Adam McKay has been working on his Dick Cheney biopic since mid-2017, and before 2018 is over, we’ll get to see it. For the longest time, the film was known by its working title – Backseat. Now, the official title has been confirmed by McKay himself: Vice. Christian Bale gained a considerable amount of weight to the play the infamous former Vice President, and he leads a cast that includes Amy Adams, Steve Carell, and Sam Rockwell.
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As soon as Beautiful Boy made its world premiere at the 2018 Toronto International Film Festival, it became immediately clear that Timothée Chalamet is due for another Oscar nomination. The 22-year-old actor stunned last year in Call Me By Your Name, and is already a shoo-in for the Oscar race with his role as a struggling teen drug addict in Beautiful Boy.
That’s not to say that Steve Carell, who plays his father, isn’t receiving raves himself — the buzz around Belgian director Felix Van Groeningen‘s English-language debut is all about both beautiful boys.
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“I don’t look at Nic the way I look at the other addicts in the room,” wrote David Sheff about his son Nic in his memoir Beautiful Boy. “Nic is a smart kid who has gone way out of control.”
The disease of addiction is rife with contradiction such as these. It can leave a person’s outside entirely in tact while eating them from the outside in. The very things that make someone charming and winning might become the very cudgels they wield in order to squeeze their loved ones for support. The addict, unlike a cancer patient, holds all the power to stop the pain inflicted to their body, yet the condition saps their agency to do what they know is necessary. And then, of course, there’s the famously paradoxical maxim: relapse is a part of recovery.
Beautiful Boy’s director and co-screenwriter Felix van Groeningen digs in and embraces the frustration these opposing truths cause in the minds of all those affected by addiction. He’s an inspired choice to bring David and Nic Sheff’s story to life given that his international breakout feature, 2013’s The Broken Circle Breakdown, depicts a similarly tragic journey as the illness of a child slowly gnaws away at the sanity of an entire family. Van Groeningen, who collaborated with Luke Davies on the adaptation, even utilizes a similar narrative technique to tell the story. Rather than charting the progress of the disease chronologically, he cuts between the happy times and the tragic ones. The adjacency of these two timelines makes their divergence all the more harrowing. Health and happiness are both so near and so unattainable in Beautiful Boy. Read More »
Director Robert Zemeckis has been working on an adaptation of the 2010 documentary Marwencol since 2013, and his fictionalized version of the true story, entitled Welcome to Marwen, is finally coming to the big screen this December with Steve Carell in the lead role. The first trailer came out almost a month ago and didn’t give us high hopes for the project, but Universal has released a new one today that implemented one major change that makes all the difference in the world. Check out the latest Welcome to Marwen trailer below. Read More »
Timothée Chalamet follows up his stellar breakout year with what looks to be another riveting performance in the (appropriately titled) biographical drama, Beautiful Boy. Chalamet stars opposite Steve Carell in the heartrending drama about a father watching his son struggle with methamphetamine addiction, which threatens to upend their rosy, suburban lives. Now, a month after Amazon Studios teased a buzzy scene between the two acting heavyweights, the first Beautiful Boy trailer has been released.
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Last week brought the first trailer for Robert Zemeckis‘ jarring juxtaposition of comedy and drama in Welcome to Marwen starring Steve Carell. It sounds like reactions to the trailer have Universal questioning whether it would have successfully opened up against the likes of Creed II, Ralph Breaks the Internet: Wreck-It Ralph 2 and Robin Hood, because they’re pushing back the release date a month.
Welcome to Marwen will no longer be opening on November 21, 2018. Instead, the film will hop back to a December opening just before Christmas and the drama Green Book will take the pre-Thanksgiving release date instead. If you’re not familiar with Green Book, don’t worry, we’ll explain what it’s about below. Read More »
Last year Steve Carell put forth a fantastic performance in the Amazon Studios movie Last Flag Flying. Unfortunately, not enough people saw it to start any real awards buzz, but it’s an outstanding drama that’s worth your time. Apparently looking for some awards buzz yet again, Steve Carell is back with a much stranger dramatic turn, one that comes with an odd blend of comedy, tragedy and animation from director Robert Zemeckis.
Welcome to Marwen follows Steve Carell as Mark Hogancamp, a man who is attacked by a group of Nazi assholes (a prospect that is sadly all too real nowadays), leaving him with severe memory loss and some serious post-traumatic stress. In order to cope with the aftermath of this attack. Mark builds a miniature model of a town called Marwen where he lives out wild fantasies that give him the strength to face his struggles in the real world. It’s all rather surreal and odd, and you can watch the Welcome to Marwen trailer below to see what we’re talking about. Read More »
The Morning Watch is a recurring feature that highlights a handful of noteworthy videos from around the web. They could be video essays, fanmade productions, featurettes, short films, hilarious sketches, or just anything that has to do with our favorite movies and TV shows.
In this edition, a video essay explores the art of sales by looking at the unconventional methods of Michael Scott from The Office. Plus, the Zack Galifianaikis web series Between Two Ferns returns with two new guests, and The Simpsons voice star Hank Azaria breaks down his career on the big and small screen. Read More »
The Office is so great that it’s become one of those shows people always end up watching when they can’t decide what to watch on Netflix. Now that the show has reruns all the time on Comedy Central, people are reliving the good ole days of Dundler-Mifflin all the time, and a nostalgic revelation has just surfaced to satisfy curious fans.
Steve Carell was a big part of the success of The Office. His departure as Dunder-Mifflin boss Michael Scott was also part of the reason the show took a huge dip in quality for the last couple seasons (though some would argue it had already started to fade before that). But his farewell episode is still easily one of the best The Office ever delivered, and series star Jenna Fischer has finally revealed what Pam’s touching but inaudible goodbye to the paper company boss entailed. Read More »
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Like many of writer-director Richard Linklater‘s films, Last Flag Flying moves with grace. The smooth rhythm of the dialogue, the lived-in settings, and characters you want to spend hours with – these well-known qualities found in Linklater’s body of work are on full-display in his latest drama, based on Darryl Ponicsan‘s novel. The film stars Bryan Cranston, Laurence Fishburne, and Steve Carell as veterans and old war buddies on a road trip and despite a tragic core, the film contains the sense of joy we often get from Linklater.
Characters talking in a contained space, like on a train in this instance, is filled with such character, personality, tragedy and laughs. How much he’s able to subtlety communicate in a single scene – sometimes a single shot – is remarkable. We recently had a chance to discuss one of those slyly dense scenes with Linklater, who’s now a few weeks into post-production on his next film, an adaptation of the excellent Where’d You Go Bernadette?, which apparently has a rather lengthy first cut.
Below, read our Richard Linklater interview.
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