The Weekend In Movies – August 28th Edition.

   If you noticed that I missed doing an entire installment of this column last week – thank you! You’re the best reader ever. Please replicate. Anyway, the reason I didn’t write about last weekend’s movies is because there was only one movie truly worth spotlighting – Inglourious Basterds – and I wasn’t going to say a word about that one until I saw it. Now, while I work on choosing a word for that one, let’s look at the movies that are hitting theaters today:   Big Fan.http://www.bigfanmovie.com/  
 Big Fan is the directorial debut of Robert Siegel, who wrote The Wrestler.  It’s about a New York Giants fan who is so obsessed with his team that it disrupts his life to increasingly disastrous results.   The “Big Fan” in the title is played by the comedian Patton Oswalt, in a rare dramatic role.  In the absence of Dave Chappelle, my favorite (and I’d argue, the best) comedian working today is Patton Oswalt.  He’s one of the very smartest dudes in show business and I recommend everything he gets involved in, but Big Fan in particular is arriving to rapturous reviews. It’s playing at the Angelika – you can get behind me in line. http://www.angelikafilmcenter.com/angelika_film.asp?hID=1&ID=328f8m1.w1101725l91487f92v.65   Rob Zombie’s Halloween 2.http://halloween2-movie.com/  Don’t know about you, but I really like Rob Zombie. Astro-Creep: 2000 was one of my favorite albums way back when; more recently I enjoyed his short-lived radio show in LA whenever I heard it. He’s a dude after my own heart; he loves monster movies and strippers and skeletons and freaking out the straights. About his career as a film director, though, I’m not so sure yet. I love that he casts great cult actors of the ‘70s, but I couldn’t even get through The Devil’s Rejects for one, and stopping a movie halfway is ultra-rare for me. So I didn’t watch his Halloween remake, although I heard horrible things about it (not in a good way), so I don’t know what to expect from his remake-sequel/ sequel-remake. I love Halloween as a holiday and as a John Carpenter movie – I’ve been known to refer to it as “the greatest Halloween movie of all time” – so I naturally will nervously circle around any movie that tries to replicate it, especially if not done well. A sequel to a bad movie is usually the only thing worse than a bad movie. A bad remake hardly ever leads to good news. Expect that not to matter at all to the lobotomized dumbos who will flock to this one on opening night.  The Final Destination.http://thefinaldestinationmovie.com/ Well, you know it’s not, so that’s a dumbass title right there. I’ve never seen more than a scene or two of any of the Final Destination movies. I’m told that as today’s horror movies go, they’re more smartly conceived and executed than most. That comparative statement means very little to me, because most horror movies stink like day-old poo. I like a horror movie where I’m rooting for a protagonist to LIVE – I am wholly uninterested in a franchise whose entire appeal is rooted in the pleasure of innovating new ways to orchestrate character deaths. That’s just my own personal taste. (Maybe, despite the love of monster movies and strippers and skeletons, etc., I’m a little bit better-adjusted than I thought?)  Taking Woodstock.http://www.filminfocus.com/focusfeatures/film/taking_woodstock/  “At what point can I stop hearing about Woodstock? The original was good but the sequels sucked. Lay off it already, damn dirty hippies.” That’s me talking, about the 30th anniversary hoopla in general and this movie in particular. Taking Woodstock, as the title implies, is a story told from the periphery of the Woodstock Festival in 1969, starring The Daily Show’s Demetri Martin as a young guy whose boundaries are expanded by the Summer Of Peace And Love. The movie is directed by Ang Lee and written by his frequent collaborator James Schamus, so it’ll probably be classy, well-observed, and artful. It’s just hard to imagine a topic that I personally can relate to less. I’m from the generation who grew up alongside the over-commercialized Woodstock 1994, and the abhorrent travesty that was Woodstock 1999. I hardly claim to be the voice of my generation, but it’s fair to say that the whole Peace & Love trip is our parents’ thing, not ours. Every high school class still has its stinky stoner hacky-sack kids who at least aesthetically grasp at the Woodstock principle, but most of us have other things on our minds (for better or worse). And we’re not even the prime movie-going generation anymore! This is all a convoluted way of predicting that Taking Woodstock is not going to lead the weekend box office.  World’s Greatest Dad.http://www.hulu.com/watch/78595/movie-trailers-worlds-greatest-dad---red-band  In actuality, this one cropped up in New York & LA last week. World’s Greatest Dad has cleared all kinds of hurdles: It’s a writer-director act from the widely-discounted comedian Bobcat Goldthwait. It stars Robin Williams, who some say hasn’t been funny in twenty years, and others say tends towards the maudlin and mawkish when playing drama. It’s got a downright dangerous plot (a failed-writer father passes off his work as his son’s, a nasty brat who recently died of auto-erotic asphyxiation, and is posthumously hailed as a talented and missed kid). Amazingly, despite all those potential pitfalls, everybody says the movie works – it’s dark and funny and even prescient, they say. As far as I can tell, the Landmark Sunshine Cinema is the only theater in the city with the stones to run it. Hell, it’s the last weekend of August and a weird weekend for movies overall – why not take a risk?