Movie of the Day: "The Joy Luck Club" (1993)

Today's film celebrating movie moms is The Joy Luck Club, from 1993, a very emotional and moving story about four Chinese immigrant women and their adult Chinese-American daughters. It was based on the great book by Amy Tan (one of my favorites) and tells the story of the present day lives of the daughters and in flashback, the previous lives of their mothers in China before coming to America. It deals with the culture clash between the mothers and daughters as it explores how different the women's lives are from the past generation. The sad thing about this movie is that to this day it's still one of the few mainstream films ever made that focuses on the lives of Asian-Americans, who remain a severely overlooked minority group in Hollywood.

Trailer:

TRAILER: "Snowpiercer"

The long-awaited Snowpiercer, from South Korean director Bong Joon Ho, is finally coming out on June 27th. This movie's been delayed for months, because the director was caught up in a fierce battle with American distributor Harvey Weinstein (a confrontation you never want to enter, frankly) over releasing his cut of the movie, and not Weinstein's, who wanted at least 20 minutes chopped from the film. Bong Joon Ho won out however, so we're getting his original version when it hits theaters, and it definitely looks unique. An action-packed sci-fi based on the French graphic novel Le Transpersoneige, Bong shot 80% of the film in English and with an ensemble cast of both American and South Korean actors. His other movies are the acclaimed Memories of Murder, The Host (which I loved) and Mother, so I'm looking forward to checking this one out.

TRAILER #2: "Begin Again"

The new U.K. trailer for Begin Again, the latest music romance from the director of Once, came out today. It looks great and even though it's coming out July 4th, it's been playing at various film festivals this spring and I personally can't wait to see it at SIFF in a couple of weeks. Keira Knightley and Mark Ruffalo team up to record an album all around New York City, and yes that is Keira doing her own singing in the movie:

Movie of the Day: "Mildred Pierce" (1945)

One of my favorite film noirs of all time is a perfect entry for Mother's Day week, as it tells the story of the self-sacrificing Mildred, the mother who does everything in the world for her daughter, including giving up all the things she wants for herself, only to be betrayed by the increasingly evil child as she grows older. Okay, so it's not exactly a happy Mother's Day movie, but it's a hugely entertaining melodrama with some classic performances from Joan Crawford (who famously won an Oscar for this) but especially Ann Blyth as the horrible little two-faced Veda- seriously, you're going to want to see Mildred take down this demon spawn through any means necessary by the time the finale rolls around. This is one of the greats.

Original Trailer (unusually for the time, this is kind of a misleading trailer, which omits the mother-daughter story and plays up the film noir angle, but Mildred is anything but a femme fatale- that role actually belongs to Ann Blyth in the film):

TRAILER #2: "One Million Ways to Die in the West"

The second red-band trailer that's even raunchier than the first, filled with the kind of gross and off color jokes that are Seth MacFarlane's brand of humor. This actually looks pretty funny (if MacFarlane's your cup of tea that is, which he isn't for everyone), and I have a feeling it's going to be big hit when it comes out on May 30th. MacFarlane fans are pretty rabid and brought his first movie Ted to a surprise $218 million in 2012. The question is whether he himself can transfer from the behind the scenes guy to an on-camera screen presence, but I don't know, he looks pretty at ease to me in these trailers.

TRAILER: "Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day"

As I watched this trailer knowing it was written by Lisa Cholodenko (who I just recommended yesterday for writing and directing The Kids Are All Right) and directed by Miguel Arteta (who made Chuck and Buck and The Good Girl), it became sort of surreal how bad this looks. Frankly, the trailer just got worse and worse as it went along, and it only seems to have a passing resemblance to the classic kids book from 1972 it's based on. And it's too bad, because obviously Steve Carell and Jennifer Garner are two of the most likable actors in Hollywood, but this just doesn't cut it. Unless somehow this is an awful trailer to what's actually a really good movie underneath, which sometimes happens, but I kind of doubt it here. It's coming out October 10th.

TRAILER: "Dawn of the Planet of the Apes"

Can't wait! The war is here for Caesar and his apes, as this new trailer shows in the upcoming sequel to Rise of the Planet of the Apes, coming out July 11th. I'll admit the whole war against the humans thing seems familiar (did that happen in a previous Apes movie?) but who cares when the apes look so cool? Jason Clarke, Keri Russell and Gary Oldman are the new human additions to the cast but let's face it, nobody goes to see the humans in these movies. It's all about Andy Serkis's Caesar.

Movie of the Day: "The Kids Are All Right" (2010)

It's time to start our Mother's Day movies, in honor of the holiday coming up on May 11th. First up today, we have two movie moms for the price of one, in this Oscar-nominated film about a family with two mothers and two teenage kids, the latter of whom go searching for the donor who helped create them. The guy they find is Mark Ruffalo, who turns out to be a cool, kind of hippie-ish laid back Californian, and whose entrance into their lives and family turns everything that Nic (Annette Bening) and Jules (Julianne Moore) have built upside down. This is a warmhearted family comedy with some really great acting in it, from all three of the adults especially. It was nominated for 4 Oscars, including nods for Bening and Ruffalo, and really worth seeing.

Trailer:

TRAILER: "Tammy"

Could Melissa McCarthy have another big summer hit this year? Here she is in Tammy, which was written by her and her husband Ben Falcone, who also directed. She looks funny as always, but sometimes with comedy trailers you can't really tell what the tone of the movie might be- I suspect that this one could actually be more of a dramedy than it looks. We'll just have to wait and see. Tammy comes out July 2nd.

POSTER: "Interstellar"

Christopher Nolan's highly anticipated sci-fi film Interstellar is coming out in November, and now the poster has officially been released:

We still don't really know anything about this movie yet, other than that it's got a big ensemble cast (Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Ellen Burstyn Michael Caine), but we won't have long to wait before the trailer finally drops. It's supposed to be released ahead of Godzilla in the theaters, which means it'll be online sometime next week. The teaser didn't tell us much, and Nolan seems to be wanting to play up the mysterious aspects of this, as usual. It looks to want to recall 70's sci-fi epics like Close Encounters of the Third Kind to me, which Nolan has admitted was a big influence on him as a kid. Let's hope it can live up to the hype.

Julia Roberts and Sally Field Curse Off

Ok, so Jimmy Kimmel is obviously trying to compete with Jimmy Fallon's celebrity viral video craze, but I gotta admit this was funny. I love Sally Field's oh-so-casually dirty mouth:

Blu-Ray Pick of the Week: "The Women" (1939)

Out on blu-ray this week is a classic from the 1930's and one of my favorites of that particular era. The Women was adapted from a play by Clare Booth Luce and featured an all star cast of Hollywood's biggest actresses at the time. The conceit is that this movie is virtually all women, showing not one single man in the entire film. Good girl Norma Shearer stars as a wealthy Manhattanite whose husband is having an affair with the evil Joan Crawford and whose friends alternately plot with her and against her in light of the scandal the affair causes. Hilarious, filled with sparkling one-liners and some all time delicious scenery-chewing from Crawford and the great Rosalind Russell. It was made into a horrible remake in 2008, but this is the one you want to see.

Original Trailer: