Drumroll…after the glut of Oscarbaiting year-end epics, Hollywood begins its annual three-month dumping of the crappiest of the crappy. Only thing is, with Oscar season producing as many misfires as it did this year, can January actually be any worse?
5.1.2007
Apparently, the answer to that question is “yes,” or so I am led to believe by Code Name: The Cleaner, a film involving…oh, why bother with the plot? It’s a spy comedy starring Cedric the entertainer, possessing the least-appealing trailer I’ve seen in ages.
Then there’s a Hilary Swank “noble white teacher” vehicle, Freedom Writers, which raises the semi-annual question: why does every Swank film that doesn’t net her an Oscar have to suck so hard? The first film I can immediately think of that has been set in the current Iraq War, Home of the Brave, starring 50 Cent & Jessica Biel, which is just about the most depressing thing I can imagine. And the awkwardly titled Happily N’Ever After, which, I’m impressed to see the crappy animated films starting so early this year, but if I want to watch an annoying po-mo fairy tale cartoon, I’ll wait a couple months.
12.1.2007
Luc Besson is retiring from directing? Quelle horreur! Why must he do it with Arthur and the Invisibles, a mostly-animated fantasy about a little boy who shrinks in his own backyard, though? That didn’t work out too well last time, and isn’t he supposed to keep making movies about gorgeous assassins?
Chris “Babe” Noonan directs the oh-so-British Renée Zellweger in a biopic about Beatrix Potter, and I guess it’s cool that Finding Neverland got its very own knockoff, but what a bizaare pitch meeting that must have been. Also, way to waste Ewan McGregor, who I don’t think has been in anything since the one-two punch of Star Wars III and The Island way back in Summer ’05. John Cassavetes’ less-talented son directs Justin Timberlake in a movie about a thing, and Stomp the Yard, which even after I’ve seen the trailer and read the synopsis, I still don’t know what it’s about.
The first movie I am remotely interested in seeing all year: we in the Midwest get Letters from Iwo Jima.
19.1.2007
No way, only one movie? Well, here we go: The Hitcher another remake of a truly nasty and fairly successful horror film, and you know how I feel…but soft! ‘Tis Sean Bean! If anyone can make this movie good, it will be Sean Bean! And hey, guess what, surprise, he plays a dude who seems nice at first and then turns out to be a psychopath. I love how Sean Bean avoids being typecast.
26.1.2007
So, here’s my weekend: work all day Friday, start B-Fest at 6:00 PM, stay awake for 24 hours, collapse into a fit of sleep, and then see a three-hour David Lynch film pretty much the moment I awake. Yes, the national tour of Inland Empire stops in Chicago for a week, and while I know that my sizable L.A. readership has already had and lost their chance to see it, that doesn’t keep it from being an “upcoming movie” for me. I’m going to lose my mind that weekend, it’s going to be great.
The real release slate for the weekend is packed-full, most of it unpromising: you’ve got your teen horror (The Invisible), your Jennifer Garner rom-com (Catch and Release, also with the actorly stylings of Kevin Smith), your supercool actiony movie with the grimly untalented Jeremy Piven (Smokin’ Aces), your late-to-the-party Oscar bait (Breaking and Entering), your bargain-basement parody anti-comedy (Epic Movie), and yet another one of those ubiquitous “teenage-werewolf-in-love pictures with a title that sounds like a European romantic thriller” that we get like, every other week, it seems (Blood and Chocolate).