2010s

World War Z

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World War Z. Plan B Entertainment 2013.

Before watching the movie:

I have a fairly clear memory of this movie’s promotion as being the point where it seemed that any big zombie movie needs to have a thing that you’ve never seen zombies do before. They were talking about how after Fast Zombies, the new innovation of this movie is climbing/swarming zombies. I don’t know what else can be done to make zombies more threatening now that they can be fast and crash over you like a tide and still be nonsapient enough to be playing the trope straight, but if somebody figures it out, they’ll probably have the next blockbuster zombie movie, or at least that was the impression the marketing for WWZ gave me.

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Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny

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Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny. Red Hour Films 2006.

Before watching the movie:

I’ve appreciated Jack Black’s work for a while, and while I haven’t really gotten much into his work in Tenacious D, I have heard some of their bigger singles. But rock culture, even affectionate parody of it, has not been much of a draw for me. So I really don’t have much of an idea of what to expect except rock comedy and they’re probably losers in over their heads somehow.

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Les Misérables

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Les Miserables. Relativity Media 2012.

Before watching the movie:

I’m decently acquainted with the plot of the book, but somehow more through osmosis than from actually having watched the 1998 movie in class. I also recall attempting to read the book, but when I picked up the distressingly large tome with shockingly small text I was already having second thoughts, and then when this supposed English translation began with five pages in Latin, I put the book down and gave up.

I’ve wanted to experience the musical for a long time, and it’s always been a disappointment to me that the 1998 version was not based on the musical and that the musical was never properly filmed on stage (though there was an “original cast in concert” film just lined up on the stage performing the music, which I saw some of possibly in the same class that watched the other movie). When I decided to include Les Mis in this run of musicals, I was hoping there would’ve been another version because I’ve heard mostly bad things about Tom Hooper’s directorial decisions. But somehow this monumentally popular show has only been done on film the one time.

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The Secret of Kells

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The Secret of Kells. Les Armateurs 2010.

Before watching the movie:

For a long time, I thought that this movie was Japanese in origin, I think pretty much entirely due to first observing it in a collection of animated movies that seemed to otherwise be exclusively Studio Ghibli movies. I had a vague sense that it was a story of Ireland, and likely concerned a fantastical adventure with nature spirits, but barely even that. I pictured something like Fern Gulley with the Irish forests. The box art was not very descriptive at all, and I’ve chosen a poster I haven’t seen before that gives more of a sense of story over mood, though I grant the other version is more visually appealing.

Having so little to go on, I think the main thing that kept me less than interested for so long was the design style of the boy and girl characters not being one of my favorite looks. I’m also not sure if the title is meant to convey more than I’m picking up. I’ve only ever heard of Kells as in “Celtic knots inspired by the Book of Kells”, so for a long time I thought the Book of Kells was a book cataloging design. For a bit, I entertained the possibility that Kells might be another name for Celtic knots.

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Tower Heist

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Tower Heist. Universal Pictures 2011.

Before watching the movie:

I passed by this a few times because I generally don’t consider crime movies to be my kind of thing. But then I noticed that it has comedy actors leading it, so I looked closer, and saw that it’s not just about stealing money, it’s about folks who lost their retirement funds to a scummy hedge fund manager stealing it back, and that interests me a lot.

I get the sense that a lot of “revenge on the Wall Street crooks” movies came out in the years after the 2009 collapse, but I mainly get that from having seen Fun with Dick and Jane in the last year, which was very very loudly about surviving a Wall Street implosion (looking it up, I realize that movie in particular wasn’t about the 2009 collapse, but the timing seems more like it was about Enron).

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The Spy Next Door

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The Spy Next Door. Relativity Media 2010.

Before watching the movie:

While the red and orange background isn’t all that unique, this poster design doesn’t do much to communicate that this is Spy Kids but with less imagination and more Jackie Chan. I’m probably always up for a Jackie Chan comedy, but the bar’s been set pretty low.

I had no idea that Billy Ray Cyrus or George Lopez were in this movie until I started looking for posters. I would’ve expected George Lopez to get more promotional focus, especially considering when the movie was made.

I’m just now noticing just how big a genre “kids doing superspy stuff” is. The ones that I think of, Spy Kids, “Kim Possible”, and Agent Cody Banks, are all early 2000s, but it seems to have come back recently with My Spy, and I know there are other notable examples from before the 90s, so I’m not sure if it’s an evergreen movie subject or if this is very late to cash in on some successful franchises.

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