Your Cinematic Offerings: April 10

Jake Gyllenhaal and Michelle Monaghan were apparently unable to stop Your Highness from arriving in theaters.

Once again, spring has sprung (I just made that saying up, just now, so don’t steal it) and as the gloomy chill of winter slowly turns into blooming flowers and warmer temperatures, it’s high time one gets out of the house and does whatever one loves to do on sunnier, prettier types of days. You’ll be happy to know that I can assure you that you’re not missing anything by sitting in a darkened movie theater for two hours.  In fact, let’s take a look at your cinematic offerings for this beautiful Sunday afternoon, and I’ll prove it to you.

Hop — As the trailers for the kids-flick Hop exclaim, “The battle for Easter is on!” — and that phrase alone, as truly exciting as it sounds, has probably has sent you already grabbing your coat and driving at dangerous speeds toward your local cinemaplex. Russell Brand, a British comedian whom entertainment science has apparently deemed worthy of laser-projecting onto the surface of all of our eyeballs all of the time, voices an Easter Bunny heir who decides to head out to Hollywood and pursue his dreams of becoming a drummer in a band. I’m not sure how that means the “battle for Easter is on,” but it surely means that Katy Perry is likely happy that Brand is out on red carpets and talking to press and not sitting around their home preening in the mirror and adjusting his wig.

Limitless — Bradley Cooper stars as a down-on-his luck writer who is introduced to a pharmaceutical called NZT, which opens up his brain and allows him to explore his full potential. I haven’t seen this movie yet, but I think that sounds really great. Surely there can’t be any drawback at all to that in the third act, right?

Source Code — Jake bowling ball Gyllenhaal stars as a soldier from the future who is able to travel back in time to revisit the last eight minutes before a tragedy happens. Like the eight minutes leading up to the moment you decided “I should go see Hop.”

Your Highness — Because Hollywood has run out of good ideas for places in which to set stoner comedies, but still wants to make them because they always rake in money, director David Gordon Green has decided to set one in medieval times. Can you imagine what that would be like? Hilarious, I’ll bet. It’s kind of like if Harold and Kumar met King Arthur, and in the process the careers of James Franco, Danny McBride and Natalie Portman all moved back ten spaces.

Arthur — I’ll be glad when this is over. And by that I don’t mean the one-hour-forty-nine minute running time of Arthur. I mean this phase of popular culture where Russell Brand is famous.

Diary of a Wimpy Kid 2: Rodrick Rules — A movie based on a massively popular children’s book series (Jeff Kinney’s Wimpy Kid books have sold more than 42 million copies), which you already know if you are a.) ten years old, or b.) a really creepy middle-aged guy.

Battle: Los Angeles — This alien-invasion flick is still holding strong in theaters. I haven’t seen it, I don’t know how much of Los Angeles the aliens destroy, and my fingers are crossed that Earth wins in the end, but I’m hoping that our U.S. forces are at least too late to save the executives who greenlit an Arthur remake.