Things I Picked Up On My Third Viewing of "Inception"

My favorite film of 2010 is probably going to be "Inception," because I am still totally enamored with it six months and three viewings later. There are still little things I'm picking up with each viewing and I thought I'd share some of them to show where I am in the process of breaking down and getting to know the film. Here's a quick list of observations I made while watching "Inception" for the third time. Spoilers are everywhere, so be warned.

During the preparatory and planning scenes for the Fischer job, the characters hold discussions in the dream architecture for the first two levels. First, we get to see the car chase environment when it's not raining and then the office building environment empty, and with different lighting. It's wonderful foreshadowing.

The wine glass breaking in the bar during the "Mr. Charles" sequence is a visual and aural reference to Cobb stepping on a glass in the hotel room before Mal's suicide. You can really see the way Christopher Nolan added all these recurring motifs throughout the film upon rewatch, and I'm still finding new ones.

Is the snow fortress Eames' dream or Fischer's? I figured out the reason why I got confused was that Cobb tells Ariadne that they're going into Fischer's dream to clarify that they're not going into Browning's. This doesn't mean he's the Dreamer, to use the film's terminology. The entire time, Fischer remains the Subject, while the other team members are the Dreamers constructing dreams for Fischer to populate. That's why all the projections are hostile all the way down - they're all part of his subconscious. The other people sharing the dream can also affect the environment and bring things in, which is why it's raining in Yusuf's level and Cobb is stalked by Mal and a freight train.

Also, I still can't figure out why there should be a loss of gravity in the second dream level, but not in the third. Saito's injury still affects him as he goes deeper into dreams, but the effects are delayed. So the loss of gravity should still affect the third dream level, but maybe to a lesser extent. Wouldn't it have been fun to see the assault on the hospital base if the gravity was similar to the moon's? Then James Bond fans could have had "Moonraker" references instead of the ones to "On Her Majesty's Secret Service."

There are a few other inconsistencies with the second level that I spotted. Arthur has to retrieve the explosives, get his floating teammates into the elevator, reset the charges, and then blow them for the kick, all in the space of about five minutes according to Cobb's math. I find that unlikely. Also, the projections are supposed to get worse the further down into dreams you go, but Arthur fights off far fewer projections than Yusuf does a level above him, few enough that they can be dispatched by hand-to-hand combat. Maybe his level is better designed and only a few projections managed to find him?

I no longer have any trouble understanding Ken Watanabe or Marion Cotillard's dialogue. As non-English speakers, they're actually being very careful with their pronunciation. However, I want to watch "Inception" with closed captioning for a fourth viewing because I'm still missing Tom Hardy's lines. He tends to blurt things out quickly, and his British accent gets pretty thick.

Isn't the whole team still stuck in the car chase level for a week after the van goes off the bridge? The reason the team wasn't going to wait out the sedative once they realized Fischer's subconscious was militarized it because they would have had to survive in the first dream level for a week to wake up naturally, and even longer the farther down they went. Everyone except Saito and Cobb only wake to the first level at the end of the film, because we don't see a kick in the real world to bring them all the way back up to reality. Does this mean Fischer's projections were placated after the inception and the team waited it out for a week? What were they doing for all that time?

And why did they just leave Cobb in the van underwater? Not being conscious might mean you can't drown in a dream, or killing yourself in Limbo might automatically bring you all the way back to reality. The rules about death and limbo still elude me. If suicide was always the way out, why didn't Dom and Mal kill themselves earlier when they were stuck in Limbo the first time? My guess is that no one had been to Limbo before so nobody really knew the rules of the place yet. Or something.

I love that the film ends in LAX because I'm frequently at that airport, groggy, have just woken up or having been awake for too long. I think the filmmakers fudged some of the interiors because I never remember going through any sort of security to go from the baggage claim to ground transportation. Or maybe coming in from Australia you get a different terminal. Did they ever mention what Fischer was spending so much time in Australia for? He doesn't have an accent.

On the subject of accents, Michael Caine's character, Professor Miles, is identified as Dom's father-in-law, but why does a professor with a British accent have a daughter with a French one? There are lots of possibilities here. He could have divorced her mother, or been a step-father, foster father, adoptive father, or simply an absent one - in the military or living in England separately for work. There are hints in the film that Mal didn't have a happy childhood. Some interesting backstory is lurking in there.

