If films like The Irishman, The King, and Marriage Story didn’t make it crystal clear how serious Netflix is about bringing home that Academy Award for Best Picture they were unable to win with Roma last year, they also have someone Oscar is quite fond of, none other than Meryl Streep, a 21-time nominee and three-time winner.
Streep stars in The Laundromat, which Netflix released an official trailer for today. But she’s not alone. Not by a long-shot. The movie is directed by Academy Award winner Steven Soderbergh, and she’s joined on the cast by fellow Oscar winner Gary Oldman and Antonio Banderas. And they’re just the tip of the iceberg; the cast is massive, with numerous familiar faces. You can watch the trailer and see the full cast in the synopsis below.
HBO has released a new trailer for Mosaic, an ambitious project from Ocean’s Eleven and Traffic director Steven Soderbergh and former Universal chairman and CEO Casey Silver, along with writer Ed Solomon.
Mosaic is an interactive story in which you can make choices to follow the story from different perspectives. It’s both the name of an app, which launched this week and is where you can choose different paths, and also the name of a six-part limited series airing on HBO in January. The limited series will be Soderbergh’s version of the story, and people will be able to compare how their experiences with the app played out compared to Soderbergh’s version. The cast includes Sharon Stone, Garrett Hedlund, Frederick Weller, Beau Bridges, Paul Reubens, Jennifer Ferrin, Devin Ratray, Michael Cerveris, James Ransone, Jeremy Bobb, and Maya Kazan.
You can read the full details in the press release, and watch the trailer and a cast interview video below.
Schwarzenegger Collector’s Set Directors: Walter Hill, Paul Michael Glaser, James Cameron, Paul Verhoeven
Starring: Arnold Schwarzenegger, James Belushi, Laurence Fishburne, Peter Boyle, Maria Conchita Alonso, Jim Brown, Jesse Ventura, Richard Dawson, Sharon Stone, Michael Ironside, Linda Hamilton, Edward Furlong, Robert Patrick
Lionsgate Home Video
You could make a case for Arnold Schwarzenegger as the greatest action movie superstars of all time. This is a case you would win every single time, because there is no one that tops this man when it comes to the genre. Regardless of what you think of him as a Governor, there is no arguing that his presence in movies has been missed for some years now; and thus, we retreat back to his best works to get our Schwarzenegger fix.
On the bright side, there’s sets like this one being released from time-to-time to help your binging needs. This particular set includes Red Heat, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, The Running Man, and Total Recall.
When I got the chance to review this new four-movie collector’s set of Schwarzenegger flicks, I jumped at the chance for a couple of reasons: One was because I shockingly had not seen two of them; and also because I even-more shockingly didn’t own any of them.
There’s obviously a good chance that you’ve seen all of the movies reviewed here and know whether you would jump all over this set or pass it by. For this, think of these reviews as more of a recap and my own personal opinion of these intense flicks that likely hold a great deal of nostalgia for many of us.
Iron Man was a great movie. With an unusual amount of humor and sarcastic wit, the movie took on the usually tough assignment of telling the superhero origin myth and as a result became a summer favorite with audiences. It also was a financial powerhouse, earning nearly $320 million in U.S. domestic receipts by the end of September.
With such success, a sequel is inevitable. Hollywood being Hollywood, someone will always suggest a way to “improve” a monster hit. Take the much-publicized decision to replace Terrence Howard with Don Cheadle in the sequel. While I do not think that Mr. Howard was the strongest link in the first movie, that opinion has much more to do with the fact that the character of James “Rhodey” Rhodes was a minor, supporting character in this version of the origin myth, and not any reflection on Mr. Howard’s acting chops. Yet, I’m sure that someone in Hollywood felt that Mr. Cheadle will add something more to Rhodey either being Iron Man or War Machine in the next film. People say “don’t mess with a winning formula,” but they’ve never heard that rule in Hollywood (or never listened, if they did.)
So, it is in the spirit of messing with a winning formula that I offer some further boneheaded casting changes and the rationale behind them that could be proposed by some mid-level Hollywood creative type hoping to make a mark on Tinsel Town …
Students of the Unusual™ comic cover used with permission of 3BoysProductions
The Mercuri Bros.™ comic cover used with permission of Prodigal Son Press