Most of Elden Ring developer FromSoftware’s games have some form of cooperative play. However, they are full of restrictions and cost-related mechanics that make it impossible for you to play the whole way through with a friend without jumping through hoops. The good news is, it doesn’t sound like the studio is…
You’re a wizard, Tony! Wide-ranging actor Daniel Radcliffe is officially a Tony-winning actor, nabbing Best Performance by a Featured Actor in a Musical for his work in Merrily We Roll Along. This was Radcliffe’s first nomination for the prestigious theater award, while the musical itself would take home four Tonys total, including Best Revival of a Musical.
You can check out the full list of winners from last night’s Tony Awards below:
Best Musical: The Outsiders
Best Revival of a Musical: Merrily We Roll Along
Best Direction of a Musical: Danya Taymor, The Outsiders
Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Musical: Jonathan Groff — Merrily We Roll Along
Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Musical: Maleah Joi Moon, Hell’s Kitchen
Best Performance by a Featured Actor in a Musical: Daniel Radcliffe, Merrily We Roll Along
Best Performance by a Featured Actress in a Musical: Kecia Lewis, Hell’s Kitchen
Best Book of a Musical: Shaina Taub, Suffs
Best Original Score: Shaina Taub, Suffs
Best Orchestrations: Jonathan Tunick, Merrily We Roll Along
Best Choreography: Justin Peck, Illinoise
Best Scenic Design in a Musical: Tom Scutt, Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club
Best Costume Design in a Musical: Linda Cho, The Great Gatsby
Best Lighting Design in a Musical: Brian MacDevitt and Hana S. Kim, The Outsiders
Best Sound Design of a Musical: Cody Spencer, The Outsiders
Best Play: Stereophonic
Best Revival of a Play: Appropriate
Best Direction of a Play: Daniel Aukin, Stereophonic
Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Play: Jeremy Strong, An Enemy of the People
Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Play: Sarah Paulson, Appropriate
Best Performance by a Featured Actor in a Play: Will Brill, Stereophonic
Best Performance by a Featured Actress in a Play: Kara Young, Purlie Victorious: A Non-Confederate Romp Through the Cotton Patch
Best Scenic Design in a Play: David Zinn, Stereophonic
Best Costume Design in a Play: Dede Ayite, Jaja’s African Hair Braiding
Best Lighting Design in a Play: Jane Cox, Appropriate
Best Sound Design of a Play: Ryan Rumery, Stereophonic
Daniel Radcliffe has earned major praise on the stage throughout his career, earning four Drama Desk Award nominations. He also has a Grammy nomination for Best Musical Theater Album for How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.
Congrats to all of this year’s Tony Award winners, especially those like Daniel Radcliffe, Jeremy Strong and Sarah Paulson who we associate more with the screen.
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Fallout fans have been desperate for something new to play in the post-apocalyptic RPG franchise ever since the Amazon TV adaptation blew up earlier this year. Recently, however, director Todd Howard said Bethesda doesn’t want to “rush” a new single-player Fallout game, and went into more detail about what the team is…
Fallout fans have been desperate for something new to play in the post-apocalyptic RPG franchise ever since the Amazon TV adaptation blew up earlier this year. Recently, however, director Todd Howard said Bethesda doesn’t want to “rush” a new single-player Fallout game, and went into more detail about what the team is…
After being delayed several months by the writers strike and the actors strike, season 5 of the hit Netflix series Stranger Things (which is also the last season of the show) finally went into production at the start of the year and is now six months into its twelve month shooting schedule… and according to cast member Jamie Campbell Bower, who joined the show in season 4 as the supernatural villain Henry Creel / Vecna, the episodes that make up the final season of Stranger Things are out of control and completely insane.
During an interview on iHeart’s I’ve Never Said This Before with Tommy DiDario, Bower said (with thanks to The Hollywood Reporter for the transcription), “If you thought last season was nuts, this season is just out of control, wild, like it’s bonkers. It really, really is. It’s bigger. It’s just completely insane. It’s completely insane.” The season is so big, with so much going on, that Bower even admitted that he’s struggling to keep track of all the events.
