No matter what else happens, 2013's Prestigious Drama Season has already paid its dues, to a degree that is virtually unprecedented in recent years. The biggest question is whether anything for the rest of the year will be able to top the 1-2-3 punch of Gravity, Captain Phillips, and 12 Years a Slave, a trio hitting that rarest sweet spot of being terrific cinema that's also mainstream enough to win consensus approval. I rather doubt it; it's a treat to get just one movie in the heat of Oscar season that turns out that well, three is flat-out astonishing, and to hope for more would be greedy.
Besides, November seems to be, this year, a clearing ground for year-end popcorn movies, and the less exciting-on-paper awards hopefuls. Not all of which are equally unappealing, though it seems like a month heavier on question marks than sure things.
1.11.2013
A couple of things I am sure of, though: there are no gems hiding in plain sight to open the month. The wide releases are a dire lot, indeed: the best one, I imagine, is likely to be the decades-awaited YA sci-fi adaptation Ender's Game, and that's even if the thing ends up looking as glossy and plastic as the ads suggest. That's still enough to push it over Last Vegas, in which old men are wacky and horny and old, and the deeply unpleasant-looking Free Birds, an animated time travel comedy about turkeys sabotaging Thanksgiving, about which all available evidence suggests that "intolerable" will be a particularly generous evaluation.
Among the limited releases, we have at least Dallas Buyers Club, which has the unmistakable tang of being a Serious Film on Important Themes, but looks to have good acting on top of it; also Le Week-End, which I'll vouch for (it's getting one of those invisible Oscar-qualifying runs). The flipside is Diana, a biopic that was more or less laughed right out of England. Can't lie, that actually makes me more interested.
8.11.2013
A light weekend. About Time, an inordinately concept-heavy romantic comedy, goes wide after a single week in the platform release trenches; and then the elephantine Thor: The Dark World, which I gather people are looking forward to. Personally, the increasingly airbrushed Marvel house style has become sufficiently charmless to me that I wouldn't be anticipating this one even if it wasn't the sequel to my least-favorite entry in the Avengers universe thus far.
Glancing over the limited releases, none of them seem interesting. Move along.
15.11.2013
Making a sequel 14 years later is a sign of either madness or creative inspiration, certainly not of mercenary concerns, so on the face of it, I'm intrigued by The Best Man Holiday, and the fact that it's the only wide release of the weekend pretty much seals the deal.
Back among the awards-qualifying runs, Alexander Payne's Nebraska hits the States after receiving uncertain reviews and awards at Cannes, and I'm honestly not prepared to start liking him again after The Descendants, not just yet. Also: after two years, Aleksandr Sokurov's Faust finally tours North America! Which is a long damn delay, but for Sokurov, I will carry that torch.
22.11.2013
The Hunger Games was many wonderful things; exciting, vibrant cinema wasn't one of them. And it was based on the best book of its trilogy. So I am personally adopting a very defensive posture towards The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (shitty title, by the way), while admitting that Michael Arndt being involved with the screenplay seems like a good reason for something in the general wheelhouse of optimism (swapping the director of Seasbiscuit out for the director of Constantine seems like more of a push).
Also, a sperm donor feel-good comedy called Delivery Man. It's a remake of a Canadian film, during the trailer for which a friend and I snarkily predicted who would be the lead in a U.S. remake. I am pleased to say that we weren't craven enough to come up with Vince Vaughn, and are thus better people than the producers of Delivery Man.
27.11.2013
Ah, Thanksgiving Wednesday, when everything suddenly opens all at once and you go mad trying to keep on top of it. Speaking privately, I hold out the most hope for Black Nativity, owing to its apparent oddness and to lingering affection for director Kasi Lemmons, though of course the biggest deal around these parts is going to be Frozen, the 53rd feature from Walt Disney Animation Studios, and a film whose godawful trailers have not yet suggested that it isn't just Tangled in the Snow, on the level of plot, character, or aesthetic. On the other hand, Tangled itself was so vastly different than the ads promised, it's hard not to hold out hope.
Meanwhile, the year's most fascinating, counter-intuitive marriage of director and script finds Spike Lee remaking Oldboy. Lastly, Jason Statham and James Franco star in a home invasion thriller scripted by Sylvester Stallone, Homefront, and that's much too weird a collision of names for me to not at least be intrigued.
29.11.2013
The traditional home of quietly releasing films for Oscar purposes, Thanksgiving Friday this year witnesses the Judi Dench sad mama film Philomena, and urgently-titled biopic Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom, possibly the only moment in all of history where you'll get me to acknowledge the possibility that Idris Elba might have been miscast in something.
30 October 2013
20 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'm glad that thinking that Frozen trailer was ghastly wasn't just me being grumpy. I'll only see it if there's a pretty strong critical consensus in its favor, that's for sure. And it especially sucks because "The Snow Queen" was always one of my favorite faerie tales when I was small, and the movie appears to to have essentially no connection to its alleged inspiration.
ReplyDeleteI wouldn't normally say this, Tim, but have you seen the second Frozen trailer? The "For The First Time In Forever" trailer? I find it presents a better picture then the first full trailer, though not to an overwhelming degree. And it openly announces that the film will contain character-sung songs, a fact almost never announced in the trailer for animated musicals these days.
ReplyDeleteI personally am looking forward to Frozen, though I did love Wreck-It Ralph, even though I understand why you view that film as "good, not great."
Oh, and I've also already seen Ender's Game. I won't spoil it, but it got me thinking of your Hunger Games review a year-and-a-half ago, in that the biggest problem is that the way in which the book is good is lost by default on transferring to film. It does cut a lot of unnecessary points and subplots, though whether that actually helps the finished film is up for debate.
