Volume 13: Kristen Stewart’s Vampire Baby Will Kill Us All
J. Edgar
Dir: Clint Eastwood – Planned release date: November 9
Ah, fall movie season. The time when Hollywood showers us with all of the Oscar-hungry prestige pictures. Many of them may deserve the acclaim, but others will simply sit there, wallowing in their own pretension. However, no trailer I’ve seen this year (with perhaps the exception of The Iron Lady) has seemed more like it was already reaching for the golden statuette than this preview for Clint Eastwood’s J. Edgar. A biopic about an important American figure who may have some skeletons (read: homosexuality) in his closet? One of America’s most famous actors in Leonardo DiCaprio? Citizen Kane-esque aging makeup? The direction of Clint Eastwood? Dame Judi Dench being Dame Judi Dench? A cinematography style where everything seems to be a different shade of gray? J. Edgar may not end up as the best film of the year, but it will almost certainly be the most dignified. It will look upon a barbaric movie like Drive, scoff at its savagery, and walk right past with its nose in the air. “Go on outside,” it will say. “It’s time to let the grown-ups talk.”
What remains to be seen is whether J. Edgar will be a legitimately great film or just a piece of insufferable awards bait. I like Eastwood, obviously, but this trailer makes the film look so stuffy that you’ll barely be able to breathe. It’s incredibly easy to be intrigued by J. Edgar. However, I’d be lying if I said I was really, truly pumped for it. There’s just something so off-putting about a film that seems to so desperately be vying for the Academy’s attention. I truly hope it’s great—everyone involved is too talented for it to stink outright—but Eastwood has fallen victim to such material before.
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
Dir: Stephen Daldry – Planned release date: December 25
Speaking of Oscar bait, this adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer’s 2005 novel seems to have “nominate me, please” written all over it. I am an unabashed fan of the source material, and I’ve long felt it could make a great movie if done well, but I’ve also feared that Hollywood could turn it into a neutered, broad, crowd-pleasing film that completely removes all of Foer’s stranger, sadder touches. This trailer may introduce some intriguing things—you can’t look at Tom Hanks and not smile—but as soon as the U2 song kicked in I was rolling my eyes. Mild spoiler alert, but if this film is at all faithful to the book, it’s not supposed to be the most uplifting of films. Not a complete downer, but still. It’s far from the “Streets Have No Name” happy-fest that this trailer suggests. For my money, an ideal Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close would have taken the 25th Hour route and placed the actual events of 9/11 around the periphery. Yes, it’s a key part of the story, but I’m not sure it should feature entire scenes of people watching the attacks in horror.
Of course, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close was directed by Stephen Daldry, who is essentially an Oscar nomination-generating machine. (His last three films were Billy Elliot, The Hours and The Reader, so yeah.) He’s yet to officially take the leap and win the big awards, but bringing the Oscar-friendly likes of Tom Hanks and Sandra Bullock along are sure to get a great deal of attention. I did love the book, so I will see this movie. And I hope that Daldry and company were able to give it the adaptation it deserves. I’m sure this film will cause audiences around the world to tear up, but I’m less sure that the film will go about its business in the ideal way.
We Bought a Zoo
Dir: Cameron Crowe – Planned release date: December 23
For a filmmaker that was once as universally-loved as Cameron Crowe, it takes some kind of failure to considerably set back his career. Unfortunately, that’s just what happened with Elizabethtown in 2005. Since then, Crowe has not made a single feature film. That changes this Christmas with We Bought a Zoo, a film which—based on the trailer—does not tone down on his signature brand of naked emotion. Over the course of these few minutes, Thomas Haden Church talks about “sunlight” and “joy,” Matt Damon quits his job in suitably dramatic fashion, he buys a house which is actually a zoo, battles a porcupine, tries not to fall in love with Scarlett Johansson and delivers a speech about the importance of having “insane courage.” Apparently this film is based on a true story; if faithful, it must be the most Cameron Crowe-y true story of all time.
Still, it’s good to have Crowe back, even if it’s easy to see how We Bought a Zoo could become little more than two hours of excruciating schmaltz. I dearly hope this is not the case, as a cinematic world with Cameron Crowe is much preferable to one without him.
The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1
Dir: Bill Condon – Planned release date: November 18
As unfamiliar as I am with the Twilight series, I’d be lying to you if I said this trailer didn’t suddenly interest me. Not necessarily in a good way, but this preview for The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1 (phew) makes it look like the most gloriously insane mess of all time. I mean, up until now the Twilight series has just seemed absolutely boring to me. Now that we’re getting closer to the end, things seem to be going off the rails in the most awesome way possible. Pattinson and Stewart get married, finally sleep together—which, by the way, should be absolutely fine—and wind up with a crazy vampire fetus that threatens to get a lot of werewolves angry or something? Sign me up. Again, I should note that my knowledge of this series comes almost exclusively from past trailers. I mean, is this only going to be part one? Because how could you possible follow the birth of a crazy vampire baby? If nothing else, The Twilight Sage: Breaking Dawn – Part 1 (again, phew) seems like a feature-length take on that one line in Mean Girls: “Don’t have sex, because you will get pregnant and die.” Unfortunately, they forgot about the vampire babies. They don’t teach that in sex ed.
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
Dir: David Fincher – Planned release date: December 21
Ever since the pretty cool (but ultimately empty) teaser trailer for David Fincher’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo was released a couple months back, not much else about the film has been seen or heard. Well, that has all changed with this new, nearly four-minute trailer that gives us quite a bit of footage alongside the promising score from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. And let me just say, Fincher seems to have not missed a step since directing the crap out of last year’s The Social Network. This movie looks absolutely beautiful, and even if the violence isn’t here as it was in the earlier red-band trailer, you still get the feeling that there are true horrors just below the surface. If this movie is good—and I anticipate it will be, if not great—it could be the monster hit that Fincher so richly deserves. Yes, he made a pretty penny with The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, but I don’t particularly love that movie. The man works best when he’s working with something with more edge. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo certainly fits that bill, and this could be the film that takes Fincher back to the dark and gritty days of Se7en and Fight Club. I do not claim to say his films were significantly better then, necessarily. It’ll just be interesting to see how he tackles such subject matter in 2011.
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