The Weekly Report

All news contained herein corresponds to the world of film. The Weekly Report will seek to cover general film news that has emerged over the last seven days.

• 88th Academy Awards (otherwise known as the Oscars)
  • After months of build-up, the 88th Academy Awards have finally been and gone. If you didn’t manage to catch our live coverage then here is the rundown. Chris Rock was mostly an excellent host and tackled the Oscar whitewashing controversy with wit, taste, and intelligence. Although Spotlight‘s Best Picture win was somewhat surprising after The Revenant‘s surge towards the big event, few who have seen Tom McCarthy’s excellent if harrowing account of the exposure of abuse in the Catholic church will begrudge its victory – it’ll certainly prove less controversial than Birdman‘s last act win over Boyhood (watch this space, they’ll soon regret that one).
  • The Revenant scored big but delivered no surprises; as predicted Leo took home gold for Best Actor, Emmanuel Lubezki won his third successive Oscar for cinematography, and Alejandro Iñárritu managed to hold off dark horse George Miller to win Best Director, though if Miller manages to maintain the quality of Mad Max: Fury Road for its sequels, expect a half-apologetic Return of the King-style haul before the end.
  • The other nominees might as well not have shown up; Brie Larson was unsurprisingly awarded Best Actress for Room and the same could be said of Leo who, alongside Larson, also won the BAFTA, Golden Globe, and SAG award on the journey to the Oscars. Alicia Vikander won in support for her touching role in The Danish Girl, and Mark Rylance overcame Sly Stallone to win Best Supporting Actor for Bridge of Spies.
  • Spotlight collected Best Original Screenplay alongside its Picture win, and The Big Short won in the Adapted category. Inside Out scored Pixar an 8th win in the Best Animated Feature category, while Amy won Best Documentary and Son of Saul won Best Foreign Language film; Ex Machina scored a big win for Best Visual Effects, fending off heavy-hitters such as The Martian, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Mad Max: Fury Road, and The Revenant. Also, as expected, Mad Max did a Gravity-style sweep of the major technical awards. Overall, the 88th Academy Awards was a relatively unsurprising but generally pleasing affair. Of course, you mustn’t forget to check out the ORWAV Oscars also.

Tom McCarthy’s gripping if sobering Spotlight took home Best Picture at Sunday’s Oscar event. Courtesy of: Entertainment One.

• Spotlight cast and crew show solidarity with sexual abuse victims just hours before the Oscars
  • Despite being nominated for a whole host of awards, not to mention going on to win two of the big ones (see above), the cast and crew of Spotlight, headed by writer/director Tom McCarthy and all-round nice guy Mark Ruffalo (who plays Mike Rezendes in the film) joined victims of sexual abuse outside of a Los Angeles Catholic Church to protest the continued cover-up of the scandal that features in their Oscar-nominated film. The stars and survivors joined together at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels where they called for the public release of the names of those priests accused of paedophilia. Spotlight is a great example of vital filmmaking and McCarthy and Ruffalo’s commitment to their message is admirable.

• Miramax Sale
  • In the mid to late-1990s Miramax, founded by the infamous Weinstein brothers, was a major player in the Hollywood studio system as it produced Oscar heavy-weights such as Pulp Fiction, The English Patient, Shakespeare in Love, and Chicago. The studio, however, is no more having been sold to the Doha-based beIN Media Group. The company lost some of its shine in 2005 when the Weinsteins departed Miramax to set up The Weinstein Company (a company that would continue their Oscar-winning streak with films like The King’s Speech and The Artist). After Disney offloaded the company in 2010 its future was starting to look a little bleak. The recent acquisition might see new life blown into Miramax, or it might prove to be an expensive purchase of a dead duck.    

– EF

What’s Hot

Dealing with those projects in production, this is where to come to find out what has been greenlit, what major casting decisions have been announced, what century we can expect Avatar 2 in, and any other related film news.

Courtesy of: IG @gutierrezary

• xXx: The Return of Xander Cage
  • If casting Donnie Yen was a fairly unsurprising pick for a villain, Paramount has hardly played it safe for the casting of Vin Diesel’s love interest in the upcoming installment in the xXx saga. TMZ are reporting that Ariadna Gutiérrez, aka the runner-up mistakenly announced as the winner of Miss Universe back in December, has signed onto a project fifteen years (and 6,000 years of human civilisation) in the making. The Return of Xander Cage will be Gutiérrez’s feature film debut and she will apparently appear in about half a dozen scenes before, in all likelihood, being killed off and replaced by a Filipino model who can snowsurf and wakeboard for the talent portion of the film.

