A Cat in Paris (trailer)
Directors: Jean-Loup Felicioli and Alain Gagnol
Personal Interest Factor: 6
French Oscar-nominated animated film about a cat who needs to rescue a little girl from a gangster. Not sure if it’s actually any good.
Metacritic: 63
Ruby Sparks (trailer)
Director: Jonathan Dayton & Valerie Faris (Little Miss Sunshine)
Personal Interest Factor: 8
Dayton’s and Faris’s long-awaited followup to Little Miss Sunshine seems to be taking on the whole Manic Pixie Dream Girl subgenre in a clever way. Either that, or it’s shamelessly indulging in it, which would be a lot less interesting. I guess we’ll see. The script is by Zoe Kazan herself, who stars in the lead role.
Metacritic: 67
Sacrifice (trailer)
Director: Chen Kaige (The Emperor and the Assassin, Killing Me Softly, Together, The Promise)
Personal Interest Factor: 6
Chinese feudal-era story about a guy getting revenge against the warlord who killed his family. Kaige is a reasonably well-known director (his most famous is Farewell, My Concubine, but I don’t believe I’ve seen any of his films.
Metacritic: 58
The Watch (trailer)
Director: Akiva Schaffer (Hot Rod)
Personal Interest Factor: 5
This looks passably amusing, but man, are the reviews ever bad. In a possibly related question, is Vince Vaughn funny anymore? He always kind of irritated me, and now I wonder if that wasn’t a more widespread belief than I thought. You know what the last movie was of his that has at least a 6.0 IMDb rating (that he was a primary star in)? Wedding Crashers, back in 2005. That’s just an awful track record. I mean, a 6.0 isn’t even very good – Adam Sandler’s Just Go with It has a 6.3!
Metacritic: 38
Also this week:
Step Up Revolution (trailer) – 3rd? 4th? 5th? in the series
I was really disappointed to see reviews of The Watch as well, as the Red Band trailer killed me. Strange that they couldn’t pull something good out of all that talent on both sides of the camera.
Sounds like some terrible, forgotten Don Bluth movie from 1992 or something.
I’m very, very upset that The Watch apparently sucks. If I’d known Seth Rogen wrote it I’d have tempered my expectations more.
I recall those Don Bluth movies being pretty disturbing. Forget dark content – even just the imagery and coloring was disturbing.
I gave THE WATCH a B- over at FSR. It’s a very funny movie… far from memorable, but very funny.
Agreed. I can’t really put into words what was disturbing about it…I remember the choppiness of the animation always bothered me.
They’re like bargain-basement designer knock-offs of Disney films.
Cool. Any idea why FOX had such trouble selling it?
Jeezus, all of you. Really. Enough with the bashing of my younger-life stalwarts. Don Bluth is a master at his craft and he designed and did the animation for one of the greatest video games of all time. He is a visionary and should be accorded the proper respect as such.
Man….first Burton’s Batman…
“Cool. Any idea why FOX had such trouble selling it?”
The vast majority of the laughs, I mean the overwhelming amount of them, are R-rated. There isn’t much left to appeal to the non-redband crowd when it comes to the marketing aside from the stars themselves.
And apropos of nothing, Burton’s Batman blows.
He had a really good run for 4-5 years or so, culminating in Wedding Crashers. The films were variable in quality it seems but from what I saw of them his particular persona and comic style seemed really suited to them.
The turning point was ‘Fred Claus’, with it’s kid-friendly perspective and look of general lameness seemed an awfully misguided step to take for his generally raucous screen persona. He seem to lose his status amongst film fans and never really recovered it.
For what it’s worth, I thought ‘The Break Up’ was a fairly good movie.
The Watch is so very bad it hurts.