February movies

February is a weird month for movies. Let me go through the top two February movies from the last 10 years to illustrate my point.

2015 – Fifty Shades of Grey, The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water

2014 – The LEGO Movie, Non-Stop

2013 – Identity Thief, A Good Day to Die Hard

2012 – The Vow, Safe House

2011 – Just Go With It, Justin Beiber: Never Say Never

2010 – Valentine’s Day, Shutter Island

2009 – Madea Goes to Jail, Friday the 13^th

2008 – Hanna Montana/Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert Tour, Jumper

2007 – Ghost Rider, Norbit

2006 – Madea’s Family Reunion, When a Stranger Calls

So on that list we have: 

4 romanticish films. I add ish because I don’t know if Grey is considered to be romantic and I only assume Just Go With It is a romance film. The Vow is the film where Rachel McAdams gets into a car accident and forgets she was married to Channing Tatum, right? I saw Valentine’s Day, it’s exactly what you think it is.

4 movies aimed at kids. Those concert films are for kids right? SpongeBob and LEGO are also for kids but you better believe that I saw them in theater.

5 action films. Jumper is a pretty forgettable movie to most but it was the film my wife and I saw on our first Valentine’s Day together so I’ll always love it. Oh and A Good Day to Die Hard is horrible but of course I saw it. Non-Stop is another Liam Neeson action film so of course it’s awesome (well not of course, but it really is good). Safe House was a surprise hit that began to show a turn-around in the quality of films released in February and Ghost Rider is Nicholas Cage as a comic book motorcycle rider from Hell- not figuratively, that’s the actual plot. 

4 comedies, two of which are Madea films. Tyler Perry seems to be the only person capitalizing on February, releasing two films in the early oughts. Norbit was another Eddie Murphy film seeing him play numerous roles, which was something that helped him shoot to fame in the 80’s.  Identity Thief is like the last film starring Melissa McCarthy that wasn’t a summer release.   

3 horror films, one featuring DiCaprio and two remakes. Shutter Island was a big hit but, spoiler alert, it had the ‘it was all in his mind’ twist ending that all too many thrillers utilized since, spoiler alert, Fight Club. When a Stranger Calls is like the perfect February release for teens who wanted to be scared on Valentine’s Day as it stars a babysitter being stalked and Friday the 13^th was another film featuring the hockey mask wearing Jason who kills all that come near his lake side resting place.

So as you can see, over the past 10 years there have been some films that make one think, “yeah, I could see that as a date film,” and some films that make very little sense at all.

This year the choices are:

Hail, Caesar – a new Coen Brothers film starring George Clooney, Josh Brolin, Frances McDormand, Channing Tatum, Scarlett Johansen and many more. It’s about a Hollywood star, played by Clooney, who gets kidnapped and the ‘fixer,’ played by Brolin, hired to find him, and all of the others – portrayed by pretty much the rest of Hollywood - he has to deal with in trying to solve the case. Coen Brothers at their best churn out some of my favorite crime-comedies of all time and this one looks great, too. The February release doesn’t bother me because their films are rarely huge hits so it makes no sense for a company to release it during the summer months. I can’t wait to see this.   

Zoolander 2 – This film was going to be made one way or another. The first one was a huge hit. People are still familiar with Ben Stiller’s character. After 15 years was a sequel necessary? Probably not but it looks to be in the same vein as the first one, so that’s a good thing. The first one dealt with evil Mugatu, Will Ferrell, brainwashing stupid male model, Derek Zoolander, to kill the Malaysian Prime Minister to ensure Mugatu’s cheap labor can continue in Malaysia. Derek gets help from a reporter, played by Stiller’s wife Christine Taylor, and his male model nemesis Hansel, played by Owen Wilson. I actually hated the first one when I first saw it but I watched it again and again and learned to love it - so much that I am able to recite the entire plot from memory. Now 15 years later, Derek and Hansel are washed up and no longer relevant, which I’m sure will be played up for meta-hilarity, but when ‘beautiful’ people like Justin Beiber and Usher start turning up dead they are leaving only one clue behind: they are each wearing Derek’s signature facial expression, Magnum. So then a high stakes, worldwide chase begins that I’m sure will have dozens of cameos. Watch the first one again to familiarize yourself with the formula and to see a great appearance from the late David Bowie.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies – The Jane Austen classic has taken many forms. It’s been a film, a miniseries, a short film, another film, another miniseries – okay so not that many forms but people won’t stop retelling this story on film. So why not update it? Well from the writer of Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter and directed by the guy who Samuel L. Jackson shoots on the couch in Pulp Fiction - which is followed by the line ’I’m sorry did I break your concentration?’ - comes a new version of the story, but this one features the people in 19^th century England fighting off zombies. It sounds like a cool idea, but Vampire Hunter didn’t quite work so I’m skeptical. Still it’s probably a good movie for young people to see when they can’t get a ticket to see anything else and don’t know what Zoolander is because they weren’t even born when the first one came out. 

