Are we going to pretend like I didn’t totally forget to do a preview for September and that this isn’t a week late? Yes we are!
October 5
Butter
It’s a political allegory centered on small-town politics and amateur butter carving starring Jennifer Garner, Ashley Greene (the Twilight franchise) and Olivia Wilde (professional box office curse). I don’t even know how this movie got made.
Limited
Escape Fire: The Fight to Rescue American Healthcare
This documentary about the American healthcare system is being billed as a more investigatory, less manipulated account of the state of US healthcare than Michael Moore’s Sicko, and while it does look interesting and well done, without that kind of fire-brand rhetoric, it won’t reach nearly the same scope of audience as Sicko did. Which is too bad, because we really do need to have more informed, rational discussions about healthcare. This is already queued up in my Netflix.
I think “fall” is a little misleading. It’s winter now. I should say “winter movie preview”. I should, but I won’t. Yeah, I’m a rebel like that.
December 2
A Warrior’s Heart
Twilight’s Kellan Lutz and Ashley Greene star in this movie about the healing powers of lacrosse.
And that pretty much tells you everything you need to know.
Answers to Nothing
Historically, Dane Cook starring in movies doesn’t go well. Dane Cook starring in dramatic movies has a tendency to end in disaster (see also: Mr. Brooks). Answers to Nothing follows the week in the lives of a bunch of people surrounding a child abduction case. Sounds like a heartwarming holiday tale for the whole family. At least this movie has Zach Gilford (Friday Night Light’s Saracen) going for it.
Coriolanus
Ralph Fiennes makes his directorial debut with one of Shakespeare’s densest texts. He also stars at the titular Coriolanus, a Roman general attempting to run for political office. Fiennes is good and everything, but the real surprise is Gerard Butler’s surprisingly restrained work as Coriolanus’ antagonist. Although GERARD BUTLER, OSCAR NOMINEE will not be happening, which is a shame as that would have been hella entertaining.
Opens in New York and LA only for one week Oscar-qualifying run.
The Lady
Luc Besson returns to serious filmmaking for the first time since 1994’s The Professional (I liked The Fifth Element, too, but let’s not pretend like that was serious filmmaking) with The Lady, the story of pro-democracy Burmese activist Aung San Suu Kyi (Michelle Yeoh, Memoirs of a Geisha, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) and her husband, Michael Aris (David Thewlis, Harry Potter’s Lupin). While Yeoh has been getting good notice for her work on the festival circuit, reviews for the movie are mixed.
Opens in Los Angeles only for its Oscar-qualifying run.
Outrage
Written, directed by and starring Takeshi Kitano (Kikujiro), Outrage is about warring Yakuza clans. The escalating violence revolves around a betrayal and it’s a very stylish effort from Kitano. He’s one of Japan’s most interesting directors and Outrage has been very well received all over the world. Kitano is currently shooting the sequel.
Shame
The Fassbender reteams with his Hunger director, artist Steve McQueen, as Brandon, an urbane Manhattanite struggling with sex addiction. Brandon’s life veers out of his control upon the arrival of his sister, Sissy (Carey Mulligan), who has issues of her own. Word has been really good for Shame and everyone involved, particularly The Fassbender, who stands to earn his first Oscar nomination. As sexy as it sounds on paper—The Fassbender starring in a movie about sex and featuring a lot of sex—based off Hunger, I’d say that Shame is likely to be the unsexiest movie about sex ever made. Still, this is one of my must-sees for the month. As good as The Fassbender is, he’s even better when working with McQueen.
This movie has gotten some of the worst reviews of the year. Pretty much everyone agrees that it’s a pretentious, self-indulgent mess about forty-something white dudes indulging themselves during a vacation at Big Sur. It does star Rob Lowe, though, who is so handsome and unchanged that I’m convinced he’s got a gross rotting portrait of himself stashed in an attic somewhere.
New Year’s Eve
“It’s a disastrously conceived and hellaciously executed soul-sucking shit pile of a movie!”
– Sarah, Cinesnark
There you go, movie publicists. That one’s a freebie.
The Sitter
I know Jonah Hill tops the shit list for a lot of you, but the dude hasn’t worn out his welcome with me (despite being something of a little bitch in real life). And this is the last time we’ll see Fat Jonah in a movie! After this it’s Increasingly Skinny Jonah then we’ll see Wow He Really Lost A Lot Of Weight Jonah and finally we’ll have Someone Stop Him From Doing Any More Blow Before He Disappears Jonah. No, let’s be fair. Jonah Hill wasn’t the one who used the blow diet to lose weight. I do want to talk about how Jonah started losing weight after working with Brad Pitt on Moneyball. What is it about Pitt that makes everyone around him get so damn skinny?
The Sitter looks stupid but funny and will be much-needed comic relief amidst all the Very Serious Award Films of the month.
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
A movie made by grown-up adults, for grown-up adults. One of my very favorite of the year.
W.E.
W.E. is to Madonna’s directing as Swept Away is to Madonna’s acting.
Madonna brings us this biopic of Wallis Simpson and Edward VIII—she also co-wrote the script—and it looks like a mess. A lavishly made mess, but a mess nonetheless. And the revisionist history borders on offensive, given the very intentional glossing-over of Simpson and Edward’s Nazi sympathies. Andrea Riseborough (Made in Dagenham) is getting good notice as Simpson, but Madonna and this movie have earned boos everywhere it’s screened.
Opens in New York and LA only.
We Need to Talk About Kevin
Everybody’s favorite alien, Tilda Swinton, stars in Lynne Ramsey’s (Ratcatcher) adaptation of Lionel Shriver’s eponymous novel about the emotional aftermath a mother deals with when her son goes on a high school killing spree. Swinton has been getting rave reviews all year and is a likely Oscar nominee, but I can’t do these kinds of movies. High school shootings are just not something I’m interested in seeing recreated on screen, even if a strong performance by Swinton is involved. At least we have Her Weirdness out and about on the publicity trail in support of this movie.
Opens in New York and LA only for one week Oscar-qualifying run.
Young Adult
I want Charlize Theron to adopt me. Not to be her child or anything, but to be her little sister. In my mind, Charlize is like an older sister who was old enough when you were born to be completely disgusted by your mere existence and who totally ignored you throughout childhood, unless it was to deliver some self-esteem-wrecking bit of bitchery that destroyed all your family holidays growing up. Then, when you finally hit your late teens and think your big sister will come around and be your friend finally, she sleeps with your college boyfriend and tells you how terrible he was in the sack and how you should hold out for something better. Except she says all this in front of all your cousins and aunts and uncles and it’s so mortifying you claim to have bird flu for three years to avoid seeing any of them ever again.
Charlize Theron is an alien* bitch goddess and I love her and she’s heaven. She’s my #1 lady crush right now, helped along by her current career resurgence after taking a break from Hollywood for a couple years. She’s getting super good buzz for Young Adult and a lot of analysts have her locked in for her third Oscar nomination.
Limited release, goes wide December 16.
*Charlize belongs to the alien race that has come to earth to enrich our genes by sharing their superior alien DNA with us (see also: Angelina Jolie). Not to be confused with Everybody’s Favorite Alien, Tilda Swinton, who is the queen of a dying alien race searching for a new home. She’s here to study us so her people can successfully acclimate to Earth but she’s failing to blend in.
