I think it’s official, at this point: this has been a pretty solid (in some ways very surprisingly so) summer movie season. I don’t believe I’ve ever said that in all my years of blogging. So hurrah for all the good films that have been, and let’s hope that we can add one or two titles to that pile before fall comes and brings with it all the burn-off movies of September.
1.8.2014
The implacable march of Marvel Studios to dominate all popcorn cinema continues with Guardians of the Galaxy, which achieved something that not a single Marvel picture to date has managed: an ad campaign that made me want to see the thing. And admittedly, the more we’ve seen, the more it looks like a formula-driven “more of the same” type of thing, but it’s been too long since we had a good big-scale space opera, and the Chris Pratt Moment in pop culture has been hugely enjoyable so far.
Rather adroitly noting that GotG is tailor-made for white male nerds, Universal has positioned as counter-programming Get on Up, a biopic of James Brown. Starring Chadwick Boseman, who has rather randomly established himself as the guy who plays the lead in movies about famous black people, even those who have as little in common as James Brown and Jackie Robinson.
8.8.2014
They really can’t make enough awful Step Up movies for me to stop looking forward to them, after the holy majesty that was Step Up 3D. So I will, thank you, continue to look forward to Step Up All In right up until I emerge, squinting, from the auditorium, depressed about the money I just wasted.
Warner is basically remaking its 18-year-old Twister as Into the Storm, the first honest-to-God disaster movie in years. It’s a film I’m going to primarily because I think it will be a nice thing to do with my mom, and I’m 100% not kidding about that. Also, because the first trailer as much as claimed “the sound design is great! the rest, not so much”, and I admire the bluntness of that. For those of you with more conventional moms than my own, there’s The Hundred-Foot Journey, with Helen Mirren as a sassy French chef squaring off against Indians, as directed by Lasse Hallström, modern cinema’s greatest creator of pointlessly inoffensive fables. This one’s giving me a Chocolat vibe, which is one of the worst things you could say about anybody.
Lastly, Michael Bay is producing a Jonathan Liebesman film that has to do with turtles. Let’s not talk about it.
13.8.2014
How to tell you’ve aged out of pop culture: watching the trailer for Let’s Be Cops, starring Damon Wayans, Jr. and Jake Johnson as two bros pretending to be policeman, and realising that not only do you not have the god-damnedest idea who either of them are, despite the trailer’s clear assumption that you do, this lack of knowledge does not bother you in the tiniest degree. Fun fact: it’s the only wide release of the month that I’m already entirely sure I won’t be seeing.
15.8.2014
FINALLY, Stallone has decided with The Expendables 3 to bring in the action star to end all action stars in one of his big old action ensemble jobs: Kelsey Grammer. As somebody named “Bonaparte”.
The cast and director of The Giver tell me that it’s got bit more meat on it than most YA adaptations. Tell me in comments if I should read the much-beloved and highly regarded book that I hadn’t heard about until earlier this year.
22.8.2014
Speaking of YA, Chloë Grace Moretz, who I increasingly can’t stand, headlines an out-of-body teen love story called If I Stay, which whatever, but the trailer is hilariously sober. And after the campy excess of her out-of-control crack whore in Sabotage earlier this year, I will follow Mireille Enos anywhere she wants to go.
Sports movies aren’t my bag at all, so if I say that “the longest winning streak in American sports history is snapped, and the high schoolers and coach involved process what that means to them” is literally one of the least-compelling ideas for a movie I’ve heard all year, I hope you’ll take it with a grain of salt. Also, When the Game Stands Tall is a goofy title.
After nine long years in development hell, Sin City: A Dame to Kill For finally is happening, and my 23-year-old self is very confused why my 32-year-old self is so immensely dubious about that fact.
27.8.2014
Pierce Brosnan playing an old spy, as he does in The November Man, is the worst kind of obvious stunt casting. But then, The Matador and The Tailor of Panama were both better than three-quarters of his stint as James Bond, so let’s wait and see.
29.8.2014
Between the extremely serious tone with which it appears to treat generic horror content, the ham-handed dialogue in the ads, and above all the catastrophically pretentious title of As Above, So Below, I am not at all too mature to confess that I’m looking forward to hate-watching this one more than anything I’ve seen in a long, long time.