98% of The Road consists of the two main characters, a father and son who never get names, avoiding gangs of cannibals and scrounging for food. Great book, but I realize that makes for kind of a boring downer of a movie trailer. Solution? Just slap some triumphant background music over it (starts at the 1:25 mark). Man, that worked perfectly. All Viggo did was eat some food and watch a town burn, but I felt all proud, like I was watching Sandra Bullock teach a black kid to play football or something.
(Viggo was terrified of life after pupation)
ZOMG, VIGGO MORTENSEN IS RETIRING!, reports every other site in the world. All apparently based on this quote:
“I have no plans to do another movie. I don’t know what’s going to happen. I’m open to seeing how I feel in a while, but right now I’m not saying yes to anything.”
I wouldn’t even bother reporting this if a thousand other sites hadn’t put VIGGO MORTENSEN TO RETIRE FROM ACTING in big headline text. Jeez, guys, at least have the journalistic integrity to put a question mark at the end. (That’s a joke, MTV). Key phrase: “I’m open to seeing how I feel in a while,” “right now I’m not saying yes…” Point being, he never said he was retiring. Being burnt out and taking a vacation is not the same thing as retiring. To put this in movie blogger terms so that you guys will understand, Viggo is simply saying, “I’m really exhausted from all this photoshopping Paula Abdul on top of Mexicans. I need to take a jerk break and the cats could use a-pettin’.” In conclusion, CROTCH FIGHT!
Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is a hell of a book, the kind of thing you wish they’d make more movies out of instead of crap like The Lovely Bones. It’s about a man and his son (who never get names) wandering through a post-apocalyptic wasteland of cannibals and roving bands of outlaws. Though so far, reviews of the John Hillcoat-directed movie adaptation have been sort of mixed. I wasn’t a huge fan of Hillcoat’s last movie (The Proposition), but Viggo Mortensen is perfect casting. That dude has looking like the survivor of an apocalyptic cataclysm down pat.
It also stars Kodi Smit-McPhee as the boy. I don’t know much about this kid other than that he clearly has a couple of a-holes for parents. Really? It wasn’t enough to stick him with a hyphen, you also had to make his first name a misspelled version of crappy name to begin with it? AND you put an ‘I’ at the end? Was he supposed to dot that with a heart? You only had nine months to come up with something he wouldn’t have to drag around like wheelbarrow full of cement his entire life, so well done. Might as well have named him Stealmylunchmoney McPussy. Then again, that was my nickname, and look how well I turned out.
(Don’t worry, Viggo, someday you’ll be a butterfly.)
At long last, we have the first trailer for The Road, John Hillcoat’s (The Proposition) adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s pulitzer prize-winning novel, starring Viggo Mortensen and Charlize Theron. McCarthy also wrote No Country for Old Men and Blood Meridian, and critics have often described his work as “gnarly as f*ck.”
The Road is the epic post-apocalyptic tale of a journey taken by a father and his young son across a barren landscape that was blasted by an unnamed cataclysm that destroyed civilization and most life on earth. [TrailerAddict]
It opens in October, and my guess is that it’s going to be pretty good. For one thing, no one can look like the survivor of an apocalyptic event like Viggo. For another, skulls mounted on sticks in the trailer. Think about it, have you ever seen a movie that had skulls mounted sticks in the trailer that wasn’t awesome? Is the answer yes? Congratulations, you’re a liar.
At the end of Eastern Promises (SPOILER ALERT), we find out Viggo Mortensen’s character is really an undercover British agent. Between the open ending and the fact that Watchmen and Forgetting Sarah Marshall exposed America’s appetite for full-frontal male nudity (dudity), the time is ripe for a sequel.
“We are moving forward with it,” Cronenberg told MTV News in an exclusive chat. “We all are excited about the idea of doing a sequel.”
The “we” includes Mortensen, who was nominated for a Best Actor Oscar for his role as Nikolai; the film’s screenwriter, Steven Knight; original producer Paul Webster; and original studio, Focus Features.
“We are going to have a meeting very soon between me, Steve Knight and Paul Webster to discuss what the script would be,” Cronenberg said “If all goes well, Steve goes away and writes a great script. If we all like it, we make it.”
I’m a Cronenberg fan, but Eastern Promises was far from his best work. In this day and age, there’s just no excuse for poorly choreographed fight scenes. I know a thing or two about naked fights to the death in a Russian bath and I demand realism dammit.
