September movies

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.

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August movies

August is a strange month. It’s not quite the dumping ground that January is for movies but it’s the end of summer so there’s maybe like two movies coming out this month that studios are banking on. The rest are smaller films that might have a chance of being a sleeper hit or bigger films that didn’t turn out that great and an end of summer release is the best chance they have at getting an audience.

Many of our favorite comic book heroes are anti-heroes of sorts. They break the rules and disobey authority and live by their own moral code for some sort of greater good. Well, the members of the Suicide Squad are not like those guys. They are all villains that have crossed the law and/or Batman and have been placed in a government prison for their deeds. Now the government has some problems of their own and for one reason or another they can’t get help from Batman, so they decide to put these imprisoned baddies to work. With a cast of colorful characters with names like Deadshot, Harley Quinn, Katana, Slipknot, Killer Croc, El Diablo, Enchantress and Captain Boomerang you might think this is all very strange. You’d be right. This is all very strange. It’s from a director known for making gritty, hard “R” cop movies, so the fact that he is tackling a quirky super villain ensemble cast has me very excited, and confused, but mostly excited. 

Kevin Spacey, Christopher Walken and Jennifer Garner have all been in good movies, but I don’t think Nine Lives will go down in history as their greatest film. Spacey stars as an over-worked businessman and distant father who needs a last minute birthday gift for his daughter and walks into a weird shop owned by, of course, Walken, who gives him a cat. On his way home to his wife, Jennifer Garner, and daughter he becomes trapped inside the cat. Now, curiosity got the best of me (but I didn’t care enough to turn this into a pun) so I wanted to know exactly how he got trapped inside the cat. The film description simply says ‘a bizarre turn of events’ so yeah, this is a thing. 

We’re long past the days of an animated cartoon character being edited into a live action film, and that’s a bummer because I’m a huge fan of Roger Rabbit. I was not such a big fan of Pete’s Dragon which I continually mix up with Puff the Magic Dragon. Pete’s Dragon is getting the big budget remake but this time instead of a pink animated smiling dragon, it’s a photorealistic (well, as realistic as you can make a dragon at least) CG dragon that hangs out with a kid named Pete and the two go on an adventure of some kind. Robert Redford pops up in this one. Either they had money lying around because CG is getting cheaper and cheaper these days or it’s a good script and he wanted to be part of it. He doesn’t need the work right?

Seth Rogen must be having the time of his life right now and somehow he has not spread himself too thin and had some sort of public breakdown - so good for him. He’s had recent forays into Academy Award nominated movies like Steve Jobs, unnecessarily controversial films like The Interview, strange television like Preacher and now he’s taking a stab at writing and starring in the animated feature Sausage Party. He plays Frank, a hot dog in a pack of hot dogs, who spends his days sitting on a shelf waiting for the day when he gets purchased and can go onto the great beyond. One day he and the love of his life Brenda, a hot dog bun voiced by Kristen Wiig, along with several other food items voiced by a good chunk of Hollywood, get picked up - and boy are they excited. That is until they finally come to discover exactly what it is that humans do to food. I briefly thought this movie might be a comical film pushing a vegetarian message but the first food item seen comically slaughtered is a potato, so there goes that theory. This just looks to be a hilariously profane adventure about food items trying to stay alive in a world where they all share the same possible fate. 

A southern crime flick with a title like Hell or High Water has my attention. Then there’s the added bonus of Ben Foster and Jeff Bridges, who are no strangers to the crime genre, and I’m even more excited. Then you toss in Chris Pine, who is mostly new to this genre, and I’m very excited. Foster and Pine play brothers who, in an attempt to save the family business, start robbing banks and catch the attention of the local law. It doesn’t sound like anything too new but all you need to make a film like this interesting is a decent cast who is up for some shoot outs and tension. I think this film will deliver.

