Hitting Screens, Week of
September 12

Tom Hanks’s turn as Sully in Clint Eastwood’s movie about the hero pilot  is scoring with audiences, based on today’s box office. The tie-in continues on best seller lists, enjoying the promotion from the movie’s advance publicity.

Also doing well is the series Queen Sugar on Oprah’s OWN channel. It’s two-night premiere was a ratings high for the network. The novel it is based on,  Queen Sugar by Natalie Baszile (Penguin/Pamela Dorman;see our chat with the author just prior to the book’s publication), has also been rising on Amazon’s sales rankings.

MV5BMjQyMTI0MjIyOV5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTgwMzEyMjQ1ODE@._V1_SY1000_CR0,0,675,1000_AL_Opening on Sept 16 is Bridget Jones’s Baby, the third in the franchise based on Helen Fielding;s character.

Renée Zellweger and Colin Firth reprise their roles as Bridget Jones and Mark Darcy and Patrick Dempsey stars a dishy American love interest. Emma Thompson features in the new role as Bridget’s ob-gyn.

Fielding, along with Thompson and David Nicholls wrote the script.

The producers unsurprisingly feel that, fifteen years after the first film in the series arrived and ten years after the most recent one, viewers might need a refresher course. To help that cause they have made an orientation featurette:

9781524732400_72a9bNever published as a novel, the tie-in will come out after the film premieres, Bridget Jones’s Baby (PRH/Knopf, Oct. 11, 2016; RH Audio/BOT), presumable to avoid spilling the beans on who fathered Bridget’s baby.

It may not matter if viewers remember the earlier movies. Placing it at #1 on their “Must List” for the week, Entertainment Weekly asserts, “it’s the rom-com romp fans have been waiting for.”

Below is the full trailer:

MV5BMTg2MzYzNzgzOF5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTgwOTg4NzQ4OTE@._V1_SY1000_CR0,0,641,1000_AL_Also opening on the 16th is Oliver Stone’s Snowden. Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and Shailene Woodley, Melissa Leo, Zachary Quinto, Tom Wilkinson, and Timothy Olyphant also star.

9781101972250_8a27aAccording to Variety, Stone co-wrote the screenplay with with Kieran Fitzgerald and based it on Luke Harding’s nonfiction account The Snowden Files (Movie Tie In Edition): The Inside Story of the World’s Most Wanted Man (PRH/Vintage; RH Audio/BOT; OverDrive Sample) and the novel Time of the Octopus, Anatoly Kucherena (Glagoslav Publications. Note: Kucherena is Snowden’s Russian lawyer).

That fictional account is not yet published in the US, but The Hollywood Reporter quotes Stone as describing the book as

a ‘grand inquisitor’-style Russian novel weighing the soul of his fictional whistle-blower, Joshua Cold, against the gravity of a 1984 tyranny that has achieved global proportions. His meditations on the meaning of totalitarian power in the 21st century make for a chilling, prescient horror story.”

The director has visited Snowden in Russia and shown him the film. For his part, Snowden says “it’s pretty on the money.”

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