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6 Degrees: Summer Film News

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Hello Film fans! In this edition of Summer Film News, we are looking at the movies opening in the summer of 2018. From the films we have seen, here’s a list with some that look interesting enough to recommend making a trip to the movies.

At the Movies Now: Avengers: Infinity War has already opened. This one is already setting records…. so we can safely say that this is a hit movie that will do well, as did the two similar films which are in the top ten box office hits of all time.

The Classics: The Seagull with Annette Bening is a remake of Chekhov’s classic play. And an artsy Chekhov film is something you don’t see too often, at least not with A-list stars. This one is billed as a story of ‘unrequited love and artistic jealousy.” Annette Bening is one of only a handful of actresses with enough clout and acting chops to pull this dramatic adaptation off. Brian Dennehy co-stars.

The Baby Boomer Movies: Book Club and Mamma Mia! Here we Go Again; Mission Impossible- Fallout and Life of the Party with Melissa McCarthy, are all baby boomer fanfare. Most of these are films that people of a certain age will gravitate towards.

The Documentaries: Out now is RBG, a documentary about the life of the notorious Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, and a documentary on the life of Hedy Lamarr called Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story. Both are must see films in an era where we are striving to teach our girls about how to be brave and courageous, and to stand up for what we believe in. Coming soon is a doc on Pope Francis; Pope Francis- A Man of his word, from director Wim Wenders, plus an upcoming look at the life of Fred Rogers, the man who was known as Mr Rogers entitled Won’t You be my Neighbor? Rogers life may surprise some who have pigeonholed him as simply the nice man in the sweater who taught kids on public television.

Solo: A Star Wars Story opens May 25th, and is directed by Ron Howard. This is the highly anticipated prequel that is debuting at Cannes Film Festival. Some of the advance previews have gotten good reviews, so it looks promising. It is also an interesting prospect to watch an award-winning director such as Howard, one who is so obvious a fan of the genre and yet isn’t part of the original Star Wars clique, show us with fresh eyes their ‘take’ on this classic tale.

The Remakes and Sequel Season: Ocean’s 8 is out June 8th; this is the female version of the franchise and stars Sandra Bullock and Julia Roberts. They will have to convince me the very original poster for this film contains something that has not been done and redone many times over….
• Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom opens June 22nd
• Sicario: Day of Soldado opens June 29 plus the aforementioned Mamma Mia sequel plus Denzel Washington returns in his sequel offering as The Equalizer 2

Mamma Mia! Here we go again hits theatres on July 20th…here we go again… This may not be worth revisiting, but I’m a huge Meryl Streep and Colin Firth fan, and this premise does (not) seem interesting enough to hold our attention….
Mission: Impossible-Fallout starts July 27th…. And I ask without snark….but in the tradition of all good soap opera openings: will Tom Cruise ever make a film that is anything other than an exercise of gymnastics and stunts? He was a good actor in another life…

Papillon is coming at the end of the summer cycle, it’s set for release late in August. The original would be hard to beat. The original film from 1973 with Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman was a great action-adventure film that was also an intense drama and remains one of McQueen’s great screen triumphs. Charlie Hunnam (King Arthur) plays the lead in the remake. The film is based on the real life story of a Frenchman who is desperate to escape from a life sentence in a French Guiana penal colony.

The Kids Films are Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation and Incredibles 2; plus Teen Titans Go! To the Movies…. I have often said that some of the most innovative work in film is done by Pixar (Incredibles 2) and is found in children’s movies. Therefore, let’s hope the imaginative sparks will fly into main stream films some day!

The Comedies of Summer include the Melissa McCarthy offering called Life of the Party, and Mamma Mia! Here we Go Again, plus Dog Days, opening in August, and a film with Mila Kunis billed as an “International espionage comedy’ also in August, called The Spy Who Dumped Me.
Regarding Life of the Party, I have found that some of McCarthy’s comedies have been hit and miss. Spy was funny but the one with Sandra Bullock- The Heat (2013)- was deadly dull. So who knows?…The story line for this outing has McCarthy going back to school with her daughter. This is one of our 6 Degrees reworks. Rodney Dangerfield, as Thornton Melon, went Back to School back in 1986 and it’s hard to find a comedy to top that particular subject. (Watch it just for the Triple Lindy!)

Dog Days looks light and fairly benign, and the film with Kunis-The Spy Who Dumped Me– could be something different, but we’ll have to wait for some early reviews. Although with SNL’s Kate McKinnon co-starring, this one could be a sleeper hit. Stay tuned

Something Completely Different:
Christopher Robin opens August 3th- and is a live action version of the well-known children’s story. This version, with Ewan McGregor, is billed as a fantasy and it could be one of those films where the previews show us one type of film, and we see a completely different version when we get to the theatre. McGregor sums up the plot of the grown up version of Christopher Robin as one where he is ‘finding his relationship with his younger self again.’

The Meg on August 10th stars Jason Statham in an updated action version of Jaws with a megalodon monster that measures 70 feet Ordinarily I would not include this type of rehash, but it seems intriguing enough as they are trying to mesh Jaws with Jurassic Park to create another box office bonanza.
Slender Man is a horror flick debuting in August. Horror is big, and many of the most original plots with the best reviews have come out of the horror genre. It and Jordan Peele’s Get Out come to mind. Horror used to be for the bad B set only, and the films in recent years have shown the genre to be making a comeback

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society starring Lily James opens in August in the states, with James playing a writer in 1946 who exchanges letters with German occupied residents of Guernsey during World War II.

This is the end of what we have seen that is coming this summer. And you can start adding to some of those lists we’ve been talking about. I’ve noticed that when you see film reviews and film blog sites, we are always looking at lists. And a few of these lists have films that I may have missed. But most of them seem fairly pedantic and uninspired. I have encouraged everyone to make up, besides the Netflix list you may keep or films that you have missed at the theatre, a running Personal list of films to record and to watch. In the same way we have book lists for those titles you want to read at some later date, these are films which are ‘must see’ for the course of your lifetime and that you don’t want to miss.

From 6 Degrees of Film; the Future of Film in the global village, there are several lists, including a list of top 100 films, that can be found in the back of the book. The book has an overview of the history of film, as well as some insights into where we are going with movie making in the twenty-first century.

In the coming months, 6 Degrees and Friday Flix will highlight some excerpts from the book that will apply to the current state of moviemaking in Hollywood. We have been talking about the diversity issues, and the MeToo movement which sprang from the Harvey Weinstein scandal, and the forerunner of this, the old Hollywood casting couch cliché where women were notoriously exploited by older, rich, powerful executive men who used young girls and got away with it for over a hundred years.

The Future of Film in the Global Village

Talking about the future of film. I see a lot of art houses showing revivalist work and Film Festivals featuring favorite actors as well as genres and directors. I see the neighborhood movie theatres being converted into multi-use platforms. Some are mega-churches, or meeting venues.

And I see a lot of films being made for the small screen. You can bet there will be more series with six or eight episodes, (Benedict Cumberbatch as Patrick Melrose) to be sold as a feature in a ‘boxed set.’ And hopefully, we can create our own “Armchair Film Festivals” as we can begin to personalize our smart sets to view and download our favorite films, customized in a digital system for our own personal use. (You can make good use of the ‘must-see’ list of films!)

There are good and bad arguments in seeing our own tastes in cinema displayed before us. Of course, Netflix and Amazon will still be able to suggest films that we like, based on our settings. So that is not going away in the future world of film. But as we get older, our tastes in music and film will change along with everything else. We will see this is an evolving list to grow and to revise through the years.

Critics will perhaps move to categories and genres that encompass older films and films of the past….like the 6 Degrees of film critic! The inevitable comparisons in film styles and categories will make it necessary, after seeing many films with similar plots and story lines, to have film guides for the styles and genres of the past that reemerge in different formats.

