Not a front for a secret organization.
Written by Rob Schultz (human).
I saw a trailer for a new movie the other day, Death at a Funeral. It reminded me a lot of another trailer. For Death at a Funeral. Here's a look at both so you can decide which actor you think is best at saying all these great jokes!
So far, I'll tell you this: Book of Eli is my favorite film of 2010. Will it be able to hold the title after I've seen any other movie hitting theaters in the next 12 months? Are there, in fact, any other movies being released this year? More than 250 of them, supposedly. Let's take a look. My categories aren't quite the same as last time, although I've got twice as many movies in my top tier, they don't represent "the best chance of both being good and doing well" so much as the titles that have grabbed my interest the strongest. Assuming they're all released, the A-List are the movies I won't hesitate to go see, even though quality-wise there are some gambles in the mix:
The A-List: Buried, Carlos the Jackal, From Paris with Love, Get Low, Greenberg, Harry Brown, Inception, Iron Man 2, Knight and Day (sure, this might be terrible, but half of the trailer is intriguing), The Last Airbender (From M. Night, and apparently condenses 60 episodes of a good cartoon into 1 live-action movie, so it might be terrible too, but let's hope not), Let Me In, The Mechanic (the original is terrific, and Statham is probably the Bronsonest modern actor we've got), Paul, Prince of Persia (should be stuffed to the gills with neat Parkour stuff. Hopefully it's a Pirates 1 and not a Pirates 2), A Prophet, Red Tails, Splice (from Cube-master Vincenzo Natali!), Stone, Four Lions and The Town (if Affleck directs as well as last time, with Gone Baby Gone).
The B-List: I'd like to see most of these, they've got something in their corner that makes them more appealing than 60% of this year's announced titles: 13, The A-Team, The American, Black Swan, Blitz, Brighton Rock, Cemetery Junction, Centurion and Eagle of the Ninth (an unrelated pair of movies about the Roman 9th Legion), Clash of the Titans, The Company Men, The Conspirator, Daybreakers, Due Date, Edge of Darkness, Eat Pray Love, Enter the Void, the Expendables, The Extraordinary Adventures of Adele Blanc-Sec, Frozen, Green Hornet, Guardians of Ga'Hoole (from Zack Snyder), Happy Tears, Henry's Crime, Hereafter, How to Train Your Dragon (Dreamworks is a big red flag, but I like Chris Sanders...whose movie is it really going to be?), The Irishman (Cleveland mob movie!), Ironclad, Jack Goes Boating, John Rabe, The Joneses, The Karate Kid (Kung-Fu Kid, you mean), London Boulevard ([ready for closeup joke]), Lottery Ticket, Machete and Predators (representing a return to the Rodriguez that makes things), Micmacs (Jeunet), Morning Glory, Mother's Day, Mr. Nobody, Never Let Me Go, North Face, The Other Guys, Please Give, Priest, Ramona and Beezus (I hope it does well enough to spawn a sequel so we can see those french fries at the end of Ramona Quimby, Age 8), Rapunzel, Red, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Undead (!), The Rum Diary, Salt, Sanctum, Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World (worrisome, it looks like the late 80s have been thrown in a blender with Michael Cera, but on the other hand, it's Edgar Wright), Shutter Island, Social Network, Solomon Kane, The Sorcerer's Apprentice (Jon Turteltaub is one of those people that I should get on with just great, but it doesn't work - this is something that I should love, but I bet I'm let down again like Nat'l Treasure. Ah well. We'll always have 3 Ninjas), The Tempest, Tomorrow When the War Began, The Tree of Life, Triage, Tron: Legacy, True Legend, Tucker & Dale vs. Evil, Twelve, The Way Back, The Extra Man, Wild Grass, The Winning Season, Womb, You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger
The C-List: These have some promise, but I'm either doubtful about the end product or there just isn't enough info out there yet to boost it to one of the above categories. I'm sure I'll see a few of 'em, but these are more likely to be rentals because they haven't grabbed my attention (yet). Lower expectations based on the advance material that's available right now might make for some nice surprises by year's end.
