Month: May 2024

24 May

JoBlo Revs Up for Furiosa and Talks With George Miller

By . FilmTV No Comments
george miller furiosa

Are you ready to head back to the Wasteland? In 2015, George Miller brought Mad Max back to rev up his engines in a massive way. Mad Max: Fury Road thrilled audiences and critics alike. The new chapter did something unexpected for a colossal summer action flick; it earned six Academy Awards and nominations for Best Picture and Best Director. That’s pretty great for what started as an Ozploitation flick in 1979.

What’s truly special about this franchise is that it’s all from Miller, aside from Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, co-directed by him and George Ogilvie. Even still, every film in the franchise has delivered. The Road Warrior and Fury Road are top picks for this viewer. Even still, every movie in the series resonates, and it’s easily one of my favorite franchises. Whether it’s Mel Gibson or Tom Hardy, this is a fantastic world that I continue to appreciate with each watch. And with Furiosa heading into theatres, Mad Max fans have much to be excited about.

Recently, we had the opportunity to get an early look at Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. And while I won’t go into a full review, As a massive fan of the franchise, I was not at all disappointed. Seeing what Mr. Miller has accomplished with his latest adventure is incredible. We will give you a more detailed review of the film closer to the film’s release after the official embargo ends. Until then, we did have a brief chance to speak with George Miller along with the other guests invited to the event. We’ve included a few highlights from the discussion and you can read our full Furiosa review HERE.

Was there an “aging” process for Anya Taylor-Joy throughout Furiosa?

No, we did not do the aging. There is one shot in which we made her smaller. Just one shot where we made her smaller, and then she became her normal age. No, it is just make-up. It is really weird when I see Anya on this press tour, and I see Anya as a different person.

It is freakish, and the same is true with Chris because I spent a year in the camera seeing them as their characters. And suddenly, I saw her with long hair, her immaculate skin, and she had make-up on. I said, “Wait a minute, that is not the real one.” The same goes for Chris Hemsworth; I can not believe that the character I have been watching for a year is on the screen. I know every frame; it is really hard for me to compute it, honestly.

How long did it take for you to plan out and storyboard the War Rig sequence?

I can not remember, but it took a long time. Fury Road was all storyboarding; in this case, we did a lot of storyboarding, but when it came to that sequence, Guy Norris, who is the second unit director and stunt coordinator, we have been working together for 41 years from the first, he was in Mad Max and he was a 21-year-old stuntman, and he is one of those people who has evolved with the technology and his son, he has got two sons, both who work as stuntmen and stunt people.

And even though the film was great, I really thought I could never make it on that movie. It was too bewildering. And I remember I spoke to Peter Weir, who had done his third feature, the second or third feature. And I explained it to him how difficult it was. He said, “George, don’t you realize it’s like that for every movie?” And he said, “Think about it. This is just…” At the time the Vietnam War was finishing, which is in the late Seventies. And he said, “Think about it as if you are on patrol in Vietnam. You’ve got your platoon; you’ve got to finish and get through it. You’ve got your mission.” He said, “But you don’t know where the snipers are. You don’t know where the landmines are. You don’t know what’s going to happen, but you’ve got to be agile enough to go with the flow and still get the end result.”

That stuck with me. It still sticks with me today. Things are going to happen. On this film, the worst things we had to struggle with were really inclement weather, bad weather.

How did you approach making Furiosa feel like its own isolated film and making people feel there were still stakes in her story?

Well, you’ve got someone who’s taken as a child, who can no longer depend on others. She has to unearth, if you like, un-evolved, un-practiced resources, inner resources to survive and then make a way back. And go through all that hardship and trauma and so on, and still endure the Wasteland, which is not an uncommon story. Each in our own way have to go through those sorts of things. And I know, I’m sure, in my own family, my parents who left.  Both of them left in World War I Europe and ended up in Australia and made a life there. And we all have those in our histories, or we know people like that. So that’s a story that, regardless of what the outcome is, it’s not about where they end up; it is what happens and how that person is forged in those worlds. And we are interested in those sorts of stories.

And that’s why we go back over and over again, particularly as children, to the same story. I don’t know if you know that book, The Uses of Enchantment by Bruno Bettelheim. And he talked about how kids, and all this from your own childhood and from kids around you, that we go back to the same stories over and over again. A kid will want to watch or be read the same story over and over again until they get to a moment where they don’t need it anymore. And Bettelheim said, “Never ask the kid what they were processing”, but they were processing something because they can’t articulate it. But that’s one of the functions of stories: to help us process the world and make meaning of the world around us. And that’s why, regardless of what happens in Fury Road, Furiosa, for me is part of that process, I think. That applies to all stories.

