Keeping it Real-ish.
APRIL
1
Spring arrives brightly amid the dour murk of Mickey Rourke, Academy nominee Clive Owen and Bruce Willis tangling in the dark streets of
Sin City
, directed by both Frank Miller and Richard Rodriguez. April also brings Agnès Jaoui's
Look at Me
, a hot ticket at Cannes and the New York Film Festival, in which Marilou Berry struggles with low self-esteem and the desire to look like Gisele Bundchen-maybe she should visit the
Beauty Shop
, Queen Latifah's new joint, following hard on the heels of
Diary of a Mad Black Woman
's unexpected success.
8
When Penélope Cruz plays a UN scientist, you know it's gonna be a blockbuster. Cruz's latest squeeze, Texan
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Matthew McConaughey, heads up the cast of
Sahara
as adventurer Dirk Pitt (what's the entry-level salary for an adventurer these days, anyway?), who must comb the, you know, Sahara, for some ecological threat to humanity or other.
What would springtime be without baseball? Thus
Fever Pitch
, based on Nick Hornby's autobiography, previously rendered into a servicable film with Colin Firth. Fart-joke boys Bobby and Peter Farrelly have cast Drew Barrymore and Jimmy Fallon (in lieu of Adam Sandler) and have also-with the magic of cinema-turned a British football team into the bizarrely victorious Boston Red Sox. Filling out the weekend are a pair of comforting genre films-
Winter Solstice
, a family drama starring Anthony La Paglia and Allison Janney, and Stephen Chow's
Kung Fu Hustle
. Finally, look for
Eros
, a supposedly uneven trilogy of shorts from directors Michelangelo Antonioni, Steven Soderbergh and Wong Kai-wai, all of which focus on-can you guess?-love and sex.
15
If the 1979 version of
The Amityville Horror
wasn't enough for you, perhaps 2005's take on the supposedly possessed and deadly house will settle, once and for all, whether the story was fact or fiction.
Also based on a true story,
Valiant
tells the story of Great Britian's Royal Homing Pigeon Service during World War II, with Ewan McGregor supplying the voice of Valiant, the little pigeon who could.
David Duchovny may be an Ivy Leaguer, but apparently he hasn't learned from the mistakes of other couples, as his directorial debut,
House of D
, also stars himself and-yup!-wife Téa Leoni in the story of a man working through the problems of the past (no word yet on whether that past involved an alien abduction).
Continuing on the keeping-it-real tip, if Jack Black's
School of Rock
seemed far-fetched (a school devoted to rock and roll? C'mon!), then
Rock School
, a documentary directed by Don Argott, should be enough to convince you that if you spent your childhood dreaming silently about becoming a rock star, you got gypped. Turns out there's a real School of Rock where Paul Green trains the next generation of guitary-wielding maniacs.
Speaking of maniacs, Chris Rock nailed it at The Oscars with his riff on bad movie titles.
State Property II
, starring Beanie Sigel, Noreaga and Damon Dash tells the sequelled tale of three gangstas as they vie for control on the streets of Philadelphia. Wonder if Al Sharpton will try to ban the soundtrack?
On the other hand,
Palindromes
, the latest from director Todd Solondz, will likely require an audience willing to deconstruct. In this case, the palindromy (well, it could be a word) stars Jennifer Jason Leigh, Ellen Barkin and Stephen Adly-Guirgis in the story of 12-year-old Aviva, who runs away from home after her parents force her to have an abortion and ends up in the hands of several abusers. Welcome to the Unhappiness.
22
While airport security is likely to perform an anal probe if they find a tweezer in your makeup case, Director Sydney Pollack, somehow, managed to shoot footage inside the UN. The story's plot concerns an interpreter who overhears an assassination plot. Apparently the real intrigue, however, is trying to figure out what's up with Kidman's accent.
It's also strange that Amanda Peet has yet to be in a film worth remembering but that didn't stop Nigel Cole from casting her as Ashton Kutcher's love interest in
A Lot Like Love
: Emily and Oliver meet on a plane, feel the vibe, reject the vibe and then both decide to take vows of silence-OK wait, no, that last part was just wishful thinking.
