We're meant to be warming up for summer, but the whole month feels a little bit empty, from where I stand. Not even any good-looking limited releases, really. But it has the merit of opening big with one of the popcorn movies I'm most excited about all year. And in that respect, it is a good warm-up.
3.4.2015
If you'd asked me as recently as 2009 if I thought that the day would come when a movie in the Fast & Furious franchise could possibly have been one of my most eagerly anticipated films of a year, I'd have found that a totally ridiculous question (I'd also have wondered why in the hell you thought the franchise would still be around six years later). And yet here we are at Furious 7, and after two movies that flawlessly combined Looney Tunes physics, dumbfounding practical effects, and heist movies, I'll be onboard with the further adventures Vin Diesel and family for a good while yet. The one big concern: it's only seven minutes longer than Fast Five and Fast & Furious 6, but 137 minutes is a gross length for what amounts to a live-action cartoon about people punching each other with cars. At any rate, I don't see an outcome where this doesn't prove to be the best wide release of the month.
10.4.2015
The annual Nicholas Sparks adaptation, The Longest Ride, apparently makes the argument that love affairs divided by one man's addiction to rodeo riding are equally as noble as love affairs divided by World War II. Which is an argument that one can make, I suppose.
Meanwhile, Clouds of Sils Maria starts its U.S. arthouse tour, and I would not expect any of you to believe me when I call Olivier Assayas & Juliette Binoche's latest a total flub enlivened only by Kristen Stewart an more than I believed it when I was told it by others.
17.4.2015
In a month notable for its anemic release slate, all of a sudden we get no fewer than four wide releases dropping all at once. The biggest will undoubtedly be Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2, because you can never exhaust the possibilities of a fat man falling down. Or being kicked by a horse and turned into a shitty visual effect, a fucking terrible gag lovingly showcased in the film's trailer, which is my current reigning "I can't wait for the film to open so I don't have to see it in front of every movie" pick. Fighting it for dominance, we find the tacky and gimmicky-sounding horror film about social media, Unfriended, and Disney's newest animal documentary, given the dubious title Monkey Kingdom. And then there's Child 44, for which I have not personally seen a shred of advertising, and the hook - chasing a serial killer in the Stalinist era of the Soviet Union - sounds a bit hacky, but Tom Hardy and Gary Oldman headline. And even if we can't always trust either of those men, surely we can trust them both?
24.4.2015
After years of lingering in development hell, the paranormal romantic melodrama The Age of Adaline finally has attained a form where it can be released, and we can all bask in its vaguely Benjamin Button-ey tale of a woman who stops aging, and then falls in love with a man and his grandson. And this is kind of the opposite of a Blart 2: Bigger and Blarter for me, since I've been seeing the trailer for this in front of everything as well, but it's one of those deals where it feels like I have to catch it, just to see what the hell. Also falling into "what the hell" territory: Little Boy, one of those faith-based movies about a little boy (imagine that!) who prays to move a mountain in order to bring his father back from World War II. Presumably, this makes sense.
It's not opening wide and I haven't the slightest intention of seeing it, but it would be remiss of me not to mention that Russell Crowe is making his directorial debut with The Water Diviner, featuring no less a movie star than Russell Crowe.
And since we live in a global world, I will observe without comment that 2015's pre-ordained Biggest Box-Office Smash (Unless That Space Picture This Christmas Beats It), The Avengers: Age of Ultron, shall be available in most of the world that isn't the United States as of this weekend.
31 March 2015
19 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 disagree on Child 44 - that hook sounds amazing. I'm just grimly certain that the movie will grossly fuck it up.
ReplyDelete*checks IMDB*
"A disgraced member of the military police..."
Oh, look at that. They fucked it up.
Okay, fair is fair, if all I knew about the hook is what I said about the hook, I'd have been thinking "Communist Zodiac" and I'd have been excited.
ReplyDeleteWe are in full agreement that a "disgraced X" is pretty much an automatic turn-off.
