Fall Movie Preview Spectacular! Part 1

Dredd 3D

Release Date: September 21^st

Directed by Pete Travis; Starring Karl Urban, Olivia Thirlby, and Lena Headey

Oh hell yeah. I simply cannot wait to land my eyes on this one. I have no major attachment to the comics or earlier Stallone adaptation, and admittedly found myself scoffing like everyone else when this ‘reboot’ was originally announced, but then the trailer came out, and I was simply blown away. That is as confident, collected, and bombastic a preview as I’ve seen all year, one that makes me eager to see the finished product no matter how it turns out.

As for the cast, Urban is an inspired pick for the title role, and though Thirlby and Headey aren’t as instantly recognizable, they are both very intriguing performers in their own right. Headey’s stupendous work on Game of Thrones has certainly proven she can play an intimidating antagonist.

Reactions out of Comic-Con, where the film screened in full, has been nothing but positive, only heightening my anticipation. I am wary, as always, of the 3D process, but other than that, this one has me very excited indeed.

Trouble With The Curve

Release Date: September 21^st

Directed by Robert Lorenz; Starring Clint Eastwood, Amy Adams, Justin Timberlake, John Goodman, Robert Patrick, Matthew Lillard, and Joe Massingill

Clint Eastwood comes out of acting retirement for this drama about an aging baseball scout taking one last recruitment trip with his daughter, played by Amy Adams. That’s a lovely pairing, one I hope shall be used to its fullest potential.

The trailer, however, worries me. It’s tonally bipolar, jumping back and forth between lighthearted and sappy without effectively illustrating what the final product may look like. The movie could be fantastic regardless, but a lot of disappointing, lazy prestige pictures are marketed this way, and I hope Trouble With The Curve is actually something special.

House at the End of the Street

Release Date: September 21^st

Directed by Mark Tonderai; Starring Jennifer Lawrence, Max Thieriot, Gil Bellows, and Elizabeth Shue

House at the End of the Street Fall Movie Preview Spectacular! Part 1 The Films of September

At this point, I would watch Jennifer Lawrence read the friggin’ phone book; she’s simply a tremendous young actress, and her presence alone makes this horror film an intriguing prospect. Who knows if this is something she would have signed on for now, after The Hunger Games catapulted her to international stardom, but the trailers are effectively atmospheric, if nothing particularly fresh.

Mother and daughter move into a house. The house next door was once home to a brutal double homicide. Daughter begins investigating. Bad things happen. We’ve seen plenty of variations on this movie before. But the trailer I’ve embedded below is an undeniably clever one, taking the typical horror preview format and doing it all in reverse. If the film itself is that creative, it could be a pleasant surprise.

Continue the Preview on the next page…

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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).