Bryan Singer's ‘Red Sonja' Finally Put On Hold by Millennium Productions

Millennium Films, after much resistance, have finally decided to temporarily shelf Bryan Singer’s “Red Sonja” due to the alleged misconduct that has come out in recent months about his past history with underaged boys.

Singer has all but been shunned by the critical community, not to mention his Queen biopic “Bohemian Rhapsody” star Rami Malek who actually refuses to thank him in any speech he gives whenever winning his best actor awards, it most recently happened again last night at the BAFTAs where Malek decided to thank Singer’s two-week replacement on the Queen biopic Dexter Fletcher instead. Hilarious.

The CEO of Millennium Films, the studio behind Singer’s latest “Red Sonja,” stood by Singer in a recent THR report. Avi Lerner claimed the allegations of sexual misconduct aimed at Singer were “agenda driven fake news.”

Despite all that, “Red Sonja” has been put on hold.

James Cameron Claims in the Future We Will Have ‘AI creating movies – and it’ll suck’

“I think you’ve got plenty of AI experts around who would say, yeah, sure. They’d take every movie every made, throw it into a massive database, feed all that into an AI, deep learning neural networks will analyse why they work, and you’ll have an AI create a movie – and it’ll suck. Because the AI is not embodied, it’s not having the human experience. It’ll be like a filmmaker who only knows other movies as opposed to being human.” - James Cameron

[Little White Lies]

“Moonlight" director Barry Jenkins says growing up he was inspired by “Aliens," “Die Hard," and “Coming To America"

“Which films inspired him, growing up? “I wasn’t really inspired by film,” he says, “but I admired Spike Lee’s movies because they just felt very, very, very black. I remember watching School Daze and thinking, ‘What the hell is this?’ There were colleges for black people that just black people go to? And those colleges had all this shit going on? This is so energizing!

“Otherwise, it was the really big Hollywood stuff – The Color Purple, Aliens, Die Hard, Coming To America. I would catch the bus to go to the AMC theatre downtown. But I never thought, ‘Hey, maybe one day I might like to do that.’ It just didn’t seem possible.”

[The Guardian]

“Hala" is a coming-of-age drama that feels unique and vital [Sundance Review]

A film based on women trying to break through the restrictive barriers of their parent’s religious upbringing is nothing new. However, Minhal Baig‘s “Hala” is unique because it tackles a gifted, hijab-wearing, skateboarding Pakistani (Geraldine Viswanathan) student who tries to navigate both her duties as a Muslim and her academic social life with poetic grace. The complications that arise in Baig’s film can be deemed conventional for this type of film but regardless they feel fresh and, more importantly, authentic because of the way Baig’s camera relates, in such intense ways, to Hala’s on-screen plights. Her sudden and out-of-the-blue romance with Jesse (Jack Kilmer) takes Hala away from the restrictions of her religion, the arranged marriage her father has in mind. And her own parent’s disintegrating relationship, threatened by her dad’s infidelities with a white woman in his office, only makes her life worse. Expanded from Baig’s 2016 similarly titled short film, the American female perspective in “Hala” is unique, bringing a new, much-needed perspective to the coming-of-age genre. Despite being apart from the intense Muslim world our main character lives in, there’s a relatability to her tribulations that hits home. Viswanathan (“Blockers”) proves to be a formidable actress, showcasing a woman trying to take the liberties that come in living as a woman in America and creating her own destiny, free of restrictions. [B/B+]

‘Cold Case Hammarskjöld’ Is An Astonishing Murder Mystery Investigation Doc [Sundance Review]

It’s a cliché, but “more than you bargained for” documentaries are typically the best ones. Those films that feature a filmmaker on an odyssey quest for one piece of truth, but discovers something richer and more profound along the journey. Such is the case with what Mads Brügger‘s astonishing “Cold Case Hammarskjöld,” about an investigation into a mysterious murder that strikes a vein and the blood of discovery comes gushing. What begins as a look into a plane crash, and the consequent death of United Nations secretary-general Dag Hammarskjöld in the early 1960s, quickly turns into something much more transfixing: the confirmation of a conspiracy theory that has existed for more than five decades.

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