May 28 2009Films You Could See in a Theater This Weekend

Keep seeing trailers, posters, and clips that catch your interest but unsure of when the films are being released? How about I start telling you what's coming out every week? So you can ask girls on dates to movies. I'll try to come up with a better title by next week.

Anyway, this weekend:

Up
Director: Pete Docter
Starring: Ed Asner, Christopher Plummer, Delroy Lindo, some other voices.
Recommended if you want to see: the elderly as three-dimensional computer-renderings; the delighted faces of children exiting the theater; a talking dog; an obviously good movie because it's a Pixar.

Drag Me to Hell
Director: Sam Raimi
Starring: Alison Lohman (that girl from Matchstick Men), Justin Long (that guy who is a Mac commercial).
Recommended if you want to see: Raimi's favorably-reviewed return to horror; a bug crawl into a girl's nose (I think that happened in one of the TV spots); someone forcibly pulled into a fiery netherworld.

Departures
Director: Yôjirô Takita
Starring: Masahiro Motoki, more Japanese names that will mean nothing to you.
Recommended if you want to see: an Academy Award-winning, moving, sometimes comical, beautifully-shot film from Japan; how this thing managed to lose you the Best Foreign Language Film point in your office Oscar pool when you heard that Holocaust movie was a fucking lock.

What Goes Up
Director: Jonathan Glatzer
Starring: Steve Coogan, Hilary Duff
Recommended if you want to see: confused families saying, "I thought this was supposed to be the animated thing with the old guy."