There's a bit of
everything hitting theaters this weekend. You get your sequels and
reboots, but they're of slightly lesser-known quantities than usual.
You also get your counter-programming, the comedic weirdness of the
late summer season. It helps that each of the new movies is of a
different genre, too, so the lack of true originality is hardly a
burden. Let's take a look.
American Ultra
Director: Nima
Nourizadeh
Writer: Max Landis
Starring: Jesse
Eisenberg, Kristen Stewart, Topher Grace, Connie Britton
A sleeper agent
(Eisenberg, who has been quite busy these last few weeks in theaters)
has been living a quiet, marijuana-filled life. Then one night he
gets activated and things start going haywire for him and his equally
hazy girlfriend, played by Kristen Stewart. He is targeted by the
agency that created him and, while the muscle memory kicks in,
everything seems new to his addled mind.
Eisenberg gets to
twist his nebbish persona into something much more relaxed and
Stewart gets to play on her publicly perceived persona of not being
totally “present” all the time. They're each much more layered
performers than those descriptions imply, so it could be fun to see
each actor play into and subvert these expectations.
Hitman: Agent 47
Director:
Aleksander Bach
Writers: Skip
Woods, Michael Finch
Starring: Rupert
Friend, Hannah Ware, Zachary Quinto
The last time
Hollywood took a stab at turning the Hitman video games into a
movie, they turned to one of the better character-actor-leading-man
hybrids in the business, Timothy Olyphant (pre-Justified) to
shave his head and shoot at bad guys. This time around, it's Rupert
Friend of Homeland getting the nod, and he gets to fight Star
Trek's Mr. Spock, Zachary Quinto. That's about it. There appears
to be a little too much CGI for the budget (re: it doesn't look
particularly good), but that could just be the effects not being
entirely finished for the trailer. Cars go zoom, bombs go boom, and
the bald guy with the red tie gets to look neat. It's pretty
meat-and-potatoes.
Mistress America
Director: Noah
Baumbach
Writers: Noah
Baumbach, Greta Gerwig
Starring: Greta
Gerwig, Lola Kirke, Seth Barrish
Gerwig and Baumbach
team up again after 2013's Frances Ha, with Gerwig playing a
woman who meets her soon-to-be step-sister and begins teaching her
the ways of the world. Except, of course, Gerwig doesn't know much
about the world and is pretty bad at pretending she does. That
premise-actress combination is ripe for screwball comedy.
Sinister 2
Director:
Ciarán Foy
Writers:
Scott Derrickson, C. Robert Cargill
Starring:
James Ransone, Shannyn Sossamon, Robert Daniel Sloan
Modern
horror is one of my biggest cinematic blind spots. I've never seen
the first Sinister from
2012, but it, like this weekend's sequel, was co-written by C. Robert
Cargill, a man whose film criticism I read for a long time when he
worked for Ain't It Cool under the pseudonym Massawyrm. He's a guy
whose cinematic writing I would like to experience because the lives
and breathes genre movies.
Plot-wise,
it involves the murders of the bogie man. A family in a farm house
experiences strange things, a kid starts to go nuts, a handsome guy
who was apparently in the first movie investigates. It sounds
straightforward, but there are some visual flourishes in the trailer
that indicate a little more than regular scares.
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