; Luther then blames the Warriors. Miranda and Davis’s gang share a sisterly solidarity as they essentially reclaim the night. Cyrus is now female too, played by Lauryn Hill.

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The big question is: will Miranda and Davis’s Warriors get all dressed up and hit the stage? Miranda thinks back to when Hamilton tickets were gold dust. With the album of The Warriors, he says, “you’re not getting the soundtrack to a show you can’t see. You are getting the thing we made. That feels enormously gratifying.” But he admits a theatrical version would be “enormous fun”, and they are open to the idea. All you boppers out there: The Warriors’ journey surely won’t end here.

My kids haven't seen Close Encounters of the Third Kind yet and I thought it would be a fun surprise to recreate the meal eaten in the mashed potato scene and watch the movie with the movie dinner. (I can't wait to see if they put two and two together when that scene comes up lol.)

Obviously there's mashed potato. And I can see sweet corn. Kids are drinking milk. But I can't tell what the little meat things are. I assumed they were crumbed rissoles but having not been raised or lived in the US, I'm unsure if I'm missing a common protein that was eaten at dinner around the late 1970s. Meatloaf has also been suggested but in my country we never have mini meatloaves that I've seen so I'm unsure how accurate that is.

EDIT: Middle bottom, you can see a partially eaten meat thing which looks pink inside:

I also can't tell what is in the bowls beside Roy and his sons - to the top left of Roy's plate, right hand side of Toby and top right of Brad's plate. Maybe Ronnie and Silvia have one of these bowls too but I can't tell. You can see Brad eat out of his bowl at one point and it looks like something pale (I wondered coleslaw or macaroni).

EDIT: Screenshot of side

Anyway, anyone know or have an idea of what the little meat things are and what are in the side bowls?

Fans customized the Wicked movie poster to more closely match the original Broadway poster.

Original Broadway Poster:

Movie poster:

Some fans, disappointed by the poster, altered it to be closer to the original, moving Grande’s hand and lowering the brim of Erivo’s hat to cover her eyes. The edits prompted Erivo to respond. “This is the wildest, most offensive thing I have seen

“None of this is funny. None of it is cute. It degrades me. It degrades us,” Erivo continued. “The original poster is an ILLUSTRATION. I am a real life human being, who chose to look right down the barrel of the camera to you, the viewer… because, without words we communicate with our eyes.”

So, this seems like a completely reasonable reaction to fans making fan content.

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/45150403

When Hollywood’s writers and actors went on strike last year, it was, in part, because of AI. Actors didn’t care for the notion that their likenesses could be used without their permission, whether by the studios that hired them that week or by someone at home with a computer in 2040. Writers didn’t want to do punch-ups on potentially crummy AI scripts or have their words (or ideas) cannibalized by large language models that didn’t pay them a dime.

But while some Hollywood filmmakers came out of the strikes fearful of how AI might wreck their industries, others wanted to learn more. This week, many of those filmmakers gathered in a movie theater in Culver City, California, for the inaugural Culver Cup, a generative-AI film competition sponsored by FBRC.AI and Amazon Web Services.

To quote Heath Ledger’s version of the clown prince of crime, maybe some wag should be scrawling “Why so serious?” on glass-fronted offices at Warner Bros Discovery this week, as executives there contemplate the box-office implosion of Joker: Folie à Deux. A catastrophic $37.7m opening weekend, the largest second-weekend drop for a DC film (81%), a worldwide take currently standing at a piddling $165m … how has the studio gone from the 2019 original, a billion-grosser that was then the highest earning R-rated film, to this?

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With bubonic word of mouth, Joker: Folie à Deux is now projected to lose $125m-200m, depending on whose budget estimate you believe. If it’s the $300m figure being generally touted for production and marketing, then this is clearly what has hobbled the film; it would leave it needing as much as $475m to break even. Risky reinventions of hallowed pop-cultural icons are a lot more feasible on the first film’s sensible $60m budget.

$300m is a shocking amount. The money is up on the screen in the sense that director Todd Phillips and star Joaquin Phoenix were both paid $20m and supporting actor Lady Gaga $12m; over a quarter of the $200m production budget. But other than beautiful lighting and cinematography, and the climactic sequence, the film doesn’t look outrageously lavish. A cloistered affair set largely in Arkham State Hospital and the courtroom, there’s virtually nothing in the way of extended CGI pyrotechnics to explain the spend. The likeliest explanation is that it was a big bet born out of pandemic desperation for a surefire hit when cinemas reopened.

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Phillips evidently wanted to course-correct after accusations that he had indulged toxic fandom in the first film. Having Arthur Fleck definitively dismiss the Joker as a pathetic psychological crutch certainly gets his point across.

But chastising the fanbase so openly is tantamount to box office self-harm (probably why the director refused to test-screen Joker: Folie à Deux). The impunity of a $300m budget seems to have led Phillips to mistake this for an auteur film, and shooting during a period of regime change at both Warner and DC reportedly allowed him to operate with weak oversight. According to Variety, he refused to liaise with new DC heads James Gunn and Peter Safran, saying: “With all due respect to them, this is kind of a Warner Bros movie.” But he also pushed back on new Warner president David Zaslav’s suggestions for lowering the budget, including moving the shoot to London rather than Los Angeles.

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The film’s nosedive will have repercussions for the still-floundering DC and beyond. This kind of overly conceptual punt will surely become verboten in blockbusters for some time, and you wonder if it will force more conservative reimaginings of other returning icons, particularly Bond. It’s another question whether this almighty flop will give pause for thought in Hollywood about squeezing beloved IP until it has no more juice to give. Could Phillips’ sluggishness in converting realism into expressionism be something to do with the fact that this is the fifth major outing for the Joker in just over 15 years?

Example of feet hidden:

https://archive.is/4z1C3