Mega Autumn/Winter Preview – The Revenge!!

I have said it before and I will say it until I am blue in the face, all the best movies come out between September and March. This year has been really, really good for films so far and is perhaps the best year for quality films since about 2006. When you consider that this year has already brought us Inglorious Basterds, District 9, Watchmen, Public Enemies and (500) days of summer and all of the below is still to come then its going to be difficult to come up with a top ten this year but probably easier to list a top twenty. The list below is made up of what I personally am looking forward to, if there is something I have missed that is on your radar then let me know. Weird thing is this year there does not seem to be many obvious Oscar race entries, even things like Shutter Island, Avatar, The Road and The Lovely Bones are genre pictures. Is this a sign of the difficult dark times we live in and the search for escapism or have I truly overlooked something gritty and real that you know of?

 

Surrogates

It seems to have been a while since we have had a truly kick ass futuristic movie and Surrogates looks set to fill that void, based on the trailer that was released some time ago. Adapted from the graphic novel by Bret Wedele, Surrogates portrays a future in which humans no longer leave their homes to live out their lives, instead we rely on androids that look and sound like the best possible version of ourselves. When the surrogates begin to get murdered, a cop played by Bruce Willis, is forced to leave his home for the first time in years to solve the crimes. To be honest with you this will probably only warrant three or so stars when it comes out. It will be a fun flick for sure, but the trailer looks more I Robot rather than Children of Men or Blade Runner. Willis is doing his usual grizzled cop shtick and director Jonathan Mostow is reliable when it comes to this kind of mainstream action film. Good for a laugh at the end of September and probably a safe bet for a Saturday night?, or could I be wrong and this is set to go HUGE?

Release Date: September 25th

Zombieland

This movie has confused me already. Zombieland takes place in a world overrun by the living dead and focuses on two characters whose paths cross as they try to survive. Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg) is a nerdy teenager doing anything to survive and Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson) is a kick ass zombie killer who is looking for the last remaining twinkie in the world. The tone of the trailer makes it look like an out and out comedy but with cool zombie kills and possibly a lot of gore. It seems like something made in the 1980's which isn't a bad thing as the horror films in the 80's were among the best ever. This could well be the next Shaun of The Dead or we could be looking at real let down like the overrated Slither.

Release Date: November 27th

The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus

As well as being Terry Gilliam's latest film this is also Heath Ledger's final screen performance. He died midway through filming and his friends, Jude Law, Johnny Depp and Colin Farrell stepped in to play alternate versions of the same character and worked it into the script. By all accounts it turned out quite well, this has not generated the poisonous reviews that Tideland and Brothers Grimm did. Word ranges from good to masterpiece on this one and it certainly looks as though Gilliam is back in his comfort zone. The trailer shows lots of weird imagery along the lines of Gilliam classics The Adventures of Baron Munchausen and Time Bandits. The plot follows a man who falls in with a traveling carnival owned by the titular Dr Parnassus. Parnassus is locked in a battle for his daughters soul with none other than the devil himself. I recently watched The Fisher King, Twelve Monkeys and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas back to back and when Gilliam gets the right material, magic appears on the screen. I am hopeful that this will be one of the great films of the year.

Released: October 16th

 

 

Jennifers Body

Everyone's favorite sexiest woman alive, Megan Fox returns to screens for this horror film scripted by Oscar winning Juno scribe Diablo Cody. Fox plays Jennifer the hottest cheerleader in high school who is one day possessed by a demon and begins to munch on all the boys who try to get in her pants. Her best friend Needy (??) has to try and stop her whilst dealing with all the things a girl in high school has to deal with, y'know like the Jonas brothers and hello kitty backpacks. Speaking of the 1980's this movie definitely seems to be sharing some DNA with a lot of the movies released in the second half of that decade. The cinematography in the trailer reminded me a lot of the Nightmare on Elm Street series from part 3 onwards and the plot seems reminiscent of a lot of films I watched round that period. Director Karyn Kusama does not have the best track record since Girlfight but this should be good for a few laughs around Halloween. Sadly perverts, Megan Fox's nude scenes have been cut from the final print. If you look hard enough online I'm sure you will find the stills somewhere. I did.

