Get There Early – August 13, 2009

Many of these came out over the course of the last month but definitely deserved a little more examination.  Beware that the last trailer (as in, “best for last”) is red-band and NSFW.

The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus

Terry Gilliam is not automatic cinematic gold unless you have a unique (and often aggressively acquired) taste for the quirky and unusual.  However, this vision of a sort of Faust-esque tale featuring deals with the Devil (played by the always-awesome Tom Waits) and beating the veil of death could turn the tables.  This was the movie that Heath Ledger was working on at the time of his sudden demise, and his friends Johnny Depp, Jude Law, and Colin Farrell all stepped up and allowed the story to be re-written just enough to pull off what has been lauded as possibly a greater posthumous masterpiece than even “the Dark Knight”.  The visual effects have those trademark Gilliam touches, complete with eye-bending camera angles and more-vivid-than-real imagery.  This is definitely on the “must see” list, so far.  It’s slated for release on October 16, 2009.

9

Mankind is gone, the victims of a Matrix-ish (or maybe Cylon-ish) demise at the hands of a machine army.  Left behind are nine golems imbued with the spirit of their creator, and they are charged with somehow reclaiming the earth from the grip of the metal monstrosities.  Okay, that part is pretty cool.  But then we realize that it’s a Tim Burton film, and that Elijah Wood and Jennifer Connelly are featured voices (among many other excellent talents), and the dark grittiness of the trailer just puts us in the frame of mind to camp out now until it opens in theatres (of course) on September 9, 2009.  In this more complete trailer (the original teaser fronted “Watchmen”, if I’m not mistaken), there’s a glimpse of Burton’s ubiquitous black-and-white vertical stripe motif, but no jack-o-lanterns just yet.  It could be a foregone conclusion that it’ll be in there somewhere, but maybe this is more than just a format-departure for him.  Could it be that the king of twisted and disturbing cartoonish fare is embracing a true animated method?  I’m all set to find out.

New York, I Love You

If stunt-casting was a mortal sin, the writers of the vignettes that make up just the trailer bits of this movie would all be burning in the deepest circles of hell. The good news is that it doesn’t seem overly saccharin and artificial. The better news is that it doesn’t seem to use a lot of “go-to” romance-drama actors (Christina Ricci, Shia LeBouf, Orlando Bloom, Natalie Portman, Ethan Hawke, and James Caan all have parts in this). The bad news is that with the cast about four miles long – and the writer list pretty close in length – is a run-time of only 110 minutes going to be long enough for us to care about any of them? Or is the movie itself going to have to run in the same disjointed fashion as the trailer, just to get all of the material in there? It comes out October 29, 2009.

Legion

What if someone took “the Prophecy” (1995) and made it an actual action movie with Dennis Quaid and everything? That’s the first thing that came to mind. The second thing (and this gets major kudo-points from me) is that the title and a couple of scenes from the trailer hint that the writer(s) have done an excellent job of researching their material: to wit, all “demons” are really angels, and the angel/demon Legion (many that was one) was charged at one point with killing humans on a highly impressive scale. The presence of Doug Jones as one creepy so-and-so only heightens my interest – and you may remember him as Abe from “Hellboy”. I’m definitely going to have to put this on the “keep tabs on it” list when it comes out late January of 2010.