A January with some halfway decent surprises lying behind us, it's time now to plow into the real depths of the winter dumping season: after a few years where there was one surprising hit toe be found in February, 2015 looks to have nothing of the sort. A hit, yes - a big, enormous, Top 10 of the Year sort of hit - but one that looks terrible. We might always be surprised, of course, but I'm not counting on it, so let's just get this over quickly
6.2.2015
But now, having said all of that, I am going to proudly declare that I'm totally excited for Jupiter Ascending, and I don't give a shit what anybody has to say. After Cloud Atlas, a movie I just keep loving more despite/because of its faults when I re-watch it, I will follow the Wachowskis to whatever place they have it in their mind to go. Will Jupiter Ascending be bafflingly dumb? Probably. Maybe. Will it be splendid to look at? I expect so. Will it be totally its own thing and a complete outlier in the 2015 popcorn movie biosphere? Undoubtedly, and that's what matters to me most of all.
Elsewhere in very visibly-delayed effects-driven fantasies, we find Seventh Son, which manages to combine the powers of Jeff Bridges, Julianne Moore, and Olivia Williams into the creation of what is, by all available evidence, boring crap. Though it's exciting to think that Moore and Eddie Redmayne might both end up winning Oscars after having played the main villains in two enormous, high-profile flops that opened just 16 days earlier. Oscar joke writers: do something with this, now that I have called it to your attention.
And then we have the animation hybrid The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge out of Water, which I'd surely have any kind of opinion toward if I had any level of connection to the SpongeBob SquarePants media franchise.
13.2.2015
So here's the deal: I am indecently excited for the thought pieces to come out surrounding Fifty Shades of Grey, from all directions. It will be the great talking point of 2015. But I could not possibly be less excited to drag myself out to see the actual movie, outside of what appears to be some sleek, handsome Seamus McGarvey cinematography. I've failed multiple times to get more than a few pages into the infamous bestselling novel it's based on, which is written at a sub-literate level, and my understanding is that the whole thing is really just porn dressed up with a feeble narrative copying the main points from Twilight. And I don't mean to say "just porn" in a dismissive way; it frankly makes the whole thing seem more respectable than assuming all those middle-aged women are actually enjoying the horrible, horrible prose and what I am assured is horrible, horrible character psychology.
But it leaves us with the ungainly fact that a movie is being adapted out of a porno while not, itself, being very pornographic (R-rated in the sexophobic United States, with apparently only around 20 minutes of sex, and a confirmation that there'll be no onscreen penis). Which suggests that the horrible horribleness is all that's going to be left. And director Sam Taylor-Johnson's only other feature, Nowhere Boy, was a fucking dog.
As counter-programming, nobly muscling its way to the teenage boys confused why a major blockbuster release doesn't care about them at all, we have Kingsman: The Secret Service, a Matthew Vaughn film that sure as hell looks like a Matthew Vaughn film, and there are some people for whom that is a good thing. But some people ain't me.
20.2.2015
Now this feels like a February weekend. Disney is gamely releasing a warm and fuzzy "crusty old white dude intervenes for the better in the lives of underprivileged minorities" sports drama, McFarland, USA, and the white dude is even played by Kevin Costner. There's some hideously generic high school clique movie, with the "ooh, look at me, I'm raising all kinds of questions!" title of The DUFF, and then there's Hot Tub Time Machine 2, which has all the feeling of a project that got greenlit and financed at a particularly drunk party, and by the time everybody came to their senses, they were into it for too much financial and legal liability to safely back out.
27.2.2015
And then, blessedly, things finally sputter to a close. We've got Focus, starring Will Smith and Margot Robbie as con artists who perhaps have romantic comedy sparks between them - or perhaps that is part of the con! - and is giving me something not entirely unlike Duplicity vibes, so maybe it's got something worth looking forward to, hiding in its DNA? Anyway, there was a time when Smith made enjoyable movies for halfway intelligent adults, and I'm kind of getting that vibe, too.