Release Date: November 6th

Thirst

A new Park Chan-Wook film is always a cause for celebration and Thirst is on the surface at least a vampire film. The plot of Thirst follows a priest played by the brilliant Kang Ho-Song (The Host, The Good The Bad The Weird) who after a failed medical experiment begins to crave human blood. He then begins an affair with a childhood friend's wife, all this understandably begins to make him question his faith. Sounds almost like the plot of a typical soap opera except for the blood drinking and huge amounts of sex. Early reports have said that this film is far more of an erotic drama than an out and out horror tale, even comparing it to the once banned 1976 film In The Realm of The Senses. There will be a major lack of wooden crosses, stakes and fangs in this one me thinks, instead replaced by a painful but beautiful though provoker. Probably worth the trip into a city to see it at an arthouse, its doubtful this will play at the local Odeon.

Release Date: October 16th

The Fantastic Mr Fox

I was also very confused by this trailer. I read an article recently all about this movie and there was an interview with one of the technicians who worked on the film. He was basically bitching because director Wes Anderson did not understand that there were certain things you could not do when it came to stop motion animation. Evidently he wanted to achieve something similar to his usual style (beautiful slo mo, weird shots of people who are either facing the front or facing off to the side etc) and it just was not possible with claymation models. The technician may never work again but his fears seem valid and I seem to be the only one who is a little worried by the trailer. The animation seen in the trailer looks terrible to me, it really does, its jerky and stiff looking and looks like the kind of thing you would see late at night during the 1980's on late night TV (why does that decade keep creeping up in this article?). Maybe its supposed to look like that? maybe the animation is not quite finished and will be smoothed out over the next month or so but for now I am concerned that the great Roald Dahl has been done a major disservice. Please do not let me down Mr Anderson.

Release Date: October 23rd

Where the Wild Things Are

I cannot stop watching the trailer for this movie, it is one of the best I have seen and a real thing of beauty. Spike Jonze's first film for seven years is one of the most anticipated of the season among net nerds (myself included) The reason? Its based on one of the best loved children's books ever and its Spike frickin Jones making a movie with massive puppets. Say what you will about CGI and the advantages of the leaps in technology since The Abyss in 1989 but for my money you cannot beat practical effects. Its become a cliche in the realm of this article to mention the decade now but the puppet epics seen in the 1980's like Labyrinth, Dark Crystal and Return to Oz had a charm that no amount of CGI characters could replicate. Would John Carpenter's The Thing have been as good if it was all CG? what about An American Werewolf in London? Mr Jonze knows this as his film has had a long post production period which lead to the release date being delayed by a year so they could get the puppets just right and augment them with CGI effects. Seriously though, the book is about 35 pages long with around 50 words maximum so how have they extended this to a whole feature length movie? I cannot wait to find out.

Release Date: December 11th

2012

The Mayan calendar ended in the year 2012, its not clear why as Mel Gibson taught us, the Mayans all wiped each other out before anyone could get a straight answer. Cue destruction fetish German director and millions of dollars worth of CGI as the world literally falls apart. Yes Roland Emmerich is back again with CGI waves, wind and earthquakes as the world literally falls apart. The exact plot is not entirely clear from the trailer but it seems as if John Cusack plays a family man trying to get his (probably estranged) wife and kids to some gigantic spaceships designed to carry humanity away from the imploding planet earth. I find Independence Day to be one of the great blockbusters of the 90's and The Day after Tomorrow is a guilty pleasure that I really enjoy when I catch it on TV. The destruction in this cannot possibly be topped and will rock your socks off in Imax no doubt. This could well be Emmerich's final movie as what is there left to do after destroying the planet?

