The "Bad Moms" Sequel You Don't Want Is Coming

Chris here. One of the biggest success stories of the past summer was Bad Moms. The film's strong word of mouth and box office staying power flew in the face of the more macho movies that came and quickly went during this lackluster season. With a fun cast of likeable stars including headliners Mila Kunis, Kathryn Hahn, and Kristen Bell you can see how distributor STX Entertainment would want to replicate their biggest success yet. They've just announced a sequel is being fasttracked, but don't get too excited.

Next year's sequel will flip the script in the lamest of unexpected ways: Bad Dads.

Call me crazy, but isn't the concept Bad Dads exactly the kind of film we get all of the time, the antithesis of which made Bad Moms's concept so appealing to audiences? This flies in the face of exactly how the film was able to financially merit a sequel in the first place, not to mention denies us a potential franchise of Hahn being hilarious.

There's no word yet if Dads will be a direct offshoot and keep any characters, or if writer/directors Jon Lucas and Scott Moore will return, but STX is planning several films, reality shows, and consumer products. Does this film have any chance of being unique next to the bawdy manchild likes of Old School and The Hangover?

NYFF: Sonia Braga in "Aquarius"

Manuel here reporting from the New York Film Festival and reminding you that Sonia Braga is a goddess of cinema 

Aquarius is the name of a building in Recife where Doña Clara (a resplendent Sonia Braga) has made her life. The apartment she lives in, which is littered with books and old LPs (she was once a famed music journalist), once belonged to her aunt. Indeed, Kleber Mendonça Filho first introduces us to the Aquarius and to the apartment back when Clara was a young woman who’d recently battled breast cancer, a key detail her aunt brings up in the midst of a birthday celebration. In this lively opening sequence, the camera pauses on an old furniture piece before giving us a glimpse of even livelier days of the older woman celebrating her birthday surrounded by family. We see a memory flash before us of a heated sexual encounter, her lingering gaze having triggered an old but cherished memory...

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Power Link and Iron Fist

Vanity Fair interviews reclusive legend Warren Beatty. He talks Annette, his trans son Stephen and
i09 Forest Whitaker is joining the ever-expanding cast of Marvel's Black Panther movie
Vulture Daniel Craig, newly platinum blonde, is warming up to returning to the 007 gig. Money money money. Money money money. ♫ Money money money. If you happen to be rich - .......Ooooh -- and you feel like a Night's entertainment, you can pay for a gay escapade.

 

Antagony & Ecstacy catches up with The Neon Demon and loves it more than he knows he should
MNPP it looks like Nicolas Hoult will be playing Nikola Tesla in the costume drama Current War about the fight over monetizing electricity co-starring those actors of endless ubiquity: Benedict Cumberbatch and Michael Shannon.
The Playlist Guy Ritchie will direct Disney's live action Aladdin. Weird.
/Film Boyd Holbrook will play the cyborg villain Donald Pierce in the third Wolverine movie, now titled Logan
AV Club Ron Perlman has finally given up his dream of Hellboy 3 

Power Man and Iron Fist
I don't know how many people who are into Marvel's modern universe of TV and movies knows this but Luke Cage was always paired with Iron Fist in the comicbooks. That's hard to imagine now because Luke Cage has been portrayed as such a loner in both Jessica Jones and on his own show.

I know this because I was kind of addicted to that duo as a kid. When I heard they were adapting it for television I wanted Marvel to quit whitewashing the Iron Fist character. Yes Danny was always white but since he grew up in Tibet and is a master of martial arts it would make sense that he were Asian. What's more the common narrative of the white man being better than all the Asians at the super powerful stuff they picked up over in Asia (see also Dr Strange's sorcery) is inherently a racist trope. We were not alone in this thinking. Apparently the handsome actor Lewis Tan, who will play one of the villains in the show, actually wanted to play Iron Fist but Marvel was adamant that he be white (sigh). So we get Finn Jones in the lead role who is most famous for playing Loras Tyrell, the Knight of Flowers in Game of Thrones.

In happier casting news, after Iron Fist premieres we'll eventually get the team up series The Defenders (which will feature Sigourney Weaver as their big bad (yes!))  Here's the new Comic Con teaser for Iron Fist in case you missed it.

Beauty vs Beast: Devils in the Dakota

Jason from MNPP here with this week's "Beauty vs Beast" -- you wanna know what's unlikelier than a young Catholic girl being impregnated with the Antichrist thanks to a pact with the Devil made between her role-seeking actor-husband and her elderly mousse-loving neighbors? Unlikelier than all that is the fact that I have never used my favorite movie, aka Rosemary's Baby, for this series before. Somebody call Dr. Shand to lure me off of this ledge with some of his sweet recorder music before I make myself the next Terry Gionoffrio over this. 

Did I think the choice between Rosemary (never Oscar nominee Mia Farrow) and Minnie (Oscar winner Ruth Gordon) would just be too difficult a choice to subject our brains to? I must admit I find it personally impossible. I cannot! So I leave it to you. Just keep reminding yourself that this is no dream, this is really happening...

PREVIOUSLY Where are the Wild Things? Well last week the Wild Things were celebrating Neve Campbell's birthday. And y'all gave her bad girl Suzie a win to top it off - 70% of you voted for her over co-star Denise Richards. Said Ez:

"Aw, this film is so rooted in my '90's teenage girl experience. I saw it with my buddies for the first time at a sleepover birthday party. We all squealed at the Matt/Kevin shower scene! We were big Party of Five fans (I remember that it aired on Sunday nights after The Nanny in Australia) so we were totally there for Neve. So for nostalgia's sake, my vote goes to Neve :)"

The Furniture: A Nightmare in Sleepy Hollow

"The Furniture" our weekly series on Production Design. Here's Daniel Walber...

Sleepy Hollow is an excellent October movie. It has well-placed jack-o-lanterns. Every frame shivers in the autumn chill. Washington Irving’s Hudson Valley falls under perpetually overcast skies, sapping the harvest season of its color. Rather than admire the changing leaves, Tim Burton emphasizes those aspects of fall that foreshadow the bitterness of winter. 

This harsh climate swept up three Oscar nominations, including a win for production design. It’s a testament to Burton’s fanatically specific vision. Location scouting began in Irving’s New York, but the perfect town wasn’t there. It wasn’t in New England, either, nor even in Old England. After all of that searching, the design team ended up building an entire 18th century village from scratch at Leavesden and Shepperton Studios in the UK.

The final product is an expressionistic, spooky riff on colonial life. The credit goes to production designer Rick Heinrichs, whose collaboration with Burton goes as far back as 1982’s Vincent. The set decorations were by Peter Young, who first worked with the director on Batman. Their version of Sleepy Hollow, New York is a clever blend of historical realism and nightmarish fantasy...

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