"Wonder Woman" Gets More Promising

Chris here. Among the seemingly endless barrage of horrors, 2016 has also been the year that gave us two DC filmic trainwrecks. Next year however Warner Bros. will be able to turn that around in equal measure with Wonder Woman and Justice League (and, oh yeah, The LEGO Batman Movie). While we're less optimistic about Justice League, the goods on Wonder Woman keep getting better and better.

These new posters send clear strong messages to the fanboy hoardes ready to trash a female superhero picture. Maybe we'll even get more in this series with the captions YAAAS, QUEEN, and SLAY. For my money, we have enough "power" and "courage" at the movies, but Woman just might make good on that "wonder" promise. Check out the new trailer below...

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Cecil B DeMille 4 Meryl Streep

by Nathaniel R

For those craving their dose of La Streep this awards season, rest easy: even if she isn't Oscar nominated for Florence Foster Jenkins in an already highly competitive Best Actress race, she'll at least grace the Golden Globes. She's a shoo-in for a Best Actress in a Comedy or Musical category for her off-key diva and she'll also be this year's Cecil B DeMille Honoree. Remember that every year at some point during the broadcast they stop handing out awards and celebrate a whole career with clips and speeches. On Sunday January 8th, 2017, that section of the night belongs to Meryl...

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Review: "Hacksaw Ridge"

by Chris Feil

Caught between championing pacifism and luxuriating in brutality, Hacksaw Ridge struggles to have it both ways. Telling the story of WWII medic Desmond T. Doss (Andrew Garfield), America’s first conscientious objector (a soldier refusing to bear arms) who rescued over seventy soldiers in a single night. What plays out is part old-fashioned star vehicle for Garfield and part survival epic.

The film is as bloodthirsty as Mel Gibson’s other directorial efforts despite Doss’s message at the center. There is more fascination in the multitude of ways military bodies can be destroyed than Doss’s moral stance against that very violence - Gibson’s gaze is never more invigorated than when someone is brutalized. While the third act could simply be presented as the grim reality of war, it is instead an aimless fetishizing of bloodshed. This won’t come as a surprise to the dissenters of Gibson’s filmography, but the habit is perhaps more glaring given it is directly at odds with the material. The taste level is questionable and the subject gets lost.

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Sony is Finally Serious About a "Dragon Tattoo" Sequel

Chris here. Just when you think the Lisbeth Salander ship has sailed, Sony keeps dangling a Girl With the Dragon Tattoo sequel potential in front of us even without original director David Fincher. Well now we have some concrete news: the studio is fast-tracking The Girl in the Spider's Web for a production start next year and they are courting Don't Breathe's Fede Alvarex to take the helm.

Curiously, this skips the two novels that follow Dragon Tattoo, which had at one point been discussed to be combined into a single film. Dropping those stories means we'll miss out on some of the series's most thrilling moments that are also heavy of Salander's background. Not written by original author Stieg Larsson, Spider's Web could be a more standalone piece to keep those reported high costs at bay. Either way, after Don't Breathe was a sharp and tidy thriller (and inching closer to a stunning $90 million gross) it's clear Alvarez is ready for a larger project.

So does this mean that Rooney Mara and Daniel Craig will be totting back to the Sweden's underbelly? Mara's interest is still piqued as of the last time she was asked (depsite rumors of an Alicia Vikander swap), but will the Brady Corbet-directed 70MM musical Vox Lux conflict? Craig can't seem to decide on whether or not to be Bond again, so I'm guessing no Mara would mean no Craig - he also has the miniseries adaptation Purity to keep him busy. Is the series worth exploring without the Fincher/Mara/Craig trifecta?

It's Electrifying. It's Electrifying.

Jason from MNPP here -- isn't it strange, the stories that suddenly catch fire with the movie-makers and ignite dueling projects that race towards the finish line to beat the other to the eyes of the public? You've got your Volcano and Dante's Peak, you've got Deep Impact and Armageddon, and for those of you who don't see Disaster Movies as the be-all end-all of the cinematic form you've got Capote and Infamous... in which that southern writer was tossed at New York Society like a killer meteorite from outer space.

Today comes new news of another bizarre example - the the 1880s a battle over who would best monetize the invention of electricity was waged between George Westinghouse and Thomas Edison, and all of sudden, some one-hundred-and-thirty odd years later, it's all Hollywood wants to talk about.

I've been following the momentum of the movie called The Current War semi-regularly over at MNPP because a cast of handsome dudes have been attaching and un-attaching themselves from it for a few months -- as of right now the film will star Nicholas Hoult, Benedict Cumberbatch, Michael Shannon, and just today Spider-man himself Tom Holland has joined the cast. Oh and Katherine Waterston too, because I guess there needs to be a token wife character who frets at the sidelines of all the men's manly business. The Current War will be directed by Alfonso Gomez-Rejon, who made Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, and it's set to start filming next month.

Meanwhile everybody's favorite Oscar nominee Morten Tyldum is making a film called The Last Days of Night, based on a book by the same title, which tells the story from the point of view of Westinghouse's lawyer, who will be played by Eddie Redmayne. That movie is supposed to start filming in February. Do you think Benedict Cumberbatch and Morten both had their light-bulb moments (as it were) on the set of The Imitation Game, and this is some kind of secret spiteful race between the two of them? That's how I'm making entertainment out of the story for myself anyway.