He also revealed that going to see the prequel stage play Stranger Things: The First Shadow, which is set in 1959 (the Netflix series is set in the 1980s) gave him a deeper understanding of the character he plays on the show. He said, “It’s been really interesting as well to have the play on in London, which I went to go and see, which goes back to Henry before we met him in season 4. And to have a lot of the questions or a lot of the thoughts that I had about that character kind of answered by watching the play and also discover more, was really interesting for me.“
Written by Stranger Things writer and co-executive producer Kate Trefry from an original story she crafted with Jack Thorne and series creators the Duffer Brothers, Stranger Things: The First Shadow has the following synopsis: Hawkins, 1959: a regular town with regular worries. Young Jim Hopper’s car won’t start, Bob Newby’s sister won’t take his radio show seriously and Joyce Maldonado just wants to graduate and get the hell out of town. When new student Henry Creel arrives, his family finds that a fresh start isn’t so easy… and the shadows of the past have a very long reach. Brought to life by a multi-award-winning creative team, who take theatrical storytelling and stagecraft to a whole new dimension, this gripping new adventure will take you right back to the beginning of the Stranger Things story – and may hold the key to the end.
Stranger Things has the following synopsis: A love letter to the ‘80s classic genre films that captivated a generation, Stranger Things is a thrilling drama set in the seemingly normal Midwestern town of Hawkins, Indiana. After a boy vanishes into thin air, his close-knit group of friends and family search for answers and are pulled into a high-stakes and deadly series of events. Beneath the surface of their ordinary town lurks an extraordinary supernatural mystery, along with top-secret government experiments and a dangerous gateway that connects our world to a powerful yet sinister realm. Friendships will be tested and lives will be altered as what they discover will change Hawkins and possibly the world — forever.
Here’s the list of the cast members and the characters they played in season 4: Winona Ryder (Joyce Byers), David Harbour (Jim Hopper), Millie Bobby Brown (Eleven), Finn Wolfhard (Mike Wheeler), Gaten Matarazzo (Dustin Henderson), Caleb McLaughlin (Lucas Sinclair), Noah Schnapp (Will Byers), Sadie Sink (Max Mayfield), Natalia Dyer (Nancy Wheeler), Charlie Heaton (Jonathan Byers), Joe Keery (Steve Harrington), Maya Hawke (Robin Buckley), Priah Ferguson (Erica Sinclair), Brett Gelman (Murray), Cara Buono (Karen Wheeler), Matthew Modine (Dr. Brenner), Paul Reiser (Dr. Owens), Jamie Campbell Bower (Peter Ballard), Joseph Quinn (Eddie Munson), Eduardo Franco (Argyle), Sherman Augustus (Lt. Colonel Sullivan), Mason Dye (Jason Carver), Nikola Djuricko (Yuri), Tom Wlaschiha (Dmitri), Myles Truitt (Patrick), Regina Ting Chen (Ms. Kelly), Grace Van Dien (Chrissy), Logan Riley Bruner (Fred Benson), Logan Allen (Jake), Elodie Grace Orkin (Angela), John Reynolds (Officer Callahan), Rob Morgan (Chief Powell), Amybeth McNulty (Vickie), and Freddy Krueger himself Robert Englund (Victor Creel).
Stranger Things is produced by Monkey Massacre Productions and 21 Laps Entertainment. Series creators The Duffer Brothers serve as executive producers alongside Shawn Levy and Dan Cohen of 21 Laps Entertainment, Iain Paterson, and Curtis Gwinn.
10 Cloverfield Lane and Prey director Dan Trachtenberg is directing an episode of the final season before he heads off to make the new Predator movie Badlands, starring Elle Fanning. New to cast for Stranger Things season 5 is Linda Hamilton (The Terminator).
