The Weekend In Movies – August 14th Edition.

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Whoa – what the hell is happening? The floodgates opened and there’s an insane outpouring of new movies opening this weekend! What is this, the end of summer or something? Clearance sale? I count nine notable releases opening in major markets. That’s a lot. So enough preamble, let’s get up in it:

1. DISTRICT 9. Everyone who’s already seen it has raved. I haven’t seen it and even I’ve raved about it a little already. It looks cool, and everything I hear suggests that it’s even better than that. At this point I just want to see the movie and get it over with.

2. PONYO. Hayao Miyazaki is universally referred to as “the Walt Disney of Japan”. It’d hardly be controversial to suggest that he’s even better than that. His movies are poetry multiplied by imagination. My favorite is Princess Mononoke because it has a giant wolf in it, but you really can’t go wrong. This time around, he’s doing his version of the Hans Christian Andersen story The Little Mermaid. There’s no better choice of movie for your kids this weekend than this one. Blow their little minds; introduce them to Miyazaki.

3. BANDSLAM. Teenagers in band camp or something. I watched the trailer. Not for me. The kid they obviously hope to be the new Shia LaBeouf looks a lot more like a young Daniel Stern to me. No time for any further sarcastic quippage on this one though; it’s too busy a weekend.

4. THE TIME TRAVELLER’S WIFE. So apparently this is based on a book by someone named Audrey Niffenegger (nice) about a woman who falls in love with a guy who can’t control his ability to travel through time. If it starred Adam Sandler and Christina Applegate, it’d be a comedy [which I might probably watch.] Instead, it stars Eric Bana and Rachel McAdams, and judging from the intolerably sincere trailer, it wants to be The Notebook 2.0 in the worst way. It’s The Notebook meets Back To The Future. The NoteBOOK To The Future. Mark my words: this will be every stripper’s favorite movie of the year. You, sir, might cringe at the way that fully-grown Bana first falls in love with McAdams when she’s a little kid, or you might scoff at the way his voice breaks when he says he’s met their future kid “Alba” and “she’s SO beautiful” – just don’t bring those opinions with you to Rick’s Cabaret.

5. PAPER HEART. The giggly Asian girl from Knocked Up gets her own movie, and good for her. This movie looks like the kind that all the indie kids will love, which is fine – it seems like every single demographic is being served this weekend: South African sci-fi fans, imaginative Japanese kids, high school band nerds who look like Daniel Stern, sensitive strippers, and now kooky indie-rock kids who look at Michael Cera the way their moms look at Eric Bana. But what about the assholes, you ask? What movie this weekend is there to serve the assholes?

6. THE GOODS: LIVE HARD, SELL HARD. Wherein Jeremy Piven brings his asshole shtick back to the big screen. People give Jeremy Piven so much credit for being so good at being an asshole on Entourage that they seem to forget how long he’s been playing an asshole – from One Crazy Summer, to Judgement Night, to Heat, to Old School, and on and on til the breaka-breaka-dawn. That’s a couple decades of solid practice! Jeremy Piven is one timeless asshole. If this movie is funny, credit probably goes to Neal Brennan, the director, who was previously best known as the co-creator of Chappelle’s Show. I’m still heartbroken over that one.

7. IT MIGHT GET LOUD. Guitar documentary with Jimmy Page, Jack White, and The Edge. Getting great reviews – no matter what, you know the music will be good. (Unless you’re the kind of dick who can’t stand Led Zeppelin, The White Stripes, or U2.) Find a theater with a good sound system for this one.

8. SPREAD. This is the one where professional D-bag Ashton Kutcher stretches his acting muscles to play a So-Cal man-whore for the year 2009. He’s this guy who hangs out all day on the west side, hooking up with hot chicks, and judging from the trailer, talking in an unbearable cool-guy drawl. Clearly, this is a movie about the kind of people I hate. A question the movie had better answer: Why should I care about these characters? I won’t be rooting for them, and I won’t care if they grow up or change. The only resolution I’d want to see would be a massive earthquake that swallows them all in the final scene. And it doesn’t look like this movie had the budget for that. Put it another way: I didn’t even like this movie when it was called BOOMERANG.

9. GRACE. Zombie baby. Bottom line. That’s the sell. I mean, it’s essentially the feature length version of that scene in the Dawn Of The Dead remake where a woman gives birth to a zombie infant. That was definitely something I’d never seen before in a horror movie. I’m not sure I need to see it again, and drawn out to movie length this time, but the reviews have been good, so there’s that. And back to my theory about this weekend serving up something for every demographic – let’s just hope that the horror fiends who are amped to see Grace don’t accidentally wander into a screening of Bandslam. Hell to pay…