OCTOBER 2013 MOVIE PREVIEW

After a year that has been, film for film and month by month, the most tepid in my living memory, we're finally hitting the good stuff: not that I am typically fond of the sort of movies that tend to get released in Oscar season, because it is a matter of record that the stuff I just love and the stuff that AMPAS just loves are not, for the most part, the same stuff. This year, though, some of the films that were probably never meant to be Oscarbaity in the first place are getting crazy awards buzz, and the season's two biggest auteur pictures by two of the most exciting filmmakers out there right now are both coming out this very same October. I presently feel something that I have felt since before May: anticipation. It is a warm and fuzzy feeling.


4.10.13

And how about that, it's one of those auteur pictures I was just talking about! Alfonso Cuarón, famous in story and song, brings his long takes and moving camera trickery to outer space with Gravity, and even if, as the early word seems to indicate, it's "only" the year's most corking, technically accomplished thriller, that's still enough to make it my most-anticipated film of the rest of 2013, though "the rest of" is a bit of a dodge - not only has it been my most-anticipated for all of 2013, it was my most-anticipated for the bulk of 2012, too, until it got delayed. So this is a long time coming for me, and while it probably can't be good enough to live up to my hopes, I will be dumbfounded if it doesn't end up squatting on a space in my year-end top 10. A prediction that, sight-unseen, I have not made for any other movie this year.

Also, Justin Timberlake whines ineffectually in front of Ben Affleck, in the techno-thriller Runner Runner. Let us spare it a moment of our pity.


10.10.13
The first day of the Chicago International Film Festival. Wish me luck.


11.10.13

The closest thing to traditional Oscarbait among the month's wide releases is a Paul Greengrass movie which should tell us a little bit about the Oscarbait. It's Captain Phillips, a true story in which Tom Hanks sports a badass attitude and a silly accent, and fights Somali pirates.

Less respectable, but I suspect more fun, Robert Rodriguez is gracing us with Machete Kills, a movie whose tawdry, dumb trailer, with it's completely sophomoric sense of humor, has been one of my favorite things this year. Suffice it to say that sensibility and taste are not winning out in my head with this one.

In limited release, the seven-year-old feature debut for Jonathan Levine, who has made and released three films since, finally gets released: All the Boys Love Mandy Lane, a horror film of some reputation. Because when you sit on a film for seven years, fucking duh your target audience will hunt it out. Also: Escape from Tomorrow, which was shot illegally in Walt Disney World and Disneyland, is making its way into theaters and allegedly onto VOD (which is, sadly, how I'll probably end up seeing it), and the basketful of conflicting feelings I have going into it will best wait for the review, because that's an essay in and of itself.


18.10.2013

There's one and only one horror movie opening this October - isn't that odd? Sadly, it's the unasked-for remake of Carrie, starring Chloë Grace Moretz, what we might call an unintuitive casting choice given the requirements of the part. Accompanying it are a pair of thrillers of different sorts altogether: '80s wet dream made '10s program-filler, the Stallone-Schwarzenegger team-up vehicles Escape Plan, and The Fifth Estate, about the controversial acts and life of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, which may or may not be a pack of lies, depending on who you listen to, but probably is a tepid headline-grabbing cash-in, according to almost everybody.

WAY more exciting are the limited releases: All Is Lost, the month's second story of surviving a crisis in extreme isolation, this time with Robert Redford on a boat, and 12 Years a Slave, in which the singular vision of British filmmaker Steve McQueen is trained on American slavery, with the most astounding-on-paper cast of the year.


25.10.2013

Cormac McCarthy's first original script, in a film directed by Ridley Scott: could go either way very easily, but I am going to choose to be excited for The Counselor until proven otherwise. Certainly, with Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa kicking it on the sidelines, I know which one I want to go to #1 for the weekend box office.

By the time that Palme d'Or winner Blue Is the Warmest Color hits Stateside theaters, I will have seen it and probably reviewed it, and probably been terribly excited about it, but it still does well to point out that it does start its potentially expansive limited release run at this point.