First, an observation: at the start of April 2005, I had not seen one decent movie. So far this year, I’ve seen three. Does this mean 2006 will be better than last year? Hard call: last April brought us Sin City, and I don’t see anything of the calibre coming up soon.
7.4.2006
So much bad, but nothing likely to be worse than The Benchwarmers, starring the unholy trifecta of David Spade, Rob Schneider and Jon Heder, and produced by Satan himself. Moving right along is Mo’Nique in Phat Girlz, a warm and fuzzy type comedy about a fashion designer; Jennifer Aniston, Frances McDormand and Catherine Keener in Friends with Money, which looks like it shall be wasting a 66% good cast on a film whose guiding principle seems to be “Interiors? Yeah, that film had too much going on.” Oh, and Antonio Banderas in Take the Lead, AKA the fictional version of Mad Hot Ballroom.
I want to single out Lucky Number Slevin because I’m pissed off at it; Ben Kingsley’s return to crime drama, with the likes of Bruce Willis, Stanley Tucci and Morgan Freeman, and some studio asshole decided to cast Josh fucking Hartnett as the central character.
Also, the one hope I have for the entire damn month, the high school noir Brick. Not clear if it’s just NY/LA, or if it drifts to Chicago this weekend.
14.4.2006
Why even bother complaining that Scary Movie 4 will suck? They have to stop making them eventually. And I must admit, I find the poster sort of amusing, with its “The funniest thing you ever sawed” tagline and the shocked Hello Kitty bandaid.
What else? Disney’s reverse-Madagascar, and the last in their line of “hey, CGI is r0x0rs!” attempts to steal some of the Pixar magic (have you heard, Lasseter wants to bring back 2D animation? And the Pixar guys are killing all of the in-progress Disney projects? Awesome), The Wild. Also Gretchen Moll as The Notorious Bettie Page, a film that looks like it could go anywhere quality-wise, and that’s kind of exciting to me, in this age of hugely predictable everything. Kinky Boots, a Britcom about drag queens and shoemakers whose sole reason for being is the presence of Chiwetel Ejiofor as a woman. And Hard Candy, which has an awesome trailer and looks real damn creepy, but is getting bad reviews.
21.4.2006
American Dreamz: the new Paul Weitz comedy (and five years ago, that would have made me very scared, but hey, always give a guy a chance to knock a couple out of the park), and broadsided satire of American culture (poster: “Imagine a country where the president never reads the newspaper, where the government goes to war for all the wrong reasons, and more people vote for a pop idol than the next president”). I don’t know why Hugh Grant is in the cast, and I fear it will be too dumbed-down to have anything real to say, but I maintain an open mind.
Otherwise: the gorgeous Radha Mitchell in a “missing child” thriller, Silent Hill, likely to be the next horror film that completely disappoints me; The Sentinel, which looks like a tarted-up In the Line of Fire with Michael Douglas as a Secret Service agent (who really needs to stop making movies if he’s going to age this vulgarly); and believe it or not, another damn Secret Service movie, starring Mariel Hemingway (!): In Her Line of Fire. My money says it’s going to be glorious trash – Brian Trenchard-Smith (he of Megiddo!!!!) directs.
28.4.2006
Okay, the big deal is obviously United 93, the first-ever 9/11 movie, which I really think is going to suck hard. The trailer makes it look a little too written, like the passengers know that they are Actors In A Larger Drama in a profoundly fake way. I might see, might not, but I’m definitely looking forward more to Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center.
A new Robin Williams road-trip family comedy (God save us) with a miserable trailer, R.V. managed to wrangle both Will Arnett and Tony Hale, and if this is what a post-Arrested Development world is going to look like, I think it’s probably just time to die (off-topic: Michael Cera and Alia Shawkat on Wednesday’s Veronica Mars? Awesome, and if it gets renewed they’d better come back). Akeelah and the Bee is another damn spelling bee drama, but it looks infinitely better than Bee Season, which I refused to see; and Deepa Mehta’s Water, a drama about gender roles in India which I probably shouldn’t see – it doesn’t look like a good place to start watching her films – but it has a truly beautiful trailer.