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.

We Could Be Equals Just For One Day

Team Experience is at the Tribeca Film Festival. Here's Jason on Equals.

I'd be curious to know if Lil Nicky Hoult got into his parents Blockbuster stash around the tender age of eight and saw some things he wasn't supposed to see... like perhaps the 1996 film Trainspotting and the 1997 film Gattaca? Because he's totally spent the past year trying to remake the two of them. Kill Your Friends, the Trainspotting wannabe, has already come and gone without much love lost or gained, and now we have Equals, a shiny "doomed by science fiction" romance for the Swipe Right Age.

Equals - the tale of a gleaming future where emotion's verboten - makes a much more successful case for itself. Yes it echoes Andrew Niccol in every perfume-ad pretty shot, all futuristic silvers and golds shimmering beneath the camera's upturned palm. You've never seen skin as devastatingly luminescent as Hoult's here - he resembles nothing less an unnamed organism from under the sea seeing light for the first time, a spectacle of unspeakable translucence squinting at the sun.

His purity has a point and a purpose though, beyond just its usual pretty surface charms - his cheeks flood with color, bathing the screen and the palette, pinkening, tells us he's seeing what a lot of us have for awhile now... namely hot damn, Kristen Stewart, you're on fire! Burn it up!

Yes, the other half of this romance is no stranger to the soft glow of twilight (you know, Twilight) but far from sullen here KStew is a barely contained nervy jangle, a tremor, dark eyes sunken in a sea of foam. She makes you lean in, which is what this romance needs - look closer. Closer. And once you do, once you're spinning in their orbit, wham, that's that. You're under. They make a surprising pair but they work, and there's defnitely a queerness to it - they're meeting in the middle, gender-wise, with their utilitarian costuming and eyelashes for days; love like an invention, self-built, new and shiny... so shiny it stings.

Grade: B

Equals Poster & Teaser

Manuel here. After premiering at Toronto last year, Drake Doremus's (Like Crazy) sci-fi romance Equals is headed our way soon via A24. And perhaps as a way to dispel the mixed-reaction this Kristen Stewart/Nicholas Hoult flick got at the busy Canadian festival, we've been given two beautiful pieces of marketing: a gorgeous one-sheet poster (with the nevertheless corny tagline, "Find your equal") and a Chromatics-scored teaser trailer that shows us the sleek and slate future Doremus has cooked up.

In case the beautifully bleak futuristic visuals don't give it away, the film centers on a dystopian future where human emotions have been eradicated...or have they? There really is only one way a plot like that develops but it'll make a nice addition to this growing romance-deconstruction-via-sci-fi genre to which Spike Jonze, Alex Garland, and Jonathan Glazer have treated us in these past few years.

Check out the teaser below and discuss with us whether anyone could really resist Hoult's cheekbones, even or especially, when told not to.

Contrarian Corner: Mad Max Fury Road

Lynn Lee test-drives a new, potentially recurring feature wherein TFE members voice dissent on Oscar hopefuls and critical darlings.

If you’re on this site, it’s safe to assume you pay attention to movie critics. It’s also a fair bet you’re likely—or at least more likely than the average person—to agree with the critics when they coalesce around a particular movie. But if you’re like me, every once in a while a film comes along that generates a level of critical enthusiasm you just don’t get. You’d like to share or at least understand it, but instead find yourself feeling like the lone non-believer in a church full of the radiant converted.

That’s how it’s been for me and Mad Max: Fury Road, which met with rave reviews and solid box office when it hit theaters this summer. More recently, it’s picked up a raft of critics’ awards and nominations that have kept it in the Oscars conversation - not just in the technical categories but the majors, including picture and director. Any doubt about its chances stems from the fact that it’s a “genre” film, not its intrinsic merits, which most agree transcend its genre. [More...]

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Situation Linky

Arts.Mic Our Manuel dives deep on TV's family sitcom through history and how it does and doesn't reflect our changing world. Fun and depressing stats.
Dark Horizons BBC will try adapting Phillip Pullman's "His Dark Materials" into a franchise. Exciting since those books are so complex and adult (movies were probably never the right approach) but that said... good luck besting Nicole Kidman's Miss Coulter in the aborted movie franchise
Oscar Conversations [video] director, costume designer, and composer talk Beasts of No Nation
Africa is a Country Noah Tsikas with an alternative perspective on the much lauded Beasts of No Nation

Pajiba lists 20 upcoming sci-fi fantasy movies that are NOT from a franchise. How exciting. Original or fresh adaptations. Of course some of these will launch franchises if they're big
Guardian Colin Welland, Oscar winning screenwriter of Chariots of Fire has died. 
People Adele cites Madonna's "Frozen" as an inspirational song in her life. Same. That song rescued me at the time, no joke. (Love it when artists show Madonna respect rather than dissing her)
Little White Lies has a whole freaking issue on Carol ! Beautiful motion cover, too 
Los Angeles Times the ongoing drama of Quentin Tarantino vs the police
Boy Culture somehow I missed this Mommie Dearest night in Manhattan with actress Rutanya Alda (The Deer Hunter, Mommie Dearest) and Michael Musto 
Awards Daily talks to Tab Hunter about the documentary Tab Hunter: Confidential which is really fun if you're into Old Hollywood history
Playbill Here's a project with potential I hadn't heard a peep about: Shirley Maclaine and Amanda Seyfried will co-star in a movie about an old woman who wants to control everything including her own obituary. A young reporter has other ideas.
Variety Brad Pitt & Marion Cotillard (what a lovely pair) are headling Robert Zemeckis next feature and its got an Oscar hungry Thanksgiving 2016 release date 

Beauty Breaks
if you need it -- and who doesn't from time to time?
My New Plaid Pants Edgar Ramirez three times
NY Times amazing never before seen 80s photos of Madonna, Warhol, and Basquiat
Queerty on Empire's Jussie Smollet. Mmmm. Are any of you watching Season 2 of Empire? I don't like it quite as much this year but Jussie & Taraji & Gabby are still great fun
Vogue chooses best dressed: Meryl, Alicia, and someone named... Sienna Miller (sp?)
VJ Brendan Nicholas Hoult in Hero magazine. I saw this mag cover in London but if I'd known the photos were this good. It's a pretty pretty pretty pretty pretty pretty pretty pretty reminder that he was so great in Mad Max Fury Road earlier this year. FYC people.

WHAT A LOVELY DAY!