​If you have seen the trailer for the new Joker film starring Joaquin Phoenix, you know it's not your average comic book film with the good guy swooping in to save the world. It is an in-depth character study about a depressed, lonely man who has trouble relating to people, especially to the women in his life who he dearly wants to impress. 
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The Joker has always been one of DC Comics most favourite villains, having been played multiple times by some of Hollywood's most legendary actors.  Jack Nicholson played him in the 90s. Mark Hamill voiced him in the illustrated version. Health Ledger took him to a whole new level in the Christopher Nolan Batman series. How will Joaquin Phoenix's version stack up against all these past performances? Well, the film is all the buzz at this years' Toronto International Film Festival and there is talk that Phoenix will earn an Oscar nomination. 

In the past, the Joker had no origin story.  According to some versions, Joker is a failed clown who just had a bad run of things but he really has no history. Director Todd Phillips origin movie attempts to correct this but this has led to quite a diverse opinion and even controversy on social media.

With the Toronto Film Festival wrapping up, the film industry is looking at ramping up their Oscar campaigns in the industry's biggest night of the year.  As hardcore film buff knows, it takes a lot of hard work to win an Oscar. However, what you may not know is that it also takes an incredible amount of money -- and I mean a LOT of money -- to run one of these campaigns. In fact, sometimes, the price of winning is more than a film's budget.
 
How Much Does It Cost To Win A Oscar?
 Securing an Academy Award isn't cheap. The best picture, best director, best actor and actress, and best support actor and actress are the five most prestigious categories and can add a significant boost to their box office draw.  Studios usually spend anywhere between $3 million and $10 million to try to secure votes for Best Picture – and that’s just one category. That’s a lot of money for a statue.
 
Why Does It Cost So Much?
In the perfect world, an Oscar-nominated movie would win an Academy Award based solely on its artistic merit. But of course, human psychology comes into play and film studios aren't afraid to go out to promote their films and feed large egos. 
Some estimates for the total amount Hollywood studios spends on Oscar campaigns range between $100 million right up to $500 million in a single year.  That's a lot of money, you might say, so how is it spent?
 

​By now, I'm sure that you've seen the latest Star Wars trailer, Rise of Skywalker. It starts off by recapping the saga that started all the way back in 1977 (as if you needed a recap but it was cool and nostalgic anyways.)

While the JJ Abrams Star War films have satisfied an itch that needed scratching, it has not lived up to the insane hype. It's not an easy task but most fans were expecting a little more from the films. A more original plot, better character development and more action. However, having said all that, with the final installment insight, it's hard not to be excited after seeing the trailer. There is so much to discuss, so much that is unknown but the only real question fans should be asking is does the final film live up to expectations? Will it compensate for all that is missing in the first two fims?
The Star Wars 9 trailer is teasing the return of an old villain. How exactly Emperor Palpatine is back, considering he was presumably killed in Return of the Jedi, and whether he will face off against Rey, remains to be seen. A rumour is circling the internet that Palpatine transfers his soul to Darth Vader's helmet. While many fans might dismiss this rumour, there is some Star Wars lore that back ups the theory. 

 Alongside that, the fans are wondering how the franchise will send off Princess Leia. Plus, there's the small matter of new characters appearing alongside popular characters like Luke and C-3PO.
Thanks to Lucasfilm wrapping the movie in a cloud of mystery, there's plenty to speculate about, too. The most recent trailer adds more backstory to the previous teaser and more reveal about the actual storyline, which is to be expected. C3PO with sinister red eyes, epic space battles, yes, and double-edged lightsabers add to the excitement and intrigue. We also see Kylo Ren and Rey fighting the fight of light and dark on what appears to be a sinking Imperial battleship. That will be cool. For the rest, we'll have to wait until closer to that December 20th launch date.

While this won't be the last Star Wars film, it will probably be the last that has a majority of our favourite characters playing major roles. And because that is the case, it is an important milestone in the Star Wars films.By now, I'm sure that you've seen the latest Star Wars trailer, Rise of Skywalker. It starts off by recapping the saga that started all the way back in 1977 (as if you needed a recap but it was cool and nostalgic anyways.)

While the JJ Abrams Star War films have satisfied an itch that needed scratching, it has definitely not lived up to the insane hype. It's not an easy task but most fans were expecting a little more from the films. A more original plot, better character development and more action. However, having said all that, with the final installment insight, it's hard not to be excited after seeing the trailer. There is so much to discuss, so much that is unknown but the only real question fans should be asking is does the final film live up to expectations? Will it compensate for all that is missing in the first two films?

The Star Wars 9 trailer is teasing the return of an old villain. How exactly Emperor Palpatine is back, considering he was presumably killed in Return of the Jedi, and whether he will face off against Rey, remains to be seen.

 Alongside that, the fans are wondering how the franchise will send off Princess Leia. Plus, there's the small matter of new characters appearing alongside popular characters like Luke and C-3PO.
Thanks to Lucasfilm wrapping the movie in a cloud of mystery, there's plenty to speculate about, too. The most recent trailer adds more backstory to the previous teaser and more reveal about the actual storyline, which is to be expected. C3PO with sinister red eyes, epic space battles, yes, and double-edged lightsabers add to the excitement and intrigue. We also see Kylo Ren and Rey fighting the fight of light and dark on what appears to be a sinking Imperial battleship. That will be cool. For the rest, we'll have to wait until closer to that December 20th launch date.

While this won't be the last Star Wars film, it will probably be the last that has a majority of our favourite characters playing major roles. And because that is the case, it is an important milestone in the Star Wars films.

Keanu Reeves star keeps rising. For someone who doesn’t seem much like your typical action star, he is fresh off the hit franchise John Wick which has green lit the fourth Matrix film. The third John Wicks movie made more than $320m worldwide.

Lana Wachowski, who created the franchise with her sister Lilly, will also return as director, along with Carrie-Ann Moss. The new script is co-written by Wachowski with sci-fi novelists Aleksandar Hemon and David Mitchell who wrote Cloud Atlas which was also made into a Wachowski film.

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the first Matrix film, which told the story of computer hacker Neo and his discovery  the world was in fact a computer generated reality. It was a surprise hit, making more than $460 million worldwide and launching two sequels, The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions. The franchise which set a new bar in special effects made more than $1.6 billion. 

Rumours of a new film have been circulating since 2017, with Michael B Jordan tapped as the lead. Plot details are currently unknown, as is how the role of Morpheus will be handled, originally played by Laurence Fishburne. Some sources say the role may be recast for a younger actor.

Since the original trilogy, the Wachowskis have had a number of commercial disappointments, including Speed Racer, Cloud Atlas and Jupiter Ascending.  Their Netflix show Sense8 was cancelled after just two seasons

So how will Matrix 4 fair with the hardcore fans? If we look at other popular franchises such as Diehard, Toy Story, Rambo, and Indian Jones, some of them did well at the box office, but most of the fans felt they were lackluster attempts at best. By the fourth film the magic is gone. While Matrx Reloaded and Matrix Revolution did alright at the box office, for the fans they were generally disappointed. Matrix entered into popular culture and still 20 years later it's still referenced both on television and in casual conversation -- a rarity for any film. Why mess with a good thing? 
 

These days, you can’t just sit back and wait for the network to do all the marketing and sales for you. The landscape is just too competitive with too many shows out there jostling for attention. You need to take matters into your own hands as producer Anders Tangen did with his satire ‘Norsemen’.

Knowing it would get lost in the hours upon hours of programming, Tangen launched his own marketing campaign. When Tangen sold Norsemen to Netflix a couple years ago, he knew he had a winning show. It is a period comedy about Vikings but with modern day issues – first world problems, if you will. One chieftain apologizes for his "fear-based leadership style," another hires a slave as his "creative director"

Although the show was well received by audiences, there was a problem. With so many shows on Netflix, its U.S. service alone has 1,700-plus TV series,  how would a Norwegian Viking comedy get noticed, especially when Netflix doesn't traditionally provide a marketing push for acquisitions?

The key to landing on Netflix's radar, Tangen knew, would be to hack the recommendation algorithm so it would appear as a suggested viewing for people searching for new shows to watch. The idea was to get enough people interested in the show early and then get Netflix's advanced recommended engine to leverage that early momentum.

Netflix had given Tangen a date for the premiere of Norsemen in its English-language territories. Three weeks before launch, he set up a Facebook advertising campaign, paying for targeted posts and Facebook promotions. The post were fairly straightforward — most included one of six 20- to 25-second clips of the show and a link, either to the show's webpage or to media coverage.
They used A/B testing — showing two versions of a campaign to different audiences and selecting the most successful — to fine-tune. The U.S. campaign cost around $18,500, which Tangen and his production partners put up themselves. Tangen focused the initial campaign in and around major U.S. cities including L.A., New York, Miami, Chicago with additional pushes in three states with large ethnic Norwegian populations. He broke potential Norsemen fans down into seven separate target groups, with each getting its own tailored Facebook campaign.

In just a month, the Norsemen campaign reached 5.5 million Facebook users, generating 2 million video views and some 6,000 followers for the show. Netflix noticed and its algorithm  started to kick in. Fans who had become aware of the show through Tangen's campaign began recommending it to their friends. Norsemen started appearing on Netflix's recommendation list.  Tangen invested a further $15,000 to promote the show on Facebook worldwide, using what he had learned during the initial U.S. campaign.

