April 2015 - Look Ahead(?)

Hey, it's April!  Have you met April?  She's a lovely month.  Young, full of hope, with bright green eyes, and ready for life.  Please treat her well, she's kind and confident, but also very innocent despite her proud ways.  Mistreatment of months is now a crime punishable by federal prosecutors.  I knew a guy who slapped July 2011 once, he won't be out of prison for another six years.  So be good to April, and she'll be good to you, and we won't have to get any Grand Juries involved.

Anyway, here are the movies and video games coming out in April 2015... I think:

Predator: Pilgrim Hunt (April 3rd) - So finally a fourth... or maybe sixth Predator film, the long-running 80s franchise dating all the way back to the hallowed muscled days of Schwarzenegger himself.  I was rather easy on Robert Rodriguez's previous film in the franchise, "Predators" but I am not really a big fan of just rebooting the franchise again.  Especially since this time, the Predators are not fighting modern action stars, but rather are going back to 1692 where they will be fighting Puritans at the Salem Witch Trials.  Somehow the idea of Michael Cera with a pitchfork is less of a serious threat than Schwarzenegger with a machine gun, you know?
--Chances to be Good:  40%.  "Alien vs. Predator" was silly enough but "The Scarlet Letter vs. Predator" is just too much.

The Astronaut Loner (April 3rd) - Well, here's your big arthouse movie of the month, this one from Lars von Trier.  Michael Cera stars as a cantankerous misanthropic astronaut in terrible old age make-up living seven million light years away from Earth, spending his days mostly refusing to answer his phone.  Stuck somewhere in the Horsehead Nebula, Astronaut Cera sits lonely, bitterly recounting to himself how he was cheated out of five dollars from the girl at Panera Bread.  Later he befriends a cute alien friend, and they get married.
--Chances to be Good:  10%.  Since this is von Trier you know explicit sex is going to happen, and probably some disturbing scenes of self-mutilation too.

March 2015 Look-Ahead

Wait, February is over?  Already?  That was strange, it only lasted four exact weeks.  Anyway, now that it is over, we have a new month, one that is called "March".  The Planet Blue court mystics and witchdoctors tell me that this month will see the end of winter, a day where night and day will be the same length, and a couple of weekends where most of the nation will be drunk to celebrate a foreign holy man who hated snakes.  There's also a rumor about the End of Days floating around here, but that's probably nothing.

For this blog's purposes, however, March will see new movies and video games!  So let's Look-Ahead as we always do.

"CHAPPiE" (March 6th) - Hey, a remake of "Short Circuit"!  ...You all know "Short Circuit" right?  ...It was a movie.  ...In the 80s.  ...There was a robot named Johnny 5 who came to life.  Whatever, you all need more culture, okay?  Anyway, "CHAPPiE" comes to us form Neill Blomkamp, the visionary who gave us "District 9" and the total hack that gave us "Oblivion" "Elysium".  It stars Blomkamp's favorite actor, Sharlto Cooper as Chappie, an emoticon-faced robot that comes to life and has to fight an angry Hugh Jackman.  Blomkamp is also obsessed with practical-looking greasy metal machines, and Chappie is obviously one of his creations.  This is a lot cuter than anything he has made before, so it is something of a gamble.
--Chances to be Good:  70%.  This is one of those movies where my honed swordsman instinct on movie quality has no real answer.  It could be brilliant, it could be "Oblivion".

"Unfinished Business" (March 6th) - I have no faith at all in Vince Vaughn at this stage in his career.  The more boozed-up washed-out middle aged failures he plays the less I am convinced this is an act, and the more he depresses me.  Luckily he is sharing the screen with a young Dave Franco, playing Mike Pancake, who actually seems to have some fun clueless energy.  Also there is a Tom Wilkinson for some reason.  The plot is that three businessmen must close a deal in Europe and everything goes wrong in the typical bawdy comedy way.
--Chances to be Good:  50%.  This actually does not look too bad.  Not really all that funny, but not that bad.  Nobody is screaming at least, so it is more tolerable than most comedy trailers.

February 2015 Look-Ahead

So January was a month. Now there is February, another month.

