Plot:
David O. Russell’s movies (things like Three Kings and The Fighter) are generally known for being populated by eccentric characters and for being rather experimental in their content and execution. His latest film, Silver Linings Playbook, sticks to one approach but not the other, and it results in maybe the most solid work he’s done so far. The film stars Bradley Cooper as a down-on-his-luck bipolar case who’s just been let out of the looney bin and is looking to get his life back together. Seeing as his ex-wife has a restraining order on him, however, he’s forced to get his feet back on the ground at his parents’ (Robert De Niro and Jacki Weaver) house instead of at his own former home. This is complicated, because his parents are the type of people who have mental issues of their own -- as does the fetching blonde from the next neighborhood (Jennifer Lawrence) whose eye he catches. Can things work out for people with mental issues, or are we all just doomed to be miserable forever?
Stop me if this sounds too crazy. In The Guilt Trip Seth Rogen plays a Jewish guy, and he’s got a mother (Barbra Streisand) who’s -- wait for it -- kind of overbearing and smothering. I know, right? That’s not the end of it, though. Things get worse when what’s supposed to be a quick visit home ends in Rogen’s character having to take dear old mom on a road trip. Can you imagine? Perhaps predictably, things on the trip don’t go so well when mother and son’s personalities begin to chafe against each other. And perhaps even more predictably, those initial tensions eventually abate and lead to a life-changing experience where mother and son learn quite a bit about not only each other, but also themselves. Isn’t that precious?
Given the longtime support that the convention community has given director Guillermo del Toro, Warner Bros decided they were going to reward the geek element by putting together a sizzle reel of footage from his new giant-robots-fighting-giant-monsters movie, Pacific Rim, and only show it to those attending WonderCon. It turns out their new trailer started so much buzz that it seemed kind of stupid not to just show it to everybody, though. They are in the business of selling movies, after all. So here it is...
Plot:
Gangster Squad is a pretty typical cops and robbers story, but jazzed up with a bit of style, some particularly egregious violence and sex. It gives us a probably pretty fictionalized account of real-life gangster Mickey Cohen’s (Sean Penn) rise to power through the fairly wide open Los Angeles crime scene of the 40s, and the guerrilla warfare tactics that the LAPD resorted to in order to take him down. Guys like Josh Brolin, Ryan Gosling, Michael Peña, Robert Patrick and Giovanni Ribisi play the rag-tag group of cops who form the lynch mob, Emma Stone provides the film with its femme fatale and Zombieland and 30 Minutes or Less helmer Ruben Fleischer is in the director’s chair. Oh yeah, and Nick Nolte shows up and growls for a few minutes too. That’s always notable.
A Haunted House is a found footage horror movie spoof, which is pretty much the dirtiest sentence anyone has ever typed. It stars Marlon Wayans as a guy who owns a house and Essence Atkins as his girlfriend who just moved in. If you’ve ever seen any of the Paranormal Activity movies, then you know what happens next, because A Haunted House is mostly just a loosely connected series of vignettes that recreate haunting scenarios that the Paranormal Activity franchise has driven into the ground -- strange noises, blinking lights, people being pulled out of their beds -- and dresses them up a bit with fart, poop and wiener jokes. But like, bad fart, poop and wiener jokes. Not the hilarious kind we all love.
Plot:
Wuthering Heights, based on the novel Push by Emily Brontë, is one of those stories that everyone kind of remembers from high school English class. It’s about a young orphan boy (Solomon Glave) who is adopted by a family, develops a close friendship with his new foster sister (Shannon Beer) and is eventually forced to go away after things at home get too intense and emotional. He returns years later, though -- now a man of means (and now James Howson) -- to find that his sister is married (and now Kaya Scodelario) and that things are once again very intense and emotional. There’s other stuff about the history of the property they live on and the next generation of the kids in the book, but co-writer/director Andrea Arnold cuts all of that out to focus on the juicy parts here.
