Off the Couch and Into the Theater - September Oh10

Chris is choosing to bypass movies in favor of real life for at least part of this month, which both confuses me and offers me the great opportunity to annex this feature for myself. You all know me for playing video games and working on farms with strange British men, so here's a quick background on my film taste before I get into it. My favorite movie is Ghostbusters. My favorite director is either Edgar Wright or James Cameron, depending on which one is Edgar Wright. And until August I'd only seen one movie in theaters this year - How to Train Your Dragon. I've now also seen Piranha (in 2D).

If that doesn't make you want to know the percentage likelihood of ever seeing these September releases, then I don't know what will!

Sept 3rd: Every Machete (10%) commercial has reconfirmed my growing apathy for extended action sequences, and Michelle Rodriguez's inclusion in any cast is irrelevant until I'm given what I want - Blue Crush 2: The Return of the Wave. Opening two days before the weekend is The American (47%), the latest movie to inspire comments that George Clooney keeps doing the same movies. After watching the Emmys, I can say that he seems to be doing the same comedy bits as well, but that doesn't make him any less charming. Sports and leisure fans get what they never wanted with The Tillman Story (0%), which addresses the overplayed/misreported tragedy of an NFL player who died in Iraq. Meanwhile, arts and literature fans hope the news actually is false that Drew Barrymore and her real-life boyfriend Justin Long have taken their romance to the big screen in Going the Distance (7%). Mesrine Pt 1: Killer Instinct (2%) is a French gangster movie which I expect to be similar to an Italian gangster movie, only with smaller portions and less bread. The country of Lebanon (1%) finally gets its own movie, disappointingly ignoring Brazil's lead by telling a war-time story that doesn't feature Jonathan Pryce in wings. Waking Sleepy Beauty (o%) appears to be a documentary about the genesis of modern animation, with minimal emphasis on Bobby's World. And opening in an alternate universe where Step-Up 3D didn't change the world forever, Mao's Last Dancer (o%) tells the story of a Chinese ballet dancer, which was probably a nightmare I had when sleeping during my sister's recitals.

Sept 10th: How appropriate is it that I - the video game editor - get to pre-judge Resident Evil: Afterlife (23%)? Actually not very, seeing as how my enjoyment of this brand comes from me and not Ali Larter shooting zombies. I'm Still Here (7%) is, according to IMDb, Casey Affleck's documentation of Joaquin Phoenix's transition from acclaimed actor to aspiring rapper. So it's a true story in that sense of the word “true,” ya know. The Virginity Hit (12%) is a movie starring (blank) and telling the story of young men trying to get their friend to lose his virginity. This concept has so far only been breached by movies such as (not at all blank). The WWE attempts a family relationship piece (of course) through the lens of high school wrestling with the humbly-titled Legendary (0%), and suburbanites everywhere will soon wonder how they recognize the name of star John Cena as he seeps into their memories through the DVD boxes ubiquitously placed along highway gas station shelves. Mesrine Pt 2: Public Enemy #1 (1%) continues where the first installment left off last week (I assume), in an apparent ploy to shame Harry Potter for waiting months between his final two parts. The first ever Aboriginal musical comes to the screen in the form of Bran Nue Day (3%), so I encourage you to remember that for future pub trivia contests. And I'm skipping any mention beyond this of Heartbreaker (0%) until it adds an "s" and a "2" to its title and casts Jennifer Love-Hewitt.

Sept 17th: Soul Kitchen (5%) is a Grecian film that also tragically lacks Love-Hewitt, replacing her tail/tale with one of restaurant politics. Honestly, I don't even know if these foreign movies come out in my Milwaukee, but they offer the chance for horrible puns and borderline racist humor. For instance, I pita the fool who reads this sentence. Hey! Remember that French girl from Inglorious Basterds? She's in a movie called The Concert (1%). It's tagging itself as an uplifting comedy, but Glee already tried that trick on me. Another Frenchie is releasing a documentary about her friend Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child (0%), surely offering an objective take on its subject along with excellent thesis fodder for anyone who cares. Meanwhile, the Hollywood illuminati carves its scarlet letter into Emma Stone and Amanda Bynes via Easy A (85%). The presence of supple starlets almost guarantees I'll watch one of its thousand future showings on TBS, but I can't promise that the sweet angst it offers won't actually rot your movie chops. Never Let Me Go (44%) takes the more serious road by replacing the girls with their Oscar-nominated counterparts Carey Mulligan and Keira Knightley; in this case, however, whether or not there's any nutritional value depends wholly on your ability to digest melodrama. Affleck fans celebrate again as brother Ben puts out his September release The Town (27%), which I have in my creep notes as including little more substance than an accent-degraded Blake Lively. If you're interested in believing MySpace still exists, you can watch an adult photographer and an 8-year old use it to communicate in Catfish (13%). Philip Seymour Hoffman shoves his CV in our face with the self-directed, self-starring Jack Goes Boating (3%) at the same time that M. Night Shymalan mistakenly shines his fallen star upon an otherwise potentially interesting elevator gimmick in Devil (71%). And everyone comes together to applaud the real star of the month, Alpha and Omega (17%), for offering the first animated trailer in which a protagonist runs into a tree pole. Clap. Clap. Bang.

Sept 24^th: The past year has seen a majority of my friends come forward and express their love to me for the original Wall Street, to which I responded with the blank stare of a man who hadn't been told that in any year prior and therefore had never seen the movie. I expect to offer similar awkward pause, followed by acquiescence, when asked to accompany some of these same friends to the long-awaited (I guess) sequel Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (98%). China remakes Ethan Coen's 1984 script Blood Simple by replacing the blood with ramen and titling the movie A Simple Noodle Story (7%). A bunch of stars known for their off-screen couplings (Katie Holmes, Anna Paquin, Josh Duhamel, and more!) team up to become The Romantics (4%), a woman-helmed project that, according to my interpretation of the trailer, aims to inform men of the symptoms of morning sickness.


Also delivering Hollywood's vision of love through the emotional hilarity of high-school rivalries is Kristen Bell's latest decline into mediocrity, the PG-rated You Again (61%). I would decry it as the fall of Sigourney Weaver as well, except that already happened with Avatar blah blah I've now met my personal minimum for attacking that crap. Ryan Reynolds gets Buried (28%) alive in a coffin in Iraq, a premise that once and for all justifies the invasion and subsequent occupation. Waiting for 'Superman' (8%) claims to document the state of public education in America, yet by including even a momentary interview with Bill Gates demonstrates a lack of learning in the provision of expert-based, non-biased analyses of social issues; not that it matters so long as it gets a good grade on Rotten Tomatoes, right? And finally we have Zack Snyder's oddish follow-up to Watchmen, the pronounced-while-gargling Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole (4%), because what kids really need today is another fantasy universe filled with Tolkienesque lore.

Chris will return with his relatively garish optimism next month, so go outside and grab some sun while you still can. That's what he's doing.

This entry was posted by DoktorPeace, on Friday, September 03, 2010. You can leave your response.