September signals the end of summer and for most studios it
might be too early to put out your Oscar hopeful. The one animated film and the
big budget western will probably win the month and, for some reason, this was
the month that several studios decided to release their ‘true story’ films with
varying degrees of trueness and Oscar clout. One has Mark Wahlberg, one has
Joseph Gordon Levitt, one has Lupita Nyong’o, one has Tom Hanks and one has
Zack Galifinakis.
In Oliver Stone’s JFK,
we are presented with a one-sided argument that claims the government
killed the President and that we the sheeple need to deal with it. The film is
one that plays it fast and loose with ‘facts’ but I find it quite enjoyable. It’s
a of a downer message but at the same time it’s an interesting procedural with
a great cast. Now, the JFK conspiracy was decades old in the 90’s when the film
was released. The Snowden situation
is ongoing and with new government documents being leaked on what seems like a
weekly basis, it has quite the cultural impact. So Mr. Stone grabbed himself a
decent cast, like most Stone movies, including Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Snowden.
Even without reading too much into the film I imagine Stone is against the
government spying on its citizens and this, too, might be a one-sided, yet,
entertaining, film.
If you want a critically acclaimed
western, well you have a lot to choose from. It’s not really that difficult to
find a good western. Now a profitable western? Well, that’s tricky. My 5
minutes of research shows that within the top 50 films of the following genres,
some more popular than others, no genre has a bigger difference financially
than the western. The #1 western grossed $184 million while the #50 western
grossed only $15 million. For action it’s $936 mil to $245 mil. Comedy is $470 to
$206. Romance is $658 to $148. History is $350 to $44. IT GOT BEAT BY HISTORY. I’m
sure that shooting a big western these days is a hard task and any small
western falls under the radar. So unless you’re making Django Unchained, you’re little Slow
West or Bone Tomahawk (two
westerns that came out last year that at are fantastic) might go unnoticed.
Well, The Magnificent Seven falls
more in line with Django. It’s a big
budget film with a heck of a cast that includes Denzel Washington, Chris Pratt,
Vincent D’Nofrio and Ethan Hawke as guns for hire tasked with stopping a cruel
industrialist from taking over a small town. It’s directed by Antoine Fuqua whose
last two Denzel starring films, Training
Day and The Equalizer, were huge
hits and I’m thinking this will be number 3.
I see a lot of click bait that states an actor is ‘unrecognizable
now!’ and I ignore it because usually it’s like they got a haircut or something,
but Renee Zellweger is truly unrecognizable. Completely. I looked her up and
wow, that is not the same person. So this new Renee Zellweger is going to star
in Bridget Jones Baby. This is the
third go around for Zellweger as a British publisher with an entertaining love
life. I saw the first one. Colin Firth and Hugh Grant get into a fight and go
crashing through a window. That was my biggest take away but it really was
pretty entertaining. I never saw the second one, I believe subtitled The Edge of Reason, but something
happened to Hugh Grant because he’s been replaced by Patrick Dempsey, so now
Colin Firth has that to deal with. Judging by the title, I imagine a baby also works
its way into the plot.
One of the coolest things I’ve seen in the past few years
was an orchestra perform Danny Elfman music for all of his Tim Burton movies.
It was awesome. So much fun. So it’s kind of a bummer that Danny Elfman won’t
be doing the music for Miss Peregrine’s
Home for Peculiar Children. But since the screenplay was written by Jane
Goldman, who also wrote The Kingsman
and a couple of the recent X-Men films,
I am pretty excited for this film. I’m not the biggest fan of Tim Burton films
but he has the capability to make a really weird and very good film and that
takes talent, plus this has a solid cast including Eva Green, Allison Janney,
Samuel L. Jackson, Judi Dench and Chris O’Dowd. Oh, and I’ve only seen one
image from this film. It was a group shot of the peculiar children, and even
though it’s, I assume, directed at a younger audience it was freaky. So that’s
something.
You might look at the cast of Masterminds, which features Leslie Jones, Kate McKinnon and Kristen
Wiig, and think ‘wasn’t this group just in Ghostbusters?’
- and you’d be right. But this film was actually made before Ghostbusters. It is another strange film
about strange people from the strange director of Napoleon Dynamite. It was supposed to be released last summer but
the company releasing it had financial troubles and the film sat on the shelf
for a while. It stars Zack Galifinakis and Wiig as employees of an armored
transport company that is moving a whole load of cash and the two decide to
steal it. When there’s a lot of money there’s usually a lot of people who want-in
or who are searching for it, so plenty of recognizable people, including ¾ of
the new Ghostbusters, Owen Wilson and Jason Sudekis, round out the cast of what
will probably be a funny, strange film that is apparently based on a true
story.