The Impossible tells the true story of a family of tourists who were visiting Thailand during the deadly tsunami of December, 2004, one of the worst natural disasters we’ve seen in modern times. Things don’t stick completely to reality, however, seeing as the real family was from Spain, and this family (Ewan McGregor, Naomi Watts, and child actors Tom Holland, Samuel Joslin and Oaklee Pendergast) has been made British, for the purposes of white people being more relatable or whatever. Anyway, the tidal wave comes, the family is split up and much subsequent suffering takes place in the decimated landscape and the makeshift hospitals. Will everyone in the family survive? Will their journeys to find each other eventually bear fruit? Whatever happens to those millions of brown people who all lost loved ones and nearly everything they’ve ever owned? All questions get answered except for that last one.
Plot:
Back in 2009 Quentin Tarantino made Inglorious Basterds, a wildly stylized and escapist World War II film that rewrote history and put Hitler and his Nazi cronies at the mercy of its revenge-seeking protagonists. Django Unchained tells a similar story, only instead of tackling the Holocaust, it’s tackling American slavery, and giving a downtrodden hero (Jamie Foxx’s Django) an opportunity to rise up against his oppressors and exact brutal revenge. The specifics of the situation are that Christoph Waltz is playing Django’s partner and mentor, Dr. King Schultz, Leonardo DiCaprio is playing the ruthless slave owner, Calvin Candie, who has possession of Django’s wife and Kerry Washington is playing the wife, Broomhilda, who is very much a damsel in distress. Think of the whole thing as an homage to the Spaghetti Western with a healthy dose of Blacksploitation thrown in.
If you’ve seen the first The Haunting in Connecticut, which was about a family’s experiences after moving into a haunted house in upstate Connecticut, well, that doesn’t necessarily mean that you know anything about The Haunting in Connecticut 2: Ghosts of Georgia. As you might be able to tell from its ridiculous, idiotic title, this movie is a sequel in name only, and doesn’t have anything to do with the characters from the first. On the other hand, if you’ve ever seen any sort of haunted house movie ever -- set in Connecticut, Georgia or otherwise -- then you pretty much know beat-for-beat what this movie is about anyway. A family moves into a house, the property has a mysterious and murderous past and the family begins to be haunted by the specters who dwell in the place until they can figure out how to finally put their tortured spirits to rest. This one doesn’t really offer up any twists on the formula, except that, like Django Unchained, it has plot elements that have a tenuous connection to American slavery.
Plot:
The appropriately titled Bully is a documentary directed by Lee Hirsch that attempts to shine a spotlight on the bullying problem that plagues our nation’s schools. All over the country freaks, geeks and weirdos are being picked on by their perfectly quaffed, heteronormal classmates, to the point where school shootings and teenage suicides have become something of an epidemic. Hirsch’s camera follows around an awkward kid with big lips, a teenage lesbian who’s out in a small town, etc... and it records the way they’re physically, verbally and emotionally abused on a daily basis. And, more than that, he records the way that the teachers, the parents and the school administrators do whatever they can to ignore the problem and sweep it under the rug with simple platitudes like “kids will be kids” or “you need to learn to stand up for yourself.” The hope here seems to be that if enough people see this footage and get angry, a movement can be created that might eventually stop children from being psychotic douches.
Girl Model is directors David Redmon and Ashley Sabin’s look at the fashion model industry in Russia, and how it plucks young girls out of their lives and sends them traveling around the world to compete for work long before they’re emotionally mature enough to be out on their own. The story focuses on a 13-year-old model named Nadya and the ex-model scout who picks her out of obscurity and sends her off to Japan, and it reveals the supply chain system that leads to so many young girls being taken away from their homes and left to develop drug problems, eating disorders or end up involved in prostitution. The photographers here are flesh peddlers in the purest sense, always demanding that they be supplied with fresh faces and tossing girls aside the second they add even a centimeter to their waistlines. Basically, the moral of the story is that modeling is gross, and we mostly just stand by and allow these young girls to be exploited.
