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--- Romantic Plots - Photog Autumn de Wilde is making a new movie version of
Emma, the Jane Austen tome, which well even besides the perfectly fun Gwyneth Paltrow version will never get a better movie than
Clueless made from it; I don't know why they try. Anyway I only bring this up because
they have cast Anya Taylor-Joy in the lead which is very fine work, but even better they have cast
Callum Turner, perennially underrated hot piece, as well as the great Josh O'Connor from
God's Own Country and Rupert "Scudder" Graves to boot! It's a good damn cast they have.
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--- Wicked Means - Colin Trevorrow gets a lot of shit for being a straight white dude who made a for-nothing indie and immediately graduated to blockbuster movies without proving himself, but we really should save some of that same shit for Jordan Vogt-Roberts, who went from
The Kings of Summer straight to
Kong: Skull Island, which is just as bad a movie as the
Jurassic Worlds are, plus he also has
the douchiest hipster beard. Anyway that aside I'm fairly interested in
his maybe next movie, which might be an original monster movie set in Detroit and starring Michael B. Jordan. I'm always down for monster movies, my curse and a blessing.
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--- Bad Vibes Ahoy - Mark your calendars with a great big red slash and make sure you've got a bottle of Pepto Bismal waiting for you at home that week,
The Babadook director Jennifer Kent's next film, the already wildly controversial
The Nightingale,
has been set for release on August 2nd. We recently posted a clip from the film
right here, which stars
The Fall's Aisling Franciosi and Sam Claflin in a dark turn that will supposedly wipe all our bad Finnick memories right away.
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--- The New Avenger - I constantly get the actor Macon Blair mixed up with his most frequent collaborator, director Jeremy Saulnier -- they made
Blue Ruin and
Green Room together -- and so when I read the news that
Macon Blair is directing the Toxic Avenger reboot I thought the director of
Green Room was directing the
Toxic Avenger reboot and I was stopped in my tracks for a second. But all that is unfair to Blair, who did actually prove himself a director worth paying attention when he made a movie starring the goddess Melanie Lynskey. He knows what's up! Bring on the Toxie, then.
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--- Cruel Bummer - I forgot to commemorate the 20th anniversary of
Cruel Intentions earlier this month but you know what, I've commemorated the only moment in that movie that really matters so many times over the years that my work here is done. Still if you missed it
EW did an oral history of the film speaking to all the folks involved and they got this choice bit of quote from Ryan Phillippe, owner of said "only moment in that movie that really matters," himself:
"I felt okay with [showing] my butt. Everybody has a butt, it’s really not that graphic. [Laughs] So many guys on Twitter are like, 'That’s the moment I knew I was gay.'"
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--- Music Woman - When I reviewed
Gloria Bell the other week I talked a lot about its soundtrack, which is a vital piece of what makes it work so well (as it is with all of Lelio's films) -- when I wrote all that I was hoping that one of our pal Chris Feil's "Soundtracking" pieces at The Film Experience would be forthcoming and I didn't have to wait long,
click here to read Chris's typically gorgeous take.
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--- Wolff's Pack - While I tend to focus on his
Hereditary co-star Toni Collette more we should all be paying attention to what Alex Wolff is up to as well, seeing as how he was also top-tier in that movie -- well here's what's what:
he's just lined up a thriller called
The Line which has him starring opposite John Malkovich, Scott "Scoot!" McNairy, Jessica Barden (we lovvve Jessica Barden) and the
adorkable Lewis Pullman. It is about "the wild excitement of being young and the dangers of living without fear of consequences," so they say.
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--- And Finally it looks like
Blumhouse is rebooting The Craft! Well "reboot" is a premature word to use - they might be giving us a sequel of sorts, set in the same world as the 1996 film, we don't know yet. (That link does have some plot details and uses the word "reboot" but... well we'll see.) Anyway even more important is that Blumhouse has actually hired a female director to direct the thing -- who knew there were female directors, right Jason Blum?
Zoe Lister-Jones, mainly known as a TV actress (she was on
Whitney and
New Girl) is writing the thing and directing it. All I know is Fairuza better show or else...
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