October movies

Some say that Christmas season is the most wonderful time of the year. I’m open to everyone having their own opinion so I politely disagree because Halloween season is the most wonderful time of the year! And this month at the movies we have a few horror movies to look forward to but we also have a couple of comedies and a few thrillers starring some heavy hitters. 

Something about the trailer for The Girl on the Train leads me to believe I was already supposed to know about this movie. It was short on plot but heavy on detail, if that makes sense, it made it clear that SOMETHING was going on but it didn’t want to tell you what that thing was. Best I can tell is that Emily Blunt is not a happy person but she wishes for a happy life, similar to the life she used to have before her husband left her. One day she meets a man and his wife, they seem happy. Then things get hazy and she comes to. The wife is missing and she hasn’t attracted attention yet but she feels she might be responsible somehow. This is all very vague, I know.

Years ago there was talk of blending the Underworld series with the Resident Evil series. I’m all for that. The Resident Evil film series had gotten pretty crazy and strayed very, very far away from the video game series so it might as well go even farther. That did not wind up happening but this month we are getting Underworld: Blood Wars and in January we are getting a new Resident Evil film. I guess studios saw it was more profitable to let each film be its own thing. The Underworld series is the blue tinted emo vampire v. werewolf series that has the aesthetic of the Matrix a few years after the Matrix came out and the plot to Twilight a couple years before Twilight came out. I know I saw the first one and I believe I saw the second but I really can’t remember. I’m pretty sure this is the 5^th. As an action junkie I’m not sure how I’ve gone this long without seeing all of them. This one finds our heroine vampire Selene, played by Kate Beckinsale, continuing her battle to end the war between vampires and werewolves while also taking care of some infighting within her own clan. I swear this was the plot to the first one but this is the official synopsis for the newest one. I’m not one to scoff at a lack of originality but if it’s boring and unoriginal then perhaps that’s why I tuned out early. 

With a title like The Accountant, one can’t be blamed for maybe thinking this will be a boring movie about an accountant. But then you look at the poster and see that it’s Ben Affleck holding a rifle the size of an average human and, well, it’s got to make you the slightest bit curious. Affleck stars as a quiet, loner accountant who has trouble communicating with others but he does his job and no one seems to pay much attention to him. This works fine for him because he is an accountant for criminals the world over and since people are trying to stop these criminals, eventually the trouble might come to his door. When he takes on a legitimate client at a robotics company, a young employee, Anna Kendrick, attempts to start a friendship with him but also takes notice of some financial issues. With her poking around and a government agency beginning to take notice of a guy who looks like Ben Affleck in the company of criminals, things are about to get violent.

For more than a decade Tyler Perry has been making movies with his most popular character, Madea. He’s acted the part over a dozen times in feature films and after all these years he’s never made a Halloween movie, so this month we have Boo! A Madea Halloween. Having never seen a Madea film I’m not sure what one is to expect but in this Madea fends off killers, ghosts and zombies while keeping an eye on troublemaking kids. The character is an older woman so I guess the shtick is that she’s annoyed by troublemaking kids and that’s almost as annoying as creatures from the beyond attacking her.

Felicity Jones has been acting since the 90’s, mostly in TV shows.  But recently she’s been in The Theory of Everything and The Amazing Spider-Man 2 and she’s about to becomes one of everyone’s favorite characters ever (judging strictly from fan anticipation) in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. Before that can happen though, she’ll be in the 3^rd part of the Ron Howard/ Tom Hanks Davinci Code series entitled Inferno. I haven’t seen the other two but the trailer makes it seem like it’s a more serious, higher stakes version of National Treasure. In this one Hanks’ character is trying to stop a disaster of literal biblical proportions when he uncovers a plot to kill a whole lot of people and it’s somehow connected to Dante’s Inferno. I think.

I guess the guys who tried to frame Jack Reacher never saw Jack Reacher.  Well of course they didn’t, unless it was some sort of meta-action masterpiece; but alas that is not the world of Jack Reacher: Never Go Back. In this sequel to the Tom Cruise starring thriller, Mr. Reacher is a wanted man at the center of a government conspiracy that ties back to his past. From the first film all I know is that his past involved him very successfully taking out the bad guys. It seems he’s very good at this and from the trailer there will be no shortage of him beating people up in this movie. The first one was all right but this one looks fun, plus the addition of Cobie Smulders means there might be a bit more personality to this movie. 

When I think of huge stand up specials my mind goes right to Eddie Murphy: Raw and I looked into it and that is one of the most, if not the most, popular stand up movies of all time. Now that was in the 80’s and barring HBO specials, a stand up movie is a rare thing so since Kevin Hart is at a pretty high point in his career, he made Kevin Hart: What Now? It is reportedly his last stand up special because he feels that after selling out the Eagles stadium you can’t do any better, so why try? Plus his acting career is going pretty well right now so I imagine he’ll be focusing solely on that. 

The Transformers series got producers thinking that making movies out of toys/board games is profitable. G.I. Joe succeeded, Battleship failed and Ouija succeeded. I’m pretty sure the Ouija board falls under the category of board game. Since the first one had a small budget and made a decent amount in theaters they had to make another one. The cool thing is they decided to get the director of Oculus, which is truly terrifying, and make a direct prequel to the original rather than just taking the board itself and making a new story all together. I always appreciate when a film series continues with a story, even if it’s a prequel. The plot is the same as any story that involves the Ouija board.  People get irresponsible playing with it, open a door, welcome an evil spirit and things get freaky. This comes out right before Halloween, it’s going to do well.