SUMMER MOVIE PREVIEW 2011

paul cooney, john cribbs & eric pfriender

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<<click here for Summer Movie Preview 2011 Part III: JULY>>

   August 5

RISE OF THE APES (Rupert Wyatt, 20th Century Fox)

In present day San Francisco, a scientist (James Franco) looks for a cure for Alzheimer's disease by experimenting on a chimpanzee named Caesar. The development of animal intelligence brings about a war for supremacy between humans and apes.

PAUL: Frieda! I don't know about the apes but something will be rising when the lovely Miss Pinto graces the screen with her incredibly skinny frame and unbelievable face. Spoiler alert...it's my cock! This could potentially be a good movie notwithstanding the distraction of my erection.  I don't much care for Roddy McDowall! Or James Franco for that matter...let's put that fey cocksucker out to pasture. Your Highness was a real big hit...aren't you some kind of movie star? Maybe you need a few more degrees, you pompous dick!

ERIC: So tempted... I love end of the world movies. And smart monkeys are scarier than zombies. And the effects look great. Seeing the intelligence behind the eyes of the apes is genuinely scary. But...this has that distinct Resident Evil feel of something thrown together by a bunch of hacks. It will almost definitely be terrible.

JOHN: Ape Apocalypse!

Believe it or not, I'm actually interested in seeing this. Although I'm hard pressed to think of a prequel that actually counts as a good movie (other than Fast Five, which is technically a prequel to Tokyo Drift*), I'm damn dirty curious to see if we find out how the Statue of Liberty ended up wrecked on the beach to Charlton Heston's legendary indignation. Maybe Brian Cox plays the maniac who blew it up? Waitaminute...the Statue isn't it San Francisco! Does the Golden Gate get wrecked first? The "twist" ending of the gowdawful Tim Burton remake was nonsensical, but at the same time it makes me wonder whether we're going to get to meet the monkey Abe Lincoln. Or are they saving that for the second prequel? Hm...what can we realistically expect from this movie?

If the preview is to be believed, we can expect apes and lots of 'em. Like, a whole barrel full. Visually, the CG monkeys are a huge step down from Rick Baker's makeup work from Burton's movie, but visually the lovely Freida Pinto is a vast improvement over Estella Warren. So that balances out at least.

And as an extra incentive, this movie offers Tyler Labine! Holy shit, Sock and Freida together at last!

I'm not honestly counting on this to transcend its sequel-to-much-hated-reboot status but I hope it's at least entertaining, and I hope it's lucrative enough that I can anticipate an immediate greenlight of my own ape movie: Empire of the Apes, a straight Bad Sleep Well-style political thriller that just happens to feature chimp protagonists and has no human characters whatsoever. In other words, apes in suits carrying briefcases but when the hero gets mixed up in a corporate scandal, he tries to elude monkey-cops by climbing up buildings and shit, with the chimp-police in pursuit! (Did one of the first five ape movies do this already? I'm going to have to check.)

Wait, did I miss something? Was the title recently changed to the stupider-sounding Rise of the Planet of the Apes? Were they honestly worried people would be confused about what this is? That's disappointing. Well, I'm not changing my title to Empire of the Planet of the Apes. I might consider Planet of the Empire of the Apes, but that's the only compromise I'd even consider.

* The Good the Bad and the Ugly is technically a prequel to the first two Dollars movies (it takes place during the Civil War, which it's established Lee Van Cleef is a veteran of in the second movie; the first one features a tombstone marked "1873"), so I guess that counts and is clearly the best. And I like Temple of Doom more than most people.

THE CHANGE-UP (David Dobkin, Universal)

A family guy (Jason Bateman) switches bodies with his slacker best friend (Ryan Reynolds) in an effort to romance his co-worker (Olivia Wilde.)

PAUL: Let's all change things back to the way they were before Jason Bateman kept bringing his special brand of blandness to roles that required people to be funny. Perhaps I'm being too hard on Bates...the fact that this season seems largely Cera-free is a blessing.

ERIC: I was shocked halfway through this trailer when it turned out to be another twist on Freaky Friday. Also, every time I see Ryan Reynolds I think he's Dane Cook, and that makes me hate him.

