Your Cinematic Offerings: The Weekend of November 19

If you live in the continental United States of America today, chances are good that you’re having a beautiful day. In fact, according to the Brown Tweed Society’s state-of-the-art global weather tracker radar (the TBTS News Team at 11 — Where the News Comes first!), unless you live in the Noshiro-Yamamoto Chiiki region of Japan, which is experiencing several areas of dense fog, today would seem to be a prime day to get out and enjoy what we here in the United States traditionally call”autumn.” Don’t worry, you’re not missing anything in the theaters. Want proof? Fine, asshole. Read on, then.

Megamind — The reigning box office champ, Dreamworks’ Megamind is an animated picture that you will go see because it stars the voices of Will Ferrell, Tina Fey, Jonah Hill and Brad Pitt in a film that you would not go to see if it were the same animated picture starring the voices of Jim Belushi, Joan Cusack, John Leguizamo and Nathan Lane.

Unstoppable — Denzel Washington and Star Trek’s Chris Pine star in a movie about a trainload of hazardous material barreling uncontrollably through middle America. Consequently, this is also how the American Idol tour is billed. Seriously, though, I love me some Denzel Washington movies, and I love me some runaway train movies, and if you want to throw Rosario Dawson in there too, here is my $9.75, thank you. Also, can something explode? Yes? Awesome. I would appreciate that.

Morning Glory —  A movie for people who loved Broadcast News but wish Holly Hunter had acted more “cutely.”

For Colored Girls — One thing we know for sure: Tyler Perry sure does love to write about women and their problems. And he writes, by my count, roughly four types of women: the high powered executive whose life is passing her by, the nice woman whose low-down dog of a man is cheating on her, the overweight woman who is married to an overweight guy (they are both hilarious and, though they jab at each other, really love each other a lot) and the cross-dressing grandma. Will Perry turn Ntozake Shange’s infamous series of poems/monologues For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf into a solid tale of love, redemption and life lessons? I don’t know, but would you like to bet me ten dollars that the movie doesn’t end in a church where everyone ends up happy? You would! Ha ha! Sucker!

The Next Three Days — What would you do if your wife were wrongly imprisoned for life after being found guilty of killing her boss? If you are Russell Crowe, you watch some YouTube videos on how to break someone out of prison and track down Liam Neeson and his terrible New York accent. Then, I’m going to assume, you put together a montage of you thumbtacking a bunch of prison blueprints and notes up on a wall as you stay up all night planning things, have a crisis of faith at the end of the second act where you almost abandon it, and in the beginning of the third act you decide that, fates be damned, you’re going to do it anyway. Then you turn everything into an action movie, like Russell Crowe tends to do, and it all probably gets very exciting. Come to The Next Three Days for the edge-of-your-seat writing by Academy Award winner Paul Haggis, stay for the lovely travelogue of beautiful Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania!

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Part I) — Harry who? I’m sorry, but it’s a bit presumptuous to assume that you can only give us part one of something no one has ever heard of and expect us to come back for part two. We have to be invested in the story in some way first. What do you take us for, Hollywood? A bunch of rubes? No thanks! Come back when you’re in 3-D! I’m not shelling out my hard-earned cash for a low-budget, non-3-D picture like this, I don’t care how deathly the hallows are. Sounds like a load of baloney, if you ask me.