The director of The Hangover, Road Trip and Old School really enjoys putting man-children into stupid and over the top scenarios and have them walk away mostly unscathed. He’s been pretty successful with it and I like those movies for the most part, although I haven’t seen the latter two Hangovers. This time around his man-children have a whole new situation to tackle: weapons dealing. In War Dogs, Miles Teller, an actor who is so good at being a pretentious jerk that I’m convinced he truly is one, and Jonah Hill, an actor who is pretty good at being a pretentious jerk but can also be the laid back guy and can also be the best friend, play two guys who find a loophole that allow them to bid on U.S. weapons contracts so they can cash in on the war in Afghanistan. It’s based on a true story but I have to imagine what happens on film might be a bit more fantastic than what happened in real life. 

I never saw Ben Hur, but I did see Gladiator and I thought that was a remake of Ben Hur or Spartacus. Turns out it isn’t a remake at all - it’s just that I can’t tell sword and sandal epics apart. This new Ben Hur stars John Huston’s nephew, Jack, who will take over the role played by Charlton Heston. And while I don’t know if John Huston and Charlton Heston ever worked together, I’m sure they bumped into each other at Hollywood parties. This has nothing to do with the movie. The story is about a prince being falsely accused of treason and then returning years later to seek revenge and become a champion on a chariot, or so the pictures lead me to believe.  Because we live in a post 300 world, you can’t just have people fighting with swords and riding chariots, you need to make it flashy. This remake is coming to us from the director of Wanted and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter and he likes to shoot his action scenes with an unnecessary flair that I feel sometimes works. But I can’t see it working in a period piece that features Jesus as a character (the actor portraying Jesus played the antagonist in 300- that’s my last bit of useless trivia).

I’ll watch any action movie with Jason Statham. He’s a personal favorite of mine, but one film I wasn’t crazy about was The Mechanic starring him, Ben Foster and Donald Sutherland. With a cast like that my expectations were high but it wasn’t that great, didn’t make all that much money yet, somehow, we’re getting Mechanic: Resurrection. With a hackneyed sub-title and a plot that involves him being forced to kill targets and make the deaths look like accidents (which is the exact plot to another Statham film called Killer Elite) it gives me cause to worry, but it’s got Jessica Alba and Tommy Lee Jones in it so I’m kind of excited. The action scenes in the trailer look pretty cool and like I said, I will watch any Statham action film.

Say what you will about Mel Gibson but the man is a great actor. He may be a crazy person but a great actor none the less. Fortunately for us Gibson fans he saw the writing on the wall and hopped on this ‘older hard edged loner has to rescue daughter’ craze that Taken kick-started. In Blood Father, Gibson plays and ex-con (it’s either a con or a spy, there’s hardly any middle ground) who has to protect his daughter from criminals. Why are they trying to kill her? Well I don’t know, but I imagine the film will not be very plot heavy. William H. Macy is in this as well and apparently Gibson and Macy play old friends. Even if this wasn’t an action film I’d watch this.  

So that’s August, anything you’re interested in?

July Movies

This July there’s no shortage of fun summer movies coming out, which makes the dark and disturbing ones all the more dark and disturbing. 

I’m not sure how I managed to do this but I did not read The BFG in grammar school. I remember my classmates reading it and we all said BFG stood for Big Fat Guy and thought that was hilarious, so yeah, I never got around to reading it. Apparently it stands for Big Friendly Giant, so we were 1 for 3, and it is indeed about a giant who is friendly. But he is an outcast because, and remember this is a children’s story, he doesn’t eat children. People love this book and it’s directed by Steven Spielberg, so this one might be a pretty darn good nostalgic tear jerker. 

