Formerly Quint of Ain't It Cool News, current co-host of The Kingcast (
@Kingcast19
). Bylines at Slashfilm, Collider, Syfy Wire, Fangoria. ericvespe
@gmail
.com
I am very happy to announce The Kingcast, a project I’ve been cooking up with
@ScottWamplerBMD
for many months. We’re big
@StephenKing
dorks and so, it seems, are many filmmaker friends. Make sure to follow
@Kingcast19
to be the first to know all the fun stuff we have in store!
For those going to see The Batman tonight, pay extra close attention to the way Matt Reeves filmed the big car chase set piece. For most of it he locks the camera to either the Batmobile or Penguin’s car…
Stephen King’s IT made over $700m. Deadpool and Deadpool 2 made more money than the first two Captain America and Ant-Man movies. Can we please retire the myth that an R-rating automatically limits box office potential?
Scott Wampler passed away today. He was my friend, co-host, and partner in crime. I’m still in shock. I don’t know many details, but I know it was sudden and he was with friends.
Dan Stevens is just the best. We need to figure out why he’s not the biggest star of his generation because the dude has it all. He’s movie star handsome AND a big fucking weirdo, which is such a winning combination.
Listen, Lily Gladstone is fantastic in Killers of the Flower Moon, but please refrain from under-valuing the flat out miracle performance Emma Stone gave in Poor Things. It’s a part that could have (and maybe should have) been a disaster, but turned out extraordinary.
Ran into JJ Abrams on the Sony lot a couple months ago & he was saying nothing but nice things about Rian Johnson and TLJ. In fact, he said he viewed the set up for IX Johnson gave him as a big gift. This shouldn’t be a surprise to anybody not named Grace Randolph.
Got tired of arguing with random Twitterers about their bad takes on The Last Jedi, so I wrote a very spoiler-heavy summary of the themes of the movie and why I love it so much. I'm not kidding about the spoilers, don't click if you haven't seen the movie!
I just learned that pretty much every under-30 Twitterer thinks this gif is Zach Galifianakis nodding, not Robert Redford in Jeremiah Johnson. Someone hold me and tell me everything will be okay.
Happy birthday, The Last Jedi. You rule, we clearly don’t deserve you, but thanks for being so thoughtful and truly understanding the subtext of the stories that have meant so much to me for so long.
Just saw someone confidently assert that Glass Onion isn’t really a sequel to Knives Out because the only thing that connects the two is the same lead character/actor doing what he did in the first film: solve a mystery. Apparently if you’re a sequel now you must carry over plot.
I know it's the go-to joke, but if they did replace TJ Miller with Christopher Plummer in future Deadpool movies it'd be one of the most amazing meta-jokes they could possibly do and would totally fit in that universe.
I love Netflix and the freedom they give their filmmakers. But if they’re going to present themselves as the wardens of cinema then they should probably have more than 17 movies made before 1995 on their platform.
@kumailn
Their official statement is he "tripped and fell." At some point they're going to realize every single thing they do right now is being recorded from a hundred different angles, right?
Can you imagine this level of honesty happening with literally any movie today? “What’s it like working with Bruce Willis?” “Honestly, he’s phoning it in and that’s a shame.”
Eternals is everything all the loudest MCU critics were demanding and they all shit on it. Singular vision, real locations, complicated characterization, sex, minimal goofiness, and it built a complicated, nuanced world. Not perfect, but it’s the movie many say they wanted.
Some of us boarded the Eternals train while it was still in the station. Some of us became the founder, treasurer, and secretary of the Eternals fanclub. SOME OF US.
Guillermo del Toro has spent so many years struggling to tell his stories without compromise, losing so many of his cherished projects along the way, I can't help but tear up thinking of how much validation he must feel right now and how much more wide open his future looks.
When we’re on Batman the camera is pointed forward. Penguin’s camera is almost always pointed backwards. It’s subtle, but it’s wonderful visual storytelling. Penguin is always looking over his shoulder at his pursuer, Batman’s focused forward, intent on catching his target.
Call me crazy, but maybe the person who built her whole online persona around Mean Girling Jessica Chastain, Henry Cavill and Kathleen Kennedy should be the last person to demand an end to “bullying movies,” whatever that means.
I don’t know what to say right now other than he was a singular presence. Hunter Thompson would have called him “one of God’s own prototypes, a high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production.” That’s the Scott I knew. Hilarious, infuriating, singular.
