Almost time to put another year to bed. But not just any year: Alternate Ending will be celebrating its first birthday just a couple weeks into January, so we might as well call this our first full year. Thanks to all of you who followed over from Antagony & Ecstasy that was, or who were listening to Rob and Carrie before they brought on this Tim fella, and thanks as well to all of you’ve joined us along the way.
Anyway, there’ll be time for that sweet and sentimental stuff later: right now, let’s stand in amazement at the spectacle of a month that’s both crowded and somehow barren, like pretty much everybody just gave up trying in the face of the new Star Wars, but couldn’t bear to see the release dates go by empty.
1.12.2017
And yet, empty is practically the word for this first weekend, which follows the pattern of many post-Thanksgiving weeks by premiering zero new wide releases. A few of the more noteworthy efforts include the Oscar-buzzing likes of The Shape of Water (one of Tim’s most anticipated films of the fall) and James Franco’s adaptation of The Disaster Artist, a story about the making of the notoriously terrible The Room.
Also, we get the short theatrical release of the Amazon-produced Wonder Wheel, the latest nostalgic drama written and directed by Woody Allen, and I’m not going to get into all that. I try to make very sure that current sociopolitical conversations stay away from my part of this website. Not for any principled reason! It is because I am a coward, terrified of getting in trouble. But I do think it’s fascinating that there’s been essentially no chatter whatsoever about Woody Allen having a new film in the face of all of everything that’s been going on the last few weeks. Anyway, the film has a beautiful poster, and Allen’s last film, Café Society, was the first movie of his entire career that looked pretty, and I constantly root for Kate Winslet.
8.12.2017
Here comes a wide release, Just Getting Started, though it’s not much of one: Morgan Freeman and Tommy Lee Jones play antagonistic old men in a comedy that feels like it could have been made at any point, with these exact actors, in the last 20 years. It’s the late Glenne Headly’s penultimate film, if that helps you make any decisions.
Last-minute Oscar hopefuls march on: I, Tonya, a dark comedy biopic of noted bad sport Tonya Harding. Today, a friend described it as, “I already know how I feel about real David O. Russell, why would I want to see how I feel about knock-off David O. Russell”, which is probably unfair – director Craig Gillespie only wishes he was knock-off David O. Russell – but it was too good not to share. The movie looks like crap, anyway.
15.12.2017
Alright, straight into the rant. I already bought tickets on the Giant Ass Screen for opening Friday of Star Wars: The Last Jedi, so all that follows is of course self-righteous bullshit, but I think Disney has succeeded in making sure that I’m never excited for a new Star Wars film again. It was the whole Han Solo director kerfuffle. Like, we could already tell from the cautiously uncreative Force Awakens and the murmurs of just went on during the Rogue One reshoots that Kathleen Kennedy has no interest at all in letting people do genuinely interesting things on her watch. But firing Phil Lord and Chris Miller felt like a gauntlet being thrown. If a body doesn’t want to make a Lord & Miller Star Wars picture, I get that. But hiring Lord & Miller, and then being appalled that they’re making a Lord & Miller Star Wars picture? That’s just dumb.
Dumb, and it speaks to a profound horror of making a Star Wars film that doesn’t fit into a hugely narrow band of what Star Wars films can be. Nobody even wanted a Han Solo picture. That was the one to go crazy with, if they were ever going to go crazy. And even that was just too damn much for Kennedy and Lawrence Kasdan, apparently, so fuck ’em. Disney and Lucasfilm are both thrilled with Rian Johnson’s work on The Last Jedi? So thrilled that they’re letting him come up with a concept for a brand-new trilogy, away from the main series? That is, to me, bad news. I don’t want a Star Wars film that Disney and Lucasfilm are both thrilled with, not even from the director of Brick, The Brothers Bloom, and Looper. I’ll see it, probably twice (two years out of the last two, the new Star Wars has been my family’s unanimous pick for our Christmas movie), and I’ll probably like it a lot. But I don’t want it.
Rob does, though. It’s his number 1 anticipated film of the whole fall, in fact.
Meanwhile, if you have children, and you take them to the theater for the new Star Wars, forgetting that the new Star Wars will be sold the fuck out until New Year’s Eve, you can daub their tears on the featureless CGI fur of Ferdinand, the animated feature I have been least excited for in a year of animated features that has included Rock Dog and The Emoji Movie.
20.12.2017
A Monday Christmas means a real fucked release schedule for holiday films. This particular Wednesday, we get the two big “fun for the whole family!” releases, in the form of 22-years-later spinoff Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, and to HELL with them for leaving a title Two-manji just SITTING THERE. God help me, but the trailers make it seem like all four of the leads are having a blast, and it wouldn’t be the first godawful children’s adventure movie that I allowed Dwayne Johnson to seduce me into…
Speaking of seductive men, the promise of Hugh Jackman singing and dancing is, I believe, literally the only imaginable reason to go see The Greatest Showman, a musical biopic claiming that P.T. Barnum was a great humanitarian eager to help the underprivileged find their voice, which is sort of like a movie about Henry Ford that casts him as an environmentalist, when he wasn’t busy fighting for Jewish rights.
22.12.2017
The bucket for movies that wanted a generic “holiday frame” release, but also know they don’t have the meat to be anybody’s first choice to see in a holiday state of mind. If I’m ranking them by personal preference, sheer morbid curiosity puts All the Money in the World right at the top: trying to reshoot that much movie in barely any amount of time is a high-wire act rare in modern filmmaking, and I’m almost as excited to see if it works as I am excited to see if it doesn’t. Regardless, Christopher Plummer was always a better choice than Kevin Spacey.
Other movies, in descending order of appeal: Pitch Perfect 3, and the mere fact that this is the least-unappealing offering speaks volumes about the rest. As I was saying, Pitch Perfect 3, the third in a franchise that already proved in Pitch Perfect 2 that it had just enough material for the one film. Then comes Alexander Payne’s sci-fi parable Downsizing, which looks like just the dumbest social satire imaginable, and certainly pulling up the rear is Father Figures, in which two men are alarmed to realise that their mother cuckolded their father, and thus they are bastards. Comedy ensues.
In limited release comes Stephen Spielberg’s most naked Oscar-grab ever, in the form of the Meryl Streep/Tom Hanks-starring The Post, which is not quite the Spielberg film I’ve been the least excited for in my entire life. That film comes out in March. The Post is merely #2.
Also, there is a new Michael Haneke film, starring Isabelle Huppert and Jean-Louis Trintignant, and am I right that nobody is talking about it? Anyway’s it’s called Happy End, and will surely be something – something good or bad, I don’t know, but something.
25.12.2017
Oh man, nothing but nothing says “Christmas movie” like a limited-release Paul Thomas Anderson costume drama starring Daniel Day-Lewis as an emotionally stunted tailor. I mean, “Daniel Day-Lewis as an X” gets my ass in the seat already, so I’m looking forward to Phantom Thread, but it’s still amusing.
Elsewhere, still in limited release, Aaron Sorkin makes his directorial debut with Molly’s Game, and I’m sure he has every right to do so.
29.12.2017
Closing off a drab-looking month to end a drab year, Annette Bening plays real-life movie star Gloria Grahame in Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool, the kind of movie that exists for almost no reason on earth other than to lose Bening yet another Oscar.