October! The month of scary movies and the first self-conscious awards bait! We had a banner year for October releases which I absolutely do not expect to see matched; that said, October is also the month of the Chicago International Film Festival, about which I am particularly excited this year. But more about that in a week or so.
3.10.2014
So first up, the film that splits the difference between generic thrills and Oscary respectability: the David Fincher-directed bestseller adaptation Gone Girl. About which I will mostly confess that I read the book and wish I hadn't; it's fine, if a bit beachy, but I don't quite see what the point of making it into a film could possibly be. But that said, the trailer makes it look like Zodiac Fincher might be the one who made it, and that is far and away my favorite Fincher.
Fans of groan-inducing prequel-spinoffs are lucky that the month's one and only R-rated horror picture - I hasten to remind you, it's October - is Annabelle, the story of that doll that was by no stretch of the imagination the most interesting thing about The Conjuring. Fans of Nicolas Cage making daft choices (and who isn't?) are even luckier, because his current daft choice is a remake of Left Behind, the evangelical Christian thriller that launched a cottage industry.
10.10.2014
I am way more interested in the Robert Downey, Jr./Robert Duvall father & son drama The Judge now that it's apparently terrible and not just harmless, lifeless Oscarbait. Schadenfreude is fun, kids.
Other wide releases... Disney is shitting out a dumb-looking farcical expansion of the slim children's book Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day, and the weird cultural obsession with taking all of our best pointlessly evil villain and making them sad anti-heroes has now extended as far as Count Fucking Dracula, though I guess the precedent for that has been there since at least the Gary Oldman movie by Francis Ford Coppola. Anyway, Dracula Untold. It's going to suck real bad.
There's also something about having an affair called Addicted, about which I have heard nothing prior to this moment.
17.10.2014
It's the time of year when limited releases come by too fast to bother trying to keep track of them all, but I'd be remiss if I failed to mention that Birdman is absolutely the "big" movie about which I'm most excited for the rest of 2014. And that is, I concede, almost entirely a function of Emmanuel Lubezki long takes, which are my favorite kind of long takes. And my favorite kind of Lubezki, for that matter.
As far as the bigger releases go, I have never yet liked a David Ayer project, and I don't know why the WWII movie Fury will change that. And I haven't liked a Nicholas Sparks adaptation yet, either, but that doesn't make me special, and The Best of Me feels like one of those movies that doesn't actually exist.
While those two duke it out, not being interesting, I'm still trying to figure out if the animated The Book of Life is going to be a gorgeous movie that's absolutely terrible, or a gorgeous and wonderful movie that got stuck with a relentlessly shitty ad campaign. I am not hopeful that it is the latter.
24.10.2014
The grand experiment in making movies about board games continues with Ouija, a PG-13 demonic possession that seems to labor in ignorance of the way that, y'know, ouija boards or their generic equivalents are in, like, every haunted house movie. And throwing a bunch of generic starlets at the problem isn't what makes it go away.
There's also this thing called Laggies, about which I'm sure other information exists, but seriously, that name...
Lastly, the IMDb summary for John Wick starts out, "When Russian mobsters kill his beloved dog, retired hit man John Wick..." so I'm basically seeing the Liam Neeson remake of Umberto D. happening here.
31.10.2014
Happy Halloween! Like horror? Too bad, because all you get is a Nicole Kidman/Colin Firth psychological thriller, Before I Go to Sleep, and a Jake Gyllenhaal psychological thriller, Nightcrawler, and while they both have horror-ish titles, that's as far as it appears to go.
30 September 2014
17 comments:
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I just finished reading Gone Girl last night (in anticipation of the film, natch) - my abiding impression of it is that it's a marvelously ambiguous, tautly constructed thriller with a killer final twist, which it proceeds to completely undermine by having another 200 pages follow it. I'm sure the movie will be fine, but I don't see how it can work around that sense of immediate shock at the halfway point, followed by slowly encroaching disappointment that you're reading something trashier than you thought you were.