December 16
Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chip-Wrecked
YOU GO TO HELL! YOU GO TO HELL AND YOU DIE!
Carnage
I’m not a huge fan of Roman Polanski. Legal drama/creepy sexual proclivities aside, his films have a habit of feeling dated really fast. The only movies of his I’ve really enjoyed are Chinatown and The Pianist, but Carnage looks like something I might dig. It’s adapted from Yasmina Reza’s play God of Carnage and follows two couples through a meeting as they try to hash out what to do with their children, who got into a fight at school. Basically it looks like one of those living-room dramas where everyone is a hilariously terrible person. Jodie Foster, John C. Reilly, Kate Winslet and Christoph Waltz star. I’m especially interested in Waltz, as he’s been cashing it in ever since Inglorious Basterds and it will be nice to see him in a role where he isn’t revisiting Colonel Landa.
Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows
I quite liked the first Sherlock movie, fueled mostly by the fun chemistry between Robert Downey, Jr. and Jude Law. Director Guy Ritchie’s stylized take on Holmes’ Victorian London provided some drool-worthy visuals and set pieces and the second entry in the franchise appears to be offering more of the same. It also adds Jared Harris (Mad Men) as Sherlock’s nemesis, Professor Moriarty, and the Original Lisbeth herself, Noomi Rapace, as some kind of fortune teller. Every time I see this trailer I end up transfixed by Rapace’s face. Goddamn, that’s a Face.
December 21
The Adventures of TinTin: Secret of the Unicorn
The mo-cap monsters have come for our souls. The day of reckoning is here. Do not look directly into their dead, hollow eyes, for that is how they rob you of your very being. Once captivated by a mo-cap monster you will be lost to a nightmare hellscape where everyone has gummy faces and empty eyes and no amount of visual effects can cover up the inherent creepiness of photo-realistic animation. Nothing can save you from the uncanny valley!
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
I’m not as bent out of shape about this movie as everyone else is. Given the success of the books, and the arthouse success of the Swedish films, it was inevitable that an English language version would be made so I was resigned to it all along. In such cases—when a remake that isn’t, strictly speaking, necessary gets made—all you can do is cross your fingers and hope for the best. From the looks of the trailer and the compiled early-release footage from the film, it looks like director David Fincher has crafted something interesting to watch. I already super love the Trent Reznor/Atticus Ross score (they won an Oscar for their Social Network score), and Rooney Mara looks like she’s taking Lisbeth in a willowier, more vulnerable direction than Noomi Rapace did. Which, given how powerful Rapace’s original performance was, going in a totally different direction is the best thing Mara could do. I’m willing to like the English-language remake of Dragon Tattoo.
Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol
Tom Cruise continues his sad descent into complete toolery with the fourth installment in the Mission: Impossible franchise. Yes, he’s very fit and he can swing off buildings, but he comes off as trying SO HARD that it’s kind of off-putting. Especially next to the effortless Jeremy Renner who, even in ten second increments, completely upstages Cruise. You know, Renner is a wee guy, too, and at forty he’s also past the first blush of his youth, yet he comes off as so much more cool and effortless than Cruise. Aww, poor Maverick. He’s lost that loving feeling.
December 23
Black Gold
A Prophet’s breakout star, Tahir Rahim, stars in this period drama about an Arabian prince with divided loyalties on the cusp of the Arab oil boom in the early 20th century. I’ve got this one stashed in my Netflix queue already—I want to see it, but I don’t feel a burning urge to get to it right away. Mark Strong and Freida Pinto* also star.
*Pinto is another of those aliens here to enrich our gene pool.
In the Land of Blood and Honey
Angelina Jolie makes her directorial debut, working off a script she also wrote (and, according to Brad, just HAD TO SHARE). There will be sharks in the water with this one, looking for Jolie to fail, but the trailer honestly looks pretty strong. The story revolves around lovers, one Serb, one Muslim Bosnian, during the onset of the Bosnian war in the 1990’s. It’s a tough subject matter and Jolie resisted the urge to people the project with her Hollywood friends, instead going for an Eastern European cast no one in the US will recognize (well, maybe some will recognize Rade Serbedzija). The movie is also in the Bosnian-Serb dialect with subtitles—Jolie did not make this easy on herself. A lot of people are going to want her to fail, but I’m always up for more talented female filmmakers with strong voices and interesting points of view. I just hope Blood and Honey doesn’t end up being preachy.
Pina
German director/documentarian Wim Wenders (Land of Plenty, Buena Vista Social Club) brought together dancers from the Tanztheater Wuppertal to make this tribute to the choreographer, Pina Bausch. You don’t necessarily have to be into dance to enjoy Pina, but it certainly helps. Intercut with the dance sequences are reflections from the dancers about Bausch, and Wenders uses 3D in a way that is considerably more interesting than its usual application. I wasn’t transported by it like many others have been, but it is a very pretty, dynamic dance film and a worthwhile tribute to a great choreographer.
New York and LA only.
We Bought a Zoo
Cameron Crowe needs to stop making movies about families in crisis after a death (see also: Elizabethtown) and go back to making movies about rock and roll. I can never hate on Crowe too much as he gave us Lloyd Dobler and Say Anything—and makes a big rebound with the documentary Pearl Jam 20—but first Elizabethtown and now Zoo seem to be indulging his worst traits as a filmmaker. The intentions in Zoo are good and the cast (Matt Damon, Elle Fanning, Scarlett Johansson, Eric Haden Church, Patrick Fugit, Colin Ford, Maggie Elizabeth Jones) works well together, but this is a bloated carcass of a movie. It’s not nearly as horrible as Elizabethtown, but that’s down to Damon being capable of carrying a film where Orlando Bloom folded under the weight of his leading-man responsibilities. Zoo might make a decent film for a family to see over the holidays, especially if you’ve got kids, as there’s nothing objectionable in it and its purpose is to vomit sunshine and glitter at you constantly, but unless you’re towing children behind you, you can feel okay about skipping this.
December 25
The Darkest Hour
Emile “Horrid Twat” Hirsch stars in this Moscow-set thriller about aliens using our own power grid to take over the world and crush us like the ants we are (Dear Mother Alien Swinton: Please show mercy). Nothing else about this movie matters. Releasing a movie like this at Christmas might work out for Tom Cruise, but for this cast (which unfortunately includes the charming Olivia Thirlby), it’s a death sentence. I’m not seeing it, you’re not seeing it, no one is seeing it. Just see Attack the Block instead.
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
*Imaginary meeting in Paramount’s distribution department*
Sales rep: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is almost done, but it won’t be ready in time for a pre-Thanksgiving release.
Distribution exec: What? But it’s about 9/11 and it’s the tenth anniversary of 9/11! We NEED that movie to come out this year!
Marketing rep: We’re not really selling it as “the 9/11 movie” are we? I mean, it’s made by Stephen Daldry and it’s Jonathan Safran Foer’s book. And Tom Hanks and Sandra Bullock are in it, and people are already talking about Max von Sydow as a feel-good Oscar pick, and Thomas Horn is so precocious and cute. There’s so much more than 9/11…
Sales rep: I guess we can put a rush on Daldry to get it done.