What do you think of Jamie Campbell Bower describing Stranger Things season 5 as out of control and completely insane? Share your thoughts on this one by leaving a comment below.
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Elden Ring’s highly anticipated expansion, Shadow of the Erdtree, is dropping later this week, and a lot of people are pumped for what’s shaping up to be one of the biggest releases of the year. Whether you’re a lorehound or simply someone looking for a proper excuse to dive into the game of 2022, Shadow of the…
Elden Ring’s highly anticipated expansion, Shadow of the Erdtree, is dropping later this week, and a lot of people are pumped for what’s shaping up to be one of the biggest releases of the year. Whether you’re a lorehound or simply someone looking for a proper excuse to dive into the game of 2022, Shadow of the…
When it was announced that the third movie in the Deadpool franchise would be released under its new Disney overlords, many had speculated that it might get its bite taken from it since the company does not partake in more mature content. The character of Deadpool is a crass one, and the source material can get incredibly crude, which the previous films have been able to capitalize on with their adult-oriented entries. Thankfully, Kevin Feige would put everyone’s worries to rest when he made sure that Deadpool & Wolverine would be shooting for an R-rating.
In a new development for this anticipated release, The Hollywood Reporter has revealed that Deadpool & Wolverine has secured a release date for China and, for the first time, it will be released simultaneously with the U.S. premiere. However, the China release will be showcasing some censored cuts. The original Deadpool from 2016 was not granted a release in China since the movie showcased graphic violence and strong language. Then, the sequel had eventually passed the censors months after its release due to the Once Upon a Deadpool re-edit that gave the film a more holiday vibe and brought it down to a PG-13 rating. That watered-down cut would raise $42 million at the box office in China and would top out at $51 million worldwide.
There hasn’t been a formal announcement from Disney about what cuts will be made. However, the red band trailers for the film have already shown plenty of blood, a pegging joke, references to cocaine and both characters cursing up a storm. Sources that are close to the film have stated that the censored cut will not compromise “the integrity of the storytelling” or the “Deadpool spirit.”
Despite these cuts being made, Ryan Reynolds, who championed and saw this franchise through to its maximum effort, was pleasantly surprised at how uncuffed they were with this film. “I hope it doesn’t sound condescending, I’m really proud of them for doing this. I think it’s a huge step for them,” Reynolds said. “I mean, it adds a whole other color to this kaleidoscopic wheel that is that company and the different people that they have been entertaining forever.“ He continued, “I was surprised though, that they let us go as hard R, but very grateful. I mean there’s no other way to do it.” The actor added that the R rating allowed them “to do anything and everything in a world where anything and everything is possible.”
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In the 80s and 90s, an interesting cycle of inspirational teacher movies was being made. You know the type – the film where a big star plays a down-and-out teacher who gets posted in some crime-ridden school, and they manage to turn things around? Often, they were based on true stories, like Stand and Deliver, Dangerous Minds, Lean on Me and a few others. Then, there were the more fanciful, tough-guy teacher movies, like Nick Nolte’s Teachers and James Belushi’s underrated The Principal.
But of all these movies, the most badass, by far, is a little movie called The Substitute starring Tom Berenger.
In it, he plays a mercenary who goes undercover as a substitute teacher to avenge a brutal assault on his girlfriend, a crusading teacher played by Heat’s Diane Venora. While initially only planning on staying long enough to find the teens responsible, he finds himself oddly drawn to his new profession, realizing that a lot of his students are pretty good kids and that there’s a massive drug operation going on at the school that he’s going to burn down – all in the name of giving these kids a future! While somewhat obscure nowadays, it was an unexpected box office hit in ’96 and did so well on home video that it spawned three sequels, none of which Berenger returned for.
