Endeth summer and with it the promise of large a-splosions and hours of CGI bric-a-brac; beginneth that glorious time of middlebrow “art” films and unsubtle morality plays known as Oscar Season!
7.9.2007
But it doesn’t begin quite yet: unless you want to assume that an action film starring Clive Owen and Paul Giamatti is Oscarbait. Hell maybe it is Oscarbait. The trailer surely doesn’t make it look like an action movie, or at least not a very good one. And the title Shoot ‘Em doesn’t make it sound like a movie at all.
Also falling in the category of “oh wait, August is over? Crap.” are The Brothers Solomon, a sex comedy starring Wills Arnett and Forte, and Hatchet, an old-timey slasher movie starring none other than Kane “Fucking Jason” Hodder and Robert “Fucking Freddy” Englund.
On the other hand, I actually kind of expect the remake of 3:10 to Yuma, with Russell Crowe as Glenn Ford and Christian Bale as Van Heflin, to turn out sort of well, even if it does have the stylegasmic director of Walk the Line and Kate & Leopold on board.
14.9.2007
Now this is more like it! Paul Haggis comes out with a film about the Iraq War, which I expect to be handled with all the mystic subtlety that we’ve come to love from that director: In the Valley of Elah! And Neil Jordan has a new movie and it stars Jodie Foster, so who cares if it’s just a revenge picture: The Brave One! And Julie Taymor has a ka-razy new musical coming out that freaked the squares out at the studio so much that they wanted to kill it, like you couldn’t predict that Taymor would do such a thing: Across the Universe! And David Cronenberg is reteaming with Viggo Mortensen: Eastern Promises! And a movie whose title is a phallic pun: Mr. Woodcock!
About these films I feel, respectively: resignation, confusion, nervous anticipation, abject glee, and whatever one feels when confronted with phallic puns.
Elsewhere, Daniel Radcliffe continues to suppose that being a little slut will make him a real actor.
21.9.2007
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. I assume this is a film about Jesse James’s assassination by Robert Ford, who was a coward. At any rate, that title makes me feel very sexy inside.
Otherwise, there is some dire goddamn crap opening this weekend: Resident Evil: Still, a horrible post-feminist misreading of Jane Austen, and the positively evil-looking Dane Cook vehicle (as opposed to history’s many exciting & appealing Dane Cook vehicles), Good Luck Chuck.
Also: Sean Penn + twentysomething anomie = my brain is bleeding.
28.9.2007
The new Ang Lee film opens, which would be exciting enough even without a title like Lust, Caution and NC-17 shenanigans. And Tony Leung. I assume there is a way that this will not be the best film of the year, but I don’t quite see how.
Meanwhile, those of us who have delicate sensibilities and don’t like The Sex can see Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson in The Game Plan, where he blah blah blah cute little girl.Also a thriller about Saudi Arabia that looks like absolute shit, although apparently it got delayed because test audiences loved it so much, and when have they ever been wrong about anything? Plus, new Uwe Boll.
Allegedly, The Darjeeling Limited opens somewhere this weekend, and after The Life Aquatic, I promised myself I’d be more reserved about Wes Anderson films, but I mean, goddamn, that trailer. Goddamn. I’ve long thought that the Kinks’ “Strangers” is a perfect Anderson song, and there it is. God, I’m going to be so disappointed.