The “Cars”-ish cartoon “Planes” is due out in August, a bit late in the summer for a cartoon of any sort to have maximum money-making potential.
And now Disney (not Pixar, which was responsible for “Cars”) has re-cast the lead voice actor. Dane Cook is re-voicing Jon Cryer’s bit as the lead in this airplane/airfield set picture, due out Aug. 9. It’s about a cropduster who dreams of racing.
What might one need if one finds oneself on the lam from The Sweeney, the Flying Squad of coppers in the new film from Olde England? A pack of biscuits, a Cockney rhyming dictionary set of flashcards, thumb cuffs/keychains, and a pint glass. “The Sweeney” opens in theaters and on VOD Friday.
“The Sweeney,” in Cockney, is short for Sweeney Todd, whom everybody remembers from the musical, “The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.” “Rhyming slang” for the police in cars, the “flying squad”? “Sweeney Todd.” Shortened, Cockney fashion, to “Sweeney.” There’s a barbering pun in addition to the rhyme whenever Jack Regan says, “We’re the Sweeney. You’re nicked.”
There’ll always be an England.
James Wan’s “based on a true story” is a haunted house/spooked family tale starring Lili Taylor, Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga.
This trailer is chilling, in an utterly conventional way — strange noises, children giggling, spooky destruction of family photos, etc.
“The Conjuring” opens wide July 19.
Sometimes, a documentary is more than a non-fiction film. Sometimes it becomes a cause.
That was the idea behind the film “Bully” last year, a movie that tapped into a national movement, a national conversation about bullying.
And somewhere in the four year process of making the critically acclaimed “A Place at the Table,” filmmakers Kristi Jacobson and Lori Silverbush realized that they wanted more than a movie out of their research into hunger in America. They wanted to start a conversation.
“I was stunned when I learned there is hunger and food insecurity in every single corner of America,” Jacobson says. They met with experts, networked with food assistance organizations, and found hungry and poorly nourished people in cities across the nation, and in small towns from Colorado to Mississippi.
Jacobson, a New Yorker, says “it was not the picture of hunger I expected to find.” It wasn’t just urban, it was rural. It cuts across racial boundaries. And it’s not just the unemployed, but the working poor who face it.
“Multiply these deeply personal stories times 50 million and you get a movie you have to make,” Jacobson says.
The stories of the little Colorado girl, part of two extended families sharing the same house, adults all working, but unable to afford enough food, a single mom in Philadelphia, a waitress in Mississippi “help the numbers resonate more deeply and who also illuminate just how entrenched and complex the hunger crisis has become in our country,” Slant Magazine said of the film.
“A Place at the Table” ties together hunger and America’s obesity epidemic, the “food deserts” where only cheap, subsidized processed food is available to people of limited means and no transportation. People who can only find and buy junk food get fat. The government’s decision, in the ‘80s, to pass this problem on to food banks means that there are 40,000 of them operating, stretched to their limits, today, when there were only 200 when Ronald Reagan took office and food programs were cut back.
Jacobson, whose background is in narrative, fictional films, says that “People wouldn’t believe it, if we told these stories in a narrative film. It’s happening in a country with plenty of money and plenty of food.”
(Review of “A Place at the Table” is here.)
Their first step was learning about the problem themselves. Jacobson says their second step was finishing the film, which shines a spotlight on an issue little discussed in public life.
“Our film will help with that. And if we’ve done our job, to be entertaining and be inspiring, you’ll want to get involved. “
And the third step? A national action center on hunger. The website connected with the film, www.take.com/table “allows you to call your Congresspeople, volunteer at a food bank or whatever. If we make this an issue politicians have to respond to in order to get elected, if we can bring transparency to how they’re voting and who they’re listening to, we can make a difference.”
“If we all take action, a conversation will start and we can move the ball on these policy issues that address hunger.”
Warner Brothers is in the Bradley Cooper business for a remake of the biggest German hit of 2011. “Kokowaah” is about two pals who have to deal with the unsettling news that one is actually the real father of the other’s one’s daughter.
Johnny Depp had been “circling,” as they say, the film project about notorious Boston mobster, the long on the lam Whitey Bulger. “Black Mass” it is titled. And now THR says he’s doing it. Shooting it later this year. Barry Levinson will direct, Jim Sheridan is among those credited on the script, at this stage.
