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A “Magic: The Gathering” Adaptation Is Coming!

Right up front, let me inform you that I am not part of the sprawling fandom devoted to the card, tabletop and digital Magic: The Gathering games. For those of you who are, you will be pleased to know that the upcoming Netflix adaptation of the games will be directed by devout fans – none other than Joe and Anthony Russo. Maybe their names aren’t familiar to you? They’ve directed a couple of films – Captain America: Winter Soldier, Captain America: Civil War, Avengers: Infinity War, Avengers: Endgame. Nothing too big.

Turns out the Russo Brothers aren’t just Marvel fans, though: apparently, they’ve been playing the game for “as long as it has been around” – in other words, since 1993. And since pretty much anything that the Russos touch turns to pure cinematic gold – and box-office gold, too – that’s enough to pique my interest in this show. The adaptation will be an animated series, and will be produced in collaboration with game-makers Wizards of the Coast and Hasbro. Never having played the game in question, I really can’t say for certain what I expect to see in the series (um, magic, I’m guessing?), but I bet it’s a pretty great game, if it comes from Wizards of the Coast – who also created one of my own personal favorite tabletop games, Axis & Allies.

If the idea of “animation” conjures up disturbing visions of two-dimensional cartoons, rest assured that the show will combine cutting-edge animation techniques with multi-genre storytelling including suspense, horror and drama. Sounds pretty good, right? The drawbacks, of course, are obvious: Magic: The Gathering is a game, and game adaptations aren’t exactly notable for being faithful to the source-material, or even very entertaining on their own merits. And this one is more convoluted and complex than most: there’s a huge cast of characters (sorry, “Planeswalkers”) involved in the Magic: The Gathering game franchise, and an inordinately large number of fantasy worlds and dimensions to bring to the screen. But if anybody can do this, it’s the Russo Brothers, who were able to satisfy both long-time Marvel comic fans as well as general audiences during their four-film tenure in the MCU – and, as previously noted, they’ve raked in a lot of cash with just those four films.

Avengers: Endgame is still in theaters if you want to get a taste of what a Magic: The Gathering adaptation might look like in the Russo Brothers’ hands.

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“Umbrella Academy” Season 2!

SPOILERS FOR UMBRELLA ACADEMY SEASON 1 AHEAD. BEWARE.

"Umbrella Academy" Season 2! 1
tvline.com

The final scene of Netflix’s first season of Umbrella Academy is one that inspires a sinking feeling of dread and depression, and eventually anger, frustration, and impatience. You watch the seven beloved members of the Hargreeves family of superheroes, plus fan-favorite couple Hazel and Agnes, vanish through time-vortexes mere seconds before the world is utterly obliterated by a piece of the moon. And then…the screen goes black. I don’t know about you, but that ending drove me insane. Not because it’s bad (it’s fantastic), but because it makes you desperately want more.

Like, now. Right now.

But no, instead we have to wait forever for Season 2 to finally arrive on Netflix: there are a billion questions we have, and none of them will get answered until next year, at the earliest. Thankfully, over the past couple of weeks, we’ve seen indications that Season 2 is going to start filming very soon, maybe even this month.

First, we know that the script for at least the first episode is completed, because writer Steve Blackman posted a picture on his Instagram of the script, titled “Right Back Where We Started”. That lends extra credence to the idea that the Academy will be traveling back to the time when they were kids: as the family time-traveled in Season 1, we watched them almost morph into younger versions of themselves, though it was difficult to tell if this was some sort of temporary thing, or if they would be actually transformed back into children. Since the adult actors are still confirmed to star in Season 2, the latter seems somewhat unlikely – though it’s possible we might see the adult versions and the child versions both existing simultaneously. “Right Back Where We Started” also implies that our heroes will be reunited with the man who literally started their whole cycle of disaster and catastrophic violence: their abusive and dispassionate father, Sir Reginald Hargreeves – who was kind-of-maybe-sort-of implied to be an alien in the first season’s finale.

