Thursday, March 12, 2009

New Movie Releases of the Weekend of 3.13.09

- I believe this a remake of the original 1975 family film Escape to Witch Mountain and not a sequel to it although this film will be retaining some of the same mythology inherent with the original film. This one stars Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson as a cab driver who helps out two unusual kids with paranormal powers and must protect them in order to save humanity. I have to say, this looks like some light family fun. It stars the young girl from the incredibly depressing family film Bridge to Terabithia (seriously how is that a family film?), AnnaSophia Robb, who has a very unusual first name since AnnaSophia is all one word. Anyway, yeah the marketing for this film has been pretty intense so we shall see if it warrants the hype. Wait, what hype?









- I’m still wondering what market is there for a remake of a controversial film that was Wes Cravens directorial debut which was a remake of an Ingmar Bergman film called Virgin Spring and is one that not many people have seen. Basically, this is the story of a group of degenerates that kidnap and brutally assault 2 women and then wind up looking for shelter at the parents of one of the girls they killed. The key difference between the original film and this one is that one of the girls makes it out alive and the parents find her. It takes away some of the punch out the revenge, but well the original is just a terribly brutal film, so again I have to ask, what’s the market for a remake of a horror film not many people have seen? At least the My Bloody Valentine remake was in 3D.






- Another sex roadtrip comedy about a kid who wakes up from a 4 year coma only to find his ex-girlfriend is now Playboy’s Miss March. He sets off on a journey to seek her out and lose his virginity to her. Yay. If there is one genre, even beyond J-horror that I’m getting really tired of, it’s this deluge of sex comedies, many straight to dvd, that are somehow still riding the wave of American Pie from 1999.









- This premiered at last year’s Sundance Film Festival, so it’s taken a little over a year for this film to finally get a proper, if limited, release. The early buzz is that while not a great film, this should appeal to Amy Adams and Emily Blunt fans, which I am both so yeah can’t wait to see it. Sunshine Cleaning is about two sisters who start a biohazard removal and crime scene clean-ups businesses in order to help pay for one of the sisters son to go to a private school. Frankly I watched a documentary on the National Geographic Channel about people who have to clean up crime scenes and let me say, it’s truly disgusting. I doubt this film will show the horrors of the reality of it all and rather be cute and funny, which I think I actually prefer.






- This documentary is of Jake Rademarcher who sets out to understand the sacrifice and motivation of his two brothers who are serving in Iraq. Filmed over 3 and a half-years, Jake set out on two different trips to Iraq and stayed with 4 different army encampments in order to film an intimate story on why his two brothers gave up everything to serve their country. Evidently this is supposed to be pretty good, but there have been a lot of Iraq war documentaries already to have come out. Still, I love documentaries so I’ll have to check this one out soon.

No comments: