One of television's biggest dramas is entering its final stretch. Speaking to the Television Critics' Association earlier today, HBO programming prexy Casey Bloys confirmed that Game of Thrones will end after its planned eighth season - though there's, as one might expect given the size of the show, a lingering possibility of spinoffs.
File this one under "news nobody saw coming... because no one was exactly looking." There's been buzz since 2011 about a remake of the sci-fi cult hit Flatliners, but things became more solidified in recent months as a cast popped up around the project, including original star Kiefer Sutherland. His involvement seemed to indicate that the remake might carry on from the events of the first pic - which would in fact make it a sequel (or at the very least a requel, if you hate yourself enough to engage in that level of Hollywood jargon) - but it wasn't until earlier this week that Flatliners was unveiled as a full-on sequel.
Despite its paltry reviews and failure to register with mainstream audiences, Flaked is getting another season on Netflix, the streaming service confirmed on social media.
It's been a cruel summer. In Nice last week, a truck tore through a crowd of revelers, killing at least 84 and grievously wounding scores more, leaving a battered if not broken France in its wake. In Turkey, around the same time, a military coup terrorized and rapidly destabilized the nation, killing almost 250 and resulting in thousands of arrests. In America this month, video footage of police officers gunning down two black men reignited the painful, necessary mission of ending police brutality and addressing systemic racism in a country that's always been obfuscated by its dehumanizing darkness; its disorienting, devastating impact was also present in Dallas earlier this month, where five cops died during an attack by a sniper. And packaged in that brutal assault was another one of America's most enduring enigmas: how to tackle preventing gun massacres in a society obsessed with the weapons that facilitate them. For a nation still reeling from the hateful carnage of the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, the sheer quantity of tragedy has been overwhelming.
It doesn't take long for HBO's half-hour comedy Vice Principals to display its true colors. Within the first five minutes of the series, from star Danny McBride and exec-producer Jody Hill (the team behind Eastbound and Down), oafish and authoritarian high school v.p. Neal Gamby (McBride) is cussing out students, getting into slapping matches with fellow vice-principal - and long-time rival in the ever-brewing competition for a promotion to the big chair - Lee Russell (Walton Goggins), and leering at a female co-worker after shutting down her attempt to defend the bullied student he'd happily send back out into the halls without any semblance of safety.
It takes a while to put your finger on why the opening episode of HBO's The Night Of is so damnably unnerving. For most of its length, the premiere follows a fairly standard small-kid-big-city narrative, with Riz Ahmed's nerdy college student Nasir Khan (that's "Naz" for short) "borrowing" his father's yellow cab to sneak out to one of the few parties he's been lucky enough to score an invite to. Making his way through the maze of traffic lights and stumbling pedestrians, he's surprised when a beautiful young woman (Sofia Black D'Elia) steps into the car, looking to catch a ride. The two lock eyes; from Naz's perspective at least, it seems like there's something there - and off they go on an unexpected escapade through New York.
It's no secret that Warner Bros. is keen to launch a new, very likely massive franchise with this fall's Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them - and who can blame them? The Harry Potter series is one of the biggest cinematic cash cows ever, and with supposedly certain tentpoles like Jupiter Ascending, Pan, In the Heart of the Sea, and even Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice coming up unexpectedly short at the box office, the studio is ready for a sure thing.
It's easy to understand why Warner Bros. was tempted to make The Legend of Tarzan. Franchise-friendly, FX-heavy, and blockbuster-ready, it also boasts one of those illustrious brand names that everyone knows and Hollywood has yet to capitalize upon. To the studio, especially back when the project was first green-lit, in the wake of Alice in Wonderland and with the juggernaut Harry Potter franchise winding down, Tarzan must have seemed like a no-brainer, at once familiar enough to draw audiences and broad enough to allow a new team of filmmakers to provide a contemporary take on an old mythos.
Anyone who's seen the now-in-theaters Neon Demon, Only God Forgives, or really any other offering from Danish auteur Nicolas Winding Refn can attest to the fact that the guy makes movies his way, without much concern for making anything "mainstream" or even really "marketable." Even with the somewhat commercial Drive, which starred Ryan Gosling and turned into the most successful movie of Refn's career, he took a getaway-heist thriller and turned it into something much more bloody, stylish, and strange. For better and for worse, Refn marches to the beat of his own drum - which makes his recent interview with Business Insider, in which he professes to want to work within the studio system on a superhero movie, if you believe it, all the more interesting.
