Say A Prayer For "Serenity"

by Jason Adams

Although I don't think it's ever spoken in the film it's hard not to have the "Serenity Prayer" -- God grant me the serenity, wisdom, change, courage, check and etc -- echoing in your cavernous, more cavernous by the second, head while watching Serenity, writer-director Steven Knight's nervous-breakdown-put-to-film. Starring Matthew McConaughey as the hard-drinking and hard-sexing good ol' boy in paradise called Baker Dill (and really we all knew it was only a matter of time before Matthew McConaughey played a character called "Baker Dill" right?) watching Serenity is, well, an experience that calls for prayer. Any prayer. An exorcism, even.

I realize at this point, with these balls-deep references to demon possessions and nervous breakdowns, you're probably thinking that Serenity sounds like a miserable experience. It's not...

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Yes No Maybe So: "First Man"

by Nathaniel R

Raise your hand in the comments if you needed this month of enticing trailers. I sure did. There have been too many weeks this spring and early summer where too few interesting options appeared in movie theaters asking for our money. Suddenly June's onslaught of teasing has led us to hope that 2018 will turn itself into a stellar film year... and thus a competitive Oscar season to come. We've already discussed A Star is Born, White Boy Rick, The Children Act, Suspiria, Widows, Mowgli, and Christopher Robin. Now we have the latest from Oscar winning young director Damien Chazelle (Whiplash, La La Land) and it's the historical drama First Man about Neil Armstrong (Ryan Gosling) and the moon landing.

As with A Star is Born before it, this trailer lives up to the movie's 'on paper' promise and will only feed into more pre-release Oscar hype. Let's Yes No and Maybe So™ it after the jump...

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The Men in the High Castles

Jason Adams reviews Chappaquidick, new in theaters this Friday

"I am a collage of unaccounted for brushstrokes - I am all random." Those are among the last words spoken by Stockard Channing's character in Six Degrees of Separation as she flees another ritzy party, her sense of self in tatters. Who are we, just an assemblage of stories we tell ourselves, and others? Is there something in between the molecules, if you drill down deep enough, or does infinite digging render everything dug? When we get up and look at ourselves in the mirror in the morning, are our eyes showing us Fake News? The post-modern self is an existential crisis in overdrive, but at a certain point don't you have to just stop drilling and take stock of what you actually see? Where does the scrutinizing of facts end and the perversion of them begin? Who writes our histories?

On July 18th, 1969 in Chappaquiddick, Massachusetts, Ted Kennedy drove off a bridge and a 29-year-old woman named Mary Jo Kopechne died. What happened in the hours following that accident has been the subject of numerous books, not to mention many a feverish speculative daydream of right-leaning politicians and pundits. But it hasn't gotten the movie treatment until now with John Curran's Chappaquiddick, starring Jason Clarke as Kennedy and Kate Mara as Kopechne, out in theaters this Friday. Curran seeks to write that history...

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The Furniture: Building a Way out of Mudbound

"The Furniture," by Daniel Walber, is our weekly series on Production Design. You can click on the images to see them in magnified detail. 

“I dreamed in brown,” remembers Laura McAllan (Carey Mulligan), surveying the near-monochrome dirt of a Mississippi farm. This small pocket of land is owned by her husband, Henry (Jason Clarke), but one doesn’t get much of a sense that she’d call it home. He appears not to like it either, but is motivated by a sour sense of duty. Perhaps this is why his agricultural efforts fail, barely introducing any green into this expanse of brown.

Even more obvious, when it comes to metaphors, is the way Mudbound begins. Dee Rees opens her earthbound epic on Henry in the dirt, digging a grave. The deceased is his Pappy (Jonathan Banks), an acrimonious Klan member who has done his utmost to pass his ideology down to his sons. It’s largely worked on Henry. Jamie (Garrett Hedlund) resists, but still winds up digging in the mud.

At the bottom of this new ditch, Henry finds a skull. It’s a “slave’s grave,” he declares; he can tell by the bullet-hole. It’s a hint at an old story, one that Rees knows she needn’t bother put into words...

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The Epic and Crowded "Mudbound"

by Murtada

About halfway into Mudbound, the new film from Dee Rees (Pariah), the matriarch of a family of landowners in the Mississippi Delta Laura Mcallan (Carey Mulligan) offers a maid job to Florence (Mary J Blige), whose family are land tenants of Laura's husband Henry (Jason Clarke). The offer comes after Florence had been forced to leave her own family for a few days to help Laura with her sick young daughters. It is a startling offer that comes out of nowhere and Florence isn't given an option to accept or refuse, but rather told it’s been decided to hire her.

However before the audience can process the audacity of Laura’s offer and Florence’s resignation, we are immediately pulled into a combat battle in WWII where Henry’s brother (Garrett Hedlund) and Florence’s oldest son (Jason Mitchell) have enlisted. Herein lies Mudbound's dilemma...

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