I like to start these previews off with a theoretical bit of noodling about the nature of the month to come, but this time, it's so tightly linked to the big release on the first weekend that I'm just going to save it. Let's jump right in!
4.4.2014
So, Captain America: The Winter Soldier. A film that I should not be indifferent to, given that Captain America: The First Avenger is probably my favorite of the Marvel movies that exist so far (not the one I think is best, just my favorite), but I am far more fascinated by its position in the ecosystem than I care about it as a work of cinema. See, we've had March blockbusters for a while, and April blockbusters for a couple of years, anyway, but something about the exact position of this film, with the usual release overseas a week earlier, makes it feel like Disney isn't trying to extend summer earlier, or force a brand new blockbuster season; it feels sort of like they're trying to connect the spring and summer movie seasons, making one long stretch of popcorn blockbusters reaching from March to August; and that, honestly, is not a future that I am terribly excited to contemplate. The sameness and ubiquity of Big CGI Action Event Pictures has made it virtually impossible, for me at least, to find any of them genuinely special, and the idea of a wave of indistinguishable tentpoles covering fully half of the calendar sounds as much like the death of cinema as anything else ever has.
But then, here to make me feel better is Under the Skin in limited release, finally showing up Stateside. The third film by Jonathan Glazer, whose Sexy Beast and Birth I both love, is surely cause for celebration, all the more since it's been such a long decade since his last release.
11.4.2014
Kevin Costner is Brad Pitt in Moneyball for football, AKA Draft Day. Who'd have thought in December that this would have such an easy shot at being Costner's best movie of the year?
A pair of horror films, because Captain America notwithstanding, it is still the offseason: Oculus, which is somehow crossed with a murder mystery; and Rio 2. Now, the latter of these is not being marketed as a horror film, but surely we all know better.
Once again, the limited releases come to the rescue: I don't actually expect Only Lovers Left Alive, an art house vampire film, to be any good, but it's never wise to count out Jim Jarmusch or Tilda Swinton, and when they're collaborating? Mercy me.
16.4.2014
The unexpected glut of Christian themed films in the first third of the year continues right along to Heaven Is for Real One of these days, one of these movies will go to #1 and I'll have to see it, but it's not going to be this one.
18.4.2014
The fact that A Haunted House made enough money to generate A Haunted House 2 depresses me. Like, literally.
Meanwhile, we can all enjoy the spectacle of Disney making another documentary that shamelessly anthropomorphises animals with Bears, whose poster is confusingly and unpleasantly similar to their 2003 obscurity Brother Bear. Or we can enjoy watching Wally Pfister, Christopher Nolan's cinematographer, make his directorial debut with Transcendence, which happens to exactly look like the kind of product that Nolan secretly knows himself to be too good for nowadays. But hey, anything that throws a paycheck at Rebecca Hall deserves my attention.
25.4.2014
There is a 2004 Luc Besson production, District B13, which kicked off the most ambivalent review I have ever written, wondering if its phenomenal, legitimately masterpiece-level opening act justified the tedium of the rest. I do not expect to be similarly ambivalent about its weirdly late American remake, Brick Mansions.
Other sacrificial lambs being put on the chopping block to be completely forgotten in a week, once summer proper starts: The Other Woman, a peculiarly mean-looking female-driven comedy, feeling oddly like a relic from the '90s and the days of The First Wives Club; and The Quiet Ones, the newest horror picture from the revived Hammer Films. Having thus far thought that the studio's attempt to navigate the 21st Century has been noble and intelligent if not uniformly successful, I think I can count myself excited for this one, kind of.
01 April 2014
9 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.
If its any consolation, The Winter Soldier is supposed to be quite good.
ReplyDeleteAnd is this really the first time Tilda Swinton has played a vampire? I find this harder and harder to believe as I type that sentence and read it out loud.
Teknolust maybe, although if you can parse the imdb summary for that movie you're a better man than I.
ReplyDeletePerhaps I'm simply being too curmudgeonly at this point, but given the degree to which all the Marvel films have felt hopelessly samey, hearing positive buzz about "how good" at upcoming Marvel movie is does absolutely nothing for me. I can only assume it will be, as with all the rest, at least blandly competent, filled with oh-so-witty writing and the best action scenes that computers can make, and will upon release be instantly adored by legions of fanboys. But it will do precisely nothing for me.
ReplyDeleteFor whatever it's worth, I thought The Winter Soldier was fantastic, and this is from someone who's broadly enjoyed the MCU thus far but with considerable reservations. It's by far and away the best film in the franchise by my reckoning, and in no small part because it reigns in the CGI excess and faux-Whedonesque humour in favour of genuine stakes and tension.
ReplyDeleteI'm actually keen on seeing Captain America 2 even though I still haven't sat through the first one all the way mainly because of my aversion to Captain America the character; however, this one actually looks quite intriguing and GSP has a role (thankfully in his first language of French).
ReplyDeleteAlso, am I the only one who is excited about Transcendence even though looks like a dressed up version of Lawnmower man?
I have a sudden masochistic desire to throw money at Heaven It's For Real just in the hope that it will hit #1 and you'll have to review it. Not because I actually want it to be an international hit, but just because I'm jonesing for a classic vitriol-filled Tim Brayton God-I-hate-this-movie review. They've been thin on the ground since Twilight ended.
ReplyDeleteI've only been able to sit through Cap Murica's first outing once, and that was because I paid money in the theatre and didn't just want to stand up and leave, but it's by far the worst movie of the Avengers series, in my opinion.
ReplyDeleteJoe Johnson has to be one of the blandest hacks since Ron Howard. The film had no personality, was shot completely flat, criminally wasted Weaving and didn't do a single interesting thing with its unique WW2 setting.
That said, Winter Soldier is getting a lot of great buzz and I'll probably be there opening weekend, hopefully in for a better experience now that Johnson isn't involved.
Under the Skin has me excited for the return of Glazer, and though I'm not at all sold on Scarlett's acting chops, the director gives me hope of the film not being a trainwreck.
Oculus is getting great reviews so far, and even from a few people I kinda trust, but there's no way the movie's anything more than awful. Just can't be, and if it is, then someone needs to fire the trailer editor and make sure he never gets another job, ever. Cos man, those previews were just vile.
Transcendence could go either way, though my hunch tells me it will be aggressively mediocre at best, and Brick Mansions is just a bizarre decision all around. B13 is a really fun film and it cannot possibly benefit from a remake. It will fail as hard as Oldboy.
And yes, seeing GSP act should be a fun time, too. If he doesn't make a single performance-related joke, or call anyone an "uneducated fool," I shall be very upset.
For my part, "Captain America: The First Avenger" is notable for being the first movie with Chris Evans where I didn't seethe with the burning desire to rip his face off. In fact, I liked him (and the movie) quite a lot. There's no trace of the entitled douchebro persona of a lot of his other movies, especially the Fantastic Four" films. Evans disappears into the role, and won me over completely.
ReplyDeleteHe pulled it off again in "The Avengers", where Evans and Downey Jr. have a hell of a lot of fun bouncing their characters off each other. Their scenes together are some of the best in the movie.
So yes, I'm looking forward to "Winter Soldier", and I'm not even a comic book fan.
Scarlett Johansson sneaking around Glasgow? Had to see this one. For the most part very cool. The scene with the Tesco shopper is sensational.
ReplyDelete