You have good villains and bad ones. In the category of most vile villains, the ones you don’t actually love to hate but just hate, it’s hard to top Louise Fletcher’s icky, nasty, and… hateful Nurse Ratched from the 1975 Academy Award-winning movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. If you’re the type of person that can’t get terrifying imagery out of your head, you’re going to want to skip the trailer for the new prequel series Ratched. From the people behind American Horror Story, the series Ratched is the next spin-off of a classic horror film character–think Vera Farmiga’s Norma Bates in A&E’s Bates Motel–the spin-off prequel of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho.
Along with a special sneak peek that can be found in theaters at the end of the credits for Marvel’s Venom, a new trailer for the animated Miles Morales Spidey pic Spider-Man: Into the Spider-verse has landed this week, revealing some of the key characters fans of the modern comics stories have been waiting for. It has Shameik Moore as Miles, BumbleBee’sHailee Steinfeld as Spider-Gwen, Nicolas Cage as Spider-Man Noir, New Girl’sJake Johnson as Peter Parker, Lily Tomlin as Aunt May, and Liev Schreiber as The Kingpin. And a few other cool surprises.
DC Entertainment’s latest effort, Aquaman, got its own extended trailer this weekend, too, showing more of the story arc with Jason Momoa‘s Arthur Curry and Amber Heard‘s Mera. The CGI sharks are the highlight of this trailer, plus Yahya Abdul-Mateen II‘s Black Manta in action, and the first look at Aquaman in a new costume that more closely matches his classic look.
On the small screen Marvel’s Daredevil is back with its third season this month. Charlie Cox is back as Matt Murdock, with Deborah Ann Woll as Karen Page, Elden Henson as Foggy, and Vincent D’Onofrio returns as the season’s key villain Wilson Fisk.
And in case you missed it, the new Hellboy movie has a new official poster, featuring Stranger Things’David Harbour in the updated prosthetics. And a new wide-angle poster released at New York Comic Con shows a first look at co-stars Milla Jovovich, Daniel Dae Kim, Sasha Lane, and Ian McShane.
It’s Bruce Willis in a sequel to M. Night Shyamalan’s Unbreakable? Nope.
Bruce Willis took over for Denzel Washington in the sequel to The Equalizer? Nope.
But the remake of 1974’s Death Wish is another vigilante action thriller just the same. Willis is back in his Unbreakable hooded sweatshirt and he’s adding another entry into the long list of films in the modern vigilante sub-genre. We all must like the good guys getting rid of the undisputed bad guys, one way or the other, because Hollywood keeps giving us more vigilante movies. Just look back to this abbreviated list of predecessor films: Dirty Harry (1971) (and all the sequels), Billy Jack (1971), Walking Tall (1973), Coffy (1973), Taxi Driver (1976), Mad Max (1979) (and its sequels), The Star Chamber (1983), Batman (1989) (and all its superhero emulators and incarnations before and since), Out for Justice (1991), Falling Down (1993), Nowhere to Run (1993), The Crow (1994), Timecop (1994), Kill Bill (2003), A Man Apart (2003), Walking Tall (2004), Man on Fire (2004), Sin City (2005), V for Vendetta (2005), Munich (2005), Shooter (2007), Taken (2008), Kick-Ass (2010), Machete (2010), The Equalizer (2014), and Deadpool (2016).
Charles Bronson (The Dirty Dozen, The Great Escape, The Twilight Zone, The Magnificent Seven, Never So Few, House of Wax, Pat and Mike) was 53 years old when he made the first Death Wish, and 72 by the time he made the fifth and final film in the Death Wish series. Bruce Willis is 62, so we’re in the right neighborhood for re-casting the role of a husband and father out for payback after his wife is murdered and daughter assaulted. Willis’s character’s ill-fated wife is played by Elizabeth Shue, seen most recently on TV’s CSI, but most memorable from Karate Kid, Cocktail, Back to the Future II and III, and Leaving Las Vegas, where she earned an Oscar nomination. The film co-stars Vincent D’Onofrio (The Magnificent Seven, Daredevil, Men in Black).
Check out this first trailer for Bruce Willis in the remake of Death Wish:
Warner Bros. has finally released the first trailer to the comedy reboot of the classic 1977-1983 television series CHiPs. The original drama series, starring the suave Erik Estrada and Larry Wilcox as California Highway Patrol officers Ponch and Jon, didn’t have the comedy you’re going to see in this reboot. No, this is an all-out, Rated R, Deadpool-level humor comedy. Think the movie remake of 21 Jump Street and you’ll get the vibe.
