This Weekend, Watch This
A comparison for the new releases for January 4-6, 2012
By Curt David
January 4, 2013
New movies are released into theaters every weekend. How do you decide which movie to watch? Some people could pick a movie based on the title (Surprisingly, The Princess Bride, Corpse Bride, Father of the Bride, and Bride of Chucky all have different genres). Some people watch trailers (misleading), some people listen to their friends (friends can be idiots), and some people only go to the movies if their Hollywood crush is on the screen (My alphabetical actress crush list...Z is for Zoe Saldana).
More likely than not, each weekend there is a movie that you have never heard of in the theaters. I'll save you the hassle of researching every movie, by comparing the new releases for each weekend in this column. Then, I'll tell you which movie to watch.
For Christmas weekend, the new movies in wide release are Texas Chainsaw 3D and Promised Land (also The Impossible opens in a slightly smaller release; you may want to check out that trailer too).
| Texas Chainsaw 3D
| Promised Land
| WINNER
(1 point per category) |
| Clearest Title | This sounds like a remake or a re-release of the classic horror movie...of course in 3D. | This sounds like a, umm, a remake of The Ten Commandments or something. | Texas Chainsaw gets the promised point this round. |
Best Genre
and Rating | Horror
Rated R for strong grisly violence and language throughout. | Drama
Rated R for language. | Two different genres, so they’ll split the grisly point this round. |
Cleverest Tagline
(out of 5 stars) | “Evil has many faces”
1/5 - I don’t get it, doesn’t evil only have one face/mask in this movie? | “What’s your price?”
2/5 - Simple. Thought Provoking. | This row doesn’t have many points. Just one. And it’s for Promised Land. |
| Best Part of Trailer | A typical trailer, sexy teens go into woods, someone tries to kill them. | A typical trailer, a corporation tries to take advantage of a small town, people dramatically fight back. | I’m not sure why Promised Land is rated R (other than apparent language), because the trailer made it look like it was rated G. But it was still the better trailer. Typical point. |
| Coolest Lead Actor | Alexandra Daddario was the girl in Percy Jackson The Lightning Thief. | Matt Damon from Good Will Hunting and The Bourne Identity. | The Identity of the winner of this point will now be revealed: Matt Damon |
| Best Cast | Trey Songz (a singer) | Hal Holbrook (Into the Wild), Frances McDormand (Almost Famous), John Krasinski (The Office) | Promised Land (the point scorer) |
Best Street Cred
For the Production | Director John Luessenhop also directed Takers. | Director Gus Van Sant also directed Good Will Hunting...but more crazy, Matt Damon AND John Krasinski wrote the screenplay! | Gus, Matt, AND John will win the best street cred point this round. |
So out of a maximum of 7 points per movie, Promised Land scores 5 and 1/2 points and Texas Chainsaw 3D scores 1 and 1/2 points.
You may interpret this column for your own movie preferences. For example, if you watched a remake of a horror movie in the past year or two, feel free to watch the one this weekend as well. However, if you are still on the fence, please read the following conclusions from the scientific data gathered in this column.
Conclusion 1: On paper, Promised Land is the best movie to watch this weekend.
Conclusion 2: So I went ahead and watched the trailer for The Impossible. The tsunami footage looked real, but that also made it too disturbing for me. If it competed in this column this week, I bet it would have gotten second place.
Conclusion 3: I loved the movie Into the Wild. It made me want to become an actor.
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