Add last year’s The Autopsy of Jane Doe and Lights Out to the long list of excessively derivative, and thus increasingly tired horror movies that would be better suited for the stage.
Category: Remember All the Movies, Terry, We’d Go See
A Weekend in the Cinema: KONG: SKULL ISLAND (and more on LOGAN)
Kong: Skull Island shares traits with both of the last two weekends’ slates of releases: like Get Out two weeks ago, it’s basically the sole offering of interest this weekend; and like last weekend – but unlike Get Out, unfortunately – this lone offering did not offer moviegoers much of a reason to leave their houses to hit the local cinema.
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A Weekend in the Cinema: LOGAN; TABLE 19; BEFORE I FALL; THE SHACK (kind of)
For much of my life, I’ve made a concerted effort to see wide release movies in their opening weekends. Though rival studios only really focus on one element when choosing release dates – $$$$$ – unintentional connections can still be forced made between the flicks because most contemporaneous art tends to comment on shared factors intrinsic to the time and environment in which they’re produced. As such, I shall attempt to explore these ideas – BRIEFLY, I swear – every Monday through the lens of the weekend’s slate after having the opportunity to see them all (within reason). Due to their different release dates from city to city, independent films will be excluded from this series, which I’m dubbing “A Weekend in the Cinema” (STEPHEN SONDHEIM/A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC REFERENCE ALERT!!!). Without further ado…
All three (or I guess four) of March 3rd’s wide releases suffer from flawed screenplays that fail to transcend the more artistically restrictive conventions of their chosen genres. Logan is the biggest and also probably the best, less a testament to its (disappointing) quality and more a reflection of the overwhelming turpitude of these offerings…
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Movie Roundup 3/3-22 (Tweet-of-Consciousness)
THIS WEEK’S LINEUP
Dying Laughing (Lloyd Stanton / Paul Toogood) / The Last Laugh (Ferne Pearlstein)
Catfight (Onur Turkel) / Fist Fight (Richie Keen)
The Girl with All the Gifts (Colm McCarthy)
I Am Michael (Justin Kelly)
The Last Word (Mark Pellington)
My Scientology Movie (John Dower)
Song to Song (Terrence Malick)
Wolves (Bart Freundlich)
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The Means Are the Message (Tweet-of-Consciousness)
First, read the pictured excerpt from this article about Netflix’s CEO’s continued war vs the movieGOING experience: https://t.co/mIcOWWSgHE pic.twitter.com/vy2n2KmpHl
— Steven Strauss (@aintnohero) March 18, 2017
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A Weekend in the Cinema: GET OUT
After looking at the slate of wide releases for this past weekend, I initially decided to skip my recently launched “A Weekend in the Cinema” series out of a sheer lack of desire to see more than one of the movies (no offense to Collide and Rock Dog – an animated flick literally about a rock-and-roll playing dog – but like, nah b)…that is, until I actually saw the sole offering of interest, Get Out.
Movie Roundup (Tweet-of-Consciousness)
THIS WEEK’S LINEUP
A United Kingdom (Amma Asante)
Alone in Berlin (Vincent Perez)
American Honey (Andrea Arnold)
Fences (Denzel Washington) / It’s Only the End of the World (Xavier Dolan)
The Founder (John Lee Hancock)
John Wick: Chapter 2 (Chad Stahelski)
Journey to the West: The Demons Strike Back (Hark Tsui)
Kedi (Ceyda Torun)
Keep Quiet (Sam Blair / Joseph Martin)
La La Land (Damien Chazelle)
The Lure (Agnieszka Smoczynska)
Moana (too many to list, so I’ll just go with: Disney)
Mr. Gaga (Tomey Heymann)
My Life As A Zucchini (Claude Barras)
Paris 05:59: Théo & Hugo (Olivier Ducastel / Jacques Martineau)
The Red Turtle (Michael Dudok de Wit)
The Salesman (Asghar Farhadi)
Split (M. Night Shyamalan)
My Academy Awards 2016
BEST PICTURE
Oscar Nominees (ranked):
- Moonlight
- Fences
- Arrival
- Manchester by the Sea
- Hell or High Water
- La La Land
- Hidden Figures
- Lion
- Hacksaw Ridge
My Nominees (also ranked):
- See below for my ranked top 40 movies of 2016
THE OSCAR NOMINATED SHORT FILMS: The Most Unappreciated Annual Movie Event
The Academy Awards are a hot topic right now leading up to Sunday, but very few talk about…THE SHORTS!!! Most people don’t know that the nominated Live Action (good), Animated (better), and Documentary (best) short films are currently playing in movie theaters near many of you (if not, they’re also online and on demand, but everyone who CAN see these in theaters should do so; they deserve the big screen treatment). Since it’s really the most unappreciated and flat out best annual movie event (FAAAAR more enjoyable than the actual Oscars ceremony), I decided to write a bit about this year’s entries:
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A Weekend in the Cinema: A CURE FOR WELLNESS; THE GREAT WALL; FIST FIGHT
For much of my life, I’ve made a concerted effort to see wide release movies together in their opening weekends. Though rival studios only really focus on one element when choosing release dates – $$$$$ – unintentional connections can still be forced made between the flicks because most contemporaneous art tends to comment on shared factors intrinsic to the time and environment in which they’re produced. As such, I shall attempt to explore these ideas – BRIEFLY, I swear – every Monday through the lens of the weekend’s slate after having the opportunity to see them all (within reason). Though they’re almost always far superior offerings, because of their ever-changing release dates from city to city, independent films will be excluded from this series, which I’m dubbing “Weekends in the Cinema” (SONDHEIM!!!). Without further ado…
The three movies released wide this past weekend – A Cure for Wellness, The Great Wall, and Fist Fight – are all throwbacks in their own way:
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Write All Nite 