How to be Single – Now this to me sounds more like a fun party movie than your typical date movie. It’s about single women in the city partying and having fun. The partier Rebel Wilson, whose presence in any film guarantees a rise in ticket sales, shows the quiet Dakota Johnson, who starred in last year’s top grossing Valentine’s Day movie 50 Shades of Grey, how to have fun while single. This is my assumption from a trailer I watched a few weeks ago. It does not sound like a date film so I imagine people on dates thinking they’re seeing an old school typical cheesy Valentine’s Day film will be in for a surprise. 

Deadpool­ – The fact that this film is being released is pretty mind blowing. Studios rarely take chances with an R-rated comic book film because the PG-13 ones make billions at best and 100 million at worst. So why risk it when the R-rated ones rarely come near those numbers? Well here’s one reason, you can potentially have a better film if you make an R-rated movie. Deadpool is a foul mouthed killer who can’t be restrained by the editing board and from what I’m hearing this film goes above and beyond to be over the top- reportedly it’s already banned in China. Ryan Reynolds is the lead here and he already played a PG-13 version of Deadpool’s alter-ego Wade Wilson in Wolverine which, for my money, is the worst X-Men film to date. But Reynolds wanted to do the character again and he wanted to do it right and he did not give up.  He campaigned for this film for years and this Valentine’s Day we will finally have it. Many people will see it and many kids will buy tickets for that Zombie movie or that Zoolander movie and sneak in. Or they’ll do something stupid like make a petition just a month before the film gets released and request that a PG-13 version be released instead (this actually happened). 

So my question to you is do any of these strike you as Valentine’s Day films? The only one, as far as I’ve seen, pushing a Valentine’s Day marketing scheme is Deadpool and that’s what I’ll be seeing.

January Movies

The time to get your 2015 Oscar hopeful into theaters has passed. See the trick is, films like The Revenant and The Hateful Eight might not be out in every theater across the U.S.A. until mid-January but as long as they are released to some theaters in December 2015, they are eligible for the 2015 Oscar run. Films that are not released in December sometimes get stuck in the film dumping ground that is January. That means that a lot of films coming out this month will have an aura of ‘who wants to see this?’ However some studios have caught on. They know that people will still want to go see a movie so they are putting out big releases this month in hopes of capturing a big audience that cannot find anything else to watch. 

For those Game of Thrones fans out there we have The Forest, starring Natalie Dormer. In the film she ventures off to a Japanese forest that is famous for being a location where people go to end their lives. So we’re starting with heavy material here. She hears that her twin sister went off into the forest and goes in after her. After learning the sad history of the place she is told that if she is to go in she is not to leave the path. So of course she immediately does just that and gets attacked by the spirits haunting the forest. I saw a string of horror movie trailers recently and all of them included people being instructed to do something and doing the exact opposite. I know that happens in many horror films but why make the protagonist look so careless in the trailer? 

It disappoints me when sequels to hit films come out and the producers just tack a number on the title. Unfortunately this is the case with Ride Along 2. I’ve always been a fan of Ice Cube and I’m warming up to Kevin Hart. In the first one, which is pretty entertaining, wannabe cop Hart wanted to marry tough detective Cube’s sister and had to prove he was worthy by joining Cube on the titular ride along which became a messy situation of police corruption, criminals and ridiculousness. In the end they learned to tolerate each other. Fast forward a few months, it is right before the big day and the duo head to Miami to take down a drug dealer. If goofy action-comedy is your thing this movie will surely provide.

