Fall Movie Preview Spectacular! Part 1

The Perks Of Being a Wallflower

Release Date: September 21^st (Limited)

Directed by Stephen Chbosky; Starring Emma Watson, Ezra Miller, Logan Lerman, Nina Dobrev, and Paul Rudd

While the trailer makes this look like a fairly dull, calm little coming-of-age tale, I understand that the original novel – written by director Stephen Chbosky – is a fairly frank and inventive account of teenage life. If Chbosky can translate that to screen, we may have the first interesting entry in this sub-genre in a long while.

The cast is certainly impressive. I’ve liked Logan Lerman a lot in the past, Ezra Miller was fantastic in last year’s We Need to Talk About Kevin, and Emma Watson was, of course, the most talented young actor in the Harry Potter franchise. It will be especially interesting to see what she does with a role that is decidedly not Hermione Granger. Color me cautiously optimistic about this one.

End of Watch

Release Date: September 21^st

Directed by David Ayer; Starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Michael Peña, Anna Kendrick, Natalie Martinez, and America Ferrera

End of Watch 03 Fall Movie Preview Spectacular! Part 1 The Films of September

Open Road has been running their trailer for this one all summer, and it’s a fairly compelling piece of marketing. We’ve seen the story of two best-friend cops going after the big drug cartel plenty of times before, but End of Watch seems like it truly means business, and may have a lot of heart to boot.

Gyllenhaal and Peña are a clever pairing, and they’re surrounded be a quality cast (though that could be colored by my undying love for Anna Kendrick). I don’t know if the film has what it takes to truly reinvigorate the police drama formula, but it appears to be a noble effort, and I’m looking forward to checking it out.

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obloodyhell

So far:

The Master looks like a thinly veiled attack on the inception of Scientology. I’d be a lot more impressed if they actually did a movie about Scientology’s inception….

Arbitrage looks like a lame, trite, cliche’d potboiler. The only hope it has of rising above the dreck concept is if the actors in it pull off magnificent performances. Possible but unlikely.

Wallflower: Yeesh… save me from the senselessly obligatory gay character in anything like this. Need a third wheel for it? Less see, a nerd? No. A music geek (of any kind, not necessarily “band”) No. An artistic type that WASN’T gay? Naww… Why be original, and use any of a number of possible third wheel types… No let’s go with the GAY outlier… Especially one that has to be flamingly so. “Ezra Miller was fantastic”… so much so that his only way to play a gay teen is to be so obviously gay that he’s going to regularly get beat up for it? I mean, really? Seems to me that the fantastic way to play a gay person would be one that WASN’T obviously gay from 100 paces. Because THAT is a heck of a lot more like most gays than the ones who look like they’re getting tooled up for a career in the ballet.

Looper looks good. Dredd might surprise (though releasing either in September, the “dead zone” for movies, is a bad sign for the studio’s opinions of them both).