Director Marcus Wagner has signed with Rockstar Media Group, Los Angeles, for exclusive representation. He is best known for high profile promo work on behalf of such clients as Nickelodeon Movies, Dreamworks Studios, Paramount Pictures, Disney Channel and Major League Baseball. Rockstar is headed by producers Marc Blitstein and Michael Schlenker….Pioneering motion picture technologist Gary Demos has joined Lowry Digital, a Burbank, Calif.-based company specializing in digital restoration and enhancement of motion pictures, as senior algorithm scientist, reporting to chief technology officer John Lowry. Demos received the 2006 Gordon E. Sawyer Award for lifetime technical achievement from the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences. He was a leader in computer-generated images in the early 1970s, and began working on the processing and compression of high-resolution images by the late 1980s….Pulse Music, New York, has extended its reach to South Africa with an operation under the aegis of executive producer Marc Algranti….
Review: Director Bong Joon Ho’s “Mickey 17” Starring Robert Pattinson
So you think YOUR job is bad?
Sorry if we seem to be lacking empathy here. But however crummy you think your 9-5 routine is, it'll never be as bad as Robert Pattinson's in Bong Joon Ho's "Mickey 17" — nor will any job, on Earth or any planet, approach this level of misery.
Mickey, you see, is an "Expendable," and by this we don't mean he's a cast member in yet another sequel to Sylvester Stallone's tired band of mercenaries ("Expend17ables"?). No, even worse! He's literally expendable, in that his job description requires that he die, over and over, in the worst possible ways, only to be "reprinted" once again as the next Mickey.
And from here stems the good news, besides the excellent Pattinson, whom we hope got hazard pay, about Bong's hotly anticipated follow-up to "Parasite." There's creativity to spare, and much of it surrounds the ways he finds for his lead character to expire — again and again.
The bad news, besides, well, all the death, is that much of this film devolves into narrative chaos, bloat and excess. In so many ways, the always inventive Bong just doesn't know where to stop. It hardly seems a surprise that the sci-fi novel, by Edward Ashton, he's adapting here is called "Mickey7" — Bong decided to add 10 more Mickeys.
The first act, though, is crackling. We begin with Mickey lying alone at the bottom of a crevasse, having barely survived a fall. It is the year 2058, and he's part of a colonizing expedition from Earth to a far-off planet. He's surely about to die. In fact, the outcome is so expected that his friend Timo (Steven Yeun), staring down the crevasse, asks casually: "Haven't you died yet?"
How did Mickey get here? We flash back to Earth, where Mickey and Timo ran afoul of a villainous loan... Read More