This Week In Movie Posters And Sex Scandals

We've got all your new movie posters, but also some other stories too insane not to comment on.

Welcome to The #Content Report, a newsletter by Vince Mancini. I’ve been writing about movies, culture, and food since I started FilmDrunk in 2007. Now I’m delivering it straight to you, with none of the autoplay videos, takeover ads, or chumboxes of the ad-ruined internet. Support my work and help me bring back the cool internet by subscribing, sharing, commenting, and keeping it real.

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News Roundup

Good God, this week was incredible week for sex scandals. From Nuzzi to Gaetz (do not assume an equivalency there!) I’m not even going to attempt to catch you up on all those. Except to say that I really enjoyed Mark Robinson’s post about golden showers. Say what you will about his politics, the man clearly has the soul of a poet. I’m going to call my friends and just read his posts (from the NUDE AFRICA message board) as voice messages.

The Most Free Press Article In History?

The Free Press, one of those “radical centrist” publications founded by professional annoying person Bari Weiss, published one of their “college campuses are becoming woke prisons!” articles this week, which is essentially their entire raizon d’etre (pardon my French). But even for them, this one was a doozy. You expect them to find the most bespoke, wedgy-worthy angle on any story possible, but “My French Teacher Was Beloved for 25 Years. Then She Was Asked About Hijabs.” which describes a 62-year-old French teacher’s firing from a $65,000 private high school in Manhattan, is something I could not have conjured in my wildest Fauntleroy fantasies. Did I mention it was written by an actual heir to the Koch Brothers fortune? There aren’t enough chef’s kisses for this one. This is the lede:

At The Spence School, a tony all-girls private institution on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, Anne Protopappas was larger than life. “Bonjour!” she’d smile to students, wearing her quintessentially French red lipstick with Plato tucked under one arm and croissants in the other to offer her next class.

Good luck getting a warm cwah-sohn at that shithole now! Thanks, wokeness!

A 57-Year-Old Politician Claims He Was “Groomed”

We talked about it on this week’s Frotcast, but I started reading this piece about the chief of staff to a California state senator who was suing his boss over claims she sexually harassed him and demanded oral sex, for obvious reasons (he said he herniated three discs performing coerced oral sex, that’s a hook I simply could not resist).

Turns out, the “staffer” was Chad Condit, son of disgraced congressman Gary Condit (who didn’t actually kill Chandra Levy, but I’m pretty sure was probably still a creep). I assumed a guy named Chad working for a state senator was 20-something, but it turns out, nope, this here dude is 57 years young. His boss was 50. Not to be agist or anything, but whatever happened there, I don’t think it counts as “grooming.” Fiddlin’, maybe, but not grooming.

I Wrote About Top Chef for SF Gate

Shameless self-plug here. 18 years ago, Top Chef started as a goofy reality show, then quickly became a legit competition and a genuine culinary honor almost by accident. I attempted to reflect on it all (not necessarily very well, mind you!). There was an editorial comment about me referring to Tom Colicchio as “a guido” (with love!) and I said “I’m pretty sure a guy named ‘Mancini’ is allowed to call a guy named ‘Colicchio’ a ‘guido.’” They left it in. Score.

Lionsgate Announced Plans To Partner With An AI Company

In a significant move, Lionsgate and the video-focused artificial intelligence research firm Runway have inked a deal that will see Runway train a new generative AI model on Lionsgate content, and will see the entertainment company use the tech as it produces future film and TV projects.

So, who is paying whom in this here deal? They never say.

It can also, as insinuated by Lionsgate vice chair Michael Burns, ultimately serve to reduce costs, something that every studio is interested in, but particularly Lionsgate, which has long relied on films and series that are produced at more modest budgets compared to the blockbusters at some counterparts.

So, how is it going to reduce costs? AI extras? This stuff is all so vague. They do know how full of shit they sound, right? They must.

“Runway is a visionary, best-in-class partner who will help us utilize AI to develop cutting-edge, capital-efficient content creation opportunities,” said Burns. “Several of our filmmakers are already excited about its potential applications to their preproduction and postproduction process. We view AI as a great tool for augmenting, enhancing and supplementing our current operations.” [HollywoodReporter]

“Several of our filmmakers.” Mmm-hmm, sure, buddy. “Many people are saying.” Literally you coudn’t name a single one!

What was I just saying about Bootlicking on Spec? This feels like a classic example of just saying some words investors like to hear. There should be some kind of shame penalty for just putting garbage like this in a press release. I’m sorry, Michael Burns, but you should never be able to say your name in public without a derisive sneer. Boo these men!

