The Game Plan: “A superstar Boston quarterback (Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson)…” Next! March.
Georgia Rule: “Mother-Daughter dynamics lead to friction [do tell] between three generations of woman (Jane Fonda, Lindsay Lohan and Felicity Huffman).” Good grief, when woman complain they don’t make enough movies for them, is this really what they want? Ladies, let me put it this way: You’re going to have to see a buttload of Fantastic Four 2’s before your guy is obligated to see something like this with you. May 11.
Ghost Rider [Written before movie came out]: I’m a huge Ghost Rider fan, and always have been. Back in the day, by which I mean the ’70s, it was GR and Luke Cage, baby. (Speaking of, John Singleton, get your ass in gear…and make Luke’s wife white again, you coward.) Sadly, I’m no fan of Nick Cage, who ironically took his acting name from Luke Cage—really—and I’m really especially no fan of the guy who directed the highly lame Daredevil, who sadly made this, too. Quite a while ago, I read an interview with that guy, who said the following two things in the same article (I’m paraphrasing).
1)”We decided to go back to basics and get to the character’s roots.”
2)”We decided to make the character the Devil’s bounty hunter, despite the fact that he never had been such a thing.”
Uhm, yeah. Going back to the character’s roots by…completely changing the character. Gotcha.Anyway, there was another, discrete Ghost Rider character in the ’90s, with some different powers than the earlier Johnny Blaze GR I love, and they have merged the two (the flaming chain so prevalent in the commercials is from GR II), which annoys me even further. Audiences don’t seem interested in lame superhero movies, and so I’m pretty sure this will be this year’s Elektra, both critically and commercially. I hope I’m wrong about it sucking, but I doubt it. Since the chances of the film being good are so slight, the only real hope it has is that GR is so freakin’ cool looking that people will buy tickets anyway. We’ll see. February.
The Golden Age: A sequel to the superlative Elizabeth, with Cate Blanchett and Geoffrey Rush returning to the roles of the Queen and Sir Francis Walsingham. Clive Owen joins the cast as Sir Walter Raleigh. Cool. October.
The Golden Compass: An adaption of Philip Pullman’s acclaimed, forthrightly anti-Christian fantasy series. When they made Narnia, there was a lot of talk about to what extent they’d downplay C. S. Lewis’ overtly Christian themes. Expect the opposite for this one (unless they just try to ignore the matter entirely). Big cast, including Nicole Kidman and Daniel “James Bond” Craig. Dec.
Gone, Baby, Gone: Before he quit detective fiction to go mainstream (Mystic River was one of his), author Dennis Lehane wrote a brilliant PI series. Now first time director Ben Affleck (ack!) is adapting one of the books to the screen. As least he’s not playing is the main character, that’s…Casey Affleck. Hmm, my level of relief just plummeted. Ben is classing up the joint with supporting roles for Ed Harris and Morgan Freeman, but man, I just can’t even get any hopes up for this. Oh, well, I could always reread the novels.
Gray Matters: A brother and sister are so alike they both fall for the same woman. Consider the sister is played by Heather Graham, and the woman by Bridget Moynahan, that brother can just get the hell out of the movie. Feb.
Grindhouse: Actually, being a complete wimp, I’m torn about seeing this upcoming ‘double feature’ throwback to the sleazy double bills of the 1970s. I assume it’s going to be very gory and very nasty, and indeed, it wouldn’t be living up to the works it means to pay tribute to if it wasn’t. Still, Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez remain two of our finest genre directors. Tarantino is making a slasher / car chase movie with his regular star Kurt Russell as the psychopath, and Rodriguez is making an insane zombie epic. Then there’s the fact that I love this concept as a marketing idea. I’ve long complained that one reason we so love older b-movies is that they tended, back before the mid-’70s, to often be anywhere from 60 to 80 minutes long. Now everything seems to be a hundred minutes, or more. Take those old movies, add twenty minutes, and let the snoozing begin. Therefore, this idea. Take two comparatively cheaply budgeted movies, yoke them together, and each can be pithily short and yet together reach the now seemingly obligatory length. And if this works in a theater, there’s no reason it couldn’t work on the straight-to-DVD market. Indeed, each of the main ‘features’ was supposed to run 60 minutes originally, but in the end the directors wanted the movies to be longer, and got their way. Grindhouse is also budgeted at a fairly muscular but not crazy $50 million, but that’s with two directors powerful enough to get their way. Meanwhile, there’s no reason why you couldn’t assembled an old-fashioned cheapie genre double bill for, say, $10-15 million. All we really need is another tight-fisted producer along the lines of Roger Corman. Then I love the idea that the ‘movies’ will be separated by bogus trailers, assembled by other b-movie directors. Here’s the thing; if the film takes off, you don’t even have to necessarily come up with concepts for another double bill, but can merely flesh out the pre-existing trailers. I’m telling you, this could really be revolutionary. Boys, don’t screw it up. April.
Halloween: Rob Zombie (ugh) makes over John Carpenter’s horror classic. Zombie’s aesthetic is indicated by his casting of the huge, hulking wrestler Taylor Mane to play Michael Myers. Great cast, though. August. (That’s right, Halloween is being released in August.)
The Host: Hot damn! Reportedly way cool giant monster flick from Korea is actually going to play in theaters here. March.
Hot Fuzz: Definitely a film to get excited about, as the guys behind the superlative Shaun of the Dead make a violent ’70s style cop action flick. A hard-nosed supercop is punished by being resigned to a small rural village, only to find there’s more going on there than meets the eye. April.
Hot Rod: Andy Samberg tries to be the next Will Ferrell (and not the next Jimmy Fallon or Tim Meadows, or whoever) to graduate from Saturday Night Live, playing an inept Evel Knievel-esque motorcycle stunt rider with family issues. Great dramatic actors like Ian McShane and Sissy Spacek have been cast along with more overtly funny actors, and that’s a wise strategy that’s seldom employed enough. June.
I Am Legend: Third adaption of Richard Matheson’s classic post-apocalypse vampire novel. Vincent Price made the very decent, Italian Last Man on Earth, and then Charlton Heston starred in the ’70s campfest The Omega Man. This time it’s Will Smith crack at playing a fellow who’s the sole human left after a plague has turned everyone else into what are, functionally, vampires. Although it looks like they might be heading more in a zombie direction this time around. (Yeah, because that’s fresher.) Since Smith is involved, I’d expect a lot more explosions and people running in front of expanding fireballs. Dec.
I Could Never Be Your Woman: Michelle Pfeiffer is a divorcee who is falling for a man in his ’20s. I’ll wait for the musical version, “MILF!” Co-starring Jon Lovitz and Tracey Ullman?! Brrr. TBD.
Invasion: Another redo of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, set in Washington. One of two movies this year to co-star Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig. August.
The Invisible: After being attacked, a man finds himself invisible to the world. He tries to learn why he was targeted. Ho hum. Remake of a Swedish film. Here’s an idea: Make a horror movie that hasn’t already been made by someone else.
Kickin’ It Old School: A break dancer comes out of a decades-long coma and has to show these hip-hopping whippersnappers how it’s done. I’m pretty much the demographic for this film—I own the Breakin’ movies on DVD—but how I can not pause to read “starring Jaimie Kennedy”? Filled with joke ’80s celebrity cameos. Nice idea, but the execution is presumably horrible.
