Fall Movie Preview

After a bleak and mostly boring summer at the theater, the fall movie season begins. There are, of course, the big ones we all know about: the next Star Wars episode, the latest Marvel movie (Thor: Ragnarok, in case you’re wondering), the Blade Runner sequel that was 34 years in the making, another Lego something or other. But there are also some other, quirkier films coming our way that hopefully will find their way into theaters near us.

Late September will see the arrival of Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House. Liam Neeson stars in this based-on-real-events thriller about the man who is better known as Deep Throat. Felt was a higher up in the FBI and was the informant who spoke to Woodward and Bernstein who wrote the Watergate stories that eventually led to Richard Nixon’s resignation. It seems as though it will be All The President’s Men but from the perspective of the shadowy figure smoking in the parking garage. Neeson looks the part and the tone seems appropriately tense and paranoid. I look forward to seeing this version of one of our nation’s pivotal moments.

 

In October, we’ll see the release of Suburbicon. It’s the first film directed by George Clooney since 2014’s The Monuments Men sputtered into theaters. Not a lot is known about the actual story, but much is being made of the fact that the script was written by the Coen brothers. Interesting fact, the script was actually written by the brothers in 1986, just after the release of their first film, Blood Simple. I’m not saying the script will be bad. I mean, Blood Simple is a fantastic film, but I do wonder. If it’s good, why did it take 30 years to produce? I’m a fan of Clooney’s direction generally and of the Coens’ writing almost always, but I will watch for this one with a bit of a suspicious eye. 

 

November will welcome Kenneth Brannagh’s adaptation of Agatha Christie’s famous thriller, Murder on the Orient Express. After being hailed as another Orson Welles in his 20s, Branagh has walked a fascinatingly uneven path as a filmmaker. Sometimes he directs Marvel movies and live action Cinderella, and sometimes some of his projects, like this one, seem like a slightly desperate bid for awards. He superloads the cast with stars, chooses high class subject material (like his four hour adaptation of Hamlet from 1996), and soaks the thing in ornate set and costume design and throws the whole thing at the Oscar and Golden Globes wall to see what sticks. The thing about Brannagh is that he is clearly a guy who loves film and all its components. So even if a project like Murder on the Orient Express seems like that kid in first grade raising his hand saying, “Ooh, ooh, pick me!” they’re still usually a pleasure for other film fans to watch. 

 Finally, a film that has already had its limited release but hopefully will come to disc or streaming sometime this fall is the documentary California Typewriter, a love letter to and an examination of those clunky, outdated machine with the keys and carriage return. The documentary features various typewriter-loving celebrities like Tom Hanks, John Mayer, and Sam Shepard as well as an artist who makes sculptures out of typewriter parts. But according to the film’s website, it is also the story of California Typewriter, “one of the last standing repair shops left in America dedicated to keeping the aging machines clicking.” As a typerwriter lover myself, I am particularly interested in the light this film shines on why some of us are still moved by this antiquated technology.

So there are four films that might be a little something different for you this fall. Hopefully, some or all of them come our way so we can find out if they’re as interesting as they look.

Logan Lucky

When director Steven Soderberg made the medical drama Side Effects in 2013, it was supposedly his final film. At least for a while. Sometimes he called it a retirement, sometimes just a sabbatical. But after nearly thirty years in the business, Soderberg wanted to take a break from making movies and do other things. He did some tv, produced other people’s films, took up painting. But I don’t think anyone really believed that he would stay away from big budget filmmaking forever. The director of Sex, Lies and Videotape, Traffic, Erin Brockovitch, Ocean’s Eleven and about twenty other movies is too talented and too much of a movie lover himself to ever really leave the business. 

 But I was initially surprised that Logan Lucky is the film that brought him back after a four year break. It’s the story of Jimmy Logan, a former high school football hotshot, who blew out his knee and now just gets by working construction in rural Virginia and South Carolina. He adores his beautiful little daughter and does his best to be a good dad despite his relative poverty and the distain of his ex-wife. When he loses his job and finds out his ex may be moving his daughter several hours away and he doesn’t have money to hire a lawyer to fight her, Jimmy decides it’s time to enact a plan he’s had brewing for a while.

Along with his brother and a couple of other accomplices, Jimmy plans to rob the Charlotte Motor Speedway. Channing Tatum plays Jimmy and Adam Driver plays his Iraq-veteran-turned bartender brother, Clyde. The two of them have a funny chemistry that’s heightened by Tatum’s easy-going good looks and Driver’s utterly deadpan awkwardness. They bring on demolitions expert Joe Bang played by a bleach blonde, completely committed Daniel Craig.

