Friday, April 8, 2011
Film Your Medieval Weekend at the Movies
Posted by Jesse Hassenger on Fri, Apr 8, 2011 at 11:18 AM
The Sitter, which sounds like a dark retake of Adventures in Babysitting, was just pushed back until Christmas (by which I assume the studio will eventually mean: January or February); in the meantime, we have Your Highness, another stoners-on-a-mission comedy, this one reuniting Green with buddy Danny McBride (who appears not just in Pineapple Express but in All the Real Girls) and their cohort/former classmate Ben Best, who cowrote the movie with McBride. Apparently the boys held a long-standing interest in making a sword-and-sorcery epic, and acted upon the brief window during which it seemed possible to actually get away with this (I got a kick out of the New York Times article describing an early draft of the script that would have cost, the paper estimates, between 200 and 500 million dollars).
It's a little strange that Green's comic sensibility (present, if less broad, in his artier movies) amounts to redoing movies he seems to have watched repeatedly on HBO as a kid, and I hope he eventually genre-hops back to some smaller, stranger fare (after which he is welcome to genre-hop back to movies with minotaurs!), but in the meantime: minotaurs! Seriously, this movie looks delightful, and I haven't even mentioned that it has Natalie Portman and Zooey Deschanel (another All the Real Girls alum).
Meek's Cutoff: Yet a third artsy director goes genre as Kelly Reichardt takes up the reins of a Western starring her Wendy and Lucy muse Michelle Williams. I feel like every critic I know already saw this ages ago, but it sounds good [It really, really is! -Ed.]. Sometimes small-scale indie directors can get a jolt of incident just from stepping into genre waters, where it might be somewhat less acceptable for characters to noodle around looking lost/sad/poor. That Blue Valentine guy is invited to give that a shot.
Henry's Crime: If all of these indie directors going on genre adventures doesn't sit well with you, well, this probably won't either, because it looks like the kind of cutesy-crime picture that happened all through the 90s to little fanfare, interest, or success. Then again, whoa, it does have a long-absent Keanu, plus a decent cast: Vera Farmiga, Judy Greer, and James Caan, who was pretty hilarious in that cutesy-crime classic that transcends the genre, Bottle Rocket.
Soul Surfer: A girl gets bit by a shark but doesn't give up surfing. Inspirational, yes, but it seems possible that I just conveyed the depth of inspiration in a single sentence, and it wasn't even a very interesting sentence. How about this one: from the director of Bratz! And a ton of Disney Channel stuff! Like a ton. And many direct-to-DVD sequels to popular children's films. Which raises the question, when Soul Surfer Sweet Sixteen goes direct to DVD, who will be in charge?!
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