The Adjustment Bureau, Afterlife, Abel, Agora, Animal Kingdom, The Beaver, Biutiful, Black Death, Breaking Upwards, Brooklyn's Finest, Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Cop Out (I want to back Kevin Smith, but that's one rough trailer), Cracks, The Crazies, Date Night, The Debt, Despicable Me, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Dinner for Schmucks (a title that says 'no, we're not remaking a french film. why? what have you heard?'), The Disappearance of Alice Creed, Dorian Gray (the same one we didn't get last year), The Dry Land, The Experiment, Fair Game, The Fighter (dropped a category from last year, somehow), The First Gun, The Ghost Writer, Glorious 39, Heartless, Hesher, Hot Tub Time Machine, Howl, The Hungry Rabbit Jumps, It's a Wonderful Afterlife, It's Kind of a Funny Story, The Kids are Alright, The Killer Inside Me, Killers (fun idea, lots of worrysome names), The Last Word, Letters to Juliet, Life During Wartime (aka Happiness 2), The Losers (is this the double for the A-Team, or the Expendables?), Love and Other Drugs, Love and Other Impossible Pursuits, MacGruber, Main Street, Megamind, Middlemen, Mother and Child, My Own Love Song, My Soul to Take (the Wes Craven movie, not the duo of horror and action movies I worked on a few years ago that seem to have vanished from IMDB again), Nanny McPhee 2, The Next Three Days, Nightmare on Elm Street (couldn't've cast a better new Freddy, but it's not like any of the other Platinum Dunes horror remakes have been any good), Night Catches Us, Ondine, The Lightning Thief, Perrier's Bounty, Red Dawn, Remember Me, Repo Men (which was apparently shot before Repo: The Genetic Opera), Robin Hood, The Romantics, Route Irish, Runaways, Saint John of Las Vegas, Secretariat, Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll, Shanghai, Skateland, Somewhere, Solitary Man, Stay Cool, Sympathy for Delicious, Takers, 3 Backyards, Unstoppable, Unthinkable, Valhalla Rising, Wall Street 2, Warrior, Waska, Welcome to the Rileys, What's Wrong With Virginia, The Wolfman (I'd hope for more, but it's turned over an awful lot of creatives. You bring in a half dozen writers, almost as many directors, editors, and composers, and there's going to be some wildly differing ideas on what kind of sauce was being made in the first place), Yogi Bear (might get a watch just for Andy Daly), You Again, and Your Highness.
No Thank You: These are mostly movies I want to avoid. They have something (usually multiple somethings) in their corner that's working against them. Here is the trite, the cash-grabs, the formulaic, the pot jokes, and the Jonah Hill.
44-Inch Chest, Alice in Wonderland, Alpha and Omega, And Soon the Darkness, Area 51, The Backup Plan, The Baster, Beastly, Bitch Slap, Born to be a Star, Bounty Hunter, Burlesque, Case 39, Cats and Dogs 2 (More like G-Force 2), Chloe, Confucius, Crazy on the Outside, Creation, Cyrus (Jonah Hill? Yuck.), Dear John, The Death and Life of Charlie St. Cloud, Death at a Funeral, The Descent 2, Easy A, Extraordinary Measures, Fish Tank, Flipped, Furry Vengeance, Georgia, Get Me to the Gig (Jonah Hill? Yuck!), Going the Distance, The Greatest, The Good Guy, Green Zone, Grown-Ups, Gulliver's Travels, HIGH School, Hippie Hippie Shake, Holy Rollers, I Love You Phillip Morris, Jackass 3D, Jonah Hex, Kickass, The Last Song, Leap Year, Legion, Life as we Know It, Little Fockers (the only good thing this franchise has ever brought me is a pal who liked to do Jimmy Fallon's weekend update bit on camping trips), Marmaduke, Multiple Sarcasms, Nowhere Boy, Our Family Wedding, Rabbit Hole, The Resident, The Roommate, Saw 7, Season of the Witch (flashlights off! Don't disturb the witch!), Sex and the City 2, Shrek 4, She's out of my League, The Spy Next Door, Tooth Fairy, Piranha 3D, Step Up 3D (only, of course, because I haven't seen the first two installments of either series. I wouldn't know what was going on), Tell Me, To Save a Life, Twilight 3 (does the fact that they're rushing these out mean the studio considers it a flash in the pan?), Tyler Perry's next cynically exploitive something something (working title), Valentine's Day (just following the Love Actually formula isn't enough to get a hopeful rating anymore, especially when this one looks to be following that formula a little too closely), When in Rome, Wonderful World, The Yellow Handkerchief, You May Not Kiss the Bride, Youth in Revolt (I can hardly imagine a less appealing movie. Maybe if it had Jonah Hill in there somewhere), and The Zookeeper (oh.) This category also lands Harry Potter 7 and Toy Story 3. I'm not sure if there's a Potter entry that worked as a good standalone movie and while I'll probably end up seeing TS3, the recent double feature rerelease of the first two doesn't have me looking forward to another rehash of the same elements.
