Trailers for Upcoming Films

[brundlefly]

October (Jeremy Saulnier)

This is apparently now titled Slayground. Supposedly it's a "Halloween-set horror action thriller film". A teaser has been screening in cinemas over the weekend and there's an official site with a bunch of surveillance camera footage and a countdown timer:

https://www.runlikehell.com/

Teaser.

[spectre]

Gerwig’s Narnia movies for Netflix have been teased with this odd new detail

“It's a very new take... It's all about Rock 'N' Roll,” says Amy Pascal.

Trailer for Narnia: The Magician's Nephew.

I try to take trailers with a grain of salt, but I'm not sure I've ever been more disappointed by a first look at a film – I loved this book in my childhood and had always hoped to see an adaptation of it, and while I've had mixed feelings about Gerwig's directorial oeuvre she's at least an interesting filmmaker who I thought would have the ambition (and cachet) to do something with this other than a rote children's adventure film.

It's always foolish, of course, to expect a screen adaptation to in any way align with the version of the book in your head (let alone how another reader might picture it, or the author themselves), but some of The Magician's Nephew's settings – like the eerily peaceful Wood Between the Worlds and the decaying world of Charn – carry so much atmosphere, and you could do so much with them on the big screen (imagine this material in the hands of Return to Oz's Walter Murch, just as a random example). So to see them represented in the trailer as maximalist CGI baubles is really dispiriting. If only the BBC had gotten around to adapting this with the four other Narnia books they did back in the late 1980s – even with their janky sets and budget special effects, I would trust them to at least capture the essence of the book in a way that seems to have been wildly missed here.

Hopefully it's just a bad trailer and the film itself isn't as much of a trainwreck as it suggests, but my enthusiasm for seeing it is kaput.

[hearthesilence]

My introduction to these books was in the fourth grade when The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was class reading. I enjoyed it then but never bothered to read the other books. (I vastly prefer feature films over episodic television/streaming, so this could be reflective of that preference.)

With that in mind, and having sat through more mind-numbing "family" entertainment in recent years than I'd care to repeat, I think this trailer is a relief and wouldn't mind accompanying my nephews or nieces to a screening. It's not something I'd see on my own, and I've never been knocked out by Gerwig's films like other people, but I wish nothing but the greatest success with this - I'm pretty sure I'd rather have many more of these around than the grotesqueries DC Comics have been churning out.

[brundlefly]

Lukas Dhont's Coward.