Perhaps a more winning plotline can be found in
The Game of Their Lives
, based on the US battle against England for the 1950 World Cup. After all, Patrick Stewart (
Star Trek
) has a bit role.
29
Dig up your dog-eared copy of Douglas Adams'
The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy
or
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just sit back and enjoy Garth Jennings' take (20 years in the making). Starring Martin
Freeman as Arthur Dent and Mos Def (love him!) as Ford Prefect with Sam Rockwell, Zooey Deschanel, Warwick Davis playing fellow galaxy travelers.
And, yes, for every sci-fi adaptation, there needs to be a government-conspiracy movie.
XXX: State of the Union
brings together Ice Cube (love him, too) and Samuel L Jackson for the first time in a sequel bound to be better because Vin Diesel isn't in it. Director Lee Tamohori banks on Cube with Jackson to stop a conspiracy to overthrow the government (presumably not by liberals).
MAY
6
There's nothing you need to know about Ridley Scott's
Kingdom of Heaven
except Orlando Bloom is in it, albeit wearing a rug on his pecks. Oh, OK, sure, there's a plot. Crusades, foreign invaders, insurgencies. A movie with lower expectations,
House of Wax
includes a line-up of young hotties, including the always-abhorrent Paris Hilton, Elisha Cuthbert and Chad Michael Murray. There is allegedly a plot to this movie, as well.
13
J-Lo's love life is a disaster. No, this isn't People Mag gossip, it's the premise for
Monster-in-Law
, in which Jenny from the Block meets the perfect man (played by Michael Vartan). Fortunately, there is little indication she teaches him to dance, plans his wedding or becomes his maid. Instead she battles with our "favorite local celebrity-to-sight," Jane Fonda. The fact that Jane came out of retirement for this film without kicking or screaming (as far as we know) is its most enticing feature.
Speaking of
Kicking and Screaming
, that's the new title for Will Ferrell's latest. Ferrell was so convincing as an unloved son in
Elf
that he's coming back for more. This time, he's an unloved soccer
coach who has to play his father's (Robert Duvall) team, which has his new son (via marriage) on it while confronting a whole lot of family dysfunction. It's probably the soccer that makes this a comedy.
If
Unleashed
strikes you as an uninspired title, keep in mind Jet Li's newest film was called
Danny the Dog
in France. Billed as a big change from Li's usual martial arts' extravaganzas, the story concerns a man (Li) raised as a slave, treated like a dog (yes, that's why the title), who learns about the less Hobbsian side of humanity from a piano tuner played by Morgan Freeman. (Thinking it's good Freeman already got that Oscar.)
No Oscars expected for
Snatch
producer Matthew Vaughn's directorial turn with
Layer Cake
, a seeming-generic Brit action flick in which a drug dealer (Daniel Craig) and a hot woman (Jude Law's honey Sienna Miller) and a cast of others with hard-to-understand accents end up running around due to a variety of implausible shenanigans.
The Beautiful Country
, however, looks more promising. Damien Nguyen stars as the son of a Vietnamese woman and an American GI who flees Vietnam to find his father in Texas. Tim Roth, Bai Ling and Nick Nolte also appear in this film in which the consequences of America's war in Vietnam are explored. No cameos by John Kerry are expected.
20
Rather than unroll the latest in the
Star Wars
series during the summer blockbuster season, George Lucas rolls out
Episode III–Revenge of the Sith
on this day, in which Anakin (Hayden Christensen) flirts with the Dark Side, which puts him in conflict with Obi-Wan (Ewan McGregor) and pregnant wife, Senator Amidala, (Natalie Portman). Meanwhile, the Clone Wars draw to a close as does, we think (hope), the
Star Wars
' revival.
27
While opening days for most movies can often mean a longer wait for Santa Fe audiences, we're betting
The Longest Yard
will open as scheduled with lots of fanfare. Filmed here last summer, directed by Peter Segal, this remake stars Adam Sandler, Burt Reynolds, Chris Rock and includes appearances by, well, pretty much everyone we know in this story of a football game between prisoners and guards. Just like real life, minus the solitary confinement, mind-control and exploitation.