A few days ago, it was again hinted that Umbrella Academy Season 2 is soon to begin filming, with Business Times also pessimistically reporting that it could take about…18 months before we actually see said Season 2 on Netflix: i.e., sometime around late 2020 or early 2021.

But we have so many questions! Vanya is in an unstable condition (having just blown up the moon and the earth), Allison can’t speak and thus can’t use her powers (and is probably also going to be reeling from losing her daughter in the apocalypse), Hazel and Agnes are hopefully safe in some other time and dimension…there’s a lot going on. Is Ben possibly coming back from the dead, after being given tangible form through Klaus’ powers? Are Allison and Luther actually going to end up together? Did Cha-Cha really die, or will she come back too? Is there someone greater than The Handler, and will we finally find out where she – and all the other time-traveling assassins – came from?

Today, we got another clue from Instagram, specifically from actor Aidan Gallagher, who portrays the enigmatic and sarcastic Number Five on the show. His official location is now “Toronto, Ontario” where Umbrella Academy will be filming, and he posted a picture of the city, with the caption “Season two starts now!”. It might not be official confirmation, but it’s good enough for me. I’ll take any tidbit of hope that I can get, at this point. I’m going to cautiously predict that Season 2 will indeed start filming this very month, and we’ll start to (maybe) get some vague answers to some of our burning questions.

What are you excited to see from Season 2 of Umbrella Academy? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

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The Sony Cinematic Universe

Taking inspiration from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Sony Pictures has today announced plans to launch their own video-game movie adaptation universe called PlayStation Productions – but we’re just going to call it the Sony Cinematic Universe, or SCU, because (a) I like that name better, and (b) PlayStation Productions overseer Shawn Layden is already drawing the parallels himself, saying that “[we] looked at what Marvel has done in taking the world of comic books and making it into the biggest thing in the film world”. In other words, they think they can unseat Marvel at the box-office. Which is fine – but with PlayStation?

Apparently so, and there are over 100 game titles that Layden and SCU president Asad Qizilbash are interested in adapting to the big and small screen. That probably includes best-selling games like Final Fantasy, Gran Turismo, Tomb Raider, and…Crash Bandicoot.  Perhaps unsurprisingly, this news follows the success of Detective Pikachu, which became (just barely) the best-reviewed video-game adaptation on Rotten Tomatoes. But the hard reality is that, for the most part, video-game adaptations are massive failures, critically and often financially. They also seem to attract a lot of negativity from the fans they desperately want to please, some of it so overwhelming that film studios feel compelled to cave in to pressure (looking at you, Sonic the Hedgehog).

Why would anyone want to try and build an entire cinematic universe around video-game adaptations? It’s not like this is the first time PlayStation games have been adapted – just look at Lara Croft: Tomb Raider and its 2018 reboot Tomb Raider, (oh yeah, and Lara Croft Tomb Raider: Cradle of Life, how could I forget about that one) all of which were burdened with poor audience scores and staggeringly bad reviews. Even Angelina Jolie couldn’t save the franchise from a solidly “Rotten” rating. Ryan Reynolds, meanwhile, has narrowly saved the blossoming Pokémon franchise from a similar fate, but for how long? Detective Pikachu may have offered false hope to all the Hollywood moguls looking to jump on the bandwagon – are we seriously now going to get a Crash Bandicoot movie? Does anybody want that? Anybody?

Okay, well now that we’ve raised the possibility, I probably do want that, but I’m not going to admit it.

So, is the video-game movie curse officially broken with the success of Detective Pikachu? I doubt it. But then again, Angry Birds, a movie based on an iPhone app, garnered millions of dollars at the worldwide box-office – so what do I know? But maybe now is the time to start building a Sony Cinematic Universe: The Witcher video-game adaptation is going to release on Netflix later this year, and a Nintendo Mario Brothers movie is still in production at Universal – that’s something that could easily wipe out all the competition.

I’m wishing Layden and Qizilbash all the luck in the world, but the current track-record – and the curse – give me little hope for the future of their fresh new cinematic universe.

