Ryan Reynolds

Summer Movie Preview

summer-preview-2013

The beginning of May, which is now less than two weeks away, officially starts the Summer movie season with big budget action flicks, comedies, and sci-fi films hitting the theaters every week until the end of August. This year’s crop brings us the end of the world (at least three times), post-apocalyptic futures, zombies, giant robots, sequels, monsters, super-heroes, aliens, Greek mythology, men of steel and iron, action, Minions, animated racing snails and planes, old spies back in the game, a hearty Hi-Yo Silver, and new takes on the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Shakespeare. Here’s a look at the big movies of the summer (with a handful of smaller films that just may be worth a look, too).

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Safe House

  • Title: Safe House
  • IMDB: link

safe-house-posterSafe House just goes to show you that Hollywood can find a way to take even one of the most boring jobs of any CIA agent would ever have and turn it into an action thriller with a horde of nameless bad guys who never seem to run out of ammunition.

The first thing you need to understand about Safe House is that very little of the film’s close to two-hour running time actually takes place in a safe house. Ryan Reynolds stars as Agent Matt Weston who has spent the last 12 months keeping an empty safe house in South Africa ready in case the CIA needs to safeguard, interrogate, or house someone in the area at a moment’s notice.

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Green Lantern

  • Title: Green Lantern
  • IMDB: link

green-lantern-posterHere’s the thing, I’ve been waiting for a Green Lantern movie since 1980. That’s a long time (and a big stack of comic books). On hearing Green Lantern was finally getting his own live-action franchise I was cautiously optimistic. And then every still, trailer, and commercial I saw made me increasingly less so. Was this really what I waited so long to see?

Director Martin Campbell unleashes a CGI extravangza which certainly isn’t the Green Lantern of my childhood. However, the script by Greg BerlantiMichael GreenMarc Guggenheim and Michael Goldenberg gets enough of the character right and does a fair job of combining various story threads, told over several decades, into a single cohesive narrative that by the time the credits rolled, I’ll admit, I had a slight grin on my face.

Of course it’s also possible that my longtime love for the character and my growing unease at something during its marketing began to look all too similar to Marvel’s botched Fantastic Four franchise may have caused a psychotic break.

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Definitely, Maybe

  • Title: Definitely, Maybe
  • IMDB: link

“I’m going to tell you the story and I’m changing all the names, and I’m not telling you who your Mom is.”
“I like it; it’s like a love story mystery”

definitely-maybe-posterOkay, here’s where I usually blast contrived romantic comedies like this one.  And although Definitely, Maybe does fall into that category the level of talent involved and the sheer joy of the tale make it a far more enjoyable experience than it has any right to be.

On the eve of his divorce Will Hayes (Ryan Reynolds) tries to explain love and relationships to his precocious daughter Maya (Abigail Breslin).

Will recounts a bedtime story of his relationships with three women (Elizabeth Banks, Isla Fisher, Rachel Weisz), one of which is Maya’s mother.  Changing names and small facts Maya analyzes her father’s romantic history and tries to guess the identity of her mother, and try to figure out just what’s wrong with her father.

With a premise like that I thought I might be pulling my hair out by the time the film moved into the second act, but although the story is a tad contrived (and at times just too cute for words) it’s balanced by a darn good cast and Reynolds’ ability to find chemistry with each of his leading ladies.

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I’ve got a “Proposal” for you

  • Title: The Proposal
  • IMDB: link

The ProposalRomantic comedies can scare critics away quicker than a mob racing out of a burning building. It’s hard to warm up to a genre that’s let you down so often, and so consistently. So settling down to watch The Proposal all I really was hoping for was to make it out of the theater with my sanity intact.

Here’s the thing, aside from the contrived device used to get the film’s stars together (and a few best-forgotten groan-worthy scenes), the film actually works better than I expected. It’s not great by any stretch of the imagination, but for the genre it’s above average.

Sandra Bullock stars as Margaret Tate, a bitchy cutthroat book editor who is feared by all. Her assistant, Andrew (Ryan Reynolds), sums up her character best as someone who is allergic to “pinenuts and the full spectrum of human emotion.” When Margaret is faced with being deported and losing her job she decides to blackmail Andrew, whose career track is tied to her success, into marrying her. The newly engaged couple take a trip to Andrew’s hometown to learn about each other and prepare for a quicky wedding. And so the shenanigans begin.

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