Disaster Movie

Disaster Movie: One sign of slow times at the multiplex, if not necessarily of the Apocalypse.
Lionsgate

So which new movie are you most overwhelmingly excited to see this week: Disaster Movie, Babylon A.D., College, or Ballet Shoes?

Yes, these are the thin days. The days when the late-summer movies have all opened and the fall movies haven't started.

There's activity off at film festivals (where no one can agree on the Coen brothers' Burn After Reading), but there's not much here at home.

One bright spot is Traitor, an FBI thriller starring Don Cheadle and Guy Pearce, which has a perfectly respectable pedigree; it comes from the writer of 2004's The Day After Tomorrow.

But after that, it gets very thin very quickly. How thin? How quickly? We investigate, after the jump.

  • Disaster Movie is another of the Epic Movie/Date Movie efforts, starring tabloid staples Carmen Electra and Kim Kardashian.

  • Babylon A.D. is a Vin Diesel vehicle about a virus and a mercenary that doesn't even have the support of its own original director.

  • College is a comedy starring Drake Bell, the flopsy-haired "charmer" of Nickelodeon's Drake & Josh, and — no kidding — Kevin Covais, a bad singer ported over from a past season of American Idol who once went by the nickname "Chicken Little."

  • Ballet Shoes stars Emma Watson (from the Harry Potter movies), but it's apparently about three plucky orphans, and that's three more plucky orphans than many of us are looking for in an evening's entertainment.

When will things improve? Not next week, when the big newsmaker will be Nicolas Cage in Bangkok Dangerous. (A real movie.)

The week after that brings the aforementioned critic-dividing Burn After Reading, that Meg Ryan remake of The Women that feels like it's been in development since my infancy, and Righteous Kill — which, from the trailers, appears to star Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro as themselves, as portrayed on Saturday Night Live. Higher profile, but also high in things that might make you dubious.

We've got a little way to go before the tumbleweeds clear out of the late-summer non-movie season, so renew your Netflix subscription and check out the cable lineup.

And take heart: Divided critics or no, Burn After Reading will at the very least give you John Malkovich saying, "You're part of a league of morons."

Which is already my favorite moment of his career.

-- Linda Holmes

categories: Movies

12:19 - August 28, 2008

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