And we will always have Paris. What do I mean by that? I don’t know, but it always sounds good, and I recommend every film goer to watch Casablanca at least once in your lifetime.
Speaking of Casablanca, here’s a line up of some films for Millennials to watch and record…

• Bogart Film Fest: Some of his best work is seen this month on TCM, including the aforementioned Casablanca and a less well known but equally entertaining film, Across the Pacific.

• The Thin Man Series: Coming on TCM this month, the original was one of the “Screwball Comedies” that Hollywood churned out during the depression era thirties. The witty repartee and the film chemistry between William Powell and Myrna Loy make these light comedies classic and timeless. Highly recommended as part of anyone’s must-see film series, and part of the Armchair Film Fest to record this month.

* The Great Escape with Steve McQueen. One of my favorite lines about the actor was from a critic who said, “He could act with only the back of his head on screen’ By that, I think the critic meant that Steve McQueen was a natural, and that he didn’t have to reach for anything. One of his early successes was in this film from 1963 featuring a great ensemble cast about a real-life prison break from a prisoner of war camp in Nazi Germany.

• The Lion in Winter: In contrast to the coolest of cool actors, here are two that blew hot most of the time: Peter O’Toole and Katherine Hepburn. They worked together in the film adaptation of the play; “The Lion in Winter.” The wonderful thing about this story is that it really is part of our historical record. There was a Henry II who ruled England with his powerfully political wife, Eleanor of Acquitaine. And he really did lock her up after she rebelled against him with their oldest son, Richard the Lionhearted. And he did trot her out only for royal events such as Christmas holidays. And that is where the story picks up, with Eleanor coming home for the holidays. The playwright took the challenge of “What if…?” and wrote this funny, bizarre and poignant script which results in a bonanza of emotional scenes for great actors. This is a clever and moving film at times, and there really are no two better actors to play these over the top characters than Peter O’Toole and Katherine Hepburn. They worked well together but were only on screen as a duo in this one film, (By the way, Hepburn’s nickname for O’Toole in real life was “Pig.”)

• Capracorn: This is the name given to all of the work of Frank Capra, who is somewhat unfairly labeled with the title of schmaltzy director of heart-tugging films. He did indulge in this tugging of heartstrings at times, as did many, (Spielberg is guilty of this too). But Capra’s films are classics, and some of them are seen less than the one shown almost on a loop at Christmas time, Capra’s It’s A Wonderful Life. Before Jimmy Stewart became George Bailey, he starred in You can’t take it with you with his acting partner from It’s a Wonderful life– Lionel Barrymore. Barrymore was a member of one of the first of Hollywood elite acting dynasties, the Barrymore Family. John, Ethel and Lionel were all consummate actors of stage and screen, and they would be the first ones to tell people how good they were.
• Barrymore portrays a laid-back character in this film, a complete turn-around from his mean Mr. Potter role in the Christmas classic. You Can’t Take it with you is also based on a Pulitzer prize winning play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart. The theme centers around the idea that we need to stop worrying about tomorrow, about making money, and concentrate on the things that matter and on what makes us happy. This was apparently a problem even when we supposedly lived in a much slower paced society. But this film came out during the Depression, (1938), and the themes of working for what really matters and looking for more in life than just getting ahead and making money were already huge issues for middle class America

I could go on about films for a long, long time. This will have to be the end of the Summer Film News and we hope you are as excited to see some of these films, on the big screen and the small one, as we have been in compiling the list and writing about them. Till next week, have fun, get those must-see lists of movies going, and see you at the movies!-ML

6 Degrees Friday Flix

The Friday Flix is basically a list of the threads that tie together to become part of the 6 Degrees of Film. For those who may not find the connections in older films, and the notion that everything old is new again, we’ve decided to keep the 6 Degrees theme for our Friday Flix weekly film review. And naturally, that applies to our online magazine, 6 Degrees, as well.

For this week in film, there’s a good piece that ranks all the James Bond films. On Flipboard, (Favorite Things for Writers), the Bond blog takes it to extremes with the question of Bond’s salary, which seems to be stretching it a bit far. But Bond movies are in the news as companies are salivating over the bids by studios to take over the successful franchise.

