DT’s weekly entertainment show, Between the Streams, is your guide to all of the hottest, most important, and (of course) dumbest new developments in streaming and entertainment, providing a handy recap of the week that was. Follow us here every Friday or add us via RSS, iTunes, or Stitcher at the links above to take BtS on the road!
Well, it’s a brand new week of movies, TV shows, and all sorts of good stuff. We’ve made our peace with Suicide Squad — including its absolutely monster opening box office numbers and its gently resting 26 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes — and now it’s time to move forward with our lives. Forward this week includes a brand new trailer for the Star Wars anthology film, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. We’re still not sure about the name, but we are sure about our excitement, and last night’s trailer did nothing but further stoke the flames for a movie we’ve still got to wait four months to see.
We’ll say this for Disney and Lucasfilm: they know how to play a crowd. Last night’s Olympics broadcast made for a great debut for the new scenes, and there were some excellent moments, including a sneak peek of you know who’s gleaming black helmet. We’ll discuss highlights for the latest shot of Rogue One, and whether it’s still the film to see come Christmas.
But, of course, Rogue One is still a long way out on the horizon and we’ve got a mess of critically well-received movies to talk about in our Weekend Box Office preview. In fact, it’s hard to recall a time when we’ve had this many critically warm movies debuting at once, as virtually every movie on the list is above 80 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. Now, it’s important to remember that doesn’t mean they’re all highly reviewed movies, but it does mean they’ve all made a majority of the critics pretty content.
The list includes a film that nobody would have believed could have been made until we saw it with our own eyes. That’s right, we’re talking about Sausage Party, the raunchy new animated feature from Seth Rogen & Co. that spits out fart jokes and F-bombs (so many F-bombs) as easily as it does overlying themes about religion and the existence (or lack thereof) of god. Sausage Party walks this bizarre road by telling the tale of a happy group of anthropomorphic groceries who get snatched up in the store for what they think will be nirvana, only to find out that they’re about to be skinned, skewered, roasted, and/or eaten alive by the “gods” they’ve been dreaming about. It’s a brilliant turn from Rogen and partner Evan Goldberg and a relative first for the genre, co-directed by the man behind films like Shrek and Madagascar, Conrad Vernon. Sausage Party is sure to cause some controversy this weekend, and it won’t be for everyone, but its massive comedic cast — which includes Jonah Hill, Paul Rudd, Kristen Wiig, Bill Hader, etc. — and blend of dumb and witty humor should offer more than enough to please Rogen fans — and even South Park lovers.
As we mentioned, Sausage Party is just one of several intriguing films this weekend. Chris Pine, Jeff Bridges, and Ben Foster will hope to grab those looking for more some weightier storytelling with Hell or High Water, a modern western that pits Pine and Foster as desperate bank robbers in a depressed town against Bridges’ soon-to-retire Texas Ranger. The film, from the writer of Sicario, looks excellent and it’s nice to see Pine branch out from Star Trek with something worthy of his talents.
Of course, there’s also Pete’s Dragon, the surprisingly well-reviewed remake of the classic (and rather bizarre) 1977 film from Disney. Frankly, the wooly CGI dragon and Karl Urban’s seemingly two-dimensional pitchfork-and-torch character in the trailers made this one look like a mess, but critics seem to have been taken aback by its charm and good pacing.
Joining those great choices are Meryl Streep’s biopic about a plucky heiress who wants to sing opera but has a horrible voice, Florence Foster Jenkins, and Mel Gibson’s pulpy B-movie, Blood Father, about a father saving his daughter from drug dealers.
Whew! That’s a lot of movies premiering all at once, and there really is something for everyone. But that’s not all we’ll be talking about this week. We’ll also be discussing the latest turn for the long awaited (and seemingly doomed) remake of The Crow, a quick review of Vice Principals by our own Greg Nibler, this week’s Between The Cracks segment, which details a movie or show you probably don’t know about, and Tales From the Crypt returns to TV. That’s just part of the story, so tune in to find out more!
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