More than a decade has gone by since the Twilight Saga ran its course on the big screen, with five movies telling the story of the four books in author Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series. So, of course, it’s time for a franchise revival! While there are some side stories and reimaginings that could still be brought to the screen in live action (Life and Death: Twilight Reimagined swaps the genders of the lead characters, Midnight Sun tells the story of the first Twilight book from the perspective of a different character, The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner is a novella featuring one of the vampires from the saga), that’s not the way things are going right now. Earlier this year, we heard that Lionsgate was developing a Twilight animated series, and now that series is set up at the Netflix streaming service! Netflix also revealed that this animated series is an adaptation of the Midnight Sun novel.
When we first heard that Lionsgate would be taking Twilight to TV, it was said that Meyer was expected to be involved with the series, with Wyck Godfrey and Erik Feig serving as executive producers. Feig was the executive at Summit Entertainment (formerly a standalone studio, now a Lionsgate label) who bought the Twilight film rights after Paramount Pictures’ MTV Films had put the project through three years of development hell. Godfrey’s company Temple Hill produced all five of the films, which earned a total of more than $3 billion at the global box office. Netflix confirms that Meyer will serve as an executive producer on Midnight Sun alongside her Fickle Fish Films partner Meghan Hibbett. Godfrey and Marty Bowen are executive producing for Temple Hill Entertainment, while Feig and Samie Kim Falvey do the same for Picturestart. Sinead Daly (Tell Me Lies, The Walking Dead: World Beyond, Raised by Wolves, and The Get Down) will executive produce and write the series.
The first of the Twilight movies was directed by Catherine Hardwicke, who recently suggested that Jenna Ortega and Jacob Elordi would be good choices to star in a reboot, stepping in for original stars Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson. Twilight had the following synopsis: High-school student Bella Swan, always a bit of a misfit, doesn’t expect life to change much when she moves from sunny Arizona to rainy Washington state. Then she meets Edward Cullen, a handsome but mysterious teen whose eyes seem to peer directly into her soul. Edward is a vampire whose family does not drink blood, and Bella, far from being frightened, enters into a dangerous romance with her immortal soulmate.
As mentioned, Midnight Sun unfolds entirely from the perspective of Edward Cullen, the captivating, and yes, extremely sparkly vampire who catches a young Bella Swan’s attention.
What do you think of the Twilight animated series being an adaptation of Midnight Sun? Are you glad to hear the show has found a home at Netflix? Let us know by leaving a comment below.
Honkai: Star Rail has introduced a variety of awesome characters lately, but a majority of them fulfill the DPS role, such as Archeron or Yunli. If you’ve been wanting a new character with a much different role, you should be excited about Jiaoqiu. This Fire Nihility character is all about debuffing enemies and…
Honkai: Star Rail has introduced a variety of awesome characters lately, but a majority of them fulfill the DPS role, such as Archeron or Yunli. If you’ve been wanting a new character with a much different role, you should be excited about Jiaoqiu. This Fire Nihility character is all about debuffing enemies and…
PLOT: In the ninety minutes before the live airing of the first episode of Saturday Night Live, a young Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle) desperately tries to keep NBC from pulling the plug while dealing with a cast, writers and crew in open rebellion.
REVIEW: Comedy would be very different nowadays if not for Saturday Night Live‘s impact. Most noteworthy comedy film stars of the last four decades emerged from their ranks, and nearly fifty years since its premiere, it remains as vital as ever. Yet, the making of the show itself had become an almost mythological tale, with it a known fact that the young Lorne Michaels had to overcome overwhelming odds to make the show in the first place.
What Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night does is that it distills most of the big challenges Michaels had to overcome into one ninety-minute period. It’s a conceit that initially overwhelms the audience by throwing us into the hectic mix, making this easily Reitman’s most propulsive film. While it’s initially a lot to take in, something interesting happens after about twenty minutes – like Michaels himself, you start to thrive on the chaos.
However, it should be noted that Reitman and co-screenwriter Gil Kenan assume viewers have more than a little familiarity with the history behind the shows. They don’t stop to explain who guys like Michael O’Donoghue, Tom Davis, and Al Franken are and what they mean to the show. They assume you know. All that makes Saturday Night a movie that’s defiantly for fans of the show, with it almost playing like an adaptation of James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales’s oral history, “Live From New York,” albeit with all the chaos of the first part of the book taking place in just a shade over ninety minutes.
