My turn:
- Iron Man 2 - Usually it's the most requested franchise sequels that end up dropping the ball, just to make the character more "complex", and superhero sequels most of all. (Personally I couldn't
stand all the "Poor, poor Peter" subplot wrist-slitting in Spiderman 2, especially when they had a good main-plot villain that they were ignoring.)
But as as the story's
about Tony's complexity, and Downey's getting the hang of mixing drama with smug wisecracks, even that won't end up ruining the War Machine kewl you
know we're coming to see..
- Robin Hood - My feelings on Russell "The world can kiss my don't-give-a-damn-hinder" Crowe's increasingly narcissistic onscreen image have already been noted (he's one step away from actually
being Mel Gibson by this point), but that didn't seem to be my complaint about the movie:
Scott seems to be going for "Historical realism", and it wasn't that interesting in the King Arthur movie either--Robin Hood likely wasn't real, so what's the point of making him into Not Errol Flynn in the first place?
(And besides, Sean Connery did "realistic Robin" better in "Robin & Marian".)
- Shrek Forever After - The finale and it's just a matter of Giving the People What They Want.
I'm convinced a lot of the first Shrek's mania was a product of the anti-Disney fervor at the time, and audiences hypnotizing themselves into seeing what they wanted to see...Nowadays, the anger's gone but Katzenberg's jokes stayed, and everyone wonders why the Shrek movies are "suddenly" stale, repetitive, borscht-belt and unfunny. Huh...Imagine that.
- MacGruber - Well, at least it's not one of Lorne Michaels' authorized "talent-factory" movies from the 90's...And for some reason, I'd feel safer if it had been. But no, this's a SNL'er going rogue and trying to escape on his own, without any experience of how, y'know, actual big movies 'n stuff are made.
- Prince of Persia: Sands of Time - It's hard to do a good videogame adaptation, because not everyone can capture the soul of the gameplay in their quest to give us A Big Plot 'N Stuff. When they manage to do both, that's a rental at worst, and on the theater list at best.
- Sex and the City 2 - At this point, we're dealing with audiences who can't even remember it was ever actually a
series...
- Get Him to the Greek - Russell Brand...please stop. And go home.
We know you want to Be Discovered in the US, but we do not like you. We will not watch you as Arthur. We will not watch you as a cartoon character. We will not watch you in a spinoff of the one movie where we'd ever heard of you. We will not watch you on a train, we will not watch you in the rain...
- Splice - It was Del Toro's name that convinced me it wasn't "Species 4-1/2", but unfortunately, it was also Del Toro who reminded me that his Hellboy II characters looked exactly like his Pan's Labyrinth characters, and his tastes for Strange Monsters, well, does sometimes sink into a rut. But as long as it's not Species 4-1/2, I'll keep an advised eye on the reviews
- The A-Team - Good TV series adaptations are like good videogame adaptations (see above). Also watching the reviews.
- The Karate Kid - Not implying that Will Smith might be a tad indulgent about his son's emerging "career", but I've been referring to this movie since day one as "Jayden Wants A Pony: the Movie"
- Toy Story 3 - At this point, it's become
tradition to watch somebody say "The trailer looks weak!", and then collect bets on just how much Pixar delivers by the last reel. Too good to discuss.
- Jonah Hex - I've never heard of the comic character, and that's always a good sign. Watching reviews.
- Knight and Day - If you're in the "Tom Cruise is a Looney" crowd, his character in this movie is not going to change your mind. And is it me, or between this movie, "Date Night", and "Salt", action movies now seem to be polarizing themselves into more and more of a chick-flick audience, since
they're the ones who still empowerment-fantasy themselves into chases and shootouts?
- Grown Ups - Every year, we all say "This's the one Adam Sandler nobody's going to go see", and then $75M worth of slacker Nobodies pump it up to #1 weekend. (Although there was some hope with nobody going to see "Zohan".) But with Adam's new aspiration to become "serious" and do more stories as a Family Man--while still doing the same violent-sociopath shtick--his wishful violent-sociopath audience may be be driven off more and more by All the Boring Mid-Life Stuff...C'mon, when's he going to bellow at some funny-looking foreign jerk and club him with a baseball bat?
- The Last Airbender - Yes, I am an M. Night apologist, and I LIKED parts of "The Happening". But the fact that this's someone else's franchise-recognizable series (even though he still wrote it) has me hopeful--All this time, fans said, if only there was some way of harnessing M. Night
style, without getting M. Night
scripts...
- Despicable Me - The worst-promoted third-party-animated movie of the year.
Unfortunately, now that we actually
do see the plot, looks like a lot of ex-Ice Age, faux-Dreamworks gags in search of a vision. Doesn't help much that marketing is trying to fix their earlier mistakes by trying to promote the yellow "Minions", who bear a, ahem,
uncanny resemblance to the green Toy Story aliens, who, well, already have their own movie this year.
- Inception - Call this one Eternal-Sunshine Syndrome: "I had no idea what the heck the trailer was about, so it's GOT to be some mindbending classic that will last for the ages!" Uh, I'll wait for the reviews, thanks, and find out whether it actually
is a good film, before still proclaiming it as a "classic cult film" ten years after we found out it wasn't...Wishing doesn't make it so.
- The Sorcerer's Apprentice - Well, at least nobody's saying "Is it a version of the Mickey Mouse short?", which's why Disney had to insert a "broom" scene to make it Corporate. Otherwise, it would've looked like Generic Bruckheimer, ie. the third-picture at the bottom of his three-picture Prince of Persia deal.
- Salt - It's getting to the point that if I see Angelina Jolie, I immediately think "Narcisisstic empowerment fantasy". It's one of the only two movies she does anymore, and at least this one isn't her other "Caring world missionary" typecast.
- Dinner for Schmucks - I've seen the French movie, and it's hysterical. I also know that, unfortunately, US humor isn't French. And that's even giving Steve Carrell the benefit of the doubt, although he doesn't
exactly seem to be the Francis Veber type.
- Beastly - For some reason, the ONE thing that had hairs raising up on the back of my neck was that the teen-novel author and the director thought they were "updating Beauty & the Beast", and had clearly taken all their story research from having seen the Disney movie. ("An egotistic, uncaring handsome teen is punished...") I've whined for years about Disney's steamrollering being a bad influence, and seeing it actually BE an influence makes me want to go out and punch somebody.
- Piranha 3-D - They showed the trailer to this one before Avatar, and for those of us who remember '83, the days of cheap, tasteless gimmick-laden 3D-triquels was like a glorious blast from the past, especially in front of Cameron's hopes for dimension-pretention. Unfortunately, like most horror remakes, the director wants to up the ante with a bigger budget and a "slicker" plot concept, which in this case takes all the fun out of Joe Dante and John Sayles....Only Dante & Sayles could make another Piranha.
- The Last Exorcism - Think Eli Roth wanted to make "The movie we WANTED Exorcism of Emily Rose to be when we saw the trailer, and didn't get"...Which is understandable. Unfortunately, it's Eli Roth, and he can't make that movie either. (Oh, according to the description, we're getting "camera footage" of the exorcism--Could we
please make a horror movie without one?)
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