SFist Watches: New Movies This Weekend

There's not a whole lot of movies opening up this weekend, or at least none mentioned in the Chron as they were too busy with their annual "New Year's Eve Hat" cut-out, a tradition looked forward to by no one and an idea so lame it doesn't even work ironically. Suffice it to say, that with the big holiday movies already being released, the studios have been quietly dumping their Oscar-bait movies on us, those movies that get advertised to us by mentioning all the adoring critical reviews the movie has gotten and shots of the actors looking really, really serious. Yawn. The movies slowly released this week include Kevin Spacey's supposedly awful but beloved by Jan Wahl Bobby Darin biopic Beyond the Sea, a movie which we've been hearing an awful lot about despite the obvious fact nobody we know of could care about Bobby Darin. Also there's the new Clint Eastwood movie, Million Dollar Baby which is drawing either rave reviews or awful reviews depending on what the reviewer thinks of Eastwood's patented somber, slow-moving and ponderous oeuvre. We once again see that Hillary Swank is being bandied about for a "Best Actress" Oscar which we still have to admit makes us a little amazed in that the words "Academy Award" are being used in reference to someone who appeared on Beverly Hills 90210 and that it's not in reference to Ian Ziering (as the Sports Guy on ESPN put it- "when you've worked with Eastwood, Freeman, Ziering and Morita in a 10-year span…that's a career."). Also being released today is Moolaadé, a cheery holiday movie about female genital mutilation. Sounds like a perfect movie for that post-New Year's Hangover.

In other words, if you haven't seen "House of the Flying Daggers" yet, go see it. Now.

Happy New Year!