• The Predator
  • Right now our eyes are pretty much set on the release date for The Nice Guys, Shane Black’s upcoming pithy pissy showcase for Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling. But then, that’s exactly what the Predator would want – for us to focus elsewhere so he could silently, swiftly pick us off one by one. Conveniently, Collider reports that Black’s recently announced “inventive sequel” in the Predator franchise – a franchise in which Black actually starred back in 1987 – has set upon a release date: March 2, 2018. Black is directing and co-writing alongside Fred Dekker, his collaborator for 1987’s The Monster Squad.

• Miles Teller & Josh Brolin
  • Despite the fact that firefighter movies are usually either doomed to be lacking in quality (Ladder 49, Backdraft, Firehouse Dog) or reality (Smoke Jumpers), Miles Teller and Josh Brolin have both signed up for No Exit, reports Variety. Due to be directed by Joseph Kosinski (Oblivion, Tron: Legacy), No Exit is based on an Arizona wildfire that left the state reeling in 2013. Unless there’s a major switcheroo and Teller plays the fire or something, both will serve as members of the Granite Mountain Hotshots, a team dispatched to fight the blaze with devastating consequences. No release date has yet been set.

• The Lonely Island
  • The Judd Apatow-produced Lonely Island movie finally has itself a title and a poster. Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping stars Samberg as the Justimbieberlake-esque Connor4Real who reunites with his former bandmates after his second solo album disappoints and all around him realise “he’s no longer the dopest star of all”. Along with co-Lonely Islanders Jorma Taccone and Akiva Schaffer, Popstar stars Sarah Silverman, Tim Meadows and surely, inevitably, Timberlake himself. It hits cinemas in the US June 3.

• Gambit
  • Although it means we’ll have to wait even longer to hear Channing Tatum attempt a Cajun accent and flick cards towards a masked assailant before saying something like “May bayou should deal this hand” (the card would then slice off his opponent’s hand), Doug Liman’s Gambit adaptation has been pushed back by Fox. Instead, the studio have scheduled two dates for as-yet unknown Marvel films: October 6, 2017 and January 12, 2018. Collider reports that the latter date is likely to be either Deadpool 2 or X-Force but the former, coming a year after Gambit’s original release, could finally give us a glimpse of Tatum donning that unmistakable black maroon brown trench coat.

– SON

In Memory Of…

Hopefully this won’t be necessary each week, but on those sad occasions that the film world loses a treasured talent, you can stop here to read the final word on their legacy.

• George Kennedy
  • The sad news of George Kennedy’s passing emerged last weekend. The actor, who was 91, will be best remembered for his tough-guy roles, not least his Oscar-winning performance as Dragline in the Paul Newman classic Cool Hand Luke. Kennedy made his break in the 1963 whodunnit Charade opposite James Cogburn, Carey Grant, and Audrey Hepburn. Other notable performances include The Dirty Dozen, Guns of the Magnificent Seven, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, Airport, Earthquake, The Eiger Sanction and, of course, The Naked Gun trilogy in which he starred as Detective Captain Ed Hocken. Despite a series of health concerns, Kennedy performed up until his death with his last screen credit being a role in The Gambler opposite Mark Wahlberg. He will be missed. 

• Jim Clark
  • Oscar-winning editor Jim Clark also passed away this week at the age of 84. What is interesting about these two sad deaths is the fact that they met on one of their earliest film; while Kennedy had a starring role in Stanley Donen’s Charade, Jim Clark (then going by James) was the film’s chief editor. Jim Clark was a great editor whose work included The Innocents, The Day of the Locust, Marathon Man, Memphis Belle, This Boy’s Life, Nell, The Jackal, The World is Not Enough, and two Mike Leigh films, Vera Drake and Happy-Go-Lucky. Beside this impressive body of work, Clark’s greatest collaborations were with director Roland Joffé on The Killing Fields and The Mission. Both films stand as testament to Clark’s skill; the editor won an Oscar for the former and was nominated a second time for the latter.

– EF

Trailers of the Week

Want to know what you should be excited about this week? This is the place to come to check out the week’s best trailers and related items including clips, TV spots, and teasers.

It’s the timeless story of an enthusiastic, but ultimately pretty dim, optimist searching for that which can enrich their life with meaning;  yup, we’ve been looking for some trailers again. Fittingly, we’ll start with Pixar’s subaquatic cinematic – Finding Dory, which features the old gang getting back together again and promptly splitting up.

That’s followed by the return of the Ghostbusters. Wiig, McCarthy, McKinnon and Jones all suit up (Hemsworth just kind of wears a T-Shirt and cargos) and run about New York, giving eagle-eyed viewers a chance to tick off their Ghostbusters scavenger hunt cards: Slimer, streams, shrieking. Ghostbusters releases worldwide from July 14.

– SON

Thanks for reading. Be sure to come back next week for your weekly film news with One Room With a View.