SEPTEMBER 2016 MOVIE PREVIEW

First, the mea culpa: I'm as aware as anybody as to how many films behind I am from the summer-that-has-ended, and I am very eager to get to them as soon as possible. But "as soon as possible" isn't that soon, because it turns out that one of the perks of being a graduate student at UW-Madison is that sometimes they select you to go on a trip to the Telluride Film Festival. Which is certainly one of the cooler things I've done this year. Or lifetime. Sadly, they do not let you review the Telluride Film Festival, so I won't be able to talk about all the movies I see over the weekend, but I wanted to let you all know why it would be, unforgivably, at least another full week before I'm able to render my considered, weighty thoughts on Ben-Hur mk. 3. Which will probably not benefit from the comparison

(I'm hopeful that I can find a few free hours for other blogging, but if this place seems a little desolate for the next few days, that's why).

But hey, on to September! The fairly mild, middling summer behind us, it's on to the brief lull in between the popcorn movies and the Oscarbait. Although in this lull, there's even one film I'm honest-to-God super-excited for...


2.9.2016

...and that would be The Light Between Oceans, the new film directed by Derek Cianfrance, whose Blue Valentine remains my standard-bearer for romantic dramas in the 2010s. And that's without even adding in a pair of actors I virtually always adore in the form of Michael Fassbender and Rachel Weisz (and an actor I enthusiastically tolerate in the form of Alicia Vikander). Presumably, if this was actually as good as I wanted it to be, it would be getting a more prestigious release weekend, but hey! better than nothing.

There is also a bio-horror movie about a murderous test-tube baby coming out, Morgan, and that sure does sound like a Labor Day weekend movie, alright.


9.9.2016

Tell me "Clint Eastwood directing Tom Hanks", and I am instantaneously interested. Continue on to explain that Sully is the story of Captain "Sully" Sullenberger, and I just get confused. Like... is there actually enough content to make a feature film here? He landed a crashing plane, was found blameless, and everyone loves him. How does dramatic conflict even start to enter into this situation? Why is this more than 10 minutes long? It is a bafflement and no mistake.

And there are two horror movies, which seems profoundly misguided: The Disappointments Room, about a haunted attic, is almost certainly going to be better than When the Bough Breaks, about the psychotic biological father of a surrogate baby, but surely they're going to devour each other, right?

A potential third horror movie comes along in the form of Belgian cartoon Robinson Crusoe, released in the States under the title The Wild Life - which already makes no sense whatsoever, from a marketing perspective alone - and which looks to be made out of the leftover animated zombies from the early mo-cap features from the 2000s.


16.9.2016

Third week in a row of horror! In this case, it's Blair Witch, which I believe is more in the line of a sequel to 1999's The Blair Witch Project than a remake, but I think we can reasonably wonder whether either of those things are necessary. The film (which was announced very late in the game, as a bit of fun) is getting fair enough buzz, but I am inordinately hostile to the hipster indie horror team of director Adam Wingard and writer Simon Barrett, so even given my inherent resistance to the project, this one has all my hackles raised.

Speaking of sequels nobody needed: was a third Bridget Jones picture actually on anybody's wish list? Because we've got one, in the form of Bridget Jones's Baby. I will assume that 12 years is long enough to wipe away the bad taste of Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, though this doesn't strike me as an obvious nostalgia property, unless you yearn for the heady days of needlessly toothless British comedies larding up the movie theaters.

Along with the aforementioned Sully, the month's biggest "we wanted this to be an awards player, but it clearly won't be, damn" is surely Snowden, Oliver Stone's bid to return to politically-charged filmmaking, with Joseph Gordon-Levitt starring as famous and infamous document-leaker Edward Snowden. I am not at all unsympathetic to that story and this filmmaker's preoccupations meeting up in one place, but we must at this point seriously start to grapple with the question of when, exactly, Stone made his last good movie, or even a particularly tolerable one. Because it's definitely been more than a decade.

Lastly, my commitment to name-dropping every wide release film requires me to observe the Christian rock concert film Hillsong: Let Hope Rise, about which I'm sure you're all extremely interested.


23.9.2016

If there's any single bit of advertising prattle that I find obnoxious right now, it's the shamelessness of advertising Storks as "from the studio that delivered The Lego Movie" ("delivered" because storks, ha-ha), which is of course entirely true, except that the two films occupy functionally opposite poles of the commercial American animated landscape: Storks looks like the kind of crap Blue Sky used to try to put over in the mid-'00s, or whatever studio was next lower on the ladder than Blue Sky. Exactly the kind of movie that The Lego Movie existed to mock and show up, in other words.

We get a rare remake of a remake: The Magnificent Seven, an Antoine Fuqua version of the 1960 Western based upon Seven Samurai. If they could make it work once, I don't see why they can't make it work again, and I am certainly intrigued when you put Denzel Washington, Chris Pratt, and Ethan Hawke all in the same movie. On the other hand, Fuqua hasn't yet made a film I've especially cared for, and this looks a lot like an Antoine Fuqua picture for something set in the 19th Century.


30.9.2016

The month's second real-life tale of politically-significant history is Deepwater Horizon, based upon the 2010 explosion in the Gulf of Mexico that created the worst oil spill in history, a fact I will never forget because at the time I was working at a Whole Foods fish market, and we started a big promotion on Gulf shrimp like the week that the explosion took place, and every. Damn. Customer made the same bad jokes. Anyway, it's directed by Peter Berg, whose politics make him kind of the anti-Oliver Stone; the two men are alike only in that both of them are more talented than the movies they make would lead you to believe.

Learning about Masterminds the first time gave me whiplash: so much good comedy talent in the cast! Kate McKinnon in her first post-Ghostbusters role, now that I know to be excited for her! And it's a Jared Hess movie, which makes me feel like a kid on Christmas morning who saved the biggest box for last, and discovered that it was empty except for a solitary pair of socks.

Last and I hope not least, but it doesn't do to be optimistic is Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, which is sort of like a British child's fantasy version of X-Men, near as I can tell, and it re-teams Tim Burton and Eva Green for the first time since she was so incandescent and intelligently campy in his otherwise tepid Dark Shadows. So the question becomes, is she his lucky charm, and this will be great? Or is it just that she enjoys showing off in terrible movies, and this will be godawful.Dear reader, I have my suspicions that it is not the former.