When Norsemen came up for a season two renewal, Netflix upped its commitment, making the show a "Netflix Original," meaning more in-house marketing. Season 3 is currently in production and will go out on Netflix worldwide next year. While it might take awhile for Tangen and his producers to recoup their $33,000 back, but it has certainly helped Norsemen and Tangen’s career.
 
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​India is known for their fantastical Bollywood movies where there is drama, romance, singing and dancing– a LOT of singing and dancing. But Indian cinema has matured over the years with more realistic storytelling and branching to other genres like thrillers, mysteries – and now science fiction.

In 2014, India sent the Mars Orbiter Mission into space, and became the first country to send a satellite to orbit the Red Plant. The patriotic feeling that followed the Mars mission has fuelled the latest example of Indian space cinema: Mission Mangal, a fictionalized account of the Orbiter Mission, starring and produced by Bollywood actor Akshay Kumar.

Contrary to most Indian films, Kumar, one of the highest-paid actors in the world, says he had long wanted to work with the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) to bring realism and science to the big screen.

Sci-fi isn’t a new genre in Indian cinema — Kaadu was made in 1952, which was a Tamil-American co-production, and is often considered the kickoff to Indian Science Fiction filmmaking, it has nothing like the profile it has in the United States. It only established itself after the country opened up its economy, allowing the entry of satellite channels and foreign movies, as well as studios such as Disney and Warner into Bollywood production. Before then, what little there was consisted mostly of low-budget fare involving superheroes.

While Hollywood has a long tradition of making more naturalistic films about space travel – from 2001: A Space Odyssey, Blade Runner and, of course, Star Wars– it’s only now, with the enormous strides in India’s own space exploration, that such films are beginning to resonate with moviegoers.

Another key factor over the last decade has been the boom in India’s visual effects industry – to which Hollywood outsources much of its own special effects – that has enabled higher quality film-making. While the popular Koi … Mil Gaya looked like a bad 80s TV show, it received the National Film Award for Best Film on Other Social Issues, and was screened at the Jerusalem Film Festival and the NatFilm Festival in Denmark. The film garnered the Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor. It also started a superhero franchise. The fourth instalment is released next year, and each film has exhibited a giant step forward in Bollywood’s use of CGI.
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While India might still have a long way to go to catch up to Hollywood, with some high profile space missions, sci-fi is set to become a milestone in Indian cinema.  

Just in case you were wondering, there are some major spoiler alerts in this post so you may not want to read it if you haven’t seen writer-director Quentin Tarantino's new movie “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.”

But first before we dive into it, it’s agreed upon by almost all the critics that this is Tarantino’s masterpiece. It is maybe even better than (gasp) “Pulp Fiction” or “Reservoir Dogs.” (Although probably not as quotable.) So if you haven’t seen it, what are you waiting for? Stop reading and order yourself a ticket.

This film is a dreamy, idealized ode to Old Time Hollywood. The film revolves around Rick Dalton played by Leonardo DiCaprio as an actor who is past his prime. In the late fifties and early sixties, he was the star of a TV Western series called “Bounty Law,” but is now struggling to find roles, always playing the heavy, never the lead role. He is an alcoholic and spends his days wandering from his house on Cielo Drive to studios for the occasional day of filming and to various bars, driven around by his stunt man, Cliff Booth played by Brad Pitt. Cliff too is in decline after he was arrested for murdering his wife, but never convicted.  (Whether he actually killed her or not, we never really get to know.) Margot Robbie plays Sharon Tate, the best known victim of the Manson family. She hardly speaks throughout the film, but does dance and walk around Los Angeles, a lot in slow motion.

The ending is true Tarantino style, albeit slightly re-writing to depart reality. The film takes a notorious bit of Hollywood history and turns it on its head in graphic and brutal fashion. While most of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is relatively violence-free, the ending takes a very brutal turn. You see what happens to the Manson Family members after they take a disliking to Leonardo DiCaprio when he screams and yells at them to get off his road.
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The Manson family decide to go after him instead of Sharon Tate. Needless, to say things don't go well for the Manson family members. (Come on, nobody bests Leo or Brad.) Brad Pitt sets his dog on them and Leonardo DiCaprio finishes one of them off with a flamethrower. While this has angered some history buffs who like this sort of things to stick to reality, however, I don’t think most people will be too sorry to see the Manson family get what was coming to them. 

