April is my birthday month and
each year I am treated to something great, usually in the form of a Fast and Furious film. No FF this month but there’s still a lot to
look forward to.
I never saw Boyhood but I’ve seen Dazed
and Confused like 20 times. Does that make me well versed in Richard
Linklater’s filmography? No, no it does not - but my appreciation for Dazed and Confused does get me excited
about his newest film, Everybody Wants
Some!! (with 2 exclamation marks which, grammatically, goes against
everything I believe. It’s either 1 or 3). This new film is a spiritual sequel
to Boyhood because at the end of that
film the lead goes off to college and it is a spiritual sequel to Dazed because that was a fun 70’s high
school period piece and this is a fun 80’s college period piece. The term
‘spiritual sequel’ really just means that it is not an actual sequel, it just
reminds you of another film. Everybody
Wants Some!! focuses on a group baseball players and all the good times
they have in college. Kurt Russel’s son, Wyatt, plays one of the guys and he is
certainly looking like a late 70’s Kurt Russell, so that’s awesome.
Go-Pros are nifty little cameras that people can attach to
their heads so a viewer can see the footage from the wearer’s point of view. It
can be pretty cool if they’re doing some sort of extreme sport but if they’re
just sitting down it can be pretty darn boring. Fortunately the folks behind Hardcore Henry managed to come up with a
way to shoot a full length action
movie using the camera. You are Henry and you are about to have a very rough
day. You wake up in a lab, your wife is operating on you, giving you a new leg
and a new arm. She begins to explain that you are stronger now but then you get
attacked and she gets taken away. You then meet up with a guy named Jimmy who
explains that there are people trying to kill you and you can fight back
because whatever happened to you made you faster and stronger. Now it’s your
mission to drive, shoot and punch your way through all of the waves of bad guys
to get to your wife. If this sounds like a video game it’s because it is
supposed to. That might not work for some but the trailers I’ve seen show off
some crazy stunt work and what this director can pull off with a Go-Pro makes
me happy the thing was invented in the first place. The First Person Movie
experience will either die with this film or it’ll become another fad like the
found footage movie. Either way I’m happy this one is out and can’t wait to see
it.
There’s a guy who appears in pretty much every Melissa
McCarthy movie. His name is Ben Falcone and he also happens to be Melissa
McCarthy’s husband. The two of them wrote Tammy
together and he directed and the same goes for The Boss, where McCarthy plays a rich and powerful business woman
who loses it all after being arrested for insider trading. Her old assistant,
played by everyone’s favorite person ever Kristen Bell (I can’t hide my
appreciation for her, I think she’s awesome), helps her get back on her feet
and the two tackle the ugly, cruel world of selling girl scout cookies, which
takes them from arguments in school halls to street brawls. McCarthy has shown
off some solid skills in the R-rated comedy department and there’s something
about the manner in which she uses profanity that I find wonderfully
entertaining.
Occulus is a
horrifying movie that came out a few years ago about a killer mirror. It deals
with kids whose parents were killed by the evil mirror years ago and now they
are trying to fight it. Any more details would be too much because the movie is
not an easy watch - images of it haunt me. So one horror film based around kids
deserves another, apparently, and the creator has made Before I Wake, which I feel is a much less original title than Occulus. In the director's newest, a
couple adopts a young boy and realize that his dreams literally come true. It’s wonderful and magical, that is until he
has nightmares and those come true, too, and everything goes horribly wrong.
This might be the kind of film I’ll watch in the comfort of my own home with
all the lights on and a blanket to hide under.
Marvel alumni Jon Favreau, Scarlett Johansson (I’ve been
misspelling that name forever), Idris Elba and Ben Kingsley joined with
greatest actors ever Bill Murray and Christopher Walken to bring a new version
of The Jungle Book to the big screen. The trailer looks like a decent
adventure and it is fun that Bill Murray is voicing the ever optimistic Baloo,
singing about his bear-necessities. But man, the CG is mind blowing. If I were
in a Rip Van Winkle scenario where I’ve been asleep for decades or centuries or
whatever and when I awoke the first thing I viewed was this trailer I would
assume I was in a world where animals can talk. It looks that good. It’d
probably also freak me out. But yeah, this looks pretty solid for yet another
remake and, for some reason, it’s one of two Jungle Book movies we’re getting
in the near future. Slated for an October 2017 release is Jungle Book: Origins, directed by the king of motion capture Andy
Serkis. He’s Gollum/Smeagol in The Lord of the Rings/Hobbit films, the titular King
Kong, Caesar in the Planet of the Apes films and Snoke in
the new Star Wars. So there’s that to
look forward to.