Too many unanswered questions. I'd better go watch the movie again.

In the Home Stretch With "Babylon 5"

This post will contain spoilers for the fourth season of "Babylon Five."

Since my last post, I've finished off Season Four and now I'm about five episodes into Season Five, the show's final year. My worries about "Babylon Five" jumping the shark after the conclusion of the Shadow War turned out to be unfounded. After a brief transition, the show moved right into the struggle to free Earth and Mars from a corrupt tyrant, and Season Four ended in a totally different place than I thought it would. So I'm giving Season Five the benefit of the doubt, even though the action has slowed down again and we've lost two more major cast members.

What I really loved about the latest batch of episodes at the end of Season Four was that the story maintained such a broad scope and really felt like the climax to a full-fledged space opera. I love science-fiction stories that aim for the moon, tackling big ideas and big conflicts that require a tremendous stage to fully explore. In "Babylon Five" battles are fought over planets and wars can engulf galaxies. You have dozens of different alien races in the mix and the main characters are constantly searching for common ground with multiple, disparate cultures and peoples. And then there's one of my favorite science-fiction tropes: giant leaps in time. One episode, which would have been a great coda for the show if Season Four was the final season, charts the effects of the characters' actions over millennia. It was a little clumsy in execution, which is how I feel about "Babylon Five" in general, but you have to admire the guts and ambition it took to put it on television.

At the same time, the personal stories also saw some major advancements. One of the central arcs of "Babylon Five" is the romance between Captain Sheridan (Bruce Boxleitner) and the Minbari Ambassador Delenn (Mira Furlan) I was a skeptic in the beginning, but their relationship progresses so naturally over time, by the end of Season Four when they reach some major commitment milestones, it feels right. And then there was the unrequited love story between Commander Ivanova (Claudia Christian) and Ranger Marcus Cole (Jason Carter) that had been playing out since the middle of Season Two. Boy, what these two lacked in screen time they sure made up for in emotional trauma. And then there's the ongoing "Odd Couple" re-enactment that Ambassadors G'Kar (Andreas Katsulas) and Mollari (Peter Jurasik) have been treating us to. Since the major fisticuffs seem to be over between them, they're mostly acting as comic relief now. But they're so good at it, I don't mind.

There were some missteps in Season Four. Michael Garibaldi (Jerry Doyle) had a very involved subplot that took him to Mars to confront some of his personal demons. It wasn't a bad concept, but the what they did with it was lousy. To say that Garibaldi's actions felt forced during this whole adventure is an understatement. I never bought for a second that he was ever going to turn traitor or leave Babylon Five behind forever, so his storyline got pretty tedious as I waited for events to play out. Fortunately Marcus and Dr. Franklin (Richard Biggs) were also on Mars - I complained in the last post that they weren't getting enough to do, but they got plenty of action in the second half of the season. These episodes also introduced one of my favorite minor characters so far - Number One (Marjorie Monaghan), the leader of the Mars resistance.

Season Five is still in the process of ramping up toward a new conflict and has introduced two new major characters. First there's Captain Lochley (Tracy Scoggins), who is brought on as the new commanding officer of Babylon Five. Scoggins replaced an actor who didn't return for the new season, and her transition was actually handled much better than I had expected. I like the character and her actress is decent. I'm less impressed with Byron (Robin Atkin Downes), the leader of a group of telepaths who are trying to establish a telepath colony on Babylon Five. Every time these telepath characters are onscreen, I feel like I'm in the middle of a very bad early 90s acoustic rock video, with all the long-haired men, the candles, and the new-agey spiritual schtick. Good Grief. Downes isn't a bad actor, but he does not make a credible messiah figure.

I hope Byron's budding relationship with the troubled telepath, Lyta Alexander (Patricia Tallman), and all these heavy forewarnings of a "Telepath War" lead somewhere interesting. Lyta's the only one of the show's regulars who still seems to have any pressing issues left to resolve. For most of the others it's business as usual running the station, and a few like Londo Mollari and G'Kar seem to be taking a break from any strenuous activity before destiny inevitably catches up with them.

