Bella Lugosi, king of the monster movies, turns 133 today.
Summarizing the group threatening to boycott The Force Awakens for daring to cast a black man as the lead — The Hollywood Reporter
With the third trailer’s release coinciding with tickets coming available, Fandango spiked to seven times its normal peak traffic last night. The movie sold eight times as many tickets in its first day of pre-sale as previous record holder The Hunger Games — The Hollywood Reporter
This shot, after the exchange takes place, goes on for about 10 of Bridge of Spies’ 141 minutes as the orchestra swells and pats Donovan on the back for the great job he did. Photos courtesy Walt Disney Motion Picture Studios.
Look, Steven Spielberg’s filmography is beyond reproach. The guy essentially invented blockbusters with Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind two years later, and that hasn’t worked out so well, but it’s to his credit for developing the business method. But it’s time to realize that he can, and often does, do wrong.
The new wrong he’s done is Bridge of Spies, a… biopic? about lawyer James B. Donovan (Tom Hanks), who represented Soviet spy Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance) and negotiated his swap with the U.S.S.R. for captured spy pilot Francis Gary Powers (Austin Stowell) five years later. The movie dramatizes these two events.
The most frustrating thing about this is it didn’t have to be as bad as it is. The first scene of this movie, and several individual sequences after, are staggeringly good. The dialogue-free chase and initial capture of Abel is an electrifying visual story of fear and tension, marked with long, difficult shots and fantastic editing. With this scene straight off the bat, scenes of Donovan’s son, Roger (Noah Schnapp) learning about the bomb in school and filling the bathtub with water in preparation for it and of Germans being shot trying to get over the Berlin Wall, Bridge of Spies sucks you in to the intense paranoia of the time period. This isn’t just a period piece because they have period-accurate coats — you feel what they felt living in the height of the Cold War. It really shows off how great this movie could have been, and how fantastic a visual director Spielberg can still be when he tries.
Horror movies have moved away from set pieces that are scary on their own, and Crimson Peak corrects that trend, but also moves away from being scary in any other way. Photos courtesy Universal Pictures.
From the first trailer straight to its release, Crimson Peak promised to be an electrifying, visuals-driven horror movie with rich colors and music and set pieces, a horror movie interested in looking good, not just good enough to jump out from around a corner for a scare and then scurry back behind it, a rejection of the cheapness that has dominated the genre for nearly a decade now. And it is. It delivers on that promise completely. But while watching it, you realize that’s not all you want.
The film’s plot is a big source of the unsatisfying feeling, despite being a great, old-fashioned haunted house setup. Burgeoning author Edith Cushing (Mia Wasikowska), who lives in America in the 1800s with her oil tycoon father, Carter (Jim Beaver), falls swiftly in love with a charming English lord, Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston) as he visits to ask Carter Cushing for a loan. Edith Cushing marries Sharpe and is whisked away with him to his mansion in Cumbria, where he lives with his sister, Lucille (Jessica Chastain), only to find the house is decayed to the point that it can barely be called a house anymore and is also severely haunted. Through the haunting, Cushing begins to discover the truth about her new husband and sister-in-law.
The simplest explanation of why Crimson Peak is disappointing is all the scares are spoiled in the trailer, and while that is true, it’s more complicated than that. The scares aren’t just fewer than expected, they’re too loosely packed, and the movie turns its focus away from the ghosts and to the natural aspects. This should be a good thing — the best horror movies, after all, are the ones that focus on things that can happen in real life — but it all falls flat.
To say nothing else good about Pan, it is the final affirmation of Hugh Jackman’s utter magnificence. In a movie that drains the life from its other actors, Jackman is a dervish of energy and charisma and even a little bit of menace every time he hits the screen. Photos courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures.
When Pan’s Labyrinth got pushed back from a July 24 release that it surely would have dominated to do re-shoots, it was clear something was very wrong. Now that the movie’s come out, it’s more clear than ever, but it’s still not clear what that wrong thing is.
The ostensible origin story of Peter Pan begins with Peter (Levi Miller) dropped off at an orphanage in 1930’s London, because all fairy tales must be set in England, by his mother, Mary (a dreadfully wasted Amanda Seyfried). After a cut to the dog days of World War II when bombings were a daily occurrence in the city and a weird storyline with Peter’s best buddy, Nibs (Louis MacDougall), and a nun who was hording all the rations, Peter and the other orphans are abducted by pirates and brought to Neverland to work in Blackbeard’s (Hugh Jackman) fairy dust mine. During what was supposed to be his execution for insubordination, Peter discovers that he can fly and that he is the prophesied savior of the fairies who will kill Blackbeard.
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