Once Upon A Time in Hollywood Teaser Trailer Drops

It’s just after 1pm here in the U.K. (6am Pacific Daylight) on Wednesday, March 20^th and the official trailer for Quentin Tarantino’s highly anticipated ninth movie is finally here! The movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt (in their first movie together since 2015’s The Audition) is due to be released on July 26^{th, 2019}.

First off, the cast… I mean… wow! Centre stage we have the aforementioned titans of cinema, DiCaprio and Pitt who portray fictional would-be Hollywood screen actor Rick Dalton and his stunt double Cliff Booth (respectively), supported by the fantastic Margot Robbie portraying actress Sharon Tate, the wife of director Roman Polanski and murder victim of the infamous Manson family. The supporting cast is abundant in big names, featuring Al Pacino, Dakota Fanning, Timothy Olyphant, the late Luke Perry, Emile Hirsch, Bruce Dern, Damien Lewis, James Marsden Martin Kove, Omar Doom and many more familiar faces as well as returning Tarantino favourites Michael Madsen, Tim Roth and Kurt Russell.

Quentin Tarantino’s new probable masterpiece, set in 1969 California, was built on a budget of around $95m and will feature a non-linear collection of stories surrounding two fictional actors trying to make a name for themselves in Hollywood, blended in with a few tales following the careers of Roman Polanski, Sharon Tate, Bruce Lee and, of course, the Manson family.

The new trailer features little in the way of details but definitely shows off the tone of the movie as an aesthetically accurate period piece with a classic Tarantino edge. Audiences can expect the usual melting pot of exquisite dialogue, classic drama and dark comedy as well as a little over-the-top violence and hopefully an interesting juxtaposing soundtrack to compliment. The movie is expected to make pull down around $250m in domestic box office takings and may be a strong contender at the 2020 Academy Awards.

Review - Twister (1996)

Picture the scene... It's Thursday afternoon, it's tipping down with rain and you've recently had a fairly successful outing to a few local charity shops and picked up a couple of gems among the usual scratched up copies of The Matrix and carboard covered Steven Seagal movies… Okay maybe that’s just me. In any case, a good go-to easy watch for the dull days is director Jan De Bont’s 1996 epic disaster movie Twister.

The Academy Award nominated film, written by Jurassic Park author Michael Crichton and actress Anne-Marie Martin, centres around a nomadic group of meteorologists led by Jo Thornton (Helen Hunt) and Bill Harding (Bill Paxton) chasing tornadoes at frighteningly brave proximity in order to study them and to help advance tornado warning systems. The crew of scientists are being pursued and intercepted at every turn by the tech-head nightcrawler Jonas Miller (played by the fantastic, not-quite-famous-but-trying Cary Elwes of Saw, Liar Liar, Robin Hood: Men in Tights and Charlie Sheen’s outstandingly funny Top Gun parody, Hot Shots).

The movie’s supporting cast is a veritable cornucopia of future Oscar winners, cult movie favourites and more than a good few “that guy” actors thrown in for good measure. If you've got a sharp eye, you may well recognise the familiar face of a very young Alexa Vega in the opening scene playing a tiny Jo Thornton. Others include Jami Gertz (The Lost Boys, Crossroads), Lois Smith (Minority Report, True Blood), Alan Ruck (Speed, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off), TV’s Sean Whalen, Jake Busey (Contact), Todd Field (Eyes Wide Shut), Joey Stolnik (Hollow Man) and of course, saving the best for last, the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, the filmography of whom I won’t insult my readers’ intelligence or taste by listing.

Jan De Bont’s directorial filmography includes a handful of impressive titles such as Speed (1994), Speed 2 (1997) and the 2003 sequel to 01’s Tomb Raider starring Angelina Jolie. The film features a catchy original score by Mark Marcina (Bad Boys, Con Air) and an exceptional soundtrack of hits by Van Halen, Stevie Nicks & Lindsey Buckingham, Rusted Root, Alison Krauss, Mark Knopfler and The Red Hot Chilli Peppers. Against a production budget of $92m, Twister pulled down an impressive $241.7m in domestic box office revenue and a total of $494m worldwide. The movie received two Academy Award nominations; first in the ‘Best Sound’ category (beaten by The English Patient) and second for ‘Best Visual Effects’, a category which would surely have been in the bag for Jan De Bont’s disaster movie had Ronald Emmerich’s classic extra-terrestrial disaster epic Independence Day not graced our screens that same year.

Twister is a perfect lazy afternoon movie. Aside from a few minor plot holes for artistic licence (the F5 would surely have taken the little red pick-up truck rather than the giant oil tanker), it’s a great watch. The movie is an adrenaline fuelled feel-good classic, reminiscent of countless other films of the same era (they know who they are). If you haven’t seen it, I, for one, recommend it highly!

