So the whole thing where the summer movie season has been creeping earlier and earlier for years now – attested to by our recent record-breaking March box office – is given a huge punch right in the gonads this April. There is, by my count, a grand total of one, count’ em, one movie this month that seems to have been made on the assumption that a substantial paying audience would be at all interested in seeing it. Or two, I guess, but the other one isn’t even getting a wide release.
7.4.2017
That one being Colossal, a giant monster comedy with Anne Hathaway that ended up with an unheard of distributor and a modest platform release schedule. Oh well, it ain’t my business.
The actual films coming out such that many people will have a chance to see them look utterly fucking dismal: director Zach Braff muscles his way back into the world with Going in Style, about cantankerous old men being bank robbers, with the combined talent of Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, Alan Arkin, and Ann-Margret, not one of whom has ever made a bad movie. Then there’s The Case for Christ, which I assume is exactly what it sounds like. The case against Christ is that we now have a third Smurf movie: Smurfs: The Lost Village, though at least this one isn’t a live-action/animation hybrid.
14.4.2017
Like popcorn movies? This is your one shot all month: The Fate of the Furious, which is just far enough away from F8 – an abbreviation prominently featured on the poster, no less! – for me to be enormously frustrated. Anyway, we now get to see what a Paul Walker-less Fast and Furious movie looks like, and with Charlize Theron (and apparently Helen Mirren, in what is surely not more than a cameo) on hand, that’s plenty of compensation. Still, can I be forgiven for saying that the trailers make it look kind of… they’re all “dumb”, so I can’t say that, but it looks dumb in unproductive ways, maybe.
Also, we got this thing Spark, a cartoon about a space monkey, so have at it.
21.4.2017
At this moment in time, there are no fewer than five films slated to open wide this weekend, and I have no doubt in my mind that at least one, probably two, will either have its screen count slashed, or just be moved. That will probably be Free Fire, directed by Ben Wheatley, on the grounds that it’s the only one I’m even slightly interested in seeing; even though High-Rise and A Field in England before it have tempered my early adoration for his work, I’m still onboard to see whatever he does with whatever catches his fancy.
The whole weekend’s a confusing grab-bag, anyway: we have over here the Disney nature documentary Born in China, over there we have Phoenix Forgotten, an alien abduction found-footage horror film, somewhat dismayingly being sold on the good name of producer Ridley Scott. The latter will presumably be dueling for audiences with the crazy ex-wife thriller Unforgettable, right down to the fact that people will absolutely, beyond a shadow of a doubt, get their titles mixed up. If none of that does it for you, maybe you’ll cotton to The Promise, a period romantic triangle about a student and journalist who both love the same woman during the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, a film that sounds like a failed Miramax Oscar bid from 2002. My current prediction: the five films will combine for a lower total than The Fate of the Furious‘s second weekend.
28.4.2017
The IMDb data on Sleight promisingly suggests a sci-fi action-thriller-domestic drama about a street magician, which can’t all be right. The fact that the film premiered over a year ago at Sundance and hasn’t been heard of since suggests that maybe it is, and it’s exactly as muddled as that sounds.
But what else are we to do? Ken Marino, a comic actor I sometimes like, makes his directorial debut with How to Be a Latin Lover, which sounds to be more of a Heartwarming Family Tale rather than a sex farce. And James Ponsoldt directs Tom Hanks and newly-minted Queen of the American Box Office Emma Watson in The Circle, a surveillance thriller with a Dave Eggers script based on a Dave Eggers book, and damn, but that’s a lot of Dave Eggers for me to take, here in 2017.