A good argument can be made that the period 2000-2009 was the single worst decade for movies in Hollywood history. Unfortunately, judging by what we’ve seen so far in 2010, the next decade could conceivably dip even lower into mediocrity. Over just the next three months, theaters are set to debut yet more anti-conservative rewritings of history, yet more anti Prop-8 propaganda masquerading as entertainment for the masses, yet more heaping piles of torture and snuff porn, and much else that looks eminently skip-worthy.
So what’s left for those of us looking for things like stirring heroism, rousing action, and solid family-friendly entertainment? If you had to pick five films appearing between now and the end of the year that look decent enough to take a chance on, what would they be? Here’s my shortlist, sorted by release date:
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Red (October 15)
A blissfully silly, cartoonishly hyper-violent trailer. A formidable array of talent seeming to have the time of their lives as they chew up the scenery, with normally stately and self-serious Oscar-winners like Helen Mirren and Morgan Freeman hamming it up next to Bruce Willis and John Malkovich. A premise that sounds something like Spy Kids for adults. Sounds good to me.
Word has it that this movie took pains to make itself more comedic than its DC comic source material, and after a year filled with worries about unemployment and the economy, with audiences looking for some mental relief and escape, that might be just what the doctor ordered. I hope the film lives up to the promise and tone of the trailer.
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Unstoppable (November 12)
Speed on a train, and the trailer makes it look as if they’ve pulled it off. With slick action maestro Tony Scott handling the directorial duties, this might do for the action/disaster genre what The Expendables recently did for 1980s he-man action fare.
Denzel is arguably our greatest surviving star, with John Wayne’s talent for holding up pictures with the sheer weight of his presence and gravitas. Chris Pine has emerged as the best of a younger generation of pretty boys trying to make the leap upward to Real Man status. Hot concept, good chemistry — let’s just pray that the dreaded Shaky Cam doesn’t ruin things.
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Faster (November 26)
The Rock abandons his tooth-fairy phase and dives into the sort of gritty revenge flick that used to be powered by guys like Charles Bronson. Hope springs eternal that Hollywood can still occasionally produce a satisfying movie for men as counterprogramming to (in this case) Disney’s Tangled, Christina Aguilera’s Burlesque, and Edward Zwick’s Love and Other Drugs.
Incidentally, I went to school with George Tillman Jr., the director of the film. He’s a good guy who’s helmed life-affirming pictures such as Soul Food (1997) and Men of Honor (2000), and it’s nice to see him recently back in the directorial saddle after a break of some nine years (in which he, among other things, produced the Barbershop series). In an interview a few years back, Tillman stated the clichéd opinion that, “We as filmmakers need to focus less on blow-em-up action flicks and focus more on personal films that can both entertain and educate.” Here’s hoping that Faster is big on the former and mercifully unpretentious about the latter.
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The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (December 10)
I liked the first Narnia film very much, but found the second so unwatchably bad and painfully episodic that I turned it off in disgust halfway through. It was strange to see Disney dump Narnia like a hot potato after that debacle — Patrick Goldstein of the Los Angeles Times, one of Big Hollywood’s favorite whipping boys, gives a good rundown of what happened here.
But with Fox picking it up and giving it a nice Christmas push (and with a true, humane artist like Michael Apted directing), prospects look good for the third film to resemble the first more than the second. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is also widely considered to be the finest book in the series, so it has that going for it.
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Tron: Legacy (December 17)
The trailer for this one had all of the hairs on the back of my neck standing on end, as memories came roaring back of watching the original Tron (1982) endlessly on cable as a kid in between bouts of writing crude programs on a Commodore 64. Along with other early 1980s movies like WarGames (1983), this film instilled a fascination for computers into a whole generation of teen boys, and all around us today we’re still seeing the results of that early mass exposure.
The previews promise the return of both Jeff Bridges and Bruce Boxleitner, the portrayal of a sincere and healthy father-son relationship, plenty of eye candy (both of the techno and hot-babe varieties), and lots of action scenes powered by state-of-the-art effects, clever compositions, and NO SHAKY CAM! Man, I hope they knock this one out of the park. (As an aside, Bruce Boxleitner is a huge Robert E. Howard fan, always a sign of discernment.)
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So c’mon all of you Saturday morning, For Conservative Movie Lover blowhards: give us your own Top 5 must-see Fall-Winter 2010 pictures in the comments section below (if you need a master list of possibilities to work from, go here and scroll through the upcoming releases for October, November, and December).
Author’s Note: After fifty straight weeks of For Conservative Movie Lovers appearing every Saturday, a combination of real-life obligations and general burnout has me needing to relax the pace a bit. Going forward, expect gaps of one or more Saturdays in between each batch of FCML essays, with me filling in those gaps with lighter (and hopefully less research intensive) posts on other subjects.