Two-time Academy Award winner Denzel Washington teams with one-time Green Lantern Ryan Reynolds in this week’s Safe House, the latest of Washington’s midrange action movies. His recent output has been so heavy on popcorn flicks like Unstoppable and The Book of Eli that it’s easy to forget his wide range and occasional risky projects, so we decided to make Mr. Washington the subject of a video essay, spotlighting some of his more interesting (and less widely-acclaimed) films and performances. Watch it after the jump.
Welcome to “Trailer Park,” our regular Friday feature where we collect the week’s new trailers all in one place and do a little “judging a book by its cover,” ranking them from worst to best and taking our best guess at what they may be hiding. We’ve got seven new trailers this week, ranging from family-friendly zombies to haunted hotels to psycho teens; check ‘em out after the jump.
Nestled among this week’s new theatrical releases is The Big Year, a rather syrupy looking Bucket List riff co-starring Steve Martin, Jack Black, and Owen Wilson. Let’s be clear: we have not yet seen it. But we’re not holding out much hope for a movie that puts those three guys together and cannot find one single laugh to put in a trailer.
How could you combine three men as (granted, not always reliably) funny as these and not come up with a laugh riot? Quite easily, turns out. The recent cinema is all but littered with pictures that teamed up established comedic talents and thus sounded like sure-fire crowd pleasers, but which ended up tickling the funny bones of neither critics nor moviegoers. After the jump, we’ll run down ten comic combinations that misfired.
Welcome to “Trailer Park,” our regular Friday feature where we collect the week’s new trailers all in one place and do a little “judging a book by its cover,” ranking them from worst to best and taking our best guess at what they may be hiding. This week, we’ve got seven new chunks of varyingly interesting fall fare; check ‘em all out after the jump.
Editor’s note: Welcome to The Fug Report! Each week our fashion blogger friends Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan, the sartorial geniuses behind Go Fug Yourself, will feature some of their favorite looks of the week in this space. We hope you enjoy it!
Welcome to “Trailer Park,” our regular Friday feature where we collect the week’s new trailers all in one place and do a little “judging a book by its cover,” ranking them from worst to best and taking our best guess at what they may be hiding. This week, we’ve got ten to show you
— everything from new Soderbergh and Clooney movies to, yes, a film adaptation of a board game. Check ‘em all out after the jump.
Of particular note amongst this week’s new DVD and Blu-ray releases is Buried, Rodrigo Cortés’s tense, harrowing tale of a contractor, buried alive, trapped for the duration of the film in a 2’ x 7’ wood coffin. This is a risky formula for movie-making — not only must the filmmakers keep our interest in that confined space, but star Ryan Reynolds undertakes the considerable challenge of holding the audience’s attention, basically by himself, for 90+ minutes.
For the past six years, Franklin Leonard, a mid-level studio executive, has put together the annual Black List — a compilation of the year’s best unproduced screenplays according to him and 300 or so of his industry pals. But these aren’t just projects that will never see the light of day. A few of the films are in production now, and six of the top 10 screenplays — which we’ve posted after the jump — have already been scooped up by studios. Let us know in the comments what you think sounds the most promising; our money’s on Jackie, a film about Jacqueline Kennedy’s life in the days following her husband’s death, which is set to be directed by Darren Aronofsky.
1. Yesterday afternoon Little, Brown & Co. revealed the jacket art for David Foster Wallace’s unfinished novel about an IRS tax-return-processing center, The Pale King, and set a fitting release date: April 15, 2011. [via NYT]
2. A New Pornographers gig at Michigan’s Calvin College had to be canceled because “the irony of the band’s name was impossible to explain to many.” [via Spinner]
3. Kanye’s video for “Runaway” will be a 40-minute-long noir film. As he explains it, “It’s the story of a phoenix fallen to Earth, and I make her my girlfriend, and people discriminate against her and eventually she has to burn herself alive and go back to her world.” [via ONTD]
4. Is Roybn going to make a guest appearance on Gossip Girl? It sounds too good to be true, but TwitPics don’t lie. [via Vulture]
5. Ryan Reynolds is producing a new comedy for NBC called Mayors of Casterbridge that has absolutely nothing to do with the work of Thomas Hardy and is described as “Old School meets Gran Torino.” [via Deadline]
Bonus quote: “To me, there’s no real difference between a fortune teller or a fortune cookie and any of the organized religions. They’re all equally valid or invalid, really. And equally helpful.” – Woody Allen in the New York Times
