A new movie year stretches out before us like a virgin field of glistening, beautiful snow, untouched and full of magic and promise. Let us take a moment to enjoy it, before we start to deal with all the slush and black ice and backbreaking shoveling of the movies shortly to pockmark that snow. Because it's January, after all, where decent movies go to die.
3.1.2013
And here's a particularly icy patch of yellow snow to kick things off: Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones, a Latino-themed spin-off of the little franchise that wouldn't die. It would take very little effort for it to be better than the last two in the main line of the series, but "very little effort" is the clarion call of the entire found footage horror genre, so let's say that I'm not stocking up bottles of champagne to celebrate.
10.1.2013
Your standard-issue prestige movie expansion, as Her and Lone Survivor both start widening their nets, but the only really new, really wide release is The Legend of Hercules, an old-school sword-and-sandal picture that, to judge from the advertising, doesn't realise that Greece and Rome weren't the same place. And Renny Harlin directs! Truly, this will be a fantasy epic for the ages.
17.1.2013
Almost half of the movies coming out all month are being dumped in one day, with the breakout film clearly set to be Ride Along, a cop comedy with Kevin Hart doing his Kevin Hart thing. It's even probably going to be the best movie in a generally miserable, wintry landscape, though maybe Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit will find some way to be surprising, because films getting shoved to January at the last minute is a good sign.
In the Land of No Hope, the year's first animated film is a viciously generic-looking comedy, The Nut Job, which wants to be the Rififi of sassy talking animals. And even that's still going to be better than Devil's Due, a "pregnant with Satan's baby" picture that has had the shamelessness to finally adopt the title that every film in its subgenre must have passed by with a shudder at some point.
24.1.2013
In I, Frankenstein, Aaron Eckhart plays Sexy Frankenstein's Monster fighting an army of evil angels. My vote for the "get drunk and go with your friends" release of the month.
31.1.2013
Jason Reitman's Labor Day, having been quietly smacked with an Oscar qualifying release, sneaks out to let the rest of us for Kate Winslet. Also, That Awkward Moment is probably the best way to describe the experience of sitting in the dark, watching a movie in which Zac Efron and Michael B. Jordan can't pee because of their raging Viagra erections.
01 January 2014
8 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 can't wait for I, Frankenstein. It looks like it could be the most relentlessly entertaining cinematic abomination since The Last Airbender.
ReplyDeleteThis January actually looks surprisingly fun. Not "good," mind you, but fun.
ReplyDeleteWho doesn't wanna see the wizard behind Nightmare on Elm Street 4 and Die Hard 2 (the both the undisputed shining examples of the pinnacles of their respective franchises) take a quite literal stab at the original Conan? In PG13, no less? Glorious.
Also, a lightly-scarred 2Face as Frankenstein's monster battling Heaven? Not since Legion have we seen such a delicious premise!
Devil's Due, though, I mean, someone had to, right?
God, the trailer for I, Frankenstein has been haunting me at the theater for months. And every. single. time. I hate it right until the line "Frankenstein must be destroyed" and then I get happy for 2 seconds and then resume hating it.
ReplyDelete@Brian: it does make me wonder whether or not that line was intentional or if they just blundered their way into it.
ReplyDeleteAnd if it was intentional, that raises a host of questions all on its own. Who among the audience of 12 year old boys who would potentially take this film at face value is cine-literate enough to recognise a reference to an obscure 60s Hammer movie?
ReplyDeleteI've been wondering the same things.
ReplyDeleteI mean, it has to have been on purpose, right? Nobody would just randomly make that statement in a script, much less pull it for a trailer.
But why?
I have, to this point, been unwilling to question it, because it's the only thing keeping me optimistic about the project. It's not something anybody would ever say in a movie written in the 2010s, so it has to be a reference, but I fully expect it to be the only one.
ReplyDeleteA possibility: I haven't read the comic, but maybe it was featured there as a deliberate reference, and simply migrated into the movie unknowingly?
I'm just so happy to see I'm not alone on that line being both amazing and mind-boggling.
ReplyDelete