DECEMBER 25 [TUESDAY]
Ahh, Christmas at the movies, and this year we have a pair of comedies and a spaghetti western as Warner Bros. decided to shuffle Baz Luhrmann‘s The Great Gatsby off into the wilds of 2013. Oh well, there is more than enough to keep your attention after Santa has eaten his cookies and left coal in your stocking.
We’ll begin with the comedies, both of which feature some names you may have heard of. First off there’s The Guilt Trip from Anne Fletcher (The Proposal) with a screenplay by Dan Fogelman (Crazy, Stupid, Love.). The film stars Seth Rogen playing an inventor who invites his mother (Barbra Streisand) on a cross-country trip as he tries to sell his new product while also reuniting her with a lost love.
Opposite that is Parental Guidance starring Billy Crystal and Bette Midler playing a married couple called in by their daughter (Marisa Tomei) to help care for their three grandkids. I have a few concerns about this one considering it sounds as if it is going to play heavily on jokes about how the grandparents aren’t “hip” to what the kids of today are into and so on. If it’s loaded with “What’s a Facebook?” and “Who’s a Lady Gaga?” it could be a long watch.
Finally, my most anticipated title of the year, Quentin Tarantino‘s Django Unchained, a modern take on the spaghetti western that finds Jamie Foxx playing Django, a recently freed slave who teams with the German-born bounty hunter Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz) to hunt down a trio of lowlifes eventually leading them on a mission to rescue Django’s wife, Broomhilda (Kerry Washington), from the clutches of Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), an evil plantation owner.
Tarantino’s love for the genre and his ability to pay homage to the films he loves and bring a new and modern twist to their telling is something I am a complete sucker for and come Christmas time I will certainly be seeing this one and will hopefully like it enough to want to see it more than once.