Did you ever think about following up your own way as the next step, or did you always want to tell what came before?

Well, that was the one that was most prepared and that’s the one I’m most wanted to tell because it was different from Fury Road. If we did just another, all like Fury Road, the fact that it was a saga would be much more. It would be a big contrast to something told sort of almost in real time. There’s sequences told like the two big sequences in Fury Road were almost real time. That first act chase and the last act chase play out in real-time. So that’s a completely different filmmaking exercise than something told over 18 years, and that was much more attractive to me at this point.

Did the success of Fury Road and all the awards and nominations you got change your approach to making Furiosa or was that not in your consideration?

Only that it allowed us to make it. What drives how you make a film is always a story, and you’ve got to use the right tools to tell it. That’s the only catch. You don’t, look, classic example, when we made Happy Feet, the guy, the wonderful cameraman who shot Babe, Andrew Leslie, went to and shot Lord of the Rings. When he came back from the first Lord of the Rings, he showed us – he lives in Sydney, but he came back to Sydney – and he showed us the first, sorry, I said lives, he passed away a few years ago, that he’s a great guy, great cameraman, and he came back and showed us the first motion capture of Gollum. Now, I’d never heard of motion capture, but the moment I saw that we had the story of Happy Feet, and I couldn’t work out exactly, I didn’t want to animate every penguin because it means that the animators had to understand tap dancing and it takes everyone who’s a great tap dancer, learn from it as they’re kids.

So the moment you showed us that, the first thought was, “Andrew, you’ve just shown us how to make Happy Feet,” and we were able to use Savion Glover. I don’t know if you know Savion Glover?

I’ll give you the greatest living Tap dancer. By far, the guy’s a genius. We are able to use Savion Glovers and all that talent to make the penguin dance. Now, that’s what drives story, the tools, so all those other things, it doesn’t change your response. You just know that with all the difficulties that you might’ve gone through, Fury Road was a difficult movie to make. We had a bad relationship with the studio, Tom and Charlize, this is as well-documented with fighting, but that didn’t get in the way of the filmmaking, but they’re the difficulties that you have to cope with. It happens on every film. You don’t know where it’s going to come from, and you don’t know, it just happens.

You talked about the mo-cap changing Happy Feet. Were there any tools that you had access to that had the technology that had changed between Fury Road and now that helped make this?

The biggest one was Toy Box, PROXi that we did with Guy Norris and Harrison Norris that allowed us to do things. If you look at that sequence, all the action sequences basically, but if you look at that sequence, that’s got a lot of moving parts, a lot of dynamic. You’ve got underneath the truck, you’ve got on top of the truck, you’ve got both ends of the truck, you’re in the cabin, then you’ve got characters flying in on all sorts of flying things. So there’s a lot of space to use. It’s just not linear.

So you could do that with storyboards, but it’s very hard to figure out how each shot flows into the next. So that was the perfect tool to do it. Now, but previously, it can be very painstaking; it’s a bit like animation, but now the tools are getting way faster. What we did on Fury Road, we boarded and then we had this massive table out in the middle of the desert with a big tent and every single stuntman, often dressed in their wardrobe, and every single camera, like the edge arm, which is their crane arm, whatever, had a little model on the table and every war boy, every stuntman, had a little model storyboard and we did literally playing like kids.

And they’d say, “Okay, you move that way and I move this way and the camera does this and I get killed and fall off here.” All of that had to be worked out shot for shot. Every shot was rehearsed on Toy Box. Now , we are able to do that digitally. That’s not to say they hadn’t rehearsed in all this stuff, but on the day of the shoot and the days leading up to the shoot, that’s how it was done. Because that’s how you go from two-dimensional storyboards without any regard for how time moves. You can draw arrows and things, but you can’t really get the feeling of it. And it’s played out in real-time. Now you can do that digitally. That’s the biggest change , I think.

The post JoBlo Revs Up for Furiosa and Talks With George Miller appeared first on JoBlo.

24 May

What Happened to Danny Glover?

