The film: Todd Bowden (Brad Renfro) discovers that his neighbour, Kurt Dussander (Ian McKellen), is a former Nazi Sturmbannführer who worked at a death camp during the Second World War. Fascinated with Dussander, Todd blackmails the older man into telling stories about his role in the day-to-day workings of genocide. The pair become locked in an increasingly twisted relationship that escalates into violence.

Bryan Singer’s film wasn’t the first attempt to adapt Stephen King’s novella Apt Pupil (from Different Seasons, home of the source material for both Stand By Me and The Shawshank Redemption). Originally, James Mason and Richard Burton were both lined up to play Kurt Dussander, but died before their respective projects kicked off. Nicol Williamson would play the role in a 1987 adaptation, which went massively over budget almost instantly and was shut down just six weeks into shooting.

Singer had read the novella when he was 19 and took the chance to produce a spec script with writer Brandon Boyce. King had managed to get the rights back to his story and offered the rights to Singer for $1, in the manner of his Dollar Babies scheme. Boyce and Singer reworked the novella’s ending and reduced the level of violence in the plot in order to create a more character-driven horror. Much of the film is simply conversations between Todd and Dussander, shot in claustrophobic close-ups and odd angles to emphasise the intensity of their developing relationship.

With the current rise of the far right across the globe, it’s hard to avoid the resonance in watching Apt Pupil in this current climate. There’s a radicalisation at work here as Dussander’s mentoring transforms Todd from someone who is merely fascinated with violence to someone who can commit it. Though Todd initially starts their relationship with all the control, the power dynamics shift throughout, seen most obviously during the scene in which Todd forces Dussander to wear an SS uniform and march on the spot. As Todd’s instructions escalate, Dussander’s instinct takes over and he performs a Nazi salute before ignoring Todd completely, scaring the teenager into asking him to stop.

As that scene demonstrates, the one thing the film is not is subtle. The film begins pointedly and ominously, as a teacher closes up his week on the Holocaust with his class by erasing the chalk pie chart of its victims from the board as the camera focuses in on the word Jews. The stories related by Dussander are extremely graphic too, a chilling perspective of a man who not only committed atrocities, but seemed to take a relish in doing so. The violence here isn’t physical, but psychological. However, beyond the obvious “Nazism was bad” message, there is a distinct lack of depth in the film’s examinations of Dussander’s past and Todd’s relationship to it. Only once does Apt Pupil take stock of the cost of Dussander’s actions, a scene in which one of his former prisoners recognises him and breaks down in wordless hysteria. The rest of the film can’t quite separate itself from Todd’s glorification.

The performances of McKellen and Renfro are the film’s saving grace, imbuing their scenes together with an intensity that ensures that, even as the narrative becomes repetitive, there’s something to anchor the audience within it. The chemistry between the pair works well with the shifting dynamic of their relationship, particularly in the earlier scenes when the characters are testing each other out and seeing which boundaries can be pushed. David Schwimmer plays the role of Todd’s high school guidance counsellor and is a suitably unnerved foil for the gleeful machinations of the central pair. Schwimmer plays his final scene with a subtlety not seen elsewhere and the slow realisation of what Todd is both suggesting and capable of is registered in the shifting expression of his face.

Apt Pupil is a film that knows it has something to say about its subjects, but is a little too obsessed with their relationship to take a step back and offer the audience a richness that is present in other horror films.

Scariest moment: The aforementioned scene in which Dussander dons the SS uniform and is forced to march is truly the most chilling moment, especially when the salute appears. For the animal lovers, I’m sure the cat versus the oven would scare the living daylights out of them.

Musicality: As well as a rather sinister score, Apt Pupil also uses German music, such as Wagner and the song Das Ist Berlin, to punctuate some of its key scenes. Liebestod (meaning ‘love death’) from Tristan Und Isolde plays over a particularly crucial moment.

A King thing: The mentor relationship. There are a few instances in King’s work that pair an older figure with a younger one in order to guide them through their experiences. One such example is Dick Hallorann’s aid to Danny Torrance, and Danny takes over the role himself in Doctor Sleep. Here, there is a very twisted version of that relationship, one that leads further into darkness rather than away from it.

Join me next time, Constant Reader, for The Rage: Carrie 2…

One of the surprise breakout hits of the year, Sorry To Bother You is a biting satire of modern corporate culture, class systems and race in a year when such topics are part of everyday conversation. However, the fact that the film was written – and published as a book – years ago makes its insights into modern life feel even more prescient.