This month of course, I'm going to have to actually review something from 2015.  Since I pretty much wrote off January, I am now finally caught up, more or less.  February is the true start of the year for Planet Blue.  We have a nice selection of delayed blockbusters, blockbusters the studio had no faith in, and sleazy Valentine's Day SnM porn for women.  But even so, there is still unfinished January business to begin the month with:  "Song of the Sea", "Predestination", and one film that has surprised me, the embarrassingly awful "The Loft".  "The Loft" has put back gender relations so far that humans now reproduce asexually.  Other business will be a Superbowl review, a list of the Worst Romantic Movies to watch on Valentine's Day, and I might even manage to get a video game or anime post out this month, who knows?

Anyway, let's now Look Ahead at the movies and video games of February 2014.  (Video games back by reader demand.  ...One comment, but that's a lot of demand for me.)

"Jupiter Ascending" (February 6th) - Mila Kunis is an Earth girl.  Channing Tatum is an elf from Jupiter.  They are going to bang in space for freedom.  Just while Eddie Redmayne is trying to win the Oscar for Best Stephen Hawking he is now hamming it up as the Emperor of Space, or something.  You can count on a huge visual spectacle, you can count on the film being a tad pretentious since the Wachoswki Siblings are making it.  And Sean Bean's character is going to die for the sin of being played by Sean Bean.  Lasers, spaceships, sexy White girls, all of it inevitably to be overshadowed and forgotten by later bigger releases in 2015.
--Chances to be Good:  50%.  This film was supposed to be a July 2014 release, and was pulled back to fight for an easy weekend in February.  Not a great sign.  A silly space opera always catches my eye though.

January 2015 Look Ahead

BH is back.  Posts are now flowing at a nice almost-schedule pace.  I think it is time to resurrect an old series, the "Look Ahead" posts.  I guess bringing this thing back is more or less my 2015 New Years resolution.  Links to the trailers are provided if some reason you mistrust my snap judgment.

Unfortunately the first month of every year is January.  January is the shithole season of the film calendar, when the leftovers of the explosive month of December and high-minded Oscarbait choke out Hollywood's usual garbage.  Movies that get released in this month do so only because there is virtually no serious competition.  This means that you are paying money to watch things that are just barely above "straight-to-Redbox" fair.  We will just have to hold each other through this dark period and hope for the best, while knowing that everything is going to suck.

The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death (January 2nd) - It is the height of the London blitz in WWII, so small easily-scared children must be evacuated to a haunted house in the middle of a godforsaken swamp.  The original "the Woman in Black" was an average horror film starring Daniel Radcliff of whose existence I completely forgot.  I guess some people remembered it because it is getting a sequel.
--Chances to be Good:  0%.  It's a January horror release.  I'm a realist about these things.

June 2014 Look-Ahead

June.  June.  June.  June.  June.  June.  June.  June.  June.  June.  June.  June.  June.  June.  June.  June.  June.  June.  June.  June.  June.  June.  June.  June.  June.  June.  June.  June.  June.  June.  June.  June.  June.  June.  June.  June.  June.  June.  June.  June.  June.  June.  June.  June.  June.  June.  June.  June.  June.  June.

Let's look ahead at the upcoming movies and video games for June 2014:

Edge of Tomorrow (June 6th) - Well, I don't envy Warner Bros. right now, because "Edge of Tomorrow" is pretty much bound to flop.  The trailers promise some kind of SciFi war epic involving time travel, the exact substance of which makes very little sense to me or anybody else.  Tom Cruise gets to go inside a suit of power armor and thanks to remaining a bankable star gets to go inside Emily Blunt, an actress decades younger than himself.  For some reason he gets to repeat every day in order to properly defeat a race of evil aliens or something.  It looks like "Killzone: the Movie", only with humans instead of human-like trolls as the main characters.  Personally my highest hope is that this film turns out more original and interesting than last year's SciFi action movie starring Tom Cruise, "Elysium".  Or maybe that was "Oblivion".  Who cares?  They were both equally forgettable.
--Chances to be Good:  40%.  Director Doug Liman is exactly the kind of jobber who would willingly jump into making a completely unimpressive SciFi action movie.  I have no hopes.

