1969 marked the beginning of a three year slump in cinema attendances in America to an all time low of 15.8 million a week in 1971 (by comparison attendances in 1946 were 78.2 million a week). At the same time overheads were rising. Sensing an opportunity, wealthy corporations who had made their money in industries such as zinc mining or hotels, began buying and taking over the ailing Hollywood studios. Paramount was sold to Gulf + Western industries run by Charles Bluhdorn, and MGM to Navada casino millionaire Kirk Kerkorian. An unexpectedly positive consequence of these upheavals was the arrival of new production executives such as Robert Evans at Paramount, and John Calley at Warner Brothers, whose creative judgement would play a decisive part in the movies produced during the New Hollywood era.
It's not clear who will direct the upcoming American Pie movie or if it will be a spin-off or a mainline installment. The way that the report describes Day's take on American Pie suggests that it will differ from its predecessors.
The New American Movie
He's scarier and more deliberate than Peter Jackson's "big gorilla" version from 2005. He is, naturally, bigger than ever (Skull Island's Kong is 100 feet tall, nearly twice as large as any other version). Speaking with GQ, Vogt-Roberts detailed his reasoning behind the radical redesign: "I was interested in taking our Kong back to the 1933 movie monster, a creature as opposed to an anatomically correct beast. I wanted him to feel like a god. We moved him upright and added this sense of mobility to him. There's a pride and regality. But if you were to just watch him walk by you, there's like a sadness and loneliness to him."
So, demonstrably, some more crudely than others, monster movies are our greatest terrors blown up. The insurmountable made flesh. For Japan in 1954's original Godzilla, it was the nuclear holocaust wrought on them by the United States. For South Korea in the flawless The Host, it was our dying planet and the havoc we're wreaking on the environment. For Skull Island, it is, in the simplest way, ourselves.
Alongside the burgeoning MonsterVerse, the kaiju movie is getting the removed, deconstructed indie treatment, a rite of passage for any genre, cementing it as a definite trend. Pacific Rim, too, is getting its long-promised sequel, in which wholly original monsters battle against purpose-built giant robots. I would also not be surprised if one of the Cloverfield movies reintroduces its title character at some point. After a false start (and the requisite trash '90s attempt), the Western-hemisphere Monster Movie is here to stay.
So what is the new monster movie's place? Its thesis? Skull Island isn't so much about one event as it is about the whole horror of mankind. We pick up right after a humiliating lost war, and the broken group of men who try to salvage themselves by breaking something else. To Vogt-Roberts, it is about "what happens when you're truly confronted with a god, something that you're told shouldn't exist and something that doesn't exist as far as you're concerned. It is your duty as a man, as a god, to destroy this thing." The message is loud and clear from Kong: We are not as important as we think. We are at the mercy of the sudden, the inexplicable.
Whether you fully buy Godzilla's underwritten humans as a piece of thematic masterwork or not, the clear mandate has been set for the modern American monster movie, and hopefully, going forward, the MonsterVerse itself: We are often wrong and often cruel. It's not a stretch to imagine the upcoming Godzilla sequel, King of the Monsters, isn't just referring to Kong and Mothra.
Dubbed Hollywood's first Asian American movie star, Wong championed the need for more representation and less stereotypical roles for Asian Americans on screen. Wong, who died in 1961, struggled to land roles in Hollywood in the early 20th century, a time of "yellowface," when white people wore makeup and clothes to take on Asian roles, and anti-miscegenation laws, which criminalized interracial relationships.
Further details about the new American Pie movie are still being kept under wraps but is being described as a fresh new take on the sex comedy franchise. The project is based on the original pitch by Sujata Day, who is also attached to write and develop the untitled American Pie movie.
Great American Family isn't taking very long to transform itself into a Christmas-movie factory. The cable network (which happens to be run by former Hallmark Channel chief Bill Abbott) announced on Thursday that it is churning out 18 Yuletide films in just the second year of its rebrand, trailing only holly jolly giants Hallmark and Lifetime in terms of holiday-flick volume.
The onslaught of fresh merriment will commence on Oct. 22 with the Black Friday-themed Destined at Christmas and feature at least one new movie per weekend through Dec. 18. Danica McKellar, Merritt Patterson, Jill Wagner, Daniel Lissing, and Cameron Mathison are among the stars returning from last year's slate (which consisted of 12 Yuletide films, or 13, if you count the two episodes of When Hope Calls that played as a movie).
There's lots in this story that, sadly, reflects things that are happening today. There's a sequence in the movie that explores the riots in Newark in '67, where the African American community were on the streets there, protesting against not being given equal pay, and brutality from the force, the police force, and there was no representation in the local council. And Merry, our daughter ... is politicized and radicalized and becomes a bomber, as you said, so that's obviously sadly still very current today too.
I think if Roth was writing about that period in American history, he was using the family as a lens to do so, if you like. And I tried to inject as much Philip Rothian-ness as I could into the film, by showing different sides to arguments, by not making things black and white but by always trying to understand the characters in the movie, trying to understand why Merry does what she does. Trying to understand [the mother] ... how it is that she survives the tragedy in their life in a way that the Swede doesn't.
Lionsgate has released the new American Underdog trailer, which gives you a look at the Kurt Warner movie opening in theaters on Christmas Day, December 25, 2021. You can watch the trailer below. 2ff7e9595c
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