The Movies of 2010

Now, lets not forget about 2009, a pretty good year for movies.  We had Pulp Fiction meets Nazi Zombies, Jack Sparrow playing John Dillinger, and well, now that I think about it last year wasn’t that great.  Since I’m such an optimist lets take a look at 5 projects we can be hopeful about in 2010.

Shutter Island

You blinked, background extra guard guy.

Scorsese, that name is enough to make anything good.  I remember when I saw some of his earlier movements into other genres (namely, those that aren’t gangster movies) like the biopics Raging Bull and The Aviator.  I originally hated them, but the more I watch them the better they get.  Here we have a fantastical dark mystery/thriller.  Along with what seems to be a pretty good story, a startling trailer, and Scorsese’s amazing talent for making Leonardo Dicaprio bearable, this could be one of the greats of 2010. And god damn, I can’t get enough of these inexplicable Boston accents.

The Crazies

How can you pass this up. I usually don’t watch the trailers to these horror thriller movies, but there’s something really sinister about a movie in which the normal, nice people become truly evil homicidal maniacs.  Other good point: it’s not like they’re just trapped with no outside contact from the world like in most horror movies. The army comes and they’re still fucked! Oh shit! That’s entertainment right there.

The A-Team

Check out the Mr. T one's Mohawk.

I never really watched an entire episode of the A-Team, just the introduction and assorted clips shown on VH1 countdown shows.  The concept of a team of wrongfully convicted but highly trained soldiers on the run solvin’ problems gets me excited. It’s simple, it’s to the point, it has Mr. T. What more could you ask for with a story? Now, even though Mr. T’s character is played by somebody else I still hope that this version will take out some (but not too much) of the quirky weirdness of the TV show and make it a real action movie with a little bit of self-referential humor.  Or it could turn out like GI Joe. Just Sayin’.

Inception

The fact is, Christopher Nolan can do no wrong coming after the clinic on moviemaking he has given by turning the previously farcical joke of the Batman franchise into one of the most cerebral thrillers of all time. Not to mention churning out well respected thrillers The Prestige, and Memento.  All of his movies have a more than normal amount of plot and thematic development set within the human mind, and with this new project it seems he has gone all-in and placed the entire story in some type of cerebral maze.  Watch the trailer; if that’s not the most unsubtle metaphor between the dense caverns of a metropolis (or Gotham?) and the maze of the human brain than you should probably just sit this one out.

And if Nolan is going all in than I think I will too.  Leonardo DiCaprio has sharpened his skills in these types of stories (the word cerebral is really the only way to describe these movies) with The Departed and the aforementioned Shutter Island, and I think he’ll be a good tool for Nolan to take the audience through a story that walks the line between amazing twists and incomprehension.

The Fighter

I just wanted to take this opportunity to point out that Mark Wahlberg is Marky Mark

Originally Daren Aronofsky’s project after The Wrestler, The Fighter became David O. Russell’s baby. I like to think that Russell wants to make this movie because his last, I Heart Huckabees, is so quirky and weird that even he thinks he’s due to make a movie about people beating each other up.  Not to mention Aronofsky was really planning on making a movie about a Boxer right after the Wrestler? Please man, he had to move on. ANYWAY, Brad Pitt and Leonardo Dicaprio and some other people were supposed to be attached but its now Wahlberg and Christian Bale who plays his half brother and trainer. This movie shouldn’t be too different for the genre, but David O. Russel knows how to make “weird masterpieces” like Three Kings and I’d like to see his lense applied to the tried-and true boxing movie.

Of course, if it doesn’t work, maybe we’ll get some good on-set fight stories between Russell and other hothead psycho Christian Bale.

BONUS: The Karate Kid

See, black guy karate movies can work.

Ahaha just kidding. This movie is going to suck. Not only should the original remain untouched because it’s a trademark memory of my childhood, but the project has been taken over by Will Smith who has turned it into a vehicle for his son Jaden or Jadan or Jada or whatever.  Now I’ve got no problem with a father putting his son to work in the family business, but I don’t need the leftover smoltzy bullshit they didn’t use in Pursuit of Happiness forced down my throat to ruin the original Karate Kid.