Friday, February 9, 2018

In Theaters: February 9, 2018

There are three wide releases this weekend.

The 15:17 to Paris



In August of 2015 there was an attempted mass shooting on a train from Amsterdam to Paris.  The gunman's rifle jammed immediately (a miracle) and he was subdued quickly by some passengers, two of which were off duty members of the U.S. Military.

Clint Eastwood directs this movie.  He has a sort of fatal attraction to true stories.  His true story films tend to not be as well-liked as his fictional films, and this time he has gone a step further.  The three leads in the film (the three men primarily responsible for subduing the gunman) will be played by the real people.  Yeah.  Remember Act of Valor?  Remember all those acting awards it won?  Neither do I.

Proceed with caution.  The three lead actors playing themselves feels like a gimmick to me.  Also, the actual event was over in like three minutes, which means this movie's 94 minute runtime is going to be padded through the nose with sentiment.  You heard it here first.

The 15:17 to Paris is rated PG-13 on appeal for bloody images, violence, some suggestive material, drug references and language.

That means it was originally rated R, but the filmmakers appealed the MPAA for a lower rating.  They may have changed the content, or just made their case for a lower rating.

Fifty Shades Freed


There is no metric by which this movie or franchise can be a success, except dollars.  Morally?  I think not.  Creatively?  No one is impressed.  Every review I've heard even criticizes the love scenes, which, as far as I can tell, is the whole point of the franchise.

Just don't do it.

Fifty Shades Freed is rated R for strong sexual content, nudity, and language.

Peter Rabbit


It's nothing more than a copycat of the new Paddington movies.

It is mind-boggling how often studios greenlight movies for the wrong reasons.  It happens about two to five times for every truly good movie that is really successful.  The Lego Movie paved the way for Angry Birds and that Emoji movie.  Star Trek Beyond was almost a Guardians of the Galaxy copycat until Simon Pegg saved it.  The Secret Life of Pets came out just a few months after Zootopia.  That might seem like it wasn't a copycat, but everyone knew for years that Disney was working on an animated film centered around different animals living in a city together.  Sometimes this leads to additional good movies, as in the case of Logan, which was allowed to go for the R rating because of the success of Deadpool.

Studio executives are like overprotective mothers.  They know that risk is unavoidable, but they will try to minimize it insofar as it is humanly possible - often to the detriment of the finished product.

I guarantee you the studio execs at Sony genuinely believe Peter Rabbit will earn critical praise because it has a lot in common with Paddington and Paddington 2.  These are both live action children's movies with an animated lead.  They're both classic British children's books, and they're both loaded with a very British cast.  Both the leads are even talking animals that wear clothes!  The current 57% on Rotten Tomatoes is going to confuse the heck out of them.

In the mind of a studio executive, surface level commonalities with a proven hit minimizes financial risk.  No matter what you do, no matter how many decades of experience tell us this is not true, they will persist in this belief.  It's probably because they're numbers men more often than not, coming from a strong business background.  The really sad thing is that they get filmmakers who are willing to play along, too dazzled by the opportunity to work on a big studio picture to point out fundamental flaws, and they bring us films like Peter Rabbit.

Will Gluck, director of Peter Rabbit, is more of a studio man than a dazzled noob.  The kind of guy studios know they can count on to not draw attention to troublesome things like character and story.  Don't get me wrong, Will.  You make a living making movies and that's awesome!  And what you're doing isn't technically morally wrong.  But you're feeding the beast.

This whole thing is a never ending source of frustration for film fans like myself, but now back to Peter Rabbit.

Peter Rabbit is about a rabbit named Peter who lives in a village in England with his animal friends.  A new (human) neighbor movies in and doesn't want to let Peter and his friends eat his crops!  A battle of wills ensues.

Peter Rabbit is rated PG for some rude humor and action.


      Big Shot Critic

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