The weirdest month, between the winter cast-offs and the summer blockbusters, not quite certain whether the films coming out are one or t’other. Hopefully I will be personally better able to keep up with the new month’s releases than I was throughout March.
3.4.2009
Things get off to a hopefully strong start with Adventureland, in which the director of the delightful Superbad continues to leverage his adoration of ancient pop culture into coming-of-age sex comedies. The only thing I hold against this new project is the presence of the unforgivable Kristen Stewart, who has been reliably wooden in all sorts of things, but most recently sucked the emulsion off the film stock in Twilight. Beyond that, we non-coasters only get a few limited releases: Sugar, a sports movie of the apparently inspiring bent, about a young Hispanic baseball player, and R.W. Goodwin’s Alien Trespass, which is either a parody or a straight-up homage to the cheesy sci-fi thrillers of the 1950s.
Lastly, most importantly, why the fuck didn’t they name it 4 Fast 4 Furious?
10.4.2009
Somebody give me a good reason not to be excited for Observe and Report. It stars Seth Rogen and Anna Faris, and it’s from the writer-director of The Foot Fist Way, and it’s almost certainly going to be the year’s superior mall cop picture. Okay, so all of those are plausible reasons not to be excited, and I answered my own question. But hey, it might be fantastic.
You know what won’t be fantastic? Hannah Montana: The Movie, which is based on that whole “Miley Cyrus is approximately equal to Hannah Montana” mythology that I have too many years and too many Y chromosomes to ever understand or appreciate.
What might, possibly, be fantastically awful is the live-action Dragonball Evolution, which to judge from the trailer will be a boondoggle of Super Mario Bros.-esque proportions.
17.4.2009
Yet more movies that I should definitely not be excited about, and yet I can’t help myself! What is this horrid thing called April, when even a smart young film blogger as I cannot keep from looking forward to what is so obviously going to be a piece of rancid crap as 17 Again? I despise Zac Efron, and I have little use for Matthew Perry, so what is appealing to me about the fact that the one plays the younger version of the other in an atrociously high-concept idea like “Big, but the other way ’round?” God only knows.
I’m also stupidly excited for Crank: High Voltage, given that I really truly do think that the first Crank was a completely successful example of a certain kind of film. Sequels always suck, and Jason Statham sequels are no exception, so I’m sure to be let down. But what kind of man could be let down by the fucking sequel to fucking Crank?
State of Play, meanwhile, will probably be legitimately good – it has a top-drawer cast, anyway – but since all I an think is that it was based on an essentially perfect forebearer, why bother remaking it? This is why I am an essentially messed-up human being.
22.4.2009
Disney says: Happy Earth Day! To celebrate, here is a sample of pretty nature footage with cute animals, and it shall be called Earth, and verily it will be on IMAX for long days to come. Also, it was apparently culled entirely from footage already seen in Planet Earth. So that’s pretty cheap.
24.4.2009
You know what I love to hate? Movies that give away every last beat of the story in the trailers. Movies like Obsessed, in which Ali Larter wants to jump Idris Elba’s bones, but Idris’s wife Beyoncé Knowles won’t have it, and she ends up dangling Larter off the edge of a hole that conveniently opens up in the floor of her home. I exepect said dangling happens less than five minutes before the end credits. But maybe I’ll be surprised! Maybe this is, indeed, the modern version of no less than Psycho.
Maybe not.
The long-delayed Oscarbait The Soloist finally gets dumped unceremoniously… was that a rude thing to say? Whatever, the trailer makes it look like sheer shit, and Jamie Foxx in a film’s cast never augurs particularly well.
There’s also a movie called, simply, Fighting; and I say, if you’re going to give your film such a primordially simple title as Fighting, it had damn well better be a primordially simple story, and not e.g. a Channing Tatum vehicle. Once again, they don’t listen to me. Nobody does. Otherwise, this would be, like “Re-releasing Bergman films on IMAX month”, or something not completely awful. The worst thing is that the summer films look unusually bad this year. Hell.