The Suicide Squad Fight a Starfish; Meet the New Snow White; Transformers Again

Lots of Suicide Squad and Snow White and Transformers and comic books and Disney in today’s Movie News Rundown. With a wonderful song at the end.

Loki Influences: Michael Waldron, the show’s head writer, describes his influences for its look, particularly the stylized bureaucracy of the Time Variance Authority, which he envisioned as Mad Men meets Blade Runner, in this IndieWire interview.

Now It Can Be Revealed: Of course the whole point of The Suicide Squad is going all-in on ridiculous villains. But the latest trailer shows how deeply committed writer-director James Gunn is to that worthy enterprise. To wit, the evil super starfish Starro seems to have a more prominent role than previously disclosed.

Haha What Could Be Sillier Than an Evil Starfish?: The new Transformers movie will involve… robot animals or something? We’ll let Variety try to explain. Look, Bumblebee was nice. The other five movies, not so much. Unfortunately this one seems designed to move away from the smaller, more human scale of Bumblebee, which I guess is to be expected, because CGI robots.

Okay, There Is One Other Thing: In this one Optimus Prime has a friend and confidante named Optimus Primal who “can transform into a massive gorilla and is the leader of the beast-like Maximals,” Variety dutifully explains.

I Wonder: If Starro told the truth about its height.

Creation Stories: Creation Records, the label crucial to the rise of bands including The Jesus and Mary Chain, My Bloody Valentine, Slowdive and Oasis, is the subject of the new film Creation Stories. Here’s Micah Khan’s interview with the film’s director, Nick Moran, and stars Jason Isaacs and Ewen Bremner.

Meet the New Snow White: Rachel Zegler, who plays Maria in Steven Spielberg’s upcoming West Side Story, has also been cast in Disney’s new live-action Snow White. Here is a thing she tweeted of herself and the original Snow White.

May I Editorialize: I feel a personal connection with this one because in sixth grade I was cast in an elementary school production of Snow White in the role of “stage hand” by a director who yelled at a bunch of my classmates: “Come on dancers — you look like you’re dead.”

Sarah Paulson Underwhelmed: The actress says she was “underwhelmed” by the American Horror Story: Roanoke season and regrets not asking executive producer Ryan Murphy for a pass. “As much as it’s my home, and I’ve loved it always, it was the first time I felt like I wish I could have gone to Ryan and said, ‘Please let me sit this one out,'” she said, according to this IndieWire transcription of her comments from The Hollywood Reporter‘s Awards Chatter podcast.

More Starfish: “Starfish and Coffee,” one of the best songs on one of the best Prince albums, Sign o’ the Times, was inexplicably left out of the concert movie of the same name. But Prince did once perform it with The Muppets, which is maybe better.