Jay Roach
Margot Robbie to Star in New Ocean’s Eleven Movie
Margot Robbie is cashing in on Ocean’s Eleven: The actress is set to star in a new installment of the heist comedy franchise from Warner Bros. Per The Hollywood Reporter, the forthcoming Ocean’s will be directed by Jay Roach, whose 2019 drama Bombshell earned Robbie an Oscar nod for Best Supporting Actress. Both Robbie and Roach are also producing via their banners LuckyChap and Everyman Pictures, respectively. In terms of plot details, the team behind the project is keeping their poker faces on. However, we do know that it’s supposed to be independent from other Ocean’s films, set in Europe in the 1960s. Tapped-in Ocean’s fans know that Lewis Milestone’s Ocean’s 11 — which served as the inspiration for Steven Soderbergh’s franchise — was released in...
How Austin Powers Made James Bond Take Itself Seriously Again
Upon its release in early May 1997, Mike Myers and Jay Roach’s Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery became a pop culture phenomenon. Born from Myers’ faux rock band, Ming Tea, it saw the Wayne’s World star employing his typical knack for quirky personas and clever parody to poke fun at 1960s British psychedelia and campy spy cinema. Consequently (and ironically), its irresistibly fun quips, characters, and look became a defining part of the late 1990s zeitgeist in America, England, and elsewhere. Primarily, International Man of Mystery — as well as its more successful, elaborate, and ridiculous sequels: The Spy Who Shagged Me (1999) and Goldmember (2002) — was an affectionately astute and meticulously constructed send-up of the James Bond movies. In fact, Myers and company did such ...
HBO’s Coastal Elites Feels Like a Carefully Curated Twitter Feed: Review
The Pitch: Amidst the backdrop of 2020 — the heady and often unpleasant mix of an impending presidential election and a worldwide pandemic that’s hitting the United States especially hard — five people deliver five different monologues (or, as they’re briefly dubbed, “unhinged rants”) about the Way We Live Now in the satirical HBO “special presentation” Coastal Elites. Look at the Camera: Because of the very nature of the coronavirus pandemic, Coastal Elites is a decidedly un-flashy glimpse into the lives of a quintet of Americans. From sly writer Paul Rudnick, the 90-minute special presentation (that’s what HBO is calling Coastal Elites, and although it’s movie-length, frankly, the descriptor fits) is meant as a mix of earnest sincerity and dry wit. How is this disparate handful strugglin...
The 25 Most Anticipated Movies of Fall 2020
“New year, new decade, new films, right?” That was January, back when we were still looking ahead at 2020 with blind optimism and ill-fated excitement. Sigh, hindsight is 20/20 they say, right? Who knew. At the time, we had 50 exciting new titles we were anticipating, most of which have since been either postponed, dumped to VOD, or relegated to a limbo state. It’s been an unnerving year for the film industry, to say the least. A year fraught with shutdowns, furloughs, layoffs, bankruptcies, and re-evaluations. All of that change has prompted a seismic shift in how everything’s run across the media landscape, and no one truly has a grip on things just yet. Odds are they won’t for quite some time. Because of this, anticipating anything right now — let alone anything in pop culture — seems l...
HBO Shares First Trailer for Coastal Elites with Issa Rae, Dan Levy, Bette Midler: Watch
HBO has shared the first trailer for its new satirical film Coastal Elites. The socially-distanced comedy will light up your screens on September 12th with stars Issa Rae, Dan Levy, Bette Midler, Sarah Paulson, and Kaitlyn Dever. Coastal Elites solves the practical problem of filming in quarantine by borrowing an idea from the theater. It’s a cinematic approach to the monologue play, as each of the five characters take turns speaking into the camera. Here, the camera is apparently supposed to be a laptop fixture, and each of the monologues represents a remote video call. In the trailer, for example, we see Levy’s Mark Hesterman greeting an unseen therapist named Dr. Morton, before launching into a joke-filled rant about identity. It’s unclear if everyone is in therapy, but f...
