I may not be familiar with the Paul Gallico best-selling novel it’s based on, but I love nearly everything about the first trailer for the upcoming film “Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris”. Directed by Anthony Fabian, this delightfully whimsical period drama feels plucked right out of the 1950s both in terms of setting and style. And casting the always wonderful Lesley Manville as your lead is icing on the proverbial cake.
Manville plays the titular Mrs. Harris, a widowed cleaning lady from London whose dream of owning her own Christian Dior gown takes her to the City of Lights for a truly life-changing adventure. And if Manville’s casting wasn’t exciting enough, the movie also features Isabelle Huppert, Jason Isaacs, and Lambert Wilson among others. I have no idea how it will turn out, but I love that movies like this are still being made. Now, hopefully it finds an audience.
“Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris” opens in theaters July 15th. Check out the trailer below and let me know if you’ll be seeing it or taking a pass.
A few months ago we were given the teaser for the upcoming Blumhouse produced horror thriller “The Black Phone”. Yesterday Universal Pictures gave us another look at the film via its official trailer, and lets just say this thing hits all the right notes. The film is directed by Scott Derrickson and co-written by Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill, the duo behind “Sinister” and “Doctor Strange”.
“The Black Phone” immediately grabbed my attention with its star, Ethan Hawke. He plays a truly creepy presence – a serial killer who begins swiping children in a small Colorado town. Set in 1978, the film has an intriguing period style, and the story concept itself breeds a particular sense of unsettling horror. But as the trailer shows, it’s Hawke who makes it utterly terrifying. And this is just a small taste. I can’t wait to see how far they go with this.
“The Black Phone” hits theaters June 24th. Check out the trailer below and let me know if you’ll be seeing it or taking a pass.
Easily one of the most anticipated movies of the year and one of the most sure-thing box office successes of 2022 is the upcoming MCU installment “Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness”. While I admit that my fascination with the Marvel Cinematic Universe has waned a bit, this is one that I’ve been really excited about, mainly because of director Sam Raimi. But there’s also a lot of mystery surrounding what all we may see in this wild-looking adventure. To entice us even more, a new poster has popped up and I gotta say I love it. What say you?
DIRECTOR – Sam Raimi
WRITER – Michael Waldron
STARRING – Benedict Cumberbatch, Elizabeth Olsen, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Benedict Wong, Rachel McAdams, Michael Stuhlbarg, Xochitl Gomez
There’s a lot of pain, regret, and hard feelings simmering throughout the new trailer for “Montana Story”, an upcoming family drama from the writing/directing duo of Scott McGehee and David Siegel. The film was shot over six weeks in late 2020 in beautiful Paradise Valley, Montana under strict COVID-19 restrictions. Now Bleeker Street is bringing it to theaters and the first trailer has me excited.
I’m a big fan of Haley Lu Richardson. Here she and Owen Teague play estranged siblings forced to come back together at their family homeplace in Montana to care for their dying father. While there, old wounds from the past inevitably resurface as brother and sister try handling the affairs of their father while finally reckoning with the ugliness of their family history. Visually, the movie looks exquisite and there’s plenty of family tension there for a good drama. And I’m always up for Richardson digging into new roles. I’m looking forward to this one.
“Montana Story” lands in theaters May 13th. Check out the trailer below and let me know if you’ll be seeing it or taking a pass.
One of my biggest questions regarding the MCU’s next big phase was wondering what they were going to do with Thor. Long before there were even thoughts of a sprawling lucrative cinematic universe, the God of Thunder was one of my favorite Marvel Comics creations. And while I actually liked the lighthearted bend of the earlier Thor movies, it was frustrating to see him suddenly turned into a punchline. So my biggest question going into Thor’s fourth solo movie centered around its treatment of the character. Would we get a better balance or would he remain a blonde beefy gag?
We’ve finally gotten our first look at the film through a brand-new teaser trailer and to be honest, I still don’t know what to think. Is it going to be the movie I hope it will be or the one I’m afraid it might be? I have no idea. We do get several shots of Thor and a handful of his supporting players while the weird choice of “Sweet Child O’ Mine” plays in the background. I’m not sure what they’re going for, but I’ll need to see more before getting too excited.
“Thor: Love and Thunder” hits theaters July 8th. Check out the trailer below and let me know if you’ll be seeing it or taking a pass.