By . FilmTV No Comments

Detective Murtaugh sees a mysterious man pull out a weapon in the middle of a police station. He heroically jumps into action to protect, serve, and tackle. But it turns out it is just good ol’ Mel Gibson, who overpowers and flips this 50-year-old character, played by a 40-year-old actor, Danny Glover. Humiliated and hurt, Danny Glover spits out an iconic line that has come to define his career and become a meme, “I’m too old for this shit.” Danny Glover was too old for this shit three decades ago… but he has kept on grinding, making motion pictures ever since. But maybe Danny Glover is too old for this shit… if that “shit” is good movies. Oh, I kid! I kid!

Glover may not have any Oscars (or, surprisingly, a single nomination), but he did get a late start in his movie career, having broken out in his 40s. So, what has Danny Glover, now on the cusp of his 80s, been doing? He’s certainly not retired, not on the big screen and not through his other endeavors. But how has he spent his years? What has he been doing instead of giving us the Lethal Weapon 5 we deserve? Or at least a Danny Glover Arnold Schwarzenegger buddy cop Predator sequel?!!! I would settle for a Wes Anderson cameo actually…

Let’s find out: WTF Happened to…DANNY GLOVER?

To truly understand what happened to Danny Glover, we go back to the beginning. And the beginning began when he was born on July 22, 1946, in San Francisco. It was here that Glover attended State University, although he didn’t graduate. Later, he would enroll in San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater (focusing on the Black Actors’ Workshop) and the Shelton Actors Lab.

Early Roles

But even after his studies and briefly appearing in Escape from Alcatraz, Glover worked in San Francisco’s Office of Community Development. Noble as his causes may have been, he gravitated to the small screen, appearing on shows like B.J. And The Bear (1979), Lou Grant (1979), The Greatest American Hero (1981), and Hill Street Blues (1981), which was actually a four-episode arc.

Glover would balance his early acting days on screens both big and small and the stage, appearing in 1981 comedy Chu Chu and the Philly Flash followed by drama Deadly Drifter (1982), a production of “Master Harold”…and the Boys (1982), and the 1983 miniseries Chiefs, earning praise for his supporting turn. 1984 brought Iceman and, more importantly, the role of a drifter after work in Places in the Heart, which he would later say was his most precious role and a sort of tribute to his ancestors, as he was the great-grandson of slaves. This ties directly into what would eventually be Glover’s defining trait outside of acting: his causes. Inspired by parents active in the NAACP, Glover himself became a civil rights activist, participating in the Black Students’ Union during his short go at college. Such movements and protests in part led to the first college-level Department of Black Studies in the U.S. Nearly five decades later, he actively supported the SFSU hunger strike to get more resources for the College of Ethnic Studies. Glover, too, later received the NAACP Image Award and the Pioneer Award from the National Civil Rights Museum. Such commitment would remain on screen throughout his career, too, notably with 2000’s TV movie Freedom Song, which earned him Emmy and SAG nods. As he would note in the 1980s, “Given how this industry has dealt with people like me, the parts I take have to be political choices.”

Lethal Weapon and stardom

Glover had no doubt arrived, soon truly breaking out after playing a corrupt lieutenant in Witness (1985), a cowboy who suffers racism in Silverado (1985), and, most notably, the abusive husband to Whoopi’s Celie in The Color Purple (1985) in a performance that was snubbed of an Oscar nomination, an accolade that he would never achieve. Despite the acclaim, he remained fairly under the radar. This would go away in 1987 with two key works: playing Nelson Mandela in a TV movie (even beating Morgan Freeman to the punch!) and Lethal Weapon, playing on-the-brink-of-retirement sergeant Roger Murtaugh throughout the quadrilogy, which early on redefined the buddy cop movie even in its infancy. (Ironic, too, that his first blockbuster came at 41.) This franchise was key for Glover not in just international exposure but allowing him to fund projects of passion and social importance. Signing on for Lethal Weapon 2 allowed him to work on 1990’s To Sleep with Anger, which was his meatiest role yet (a man who disrupts a small family’s life), earning an Independent Spirit Award in the process. With that came 1992’s Lethal Weapon 3, which he used as leverage to get the following year’s The Saint of Fort Washington financed. By the time Lethal Weapon 4 was locked and loaded in 1999, Glover could press forward with nearly any project he wanted.

predator 2

Finishing up the 1980s, Glover played a pilot in Bat21* (1988) and a tracker in miniseries Lonesome Dove (1989). This, too, was a pivotal role, with him embodying so much of Dove’s soul. In the early ‘90s, Glover really came into his own, balancing a variety of genres to varying degrees of success. The same year he won an Independent Spirit Award, he played Lieutenant Mike Harrigan in Predator 2 (a Best Movie You Never Saw fave here at JoBlo), a performance that stood out in a genre not normally associated with strong ones. 1991 brought the weak Flight of the Intruder, fine crime flick A Rage in Harlem, ensemble drama Grand Canyon, and a horrible comedy with Martin Short called Pure Luck.

