Also: how are those Spy Kids doing?
Sure I already declared that the summer movie season was over weeks ago but that may have been a little premature. Now? This weekend’s three new cinematic offerings prove it once and for all. Summer’s done and dusted and we’re in for a couple weeks of crap.
Advanced word on Conan the Barbarian has been almost exclusively negative. Game of Thrones fans — myself among them — may be salivating at the chance to see Jason Momoa slice open the throats of thousands of ancient-world assholes but it sounds like Conan ’s less Khal Drogo than imitation Zach Snyder-style CGI.
To be fair this movie was probably a bad idea in the first place. Momoa is a one-of-a-kind physical specimen and he could definitely kill me if he wanted to. But even Game of Thrones which never shied away from gratuitous violence understood to use him sparingly. In that show’s first season Momoa’s character was established as the best warrior in the world right off the bat but the audience had to wait a full eight episodes before we got to see him slit a man’s throat and rip out his tongue. It was short sweet and worth the wait.
But after that iconic kill — and I don’t use the word iconic lightly here — Conan just looks like overkill. The 1982 Conan ’s appeal was based largely on camp and watching Momoa kill hordes of CGI beasts for two hours can’t possibly live up to the Arnold-starring original’s ridiculousness or the badassery of Momoa’s defining Game of Thrones role.
The most misleading title of a new release this week is definitely One Day . It’s actually about 20 days they’re just spread out over two decades. Someone’s got to take a stand against this outrageous titular misdirection.
I guess the movie’s about Anne Hathaway meeting a dreamy Brit played by Jim Sturgess and hanging out for 24 hours. Whatever they do — I assume it’s sex — is supposedly pretty profound because for some reason they decide to meet up once a year for one day to catch up.
As far as I can tell that’s the whole movie. There’s obviously something I’m missing because nothing about the plot summary I just wrote suggests any form of linear narrative or anything even remotely interesting. I’d be totally down to meet up with Anne Hathaway once a year but even if we’d had sex (which I assure you we haven’t) it wouldn’t make for an interesting story when I told it to my friends let alone an interesting movie.
At least Fright Night has vampires I guess. These days it’s played out to say vampires are played out so in the interest of staying hip and relevant I’m just going to heavily hint that vampires are played out and move on.
Now that we’ve moved on it’s worth noting that Colin Farrell’s career makes no sense. Either he’s on the verge of stardom and derails everything by making a couple terrible movies that everyone hates ( S.W.A.T. Alexander Daredevil probably Fright Night ) or he’s playing charming but haunted characters in under-the-radar independent movies ( In Bruges Tigerland ) and everyone’s predicting he’ll skyrocket to the top of the Hollywood A-List.
They’re banking pretty heavily on his star power to market Fright Night but that probably says more about there being nothing else worth marketing it around than it does about Farrell’s ability to bring in the bank. It’s probably worth putting money on another Esquire headline: “Colin Farrell rises from the ashes” next year.
Also there’s a new Spy Kids movie. And it’s called Spy Kids: All the Time in the World suggesting a serious lack of urgency. Maybe the spying kids meet up with Anne Hathaway and decide to only spy for one day a year? Nope director Robert Rodriguez is smart enough to know that a movie about doing the same thing year-after-year would be terrible.
I’m pretty sure the spy kids in this Spy Kids movie aren’t the same spy kids who were in the original Spy Kids but it’d be nice to see how that first set of spy kids are doing. How have they managed the pressures of being spy young adults? Did the years they devoted to international espionage help pay for school? If not how did they deal with the pressures of paying off their student loans in a depressed economy or did the economic turbulence not affect the spy game? I’m sure the franchise will get to all of that in the next film hopefully in 3-D.
