October

It's been a while since I've written an article. I've had a lot going on but I want to get back to it. I like writing these things and it's October! The best month of the year. It's Kristen's birthday month and it's Halloween month! I don't know how many of these I'll see in theaters but I know I'll be watching lots of movies this month - mostly horror movies of course.

Any iteration of Joker is going to be a big deal. He's been portrayed by the likes of Cesar Romero, Jack Nicholson, Heath Ledger, Mark Hamill and now Joaquin Phoenix will wear the makeup. Except for the Jokers who who got there start on TV, like Romero and Hamill, no actor has had the opportunity to reprise the role so each is different. Nicholson was a gangster who was dropped in  deadly toxins, Ledger kept the backstory vague (could be a could be a wounded soldier, could be a victim of child abuse - it's never truly revealed), Leto was a wannabe musician who had too much free time and now we have a new play on the character. Phoenix is Arthur Fleck (A. Fleck which is like Affleck, like Ben Affleck the most recent Batman. That has to be on purpose right?) a quiet man in 1980's Gotham who wants to make it as a comedian and get the girl - when that doesn't work out he turns to crime and things get ugly. Man of Steel through Aquaman were all connected but this is completely separate of that series and may be a one off - a rarity in the comic book movies nowadays. The director, Todd Phillips, has a history of making films about immature men who want a change in their lives going to great lengths to get that they want - The Hangover series, Old School and Road Trip. Granted they are all comedies but he has a focus so hopefully this jump to dark crime will work out. He sure has one committed actor working with him, Phoenix famously really dives into his roles and early reviews are that this is another solid performance from him.

For as long as I've been reading about movies I've heard about this upcoming film Gemini Man and after about 20 years it finally comes to the big screen. The script for this goes back so far that at one point Sean Connery was suggested as the lead and he hasn't starred in a film since 2003. The reason it took so long to develop is partially because it is about a hitman who comes across his younger self who is trying to kill him and it was intended to have the actor portray the younger and older version - using digital technology that was not readily available in the late 90's early 00's. The other reason it took so long is because that plot already exists with Looper where Joseph Gordon Levitt, wearing good ol' fashion makeup and prosthetic's, plays a young hitman hunting his older self played by Bruce Willis. Now it's 7 years since Looper was made (and that movie rules), Will Smith is making a comeback in big budget sci-fi movies that made him a blockbuster success and the facial de-aging technology looks pretty good now (those Disney/Marvel movies just love putting it to use). The story has Smith as we are familiar with him now, still dashing as ever but slightly older looking, going up against himself from his Fresh Prince days but with lots of guns. It seems older Smith has been working for a corrupt government agency that wants to retire him and to do so they will use a younger clone of him that has been raised to be the perfect killer and older Smith would rather help him than kill him but first he has to dodge a lot of bullets. I really hope there's more to it than that, this has been quite the long gestating film and a lot of people have been involved with it over 2 decades. Director Ang Lee has made some great looking movies but a good story needs to go along with it.

I want to be excited for another movie about The Addams Family but this new animated feature just isn't doing it for me. You can't replace Raul Julia and Angelica Huston - that much is obvious - but I feel Oscar Isaac and Charlize Theron would have done a great job in a live action movie. This animated feature has look of a Netflix release and there's nothing particularly theatrical about it. The trailer elicits far too few jokes and the animation is very odd looking. I hope this is more fun. I crave horror themed October theatrical releases and this is the only family friendly one coming out this month. Apparently this one has the family moving to Westfield, NJ which is where a real life spooky incident occurred. Remember when a person calling them self The Watcher was sending threateningly creepy letters to new home owners a few years ago? That true life horror story may have influenced this friendly family film. SO that's fun.

Jay and Silent Bob haven't been around for a while. They've popped up here and there but they haven't been characters in a Kevin Smith movie since Clerks 2. Now we have Jay and Silent Bob Reboot which finds the chatty stoner and quiet stoner venturing back to Hollywood to stop the remake of the Bluntman and Chronic movie - which is based on their comic book superhero alter egos. The last time the two headlined a movie was back in 2001 with Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back which focused on them stopping the original Bluntman and Chronic from getting made. There will probably be a celebrity cameo every second in this movie. Some playing themselves, some playing a character and maybe a few playing both. Kevin Smith has made some weird movies recently (there's the one about the religious fanatics, one about a guy who turn into a walrus and one with Nazi sausages) so hopefully this return to form will do well for him.

I imagine many people wondered 'WHAT ARE YOU THINKING?!' when Taika Waititi, hot off of Thor: Ragnarok fame, announced that his next project would be a coming of age period piece comedy...and he would play Hitler. Jojo Rabbit tells the story of a young boy growing up in Germany during World War II who is made fun of by the other boys in his training camp when he fails to kill a rabbit. He also finds that there is a young Jewish girl hiding in his family's home and when he needs to talk to someone about all of this he turns to the only person he can: his imaginary friend Adolf. In the wrong hands a film like this could become an offensive mess but I have loved, just loved, everything Waititi has been a part of and I'm pretty sure this will be a funny, dramatic and thought provoking tale.

Some of these Disney updates are like '(insert movie title here) but darker!' but Sleeping Beauty was already pretty dark! So why not make it about the bad guy? And that, I imagine, was the driving force behind Maleficent. I never saw it though but Angelina Jolie is great so it's no surprise a sequel is coming out. Maleficent: Mistress of Evil finds Aurora planning a marriage and her mother in law to be is happy to call her daughter and Maleficent just ain't having it. Things go about as well as you can imagine. These movies look to have a significant more action than I remember from the cartoons, so  that's cool, and it looks as if we dig a bit deeper into Meleficent's back story and meet her family of angry looking winged magical people so that wedding might be more complicated than Aurora was planning. The October release might be a sign that Disney owns too many properties! It's the only reason I came come up with for why they would release a relatively big movie outside of Summer and before Christmas. With all of their properties I think they are going to start stepping on their own feet more and more.

A Zombieland sequel would have been welcome like the day after the first one came out. I saw that movie three times in theaters. It opens with a zombie killing montage set to Metallica and has Woody Harrelson, Jesse Eisenberg, Emma Stone and Abigal Breslin shooting at zombies for 2 hours with one amazing performance from Bill Murray. Well now it's 10 years later and all four leads are back in Zombieland: Double Tap. The sequel finds them still still road tripping through America, killing all the zombies they come across. Being that this looks to be a bigger budgeted sequel I know we have a few new actors joining the crew and we are probably in store for a few more celebrity cameos - who will probably not survive the entirety of the film.