Coming this week will be two reviews of movies that I found to be just excellent: Red 2 and Pacific Rim. Pacific Rim was released this past weekend, and the follow-up to the 2010 Bruce Willis movie comes out on the 19th. I was very, very disappointed that Grown Ups 2 and Despicable Me 2 beat out Pacific Rim, especially because the Adam Sandler vehicle was so critically panned. It slightly infuriates me. Trailers after the break!
Jobs - August 13
I was quite apprehensive about Ashton Kutcher in the titular role as industry mogul Steve Jobs, but then I saw the picture comparison of young Jobs and costumed Kutcher; the resemblance is uncanny. I really enjoyed this trailer for the biopic directed by Joshua Stern. The film looks at the career of Jobs from college dropout to icon and the road the took him there. The film also stars Josh Gadd who plays Steve Wozniak, Jobs' partner through the Apple years, with the cast rounded out by Durmot Mulroney, James Woods, JK Simmons, and Matthew Modine.
The Lifeguard - August 30
In a film a lot of people my age can relate to, The Lifeguard stars Kristen Bell as Leigh, whose love life and career have just left her treading water. Upon returning to her hometown, she moves back in with her parents and finds herself stuck in the shallow end. The film, which did quite well at Sundance, looks to have a very interesting look at the life of a Millennial. (BTW, that word is being used to death - and Millennials are being blamed for everything.) So many people around my age are in a place of transition, where sometimes it takes heading back to your hometown, picking up a job beneath your pay grade in order to figure out where exactly you're supposed to be.
12 Years a Slave - October 18
As a lifelong lover of history and scholar of Antebellum America, I've longed for films which give insight into the black experience. As Forrest Wickman writes in the trailer review of 12 Years a Slave "For as many movies as there are about gladiators and Israelites and subjects as dark and difficult as the Holocaust, the subject has been explored rarely." Glory is one of my all-time favorite movies, but Matthew Broderick's Robert Gould Shaw is made the hero of the film.
Read Wickman's trailer review for very nice synopsis of the film. The cast is absolutely amazing and I am so very intrigued by Chiwetel Ejiofor as Soloman Northup born a free man in New York, but kidnapped and sold into slavery in Louisiana. With a supporting cast of Brad Pitt, Paul Giamatti, Michael Fassbender, Alfre Woodard, and Benedict Cumberbatch, I see this as a major Academy Award contender in 2014. Perhaps Steve McQueen will be the first African American director to win an Oscar for Best Picture.
Saving Mr. Banks - December 20
"Winds in the East, mist coming in, like something is brewing, about to begin." This will be my family's Christmas movie, I've already decreed it. The film stars Emma Thompson as PL Travers, the creator of Mary Poppins, who is brought to California in order for Walt Disney (Tom Hanks) to convince her to allow the Walt Disney Company to make a movie version of her book. With the development of Mary Poppins the biggest part of the film, it also explores why Travers created the character in the first place. The trailer gives away a bit of an important detail that I would have prefered not to know, but I very nearly cried when watching it.
Mary Poppins is my favorite live-action Disney film and I would watch it over and over. I even got to see it at the Kentucky Theater last year and it was practically perfect in every way. If Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke do not have cameos, I'll be sorely disappointed.
Seventh Son - January 17
I love Jeff Bridges. I really do. I'm delighted to see him in RIPD, but I think he's going to be even better in his role in Seventh Son, in which he'll play Master Gregory, who teaches his apprentice Tom Ward(Ben Barnes) how to hunt evil spirits. Based on The Spook's Apprentice, book one in the Wardstone Chronicles by Joseph Delany, Seventh Son also stars Julianne Moore and Kit Harrington.
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