Extra, Extra!: Scarlett Johansson Joins Ghost in the Shell Remake

In which I report on the latest in entertainment news.

It would appear that nervous anime fans have one less thing to worry about these days.  The live action remake of the classic cyberpunk film Ghost in the Shell, which is set to hit theaters in early 2017, has secured action mainstay Scarlett Johansson to star in the film.

Best known for her roles as Black Widow in the MCU (appearing in Iron Man 2, The Avengers, Captain America: The Winter Soldier and the upcoming Avengers: Age of Ultron), Johansson is the iconic female badass of the 21st Century: what Linda Hamilton and Sygourney Weaver were to the 20th Century.  Her undeniable on-screen presence, paired with her surprising range as an actress, makes her the ideal choice to tackle the role of Major Motoko Kusanagi: a cyberneticly enhanced police officer charged with tracking down an ellite hacker known only as The Puppet Master.

Ghost in the Shell and its sequel have garnered a considerable international following since its 1995 release.  Its influence has permiated throughout the action and science fiction genres, much of which was approrpiated into 1999's The Matrix.  And by "appropriate," I mean directly lifted, down to specific shots and scenes.

Perplexingly enough, the film is being produced by Dreamworks: a company that's built a name for itself as a bawdy alternative to Disney.  Despite this, it has successfully dabbled in live-action in the past.  Saving Private Ryan, Gladiator and Minority Report were all produced (at least in part) by the studio.

Rupert Sanders, director of Snow White and the Huntsman, is set to helm a script penned by virtual unknowns Jamie Moss and William Wheeler.  Beyond those principle three, and Johansson herself, there's not much else known about the project.

That being said, 2017 already has some stiff competition in terms of action films.  Marvel has three films set for release that year - Guardians of the Galaxy 2, Thor: Ragnarok  and Black Panther.  DC has a female-driven action film of its own in the form of Wonder Woman, not to mention its long awaited Justice League.  Meanwhile, Fox already has a Fantastic 4 sequel and a third Wolverine stand-alone film lined up.  Sony has two Spider-Man spin-offs: Venom: Carnage and an unnamed female-headed project.  Whether it can weather its competitors remains something to be seen.

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Extra, Extra!: BBC Breaking Ties with Netflix?

In which I report on the latest in entertainment news.

It may very well be that some day soon - probably sooner than you'd think and certainly sooner than you'd like - there will be no more Doctor Who on Netflix.  And not just Doctor Who either: Sherlock, Luther, Black Adder, Coupling, Top Gear, the original House of Cards and every other BBC show that is currently streamable through the company.  The end is nigh.

This is because the contract between Netflix and the BBC is due to expire at the end of the month.  Unless it is renewed, or at least revisited, the BBC's surprisingly vast library of shows that are currently available to stream will disappear in February.

There's already an online petition underway to at least save Doctor Who, whose immense cache of programming would be sorely missed by its innumerable fans (myself included).  I can only presume that a second one will pop up for Sherlock, whose fanbase is nearly as fervent.

I can only hope that Netflix manages to work something out with the BBC on this front, because Doctor Who is quite possibly the best show that it has available.  It, Breaking Bad, Madoka Magica... there are only so many absolute treasures at the company's disposal.

So binge on your favorite Brit shows while you can, because they might not be around as long as you might hope.  I know that I'll be trying to fit in as many of my favorite new Who episodes as I possibly can, between unseen episodes of Sherlock and at least the third season of Black Adder.  Needless to say, there might not be much time to watch actual movies over the next two and a half weeks.

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The Weekend Review: Five Things that this Weekend's Golden Globes Tell Us About the Upcoming Academy Awards

In which I review a selection of last weekend's entertainment.

It's that time of the year again.  While everybody else is hitting the gym and counting calories, I'm tuning into the movie awards season while polishing off the last Christmas cookies.  The kiddy awards - hosted by the various critics circles and trade guilds - have all had their say, and even the Golden Globes wrapped up on Sunday, leaving just the elephant in the room to weigh in on the movies of 2014.

And with the Academy's Thursday announcement looming large on the horizon, everybody seems to be scrambling to make some sense out of the field of potential nominees.  Will Guardians of the Galaxy snag a Best Adapted Screenplay nomination?  Is Into the Woods really Best Picture material?  Will Interstellar be this year's populist nomination (ala Inception or The Help)?

While I certainly don't have all of the answers, the Hollywood Foreign Press might have at least some of them.  While their record at predicting Oscar winners is admittedly spotty at best - correctly predicting 8 of the 21st Century's Best Picture winners - it is at least as good a predictor as some awards and better than most.  Looking back on the winners and losers from this last weekend might shed some much-needed light on which films to keep an eye on at this year's Academy Awards.