Distribution exec: Yes, do that. Do whatever it takes regardless of any other issues. Just get it out this year!
Marketing rep: The window to release it so narrow, though.
Distribution exec: It’s Tom Hanks. Everyone loves Tom Hanks. Put it out on Christmas day.
Marketing rep: You want me to sell a movie about a kid whose dad dies in 9/11 as a family film for Christmas?
Distribution exec: Now you’re getting it!
Marketing rep: *weeps into hands*
Pariah
Writer/director Dee Rees makes her feature film debut with Pariah, and by all accounts, it’s a helluva coming out party (no pun intended). Pariah is the story of Alike (Adepero Oduye, Half Nelson), a teenager struggling to reconcile her sexual identity with that of her personas as daughter, friend, lover, and budding adult. Kim Wayans completely abandons her “shitty Wayans movies” roots in her turn as Alike’s judgmental mother, Audrey. Pariah has been getting crazy amazing reviews and Rees just took the Breakthrough Director Award at the Gotham Awards.
War Horse
Steven Spielberg brings us the tale of two young friends in war-torn Europe, during World War I. When the war comes to England, Albert and Joey are wrenched apart and Albert finds himself on a dangerous mission across Europe to find and reunite with Joey. The two will struggle against the odds and defy any who get in their way in order to be together again. It’s an epic story of love, loyalty and courage between a man and his…horse.
I’m sorry—I know War Horse is already receiving crazy accolades and it looks gorgeous, but c’mon with that advertising. Replace the horse with a person and you have a classic war time romance.
December 28
Albert Nobbs
I’m actually not sure that this is when Albert Nobbs is having its LA/NYC Oscar-qualifying run. I’ve seen it listed as December 21 and 28 and also not listed at all. So since there’s a mystery I am completely unwilling to unravel, we’re leaving it on December 28. It opens in January to general audiences, though. Anywho, this is Glenn Close’s cross-dressing movie in which she plays a woman in 19th century Ireland who masquerades as a man to work as a butler. Close’s performance has been getting strong reviews but the movie itself isn’t getting the same positive notice. Mia Wasikowska and that beautiful English boy who keeps knocking up his creepily older girlfriend, Aaron Johnson, also star.
December 30
The Iron Lady
Meryl Streep makes a bid for her nine millionth Oscar nomination as Margaret Thatcher, the steely English prime minister from the 1980’s. I love Meryl and I know she occupies a pretty well sacrosanct position in pop culture, but um…this looks like a lot of try, right? Kind of…cartoony, even. Remember when Hilary Swank made that bit of award bait, Amelia? It’s not that Swank sucked as Amelia Earheart, it’s that the movie around her was so obvious and awful that it didn’t matter whether or not she did a good job—the movie sucked. I’m thinking that The Iron Lady = Amelia.
New York and LA only.
A Separation
Iranian writer/director Asghar Farhadi has been getting rave reviews for A Separation all year. The story follows a husband and wife, Nader and Simin, who are separated because Simin (Leila Hatami) wants to leave Iran but Nader (Peyman Mooadi) wants to stay because of his ailing father. When Simin leaves Nader, he hires Razieh (Sareh Bayet) as a caretaker and things unravel from there. A Separation is supposed to be really good but it comes with a strong depression warning. Because it’s really, really depressing.
We’re getting into crunch time for award season. Releases are picking up throughout the month, including a behemoth mid-month that will suck up all the money.
November 4
Five Star Day
Cam Gigandet (Twilight) stars in this undoubtedly awful movie about a dude who gets a perfect horoscope on his birthday but it turns out his birthday sucks. So he sets off to find other people born on the same day and find out if their birthday sucked as bad as his did. I’ll go out on a limb and say he falls in love with whomever Jena Malone (Sucker Punch) plays. This movie kicked around the festival circuit for more than a year—never a good sign.
The Son of No One
Channing Tatum stars in this movie about a cop who goes back to patrol the neighborhood he grew up in and old secrets and family complications rear their ugly heads. Sounds like Justified. Like…exactly like Justified.
Tower Heist
Some people seem to think that Eddie Murphy is returning to the version of himself that we loved in the 1980’s, but I don’t know what is making anyone think that. This movie looks both stupid and bad. Brett “I boned Olivia Munn once and she’s bitter about it” Ratner directs Murphy, Ben Stiller, Matthew Broderick and Alan Alda in this revenge fantasy about stealing from a Wall Street type who ran off with everyone’s pension money. As terrible as this movie looks—and it looks pretty goddamn bad—I’m sure it will make a ton of money since all anyone wants to see these days is “regular” people (in what universe do uber-successful Murphy and Stiller represent normal people?) get revenge on rich assholes.
A Very Harold & Kumar Christmas
I have a hard time getting into the Harold & Kumar movies but I get that a lot of people dig it. I like both John Cho and Kal Penn and I usually find some of the bits funny, but overall these are not must-see movies for me. And I find it odd that it’s coming out so far in advance of Christmas. By the time the holidays roll around, the abundance of holiday releases will push it out of theaters. Makes me think the movie isn’t any good.
November 9
J. Edgar
Let’s make a bet. I bet that this movie is bad. Directed by Clint Eastwood, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Dame Judi Dench and It Boy Armie Hammer, this has “Oscar bait” stamped all over it. But that’s the thing about award bait. The harder you try to make an award-winner, the harder your movie is going to suck (see also: Amelia). Using that logic and throwing in the cheeseball old man makeup on DiCaprio and his terrible accent, I think this movie probably blows. Anyone want to take that bet?
November 11
The Bully Project
Documentarian Lee Hirsch (best known for doing campaign ads for President Obama) takes a look a peer-to-peer bullying amongst our youth and the lasting effects of that bullying. It sounds both necessary and depressing.
Immortals
Here’s another one you don’t need to be a genius to tell it sucks. When the first trailer came out months ago I said to a friend, “I think Tarsem Singh has lost his mind.” Nothing about Immortals thus far has made me think otherwise. Tarsem has, in the past, made movies with extraordinary visuals and mediocre stories but Immortals doesn’t have the same shiny Tarsem look to it. The colors are dank and depressing and Mickey Rourke’s vagina dentota helmet freaks me out. I will say this, though—I’ve never really gotten Henry Cavill, but seeing him run around shirtless in the Immortals ads, I’m beginning to get what everyone else goes on about.
Jack & Jill
Adam Sandler hates us. There is no other explanation.
Melancholia
Lars von Trier has gotten great notice for this film all year, so it’s too bad he made those comments about understanding Nazis at Cannes in May. He torpedoed any hope he had of award consideration. Lead actress Kirsten Dunst might be able to escape unscathed—she did win Best Actress at Cannes, after all—but I’m not sure Melancholia will reach a wide enough audience to get some traction. Dunst, Alexander Skarsgard, Keifer Sutherland and Charlotte Gainsbourg star in the story of a bride who is dealing with unresolved sibling issues on her wedding day. Oh, and there’s a planet that just emerged from space, ready to smash the Earth to smithereens. Von Trier is not my cup of tea—his films tend to be long, slow and shocking for no reason other than to shock us. Pointless shocking is the worst kind of shocking.
