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Already 2007, with it's franchise-destroying threequels and Anthony Anderson getting more screen time than Megatron seems like just a bad, bad dream.
Films I'm anticipating in 2008:
The Forbidden Kingdom- Jackie Chan and Jet Li in the same movie! Could be very fun.
Iron Man- The past few years of comics have not been kind to Tony Stark. Hopefully the movie will show that a heroic Tony's much more interesting than evil/arrogant/hypocrite Tony.
Speed Racer- I have to admit, that trippy teaser made me curious.
The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian- Reepicheep! Aslan! Trufflehunter! Trumpkin! Oh yeah, and some humans too.
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull- Even if it does turn out to be a train wreck...it'll be a glorious train wreck!
Kung Fu Panda- Looks cute and funny. I'm hoping Dreamworks Animation can get back on track after a very lackluster year.
Get Smart- Steve Carell is over-exposed these days, but this looks like it might be fun.
WALL*E- It's a PIXAR film. Of -course- it'll be good!
Hancock- Will Smith as a drunk, burnt out super-hero. The whale tossing scene sold me.
The Dark Knight- "...nothing in his pockets but knives and lint!"
Where the Wild Things Are- The teaser images are highly intriguing.
Bond 22 (working title) - Craig is a great Bond.
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince- Duh.
Star Trek- Please let it be good. Please, please, PLEASE.
posted
Only thing I'd really add is CJ7. Stephen Chow's first science fiction movie, this should be interesting. Unfortunately, while the release date is January 31st in Hong Kong and China, I can't find the US release date.
The Forbidden Kingdom looks interesting and is news to me, looks like a good popcorn flick. The American teen angle seems entirely useless though. (Boo @ annoying filmgoers that go to Transformers to see stupid teenagers and then go to a Jackie Chan AND Jet Li film to see some no-name American kid? Bah.)
Also looking forward to HP, Indiana Jones, Star Trek, The Dark Knight, and Bond.
Posts: 7593 | Registered: Sep 2006
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Does Cloverfield not interest you? What about 10,000 BC? Both of those look pretty good to me. From your list, I am looking forward to (in order from most excited about to least):
WALL*E (I love anything Pixar) Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Double Duh) The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian Speed Racer (I like the Wachowski brothers) Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Chrystal Skull (I don't like the name though) Hancock (I love the idea, the wale got me too) Iron Man (I'm not a comic book fan but the Marvel movies have been good, mostly) Kung Fu Panda Get Smart
Posts: 1766 | Registered: Feb 2006
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Roland Emmerich lost me with Day After Tommorow Cloverfield may be interesting, but I'll wait for the reviews. The teaser/trailer makes me think that it will probably overdose me on shakicam shots.
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Although it had a 2007 release date, the single movie I'm looking most forward to seeing in the theater in 2008 is the adaptation of Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis.
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Spoilers I've read about Cloverfield make it seem like it'll not be my thing.
10,000 B.C. may be fun in a B-movie thrills at an A-movie budget kind of way.
I certainly intend to see 2007's Persepolis, as I loved the graphic novels. But it may not hit the local art house theater.
Some films I'm interested in but waiting before I get excited. For instance, on Coraline I'm waiting to see what Teri Hatcher's performance as the Other Mother is like. That'll make or break the film for me.
Posts: 6689 | Registered: Jan 2005
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quote:Originally posted by Puffy Treat: I certainly intend to see 2007's Persepolis, as I loved the graphic novels. But it may not hit the local art house theater.
Yeah, it's possible that I'm going to have to road trip in order to see it. I'm lobbying both of the art houses in the Dayton area to get it, although I'm not sure how much good that'll do. I'm sure it isn't as though they're unaware of the film.
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It has been a long time since I've been up there, hasn't it? And Liza does have that drywall project that I wanted to help with....
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I think that Hancock looks pretty cool. I rather enjoyed the whale scene. But I also liked the beginning. "What you want a cookie or something? Get out of my face."
Posts: 6026 | Registered: Dec 2004
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quote: Cloverfield may be interesting, but I'll wait for the reviews. The teaser/trailer makes me think that it will probably overdose me on shakicam shots.
I read somewhere that It wasn't going to be Blair Witchy, and that the shaky camera work was more for the advertisement. That may not be true. I'll see it either way. I'm gonna keep looking for a source for that, though....
Edit: Ok, no, I either read something VERY VERY incorrect, or am making it up. The director said that they wanted it to look like a home movie. Shaky with weird cuts in it. So..... Yeah. different. But I'll still see it.
