Long-Form Film Criticism and Fiction Writing by Derek Jacobs
All you c-section babies can bail, though. I’ve already written about the new adaptation of The Scottish Play with Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard in my Cannes Film Festival piece, but today they released the first trailer for Macbeth. It is bleak and gorgeous, offering an aesthetic more similar to the grime of Braveheart than … Read more
If you’re at all like me, then the second Jesse Eisenberg + Kristen Stewart pairing on the big screen might have evaded your feelers. I feel like I heard about American Ultra at some point, but may have dismissed it initially – even though I relatively enjoyed Adventureland (it wasn’t anything special, and I must … Read more
With all the horn-blowing I have been doing for Inside Out, it sometimes slips my mind that we’re actually due for a second Disney / Pixar film in 2015 with The Good Dinosaur being released in late November, marking the first time we get two Pixar features in the same year. So far, we’ve been … Read more
Keeping in line with the horror comedy of something like Zombeavers, I watched the trailer for Burying the Ex. Here, we are introduced to Max (Anton Yelchin, of Star Trek fame) and his relationship problems. For reasons that are unclear (though not particularly important), he wants to break up with his girlfriend Evelyn (Ashley Greene) … Read more
Those who were excited to see Cary Fukunaga’s rendition of the Stephen King classic It are going to have to find something better to do with their lives now, as the director and New Line Cinema have parted ways over budget concerns and disagreements about how best to structure the marathon story. Fukunaga, best known … Read more
When was the last time you were legitimately excited about a Johnny Depp movie? Be honest. Maybe you thought he and Tim Burton would pay appropriate homage to Alice in Wonderland (and were wrong). Or, before that, perhaps you thought a more faithful take on Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was warranted (also … Read more
I try my best to limit the number of listicles that I post, which simply amount to some number of things ordered for people to bicker over the order or exclusion of particular things. But, this isn’t so much something like “Harrison Ford’s Top 10 Movies (You’ll Never Guess what #3 is!)”, but instead a … Read more
It looks like we’re actually getting a sequel to World War Z, which had exactly zero to do with the anthology of stories by Max Brooks (a similar phenomenon can be experienced by watching I, Robot after paging through Asimov’s collection of stories of the same name). This isn’t entirely unexpected, as the original grossed … Read more
Sometimes you just want to watch disease-ridden schoolchildren getting murdered by adults. For those times, there is the Cooties Trailer, released yesterday. I had heard absolutely zero about this movie before the trailer dropped online, so I was intrigued by the idea of small children contracting a zombie disease from questionable school cafeteria chicken nuggets. … Read more
I made sure to write this trailer reaction a good three hours after I first saw the trailer to Batkid Begins this morning, otherwise it would have basically been three paragraphs of teary-eyed blubbering. The story was vaguely familiar to me from various news articles, but I didn’t really know too much about it. Presented … Read more