The end is in sight. I hope "Babylon Five" still has a few surprises for me in these last twenty-odd hours. I'll post again after the last episode with some final analysis.

"Wicked" the Movie vs. "Wicked" the Miniseries

I love it when Hollywood gets themselves into these situations. For years now we've been hearing about the potential development of a film version of "Wicked," a take on "The Wizard of Oz" told from the point of view of the Wicked Witch of the West. Originally a Gregory Maguire novel published in 1995, "Wicked" became a wildly successful Broadway musical in 2003, and a film version of the musical is supposed to be in the works with Universal Pictures. There's been plenty of speculation about possible directors and stars, but the project has been stuck in development hell for years. This may be about to change.

Enter ABC. On Sunday, the Disney-owned network revealed that they're considering an eight-hour "Wicked" miniseries. Salma Hayek's production company Ventanarosa, best known for "Ugly Betty" (which had an episode devoted to the "Wicked" musical), would partner up with ABC Studios for the project. Though Universal may own rights to the musical version of "Wicked," they don't own the rights to the original Gregory Maguire book that it was based on, so ABC could make their own non-musical adaptation. Can't you just hear the execs at Universal freaking out? If ABC's "Wicked" makes it to air before Universal's "Wicked" make it to multiplexes, it could potentially take the wind out of the movie's sails. Or would it?

The "Wicked" musical is pretty well known as musicals go, so ABC runs a risk of alienating viewers who might be show up expecting showtunes. However, I suspect there's also a pretty big potential audience that isn't familiar with the musical or simply wouldn't care. Going back to the Maguire novel as the basis miniseries also helps, because it's very, very different from the "Wicked" musical. It's darker, much more serious, and has a huge chunk of material in it that never reached Broadway. I seriously doubt ABC would be all that faithful to the book, but they could use it to go in a different direction with the story. ABC and Disney actually adapted another Maguire novel for television a few years back, "Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister." They turned a gloomy book into a much lighter, family-friendly TV movie. It wasn't bad either.

Then again, why adapt the "Wicked" novel again when the "Wicked" musical already did such a good job the first time around? Admittedly the songs aren't great, but I thought their take on the story was fantastic - especially the way they added humor and girl power themes and many, many visual references to the classic MGM "Wizard of Oz" musical. I like it far better than the book, which was too morose and tragic for my tastes. I've been anticipating the new film version because I think the "Wicked" musical would translate very well to the silver screen. A new version based on the "Wicked" novel could be good, but it's not the "Wicked" that I've been waiting for. I welcome the news of the miniseries version primarily because it might push Universal to get the film into production faster. And for the inevitable schadenfreude if the two productions do end up clashing, but that's a given.

Disney also has another Oz project lined up, "Oz: the Great and Powerful," a feature film about the adventures of the Wonderful Wizard before he met Dorothy, that might star Robert Downey Jr and might be directed by Sam Raimi. Since "Wicked" is also a prequel, hypothetically the two could be tied together in the same universe for a nice bit of corporate synergy. Also, depending on how their "Wicked" miniseries is written, ABC could go ahead and adapt the subsequent Gregory Maguire Oz books if the first series is a success. Currently there are two sequels to the "Wicked" novel, "Son of a Witch" and "A Lion Among Men." The "Wicked" musical changed certain story elements that would make it difficult to do any follow-ups, something the ABC version can take care to avoid.

The best case scenario is that both versions are produced, and we end up with two different, quality adaptations of "Wicked." The worst case scenario is that the projects are rushed or compromised and we get two lousy versions. Or both studios lose their nerve and neither get made. It'll be interesting to see how things play out. For the moment, though, the moral of the story is this: in Hollywood, good ideas should be capitalized on quickly, or they're liable to be capitalized on by your competition - especially when you don't have all the rights to the source material locked up.

What the Hell Was "Werckmeister Harmonies" All About?

