We could debate the quality of May’s blockbuster movies (although that debate would largely hinge on whether or not Star Trek is a good one, and I would lose), but I know this: May was a cornucopia next to what looks like a singularly wretched June. There are exciting films, to be sure, but they’re all low-budget counter-programming, and the E-ticket rides look gross enough to counterbalance the appealing indies, and then some.
5.6.2009
Case in point: Land of the Lost, a film that has engendered the exact same response in every single Will Ferrell fan of my acquaintance: “That’s the first Will Ferrell movie that I know I’m not going to see.” And not because it’s a challenging, interesting movie that mutilates his persona for dramatic effect: rather, because it is a comedy sci-fi spoof of an ancient children’s show that, from the trailer, looks about as funny and as fun as getting hit in the face with a brick. A pointy brick.
The Ferrell faithful ought to have more luck with The Hangover, a stoopid dood comedy by Todd Phillips, director of one of the finest stoopid dood films, Old School (the threshold for quality in stoopid comedies is surpassing low). And apparently on the grounds that, hey, if there’s a couple guy-centric comedies opening all at once, it makes sense to open a chick comedy too, there’s a new Nia Vardalos movie, which like her last big fat picture is mostly about how she is Greek-American and needs love, and has “my” in the title: My Life in Ruins.
And apparently on the grounds that, hey, that’s a lot of comedies, stick an indie comedy in there already, the rollout begins for Away We Go, which is a romantic comedy directed by Sam Mendes. No matter how many times I think through that sentence, it doesn’t get any less weird.
Seriously, though: four movies, and they’re all comedies. Doesn’t that seem a mite fucked-up?
11.6.2009
A very special Thursday release for Tetro, Francis Ford Coppola’s latest inscrutably artsy attempt to make us all retroactively hate The Godfather.
12.6.2009
Now, this is more like a summer movie: Tony Fuckin’ Scott’s remake of The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3. I expect it to be inferior to the dazzling original, gritty in the glossiest way possible, and edited together like a commercial for tennis shoes.
But it doesn’t even look all that unexciting compared to Imagine That, which sees Eddie Murphy swinging yet again from unendurable high-concept comedy (though last year’s Meet Dave was a rare case of that form, in that Murphy was not encased in a fat suit) to unendurable family-friendly comedy. A confession? To hell with my responsibilities as a blogger, there’s no way I’m seeing this.
Amongst many limited releases that may or may not play in other cities than New York, the one that looks the most interesting is Moon, apparently a locked door thriller starring Sam Rockwell – and set on the freaking moon! And it’s directed by David Bowie’s son!
19.6.2009
Early candidate for “Worst Movie of the Year”, unless the trailer is an absolute botch and the real movie has honest-to-God good jokes: Year One, starring Jack Black and Michael Cera as cavemen who act just like Jack Black and Michael Cera always do in movies. Remember when Michael Cera didn’t automatically make you expect a movie to suck? Because I’m starting not to.
Elsewhere: The Proposal is yet another romantic comedy, this one starring Sandra Bullock as a harridan and Ryan Reynolds as her put-upon assistant, who must marry her before her visa expires and she is deported to Canada. In a functional world, this would look terrible, but it actually has one of the funniest trailers of any of this summer’s comedies.
And – Jesus Christ, another all-comedy weekend! Woody Allen’s new Whatever Works opens on the coasts. The good: it stars Larry David as the Woody Allen character. The bad: the sometimes-funny trailer makes it seem kind of caricatured, in a bad way.
Okay, not all comedies: Dead Snow gets a limited release. What is Dead Snow? A movie about Nazi zombies. Nazi zombies! A sure-fire idea if ever I heard one! How could it possibly fail?
24.6.2009
Michael Bay’s wholly unneeded sequel Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen continues the incredibly uninteresting story he began in 2007’s massively rancid Transformers. And yet, I am dimly hopeful. The trailer suggests that the new film has fixed some of the larger problems with the original – you can make out which robot is which during the clips of the fight scenes, and the settings are a bit more interesting than downtown Los Angeles. Admittedly, the trailer also indicates that the godawful comic relief of the first film is returning more or less intact, but if I have to choose between the robot Bumblebee crying or Bumblebee pissing, I will readily take the former.
26.6.2009
You know what I’m looking forward to even less than Transformers 2? My Sister’s Keeper, which looks to be the kind of terrible that I almost don’t want to think about too closely for fear that my brain will leak out of my eyes. The trailer.
Limited, as before: some mildly interesting things, hopefully interesting enough. There’s Stephen Frears’s reunion with his Dangerous Liaisons star Michelle Pfeiffer in Chéri; The Hurt Locker, an Iraq action thriller with a great trailer that manages to hide the fact that it was directed by the terrible Kathryn Bigelow; and a political drama about the role of women in Iran, which could go anywhere from brilliant to impossibly haranguing, The Stoning of Soraya M.