JOHN: My wife summed it up perfectly when we saw the preview for this in front of Fast Five: the formula to a mind-swapping comedy is that one of the switchees is young, the other is old. She's absolutely right. Freaky Friday...Like Father Like Son...Vice Versa...18 Again...Freaky Friday remake...even a porno I saw once - they all used that same set up. Because the hijinx is farmed from the concept of an immature mind in control of a mature body, setting up the hilarity of Judge Reinhold skateboarding or Dudley Moore chewing bubble gum or an old impotent man who's suddenly able to please young nymphettes. If the young-old arrangement can't be made, one of the two subjects should at least be a woman so that the guy whose brain goes into her body can feel himself up. "Woah, I have boobs now." That's comedy gold! It's not interesting to see a man in his late 20's swap bodies with a man in his mid 30's. "Oh, but one's a reckless womanizer while the other is a responsible husband and father" you say. Fuck you. They could have at least cast two adults with more specific personalities who you'd like to see mimic each other, like Nicolas Cage and John Travolta in a little movie called Face/Off. And Jason Bateman is no Nic Cage - he does nothing but bumble. I've already endorsed Ryan Reynolds in this Summer Preview, but I can think of lots of other pairs of actors who could communicate that "responsibility is good but there's also something to be said for a healthy dose of sowing the ol' wild oats and it just took switching bodies with another person for me to realize that" better than these two Flavor of the Months (just off the top of my head: Kal Penn and John Cho. Why restrict them to the H&K movies when they're clearly this generation's Wilder and Pryor?) If Wedding Crashers and Hall Pass could milk such sentimentality to get away with their various lewd gags without unearthing the corpsified concept of the body swap buddy comedy, why couldn't The Change-Up? (How about Luke and Owen Wilson switching bodies? That might be amusing.)

And how many films is Olivia Wilde going to turn up in this summer anyway? I don't want my movies littered with 27-year-old skeletons. I hate to sound like Paul Cooney, but is it too much to ask for a couple curves on our actresses these days? Do people really want to look at these old, talentless, gross-looking models like January Jones and Evangeline Lilly? Are productions saving money by not hiring caterers? Seriously, these broads are making Emma Stone look gorgeous and talented by comparison.

BELLFLOWER (Evan Glodell, Oscilloscope Pictures)

Woodrow (Evan Glodell) and Aiden (Tyler Dawson) devote their time to building flame-throwers and weapons of mass destruction, part of their preparation for the global apocalypse. Their plans are derailed temporarily when Woodrow falls for Milly (Jessie Wiseman), but when their relationship sours, the two guys begin to live out an even darker, more violent fantasy.

PAUL: Woodrow falls for Milly? What do Cuthbert and Bedelia have to say about that? When they aren't too busy making flame-throwers, do they ever sit down and discuss what possessed their parents to give them such anachronistic names? Unless Selena Gomez is involved I'll leave these bellflowers to some pansy ass gardener. It's Gomez or I'm gone from now on! I'm thinking of making it a policy this summer to only watch things in which she has an executive producer credit at minimum.

ERIC: I did not spend a very long time trying to find information about the film online, but what I did find is very intriguing. The description/synopsis makes it sound like something up my alley, and the trailer is just a bunch of pull-quotes that, if they are to be trusted, places this thing right in my wheelhouse. Weirdly, the film's website claims that Bellflower was shot on "handmade cameras." I don’t know what that means, but hopefully it doesn’t mean that the film looks like shit, because it sounds awesome.

JOHN: I'd like to give this directorial debut a chance, but I'm worried it's gonna be a little too slick for my taste. Those saturated colors make the picture look terrible. If it truly is a "mix of John Hughes and Mad Max," I'll accept no less than Rockatansky grilling Judd Nelson to shreds under the fiery wheels of his Interceptor while post-apocalypse punks make Anthony Michael Hall their little bitch. Fight Club comparisons also don't win me over.

  August 12

30 MINUTES OR LESS (Ruben Fleischer, Columbia)

Two fledgling criminals (Danny McBride and Nick Swardson) kidnap a pizza delivery guy (Jesse Eisenberg), strap a bomb to his chest, and inform him that he has 30 minutes to rob a bank or he'll blow up.

PAUL: Holy crap, is this really the only movie I want to see? It's tough having such fantastic taste and a truly refined palette I suppose. Danny McBride, Mr. Kenny Fucking Powers himself, robbing banks and perving all over the lovely Dilshad Vadsaria, the princess of Pakistan, the Loki of loveliness to Freida Pinto's Thor of tawny perfection. Could this movie be better than Gattaca? It's possible!

ERIC: The trailer has exactly zero moments that are funny, and the movie appears to be full of people who reached critical overexposure last year, like Jesse Eisenberg and Danny McBride (oh, second season of Eastbound and Down, you made me so very sad.) Stay away from this one.