November 18
The Descendants
I saw this during the Chicago Film Festival and I LOVED it. It’s a bit more light and optimistic than director Alexander Payne’s previous movies, such as Sideways and About Schmidt, but I enjoyed the change in tone. George Clooney is great as a Matt, the patriarch of one of Hawaii’s founding haole families who is dealing with settling his family’s trust, discovering that his wife, who is in a coma, was cheating on him, and trying to reconnect with his daughters. Payne makes the most of his Hawaii settings and he draws out Clooney’s best performance since O Brother Where Art Thou? Clooney is an early favorite for Best Actor (he’ll have some competition from The Artist’s Jean Dujardin, though), and Payne is sure to score writing and directing nods, as well as a probable Best Picture nomination for his first film in seven years.
Happy Feet Two
Adorable dancing penguin Mumble (voice of Elijah Wood) is back, this time father of his own chick, Erik, who has to find his place in the flock. Herd? Whatever you call a bunch of penguins. Happy Feet was cute but it wasn’t groundbreaking animation or anything and I expect the sequel to be the same. Cute, but easily forgotten.
The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1
Either you’re totally stoked to see the penultimate entry into the Twilight Saga or you don’t give a shit. Director Bill Condon (Dreamgirls, Gods & Monsters, Kinsey) is a real showman with an eye for detail and it shows in the increased production values, but I’m not sure that will be enough to overcome the wretched source material—Breaking Dawn is the worst book in the series. I’m most worried about Bella’s wedding dress, though. On the one hand, it’s designed by Carolina Herrera so it shouldn’t be awful—no one understands constructing a dress for a woman’s body better than Herrera—but Stephenie Meyer, she of NO TASTE, was given a lot of input so I’m worried the dress will turn out to be a tacky horrorshow. Anyway, Breaking Dawn 1 will get all the money for November.
November 23
Arthur Christmas
Early word from the UK, where it premieres first, is that this is a brilliant film. James McAvoy voices Arthur, Santa’s son, and the movie shows us how exactly Santa does deliver all those presents in one night. The Santa family is comedically dysfunctional and Arthur ends up going on a secret mission. I wasn’t particularly interested in this until the UK reviews started coming in so glowingly, but I fear that the splashier Muppets will probably do in Arthur Christmas on this side of the pond.
The Artist
This movie is SO PRETENTIOUS. Like, if anyone other than French people made it they would be roasted as try-hards. But it is French, so everyone’s like, “This is the greatest movie ever made!” While The Artist is, technically speaking, a very good movie, it’s almost unbearably unwatchable in all its black and white, silent smuggery. French writer/director Michel Hazanavicius brings us the story of George Valentin, a silent film star who is gripped with fear and insecurity over the arrival of the “talkies”. Jean Dujardin is really good as George and if this movie weren’t so goddamn up its own ass, I would be all over that French fox Jean, but as it is I keep remembering how angry this pretentious movie made me and that ruins it.
I know I’m in the minority on this. People all over the world have been losing their shit over this movie since Cannes in May. I accept that everyone will disagree with me.
A Dangerous Method
The Fassbender stars with Viggo Mortensen and Keira Knightley in David Cronenberg’s take on the relationship between Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud, and Jung and a troubled patient, Sabina Spielrein. I’ve been hearing that Cronenberg really wants some mainstream acceptance but A Dangerous Method fell flat at TIFF and reviews have been mostly mediocre, so it falls to next year’s Cosmopolis to get Cronenberg that hit.
Hugo
Based on Brian Selznick’s The Invention of Hugo Cabret, Hugo is Martin Scorsese’s 3D homage to celluloid films, or so said all the film geeks after a “secret” screening at the New York Film Festival. I think this looks okay. The visuals are lovely and fanciful, which fits the story of an orphan boy who lives in a train station in Paris and discovers his father had been keeping a secret. The children are charming—Asa Butterfield (The Boy in the Striped Pajamas) and Chloe Grace Moretz (Let Me In, Kick-Ass) are both enjoyable young actors. The adult cast features Sacha Baron Cohen, Jude Law, Christopher Lee, Ray Winstone and Emily Mortimer, all of whom are also enjoyable. Though the movie looks very pretty, nothing about it screams, “Run out and see me immediately!”
The Muppets
Jason Segel’s labor of love, The Muppets brings the beloved characters into the 21st century. Some of the old guard from Henson’s company have recently come out against the movie, saying Segel didn’t respect the history of the Muppets because Fozzie tells a fart joke. The thing is, the Muppets have been stagnating for years (partly Disney’s fault), and what Segel has done is update the mythology and make it interesting and accessible to people today. There’s nothing wrong with that, especially if this movie is as good as some are saying and it gives us a reason to have Statler and Waldorf back in our lives. Amy Adams and pretty much all of Hollywood co-star.
My Week with Marilyn
Michelle Williams takes on the task of bringing Marilyn Monroe to life on screen and she’s at least halfway successful. Your appreciation for her performance will rest largely on your tolerance for Williams. My Week with Marilyn follows Monroe as she arrives in London to film The Prince and the Showgirl with Laurence Olivier (Kenneth Branagh) and the personality clash that ensues. Marilyn was ostensibly on her honeymoon with Arthur Miller (Dougray Scott, back from the dead) but she ends up spending time with Colin Clark (Eddie Redmayne), an assistant director on the film. Probably none of this really happened—the romance between Marilyn and Colin, anyway—but it’s a fetching story performed by an attractive, talented cast. Worth seeing eventually.
Rampart
In the 1990’s a corruption scandal rocked the anti-gang unit of the LAPD’s Rampart division. It’s a story made for the movies—widespread police corruption, the involvement of a hip-hop mogul (Suge Knight), and links to the murder of Notorious BIG. It was inevitable that someone would eventually get around to making a movie about it. Rampart focuses not on the tabloid aspect of the scandal, though, but on one of the crooked cops involved as he tries to balance his unraveling life. Woody Harrelson reteams with his The Messenger costar, Ben Foster, and director, Oren Moverman, in Moverman’s sophomore directorial effort. Harrelson, a much better actor than anyone really gives him credit for, is winning raves for his performance and has a slight chance of scoring his third Oscar nomination with this role.
October is something of a dichotomy. The commercial releases mostly look horrible but we’re beginning to get into the heavy award bait, so there are a lot of little gems coming to arthouses near you.
October 7
Blackthorn
This movie looks kind of terrible but it stars Sam Shepard (The Assassination of Jesse James), who is not only a good actor but is a great playwright. His taste is so good, that even if a movie he’s in looks bad, it’s usually good. Except Stealth. Sweet jesus why was he in Stealth? Blackthorn is about Butch Cassidy in his later years, on the lam in Bolivia, living under the alias “James Blackthorn”. I’ve never been a big Butch Cassidy/Sundance Kid fan, so this doesn’t sound very interesting to me.
Dirty Girl
I am telling you, one of these days Juno Temple (Wild Child, Atonement) is going to happen. Maybe next year, as she has a part in The Dark Knight Rises. Temple stars in Dirty Girl, a movie set in the 1980’s about a promiscuous teen that runs away, accompanied by a closeted gay classmate. It premiered at TIFF 2010 to largely bad reviews, which is why it’s just now coming out, over a year later. I like Temple a lot but I think I can live without seeing this movie.