5)  Don't count out Grand Budapest Hotel.  I have never been a Wes Anderson fan.  His films are quirky for the sole purpose of being different and come off as insufferably smug.  The best of them, 2012's Moonrise Kingdom, was only just alright, while the are decidedly worse.

There's no denying, however, that I seem to be in the extreme minority of opinion among cinephiles, many of whom find him a breath of fresh air amongst mainstream blockbusters and overly produced prestige films.  His three Oscar nominations - for The Royal Tenenbaums, The Fantastic Mr. Fox and the aforementioned Moonrise Kingdom - not to mention Grand Budapest Hotel's win for Best Musical or Comedy at this year's Golden Globes, are testaments to that fact.  But while the Academy seems fond of Anderson's writing, they seem somewhat less enamored with his films as a whole: none of which have ever earned a Best Picture Nomination.  While Grand Budapest Hotel is a pretty safe best for a writing nomination, its chances at the big prize are considerably more dubious.

4)  Michael Keaton is back.  I still have no idea what happened to Michael Keaton.  He seemed to be everywhere in the 80s and 90s, between Mr. Mom, Beetlejuice, Batman, Batman Returns, Multiplicity and Jackie Brown, you could hardly miss him.  After a thoroughly disappointing Jack Frost, however, he seemed to disappear completely: popping up for only the odd TV or voice over appearance.  With Birdman, however, he's resurfaced in a big way.

I've been predicting Keaton for Best Actor since seeing his utterly mesmerizing performance in the film, and for good reason.  Varying from subtle to explosive, Keaton's turn as the has-been Riggan unnervingly draws upon his own celebrity: playing a character who might as well be called Michael Keaton.  It's basically what Seth Rogen does in all of his movies, only good this time.  His Globe win, coupled with the myriad of other accolades his performance has justly earned, make his chances of winning an Oscar just this side of inevitable.

3)  Leviathan is safe (as long as last year's favorite doesn't rear its ugly head).  Best Foreign Language Film has always been an odd category, since its nomination criteria is just so radically different from pretty much every other category.  This is how, despite winning the Palme d'Or (essentially the Nobel Prize in film) and generating some dark horse buzz for Best Picture, Blue Is the Warmest Color was deemed ineligible for the category that it was inevitably going to win.

This is why last year's favorite is the only film that can really spoil Leviathan's inevitable Best Foreign Language Film win.  Despite losing out to Winter Sleep at the Cannes Film Festival this summer, in the months since it has garnered an incredibly broad following among the exact type of film goers that largely compose the Academy's voting body.  Unless the Ghost of Oscars Past rules lawyers its way into competition, Leviathan seems to already have this category in the bag.

2)  The Lego Movie might not be as safe as we originally thought.  Sunday's biggest upset wasn't for Best Actor, Director or even film.  It was for Animated Feature.  Despite being an uncannily strong year for animation, the front runner was always presumed to be The Lego Movie - the surprise Winter release that became a runaway financial and critical success for the creative team behind 21 Jump Street and Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs.

But with How to Train Your Dragon 2 winning the animation prize, all bets for the Oscars are off.  I still consider the The Lego Movie to be the leader of the animated pack, but it's now running a considerably more neck-and-neck race against the Dreamworks sequel.  Both are exceptional films, especially in their field, but it would be a real shame if one of the best movies of 2014 loses out in the only category it has a realistic chance of winning.

1)  Boyhood is the film to beat.  This really shouldn't come as a surprise to anybody who's been paying attention to the year's preliminary movie awards.  Boyhood has been steamrolling its competition for going on its second month now.  And while certainly gimmicky - it was shot intermittently over the course of 12 years, allowing for its entire cast to age in real-time - it's the kind of gimmick that the Academy voters turn out to see.

Realistically, there's very little that will turn the tide of Boyhood's inevitable success.  Birdman probably has the best chance of stealing the top prize from it, and maybe - just maybe - Interstellar, if Academy voters were as blown away by it as mainstream audiences were (unlikely at best).  This is one film whose success I'm not especially keen on betting against.

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Netflix Update: What's New to Netflix in January 2015

In which I report on the upcoming changes to Netflix.

Every month has its ups and downs on Netflix.  Sometimes you lose a lot and only gain a little.  Sometimes you lose a little and gain a lot in return.  This month really does seem like a pretty mixed bag: losing just as much as you get back from it.

The French Connection is something that I've wanted to see for an incredibly long time.  Directed by the notoriously difficult to work with William Friedkin (most famous for directing The Exorcist) and starring the singularly talented Gene Hackman, it follows a pair of New York cops attempting to break up a drug smuggling ring.

