David R. Walker

Posts Tagged ‘Sophia Lillis’

Asteroid City

Director: Wes Anderson

Cast: Jason Schwartzman, Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks, Tilda Swinton, Edward Norton, Willem Dafoe, Adrien Brody, Jeffrey Wright, Bryan Cranston, Liev Schreiber, Hope Davis, Steve Park, Hong Chau, Rupert Friend, Maya Hawke, Steve Carell, Matt Dillon, Margot Robbie, Tony Revolori, Jake Ryan, Jeff Goldblum, Grace Edwards, Sophia Lillis, Bob Balaban

Running Time: 1 hour and 44 minutes

Film Rating: 7.5 out of 10

Celestial flirtations abound in director Wes Anderson’s latest fluorescent theatrical film, Asteroid City featuring a blossoming cast headlined by two excellent performances by Jason Schwartzman and Oscar nominee Scarlett Johansson (Jojo Rabbit, Marriage Story) as theatre actors Augie Steenbeck and the glamorous Midge Campbell who find themselves acting in the eccentric playwright Conrad Earp wonderfully played with deadpan flamboyance by Oscar nominee Edward Norton (Primal Fear, American History X, Birdman)’s new play Asteroid City set in a one horse town in Arizona in 1955 complete without a candy coloured diner and a nuclear testing site.

Asteroid City has a population of 69.

Visually and aesthetically, Asteroid City is beautiful to watch as a film, like a trippy popup book with fabulous colours and eccentric characters from singing cowboys and random socialites, from military personnel to perilous children who comprise the space cadets of the town.

At a random event celebrating the arrival of an asteroid in a desert, the entire town is gathered and listening to an articulate speech by General Grif Gibson played by Jeffrey Wright (No Time To Die) when out of nowhere a cheeky alien arrives in a garish green UFO and unexpectedly steals the asteroid while the town looks on in horror and curiosity.

Luckily Augie who is a reluctant father of four children, a son named Woodrow wonderfully played by Jake Ryan and triplet daughters known collectively by their grandfather as The Witches, managed to photograph the alien. Then the military step in and quarantine the town, a suitable jibe by screenwriter Wes Anderson at the weird lockdown restrictions imposed by Governments across the world during the Covid19 pandemic in 2020.

Despite the ensemble cast, it is really Jason Schwartzman and Scarlett Johansson’s film as they both shine in a complex self-reflexive narrative which takes inspiration from American playwright Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town. Jason Schwartzman who played King Louis XVI opposite Kirsten Dunst in Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette and is soon to star in his uncle Francis Ford Coppola’s new film Megalopolis, really shines as a talented stage actor and part time homosexual Augie Steenbeck in a role which is equally quirky and subversive.

Asteroid City is a highly theatrical comically absurd film serving as a dazzling critique on the bizarre nature of events in 2020 and cleverly presents the concept of The West as a construct to be interchanged and taken down again, much like a cardboard city. Notable turns in the film go to Tom Hanks as Grandfather Stanley Zak, Oscar winner Tilda Swinton (Michael Clayton) as Dr Hickenlooper and Oscar nominee Bryan Cranston (Trumbo) as The Host.

Take yourself on a journey and see the visually splendid Asteroid City, which is not perfect as a film, but it is enchanting in a celestial way and will find a cult following everywhere much like the Space Cadets that follow the Milky Way. With impressive set designs, Asteroid City should win an Oscar for Production Design in the 2024 Academy Awards.

Not as brilliant as The Grand Budapest Hotel, but Asteroid City gets a film rating of 7.5 out of 10, a quirky self-reflexive play about a city that doesn’t exist and an alien that possibly does.

Wes Anderson outdoes himself with a script and a bizarre film which received a 6 minute standing ovation at the film’s glittering premiere at the 2023 Festival de Cannes.

Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves

Directors: John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein

Cast: Chris Pine, Michelle Rodriguez, Hugh Grant, Rege-Jean Page, Justice Smith, Sophia Lillis, Chloe Coleman, Daisy Head, Bradley Cooper

Running time: 2 hours and 14 minutes

Film Rating: 7.5 out of 10

Thank you to UIP for the invitation for the Film Premiere held at Suncoast Cinemas on Tuesday 28^th March 2023

Spiderman: Homecoming screenwriting duo John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein take on the director’s chair in the big screen adaptation of the role playing game Dungeons and Dragons in a lavish fantasy adaptation entitled Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves which premiered at the South by South West Film Festival in Austin, Texas in early March 2023 https://www.sxsw.com/ .

What the directing duo perfect at the beginning is the casting in Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves which features a gorgeous but funny male lead, Chris Pine (Hell or High Water, Wonder Woman) as Edgin, the manipulative hero and as the villainous and vain enemy, Forge wonderfully played with a British panache by Hugh Grant (Four Weddings and a Funeral, Florence Foster Jenkins).

In between the villain and the hero is a host of sidekicks characters including action woman Michelle Rodriguez taking a break from the Fast and Furious franchise to star as Holga, Chloe Colman to star as Edgin’s daughter Kira, screen newcomer Rege-Jean Page as the mysterious fighter Xenk, Justice Smith (Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom) as the young wizard Simon and the beautiful Sophia Lillis as the changeling Doric.

Filmed mostly in Belfast, Northern Ireland, the directing duo definitely take inspiration from HBO’s Game of Thrones and created a similar slightly medieval allegorical universe complete with dragons, both fat and vicious, mazes with strange creatures in it and wizardry galore but to make this pure fantasy epic work so brilliantly is the superb on screen chemistry between all the cast and particularly between Chris Pine and Michelle Rodriguez and of course between Hugh Grant and the rest of the cast as he tries to fool everyone into believing that Forge is a benevolent dictator, when in fact he is just a conman.

At 2 hours and 15 minutes, viewers will get their money’s worth in a dazzling and lavish fantasy epic which will suitably satisfy fans of the D and D games and its superb reincarnation as a cinema franchise. Most definitely the scriptwriters and directing duo had to make an impressive franchise debut which will attract fans of fantasy films and they have cleverly pivoted the storyline to attract younger viewers as they also hint at a potential sequel.

By far the funniest scene in the film is when Edgin and the gang visit the graves of dead soldiers as they try and resurrect the dead to question them about a vastly powerful helmet which can protect the wearer from pervading evil sorcery.

The film’s middle section could have been edited, but overall, Dungeons and Dragons: Honor among Thieves is a fantastic family action film bound to keep fans enthralled with its spectacular visual effects. For its pure fantasy, Dungeons and Dragons: Honor among Thieves gets a film rating of 7.5 out of 10 and is strictly recommended for fans of this genre.