OCTOBER 2014 MOVIE PREVIEW

October! The month of scary movies and the first self-conscious awards bait! We had a banner year for October releases which I absolutely do not expect to see matched; that said, October is also the month of the Chicago International Film Festival, about which I am particularly excited this year. But more about that in a week or so.


3.10.2014

So first up, the film that splits the difference between generic thrills and Oscary respectability: the David Fincher-directed bestseller adaptation Gone Girl. About which I will mostly confess that I read the book and wish I hadn't; it's fine, if a bit beachy, but I don't quite see what the point of making it into a film could possibly be. But that said, the trailer makes it look like Zodiac Fincher might be the one who made it, and that is far and away my favorite Fincher.

Fans of groan-inducing prequel-spinoffs are lucky that the month's one and only R-rated horror picture - I hasten to remind you, it's October - is Annabelle, the story of that doll that was by no stretch of the imagination the most interesting thing about The Conjuring. Fans of Nicolas Cage making daft choices (and who isn't?) are even luckier, because his current daft choice is a remake of Left Behind, the evangelical Christian thriller that launched a cottage industry.


10.10.2014

I am way more interested in the Robert Downey, Jr./Robert Duvall father & son drama The Judge now that it's apparently terrible and not just harmless, lifeless Oscarbait. Schadenfreude is fun, kids.

Other wide releases... Disney is shitting out a dumb-looking farcical expansion of the slim children's book Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day, and the weird cultural obsession with taking all of our best pointlessly evil villain and making them sad anti-heroes has now extended as far as Count Fucking Dracula, though I guess the precedent for that has been there since at least the Gary Oldman movie by Francis Ford Coppola. Anyway, Dracula Untold. It's going to suck real bad.

There's also something about having an affair called Addicted, about which I have heard nothing prior to this moment.


17.10.2014

It's the time of year when limited releases come by too fast to bother trying to keep track of them all, but I'd be remiss if I failed to mention that Birdman is absolutely the "big" movie about which I'm most excited for the rest of 2014. And that is, I concede, almost entirely a function of Emmanuel Lubezki long takes, which are my favorite kind of long takes. And my favorite kind of Lubezki, for that matter.

As far as the bigger releases go, I have never yet liked a David Ayer project, and I don't know why the WWII movie Fury will change that. And I haven't liked a Nicholas Sparks adaptation yet, either, but that doesn't make me special, and The Best of Me feels like one of those movies that doesn't actually exist.

While those two duke it out, not being interesting, I'm still trying to figure out if the animated The Book of Life is going to be a gorgeous movie that's absolutely terrible, or a gorgeous and wonderful movie that got stuck with a relentlessly shitty ad campaign. I am not hopeful that it is the latter.


24.10.2014

The grand experiment in making movies about board games continues with Ouija, a PG-13 demonic possession that seems to labor in ignorance of the way that, y'know, ouija boards or their generic equivalents are in, like, every haunted house movie. And throwing a bunch of generic starlets at the problem isn't what makes it go away.

There's also this thing called Laggies, about which I'm sure other information exists, but seriously, that name...

Lastly, the IMDb summary for John Wick starts out, "When Russian mobsters kill his beloved dog, retired hit man John Wick..." so I'm basically seeing the Liam Neeson remake of Umberto D. happening here.


31.10.2014

Happy Halloween! Like horror? Too bad, because all you get is a Nicole Kidman/Colin Firth psychological thriller, Before I Go to Sleep, and a Jake Gyllenhaal psychological thriller, Nightcrawler, and while they both have horror-ish titles, that's as far as it appears to go.