EPISODE 277 - The Direct-O-Matic

We’re back baby! After an impromptu hiatus of three weeks, we’ve returned to bring you our spin on all the wacky pop culture headlines from across the globe. But this week is all about movies. We’re continuing our tradition the first show of each new year by bringing you a comprehensive list of all the movies coming out in theaters over the next 365 days. I’ll just say it right now, this is one of the worst rosters we’ve seen. Like previous years, we can pretty much count on one hand how many movies we want to see. This year though, there are even less fingers needed. Every so often Hollywood goes through this copycat phase where two studios will produce very similar films that get released just months apart. We saw this in the late 90s with DANTE’S PEAK and VOLCANO as well as DEEP IMPACT and ARMAGEDDON. More recently it was OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN followed by WHITE HOUSE DOWN. In 2014 we’ll be seeing doubles again thanks to Millennium Films, MGM and Paramount Pictures. This weekend Millennium will release the Abercrombie and Fitch edition of, THE LEGEND OF HERCULES starring Kellan Lutz in the title role. And then later this summer MGM and Paramount will bring us their take on the Greek demigod in the appropriately titled, HERCULES. Dwayne Johnson stars in this one. THE LEGEND OF HERCULES tells the story of his origins and how he came to be, while HERCULES is a film about how he becomes a “sword-for-hire” and is brought in to protect a king and his daughter, which we can safely assume is hot and makes Hercules’ sword go higher. Meanwhile, a film we CAN look forward to stars Liam Neeson and it comes out at the end of February. NONSTOP, or TAKEN ON A PLANE as we jokingly call it, is about an air marshal who starts getting threatening texts during a transatlantic flight. As the mystery of who onboard is sending them deepens, he is mistaken as a hijacker and now must figure out who’s killing passengers and prove his innocence. It’s Liam Neeson, he will find them and he will kill them. By about the time we reach May Dennis is growing concerned about the summer slate. Several tentpole flicks we though would release in July are coming out even earlier begging the question, what can we expect over the summer? How about DAWN OF THE PLANET OF THE APES? It hits theaters July 11th. Caesar is now a super smart monkey and with the help of his ape pals, they’ve overthrown man. James Franco is absent in this one. Gary Oldman is in it though! Then there are more movies that just sound terrible: TRANSFORMERS 4: AGE OF EXTINCTION, RIDE ALONG, DRAFT DAY, TMNT and so on. For those of you waiting on the delayed FAST AND FURIOUS 7 there may be something to hold you over… an adaptation of the video game NEED FOR SPEED. And it’s coming sooner than later. You can race to theater for this faux-FAST March 14th. Charlie and Jabari are quite amused with my one-line synopses of all these features. So much so they are considering launching a website devoted just to single line descriptions of movie plots. They also get a kick out of how I credit some casts and directors. In my defense, some of the lower budget movies due out later this year aren’t even shot yet and don’t list any actors or directors, so I have to improvise. As an example, PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 5 is due out in October. And Oren Peli, who made the very first one, isn’t directing. IMDb has him listed as a writer though. Who is directing? “Some person” is how I listed them. Jabari and Charlie have a much more fantastic idea of who’s to blame for all these cookie cutter sequels. It must be an unsophisticated computer they call the “Direct-O-Matic”. With its 12-Hz processor and 128-Kb of RAM it’s able to churn out a major motion picture just by scanning in the screenplay. In fact, to our surprise, it’s on this week’s cover of “The Hollywood Report” trade publication. With so much crap, it’s a good thing we take a brief intermission halfway through to play our 2013 CLIP OF THE YEAR. Since our unscheduled break kept us from doing our normal year-in-review show, we thought we’d extend the listener voting a couple extra weeks and reveal the winner on the first show of the new year instead. So, although this isn’t a complete list, it gives you a general idea of what to expect in 2014. There’s a few diamonds in the rough. But boy is the rough gonna be extra rough the next 52-weeks. Show Links: Lists of 2014 Movies In Theaters: WildAboutMovies.com MovieInsider.com Teaser-Trailer.com