Much like the little engine, The Purge series is the little action/horror series that could. Made on a small budget the first one takes place on ‘Purge’ night, a night where all crime is legal and many, many people commit horrible crimes - legally. The first one is primarily a small, home invasion thriller. It made a lot of money on a small budget and since the Saw series had run its course, the industry, and viewers, needed a new [SR1] low budget series that yielded big results in theaters. So The Purge: Anarchy was made. This time it was focused on one man, only known as Sergeant, who tries to survive the night while gunning for the man who killed his son. Each film touches on the fact that the rich stay protected in their homes while the poor are left to fend for themselves on the street. The Purge: Election Year brings back Sergeant who is now in charge of security for a presidential nominee who wants to do away with the Purge. As with any presidential nominees big claims she is met with resistance and the group in charge of the Purge wants to do away with her and thus begins another violent night out on the streets on Purge night. You know what you’re getting into when watching these films. They’re fast and brutal and most certainly not for everyone.

I like the idea of a film beginning in the middle of a story. It’s an interesting approach but ultimately it’s just a set up for prequels and we all know how Star Wars wound up.  In The Legend of Tarzan our titular hero, Alexander Skarsgard, has put his limb swinging days behind him and is living in London but hears word of a mining job that disrupts his old home and goes off to save the day. I was initially very uninterested but the trailer for this is pretty cool, the cast is great and it’s by the director of several Harry Potter films (the mature darker ones, not the yay we’re kids and we can do magic ones) so tonally this might be a darker themed film. It’s also got Christoph Waltz in it and he just doesn’t know how to act poorly.

I’m a dog owner now so I’m now more likely to see a movie like The Secret Life of Pets, which is about an adventure pets embark (get it, bark) on when one of their group goes missing. Originally I thought it was just about pets hanging out at home while humans go to work, but I guess all of these goofy cartoons need to have a conspiracy subplot and that’s fine. The biggest selling point is from the trailer when a snooty dog owner leaves for the day and once he is out of the house the dog promptly turns on a System of a Down song and rocks out. If that part was just shot for the trailer and doesn’t wind up in the movie, I will be disappointed. 

If there was ever a time to make a raunchy comedy starring Anna Kendrick, Zac Efron, Aubrey Plaza and Adam Devine now is that time. They’re on the top of their game right now so they might as well have some fun before they either become character actors or have to do serious acting gigs. In Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates, Efron and Devine play hard partying brothers who are asked by their sister to find proper wedding dates for her wedding. They have a history of going overboard at family events so they promise to try and think they’ve found perfect dates, Kendrick and Plaza. When they get to Hawaii for the wedding they soon realize they’ve been tricked and Kendrick and Plaza are even harder partiers than Efron and Devine. I’m sure it all just gets more ridiculous and more R-rated from there.

It’s been a while since we’ve had a Viggo Mortensen movie right? He was a character actor in the 90’s, then became very popular with the Lord of the Rings films but since then he’s taken on smaller projects and Captain Fantastic is no different. Viggo plays a father who has raised six kids in isolation in the Pacific Northwest to be physically fit and very smart. When they are forced from their home they are not at all prepared for the real world because today in the real world being smart and in good shape doesn’t mean you’ll be successful. Kind of sad but that seems to be the point in what looks to be a poignant, charming little movie.

Every time there’s a reboot there’s going to be people who are against it, so it comes as no surprise that there is a large amount of disdain surrounding Ghostbusters - a reboot of a film that everyone I know enjoys. Some people just don’t like it when you remake/reboot a classic and that I can understand. But some pretend to feel that same way but really they’re just sexist jerks, since this time around the Ghostbusters are females. It’s from the same people that made Bridesmaids, The Heat and Spy, one of my favorite movies from last year so I’m looking forward to it. I do wish that it was a continuation from the original story and not a total reboot, but the cast is great and the ghosts look freaky so I’m thinking I’ll enjoy this one.

I forget just how busy an actor John Leguizamo is, but looking at his film credits he has had a small role in lots of movies that I’ve seen -some pretty recent ones, too - and he’s been busy as Sid the Sloth in the Ice Age series (which I’ll get to in a little bit). He’ll also have a supporting, and hopefully bigger than usual, role in The Infiltrator. The film stars Bryan Cranston, an actor who gets a lot of well-deserved praise, as an undercover customs agent who’s tracking the money flowing to and the drugs flowing from Pablo Escobar. We’re over-due for a well-made, well-produced, period piece true crime story so I have high hopes for this, as long as the story is kept interesting and it doesn’t become a depressing mess or an over the top action film that so many drug dramas turn into.