And it’s so, so wrong.
But it also looks like it could be pretty funny, if you’re not bothered by wall-to-wall crotch jokes. The big win is Ant-Man’s Michael Peña as an undercover FBI agent pretending to be Ponch. Hollywood is finally recognizing Peña as a charismatic rising star. Comedic actor Dax Shepard is Jon, and real-life wife Kristen Bell (Veronica Mars) also plays his wife in CHiPs. The couple is most recognizable these days from their long-running series of Samsung appliance commercials. Shepard wrote and directed the movie.
The film is peppered with actors you might find in serious police procedurals, which should lend something weighty to the humor. They include Isiah Whitlock, Jr. (Law & Order, The Wire), Vincent D’Onofrio (Emerald City, Law & Order: Criminal Intent, Men in Black), Richard T. Jones (Judging Amy, Godzilla, Super 8, Hot Pursuit), Wilmer Valderrama (Awake, That ’70s Show), and Jane Kaczmarek (St. Elsewhere, Law & Order).
Check out this first trailer for Dax Shepard’s CHiPs:
The Wizard of Oz–whether or not you may be a fan of L. Frank Baum’s classic book or one of the best fantasy films of all time, you may want to tune in for a new NBC series airing Friday nights this winter. Featuring well-known actors Joely Richardson and Vincent D’Onofrio, Emerald City stars Adria Arjona as twenty-year-old Dorothy Gale, who is sucked into a tornado and transported to the otherworldly Land of Oz. D’Onofrio plays the famous Man Behind the Curtain who runs Oz.
But don’t expect the bright and cheery world of the 1939 production or something like you’d see from Disney. Look for a dark world in this modern-day retelling. It’s gritty and somewhat dystopian as seen in the first trailer for the series, below.
Oliver Jackson-Cohen, Ana Ularu, Mido Hamada, Gerran Howell and Jordan Loughran co-star in the series. Series writers and executive producers include Shaun Cassidy, David Schulner, Tarsem Singh Dhandwar, Matthew Arnold, and Josh Friedman. Dhandwar directs the series.
Star Wars fans take note: Trisha Biggar, costume designer for the prequels and featured in the landmark book Dressing a Galaxy: The Costumes of Star Wars, has created the costumes for the series. Keep Padme Amidala in mind when watching the wardrobes of the various featured witches.
Check out this preview for Emerald City followed by several character posters released by Universal to promote the series:
It’s almost more useful to critique the critics than the new movie The Magnificent Seven, released in theaters this weekend. You’ll find the whole lot so predictable. The Magnificent Seven is a reboot or a remake (call it what you want) and so the best that critics are willing to do is provide the phoned-in, knee-jerk dismissal of it being something less than the original and therefore not worth the time it takes them to write a thoughtful review. Or they will compare it to the best Westerns of all time, and tell you why it falls short. The better reviews will point out that it’s a remake of the 1960 classic Western starring Yul Brynner and Steve McQueen. The smarter ones will remind you that even that version was based on the original Japanese version, Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai. Paycheck earned. Existence justified. But that’s all too easy.
Yes, the original 1960 John Sturges version is both a great Western and quite fun (it’s on my top ten list). The darker original Japanese film is more dramatic, brilliant in its simplicity, and not so much a rousing popcorn movie. Is the 2016 remake among the best Westerns of all time? Maybe not. But is it a good Western? Absolutely. Do we always want to see the best picture nominee when we go to the theater? I don’t. I want to have fun. And The Magnificent Seven is a blast. In fact, critics are looking at it wrong. It’s actually the year’s best superhero movie.
I understand the modern film critic’s dilemma, especially when Hollywood seems to have lost its imagination, churning out remake after remake. It’s the same old song: If you were a fan of–or better yet–love the original, you’re more likely than not to brush off the remake altogether, or at least not give it the attention it deserves. Those who never saw the original or those who can view a remake as its own incarnation–those who can tell themselves their feelings for the remake will not “ruin” their feelings about the original–probably enjoyed the Star Trek reboot from 2009, or Always, or Assault on Precinct 13, or The Flight of the Phoenix, The Fog, The Jackal, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., The Money Pit, Ocean’s Eleven, RoboCop, The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, or Walking Tall. Each of these, viewed on their own merits is a great film. They may even be good remakes. Those who avoid The Magnificent Seven are missing out on a fun outing. And a good remake.
