We’ve had two massive box hits in the last four months, but more importantly, we’re starting to get modest successes again (I am here thinking mostly of Dog and The Lost City, the latter of which I hope to finally get to very soon) and that, I think, is the best sign we’ve had in two years and one month that theatrical movies are back, mostly. Not in huge numbers – we’re still heading into a month where one weekend has not a single wide release planned at this point – but it’s the first time since before the pandemic that we have a month of movies that feels like a month of movies, right down to the specific variety of garbage that some of them represent. Nothing says “the world is healing” more than a hideous-looking video game sequel, after all.
1.4.2022
Or, for that matter, like a good old-fashioned catastrophically bad comic book movie. It takes a whole lot these days for a movie with the word “Marvel” attached to get pervasively bad reviews, but Morbius has achieved that and then some: it’s become such a universally-recognised critical punching bag that part of me slightly wonders if it might actually be interesting. Not a big part, to be sure: the trailers have promised the worst kind of ’90s-style “we have no idea how to adapt comics into movies” garbage. Still, the uniformity and intensity of the hostility greeting the film has actually gotten me more excited; poor movies are common, but boondoggles are not, and I don’t think it’s hoping to much for at least a minor boondoggle here.
8.4.2022
What can one say about Sonic the Hedgehog 2? The first Sonic was remarkably forgettable, with its main point of distinction being that it was the last substantial box office success before theaters closed in March 2020. And that timing served to make me, at least, more or less entirely forget that it had ever existed. Presumably somebody most have been into it, at least enough to pay off the promise of its sequel hooks. It genuinely doesn’t feel like it even exists, and yet here we are. And it’s somehow two hours long, on top of it. Again, I take a weird comfort in this getting a theatrical release: this screams “direct to Paramount+”, and the fact that it’s not means that our inevitable streaming future hasn’t fully taken over.
Elsewhere, I am going wildly against character in having a fair degree of anticipation for a Michael Bay film, out of all the movies in the wide world. In this case, the thrillingly generically-titled Ambulance, which is indeed about an ambulance, and the bank robbers who’ve stolen it. It all feels a bit small and unambitious, which is very much the mode I am interested in Bay occupying; his best work has consistently been the most tossed-off and small-scale.
Meanwhile, fans of depressing documentaries will be excited to learn that British social realist Andrea Arnold is making her non-fiction debut with Cow, a film about how the cruelty of factory farming.
13.4.2022
There is, for some reason, a movie in which Mark Wahlberg plays an ex-boxer who becomes a priest to make amends for all of the violence and self-destruction in his life. It’s called Father Stu, and I, for one, will probably need to remind myself what it’s about every single time I ever see the title.
15.4.2022
Warner Bros. is still doggedly trying convince us that we need that ongoing franchise of Harry Potter prequels. The third and latest is called Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore, and after the unwatchable disaster that was 2018’s Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, I am morbidly curious to see if they can possibly make another one that bad, or if quality control will have kicked back in by now.
22.4.2022
A big weekend: three wide release films, and two of them even look at least somewhat appealing. The one that doesn’t is The Bad Guys, an animated feature that appears to have gotten lost along the way to rip-off Shrek, and only managed to get to theaters 18 or 19 years after it was supposed to.
But there’s at least some room to be optimistic for The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, I hope: it’s a film that could only possibly work with Nicolas Cage, who plays himself playing himself as an exaggerated version of his internet meme persona, in an action movie. It strikes me as being a bit too precious, if I’m being honest, but I would also maintain that Cage is smarter and better than those same memes give him credit for, and I’ll presume there must be at least some “there” there, especially on the back of strong early reviews.
Lastly and assuredly not least, Robert Eggers is directing his third feature and the first one that isn’t at least adjacent to horror: The Northman, an action thriller about vikings with a phenomenal cast: Nicole Kidman, Ethan Hawke, Willem Dafoe, and Anya Taylor-Joy, all in support of Alexander Skarsgård. Who isn’t my favorite Skarsgård, to be certain, but casting him as a 10th Century viking is so inevitable that it feels like good casting anyway. Honestly, they had me at “Eggers’s third feature”; this is probably in my top five most anticipated films for the remainder of 2022, not just the April release I’m far and away the most excited for.