Coming Attractions 2009

I have been accused of not doing my homework before proclaiming that Where the Wild Things Are will be the best movie of the year. I submit my homework.

Nothing happened in January. We were catching up on last year's Oscar nominees.

We had a darkly whimsical stop motion picture in February, Coraline. This may turn out to be a watershed year for stop motion, with two other major releases forthcoming that will pit traditional puppetry against CGI mimicry. Since the success of Pixar and Dreamworks Animation the traditional cel animation arm of Disney has been gradually phased out; Disney hasn't made a traditionally animated feature in five years, and hasn't made a good one in the fifteen years since Lion King. (Um, I just realized I haven't seen a single Disney-produced animated film since Lion King.) The same could happen to stop motion.

As one of the naysayers prior to release, I was delighted in March that Watchmen turned out to be the first great film of 2009.

In April there is a heartwarmingly boring looking Oscar contender called the Soloist with Jamie Foxx going full retard and Robert Downey Jr. Didn't we see this last summer...? More important is Observe and Report, for which I'm going to stump not only because of Seth Rogen and the divine Anna Faris, but because this is the sophomore effort from director Jody Hill who displayed a wickedly anti-comic audience-baiting sensibility in The Foot Fist Way.

The blockbusters roll out in May. I plan to ignore Wolverine and the Da Vinci Code follow-up, Angels & Demons. But JJ Abrams, creator of Lost and Cloverfield, has already got my dollar for the Star Trek reboot. I'll also be in line for Terminator Salvation, for two reasons: Christian Bale giving a set of balls back to John Connor, and gritty post-nuclear holocaust machine war filmed in the New Mexico desert with lots and lots of seriously evil deathbots. I'm a bit worried about the possible PG-13 rating, although you can get away with a lot of violence nowadays. Pixar will offer Up the following week as an alternative to hell on earth. Also, Sam Raimi dusts off the ol' Necronomicon Ex-Mortis to summon yet another hideous horror hag in Drag Me to Hell. He must have a good reason to do so. On the indie side of things, The Brothers Bloom is another sophomore effort from a director who wowed me with his debut; Rian Johnson came out of nowhere in 2005 with Brick, a pitch-perfect classic noir set in a modern So-Cal high school. This guy's got talent, and I'm eager to see what else he can do.

Transformers will own June. There will also be light comedy of the romantic (The Proposal) and the stupid (Year One, The Hangover) varieties.

Harry Potter hysteria flares up once again in July, and once again I will march to the theater under cultural obligation because I do not want to actually read those books. I will see Public Enemies, the John Dillinger biopic starring Christian Bale and Johnny Depp, because it was filmed in Chicagoland and Wisconsin. Oh, and Sacha Baron Cohen requests that you pay to see his new movie, Brüno, because he needs another $200 million to pay the seven law firms he employs.

August will be a bloodfeast. After we get the G.I. Joe movie out of the way, Tarantino and Rob Zombie will show no mercy, give no quarter in Inglorious Basterds and Halloween 2. If the 2000s have been a far more brutal decade on film than the 1990s, these guys are to blame (thank).

On 9/9/09 Tim Burton will present "9", the faux-stop motion picture I alluded to. I don't know if I want it to be good or not. But nevermind, because something much more exciting is around the corner: Terry Gilliam! My favorite director, period. He's back with The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, undeterred by the death of his lead actor, Heath Ledger, halfway through production. As usual it will be an epic artistic success or an epic artistic failure (if it gets released at all, and depending on who you ask).

October will be remembered for the best movie of the year, Spike Jonze's Where the Wild Things Are. If you see any other films that month, you could be watching the latest Scorsese-DiCaprio venture, Shutter Island, the Astro Boy movie, or the triumphant/abysmal third outing from director Richard Kelly (Donnie Darko, Southland Tales), The Box. I assume you won't be seeing Saw VI.

There is one reason to go to the theater in November: Wes Anderson directs a (real) stop motion adaptation of Roald Dahl's Fantastic Mr Fox. This year kicks ass.

December. Looming over the entire year is Avatar. First let me mention something from Peter Jackson called The Lovely Bones, a Guy Ritchie movie with Robert Downey Jr as Sherlock Holmes, and Disney's return to traditional animation, The Princess and the Frog. Now down to business...James Cameron has not released a picture since Titanic in 1997. He is the greatest sci-fi action director of all time. He has spent the last decade developing 3D camera technology and time travel from his hyperbaric compound beneath the antarctic ice cap. At long last Cameron has announced that he will unveil Avatar, a motion picture so advanced that it will revolutionize the way your cells metabolize protein. This visionary giant leap, fourteen years and $500 million in the making, promises to be the most earth-shattering event since Guns N' Roses' long-awaited album Chinese Democracy hit shelves last November, or the Segway.


Anything sound good to you? Something I missed?