I liked the new Doctor Strange. It’s a tad clunky and some stuff feels unearned, but I can’t be mad at a movie so unapologetically bonkers. Definitely a different feel and tone from the rest of the MCU (and that’s a good thing).
Throughout the entire sequence Reeves only breaks those two perspectives a few times. Just a little filmmaking flair that I was impressed by and wanted to point out.
Unlike virtually every other A-lister,
@LeoDiCaprio
has rebuffed franchises, has never donned spandex, wielded a lightsaber or starred in a sequel – yet he has dominated the box office (and awards season) for more than two decades
The Last Jedi is incredible. Character at the forefront, amazing action and so so so much emotional payoff decades in the making. I will be watching this one a lot.
It is true that this was a huge audience moment. People went bananas. I still feel it was a terrible misreading of Yoda’s character to give him a lightsaber in the first place (the force is all he needs), but can’t deny Lucas knew what the fans wanted.
Seeing Yoda flawlessly shift from elder sage to badass duelist for the first time on-screen will forever be one of the best moments from the prequels. ✨️
On this May the 4th let me share a Star Wars observation: the prequels were universally shat upon. It was a 100x more vitriolic and pervasive than the sequel trilogy anger and now a whole generation reveres the PT. Look at TikTok and YouTube. The ST will have the same life.
Evil Dead Rise is rad! The tone falls somewhere between the 2013 remake and Evil Dead 2, there’s so much gore, and even more child endangerment. Also, there’s a nod to The Shining that had me applauding in my seat. Don’t miss it.
Yes, Shazam has some scary stuff in it. Yes, parents should be warned in advance. But also, yes, it’s good for kids to get scared at movies. All the stuff I grew up with had terrifying stuff in it. It’s part of what made me fall in love with movies.
I’m an old man, so let me share my wisdom with you all. Timothee Chalamet seems to be entering the same “everybody hates him because he’s good looking and their girlfriends all want him” stage of his career that Leonardo DiCaprio did when I was a young blogger.
I’m sure all the hot takes are coming but I found the Game of Thrones finale to be wholly satisfying in much the same way that I loved the multiple endings of Return of the King. Nitpicks here and there these last two seasons, but still a monumental achievement.
I can now say I’ve seen the first two episodes of Fallout (and maybe even more) and this longtime Fallout nerd is very pleased. Superb production design, fully realized world, straight up bizarre humor, surprising gore… everything I want in a Fallout story + God-tier Goggins.
My biggest takeaway from the revelation that
@TheRock
's Big Trouble In Little China will be a sequel, not a remake, is that they're for sure going to try to wrangle Kurt Russell into coming back as Old Man Jack Burton and I'm telling you right now I am here for it.
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes keeps the winning streak going. I have no idea why the powers that be continue to allow this one franchise be the complex, meaningful spectacle that it is, but I hope whatever wizard’s curse is in place doesn’t go away anytime soon.
I’ve been covering movies in some form or another since 1997. In that time I’ve gotten to meet my heroes, see the process of putting together a movie of all sizes and all genres, and even witness cinema history as it happened. One very strong memory was visiting the set of LOTR.
The SXSW cancellation is a devastating blow on multiple levels. A year’s work went into creating our short film, Seek, which beat the odds and got accepted to the festival. This was our big moment to take a bit of a victory lap and celebrate the hard work of our cast and crew.
Um… Alex Garland’s Civil War is incredible. A true knockout. The movies I want to compare it to will force an overhype situation, so I’ll just leave it at that. One of the most engrossing movies I’ve seen in years. Goddamn.
The happiest I’ve ever seen Scott was when King tweeted this dig at him while we were chilling in our lake house AirBnB in Bangor. If he was ever down, I’d bring this up and he’d immediately laugh.
But how could this be? A bunch of sputtering mad YouTube randos with walls of Funkos behind them said their uncle’s cousin’s roommate works at Lucasfilm and heard Kennedy was on the way out!
Horror has a long tradition of killing kids and causing outrage from pearl-clutchers like this person. Frankenstein did it in 1931 and was censored. See the new Terrifier or don’t. Performative outrage is just silly and no better than the religious right shit I grew up with.
There’s a parallel universe out there where James Cameron is making, like, 5 True Lies movies with Jamie Lee and Arnold as married spies saving the world and I have to live in the one where we’re getting neverending Avatars. Smdh.
