There are three releases this month that have a real shot at huge blockbuster status, and yet doesn't it kind of feel like the whole of November is a waiting game until that film comes out in December? It doesn't help that the anointed Oscarbait of 2015 is almost uniformly the drabbest, least exciting sort of tosh. Anyway, let's plow through while we're waiting for that space picture..
6.11.2015
Daniel Craig's fourth James Bond film, Spectre, comes in on a wave of bad signifiers: a crummy ad campaign, repellent theme song, weak reviews, and Craig's own astonishingly obvious hatred for the franchise and the characters. Not since Die Another Day has it been so hard to gin up real excitement about a new adventure for the gentleman spy. I mean, of course I'll be there opening weekend. But I'm not going to be optimistic about it.
The counter-programming is inspired: a feature-length CGI Peanuts Movie. There are obviously a lot of ways for this to go wrong, stylistically and tonally, and I trust Blue Sky Studios to find all of them. But it's hard not to be intrigued, and the soft pastel flatness of the footage that has been available so far is surprisingly appealling.
13.11.2015
An astonishingly flaccid weekend for this time of year. The thoroughly under-buzzed drama about the trapped Chilean miners of some years ago, The 33, would surely be getting an Oscar push if it was any good at all; the star packed Christmas comedy Love the Coopers drips with insincerity and flop sweat, and on top of it is the first movie in 14 years from the director of the repulsive I Am Sam. The "lucky" among us will get to check out Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt appearing onscreen for the first time in a decade in By the Sea, with Jolie on writing and directing duties. And since she's gone two-for-two on pretty unambiguously unacceptable Serious Middlebrow Art Films, I can't imagine this being even up to the level of barely watchable.
20.11.2015
And thus it ends: The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2 basically has to be better than its predecessor (it's based on the better part of the book) but also basically has to still be bad (the book is pretty crappy). Iconic franchise or not, this feels like an absolute afterthought; hundreds of millions of dollars worth of afterthought, but still.
Another all-star holiday comedy, in the multi-religious The Night Before; the target audience is about 30 years younger, but the desperation remains, and unlike most people, I thought the triangulation of Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Seth Rogen, and director Jonathan Levine was nothing remotely special or insightful in 50/50. The whole thing seems intently pandering.
Meanwhile, Secret in Their Eyes is a remake of an Argentine Oscar-winner that's only... seven years past its sell-by date? But hell, I can't say no to Chiwetel Ejiofor, Julia Roberts, and Nicole Kidman all in one place.
In limited release, Todd Haynes's Carol is here to save the whole movie season. God, I can't wait to see this thing.
25.11.2015
So what kind of movie are we meant to take our families to? The second Pixar film in a year, The Good Dinosaur, with its soft cartoony characters and photorealistic backgrounds, looks incredibly weird, but the good kind of weird. I hope. The Rocky spin-off Creed looks not weird at all, just very Dad-ish. Still, it has a good "pass the torch" hook, and it's always well to have more Michael B. Jordan.
And then there is Victor Frankenstein, starring Daniel Radcliffe and James McAvoy as the mad doctor before the monster, and I think we should only take pity on it, not mock it.
27.11.2015
Amidst other Oscary releases, we are to be graced with The Danish Girl, the most Oscarbaity Oscarbait of the season. Political themes! Road-tested prestigey director! Road-tested prestigey actor! And absolutely no conceivable reason to think that might be even minutely interesting to watch!
04 November 2015
16 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 so want to love Peanuts! I grew up on the comic strips and cartoons. It's possible that it can be great, right?! Also, no love for Spotlight? I know it's oscarbait but Michael Keaton has to count for something!
ReplyDeleteI actually wrote a college thesis about Peppermint Patty's romantic crush for Charlie Brown. Here's hoping the Peanuts movie will be good too. There's nothing wrong with hope!
DeleteI just read Matt Zoller Seitz's review of SPECTRE on rogerebert.com, and damn, what a poor replacement for the grand old man he is. Not only is the gist of the review "James Bond sucks and has always sucked," he gives away a major twist! Granted, it's a twist I had already guessed, but it would have been nice to confirm it on my own.
ReplyDelete@R.J.Ward: MZS is generally pretty awesome. There's just a couple subjects--like superheroes, and I guess James Bond--where he gets grumpy and wonders why everyone else seems to like this stuff. But he's great on Wes Anderson, Michael Mann, Terrence Malick, etc.
DeleteWith America's (hell, most of the human race's) enduring love for Peanuts, Blue Sky is walking a tightrope here. If they screw this up, there might be death threats.