A few years ago a little thriller came out that featured Jan
from The Brady Bunch and Buzz from Home Alone in the quiet, eerie and
violent crime drama Blue Ruin.
Sticking with color in the title the director brings us Green Room, which features Maybe Funke from Arrested Development and Chekov from new Star Trek being hunted by Jean-Luc Picard from Star Trek: The Next Generation. This director likes putting likeable
people into violent scenarios. This film involves a punk band looking for any
gig they can get so when they get one at a sketchy bar they take it. Things
don’t go well though, when they witness a terrible crime and the leader of a
group of criminals, played by Patrick Stewart, orders his people to kill the
witnesses. It is not going to be an easy watch. Blue Ruin is tough at times but this looks like a brutal film
through and through. I want to see it but even without watching this I can’t
recommend it to the faint of heart.
I haven’t seen Snow
White and the Huntsman (known in my household as Snow White and the Hemsworth, for some reason this has become a
running joke) but this prequel, entitled The
Huntsman: Winter’s War, looks pretty cool. Chris Hemsworth is back (can you
be back if it’s a prequel?) as The
Huntsman and Charlize Theron is back (?) as the evil queen who is apparently
named Ravenna. Not sure if that is canonical but I guess since this is a
prequel they couldn’t call her evil if she was not yet evil so best to give her
a name. Jessica Chastain and Emily Blunt are joining the cast, which is great
because they are no strangers to action films. Chastain isn’t usually in on the
action but Blunt has shown off her action skills in Looper and especially in Edge
of Tomorrow, so this should be fun to see.
Ice Cube is probably the most successful rapper/actor -
maybe even more so than Mark Wahlberg (he’d prefer you not remember the rapping
part of his career). Mr. Cube is part of several film series including Friday, 21 Jump Street and Barbershop
and this month he is revisiting the latter with Barbershop: The Next Cut. The first one dealt with Cube selling the
shop only to realize that wasn’t the right thing to do and the second one dealt
with bigger companies coming in and shutting down mom and pop shops. This most recent one features other artists
turned actors like Eve, Common and Nicki Minaj and the film will balance humor
with real world issues like violence in the neighborhood. It’s up to the folks at the barbershop to
bring the community together.
I learned a piece of history from the Elvis and Nixon trailer and that is that the most requested picture
from the national archives is the image of Elvis Presley with President Nixon. Apparently
there’s more to the story than just one of the most famous musicians ever
wanting to take a photograph with the president at the time. Nixon was not known for being cool but Elvis
was literally the king of cool so this was probably seen as a great PR boost. I
haven’t read much more on it because I am very excited to see it since Elvis is
portrayed by Michael Shannon and Nixon is played by Kevin Spacey. These are two
great actors and this should be a pretty entertaining film right here.
Garry Marshall has been involved with film and television
for decades, he was a producer/writer for Happy
Days, Mork & Mindy and The Odd Couple. He also made a few films
and it seems that in all his years he has learned one thing: audiences will flock
to a star studded film named after a holiday. Recently he has found success
with New Year’s Eve and Valentine’s Day, which are both films
focusing on different groups of people celebrating said holiday. They’re
simple, corny and mildly charming so why not continue it with Mother’s Day? This film comes out on my
birthday. I will not be seeing it for my birthday.
Sometime last year an action masterpiece hit theaters-it was
called John Wick. It’s the coolest
film and lots of people enjoyed it, including Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan
Peele, better known as Key and Peele. The basic plot is that an ex-hit man who
recently lost his wife but gains a dog then loses his dog after an attack by
criminals. He then vows to destroy the criminal element that caused him such
emotional and physical pain. In Keanu,
Peele is a recently dumped man who gains a cat but then that cat is stolen by
local criminals, so he and his friend, played by Key, team up and pretend to be
hardened gangsters to try and get the cat back. This leads them down a
hilarious path that they are not cut out for. The trailers for this are amazing
and this is what I will be seeing on my birthday.
What are you looking forward to seeing?