Hey,
@TMobile
. I’m trapped in my freezing house on day three of no power in a declared emergency. This is the only reliable connection I’ve had to the outside world. How about cutting me a break?
So far, Billy Dee Williams defending Lando’s honor is the best part of the Episode IX panel. “I’m sick and tired people saying I betrayed Han. Did anybody die?!? I was going up against Darth Vader. I had to figure something out.”
Kevin Tsujihara being out at WB is great news. Beyond the grossness of the scandal that got him out filmmakers and employees have hated him for years. I've been told numerous times he had zero understanding of storytelling, the very definition of a soulless bottom line exec.
I've seen a growing number of Film Twitter poo-pooing the idea of owning physical media. Weirds me out because these should be the people fighting tooth & nail for best film presentation available. Or maybe I'm stupid for wanting guaranteed access to uncompressed video & audio.
I have a suspicion/fool’s hope that the Cinerama Dome will be saved by some deep-pocketed cinephile, but if it really is going away Hollywood will have lost one of its most important historic landmarks.
Anyway, I got tons more, but those are the highlights. I'll leave you guys with hands down my favorite photo I took over these three months. On stage during a rain cover day, as
@IanMcKellen
's Gandalf is about to save the dwarves from the Goblin King (with some direction from PJ)
A man passed away from COVID complications who you probably don’t know by name, but he had a massive impact on geek culture. His name is Charles Lippincott and he was the advertising publicity promotion and marketing supervisor on the original Star Wars. (Thread)
Top guesses for whatever's going down at Bethesda today:
1) Remastered Fallout 3/New Vegas/4 headed to Switch.
2) Fallout Online Is Finally Announced
3) Vault Boy Accused of Inappropriate Behavior, Makes Public Statement
It is very funny to me to imagine the poor bastard tasked with cutting together a teaser video of this episode under strict orders not to give anything away.
You don’t say. It’s almost as if the shittiest, loudest minority was trying to direct a narrative on social media that simply wasn’t what was happening in the real world. Strange.
Frank Marshall and Kathy Kennedy have been Spielberg’s secret weapons since Raiders. That’s one of the reasons my eyes just about roll out of my head whenever I see some random neckbeard dude on Twitter demand she resigns from Lucasfilm.
Pro-tip: if you want to get a bunch of sputtering mad MAGA chuds up in your mentions, just (correctly) inform them that George Carlin would have fucking hated them and everything they stood for.
Been playing the original Knights of the Old Republic all day. First time. Outside of getting used to the gameplay mechanics of a 15 year old game it’s been pretty damn great. Made me even more excited for the planned Star Wars series that have zero connection to the Saga films.
Remember when the right wing tried to claim George Carlin would be on their side, making it clear they never really listened to anything Carlin actually said?
Spielberg just said he makes many films, like The Post, from behind the camera. He made Ready Player One from the audience. That’s the perfect summation of this experience.
Been seeing a few questionable takes about Bad Boys being better than Bad Boys 2. Upon a rewatch of both I must declare all such takes to be foolish and objectively incorrect. Does Bad Boys have Michael Shannon in it? Nope. Does it have horny rats? Also, no. Case closed.
Episode IX guess from the trailer. Palpatine is in the movie, but not in physical form. Maybe a force ghost showdown is in the cards? Could you imagine? Anakin, Obi-Wan, Luke and Yoda facing down powerful force ghost Palpatine? Holy shit, that speculation is nerdy, even for me.
Avatar: The Way of Water is miles better than the first. The ocean environment is incredible and Cameron clearly is wearing his environmentalist heart on his sleeve here. I connected to this one in a way I couldn’t with the original.
Reminder: it’s possible to like Get Out without shitting on The Shape of Water. This narrative about how in 20 years nobody will remember Shape of Water is some Grade A horseshit.
I’m really happy with this interview with
@rianjohnson
and Ram Bergman. Completely spoiler free but gives you a keen insight into the creative process of not just The Last Jedi, but the new trilogy as well. Set aside 20 mins and enjoy!
Today marks the 15th anniversary of The Mist and to celebrate I wrote a comprehensive oral history from many of the key players, including Frank Darabont. Pull up a chair, shoo away the spiders with human teeth, and give it a read, why dontcha?
Again, I can't get angry over Gary Oldman finally getting his much deserved Oscar. He's great, as usual, in Darkest Hour, but this is pretty obviously a career achievement award. I'm gonna pretend this is for The Fifth Element.