With a fresh calendar comes fresh optimism and a fresh slate of movies to look forward to at the local multiplex. As a film enthusiast, I always like to take this opportunity to sit back with my pipe and a snifter of cognac, Wikipedia’s film list of the coming year in hand. It’s a fine moment to compare the first film of the year with the last one.
It’s a wonder that I don’t switch from cognac to cheap white rum when I look at cinema’s 2017 offerings, from Underworld: Blood Wars released Jan. 6 to The Greatest Showman (coming Dec. 25, 2017). The former is the latest (fourth? fifth? sixth?) in the continuing vampires vs. werewolves saga that continues to give Kate Beckinsale her bread and butter in between her Jane Austen adaptations. The latter is a biopic steeped in showbiz lore and gives Hugh Jackman one of the better excuses for him to show off his masterful and classic song and dance skills as P.T. Barnum rather than his snarling, steel-clawed persona as Wolverine (see also Logan, set to hit marquees on March 3).
The first of those two is clearly a cash grab while the second is clearly Oscar bait. Welcome to Hollywood, a place where money is king and always comes first, while critical acclaim, the secondary concern (meaning it usually appears later on in the year), really just strives to be another way to draw money to a film. Maybe I’m just jaded, but then again, maybe I’ve just been paying too much attention to movies and ‘the biz’ for far too long.
Or maybe I should have started this by pulling my focus in a week or two on the calendar, like a statistician removing the outliers, the extremes of negatives and positives, trying to put a better frame around the true median of the data. So let’s squint our eyes a little at the whole month of January to the whole month of December and see what else is coming to theatres.
Here in this first month of 2017, there’s M. Night Shyamalan’s Split, XXX: Return of Xander Cage, Resident Evil: The Final Chapter, and Martin Scorsese’s Silence. The first looks like it will feature a bravura Hitchcockian performance by James McAvoy, the middle two look like the fifth (sixth? seventh? eighth?) chapters in their respective series about criminals in hot rods and glossy sci-fi martial arts action costumed heroes fighting off their relentless zombie adversaries. If you can successfully distinguish each chapter of their respective series in written format then you will have proven the necessity of endless iterations of a progenitor as described in its inheritors. At least you should be able to explain how the film XXX improves cinema as opposed to any other kind of ‘xxx’ material that people might find in the media these days.
In December 2017, the theatres will be packed with people eager for Star Wars: Episode VIII but they will have to find it in the mire created by a Jumanji remake, Pitch Perfect 3, and the big screen adaptation of The Six Million Dollar Man, wherein he becomes worth $6 billion. Thankfully, there’s also an Alexander Payne film called Downsizing also in there, but sadly, it stars Matt Damon.
That being said, there’s much in the middle that I, the critic and the film fan, am eager to plunk down ticket fare to sit in the audience for. In this world, you can only speculate at the BIG movies that will come out whereas you hold out hopes for the smaller, art cinema films that will come out that you don’t even know anything about.
In between the first and last months of the year, we can anticipate screenings of The Lego Batman Movie, T2: Trainspotting, Kong: Skull Island, and Zhang Yimou’s The Great Wall (sadly, this also stars Matt Damon). I’m sure that there’s someone out there who can’t wait for Fifty Shades Darker on Feb. 10 too.
Personally, I’m more interested in Tulip Fever (Feb. 24) because it’s written by the genius Tom Stoppard. It’s a 17th century Dutch drama about an artist who falls in love with a married woman. It sounds a fair bit like Shakespeare in Love, also scribed by Stoppard, but I don’t care. He could write a screenplay based on the recipe for haggis and I would be the first in line for it.
It’s still early on to have any real sense of what will be good, bad or at least interesting but right now, my short must-see list includes The Lost City of Z (April 21), The Sense of an Ending (March 10), My Cousin Rachel (July 14) and Kingsman: The Golden Circle (Oct. 6). Despite what many people might think, I don’t much care to sit through Alien: Covenant (May 19), Wonder Woman (June 2) or Blade Runner 2049 (Oct. 6).
Oh, and just for the record Underworld: Blood Wars and Resident Evil: The Final Chapter are the sixth chapters of their series, respectively, while XXX: Return of Xander Cage is only the third one there.