The space race is filled with so many amazing real-life stories of courage, valour, and danger, it’s no wonder that so many amazing films have been made out of the moon landing and the events surrounding it. Just recently we celebrated the 50th anniversary of the moon landing so we put together some of our favourite films that celebrate space exploration.
 
 
Moon
Duncan Jones directed this brilliant 2009 film which is from screenplay writer Nathan Parker. In a genre where special effects and amazing shots are the norm.  However, “Moon” shines for having been made on a shoestring budget. It’s a one-man show, though not necessarily a one-character show, in which Sam Rockwell gives a brilliant performance as an astronaut, Sam Bell, who’s near the end of a three-year tour of solitary duty on the moon.
The story starts as Sam Bell is supervising machines that mine helium for fusion power on Earth. Suddenly, however, he falls sick, and discovers, to his surprise, he’s not alone. Another Sam Bell has appeared, an apparent clone who insists very convincingly, that he isn’t a clone at all and that the original Sam Bell is the real clone.

 
First Man
“First Man” is a biopic story of the first man to walk on the moon, Neil Armstrong, an intensely private man.  The story behind Damien Chazelle’s film was to tell the story of mankind’s boldest adventure but telling it through an emotionally closed-off hero, Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon. The casting is ideal as Ryan Gosling plays Neil Armstrong (only that Gosling is Canadian not American), as an extremely brilliant problem solving engineer. The film is ultimately not about the trip to the moon but instead about human experience and the emotional cost all those who were involved in the voyage.
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A Trip to the Moon
The famous French filmmaker Georges Méliès made this film in the world’s first movie studio, a greenhouse-like structure that he built in a Paris suburb. As we watch the nine-minute trailblazer now, 117 years later, the science is a little bizarre  and silly for a modern audience. Six astronomers, wearing coats and carrying umbrellas to protect them from the gamma rays, climb into a shell which is shot by a giant cannon. The shell is rocked forwarded and hits the man in the moon smack in the eye. This is, of course, one of films most astounding and memorable scenes that is still recognizable by today's audiences.
 
 
 
Apollo 13
This is definitely one of the best space films of all time, only to be rivalled by Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. The film follows the story of the space disaster that befell three American astronauts on their way to a lunar landing in 1970. Directed by Ron Howard, the script is brilliant written by William Broyles Jr. and Al Reinert, as the perfect American story of heroism and bravery. Very rare is a film this perfect –from acting, lighting, camera work to direction. While the story is fairly well known, it brought a new understanding to the entire real life drama. 

While Daniel Craig is set to reprise his role as James Bond in the 25th Bond film, the franchise is set for a shake-up, with reports that British actor Lashana Lynch of Capital Marvel fame, has been cast as 007. Originally from London, Lynch, made her film debut in the film Fast Girls and has gone to make a name for herself in the Marvel Universe.
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As the scene is reported to play out in the new Bond film, James Bond is taken into the M16 office where he meets the new 007, not the new Bond, but the new holder of the licence to kill alias,  a black woman named Nomi, played by Lynch.
This is a daring move for a film franchise that has largely relied on plot formulas to make money both with on-screen sponsorship and box office tickets. The big question is will people take to a female James Bond? So far the reaction has been positive on social media where the producers have been praised for taking Bond out of the dark ages.

There has been much debate over the years whether Craig’s successor could be female, or a person of colour – or both. Executive producer, Barbara Broccoli whose father, Albert R Broccoli chaperoned the franchise since its inception, said in an interview last year that Bond was created male and she intended to keep it that way. What it was that changed her mind is anybody’s guess at this moment as its’ still tightly under raps.

Lynch’s appointment signals major progress for a franchise that has for a long time felt behind the times. Up until this point, the role of the world’s greatest secret agent has been played exclusively by white men. But it sounds like in Bond 25, the classic character will have to wrangle with the #MeToo movement.

Even the current James Bond, Daniel Craig, has acknowledged that Bond’s misogyny is out of touch. The first in the Daniel Craig era, 2006 Casino Royale, ultimately amounts to an origin story for Bond’s misogyny: He softens when he falls in love with Vesper, only to be betrayed. As a result, he reverts to his previous state as an emotionless, untrusting secret agent. It’s not just that Bond is bitter toward humanity, but toward women in particular, who, he calculates, make him weak.

What has changed in the 13 years since Casino Royale? While the setting may be 2019, but Bond is still very much a man of the 1950s. Casino Royale is a brilliant film exactly because it offers the personal backstory to Bond’s misdirected hatred towards women — though the audience shouldn’t take it as a justification for his behavior.
This is a Bond for the modern era who will hopefully appeal to a younger generation while sticking true to what we all expect in a Bond film such as spectacular chase sequences and fights, and Bond is still Bond just in female in form.