Thursday, January 14, 2021

Thursday Movie Picks #340: 2020 releases

This being Thursday, it's time for another edition of Thursday Movie Picks, the blogathon run by Wandering Through the Shelves. This week's theme is "2020 Releases". Now, I have to admit, I did not actually see any movies released in 2020. I don't go to the movie theater all that often, and then in March our idiot governor shut everything down, calling it an Orwellian "pause". Two weeks to flatten the curve my ass. I also don't have enough internet capacity to do streaming video, which I suppose is one of the negatives of living 1000 feet up a hill at the end of a dead-end road and having state forest on the other side of the property.

But I did go to the movies once last year, in January to see 1917, the first time I had been to a movie theater since watching Florence Foster Jenkins back in the summer of 2016. The showing had the usual latter-day advertisements as well as previews, so I'm selecting three movies whose trailers I saw that day.

The Invisible Man. I actually wrote a post on this trailer, since the trailer itself struck me as making the movie out unintentially to be a cross between Blithe Spirit and Sleeping With the Enemy. To me, this had the potential to be really interesting and not bad, or a spectacular misfire. (I laugh towards the end of Sleeping With the Enemy, which I suppose some people out there might find inappropriate.) Apparently it's not a bad movie, but I never got around to seeing it or paying to rent it on DirecTV's movies on demand.

Call of the Wild. The thing I remember most about the trailer is how much of it looked like CGI (ie. all of it), and how much latter-day CGI strikes me as way to sterile and cold, the coldness not being a pun for a movie set in the snows of the Yukon. (Indeed, I found the CGI in 1917 to have the same effect on me.)

Tenet. I'll be damned if I can even remember what the movie was supposed to be about. And I have better recall of some of the trailers I saw before Florence Foster Jenkins. These included La La Land, Tom Hanks as Capt. Sullenberger, and Tom Hanks uncovering another Dan Brown conspiracy in the Vatican, these last two actually being two different movies and not Capt. Sullenberger uncovering the conspiracy. Tenet was supposed to get a 2020 release before governors closed all the movie theaters; I think it eventually did get a release somewhere. Shows you how interested I was in this movie.

5 comments:

Brittani Burnham said...

Tenet was...something. I wanted to love it so badly.

Sonia Cerca said...

I loved Tenet!

Cinematic Delights said...

Hope you can get to see the films you want to soon, Ted!

ThePunkTheory said...

I did manage to catch a few 2020 releases, but for the ones you mentioned I also only saw the trailers!

Birgit said...

I chose 1917 since I saw it in the theatre and it was released, in Canada, in 2020. I love the book Call of the Wild and saw a Canadian film version of it which was excellent. This film doesn’t interest me at all because the dog looks so fake. They could have done much better with this film. I laughed too near the end of Sleeping With The Enemy and I have no desire to see this Invisible Man Story. I have no desire to see Tenet either because it just looks boring to me.