His Morgan Freeman connection was made concrete with 1993’s Bopha!, directed by Freeman himself. He also appeared in Alex Haley miniseries Queen. Now was the time in his career when he could branch out and do family-friendly Disney movies like Angels in the Outfield (1994) and Operation Dumbo Drop (1995). Such fare would carry over the next couple of years, with Gone Fishin’ (1997), The Prince of Egypt (1998) (no, he didn’t do his own singing), and Antz (1998). The rest of the decade saw him in a one-off twist as Philip Marlowe for Fallen Angels (1995), along with thriller Switchback (1998) and Beloved (1998). But his causes remained true, as in 1994 he co-founded the Robey Theatre Company, named after landmark Black actor/singer Paul Robeson.

The first part of the 21st century brought apartheid-focused Boesman and Lena (2000), thriller 3 A.M. (2001), and 2001’s The Royal Tenenbaums, showing he was somehow a perfect fit for the Anderson troupe. He would also direct his first feature (2002’s Just a Dream), return to TV (2003’s Good Fences), and surprisingly turn up in 2004’s Saw.

Random Roles

Here, Danny Glover hit us with a spree of movies that showed he didn’t give a damn what you threw in front of him so long as it came with a paycheck and steady work. And, by and large, how many of these movies do you even remember seeing Danny Glover in?:

2005’s Manderlay and Missing in America; 2006’s Bamako, Barnyard, The Shaggy Dog, and Dreamgirls; 2007’s Shooter, Poor Boy’s Game, Battle for Terra, Honeydripper, and Miranda Regresa; 2008’s Be Kind Rewind, Gospel Hill, and Blindness; 2009’s Night Train, Down for Life, The Harimaya Bridge, 2012…Oh, a couple? Did you also remember his arcs on ER and Brothers and Sisters? How about the next decade?:

Danny Glover kicked off the 2010s by appearing in – ready for this? – 10 movies! There he is in Death at a Funeral, but what’s he doing co-starring with John Cena (Legendary), voicing dogs (Alpha and Omega), and playing characters with no proper names, like The Principal in I Want to Be a Soldier? The rest of the decade was just padding: two movies in 2011, three in 2012, seven in 2013, eight in 2014 and 2015, nine in 2016, and more than a dozen total to round out the decade. So rare, too, was anything notable. Some titles were, like Sorry to Bother You (2018), The Last Black Man in San Francisco (2019), and the Jumanji sequel (2019), but the rest did nothing for his reputation. It was like he was – dare we say it? – too old for this shit.

Danny Glover’s activism

But we have to say that Danny Glover’s true interests were elsewhere, sometimes even behind the camera, usually for the sake of social awareness/justice and genuine meaning, as with 2008’s Trouble the Water, 2011’s The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975, Uncle Boonmee (2012), and more, all through his Louverture Films, so named after Haitian general Toussaint Louverture. Glover even tried making a biopic of the man, collaborating with Hugo Chavez, president of Venezuela, whose lack of support from the U.S. Glover was gravely disappointed in. Despite receiving $18 million in funding from Venezuela, the film has yet to be made.

Once saying, “I try to be the best citizen I could be,” Danny Glover would remain prominent in bringing justice to those who needed it internationally, partaking in TransAfrica – dealing with foreign policy between the U.S. and African/Caribbean regions – and serving as a UN Goodwill Ambassador for Brazil. He, too, was a UNICEF ambassador. Such causes and more would see him in a spotlight that perhaps better fit his purpose on the planet. In 2004, while protesting against violence and hostility in Sudan, he was arrested for disorderly conduct, while in 2011 he actively protested in support of labor unions; he also spoke directly in support of the American Postal Workers Union, fitting as his parents were both postal workers.

Maybe we can’t name a single movie Danny Glover had a significant onscreen role in in close to two decades, but cinema has given back to him, recently receiving the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award for “outstanding contributions to humanitarian causes.” It’s telling that in his speech, Glover barely even mentioned film… Nevertheless, the man is a legend among legends and deserves a great role to put a cap on what’s been an amazing career.

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24 May

Wake Up Dead Man: the third Knives Out mystery gets its title!

