September movies

This month contains films that make normal activities like dating and visiting grandma seem terrifying and more than one film about hiking (two, but two is more than one).

Ed Skrien had a role in Game of Thrones and, spoiler alert, his character is still alive! But for one reason or another he left, they replaced him and he snagged the lead role in The Transporter Refueled. The Transporter was Jason Statham’s first franchise and it’s essentially about a getaway driver who has no problem driving criminals and transporting illegal items.  But in the first 3 films he comes across a situation where an innocent person gets tossed in the mix and he uses his military and driving skills to do good. Now Fast and Furious it ain’t (Statham declined to be part of this 4^th film but did join the 7th F&F film) but these films have no shortage of crazy car stunts so the action lover should have a good time.

From the director of Dunstin Checks In and Sesame Street Presents: Follow that Bird comes A Walk in the Woods. The director might be better known for He’s Just Not That Into You and The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants but I haven’t seen those. The last two films were based on books and this most recent film is also based on a book. It looks as if that as time has passed he has moved away from films about animals and gone with already written material. This most recent film stars Robert Redford as a man coming back from a long stay in England and his old friend, Nick Nolte, playing a man in over his head who needs to get off the grid.  Together the two men go on a walk in the woods (actually it’s the Appalachian Trail). Pretty simple. The title says it all. It certainly says a lot more than The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, I can’t even begin to guess what that was about.

The title The Perfect Guy elicits the name of a Chris Pine movie or perhaps a late 90’s Adam Sandler movie where he’s not the perfect guy but Drew Barrymore totally realizes he is. Well this is neither of those. The tagline is “Trust one, fear the other.” Now does that sound like a fun romantic comedy to you? Well good because it isn’t. Starring Sanaa Lathan as a recently single woman who left Morris (I’m aged but still handsome) Chestnut and meets Michael (I’m over 40 but look 20) Ealy. Ealy is charming but proves to be a bit of a violent and temperamental individual. She left Chestnut because he wasn’t ready for marriage so this was not a step in the right direction. Dating is scary folks.

Remember that brief period in time that people were excited for a M. Night Shyamalan movie? People would say ‘wow, a new movie!’ now it’s ‘ugh, a new movie?’ Well I have to imagine that those negative reactions have reached Mr. Shyamalan and he decided to take a step back from making big movies and he has made a small movie that you might not have heard of called The Visit. I don’t know much about it myself. The story is about a single mother who sends her children off to stay with their grandparents. The poster lists some rules, 1. Have a great time. 2. Eat as much as you want and 3. Don’t ever leave your room after 9:30 pm. I’m guessing the expected horror aspect is played up with that third rule. It is also listed as a comedy-horror - which could be interesting from a guy who has only really done horror films.

The film Everest is about a group of men climbing Mount Everest but it stars every gruff looking actor the producers could dig up - Jason Clarke, Josh Brolin, John Hawkes, Sam Worthington and Jake Gyllenhall.  They go from charming to tough in however long it takes them to grow a beard and from the promo shots, this movie is full of bearded men. This is based on the true story of one group’s journey to climb Everest and the deadly storm they encounter while up there. 

As we all know there are plenty of young adult novels that become movies and I enjoy a bunch of them. This month’s is Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials. The first one had a group of kids lost in a maze and, spoiler alert, they get out. They find that the maze was controlled by a shadowy post-apocalypse government. The apocalyptic event here was the sun scorched a good chunk of the earth and now out of the maze and into the frying pan our heroes go. I know that’s not a real phrase, just go with it. In the first film the kids dealt with an ever changing maze of death where a terrifying creature lurked. Now on the outside they’re fighting a harsh world not fit for humans and a pseudo-government out to kill them. 

Johnny Depp has played several real life criminals - George Jung in Blow, John Dillinger in Public Enemies -  and now he’ll play Whitey Bulger in Black Mass. He’s got some making up to do for his audience because Blow starts out a fun drug/party film like Dazed and Confused before taking a jarring tonal shift into a depressing drug/family drama and Public Enemies is just a pretty lame movie for a gangster flick. This one boasts more star power with the likes of Benedict Cumberbatch, Joel Edgerton, Dakota Johnson, Adam Scott, Kevin Bacon and Peter Sarsgaard. Edgerton plays a federal agent and Depp’s Bulger and he shadily take on the Boston Italian mob which leads to all sorts of trouble.

There is a terrible shortage of female leads in action films, fortunately Emily Blunt has quietly taken it upon herself to slowly fill the void. In the past few years she has appeared in two of the, and I say this without hyperbole, greatest action sci-fi films: Looper and Edge of Tomorrow. Seriously go see them, they’re awesome and she’s fantastic in each. This month she stars in Sicario and gets top billing! This film is the story of an F.B.I. agent thrown into the middle of a drug war on the U.S.-Mexico border. Films like this do not tend to be light fare but usually promise excitement.