Given the film’s fiercely original proposition, it’s hard to imagine there was no pushback from interested movie studios when writer/director Boots Riley was pitching his vision back in 2014. “It’s hard to push back – people are either down or they’re not,” he says. “Especially in this independent film space. It might have been different if this was a heist film but with one small part that’s different, but my thing was so much not like anything else that there was never going to be just one part that someone didn’t like.”

According to Riley, only one thing was changed from the original 2014 script – a reference to ‘Making America Great Again’ that he cut so as not to confuse the film’s message. Sorry To Bother You is not just a critique of the Trump era specifically, but of capitalism more widely.

A deeply political film, Riley wanted it to stay with people as a demonstration of what the realisation of one’s power can do when used in a certain context.

“What I put in there is the hope for change,” he says, “which comes through not just this vague notion of social action, but through a movement that uses the withholding of labour as a tactic – not just for higher wages, but also for social change.

“It’s saying that this is what we are living like now, and the things I wanted people to look at was power, where that power actually lies. Even for folks in a movement, it comes down to wanting to get the word out, but it’s really about people knowing what leverage they have.”

It was important for the film to be understood as an exaggeration of present-day America, Riley continues, rather than a dystopian future that’s far away from our everyday reality.

“I had to really balance that, because I had read that Terry Gilliam had been frustrated with Brazil because people thought it was set in the future,” he explains. “Even though at the beginning it says, ‘Somewhere in the 20th century.’ But that’s because the production design was so pushed that it seemed like it was saying it was the future.”

Back in the summer, Riley questioned the lack of international distribution for Sorry To Bother You, writing on Twitter that, despite outperforming many other movies at the US box office, it was being treated as a “black movie” that would not do well internationally.

“Corporate culture, in general, is all about fear,” Riley tells Den of Geek when asked about the distribution issue. “Not even just the film industry, but the music industry. They try to say that capitalism breeds innovation but it doesn’t. People are trying to invest in things they think are creative but are just like, ‘Oh, this is creative because it’s a purple version of the black shoe we’ve been making this whole time.’

“My movie is thought of as wild, but it’s not that crazy. I think people do the same thing that they’ve been doing and they just assume certain things. They want to sell what was sold last time, and even when something does well, like Get Out, they decide that it’s an anomaly. It’s then a self-fulfilling prophecy. I’m glad that Focus/Universal came through and made it happen.”

On the subject of Get Out, it’s true that Sorry To Bother You has been compared to the 2016 hit primarily because it features a large black cast and discusses race in modern America.

“We got our funding before Get Out was released,” Riley says. “It was already going to happen, but I think some of the success comes from theatres saying, ‘Okay, we will buy this because Get Out did something.’ So it’s more around those things, but we already had our funding… I’m happy when people are talking about it. It annoys me when they think it was inspired by Get Out, because the actual screenplay was published as a paperback book in 2014.”

With more and more high-profile films, from comedies to superhero films, wrapping a discussion of social issues in a populist wrapper, Sorry To Bother You stands out for wearing its politics and world-view on its sleeve. First and foremost a brilliant comedy, it’s impossible to exit the cinema without elements of the film’s message sticking in your brain.

“Any time you’re talking about the way you think about life, or the world, it’s exaggerating something in order to focus on it,” says Riley. “Contradiction is very much like irony, and irony is a big way to explain tragic things. But irony is also at the heart of a lot of comedy, and often they’re one and the same.”

Sorry To Bother You is in selected UK cinemas from Friday 7 December

The new trailer for Captain Marvel – the 21st entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe – arrived overnight, giving us a closer look at what to expect from the origin story of one of the galaxy’s most powerful heroes.

Kicking off with an extended version of the old lady fight glimpsed in the first trailer, this new look pretty quickly establishes the shape-shifting, pointy-eared Skrulls as “the bad guys”. Captain Marvel, aka Carol Danvers (Brie Larson), meanwhile, identifies herself as a Kree – a race of “noble warrior heroes” and sworn enemies of the Skrulls.

Only, she’s not a Kree; she’s simply been “reborn” by them to “live longer, stronger, superior”, as Annette Bening’s mysterious scientist informs us in a crucial bit of exposition. Danvers is actually an Earthling. And so, along with fledgling SHIELD agent Nick Fury (an impressively de-aged Samuel L Jackson), she sets out to unravel the mystery of her past on her way to becoming the (hopefully) Thanos-beating hero we need right now. You can watch the trailer below…

So, there you have it. Mohawk Marvel! Space battles! Jude Law! And who knew Nick Fury was such a cat person?