What’s impressive is how effortlessly Reitman manages to cover a lot of ground despite not having much time. It helps that he’s assembled a superb young cast, who were cast more for their ability to channel the energy and vibe of certain SNL folks rather than physical resemblance. Some of the performances are incredibly effective, with Dylan O’Brien a standout as Dan Aykroyd, who seemed like he was an unlikely ladies’ man behind the scenes, carrying out a dalliance with Rosie Shuster (played by Shiva Baby’s Rachel Sennott), who was a writer on the show and married to Michaels at the time.
Much of the drama revolves around the two biggest stars to emerge, Chevy Chase and John Belushi. The two are shown to be at each other’s throats, with Belushi, a mercurial figure who resents being given any direction and refuses to sign his contract. It’s the movie’s depiction of Belushi, as played by Matt Wood, which may prove to be the most controversial, as he comes off as a bit of a drug-addled nightmare, while his comedy genius doesn’t really get conveyed. There are so many stories of Belushi’s hellraising that folks often forget how funny he was.
However, the movie is very effective in depicting Chevy Chase’s rise behind the scenes, with NBC execs loving this handsome charmer, with Willem Dafoe’s David Tebet, a higher-up at NBC telling him, “you’re a handsome, funny gentile – that counts for something.” Back in 1975, that was probably true, and Cory Michael Smith plays him as increasingly cocky, albeit still a team player at this point. He has a great scene where he fights with a visiting Milton Berle (J.K. Simmons in a great cameo) and sees his future – for better or worse.
Despite it depicting so many legends behind the scenes, the movie keeps its focus squarely on Lorne Michaels; with The Fabelmans breakout, Gabriel LaBell expertly catching both his ability to pull together so many wildly unpredictable people and his ability to be cold-blooded – with him icily shutting down a request by Billy Crystal (a dead-on Nicholas Podany) in a memorable scene. Also noteworthy is Cooper Hoffman as Dick Ebersol, one of the younger NBC execs who has Michael’s back – to a point – but also is more of a pragmatic team player. Then there’s Tommy Dewey as the acid-tongued Michael O’Donohue, who goes to war with NBC Standards and Practices, Matthew Rhys as an increasingly furious George Carlin, Lamorne Morris as Garrett Morris, who struggles to find his play in the stacked cast, and Kim Matula as the even-tempered Jane Curtain. Succession’s Nicholas Braun also shows up in dual roles, as both an uncanny Andy Kauffman and Jim Henson.
For a movie that’s so short, Saturday Night has a lot to unpack in it, as there’s just so much going on at every second. It’s a somewhat stressful movie to watch, but its frenzied energy makes it the perfect big-screen version of the show, and a movie I’m sure most SNL players, both past and present, will praise as being pretty accurate. It’s one of Reitman’s best movies.
It’s not often I’d be talking about Agatha Christie, Renny Harlin, Val Kimer and LL Cool J in the same breath, but thanks to the world of Tinseltown magic, here we are! And, before you’re mis-led into thinking this video is about the great Netflix show of the same name, let me just set the record straight. This ain’t that one folks. Nope, the movie we’re focusing on today somehow manages to blend the classic British literary world of Agatha Christie with LL Cool J spitting out lines like. That’s right gore-hounds, twenty years ago director Renny Harlin was best known for action classics, pirate movies, dangling Sylvester Stallone from great heights and giant sharks; way before the likes of The Meg and more recently, Under Paris. Then, an intriguing project came his way that would blend the worlds of Agatha Christie and gangster rappers, in a movie that wasn’t met with a particularly warm welcome upon release – Mindhunters (watch it HERE).
The entire ‘one of us is a killer and we must find out who before we’re all murdered’ subgenre has, of course, been done to death, if you pardon the pun! Mindunters takes the premise to a secluded island that’s been rigged up by the FBI to look like a training camp, where the suspects / killers are assembled and must work out who the psycho amongst them is. Which is basically a reimagining of Agatha Christie’s mystery novel And Then There Were None where a graduating class of would-be F.B.I. agents are sent to the fictional Oniega Island, an isolated training compound, where they will spend the weekend profiling an imaginary killer known as The Puppeteer.
