The University Daily Kansas
Monday, June 3, 2013
Page 7
--several hundred he killed personally (often using piano wire, just like his onscreen heroes). Oppenheimer's film serves as both an indictment of historical impunity and a cinematic self-portrait of unrepentant evil.
Summer movie preview: from Shakespeare to Superman
With temperatures and ticket prices both steadily on the rise, it's often difficult to know which movies are truly worthy of your hard earned time and money. Some of the season's biggest cinematic offerings are nothing more than lumbering golems of mass-marketed mediocrity, coldly engineered to bombard audiences with droning sound and fury for a few hours before sending them back into the summer heat with aching heads, hardened hearts and empty wallets.
Yet for every big-budget letdown ("Battleship," "Green Lantern"), there's a blite indie charmer ("Little Miss Sunshine"), a rousing pop triumph ("The Avengers") or even that rarest of cinematic beasts: the spectacle of substance ("The Dark Knight"). This year has already produced two intelligent, risk-taking blockbusters, "Iron Man 3" and "Star Trek: Into Darkness," and at least one, "Fast and Furious 6", that managed to be both unabashedly dumb and ridiculously entertaining. With that in mind, here, in descending order, are the 10 films I have the highest hopes for.
MAN OF STEEL - JUNE 14
Comic book scribe Grant Morrison once compared writing Superman to contemplating the Buddha, neatly illustrating the difficulties of relating to an invincible alien whose powers and abilities would be enviable to a god. After Bryan Singer's "Superman Returns" failed to connect with fans, the herculean task of modernizing (and humanizing) the world's first superhero fell to director Zack Snyder ("Watchmen") and British actor Henry Cavill, who appears to possess both the chiseled features and plainspoken nobility necessary to play Supes. If the early buzz is any indication, "Man of Steel" promises to be a bold new origin story that balances gargantuan action scenes with a healthy amount of honest, heartfelt emotion. Michael Shannon looks suitably unhinged as interstellar war criminal
LEGENDARY PICTURES
General Zod.
PACIFIC RIM-JULY 12
Guillermo Del Toro's newest film is geared towards everyone's inner child, provided that child is a crazed Godzilla fan with an encyclopedic knowledge of Japanese monster movies. An interdimensional rift has opened on the floor of the Pacific Ocean, causing all manner of scaly, slimy critters, called Kaiju (Japanese shorthand for the giant monster genre), to slither through and attack Earth's major cities. Faced with its own extinction, mankind creates an army of Jaegers, massive robots controlled by two human pilots, to rocket-punch the nasty buggers back to their own world. Ron Perlman (Del Toro's "Hellboy") and Charlie Day ("It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia) both appear in small but pivotal roles. My favorite moment from the trailer: a Jaeger smacks a Kaiju upside the head with what appears to be a Titanic-sized ocean liner.
Executive produced by master filmmakers Werner Herzog ("Grizzly Man") and Errol Morris ("The Fog of War"), Joshua Oppenheimer's documentary challenges former Indonesian death squad leaders to confront their crimes by recreating them in the form of different film genres, including the Hollywood musicals and gangster dramas that inspired them as youths. Chilling, incisive and ethically terrifying by its very existence. "The Act of Killing" focuses on Anwar Congo, the kindly grandfather and celebrated national hero who once presided over the genocide of millions, including the
THE ACT OF KILLING - EARLY AUGUST
ELYSIUM-AUGUST 8
Writer-director Neill Blomkamp follows up 2009's critically acclaimed "District 9" with another gritty sci-fi actioner laced with trenchant social commentary on issues ranging from healthcare and immigration to literal class warfare. The year is 2154, and the ultra-rich have migrated to an Ayn Rand-approved space habitat called Elysium, an orbiting satellite free from all crime, disease and poverty. The rest of humanity, including Max De Costa (Matt Damon), is left to toil in the irradiated wastelands of a hopelessly overpopulated Earth. Informed that he has terminal cancer, Max undertakes a perilous mission that will allow him to break into Elysium and thwart the hardliner policies of the fanatical Secretary Delacourt (Jodie Foster). The film has been specially reformatted for IMAX screens.
The hotly anticipated successor to Nicolas Winding Refn's L.A. neonoir "Drive" may have premiered to a chorus of boos at Cannes, but I'm still willing to predict that "Only God Forgives," the Danish director's second collaboration with Ryan Gosling, will prove itself a worthy heir in the long run. Baby Goose plays a boxing club owner whose domineering mother (Kristin Scott Thomas) commands him to hunt down his brother's killer, a psychotic Bangkok policeman (Vithaya Pansringarm) who fancies himself the Angel of Vengeance. The trailers promise a moody art-house bruiser
ONLY GOD FORGIVES - JULY 19
punctuated by quick and dirty bursts of day-glow bloodletting, underscored by another dreamy electro-pop soundtrack courtesy of Cliff Martinez. Refn isn't the next Tarantino (something tells me he'd rather be the next Jean-Pierre Melville), but he certainly has a similar gift when it comes to using music in his films.
MONSTERS UNIVERSITY - JUNE 21
Pixar's first prequel explores the rowdy college years of one-eyed Mike (Billy Crystal) and big blue Sulley (John Goodman), the loveable closet dwellers from 2001's "Monsters, Inc." The new film, which follows the mismatched duo through their tutelage at the MU School of Scaring, looks like a light-hearted send-up of college movie tropes. If Pixar really has caught franchise fever, though, I think I'd have preferred another helping of "The Incredibles."
THE PURGE-JUNE 7
James DeMonaco's second feature is a home invasion thriller with a diabolically clever twist. In the not-too-distant future, there's one night every year when all U.S. law enforcement services are suspended and every crime, from joywalking and double-parking to rape and mass-murder, becomes perfectly legal. The theory goes that Americans need this night as a way to vent their most primal urges, thus ensuring docile, compliant behavior for the rest of the year. That premise may seem like a stretch, but as one of the movie's creepy masked intruders would surely tell you, it's all in the execution.
MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING JUNE 21
How do you follow up the highest
grossing superhero film of all time?
If you're Joss Whedon, you go back to making home movies. His ultrahip, black-and-white modernization of Shakespeare's romantic comedy "Much Ado About Nothing" was filmed entirely in and around the writer-director's Santa Monica home. The cast is stacked with Whedon regulars (Nathan Fillion from "Firefly", Amy Acker from "Cabin in the Woods" and "Dollhouse") who shot their scenes in the midst of a wine-fueled 12-day house party.
Clark Gregg (Agent Coulson in "The Avengers") plays Leonato, the uncle who resolves to bring squabbling soul mates Beatrice (Acker) and Benedick (Alexis Denisof) together in "a mountain of affection."
Director Edgar Wright ("Scott Pilgrim vs. the World") reunites with Simon Pegg and Nick Frost for "The World's End," the apocalyptic conclusion to their Blood and Ice Cream Trilogy, a saga that began in 2004 with the beloved zombie comedy "Shaun of the Dead" and reached a level of joyous anarchy with 2007's buddy cop spoof "Hot Fuzz." This time Pegg stars as Gary King, a disheveled slacker who convinces his four oldest friends (including Frost and Martin Freeman from "The Hobbit" and BBC's "Sherlock") to recreate the epic pub crawl the gang went on 20 years ago. Nothing, not even the looming threat of an alien invasion, will keep the inebriated chappies from reaching their final destination: the World's End, a legendary tavern promising "good food, fine ales and total annihilation." A sci-fi parody that's actually funny? I'll drink to that.
THE WORLD'S END-AUGUST 23