We decided that while the Monthly Primer was fun to do, it was kind of covered already by the rest of the internet movie preview world.

So, instead of doing a preview for each movie each month, I decided to just do a mini preview/recommendation/blurb of excitement about my own 5 movies I most look forward to, based entirely on personal, biased reasons.

Enjoy!

Ponyo (august 14th, my birthday!!)

Studio Ghibli deserves to be famous like Walt Disney Studios, and Hayao Miyazaki like Walt. (Waaaaaaaaaaaaaalt…! Right?) The studio has had a hand in at least 5 of my all time favorite animations: Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro, Grave of the Fireflies, My Neighbor Totoro,  Princess Mononoke, and Porco Rosso.  Aside from really liking the art style, I’m consistently amazed at how well they animated people, ESPECIALLY children.  Even the films they’ve produced I didn’t mention are good stories, well animated and pretty all around enjoyable to watch.

I saw the original Japanese version of Ponyo (which is Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea in full) not too long ago, and from what I’ve seen, by comparison the U.S. release looks like it has pretty good voice acting.  They hired genuine little kids to do the voices, albeit a Cyrus and a Jonas. While I thought the film was really bizarre and am unsure of how the U.S. audience would react (I worked in a theater when Spirited Away, and parents were ticked that we didn’t warn them it wasn’t actually a kid’s movie), I think everyone should see it because Hayao Miyazaki is awesome.  Also he looks like Colonel Sanders now.

Hayao Miyazaki from Comic Con

Colonel Sanders

Surrogates (September 25th)

I feel like it’s time again for movies about MMORPG type video games. In 2002 there was an anime called .hack//SIGN which was a show about video game avatars in the game world with the personas of the real people playing them. (Kind of like a machinima with a bunch of your friends doing the voices of the characters.) Basically if the people from The Guild voiced the characters of an animation based on the video game characters they play.  (None of these further explanations make any sense, do they?)

Although Surrogates doesn’t seem to be about a game world, thus extracting the nerdy connotations of living a second life in some made up fantasy world as a Golden Knight or something, it’s the same basic concept.  And like .hack//SIGN, it deals with “What happens to the real person behind the avatar if … were to happen?”, which I think is pretty interesting.

New York, I Love You (October 16th)

Our very own Paris, Je T’Aime. A feature film made up of lots of indie film style shorts, directed by people who can put a lot of effort in because they only had to make a 10 minute movie instead of an 80 minute movie. And I admit, I REALLY like seeing places I go to every day in movies now. I never thought it would be true, but there’s a connection for movies shot in New York to people that live here. I even feel differently about movies I had seen in the past that were shot here. Manhattan. Cloverfield. Way cool when you know exactly where they were going. When I saw Cloverfield in Wisconsin, all the street names and locations were just a blur of dialogue until I moved here. Plus I still like the city. A lot of my friends that moved here before me are just like “Meh, New York. You get over it.”

Nine (December 11th) My God, it’s so far away!

Nine Trailer from Daniel Shannon on Vimeo.

I’m not a Fellini die-hard. In fact, the part of 8 1/2 that all the trailers of Nine are based off of (where all the women are dancing around him until the end of the movie, largely) was kind of too weird, off the wall bizarre for me for an otherwise pretty normal, good movie. I may have gone to an experimental film school, but I didn’t buy in entirely.
But this movie has such great casting it makes me want to see it just for that.  It’s a lightbulb moment when you realize who each of the women in Nine are supposed to be as compared to the original and how they all look so perfect. Plus Daniel Day-Lewis as Marcello/Guido is friggin’ brilliant. Now if they just got Uma Thurman to play Gloria (Mezzabotta’s crazy fiance), I would feel like a chapter (or more like a footnote) in my life would be quietly resolved.

Ramona and Beezus (March 2010)

They are filming this now.  The Ramona Quimby books were one of my favorite book series as a kid and I’m really excited about there being a new film.  I am, however, totally open to it likely being horrendous.  I didn’t see the Nancy Drew movie, but it looked awful.  The Harriet the Spy movie however, was really good.  Or I was just the right age when it came out to like it.

It’s not a Disney movie (Thank God), but I have a feeling it might as well be. It co-stars one of the current popular Disney creations to arise from nowhere and blow up over night, which instantly gives it a candy-coated “everything is perfect in the world” shiney feeling it could do without.

The girl who plays Ramona looks promising, so I’m hoping it’s another Harriet the Spy or Harry Potter success rather than Ramona and Beezus: High School Musical 4.

What comes out when, and do you care?

Alright, I didn’t do one of these for June. Upgrading the website plus a really uninteresting collection of films, and I never could get the energy up for writing a primer.

It would have roughly said this: What’s with the art films? Moon, Whatever Works, Food Inc, Away We Go. Pelham is going to infuriate me (it did) and The Hangover might be worth it (it was) and the rest can go DTV for all I care. As much as I loved The Transformers 20 years ago, the first movie was lame and the robots looked like they were assembled pre-crushed from the junkyard (Ebert said it better “a junkyard threw up”)

May was apparently the only month for movies this Summer. After Harry Potter rolls out on the 17th, all that’s left is the Fall schedule where studios unload their dreck in preparation for Christmas. Also, doesn’t it seem like a lot of Christmas-type movies came out this Summer? Angels and Demons, Whatever Works, Harry Potter, Public Enemies, even Imagine That… Something is afoot in marketing and distribution!

