Box Office Weekend: Friday, November 9th, 2018

Welcome to another tardy trailers round-up! I’ve brought literally all the sass in New York City, so buckle up, because I have a lot of disdain. (But The Long Dumb Road looks great!) You do you, America, and if you have Monday off, treat yourself to a matinee! (Beat on Amazon also intrigues!)

Chef Flynn …Remember that white kid who was an all-star chef, and had a singular focus on fine dining? His stage mom got him a critically acclaimed documentary. I, meanwhile, bought a can of spaghetti o’s on sale, with no qualms, and will easily eat it for lunch on Thursday, my 33rd birthday.

The New Romantic has a plot so ill-advised I rolled my eyes so hard I blacked out and fell over. Fed up with immature men, a college-aged woman goes for sugar daddies. This is stupid and redundant. THIS WAS ALREADY COVERED ON SHOWTIME (The Girlfriend Experience) and Sex And the City. (Look at those fucking voiceovers and the damn column.)

In Searching finds a young man, home from college for a brief visit, “on an auspicious visit” regarding found lockets, hometown bullies, and dirt bike races. Beats Less Than Zero.

Postcards from London is “set in a vibrant, neon-lit, imaginary vision of Soho, this morality tale manages to be both a beautifully shot homage in the spirit of Derek Jarman and a celebration of the homo-erotic in Baroque art.” You know, I’m sure it’s a great film, but with a description like that I just fucking cannot. It features a character “painfully oversensitive to art.” Fucking really? Wow, what is it like being alive? Don’t tell me, that’s probably the point of this self-indulgent bullshit.

El Ángel is a Spanish-language thriller from Argentina. Set in 1971, a young man turns from thief to murderer while engaging in the affection of his crush. The film is a semi-fictionalized account of serial killer Carlos Robledo Puch; the film was Argentina’s submission to this year’s Academy Awards.

Dr. Seuss’ The Grinch, the animated adaptation that no one asked for, just in time for the holiday season, with voices from Angela Lansbury, Benedict Cumberbatch, Keenan Thompson, and Rashida Jones. Are Jones and Lansbury behind on tax payments? Why are they doing this to us?

The Long Dumb Road stars Jason Mantzoukas (as an “itinerant 30-something mechanic”) who gets a cross-country ride from a college-bound teenager (played by my fave and yours, Tony Revolori). It sounds funny and heartwarming! The film is written and directed by Hannah Fidell and it’s my pick this week.

Weightless is a drama that is either very good or total bullshit: the trailer has a lot of cliches (an overweight child in a movie titled “Weightless,” a goldfish in a pink bathtub, hints at magical realism, a fucking mine). A man “on the fringes of society” takes in his 10-year-old son. I love Juliette Nicholson, but she’s already betrayed me with the hackneyed, disappointing 10,000 Saints, so heed with caution.

The Girl in the Spider’s Web is a theatrical adaptation of the novel by David Lagercrantz, which continued the series after the death of Stieg Larsson. Claire Foy, who is everywhere now!, is Lisbeth, and there’s bad haircuts, violence, retribution, and all the stuff that people love about this series, I assume. I don’t know, I have my own issues with its politics.

Here And Now is Sarah Jessica Parker’s latest passion project (did you know her hair is a wig, and she kept her wigs from Sex and the City?) She stars as Vivienne, a woman who GAVE UP EVERYTHING FOR HER CAREER IN THE ARTS only to find out she has a TERMINAL ILLNESS, and now she has to make amends before she croaks. (It looks pretty good though!) The cast includes Common, Jacqueline Bisset, and Renée Zellweger.

Overlord is a J.J. Abrams-produced film (remember when he did Felicity?) that “follows several American soldiers who are dropped behind enemy lines the day before D-Day and discover secret Nazi experiments.” It involves a serum that “restores life” so I’m throwing my hands up in the air with disgust and walking away, because there are plenty of true stories about Nazis that deserve to be told (so that we don’t forget the horrors we are capable of, and also the resiliency of the victims and those who fought Nazis) over made-up wow, bro, that’s some cool sci-fi shit.

Coming Thursday, November 15: