Is it a wee bit silly to start thinking about the films of May already, when I’ve not yet seen any of the films of April? Aye, well, life happens pretty fast, and I’m just about ready to get back on me feet with this site again. Our last podcast has the full story of where the hell I’ve been for the last few weeks – if you’re podcast-averse (no worries! I am too, as it so happens!), know that the short version is “I’ve just taken master’s comps”, and if you know anything about grad school, you know why that phrase is enough to make the sky cloud over and a lonely wolf howl in the distance.
But golly, we’re not here to think about that. It’s summer movie time! And summer is all about fun, or at the very least, the kind of pre-processed “fun”-like simulacrum that the contemporary studio system is best designed to provide
5.5.2017
As has been standard for a decade and a half, summer kicks off with a Marvel movie: this time around, the offering is Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2. Like a great many people, I consider the first Guardians of the Galaxy, from 2014, to be just about the best film in the inexhaustible Marvel Cinematic Universe. And for exactly that reason, I’m not really excited at the prospect of a sequel whatsoever. The first film had two things heavily in its favor: it was the closest thing to an outright novelty that comic book movies had produced in nearly a decade at that point, and it was the best Star Wars movie in thirty years. GOTG2, being a sequel, obviously won’t be novel (and that’s ignoring Marvel’s rather glum track record with first sequels that aren’t about Captain America); and now we have real Star Wars, and thus no longer require false Star Wars just to give us something to feel. I’m sure the movie will still be a fun time, but this is pretty much exactly the kind of fun simulacrum I had in mind just back then.
12.5.2017
Another May tradition: a bunch of films nervously crowded together in the hopes of gobbling up some of the Marvel crumbs. The saddest of these, no question, is King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, Guy Ritchie’s music video take on the Matter of Britain; it feels like a film that was expected to be something, don’t you think? And instead it’s shaping up to be the season’s first splashy bomb. I expect it to be terrible, of course; but terrible appears to be the theme for the weekend: the Amy Schumer/Goldie Hawn action comedy Snatched looks to be wholly devoid of entertainment value, with a trailer that can’t even be bothered to give a shit about its own editing. And there’s also a sleep paralysis horror movie, Dead Awake, that I’m not even confident actually exists. Leaving us with Lowriders, a family crime urban inspirational drama with an ad campaign gleefully trumpeting the fact that it never decided what genre to be, but at least unlike the rest of the weekend’s wide releases, I can’t think of a reason it’s obviously going to be bad.
19.5.2017
I am, of course, entirely wrong to be excited for Alien: Covenant, anywhere from the fifth-to-eighth Alien movie and the second-to-fourth Alien prequel, depending on how you’re counting. I don’t hate Prometheus, the film to which this is sequel or spin-off or Lord knows what exactly, in fact I even somewhat like Prometheus, but I would not say that endlessly subdividing the gap between Prometheus and Alien is the very best imaginable way for Ridley Scott to spend the waning days of his career. Still and all, you show me a new big-screen incarnation of H.R. Giger’s marvelous xenomorph, I’ll be there opening weekend. It is a monster and franchise I love not wisely, but too well.
Ceding the adult audience to the R-rated sci-fi epic, the weekend is otherwise divided between kids and older kids: for the former, a reboot of the dormant Diary of a Wimpy Kid franchise, Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Long Haul, and whoever exactly is supposed to be the target audience for that, I’m happy on their behalf; and a romantic drama YA adaptation, Everything, Everything, that, as God is my witness, basically looks like “Todd Haynes’s Safe, but if it was The Fault in Our Stars instead”. It doesn’t get me into the theater, but it does capture my attention.
24.5.2017
You know, it’s so easy to dismiss the parodic movie version of the awful TV show Baywatch right out of hand, and then they have to go and put Dwayne Johnson in it…
26.5.2017
Six years after nobody cared about Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, Disney has seen fit to dump Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales right there, right where everybody can’t help but notice it, and sort of resignedly wonder if they might as well ought to see it, since it’s right there in theaters and all. Javier Bardem joins as the latest top-shelf actor to squander himself beneath CGI and cheap family-friendly horror as a Pirates villain, in the proud tradition of Bill Nighy and Ian McShane.