I’m a sucker for a good boxing movie. Or any fighting movie, really. But especially the Sweet Science. There’s something to be said for the poetry of brutal movement, triumph of the spirit, grand metaphors for the human condition, and all that jazz. And I loved Creed, so of course I’m excited for Creed 2 (or Creed II if you will), which now has a brand spanking new trailer.
Lots of people go through a dystopian fiction streak. Mine
was in junior high/early high school. (And, to be honest, continues to this
day.) We’ve got classics like 1984, Brave New
World, and The Handmaid’s Tale. Whole new
generations are getting in on the act with things like The Hunger Games and Divergent books, among many others. One
of the greatest of this ilk, and one of my favorites, is Ray Bradbury’s
Fahrenheit 451. Francois Truffaut brought it to the screen
in 1966, but now HBO has an impending adaptation with a fresh new trailer.
Movies obviously had a substantial impact on my life. I was
fortunate enough to grow up and see people who looked like me doing fantastic,
incredible, even relatively normal and mundane things on screen. Looking back
on it, at the films that spoke to me—Goonies, Stand
by Me, Red Dawn, and countless others—almost
everything I watched showed me a version of myself. I know what a presence that
had, I know how much that meant, personally, and I know that wasn’t the case
for everyone. But a lot of people, young people especially, are going to find a
similar sensation, to feel a similar weight, when they watch Black Panther.
I am and always will be a complete and total sucker for any
Rocky movie. It’s not a franchise many expected to continue
after the fifth installment, and there was a collective groan in 2006 for
Rocky Balboa, which turned out to be great. Still, in 2015,
we were left asking ourselves if we really needed another
movie, and after watching Creed, I’m going to come out and
say yes, yes we did.
Fox’s new superhero reboot Fantastic Four
had a rocky production, to put it mildly. There were rumors of rampant studio
interference, director Josh Trank butting heads with the producers and writers,
and even reports that X-Men: First Class director Matthew
Vaughn was brought in for reshoots. These last reports were roundly denied,
though that doesn’t exactly bode well for a movie. Building up to the release,
both producer Simon Kinberg and star Miles Teller have used the phrase, “not a
disaster,” to describe the film, and it’s not, at least not entirely.
The last time star Michael B. Jordan and director Ryan
Coogler got together we got Fruitvale Station, and now we’re
getting Creed, which appears to be a little bit spinoff, a
little bit sequel to Rocky Balboa, which is something I’ll
always watch and be excited about. Dropping later this fall, the film just
released its first trailer, and it looks fantastic.
