Opening this Week: Valentine’s Day Romance With “Safe Haven,” “Beautiful Creatures,” and…”Die Hard 5″
Posted on February 11, 2013 at 3:59 pm
This week’s releases are opening a day early for your Valentine’s Day enjoyment. Those looking for a date night movie on February 14 have two choices, both based on popular books. Nicholas Sparks’ Safe Haven
Then there’s a bit of counter-programming with the fifth of the “Die Hard” series. Bruce Willis returns as John McClane in “A Good Day to Die Hard.” Twenty-three years after Christmas at the Nakatomi Plaza, McClane will be Yippy-Ki-Yaying in Russian as his adventures take him to Moscow.
about an ex-military investigator and a former-sniper accused of murder who may be innocent.
, by Nicholas Sparks, is the story of U.S. Marine Logan Thibault, who finds a photograph of a smiling young woman buried in the dirt during his tour of duty in Iraq. He experiences a sudden streak of luck — winning poker games and even surviving deadly combat. Only his best friend, Victor, seems to have an explanation for his good fortune: the photograph — his lucky charm. When he returns home, he seeks out the woman in the picture. Zac Efron, Taylor Schilling, and Blythe Danner star in the movie, directed by Scott Hicks.
. Like 
, it has been turned into an ensemble romantic comedy featuring a dozen talented performers. Come to think of it, the advice is both books is pretty much the same, too — the better treatment you insist on, the better you will be treated. Perhaps the next movie on this theme will be based on Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies.” This movie’s title: “
a series of essays about his evolving thoughts on faith and grace. It has been turned into a film about a young man from an evangelical community in Texas whose non-believer (and jazz music fan) father sends him to study at 
came out in 1984, starring Kevin Bacon, Lori Singer, and John Lithgow. This remake has Dennis Quaid as the minister in a town so shattered by a terrible tragic accident that they have banned dancing. “Dancing with the Stars'” Julianne Hough and, in the role of the new boy in town who challenges the rules and teaches everyone to dance, Kenny Wormald, a former back-up dancer for Justin Timberlake.
, a low-budget, black-and-white film directed by Howard Hawks, terrified audiences with a story about a remote Arctic research station where scientists have detected the crash of a spacecraft. When the frozen occupant of the craft thaws, he goes after the humans, who have no place to hide. The 1982 remake from scare-master John Carpenter was called 
. It starred Kurt Russell and Wilford Brimley and some of the grossest special effects of the pre-CGI era. (And you can glimpse the original playing on a television in the outpost.)
and stars Steve Martin, Jack Black, and Owen Wilson as three guys whose only common trait is that they are even more obsessed with beating each other than they are with birds.