ReplyDeleteI doubt Left Behind will get any kind of high profile release here in the UK, which I'm sorry for because OH MY GOD.
I was kind of nonplussed by the trailer for John Wick for exactly the reasons you'd think, but pre-release word is surprisingly positive - it's meant to be a really stripped-down, lean, badass, hard-R action movie, which I dig even if I take it with a grain of salt.
Speaking of movies, have you considered Kevin Smith's Tusk? It just came out, but you'll have precious little time before it flops its way out of theaters.
ReplyDeleteNot that I'll see it, because paying 10 bucks to see Kevin Smith's stoned brainfart doesn't sound that fun after I've seen Red State and Cop Out.
Thrash- EXACTLY my thoughts on the book. But more of that when the movie opens.
ReplyDeleteGreen Angelus- I made the amateur mistake of watching exactly those two movies, finally, as my homework for Tusk, and they kind of made me absolutely not want to even consider seeing it in theaters, or ever.
I thought you once wrote a fairly positive review of The Notebook?
ReplyDeleteI'm interested in seeing The Canal when it comes out on October 10th (according to IMDB).
ReplyDeletehttp://www.imdb.com/title/tt2517658/?ref_=wl_li_i
So there's some horror for you.
I would love to see your opinion on Tusk, but I'm heartened that those two movies produced the same revulsion in you.
ReplyDeleteBesides, Kevin Smith's attitude really gets to me. He seems committed to sticking himself in an echo chamber of his biggest and least discerning fans while acting condescending and dickish to everyone else.
I'm excited to see Fury if for no other reason than they used actual WWII tanks for the production. That includes the only operational Tiger I in existence, marking the first time an actual Tiger has appeared in a movie since the 1940s.
ReplyDeleteBrian- Maybe? I don't remember now. I think I definitely liked the cast, at least.
ReplyDeleteMatticus- That's incredibly cool to know. Something to look forward to, at least.
Speaking of Nicolas Cage, any chance we'll see a review of Joe during the year-end catchups? Cage working under David Gordon Green is a pretty irresistible pairing, although one I think is more likely to produce a dreadful film than a great one.
ReplyDeleteNo horror films on October 31st? Did you miss Horns, Daniel Radcliffe's devil dilemma based on the novel by King's good ol' boy, Joe Hill?
ReplyDeleteI'm kind of looking forward to that one.
Chris- I'd say that's extremely likely.
ReplyDeletemoviemotorbreath- Well, wide-release horror. I'm looking forward to Horns too, but I have no clue when I'll get to see it.
Anyway, Dracula Untold. It's going to suck real bad.
ReplyDeleteOh, come on, Tim. There's got to be a better pun for the situation than that.
I thought I read somewhere that Fincher made Flynn (who also wrote the script) change the ending. So if you--like many that read the novel--had problems with the final 200 pages, it sounds like the filmmakers (and even the author) was aware of those problems and tweaked it accordingly. I trust Fincher to get the tone right that made the first half of that book so compelling.
ReplyDeleteThey walked back from that awhile ago. The events of the ending are the same, it's the tone, or some such.
ReplyDeleteWell, how could you NOT like the cast of The Notebook?
ReplyDeleteEven while fully acknowledging that the movie is manipulative and rote, it's somewhat hard not to get sucked into it anyway, just because the cast is so god damn good, and they deliver across the board.
The only other Sparks movie I've watched all the way through is A Walk to Remember (which is also the only Sparks book I have ever read) and it was... Not good.
I really don't see why you can't get worked up for the remake of Left Behind. I mean, it has Nic Cage at the top of his game, a 150 min. runtime, and an ace trailer to boot. What else do you want from your movies?:D
ReplyDeleteI believe Horns will in fact be a wide release on the 31st after having spent the last year on the festival circuit.
ReplyDeleteIn fact, it's already released on iTunes, though I'd rather see it on the big screen.