This is quickly turning into an exciting, unpredictable summer: somewhat because of the films that are more and less interesting than you’d suppose, and especially because the box office is behaving like it had a massive stroke and is throwing out successes and failures in random, even arbitrary ways. That’s not exactly something we should have to care about as cinephiles, but as somebody who wants to be a fan of big popcorn movies but very often finds them to be too buffed and test-marketed to be at all interesting or unique, I consider anything that forces to studios to concede that they don’t actually know as much about creating simplistic mainstream fare as they like to pretend to be an absolute good. More random personal projects, fewer franchise entries, please.
And having said that, the two wide releases I’m looking forward to this month are franchise entries. But then, a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.
7.6.2013
In case you were wondering: neither of those movies – emphatically comes in this traditional dead zone of a release weekend, though if I were forced to pick, I’d say that The Purge, with a strange but unique sci-fi/horror premise is going to be objectively better, and more up my own alley. Because The Internship, in which Google product placement money pays for Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn to recite jokes that might have been socially relevant as recently as five years ago, doesn’t like like any kind of competition whatsoever.
12.6.2013
Speaking of things not up my alley: This Is the End is notable primarily for how many people in the Seth Rogen-Evan Goldberg sphere of influence appear as fictional versions of themselves. Given that the total number of people in the ensemble that I’m still excited to watch doing anything at all doesn’t add up to a full integer, I have to confess myself wholly out of the movie’s target audience or even the audience adjacent to it, and move on.
14.6.2013
I am not dumb. I swear it. But I am failing, with increasing desperation, to keep myself from getting excited about Man of Steel, the new Superman movie, with the absolute no-two-ways-about it best ads and trailers of any comic book movie for a couple of years or more (the posters have almost uniformly sucked; that’s helped keep the edge of). The presence of an untrustworthy actor as the iconic central figure, and even more the fact of Zack Snyder’s directing the project – you’ll perhaps recall that this blog is a vigorously and redoubtably anti-Snyder zone – should be bigger problems than Amy Adams as Lois Lane and Kevin Costner as Jonathan Kent are pluses; yet they are not. Increasingly, I find myself giving up and assuming that I’ll totally love the shit out of it, so watch this space for a thoroughly disappointed blogger the following Monday.
21.6.2013
Zombie movies are getting over-exposed; zombie action movies really never worked in the first place. I usually trust Brad Pitt, but no, World War Z does not feel like a film of any presumptive merit.
But the other wide release: ay me. Cue to usual hand-wringing about how Pixar ain’t what it used to be, and Prequels, why are they making prequels now, and The trailers are just so bland, don’t you think? The fact will remain that Pixar is making Monsters University, and that theoretically means that sight unseen, Monsters University has a better shot at being the best wide release film of the summer than anything else. Even now, they still have the benefit of the doubt from me – that’s all there is to it.
28.6.2013
The Heat certainly should be good. Melissa McCarthy has a good sense of comedy, so does director Paul Feig, and Sandra Bullock is at her best when she’s being the most silly. But I cannot persuade myself that anything that has been thus far shown from The Heat is going to be good; it looks like a totally generic cop comedy, with the strait-laced prig and the loudmouth wreck, and the blind of swapping out genders is not enough to make this seem any less paint-by-numbers.
Meanwhile, Roland Emmerich continues his multi-decade quest to do terrible things to the White House in movies, with White House Down. Emmerich is as reliable a so-bad-it’s-good blockbuster director as we’ve got right now, and while I’m not expecting 2012-level inanity, I feel like Emmerich and Channing Tatum is a pairing of filmmaker and star that I can ironically support with maximum enthusiasm.