Ah, yes. What can be said against February that hasn’t already been said? The lashing, Midwest winter tempered with the worst films of the year – whee!
2.2.2007
Remember when Diane Keaton was good? Because I actually don’t. I mean, yeah I’ve seen her good films, but they were all made before I was born, or when I was just a wee tiny thing. So, right, Because I Said So, in which Keaton plays a nosy mom who just needs to get laid in order to be happy. Way to age gracefully.
Elsewhere: The Messengers, a horror film set “on a sunflower farm” according to the IMDb, which is kind of interesting. I mean stupid. It’s kind of stupid. Also, the wide release of Factory Girl, in which Sienna Miller plays Edie Sedgwick and Guy Pearce plays Andy Warhol, which we were actually supposed to take seriously as an Oscar contender when it was tossed into LA theaters at the last possible date. To be honest, I saw the trailer, and it doesn’t look like complete ass, although I still don’t believe that Miller is capable of “acting.”
9.2.2007
Wow, which of these is the more irresistible looking: Hannibal Rising, the fifth fucking movie in a family of films that produced one masterpiece and one interesting failure, and has now gone batshit crazy. After the origin story, there’s really only one place for awful horror franchises left to hide, and I don’t think even a Hollywood exec could greenlight Hannibal in Space.
Candidate 2: Eddie Murphy, a scant two weeks before picking up an acting Oscar, plays a woman in a fat suit in Norbit. Murphy in a fat suit schtupps Murphy not in a fat suit. A splendid time is guaranteed for all.
Oscar Also-Rans, Week 2: Anthony Minghella’s Breaking and Entering, whose plot I can’t be bothered to learn. It involves an urban planner, or architect, or some damn thing like that (Jude Law) having an affair.
And then, the sole bright light of the whole entire month, The Lives of Others, which I’ve been looking forward to since I saw the trailer ages ago, and now it’s gone and gotten an Oscar nomination, which totally means it sucks, but I’m going to remain excited anyway.
14.2.2006
Hugh Grant and Drew Barrymore are thrown into the heady world of pop songwriting, and a little part of my soul dies in the frolicking new romantic comedy, Mysic and Lyrics!
16.2.2006
YES! At long last, Nic Cage in Ghost Rider, the most famous and beloved of all Marvel Characters in his long-awaited feature film debut! With an actor like that playing a character like this, how can it not be the high watermark of the current comic-movie wave?
More importantly, how can I score some of what the Sony executives who paid for this were smoking?
There’s a new adaptation of Bridge to Terabithia, a book that I was juuuuust on the tail end of being the right age to read it when people were still reading it, and it was actually quite influential on the formative me, and if they change the famously downbeat ending, you will see hellish rage like you’ve never seen, so I guess everyone should pray that they change the ending.
Other things: a real-life spy thriller that I might almost think could be interesting if it weren’t being released in, y’know, February, Breach; and apparently the Oscar-nominated Indigènes gets a wide release, but I could swear I missed it when it was in Chicago for a week about a month ago. Weird.
Last, and almost certainly least, the annual Tyler Perry film.
23.2.2006
A movie about paranoia surrounding the number 23 opens on the 23rd? Oh, how clever you Hollywood marketers are! So anyway, it’s a Jim Carrey film that isn’t a comedy (yay!) and has a squirrelly trailer and premise (pooh!) and is directed by Joel Schumacher (fucking hell!), The Number 23. It’s that last detail that really wrecks the movie for me.
God-damn…the feature version of Reno 911! Because the world was asking. And a film about I don’t even know what, but it stars Samuel L. Jackson and is not an action film, and I like those odds, Black Snake Moan. And Billy Bob Thornton builds a rocket ship in what I’m sure will be a moving tribute to the human spirit, The Astronaut Farmer. And then, blissfully, the worst month of the year pukes to a close.