Release Date: November 13 2009

The Lovely Bones

Peter Jackson's first movie since 2005's King Kong is an adaptation of the acclaimed novel by Alice Sebold. It involves a 14 year old girl who is brutally raped and murdered and then remains in limbo to watch over her grieving family and the subsequent investigation. Its not an entirely original plot and the story sounds very familiar, the trailer also comes across a bit like the forgotten 1998 Robin Williams movie What Dreams May Come. That film was filled with potential but too damn mawkish in the delivery to really be taken seriously. The people who have read Alice Sebold's book tell me its one of the best they have ever read and their reaction when I tell them there is a film coming out is basically 'but how?' Plus after original lead Ryan Gosling was given the shove. Mark Wahlberg took over as the father of the dead teenager. Wahlberg can go either way, brilliant in Boogie Nights, The Departed and I Heart Huckabees or wooden puppet in Planet of The Apes and last years masterpiece The Happening. Wahlberg playing a grieving father is a risky proposition. Shouldn't get too cynical about this one as it could be next years big Oscar winner, plus its a new film from Peter Jackson for gods sake.

Released: January 29th 2010

Avatar

This is it folks, the big one. James Cameron's first film since Titanic back in 1997 is the years most anticipated movie. As of time of writing the hype has started to build with 3D Imax theatres in the US now selling tickets four months before it comes out. Is there a reason for the over excitement? I think so. Cameron has been developing the technology to bring this story to life since the mid 90's. He has been pioneering the immersive 3D that you have seen in the likes of Beowulf and Monsters Vs Aliens and Avatar should present a new leap forward even beyond that. Recently there has a been a whiff of disappointment over the footage premiered at Comic Con and the trailer on the Internet. Complaints have been that mainly this looks like The Phantom Menace, a bunch of CGI all over the place which doesn't gel into a coherent whole. To those people I would say 'I agree, but what you have to consider is that this movie is designed with Imax 3D in mind and Cameron is renowned for injecting so much humanity into his hardware dominated futures'. First watching Apocalypse Now on an IPOD would suck, watching Avatar anywhere apart from IMAX is probably going to be similar. Secondly, remember in Aliens where Ripley cares so much about Newt due to having outlived her own daughter? what about the relationship between estranged husband and wife and the subsequent sacrifice that changed the aliens minds on humanity in The Abyss? Here you are going to have that kind of emotional heft but with mind meltingly awesome visuals. Will it change cinema forever? We will have to wait and see…

Released: December 18th 2009

Ninja Assassin

Ninjas! Ninjas leaping around with cool as hell weaponry and blood flying everywhere! that was pretty much the reaction in test screenings of this movie. The plot sounds like your typical rubbish action movie featuring the likes of DMX and Jet li that they made for Warner's when they didn't know what to do with Jet Li. Basically some kind of a ninja who was raised to be a ninja from an early age goes on the run from his brethren in the US. The trailer looks very very slick, the effects team on this worked on The Matrix movies and the director is James McTeague who did a great job with V for Vendetta a couple of years back. Its been a looong time since we have had a movie solely about ninja's, I'm thinking Michael Dudikoff long time, oh American Ninja how I miss you. Of course there is a chance that this could all be sound and fury signifying nothing.

Released: November 27th

Extract

Mike Judges latest movie will probably end up straight to DVD come March. Judge does not have much luck with the cinema release. Office Space and Idiocracy both went straight to disc in the UK after failing to make a dent in the box office or being dumped by 20th Century Fox. Extract follows the manager of a flavor extract factory played by Jason Bateman who must contend with a potentially unfaithful wife as well as a myriad of employees who attempt to take advantage of him. The trailer for this movie is very reminiscent of Office Space which is a good thing. as of time of writing this film just came out and belly flopped in the US despite some good reviews so a UK cinema release seems unlikely.