Posts: 349 | Registered: Oct 2007
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no more HP movies for me. I've given up on them since 4 was terrible and illogical in bits and it made me mad. But I am looking forward to WALL-E and that Jet Li and Jackie Chan joint. GO KUNG FU ACTION!
Posts: 9942 | Registered: Mar 2003
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The whale tossing scene is hilarious. My best friend and I did our yearly schedule of movies to see this year, and came up with:
In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale - Could be good in a cookie cutter bigger budget fantasy flick sort of way. Cloverfield - If the shakey cam thing isn't as bad as the preview looks, I'll give it a go and it could be good, but I'm leery of movies that try THAT hard to be mysterious, methinks they might try too hard. Be Kind Rewind - Looks hilarious. Movie about guys who accidentally erase all the movies at a rental store and then tape and act out the plot of the movies themselves. Strange Wilderness - Watch the trailer, it should have you at the shark scene in the same way Hancock would at the whale scene. It's a comedy, one of those goofy ones that won't be a smash hit, but I have a soft spot in my funny bone for Steve Zahn. In Bruges - I love comedy action shoot 'em up thrillers. Definitely, Maybe - The plot looks so-so, but Ryan Reynolds is hilarious, and it looks like he's maybe softening up a bit, so I'll see this out of curiosity. Vantage Point - I like the actors, and the structure of the storytelling looks a little different than usual, and I like unusual storytelling methods for movies. Chicago 10 - I haven't seen a trailer, but it's about the protests about the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Archival footage, music and even animation will be used in the telling, and it sounds interesting enough to where I want to see more. Horton Hears a Who! - Trailers looks pretty funny. 21 - I love movies about cards, probably because I love playing cards, but it's also a depiction of actual card counters in Vegas. Leatherheads - This looks hilarious and interesting. George Clooney and Krazinski from The Office meet up to make football in America a real sport. Based on a true story, it looks great. Iron Man* Caspian* Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull - All for obvious reasons. Kung Fu Panda - Looks funny. The Happening - This movie is perhaps the one I'm looking forward to the most that isn't getting all the huge hype. It has three VERY important things. M. Night Shyamalan, Zooey Deschanel and it's a disaster movie. I think he's brilliant, and I've loved every one of his movies. Zooey Deschanel shall one day be my wife, so I think it's good to see her movies, and I love disaster flicks. Get Smart - Looks good, I like the actors though I never saw the original. Wall*E - He looks so cute! Hancock - I love Will Smith, and it looks really funny. Like Puffy, the whale scene sold it.
I don't know when some of the others like Bond 22 and Star Trek are coming out, so they aren't on my list yet. This is based on IMDB's current release list.
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quote:Originally posted by Puffy Treat: Bond 22 has a tentative holiday of 2008 release. Trek is set for Christmas Day, 2008.
In the Name of the King is an Uwe Boll video game adaptation! Fear it!
It looks like Eragon redux. I'm not uber impressed, but it has a certain eye candy quality about it. If anything moderately better is out that week, I won't be seeing ITNOTK.
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So will stuff coming out of New Zealand be affected by this writer's strike? That is, will the Narnia movies keep coming?
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PC is done. VDT doesn't start filming until this summer. I think the script for that's done, so it won't be a factor until they reach The Silver Chair.
Posts: 6689 | Registered: Jan 2005
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Another film I'm anticipating is The Secret of Moonacre, though I'm uncertain if it'll see a 2008 U.S. release. It's Gabor Csupo's follow-up to Bridge to Terabithia, featuring a girl in the mid-1800s who comes to live at a mysterious manor.
I've tried to read the book it's based on (The Little White Horse) several times, but the book's a bit too heavy on the "precious" and light on the depth.
Fortunately, it looks like Csupo's vision will be quite a bit more exciting. I'm already digging the dark, almost punk look for some of the costumes.
quote:Originally posted by Lyrhawn: It looks like Eragon redux. I'm not uber impressed, but it has a certain eye candy quality about it. If anything moderately better is out that week, I won't be seeing ITNOTK.
I don't really think an Eragon redux is what the world needs right now, either. LOTR created a narrow window wherein studios might actually believe fantasy movies could sell tickets. I can't help but feel poorly conceived fantasy movies are squandering (and possibly destroying) that window.
Eragon wasn't exactly great literature, but large parts of the movie were actively painful, especially knowing what had been condensed. Turning a short infancy into "you fly through a lightning storm and suddenly you're an adult" and one of the more emotionally effective segments of the book into "here, let's just set your house on fire" was particularly pathetic.
