Alright, time to dust ourselves off from what I think most of us would agree has been something of a terrible year for the world, if not for the movies (though I think it was pretty terrible for movies as well), and start off with a clean slate. It being January, and January being a movie graveyard, the clean slate is going to get filthy really fast, but I am going to remain stubbornly optimistic that at least something in all of this might be okay.
5.1.2018
That something will not, however, probably be Insidious: The Last Key, which endeavors to be, as I understand it, an inter-prequel, coming after Insidious: Chapter 3, but before Insidious, because this is a hopeless and corrupt franchise. Anyway, the “shitty horror film to kick off the new year” tradition has settled in enough that I’m obviously going to see it as soon as it opens, but I don’t feel good about myself.
12.1.2018
Something’s awry. This is a strangely okay-looking weekend, which probably means that my expectations are much too high for at least one of the big action movies. At any rate, if there’s a safe bet for the whole month – or even for the first quarter, really – it’s probably Paddington 2, which has been greeted with positively reverential reviews in its native Great Britain, where it already released. And besides, the first Paddington was a great treat, and producer David Heyman has basically staked his entire career on quality control for sequels. So let’s mark it down – this one is going to be good.
I’m less certain, but definitely hopeful, for a pair of action movies that both have at least one big check against them. Still, the hooks in both cases are obvious: The Commuter is a Liam Neeson thriller, and director Jaume Collet-Serra is coming off of The Shallows, his best-ever film (but I wasn’t totally in love with the previous Neeson/Collet-Serra collaborations); Proud Mary stars Taraji P. Henson as a hitwoman, and that is a combination that I refuse to treat with any kind of measured enthusiasm at all (but director Babak Najafi most recently helmed London Has Fallen, which is completely devoid of any value on any level).
And then comes a total wild card: the Peruvian Condorito: The Movie, which if I’m reading it right is going to be the first wide-released Spanish-language, Latin American-made animation in U.S. history, and that’s certainly worth paying attention to, even if I have grave doubts as to the film’s prospects for quality.
19.1.2018
Oh yeah, this is more like it. Den of Thieves, a crime thriller starring everybody’s favorite non-star, Gerard Butler? 12 Strong, the annual wintertime pro-military movie starring people who are famous but not quite famous enough to star in their own movies, like Chris Hemsworth and Michael Shannon? Forever My Girl, a pretty-young-white-people romance starring people you’ve never heard of but seem like they might possibly have been in the ensembles of religious-themed teen soap operas? Yes, this is a January weekend all right.
(And I actually shouldn’t be so snippy: I pledged after loving Happy Death Day that I’d be following Jessica Rothe’s career for at least a little bit, and she’s one of the leads of Forever My Girl. So I guess I’m going to see it).
26.1.2018
And bringing up the rear, here comes the massive afterthought of Maze Runner: The Death Cure. It’s the film that wraps up a trilogy barely any cared about at the time, and I assume we’ve all forgotten about by now. It’s of course nobody’s choice that the lead actor had a terrible accident and production was delayed by months, and of course his survival and recuperation matters more than some crap-ass Hunger Games knock-off, but this film couldn’t survive missing a fall 2016 release date. And yet here we are.