Left to right: Miles Teller, Kate Mara, Jamie Bell, Michael B. Jordan
Today the internet exploded once again (it seems to do that a lot) after hearing the news that Fox had completed casting of the primary roles for their Fantastic Four reboot, scheduled to hit theaters June 19, 2015. Unfortunately Fox forgot to ask the fans to approve their choices first and decided to make its own decisions like an independent adult. The internet responded by leaving nasty notes in Fox’s locker and spitting on its cafeteria pizza at lunchtime.
Fans who feel sole ownership of an intellectual property that’s been around for fifty years unanimously agreed everything about the four actors seen above is wrong. Reed Richards absolutely, positively must be middle-aged. Ben Grimm must begin as a muscular guy, because medical science has proven cosmic rays can’t possibly turn a short, thin guy into a giant rock monster. Johnny Storm has to be white, because all siblings in all Creation have identical skin tones. Sure, Jessica Alba wasn’t white in the last two movies either, but This Is Different. Thanks to these complaints, Fantastic Four has already been given a 5% Rotten rating on the Tomatometer sixteen months before release. That’ll show ’em.
Alexander Payne’s new film Nebraska perfectly replicates that forlorn Midwest sensation of being trapped in rooms with hordes of impressionable, elderly relatives all living on the same slow-motion wavelength, visiting and reminiscing and comparing their amnesia levels and enjoying life’s remaining minutes at the speed of molasses, except when they’re jumping to conclusions at hyperspeed. When that happens to me, I put on a brave front while suppressing the desperate urge to crawl out of my skin. With SNL’s Will Forte acting as my proxy and reenacting my childhood family vacations so vividly, I’m surprised I didn’t convulse in my seat with flashbacks.
Older fans of Matthew McConaughey’s spate of ’90s romantic comedies may be in for a shock when they walk into Dallas Buyers Club and see him playing Christian Bale’s character from The Machinist. He and costar Jared Leto (both radically transformed and up for Oscars this year) underwent severe weight loss for their roles in this based-on-a-true-story underdog drama that’s one part can’t-we-all-just-get-along and four parts sticking-it-to-The-MAN.
If you’re online much, you’re already aware this year’s Academy Awards nominations were announced today. If you follow either The Hollywood Reporter or The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences on Twitter, you had the opportunity to see the categories live-tweeted one at a time early this morning. If you shared my mistake of following both entities, you were treated to a double-barrel Oscar-nom redundancy blast that turned Twitter to sludge for fifteen minutes. Homework question: how many live-tweeters does any given event really need?
Midlife Crisis Crossover! 