Plot:
What is Soy Sauce? It’s a maybe mystical street drug that allows its user to transcend time and space and connect with things on a psychic level in a way they never thought possible. And it’s also the conceit that allows John Dies at the End to be an absurdist adventure tale where its protagonists, Dave and John (Chase Williamson and Rob Mayes), can come into contact with monsters made out of meat products, mustaches that rip off of dudes’ faces and fly around like bats and bratwursts that work like cell phones. Can Dave and John get to the bottom of what exactly the Soy Sauce is before the entire world gets turned around topsy-turvy? Probably. But, from the sound of the title, I wouldn’t put my money on things ending very positively for John.
Cool World is another thoroughly ridiculous movie about strange creatures and different dimensions. It’s about a comic book universe called Cool World that exists parallel to our own, and that real-life humans and animated creations called doodles can travel back and forth between. The effect is something like Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, where humans and cartoons interact, except (arguably) raunchier. Gabrielle Byrne plays a modern day incarcerated cartoonist who at least believes that he created Cool World, Brad Pitt plays a 40s-era war vet who got sucked into the animated universe decades ago and has served as its police force ever since and Kim Basinger voices the cheesecake pinup of a femme fatale who will do whatever it takes to leave her animated form and find out what it feels like to exist in the flesh. They all run afoul of each other in various ways, and generally the results are super strange.
Due to their work on The Descendants, Nat Faxon and Jim Rash have proven that they’re a writing team who you can trust to mix comedy and human drama with smile-inducing results. That’s one of the reasons that you should pay attention to The Way, Way Back, which is not only another script that they’ve collaborated on, but also their debut as tandem directors. Their involvement isn’t the only reason why this film’s upcoming release should be marked in red on your calendar, though. Heavens no. There are about a million more...
If you’re the type of person who really dug Nicolas Winding Refn’s 2011 film Drive, who is still humming along to its soundtrack and daydreaming about a guy as dreamy as Ryan Gosling stomping a man to death in your honor, then chances are you’re going to love what the trailer for the new film they’re doing together, Only God Forgives, has to offer.
Did you think Gosling did a great job of milking the tension of protracted silences in Drive? Well, wait until you see how quiet he is in this thing. He doesn’t even say a word until the very end. Did you like the dayglow, throwback color palate that Refn used for Drive? Well, in this one absolutely everything glows neon pink. Always. All of the things we’ve come to expect from a Nicholas Winding Refn film are here
The Plot:
Steven Spielberg’s latest play at maintaining your grandparents’ respect, Lincoln, isn’t your typical biopic. We don’t start with Abraham Lincoln as a young boy, we don’t follow his development from living in a log cabin to living in the White House. Instead, the film focuses on the last few months of his life, when he was trying to get the 13th Amendment passed through the House. The film is dialogue heavy. It’s kind of a procedural. It puts less of its focus on what Lincoln was like as a man and more of it on what it is that makes politics work -- the compromise and cajoling and giving up of ideals that leads to real legislation that actually creates results. Probably that sounds pretty boring, but there are several good reasons why it’s not. We’ll get to those next.
At this point everyone at least has a sense of what Les Misérables is about. It started as a Victor Hugo novel that was published in 1862, has had a staggering amount of movie, TV and stage adaptations ever since and has never really left our cultural lexicon for too long. The most famous iteration of the story is probably the stage musical from the 80s though, and what we have here isThe King’s Speech director Tom Hooper giving us a film version of that musical. The main character of the story is arguably Jean Valjean, a prisoner turned fugitive turned powerful man turned fugitive turned father who lives a very full life and, through it all, maintains a pretty strong moral compass. There’s lot of action and politics and romance and other stuff too, though. The story is kind of epic. You could go on forever explaining it.
‘Silver Linings Playbook’ and ‘The Guilt Trip’: Sometimes formulaic is good, but other times...
