Typically, October is home to two things: horror movies and future Best Picture Oscar winners. Neither of those seem to apply this year, which is odd: certainly, the almost-complete abandonment of the month by horror is utterly peculiar (though it’s also a late development: Rings was pushed back from a prime Halloween weekend slot just a couple of weeks ago, all the way to February, AKA “a promising sign that it no way tells us that the movie is a complete turd”). Frankly, I have no clue what the hell is going on this month, but it’s got a few things that look pretty good, so let’s dive in.
7.10.2016
And in fairness to the other half of my equation, Best Picture winners, it did seem for months that The Birth of a Nation, Nate Parker’s epic about Nat Turner’s slave rebellion, had a particularly strong angle on that prize. But then it turned out that Parker is a gratuitously unpleasant human being, and has a history with sexual violence which makes him at best a dubiously unreflective sort, and at worst makes him something that I won’t say for fear that it’s legally actionable. The vigor of the cultural conversation around rape makes it impossible to imagine that the film will be greeted with the hosannas that seemed its due back during Sundance, and awards glory seems right out, but I do think that the rarity of films about American slavery is such that it would probably still be worth seeing it. That being said, I know people who are planning to boycott it, and I think that’s not unreasonable.
In much less fraught corners of the cinema world, we have Emily Blunt in a sort of Hitchcockian-looking thriller, The Girl on the Train, which is being marketed as close to Gone Girl on a Train as basic decency allows, and neither the director nor the screenwriter fill one with optimism. But hey, Emily Blunt in a thriller, this isn’t difficult stuff. There’s also a thing called Middle School: The Worst Years of My Life, which doesn’t seem to be something that I nor anyone likely to be reading this blog needs to worry about very much.
Most importantly, by far, is the IMAX release of the short version of Terrence Malick’s cosmology documentary Voyage of Time. Which IMAX screens in particular are getting the film seems to be an unanswerable question, even this close to the release date, though at very least if you live in Indianapolis you seem to be in luck.
12.10.2016
THE NEW GODZILLA PICTURE IS COMING OUT! HOLY FUCK, THERE IS A NEW JAPANESE GODZILLA PICTURE, AND IT’S COMING OUT JUST MONTHS AFTER IT OPENED IN JAPAN. I WAS ALL SET TO BOOTLEG IT BECAUSE I FIGURED IT WOULD BE, LIKE, TWO YEARS, AND INSTEAD I GET TO SEE IT RIGHT NOW.
14.10.2016
A weekend radiating confusion and flop sweat. The Accountant, with Ben Affleck as an autistic accountant who works for terrorists, is the obvious Grown Up Thriller for Grown Up Viewers, of the week if not the whole month (it seems, at any rate, statelier than The Girl on the Train), but it has that whole thing where the teaser trailer was great and the full trailer is kind of flat and literal-minded. And the one-two punch of Affleck and Anna Kendrick in the leads is a peerless case of people who can be good in the presence of a great script, director, or ideally both, but have both made plenty of missteps along the way.
The competition is dire. We have on the one hand a comedy concert film, Kevin Hart: What Now?, because stand-up films always work, and Kevin Hart isn’t gruesomely over-exposed. And then there’s a thing called Max Steel, which I think is kind of superhero-adjacent? And has a concept about a boy and his alien friend that feels like it’s been sitting under a desk collecting dust since 1986.
21.10.2016
The dumping ground for apparently every single 2016 release they couldn’t otherwise make room for. The no fewer than five wide release films coming out include the month’s solitary horror film, Ouija: Origin of Evil, which reminds me among other things that they made that other Ouija movie which I forgot about immediately after it was in the rearview mirror. It’s also set in the 1960s, apparently on the grounds that The Conjuring made money. The other big genre movie is Tyler Perry’s Boo! A Madea Halloween, which should be fascinating – how to marry Perry’s brand of soft-Baptist theology with a story in which the redoubtable Madea takes her unquenchable brand of belligerent moralising into the realm of the monster movie? I cannot imagine the film being good, and I can easily imagine it being the worst thing of Perry’s career, but boy, am I intrigued.
Impressively, the weekend hosts another movie for religious audiences: I’m Not Ashamed, billed as the inspirational story of the first student killed in the Columbine massacre in 1999. Which is maybe not the most inspirational story out there? I get why, it’s the whole stalwart Christian martyr thing, but this looks… questionable. I presume the family of the student in question has offered their permission to make this, which is the only thing keeping me from declaring this the most offensive concept for a movie in the 2010s to date, and I don’t even know that the most morbid curiosity could get me to see it. But I am hella morbidly curious.
Rattling on down the line: Zach Galifianakis and Isla Fisher are a boring suburban couple who tangle with spies in Keeping Up with the Joneses, which is both a plot hook and a title that feel like they’ve been used at least four or five times already, but I guess comedians gotta eat, just like the rest of us. Last, and by absolutely no means least, is Jack Reacher: Never Go Back, the sequel to the unexpectedly delightful Tom Cruise action vehicle Jack Reacher from four years ago; it’s the only thing here that I’m excited for in the remotest degree.
In limited release, Moonlight – which I’ve seen already, and can confirm is good in the ways you’d hope it would be good – will very probably be nominated for that aforementioned Oscar, but I do not suppose it has any real chance of winning it.
28.10.2016
Remember how Tom Hanks played that boring Indiana Jones knock-off in a couple of movies a decade ago? For some reason, they’ve brought him back in Inferno, and it has the weekend all to itself. Oh well, happy Halloween.