Now that J.J. Abrams has left the Star Trek universe and joined the Star Wars universe, we can expect some different things in Star Trek Beyond, the first installment in the newly rebooted franchise. I didn’t mind the 2^nd, but it sort of lived up to the ’Into Darkness’ subtitle so I believe this one will be lighter and more fun. It’s from the mastermind Justin Lin (I recognize that I’m over editorializing here) that turned the Fast and Furious series into the giant that it is today. This time around the crew of the USS Enterprise gets stranded on an alien planet and must survive the elements. Kirk must round up his crew and fight a whole new enemy. It sounds vague but the trailer and available descriptions don’t give a lot of information. It will be the first of many films to come out featuring Anton Yelchin after his unfortunate passing, so that might take a toll on the tone, but the producers did make a wise choice and gave Scotty, Simon Pegg, a shot at co-writing the screenplay. Since he helped make Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, I’m thinking we’ll have a good time at the movies. 

In the first Ice Age, the film not the actual age, the creators apparently reached out to the American Museum of Natural History so there might be some accuracy in the depiction of the creatures and environments shown in the film. That’s a nice bit of effort put forth for a kid's movie right? Well after 4 movies they’ve given up on accuracy because now in the 5^th (did you know they made that many?!) entry in the series, Ice Age Collision Course, the little acorn chasing creature featured in all of the films blasts off to space somehow and begins a world ending event. It’s wild that given enough time many film series nowadays will eventually deal with a world ending event. So now that the world is in danger Ray Romano, Denis Leary and John Leguizamo have to save the day. Yay. I haven’t seen any of these since the first one.

Is everyone afraid of the dark or is that just something I, and many movie producers, assume to be true? Well those movie producers are banking on it with Lights Out, another film that deals with a creature that attacks when the, well I’m sure you can guess. A sister and brother are tortured by a being that appears once the lights are out, it is somehow connected to their mother. They need to figure out why this thing is attacking them - and keep the lights on. The trailer for this is super creepy so if you’re looking for some good jump scares, I think this is the movie. 

Mike Birbiglia is on a real short list of comedians I’ve seen live so I think the fact that he also makes movies is pretty cool. His first one was Sleepwalk with Me, which was a sort of docu-comedy about his standup career, his relationships and his battle with sleepwalking. It’s real charming and funny. He’s again writing, acting and directing in Don’t Think Twice, a comedy about an improv group and the one member who goes on to make it big. I really like the cast they have for this one. It’s got Birbiglia, Keegan-Michael Key, Kate Micucci and Gillian Jacobs. It might not get a wide release but I think this one is worth finding.

Mila Kunis and Kristen Bell were stars of two T.V. shows I loved and starred in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, but they weren’t friends in that one. Fortunately in Bad Moms they do play friends. The two of them join Kathryn Hahn as fed up, over-worked mothers who haven’t had a good time in a long time and decided to let loose and party. This goes against stereotypes and angers the PTA leader, Christina Applegate, and well, it’s from the writer of The Hangover, so I imagine things escalate to comically over the top levels. 

After 3 pretty cool movies and one not starring him, Matt Damon has returned to his action franchise with Jason Bourne and so has Julia Stiles. I always forget she’s in these movies. Bourne suffers amnesia and cannot fully remember his past as a government agent, so he digs deeper and deeper and every stone he turns reveals yet another secret, along with some hired killer trying to stop him. He always manages to escape and find out more secrets about his past - and anger another government organization. These movies are pretty unique in that the style of action is quick cuts, but it actually looks good. The actors, directors and editors really put together cool movies and even after all of these years Damon, looks like the action star we always forget he is.