Tom Berenger is an interesting case of a guy who came very close to becoming a movie star but never quite crossed over. He was a substantial rising star in the eighties thanks to critical roles in two of the most influential films of the decade, The Big Chill and Platoon. If you look at those two movies, you get an interesting look at his range. In The Big Chill, he played a TV heartthrob in the Tom Selleck mode, albeit one finds it challenging to live up to the slick hero he plays on TV and is suffering through a very early mid-life crisis. In Platoon, he plays the battle-scarred Sgt Barnes, who is locked in a kind of spiritual combat with Willem Dafoe’s Sgt Elias for the proverbial souls of his soldiers, with him a nightmarish villain.
Sadly, Berenger’s follow-up roles, minus a significant cameo in Born of the Fourth of July, never entirely pushed him onto the A-list, with him doing solid work in films like Ridley Scott’s Someone to Watch Over Me, Costa-Gravas’ Betrayed, and the awesome Shoot to Kill. Yet, in the mid-nineties, perhaps playing on the notoriety of his role in Platoon, he began to carve out a mini-niche in action films, often playing characters similar to the one he played in Oliver Stone’s movies, albeit with a much more heroic nature. Probably the best of the bunch was Sniper, perhaps the best movie you never saw that got nine sequels.
If Berenger had come along in a different era for action movies, he likely would have been a bigger star, with his more down-to-earth, older heroes not all that different from the kinds of movies guys like Gerard Butler and Liam Neeson make. But, in the nineties, muscle-bound heroes and martial artists were all the rage.
That’s too bad because Berenger rocks in The Substitute. What makes him work in the role is that he has the kind of look where you’d believe him as a world-weary mercenary and a teacher. He could fit in both roles. If this movie had been made with Steven Seagal or Jean-Claude Van Damme, you would have never bought the character as a teacher. What’s cool about the movie is how you see his character, Shale, find his priorities shifting as the film progresses. In the beginning, he’s a worn-out mercenary who’s just been disavowed by the government with his whole team – who are a who’s who of nineties badasses: Luis Guzman, Raymond Cruz (long before Breaking Bad), Richard Brooks and William Forsythe. The gang is somewhat fractured, as they’re being enticed to enter the drug trade as mercenaries for drug dealers, but Shale’s code of honour prevents them from going in this direction. He’s frustrated with a world that’s been overrun by hoodlums, and when his girlfriend is kneecapped, it pushes him over the edge.
The movie kind of toys with going in a more Taxi Driver-style route, with Shale’s introduction to his students being violent, with him sneering with hatred as he writes on the blackboard. You feel like he’s going to snap. But, as the film goes on, Shale finds that he starts to enjoy being a teacher, especially when he realizes how many of the students he teaches are thugs because, as the old song says, it chose them rather than vice versa. He realizes that many of them have children of their own that they don’t want to see go down the same route, with Shale telling them that that’s how he sees them; as children, he doesn’t want to get hurt either. Berenger makes Shale’s moral stance as the film goes on a lot more realistic and three-dimensional.
Yet, The Substitute doesn’t let down action fans, either. It’s directed by Robert Mandel, who also directed the Best Movie You Never Saw favourite – F/X. Even though it’s a low-budget film financed by a company called LIVE Entertainment, which mainly deals in straight-to-video fare, he manages to pepper the film with cool, low-key action sequences. While not a trained martial artist, Berenger’s fight scenes in the movie look realistic, like the fighting a mercenary would do, without any posing. The film also has some great villains. Marc Anthony, before he became better known as a pop star, plays the student drug-dealing kingpin, head of a gang called the KOD. While initially he seems like Shale’s target, you find out that he’s working for the school’s principal, played by Ernie Hudson, who has a deal with a Florida cartel to use his school as a warehouse for coke and a guaranteed client base.
Hudson is downright satanic as the educator has gone awry. The movie culminates in a massive action battle royale where Shale and his mercenary pals go to war with the bad guys, who’ve hired their own mercenary army. While it goes a little overboard in that amount of cocaine housed in the school seems far-fetched, and there’s so much of it lying around that Berenger and Hudson are literally throwing handfuls of it at each other during the climax, it still kind of rules.