JOHN: At first I was appalled that they were making a goofy comedy based on a real life crime in which an innocent guy was kidnapped and horribly killed. Then it came out that the alleged "victim" was actually part of the gang holding up the bank, so I felt less sorry for him...but the idea of turning the story into a yuck-fest still leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Besides, Adam West perfected the "anxiety over a bomb going off at any moment" schtick long ago, and as far as madcap mistaken identity bank robbery comedies go, I already seen Three Fugitives. I also saw Francis Veber's only other English language movie Out on a Limb, which sucked. The little girl from Three Fugitives and the unappealing female lead from Out on a Limb both had careers that quickly fizzled out after the release of their respective substandard flick; the Out on a Limb chick played the romantic interest in D3: Mighty Ducks 3 for god's sake. I predict the same for your TV actress crush, Paul. Sorry, but the world barely deserves one Freida.

The gorilla masks McBride and Swardson wear do look better than the CG monkeys in Rise of the (Planet of the) Apes.

THE HELP (Tate Taylor, Walt Disney Studios)

Jackson, Mississippi, 1962: aspiring writer Eugenia "Skeeter" Phelan (Emma Stone) returns home after college, where unexpected friendships with African-American maids Aibeleen Clark (Viola Davis) and Minny Jackson (Octavia Spencer) result in a book that gives a previously unheard voice to a community's suffering.

PAUL: Unattractive and annoyingly named Skeeter condescends two noble black cleaning ladies in this horrible movie. This reminds me of the time my daddy took two black orphans in to live with us in our penthouse in Manhattan. Then our white maid, Mrs. Garrett, left me to go squire around a bunch of girls at some prep school. I was like, yo Mrs G, can I go live at the prep school and help you with their laundry? And she was like, you just want to be sniffin on their panties ya perv. She was a wily one, that Mrs G.

ERIC: I agree with this movie's conceit that if people in the South are going to continue to own slaves, they should at least be nicer to them.

JOHN: They are "the help," but they are also "helpful!" It's been a while since we had a pseudo-prestigious "period movie in which white people learn black people are good," but this one seems all the more offensive being released in the Obama era. I guess "helping" to write a book is a little more notable than driving some old bag around town or helping Matt Damon with his golf swing...still, it just don't sit right. Uncomfortable race issues aside, I have about as much interest in seeing this as any film based on a popular Fried Green Tomatoes-type chick book produced by Chris Columbus and directed by some actor from Winter's Bone. Pre-selected to be both "successful" and "important." I don't suppose there's any gods left one could pray to in hopes of either or both of those things not coming to pass?

DON'T BE AFRAID OF THE DARK (Troy Nixey, FilmDistrict)

A young girl (Bailee Madison) sent to live with her father (Guy Pearce) and his new girlfriend (Katie Holmes) discovers creatures in her new home who want to claim her as one of their own.

PAUL: Some brat is sent to live in a new house with weird creatures and, what's even worse, Katie 'Yo' Holmes. Yuck. Why hasn't she taken the Cruise family name? You think you're too good for La Cruise? You name a baby Suri but you don't want to add the sexy gorgeous name Cruise? You're suspect!

ERIC: I don't understand. Is this a haunted house movie, or a movie about an infestation of rabid squirrels? It looks a little silly. If Guillermo del Toro's name weren't featured prominently in the marketing, nobody would be giving this a second look.

JOHN: I'm working on a theory that remakes are selected by actor. First there were those two Gene Wilder remakes - The Producers and Willie Wonka - and now, with this and True Grit from the end of last year, it seems studio heads are systematically checking off the filmography of Kim Darby (gasp! Could a Better Off Dead remake be far behind?? What actress but Darby could sell the adorable blitheness with which Darby mispronounces "Perrier?")

The teaser is one big cat scare, and the film was apparently given an R rating for "pervasive scariness," which means "expect more cat scares." On the other hand, one need only examine the list of movies the trailer played in front of to see the sad state of horror films in this day and age - The Last Exorcism, Devil, Paranormal Activity 2, Saw 3D, Scream 4 - and genuinely hope this will be an exception to the rule. Guillermo Del Toro's own work has been very good, and he's certainly more entitled to lending his aesthetic to up-and-coming directors whose name will be smaller than his on the poster than, say, M. Night Shayamalan, but I still can't help but feel people give him too much credit. You want to make a Hellboy movie or a Blade sequel, he's unquestionably your man. But as a big, bearded Mexican Val Lewton? I'm not sure he's quite risen to those ranks yet.

(I should see The Orphanage again, tho. I don't remember being too impressed when I originally watched it, but I keep remembering things about it I like and can't recall what it was about the movie that didn't work for me. And other people claim it's great. Other people are usually wrong, but I'm willing to give it another shot.)

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