Let me try to explain what happens in Bela Tarr's "Werckmeister Harmonies." First, there's a village in the dead of winter. Sinister things are happening there, and some terrible cataclysm seems to be looming on the horizon. The primary harbinger of doom seems to be the arrival of a mysterious circus, the star attraction of which is a giant stuffed whale in a corrugated metal shipping container. The whale is accompanied by a figure known as The Prince, who intends to give a "blasphemous" speech that has incited terror and destruction in other places.

However our main character is not The Prince but a young man named Janos (Lars Rudolph), a resident of the village who bears silent witness to many of the strange events that are to follow. Janos's elderly Uncle Gyorgy (Peter Fitz), a pianist, may hold the key to the film's story. Gyorgy has a theory that past mistakes by certain musical theorists inadvertently caused all music on Earth to become out of tune with the greater, purer celestial harmonies. Perhaps this is why darkness has descended on the village, like the eclipse that Janos illustrates in the film's opening sequence by creating a model of the solar system with a trio of obliging bar patrons.

Have I mentioned yet that the film is shot in black and white and is in Hungarian? The black and white part doesn't faze me in the least, but the Hungarian part does, because I know nothing about Hungary or the Hungarian culture. Without that context, I can't tell if Janos is supposed to be a simpleton or if his interactions with the other villagers, usually addressed as Auntie or Uncle, is normal. I'm not sure what year it's supposed to be, whether the helicopter that appears near the end of the film is supposed to be viewed as an anachronism or if it's perfectly contemporaneous with the more dated-looking tanks and hospital equipment we see earlier. I don't know if the violence that erupts in the village is a reference to something in the local Eastern European history, or perhaps it's meant to be a more allegorical event.

And then there are the musical references. The title refers to Andreas Werckmeister, a 17th century composer who developed a tuning system called the Werckmeister Temperament. I know a little about musical theory, but not enough to fully comprehend Uncle Gyorgy's criticism of Werckmeister's work. Music is certainly important in the narrative of the film itself, especially the haunting string and piano theme that recurs throughout the film at its most important moments. If the music of humanity being in discord with the music of the heavenly spheres caused the events that occurred in the film, does this mean that the situation was corrected by the ending? Was this something that could have been avoided or prevented, perhaps if Werckmeister had caught his terrible error? Or was it predestined, like Janos's eclipse?

And speaking of Janos, his fate may be the most confounding part of the whole film. What happened to him? At one point we see him running, being chased by unknown forces. Then there's a quick cut to Janos at a later point in time that reveals his ultimate fate, but nothing to explain how he got there. Exposition is often sacrificed for mood in the film, and the lack of information adds to the atmosphere of unease. It's a fine artistic choice, but left me grasping for straws. Janos's fate is echoed in the fate of the stuffed whale, a massive physical and psychological presence in the film that also seems to represent something important, though I'm still struggling to figure out what it is. I have a dear Hungarian who friend who often makes jokes about Hungarian navigators, a great irony since Hungary is utterly landlocked in all directions. Surely it's the last place on Earth that a whale should ever find itself. But what does it all mean?

"Werckmeister Harmonies" is a great film. I find myself unable to write a traditional review of it, because I haven't been able to process it yet. It has all these mesmerizing visuals, composed entirely of long, long shots that can last several minutes apiece. I found myself having strong emotional reactions to what I was seeing, even though I couldn't understand what was going on or what it was exactly that I felt. The famous hospital sequence where the dread and violence reach their peak is a stunning piece of filmmaking. I'm fascinated by the way director Bela Tarr finds images of beauty in unconventional subjects - an old man, a room full of drunks, a shipping container. I only wish I could figure out how everything fits together - or maybe the point is that it doesn't. I just don't know.

This post has been pretty incoherent, but I guess that's a testament to the film itself. "Werckmeister Harmonies" left me confused, frustrated, emotional, and very impressed.

Here Comes "The Cape"

NBC's new superhero adventure show "The Cape" premiered last night. Before seeing a frame, I thought it had a lot in its favor, including a strong cast featuring some familiar faces - Keith David, Summer Glau, James Frain, and Vinnie Jones. The promos have been full of fancy CGI cape effects and slick villains with names like Chess and Scales. I'm not familiar with David Lyons, who plays the hero Vince Faraday, but he's got the right look for a superhero.