Captain Marvel hits UK cinemas on 8 March 2019

This article contains potential Captain Marvel spoilers…

The new Captain Marvel trailer has arrived. Fortunately, this second look at the upcoming film puts the whole “why did Carol Danvers just deck an old lady” debate to rest. Why this question even had to be answered is beyond me, even if you didn’t know that the Skrulls, the film’s alien villains, were shapeshifters. The fact that there was more to that shot (and that shot to the jaw) seemed pretty self-evident. Anyway…

If you haven’t already caught the second trailer, you might want to watch it before we get into this. Here it is…

Captain Marvel apparently takes place right smack in the middle of the Kree-Skrull War, a generational conflict between the two most famous alien races in the Marvel Universe, and a concept that has fueled no fewer than three massive Marvel Comics stories through the years. It’s a war so big that, clearly, Earth is about to become a battleground in it, and that’s certainly not going to be good for anybody involved. Hopefully, this war isn’t resolved in this movie, because I could see it becoming the basis for Avengers 5, or, hell, a whole Phase of Marvel movies. While this movie looks cool, it still looks relatively small if we’re gonna go down the Kree-Skrull War route…but I’ll get back to that in a minute.

This is a substantially different origin story for Carol Danvers than the one comic-book fans might be used to. Without getting into the little details, all you need to know is that, In the comics, Carol was an Air Force officer who gained powers via contact with alien technology and/or the original Kree Captain Mar-Vell (depending on which version of the origin you consider canon…and recent comics have changed it even further).

We see Jude Law’s Dr. Walter Lawson giving Carol some pointers here and there in the trailer, but more importantly, we see him wearing that snappy Kree uniform, so I’m willing to bet we hear his Kree name at some point, and it had damn well better be Mar-Vell.

But very early on in the trailer, it’s clear that the traditional Carol Danvers’ origin has been tweaked. Or perhaps it’s nowhere to be found. Carol Danvers at least believes she’s a Kree warrior, when in fact, she’s an Earth woman who somehow found herself rescued by the Kree and rebuilt as an alien super soldier. 

Now, before I get into the crazy, potentially spoilery part of this thing, here’s Carol’s cat.

A cat, in case you don’t know, is an alien creature that some humans have a strange fascination with. They force earthlings to do their bidding, and one who has fallen under the spell of an alien feline overlord won’t even mind that the cat shits in a box in the corner of their living room when not making unreasonable demands on its human slaves.

OK, my own suspicion of cats aside, this cat almost certainly IS an alien. A Flerken, in fact, named Chewie. This is what this cat (but not all cats…I guess) looks like in his natural form.

So, I’ve gotten all the big stuff out of the way, but there’s a few hints in this trailer that are such massive spoilers that I’m going to hide them.

Ready?

Last chance to get out of here! Right after this picture of Nick Fury petting a cat…

Is Carol Danvers a Skrull?

What if Carol Danvers isn’t an Earth woman who thinks she’s a Kree, but rather a Skrull who thinks she’s an Earth woman who thinks she’s a Kree? There’s one line of dialogue that hints at this, “do you want to know what you really are?” spoken by someone unseen, but presumably, someone who doesn’t have Carol’s (or Earth’s) best interests at heart.

One of the sequels to the Kree-Skrull War comics series was Secret Invasion, which, like many Marvel Comics events of the last 15 years, was something of a mess. The basic principle, however, was pretty sound. Secret Invasion revealed that several key figures in the Marvel Universe had actually been replaced by Skrulls, and had been operating undetected for years. Shortly before that, it appeared that Captain Mar-Vell, long thought dead, had returned from the grave.

Until it was revealed that he wasn’t Mar-Vell at all, but rather a Skrull who had undergone a process to bond with Mar-Vell’s DNA so he couldn’t change shape. Using memory implants (hmm…), the fake Mar-Vell was a Skrull sleeper agent, waiting his turn. Needless to say, he ends up doing the right thing. Well, at least for a little while, but let’s not get too far into the weeds on this one for now.

It’s pretty convenient that the Kree found her “with no memory” and then took her in and rebuilt her. Could the Skrulls have bonded one of their own with Carol Danvers’ DNA, and then planted her as a sleeper agent with their enemies? And are Carol’s memories of Earth memory implants from the Skrulls…or could they be the memories of the actual Carol Danvers somehow seeping through the bonding process?

