The year keeps barreling right on, not even waiting for me to catch up. Sigh. I think with 2016, we might have finally hit the point where February through July is one uninterrupted sweep of blockbuster after blockbuster; this March, at any rate, has two full-on big studio tentpoles waiting in the wings. This all strikes me as fatiguing, but one must push on.
4.3.2016
I am not at all looking forward to Zootopia. Any time a film comes along with (unexpectedly?) rave reviews which almost exclusively talk about its “message” over any other aspect of its creation, I’m instantly on the defensive, even if there’s not a dissenting voice to be found (honestly, that even makes it worse); plus, that sloth trailer that the internet loved set my teeth on edge. It’s one gag! You can tell what the gag is within five seconds! And then it goes on for two minutes! I suppose I admire the empathy it forces with the frustrated rabbit character, but the first time I saw it, I was already prepared to write the whole thing off, and that was four or five viewings ago…
But it’s the new Disney film, and Disney is an important thing around these parts, and I will sullenly march myself off to see it ASAP like a good trooper (P.S. I remember that I still need to provide an appropriate review for certain other Disney films, and I am sorry to report that it will not be happening soon).
I’m kind of looking forward to Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, because I am an abysmal moron who will keep imagining that one day, they’ll make a good Tina Fey movie despite the uniform evidence to the contrary. And there’s London Has Fallen, the sequel to Olympus Has Fallen that if nothing else proves the existence of a spiteful, rageaholic God. I guess I can see myself being conned into it sometime if I’m drunk. Real drunk.
Most importantly, the U.S. finally gets to take a peak at Terrence Malick’s Knight of Cups, which I’m sure is probably going to be bad, but it’s going to take many failures in a row before I stop being excited for Malick films.
11.3.2015
Now this looks like the March of old, back when no good movies came out till May. The ever-unreliable Louis Leterrier oversees the increasingly hacky Sasha Baron Cohen (seriously, that Oscars bit was soul-crushing) in Grimsby, which for its U.S. release has been rechristened with the wholly putrescent title The Brothers Grimsby; The Perfect Match follows the springtime trend of crushing overtalented African-American actors (Paula Patton is the one I am saddest for in this case) into dire-seeming romantic comedies; The Young Messiah is exactly what it sounds like. But Sean Bean is in it, for some unfathomable reason! Sadly, he is not playing Teen Jesus. Still, it’s a faith audiences movie with Sean Bean, and that’s, like, amazing.
If I were a betting man, I’d suppose that 10 Cloverfield Lane might turn out …okay… That it is a craven attempt to cash in on the Cloverfield name (eight years later!) with a wholly unrelated film seems wholly beyond dispute at this point, but it’s hard to say if that’s actually a good or bad sign. Anyway, John Goodman’s presence isn’t inclined to make me, personally, expect the worst, though something seems powerfully “off” with this one.
16.3.2015
What ho, another movie for the devout! This one is called Miracles from Heaven, it stars Jennifer Garner (!) and Queen Latifah (!?), and it is apparently about God curing a young woman’s “digestive disorder”. I am, at any rate, 100% sure that the actual movie has to be more compelling than that makes it sound. I mean, presumably it is at least a fatal digestive disorder and not, like, acid reflux, which is kind of what the IMDb synopsis makes it sounds like.
18.3.2015
The Divergent Series: Allegiant.
25.3.2015
Hoooooooo boy, here it is. From the singular mind of Zack Snyder, the man behind the lifelessly literal Watchmen, the monumentally self-indulgent Sucker Punch (which I’ve been thinking I should re-watch, for a couple of reasons, but not because I think it will turn out better than I remember), and That Thing with the Owls: Something About Guardians, comes what is, in principle, the most long-awaited comic book movie in the history of comic book movies: Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. It looks like absolutely unwatchable dog shit. Maybe it just has bad trailers, but “magnificent trailers for a crummy movie” is kind of Zack Snyder’s thing. Perhaps he has cross into the Twilight Zone, and now he has terrible trailers for brilliant films, but right around the time that Gal Gadot was cast as the first-ever big screen Wonder Woman, I stopped hanging onto that as a particularly strong hope. You guys, I want this to be good. I’m a DC reader. Was. I haven’t read a superhero comic in a really long time. But it’s in the DNA. And it pisses me off something fierce that this movie is going to suck. It is going to suck bad. And while I suppose some of the individual films to follow in the hastily kludged-together DC Cinematic Universe might be good – the Suicide Squad trailer, as I’m sure you know by now, is a pop masterpiece – it’s appalling that this is how it’s going to hoist itself off the ground.
Gamely attempting to counter-program this, Kate Beckinsale headlines The Disappointments Room, which could probably also have been the subtitle for Batman v Superman. Meanwhile, the movie industry has one of its intermittent moments of remembering that there are moms and grandmas in the audience, with the 16-years-later sequel My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2. In fact, the mom in my life has already strong-armed me into promising to see it with her.