The Human Centipede 2
These movies can get bent.
The Ides of March
George Clooney co-writes (along with his writing/producing partner Grant Heslov) and stars in his third directorial effort about a senator campaigning for a presidential nomination. I like Clooney as a director a lot, but I worry about Ides getting preachy, given the political subject matter and Clooney’s tendency toward smug. Though I’m sure I can overlook any smuggery because Clooney had the good sense to cast Ryan Gosling in the lead role. Sigh. The Gos is love. Philip Seymour Hoffman, Paul Giamatti, Marisa Tomei and Evan Rachel Wood also star.
Real Steel
Despite this movie being about robot boxing, it is not, in fact, the Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots movie. It is, however, the movie that killed the Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots movie (allegedly). Real Steel comes from Dreamworks, who is in partnership with Hasbro to turn games and toys into movies (like Transformers). Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots is owned by Mattel, who teamed up with director Wolfgang Petersen (Troy, Das Boot) to turn Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots into a movie. In the interest of preserving their corner of the “shitty toys make shitty movies” market, Dreamworks launched Real Steel into production, effectively killing Mattel’s Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots movie (allegedly). So, no, Real Steel isn’t the Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots movie, but it is a Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots movie. It stars Hugh Jackman and looks completely ridiculous.
Take Shelter
Expanding from New York and LA, Michael Shannon (The Runaways, Revolutionary Road) is earning high praise for his performance as a man who believes the apocalypse is nigh and pushes his family to the brink while preparing for the perceived end of the world. It looks tense and kind of creepy and has a psychological thriller vibe. Jessica Chastain also stars, because she’s in everything this year.
Texas Killing Fields
OH MY GOD JESSICA CHASTAIN AGAIN. She really is in everything this year. It’s a good thing she’s a good actress and I like her, and also that she tends to look quite different film-to-film, or else I’d probably be raising money to pay her to not work for a year because I’m sick of seeing her. Chastain costars along with a mannequin Sam Worthington (The Debt, Avatar) in this story about detectives in the bayous of Texas trying to solve a string of murders. Chloe Grace Moretz (Kick-Ass, Let Me In) and professional Javier Bardem impersonator Jeffrey Dean Morgan (The Losers, Supernatural) also star. At best, Worthington makes me uninterested in movies; at worst he actively repels me from them like he’s a case of DDT. Consider me repelled.
October 14
The Big Year
Do you guys follow Steve Martin on the Twitter? You should. He’s one of the few celebrities that are actually funny/entertaining in tweet form. He stars in The Big Year alongside Jack Black and Owen Wilson, which is a slightly weird combination, but I like them all individually so I might as well try and like them together. What? I do so like Jack Black! I like him when he’s being a grown up in grown-up movies, not when he’s doing his “poor man’s Adam Sandler” routine for kids in kiddie movies. I mean come on—Tropic Thunder? High Fidelity? Be Kind Rewind? Just focus on that and forget School of Rock and Year One. Anyway, The Big Year is about competitive bird-watching and it looks like it should be directed by Wes Anderson but it isn’t. Into the Netflix queue it goes.
Fireflies in the Garden
There’s no way this movie doesn’t suck. 1) It premiered in 2008 at the Berlinale and it is just now coming out, three years later. No good movie sits on a shelf for three years. 2) Julia Roberts is in it and I haven’t liked a single movie she’s made since 2007’s Charlie Wilson’s War. And 3) Ryan Reynolds has a beard in it, and no movie Reynolds makes with a beard is ever good (see also: Blade Trinity, The Amityville Horror).
Footloose
Surprisingly, this remake of the 1980’s classic high school dance flick has been getting good reviews. Directed by Craig Brewer (Hustle & Flow), I think this looks as cheesy and silly as the original, but then, dance movies aren’t really my bag (except for Center Stage, which I love) so it’s not like the original was really my thing to begin with. The new Footloose stars some people I’ve never heard of and the Dancing with the Stars twat that’s banging Ryan Seacrest. Nothing about that makes me think this is a good movie, despite the reviews, but I get that there are a lot of people that will enjoy the hell out of it. I do like the part of the trailer where they appear to be playing chicken with school buses.
The Skin I Live In
Tony Flags and writer/director Pedro Almodovar (Talk to Her, All About My Mother) reunite for this film about a plastic surgeon that develops an indestructible, synthetic skin after his wife dies from burns received in a car crash. He needs a human test subject for his new skin and that’s where things go pear-shaped, in typical Almodovarian fashion. I really love Almodovar’s work—he’s a real actor’s director and always brings great performances out of his cast—but I don’t always get to his movies right away. I’ll see this one, though. Eventually.
The Thing
A retroactive prequel-type-thing to John Carpenter’s 1980’s classic horror movie, also called The Thing, stars Mary Elizabeth Winstead (Scott Pilgrom vs. The World) and Joel Edgerton (Warrior) as scientists in Antarctica who battle an alien capable of mimicking whoever it comes into contact with. I’m not big on the original and I don’t care about this remake/prequel thingie, either.
Trespass
This also looks terrible. Trespass debuted to mostly negative reviews last month at TIFF and is about a home invasion in a wealthy community where things may not be quite what they seem. Yawn. The best part of this movie is the poster, which hilariously over-photoshopped stars Nicolas Cage and Nicole Kidman. Cage looks like a ventriloquist’s dummy.
October 21
Klitschko – Inside the Ropes
Klitschko might as well be called “the real life Warrior”—it’s a documentary about a pair of brothers, Vitali and Wladimir Klitschko, who are both boxing champions. I’m sure this a nice story and everything but I don’t like boxing at all and so this holds little interest for me.
Le Havre
This French import played to strong reviews at Cannes and TIFF. It’s about an artsy intellectual who gives up his literary dreams to work as a shoe shiner and has life upended by the arrival of an immigrant African child. Sounds cutesy and twee but the writer/director, Aki Kaurismaki, is notable for his use of deadpan humor and restrained filmmaking style. He has a knack for combining the silly and the sincere that’s worth watching at least once. I don’t feel a need to run right out and see Le Havre, but I’ll get to it before award season for sure.
Margin Call
Another boring procedural—this time masked as a “thriller—about the 2008 financial crisis comes down the pipe. Did you see HBO’s Too Big to Fail? A lot of good actors in that but good god it was interminable. There’s just nothing sexy or exciting about the financial meltdown. I don’t know about you, but I can’t ever care about any of these characters because I just get so fucking angry at everyone. I spent most of my time watching Too Big to Fail yelling, “Oh FUCK YOU, Bernanke!” at my TV. The trailer for Margin Call makes me similarly stabby so I might have to sit this one out in theaters and wait for a DVD I can scream at in peace. Paul Bettany, Zachary Quinto, Jeremy Irons, Kevin Spacey, Simon Baker, Aasif Mandvi, Stanley Tucci and Demi Moore star.