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“Wine Country” Movie Review!

Get ready to clear a space in your itinerary for this brilliantly funny day-in-the-life story. The premise of Wine Country is simple – a group of women come together in Napa Valley for a birthday party, but soon find themselves arguing bitterly and turning on each other, as their frantic schedule of wine-tasting, sightseeing and accidental art shows becomes too much for them to handle. Hysterical mayhem ensues.

The writing is what makes Wine Country so appealing: the dialogue is hilarious, but extremely real. All the subtle movements of conversation, the awkward pauses, the interruptions, the mumbled whispers: they’re all there. The situations in which the women find themselves are always real – whether they’re discovering the meaning of life in the eyes of a raccoon, or a stranger in the house wielding a dead cuttlefish. It was one particular scene, early in the film, when the group goes out to a restaurant, that confirmed to me that the writing was perfect – that scene was identical to many family reunions I’ve attended.

However, it’s not until the tarot-card reader arrives that the movie suddenly…has a plot. Up until that point, the story is episodic and uneventful, we have no clear grasp on the characters, and we don’t even really get the sense that they’re stressed out – well, except Catherine, but we’ll get to her in a moment. But after the cards have been read, leaving them all with a deep sense of dread and impending death, the women are suddenly at each others’ throats, and the plot suddenly jumps into action and doesn’t ever slow down again. This might have been jarring, if the tarot-card scene hadn’t been phenomenal. Lady Sunshine (Cherry Jones), their reader, is one of the standouts in Wine Country, with her deadpan delivery of depressing news and her chipper smile as she announces the price of the reading. This scene is one of the best in the movie, and really jump-starts everything that happens next – as the women inevitably take the message of the cards to heart.

As for the women themselves, they work best when they’re a team, but they’re worth talking about individually because a lot of them really are that good. Obviously, I have to mention Amy Poehler and Tina Fey first, but I’d really rather not. Fey is just fine as Tammy, the rough-and-tough cowgirl who acts as a mentor to the women, and she manages to get some impactful and funny material to work with, but her performance is, for the most part, uninspiring. Poehler is great to begin with, playing Abby, the group leader and party planner who makes it her responsibility to get her team moving frenetically around Napa – but then somewhere in the third act her character just seems to dry up, and Poehler’s acting became forced and cringey: she tries to have an emotional monologue about climate change and first-world-problems, but it sounds unnatural and scripted – a lot of the best acting in the movie is that which feels improvised, and Poehler’s often doesn’t.

Maya Rudolph and Paula Pell, however, have a lot more to offer: Rudolph’s character Naomi is irreverent and relateable – even as she struggles with personal issues. Each character has a moment in the spotlight, and Naomi’s is definitely her drunken birthday-speech where she manages to fall off a piano – or is it her third-act encounter with a poisonous snake? Or perhaps the scene where she confesses how terrified she is of death? She has a lot of great moments. Pell has almost as many, playing the confident, boisterous, and energetic Val, who falls in love with a modern artist and then has to deal with the fall-out.

Catherine and Rebecca, are the best characters on the team, memorably portrayed by Ana Gasteyer and Rachel Dratch, respectively. Gasteyer’s workaholic character is the outcast in the group, constantly leaving to take important calls or trying to convince her friends to do things none of them want to do. Dratch, on the other hand, plays the timid life-coach and birthday girl, whose attempts to keep her friends in check by offering them “feedback” only succeed in making her the target for all their pent-up anger and resentment.

Meanwhile, Emily Spivey portrays Jenny, the final member of the team, who has virtually nothing to do. For what it’s worth, she does a good job with what she’s got, but the role is so underwritten it’s hard to tell.

Wine Country manages to pack a delightfully entertaining punch, even with a few missteps in pacing and character development. Add it to your schedule if you’re looking for a hilarious comedy about friendship, loyalty, and female bonding, all set against the beautiful backdrop of Napa Valley’s rolling hills and vineyards.

Movie Rating: 8.5/10