ReplyDeleteBut I don't want them to fail. Hey, DreamWorks eventually got their act together and produced Kung Fu Panda; maybe, just maybe, Blue Sky will produce their first somewhat decent movie with this. They seem to have done a good job integrating Charles Shulz's flat art style into a 3D world, at least from what I've seen in the previews.
I guess I'm the only person who could never get over the Peanuts gang's repellant treatment of Charlie Brown enough to enjoy them. They have their occasional funny moments, and I've never failed to chuckle sy least once while watching one of their classic specials, but even at their best there's always got to be at least one moment where somebody points out that the sad little bald boy is just the worst piece of shit just for existing, and I can't find them at all endearing. The animation does look pretty, though.
ReplyDeleteAs for me, I've kind of rearranged my entire life in order to be in a town with a decent theatre on December 18, and yeah, every movie between now and then just seems like it's filling space - pun not intended.
Bloody hell, that Secret in Their Eyes film--I have seen the preview several times, and each time I think, can this REALLY be the totally un-self-conscious, reactionary revenge porn that they're marketing it as? Because I want to think that it must undermine this construction at some point, but the trailer just makes it look incredibly repulsive.
ReplyDeleteSo, what's the general consensus on Victor Frankenstein? Will it be more or less of a travesty than 2014's oh-so-memorable "I, Frankenstein"?
ReplyDeleteRegular GeoX — I can't speak for the upcoming remake, but the Argentinian original does a pretty good job of cultivating ambivalence around the protagonists' revenge plot. It's more The Skin I Live In than it is, like, Death Wish or something.
ReplyDeletePoor SPECTRE. The reviews are an odd beast- it went down really well in the UK, but American critics seem to absolutely hate it.
ReplyDeleteHaving seen it myself, I'm very interested to hear your thoughts on it, Tim- might time allow for a revival of the James Bondathon format?
@Unknown:
ReplyDeleteI was about to ask exactly the same thing! If/when Spectre gets reviewed, I'm definitely hoping for the Bond-retrospective format, much more fun than a standard review.
Speaking as a UK viewer, I didn't have much use for the film at all beyond the absolute baseline of being mildly entertained. More on that when the time comes, but for me it sits alongside Age of Ultron and Jurassic World as a representative 2015 franchise blockbuster that only renders itself blander and flimsier by the rush to cram in as many spectacular set pieces as possible.
>Poor SPECTRE. The reviews are an odd beast- it went down really well in the UK, but American critics seem to absolutely hate it.
ReplyDeleteI've noticed that this is pretty common actually: in movies with rolling release dates, reviews from papers in the UK, AUS and NZ tend to be more favorable on average, meaning that RT scores for those movies are higher before they hit the US. Why? Who knows.
The fact that PIXAR is making a dinosaur movie that looks like a Flintstones rerun and (according to the latest teasers) feels like yet another "Land Before Time" sequel smells very strongly of the bad kind of weird, especially if this is supposedly the significantly reworked version. This just has not been a good year for paleontologists at the movies.
ReplyDeleteDamn, remember when we mistakenly thought that PIXAR was making this instead? Fun times.
Regarding Spectre's reviews in the States as opposed to the British reviews, I honestly think there is a significant portion of the American film media that has no time for anything in the franchise before Casino Royale, and that Spectre's tonal harking back to the past is a betrayal of the bold new dawn that it promised, whereas most British critics have a long history with the franchise, and are more willing to place it into context/ forgive its inadequacies (delete as per your preferences).
ReplyDeleteI thought Spectre as a film was fairly delightful, on the whole, but it has barely more than a passing tonal connection to Casino Royale. For me, that's a good thing- Casino Royale was exactly what the franchise needed, but I'm happy that Bond can be Bond again without having to cling on to Bourne's coattails. I can see how people who far prefer Casino Royale to anything else in the franchise barely being able to tolerate it.
Some of the reviews would have us believe that Spectre is down there with Moonraker, A View To A Kill or Die Another Day, and that's ludicrously untrue.
I thought Spectre was just fine. Overlong and ruinously concerned with its own continuity, but the outdoor photograph and set design were staggering, and I'm happy that Bond can totally exist with one foot in its history while still feeling like a modern action film. Also, I'm with Unknown: though I haven't read any reviews yet, anyone who suggests it comes close to the nadir of the series hasn't seen Diamonds Are Forever in a while.
ReplyDeleteIn terms of plot coherence, SPECTRE is a huge step beyond SKYFALL. The new film also has both lots of explosions and a Proust reference. What's not to love?
ReplyDelete