Oh. My. God. I had no idea it was available.
ReplyDeleteWhich, for the record, it is here.
I won't be able to watch until at least very late tonight, so nobody spoil it for me, and I think it's fair to assume that a review will be forthcoming very soon.
Yeah, this is a miss for me except Furious 7 of course
ReplyDeletenow everybody please stop what you're doing and watch the new Mad Max trailer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEJnMQG9ev8
Pray to whatever diety you believe in you don't die before this fuckin' movie comes out
No interest in The Blartening, unless it means you're going to revisit Blart The First, which did a better job of making me want to rewatch Die Hard than it did anything for itself. It wasn't utterly vile, though, which means of course that Blart of Darkness will be.
ReplyDeleteUnfriended does look like total crap, but I have to admit that I think the poster is really impressive, at least from a conceptual point of view (and until the tagline ruins it):
ReplyDeletehttp://www.imdb.com/media/rm2115305216/tt3713166?ref_=tt_ov_i#
Brian--I'll admit a weakness for the "puns on sequel titles" genre of humor, so take this with a grain of salt, but I have to say, BLART OF DARKNESS is downright *inspired*.
ReplyDeleteAny thoughts on Ex Machina, Tim? Also, I rarely comment but thank you for your Almost Famous review! I really enjoyed it.
ReplyDeleteStill hoping for a look back on the first three Fast and Furious films. I rewatched the first one recently, and it reminded me of the way your talk about AIP biker movies or beach pictures, in that it's a piece of Youth Exploitation Cash-In that created an explosive cottage industry (hey there, Biker Boyz!). That first one is so dialed in on The Los Angeles Street Racing Scene to its near detriment (except that now it's kind of nostalgic); I wonder how much it ended up informing that same culture it was purporting to represent. Man, that franchise has gone to some weird places, and I wonder if the whole thing would be worse if it hadn't.
ReplyDeleteJohn- I mean, you got your Domnhall Gleeson, you got your Oscar Isaac, that's definitely enough to get my attention. But the logline sounds tacky as hell. I'm interested, but not entirely hopeful.
ReplyDeleteAndrew- The evolution of the franchise is truly and wonderfully inexplicable. I'd not hold out too much hope for a retro in time for Furious 7, but I would never say never.
In the unexpected category of "faith based movies I'm weirdly intrigued by", John Rhys-Davies is apparently blowing up colonial Philly on April 6th: http://m.imdb.com/title/tt2433040/
ReplyDelete@Brian: have you ever read a Summer of Blood? Those things are doing well when more than half of the movies are better than "legitimately fucking awful". :P
ReplyDeleteMan, I OWN half or more of the summer of blood films. Other than, like, Exorcist II, they're better than F&F.
ReplyDelete...Well now Tim has to review it, just for "yeah this is worse than Friday the 13th VI: Jason Lives".
ReplyDeleteHeck, I don't even think the first one is the worst of the series. Not even the second worst.
ReplyDeleteAs long as Tokyo Drift exists, there will always be a worse F&F movie.
ReplyDeleteYeah, when I think of the Fast films being ranked, I think of them as:
ReplyDeleteFast & Furious 6
Furious 7
Fast Five
The Fast and the Furious
Fast & Furious
2 Fast 2 Furious
The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift
And now that I'm looking at all those titles, I want to repeat fuck that franchise's titles (and whoever thinks of them).
Correction, whoever comes up with those titles is an absolutely beautiful human being and I can only hope that it's the same guy as whoever came up with Step Up 2 The Streets.
ReplyDeleteProbably fair to point out the only one I've seen is the first one, and, not counting Iron Giant and Guardians of the Galaxy, it's the only Vin Diesel movie I've ever seen, period. Because he was so unbelievably bad, man. Like, worst performance I've ever seen in an actual studio movie with professional actors and a budget ever levels of bad.
ReplyDelete