Nicholas Cage has spent the better part of the last decade making a bid to become the next Kevin Bacon. In other words, he seems to be in every single film that comes out, for better or for worse. That said, don’t let his ubiquitousness fool you — he is still a very talented man and the sort of magnetic volatility that has become his trademark is out in full force in the latest trailer for his newest film: The Trust.
As reported by ScreenCrush, Cage and Elijah Wood play a pair of cops who discover a mysterious bank vault while investigating a drug invasion. Seduced by the prospect of a big score, the duo sets out on what appears to be one of the more hapless heists of all-time.
Though on paper, these two actors may seem less than compatible, Wood’s water and Cage’s oil blend together quite nicely in the trailer, and this darkly comedic romp through Vegas’ seedy underworld seems like loads of fun.
Most of the laughs here are drawn from the fact that Elijah Wood excels at playing perpetually uncomfortable characters and Nicholas Cage excels at playing the sort of character that makes other characters uncomfortable. Case in point, the exchange that takes place at 0:28.
Wood: “So, what do you want to do? You want me to rob a drug dealer for you?”
Cage: “Rob a drug dealer!? (laughs) … ummm … ”
In fact, that’s exactly what Jim Stone (Cage) wants David Waters (Wood) to do, and when you see how the latter bumbles his way through an attempt to stop a receptionist from making a call at 0:47, you can understand his reluctance to go along with the plan.
With a relatively small $9 million budget and a pair of relative rookies at the helm (Alex and Benjamin Brewer) there’s still a possibility that this could be a clunker — but color us intrigued by what we’ve seen so far.
The film will be screened at the South by Southwest Film Festival on March 13, 2016 and will release in the U.K. on May 27. For the time being, its U.S. theatrical release is TBD.
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?