Harlin had already proven he could handle action with Die Hard 2, Cutthroat Island, Cliffhanger, The Long Kiss Goodnight and Deep Blue Sea; all of which are movies with more than a handful of redeeming features, plus some very memorable sequences. However, could he turn those skills into a movie where Val Kilmer’s awesome mullet was in danger of stealing the show? Let’s find out here, on what happened to Mindhunters.
Over the years the crime thriller and horror genres have collided wonderfully, with films such as The Silence of the Lambs, Seven and more recently Longlegs, proving that the mixture of a police procedural whodunnit with some lovely gore, is a winner with audiences. Sure, you may get the occasional dud like the Johnny Depp, Heather Graham 2001 thriller From Hell, but overall it’s a genre with legs. Long ones in fact. However, could Mindhunters continue the trend of mixing the crime, thriller and now slasher genre not only being high in quality, but also memorable for all the right reasons? Well, gore-hounds, we’ll take a deep dive into its merits shortly, but first let’s take a look at how it came to be in the first place, and who the talent is both behind and in front of the camera.
South African filmmaker Wayne Kramer, probably best known for directing the 2003 crime drama The Cooler, sold the spec screenplay for Mindhunters to 20th Century Fox, under his original idea for the project’s title – Unsub. Which sounds like something you should definitely not be doing to our channel and is also a pretty bad title for a crime / slasher flick. Fox seemed to agree and insisted the movie be called Mindhunters instead, despite Kramer having reservations because it clashed with the title of John Douglas’ crime book, titled Mindhunter. The novel was the main inspiration behind the Netflix show of the same name from 2017, which sadly didn’t make it past two seasons.
As I mentioned earlier, behind the camera was Finnish filmmaker Renny Harlin, but it almost wasn’t to be. Harlin was originally attached to direct the film adaptation of A Sound of Thunder, based on the short story by Ray Bradbury, however once he learned that Val Kilmer had cultivated the most awesome mullet as tribute to the great man, he couldn’t turn Mindhunters down. Which may not be 100% true gore-hounds, but I like to think it is! So with the main man onboard to sit on the director’s chair, just how did the casting of main characters Jake Harris, Gabe Jensen, Lucas Harper and Sara Moore come about? Christopher Walken, Martin Sheen and Gary Busey were all offered the part of Jake Harris, but they rejected the film before Val Kilmer and his mullet agreed to do the movie. The role of Jake Harris almost went to another horror alumni, Ryan Phillipe but was ultimately offered to Trainspotting star Jonny Lee Miller. Gerard Butler was originally set to play Lucas Harper but he dropped out to star in Timeline, while Kathryn Morris was cast to play Sara Moore.
Shooting on the movie mainly took place in the Netherlands, including its superb capital city, Amsterdam, in its northern borough, Amsterdam-noord, plus The Hague and Delft. The production also shot in the beach town of Zandvoort, on the Veluwe heath lands in the Gelderland province, plus the training village of the Police Academy in Ossendrecht. In order to cut costs down the bulk of the movie’s post-production was moved to the UK in London, where a lot of Hollywood productions go to use the excellent post facilities in and around Soho. Director Harlin apparently toned down the violence during post-production in order for the film to secure a PG-13 rating in the US. However, the MPAA still felt that the movie was too dark, and issued it an R which prompted Harlin to re-insert the scenes he’d initially removed.
Renny Harlin is a very good movie director and I’ve enjoyed many of his films over the years, especially the often underrated Die Hard 2 and its airport based shenanigans. I also really dug the Sylvester Stallone thriller Cliffhanger, and not just because Ace Ventura 2 has an awesome piss-take of the famous wire scene. That poor damn raccoon man! For some reason, however, I never saw the attraction of paying my hard earned buck to see LL Cool J and the be-mulleted Val Kilmer team up as part of an Agatha Christie inspired who-dunnit. So, the opportunity to catch the movie for the first time here at JoBlo, and provide some perspective on it was great. Actually watching the movie though. That part wasn’t so great.
The plot, as mentioned briefly earlier, follows a group of FBI trainees who are taken to a remote island for simulation training. However, once there, they realize that they’re being hunted by a serial killer, who might be someone amidst them. So far, so good. The premise is fine and although it’s not at all original, it could have been a fun ride. However, writers Wayne Kramer and Kevin Brodbin don’t manage to inject the characters with any real personality and the script is often laughably tedious. Once the FBI students are sent to the remote island by Val Kilmer’s maverick instructor, they undertake an exercise in which they must provide a profile of the apparently fictitious serial killer known as The Puppeteer. Naturally, all is not what it seems, and before long the exercise becomes a battle for survival.
