Movie Trailer Round-Up

Here are the latest trailers for your amusement:

The DaVinci Code.

This will be a license to print money when Sony releases it in May. Speculative history plus the Vatican all based on an easy-to-read page-turner means it couldn't have been more tailor-made for mass consumption if God Himself made it so. I have yet to read it, though My Fair Lady makes sure to remind me of that every other day. I'm debating not reading it between now and then (mainly out of spite) and seeing how the movie plays by itself. Its the same tact I'm using with the Harry Potter series, but that's also because I thought the first book sucked and saw no reason to devote myself to a series that didn't have the words "The Dark Tower" somewhere in the title. Once I finish the movies, I'll go back and read the books but not before.

It helps to view them as pure cinema versus an adaptation, because in the case of the later I'd be just like my friends - they enjoy it, but then spend 20 minutes complaining about what was cut and what should have been there. I don't think DaVinci is anywhere near as bulky as Harry Potter, so it should be easier to squeeze everything into a two hour flick. In theory, at least.

Poseidon.

The winning pick for "Who Cares?" for next summer. The original is a staple of 1970's disaster flicks, and rightly so, but what point does remaking it serve? Sure, it has an ultra cool wave, followed by the exact same ship-based destruction we've seen since the 1970's. Sure I'm a Kurt Russell devotee, but... why shell out for five minutes of entertainment and two hours of boring talk? Didn't I already see that with The Perfect Storm?

V For Vendetta.

This is the one for me come spring. Holy crap it looks like the Wachowski Bro(s). managed to knock this one out of the park. Early word is exceptional, but it has the same problem as From Hell did for me. Everything looks like it was filmed on a soundstage with sets out of the latest London-based play. I confess to ignorance on the architecture of the large cities having never been to England. The layout may well be as constricting as it looks in the trailer, but it still feels like the action and actors are all butting up against the walls and don't have room to move.

But I think I was a claustrophobe in a former life, so it could just be past memories resurfacing again. At some point I'll have to bring up the 15th Centrury Italian tailor memory - that one was a doozy.