April is the cruelest month

The authorial output here hasn't exactly been a raging torrent lately, I'll admit. I've been averaging only about two posts per month since New Year's, and two of those were basically just matters of forwarding things I'd read elsewhere. I've written about a few films, sure, but only one released this year; the rest have been older, ranging from one year old to seventy-six. And I haven't even compiled my best-of-2010 list yet, due to a few as-yet-unseen films that I feel would need to be considered before I could do so.

But despite these mea-culpas of mine, I don't think I can be held entirely to blame. This is spring, after all, generally a dead zone when it comes to cinematic releases (as shown here). The Oscar season ends with the previous year, and other than catching up on some of last year's releases that I'd missed and seeing what Netflix has to offer, it's mostly a matter of soldiering through a few lean months before the summer season begins in May.

And what has that month to offer, you may ask? First and foremost, of course, is Malick's The Tree of Life, easily my most anticipated film of the year (funny, I usually have to wait till the fall or winter for those, rather than the kick-off of blockbuster season). May will also feature the second installment in master cinéaste Todd Phillips's Hangover cycle (basically looking like a southeast Asian carbon copy of the first, which may or may not be a good thing), Kenneth Branagh's Thor (it's going to take me a long time to get used to writing that; as for the film itself, it looks like it has the potential to be either merely OK or ridiculously terrible, but in the "pro" category Mr. Branagh finally figured out that what superhero movies have been sorely lacking is giant, evil robots that blow stuff up with lasers), and the intriguing-sounding Hesher starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who turned in some great work in Mysterious Skin, Brick, and The Lookout. (True, the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean movie is also coming out in May, but since I haven't seen an installment of that particular franchise since the first eight years ago, it's not really on my movie-going radar.)

So here's to May giving me a little more to write about that April did.