In their heyday studio musicals brought with them an entirely new philosophy of moviemaking as colorful and vibrant music-driven set-pieces often trumped more dramatic storytelling. While these light and frothy concoctions did little to showcase what the burgeoning medium would soon become, they did offer audiences a much needed respite from the growing hardships of the real world. They was about transporting moviegoers; whisking them away with song and dance; providing a whimsical and sometimes dreamy escape from their troubles.
In the early 1930s, Depression-era audiences found their escape in the kaleidoscopic showgirl productions of film director and choreographer Busby Berkeley. A few years later, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers would begin their celebrated RKO Pictures run. And then there was MGM. Starting in earnest in 1939 and continuing for nearly two decades, MGM revolutionized the movie musical under the creative arm of producer Arthur Freed. Names like Judy Garland, Mickey Rooney, and Gene Kelly would drive the studio’s and the genre’s success.
In 1952, MGM would release what remains one of the most beloved movie musicals of all-time – “Singin’ in the Rain”. This year the movie turns 70 and to celebrate Warner Home Video is releasing a 70th Anniversary 4K Blu-ray edition on April 26th. It has been revisiting theaters across the country as part of TCM’s Big Screen Classics series, and if by some chance you’ve never seen this timeless classic, there’s no better time than now.
In 1951, MGM was coming off of a big hit with Gene Kelly’s “An American in Paris” which won six Oscars including Best Picture. It was a tough act for Freed, Kelly, and the studio to follow. Yet they did so with “Singin’ in the Rain”, a musical romantic comedy that most people (and history) agree is the better movie. Though initially met with positive reviews, its early reception was hardly that of a film many today regard as the greatest from its genre. But reassessments (beginning as early as the 1960s) quickly and rightly saw the true greatness in Gene Kelly’s singular vision.
Though he co-directed with Stanley Donen, “Singin’ in the Rain” was Gene Kelly’s show, both in front of and behind the camera. It was Kelly’s vision to fuse song and dance with storytelling, and he relied on Donen’s technical know-how to help bring that vision to the screen. For the script, screenwriters Betty Comden and Adolph Green penned the original draft with Kelly and Donen helping with re-writes. And of course, Kelly was intensely involved in the choreography which in turn produced some of the genre’s best dance numbers.
In front of the camera, Kelly gives one of his best performances playing Don Lockwood, a popular silent movie star who falls for young stage actress Kathy Selden, played by the delightful Debbie Reynolds. Only 19-years-old at the time, Reynolds was a gymnast rather than a dancer, and her lack of experience often frustrated her perfectionist teacher and co-star Kelly. “The two hardest things I ever did in my life are childbirth and “Singin’ in the Rain””, she once famously said. But the two became friends with Kelly later admitting, “I wasn’t very nice to Debbie. I’m surprised she still speaks to me.”
Equally vital to the movie is Donald O’Connor, an accomplished dancer and Vaudeville performer who was cast as Don’s best friend Cosmo. In addition to being a perfect on-screen sidekick for Kelly, O’Connor’s “Make ’Em Laugh” is one of the film’s most unforgettable (and physically demanding) numbers. And watching the remarkable duo of O’Connor and Kelly navigate the sublime high-energy tongue-twister “Moses Supposes” is still as hilarious and breathtaking as ever.
There’s also the fabulous Jean Hagen who played Don’s conniving, entitled and unimaginably shallow leading lady Lina Lamont. She quickly becomes the story’s villain as her studio manufactured romance with Don is threatened by Kathy. But she also gets some of the film’s funniest bits with Hagen conveying Lina’s high-pitched petulance for some big laughs.
While “Singin’ in the Rain” is known most for its song and dance, it also has a surprising satirical wit. It’s set in the late 1920s during a transitional period in Hollywood as silent films were slowly giving way to “talkies”. The story pulls back the curtain and has a lot of fun poking at the artifices of the big studio system. There’s actually a lot of truth in the film’s movie-within-a-movie conceit, and you could consider it a behind the scenes primer on how Tinseltown once functioned.
But let’s be honest, it’s the musical numbers that first come to mind when considering “Singin’ in the Rain”. And none are better than the film’s magical centerpiece, where a lovestruck Gene Kelly sings the title song while dancing along a studio street in his soggy tweed suit; twirling his umbrella in a man-made downpour; spinning around a lamppost with an effervescent grace and splashing in puddles with a childlike exuberance (the story goes Kelly was sick with a 103° fever while shooting the sequence, but you would never know it). It’s an iconic movie moment that still shines after 70 years. And you could say the same for the movie as a whole. It’s a cinematic slice of a bygone era, yet one that will forever stand the test of time.