Its reputation of being one of the 70's best films, certainly precedes it.  And keep in mind that this is the same decade that produced the two good Godfathers, Star Wars, Apocalypse Now, The Omen, The Wicker Man and of course The Exorcist.  Given Friedkin's unfortunate career trajectory, it will be interesting to see his one other "great" film.

Like The French Connection, my interest in The Quiet Man is largely fueled by its immaculate reputation.  It was nominated for seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture and winning for Best Director and Best Cinematography.  It's one that is often name-dropped as being a one of the best-ever films (although not quiet so often as a lot of the higher-profile competition - the 2001's and Citizen Kanes of the world).

This is an interesting counterpoint to another John Ford film that left Netflix last month: The Grapes of Wrath.  Whereas The Grapes of Wrath was a somber piece about the trials and tribulations of dust bowel workers, The Quiet Man is a light-hearted romantic comedy starring John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara.  This might be a tough sell for Becky, who's suspicious of any centrally romantic films at even the best of times, but I'm sure I can find the opportune moment to slip this into our normally scheduled viewing.

Described at the time as "Hollywood at its worst told by Hollywood at its best," Sunset Blvd should appeal to the Netflix's film buff demographic.  It was nominated for 11 Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director, taking home, among others, Best Writing.  In the AFI's 1998 list, the film was named the 12th best American film of all time, slipping to 16th in their revised 2007 list.  On top of that, it has placed on the AFI's lists for best Quotes (#7 and # 24) and best Score (#16), and was nominated for best Villain.

Despite its resounding acclaim, Sunset Blvd is a film that I simply couldn't get into.  It was too "Old Hollywood" for me - too stagy and melodramatic.  It is certainly an unnerving portrayal of the price of fame, and features an incredibly intelligent screenplay, but I could never really connect with it the way that many others have.  Still, if you're looking for a spellbinding classic, and can stomach a hefty serving of melodrama, Sunset Blvd could very well be the film for you.

Chinatown is one of those love it or hate it kind of movies.  Roman Polanski's neo-noir film takes Nicholson at his absolute best and sets his hard-boiled detective against a twisting conspiracy that he just can't win against.  I have guardedly loved the film since first seeing it: between a beautifully pessimistic ending, an uncomfortable plot twist and one of Nicholson's best performances, I could hardly fault it if its central mystery was a touch duller than I had hoped for.  Becky, on the other hand, hated it.

And she isn't the only one either.  I think a lot of that has to do with the kind of noirs people are interested in these days, when they're interested in noirs at all.  It's less about a terse mystery smartly told as much as it is about an overly-stylized shoot-em-up with pulpy voice overs: Sin City when it's done well, A Dame to Kill For when it's not.  But those in the mood for a more old-fashioned mystery with greed and power at its core, this is the film for you.

Unlike most of my friends, I did not grow up enamored with - nor even watching - the Robocoop franchise.  It wasn't until earlier this year that I even saw the first film, and that was only on TV because of the pending remake.  What it lacked for in terms of satisfying action (and yes, I just said that), Robocop more than made up for with an intelligent mix of satire and humanity (the opposite is true for the remake).  It was definitely better than I had assumed it to be, and was disappointed that it took me so long to see it in the first place.

Not only is Robocop streamable now, but so is Robocop 2.  I'm excited not only to revisit that darkly satirical first film, but to see where the rest of the series goes when divorced from having a mechanized policeman solve his own murder.  While I'm sure that the series will eventually become what I always assumed the first one to be - a mindless, 90s-styled action film whose sole worth is measured in explosions - I have no problem sitting through the sequels until I get to that point.

So what are you looking forward to seeing on Netflix in January?  Do the new streaming options make up for what was thrown out at the end of December?  Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

January 1

101 Dalmatians (1996)
Bad Boys II (2003)
Batman & Robin (1997)
Bruce Almighty (2003)
Cast Away (2000)
Get Low (2009)
Election (1999)
Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas (1998)
Fort Bliss (2014)
Jeepers Creepers 2 (2003)
Mean Girls (2004)
Shall We Dance? (2004)
To Be Takei (2014)
The French Connection (1971)
The Quiet Man (1952)
The War of the Worlds (1953)
Wayne’s World 2 (1993) 

