Star Wars is a mess at the moment. There are unvarnished bright spots like Andor, and then there’s everything else. There’s always a new hope though, and right now that’s seeing Obi-Wan Kenobi get a second season and go full live-action Clone Wars with flashbacks galore. Despite no confirmation of a season 2 from…
Star Wars is a mess at the moment. There are unvarnished bright spots like Andor, and then there’s everything else. There’s always a new hope though, and right now that’s seeing Obi-Wan Kenobi get a second season and go full live-action Clone Wars with flashbacks galore. Despite no confirmation of a season 2 from…
Recently, while Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis received criticism from audiences and critics alike, a few filmmaking peers had given their impressions of the film with some high praise. Guillermo Del Toro glowed about the Coppola passion project when he said, “Francis is still the same bold, fearless, inventive filmmaker that he was in his 20’s. I was Swept by Megalopolis!” And Steven Soderbergh, who has the horror film, Presence, coming out, reacted, “WOW! This might be the craziest thing ever shot on American soil. Certainly, one of the most sustained acts of pure imagination I’ve ever seen. I dreamt about it all night—it was inspiring!”
Now that Joker: Folie à Deux has been released, and to its own underwhelming response, one filmmaker that has come to its defense is Coppola. The Megalopolis director, who has been outspoken about the Marvel films, took to his official Instagram account to show his support for the Todd Phillips sequel. He posted a picture of Joker‘s poster with the caption, “@ToddPhillips films always amaze me and I enjoy them thoroughly. Ever since the wonderful The Hangover he’s always one step ahead of the audience never doing what they expect. Congratulations to Joker: Folie à Deux! I am also honored that the films DP, Lawrence Sher, mentioned that the film is visually inspired by One From the Heart.”
Despite being a sequel to a movie that made a billion dollars worldwide, Joker: Folie à Deux has posted a truly disastrous opening. According to Deadline, the film didn’t even crack $40 million this weekend, with them estimating a dismal $39 million finish. It seems fans didn’t go for Todd Phillips’s rather ambitious idea to make this a musical, with it peppered with fantasy musical sequences in between some rather dull courtroom melodrama. The star pairing of Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga wasn’t enough to win over fanboys or general audiences, who slammed it with an almost unheard of (for a comic book movie) D CinemaScore rating.
In his review for Joker: Folie à Deux, JoBlo’s Chris Bumbray stated, “As such, the audience who cosplayed Joker and Harley Quinn at the screening I attended couldn’t help but look a little dejected as the credits rolled. The film lacked the same kind of impact the original movie had despite a longer, bloated running time and a much heftier budget.”
The post Francis Ford Coppola lends his support to Joker: Folie à Deux appeared first on JoBlo.
New hit Throne and Liberty gives players quite a few unique spins on traditional MMO mechanics, but its most compelling is the weapon combo system. Instead of choosing a player class, by equipping two different types of weapons you earn both the active and passive skills of each, letting you create hybrid builds that…
New hit Throne and Liberty gives players quite a few unique spins on traditional MMO mechanics, but its most compelling is the weapon combo system. Instead of choosing a player class, by equipping two different types of weapons you earn both the active and passive skills of each, letting you create hybrid builds that…
Legendary author Stephen King’s vampire novel Salem’s Lot (buy a copy of the novel HERE) has received three direct adaptations over the decades. The first was the 1979 mini-series directed by Tobe Hooper, which had a running time of 183 minutes. A mini-series directed by Mikael Salomon followed in 2004, and that one had a 181 minute running time. So when it was announced that Gary Dauberman was going to write and direct an adaptation that would try to fit the story into a single feature, fans wondered how Dauberman would accomplish that… and how long this single feature would be. Dauberman’s Salem’s Lot was finally released through the Max streaming service last week (you can read our review HERE), and the filmmaker has said he whittled the story down to a 113 minute film by focusing on the core group of characters and dropping subplots with side characters. Still, turning Salem’s Lot into a single movie was quite a task, so it’s no surprise to hear that Dauberman’s first cut of the film was 3 hours long, just like the mini-series adaptations.
This new take on the concept is set in 1975, the same year King’s novel was first published. Here’s the synopsis: Haunted by an incident from his childhood, author Ben Mears returns to his hometown of Jerusalem’s Lot in search of inspiration for his next book, only to discover the town is being preyed upon by a bloodthirsty vampire and his loyal servant.
The film stars Lewis Pullman as author Ben Mears; Makenzie Leigh as Ben’s love interest Susan Norton; Spencer Treat Clark as Mike Ryerson, “one of the town’s simple folk”; Bill Camp as Matthew Burke, “a former high school English teacher who knows about the Marsten House’s evil past and helps out Ben”; Alfre Woodard as Dr. Cody; Pilou Asbæk as the vampire’s familiar Richard Straker, whose style this time around includes a purple cloak, feathered Homburg hat, and push broom mustache; Nicholas Crovetti and Cade Woodward as Danny and Ralphie Glick; Jordan Preston Carter as horror fanatic Mark Petrie; William Sadler as Constable Parkins Gillespie; and John Benjamin Hickey as Father Callahan. Alexander Ward is the vampire Kurt Barlow.
James Wan and Michael Clear produced Salem’s Lot for Atomic Monster alongside Roy Lee of Vertigo and Mark Wolper.
Dauberman told Den of Geek, “There’s so much great stuff. It’s like, what do you have to weed out? An audience’s attention span only goes so long. There are a lot of great side stories and B-stories in this book that I love, and it was hard to let those go in order to give more real estate to our core group of heroes. That was probably the biggest challenge—editing the story, and then figuring out those repercussions and those ripple effects into the main storyline. My first cut was about 3 hours. There’s a lot left out. My first draft of the script is 180-odd pages or something because you’re trying to include everything. And a lot of it has to do with a lot of the secondary characters and stuff that I spoke about. So it was sad to see that stuff go, but it’s like a necessary evil. In the book, Ben sneaks into the Marsten House and he sees the ghost of Hubert Marsten. I shot that and it used to open the movie, but it seemed to muddy the waters for audiences; the ghost story within the vampire story. To me it’s so important because it’s why Ben believes the vampire stuff, but we’re not telling that story, so that was the hardest thing to cut because I love the sequence.“
Do you think Dauberman did a good job of whittling Salem’s Lot down from 3 hours to 113 minutes? Share your thoughts on this one by leaving a comment below.
The post Salem’s Lot: Gary Dauberman’s first cut was 3 hours long appeared first on JoBlo.
On Monday, Sega and Creative Assembly announced that after a decade of fans asking and pleading for an Alien: Isolation sequel, it’s actually happening. However, it’ll still probably be at least a year or two before we’ll see the highly anticipated horror game.
On Monday, Sega and Creative Assembly announced that after a decade of fans asking and pleading for an Alien: Isolation sequel, it’s actually happening. However, it’ll still probably be at least a year or two before we’ll see the highly anticipated horror game.
In the past decade, Metroidvanias have seen a massive resurgence thanks to the indie scene. There have been dozens of new entries in the genre that introduce their own twists on the formula, and one of the best examples of this is Dead Cells. Released in 2018, the title from developers Motion Twin and Evil Empire has…
In the past decade, Metroidvanias have seen a massive resurgence thanks to the indie scene. There have been dozens of new entries in the genre that introduce their own twists on the formula, and one of the best examples of this is Dead Cells. Released in 2018, the title from developers Motion Twin and Evil Empire has…