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The latest Star Wars trilogy may have proven controversial, but there’s one thing most people can agree on: Oscar Isaac’s Poe Dameron was one of its key assets. He had the swagger of an old fashioned hero even as the movies critiqued his type; in The Last Jedi, he’s as bold as he is reckless, and not every feat of derring-do paid off. (Isaac wanted them to go even further with the character.) So here’s some potentially bad news: While it’s still up in the air if we’ll ever see the kids from the last three episodes, don’t count on Isaac returning.
The esteemed actor was speaking to Deadline (in a bit teased out by ComicBook.com) when he explained that, all things considered, Star Wars isn’t really his bag. Here’s what he said:
“I enjoyed the challenge of those films and working with a very large group of incredible artists and actors, prop makers, set designers, and all that was really fun. It’s not really what I set out to do. What I set out to do was to make handmade movies, and to work with people that inspire me. Paul [Schrader]’s movies, the things that he’s made, it’s in my DNA. I’m not alone, obviously. [For] every actor of a certain generation, those are the films that made them who they are, so that’s certainly my case. It feels like for me a personal turning point and that, as far as I’m concerned, it has nothing to do with the finished product. It’s the process of doing this.”
When pressed if he’d ever return to Star Wars, he joked, “Probably, but who knows. If I need another house or something.”
Isaac, of course, has done plenty of big franchise numbers, like the 2010 Robin Hood, The Bourne Legacy, and X-Men: Apocalypse — in which he played the titular baddie — he’s more into challenging fare, such as Inside Llewyn Davis, A Most Violent Year, and Ex Machina. He’ll also be seen, allegedly at year’s end, in another sci-fi classic: the latest adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune.
(Via Deadline and ComicBook.com)
When it bowed back in 2018, the HBO show Random Acts of Flyness immediately stood out as visionary, unique television — a kind of sketch show that was described by its creator, Terence Nance, as a “fluid, mind-melting stream-of-conscious response to the contemporary American mediascape.” Among its subjects was race in Trump-era America. And since a lot of films and shows about African-American life has been made free in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests that have filled the country’s streets these last three weeks, it was only a matter of time before it joined the pack.
And so it has: As per Deadline, Nance’s show — which runs a mere six episodes, and should only take you a little over three hours to watch in full — can now be streamed on HBO’s YouTube Channel, through June 26.
Nance — whose shape-shifting 2012 feature An Oversimplification of Her Beauty is well worth tracking down, and who wound up dropping out of what would have hopefully been a wonderfully bizarre sequel to Space Jam — released a lengthy statement about the show and its relevance to what’s happening right now.
“It seems like everyday people ask me if and when Random Acts of Flyness will come back,” Nance wrote. He then suggests one reason is because, over the last two years, he and his creative team have been absorbing the countless things happening in the culture:
I don’t speak for the wonderful group of artists who made the show but I hypothesize that we were working to process and heal through the constant acceleration of the violence we survive – centering our body-spirit(s) and our swarms in the doing. Heal how? Heal by using the tools we are given by our ancestors, our progeny, and being(s) whose nature we have no words for: movement, touch, stories, our time, vibe, irresolution, rest, folly, and fun.
Nance wound things down by saying that he hopes “the show can help us heal in real time – from the violence: the misogynoir, the transphobia, the white supremacy the socialism for whites that we misname capitalism.” Concluding, he wrote, “I hope it can be a part of the understanding, the reading, the feeling, the healing. I intend this on behalf of my ancestors, backward and forward in spacetime, Season II coming soon.”
You can read Nance’s full statement at Deadline and you can watch the show on HBO’s YouTube Channel.
Remember The King’s Man? The prequel to Matthew Vaughn’s Kingsman series was already being kicked around the release schedule before the pandemic hit, originally aiming to land last November before being relocated to this past February. That didn’t happen, but allegedly it’s holding onto its current date of September 18…that is, if movie theaters, scheduled to mostly reopen mid-July, don’t have to close again due to another Covid-19 spike. And to show off its confidence that people will get to watch a British action extravaganza set in the early 20th century in movie theaters, here’s a new trailer.
There’s not much new intel dropped here; once again we see that the Kingsman line first banded together to battle a gang of criminal masterminds. Peter Stormare’s Rasputin and Daniel Brühl’s Prince Felix Yusopov — who, spoiler, was one of the men who killed the real Rasputin — among them.
The one difference is how action-paced it is — and how much of it involves esteemed, award-winning, pushing-60 English thespian Ralph Fiennes. He gets into skirmishes, shoots guns, gets into cane fights, even busts out swords. Just like in Quiz Show!
Will you actually get to see it on a big screen, while social distancing and wearing a mask? Who knows! A large number of Trump supporters piled into a stadium without wearing masks, breathing through the same air filtration system, so the future is once again very unclear. Then again, that number was dramatically lower than predicted, so perhaps we’ll be able to watch dumb action movies starring posh Englishpeople after all.
(Via EW)
