The release date for Star Wars: The Force Awakens is more than a year away, but that has not stopped everyone involved (and everyone not involved) from talking about it ad nauseam. With so little actual information available on the film, the Internet has been awash in rumors and speculation about who was going to appear, what parts they might play, and what might happen to them. Now we can confirm at least one rumor that has been circulating for some time now: Carrie Fisher's daughter Billie Lourd is indeed going to be appearing in the film.
By now I think we have all agreed that when Ridley Scott said that Exodus: Gods and Kings was "historically accurate," what he really meant was "historically accurate to Biblical epics of the 1950s." So taking this for granted, we can now start the debate on whether or not the film will be a Ridley Scott classic, or a Ridley Scott epic failure. To further contribute to this debate prior to the film's actual release, we have a new clip from Exodus: Gods and Kings.
If you are like me, you may have done a double take at the headline "Armie Hammer Joins The Birth of a Nation." In this case, we are not talking about a remake of the starkly racist silent film by D.W. Griffith, but rather a biopic of slave-turned-revolutionary Nat Turner being directed by Nate Parker.
Director Lee Daniels has had an interesting career so far. After helming Precious, a film that garnered quite a few Oscar nods, he went on to direct the bizarre and insane The Paperboy, with Nicole Kidman and Zac Efron. This was followed up by Lee Daniels' The Butler, another film focusing on issues of race in America. Now, the director is set to helm a very different type of film from his previous endeavors, as he signs on for Demon House, a supernatural thriller.
If you were Jennifer Lawrence, an actress with three Oscar nods, one win, and a major motion picture franchise under her belt (all at the tender age of 25), would you voluntarily appear in a Farrelly Brothers film? I guess it depends on how you feel about the Farrelly Brothers. Lawrence is evidently not impressed, because word on the street is that she decided to nix her own cameo in the upcoming Dumb and Dumber To.
It's the film that the director, stars, and executive producer do not want you to see, but that's not going to stop the studio marketing machine from showing us clips, posters, and trailers for Paul Schrader's CIA thriller Dying of the Light. Protests from the director and stars Nicolas Cage and Anton Yelchin are over the producers taking over the film after Schrader offered a less than stellar cut - and although they are required by their contracts to not disparage the film, they have nonetheless made their objections very known. Though what the public sees will unlikely be Schrader's cut, we are still going to see something - and the first clip gives us a bit of a taste.
Wes Anderson is one of the more polarizing directors working today. It seems that you either enjoy his quirky, stylized vision of the world and the people in it, or you don't. The public does seem to be enjoying him right now, though. With the critical success of The Grand Budapest Hotel, many of us (myself included) are waiting to see what Anderson will choose to develop next. Now we might have some answers, and they are not quite what you'd expect.
Give Benedict Cumberbatch some credit. A lesser actor would have enjoyed the fan adulation that comes with appearing in a major television series, resting on his laurels and taking easy and unvaried roles to solidify his starring status. He might have nodded to a prestige picture now and then, leading to the inevitable Oscar nomination, but his career would have been as uninteresting as many A-listers nowadays. Instead, Cumberbatch continues to take different and interesting roles, dabbling in everything from returning to the BBC to play Richard III in The Hollow Crown, to stopping the Nazis in his next film, The Imitation Game.
Following the not-so-great first effort to revive their monster franchises (again) with Dracula Untold, Universal continues to prove that they won't let bad reviews get them down. They will carry on doing what other studios do better, no matter what you say. In this vein, Universal is planning an adaptation of Boom! Studios' Day Men, a vampire comic book with a twist, and they have hired a writer to pen the tale.
Director Oliver Stone traveled to Russia recently to finalize details on his new film The Snowden Files, about NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. While there, he confessed to wanting to direct a documentary about current Russian President Vladimir Putin. He said that he would enjoy interviewing Putin, who "represents a different point of view that Americans don't hear." I guess you can't argue with that.
