August
5
Trailer Watch: Winged Creatures
With its sprawling ensemble of Oscar nominees and winners, from Forest Whitaker to Jennifer Hudson, Winged Creatures has the appearance of a movie designed to be Oscar bait. Dark and forboding, the R-rated pic offers multiple characters with juicy emotional roles. A raft of movies a lot like this will be heading our way as we move into the Venice/Telluride/Toronto corridor. But does Winged Creatures have the right stuff? It's unlikely, and here's why.
First, Australian Rowan Woods, who directed the grim and druggy family drama Little Fish, starring Cate Blanchett, is not a member of the Oscar club. Columbia Pictures, not Sony Pictures Classics, picked up Winged Creatures, so that tells you something. It has no release date.
Also, Luke Y. Thompson panned it in the LA Weekly after its June LAFF debut, not a good indicator of a film destined for award-season greatness:
A movie like this tends to come out at least once a year. You take a bunch of good actors, add a few who have been kind of okay in more commercial fare and are trying to prove themselves, and give them all a big tragedy to deal with that interconnects them. So we kick things off with a random shooting in a diner, and then get to see how it affects the lives of Forest Whitaker, Guy Pearce, Dakota Fanning, Jeanne Tripplehorn, Kate Beckinsale, Josh Hutcherson, Jennifer Hudson (who is of course playing Forest’s daughter, because having more than one black family in a movie like this would be just unheard of), and a couple more people you’ll recognize.Whitaker has cancer, but survives near fatal gunshot wounds and suddenly finds himself on a run of luck that he takes to the Morongo casino. Pearce discovers that a migraine drug makes his wife horny, so he starts inducing migraines by secretly drugging her food with heart medicine. Hutcherson stops talking altogether, and his dad (Jackie Earle Haley) won’t let him got to a therapist because he blames therapy for the death of his other son, who came home from Iraq all crazy. Beckinsale has an annoying baby that won’t stop crying, and she tries to hit on Pearce. Fanning gets all fundamentalist preachy.
Eventually all of them have to stop their crazy trauma-induced behavior, have a big cry, and deal with it. But you knew that. And you can take or leave the movie.
Here's the trailer:
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Posted by: RestOFTheMovie | August 07, 2008 at 02:16 AM