Charles Bramesco
Spidey Gets an Upgrade Courtesy of Tony Stark in First ‘Homecoming’ Teaser
For a fresh start with Spider-Man, Sony had to give him something distinctive. To set Tom Holland’s take on the webslinger apart from Tobey Maguire’s (and way, way apart from Andrew Garfield’s), the studio sent the hero back to high school and returned him to his teenage roots. Spider-Man: Homecoming aims to be a new take on the comic-book mythos all over, in fact — a new girlfriend in pop star Zendaya, the first onscreen appearance of the villainous Vulture, and with a new teaser unearthed today, we learned that a key piece of latter-day Spidey tech will make it movie debut as well.
Fort Worth PD Enlists Empire Stormtroopers for New Recruitment Video
Over the past couple of years, policemen have fallen pretty far out of favor with the American people. The U.S. police force is in dire need of a little PR management, something that shows their sense of humor and gives a more human, relatable slant to the boys in blue.
Is That Grand Moff Tarkin in the New ‘Rogue One’ TV Spot?
The late actor Peter Cushing, mainstay of Hammer’s horror films and erstwhile Star Wars cast member, cut a distinctive figure: cheekbones that could slice diamond, perfectly coiffed shock of grey hair, mouth permanently pursed into a single flat line. As the ruthless Empire commander Grand Moff Tarkin, Cushing left a lasting impression on generations of viewers, austerity coded directly into the lines on his face. He makes for an instantly recognizable silhouette — so is that really him, out of focus and in the foreground for a split second in the latest Rogue One: A Star Wars Story TV spot?
‘Beauty and the Beast’ Unseats ’Fifty Shades’ as Most-Viewed Trailer in 24 Hours
The trailer for the handsomely-mounted live-action remake of Beauty and the Beast surfaced on Tuesday, and drew strong reactions across the board. Many were taken with the first look at the Emma Watson/Dan Stevens romance, allowing themselves to be flooded with the same swooning emotion that Disney’s animated film conjured back in 1991. Some were less impressed, expressing low-level terror at the unnatural-looking designs for Mrs. Potts, Cogsworth, Lumiere, and the rest of the anthropomorphized household object gang. But regardless of overall reception, one thing is for certain: The Guardian notes that an unprecedented crap-ton of people accessed the trailer on YouTube, making 2017’s Beauty and the Beast the most-viewed-in-a-24-hour-period trailer of all time.
‘Patriots Day’ Trailer: Mark Wahlberg to the Rescue
Noted actor, model and erstwhile Funky Bunch member Mark Wahlberg raised a few eyebrows in 2012 when he claimed that had he boarded the planes used for the September 11 terrorist attacks, things would have gone down a little differently. Suggesting that you could have singlehandedly prevented the most traumatic disaster in American history is big talk, but now Wahlberg will get the chance to pretend to put the money where his terrorist-fighting mouth is with Patriots Day, a dramatization of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing. We may be too late for a Mark Wahlberg-led United 93 reimagined as a two-hour beatdown, but this looks like the next best thing.
Even the Microscopic Aliens Want to Kill Us in First ‘Life’ Trailer
In the annals of pop culture, encounters between humankind and our intergalactic neighbors have not gone well. Either the extraterrestrials arrive armed to the teeth and immediately get to work vaporizing everyone in sight — your War of the Worlds model — or homo sapiens play the aggressor and fly into a violent frenzy of premature retribution, only to discover too late that the aliens have come in peace — think The Day the Earth Stood Still. Today brings a first look at yet another film about what life forms await curious space explorers, and true to form, even the single-cell organisms know enough to try to exterminate humanity.
The War Comes Home in Latest ‘Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk’ Trailer
We know more about Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk today than we did when the first trailer debuted back in May. Our own Erin Whitney was present for the film’s world premiere at the New York Film Festival earlier this month, and relayed their full scoop back to us through their review: Ang Lee gets a lot of points for sheer chutzpah, having shot the first feature-length film using highly sophisticated 4K 120 frames-per-second technology, but his gambit ultimately fails. The realistic look of the film is almost too real, its crisp movements too unnaturally fluid for their own good.
Smithsonian Mounts $300,000 Campaign to Preserve Dorothy’s Ruby Slippers
A step above the sought-after Maltese Falcon and the fabled Ark of the Covenant, Dorothy Gale’s ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz have to be the single most vital prop in cinematic history. The red-sequined shoes, so lusted after by the Wicked Witch of the West in the immortal 1939 fantasy film, have spent the last 30 years as one of the Smithsonian's most popular attractions. But not even magical footwear is immune to the ravages of time, and Judy Garland’s old kicks have lost a bit of their luster. As The Hollywood Reporter notes, the iconic slippers have faded from their original Technicolor ruby to something closer to “a dull auburn.”
Let the Retro ‘Nice Guys’ Trailer Transport You Back to the ‘70s
Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s ambitious Grindhouse project — a double feature of horror flicks modeled after the look and feel of ’70s sleaze cinema — had its troubles upon release, mostly that it felt approximately a million hours long...
Viggo Mortensen Goes Back on the Grid in the ‘Captain Fantastic’ Trailer
Having already won raves at Sundance and secured a slot in the Cannes Film Festival’s Un Certain Regard section, Captain Fantastic will arrive this summer with a stellar pedigree. But movies have a funny way of playing a little differently in America’s neighborhood cineplexes than in huge auditoriums in France...
The Hunt for Kate Moss Is Afoot in ‘Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie’ Trailer
Like an enjoyable version of Entourage, the cult-beloved Britcom Absolutely Fabulous took an acidic, satirical eye to the world of celebrity and fame. A pair of aging PR agents with delusions of life of the A-list cut a calamitous swath through thirty-nine episodes of booze-and-drug-fueled hijinks in the early ’90s, and now the nostalgia factor has reunited creator/star Jennifer Saunders with her co-star Joanna Lumley for a feature-length movie. It turns out ten years’ worth of aging has only made the actresses and their characters more hilariously tragic, their futile attempts to muscle into exclusive soirees and land new clients twice as disastrous.
‘The Phantom Menace’ Star Jake Lloyd Admitted to Psychiatric Facility Following Arrest Last Year
Revisiting Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, it’s easy to hate li’l Annie Skywalker, the hero-to-be of the film. He says a lot of dumb stuff, mostly about sand, or angels, or whether or not this is podracing. (To clarify: it is, indeed, podracing...