Martha Marcy May Marlene
I saw this movie a few weeks ago—it’s really, really good. Elizabeth Olsen is impressive as the titular Martha/Marcy May/Marlene, a young woman who gets sucked into a cult. The movie deals mostly with Martha’s attempt to reintegrate into the world after she flees the cult (a series of flashbacks unravels what lead her to leave), and Sarah Paulson (Deadwood) is equally good as Martha’s older sister, Lucy. Olsen and Paulson work really well together and with very little exposition and no backstory they do an excellent job portraying a long sibling history. John Hawkes (Winter’s Bone) is Patrick, the cult leader, and he is chilling. His presence looms large over a story he isn’t actually in much and the way he undercuts Martha’s confidence is frightening. This is a tough movie but it’s one of the best psychological thrillers I’ve seen a while.
Paranormal Activity 3
These movies trip me out. I believe in ghosts and poltergeists and stuff so this shit scares me for realsies. The third installment in the lucrative Paranormal Activity franchise goes back to the “beginning” to show us how all this mess started. Guess what? It’s the kids’ fault. They played “Bloody Mary” and actually summoned Bloody Mary who proceeds to wreak havoc on their house and home. I always hated “Bloody Mary”. I mean, I’m 99.999999% that it’s just a stupid game but I DO believe in ghosts (tell me your good ghost stories—I love collecting them), so on the 00.000001% chance it COULD work, why even tempt fate? Just don’t play “Bloody Mary”.
Retreat
Jamie Bell (Jane Eyre, Billy Elliot), Thandie Newton (2012) and Cillian Murphy (Batman Begins) star in this movie about a couple (Newton and Murphy) trying to reconcile after the death of their baby. Retreating to a remote Scottish Island, Kate and Martin are quickly stressed when their communications with the mainland fail. Then, after a storm, they find a man washed up on their shore who tells them that a mysterious disease is decimating Europe. I like all these people and I like plaguey plots, but Bell tends to be in the worst movies (see also: Jumper, The Eagle), so I am leery of anything he’s involved in.
The Three Musketeers 3D
This may be the worst movie ever made.
October 28
13
This is some shitty movie with Mickey Rourke and Jason Statham—always such arbiters of good taste—about the underground world of Russian roulette. So basically, Over the Top but instead of arm wrestling truck drivers it’s trigger happy gangsters. Sounds like a winner.
And They’re Off
You know, really, Lord of the Rings didn’t distinguish anyone’s career. Just look at Sean Astin—he was great as Frodo’s life partner Samwise, but here he is stuck in a budget-looking movie about horse racing. I love horses and everything, but Seabiscuit is the only really good horse racing movie I’ve seen. Well, and The Black Stallion, but it wasn’t really about racing, strictly speaking. And They’re Off is a mockumentary about a failed trainer (Astin) who’s so desperate to win again that he hires his ex as his jockey. Since Cheri Oteri (SNL) is the ex, I’m going to assume she’s crazy. Oteri has crazy eyes.
Anonymous
Setting aside the contentious issue of the Shakespeare authorship question, this trailer looks cool. I love the artistic design. I also love that Rhys Ifans is the lead—though he’s been a drunken ass this year, he’s an actor I enjoy yet don’t get to see too much of. Anonymous is his showcase as he stars as Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, who is presented as the “real” Shakespeare. The authorship question is, academically speaking, bunk, but it’s a sexy conspiracy theory and director Roland Emmerich (10,000 BC, Independence Day) got strong notice for his efforts in tackling it coming out of TIFF. He’s going for filmmaking legitimacy and if the reviews hold, he should take a long step in the direction of being considered not the worst director ever. Vanessa Redgrave is getting early Oscar notice for her performance as Queen Elizabeth I, which doesn’t hurt.
Okay, I just have to say this. The part of the trailer where he says, “Men like me don’t write plays” drives me nuts. The Earl of Oxford published at least a dozen plays under his own name—he was regarded as a top comedic playwright—he also published poetry, patronized an acting company known as The Earl of Oxford’s Men, and was a partner in the Blackfriars theater. He did all of this under his real name, everyone knew it and NOBODY GAVE A SHIT.
The Double
Castle’s Stana Katic stars with Topher Grace (That 70’s Show), Martin Sheen and Richard Geere in this spy thriller about a Russian assassin. I feel like we just saw this movie and it was called Salt.
In Time
Writer/director Andrew Niccol will always have a place in my heart because he made Gattaca and wrote The Truman Show, but he’s been coasting on fumes for a while. In Time looks pretty bad in trailer form so I don’t have much hope for the full-length feature. Justin Timberlake stars (KILL ME NOW) as Will, a young man short on time when time is, literally, money. See, in the future, you die at 25 unless you can earn more time. I assume this has something to do with overpopulation? Will inherits 100 years from a man (Matt Bomer, White Collar), which makes him rich, but he quickly learns the system blows hardcore and some rich people are—surprise—usurping all the resources at the expense of the proletariat. So Will and his hostage—oh yeah, at some point he kidnaps Oatmeal Seyfreid—go on the run and try to bring the system down. They’re tailed by rich-people-agent-assassins because Will is stealing time and giving it away Robin Hood styles.
Look at this point we just may as well make a movie version of Duck Hunt except instead of ducks it’s rich people.
Johnny English Reborn
Rowan Atkinson returns as bumbling spy Johnny English is this completely unnecessary movie.
Like Crazy
Sundance’s breakout hit from director Drake Doremus (who also co-wrote the script) stars It Girl Felicity Jones (Brideshead Revisited) and Anton Yelchin (Fright Night, Charlie Bartlett) as a college-aged couple that gets separated when she overstays her visa and has to return to the UK. They try the long-distance thing only to find out that it’s really hard, you guys. Jennifer Lawrence and Charlie Bewley (The Twilight Saga) also star.
The Rum Diary
Johnny Depp reprises his Hunter S. Thompson impression in the long-awaited adaptation of Thompson’s eponymous book about a journalist in 1950’s Puerto Rico being drunky and having adventures while seducing a wealthy ex-pat’s fiancé. I really loved Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but The Rum Diary looks like it lacks the same gonzo verve as Terry Gilliam’s movie (this one was directed by Bruce Robinson, Jennifer Eight). Co-starring Aaron Eckhart and Amber Heard.
Sleeping Beauty
Novelist Julia Leigh makes her directorial debut under Jane Campion’s tutelage with Sleeping Beauty, a bizarre-looking film about a young prostitute (Emily Browning, Sucker Punch) who lets creepy old men drug her and do whatever they want to her while she’s knocked out. It looks creepy and weird and I can’t wait to see it, of course. Because I am perverse like that, and love creepy, weird sex movies, especially when they’re completely not sexy. Like this one appears to be.
We’re switching over to the fall movie preview now, heading into award season. September exists in a misty plain between high award season and the dwindling summer blockbuster rush. September tends to be a bit of a doldrums at the cinema, and this year is no different as the slate is mostly crap with but a few notable titles mixed in.
September 2
Apollo 18
There really was an Apollo 18 manned flight to the moon in the early 1970’s, or at least there were plans for an Apollo 18 mission. Apollos 18-20 were cancelled. Apollo 18, the movie, posits that Apollo flight #18 actually went off and while on their top-secret mission, the astronauts discover something or other that lead to ending the of the Apollo space program. Dimension is running herd on this and is advertising like the footage is real, so it’s basically The Blair Witch Project on the moon.
