Friday, November 20, 2009
Trailers for Green Zone, Kick-Ass and Clash of the Titans
Sorry, folks. Nothing about New Moon here.
Now that that's out of the way, today I'm looking at a few trailers for movies coming out in the first half of 2010 that I'm looking forward to seeing, including the latest work from director Paul Greengrass and Matt Damon, the team behind the fantastic latter two Bourne movies (no disrespect to Doug Liman; The Bourne Identity laid the groundwork excellently, but it was Greengrass that added the almost documentary-style realism that makes his entries sing. But I'm digressing again.), called Green Zone, opening March 12. I believe it's based on a non-fiction book called Imperial Life in the Emerald City, about the early days of Baghdad's Green Zone shortly after the U.S. invasion. My understanding of the book (which I haven't read) is that it focuses more on the policy-making and the often absurdly out-of-touch U.S. diplomats than combat, but Greengrass' film looks like much more of an action movie. It follows an idealistic U.S. soldier trying to uncover a sketchy source that may have given U.S. officials false information about Iraq's WMD program. The trailer has a very Bourne feel (it could easily be subtitled Jason Bourne Goes to Badgdad), but hey, a new action flick steeped in real-world issues from Paul Greengrass and Matt Damon? Sign me up.
Check out the trailer for Green Zone at Apple.
Kick-Ass is a new superhero spoof based on a new comic that's still being published (production on the film started shortly after the first issue hit comic stands) that basically explores the idea of "what if people actually dressed up to fight crime?" It's a fairly old-hat concept in comic books –Watchmen is really the first and last word in that conversation, and that came out in the mid-'80s – and I have a....difficult relationship comic scribe Mark Millar, one of the most popular writers in the medium right now. He's a very solid writer of superhero comics, and has some interesting ideas, but he's nowhere near as clever as he thinks he is, and the concept behind Kick-Ass (the comic, I mean, the first issue of which ends with the titular hero getting beaten almost to death in his first outing as a "superhero") just screams more of the same.
That said, Kick-Ass, the film, was directed by Matthew Vaughn, Guy Ritchie's former producer who made the under-appreciated Layer Cake, a slick little crime flick with a pre-Bond Daniel Craig, as well as the even-more-under-appreciated Stardust, and I like his movies quite a bit. It gives me hope that the movie will rise above the dangerously one-note premise, and the buzz coming out of last summer's Comic-Con, where big chunks of the movie were shown, was overwhelmingly positive. (The film is also a hard-R, filled with tons of over-the-top violence that the trailer can't really showcase.) Lionsgate's releasing the movie April 16, and I'm very, very intrigued to see it for myself. The last adaptation of a Mark Millar comic was Wanted, which changed tons of details from that awful, awful comic and made a fun little action flick out of it. Here's hoping Kick-Ass can similarly rise above its source material to be something awesome.
Last, but certainly not least, is the teaser for director Rob Cohen's remake of the 1981 cult classic Clash of the Titans, starring current It Boy Sam Worthington (Terminator Salvation, Avatar) in the role that Harry Hamlin made famous, at least for children of the '80s like myself. I must admit I'm sort of bummed that they went with the military buzz-cut for Worthington instead of trying to recreate Hamlin's more classical ancient-Greece hairstyle, but it looks like Cohen, who's made fun genre movies like The Fast and the Furious and truly awful genre movies like Stealth, looks to be hitting all the right notes. Of course, I could just be saying that because of my fond memories of the original movie (I wanted my own mechanical owl so bad) and my childhood fondness for ancient mythology, so naturally the idea of a big-budget Hollywood adventure with Pegasus and Medusa and giant scorpions has me pretty stoked. And any movie that stars Liam Neeson as Zeus already has my $12.
Now that that's out of the way, today I'm looking at a few trailers for movies coming out in the first half of 2010 that I'm looking forward to seeing, including the latest work from director Paul Greengrass and Matt Damon, the team behind the fantastic latter two Bourne movies (no disrespect to Doug Liman; The Bourne Identity laid the groundwork excellently, but it was Greengrass that added the almost documentary-style realism that makes his entries sing. But I'm digressing again.), called Green Zone, opening March 12. I believe it's based on a non-fiction book called Imperial Life in the Emerald City, about the early days of Baghdad's Green Zone shortly after the U.S. invasion. My understanding of the book (which I haven't read) is that it focuses more on the policy-making and the often absurdly out-of-touch U.S. diplomats than combat, but Greengrass' film looks like much more of an action movie. It follows an idealistic U.S. soldier trying to uncover a sketchy source that may have given U.S. officials false information about Iraq's WMD program. The trailer has a very Bourne feel (it could easily be subtitled Jason Bourne Goes to Badgdad), but hey, a new action flick steeped in real-world issues from Paul Greengrass and Matt Damon? Sign me up.
Check out the trailer for Green Zone at Apple.
Kick-Ass is a new superhero spoof based on a new comic that's still being published (production on the film started shortly after the first issue hit comic stands) that basically explores the idea of "what if people actually dressed up to fight crime?" It's a fairly old-hat concept in comic books –Watchmen is really the first and last word in that conversation, and that came out in the mid-'80s – and I have a....difficult relationship comic scribe Mark Millar, one of the most popular writers in the medium right now. He's a very solid writer of superhero comics, and has some interesting ideas, but he's nowhere near as clever as he thinks he is, and the concept behind Kick-Ass (the comic, I mean, the first issue of which ends with the titular hero getting beaten almost to death in his first outing as a "superhero") just screams more of the same.
That said, Kick-Ass, the film, was directed by Matthew Vaughn, Guy Ritchie's former producer who made the under-appreciated Layer Cake, a slick little crime flick with a pre-Bond Daniel Craig, as well as the even-more-under-appreciated Stardust, and I like his movies quite a bit. It gives me hope that the movie will rise above the dangerously one-note premise, and the buzz coming out of last summer's Comic-Con, where big chunks of the movie were shown, was overwhelmingly positive. (The film is also a hard-R, filled with tons of over-the-top violence that the trailer can't really showcase.) Lionsgate's releasing the movie April 16, and I'm very, very intrigued to see it for myself. The last adaptation of a Mark Millar comic was Wanted, which changed tons of details from that awful, awful comic and made a fun little action flick out of it. Here's hoping Kick-Ass can similarly rise above its source material to be something awesome.
Last, but certainly not least, is the teaser for director Rob Cohen's remake of the 1981 cult classic Clash of the Titans, starring current It Boy Sam Worthington (Terminator Salvation, Avatar) in the role that Harry Hamlin made famous, at least for children of the '80s like myself. I must admit I'm sort of bummed that they went with the military buzz-cut for Worthington instead of trying to recreate Hamlin's more classical ancient-Greece hairstyle, but it looks like Cohen, who's made fun genre movies like The Fast and the Furious and truly awful genre movies like Stealth, looks to be hitting all the right notes. Of course, I could just be saying that because of my fond memories of the original movie (I wanted my own mechanical owl so bad) and my childhood fondness for ancient mythology, so naturally the idea of a big-budget Hollywood adventure with Pegasus and Medusa and giant scorpions has me pretty stoked. And any movie that stars Liam Neeson as Zeus already has my $12.
Labels: superheroes, trailers
¶ 9:37 AM
