Movies in 2006

Today I officially became thrilled at the cinematic prospects of 2006. Earlier this year, with the release of the last Star Wars film ever, I admit I felt a little lost. Ever since I was laid up with mono in November of 98 and downloaded the original Phantom Menace trailer to my Rutgers dorm room I've spent a lot of the past 7 years looking forward to the prequels (and hoping for the best more and more). It was weird to no longer be counting down to something...

This summer, I had my first signs that there would be something to look forward to next year when a pretty decent trailer of V For Vendetta hit the web that looks like it might actually do the graphic novel justice. I wasn't as excited by other comic-book movies, Superman and X-Men 3, but more recent preview footage has gotten more a little bit more interested.

Then a few months ago, A Scanner, Darkly got pushed back to 2006 and the same later happened to V, so now I have two promising movies based on two great books coming out in March.

Looking over coming soon lists, I saw some more promise on the horizon. There's Cars from Pixar and they've never let me down. The new Pirates of the Caribbean promises some more ARRRRR fun as well as a chance to stare at Keira Knightly for 2 hours. The coming of another sequel, Mission Impossible 3, doesn't thrill me but could prove to entertain, especially with Philip Seymour Hoffman as the villain.

In the past couple of months, two very promising movies came to light. First is Casino Royale, the next James Bond adventure. It's still scheduled for November of 2006, even tho they haevn't finished casting the major parts. Also promising is the next Christopher Guest movie, For Your Consideration, which brings together the team that brought us This is Spinal Tap and Waiting For Guffman with the talented Ricky Gervais.

On top of all these, there are a bunch of lesser movies of interest... adaptations of two popular books I haven't read (The Da Vinci Code and Eragon, not one but two new Stallone movies (hm, tho now it looks like Rocky Balboa will be 2007?). Lastly, there are two new adaptations of popular kids' books, Charlotte's Web and The Fantastic Mr. Fox, the latter of which I loved when I was younger.

And now this morning, I was thrilled to learn that Studio Ghibli, producers of the great films Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away, are doing an adaptation of Ursula K. LeGuin's Earthsea books. We read these amazing books over the past couple of years and I'm excited to see a Ghibli take on them. It'll certainly be better than that crappy movie Sci-Fi channel did which deserved the drubbing it got.