A Good Old Fashioned Orgy
Jason Sudeikis anchors this “comedy” about group of friends attempting to mount an orgy (haha, puns). Eric’s (Sudeikis) father decides to sell the beach house where Eric and his pals lay about, doing nothing and disappointing everyone in their lives, so Eric and his buddies decide to throw one last bender, an orgy. There’s a lot of likeable comics in this movie—Tyler Labine, Martin Starr, Lucy Punch, Nick Kroll, Will Forte—and actors whom I have enjoyed in other funny movies—Leslie Bibb, Lake Bell, Lindsay Sloane—then there’s Sudeikis. I guess he wasn’t completely awful in Horrible Bosses but he’s still the comedy equivalent of a cucumber. He gets the job done or whatever but he’s hardly the most interesting thing on the plate. This movie looks awful but I can’t decide if that’s because it is bad or just because this trailer is shitty.
A bunch of no-name kids star in this shameless rip-off of the Piranha franchise. At least Piranha 3D was fun in a bloody, shrieky kind of way. Shark Night 3D just looks like an excuse to remind everyone that sharks are soulless killing machines intent on eating our faces off, and that we’re not safe, no matter where we swim.
September 9
Bucky Larson: Born to be a Star
Dear Nick Swardson:
WHAT WERE YOU THINKING?
Burke & Hare
Andy Serkis makes an appearance as himself, and not a soulless mocap monster, starring alongside Simon Pegg in this movie about Victorian serial killers who murder people and sell their corpses to a medical school. I’m macabre enough to think this sounds hilarious.
Contagion
Gwyneth Paltrow kicks off a worldwide pandemic of a hyper-viral strain of avian flu when she returns home from a trip and coughs on her family in Chicago. Then it’s a race to save what’s left of a diseased, broken human race as the virus spreads. Steven Soderbergh’s remake of Outbreak does look pretty cool, kind of like a worst-case scenario for the flu panic that strikes every fall. Matt Damon, Jude Law, Kate Winslet, Laurence Fishburn, Marion Cotillard and John Hawkes also star.
Main Street
Colin Firth sports quite possibly the worst Southern accent in the history of cinema in this movie about the grindingly slow death of Durham and how one magical stranger is going to save them all with a factory (that makes hopes and dreams?). A lot of decent talent other than Firth, got suckered into this project, including Margo Martindale (Justified), Patricia Clarkson, Amber Tamblyn (Joan of Arcadia) and Ellen Burstyn. Oh, and Orlando Bloom. Which—don’t we all remember what happens when Bloom tries to do “modern guy with a Southern accent”?
Shaolin
Chinese action import Shaolin is about a group of Shaolin monks who kick ass across China during feudal times. Warlord Hao Jie kills another warlord on Shaolin ground, then must take refuge with the same monks whom he previously insulted (including Jackie Chan) when his family is killed. Hao then teams up with the monks and they go on an ass-kicking spree to defeat the warlords that are tearing China apart. God I love Chinese action movies.
Tanner Hall
Tanner Hall premiered at TIFF 2009 and sat on the shelf for couple years, only to get dusted off and have a limited release in 2011, thanks to Rooney Mara’s rising star. The story revolves around a group of girls at a New England boarding school, doing coming-of-agey things like having sex with older men, back-stabbing and abusing No Doz. I’d give this one a pass and see Cracks instead.
Warrior
Estranged brothers (Tom Hardy and the suddenly-in demand Joel Edgerton, Animal Kingdom), square off in the ring/cage/whatever for a mixed martial arts championship and “the biggest purse ever”. One brother is a favorite winner; the other is a scrappy upstart. As they compete the brothers must face the history that divides them and deal with the re…
This is just A League of Their Own for guys, right?
We Were Here
This documentary examines the impact of the arrival of AIDS in San Francisco and is highly likely to make everyone cry. It premiered to generally positive notice at Sundance back in January, and is only opening in New York this weekend and in Los Angeles the following week for Oscar qualifying runs.
September 16
Drive
Ryan Gosling goes for broke in Nicolas Windin Refn’s Drive, which is about a guy, known only as Driver, who is a stunt driver by day and a getaway driver by night. He gets tangled up with the mob, and the pretty young mother next door, and then he hammers a bullet into a dude’s skull. Drive has been scoring crazy accolades ever since it debuted at Cannes, where Refn took home the best director prize. It’s a throwback to stuff like Bullitt and Driver and between Refn and Gosling it looks like not-your-average action film. I’m too excited to see this to be snarky.
I Don’t Know How She Does It
Sarah Jessica Parker appears in another shitty movie about upper-class New Yorkers. I don’t know how she keeps getting to make this crap.
My Afternoons with Marguerite
I swear I’ve profiled this movie before, but I’m too lazy to find it. My Afternoons with Marguerite is a French film about an illiterate man (Gerard “pees on the plane” Depardieu) who finally gets the education he was denied throughout his life when he meets a well-read, elderly woman (Gisele Casadesus) in the park one day. I’m sure it’s a sweet movie, and everyone involved is talented, but all I can think about is this.
Restless
I’m a fan of Mia Wasikowska, don’t get me wrong. And I want to like Henry Hopper, just because of his dad (the late Dennis Hopper). And of course I think Gus Van Sant is a good director. All that said, Restless looks so painfully hipster I can’t stand it. She’s dying! And he likes to go to funerals! And they outline themselves in chalk on the ground! And they meet a World War II ghost! And they play Battleship! It’s seems remarkably absent of Van Sant’s pointed, deconstructive style, impersonal even. There’s a lack of urgency that feels off for a movie about death, dying and young love. New York and LA only.
Straw Dogs
Director Rod Lurie (The Last Castle) remakes Sam Peckinpah’s 1970’s “classic” of the same name. Lurie relocates the action from rural England to the Deep South, recasting the Dustin Hoffman role with James Marsden as David Sumner, a screenwriter, who moves to his wife Amy’s (Kate Bosworth) small hometown. Once there, the locals give David a hard time as they think he’s weak and effeminate, and there’s also Amy’s ex Charlie (Alexander Skarsgard), who is a creepy asshole type. Things get predictably worse once David hires Charlie and his buddies to do some work renovating the old farm the Sumners bought. It all comes to a head when Charlie gets Amy alone and violently rapes her, which is why I won’t be seeing this movie. The original drew a lot of criticism because the rape scene was a bit ambiguous, with Amy seemingly enjoying herself at times. Lurie adjusts the same scene in his update to be make it clear that Amy is not having fun at any time and that this is all very horrible. Which is good? I just can’t sit through movies where the whole point is someone getting raped explicitly on screen.
Three
German director Tom Twyker (Run Lola Run) explores the world of a long marriage going stale in Three. Hanna (Sophie Rois, Enemy at the Gates) and Simon (Sebastian Schipper, Run Lola Run) are closing in on twenty years of marriage and are feeling a bit of ennui in their relationship. Enter Adam (Devid Striesow, The Counterfeiters), a young man with whom they each form a relationship. New York and LA only.