Every caped crusader needs a city, and sunny Palm City is a hotbed of crime. Its police force is replaced by the sinister ARC Corporation after the police chief is mysteriously murdered by a villain named Chess. Vince Faraday is a dedicated cop with a loving wife Dana (Jennifer Ferrin) and young son Trip (Ryan Wynott). When Vince discovers that his new boss at ARC, Peter Fleming (James Frain), is Chess, Vince is framed for the murder. He narrowly escapes and is presumed dead, left to figure out a way to bring down ARC and clear his name from the shadows. All this happens in roughly the first fifteen minutes, and it's pretty rote exposition, dispensed with quickly. Then we get to the fun stuff.

Vince is taken in by Max Malini (Keith David), the leader of a gang of circus folk who rob banks. Soon enough, Vince gets the bright idea to assume the guise of his son's favorite comic book superhero, the Cape. Max just happens to have a legendary magician's special, super-strong, super-light cape in storage, and he and his gang are perfectly willing to train Vince in the arts of fighting, illusion, legerdemain, and all sorts of other fun circus skills in an improbably short amount of time. He also finds an ally in Orwell (Summer Glau), a gonzo investigative reporter and technology wizard, bent on exposing corruption in Palm City through her eponymous blog.

So far, "The Cape" is very uneven, but I can see potential here. The show's biggest problem right now is that far too much time is spent with Vince's wife and kid. The second hour of the premiere was saddled with scenes of them struggling to cope with his absence and a few sentimental flashbacks, exactly the kind of melodramatic dead weight that killed "FlashForward" and is severely hampering shows like "V" and "The Event." If "The Cape" is meant to be a superhero action show, it needs to be less mopey and more exciting. Sure, having a tortured hero is fine, but there's only so far you can go with domestic drama when it's only going to be a minor part of Vince's adventures. Checking in every week with the miserable family is going to get tedious and repetitive really fast.

The show is much better when the focus is on Vince's interactions with Orwell and Max, or when he's out fighting crime and tracking down the show's villains. This is where the pace picks up, and we get some good action and humor. In the premiere I didn't think there was enough of either. I'm not sure why all of the recent genre shows produced by the major networks are keen on being so serious in tone when their fantasy premises call for a lighter touch. Vince Faraday may not have superpowers, but he's essentially running around in a magic cape and boarding with circus folk. "The Cape" isn't as thematically heavy as "Watchmen" or "The Dark Knight," so there's no reason why it has to be so dark and gloomy. The creators would be better off aiming for something a little more tongue-in-cheek like NBC's own "Chuck."

Where "The Cape" is the most successful is in its special effects and other fancy visuals. Vince can use the cape to vanish into thin air, to smack bad guys around, or to grab objects like an octopus tentacle. Orwell and Chess both have holographic displays for their computers, and the villains all get distinctive makeup enhancements. There were also some fine explosions and fight scenes, though I don't know if they'll carry over to the regular episodes, since they don't look cheap. The comic book motif is the most apparent in the stylish credits sequence and act breaks, which I thought was a nice touch.

As for the acting - well, it's a mixed bag. David Lyons as Vince isn't bad, but he gets hampered by a lot of awkward dialogue and multiple scenes of broody angst. It's the same with Jennifer Ferrin as his wife and Ryan Wynott as the cute kid. Genre show alums Keith David and Summer Glau are far more entertaining as the larger-than-life supporting characters. With television shows, fortunately, there's plenty of time for the kinks to get worked out and for the actors to improve and settle in. I'll probably give "The Cape" a few more episodes to see how it shapes up. There's plenty here that works, but I don't think it's quite where it needs to be yet.

"The Cape" airs Mondays at 9PM on NBC.

How Did I Miss That Movie?

I love classic films. However, the enduring popularity of many classic movies over time has to do with factors that most viewers never consider. I had a good reminder of this during my vacation, when I came across an entertainment channel that was programmed with several films I'd never seen.

First there was "How to Marry a Millionaire," a 1953 romantic farce starring Marilyn Monroe, Lauren Bacall, and Betty Grable as a trio of gold diggers. Then there was "The Agony and the Ecstasy," a historical epic about Michelangelo's painting of the Sistine Chapel ceiling, starring Charlton Heston as the temperamental artist and Rex Harrison as his patron. These two films I'd at least heard of before, but I was completely unaware of the existence of "How to Steal A Million," a romantic crime caper starring Audrey Hepburn and Peter O'Toole, which was also one of the last pictures directed by the legendary William Wyler, of "Ben-Hur" and "Roman Holiday" fame. I really enjoyed all three of these films, and I was puzzled as to why I hadn't seen any of them before, or why they weren't as popular and well-known as many similar films featuring the same actors.

The answer had nothing to do with the films themselves and everything to do with the fact that they were all distributed by 20th Century Fox. Fox's classic titles get less play than the films from other studio libraries, and are thus less well known. There are exceptions, of course. "The Sound of Music" and "Miracle on 34th Street" are easy to find on television, especially around the holiday season. However, browsing through their titles, I found that most of the ones I'd seen like the Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals, Marilyn Monroe films, and Mel Brooks comedies were ones I'd had to seek out myself on video and DVD. I almost never saw them on television. On the other hand, I'm far more familiar with the Disney catalogue that was a staple of my childhood and the films from MGM, United Artists, RKO and Warner Brothers, thanks to Turner Classic movies. Fox also has a premium classic film channel, that I've stumbled across once or twice, but it's not nearly as accessible as TCM.

And accessibility is important when it comes to older films maintaining their visibility and popularity. The most famous example is "It's a Wonderful Life," a film didn't perform very well upon its initial release. However, the copyright was allowed to lapse in the 70s and "It's a Wonderful Life," became public domain for decades. It was aired by local television stations during the holidays for years for marginal fees, until it became the perennial it is today. Subsequently the soundtrack to the film was found to still be under copyright, allowing the rights to be reclaimed in the 90s. On the flip side, there's "The African Queen," one of the most celebrated films of 50s that won Humphrey Bogart his only Oscar. The AFI listed it as #17 on its list of the top 100 Movies of all time in 1998. Thanks to snarled distribution rights, it wasn't made available on DVD until last year. As a result it became less accessible, fewer people saw it, and on the next edition of the AFI list in 2007, "The African Queen" plummeted nearly fifty spots to #65.

This is something to keep in mind when considering the potential longevity of more recent films. Whether subsequent generations will still know "The Social Network" or "Inception" might have a lot to do with who ends up with the rights to these films. Studios rise and fall, and their properties can end up anywhere. Most recently, the Miramax library has been up for sale and whoever buys it will decide the fate of titles like "Shakespeare in Love," "Good Will Hunting," and nearly everything Kevin Smith has ever made. If a film isn't seen by audiences, it can't be remembered and beloved by the ones that come after, no matter how many awards, no matter how good its reputation, or whether the hot new director of the moment is helming a remake. On that note, the original 1982 "Tron" is apparently nowhere to be found. I lucked out, having stumbled across the special edition DVD a few years ago. However, I'm still waiting on Netflix to send me the original "True Grit." Somehow I never managed to see it, and I'm determined to get acquainted with John Wayne's Rooster Cogburn before I take a look at the Coen brothers' version.

Somehow, I feel like I owe it to the Duke.

Your Belated Christmas Trailer Trove

The new batch of trailers that came with the Christmas releases had fewer surprises than the Thanksgiving ones, but there are a few interesting titles here that ought to tide us over until the Superbowl. Once again, all links lead to Trailer Addict.

Rango - Westerns are back in full force this year, with "True Grit," "Cowboys vs. Aliens," and now "Rango" for the younger set. The dusty, gritty, Southwestern vibe I'm getting from the visuals has me intrigued, more than the promise of Johnny Depp and Gore Verbinski's involvement. It's nice to see an animated film trying to move away from unreal perfection and getting down and dirty instead. This is the first new animated feature from Industrial Light & Magic in decades, and the fabled effects house might just become a surprise major player in the CGI animation landscape. And I can't help wondering if Rango is one of the lizards from "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," who made off with a bit of Hunter's soul.

Thor - Not much more to see since the Comic Con footage, but the new trailer is edited better and has more finished effects. I'm worried about the possibility of bad dialogue and epic overkill in the direction, but I still like the art direction and the sense of scope here.

Hanna - Saoirse Ronan plays a child assassin, more of a junior Evelyn Salt than a Mathilda, who is trained in secret and then unleashed upon the unsuspecting world. Already, I think this one looks miles ahead of the upcoming "Sucker Punch," which features similarly armed and dangerous teenage girls, or rather the adolescent male fantasy incarnations of them. "Hanna" at least will have a proper opponent, played by Cate Blanchett, and the appearance of Eric Bana and Olivia Williams in supporting roles doesn't hurt either.

Tree of Life - Terrence Malick's new film isn't being released until the fall of 2011, but the trailer is already making the rounds, first attached to prints of "The Black Swan," and then made available online. Ever enigmatic, Malick has only given the sketchiest details of what "Tree of Life" is supposed to be about. We know that it stars Sean Penn and Brad Pitt, though they probably won't share the screen together since Pitt is playing the father of Penn's character, and the narrative appears to be jumping around in time. The trailer is an intriguing and unapologetically artsy hint at cinematic possibilities to come. I don't count myself as a Terrence Malick fan, but it's hard not to be excited for this one.

Real Steel - I've heard a lot of negative reactions to "Real Steel," which is a science fiction boxing story starring Hugh Jackman and a lot of Transformers-esque robot brawlers. Will this be Rock 'em Sock 'em Robots the Movie? Maybe, but maybe not. "Real Steel" is based on an old "Twilight Zone" episode, "Steel," which I'm sure very few people remember. If they stay true to the original ending, I think this film is going to surprise some people. The trailer does a so-so job of selling the concept of robot-on-robot sporting spectacle, but the effects look promising. The film isn't due out until October, so they've got some time to hammer out the bugs. And speaking of robot movies...

Transformers: Dark of the Moon - Sigh.

Rio - The first trailer has been floating around for a few months, and December brought a second one. The story is awfully reminicent of the PIXAR newt movie that was quashed in pre-production - two of the last remaining members of an endangered species are brought together to propagate, and end up on a wacky adventure to help the romance along. Only in this case, it's with parrots. Blue Sky Studios, home of the "Ice Age" movies, is behind this, and from the level of humor in the trailer I'm not expecting much. The only thing I wonder about is why Blue Sky didn't hold this back to 2012, so they could take advantage of the excitement for the 2012 Olympics being held in Rio de Janeiro.

The Lincoln Lawyer - Wherever Matthew McConaughey has been, I wished he'd stayed there. This is easily the most incompetent trailer out of the bunch, that fails to establish anything useful about the film's plot or the main character. Ryan Phillippe apparently plays a lead, but we don't learn a thing about him. I pity all the other good actors I spotted filling out the supporting cast.

Paul - This was not what I expected when I heard that Simon Pegg and Nick Frost would be reuniting for a movie about two Comic-Con fanboys who meet an alien. I was anticipating something along the lines of "Galaxy Quest." "Paul" looks like "The Hangover" with E.T.'s stoner cousin. The trailer could just be playing up the crasser moments for the lowest common denominator, and since director Greg Mattola was also behind "Adventureland" and "Superbad," there ought to be some more character-based humor in there too. On the other hand, it doesn't help that Paul the alien reminds me an awful lot of Roger from "American Dad."

Red State - Kevin Smith is making a horror movie about fundamentalist extremism taken too far. The teaser went up on his websites just before Christmas, and the buzz from those who have seen the film has been terrific. I'm not big on horror films, but all the best luck to Smith to stage a comeback. At this point, anything will be a step up from "Cop Out."

Water for Elephants - The trailer is pretty awkward, especially toward the end, but the film itself seems promising enough. I guess it was inevitable that I'd see a Robert Pattinson movie eventually - he's up for the next Cronenberg film, which seals it - but one look at the cast run makes me wonder if he's not out of his league here. Anyway, it'll be good to see Reese Witherspoon onscreen again, as I've missed her and have no intention of going anywhere near "How Do You Know?" The release date suggests this is an Oscar season reject, but I'm a sucker for period pieces and shameless melodrama.