Something not Marvel-related for a change

There have been so many movie announcements and casting announcements from Marvel in the past couple months --

["How many have there been, Derek?"]

-- that basically nothing but these announcements has been filling up our movie-related news feeds.

So it's kind of a relief to see a movie called Nightcrawler hit theaters that has nothing to do with comic books.

One of the X-Men characters -- whose rights are split in some complicated way between Marvel and Fox -- is named Nightcrawler, and with the way these characters have been spun off into their own stand-alone movies or even franchises, it's remarkable that the rights owners would even allow a movie unrelated to this character to bear his name.

Yet Nightcrawler IS completely unrelated. It's a Jake Gyllenhaal vehicle about an ambitious journalist armed with a video camera, which is drawing more comparisons to Taxi Driver than to X-Men Origins: Wolverine.

And unfortunately, I'll have to wait a month more to see it, as it actually doesn't come out until November 27th in Australia. (Funny -- Halloween release date in the U.S., Thanksgiving release date in Australia.) So yes, what you are currently reading is that good old-fashioned American release date preview post, an endangered species on this blog since I've moved to Australia and never seem to know when anything is coming out anymore.

Actually, I could see it before then, as I'll actually be in the United States from November 13th to November 28th. So that's when you can prepare yourself for a little Audient sabbatical, or at least, only a few very brief updates.

But I'll have bigger movie fish to fry when I'm stateside. My biggest priority will be Foxcatcher, which I understand will open sometime while I'm there, but won't open here until after the cutoff for my 2014 rankings in mid-January. Then there's Birdman, which gets a release date on the final day of my 2014 list eligibility, just like Her and Inside Llewyn Davis did last year. I'll have to go see it on opening day if I want to include it.

So while I'm in the U.S., I'll be catching either a fox or a bird, or possibly both.