Who will direct Star Wars Episode VII? Despite having Michael Arndt on-board for writing duties, Disney still hasn’t picked a director for their continuation of George Lucas’ alternately beloved and maligned space opera franchise. That said, we can now add one more name to the list of people who won’t be at the helm of the sci-fi blockbuster: Guillermo del Toro. The news comes courtesy of The Playlist, who had the chance to speak with the celebrated genre prince and got a couple of juicy nuggets of info out of him in the process. Normally, I wouldn’t consider this sort of thing news; why bother reporting on one of the…
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Time to Meet the Devil: 'Only God Forgives' Teaser Clip
I’m going to hazard a guess here and assume that this clip stands a good chance of getting yanked, so if you want to see twenty seconds of footage from Only God Forgives, Nicolas Winding Refn’s upcoming re-teaming with Ryan “Hey Girl” Gosling, you’d better click the Youtube window below quick-smart. The film has distribution courtesy of Radius-TWC, but it doesn’t have a solid release date as of yet; I’d expect that to change either just before or just after Cannes, when the movie will likely screen in full for the first time. First impressions: unsurprisingly, this looks like a spiritual cousin to Drive between the promise of graphic, brutal…
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Jo-Go In the Running to Guard the Galaxy
Marvel pulled off the finale to their impressive superhero balancing act this year with The Avengers, a trick they look to duplicate with a sequel in 2015. In between now and then, though, the studio– now positioned as one of the film world’s most important blockbusting authorities, at least as far as I’m concerned– looks to unveil a variation on that delicate but bombastic act with Guardians of the Galaxy, which at present boasts a release date of August 1st, 2014. Naturally, that means we know one thing for sure: that there’s very little information for us to go on beyond its title and its projected opening day. True, we…
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Pixar Reveals Concept Art For 3 Years of Releases (Plus: 'Monsters University' Promo)
Nothing says “Happy New Year” like a slew of preview material for Pixar’s release slate leading into 2016! Coming Soon had the good fortune to receive a fold-out card from the animation studio this past Monday, which contained concept art from each of their four pending endeavors– Monsters University, which hits theaters this June, The Good Dinosaur, and their two untitled projects– one that takes place inside the human mind and one which occurs on Día de los Muertos. To no one’s surprise, Pixar sprung a Monsters University promo clip on us yesterday as well, and while it’s pretty short it also completely nails the intended tone. If you’re a…
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G-S-T Year in Review – Andrew’s 2012 Wrap Up
I’m willing to admit that last year, I talked 2011 a bit more than necessary. Not that my feelings on the year were dishonest; contrary to many, I thought well of 2011, a year that didn’t contain a plethora of lasting classics but still offered a lot of excellent cinema for our viewing pleasure. But to call it a “great” year may have been a stretch, and I’m willing to admit that now in light of the fact that 2012 has, in fact, been a great year. How can you trust me on this one? Simple: I’ve written my top ten list, re-written it, scrapped that, started over from the…
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G-S-T Quick 5 – 2012's Underseen Gems
For critics, bloggers, and all-around cineastes, the end of the calendar year marks a time to look back and reflect on the best offerings of the last three hundred and sixty five days (and sometimes even the worst). This is when we talk about the There Will Be Bloods and the Hurt Lockers, the Slumdog Millionaires and the Yi Yis; it’s when we decry the dreck that fills the spaces in between the better releases, the Battlefield Earths and the Giglis, the Pearl Harbors and the The Number 23s. (And I realize that this collection of titles represents only a microcosm of the cinema that makes its way to theaters…
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The Real House-Guests of 'Argo' Weigh In On Affleck's Vision
Argo deserves high praise and admiration for a plethora of different reasons, but one of its greatest strengths happens to be one of the most invisible elements in the entire production: the very real people whose story it captures happen to be ready, willing, and able to bolster the film’s integrity. True, the details of the operation Ben Affleck dramatized in arguably his best movie to date (and certainly one of the best movies of 2012) have been declassified for years, so in making Argo he benefited significantly from the passage of time, but there’s something to be said for not only having documentations of the truth at one’s fingertips,…
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G-S-T Review…Not Fade Away
I left my recollection of David Chase’s Not Fade Away in the theater shortly after walking out during the credits. Maybe that sounds like bad news, and maybe I’m putting myself in a hole by starting off my review on that note, but truthfully, memorability happens to be Not Fade Away‘s biggest Achilles’ heel. Chase hasn’t made a bad film, not by any stretch of the means, but he’s made one that suffers from diminishing returns, one which our connection to slackens and grows hazier the longer that the picture runs. He’s also made a picture about listless, directionless youth; appropriately, Not Fade Away meanders and lazes as much as its…
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Definitely Dead: Summit Shows Off the First Four Minutes of 'Warm Bodies'
More than a few of us have likely wondered at one point or another what goes through a zombie’s head on a daily basis. Do they remember who they were? Can they conjure up any thoughts on what life used to be like before, well, death? Is their only concern finding their next meal? Back in 2011, Isaac Marion sought to answer this question with his YA novel, Warm Bodies, and this coming February Jonathan Levine will follow up the success of 50/50 with an adaptation of Marion’s book. If you’re like me, you’re excited for this and you’re not embarrassed in the slightest; the story is very clearly a descendant of Twilight, but…
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Off the Netflix Queue…’Bernie’
Bernie, Richard Linklater’s black comic docudrama about Bernie Tiede, has two great tricks up its sleeve. The first happens to be Carthage, Texas, the city in which both the events that inspired the film and the events that occur within the film take place. Choice in location may not seem like an impressive sleight of hand, but Linklater so successfully installs his production “behind the pine curtain” that we’re not only transported to Carthage proper, we’re drawn into their culture. The townsfolk we meet– bona fide Carthage residents who knew Tiede and witnessed the circus surrounding his 1998 trial– breathe rural, down-home authenticity into Bernie, but more importantly they talk…