The 4 Least Anticipated Movies of February 2013
February is the time of year when culture-defining opuses such as Daredevil and Scream 3 are released, challenging us to decide which one will most effectively bookend a Valentine's Day dinner date with irrevocable ruin. 2013 continues that grand tradition by assaulting us with a stream of instantly forgettable midday TNT programming as punishment for not dying when the Mayans told us to.
Stand Up Guys
"Christopher Walken's got a gun! There's a good 30 percent chance this won't suck."
Stand Up Guys is the latest movie starring Al Pacino to serve as undeniable proof that all of his roles are being picked for him by a jaundice-yellow sorting hat with whiskey breath and night blindness. Judging by the look on his face, he is no longer certain what movies even are, and he just agrees to them because they make money appear in his wallet. The movie might as well be called Mighty Fuck, We Are So Goddamned Old, because that is the only point the trailer seems to want to get across. As best we can tell, Pacino, Alan Arkin, and Christopher Walken do impressions of themselves for 90 minutes and dare you to exchange money for it. It's like a Saturday Night Live pitch that got turned into a real movie by the genie of terrible ideas.
Beautiful Creatures
Beautiful Creatures is Hocus Pocus with a Foghorn Leghorn accent for teenage girls not quite at the Twilight reading level. The trailer paints a vivid picture of what Judy Blume would write if she were stood up by Tim Burton at an Evanescence concert. The end result looks every bit as Gothic and refined as Vincent Price reading The Vampire Diaries while taking a dump at a Bojangles, or Edgar Allan Poe boiling hooker stains out of his underwear. Fun fact: This movie was originally called The Craft, and it came out in 1996.
Safe Haven
The posters for Nicholas Sparks movies all feature some guy grabbing a girl by the face and trying to make his eyes grow penises. Safe Haven ups the ante by assuming that people will pay to see a movie starring Josh Duhamel and Julianne Hough, despite the fact that it is statistically more likely that Josh Duhamel will be struck in the face by a lightning bolt made of dinosaur ghosts. The trailer looks like something you'd be forced to watch on a muted hospital television while sharing a room with a homeless diabetic who'd fallen asleep behind a Starbucks and had his foot eaten by cats.
Escape from Planet Earth
Escape from Planet Earth stars Brendan Fraser's voice, because the actual sight of Brendan Fraser reminds people of a Twinkie that fell in a bathtub. The trailer promises at least one hijink and/or space-related pun per minute, while the undeniably wacky poster comes complete with an alien lizard crossing his arms in the universal sign for "Ain't gonna take no sass." It's the latest entry in the "bloated voice cast makes up for bad writing and animation" category of movies that stoutly refuse to learn anything from Shark Tale, and consequently it looks about as whimsically entertaining as a clown's funeral. Children would be more captivated if you made them watch C-SPAN with the theme from DuckTales playing on an endless loop.
Tom is wondering if people will even be able to see J.J. Abrams' new Star Wars movie through all of the lens flares off the light sabers. Read his novel Stitches and follow him on Twitter and Tumblr.
