Post-Holiday Post

Well, another year and another decade have come and gone. I thought about trying to come up with some sort of nostalgic look back across one of them before 2010 came, but there were so many other blogs out there that said all I'd have to say and more. I don't have a good grasp of my walk through this decade anyway, it's like trying to remember every move you made in the middle of a drunken, off-the-cuff dance-- you know you were doing things, and maybe a few of them stand out, but in retrospect it was just this chaotic mess that somehow got you to where you are now. The best you can do is look back at it and be amazed at how far you managed to come.

So many people have done great retrospectives (check some of those links at the right hand of the page for a few), that I feel I don't have anything to add to them. So instead, on the first day of the new year, I'm going to look ahead to what I'm looking forward to. I have no idea what's coming down the pipe for me this year, but I do have expectations in a general sense.

1) Things will change. Change is constant and inevitable, and much as I dislike it at times, I don't think it's a good or bad thing in and of itself. It is what it is, and I'm the one who makes meaning out of it. The best way to get through it is not to fight it, but adapt to it.

2) I will be exposed to new ideas. These ideas are likely not new in the general sense so much as they are new to me. Or maybe they will be very old ideas that I've forgotten, or will see in a new way. Some I will like, some I will not. But they're all a valuable part in my learning to grow beyond the state I'm in now.

3) I will look back on the ideas I had and the things I've said now with a slight sense of embarrassment. At least I hope I will. If I've got everything figured out now, I've got some very boring decades ahead of me. I just hope I remember that even then, I won't have it all figured out either, and I hope that I'll have learned to be a little kinder to my younger self than I am now.

4) I will watch a lot of movies. Hopefully I will like some of them. I really hope that I love at least a few of them.

5) I hope that I will continue to meet people who challenge me, who inspire me, and who connect with me in some way. I also hope I can hang on to the people who put up with my quirks, my ego, and my insecurities. I feel like I'm in a very different place than I ever have been in my life, and in some ways it's exhilarating, and in other ways it's lonely.

And so this post has some relevance to the topic of this blog (and I feel less like a sappy blowhard), here are some trailers for movies I'm looking forward to, for various reasons.







The Wolfman







Alice in Wonderland





And just for the sake of perspective, here are trailers for some of my favorite movies from the past year.

















Inglourious Basterds





Up



Where the Wild Things Are





Some of those trailers are better at describing the movie than others, but still. That's a mighty fine lineup for one year.

Need to start saving my pennies for popcorn

After browsing through Moviebox (it's been a while, I'm really behind on my trailers), and seeing some things I didn't know were coming out (Percy Jackson? could be fun, I love mythology, especially Greek, but Chris Columbus hasn't wowed me in a while, so we'll see), there are a few in particular that I will definitely be parking my butt in a theater for.

The Men Who Stare at Goats, starring George Clooney, Ewan McGregor, Jeff Bridges, and Kevin Spacey. Those are four of my favorite actors working today, there is no way I'm not going to a movie with all of them in it, especially if the movie is a comedy about psychic military experiments that is evidently based on a real story.

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, written and directed by Terry Gilliam, starring Heath Ledger, Johnny Depp, Jude Law, Colin Farrell, Christopher Plummer (and I think I saw Tom Waits, too, score!). This is one of those movies that I'd see no matter who was in it because it just looks incredible visually. But beyond really great visual effects, it looks... well, imaginative. I love imagination in my awesome-looking special effects.

The Lovely Bones, directed by Peter Jackson, starring Susan Sarandon and Stanley Tucci, and a bunch of other people I'm too lazy to look up. This is one of Stacy's favorite books, so I was curious when I saw the trailer (at Julie and Julia, of all things) at how faithful this looked to the original story. She said it seemed pretty close, and I must admit that I'm very intregued this got green-lit and that it seems to have a decent budget to boot. I will be seeing it.

Whip It, written and directed by Drew Barrymore, starring Ellen Page, Drew Barrymore, Zoe Bell, Juliette Lewis, and Jimmy Fallon. This just looks fun as hell, and I am in full support of Zoe Bell getting more facetime in movies.

Just hope they use their powers for good

So who else has seen a movie and felt completely mislead by the trailer you'd seen for it beforehand? I'm sometimes amazed, even now, of just how important movie trailers are to get right, and easy they are to manipulate. Seriously, it's so easy to make a mediocre movie look fun or a good movie look boring, to say nothing of how easy it is to even switch the genre. In cooking, it's said 'the first bite is with the eye', meaning the appearance of the food can set up a person's expectation for the taste, and for me, the trailer is that same idea for the film. It takes a lot of skill to make a good trailer that offers enough to inform the viewer of what the plot is without giving away too much of the good stuff, and keeping it all under three minutes.

I was just reminded of this in part because of the trailers I'd been seeing for Jennifer's Body and then reading about what the writer and director have been saying about it, along with other people either anticipating it or who have seen it. And I was reminded again today about it because of browsing through my Youtube favorites and seeing how many fake movie trailers I had in there. There are some really well-made ones there, and probably still more I don't know about. I figured I'd share some of my favorites, since all my other blog posts are half-finished and I'm still moving. (Sorry for the links instead of imbedded videos, I just got a laptop and for some reason can't figure out how to copy the entire imbed code.)

The Shining as a romantic comedy.
Mary Poppins as a horror movie.
A Goofy Movie if it had been directed by David Lynch.
Titanic 2, featuring footage and dialogue from possibly every movie ever made.