Happy Friday Eve! I meant to post the teaser trailer of Empire of Light but got busy during the day and had a screening of George Miller’s Three Thousand Years Of Longing (review coming this weekend) in the evening. Well, I’m glad I waited as White Noise‘s trailer came out this morning so might as well do a double feature!

Can one fall in love with a movie poster? Why yes of course! In fact, I am falling for this gorgeous poster of Empire Of Light that makes me want to watch it immediately!!

A love story set in and around a beautiful old cinema on the South Coast of England in the 1980s.

The film is written and directed by Sam Mendes, his first solo screenplay since the Oscar-winning 1917, and also shot by Roger Deakins, but the premise couldn’t be more different. I love everything about what I’ve seen so far from the opening sequence inside a movie theater, with a projectionist (Toby Jones) narrating the story… “Film: It’s just static frames with darkness in between.” Hollywood loves making movies about themselves, and this one is billed as a love letter to cinema, as well as featuring a love story. This article gives some insight into the plot which apparently deals with a forbidden romance between Olivia Colman and Michael Ward who met while working at a cinema house in Britain.

The world could use more love stories and I’d watch anything with miss Colman in it! The rest of the cast is fantastic – Tom Brooke, Tanya Moodie, Hannah Onslow, Crystal Clarke, and Colin Firth. The film will have its world premiere at TIFF later in September, the US release is December 9 and the UK release is January 13, 2023.

It’s been ages since I saw an Adam Driver movie!! Honestly, it’s been way too long. I’ve been seeing pics of him on the set of White Noise for months, which reunites him with the Marriage Story‘s director Noah Baumbach.

White Noise dramatizes a contemporary American family’s attempts to deal with the mundane conflicts of everyday life while grappling with the universal mysteries of love, death, and the possibility of happiness in an uncertain world.

In contrast to Mendes whose Empire Of Light is his second solo screenplay, this is Baumbach’s first film out of 11 that he’s directed that’s not based on his own original story. Billed as a comedy-drama-horror on IMDb, it’s based on Don DeLillo‘s 1985 novel of the same name.

Per Wiki, in the novel, White Noise is written in the first person through the eyes of Driver’s character, Jack Gladney, a middle-aged college professor in, get this, Hitler studies, who’s overly concerned with the inevitability of death. Gladney has been married five times to four women and rears a bunch of children and stepchildren with his current wife, Babette.

The movie also stars Don Cheadle as a science professor, a colleague of Driver’s character. Baumbach’s real-life wife and writing partner Greta Gerwig plays Driver’s wife in the movie. The dynamic duo have been collaborating quite a bit as Baumbach is the co-writer of the much-anticipated Barbie movie that Gerwig is directing. The rest of the cast include André Benjamin, Lars Eidinger, and Jodie Turner-Smith.

It’s fun to see Driver plays another quirky character, he’s just so good at playing idiosyncratic guys. After three movies back-to-back last year where each of his characters has a glorious mane, it’s time for bad-hair-day-Driver… no matter, he still looks pretty hot to me anyway 😍

The horror part could be when a cataclysmic train accident casts chemical waste over his town that prompts an evacuation. The trailer looks like a black comedy and I trust that with Baumbach adapting, it’ll be well-written. The movie premieres next weekend, August 31 at Venice International Film Festival, then a month later at New York Film Festival. Not sure yet when it’ll drop on Netflix, but I can hardly wait!!

What do you think of these two teaser trailers?

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