December movies

It’s home stretch for Oscar wannabes so even though it’s the holiday season there’s no shortage of heavy handed dramas coming out.  To balance that out there are a couple fun movies but most importantly there’s a new Star Wars movie coming out and I can’t hide my excitement for it. 

Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone singing and dancing? Sounds like the plot for La La Land is a winner for lots of viewers. The two of them are a fun pair and a fun musical around this season makes for a good time at the movies. I like Gosling when he’s beating people up so I forget there was a long period of time when he was a heartthrob and this is the 3^rd collaboration with him and Stone. I predict this will get some sort of music related nomination. 

To win over a big client and save his company a man throws a massive Office Christmas Party. Now this sounds like the plot to a Nation Lampoon movie but it attracted the likes of Kate McKinnon, Jason Bateman, T.J. Miller, Jennifer Aniston and lots and lots of other funny people. These party movies are usually a good time as long as everyone on screen is game for it.

In the beginning of Star Wars: A New Hope the Rebel Alliance has in their possession the stolen plans to the Death Star. Rogue One: A Star Wars Story tells the tale of how those plans were stolen and who went on the mission. It looks to be more of an action film than your usual Star Wars fare and that’s partially because in the time that this film takes place people have forgotten about Jedi’s and The Force. This might be a departure from the typical Star Wars story but fear not because we still have droids and spaceships and lasers and all sorts of cool stuff going on. These movies are usually good for a special effects nomination.

Every time Will Smith does a heavy handed drama I say to myself, “it’s okay, this is just one more step to Bad Boys 3,” so once again I’m reassuring myself of that with the release of Collateral Beauty. Angry at the world and distancing himself from those that care about him Smith begins writing letters to Love, Time and Death. To his surprise Love, Time and Death pay him a visit in human form and try to make him understand the way of the world a bit better. As of today Bad Boys 3 is now titled Bad Boys for Life and is scheduled for a January 2018 release. I am counting the days. Perhaps this will get a best actor or a best supporting actor nomination.

I’m not sure how loyal Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy is to its source material but I enjoyed it and the opening music number “So Long & Thanks for All the Fish” is very entertaining. So when I see that the director of that film, who wrote that song, has made an animated movie called Sing about animals putting on a musical competition I can’t help but be interested. Plus Matthew McConaughey plays a koala who sings “Call me Maybe” and I feel that alone will be worth the price of admission. This is a good bet for best animated film and maybe a music nomination.

When a malfunction occurs on a spaceship sailing through deep space two of the Passengers awake 90 years before they’re supposed to. Fortunately those passengers are two of the more likeable people around: Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt. The two of them hang out with the robot bartender and enjoy each other’s company before realizing that they might have been woken up early for a reason and have to figure out how to save the whole crew.  This looks like it might be a romantic charmer combined with a sci-fi story. Even after Castaway and Moon I’m still hesitant about these stranded movies so it might be a while before I see this. Since people love these actors maybe we’ll get an actress and actor nomination, people also love space movies so maybe a best picture could be thrown in there. 

I was excited for A Monster Calls, which is about a giant tree monster, until I learned the plot. It’s about a boy who begins talking with a monster, voiced my Liam Neeson, while his mother is sick and dying. That’s some heavy material there, can’t the kid just befriend a giant tree monster and have fun adventures? Maybe that’s the stuff January films are made of. There’s probably hope for a special effects nomination here. 

Now I’m not sure if you’ve ever seen the commercials for the video game Assassin’s Creed but in it you play a hooded assassin who sneaks around and dispatches enemies with a cool retractable knife. That’s pretty much what I thought it was all about, apparently there’s a lot more to it than that and the film delves into it. Michael Fassbender plays a man who is captured by an organization who need to unlock the memories of his ancestors with this fancy machine they got. To properly unlock said memories he has to play out the memories and become a 15^th century assassin during the Spanish Inquisition. It’s a pretty odd concept but it looks like it might make for a pretty cool movie.  

I like James Franco and Bryan Cranston but Why Him? just looks silly. Cranston is an uptight father who doesn’t approve of his daughter’s new boyfriend, a super rich relatively young eccentric goon. The more Franco tries to impress Cranston the more he pushes him away and I imagine the trailer doesn’t show all of the hijinks so hopefully there’s more fun to be had in this film than we’ve seen so far. 

Kylo Ren and Spiderman go in search or Qui-Gon Jin is NOT the plot to Silence. The actors that have portrayed those characters may appear in Martin Scorsese’s latest but in this one they’re all priests in the 17^th century. Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver travel to Japan, at a time when Christianity was forbidden, in search of their mentor Liam Neeson.  The journey ahead of them will be a hard one as they are trespassing and I’m sure with Scorsese behind the camera this will rack up some Oscars nominations.

Ben Affleck is not the same Ben Affleck that Ben Affleck used to be. He went from rising star, to big star, to joke, to forgotten about, to respected writer/director to respected writer/director/actor. His most recent writer/director/actor gig is Live by Night, a prohibition era gangster film. There’s no shortage of period piece gangster films and the recent ones, specifically the Johnny Depp starring ones, haven’t been great but this one looks good. His crime flick The Town was good so I have high hopes for this one. Affleck’s directing always gets some attention at the Oscars.

There’s always going to be at least 1 historical drama coming out around Oscar season and this year it’s Hidden Figures. So most of us know about NASA and the space missions but I for one have only recently heard about the female African-American mathematicians who were behind the scenes helping out with ground control. You don’t see any of that in Apollo 13, it’s just Ed Harris and Ron Howards weird brother. This film looks to right that wrong and give some credit to a piece of forgotten history. This might get some Oscar attention as two of the leads, Octavia Spencer and Taraji P. Henson, have a win and a nomination under their belt, respectively.

Gold is about Matthew McConaughey and a crew venturing into the Indonesian jungle to find gold. I knew that much about the plot but from the trailer it seems that this is 2 films in one. One film is about the adventure to find the gold, then the film takes a turn and becomes more of a drama/thriller about what happens when you have that much gold. It looks at times fun and at times serious but McConaughey rocks a wild hairdo and seems to be enjoying himself and everyone likes that right? 

Anyways, Happy Holidays folks! Enjoy the movies!