And the “Inception” cinematographer Wally Pfister is directing “Transcendence,” a sci-fi film that doesn’t look to be too demanding of Mr. Depp’s time. He plays a scientist who uploads the contents of his brain to a super computer, and then is killed. Will the computer have his vengeance for him?
A pretty busy year for Depp, who turns 50 in 2013.
I’ll be joining Mike Bianchi on his sports talk show, “Open Mike,” to chat about “Phantom,” a passable Cold War submarine thriller, and “21 and Over,” a college Hangover written and directed by the guys who wrote “The Hangover.”
Oh, and this big budget thing thing, “Jack the Giant Slayer,” from the director of “The Usual Suspects” and “X-Men,” Bryan Singer.
That’s at 745 am on 740 am, or tune in here.
Oh, for those innocent days of yore, when “The Hangover” was a malady and not a movie, when the words “Zach Galifianakis” were as alien as “Klaatu barada nikto.”
It seems like millennia since the binge comedy became the new normal. But here comes “21 and Over,” taking rude to a new level of crude, a post-racial romp through one epic night on one Asian American collegian’s twenty-first birthday.
A couple of “Hangover” writers co-wrote and directed this sometimes inspired, often funny and occasionally psychotic pub crawl through the long dark night of Jeff Chang’s soul. Scott Moore and Jon Lucas hope we know that it’s not “ripping off” if you’re ripping yourself off.
Jeff Chang (Justin Chon from “Twilight”) is a catchphrase, a punchline and a punching bag, all in one.
As in “Just one beer, Jeff Chang.” And “Jeff Chang is a grown man and he made his own decisions,” to “I think we killed Jeff Chang.”
He’s the Ken Jeong character here, a wild-partying break from Asian stereotypes. All he may want to do is sleep in the night before a big internship interview. But his gonzo pal Miller (Miles Teller of “Project X”) and more responsible friend Casey (Skylar Astin of “Pitch Perfect”) want to do is get him blind drunk.
All they have to do is get him back to his apartment, sober and cleaned-up by the time the kid’s comically stern dad (Francois Chau) shows up. Which we guess, from the film’s opening scene, they won’t manage.
Because Miller and Casey are naked and branded, stalking across campus in the early morning light, muttering “This never happened” when we first meet them.
The night starts with beer, with Casey falling for Jeff Chang’s gal pal Nicole (Sarah Wright), and it staggers to a sorority house and a pep rally, from a progressive dorm drinking party concocted to resemble a multi-level video game (drink and compete your way to the roof) to the campus police station and infirmary.
Jeff Chang is passed out. Miller and Casey don’t remember his address. The night is their quest to get this student in a stupor back home, as Jeff Chang incoherently blurts out random needs like “Count CHOCULA.”
Lucas and Moore swap the homophobic riffs of “The Hangover” for comical jabs at race – stumbling into a Latina sorority, a minefield of Asian jokes and the odd Jew jab.
The dizzying drinking montage of how hapless Jeff Chang got into his stoned state is hilarious, cleverly cut and packed with deranged “Oh no he DIDN’T” moments.
It’s irresponsible as all get out, and “21 and Over” becomes a drag when a gun shows up, when Jeff Chang’s dark secret and Miller’s embarrassing revelation come out, when the drunken driving sight gag arrives.
But the bottom-line on this bottom-baring/bottom-branding farce is “Is it funny, on top of all the shocks?” And yes, it is. On a number of few occasions, all of them involving Jeff Chang.
MPAA Rating: R for crude and sexual content, pervasive language, some graphic nudity, drugs and drinking
Cast: Miles Teller, Justin Chon, Jonathan Keltz, Skylar Astin
Credits: Written and directed by Jon Lucas and Scott Moore. A Relativity release.
Running time: 1:30
A Weinstein Co. release, this 2014 film co-stars Tim Roth as Prince Ranier and purports to cover their romance and lives into the early 60s in the principality of Monaco. Hitchcock, Maria Callas and Onassis also figure in the film, according to the cast list.
It’s about global warming deniers. No, not the rubes who only recently realized that whatever Fox News was serving up on the subject was utter bull and saw the light — after their house was washed away by Sandy, burnt to a crisp by runaway wildfires or their crops withered in the third year of the Great Heartland Drought.
It’s about the professional lobbyists and Big Energy shills who sell this non-science, who sew doubt with whoppers and rely on an ignorant audience’s ability to be swayed by whoppers. “Greedy Lying Bastards” opens March 8.
