2009 Things To Look For
1. Will Watchmen Be Released?
Watchmen has been heavily advertised. It’s a big movie. It’s expensive. It’s probably considered a possible tentpole by its studio.
It also may not even get a release date.
As has been reported by numerous outlets, Fox has basically said Warner Bros doesn’t have the right to distribute Watchmen and the legal matters are still working their way out.
Watchmen‘s release date is March 6th. Tick tock.
2. Is The Dragonball Movie Going to Be as Bad as It Looks?
Maybe. Frankly, the utilization of so many white actors is already problematic, as is what seems to be the exclusion of Vegeta, going by the IMDB cast list and the trailer.
Now you don’t have to take my word for it, check out what I’m pretty sure is the official trailer.
http://movies.foxjapan.com/dragonball/
But anyone who watched the original series knows Vegeta was like the Wolverine of Dragonball, he was really the coolest character, a grouchy anti-hero type. if he’s not in the film it would be a major shame.
Also the contemporary look of a lot of the costumes and settings has a distancing effect and makes the whole thing seem much sillier.
3. Will Angels and Demons Be Nearly as Bad As The Da Vinci Code?
Another maybe. I’m about halfway through the book right now, and it’s kind of an adapters dream, as far as I’m concerned.
The plotting is there, and at a pace much stronger than in the first film.
A good adapter could easily cut out the occasional stereotypical character, and a film version will not suffer from Dan Brown’s sometimes over-wraught description.
The real challenge will be condensing the novel’s lengthy bits of expositional information, necessary to understand the historical elements involved, into a form more viable for film. That will be the major challenge for the adapters (David Koepp and Akiva Goldsman).
But frankly, if they can put in a good effort this could work, at least judging from the first half of what I’ve read.
And both have d0ne fine work in the past (recently Koepp’s Ghost Town was a pleasant suprise, and Akiva adapted A Beautiful Mind) but both also have been associated with some not so fine work (cough, Koepp’s Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and Akiva adapted The Da Vinci Code).
It bears watching.
4. Shutter Island Adaptation
Here’s a book I’ve actually already read, a great one by Dennis Lehane that hinges around a central conceit that’s fairly implausible, admittedly, and only revealed at the end. Let’s just say it has a guy investigating something on an Island, there’s a mental institution, and I’m stopping there.
But Lehane uses that conceit to ask questions about human beings, it is not just a gimmick.
The film Gone Baby Gone also had a late twist that seemed somewhat implausible, which served as a thinking point (I would imagine the novel shares this moment).
It will be very interesting to see how director Martin Scorsese and co. handle this, without careful treatment it could come off as simply laughable, but nurtured properly a film could retain the element of thoughtfulness invoked from reading Lehane’s novel.
It’s got a sweet cast though, including Leonardo Dicaprio, Ben Kingsley, Max von Sydnow, Mark Ruffalo, Emily Mortimer and Jackie Earle Haley.
-Dan Benamor