The Fault in Our Stars (June 6th) - Here is a romantic teen comedy starring two kids dying of cancer.  For movies built directly with adolescents in mind, it is easily more high-minded and intelligent than most of the shit Hollywood sends that age demographic's way.  Hey, even if it is just "Twilight" with terminal diseases replacing sex vampires, we're already moving in a good direction.  This is definitely not my kind of movie for a number of reasons, but it actually looks well-meaning and heartfelt.  Unlike Twilight, the main couple seems to actually like each other.  It looks charming.
--Chances to be Good:  70%.  There is always a possibility that diving deeply into misery and agony can be pandering too.  I just hope it isn't.

May 2014 Look-Ahead

May I muse on the month of May?  May is the motherly monarch of the months, a magnetic monopoly of Mitzah morality. Merely mentioning the month of May memorizes mortal men in mad merriment for melodic music on metronomes.  Myriad magpies in milky marigolds make May mumble on top of maple mahogany.  May is much more than Magnesium Mujaheddin militarism massing mechanized monstrosities.  Maybe May is multiple mudslingers muckraking malevolently in malfunctioning malfeasance, but May is mostly microscopic macrocosms, millennium millimeters, and mystical mathematics.  Mention also, I must, is the misbegotten maggots mellowing in menstruating malnourished murky mucus that make the middle of May's midmonth moribund.  May I muse on the month of May?

Let us look ahead a the movies and video games which are coming out in May 2014:

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (May 2nd) - Spider-Man returns for his fifth movie, but only his second amazing movie, apparently.  May this year is completely stuffed with Blockbusters, with every week having its own huge release.  And we do not start small, since "The Amazing Spider-Man 2" is seemingly the vanguard for all of Sony's hopes and dreams for the next century.  Every goddamn visit to the movies for seemingly a decade has had a trailer for this movie, I am so sick of looking at Spider-Man's red and blue uniform.  The movie itself seems to be skipping straight to "Spider-Men 3"'s mistake of too many villains, with three bad guys to fight.  It will be a mess.  All of this is going to set up Sony's answer to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, with "The Amazing Spider-Man 3", "The Sinister Six", and a "Venom" movie all coming out in the next few years.  So eventually there won't even be regular movies, everything will just be a superhero film.  Could this please be a flop so that particular dark future does not come to pass?
-- Chances to be Good:  60%.  I liked the first "Amazing Spider-Man" but I cannot remember for the life of me if Dennis Leahry died at the end or not.

Belle (May 2nd) - Perhaps the stuffiest film of 2014 yet, "Belle" is an English drama film about an upper class British family raising an illegitimate Black child as one of their own, and the social wackiness that ensues.  It is based upon the real case of Dido Elizabeth Belle, a gentlewoman of African descent that lived in an abolitionist family in England during the 18th and 19th centuries.  And that's really all there is to say about that.
-- Chances to be Good:  61%.  Tom Wilkinson is in it, there is that.

April 2014 Look-Ahead

The bitter misery of winter has finally passed.  After a brutal season in which Roland Emmerich's predictions for a global warming apocalypse turned out to be adorably naive compared to the weather nightmare the Northeast suffered, the Sun has come out.  The evil snow goons have melted, mankind is victorious for another year.  And now we can bury our dead, rebuild our homes, and look forward to a glorious future of warmth and peace.

At least until it gets cold again, which since it is April, will probably be within the next thirty seconds.  Now comes the freakish weather cycle where spring, winter, and summer will do epic battle across the sky, as the climate of New Jersey flips wildly back and forth with an unpredictable madness that will most likely eradicate all life on this planet.  We know at the end that summer shall rule, leaving winter beaten and bloody for another six months.  But until then, our world will be ruined by the war of the seasonal gods.  Warm lovely days will bleed into frigid deathly winter, and then suddenly after torrential rains flood our streets, the entire landscape will be set ablaze by 10,000 degree solar flares.  What kind of a sick month makes you turn on your air conditioner one day and wear a winter jacket another?  April, that's what.  Watch your balls, because April is coming for them.  And just when you think its safe, May will come wanting revenge!

Anyway, since its the first of the month, let us do our usual recap show.  I'm thinking this time we will begin with the major video games getting released in April:

APRIL FOOLZ!!!  I GOT YOU!  I GOT YOU SO BAD!  HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!

No, we're doing movies first.