Dallas (Season 3

January 2

Big Fish
Bowling for Columbine (2002)
Bright Lights, Big City (1988)
Chinatown (1974)
Deep Impact (1998)
Dirty Dancing (1987)
Footloose (1984)
Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994)
Fried Green Tomatoes (1991)
Ghost (1990)
Insomnia (2002)
Marathon Man (1976)
Marty (1955)
Moonstruck (1987)
Mr. Mom (1983)
Mystic Pizza (1988)
Mystic River (2003)
Notting Hill (1999)
Patriot Game (1992)
Pee-Wee's Big Adventure (1985)
The Ref (1994)
Robocop (1987)
Robocop 2 (1990)
The Running Man (1987)
Sabrina (1995)
Snatch (2000)
Sunset Boulevard (1950)
Swingers (1996)

January 3 

Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit (2014) 

White Collar (Season 5)

January 7

Brick Mansions (2014) 

January 8

Frank (2014) 

Psych (Season 8)

January 9

Z Nation (Season 1)

January 13

Being Human (Season 4)

January 15

Wolfblood (Season 3)

January 16 

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (2011) 

The Adventures of Puss in Boots (Season 1)

The Fall (Season 2)

January 28 

Chef (2014) 

Beauty & the Beast (Season 2)

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Extra, Extra!: Ant-Man's New Teaser Trailer

In which I report on the latest in entertainment news.

Well, it's finally here.  One of my most anticipated films of 2015 finally released a teaser trailer during last night's premiere of Agent Carter.  That's right, Ant-Man is here and the pint-sized here looks absolutely phenomenal.  Just check out the trailer:

I've always maintained that Michael Douglas was the perfect actor to play an aging Hank Pym, although Paul Rudd as the younger incarnation of Ant-Man still leaves me feeling a bit cold.  I'm sure that he'll be fine in the role when all is said and done - because, after all, Marvel has an uncanny talent for unerringly choosing the right people for the right projects at the right time - but I still can't get too enthused by the cow-eyed, Ryan Reynolds look-alike headlining a superhero film.

It's also worth noting that this sadly Edgar Wright-less film will feature John Slattery as an older Howard Stark - returning to the role for the first time since Iron Man 2.  It will also feature Hayley Atwell as Peggy Carter, who seems to be making a small career out of this one character, appearing in Captain America: The First Avenger, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and now her own show, Peggy Carter.

I personally love the fact that Marvel is going to such great lengths to meaningfully incorporate and develop their supporting characters over so many different films and TV apearances.  It adds a degree of depth to the MCU that other shared universes, with their hellbent focus on their superpowered headlliners, simply can't match.

DC came close with Gotham - their Gordan-centric Batman series - but it is completely divorced from anything resembling a shared universe; it doesn't tie in with other DC TV shows like Flash or Arrow, doesn't tie in with either the most recent Nolan trilogy nor will it tie into the new DCCU, so it's actually not plumbing the depths of anything other than how long people will tune in to not see Batman every week.

At any rate, I am stoked about the movie and can't wait for it to hit theaters.  What are your thoughts about the trailer / movie?  Is there anything that you're especially happy / disappointed about?  Share your thoughts in the comment section.

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The Five Most Disappointing Films of 2014

There seems to be a few every year: movies that are not necessarily bad, but fail to live up to whatever expectations have been set up for them.  They are the American Hustles, Batman Returns and Godfather: Part 3s of the world (and, yes, outright dreck like Spider-Man 3).  I've even enjoyed most of these films to one degree or another (although certainly not my #1 choice).  Through either hype or misplaced talent or never quite coming together the way that they could have, these five movies were the biggest letdowns of 2015 for me.

5) A Million Ways to Die in the West - I had some concerns about Ted when it came out.  Although I loved MacFarlane's outragious brand of comedy, a movie about a foul-mouthed Teddy Bear and an overgrown man-child didn't seem like a particularly well-thought out premise.  A friend of mine was quick to defend it, arguing that he "trust[ed] MacFarlane to make [him] laugh," so I gave it a shot and was glad that I did.  21 Jump Street aside, Ted was easily the funniest movie of 2012.

Naturally MacFarlane's big-screen followup had some big shoes to fill.  The result?  An alright movie that was just funny enough to keep from being boring.  It wasn't bad by any means, but it wasn't especially good, either.  It traded away some of the more sophisticated humor that made Ted, Family Guy and American Dad so fantastic for a more diarrhetic type of comedy.  It was basically a better version of "Jesus, Mary and Joseph," which sadly isn't saying all that much.

"If You Only Have a Moustache" is a great song, as is the ballad "A Million Ways to Die," but nothing else in the song quite lives up to those combined three minutes fifty-eight seconds of its run-time.  And while Neil Patrick Harris was fantastic as the mustachioed douchebag who runs the local moustache parlor, everybody has pretty much caught onto the joke of making Doogie Howser a dick by now.