Released: TBC

A Serious Man

The Coens latest movie comes out this Autumn and this one actually has no big star names attached. Yes, after making a movie with George Clooney and Brad Pitt which was not about a heist, the biggest star in A Serious Man is real life friend of George, Richard Kind from 90's sitcom Spin City. A Serious Man is all about a college professor who faces family turmoil because his layabout brother will not move out of the house, then his life begins to spiral out of control with the usual Coen staples of blackmail, affairs and possibly murder. Out of all the movies they have released in this century so far, apart from O Brother Where Art Thou I would say that this looks the most like capturing the lunatic spirit that made Raising Arizona and The Big Lebowski feel so fresh.

Released: November 20th

The Box

Richard Kelly has a lot riding on this movie. Donnie Darko was massive in the UK, you know when a cult oddball movie has crossed over? when you go round to your yuppie friends house and its in their DVD collection of about 8 titles which also consists of films like Bad Boys, Dirty Dancing and if you are lucky; Goodfellas. The cover of Mad World by Gary Jules was even Xmas number one in 2003 for gods sake. So Darko was a hit but then came Southland Tales, a film that was so ambitious it just collapsed under the weight of expectation and its own ideas. That film did have some moments of greatness though and I'm hoping The Box will be a return to the weirdness of Darko. The Box follows a couple in 1970's Virginia who are visited by a mysterious stranger who presents them with a box with a red button. When they press the button they collect 1 million dollars but someone somewhere will die. The story is based on an old Richard Matheson Twilight Zone story and has been expanded somewhat to include NASA and a vast conspiracy. This could really go over massive as a Ring style word of mouth hit or could finally reveal Kelly as a one off sham artist.

Released: December 4th

The Book of Eli

Albert and Allen Hughes made some great movies once, Menace 2 Society, Dead Presidents and even From Hell are great pieces of raw, uncompromising filmmaking. Its all been quiet from the Hughes brothers since From Hell in 2001. The Book of Eli wasn't really on anyone's radar until San Diego comic con and the release of the trailer. Now people are intrigued. The film takes place in a post apocalyptic (think Mad Max) world where Eli (Denzel Washington) travels across America with a book that holds the key to saving mankind. If you have seen the trailer you could be thinking that it looks like some kind of straight to VHS post apocalyptic rubbish that Jean Claude Van Damme used to make in the 90's, and I would agree but the film has Denzel, Gary Oldman and is produced by Joel Silver. None of these players are exactly lightweights that do rubbish on a regular basis. I will say that Denzel doing kung fu in the trailer just does not look right.

Released: January 15th 2010

Sherlock Holmes

Guy Richie's Sherlock Holmes revamp goes pretty much toe to toe with Avatar this Christmas and it may have a so hot right now Robert Downey Jr, but it is going to get clobbered. When this film went into production we were lead to believe that Richie was creating a rough,gritty version of the worlds most famous detective. Stories about bare knuckle boxing and Holmes reported cocaine addiction were leaking from the set. When the trailer came out it appeared we have all been duped. Sherlock Holmes looks like your typical Indiana Jones type of crowd pleaser, or maybe this is just what Warner's want us to think to get bums on seats? Either way this will be a good excuse to get out of the house and avoid left over turkey, especially if Avatar turns out to be a disappointment.

Released: December 26th

A Christmas Carol

Its likely that Avatar will even make Robert Zemeckis's latest look silly but they decided to release it in November and Christmas decorations have been in the shops since August anyway,so its got a couple of weeks head start. Like Avatar this film this will also be released in IMAX 3D. This is obviously a re-telling of the old classic but this time done motion capture style with Jim Carrey playing Ebeneezer Scrooge as well as the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future. Early reports say the footage is jaw dropping and they have resolved some of the problems with the eyes that previous motion capture epics have not been able to do. Hopefully this will be slightly dark to offset Carrey's inevitable mugging as Scrooge and this tale should always have a terrifying last ghost. Could be a festive treat for all the family.

