Charles Bramesco
Will Smith Assumes the First ‘Bright’ Teaser Won’t End Well
David Ayer, director of the newly-minted Academy Award-winner Suicide Squad (there’s a phrase I don't ever see my fingers getting comfortable with), has already begun work on his next film. Will the new project Bright also win an Academy Award like Suicide Squad did last night, which was real and not a dream we all had? We have no way of knowing, but it could happen. Evidently anything can happen, because Suicide Squad won an Academy Award last night. As in, one more award than Martin Scorsese’s career-defining religious epic Silence. So today, look upon the first teaser for Bright and bow before your new King of Oscars, for it is David Ayer.
‘My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea’ Trailer Is Exactly What It Sounds Like
What with social cliques, homework, and hormones, high school is tough enough already. Add to that a massive natural disaster, and it’s a different sort of catastrophe entirely. My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea is both exactly what it sounds like and much more than that, an animated riff on the likes of San Andreas that adds an eccentric sense of humor to the genre. The newly unveiled trailer offers a sample of the thrills (jumping across shark-infested waters!) and the laughs (the bookcase-amputation joke is aces) to be had in this odd little festival favorite.
‘La La Land’ Gets David Lynch-ified in Creepy Mashup Trailer
Humor me for a moment — is Damien Chazelle‘s old-school romantic musical La La Land really all that far removed from the cinema of David Lynch? Like the avant-melodrama triumph Mulholland Dr., Chazelle’s film is obsessed with the artifice that defines both Los Angeles and the entertainment industry around which it was built. Both films revolve around a pair of people inexorably drawn to one another, linked even as they drift apart due to the vicissitudes of circumstance. Both Lynch and Chazelle are fond of stylistic breaks from reality, exploring a dreamlike or otherwise surreal plane beyond this dimension. Hell, “here’s to the ones who dream” might as well be the mission statement of Lynch’s entire filmography.
Amandla Stenberg Risks It All for Love in ‘Everything, Everything’ Trailer
“It’s like Me Before You meets Bubble Boy.” While I am confident that this is not how things went down in the pitch meeting for the upcoming young-adult-geared romance Everything, Everything, the description’s still fundamentally accurate. Amandla Stenberg (a rising star with credits in The Hunger Games, Birth of a Nation, and Beyoncé’s Lemonade visuals on her CV) stars as Maddy, a #teen who has spent her entire life within the safe, climate-controlled confines of her tech’d-out home. And just as love eventually drew Jake Gyllenhaal out from his insulated plastic bubble, so too does a crushworthy hunk drive Maddy to venture out into the world. Will she say some snappy one-liner drawing a distinction between living and actually having a life? You bet she will!
Family Tensions Flare in Trailer for New Psychological Thriller ‘The Dinner’
Every family argues at the table. Some squabble about religion, some yell about politics, and some get into screaming matches at Thanksgiving dinner over whether or not Jimmy Fallon is a sniveling sycophant. But while all happy families are the same, all unhappy families are miserable in their own way, and the Lohman clan has an ocean’s worth of bad blood between them. It‘ll all come to the surface when Oren Moverman’s new drama-thriller The Dinner debuts at the Berlinale Film Festival on February 10, and today, those of us unable to jet to Europe can still check it out with the newly released trailer.
Amy Schumer Brings the Rumble to the Jungle in New ‘Snatched’ Trailer
Could the upcoming Amy Schumer/Goldie Hawn buddy comedy Snatched be the Bad Moms of 2017? While last year’s sleeper hit saw some downtrodden moms cutting loose and having a little fun, the new trailer for Snatched explores the tricky bond between a mother and her adult daughter. The Mother’s Day release date underscores the theme of motherhood, and the newly released trailer shows Schumer’s character helping her mom get what’s left of her groove back while on a tropical vacation. They even share a cast member in Wanda Sykes, who appears in the trailer to warn the two women that they’re cruising for an abduction.
Robert Englund Suits Up as Freddy Krueger Once Again for ‘Nightmares in the Makeup Chair’
Over the course of the eight Nightmare on Elm Street films, Robert Englund made dream stalker Freddy Krueger from a slasher-film specter into a major cultural icon. His sartorially questionable striped sweater/fedora combo, the pepperoni-like complexion, the razor-blade gloves — it’s all been enshrined in the horror hall of fame for years. He officially laid his signature character to rest with 2003’s Freddy vs. Jason, turning the role over to Jackie Earle Haley for the 2010 remake, but a new project indicates that Englund and Freddy can’t get rid of one another that easily.
Things Blow Up Real Good in ‘Transformers: The Last Knight’ Super Bowl Spot
Transformers and the Super Bowl are a match made in heaven. Is the NFL’s biggest night not, in its own way, the Michael Bay of televised sporting events? Massive budget, fetish for pyrotechnics, close-up shots of muscle-bound men glistening with hard-earned sweat, oodles of American patriotism, very few women, an overall roiling undercurrent of homoerotic tension — when the new TV spot for Transformers: The Last Knight runs on Sunday night during the big game, it’ll be difficult to tell where the football ends and the gigantic alien robot battles begin.