(Author’s note: there shall be no Sunday Classic Movie Review today…I have been exceptionally busy this weekend & didn’t have time to watch anything. I crave your pardon)
Blah blah blah, boilerplate about how movies suck when it’s not October. Except, my lord if if it doesn’t look like this month is going to suck with exceptional ferocity. I mean, for god’s sake, look at…
4.4.2007
…Are We Done Yet?, which manages to be in one nimble package both an unnecessary sequel to Are We There Yet? and an unnecessary remake of Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House. There is no conceivable reason for a human being with any particular mental stability to consider for the briefest moment paying money to watch this film. Hell, I probably won’t even pay money to watch this film.
And: Firehouse Dog. It is about a celebrity Hollywood stunt dog who ends up working in a firehouse. My eyes are bleeding just from typing that out.
6.4.2007
Quick, list things that make me all melty that normal film viewers couldn’t give less of a crap about: ’70s exploitation cinema, filmmakers who self-consciously evoke other filmmakers, movie trailers. So I’m pretty much the precise target audience for Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s Grindhouse, which I surely don’t need to synopsize at this point. I would like to claim a certain point of pride, I’m the only person I know who is primarily excited by the trailers between the two features, and not the features themselves.
Plus: a thriller for the bible-thumping crowd that’s been pushed back I don’t know how many times, and I can’t wait to see how badly it sucks: The Reaping. Also, Lasse Halström makes Orson Welles’s ghost cry with The Hoax, a Hallströmy (i.e. shitty) take on a story prominently featured in the magnificent F for Fake.
13.4.2007
You know how the world really needed a teenybopper remake of Rear Window? Well thank God, we finally have it: Disturbia. What a great fucking title! And hey, it stars Shia LaBeouf! Well, I know what I’m going to see as many times as I possibly can Friday night!
Whatever the opposite of sparks are, those are surely going to fly between Bruce Willis and Halle Berry in Perfect Stranger, which looks like such a damn ’80s movie, I can tell you. Also, a pox on The Left for stealing the Bronson Pinchot joke that I wanted to make. Lessee, there’s also Year of the Dog, a really typical looking “indie” “comedy” by the man who brought us the screenplays to Orange County and Nacho Libre (and School of Rock, but if you think that means I forgive him even a little, you are so wrong); Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film For Theaters, whose title tries a little too hard, wherein “a little” means “a whole damn lot.” Also, given that even Golden Age ATHF was just perfect at 9 minutes, I have no idea what insane person thought an hour and a half was a good idea in these days of the show’s steep decline. Lastly, Vikings battle Indians in Pathfinder, which appears to be one of the worst adaptations of a James Fenimore Cooper novel ever.
20.4.2007
The Month of Ripping-Off Hitchcock continues with Vacancy, in which two people get off the main road, end up checking in at a tiny hotel and are thereupon threatened by the psychotic proprietor. On the other hand, the director, Nimród Antal, made Kontroll which was brilliant and then some. On the first hand again: the worst lobby advertisements in decades.
Elsewhere: Fracture looks to explore just how bad a film starring Anthony Hopkins and Ryan Gosling can actually be; the makers of the fantastically awesome Shaun of the Dead come back with another parody, this time of cop films, Hot Fuzz. Also, Adam Brody seemingly gives up on ever escaping his persona from The O.C. by starring as an Adam Brody-esque emo heartthrob who makes it with a teenager in In the Land of Women, and to me, playing a caricature of yourself is never much of a good idea, but what do I know. Though seriously, who wouldn’t want to see Adam Brody as, like, a meth-addicted janitor who fights crime while listening to Billie Holiday songs? I’d watch it.
Plus: David Arquette directs The Tripper, a slasher film somehow involving Ronald Reagan. The concept, she does not get much higher.
27.4.2007
JESUS FUCK, when is Nick Cage going to take a break? This time, he’s in a Philip K. Dick adaptation, and I don’t know yet how it’s going to go wrong, but clearly it will, because it stars Nick Cage. Jesus. Oh, right, title: Next.
I mean, seriously, what the Christ?
The teen horror project that kept David Goyer away from The Dark Knight, which seems like a great career move: The Invisible. A movie whose very unpleasantly self-aware tagline is “9 people will die. You get to watch,” and it HAS GOT TO be a satire of some kind, because WWE-produced or not, nobody advertises a film with that level of barbaric literalism, right? The Condemned.
Fucking Cage! Goddammit!
Jamie Kennedy gets to make another movie, and the free children of the world skip and sing and laugh: Kickin’ It Old Skool. I first misspelled that as Kickin’ It Old Skoal, which couldn’t really be any worse of a film. Chewing tobacco is funny, right? Funnier than Jamie Kennedy, anyway. And then some sort of horror movie, I don’t know, Wind Chill. At least it doesn’t fucking star Nicholas fucking Cage.