John Cena to Star in Matchbox, Based on the Toy Car

John Cena, the director of Extraction, and the writers of The Family Plan and The Adam Project are teaming up for a movie adaptation of the Mattel toy. What was I saying about Hollywood learning all the wrong lessons from Barbie? It feels like it’s 2010 again. Remember Stretch Armstrong starring Taylor Lautner? This feels like the perfect movie to stream on your smart refrigerator.

Boon-Joon Ho’s New Movie Has A Trailer

As Aaron Stewart-Ahn skeeted (I’m sorry), “David Zaslav’s Warner Bros has been trying to bury Bong Joon-ho’s sci-fi follow up to Parasite for over a year now, refused to let it play Cannes, and is now dumping it in January. Rumors are Robert Pattinson’s weirdo performance also bothered them.”

Now there’s a trailer, and unsurprisingly, Pattinson being super weird looks awesome:

David Zaslav being bad at everything usually has negative consquences (“we are resigned to the fact that we work for Michael Scott now”), but every once in a while, it means we get an awesome-looking Bong Joon-ho movie in the doldrums of January. Score!

Phew. Okay, onto the posters.

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This Week In Movie Posters

Welcome to the This Week In Movie Posters, the feature in which we go through all the week’s new movie posters and read way too much into them. Blessed are the paid subscribers, as without them, none of this would be possible. All posters via IMPA.

We begin this week with this poster for The Critic, starring Ian McKellen, or should. I say, ACADEMY AWARD™ NOMINEE IAN MCKELLEN, per the poster.

Any guesses which movie(s) Sir Ian was nominated for? Turns out there were two — Best Actor for Gods and Monsters and Best Supporting for Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (the last decent LotR before Peter Jackson became terminally tedious). He lost the first to Roberto Benigni for Life is Beautiful and the second to Jim Broadbent in Iris. I still haven’t seen either of those, but I remember Roberto Benigni climbing over people to claim his award fondly. Aw, look at him go! He’s so… Italian!

Anyway, The Critic is not to be confused with Tarantino’s may-or-not-be next film, The Movie Critic. (I swear I won’t include this much background information for all of these).

As for the poster, the movie critic here still looks a lot like Anton Ego from Ratatouille. But he also seems much more glamorous and powerful than most of the critics I know. Way fewer Cheetos stains.

Academy Award Nominee Sir Ian McKellen stars as a powerful London theater critic who lures a struggling actress into a blackmail scheme with deadly consequences. [IMDB]

Sure? Call it a hard maybe. This looks like the kind of movie with a confusingly good cast that you see on Amazon Prime in two months and wonder, “Wait, did this come out already?”

This is a pretty cool poster for The Apprentice, a movie about, you guessed it, Donald Trump’s run on The Apprentice. I was about to say that it makes Donald Trump’s run on The Apprentice, a replacement-level reality competition from the aughts, seem a lot more dramatic than I remember it. But then I remembered that Ali Abbasi directed Border, one of my favorite movies no one else saw, and I have since upgraded it to “cautiously optimistic.”

“An American horror story.”

I dunno, man, Trump’s life always seems more like a Coen Brothers movie. Alexander Payne, maybe. Sebastian Stan is also younger than me so I hope most of this takes place in the eighties. Maria Bakalova plays Ivanka and Jeremy Strong plays Roy Cohn (who died in 1986) so I’m guessing it does indeed take place in the eighties, and that “The Apprentice” is more of a play-on-words title than a movie specifically about that show. I get it now! Sorry about that, biopics have conditioned me to be a lot more literal than this movie is going for. Usually when a movie is called “Flamin Hot” or “Air” or whatever, it’s actually about the Cheeto and the shoe.

Speaking of movies from directors I like, Conclave comes from the director of All Quiet on the Western Front. Even aside from that, I think I’d be sold based on cast alone. Ralph Fiennes was born to play an evil Pope.

…Bishop? Priest? Someone do the Catholic hat math for me here. I’m not even going to look up the synopsis here, I’m just going to assume Ralph Fiennes does some evil shit. And that’s enough for me.

Here’s the latest for Anora, which looks pretty good. Is Sean Baker the only director who essentially has his own poster font? He should trademark that. Great tagline too (“Love is a hustle.”). It doesn’t seem right that a guy this good at directing should also be this good at branding.

Here’s the trailer, because why not? Certainly one of my most-anticipated.

I think we talked about this at some point, but this one is called Here, from Robert Zemeckis. The gimmick of which is that the movie spans 100 years, but all takes place in this one living room. Good, I say! Too many locations these days. Give me a movie where the surroundings never change.

I get the feeling that Robert Zemeckis is more impressed with actor de-aging technology than pretty much anyone else in the entire world.

Hey, at least they got the faces and the names lined up for the poster.

“Part Dog, Part Man, All Hero.”

I assume someone threw that tennis ball in there to distract him. It’s Dog Man’s only weakness!