Chess is a tool used in many action-crime films as a kind of metaphor about how one criminal toppled another. Then sometimes it is the whole focus of a film. Steven Knight, the creator of Eastern Promises and Peaky Blinders, wrote the screenplay for Pawn Sacrifice several years ago and it sat on a shelf until Edward Zwick, director of Glory, The Last Samurai, and Defiance picked it up. The man loves himself some historical drama so the tale of Bobby Fischer taking on a Russian chess legend sounds right up his alley. As I said, chess is often used a metaphor but in this film there is no metaphor - it’s just about a really tense chess match, which I imagine could be done well.

I’ve never seen an animated Adam Sandler film but a few years ago he released a film about a group of monsters all hanging out at hotel and now we have the sequel  - Hotel Transylvania 2. The film features Dracula, The Wolfman, The Invisible Man, Frankenstein’s Monster, The Mummy and Andy Samberg. From what I understand, in the first one Samberg is a human who wanders into the hotel for monsters and falls in love with Dracula’s daughter. Unlike most monster stories, everyone survives to see another day and now we have this sequel where Dracula gets to hang out with his half-vampire half-human son. Blade it is not (Blade is half human-half vampire).

Eli Roth prides himself in making disturbing films for a big audience. Trouble is the Disney audience (Disney being the blanket that covers Pixar, Marvel and Star Wars) doesn’t like disturbing films so these films are hard to market and sometimes have to wait to get released. Well, The Green Inferno was directed in 2013 and sat on a shelf until now. The film is the tale of a bunch of do-gooders who venture into the Amazon to save the rain forest and come across a tribe of cannibals. Roth actually did find a tribe in the forest who has never seen or heard of film before. Once they learned what it was they apparently enthusiastically joined in on the feature film. This movie will probably be gross, just a warning.

If you haven’t seen the Coen Brothers remake of True Grit you should do yourself a favor and see it. It’s really good. The Keeping Room isn’t another Coen film but it is another western featuring Hailee Steinfeld and that’s just as good. The civil war is coming to an end and it’s a dangerous time. Two sisters and a slave find themselves the target of murderous rogue soldiers and have to fend for themselves in their home. Female led indie western is a pretty rare genre but that could mean it will be great. 

There are some very popular gambling movies out there and Mississippi Grind could be one of the better ones. Starring Ben Mendelsohn as the older guy who is running out of luck and Ryan Reynolds as a young poker player who seems to know what he’s doing, the two get together to win some money. The older/younger team up in gambling movies has been done before but there always seems to be room for more. Mendelsohn is relatively new to the Hollywood scene yet has played the older character for the past few years whereas Reynolds has been around since the 90’s and still gets to play the younger guy. Good for him. 

So what are some films you’re excited about this month?

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August movie overview

August Movies

By: Kyle Davidson

It’s August and this month there’s no shortage of big summer movies and not ones just for kids! There’s also 3 reboots. Not surprising. 

Reboot number one is Fantastic Four. The tale of four people who, in this version anyway, travel to another universe and each come back with various powers. There’s a guy who can stretch, a girl who can turn invisible, a guy who can burst into flames and a guy who can turn into a giant rock monster. From the director of Chronicle, a super cool low budget super hero movie, comes a new interpretation of these characters than the ones from a few years ago that featured Jessica Alba and the man who would be Captain America. This one is probably a bit darker and not as goofy as the other series so I’m thinking it will be less fun. For some reason every comic series outside of the Marvel Cinematic Universe thinks that the best route is to make dark movies.

Batman ruined it for everyone.

Masterminds is a new movie from the creator of Napoleon Dynamite, so it shouldn’t surprise you that it looks super weird. It’s the story of an armored truck driver, played by Zack Galifianakis, who gets roped into a scheme and steals a whole lot of money. Where there’s a lot of money there’s a lot of characters involved with said money. In this film those people are played by Kristen Wiig, Owen Wilson and Jason Sudeikis. The plot may sound standard but the execution will probably be odd and all of these characters have the wonderful ability of looking quite fitting in odd movies.

What do you get when you bring together the director of Silence of the Lambs, the writer of Juno and Meryl Streep? A film called Ricki and the Flash, that’s what! Streep plays a rock and roller who left her family for a life on the road and has now returned to right some wrongs. She is not all that welcome because she pretty much upset everyone she ever knew. Her band is the only thing that helps her keep it all together and Mr. Jessie’s Girl himself, Rick Springfield, is one of her band members and has a thing for her. That guy has a surprising IMDB resume - I had no idea. Streep’s daughter is played by her real life daughter and her husband is played by her real life Sophie’s Choice co-star Kevin Kline. Is that in poor taste making a pointless Sophie’s Choice reference? I could have easily gone with A Prairie Home Companion.

