January is an odd month for movies. The winter holiday season has ended and the studios are laying their spent, having shot their wad of films they hoped would bring in the crowds over the weeks between Thanksgiving and New Years. While you do have some of the Academy Award hopeful pictures starting to expand their distribution from the limited number of cities that they opened in, most of the stuff hitting theaters over the next couple of weeks is not at all inspiring. For example-
Bride Wars (3,226 screens, Fox)- Kate Hudson and Anne Hathaway are bestest friends who become rivals when they each schedule their weddings for the same day. Hilarity ensues, evidently. Not that you would know so by the trailer for this. The presence of Candice Bergen only serves to remind us how good she used to be both in drama and comedy, and how far she has fallen since.
The Unborn (2,356 screens, Universal)- Screenwriter David Goyer steps up to the director’s chair for this tale of a young woman who discovers she is slowly being possessed by an evil spirit. It is interesting to see the influence that the recent wave of Japanese horror films have had on US filmmakers. If I didn’t know anybetter, based on the trailer I would suspect that The Unborn was yet another English-language version of one of those films from that cycle. Either that, or a Munsters remake cause that kid seriously looks like Herman and Lily’s son Eddie.
Not to worry, though. The Clint Eastwood vehicle Gran Torino (Heh, get what I did there?) and a pair of Kate Winslett dramas, The Reader and Revolutionary Road, expand their screen counts this weekend. Check out their trailers after the jump.