This would usually be all well and good if the resulting carnage was heavy on the claret; unfortunately though, what we get are people being frozen by jets of helium, death by acid cigarette, being impaled by spears and not much more to be honest. Some of the kills are admittedly quite inventive and match what seems like the one and only character trait each victim has been afforded by the writers. There’s one character who won’t go anywhere without a gun, one who likes to smoke, and they invariably die due to the weakness in their particular trait. The killers’ habit of keeping to a strict deadline for their murdering spree does bring some decent tension but the eventual reveal isn’t satisfying enough to have kept them hidden in the movie for so long. Overall, Mindhunters is exactly what you’d expect from how it was sold during its marketing campaign; It looks like a direct to video title and despite some fun sequences, it’s probably best left to those looking for a cheap laugh and some tame kills on a Monday night.
Mindhunters was released domestically on May 13th, 2005, but only made a disappointing $4.5 million from a reported budget of $27 million. The movie’s release strategy was perhaps not the smartest, with it opening on the same day as the third Star Wars prequel, Revenge of the Sith, plus other movies with a similar audience demographic. Kingdom of Heaven was in its second week, the Jet Li action flick Unleashed was doing quite well, plus another rapper’s movie had already grossed way more than Mindhunters; Ice Cube’s XXX: State of the Nation.
Critically, the movie received generally negative reviews, and it currently holds a 24% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and the consensus calls it, “a retread of Ten Little Indians that lacks the source material’s wit”. Roger Ebert awarded the movie 2 ½ stars and had the following to say about how other movies can be likened to it, “I will leave you with only one clue. In ‘House of Wax‘, which opened last week, the movie theater is playing ‘What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?’. In this movie, the theater marquee advertises ‘The Third Man’. No, the male characters are not numbered in order, so you can’t figure it out that way, nor is the killer necessarily a woman. So think real hard. What else do you know about ‘The Third Man’? If you have never seen ‘The Third Man’, I urge you to rent it immediately, as a preparation (or substitute) for ‘Mindhunters’”.
So then gore-hounds, I didn’t love the movie, nor was it a complete disaster, but with a very capable director on board, plus a cast that had some excellent pedigree involved in it, it was a let down overall. The whole ‘one of us is a killer and we must find out who before we’re all murdered’ trope has been done to death, so to speak, and has been done better elsewhere. However, the most important opinion we always love to hear is from YOU guys, so what’s your take on Mindhunters? Did you buy into the fun premise and semi-inventive death scenes? Or was this one just a cheesy mullet away from absurdity? Let me know in the comments and I’ll see you wonderful gore-hounds next time. Thanks for watching!
About a year and a half ago, we heard that AMC was developing a third TV series based on the works of Anne Rice, adding to the franchise they’ve been building out of the Vampire Chronicles novels and the Mayfair Witch books written by Rice. A few months ago, the show – which is going by the working title of Anne Rice’s The Talamasca – was officially ordered to series, with the plan being for episodes to start airing sometime in 2025. Now we have information about the lead of the show, as Variety revealed that Nicholas Denton of Glitch and Dangerous Liasions has been cast as a character named Guy Anatole.
This entry in the franchise that AMC is calling the Anne Rice Immortal Universe will follow a secretive society called the Talamasca that’s responsible for tracking and containing witches, vampires, werewolves and other creatures. Members of the Talamasca have already been introduced in the AMC shows Anne Rice’s Interview With the Vampire and Anne Rice’s Mayfair Witches.
John Lee Hancock, whose credits include The Blind Side and the Stephen King adaptation Mr. Harrigan’s Phone, is writing the Talamasca series and will be serving as showrunner alongside Mark Lafferty of The Right Stuff and Halt and Catch Fire. Hancock will also be directing the first episode. All of AMC’s Anne Rice projects are produced by AMC Studios and executive produced by Mark Johnson.
Denton’s character Guy Anatole is “brilliant, handsome and sharp on the surface, but he’s always known his mind works a little differently. On the cusp of graduating law school, he is approached by a representative of the Talamasca, a secretive agency that monitors and protects us from the supernatural world. When Guy learns that the Talamasca has been tracking him since his childhood, he falls headlong into a world of secret agents and immortal beings who, up to now, have maintained a fragile balance with the mortal world. But for that balance to hold, and for Guy to survive, he will have to learn to embrace the dark, treacherous depths of his true and singular self.” He does not appear to be a character from Rice’s novels.
