Hey, look! There are only five movies opening this week! And just one film festival! However did we get so lucky?
… well, here’s the catch.
Baywatch: I have recently become aware of the term “nothingburger”, which describes a manufactured object or a situation that’s entirely devoid of substance. Dax Shepard’s CHIPS was a nothingburger. Baywatch is a nothingburger with cheese.
Paris Can Wait: Tina stands up for Eleanor Coppola’s first dramatic feature, which stars Diane Lane as a woman towrn between her distracted husband (Alec Baldwin) and his far more engaged business partner (Arnaud Viard). Sounds like eminently reasonable counterprogramming for this weekend.
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales: It’s better than On Stranger Tides, but it’s still pretty lame, thanks to a generic quest narrative and a truly exhausting performance from Johnny Depp. But Geoffrey Rush has his moments, and I did like Kaya Scodelario as the new Keira Knightley.
Population Zero: Documentary filmmaker Julian T. Pinder pivots to fiction with this fake true-crime investigation that pivots on a real Constitutional loophole. I have never been an especially big fan of Pinder’s work … but even for him, this is some bullshit.
The Transfiguration: Michael O’Shea’s feature debut is a really smart reworking of the ambiguous vampire narrative first set out in George A. Romero’s Martin, situated in the projects of Queens and played out between a weird kid and a slightly older girl. Virtually every vampire picture is name-checked, and the one that isn’t is ably represented by a Larry Fessenden cameo. Well done.
Have a good weekend, everybody. Is it still raining? I’m afraid to look.
Hope you don’t mind me sharing this link, but the Baywatch review does make this sort of appropriate. Here’s a Slate article on the actual signs of what someone drowning looks like as opposed to what we see in movies. It’s an informative and scary read.
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/family/2013/06/rescuing_drowning_children_how_to_know_when_someone_is_in_trouble_in_the.html