Sollosi's Top Five Most Anticipated Films of 2012

I love movies, I love listing things, and 2012 has my wallet primed for losing money at the theatre this year. Late spring through the summer is the time most of the Hollywood blockbusters roll out, so of course I'll make a list of movies I'm keeping an eye on. Ranked in order of interest / hype.

Before I go on, I should mention that these are movies for pure entertainment. I'm avoiding most Oscar-bait spectacles and hardcore dramas ("The Great Gatsby" and "Lincoln" for two examples) because, well, those are the kind of movies I'll watch and be impressed by, but not movies that get me fired up the way an intense action movie or a superhero flick or a gorgeous animated film will. And for the record, the final considerations cut from this list of five seven were The Expendables 2, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, Hunger Games, the upcoming Les Miserables remake, The Pirates! Band of Misfits, The Three Stooges, The Dictator, and Ted. Look up those movies anyway - I think each of them has promise.

(I couldn't get the text to wrap around the images how I liked without messing with the entire blog; I went with HUGE posters and promos instead).

Honorable Mention(s):



The Amazing Spider-Man (July 3rd)
&
The Avengers (May 4th)

Yeah, I feel I can use one entry for both of these. I've enjoyed most of the recent crop of Marvel movies, with the highs (Iron Man, Captain America, Spider-Man 2) outnumbering the lows (X-Men: The Last Stand, Thor). I'm not quite as excited for these two movies as a few of my friends are, but I have faith in a lot of the talent at work (Andrew Garfield, Emma Stone, Robert Downey Jr., Joss Whedon, et al.) and who knows? Maybe the third Hulk's the charm.




5. Wreck-It Ralph (November 2nd)

The bottom spot on lists like these is often reserved for an out-there pick that gives the list a certain uniqueness or elitist flavor that media snobs like me crave. Well, here it is - I could have put almost any of my almost-rans here and I rolled with the weirdest. Wreck-It Ralph is a cartoon with a unique, interesting premise - a has-been Bad Guy from an old arcade videogame wants to salvage his image and become a Good Guy, so he traverses throughout the different machines in the arcade to try his hand at heroism. Voice cast includes John C. Reilly and Jane Lynch. I have a feeling that Wreck-It Ralph could be this year's Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs or Rango - an excellent cartoon that I absolutely didn't see coming, but eventually warranted multiple viewings. I'm probably the only person on the Wreck-It Ralph bandwagon at present, but I dig it.




4. Brave (June 22nd)

Ordinarily, a year's Pixar offering would absolutely warrant a spot higher than #4 on a list of my most-anticipated films of a given year, but Brave is unlucky to be in a totally stacked movie year. I'm going to see this one on opening weekend - every Pixar movie (with the possible exception of Cars 2) brings incredible imagination and beauty to any concept and genre it adapts, and I cannot wait to see their take on an original fairy tale. Our heroine, Princess Merida, seems like a tomboy princess that could fit into a number of stories, but I know Pixar will make her legend into something awesome.




3. Prometheus (June 8th)

Any of the next three titles would have been #1 in 2010 or 2011, but not when they're all stuck in the same year. Prometheus is going to be a major movie event. A huge science fiction epic directed by Ridley Scott, with an ensemble cast featuring Michael Fassbender, Charlize Theron, Noomi Rapace, and others. Intense, dramatic trailers and rumors that Prometheus is a sequel or prequel to the Alien franchise have only upped the intrigue surrounding the science fiction epic. As a huge fan of Scott and the first two Alien films, I couldn't be more excited. I'm planning on attending a midnight showing with some of the college crowd.




2. Django Unchained (December 25th)

When Django Unchained was first announced, I couldn't believe what I was reading. Quentin Tarantino's newest film stars Jamie Foxx as a slave, Django, who escapes from the captivity of an evil plantation owner, Calvin Candie, played by Leonardo DiCaprio. Django recruits a team of badasses to return to the plantation, kill Candie, and rescue Django's wife and children. Django Unchained is Tarantino's love letter to Spaghetti Westerns (he's been calling the film a "Southern"), and it's movies like these why I consider Tarantino one of my favorite movie directors of all time. I know it debuts on Christmas, but I'm going to try and see it at midnight anyhow.




1. The Dark Knight Rises (July 20th)

Not much to explain here. The Dark Knight is one of my favorite movies of all time, and Christopher Nolan intends to end the pre-planned trilogy with The Dark Knight Rises, whose provocative previews show a suffering Bruce Wayne, a crippled Jim Gordon, and a massive, terrifying Bane. This is going to be grim-dark as &%$*, but you don't follow up the greatest superhero movie of all time with a candy-colored feel-gooder. You go all out and give the next filmmaker to adapt the caped crusader something to aspire to. I have not felt so much hype to see a movie sequel in my entire life.

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It's been a long time since my last blog post, in large part due to the lack of Sequential Art and my game time being devoured by time-consuming titles. I'm rolling a Star Ocean 2 playthrough that started up in February and a few recently-downloaded indie RPGs on PC, but the real culprit is Mass Effect 3. I'm hoping to finish that one by the end of the month (doable) so I can get back to my 2012 targets. The year's not even a quarter done and I'm already behind schedule.