Alright, the last phase of the year is about to start up! In the very near future, you’ll be able to hear all our thoughts on the upcoming fall season, but I’ll go ahead and start spoiling some of my own thoughts right now. Suffice it to say that, after nine months of movie that haven’t done much to get me very hot and bothered, the semi-official start of Awards Bait season isn’t doing a whole lot to move the needle…
6.10.2017
That being said, like anyone else, I’m real damn curious about this whole Blade Runner 2049 thing. On paper, the mere notion of providing a sequel to Blade Runner already has me very much on the defensive; the fact that (executive producer) Ridley Scott has signed off on it somehow makes it worse. After all, he’s on a bit of a downswing with revisiting his old sci-fi triumphs. And yet: setting Roger Deakins loose on neon-soaked future noir is absolutely, in every imaginable way, exactly my thing. So let’s say that I’m okay with being optimistic.
(And yes, the early word has been rapturous; I’ve certainly learned by now that social media first responses are no good at predicting anything much about whether the film is actually good, or simply not as bad as was expected).
We also come up against a very different ’80s throwback: My Little Pony: The Movie, second film of that exact title. And here my desire for more American 2D animation to end up in movie theaters runs up against my rather deep-set feeling that this particular 2D animation doesn’t really look good, like, at all. But y’know, gotta support the troops.
And over here, Kate Winslet and Idris Elba co-star in a movie, which should be the most AMAZING thing, but The Mountain Between Us instead looks like utterly unwatchable crap. But you knew that already, because Idris Elba keeps getting stuck in this absolutely unforgivable movies.
Victoria and Abdul makes the leap into wide release, but I’ve already talked about that; instead, let’s shift attention to the biggest limited release film of the weekend, The Florida Project. If I’m being honest, the kind of praise that director Sean Baker tends to attract is kind of the exact specific sort of praise that makes me not interested in a movie – I still haven’t seen Tangerine, I’ve heard it’s a masterpiece, and it still sounds like such an “eat your vegetables” exercise to me – but I get that I’ll have to check this one out at some point before the year-end list-making can happen.
12.10.2017
So, supposedly, this is the day that Amityville: The Awakening starts a one-month run, for free, on Google Play. But I bet that Google’s servers all catch on fire and the company is plunged into oblivion first. There’s just no way the movie will ever actually come out in North America.
13.10.2017
Friday the 13th of October? Hell no, you do not waste that date, and so we’re getting a proper slasher-type movie: Happy Death Day, which is such a perfectly terrible title that it makes my entire soul coo with pleasure. Also pleasurable: it’s nothing more or less than “slasher Groundhog Day“. And that is such a faultless idea for a movie that I am quite baffled that it didn’t come out 20 years ago, but has instead been waiting in that infinite storehouse of concepts so pure and right that it feels, the moment they are brought into physical existence, like they’ve always been here.
Elsewhere, Chadwick Boseman returns to his life’s work of starring in a biopic of every significant African-American male in history, with the Young Thurgood Marshall story Marshall; between being an Oscar-timed biopic and a Boseman-starring biopic, I think I can safely predict a fucking fantastic lead performance surrounded by absolutely nothing else that is even the smallest bit good.
And if you like biopics, there’s a real damn weird one waiting for you: Professor Marston and the Wonder Women, which is about the man who created Wonder Woman, and his unconventional sex life, and why yes, this does seem to be the story of a polyamorous triad made in the bland aesthetic sensibility of a movie you take you grandma to over the holidays (which is, apparently, absolutely on purpose; intentionally making a movie shitty and boring to normalise the content is an unexpected directorial gambit, but I guess it’s a valid one). Also, I absolutely adore how this went from the kind of movie that gets quietly buried during a busy weekend, to the kind of movie that gets a wide release, solely because Wonder Woman made such a giant quantity of money this summer (if I were a betting man, my bet would be that this will not work out very well for the distributor).
And lastly, we’ve got Jackie Chan facing off against Pierce Brosnan in a movie called The Foreigner. Which was, on my honor, changed from the working title, The Chinaman. Good change. It’s directed by Martin Campbell, whose batting average is impossibly low; but both of his hits were James Bond pictures, and here he is with Brosnan, and I don’t know what to do with any of this information. I mean, what the hell, even old Jackie Chan is still Jackie Chan.
In limited release, a British man struggles with a terrible disease, and it’s Inspiring: this time it’s called Breathe, and somehow, it’s the directorial debut of motion capture specialist Andy Serkis. My God, I hate Oscarbait.
20.10.2017
No way, five movies are not all opening wide the same weekend, somebody’s going to blink. My money would be on Same Kind of Different as Me, which is I think about how being homeless, or having a rough time in your fabulously sophisticated, wealthy marriage, are basically the same thing; except it’s clear-cut counterprogramming (it’s the latest from the indefatigable Christian production company Pure Flix), so it’s probably more secure than Only the Brave, an Inspiring Tale of Firefighters. The vibe I get is that they’re chasing the same audience, except that Only the Brave is the watered-down version of it.
What this leaves us with, anyway, are three very different flavors of shitty movie. And perhaps I am being unfair to The Snowman, which is after all directed by Tomas Alfredson, who has gone two-for-two now in the films he’s made over the last decade, Let the Right One In and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Still, a serial killer thriller with a taunting, cryptic killer and a bitter, wintry tone? We have seen this many times, and it’s almost never very good.
At any rate, I’m definitely not being unfair to Geostorm, which finds Dean Devlin sitting in the director’s chair as Gerard Butler tries to prevent weather-control satellites from destroying the world, and if it’s not the funniest movie to come out in the last third of 2017, I just don’t know from unintentional comedy. The trailer includes the sentence “Seriously, we’re kidnapping the President in a self-driving cab?”, which already seems like a candidate for Dialogue of the Year honors, from where I’m sitting.
And then, last but definitely not least – I see no way that it doesn’t win the weekend box office race, if nothing else – Boo 2! A Madea Halloween, the first direct sequel in Tyler Perry’s Madea series. And in this entry, it appears that Madea is facing off against actual ghosts, which already puts it ahead of the last one.
In limited release, a couple of heavy-hitter auteur pieces: Todd Haynes makes a children’s movie, Wonderstruck, and Yorgos Lanthimos makes a revenge thriller, The Killing of a Sacred Deer.
27.10.2017
It has been seven years since Saw 3D wrapped up that series, and did anyone miss it? Certainly nobody I talk to. But here it is, coming right on back with Jigsaw. I guess this is how Michael Corleone felt in The Godfather, Part III.
With that taking care of the genre film front, the Oscar hopeful of the weekend is director George Clooney’s Suburbicon, the latest in the dispiriting run of films with scripts that the Coen brothers wrote, decided weren’t good enough, and discarded, but left for other, unwiser directors to pick up in their wake. Or I don’t know. Maybe aaaalllll of those festival viewers are wrong, and it’s a secret work of genius. Given Clooney’s track record, it pays to be wary.
Rounding off the weekend are a couple of films that nobody will see or remember: a military PTSD drama starring Miles Teller, Thank You for Your Service, and the Blake Lively thriller All I See Is You, which has gone through enough release dates that it maybe won’t pay to start making your date night plans just yet. And to wrap things up, the 2017 Palme d’Or winner The Square starts to make its way across North America.
28.10.2017
Sixteen days after they put it out for free online streaming, the Weinstein Company is actually pretending that Amityville: The Awakening is still going to get a cursory theatrical release. I mean, might as fucking well, at this point. This saga deserves a shabby ending like a shame-faced theatrical release that starts on a goddamn Saturday.