Entertainment Weekly: Not Completely Useless

I used to get really psyched about Entertainment Weekly's seasonal movie preview issues. I remember getting my first glimpses of Dazed and Confused, Pulp Fiction, Natural Born Killers, Mars Attacks! and Even Cowgirls Get the Blues in those things, and even though some of those turned out to be duds, it was always a cool thing to look out for. Then the internet came, and by the time one of those preview issues came out, you'd already heard all about the cool movies coming up.

But maybe that's not entirely true. This morning I started flipping through the new Summer Movie Preview issue, already two weeks old, and discovered several cool movies that I'm now looking forward to. One is Jim Jarmusch's The Limits of Control. Combining the above picture of Tilda Swinton with a misunderstood quote Gael Garcia Bernal, I at first thought that this would be Jarmusch's superhero movie (God, that would be so cool!), but it's more of a French New Wave crime drama. Still, I'm looking forward to it. Then there's Woody Allen's Whatever Works, starring Larry David. Definite potential in that combination. But the one that jumped out at me was Soul Power!

Soul Power! is something that I've been saying needs to happen for years. If you've seen the documentary When We Were Kings, you know that they've got footage of the concert that Don King organized to tie in with the Ali-Foreman Rumble in the Jungle, featuring James Brown, B.B. King, and a bunch of African acts including Miriam Makeba (I have no idea who else). The most obvious thing to do would be to put this on DVD. But this is even better--it will be in theaters July 10! imdb lists the running time as around 90 minutes, which is a bit chincy, but still, I'm going to make a point to catch this in the theater.

Also looking forward to Sam Raimi's Drag Me To Hell and of course Tarantino's Inglorious Basterds. And would watch Star Trek, Land of the Lost and Public Enemies if the opportunity came up (I'm assuming I'll see Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, even though now that the books are over I'm not nearly as interested).