4) Lucy - 2014 was a pretty big year for Scarlett Johansson no mater how you look at it.  She achieved some critical notoriety with Chef, played off of Chris Evans to great effect in Captain America: The Winter Soldier and even headlined a blockbuster of her own.  But while Lucy is the most pleasingly pro-science film of the year, as an sci-fi / action film directed by the accomplished Luc Besson, it was pretty forgettable.

Don't get me wrong, though.  It was about as entertaining as it needed to be, used its scientifically iffy premise of unlocking hidden potential in the brain to great effect and had a few memorable visuals thrown in for good measure (my favorite being intercutting wildlife footage with the actual goings-on of the film as a visual metaphor for Lucy's "fight or flight" response kicking in).  The problem is that the film doesn't do much beyond a rushed set-up, an escalating series of mostly superfluous chase scenes and a payoff that was far more impressed with itself than I was with it.  It's an interesting counterpoint to Watchmen's Doctor Manhattan, but really no more than that.

3) Son of Batman - DC redoubled their focus on animated films this year, promising a small-screen shared universe analogous to the MCU but more appropriately rooted in the old DCAU (which included Batman: The Animated Series, The New Batman Adventures, Batman Beyond, Superman: The Animated Series, Static Shock, The Zeta Project, Justice League, Justice League: Unlimited and a handful of Batman films).  They launched this new inter-film continuity with Justice League: War, which currently stands as one of my favorite films of 2014.  Their followup to this, an adaptation of Batman and Son, was not quite as amazing as its forebearer.

While the animation is without a doubt excellent, and the voice talent behind the characters well-chosen, the film was only alright.  It immediately kills off the immortal Ra's al Ghul.  Seriously: they kill him off.  He finds himself on the losing end of a fight with Deathstroke and dies inches away from the Lazarus Pit.  There goes any hope I had of further appearances from my favorite Batman villain in the new DCAU.

Damien is a fun character, and goes as dark as he needs to, but is more off-putting than endearing.  While it's fun to see Batman as a stodgy parental figure, it doesn't give him much room to actually be Batman.  The plot, while serviceable, is not especially engaging.  I can only hope that the dynamic duo's next outing will be more of a return to form for the Caped Crusaders. 

2) Deliver Us from Evil  - It should come as no surprise that horror is my favorite film genre.  After seeing Deliver Us from Evil's unnerving trailer, I thought that we were finally getting a possession film that not only understood exactly why The Exorcist worked, but exploded its scope to a truly pandemic scale.

What we received was a worse permutation of the same possession-based scares than better-made Judeo-Christian horror films (The Exorcism of Emily Rose and The Last Exorcism being the best of these).  While I understand what the beginning was trying to accomplish, it ended up being overly long and generally unneeded.  The promise of more wide-spread possessions was delivered, but underwhelmingly, playing off more like a bargain-bin slasher than as a religious horror.  And while the priest was an amazing character who played off of the protagonist to great effect, his introduction to the film was simply too little, too late.

1) Cabin Fever 3: Patient Zero  - I don't really know what this film was trying to accomplish.  It set itself up as a prequel to the first film, but that story was shoved into Sean Astin's back story.  It plays out like two mostly unrelated sequels intercut together to pad out the run-time to feature length, neither of which are even remotely good.  Only Sean Astin's character has any sort of depth to him, and he's forced to play second fiddle to a bachelor party filled with obnoxious man-children.

It was an unequivocal mess from start to finish, but I can't help but feel that there was actually a really good movie to be made from this.  The first film showed how the slow-burning terror of a flesh-eating virus can work especially well when given time to let the inevitability death-by-liquefaction sink in.  Sean Astin is a phenomenal actor who, perplexingly, seems to choose the worst possible projects since his career high in The Lord of the Rings.  His character's backstory really did seem interesting, and I would have loved to have seen it play out in full.

Hopefully 2015's most anticipated releases will prove to be better than some of 2014's.  Here's to hoping, at least.

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Blog Update: No One Expects the Filmquisition!

In which I detail changes to Just a Matter of CineMantics Filmquisition.

With a new year comes a new dedication to the cause: to the Filmquisition.  This is where I take the decidedly modern entertainments of film, television, video games and comic books and rake them them over the coals to see what charred bits of truth there are to be found.  It is as much a celebration as it is an indictment of the 20th and 21st centuries' most visible forms of diversion.

With this rededication to the cause is a redoubling on my part to timely, regular and substantive content.  New content will be posted when they're intended to be, not just when I get around to them.  Lapsed series - such as Date Night, From the Vault and even the (as of yet) one-of Diamond in the Rough - will come back with a vengeance and there are a few nascent series ideas that will invariably come to fruition within the next year.

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