When it came out in 1996, it was released as a quickie movie that, to everyone’s surprise, actually opened in second place at the box office. It topped out at about $13 million, which certainly didn’t make it a hit, but it picked up a cult following, with the soundtrack being famous and the movie’s eventual VHS release being a smash.
It spawned a franchise which happened just a shade too early to ever get Berenger on board to reprise his role. In the three sequels, the late Treat Williams, an actor very much in the Berenger mould, took on the role. Oddly, even after Berenger’s Sniper movies became bit DTV hits, they never tried to reignite the franchise with him. It remains a popular catalogue title for Lionsgate, which has the film streaming on Netflix.
While no one will say The Substitute is a top tier action movie of the nineties, as far as B-grade actioneers of the era go, for me, it’s pretty close to the top of the list alongside some of JCVD’s best movies, or those early Seagal flicks. If you haven’t seen it, put it on your Netflix watch list. You’ll have a blast.
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Longlegs, the latest horror project from The Blackcoat’s Daughter (a.k.a. February), I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, and Gretel & Hansel director Osgood Perkins, is set to reach theatres on July 12th, and is has come to the attention of our friends at Bloody Disgusting that a strange, coded letter that was printed in the Seattle Times last Friday “at the request of Longlegs” points readers in the direction of a viral marketing website called TheBirthdayMurders.net, which chronicles the crimes of the serial killer character in the film by Nicolas Cage (Dream Scenario).
The front page of the website informs us, “For nearly three decades, this Satan-worshipping psycho has terrorized families throughout the Pacific Northwest. A bloody trail of bodies here in the great state of Oregon attests to the depraved savagery of this one-of-a-kind serial killer. With over three dozen victims that we know of, LONGLEGS is one of the most prolific mass murderers ever to have graced the region, and his gruesome endeavors are the stuff of nightmares. At first, all of the killings appeared to be straightforward murder-suicides: the handiwork of average men who suddenly snapped and slaughtered their wives and children. But a series of eerie coded messages left at the crime scenes indicate that someone – or something – is influencing these horrific crimes. The cryptic letters are signed by someone calling himself… LONGLEGS.” Readers are encouraged to check the site again next Monday, June 24th.
The “Victims” page of the site offers information on the many murders that have been committed in the name of Longlegs. At the bottom of that page is a download link for a zip file that will require some sleuthing to open and decode. I don’t have the time nor inclination to do such things, so I just look at posts from people who put in the work at reddit.
Cage stars in Longlegs alongside Maika Monroe (It Follows), Alicia Witt (Urban Legend) and Blair Underwood (Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D). The story Perkins crafted for the film is said to be “in the vein of classic Hollywood psychological thrillers.” Monroe takes on the role of FBI Agent Lee Harker, a gifted new recruit assigned to the unsolved case of an elusive serial killer. As the case takes complex turns, unearthing evidence of the occult, Harker discovers a personal connection to the merciless killer and must race against time to stop him before he claims the lives of another innocent family.
Cage has said (while speaking to John Carpenter) the film is about “a character who’s hearing voices. It’s kind of like a possessed Geppetto, who’s making these dolls”. Production took place in Vancouver, Canada. Cage is producing Longlegs through his company Saturn Films, which recently had success with The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent and Pig. Also producing are Dan Kagan, Brian Kavanaugh-Jones, Dave Caplan, and Chris Ferguson. Jason Cloth and Fred Berger of Automatik serve as executive producers with John Friedberg of Black Bear.
In addition to directing the films mentioned at the top of this article, Perkins directed an episode of the recent revival of The Twilight Zone. He has also worked on the screenplays for the thriller Removal, the crime thriller Cold Comes the Night, and the horror film The Girl in the Photographs.
What do you think of the viral marketing website that ties in with the release of Longlegs? Let us know by leaving a comment below.
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