Aside from that, it also seemed like someone had seen LOTR and come to the conclusion that what made the movies work was lots of helicopter shots.
And the somewhat amusing impression that John Malkovich was never actually on the same set as 99% of the rest of the cast.
And spending all their budget on dragon CG to the point that almost all of the non-human humanoids just looked like extras in grubby clothing.
And wondering why any of the flunkies ever bothers to report back to the bad guys when the only result is getting injured or killed.
...Okay, off on a tangent there. Original point: Mediocre-to-awful fantasy movies, bad for the future of the genre.
Posts: 3826 | Registered: May 2005
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Eragon's quality (or lack thereof) didn't hurt the film nearly as much as that all the money poured into making and promoting it didn't translate into good box office returns. Money is what talks loudest, not quality. That's why we'll be seeing Shrek 4 for certain, despite Shrek 3 being a -terrible- film. Because Shrek 3 was one of the biggest hits of 2007.
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Domestically, The Golden Compass was a dud, but internationally it's finally broken even.
Though I wonder if it'll continue to earn enough to justify the planned sequels.
But my point Sterling, was that Eragon had the same (or almost) as high level marketing as Shrek 3. We won't see Eldest -not- because the film was bad, but because it didn't make money.
Shrek 3 got mostly putrid reviews compared to other high profile animated films like Ratatouille. And yet, it did boffo box office.
They don't care about the quality so long as people pay to see it. Sad but true.
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Eragon wasn't HORRIBLE literature, I'd call it mediocre. It was entertaining for what it was (a fantasy retelling of Star Wars with bits of LOTR thrown in for variety), but nothing special. A movie version COULD have been good, but it was very poorly put together. Eldest could be a good movie too. There's a lot to work with there both plot wise and visually. But like Puffy said, sequels don't happen when the originals bomb.
Posts: 21898 | Registered: Nov 2004
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That movies tend to get made for money-making ability, rather than quality: very true.
And I'm sure marketing people still periodically tear out their hair at their inability to predict with complete reliability what movies are going to sell.
Honestly, given the desire for payback, it's rather surprising that Hollywood doesn't back more ventures on the lower end (say, the 5-to-20 million scale) rather than bankrolling smaller streams of expensive, high-profile, high-budget sequels and remakes.
But I still dare to believe (despite occasional suggestions to the contrary) that what people really want to turn out and see is good movies. I'm even enough of a snob to hope that maybe the audience that turns out for high fantasy is a little more demanding?... But then, I'm probably fooling myself.
Still, I can't help but think TGC's big opening and subsequent rapid fall-off wasn't at least in part a result of mediocre reviews.
Lyrhawn: yeah, I thought the book Eragon was all right. Derivative, but certainly not an insignifigant achievement for a newly-published teenager. It's part of why the loss of so many parts of the book that showed more depth or detail from the movie was so disappointing to me.
Posts: 3826 | Registered: May 2005
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They're coming out with Chicago 10? I saw Chicago a few years ago, and really enjoyed it (who knew Richard Gere could tap dance!), but I had no idea that they'd made that many sequels! I guess I'll try to catch them on Netflix.
Netflix doesn't always have all the movies in a franchise, though. I remember that before I saw Malcolm X, I wanted to catch I-IX, so that I could follow the story. The only ones they had was "Malcolm in the Middle", which, I suppose would catch me up on the middle of the saga, but that still leaves me in the dark about the beginnings.
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quote:Originally posted by Sterling: But I still dare to believe (despite occasional suggestions to the contrary) that what people really want to turn out and see is good movies.
Almost. They want to see movies that entertain them. Which occasionally intersects with "good" (Ratatouille made almost 700 million dollars worldwide! Hurrah!) and sometimes not. (Alvin and the Chipmunks looks poised to earn even more, on a much smaller production budget! UGH.)
I think a large reason of why TGC fizzled out in the US comes it just not clicking with what movie-goers wanted to see. I Am Legend was what adults and teens were more interested in seeing, and it was released early enough that the kids who wanted to see it most likely already had by the time the lucrative Christmas vacation weeks rolled around.
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quote:Spoilers I've read about Cloverfield make it seem like it'll not be my thing.
Most of those have been disproven already as false.
I've been following the ARG surrounding it for some time.
And, sadly, Uwe Boll is hardly done yet. Far Cry, Alone In the Dark II, Bloodrayne 3, Zombie Massacre... Not to mention several other movie that *must* be based on video games, at least based on their descriptions.
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How do you know the spoilers I've read are the ones proven false? I haven't said what they were. Posts: 6689 | Registered: Jan 2005
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