There is one article that lists recommended search engines for films. With the recognition that many sites are offering free streaming movies to view, and so many types of either “niche” postings for horror or comedy or comics, there are way too many places to list. But the ones that we all know: Netflix, IMDb, and Rotten Tomatoes are certainly on there, and then there’s the newer and –I hate to use this word- “hipper” ones which are Criticker-which finds movies to watch; Clerkdogs-which uses a film you like to find similar types; and the highest recommendation went to Jinni. You can search films or find new films and reviews on this site. So check it out….?

Recommendations are included for two big film festivals- Tribeca Film Festival in New York City, opening this week, and Cannes Film Festival in France. Classic films and films stars will be honored, as well as premieres of art films and other major productions. One retrospective will feature Michael Moore’s “Bowling for Columbine” documentary (hard to believe Moore’s films are old enough to start doing retrospectives of them!)

The Summer Film rollout seems to come earlier each year. It used to be the end of May, but now we see the films rolled out the week after Easter (which this is!). The Guardians of the Galaxy franchise is big (no surprise), and Guy Ritchie’s re-tool of the King Arthur legend is opening soon with Jude Law and Charlie Hunnam as Arthur.

Goldie Hawn is back in a comedy with Amy Schumer, Snatched, opening Mother’s Day weekend. Another comedy that features a female cast is Rough Night with Scarlett Johannson, about a bachelorette party in Miami gone wrong. A female styling of The Hangover perhaps?

For those awaiting the return of Will Ferrell to comic form, he is starring in The House, with Amy Poehler, about a couple who try to convert their basement into a casino.

The prequel for Alien-Alien: Covenant opens in May. Pirates of the Caribbean has another entry with a returning Johnny Depp. Baywatch has been widely publicized, and stars Dwayne Johnson and Zac Efron. Wonder Woman kicks off the Summer Season in June with Gal Gadot in the title role.

For kids, Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie is also in June, based on the popular book series. Also for kids, Cars 3 from Pixar with Owen Wilson as the voice of Lightning McQueen. And Despicable Me 3 opens June 30th with Steve Carell returning in the third installment.

For adults who are still Tom Cruise fans, Tom is re-booting The Mummy franchise. For young adults, there’s The Book of Henry, about an 11 year old who discovers a secret about the family next door.Transformers is back in June, titled: Transformers: The Last Knight.

And the sequels and comic book series keep on coming with Spider-Man: Homecoming, starring Tom Holland. Then there’s War for the Planet of the Apes.

One that looks good is from director Christopher Nolan, and features Tom Hardy and the acting debut of Harry Styles-it’s the WW II drama Dunkirk, coming in July.( There’s a trailer on our site for this one). We’ll have more in the next week with a full list of the Summer Movies opening. But there are a few here that look pretty good, amidst the sturm and drang of the sequels and prequels.

One film that has an anniversary and therefore, is getting some renewed attention features Jack Nicholson’s masterful performance in “One flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest”, based on the book by Ken Kesey. The book is great, and the film is recommended viewing for anyone who has never seen it. Check out the review on 6 Degrees.

One funny post was a list of actors who “sell out” to make movies. My friend and I used to talk about, in particular Michael Caine, who seemed to always be in these parts where he was just walking through and picking up a paycheck. We always called these actors “whores” for money (as a joke!). But it is easy to spot the talented actors who are seen from time to time in films where there is not much story, little need for a range of emotions, just lots of money and wasted talent on display as the veteran actors trudge through, sometimes gamely, as guns for hire in these plotless wonders.

One interesting development over at Turner Classics has veteran Alec Baldwin stepping in as host for The Essentials on TCM. Should be good!

The films that are reviewed this week, besides Rear Window from Ebert, are The Handmaiden, Colossal with Anne Hathaway, The Promise with Christian Bale and Oscar Isaac, Unforgettable with Katherine Heigl-which has mixed reviews, The Lost City of Z from the McGuffin site and Free Fire, also on McGuffin.