NTN Score: ****

The 1975 - It's Not Living If (It's Not With You) - Warren Fu's Latest Music Video Masterpiece

The 1975 are devotees to the art of surreal music videos and their new hit It’s Not Living (If It’s Not With You) is certainly no exception. The track’s lyrics illustrate lead singer Matt Healy’s struggle with heroin addiction from the point of view of a separate character named “Danny”. In an interview with NME, the singer stated that he was “trying to consciously hide it behind somebody else”, indicating his reluctance to disclose his addiction.

The extraordinary music video comes to you from the mind of Warren Fu, director of a huge host of classic videos including Daft Punk’s Get Lucky and Miss Atomic Bomb by The Killers as well as a few more recent hits such as Rose-Coloured Boy by Paramore and A Tribe Called Quest’s latest single The Space Program.

The video is inspired by the bizarre 1984 concert film Stop Making Sense featuring a live performance by twentieth century musical legends Talking Heads, created by Academy Award-winning director Jonathan Demme (The Silence of the Lambs). Warren Fu’s surreal creation features a few not-so-subtle references to the Talking Heads movie. Matt Healy enters the stage wearing an oversized suit identical to David Byrne. A pair of identical backing singers can be seen to the left of the stage, filmed from the centre crowd position in the same style as the 1984 concert film.

The video begins with singer Matt Healy waking up from a dream within a dream in a pre-music sequence intended to introduce the concept, a classic technique common to the style of the director. Healy is trapped in some kind of surreal nightmare, playing to an empty crowd, hallucinating, presumably due to the influence of heroin. Healy attempts to escape after seeing a second version of himself on stage taking his place, finding himself behind the set of Sincerity Is Scary, 2018’s previous video by The 1975, created by the same director, watching himself in disbelief.

It’s Not Living (If It’s Not With You) features a few interesting filming and editing techniques from wide camera shots, low lit close-ups and harsh lighting amongst intense darkness to thirty-second breaks from the music to enhance the almost disturbingly bizarre plot of the video. The hypnagogic music video is another classic example of Warren Fu’s unconstrained genius. He is not currently set to direct any new projects but with The 1975’s propensity towards making surreal videos, a tendency shared by the gifted director, it’s safe to assume that we can expect a few more collaborations in the future.

See the video here!

Back to the 2015 Oscars - Battle of the Biopics

At the 87th Annual Academy Awards back in 2015, two of the best biographical movies in film history went head-to-head, eventually walking away with just a single award each. The Imitation Game starring Benedict Cumberbatch received eight nominations and took home a win for screenwriter Graham Moore for Best Adapted Screenplay. The Theory of Everything won Eddie Redmayne a single award for Best Male Lead after the film received a total of five nominations.

The Theory of Everything follows the story of exceptional British physicist Stephen Hawking, his quest for a single unified equation that explains everything in the universe, and the tragic decline in his health. The film stars Eddie Redmayne (Fantastic Beasts, Les Miserables) as Hawking himself alongside Felicity Jones (Rogue One, Inferno), Harry Lloyd (Game of Thrones, The Iron Lady), Simon McBurney (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation) and of course, a favourite from the Harry Potter universe, David Thewlis (Wonder Woman, Dragonheart). The Theory of Everything was nominated for five Oscars in 2015; Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Original Score and of course, Best Picture, competing on several fronts with The Imitation Game.

The Imitation Game tells the story of mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing and the race to decipher the Enigma code during World War II using Turing's codebreaking machine. The film demonstrates the hardships that Turing and his team endured at the offices at Bletchely Park as well as the hardships Turing himself suffered after the war due to persecution over his sexuality and his eventual suicide by self-administered cyanide poisoning. Benedict Cumberbatch stars as Turing with support from Keira Knightley (Pirates of the Caribbean, Atonement), Mark Strong (Kingsman, Sherlock Holmes) and Rory Kinnear (Skyfall, Spectre). The biopic received Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Best Lead Actor, Best Supporting Actress, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Original Score, Best Editing and Best Production Design; a grand slam total of eight nominations.

2015 was a tough year at the Oscars with exceptional hits on the board such as Whiplash, Selma, American Sniper, Gone Girl, Interstellar, Boyhood, Foxcatcher, Nightcrawler, Still Alice and of course the two titans of the year, The Grand Budapest Hotel and Birdman: The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance, both taking home four awards each. The decisions were surely almost impossible for the Academy to make but in terms of nominations alone, the two biopics shone brightly among other nominees with harrowing real-world stories of two of the greatest minds of the 20th (and indeed the 21st) Century.