It’s zippy, funny, light, and unexpectedly absurd at times. What it’s not is particularly original. Soderberg himself described it as a de-glammed version of Ocean’s Eleven and that’s exactly what it is. Danny Ocean’s monologue about how the house always wins in gambling is a slick, more glamorous delivery of  how Jimmy Logan feels – the deck is stacked against a regular guy unless he does something to change his luck. So everything from the crew of misfit helpers to the carefully orchestrated heist sequence to the unexpected reveal of how the heist actually went down to the big stars in unexpected cameos to the hint at the possibility of a sequel at the end, everything is beat-for-beat almost exactly the same as Soderberg’s very successful 2001 version of Ocean’s Eleven.

So why do it? Why would such a familiar film be the thing to bring Soderberg out of his semi-retirement? Turns out, one thing he’s been thinking about for a long time is Hollywood’s marketing and distribution system and how he doesn’t like it. Soderberg doesn’t want Hollywood studios to have all the power when it comes to advertising a movie and getting it in front of audiences. So with Logan Lucky, he basically raised the money himself and struck a series of really unusual deals that gave him almost complete control over the entire process from the final edit of the film to what trailers played in which cities when. The idea, I think, was to choose a project with strong commercial appeal so that his plan would work and he could do it again in the future with perhaps more challenging or experimental material. So Logan Lucky’s familiarity was all part of the game plan for a bigger project Soderberg was taking on. Though it’s a funny, enjoyable film, it doesn’t look like it’s going to provide the game change the director hoped for. With a budget of 29 million dollars, Logan Lucky has cleared has just barely cleared 10 million worldwide so far. It seems that Logan Lucky may not be so lucky after all.

End of Summer Wrap Up

It’s September, and so school is back in, the leaves are just beginning to turn a bit, and it’s a little cool in the mornings when I walk my dog. Summer’s over, my friends. But before we say goodbye to it altogether, what did you do this summer? Go to the beach maybe? Take that big family trip out west? Maybe you spent it putting together that ten thousand piece jigsaw puzzle that’s still sitting on the dining room table. Whatever you did, it’s a good bet that you didn’t go to the theater very often.

I know I didn’t, which seems wrong for a movie review guy, but I come by my lack of movie attendance honestly. Our basement flooded this summer, and so I spent most of June and July tearing out carpet and drywall, hanging and sanding sheetrock, and generally hating every second of it. But it seems like the rest of the country was preoccupied too.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, this Labor Day weekend, which traditionally marks the end of the summer movie season, was the tail-end of a historic summer box office downturn. North American movie revenue is down 16% over this last year which is the steepest decline the industry has seen in decades. According to the movie money tracking site, Box Office Mojo, the number of actual theater tickets sold is at a 25 year low. August in particular was a slow month with one industry paper headline calling it “The August Death March.” This was the first Labor Day weekend in 25 years in which studios failed to release any new major movie. The movies that were in the theaters were led by the Ryan Reynolds/Sam Jackson action comedy, The Hitman’s Bodyguard, but leading a race of dead horses isn’t much of a victory. Hitman’s Bodyguard made 12 million dollars over the weekend, or roughly the equivalent of the loose change in Samuel Jackson’s couch after filming a “What’s in your wallet?” credit card commercial.

It’s been a dismal summer at the movies for sure, but why? We can place a lot of the blame on the movies themselves. So many of the big budget tent poles from the last three or four months were sequels, remakes, reboots, and regurgitated. Who wants to see a fifth Pirates of the Caribbean or Transformers movie? No one, apparently. Rebooting the Mummy with Tom Cruise? Nope. Cars 3, Despicable Me 3, Alien #47, and the big screen adaptation of Baywatch that no one ever asked for? No, no, no, and definitely no. Part of why hardly anyone went to the movies this summer is that there just wasn’t much to watch.

There were standouts, of course, a few exceptions. Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk is still making money and tickling critics. Wonder Woman, in addition to being great, was the most financially successful movie of the summer and the second highest grossing movie of 2017 so far. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 did just fine too along with a handful of others.

But overall, the message of summer 2017 to Hollywood studios was not “If you build it, they will come” but rather, “If you keep building and rebuilding the same stuff over and over again and treating us like we’re mindless idiots who only love spectacle and repetition, there’s always Netflix.”

I don’t want Hollywood to fail (although failure is a central part of its ongoing history and evolution). I love movies and I love going to the movie theater. I love writing about wonderful movies that succeed because they’re good. I’m kind of a sucker that way. So listen up, Hollywood. Give us something new, something moving, something powerful, something worth seeing. Give me something to see that’s better than refinishing my basement. Please.