Today’s ensemble movie is mostly found in the superhero genre. Stack up The Magnificent Seven against The Avengers, The Avengers 2, or Captain America: Civil War, or any DC Comics superhero film of the past 20 years, and it leaves them all in its dust in its success in introducing a team, getting them to work together, and MacGyver the situation into some giant climactic battles. Each of the titular seven stars of the movie have their own extraordinary abilities, they just don’t wear capes. It’s an ensemble piece. A superhero team-up. So why don’t we have a casting Oscar? The three casting directors knew what they were doing–they created the teams for Suicide Squad, Batman v. Superman, No Country for Old Men, True Grit, Sin City, and Star Wars Episode VIII.
Sony has finally released the first trailer for the remake of The Magnificent Seven, which we first previewed here at borg.com last May. Based on a reworked script by Nic Pizzolatto (True Detective) and John Lee Hancock (Snow White And The Huntsman) from the classic John Sturges film starring Yul Brynner and Steve McQueen, the new version will be directed by Antoine Fuqua (The Equalizer, Shooter, King Arthur, Training Day).
The list of leading actors is promising: Denzel Washington (2 Guns, Unstoppable, The Manchurian Candidate, Training Day, Philadelphia, Much Ado About Nothing),Chris Pratt(Guardians of the Galaxy, Jurassic World, Moneyball, Everwood),Vincent D’Onofrio(Men in Black, Jurassic World, Daredevil),Byung-hun Lee(Terminator Genisys, G.I. Joe: Retaliation, G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, RED 2),Matt Bomer(White Collar, Tru Calling, Chuck), and Ethan Hawke (Gattaca, Dead Poet’s Society, White Fang, Alive, Training Day, Assault on Precinct 13) should come together to form an interesting ensemble cast.
The 1960 cast was as gritty as they come: Brynner and McQueen were joined by Charles Bronson, James Coburn, and Robert Vaughn with Brad Dexter and Horst Buchholz.
If you think a remake of one of the greatest Westerns of all time is a bad idea, recall that The Magnificent Seven itself was a remake of Akira Kurasawa’s equally superb The Seven Samurai from 1954, starring Takashi Shimura and Toshirô Mifune. We’d also count Washington, Bomer, Hawke, Lee, and Pratt among our favorite actors in Hollywood, so this is promising. Other actors slated for the remake include Peter Sarsgaard, Luke Grimes, and Haley Bennett (who is a ringer for Bryce Dallas Howard in the previews).
Check out this first trailer for The Magnificent Seven:
In simplest terms, Jurassic World is simple entertainment on a big scale–a feast for the eyes. But for all its incredible special effects and fantastic futuristic technology, Jurassic World proves the maxim George Lucas laid out in reference to the success behind the original Star Wars–“Special effects are a tool, a means of telling a story… A special effect without a story is a pretty boring thing.” And that sums up Jurassic World, as a film and a 3D Blu-ray, Blu-ray, DVD, and digital release–the umpmillionth variation on the Frankenstein how-not-to-build-a-monster story, and the latest twist on Michael Crichton’s original look at a theme park gone bad in his movie Westworld.
Touted in its marketing as the #1 movie of the year, and proven out at the box office, in many way Jurassic World is a remake and certainly an homage to the original Jurassic Park. More than twenty years after the devastation caused in Jurassic Park, Isla Nublar now features a fully realized, fully functioning dinosaur theme park, Jurassic World, as originally envisioned by Richard Attenborough’s John Hammond. You’ll experience deja vu several times as these new characters, and one from the original, fail to learn the lessons of history. Didn’t the production team watch The Lost World (Jurassic Park II) and Jurassic Park III? The new theme park is built over the old park where so much went wrong and so many died, including leaving the original park all derelict and intact as it was in the last scene of the original movie, including leaving old Jurassic Park jeeps around for a modern, distracted teenager to magically restore to driving condition in a single scene. Dinosaur battle shots mirror those from the original, including the finale, although despite new technology the dinosaurs don’t seem as “real” here. Jurassic World seems to repeatedly search for a scene to match that “objects in mirror are closer than they appear” scene in the original. Michael Giacchino’s score misses the wonder and excitement of John Williams’s original themes. Although the effort is there, no single scene in Jurassic World captures the startling jumps and wows of Jurassic Park.