Released: November 6th

The Road

The latest Cormac McCarthy adaptation has had a long (excuse the pun) road to the screen. It was originally intended to be a release during the 2008 awards season but then a couple of reports came out that the movie was dull as dishwater and the release was pushed back. Now its finally coming out and showing at festivals and the reviews are mostly positive. The story is about a man played by Viggo Mortensen and his son who make their way across a devastated United States. On their way they must avoid the attention of savages and cannibals and rely on each other to survive. The Road is directed by John Hillcoat who made the cult Australian western The Proposition a few years back. Mortensen looks likely to gain another academy nomination according to early reports and by golly its about time he won. If like me you thought parts of I Am Legend were awesome but as a whole the CGI bald fellas ruined it then this could be the film for you.

Released: January 8th 2010

Legion

Two guilty pleasures in my DVD collection, The Prophecy and Feast. The Prophecy was all about angels battling for a child's soul on Earth and starred a mad Christopher Walken as Gabriel and an early performance by Viggo Mortensen as Lucifer. It was cool as shit in 1995 trust me. Feast I recently caught up with and its gory, exciting fun with monsters laying siege to a bar in the desert. Legion looks like a cross between the two with a mad Paul Bettany playing a gun toting angel defending the inhabitants of a desert diner from the hordes of darkness. After San Diego comic con an extended R Rated trailer came out and the film looks visually stunning as well as violent as heck. Also stars the legend that is Dennis Quaid, Doug Jones erm Lucas Black and errrrrr Tyrese Gibson.

Released: March 5th

Daybreakers

Start getting used to the idea of a world ruled by vampires as the Internet buzz has already started to build for Daybreakers. The Spierig brothers made a low budget zombie movie called Undead about 5 years back which was entertaining but a little overblown for what it was. Still it showed promise and now they are back with this one. Daybreakers takes place in a world that is ruled by the Vampire, humans are gone or possibly underground and now the blood is running out. Hello subtext for the modern world. Ethan Hawke plays a scientist who teams up with a band of humans to find the solution to the vamps survival. The trailer for Daybreakers is one of the coolest I've seen in a while, it presents a world we have never seen before, a world that we would have seen in Kurt Wimmer's Ultraviolet if he had a budget and didn't have ADD. Plus the trailer uses Placebo's cover of Kate Bush's Running up that Hill to spine tingling effect. Now its started to screen some Internet sites have started to run reviews that compare this to the original Matrix. Must be something in it too as the Spierig brothers have started to be linked to some big movies like a Sci Fi retelling of Captain Blood and a remake of An American Werewolf in London (bad idea). Is this another case of overhype or are we about to see something truly awesome?

Released: January 2010

The Cabin in The Woods

This is the directorial debut of Cloverfield writer Drew Goddard and is co written by Goddard and the great Joss Whedon. Not much is known about it apart from the fact that its a horror film and may be set in the woods. Whedon's involvement is reason enough to be excited, when production began Whedon proclaimed this "the Horror movie to end all horror movies". Just leave your shaky cam at home okay Goddard!?

Released: February 5th 2010

Shutter Island

Shutter Island was advertised in front of every movie I saw in July and August and it was due to come out in October and then suddenly was pushed back to 2010. What could be the reason for this? Surely Martin Scorcese hasn't made a turkey has he? What other competition could their possibly be in October? Leonardo Dicaprio and Scorcese had a big October hit in 2006 with The Departed, what was there to lose? Based on a pulp novel by Dennis Lehane who wrote Gone Baby Gone, Shutter Island takes place in the 1950's on the titular island at an insane asylum where a patient is missing. Dicaprio plays a troubled detective who must find the missing woman. The trailer was great and I was all hyped up to watch this on an October Sunday afternoon but now I have to wait until February. Chances are Scorcese will not win another Oscar with this one.

Released: February 19th 2010

The Hot Tub Time Machine

In this list due to the title more than any actual buzz I have heard, This is the directorial debut of Grosse Pointe Blank screenwriter Steve Pink. The film is about four friends including John Cusack and Craig Robinson who travel back to 1986 and relive their youth during a vodka and redbull binge in a hot tub. Hilarity ensues and I am so there.

Released: March 2010