While on trailers..

Some of the big/most awaited movies of the year have still to come up with trailers. Harry Potter 4 is still a few days from its first trailer even though the principal shooting has just finished. And I still don't know what is the status of Jarhead. I still have to see an online trailer of Miyazaki's Howl's Moving Castle even though it has been playing in Japan for more than a few months now. Then there is The Chronicles of Narnia which is being hyped to be the next LOTR (which reminds me of King Kong.)

King Kong is fast approaching end of shooting but no teaser trailer in sight yet. However, the video blog of the movie is probably the best movie site I have seen in a long time. Not because it has flashy flash introduction of the movie or such, but because those production diaries are a godsend for anyone who loves movies but hasn't seen much behind-the-scenes footage except what ends up in the extended DVDs of famous movies. The online posting of daily production diaries is a revolutionary idea. (I should probably have made a complete post about it). I had my doubts about the idea of Peter Jackson following up LOTR series with a remake of King Kong, but these diaries have got me so excited about this movie that for me its probably the most anticipated movie of the year now.

Which brings me back to the movies whose trailers have caught my eye over last few days/months. I can't comment on Star Wars 3 as I have not seen the last two movies, though anything with Natalie Portman can't be too bad. :)

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is another. Even though its trailers might not seem great to people who haven't read the book, they are EXACTLY what they should be for fans of the book. War of the Worlds is probably going to be one of the two top movies of the summer (the other being, inevitably, Star Wars) and its trailers are looking great. The other big summer movie, Batman Begins, is also highly anticipated though I personally don't know much about the franchise and the trailer is of the kind that can easily be a sign of either a great movie or a disappointing one. Pixar's next, Cars, had a teaser (not very exciting teaser though.. but then that was exactly what I thought when I first saw the first teaser of The Incredibles... so...) released with the release of The Incredibles but it has probably been shifted to 2006 now. Zathura seems so much like Jumanji, that they probably should've named it Jumanji-2. Linklater's A Scanner Darkly, Tim Burton's Corpse Bride and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven and Michael Bay's The Island are all going to be either very good or very disappointing.

There are some movies, however, that have made me highly excited simply because of their trailers. These are not the movies that I knew earlier about. But the trailers are truely great and give you the sense that they might be some of the best movies of the year. Russell Crowe and Renee Zellweger come together in Ron Howard's Cinderella Man and if the trailer is anything to go by, this is going to be another great addition to Crowe's already stupendous resume. Downfall was nominated for this year's best foreign language film oscar (and lost to The Sea Inside) so it is not technically a 2005 movie, but in all likelihood most people are going to watch it sometime this year so I guess it belongs here. The trailer quote's The Hollywood Reporter reviewer as saying that it is "one of the best war movies ever made" and going by what I saw in the trailer, it very well might be. Old Boy is a South Korean action-adventure revenge drama that looks extremely good. I don't know when it will come to Rochester, but the trailer has got me excited enough to go for it whenever it does.