As Prestige Season starts to really rev up (though am I completely wrong in thinking that virtually all of this year’s legitimate Oscar hopefuls are crammed into a three-week period from Thanksgiving to December 19?), October is rather dauntingly full of new releases. Let’s jump in!
3.10.2008
A friend and I had an argument shortly after its premier about the teaser trailer for Beverly Hills Chihuahua. I made the claim that it was the most debased thing ever produced by the human mind; he countered that the word “debased” failed to suggest the physical sensation of nausea the clip induced. Which is a tremendously hard thing to disagree with. Anyway, I’ve gone out of my way to avoid learning anything else about it, as the real film cannot possibly as superfucking awesome as the film in my head (basically Moulin Rouge! with nightmarish CGI dogs). The saddest thing? I’m actually going to pay the $9 to have this fact confirmed.
Alright, let’s unpack the rest of this mother: two comedies, one which appears to be broad ‘n’ wacky (How to Lose Friends & Alienate People), on which seems to have been made to experimentally determine how much hipsterism you can stuff into a slender 90-minute frame without completely destroying Michael Cera’s career in the process (Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, and if you’re going to co-opt those names for a goddamned hipstersploitation flick, you’d better have a pretty fucking great card up your sleeve to make up for that terrible trailer).
Then, we got us a pair of warm/fuzzy true life stories, one about sports, one about a man getting dicked over by Corporate America: The Express and Flash of Genius, respectively.
Then, a dueling pair of political films: from the Left, Bill Maher’s anti-organized religion documentary Religulous; from the right, 9/11 Republican David Zucker’s clearly unfunny comedy about how Michael Moore is a fat socialist, An American Carol.
Then (I told you the month was busy), the delayed release of former Oscarbait and Cannes failure Blindness, plus fresh and exciting Oscar hopeful Rachel Getting Married, which from the trailer looks like it might finally be the film to convince me that Anne Hathaway doesn’t completely suck at acting.
10.10.2008
October is for horror movies, and the first one this month is the first unabashed Cloverfield knock-off Quarantine. Hurrah for new subgenres!
Competing for the top box-office slot is Ridley Scott’s newest, a spy thriller with Leonardo DiCaprio and Russell Crowe title Body of Lies that appears, from the trailer, to be a shallow exercise in masculinity and explosions, though they’d have you believe that it’s an important film about the war on terror. Man, why is Ridley Scott so terrible now?
The arthouse run of Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky kicks off, along with the latest from the supremely talentless Mumblecore baby Joe Swanberg, Nights and Weekends. Plus, rather incongruously, a fantasy epic about the hidden City of Ember. You know, for kids.
16.10.2008
The 44th Annual Chicago International Film Festival begins, because my October isn’t apparently hard enough as it is.
17.10.2008
It’s thrilling – and horribly rare – to have an upcoming release that you just can’t figure out beforehand. That’s exactly what’s coming with Oliver Stone’s unlikely W., biopic of the soon-to-be ex-president. Funny or serious? Both? Is it going to be any good at all? The best film of the season? The first worthwhile Stone film in a decade? Is it too soon? Pre-election propaganda? SO MANY QUESTIONS! I can’t wait for this one, and I am weirded out to say so.
From one film about an indulged frat boy to another, there’s a sort of farce called Sex Drive opening, and I might be more worked up about the plot if there was any chance in Hell of my going to see it.
The next comedy: What Just Happened, the newest attempt from the increasingly irrelevant Barry Levinson to keep himself in the game. Pity he chose the ludicrously overworked Hollywood satire genre for the attempt.
Wrapping things up with Mark Wahlberg in a Gothic CGI epic video game adaptation, Max Payne, and while there must eventually be a video game movie that’s remotely decent…I take that back, there really doesn’t. And then some bit of pasty humanism titled The Secret Life of Bees.
24.10.2008
If it’s Halloween, etc. Saw V. And yet people still claim that there’s a loving God.
But seriously, for the more adventurous viewer, today brings Fear(s) of the Dark, a French animation anthology. Except maybe not; it might actually be opening on the 24th, or that might just be New York, and why God why do we have the internet if three weeks before the fact this is the kind of half-information that’s out there? I might just catch it at the Festival and be done with it, myself.
Two prestige films to clear the palate: Clint Eastwood’s Changeling, which can I be honest? I adore Clint – I was way ahead of the curve on the whole “one of America’s greatest directors” thing, and I haven’t budged – but I look at the trailer, and I think, this does not look like a very interesting movie. Besides, J. Michael Straczynski tends only to be a great writer when he’s writing Babylon 5. But I’m sure it will look amazing. I have the exact opposite fear about Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut, Synecdoche, New York: no doubt it’s a great story, but what’s he like behind the camera?
The disposables: a PG-13 horror film (meh) with an overqualified cast, Passengers, a long-delayed cop movie, Pride and Glory, and the theatrical fucking release of High School Musical 3.
31.10.2008
And then it was Halloween itself, the day marked by two very different horror pictures: for the teens and tweens, The Haunting of Molly Hartley, about a young girl who learns that terrible things will happen when she turns 18 – I can’t figure out what that metaphor might be about – and for the easily satisfied adult, Splinter, about a bunch of people trapped in a building. Groundbreaking!
Kevin Smith teams with Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks – and I know which one I think will be a better fit to the writer/director’s sensiblities – for Zack and Miri Make a Porno, which at least has an amusingly straightforward title, even if Smith’s recent track record makes me more nervous than excited.
And 29 films from where we started, that’s that!