The Halfway Point: The 10 2013 Movies I'm Most Looking Forward To

Towards the end of the year in 2012 I continued a tradition of mine here at SSTS and posted a list of the movies coming out in the next year that I was most looking forward to seeing. As July is just a little bit past the halfway point of 2013 and as I realize I haven't posted anything other than a book review in a few weeks now and as I sit her entirely bored by the 2013 MLB All-Star Game, I figured it's a perfect time to take a brief look at the movies on the list that have come out so far...

...and to admit just how wrong I was about everything.

Sorry, Sheldon. I was wrong.

But I'll get to that in a minute.

I organized the list by month, so that's how we'll do the happy recap. In January, I was waiting for Mama, a Guillermo Del Toro-produced horror movie that wasn't scary at all but I still enjoyed enough to give three stars to, and Gangster Squad, which was, well, pure and utter garbage. Sorry, but it had to be said. The movie is so bad that even Emma Stone can't make it watchable.

And that's saying something, because I'd watch her watch paint dry.

Things rebounded in February, though, as Stand-Up Guys came out. Christopher Walken, Al Pacino, and Alan Arkin played retired gangsters in a movie that was as downright hysterical as you'd expect it to be. While nothing came out in March, the good momentum continued into April with the remake of Evil Dead, a movie I enjoyed enough even if I didn't think it loved up to the hype of calling itself the most terrifying movie of all time.

Really?

The fifth and final movie in the first half of the year I was really looking forward to was Iron Man 3, which was certainly as awesome as I expected it to be and more.

So you may be asking yourself what I mean when I say I was wrong about everything. After all, out of the five movies I mentioned, only one was bad. Sounds like a win, right? Well...

For some completely inexplicable reason, I left Much Ado About Nothing off the list. It's not like I wasn't looking forward to it; I've known about it for a year now and I've been dying to see it since I first heard about it, even going so far as to predict that it'll win my "Favorite Movie of the Year Award" for 2013. After all, it's my favorite playwright (Shakespeare) directed by one of my favorite writer/directors (Whedon) starring a boatload of actors I love. I honestly have no idea what I was thinking not including this on the list.

However, while leaving a movie I knew I'd love off the list was stupid, it wasn't my biggest mistake. No, my biggest mistake was dismissing a movie when I first heard about it last year. A movie that I became totally fascinated by when I saw the trailer and a movie I fell in love with when I finally saw it.

Yeah. I dismissed this movie out of hand and as it stands now, it's neck and neck with Much Ado for the award I mentioned above. So yes, I was wrong. Very, very wrong. And I'm admitting it for the world to see.

Mark this shit on your calendar, because we'll probably all be dead before it happens again.