Skiptrace is a
film out of time. It’s by the director of Cliffhanger
and Die Hard 2 and starring Jackie
Chan and Johnny Knoxville. I’m a fan of each of these people and even though
this movie is 15-20 years too late, I’m pretty sure it’ll be a fun time. It
stars Chan as a Hong Kong cop and Knoxville as a gambler going up against a crook
who killed Chan’s partner and Knoxville has evidence needed to bring him down. Now,
the two of them have charisma for sure but they also are best known for taking
a beating on screen without stunt men. Chan is in his 60’s and Knoxville is
nearly 50, but I imagine they still have some energy. So while some stunts
might require stunt men I imagine they’ll be doing all they’re capable of and they’re
both funny, so that helps.
Peter Berg is a character actor that decided in the late
90’s that he wanted to be a director. He’s been mildly successful with genre
films like The Rundown, Friday Night Lights and Hancock. After the failure that was Battleship, he’s decided to turn his
attention to true stories. Lone Survivor was the first with Mark
Wahlberg, Deepwater Horizon was the
second with Mark Wahlberg and early next year comes Patriots Day starring, you guessed it, Mark Wahlberg. They’re all based on different events and
different people and yet somehow Wahlberg fits the bill each time. This month Wahlberg plays a man working on a
crew at the offshore drilling rig named Deepwater
Horizon. This is the true story of the incident in 2010 when the rig exploded,
creating a horrific oil spill, but we’re focusing on the men on board and their
struggle for survival.
Lupita Nyong’o has been pretty busy since she won her Oscar for
12 Years a Slave in 2013. She was a voice in the most recent Star Wars and The Jungle Book and she’ll appear in Black Panther. In Queen of
Katwe, she plays the mother of Phiona Mutesi, a young Ugandan girl who
trains to become a world chess champion. David Oyelowo plays the man who trains
her. He’s been in no shortage of docu-dramas since portraying Martin Luther
King Jr. in Selma. Genre-wise a chess
film is usually a drama but they can also be considered sports films and this
is an ESPN co-production. Since there is most certainly competition and since
that competition is an intense one of mind v. mind, there is usually a
thrilling element to it. This will probably be more of a feel good family film
but the plot element of chess brings more to the table. The chess table that
is. I’m terrible at puns.
A goofy, kid-friendly cartoon featuring silly animals and an
adorable baby will surely be the hit of September. Interestingly enough, it
will be from the writer/director of Neighbors,
who wanted to try a kid friendly film for a change. In Storks, we are introduced to a world where storks no longer deliver
babies. They now strictly deliver packages, but something unusual occurs and a
baby must be delivered so the best delivery stork, voiced by Andy Samberg,
takes on the job. Like any mid to high budget animated film there is no
shortage of famous actors voicing cartoon characters and silly hijinks. There’s
probably also a message about family in there somewhere- this is about the
delivery of a child after all.
After a movie does well there is always talk of a sequel, no
matter what the ending. Sequels to films like Casablanca, which had Bogart’s character as an American agent spying on the Nazis, and Gladiator, which had Crowe’s character
rising from the dead and fighting in Vietnam, were written and then nothing
happened because either the studio backed out or the stars wanted nothing to do
with it. So in the mid 90’s after the success of Seven, the studio wanted a sequel and found this psychic serial
killer script and reworked it to be called Eight.
The title of Seven was referencing
the seven deadly sins, so either they intended to create a new sin or they were
just very uncreative, but either way that film never happened. But the script
lived on. Fast forward about 20 years and the original script has been turned
into feature film under its original title, Solace.
It stars Anthony Hopkins as a psychic working for the FBI hunting a psychic
serial killer played by Colin Farrell. Is it any good? Well, it was made quite
a while ago and is only now getting a small release, so I don’t know, but I
can’t help but be intrigued.
We all remember in 2009 when Sully safely landed that plane in the Hudson River and everyone
lived. He then went on a number of T.V. shows and everyone was happy. The end.
Well Clint Eastwood, Tom Hanks and Chelsey ’Sully’ Sullenberger felt there was
a bit more to tell than that. Apparently there was an investigation that was
held after the incident that might have made him seem less heroic. I imagine
Sully had to go through it, we the public hardly knew about it and he wanted
the world to know. True story, Tom Hanks and Clint Eastwood usually adds up to
an Oscar nomination so I’m sure we’ll be hearing about this one for a few
months after it comes out.