The name Michael Bay has become a joke in the movie world. If a film is made by Bay, it is more often than not considered to be an over the top stupid movie and if a film is too over the top and stupid, then it is considered to be too much like a Michael Bay movie - which most consider a bad thing. His movies are big and expensive looking, but that a good movie does not make. Okay, so all that said it looks as if Bay is making an attempt to turn all of that around with 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi. This is based on the true story of an attack on a U.S. compound in Libya and the military contractors who fought back. Now some people take issue with Bay doing a ‘true story;’ lest we forget the action-romance extravaganza that was Pearl Harbor. Recently he has made a toned down crime-drama. Maybe he learned a thing or two and will turn down the insanity that he usually provides. 

When a piece of trivia for a film includes the fact that the film was supposed to be released straight to DVD it causes me to worry for the quality of the film. Then toss in the fact that it is a global warming propaganda cartoon about a polar bear voiced by Rob Schneider and I worry this may be the worst film ever. There are several films that have an agenda and sometimes the message gets in the way of a good film. This isn’t the place to get into a discussion about global warming but if you have something to say, there are better ways to go about it. So about the movie, it’s called Norm of the North and is about a displaced Arctic bear who goes to New York City and gets on the path to saving the world, probably.

Robert De Niro hails from The Godfather series, Zac Efron hails from the High School Musical series so it only makes sense to put them in a film together. Neighbors proved that Efron could be funny in that he plays a frat boy and really plays it up to hilarious levels. It’s very entertaining, but in this one he is the more reserved one and De Niro is playing his Dirty Grandpa. This film is directed by the writer of Sacha Baron Cohens films Bruno and Borat and helped out on his show Da Ali G Show, so the potential for raunchiness is high with this one.

The Hunger Games is over, for now anyway until producers convince the writer to make prequels, so Hollywood is looking for the new young-adult-novel-female-lead-sci-fi-drama series which brings us to The 5^th Wave. Aliens have invaded earth and after 4 waves we’re pretty beat and now have aliens taking the form of humans. This causes a young woman, Chloe Grace-Moretz, no stranger to action films as she played Hit-Girl in the Kick-Ass series, to rise up and start to fight back. I’m concerned with this one as it has all the makings of a Hunger Games or Divergent film, but with a January release as opposed to summer so we’ll see how this goes. 

No matter how bad it is I always have an appreciation for any film that features a doll coming to life. It terrifies me to such a degree that I can ignore how bad it might be and enjoy it. The best of the bunch is Childs Play. The worst of the bunch is Pinocchio’s Revenge, which is the actual title of a lousy Childs Play knockoff. The Boy sounds like a more subtle approach to the sub-genre of killer dolls but it’s from a horror director, so either the trailer is misleading or I’m in for a surprise. In it a woman is hired by a family to watch their son while they are away. When she gets there she finds that the child in question is a life-sized doll and the parents take caring for him very seriously - that is until they leave a stranger in his care for some reason. They give her a list of rules, which include never leaving him alone and feeding him, which she totally ignores, and this leads to some bizarre events that lead her to believe the doll is alive and out to kill her. 

I’m not a fan of all cartoon series that come out but one that I really enjoy is the Kung Fu Panda series. The first and second both have a lot of heart, action and comedy - plus that added bonus of Jack Black, Jackie Chan, Seth Rogen, Lucy Liu, David Cross and others as voice actors. It makes for a pretty fun time so I am excited for Kung Fu Panda 3. The whole series was built on the fact that a lonely (there’s a sad backstory where he is the only panda left) giant panda has no place kung-fu fighting alongside more nimble creatures like a monkey, a snake or a crane, but he learns and becomes a master and saves the day, twice. In the end of the second one he finds there are more pandas in hiding so this one finds him joining his long lost family, and he has to teach them to fight as a new threat is on its way. This series has a knack for getting great actors to play villains. The first was Ian McShane, the second was Gary Oldman and now it’s J.K. Simmons. I am concerned about the release date but I will see this anyway.

Taking a break from spoofing horror movies, Marlon Wayans has decided to spoof another series and he has chosen 50 Shades of Grey as his next target. If you’ve seen the Scary Movie films (the first two are great) and have a basic understanding of what Grey is about you probably have a good idea where Fifty Shades of Black is headed. If you don’t I’ll just say it’s going to be goofy and very crass.

I’m sure Star Wars will be number 1 at the box office throughout the whole month but hopefully there is something for you in here! Happy 2016!

December movies

Lots to be excited about this December! A new Tarantino film, a new Ron Howard film, a new DiCaprio film, a new Will Smith film, a new Amy Poehler/ Tina Fey film and, most importantly, a new Star Wars film!