Could Marvel be pulling this kind of double fakeout with Carol Danvers in the film? I doubt it, mostly because I figure Carol’s loyal fan base might feel cheated (and rightfully so). On the other hand, this would be perhaps the craziest, most risky move the Marvel Cinematic Universe has taken in recent memory.

I also can’t imagine that if they were going that particular route with Carol, that they’d tease it so overtly with that line. It’s bait for comic-book fans, and it just begs to be spoiled in endless news items and trailer breakdowns all over the internet (cut me some slack, I gave you plenty of warning to get out of this article before I got into this particular point!).

In any case, even without this admittedly out-there theory, the second trailer gives fans a lot more to work with than the first. And there’s not long to go before all our questions are answered, with Captain Marvel hitting UK cinemas on 8 March 2019.

Universal Pictures is developing an original film musical inspired by the music of Prince, according to Variety. Universal Chairman Donna Langley said the film studio worked aggressively to nab the rights to classic songs from the artist’s catalogue.

The upcoming Prince movie will not be a biopic, but an original story with the songs driving the narrative, much like the use of Abba songs in Mamma Mia!. The news comes months after that film’s sequel, Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, pulled in $400 million worldwide. This year also saw Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody become the biggest music biopic of all time, raking in $534 million, while Bradley Cooper’s A Star is Born remake, which starred Lady Gaga, earned more than $350 million at the worldwide box office. Clearly, musicals still mean big business in Hollywood.

The Prince estate and the studio decided that the 1984 film Purple Rain covered the biopic territory already, so the two parties are meeting with potential writers and producers to come up with a completely original story.

The film will be executive produced by Atom Factory’s Troy Carter, the entertainment adviser of Prince’s estate, alongside Universal Music Publishing Group Chairman and CEO Jody Gerson. Universal Music owns exclusive worldwide publishing rights for Prince’s catalogue.

Prince is one of the best-selling music artists of all time. He sold more than 100 million records worldwide, won eight Grammy Awards, six American Music Awards, a Golden Globe Award, and an Academy Award for Purple Rain. Prince, whose legal name was Prince Rogers Nelson, died in 2016. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2004. Selma director Ava DuVernay will also be making a Prince documentary for Netflix next year.

This isn’t the only musical that Universal has on its slate, either. Also in development at the studio is Last Christmas, which will feature the music of the late Wham! frontman George Michael, and a film adaptation of the Broadway smash Cats, starring Taylor Swift, Idris Elba, Ian McKellen, Judi Dench, James Corden and Jason Derulo. The movie musical renaissance continues…

Marvel is digging deeper into its catalog for its Phase 4 slate. We already knew about The Eternals becoming a priority for the studio, but they’re also looking back to bronze age martial arts comics sensation Shang-Chi, who headlined a comic known as Master Of Kung Fu, to launch a brand new franchise.

In the original comics, Shang-Chi was the son of none other than Fu Manchu, that relic of a less enlightened era of storytelling. When the young son learns of his father’s true nature, he sets out into the world to right wrongs. Deadline broke the news, and they report that “Marvel is already looking at a number of Asian and Asian-American directors” with the intent that Shang-Chi will be the Asian-American equivalent of Black Panther, which was not only an excellent film in its own right, but had signficant cultural implications as the most prominent black superhero to headline a movie, with a black director at the helm.

Dave Callaham, who has worked on The Expendables franchise, Warner Bros’ inaugural Godzilla feature, and upcoming superhero fare like Wonder Woman 1984 and the untitled sequel to Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse, is writing the screenplay. Marvel routinely pays lip service to the idea that certain films aren’t meant to be superhero movies. Captain America: The Winter Soldier was pitched as a political thriller, and certainly both Guardians Of The Galaxy movies lean heavily into their weird space opera/comedy vibe. Would Marvel dare to make a straightforward modern martial arts movie rather than a nine-figure extravaganza?

While we are obviously far too early in the process for casting to even be considered, if Lewis Tan (Deadpool 2, Into The Badlands, the upcoming Wu Assassins, and one of the only good things about the first season of Iron Fist) doesn’t at least get a serious look for the lead role, something isn’t right. Similarly, we’re nowhere near discussing release dates, but there are no shortage of dates on the superhero movie calendar between 2020 and 2021. Several of those would suit Shang-Chi just fine.

We’ll update this as more information becomes available.