Talamasca is scheduled to start filming in Manchester, England next month. Dan McDermott, president of entertainment and AMC Studios for AMC Networks, provided the following statement when the series was announced: “This is a story we’ve been developing and wanting to tell from the earliest moments of this franchise, focused on a fascinating and compelling secret society that has already appeared in both of our existing Anne Rice series, the Talamasca. As with all of these shows, we are thrilled to have such a high level of talent involved, represented here by John Lee Hancock and Mark Lafferty, and of course working closely with producer Mark Johnson as the creative head of our Anne Rice Immortal Universe.“
Hancock added: “This all started for me with a call from Mark Johnson, who asked if I’d ever heard of the Talamasca. I was intrigued by the idea of an organization that, to me, had more than a passing resemblance to the CIA or MI6, which are necessary but not always necessarily transparent. An organization with its own secrets. Thankfully, Dan McDermott liked the take and so did Mark Lafferty, who is so talented and accomplished in the world of television. Many thanks to everyone from Gran Via to Mark Lafferty, to our talented writers and everyone at AMC, who have been supporters, advocates and cheerleaders from day one. I couldn’t be more thrilled to be involved and look forward to presenting a third series in the Anne Rice Immortal Universe.“
Are you a fan of Interview with the Vampire (you can read our review of the first season HERE and the second HERE) and/or Mayfair Witches (our review of that show’s first season is HERE), and are you interested in seeing what John Lee Hancock and AMC do with Anne Rice’s The Talamasca? What do you think of Nicholas Denton being cast in the lead role of Guy Anatole? Let us know by leaving a comment below.
Briarcliff Entertainment has released the trailer Ali Abbasi’s upcoming controversial film The Apprentice, which details Donald Trump’s rise in the real-estate business. Briarcliff has scheduled the film to be released weeks before the U.S. Presidential Election on October 11. Additionally, the studio plans to give the movie an awards push. Movies about New York business are predominantly cutthroat and this one is no exception as it quick-cuts through a montage of chaos as Sebastian Stan as Trump builds his real estate empire with Jeremy Strong’s Roy Cohn guiding him along the way.
The Apprentice‘s story will follow the era of Trump’s life from his twenties through his late thirties. It will “examine his efforts to build his real estate business in New York over the course of the ’70s and ’80s, also digging into his relationship with infamous attorney Roy Cohn.” The film description also adds that the project is “billed as an exploration of power and ambition set in a world of corruption and deceit. It’s a mentor-protege story that charts the origins of an American dynasty.” Alongside Sebastian Stan and Jeremy Strong, Borat 2 and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3‘s Maria Bakalova also signed on to play Ivana Trump.
The project was penned by long-time Vanity Fair Donald Trump chronicler Gabriel Sherman, whose book The Loudest Voice in the Room inspired the Showtime series starring Russell Crowe as Roger Ailes. It is said that in the time before its wide release, the film is being planned to screen at some fall film festivals and it will be receiving a full-on awards campaign, which Ortenberg has been successful in with past projects like Crash and Spotlight.
Our EIC Chris Bumbray would get to see the film at a screening at TIFF and he said in his review, “More than anything, this movie is about how men like Trump are formed and somewhat cautionary about how the desire for power breeds ruthlessness. Again, I don’t think Trump himself would dislike much about this—save for the way it depicts the unravelling of his relationship with Ivana. It is a thoroughly entertaining film with a broader appeal than you might think, even if some are positioning it with their own agendas as something it is not.”
Concord’s servers officially went offline last Friday on September 6. The always-online hero shooter, which launched on August 23, became unplayable at that point, but Sony didn’t stop there. The company has since taken the unprecedented step of also removing the game entirely from players’ PlayStation accounts.
Concord’s servers officially went offline last Friday on September 6. The always-online hero shooter, which launched on August 23, became unplayable at that point, but Sony didn’t stop there. The company has since taken the unprecedented step of also removing the game entirely from players’ PlayStation accounts.
There have been a lot of amazing characters recently released in Honkai: Star Rail, from the powerful Firefly to the version of March 7th following The Hunt path. That being said, few stand out the way that Sparkle does. She might be a devious trickster in the story, but she’s an invaluable ally during battles. Let us…
