With a particularly unholy burn-off month of January behind us, it's time to head into the year's most consistently weird month: a little bit of unbridled trash, a lot more random films that simply couldn't be stuffed anywhere else, and - if we are lucky - the occasionally wonderful little thing that slips in, unnoticed, and is great. This year, we have the best candidate we've had in ages for a genuinely good motion picture with a winter release date, alongside all of the usual suspects: tacky romance (lots), tacky action (some), and the year's first family movie, a truly hideous thing that is going to put a serious test to my tradition of always and in every case seeing the first wide-released animated movie of the calendar year.
1.2.2013
How about that? Tacky romance and tacky action at the exact same time! Warm Bodies was, if I am not mistaken, original scheduled for an August release, one of the only months as dubious as February, and I can't imagine why not "the power of love cures a zombie" is the sort of concept that can only be approached with some measure of dazzled disbelief, by fans of zombies and fans of the power of love, particularly since the ads, at least, suggest that there's a bit more Twilight than Shaun of the Dead in its approach to genre. Though it will surely not be the month's worst wide release, it's readily the one I'm least excited about.
Though it's not that far behind Bullet to the Head, in which Sylvester Stallone plays a grizzled old cop, or some such, in the companion piece to The Last Stand that, to my knowledge, nobody alive wanted. Walter Hill, who many generations ago made great action films, is on hand, though I see no reason whatsoever to assume that's a good sign.
In a much narrower wide release, the "old actors is funny!" thriller Stand Up Guys rears its head, after opening the Chicago International Film Festival last year to general indifference
8.2.2013
Steven Soderbergh movie! And, if his thoughts in that recent Vulture interview, in which his retirement suddenly sounded like a real thing and not just an artist talking out of his ass, hold true, maybe the last-ever theatrically-released Steven Soderbergh movie! Which is certainly more pressure than I want to subject the romantic-thriller thingy Side Effects to, but when one of America's most important working filmmakers stops being that thing, it is an occasion for holding his last hurrah to a ridiculously unsupportable standard. Anyway, it's the one film of the month - nay, of the first third of the year - for which I'm unhesitatingly excited, because Soderbergh releasing films in the dead of winter worked out really well last time, IMHO.
Meanwhile, have you seen the trailer for Identity Thief? It looks like the place where comedy goes to die. Huhr huhr, Melissa McCarthy is a gargoyle!
14.2.2013
A Valentine's Day present for everybody!
-For teen girls who want to have unreasonably florid expectations about how romance works - the post-Twilight teenage witch story Beautiful Creatures!
-For adult women to drag their silently resentful menfolk to, Nicholas Sparks adaptation #317, Safe Haven!
-For single men in their 30s, and past the point of caring about what a shambles they've made of their lives, A Good Day to Die Hard!
-For families with small, undiscerning children, a grueling reminder that romance is dead in their lives now, Escape from Planet Earth!
(Okay, that's snotty, I'm actually kind of excited about Die Hard 5. Said the single man in his 30s).
22 2.2013
Director Scott Stewart has been a reliable manager of the most barbaric kind of horror lately, between Legion and Priest; sadly, his newest, Dark Skies, lacks both Paul Bettany and any obvious angle for asinine religious imagery divorced from any religion actually practiced on Earth, and will probably thus be a merely bad movie, not an epic botch.
Meanwhile, over in the highly proficient-looking Snitch, Dwayne Johnson goes undercover to fight drugloards and save his son from the DEA, in the the person of Susan Sarandon, who really deserves more than little roles in Mark Wahlberg vehicles that forgot to cast Mark Wahlberg.
30 January 2013
12 comments:
Just a few rules so that everybody can have fun: ad hominem attacks on the blogger are fair; ad hominem attacks on other commenters will be deleted. And I will absolutely not stand for anything that is, in my judgment, demeaning, insulting or hateful to any gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or religion. And though I won't insist on keeping politics out, let's think long and hard before we say anything particularly inflammatory.
Also, sorry about the whole "must be a registered user" thing, but I do deeply hate to get spam, and I refuse to take on the totalitarian mantle of moderating comments, and I am much too lazy to try to migrate over to a better comments system than the one that comes pre-loaded with Blogger.
I think it's overkill that the poster for Identity Thief not only says "FROM THE DIRECTOR OF HORRIBLE BOSSES", but looks exactly like the poster for that movie. Then again, "HERE'S A MOVIE EXACTLY LIKE ANOTHER MOVIE THAT YOU COULD EASILY RENT FROM REDBOX OR AMAZON INSTANT FOR $2" inexplicably seems to put butts in the seats.
ReplyDeletePoor Melissa McCarthy. She's a hugely appealing and talented actress, she broke through in such a gratifying, non-stereotypical way in "Bridesmaids", and her first film-carrying role appears to be one long "Fat Woman Is Vulgar" joke. I hope things improve soon.
ReplyDelete"Director Scott Speedman"
ReplyDeleteI think you mean Scott Stewart.
It's worth noting that Warm Bodies is, I'm assured by people who actually read the book, a comedy at the expense of things like Twilight.
ReplyDeleteI suspect it's not a very distinguished one, but it makes me a little less resentful of it.
David- Even weirder, in that nobody really liked Horrible Bosses, or at least nobody talks about it. I guess it made money, though - a lot more than I remembered, when I looked it up.
ReplyDeleteZev- Don't look up the trailer for The Heat.
Rick- What an odd mistake to have made. One Scott I hate is as good as another, I guess.
Chris- Here's hoping, because I see no way around it going to #1. The idea that it has a touch of satire about it is enough to keep me warm on my way into the theater, anyway.
"we have the best candidate we've had in ages for a genuinely good motion picture with a winter release date"
ReplyDeleteForgive me, but which one out of this pack? I didn't see you point it out.
And boy-howdy is there ever no indication in any of the ads for it that "Side Effects" is a Soderbergh joint. Huh.
It was, in fact, Side Effects that I had in mind, inasmuch as I still haven't seen a Soderbergh film I haven't liked.
ReplyDeleteThe source material of Warm Bodies is quite well-regarded and while it's on my ever-increasing to-read list and I can't speak personally, I've only heard good things, unlike Beautiful Creatures, which I couldn't bring myself to finish. (This after having read all four Twilight novels.)
ReplyDeleteIn the preview for Snitch, we can see that Michael K Williams aka Omar from The Wire is to all appearances once again playing Omar from The Wire. It just seems so...undignified.
ReplyDeleteHaving seen WARM BODIES on Tuesday, I can assure you that it is not very TWILIGHT-y at all, and what little part that is TWILIGHT-y is fairly ruthless satire of TWILIGHT and all of its kin.
ReplyDeleteIt's basically a warmed-over mashup of Beauty and the Beast with Romeo and Juliet, presented in the same gory-yet-amusing tone as SHAUN OF THE DEAD. Of course, it's not even a tenth as funny as SHAUN. It has its moments, but it's pretty forgettable.
But, still, not TWILIGHT-y.
A friend told me this yesterday, "Good news, we're almost out of January! Bad news, we're about to enter February!"
ReplyDeleteDie Hard maaaaay be my favorite movie ever, if I had one of those, so even though none of the sequels have matched up at ALL, I'm inclined to see ol' Bruce smiling his way through some forced catchphrases and CGI blood.
And Side Effects looks genuinely interesting. I run more hot-and-cold on Soderbergh than you, but I've never outright HATED any of his films. I hope if this is the last one, it's a great one to go out on.
Tim...you had me at "shambles".
ReplyDelete