A year ago I threw imaginary darts at an imaginary wall of movies as I imagined them. Let's see how I did. I saw 35 of 2009's releases, according to IMDB. (Edit: Should be more like 40 for the year, since IMDB lists Hurt Locker, Ponyo, Taken, Brothers Bloom, and Anvil! as 2008s) I'm pretty sure reposting last year's lists and breaking them into ratings and thumbs and stars isn't an interesting thing to do, but in broader strokes, every A-list pick I saw I liked, I liked more of the B-listers than I didn't, and I was delighted to find three I bet against on my top list for the year.
Top list for the year? Well okay. Since this is the year that we got the results of the writer's strike, it felt kind of thin on the ground to me. Maybe I just missed out, since it seems I only saw, say, 5 of Ebert's 21. If I have to pick ten you should take a look at, I'm going with: Anvil!, Brothers Bloom, District 9, Hurt Locker, Inglourious Basterds, The Informant!, Moon, Sherlock Holmes, Star Trek, and my favorite movie of the year, Up (along with it's two companion shorts, Partly Cloudy and Dug's Special Mission).
Also likable enough: Avatar, Coraline, Drag Me to Hell, Taken, Up in the Air, Ponyo, Watchmen, Banlieue 13: Ultimatum, Night at the Museum 2.
Didn't particularly like: Crank 2, Friday the 13th, Funny People, It's Complicated, Push, The Girlfriend Experience, Wolverine, Zombie Girl, Terminator 4.
Hated: Zombieland, Ninja Assassin, Monsters v. Aliens.
I still need to track down and make time for Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, This is It, In the Loop, Tyson, Big Fan, World's Greatest Dad, Julie & Julia, A Serious Man, Whip It, The Road, Princess and the Frog, 9, The Cove, and just maybe The Fantastic Mr. Fox, Public Enemies, and the Hangover. That's a list borne of things I might've picked on my own, and titles I wouldn't've expected if not for some emphatic positive reviews.
Of the 2008s I missed in last year's post, I was underwhelmed by Man on Wire and Let the Right One In (victims of their own hype?) and Timecrimes. I liked Dear Zachary and In Bruges and Zach & Miri, and I never got to Counterfeiters, Appaloosa, or Boy A.
2010 Picks are on the way!
-Take the Money and Run – Early Woody Allen. Has its good parts. We don’t get too many movies built out of fun jokes anymore, like we did from the folks that came out of the Your Show of Shows writers’ room. Something to ponder… -How to Rob a Bank – The biggest mistake made by this first time writer/director who hasn’t done anything before or since, was having some kind of free screening for the cast, crew, and family. Without those valuable dollars, the film was left leaning on fans of 90s rock band Bush frontman Gavin Rossdale to bring in the powerful $109 opening weekend en route to a powerful thousand dollars domestic take. Also, the movie is terrible, not least because every character talks just the same.
-The Killing - Early Kubrick. Only 5 big Kubricks left for me. I didn’t like this as much as I expected to, or as much as I think I’d like hearing someone else describe it.
-Bottle Rocket -I think I saw this on TV a couple years ago, but it didn’t make the list since I didn’t remember a thing about it. It’s only been a couple of weeks since I saw it again. Couldn’t really tell you anything that happened in it though.
-In the Realms of the Unreal – A doc that falls short of an amazing but unknowable subject: a gentleman in NYC who spent his life writing and illustrating tens of thousands of pages of a vaguely original fantasy story.
-Crank 2: High Voltage – On one hand, basically the same movie ast he first one. On the other hand, I liked it a lot less. Maybe a difference between theater viewing and DVD? Not sure. And I’m writing this too much later to remember specifics.
-Drag Me To Hell – A big crazy cartoon. You have to suspend your disbelief about things like there being an ice cream shop next to that fortune teller on Olive. Alison Lohman is always great, and the whole movie is worth it for the ending.
-The Caller - This was very….French. Like a few items in the list, the setup and the puzzle are more fun than the solution.
-Creepozoids! and Endgame and Santa Claus and Poultrygeist – Courtesy of Doc Mock’s Movie Mausoleum. Some girl from the Horror Convention Massacre made a big deal about being in Poultrygeist. Didn’t even spot her.
-Seance on a Wet Afternoon - grabbed because it's on a bunch of lists. I guess mainly to showcase Kim Stanley as the 'lady Brando.' No acting really covers the convenient plot element of crazy that pokes through just enough to blurt incriminating evidence though. The set up was kind of sharp though.