The Lazarus Effect, for its own part, has an excitingly junky trailer surrounding a lazy, retread concept, with a much too classy cast for it, including Olivia Wilde as this movie's version of the Frankenstein monster. Hopefully cheesy enough to be fun, possibly actually good and just mis-marketed, but either way, it's the first horror movie in some while I've actually caught myself looking forward to.
03 February 2015
11 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.
Many many people have already written about "Fifty Shades of Grey" and the phenomenon that sprang up around it.
ReplyDeleteMy prediction about the movie- in certain key ways, it's going to resemble the screenplay for the first "Left Behind" movie- it will file off a lot of bits that made the "heroes" look like giant, psychopathic douchenozzles and leave them merely unpleasant, it won't have to deal with the awful, awful prose of its source novel, and it will fix plot elements just enough to seem like there's something like "drama" going on in its drama plot.
In other words, it'll be merely boring.
But yeah, I can't wait for all the think-pieces on it. As far as box office goes, I think it'll open huge, but will die off pretty quick as word of mouth gets out that it's just not dirty enough to masturbate to.
"I am going to proudly declare that I'm totally excited for Jupiter Ascending, and I don't give a shit what anybody has to say."
ReplyDeleteYES! Jesus. Thank you.
My understanding is that Fifty Shades is not only Twilight-derivative porn but actually literally began life as porny Twilight fanfiction before mutating into whatever exactly it is now.
ReplyDelete@Lucas- Correct. Fifty Shades of Grey started as a Twilight fanfic called Masters of the Universe. The author reconfigured Bella as a University student, and Edward as a young billionaire CEO, and she also stripped off all the supernatural elements.
ReplyDeleteWhen a publisher became interested in it, it became necessary for the author to change the characters' names. Although all of the characters in FSoG have analogues in the Twilight books.
Thrash, Tim:
ReplyDeleteGlad I'm not the only one.
Yes on Cloud Atlas! I did not expect much from that film given that I was a fan of Mitchell's novel and was skeptical it would work cinematically but the Wachowski's solved that by not even attempting to capture the narrative structure of the book, instead using dynamic editing that makes the film seem like a series of constant climaxes for most of its running time. Despite its weighty themes, it never feels labored and moments that could come across as pretentious are undercut by a self-aware but still completely earnest tone. It's a film that constantly calls attention to itself without ever coming across as self-important. It's clear when you are watching for example that the filmmakers are in on how ridiculous all of the actors look in the different makeup and they have quite a lot of fun with that, using it to great comic effect in some instances or to make narrative connections in others. I cannot fault the people for whom this film doesn't work, but if nothing else, isn't it wonderful to have 100 million dollar art film?
ReplyDeleteI'm likewise excited for Jupiter Ascending, though my reason is called Speed Racer.
ReplyDelete@Rick Rische: I'm likewise informed that Grey's behavious makes a lot more sense when you realize he can't go to the police about things because he's a vampire.
ReplyDeleteRe the actual post: the only release I'm looking forward to this month is Big Hero 6, which I missed in theatres. But having never heard of The Lazarus Effect before, I'm a little sad that they're not adapting the third book in a typically trippy late-phase Frank Herbert series. ;)
Everything that's been released so far about Jupiter Ascending makes it feel much less creatively ambitious than Speed Racer or Cloud Atlas, so I'm not getting my hopes up.
ReplyDeleteAlso it's a shame that something so creatively and ideologically questionable as 50 Shades of Grey of all things had to be the introduction to alt-sex for so many people. But at least we're getting a major release that recognizes the fact that women actually do enjoy sex.
What about Maps to the Stars, the new David Cronenberg movie about fucked-up Hollywood with Julian Moore, John Cusack, and Robert Pattinson? It's getting some kind of release February 27th.
ReplyDeleteJust wanted to add to the echo chamber re Jupiter Ascending, and I'm with Hunter on loving Speed Racer ^_^
ReplyDeleteBUT... I'm not optimistic. It has that "Man of Steel" feeling of atoning for a work of genius that made no money with something more conventional. Hopefully I'll eat my hat when I finally see it.
And I'm probably more excited about "Maps to the Stars" than anyone in the room!