{"id":2305,"date":"2012-04-19T14:35:46","date_gmt":"2012-04-19T14:35:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/?p=2305"},"modified":"2012-04-19T14:35:46","modified_gmt":"2012-04-19T14:35:46","slug":"dont_mind_me_2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/2012\/04\/19\/dont_mind_me_2\/","title":{"rendered":"Don&#8217;t Mind Me&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Just jotting down a few notes about upcoming movies of interest&#8230;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><em>The Raven<\/em> (April 27) &#8212; John Cusack plays Edgar Allan Poe trying to stop a serial killer who&#8217;s using Poe&#8217;s own stories as inspiration. In what universe does that <i>not<\/i> sound cool?<\/li>\n<li><em>The Pirates! Band of Misfits<\/em> (April 27) &#8212; Animated flick from Aardman Studios, the people behind <em>Chicken Run<\/em> and the <em>Wallace and Gromit<\/em> shorts. I love their stuff, and this one looks like more of the same old fun.<\/li>\n<li><em>The Avengers<\/em> (May 4) &#8212; This ambitious multi-film\/franchise crossover event had my box-office dollars from the moment Samuel L. Jackson appeared as Nick Fury in <em>Iron Man.<\/em> The fact that it&#8217;s starting to look as if it&#8217;s actually <i>good<\/i> is just icing on the cake.<\/li>\n<li><em>Dark Shadows<\/em> (May 11) &#8212; Lots of folks seem to be down on Tim Burton these days, but I usually enjoy his films at least on the first viewing, and this reboot of the old supernatural soap opera of the 1970s looks really funny to me.<\/li>\n<li><em>Men in Black 3<\/em> (May 25) &#8212; The <a href=\"http:\/\/youtu.be\/Y2r9AIfYcV8\">trailer<\/a> looks like more of the same old MiB schtick we saw in the first two, but I liked them a lot, so that&#8217;s not necessarily a bad thing. And Josh Brolin&#8217;s impersonation of Tommy Lee Jones looks to be uncanny, and worth the price of admission itself.<\/li>\n<li><em>Prometheus<\/em> (June 8) &#8212; Director Ridley Scott swears up and down this film is not a prequel to <em>Alien<\/em>, but I ain&#8217;t buying it, and so I&#8217;m pretty ambivalent about this one.\u00a0<em>Alien <\/em>is one of my all-time favorite movies, in large part because so much of what happens in it remains a mystery at the end, and frankly I don&#8217;t want that to be ruined with unsatisfying (and unrequested) explanations. I don&#8217;t want to know where the aliens come from, or really anything at all about the wrecked spaceship that the good crew of the <em>Nostromo <\/em>will investigate someday. As far as I&#8217;m concerned, those things don&#8217;t matter. Nevertheless, there&#8217;s so much buzz growing around <em>Prometheus<\/em>, I imagine I&#8217;ll probably give in and see it anyhow. I suppose if anyone could return to the <em>Alien <\/em>universe and make anything worth watching, it&#8217;d be the guy who first took us there. (Of course, it would help if the late screenwriter Dan O&#8217;Bannon were involved, too&#8230;)<\/li>\n<li><em>Rock of Ages<\/em> (June 15) &#8212; The Girlfriend loves musicals and has been trying for years to find one I&#8217;ll love too. Between Alec Baldwin as a sleazy nightclub owner, Catherine Zeta-Jones as, well, anything as long as she&#8217;s in it, and a soundtrack featuring all the lame old &#8217;80s hard-rock music I love, this just may be the one she&#8217;s been looking for. I&#8217;m totally stoked for this one and I won&#8217;t apologize for it.<\/li>\n<li><em>Brave <\/em>(June 22) &#8212; The latest animated film from Pixar, set in the 10th century Scottish Highlands. &#8216;Nuff said.<\/li>\n<li><em>The Dark Knight Rises<\/em> (July 20) &#8212; Meh. I&#8217;ve decided I really don&#8217;t care for Christian Bale and Christopher Nolan&#8217;s take on Batman, but there&#8217;s a trilogy to be squared, and I know some of this one was shot just outside my friend Cranky Robert&#8217;s office in Pittsburgh, so I imagine I&#8217;ll see it eventually just out of curiosity.<\/li>\n<li><em>Total Recall<\/em> (August 3) &#8212; I know, I know, it&#8217;s a remake, and I&#8217;m the dude who loathes remakes. But this looks like a somewhat different take on the original source material (a short story by Philip K. Dick) rather than a direct rip of the &#8217;91 Schwarzenegger film, so with luck it&#8217;ll turn out like John Carpenter&#8217;s <em>The Thing<\/em> vs. Howard Hawks&#8217; <em>The Thing from Another World<\/em> &#8212; both good films based on the same source, but not really very much like each other. Maybe I&#8217;m rationalizing because the <a href=\"http:\/\/youtu.be\/sWMhADqlPYg\"><i>trailer<\/i><\/a> looked better than I expected.<\/li>\n<li><em>Looper <\/em>(September 28) &#8212; A time-travel action thriller starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt &#8212; yes, that&#8217;s the kid from the TV sitcom <em>Third Rock from the Sun<\/em>, now all grown up and playing a mob enforcer &#8212; and Bruce Willis as Gordon-Levitt&#8217;s future self. I hadn&#8217;t even heard of this until a couple weeks ago when a buddy sent me the <a href=\"http:\/\/youtu.be\/5kGFyVKmqA0\">trailer<\/a>. It looks good!<\/li>\n<li><em>The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey<\/em> (December 14) &#8212; It could be a disaster, I know, trying to integrate a children&#8217;s book with the much darker and more sophisticated <em>Lord of the Rings<\/em> saga, and also splitting that relatively short volume across two movies&#8230; but what the hell. At the very least, it&#8217;ll be nice to see Ian McKellen as Gandalf again.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Just jotting down a few notes about upcoming movies of interest&#8230; The Raven (April 27) &#8212; John Cusack plays Edgar Allan Poe trying to stop a serial killer who&#8217;s using Poe&#8217;s own stories as inspiration. In what universe does that not sound cool? The Pirates! Band of Misfits (April 27) &#8212; Animated flick from Aardman [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2305","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-film-studies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2305","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2305"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2305\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2305"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2305"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2305"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}