Category: Cinema

IIIrd times the charm?

Fool me once, I’m the fool. Fool me twice, I’m the fool who follows him. Still, I have to admit, this muddy, Peruvian Kramervision version of the new Episode III trailer — which officially premieres tonight on Fox during The O.C — looks pretty darn good. After the bunt that was A Phantom Menace and the travesty that was Attack of the Clones, there’s no reason to expect anything at all from Revenge of the Sith. But…I sense something, a presence I’ve not felt since… Update: Multiple mirrors here. Update 2: It’s now officially up here.

Dent, Arthur.

Don’t forget the llama food…Hitchhiker’s meets Douglas Adams’ Bureaucracy in this new shot from the forthcoming film. Apparently, in a deviation from the book, Arthur, Zaphod, and Ford [Spoilers — Click to Reveal] have more problems with paperwork in an impromptu visit to the Vogon homeworld.

Good, Bad, and Sinbad.

With Neo, Constantine, and A Scanner Darkly all under his fanboy belt (we’ll put aside Johnny Mnemonic for now), Keanu embarks on The Eighth Voyage of Sinbad. Keanu in a period piece? Uh oh. At this point, though, I’m more worried about the director — Rob Cohen of XXX and The Fast and the Furious. Hardly a Harryhausen.

Running Ape, Running Water.

Coming Soon offers some choice updates on two long-awaited fanboy projects this afternoon. First, Naomi Watts finds it’s not easy seeing green as she films her New York scenes “with” Kong, and secondly, we have confirmation that Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain is finally off the ground with these first two shots from the movie, starring Hugh Jackman (not Brad Pitt) and Rachel Weisz.

No Jacket Required.

Attentive observers of the sidebar might have noticed that I caught The Jacket over the weekend. If I don’t write about it now, I just might forget it completely. Amiable enough as a genre exercise, The Jacket is ultimately a fluffy, ephemeral B-flick. While containing elements of Jacob’s Ladder, 12 Monkeys, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, it ends up falling somewhere between an average episode of Quantum Leap and any episode of Touched by an Angel.

The story doesn’t make much sense, even by the liberal standards one must accord time travel tales. But here goes: After befriending a small child and her mother (Kelly Lynch, looking haggard) along the side of the road, recent Gulf War vet Jack Starks (Adrien Brody, better than the material deserves) manages through a series of unfortunate events to get himself locked up in a mental institution somewhere in what looks to be Stephen King’s Maine. At this asylum, despite the concerns of the resident Good Doctor (Jennifer Jason Leigh, not HST), the staff Bad Doctor (Kris Kristofferson, grizzled-as-ever) insists on pumping patients like Brody and Daniel Craig (crazier here than Rhys Ifans was in Enduring Love) full of drugs and locking them in a morgue cabinet for hours at a time. During one of these sessions, Brody’s Starks finds he can visit “the future” (2007), where he encounters the girl he met by the side of the road…all grown up, Knightley-esque, and troubled to the core (you can tell she’s troubled, I presume, because her mouth is open all the time — Knightley pulls off a decent American accent, but that’s about it.)

Got all that? Well, if it doesn’t make sense on the page, it doesn’t do much better on screen, and there are several more narrative jags to go. I don’t want to give the ending away, because that’s all there really is here, but it has very little to do with the first half of the film, in either tone or content. What begins as a dark psychological thriller — the audience spends a lot of time as a mote in Brody’s eye while he writhes and whimpers in the dark — becomes a rather saccharine (and creepy, given Brody and Knightley’s first meeting) romance along the lines of Always. All in all, The Jacket looks menacing but turns out to be harmless — I guess it might make for a decent enough afternoon rental if you’re bored enough. (And here’s one last tip, Brody, next time you find you can travel back and forth through time, think Biff in Back to the Future II.)

Sea of Sin.

The full trailer for Robert Rodriguez’s Sin City is now online. The jury’s still out on this one for me. On one hand, it looks as close to the Frank Miller source material as you can get. On the other, I’m not sure if it looks like a film, really…I could see this coming off like a bad community theater production after the first few minutes. Quite a cast, though.