By . FilmTV No Comments

Writer/director Rian Johnson got the title for his 2019 murder mystery Knives Out from a Radiohead song. When it came time to make the 2022 sequel Glass Onion, he got the title from a song by The Beatles. So it’s only fitting that the third film in the franchise have a song-inspired title as well. But while Radiohead and The Beatles were from England, the band that inspired the third title originates from Ireland. The band is U2, and the title for the third Knives Out movie comes from their song Wake Up Dead Man. Johnson made the title announcement by sharing the video that’s embedded above.

No plot details have been revealed, but we can count on Daniel Craig to reprise the role of private investigator Benoit Blanc in the new film. Like Glass Onion, Wake Up Dead Man will be released through the Netflix streaming service. Here’s the logline: Benoit Blanc returns in his most dangerous case yet.

Back in January of 2023, Johnson told Empire Magazine that the follow-up to Knives Out and Glass Onion would be his next film because “it’s the most exciting thing right now to me. That’s served me really well. I feel like any movie I’m making, I need to be making it because I can’t imagine doing anything else. I’m jumping into the next Benoit Blanc next because I can’t think about another story.”

We have to address the fact that the full title for Glass Onion is actually Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, and the full title for Wake Up Dead Man is Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery. Hopefully Johnson has made his peace with these extended titles, because he was upset about it when A Knives Out Mystery got slapped onto Glass Onion. He told The Atlantic, “I’ve tried hard to make them self-contained. Honestly, I’m pissed off that we have A Knives Out Mystery in the title. I want it to just be called Glass Onion. I get it, and I want everyone who liked the first movie to know this is next in the series, but also, the whole appeal to me is it’s a new novel off the shelf every time. But there’s a gravity of a thousand suns toward serialized storytelling.“

What do you think of the third movie in this franchise being titled Wake Up Dead Man – or, officially, Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery? Let us know by leaving a comment below.

The post Wake Up Dead Man: the third Knives Out mystery gets its title! appeared first on JoBlo.

24 May

Morgan Spurlock, the Oscar-nominated director of the eye-opening documentary Super Size Me, has died at 53

By . FilmTV No Comments
Morgan Spurlock, death, Super Size Me

Sad news has hit the drive-thru line of Hollywood as we learn about the untimely passing of Morgan Spurlock, the Oscar-nominated director of the eye-opening documentary Super Size Me. According to his family, Spurlock passed away at 53 after losing a private battle with cancer.

In a statement to the press, Spurlock’s family said the risk-taking filmmaker “passed away peacefully in New York surrounded by family and friends” on Thursday. Spurlock was undergoing chemotherapy treatments earlier this year, though the cancer proved too much in the end.

“It was a sad day, as we said goodbye to my brother Morgan,” said Craig Spurlock, one of the filmmaker’s older brothers. The sibling duo joined forces on several documentary projects, including Morgan Spurlock Inside Man and 7 Deadly Sins. “Morgan gave so much through his art, ideas, and generosity. The world has lost a true creative genius and a special man. I am so proud to have worked together with him.”

Unafraid to sacrifice health and well-being for art, Spurlock took the fast food industry to task with his groundbreaking documentary Super Size Me. In the doc, Spurlock voluntarily ate McDonald’s food exclusively for 30 days to demonstrate the impact and risks of a fast food diet. Subsisting on a strict diet of Quarter Pounder combo meals, hot cakes, french fries, McChicken sandwiches, and various flavors of pop, Spurlock’s health cratered with catastrophic liver failure and excessive weight gain. Super Size Me earned $20 million worldwide, a “Biggie Size” amount for any documentary. The film’s popularity instantly catapulted Spurlock to the top of the Hollywood charts as a non-fiction filmmaker to watch.

“Spurlock fearlessly challenged modern conventions utilizing humor and wit to shed light on societal issues,” the family said in its statement. “His films inspired critical thinking and encouraged viewers to question the status quo. Over thirteen years, through his production company Warrior Poets, Spurlock found additional success producing and directing nearly 70 documentary films and television series.”

The statement continued, “He deeply valued the creative contributions of the talented people who worked on his projects, developing a cadre of freelance production professionals who came back time and again. A great lover of modern artists, Spurlock compiled an extensive art collection, which decorated the walls of his home and the Warrior Poets office in SoHo, New York.”

Did Spurlock’s films do anything to change your perspective on the world? Have you limited the fast food you consume after seeing Super Size Me? Let us know in the comments section below.

The post Morgan Spurlock, the Oscar-nominated director of the eye-opening documentary Super Size Me, has died at 53 appeared first on JoBlo.

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