Interestingly, check this out. This month may suck, but:
REMAKE/SEQUEL METER: 2/10 a new best!

JULY 3rd
Public Enemies
Disclaimer: I am a little bitter towards this movie. My lovely film-professional girlfriend and I lived in Wisconsin until last Spring, at which point we moved to New York for more work. Public Enemies shows up and immediately hires like everyone in the state of WI on the production, giving them all a great credit while we compete against a million other people for the ten jobs here in Gotham. As an addition to the story, I originally come from a small town in central Illinois (Decatur) where, having left to go to WI, both Soderburgh’s The Informant and Spielberg’s Lincoln biopic set their production.

Sour grapes aside I like and trust Michael Mann (though I feel he can be a sloppy writer) and would be looking forward to this much more if it weren’t for the fact that the entire marketing campaign seems to be showing you tommy guns as much as possible. “Do you like tommy guns? Come see Public Enemies, starring Johnny Depp! (and Christian Bale) More tommy guns than any other Summer release!”

Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs
In a world of with Pixar, the Shrek franchise, Madagascar, it’s always seemed like Ice Age was the inferior market exploitation product. For this reason, I really can’t believe there have only been three Ice Age movies. I feel like Ice Age has always been there, the generic and low-rent alternative to CG with style and writers. This one? More of the same. Enjoy! Also, even if we grant him the cartoon ability to fall off cliffs, get crushed by boulders and blow himself up with ACME rockets, Scrat should have starved to death long-ago.

JULY 10th
Bruno
I like the mix of scripted segments and documentary scenes, and even the in-character events too. Cohen’s characters are always more art projects than simply movies, but let’s face the facts: You already know whether you’re going to like it. I’m surprised by how many fratties still say ‘Niiiice’ three years later. Man, has it already been three years?

I Love You, Beth Cooper
Chris Columbus? Well, that’s weird. At least he’s mixing it up, having followed up his two child-friendly Harry Potter films with Rent (did anyone actually see Rent?). This seems very much like a director-for-hire gig. Anyway, not much to be said about horny teens having an adventure. Count the number of times in the trailer the ROTC guy would be hauled off to jail for at least the night! Apparently I Love You, Beth Cooper takes place in an anarchist state, where geeky dudes use their lovably awkward wits to deal with assault and massive damage to personal property.

July 17th
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Yay! Finally another Big Movie! Harry Potter’s move to Summer (from last Christmas) looks brilliant up against this ridiculously poor schedule. Potter will easily dominate box office returns for at least four weeks, maybe six. The movie should herald a darker Potter (the books certainly go in that direction) and this series really should be PG13 by now, so it’s odd that we’re still looking at PG. The fans of Sorcerer’s Stone are eight full years older.

July 24th
G-Force
We have a pet guinea pig; he just wants to eat cucumbers and bite us. Think Will Arnett, Sam Rockwell and Zach Galifinakis can add sly adult comedy elements to anthropomorphic rodents? It would be nice, but this is likely a more-by-the-numbers-than-math-itself kids’ feature. Thing not to look forward to: Advances in computing power and CG software will someday reduce the budget of pictures like these to almost nothing, meaning thousands of them every year! Having watched the trailer, despite his 30-Rock greatness, Tracy Morgan stands out as being an absolutely terrible voice actor.

The Ugly Truth
At least it will lend itself to plenty of great puns about its name! The ugly truth is this: No reviewer or movie writer ever wants to really sit down with the stars of a formula will-they-won’t-they-obviously-they-will romantic comedy and talk about how they’re doing something different. I could copy/paste lorum ipsum here and you won’t care. You’ve already skipped ahead, maybe pausing for a moment because you didn’t know Gerard Butler was in it, or hadn’t heard of it altogether. Given the cute factor, I bet G-Force will even make a better date movie!

Orphan
And with this, July 24th goes down as the most embarassing three-film release day of 2009. Directors really should look more to the 1970s when they’re releasing Bad Seed knockoffs. I think ‘fog horror’ could really make a comeback, but instead psychological horror films just cribs the notes of the last ten years of startling scares. Remember Hollywood: startled doesn’t mean scared! “Who’s going to jump out at me from behind the closet door? OHMYGOD it’s a creepy little girl!”

July 31st
Funny People
Judd Apatow risks his regular audience with his ‘but seriously, folks’ moment. The more mature elements in his stuff has always gone over really well. This cast is huge and very talented (even RZA is in it!) and the movie’s trailer looks effective, successful, funny, sad, crafted! The caveat? Stand up comedy movies don’t do jack at the box office. “The ones where you try to kill Bruce Willis” might be the best line from a trailer this year.

Aliens in the Attic
Concluding July is… yet another kids’ movie! July = no school. Kids will see any old crap! Ha ha grandma is a street fighter? Ha ha the older brother is hitting himself? Crimony. Look, this site isn’t for hating everything. I want to conclude this month by saying that I wouldn’t be writing these if I didn’t like movies a lot. Seriously, each terrible blurb that goes by and month that slides into the dead season makes me more desperate to see something good. What’s the next major release I’m really looking forward to? Probably District 9. In the meantime, go find The Hurt Locker or some (any) other independent film not on this list. They need you!