Can't wait to see Gravity when it hit's here next week.
If Frozen turns out to have less to do with that terrible Scrat-wannabe snowman than the trailers suggest, it will already exceed my expectations of it.
ReplyDeleteI'm one of the people in the "decades-awaited" category for Ender's Game, meaning that unless it's perfect, it's probably going to disappoint. I'm keeping my hopes low so that I can be pleasantly surprised, although the last time one of my all-time favorite sci-fi novels got a big-budget treatment, it was the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, so maybe I should just quit while I'm shared and enjoy the book.
Not gonna lie, I really hope Free Birds is bad enough to warrant a zero-star review.
Re: the snowman's role in the Frozen marketing: I'm betting that he's the usual Timon and Pumbaa-sized comic relief common in most 1989-and-forward. In a post-Minions world, though, I can see the marketing team trying to build up the film to look like something it isn't, similar to how the Tangled ads made the film look like a Flynn-a-thon with Rapunzel as a peripheral character. Seems to be the MO for family movies these days: sell the audience a movie they think they want to see, in lieu of selling them the actual movie.
ReplyDeleteAre you planning on catching All is Lost? I'm really curious about that one.
ReplyDeleteYeah, Frozen seems like a really clear-cut "emphasise the worst parts for toy purposes" marketing campaign, though that leaves us with no real sense of what IS going to be in the film (my favorite trailer is still very much the Japanese one that stresses the epic fantasy over the humor).
ReplyDeleteKevin- Scheduling has been an issue, but yeah, I'm definitely looking forward to that one.
Tim, for the love of the FSM and your loyal blog audience, please tell me that you will be reviewing "Free Birds." Some of my favorite reviews have been you giving contemptible Dream Works movies a proper evisceration. Along with that fucked up... thing that was the movie "Hop."
ReplyDeleteJust got back from seeing Thor at the cinema. I'd keep those expectations nice and low. It's not awful; it has a lot more happening than the first film, better action and a lot of funny one-liners. But in terms of character development, character motivation, management of tone and management of subplots, the screenplay is a calamity.
ReplyDeleteIf you do end up taking the bullet and reviewing Free Birds, and it is indeed awful, may I recommend the post title "Murder Most Fowl?"
ReplyDeleteOh, I'm GOING to see Free Birds. I'd say there's no doubt about that, even if it misses #1 at the box office (it's my current prediction). It's hardly a secret that I love to see animated movies that I hate.
ReplyDeleteAlso, good to know that Thor does not reinvent the MCU wheel.
What about the Counselor? Its such a divisive movie, most hate it, some passionately defend it, I'd like to hear your thoughts on it.
ReplyDeleteTomorrow!
ReplyDeleteWhat do you think of the original The Best Man, Tim? If one of the black films from that era got a sequel I always imagined it'd be something like THE WOOD. But the idea of all those actors back together after all this time sure is interesting to consider (would ANYONE have imagined then that Terrence Howard would have the most success, relatively).
ReplyDeleteI'm always up for a Richard Curtis work, if only because I'm inclined toward his writing. He can be extremely hit or miss, I detest Notting Hill but find The Girl in the Cafe one of my favorite movies of the 2000's.
ReplyDeleteBut I've been crowing about Best Man Holiday since I saw its trailer. To respond to Andrew's question, I didn't even know a sequel was coming until I saw that trailer, and I too was shocked it got made. Not only because the first film ended so well, not only because of the long years gone by, but because in the age of Tyler Perry, it seems like something of The Best Man's type caliber has passed. That era was amazing for black cinema, remember Love Jones!
I haven't seen The Best Man, but I'm very much looking forward to catching up with it in the next couple of weeks.
ReplyDeletereading your blog for a long time now but this is my first comment.
ReplyDeleteanyway, I went to see Thor 2 with expectations of 'thor 1 was my fave marvel studio flick by far'... and came away thinking this is its absolute worst. I HAAAAATED Thor 2 so much. Tom Hiddleston, the one actor whose inclusion in this was only filmed a month before release, was the only actor who showed up at all. The rest are not at all successful at hiding 'we like paychecks'. The CG is pretty horrible too, especially for fight scenes involving fantasy creatures. The dialogue is Joss Whedon's self-aware 'irony' at its most excremental, it often feels like Commando quality writing. Plus, it's predictably another Marvel movie driven by a McGuffin that resembled a cube. Which is really tiring now that that's the fourth Marvel movie to do it (Thor, Thor 2, Captain America, Avengers). Atrocious cinema.
Thanks for posting! Glad to have you around.
ReplyDeleteSad to hear that T:TDW is that bad, especially because I'll be seeing it regardless. But not, honestly, all that shocked.
Have we seen the latest Frozen trailer? Far more focus on the fantasy and adventure, and less (although still too much!) on that bloody snowman. Looks much less of a Tangled clone to boot. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_qR8YR6WeU
ReplyDeleteJust to point this out, Hiddleston was in the movie long before a month ago. They brought him back and filmed more with him to expand his role, they didn't suddenly shoe-horn him in at the last minute.
ReplyDeleteOf course, "Joss Whedon dialog" is literally my favorite thing in the history of ever, so I'm still fairly excited about this movie.
Had no idea "Delivery Man" was a remake until I rented a movie and saw the trailer for the original film, "Starbuck". I'm astonished at how nearly identical the two trailers are. Aside from the different languages, I thought I was going slowly mad.
ReplyDeleteReminds me of this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxYA6duF-9E