The first film is documentary, Page One: A Year Inside the New York Times (Andrew Rossi, 2011). I’ve picked this film because I think it’ll be interesting to see how traditional media giants (ie newspapers) are attempting to make the transition to new media. However, call me a sceptic, but I don’t believe for a second that this film will actually deal with the paper’s transition. Instead, the film will be used to demean and villanize social medias (ie twitter, facebook and even Wikileaks), while asserting the New York Times is still the preferred place, for ‘serious’ journalism.
Warrior (Gavin O’Connor, 2011) looks to be a fairly knuckle-headed attempt to make an MMA version of The Fighter or Rocky. As with those films it features characters from a working class background, something effectively reflected in the trailers mise-en-scène. However, this will be a clichéd affair, where two brothers enter a fighting contest and surprise surprise end up fighting one another in the final.
My next pick is Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg, 1993), which has been lovingly remastered and is reissued this week for a limited time, prior to the trilogies release on Blu-ray. Personally, I cannot wait to see this on the big screen again, it’s been almost two decades since I last saw a decent dinosaur film and that was…
The final two films I’m going to discuss this week are heavily dependent upon their male protagonists. The first features Ryan Gosling in Drive (Nicholas Winding Refn, 2011), he plays a stunt-driver who by night, moonlights as a getaway driver. The ‘driver’ leads a quite, secluded life, but when he meets his neighbour (Carey Mulligan) he becomes embroiled with some very shady characters.
And finally, Jason Statham returns to cinemas punching, kicking and biting his way to bloody victory, in his newest ass kicking epic, Killer Elite (Gary McKendry, 2011). Statham plays Danny, a retired member of the SAS, but when his mentor (Robert De Niro) is kidnapped, it’s up to Danny to rescue him, while killing as many bad guys as humanely possible. The film also stars Clive Owen and his ridiculous facial hair.
• Catch more prereviews on The Misanthropic Monkey’s Movie Preview at The Electronic Farmyard
