Everything You Should Watch This July/August 2022
Thor Love & Thunder
Kiwi Director Taika Waititi single handedly made Thor the only Marvel flick worth our time of day when they released Thor Ragnarok. The classic kiwi deadpan humour infused the entire film with playful quirkiness. You can flick to any point in the movie and be about 10 seconds away from your next laugh. Thor Love & Thunder is the studio’s attempt to capture that lightning in a bottle once again, so get hyped!
Picking up after the events of the blip, Thor is in somewhat of a aimless midlife crisis. Not every hero has their path set out for them. On his travels, he also comes across Natalie Portman’s Jane Foster, who is now The Mighty Thor, an equal able to wield Thor’s hammer. We haven’t seen her since the first film (and sort of in Endgame).
Waititi knows he’s got to bring his A-game to the movie to make sure a love story doesn’t bog down what audiences want out of a Marvel film. “On paper, it feels kinds of cringy to me, but there’s a way of doing it with cool characters making a cool movie, and also having a thing that no fan ever wants in a superhero movie, which is people talking about love, and characters kissing.”
While there are romance and big feelings in this movie, Taikai doesn’t want you to be comfortable in your expectations. “I can’t promise that what people think is going to happen in this film will happen.”
In Cinemas 7 Jul
The Grey Man
Directed by the Russo Brothers (Avengers: Endgame) and starring Chris Evans and Ryan Gosling, The Gray Man is Netflix’s most expensive film to date with a production budget of $200 million.
The film drops in cinemas on July 15th but it’s only a short stint at the cinemas as its quickly going to Netflix on July 22nd.
You can expect a solid CIA cat and mouse thriller with plenty of action from this one. The setup is paint by numbers CIA’s top killer golden boy has the tables turned on him after discovering agency secrets and now he’s on their death list. HR really needs to step in with employee grievances at these spook agencies, geeze. The incredible Ana de Armas also backs up the pair. Joe Russo was excited at being able to get Gosling and Evans facing off against each other. “[Evans] reached the stage where playing the villain is more interesting to him than playing a hero, so we’re able to get two mega-stars to compete,” he said in an interview.
on Netflix 28 Jul
House of the Dragon
Set two hundred years before the terrible finale of Game Of Thrones, House of the Dragon follows George R. R. Martin’s book “Fire & Blood”, so at least this one is based on a story that’s been finished. The series concerns itself with the fall of House Targaryen and stars Matt Smith. The question is, you’ve been burned once, dare you go back again? I think HBO has learnt their lesson on this one.
Bullet Train
Deadpool 2 director, David Leitch, brings us some balls to the wall action fun with the help of an ensemble cast, including Brad Pitt and Sandra Bullock. Five Assassins on a bullet train at cross purposes with each other. Lot’s of fun and gore. Would recommend to anybody who likes fun.
It’s Morbin’ Time
Morbius has been having a hell of a time at the box office. Critically, the anti-hero spiderman villain Sony flick was panned, sitting at 17% on Rotten Tomatoes.
It bombed fairly decisively at the box office as well. In fact it bombed so hard that it bombed twice thanks to the raw power of meme magic.
Morbius has been caught up in a vortex of memes, stretching back to before it was released when someone made the joke that they liked the bit in the movie where he says “It’s Morbin time”. Quickly an ironic legion of “fans” sprouted up, proclaiming that the movie would blow Avengers and every other film to ever exist out of the water. Morbius can cure your STD’s, Morbious can fix your marriage. It’s the best thing to ever happen to cinema. They say that the crew wept every time Jared Leto morbed out. That’s sort of a taste of what people were saying about the film online.
The ongoing joke was that despite absolutely nobody watching the movie, they were going to go to their graves defending how great it was.
Google’s movie review section for the film has been morbed to bursting with reviews for the film calling it the second coming of christ, and it’s been reverse review bombed on Rotten Tomatoes, giving it an audience score of 71%.
It was presumably due to this absolute ferver online that Sony decided to re-release Morbius for a second theatrical run during a lull in film releases. Unfortunately for Morbius, it turns out that people memeing and ironically defending your film doesn’t actually translate to anyone actually going outside and seeing the movie, resulting in a new disastrous weekend for the movie.
The question is, did Sony do this as a way of drumming up some more press for itself? Or did it genuinely think that the jokes were sincere. We might never know. However Leto was good sport enough to show up on Twitter reading the script for “Morbius 2: It’s Morbin’ Time”. One can only dream.