March 2014 Look-Ahead

February has come and gone.  It was a month, as most of them are, this one only twenty-eight days of our lives.  Those days are not coming back, so I do hope you spent them well.  Reading this blog is clearly one of the best ways of living a life, just behind a constant 24-hour orgy, and being the Padishah-Emperor of the Moon.  However, if you are one of the more confused and less fortunate souls in this world and require a guide to planning your life for the next thirty-one days, here is a Look-Head for March, 2014.  First, the Movies:

300: Rise of an Empire (March 7th) - This is the long-awaited sequel to the 2007 film "300", which was based upon the Battle of Thermopylae in the Greco-Persian Wars.  "300" was innovative in that it proved to modern audiences that even 2500 years later, we can still make disgusting racist propaganda films against an empire that died out hundreds of years before the birth of Christ.  I'm not sure what this title "Rise of an Empire" refers to:  no empires rose during the Greco-Persian Wars.  Judging from the trailers, "300: Rise of an Empire" features the Battle of Salamis, the tide-turning naval battle where (spoilers) the Greeks win.  However, the Wikipedia page tells me that "Rise of an Empire" will also involve the Battle of Artemisium, which occurred at the same time as Thermopylea, and for some reason, the Battle of Marathon, which was a generation earlier.  So this movie is a prequel, midquel, and a sequel, so it is altogether just as confusing as its title.  On a fairer note, Eva Green looks like a perfect choice for the Persian commander, Artemisia.  On a less fair note, the star of this movie is apparently some bland White guy.
-- Chances to Be Good:  30%.  Focus on Eva Green, we might have a movie.

Mr. Peabody & Sherman (March 7th) - This is an adaptation of the 1960s cartoon characters, Mr. Peabody and Sherman, who used to travel through time in between episodes of "Rocky & Bullwinkle".  Let us hope that "Mr. Peabody & Sherman" fares better than Rocky and Bullwinkle's horrifyingly awful feature film from 2000 - not that I wish to unearth any repressed abuse memories within my audience.  DreamWorks is producing this creation, and it has some very crisp animation.  Unfortunately, nothing in the trailers seems to really "pop" for me.  It might make for some very basic family entertainment, or maybe it will surprise us all and be something special.  Time will tell.
-- Chances to be Good:  50%.  The little blond girl in the trailers wears too much eyeliner.

February 2014 Look-Ahead

I'm introducing another new feature on this blog.  This is the Monthly Look-Ahead.  So that you, being helpless consumers lost in the stormy seas of several billion or so pop culture items, can know exactly what to see and what not to see, or what to play or not to play.  To elaborate, its me using my gigantic and incredibly fashionable brain to predict what is going to be good and what is going to suck in the world of movies and video games.  Of course, that gigantic brain is wrong about 30% of the time when it comes to predictions, so maybe my hubris will be struck down with lightning from the heavens and "RoboCop" is going to be the best movie of 2014.  I doubt it.

So first up, the motion pictures:

"The LEGO Movie" (February 7th) - Its LEGOs, in a movie, having an adventure.  Its a movie I have to see.  Having been born up as a male (so my parents claim) in the last half century, I have played a lot of LEGOs.  I used to build capital-class starships out of my 5,000 LEGO box, which were solid as bricks and would have made for excellent blunt weapons against zombie hordes.  And in case you weren't sold already, the movie has Batman.  It appears to be a fun and not-very-serious comedy, for example the evil villain attacking LEGO world is using glue to seal the pieces together in the greatest of childhood playtime heresies.  There is a chance it might come off as juvenile, but I think its going to be a great ride.

"The Monuments Men" (February 7th) - George Clooney is directing and starring in this World War II drama featuring a band of elderly out-of-shape art scholars running up to the front lines of the Allied advance through France to save precious artworks and artifacts from Nazi destruction.  So it appears to be something of a comedy with some interesting historical and cultural questions, like is saving some dusty artwork really all that important when compared to fighting a war for freedom and whatever else the politicians are using to justify your death this year?  However, there is a pretty big omen of disaster floating over this production.  It was originally scheduled for a December 18th release, well within Oscar country, but then got delayed two months, surrendering any hopes for awards, into the relatively mediocre month of February.  This will either turn out to be perfectly fine, or the 2014 "Gangster Squad".