If I told you that there was a Christmas movie coming out this month starring Adam Scott, Toni Colette and David Koechner you probably would not be surprised. There are so many Christmas themed movies out there (the best of which is Die Hard, there is no debate, the conversation about Best Christmas Film ends there) that most actors pop up in at least one (two for Bruce Willis because Die Hard 2 is also a Christmas film but it’s not the 2^nd best, that goes to Jingle All the Way, of course). This Christmas film is unlike others because while it does feature comedic actors and a bickering family it also is about a Christmas demon called Krampus that punishes the family since they have lost the Christmas spirit.  I have very high hopes for this one since it’s from the director of Trick r’ Treat, which is a great Halloween anthology that all should see on Halloween (I won’t get into what the best Halloween film is, that’s an October discussion. Also that Jingle All the Way comment was a joke, it’s Home Alone).

I just looked up how many variations of Macbeth there are on IMDB and there’s 162! Granted some are appearances in TV shows and many are short films, but a few of them are big movies and this latest version looks to be another big version. It stars Michael Fassbender as the murderous wannabe king (how’s that for over simplification?) and, in an interesting DC/Marvel mashup, Marion Cotillard as Lady Macbeth. I should probably have more to say about a Shakespeare movie but I don’t.

Now, that DC/Marvel clash might be a bit of space filling trivia that I felt worth noting, but it doesn’t hold a candle to In the Heart of the Sea because with that we have a mashup of Happy Days/James Bond/Marvel/DC/ and Harry Potter! It’s the real life Moby Dick story directed by Ron Howard and starring Ben Wishaw, Chris Hemsworth, Cillian Murphy and Brendan Gleeson. I really hope people are getting these references. When a giant whale seemingly targets a ship it puts a group of sailors through all the perils one would expect from a big budget seafaring adventure film. This isn’t the story of Moby Dick but it’s the story that inspired Moby Dick. I don’t know if that makes it more or less interesting but that director and that cast are great.

I could go on with my mashup jokes but I feel they’ve run their course, so feel free to make up some of your own with the cast of The Big Short. It features Christian Bale, Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling and Brad Pitt. That is a lot of star power for yet another film about the banking crisis. This may be a story many of us are familiar with or tired of but it is from Adam McKay, the writer/director of Anchorman, Talladega Nights, and The Other Guys. Since The Other Guys is absolutely one of my favorite comedies of all time, I will pretty much give anything this guy is attached to a chance, plus he made that hilarious The Landlord video where his 2 year old daughter plays an angry landlord who screams at Will Ferrell for rent money. None of this has anything to do with the plot of The Big Short, I just really don’t feel like dwelling on the banking crisis. 

Joss Whedon has his Buffy and Firefly and now has Avengers, similarly J.J. Abrams has his Alias and Lost and now has Star Wars. They’ve also each done A LOT more for television and film. It’s pretty wild. Look em’ up, they’ve each been in the business longer than I ever realized. After taking over for the Star Trek reboot I honestly did not believe Abrams would get the job to direct Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens because that is a pretty darn big responsibility. If he fails and this turns out to be another Phantom Menace then J.J. Abrams will forever be known as JarJar Abrams (joke stolen), but I have high hopes and have already purchased my tickets. Truth be told I know very little about the plot except that there’s new characters, old characters and an adorable little soccer ball droid. That’s all I need to know.

Amy Poehler and Tina Fey both got big on SNL and then got even bigger in their respective television shows. I’ve only seen reruns of 30 Rock and it’s pretty funny but I love Parks and Rec. The two have already made a film together and it was the cute romance comedy Baby Mama where Poehler is a scheming surrogate mother to Fey’s workaholic New Yorker - much like 30 Rock. It’s pretty funny, but I have high hopes for Sisters where they play, you guessed it, sisters. When the pair finds out that their parents are selling their childhood home they decide to have a nice send-off and throw a massive party. John Cena’s in this one as well and after his role in Trainwreck, I have a new appreciation for him in a comedic role. 

Tarantino made a name for himself with his talky crime pics like Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs and Jackie Brown and then he made a few films that paid homage to old genre pictures. Kill Bill was his martial arts film, Inglorious Basterds was his war film and Django Unchained was his western. Turns out he enjoyed making a western so much that he decided to make another one. The Hateful Eight features Samuel L. Jackson, Kurt Russel, Michael Madsen, Tim Roth and at least 4 others playing western tropes snowed in at a cabin. Some are lawmen, some are bounty hunters, some are criminals and, it being a Tarantino film, all probably are prepared to kill the other. Putting a group of people in one room was the best thing about his first feature, Reservoir Dogs, so here’s hoping he can recapture that dialogue, tension and excitement. He already has Mr. Orange and Mr. Blonde here. 