There’s also a biopic of Emile Zola and Paul Cezanne called Cezanne et Moi, a review of director David Lynch’s masterpiece, Mulholland Drive, and a review of Their Finest from our friends at Salty Popcorn. There’s also a review from Time magazine in 1977 of the Academy Award winner, Annie Hall, from Woody Allen.

Other film news is an adaptation in the works of Fahrenheit 451, done by HBO Films. And there’s a piece on the classic Mike Nichol’s film of the sixties, ‘The Graduate” starring Dustin Hoffman. Sofia Coppola is remaking “The Beguiled” with Nicole Kidman starring in the remake of the Clint Eastwood film from the seventies.

There’s a blog post making the case against the genre of Film Noir. That may be true for some aspects of a defunct genre, with the very few films even being made in black and white, but there is a very real and distinct place in the annals of cinema history for the Film Noir genre. In my book, 6 Degrees of Film,there’s a chapter devoted to The Rise of Film Noir.

Noir brought us the antihero, and with it, the rise of actors like Humphrey Bogart, who really found his footing playing these cynical characters always with a touch of gallows humor. There is such a thing as New Noir also, and if you’ve ever seen a film made in Noir style and shot in stark black and white, you usually remember it. My final thoughts from 6 Degrees were that although it’s out of vogue at the moment in Hollywood, if it’s done right the genre can produce great cinema; done poorly, it becomes camp.

Also of note: a post on Filmmaking in the Age of Social Media. It is a good discussion as the way we view films and perceive reality is at times different after we have lived with Social Media and the age of the Internet.

And along these lines, there’s an article on Film Inquiry about favorite opening credits. That’s a good one to mull over, as some of the most innovative and interesting film ideas reveal themselves as we watch the opening credits of movies and see how a director or a filmmaker can portray something that we may have watched dozens of times, but with a new twist or a different visual perspective, we see things with fresh eyes. That’s part of the beauty of film and it’s what keeps us going back for more. Till next time, see you at the movies!-ML

6 Degrees: Movie Trends for the New Year

Happy New Year to my fellow movie goers and 6 Degree friends! The Silly season is upon us, and in Hollywood, that’s saying a lot…(It’s always silly season, really). The Awards season has arrived with the Golden Globes, and BAFTA (British Films), and Film Critics Association and so on. The big Kahoona-the Oscars-just announced their nominees late this week.

But the most dreaded of all things for most film critics is the annual lists. The Year’s best films are all on parade as a sign of how very good or bad or banal or pseudo-intellectual the noted reviewer can be. There are some surprises when a list of films that no one in America has ever seen start to populate the lists. And then there are some absolute stinkers that crop up on one or two selected lists.

I think that the worst thing about the yearly list of lists is the predictable nature of the institutions that publish the lists. One of the reasons I’ve become overly cynical about the production of yearly film lists is that I not only write about film, but I also edit a film magazine. And the worst part of the job (besides not getting paid!), is that the same stories are recycled about 100 times and the only changes are the snazzy titles that are offered: “Films to watch when you want to lose weight”; “The best of….fill in the blank”; “Summer surf films”; “China is boffo at box office”; or “Who will be the next hero in the Cinematic Universe?”

The list goes on…I have my own list of movie trends. These are some of the things that seem to be rotated on an amazingly and at times, boringly regular basis:

Movie Trends List from 6 Degrees

Sequels & Spin offs-These are the bread and butter movies for most of Hollywood. They are not all terrible, as I’ve often pointed out that Shakespeare did pretty well with re-hashing old plots.
• The Comic Book Universe-This is a genre that could use a good shake-up. It could use a small electrical shock for all the writers who continue to re-work the same basic plot through a never-ending list of superheroes bent on saving the world.

• The Cinematic Universe-This is an interesting conceit as it encompasses so many different cinematic universes. We may think of Harry Potter or the Lord of the Rings, but it could be interpreted as far back as The Cinematic Universe of Oz or the Cinematic Universe of Charlie Chaplin and Laurel & Hardy. The Cinematic Universe connotes fantasy and storytelling, some of the strong suits of Hollywood classics. In the world of fantastic beasts and unrequited yearning, we find some of the greatest stories and cinematic universes imagined.

