Last year, I started a tradition on Facebook to lay out my moviegoing schedule at the beginning of the new season. Normally, I do that as a way of psyching myself up for an exciting three-or-four-month run of flicks, but in the early spring, it’s more like placing flags delicately next to landmines.
Looking down the pipeline, there’s a whole lotta ugly coming, kids. Hold on to your butts…
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JANUARY 22
Toss up: Extraordinary Measures, Legion, or The Tooth Fairy. – A medical drama with Harrison Ford, The Prophesy reimagined for a post-300 audience, or The Rock’s latest grab for Kindergarten Cop money. What do I want here–dreary, schlocky or stupid?
JANUARY 29
Saint John of Las Vegas. Steve Buscemi = win, but it’s in a limited release, so it probably won’t open in the STL. Which means we’ll probably see Mel Gibson’s tsunami of cop movie clichés, Edge of Darkness.
FEBRUARY 5
Frozen, by default. The director sounds like the goods, but I hesitate to pick any movie I can’t take Andrea to. (She doesn’t do well with horror movies, and this sounds especially unnerving.)
FEBRUARY 12
The Wolfman. Oh my GOD The Wolfman. And also, hopefully, Beauty and the Beast in 3-D, God willing. And perhaps even Percy Jackson – The Lightning Thief. Finally, a good weekend after five solid weeks of poop.
FEBRUARY 19
From Paris With Love looks like fun in a Transporter sort of way, and I’m curious enough about Scorsese’s Shutter Island that I may check it out, with or without my wife (who is pretty blasé about either one). Hey—two strong weekends in a row!
FEBRUARY 26
The Crazies looks like a decent, if uninspired zombie flick. Cop Out looks like a decent, if uninspired cop buddy movie. The tiebreaker here is Kevin Smith, who directed the latter of the two. Hey, the guy was my hero for most of two decades—I want to see if he can pull off a proper movie written by someone else.
MARCH 5
Alice in Wonderland in 3-D. A noisy, crowded Tim Burton spectacle. I’m a sucker for ‘em, and so are you. If ever there was a movie he was meant to make, this is it.
MARCH 12
Green Zone. I stopped watching Bourne movies with the first one, but I’ve been assured that the second two are better because of director Paul Greengrass. So, I’ll give him a shot with this one. In an added bonus, Matt Damon!
MARCH 19
Toss up: Bounty Hunter, Season of the Witch, The Runaways, or Last Night. Here we have a romcom with Jennifer Aniston and King Leonidas, a Syfy Original with Nicholas Cage, an entirely inaccurate biopic starring not one but TWO Twilight stars, and a movie in which Sam Worthington is required to ACT. Ugh…maybe I’ll catch up on one of those Feb. 12 movies if they’re still out…
MARCH 26
Another hard choice here: Hot Tub Time Machine with John Cusack or CLASH OF THE FUCKING TITANS. I think I’ll probably go with the movie that has the word “fucking” in the title (although I do want to see HTTM – plenty of interesting reading on that one online right now). Plus, How To Train Your Pet Dragon looks cute and has some neat character design, but ultimately looks flat as can be. Oh! And I Love You Phillip Morris, starring gay Jim Carrey macking on gay Ewan MacGregor. Another weird, anomalously strong week here in the middle of March.
APRIL 2
Woof…a Miley Cyrus flick, a Tyler Perry movie, and a movie called Repo Men about a collection agency that repossesses people’s organ transplants. Welcome to the wasteland, folks…
APRIL 9
The Losers. We’re doing an adaptation of an Andy Diggle comic? Color me there.
APRIL 16
I realize that, as a comics geek, I am required to look forward to seeing Kick-Ass, but you know what? Mark Millar, the writer of the comic this flick was based on, is a dick. Everything he touches just wreaks of a crass cynical commercialism that I find just personally off-putting. So sign me up for Piranha 3-D, which looks like every inch the B-movie cheesefest Snakes on a Plane was trying to be.
APRIL 23 and 30
Right now, all IMDB has up for the last two weeks of April are a sequel to Wall Street and a remake of Nightmare on Elm Street. Shit–I don’t care about either of these franchises, but you do what you gotta do, right?
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Wow—this was harder than I thought. Of this list, there are only five movies in four months that I would’ve actually sought out if I wasn’t making a concerted effort to a see a movie a week for the purposes of reviewing them for the site. (Those being The Wolfman, Alice in Wonderland, Beauty and the Beast, Clash of the Titans, and, for some reason, Piranha 3-D. And bust this—all but one are either re-releases or remakes!)
Of the rest, there are only eight more that I’m even looking forward to. Don’t get me wrong—any excuse to go to the movies, but…Jesus…it’s gonna be a long hard row to hoe.
Have fun this weekend, kids!
Luke
JOE
