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Just in time for Valentine's Day, the most swoonerific tales of child manipulation, homicidal maniacs, fighting couples, unhappy Midwesterners, toilet seats and Nia Vardalos.
For the staff at Movies Without Pity, there is usually only one reason to watch the Super Bowl: to recoup our gambling losses for the season. Also, new movie trailers! Granted, not all of them are first looks -- all of these films have had teaser trailers and even full trailers before -- and all of them are a content-light 30 seconds. But for movie buffs like us, the excitement of who will win the game nicely translates into excitement (and sometimes disappointment) for the films advertised.
After a long and bumpy road, Benicio Del Toro's Wolfman remake is finally coming out next Friday. Its release dates have shuffled around a bit in the past, making critics wonder if it's because the studio fears the film is bad. We haven't seen it yet, but the cast (Anthony Hopkins, Emily Blunt and Hugo Weaving also star) and transformation effects in the trailers look interesting, at the very least. So we're tentatively excited! And in the spirit of that excitement, I've put together a little list of my favorite werewolves and Lycans of films past. Howl at the moon with me (and my list), will you?
The news that La Femme Nikita would be coming back with a brand new TV series came as somewhat of a shock -- after all, we still can't believe that the awesome French action film from 1990 managed to inspire such a terrible Bridget Fonda movie, let alone the hit Peta Wilson TV show that lasted five seasons. But then again, it is an awesome shoot-'em-up written and directed by Luc Besson, the godfather of modern French action films. Which got us thinking -- are there any other films in Besson's distinctively awesome body of work (including films he directed and films he just wrote) that would make kick-ass weekly TV shows? We found several, including one that's playing at the local arthouse cinema...
The horror! The horror! It's out in force this week, with zombies, Satanists and Bermuda Triangle victims wading through the gore to your house. Equally horrific? The slew of rom-coms that hit this week. If we ever succumb to their onslaught, just shoot us in the head.
The 2010 Oscar nominations are finally here, and they are... not at all surprising! Not really, anyway. Look at it this way: The good news is you're going to win your office Oscar pool. The bad news is, so will everyone else, so you're just going to get your own twenty back. Sorry, but that's the way it is. Let me show you.
Nicholas Sparks is the new Michael Crichton or John Grisham -- insofar as he's more famous for the many movies based on his books as for the books themselves. Except where Crichton wrote about science and Grisham wrote about the law, Sparks writes about schmaltz. His latest schmaltz-fest, Dear John, looks to be yet another tale in the "tragic romance" vein, which makes us wonder if there's a formula to Sparks' books, or at least to the movies based on them. We parsed the plots of his five films to date -- and his upcoming movie with Miley Cyrus -- to see what threads they had in common. (Warning: While their books have been out for a while, the write-ups of the last two films on our list contain minor spoilers, although we could figure out their plots without even seeing them.)
Can you separate an actor's personal life from the role he plays? History has showed us that it's difficult, at best; after all, overpublicized off-screen relationships have sunk on-screen romances before. But even though Mel Gibson's public behavior over the past few years is embarrassing and occasionally reprehensible, will it stop people from wanting to see a bloody action film? Hopefully not, because while Gibson hasn't acted in a while, it's not because he forgot how. In Edge of Darkness, he shows that he still has the same intensity he had as Martin Riggs in the early Lethal Weapon films, and to skip the film because Gibson is delusional and morally bankrupt is to deny yourself the pleasure.
Band/Movie Soundtrack Pairings We Want More Than AC/DC and Iron Man 2
Jon Favreau must really like AC/DC. Or, more likely, the band's blistering guitar rock, violent lyrics and electrically inspired name simply make them perfect candidates to provide the entire soundtrack to Iron Man 2. Rockers providing soundtracks is nothing new, but rather than featuring all-new songs, like Queen did for Highlander and Daft Punk is doing for Tron, the AC/DC soundtrack will be a "greatest hits" collection, including some of their best-known anthems from as far back as 1976. (The promo video is set to 1980's "Shoot to Thrill.") With this in mind, we looked at other tentpole films slated for this year and picked the bands (and solo artists) with suitable back catalogs to provide all of the music for each movie.
MacGruber Redband Trailer: Explosively Unfunny!
We really shouldn't have expected much from a film adaptation of a Saturday Night Live sketch. After all, of the ten movies that the show has spun off, you can count the ones that are entertaining on one hand (The Blues Brothers, Wayne's World, Superstar, list over). But the MacGruber sketches are so funny, with a bomb-defusing Will Forte getting held up by father-son issues, political correctness and heroin addiction, that we thought there was no way the movie could fail -- especially with co-star Kristen Wiig on board. But the redband trailer, which surfaced last week, makes it look like a huge mess. Maybe they're focusing on the more risqué elements for this particular trailer, but since it's the first one we've seen, we're gonna go ahead and assume the rest of the movie is like this, meaning a shoestring assembly of far too on-the-nose jokes.
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