If you liked Mr. & Mrs. Smith, but wondered how it would play out if told from the neighbors’ perspective, you’re in luck!
Released earlier today, the first trailer for Keeping Up With the Joneses shows us what happens when two undercover government spies move in next to typical, mild-mannered suburbanites. Spoiler alert! It shakes things up just a bit.
Jon Hamm and Gal Gadot play the international persons of mystery, while Zach Galifianakis and Isla Fisher play the milquetoast plebs who are taken along for the ride. While the plot of this film will feel familiar to … anyone who has ever watched a Hollywood movie, it does look like this could be pretty fun.
The whole “exciting strangers come to town and shake up a couple’s banal existence” thing has been done and redone, but director Greg Mottola, who reinvigorated the coming-of-age comedy with Superbad, has a solid cast at his disposal for this one.
Highlights of the trailer (embedded above) include John Hamm speaking Chinese at 0:40, Galifianakis tranquilizing Fisher at the 1:33 mark (“Momma wants to cuddle”), and the courageous spousal abandonment that occurs at 1:52. Eventually, the hijinks gives way to the suggestion of something a bit more sinister afoot, as Hamm is forced to remind his new neighbors that once the trust is gone from a relationship “bad things can happen.”
This film will live or die on the chemistry of its warring couples and — at first blush — the principals seem to mix well. Jon Hamm’s smoldering handsomeness provides a nice yin to Galifianakis’ awkward yang, and Fisher feels convincing as the everywoman opposite the lithe and leggy Gadot.
Apart from its aforementioned headliners, Keeping up with the Joneses stars Patton Oswalt, Maribeth Monroe (Workaholics), and Matt Walsh (Veep). The film is due out in theaters October 21, 2016.
Stay tuned for further updates.
China just gave Hollywood a cautionary tale about AI filmmaking. Sanxingdui: Future Past, billed as the country's first fully AI-generated movie, hit theaters on October 23 and bombed at the box office.
According to Futurism, the film's reported $1.5 million production budget landed on more than 10,000 screens. Yet it pulled in only about $181,000, averaging roughly $20 per screen, making the budget difficult to recover.
Some of the best shots in Grok Imagine’s AI-made Odyssey don’t contain actors. Ancient landscapes stretch into the distance. Close-ups of grimy hands suggest people who have touched something rougher than a keyboard. For a few seconds, the illusion holds.
https://twitter.com/imagine/status/2113712964419063911
YouTube videos could soon look better without eating quite so much data, right? Thankfully, the platform plans to introduce a new video format called AV2 on its web player in early 2027, promising more efficient streaming and potentially fewer playback hiccups on slower internet connections. The big headline is a roughly 30% improvement in compression efficiency over AV1, YouTube's existing video format. That doesn't guarantee every video will use 30% less data, but it could make streaming a little easier on both internet connections and data allowances.
What is AV2, and why should viewers care?