-Topkapi - Not a big fan of this one either, I guess because I was looking for a heist more than a heist parody. Like Seance, the crime elements work pretty well. In this case, the extra element is: Swingin' 1960s Italy!
-They Live - Might have napped through this the first time. Made much more sense the second time. Maybe just the longest fistfight you ever did see. I always think the old John Carpenter movies must have been even more awesome in their day, since today they seem watered down by having been ripped off countless times.
-Astro Boy - The digital technology is pretty impressive, the way they auto-tuned an emotion into Nic Cage's voice at some point. Also, they should have just made everything out of the same material as Toby's invincible hat.
-The Hot Rock - Now this was a great caper. In fact, it's a bunch of great capers, since if everything went right it wouldn't be much of a movie. The museum sequence is genuinely suspenseful and clever and terrific.
-The Friends of Eddie Coyle - Two in a row for director Peter Yates. Also great, but dark and noir-y where the Hot Rock was lighter and more fun. Watch this movie.
-The Final Countdown - Do not watch this movie. There's no more gutless, toothless, bloodless and wimpy a production made from such a great premise. The set up: what if a 1980s aircraft carrier traveled through time to Dec 6, 1941, with Kirk Douglas and Martin Sheen on board? The answer: the USS Nimitz will take a dog 40 years into the future, and a hell of a lot of stock footage of planes taking off and landing will be shown. Boooo.
-Rififi - This is noir + caper + the director of Topkapi. The crime is like half an hour of the movie, with no dialogue or non-diagetic sound. [edit to add: and that's awesome, in case I wasn't clear]
-The Machinist - Christian Bale was pretty good in this, but I don't know if he was the machinist. I'm not sure the pieces of the puzzle really add up correctly though, even though there's an awful lot of 'look how clever we are here' in this one.
-The Squid and the Whale - I thought this looked awful when it came out, and I liked it kind of a lot. I even went and re-watched Kicking and Screaming again afterward. I like Noah Baumbach's writing. I liked how instead of kids who talk like adults because the script is clever, these kids talk like adults the way real kids do: through mindlessly parroting things they don't understand.
-Genuine Nerd - Not a good doc. Exploitive and laughing at the subject more than with him…or..something. Bleh.
-My Neighbor Totoro -Thought I'd go back and check out some older Miyazaki. I couldn't tell you why this one makes so many lists though. I just didn't get it. Nothing actually happened. By the time it seemed like the end of the first act, the movie was done.
Hard Candy - (Presuming you've seen this one...)
BEFORE: That's an awesome poster. I'll check it out.
AFTER: That was…kind of disappointing?
I turned briefly to internets to see if I was experiencing a common problem. No good. The macguffin is child molestation, which a) creates a thick fog of useless rhetoric in which everyone feels the need to waste line after line decrying pedophiles, which is 1) noble and 2) necessary to ward off all the posts calling everyone discussing the movie a pedophile but not really relevant to the discussion, and b) gets me all off track with 'mole station' puns. ("Mole Station Zebra!" "That's no moon…." &c., &c.)
So…maybe the thing is that I'm not entirely clear on who the protagonist is. Nobody's a hero, per se. He's guilty, and she's some other kind of monster. We're going to sympathize with him, because otherwise we're probably a little monstrous ourselves. If we're going to watch him suffer for a couple hours, then movies teach us to hope to see the tormentor's comeuppance.
It feels a little bit like the Gothika problem. That is, murdering someone who turns out to be a criminal doesn't excuse the murdering. (Especially since in Gothika she had no idea.) This story doesn't have the explicit moral relativism of say, Death Wish, but she does seem to get away with it.
So how is it really any different from your The Strangers or your Funny Games? Jeff's imprisoned in his own home at the sadistic whim of some absurdly effective invader. But, he's alone, and a criminal. If anything, it's longer. The in-house cat and mouse is kind of repetitive. We could have probably skipped some of that and not missed it - the neighbor never does anything useful, for instance.
Perhaps it's just directorally weird. The first feature from a music video director who went on to do the horrible 30 Days of Night and is on Twilight 3 now. The physics-bending dolly move transitions, the completely weird and distracting mid-shot lighting and color changes, the vicious shaky cam to let the audience know when something exciting is going on…
…Or maybe this is just the most "torture-porn" flavored of the home invasion genre, with a big sensationalist gimmick, and a neat poster. At least it got me to wonder about it.
Batting .333 on that batch, and there's another 30 I've already accumulated, plus maybe some year-end stuff I could do, fashionably late.
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