September 23
Abduction
I can’t WAIT for this. 1) I’m a huge fan of bad action movies and this looks like a terrible action movie, and 2) finding out if Taylor Lautner will have a viable career after Twilight. Lautner stars as a kid whose life is made of lies and he has to run away from the CIA and some other bad guys while trying to figure out who he really is. Oh! And 3) Lily Collins also stars, and I support my fellow big-browed sister. Also starring Alfred Molina, Maria Bello, Sigourney Weaver and Michael Nyqvist, whom we all know as Blomkvist in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.
A Bird of the Air
A bunch of people I’ve never heard of star in a movie I’ve never heard of about a guy with a mysterious past who finds a parrot one day and sets out to find its owner. He’s joined by a quirky girl with a basset hound. Oh god, it’s more hipster than Restless. HIPSTER IS NOT A GENRE.
Speaking of quirky girls and indie love stories, though, have you seen this?
Dolphin Tale 3D
At this point, there’s no explaining Ashley Judd’s career. Morgan Freeman I get—pay him and he shows up. He’s supporting that town down in Mississippi so he needs a constant stream of cash. But Judd? Nope, I don’t get it. Anyway, Dolphin Tale is apparently based on a true story about a dolphin that loses his tail in a crab trap and all the people whose lives he touches along the way. As I type this, I’m laughing hysterically, which I KNOW makes me an asshole but COME ON. It’s a dolphin amputee! I laugh every time Flipper Tails comes on screen. And since it’s in 3D, please tell me there’s a scene where Tails’ prosthetic flipper comes off and flies out toward the audience. Because that would be HILARIOUS.
I’m going straight to hell.
The Double
So it seems like the Soviets are coming back as a popular movie villain trope. First Salt, now The Double. Richard Gere and Topher Grace star as a retired CIA operative and an FBI agent, respectively, trying to hunt down an assassin. I like both those guys but I feel like I’ve seen this movie a million times already, and as the buzz for Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy continues to build, I don’t want to soil my spy movie appetite before the main course, you know? Really, if you’ve got a spy movie coming out this year that isn’t Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, you should just like, wait. No one is going to stand up against it (I’m looking at you, The Debt).
The Killer Elite
Another bad action movie! September is my month. Jason Statham, Clive Owen and Robert DeNiro (another whose career I increasingly don’t understand) star in this movie about…assassins? I think? And they’re trying to kill each for the money? You know what, who cares. Statham + Owen + DeNiro + shitty action = I’m there. It will suck, it will make no sense, but it maybe it will be fun. Like, I’m not sure Abduction will be any fun, but I’m pretty sure this one will be. Also, Clive Owen. He’s dreamy.
Moneyball
Brad Pitt stuck with this project for a long time and his perseverance paid off as Moneyball looks really good. It’s the story of Billy Beane, the Oakland A’s general manager who applied sabermetrics in the early 2000s to turn the A’s from a horror show into a perennial contender. Moneyball traces Beane’s struggle to make the A’s a going concern given their bargain-basement payroll, particularly the introduction of sabermetrics via Peter Brand (Jonah Hill). Brand is a fictionalization of Beane’s real-life assistant at the time, Paul DePodesta (now with the Mets). I love baseball, so I’m not going to care if this movie is really basebally, but I can see where this might not have quite the broad appeal one would expect from a Brad Pitt movie. It’s basically about math and how math changed baseball, a sport a lot of people already think is boring. Still, I loved the book so I’m really looking forward to this one.
Puncture
This movie looks terrible but it does feature Chris “Captain America” Evans in a muscle shirt and tie, which makes me laugh. I still like Evans, though his physical appeal has lessened as his Captain America body is basically a side of beefcake. I kind of forget that he goes off and makes these little dramas in between bouts of trying to become an action star (though now that he’s succeeded in that at last, maybe we won’t see a film like this from him for a while?). He’s usually pretty good in this kind of thing, even if the movies themselves end up disappointing (see also: Fierce People and The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond). In puncture he plays a drug-addicted lawyer who takes on a healthcare company that is blocking the introduction of “safety syringes” meant to help protect doctors and nurses from infection via dirty needles. If I bother with this at all, it’ll be on DVD.
Red State
Red State is, of course, Kevin Smith’s masturbatory self-distributed “horror” movie about a group of teens who think they’re in for a night of anonymous sex but instead get taken hostage by a group of fundamentalists, or something like that. Everyone says Michael Parks (Kill Bill) is really good, but I cannot stand Kevin Smith these days, or these asshole movies he keeps making. He’s so offended that everyone says he makes crappy movies (dude, you made COP OUT) that he goes out and makes…another crappy movie. There once was something charming about Smith but now he’s just a douchebag, which makes me sad because I love Mall Rats.
September 30
50/50
I can’t write about it until the embargo is up in a couple weeks, but 50/50 is really, really good and Joseph Gordon-Levitt gives a helluva performance as Adam, a 27 year old guy stricken with a rare form of cancer. Seth Rogen is also particularly effective as Adam’s best friend—his range is limited but what Rogen does well, he does really well—and Anna Kendrick is charming as a young therapist. You will laugh AND cry—buckets—so take tissues with you.
Bunraku
I keep seeing this title all over the genre film sites. It’s some kind of samurai/spaghetti western and though I do like my bad action movies, this one holds no appeal for me, not even for Josh Hartnett and his little mustache. The trailer is a mess and looks oddly cheap. It also reminds me of The Spirit, which is a movie I’d really rather forget. Pass.
Courageous
This is one of those fake movies where you initially think you’re watching a movie but then you realize it’s just a message piece. There’s nothing wrong with the message (in this case, be better fathers), but the delivery irks me.
Dream House
The movie that brought us Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz, husband and wife! This movie set spawned an all-time hot couple to obsess over, so it’s too bad it looks like total crap.
Margaret
Cripes, how many movies does Matt Damon have this year? Well, this is another one starring Matt Damon (and Anna Paquin, Mark Ruffalo, Allison Janney, Olivia Thirlby, Jean Reno, Keiran Culkin and Matthew Broderick), and this time he’s partnered with director Kenneth Lonergan (You Can Count on Me). Margaret is about a high-schooler who witnesses a traffic accident and feels partly responsible for it, and what the emotional fall out of her experience is. Sounds sad, and Lonergan is a Grade A “gonna make you cry” guy, so Margaret gets a tissue warning, too.
Tucker & Dale vs. Evil
This movie is SO GOOD. If you haven’t seen it yet on demand, make time to find it in theaters. It’s so funny. Here’s my full review.
What’s Your Number?
Anna Faris and Chris Evans star in this romantic comedy about a girl who discovers if she sleeps with any more men her chances of getting married drop drastically. So she sets out on a quest to revisit all her old boyfriends to see if she can marry one of them. Or something like that—logic is obviously not this movie’s strong suit. Faris is funny, though, and this is Chris Evans like I like him—not a side of beefcake and snarky. Pus there’s a host of people I enjoy, undoubtedly playing the exes, including Joel McHale, Chris Pratt (Faris’s real-life husband), Anthony Mackie, Andy Samberg, Martin Freeman and Zachary Quinto. When this movie was made, Evans and Faris were both “on the cusp but not quite delivering”. Well Evans has since made good on his promise, thanks to Captain America, and now it’s Faris’s turn to live up to her reputation as “the modern Lucille Ball”. Err…sure.
