Films of 2013

If I hadn’t made it abundantly clear, I went to see Pacific Rim earlier this week. I loved it. I particularly enjoyed the part where the mech punches the kaiju in the face.

I wouldn’t say it’s much of a stretch to say that all mainstream Hollywood films should look to this film as the minimum they should be doing, as what made Pacific Rim work was the unique idea and attention to detail, not budget.

This month has a slew of good movies coming out like The World’s End and The Wolverine but there are also a lot of other interesting films coming out in the near future.

Elysium is a Sci-fi movie with Matt Damon in the lead role, the trailers looked really pretty and there was a lot of interesting tech in also, Damon appears to be wearing mechanical-assisting exoskeleton.

The Grandmaster is a film by Wong Kar Wai, who directed In the Mood for Love and 2046 which are some of my favourite films, this time he is telling the story of Ip Man, a legendary martial arts master who taught Bruce Lee and you might remember Donnie Yen playing him in the self-titled Ip Man and Ip Man 2 films of a couple of years ago. The Grandmaster features Tony Leung and Zhang Ziyi sharing the silver screen again like previous roles in Hero and 2046. We can expect a more drama-based retelling with this new rendition and hopefully a return for Wong Kar Wai to the public eye.

Pitch Black and The Chronicles of Riddick were some runaway hits that I surpisingly didn’t think were half bad, now Vin Diesel returns in Riddick, but it’s not really much of a surprise because he’s always talking about it on Facebook in between 90′s styled shopped images of him on beaches with sentimental quotes from him in italics. Katee Sackhof who played Starbuck in the new Battlestar Galactica is going to be in this film so that’s nice. I’m mostly looking forward to them explaining away Riddick’s aging of nearly ten years in the space of a few minutes.

There’s a film coming out called Gravity which has a really cool looking poster, but it looks like it’s basically Open Water without the enticement of sharks.

Not content with expanding a short trailer into a film, Machete is getting a sequel, which apparently has Mel Gibson in it. For some reason.

The Fifth Estate is a film about Julian Assange with Benedict Cumberbatch playing the title role, way to go Batchy, I thought there wasn’t anything you could do to make yourself undesirable, but you proved me wrong.

This movie sounded interesting, and for all the wrong reasons. Escape Plan, about a man who is incarcerated in a prison he designed, it looks a bit sci-fi and has Sly Stallone, Arnie and… 50 Cent. Whu-What? I’ve not heard of this film before so it will be interesting to see how this is marketed and what people make of it.

47 Ronin is a famous story in Japan about samurai that have lost their master and seek revenge on the culprit, now the American’s have decided they want a slice of the action and thought that inserting Keanu Reeves as Japanese is enough. There is a brilliant actually Japanese cast behind him, particularly Hiroyuki Sanada from Twilight Samurai and Tadanobu Asano from Ichi the Killer. For some reason I have always enjoyed seeing Keanu Reeves in films if only to ridicule him so I figure it will be gold watching him try to put on a Japanese accent.

There are also some obvious choices of films to watch this year, Thor: The Dark World, Hunger Games 2, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug and The Wolf of Wall Street which is directed by Martin Scorcese so I figured these needed no introduction.

However this year also has it’s fair share of tosh in the remake of Oldboy, whose trailer decided to ambiguously ignore a key plot issue from the original film/manga, KickAss 2, which features a ludicrous boy-child playing hero and an irritatingly innocous girl playing super-assassin, Anchorman 2, more of the same dreary and unrefined “humour” wasting away what little comical value Ferrell has, Carrie the film nobody wanted a remake of and finally there is Ender’s Game.

Oh, Ender’s Game. How I want to love you, but it’s so hard to love something that denies an entire section of society’s right to exist and pursue happiness. Of course I’m talking about the bigoted author, Orson Scott Card.

The book looks interesting if not rather derivative of Starship Troopers, and we all not what I thought of that, but it upsets me that there is a movie for this film when there are so many more filmable and better Sci-Fi books out there just waiting for illiterate audiences to mong through. I will be boycotting this film like I have his book, but if I find either in a charity shop where my money is as far away from Card’s homophobic sniffing nose then I might painfully indulge myself, knowing that a charity will earn from his intolerance.

Fortunately backwards thinking folk like Card are rapidly becoming a thing of the past as this week England finally received Royal assent, so in celebration here is a picture of Jennifer Connelly, to whom I will someday be married.

Films of 2013