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Alex Pollard reviews Hollywood's biopic of the controversial Margaret Thatcher
This year is giving us a chance indulge in our childhood selves – Toy Story 3 and Shrek Forever After go head to head in July, but can they live up to their glory days? Harry Potter is also offering us up its penultimate instalment with Deathly Hallows: Part 1 (Nov), but if you’re looking for something fresh yet nostalgic, look no further than Disney’s musical fairytale return to 2D animation The Princess and the Frog (Feb). I, for one, cannot wait.
It’s become commonplace for Hollywood to take a film we all know and love courtesy of our older siblings/parents/grandparents and market it all over again to ‘our generation’ – with varying degrees of success. Ridley Scott and Russell Crowe team up again to give us Robin Hood (May), while Jackie Chan has signed on for a Karate Kid reboot (Jul). Chace Crawford (Gossip Girl’s Nate) fronting Footloose (Jun) is less exciting than Zac Efron, but the new A-Team (Jul) is intriguing, including The Hangover’s Bradley Cooper. There’s a new Clash of the Titans (Mar), like the original based loosely on the Perseus Greek myth, though maybe the new Gulliver’s Travels (Dec) will be a success story. No list of this year’s remakes however would be complete without Tim’s Burton’s ever-creepy Alice in Wonderland (Mar), boasting one of the strongest casts of the year.
As if a boatload of remakes weren’t enough, there are plenty of sequels coming our way. In addition to the children’s films, the Twilight crew is back with Eclipse (Jul), ensuring they don’t get off our magazine covers and screens this year either. There’s the inevitable Iron Man 2 (May), and also Sex and the City 2 (May) which is going under a lot of pressure to live up to its first big-screen adaptation, for some reason being set up for a fail by many entertainment journalists. There’s also Little Fockers (Aug/Sep), the third instalment of Meet the Parents – a chance maybe for them to return to form?
There is no shortage of action films this year crossing into other genres, from fantasy and adventure to thriller and sci-fi. Christopher ‘The Dark Knight’ Nolan’s latest creation Inception (Jul/Aug) is about entering people’s dreams to place information in their heads, while Prince of Persia: Sands of Time (May) brings the videogame to the big screen. The Book of Eli (Jan) delivers the usual post-apocalyptic stuff, whereas Tron Legacy (Dec) may fill this year’s Transformers gap.
I reckon some of the best films of this year may be the ones that defy categorisation. There are of course the upcoming Oscar buzzers Precious and Up in the Air (both Jan), the former about a struggling Harlem teenager, the latter about George Clooney being a professional “firer” (I may have just invented that job title...). But later on in the year there’s The Social Network (tba), aka ‘The Facebook Story’, a Sorkin-penned screenplay starring Justin Timberlake, as well as Love and Other Drugs (tba) about the development of Viagra. Also worth mentioning is Scorsese’s Shutter Island (Feb) about an investigation at a hospital for the insane.
Have you heard of any exciting 2010 releases I forgot to mention? Share them below!
There are a reasonable number that have been missed (not least because you can't fit them all on there, I guess!) but there are a couple that stand out:
1) The Sorcerer's Apprentice with Nicholas Cage et al: http://www.apple.com/trailers/disney/thesorcerersapprentice/
2) Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the 3rd Narnia film (which should be good)
And the remake of The Wizard of Oz may or may not be coming out in 2010, but I can't find anything that actually makes me want to see it yet :-\
How about: 'The Lovely Bones', 'Invictus', 'A Single Man', 'The Last Station' and 'The Road'? Just a thought. I still love you Nat 
was part duped into seeing Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll and, despite not being a fan of Ian Dury and the Blockheads, really enjoyed the film. Andy Serkis is amazing and the girl who plays Denise is just gorgeous.
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