There is apparently a TV series called Shaun the Sheep; it’s from the Wallace and Grommit creators. If you don’t know what that is, it’s made by the same people that made Chicken Run. If you don’t know what that is, Mel Gibson is in Chicken Run. If you don’t know who he, is it’s because you only recently learned to read and this is the first thing you read. I suggest you start elsewhere. This is the first full length feature of the titular sheep who one day decides to wander off his farm because he’s tired of the mo­notony of farm life. Aren’t we all? So it seems like he goes all Ferris Bueller (you better know who Ferris Bueller is) and takes the day off and gets into all sorts of trouble. By the way, this is a British series so that might be why you (and by you I mean I) haven’t heard of it.

Reboot number two is The Man from U.N.C.L.E., another in a long line of old school spy TV show reboots like Mission: Impossible, Get Smart and I Spy. Guy Ritchie used to direct small budget crime films, some that were super cool, then he made Sherlock Holmes and has yet to go back to his smaller roots. This one stars current Superman, Henry Cavill as C.I.A. agent Napoleon Solo and past Lone Ranger/ current trust fund kid Armie Hammer as KGB agent Illya Kuryakin. The two work for different governments but they must join forces to stop a criminal orga­nization from taking control of nuclear weapons. The thing that separates this one from the other reboots is that it is a 60’s period piece so if nothing else it will look very cool.

Stand by Me, American Pie, Drive Me Crazy, Pretty Woman, Footloose, Sixteen Candles, Sweet Home Alabama and Straight Outta Compton. What do all of these films have in common? Hardly anything except that each film is named after a song. That’s where the comparison ends. Straight Outta Compton is the true story about the rap group NWA. The most popular members of the group being Dr. Dre, whose name is attached to those headphones people were going crazy about, and Ice Cube, who was in those family comedies. Before this they were young men trying to survive their tough neighborhood and their way of handling it was to put a rap group together and make music based on the way they lived. It was tough, it was real, it was violent and it was pretty good stuff. Straight Outta Compton is one of their most famous hits. Another hit has a word I can’t write in here; the point of the song is to say they don’t appreciate the police. That’s probably the best way to put it. These songs made them a target and they made some waves when all they were trying to do was make music. This is from the director of Friday, which is probably the funniest movie about growing up in a tough neighborhood. Judging from the trailer it looks like he knows how to take things seriously. Ice Cube’s character is portrayed by his real life son and Paul Giamatti plays the producer who helped make them stars.

Kristen Stewart and Jesse Eisenberg are pretty well known actors who, from what I can tell, are disliked by the public. Stewart can be too dry, Eisenberg can be too jerky. So is it a good idea for them to star in American Ultra together? This is actually the second movie they’ve starred in together, the first being a little film called Adventureland, which was in no way related to Eisenberg’s Zombieland. In this film the two of them play small town stoners who are one day targeted for elimination by government agents. Eisenberg’s character discovers that before he settled into his humble existence he was a trained, programmable killer and it seems that he just forgot about that for one reason or another. When people come into his town to kill him he is able to put all of his skills to use and get into action mode. This is written by Max Landis, son of the guy who brought us Animal House, Blues Brothers and An American Werewolf in London. Not to say this movie will be as good as those but it’s interesting nonetheless.

Reboot number three is Hitman: Agent 47¬, based on a video game series about a bald, sharp dressed hired gun known as Agent 47 who sneaks around and dispatches his targets silently and professionally. In 2007 they made a movie called Hitman. It kept the name and aesthetic but instead of a craftily made thriller it was just a shoot em’ up. Financially it did okay but the movie was an incoherent mess, one that I kind of enjoy. The video game series is apparently still popular because here we have this new movie which, from the trailer, is another shoot em’ up - not that that’s a problem. The lead does all of the action and Zachary Quinto is a man trying to uncover the secret behind Agent 47.

After Birdman, I thought we’d see more films about Broadway. From what I can tell we haven’t but here’s one at least. In She’s Funny That Way, Owen Wilson is a director of a play, Will Forte is his playwright, Imogen Poots is his girlfriend, Katherine Hahn is his wife, Rhys Ifans is his wife’s ex and Jennifer Anniston is dating his playwright and is his girlfriend’s psychiatrist. All of these people work their way into the story of putting on the play and a love hexagon develops. This probably will be nothing like Birdman, but it’s another ensemble cast putting on a play so the comparison was easy.