• Fem Flicks/Girl Power-Although there have always been strong women in films, from Greta Garbo and Katherine Hepburn to Meryl Streep and Maggie Smith, we are now seeing a new generation of moviegoers who celebrate Girl Power and young women who can identify with the heroines in hits like Frozen and The Hunger Games bringing young girls into the 21st Century and seeking parity with young boys.
• Kid Power/Pixar movies/animated & Kids movies: Some of the most creative films of the past few decades have come out of the Pixar studios. This shouldn’t be a surprise as Walt Disney was one of the pioneers in the field of animation and live action films for children through most of the 20th Century. The trend continues in the 21st Century, with more imaginative and creative films being produced from Finding Nemo and Wall-E to Shrek and Tangled.
• Global village at the movies-Diversity and Foreign Films continue to converge with the English language market and we are fast becoming a Global Village of moviegoers. You can interpret that to mean that not as many great films are coming out of Hollywood these days.
• Rise of China at the Box office-This is one of those stories that happens to have some elements of truth mixed in with a spice of hyperbole to lend it credence. Yes, there is a huge burgeoning market in the world now for Chinese audiences, but there market share is still far below most of the North American audience.
• Rise of the Small Screen- Here is a trend about fifty years in the making. In my book, 6 Degrees of Film, the movie moguls of the fifties were scared stiff by the thought of televisions showing movies on the small screen and keeping moviegoers at home. New fads such as 3-D glasses and Smell-o-Vision came to the theatres. Nothing new here, except we can now watch films on our televisions and I-Pads. Perhaps the most worrying trend is the one where the most talented writers are now working for Cable Network series, and the most interesting and creative story lines are being discovered on HBO and Showtime, and not at major film studios.
• Rise of the Movie Blogger– With the rise of the movie blogger, we find an interesting panoply of titles and genres to blog about, ranging from horror to box office totals, from Film Noir to Bollywood, from Classics to Comic book genres, and even to blogs for gaming sites. The problem is, as with the movie studios, that there exist only a certain amount of talented writers and bloggers producing material, and the rest, as they say, is “crap”!
• Twilight of the Film Critic– Not necessarily. Some of the best reviews come from NPR, The Guardian, and other old faithful’s like The New York Times and LA Times, plus some unexpected places like Ebert.com, where Chaz Ebert, Roger’s widow, has put together a really creative and varied site with different pieces covering all aspects of filmmaking. Film Comment also produces thoughtful and erudite pieces on film on a regular basis.

• Where to find the best information about film? Of course, in my humble opinion, all the news that’s fit to print about film can be found at 6 Degrees of Film, our online magazine where reviews and the best pieces on current films are selected each week, with an emphasis on weekly round-ups of top film sites each Friday, and on Mondays the box office numbers and top films are all featured.

This week: we found the following:

• News of the death of the great and distinguished English actor, Alan Rickman
• An Interview with Director Paul Verhoeven
• A piece on the newly released Orson Welles Classic “Chimes at Midnight” which was Welles’ take on Shakespeare’s Falstaff.
• An interesting looking film : “The Treasure”, about three men on a treasure hunt in a suburban backyard-reminiscent of the classic with Robert Ryan, “God’s Little Acre”
• Reviews of The Revenant (6 Degrees has a piece)
• Molly Haskell on “The Masculine and the Feminine”, a piece originally published in 1974. She looks at classics such as “The Big Sleep” and the on-screen relationship developed in characters portrayed by Bogart and Bacall.
• The complete list of Academy Award nominated films. The Oscars are held Sunday, February 28th, with Chris Rock as this year’s host. Should be a welcome change, with Rock calling attention to the lack of diversity and the ongoing “Old White Guy” problem plaguing the Oscars.
• An interesting piece on “Star Wars Mythology 3.0”. There is always a danger of overkill with so much publicity and attention surrounding the Star Wars film, but this is a different take on the Cinematic Universe, if you will, of Star Wars.
• Much more to be seen and read in 6 Degrees of Film @ the Movies