David O. Russel has been nominated for 5 Academy Awards.  He also nearly got choked out by George Clooney on the set of Three Kings. I bring this up to say that before his nominations came pouring in, this guy was tough to work with. But it seems since he met Jennifer Lawrence, things have changed for the better because the actor and director are making their third feature together. First was Silver Linings Playbook, then American Hustle and now we have Joy, which is about the woman who created the Miracle Mop. That doesn’t appear to be the plot of the film but that is in fact who the film is about. It seems to focus more on her family story, which is always nice for a Christmas time movie.

Usually if a film has made it to four films in a franchise I will have seen at least one or part of one and the Alvin and the Chipmunks series is no exception. I saw the end of the second one and it has David Cross singing Single Ladies. I can’t recommend the film but maybe look that clip up on line. This fourth film is entitled Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Road Chip and the plot is that Alvin, Simon and Theodore go on a road trip to stop Dave from proposing to his girlfriend. WOW. They used to sing and get yelled at, now they’re ruining marriages. What happened to this country? I know a new Chipmunks movie shouldn’t be the catalyst for me to have such thoughts…but I can’t help it.

I mentioned The Other Guys earlier and I mention it again because A) more people should see it and B) Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg starred in it and have reteamed to make another movie that, unfortunately, isn’t a sequel to The Other Guys because not enough people (myself included) saw it in theaters and my voice doesn’t carry into Hollywood. So this new film is called Daddy’s Home and has Ferrell as the polite, loving stepdad vs. Wahlberg’s bad boy, I’m still cool dad. It’s PG and released around Christmas time so for the parents that don’t want to see chipmunks for the 4^th time, they’ll go see this instead and this will get a sequel and The Other Guys still won’t get a sequel and I’ll cry. 

Remember when Will Smith made fun movies? The last one I saw was Hitch and while I did see Hancock and I Am Legend, those were some pretty heavy handed films for their subject matter (superpowers, zombies). Perhaps Men in Black 3 was fun but even that was 3 years ago. Continuing with his heavy handed topics Smith stars in Concussion, a film that the NFL does not want you to see (and reportedly may have tampered with the finished product, I emphasize reportedly). He stars as a neuropathologist (whew, we are a long way away from the kid who used to shoot some b-ball outside of the school) who discovers a possible connection between playing football and brain trauma. I thought that was an obvious thing- you get hit hard, you get hurt. That’s how the human body works. Apparently it takes a whistle blower to report such things and now we are even further from Will Smith appearing in Bad Boys 3.

I’ve touched on remakes before and how I wish they weren’t as prevalent as they are now-a-days, but to be honest I always wind up seeing them- maybe not in theaters but eventually I will watch them. Point Break is a remake I will probably try to go see in theaters. I got a lotta love for the first one. It’s fun, cool and Keanu Reeves and Garey Busey make for a ridiculous pair of early 90’s cops. This one replaces the California based bank robbing surfers with extreme sports anarchists whose robberies focus more on messing with the economy on a world wide scale rather than just coastal California. They still have surfing, but they also toss in a bunch of other stunts and apparently most of it is as practical as possible so the crazy stunts are actually being done and not green screened. Busey does not return but he does get replaced by Ray Winstone and that guy is awesome.

 By now I’m sure you know about Birdman. It was that huge movie that came out last year that everyone was talking about. It was a pretty cool movie- long takes, lots of cool actors, pretty funny - but the director wanted another challenge so he made The Revenant. The challenge here was to shoot a film in Canada while using only natural light, which means that any scene shot during the day had to be shot while it was light out and no special effects or lighting equipment could be used. There were more challenges but I should get to the actual plot. Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hardy are part of a group of men venturing through uncharted America in the 1820’s when DiCaprio gets attacked by a bear and left for dead by Hardy. He then tries to survive the wilderness and anyone who tries to kill him and make it to safety, wherever that is. This is probably going to win some Academy Awards and is not your typical Christmas movie, but people will be talking about this one.

Hope everyone has a nice holiday, let me know what you plan on seeing this month!