Every summer, people complain about how “this is the worst summer ever!” and I tend to ignore them. But this summer, the best film so far has been a sequel to an action franchise 12 years dead. So maybe there’s actually a touch of truth to that complaint, finally. What this month can reverse the trend?
3.7.2007
Yeah. Transformers. Michael Bay. Toy commercials from the mid-1980s. Hey, at least it’s not…hold on…I can’t think of a worse concept for a movie than this.
4.7.2007
This might actually be Mandy Moore’s last chance ever to get a successful film: License to Wed. So, of course, it’s a Robin Williams comedy. I’m so sorry, Mandy – I really did think you were a pretty fine comedienne.
11.7.2007
Lessee, we’ve had crap, crap, crap, a mostly diverting caper, and crap for our big franchise movies so far. Let us hope that Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, based upon one of the worst books in the series but blessed with some really exemplary casting choices, can pick things up a tiny bit.
13.7.2007
For the third consecutive month, we have a release date for Captivity. I’ll bet. AND, the, I don’t know, fifth release date for Werner Herzog’s Rescue Dawn. I’m really starting to despair of ever seeing that movie, but god knows I’ll be first in line if it ever truly does open.
The remarkable Kasi Lemmons has a new film opening this weekend, Talk to Me, and I think it’s a real shame that such a talented director is going to have to see her film sink like a stone against so many huge CGI epics, but what are you going to do? Damn summer.
20.7.2007
YET A-FUCKING-NOTHER oft-delayed film that I want badly to see: Danny Boyle’s sci-fi adventure Sunshine.
Also: Hairspray, and I probably shouldn’t judge because I don’t really like Broadway musicals in this day and age at all, but I really hope the seeming trend of adapting movies to the stage and then basing a movie off of the new stage version dies, because that is not a trend that anyone wants to continue, especially if, God forbid, someone decides to film Nine.
Also: Gay Panic: The Movie, starring those comic titans Adam Sandler and Kevin James.
(Ooh, two movies with diametrically opposed target audiences! I predict a rumble! But a really lame one, that I will just push through on my way to the sweet sweet Boyle).
27.7.2007
In the trailer for No Reservations, Bob Balaban must respond to the line, “I wish there was a cookbook for life,” by saying, “You should know better than anybody: it’s the recipes you make yourself that are the best.” The production life of a modern film is such that between table readings, rehearsals, takes and retakes, Balaban must have spoken this line out loud something like 40 times, conservatively (if he materialized now and told me that it was closer to 100, I’d be surprised neither at the figure nor that he has it memorized). If I were confronted with the idea that I would soon have to recite that line in that context, I would surely drink myself to death; and that is why Bob Balaban is a professional actor and I am no actor at all. You can tell that he does not enjoy it, but he soldiers up anyway. Whether he went back to his trailer that night to drown himself in cheap vodka, history does not report.
I’m one of the only people I know who doesn’t like The Simpsons, even in its early, good years (Futurama is more to my tastes), and that’s why I’m just not sure if I should even bother seeing The Simpsons Movie, which I am really not qualified to view. I just thought I should say that.
A Lindsay Lohan thriller! That sounds like dental surgery, only less promising! I Know Who Killed Me. And then that werewolf picture, Skinwalkers, gets another release date. Plus a new “cute animals in the frozen wastes” semidocumentary, Arctic Tale.
Truthfully, I am looking forward to This Is England, I don’t mind saying, as I would look forward to any British film about nasty gang children. But I’m not actually sure if it’s opening this weekend, or more just “opening” on the coasts.
You know what I love about July? Not too many things opening.