With four script/story writers for Jurassic World, it’s obvious why the story failed to deliver. Although we note above that George Lucas knows storytelling, he is also now famous for the stilted dialogue of his Star Wars prequels. The story team in Jurassic World offers up similarly strange words from the mouths of its actors–things no one would possibly say. And we can’t believe these dinosaur monsters are scary when the cast bounces back from each near-death experience so quickly. Even the worst of the characters, the youngest boy (who is a walking disaster) seems barely affected by the death going on around him for half the film.
The real conflicts within the script can be found in the strange parallels and inconsistencies. For one, director Colin Trevorrow has been quoted as saying his inspiration for the film was an image of a little girl texting in front of a T-Rex behind her. The corporate bad guy theme that underlies the plot is that no one cares about dinosaurs anymore, they are old news, and audiences needs something bigger and better. You can just see Trevorrow and executive producer Steven Spielberg laughing all the way to the bank over the irony here. The message, as delivered in the climax, is “bigger isn’t always better” and that often the original, the classic, offers up the best experience. Yet Jurassic World hammers into us the over-sized fantasies of Godzilla and King Kong instead of the science-fictional world that made a success of Jurassic Park.
With Quentin Tarentino’s The Hateful Eight due in theaters in November, we can only hope Westerns have another shot at making a comeback. Will a remake of one of the all-time, best-reviewed classic Westerns indicate other studios jumping on the bandwagon?
Actor Peter Sarsgaard(Green Lantern, Orphan, The Skeleton Key) is the latest addition to the cast of a remake of The Magnificent Seven being finalized for a 2017 release by MGM and Sony. Based on a reworked script by Nic Pizzolatto (True Detective) and John Lee Hancock (Snow White And The Huntsman) from the classic John Sturges film starring Yul Brynner and Steve McQueen, the new version will be directed by Antoine Fuqua (The Equalizer, Shooter, King Arthur, Training Day). The villain in the original 1960 story of an oppressed Mexican farming village seeking a small band of mercenaries for protection was played by Eli Wallach.
The only actor we think is missing from this remake is Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, who we would cast as Brynner’s badass hero. Still, the list of leading actors revealed so far is promising: Denzel Washington (2 Guns, Unstoppable, The Manchurian Candidate, Training Day, Philadelphia, Much Ado About Nothing),Chris Pratt(Guardians of the Galaxy, Jurassic World, Moneyball, Everwood),Vincent D’Onofrio(Men in Black, Jurassic World, Daredevil),Byung-hun Lee(Terminator Genisys, G.I. Joe: Retaliation, G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, RED 2),Matt Bomer(White Collar, Tru Calling, Chuck), and Ethan Hawke (Gattaca, Dead Poet’s Society, White Fang, Alive, Training Day, Assault on Precinct 13) should come together to form an interesting ensemble cast.
Byung-Hun Lee on horseback in I Saw the Devil.
The 1960 cast was as gritty as they come: Brynner and McQueen were joined by Charles Bronson, James Coburn, and Robert Vaughn with Brad Dexter and Horst Buchholz.
If you think a remake of one of the greatest Westerns of all time is a bad idea, recall that The Magnificent Seven itself was a remake of Akira Kurasawa’s equally superb The Seven Samurai from 1954, starring Takashi Shimura and Toshirô Mifune. We’d also count Washington, Bomer, Hawke, Lee, and Pratt among our favorite actors in Hollywood, so this will be worth a shot.
The CW Network revealed Brandon Routh’s latest supersuit–for his role as The Atom, Ray Palmer’s alter ego from the DC Universe playing out this month Wednesday nights on Arrow. Unlike the classic Captain America-esque suit, this live-action version has more in common with the classic Marvel Ant-Man garb. It’s a cool outfit and seems to fit his role on the show, much different than anything else seen in the series so far. We’re sure Routh, awesome as Superman and everything else he tries, will make it work.
Check it out:
Look for Routh in the supersuit for the first time on the February 25, 2015, episode of Arrow. He’ll then be in a team-up with Grant Gustin’s running man on a future episode of The Flash with the most comic book title yet: “All-Star Team-Up.”
Netflix has also released the first full trailer for its new series, Daredevil. So far it looks like it could be as good as Ben Affleck’s movie version (good or bad, depending on whether you liked that effort or not). Check it out for yourself, after the break:
