ohorten Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Potter and Pixar magic, a new Watchmen trailer and Roland Emmerich courts the apocalypse once again. Here's what's happening in trailers:

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Not to be outdone by those vampires over in Twilight land, Warner Bros. has released a brand new, full-length trailer for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, which, of course, should satisfy those Potter fanatics who were pissed the release date was pushed back from next week to this July. Check it out below:



2012
If Roland Emmerich hadn't chosen the career of film maker, I suspect he would have become a super villain as this film marks his third attempt to destroy the world (after Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow) -- and fourth if you count Godzilla, though the big lizard confined the devastation to New York City. Evidence as to what can happen when a dripping faucet gets out of control, this teaser looks pretty darn spectacular. Whether or not the film has any soul to back up the effects remains to be seen, but it opens on July 10.

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This preview spends a fair amount of time reminding us of all the hits Pixar has had before giving us a glimpse of this newest effort. We meet Carl Fredricksen (Ed Asner), a grumpy old man who devises a unique plan for dealing with urban sprawl that's encroaching upon his home. Still just a teaser here, so story info is light, but I'm betting Pixar has another winner on its hands when the flick arrives in theaters on May 29, 2009.

Odd Horten (Bard Owe) knows who he is and what he does. He's a driver for the train, and has spent so many years on the same route that he knows it instinctively; he has his work, he has his life. But in Bent Hamer's O' Horten, which played in the Un Certain Regard selection this year at Cannes (and has since been picked up for distribution by Sony Pictures Classics), Horten has to face the fact that his life, as he knows it, is changing; he's hit retirement age, and he simply has no clue what to do next.

Hamer's earlier films had a finely-tuned capacity for observation, perhaps best demonstrated in Eggs (1995) and Kitchen Stories (2003); Hamer's English-language debut, Factotum (2005), took the boozy, woozy prose of Charles Bukowski and put a little air and space in it, turning the alcohol-fueled anger of Bukowski's words which, on the page, hit like a shot of cheap whiskey and turning them into something smoother and finer with the smooth burn of regret going down. In O'Horten, Hamer's back in Norway, and still crafting careful, considered portraits of day to day life, but ones which nonetheless have a deadpan comedy to them, a careful and humane sense of the absurd.

After a somnolent week in which it appeared that IFC Films was the only US distributor making deals at Cannes, Sony Pictures Classics sprang into action and snapped up two pictures, with a third possibly on the way. According to Anne Thompson of Variety, Sony Classics has acquired North American rights to the latest film by French filmmaking brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Lorna's Silence, as well as Norwegian director Bent Hamer's comedy/drama O'Horten, and are also in talks to pick up James Toback's documentary Tyson.

Cinematical's James Rocchi felt "in tune" with Lorna's Silence, which he says has provoked polarized reactions in Cannes; he concluded: "It's a strong film from strong filmmakers." The titular character is an Albanian woman living in Belgium who has entered into a marriage of convenience that turns out to be a complicated, life and death affair.