The Road - We now have a trailer

A brilliant book looks to have a brilliant trailer.

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The Road - Esquire have seen it and loved it

John Hillcoat's adaption of Cormac McCarthy's brilliant novel, The Road, was due out last year, but was pushed back and back. It is now due in October of this year. Previously there have been reviews posted for rough cuts of the film and they were not that promising.

I really love the book so I wanted the film to be as good as it could possibly be so I was getting a little worried.

Now Esquire magazine have seen the final cut and it sounds as if things could be looking up. They say it could be the most important film of the year.

The Road is no tease. It is a brilliantly directed adaptation of a beloved novel, a delicate and anachronistically loving look at the immodest and brutish end of us all. You want them to get there, you want them to get there, you want them to get there — and yet you do not want it, any of it, to end.

You should see it for the simplest of reasons: Because it is a good story. Not because it may be important. Not because it is unforgettable, unyielding. Not because it horrifies. Not because the score is creepily spiritual. Not because it is littered with small lines of dialogue you will remember later. Not because it contains warnings against our own demise. All of that is so. Don't see it just because you loved the book. The movie stands alone. Go see it because it's two small people set against the ugly backdrop of the world undone. A story without guarantees. In every moment — even the last one — you'll want to know what happens next, even if you can hardly stand to look. Because The Road is a story about the persistence of love between a father and a son, and in that way it's more like a remake of The Godfather than some echo of I Am Legend.

A story without guarantees. In every moment — even the last one — you’ll want to know what happens next, even if you can hardly stand to look.” … “You have to see it. Really. You do. Not because it’s grim, not because it’s depressing, or even scary. The Road is all of those things, both acutely and chronically. But there was not a single stupid choice made in turning this book into this movie. No wrongheaded lyric tribute to the novel. No moment engineered simply to make you jump.

The film stars Viggo Mortensen, Academy Award winners Robert Duvall and Charlize Theron, Guy Pearce and 12-year-old Kodi Smit McPhee.

Have a read of the full review if you wish.

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Viggo will walk along The Road in October

Dimension Films and 2929 Productions have finally announced that they will be releasing John Hillcoat’s adaptation of the Cormac McCarthy novel The Road, on October 16th 2009.

Academy Award nominee Viggo Mortensen, Academy Award winners Robert Duvall and Charlize Theron, Guy Pearce and 12-year-old Kodi Smit McPhee star in the the story of a man (Mortensen) and his young son (Smit-McPhee) traveling through a desperate, post-apocalyptic world.

It was meant to be release last year, but was knocked back. I am made up it is finally going to be released as it was one of my favourite books of recent years.

Source: /Film

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Early review of the early version of The Road

One of NY Entertainment's Interns got to see an early screening of The Road. This is what he had to say about it.

However you adapt it, Cormac McCarthy's The Road is going to be bleak. Director John Hillcoat, a relative unknown, gets it just about right. Arguably the best parts of the film (aside from some stellar acting, which I'll get to in a minute) are the postapocalyptic urban exterior scenes — burnt-out malls, crumbling highways, long-abandoned neighborhoods. It certainly doesn’t hurt that Hillcoat did most of the filming in and around Pittsburgh, a bastion of urban American beauty, but every inch of the landscape and set seems to be painstakingly trashed.

Hillcoat expands the book's flashback sequences to give Charlize Theron more screen time (she's good!), and contrasts the grayscale color palette of the movie-present with the vivid one of the movie-past. Viggo Mortensen seems to play a mix of Aragorn from Lord of the Rings and Tom Stall from A History of Violence. His unnamed character is human and believable (and naked at one point — Viggo didn’t want you to forget Eastern Promises). As his son, newcomer Kodi Smit-McPhee holds his own.

Hillcoat and screenwriter Joe Penhall tone down the more gruesome parts of the original novel (we don't see the baby on the spit, for example), and they never actually show any of the cannibals eating people (we only see charred bones and a severed head). The scene in the basement, with the prisoners waiting to be eaten, is jerky and brief, though the camera lingers just long enough for us to see that one legless man has already been nibbled on.

Aside from a few sound glitches and yet-to-be applied color correction, The Road seems pretty close to completion. At the end of its two-hour running time, the crowd I saw it with (made up of those lucky enough to be walking through Union Square when they were passing out free tickets last night) applauded.

What do you think of that?

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The Road - Photos from movie based on Cormac McCarthy's novel

USA Today have some photos from The Road. A movie based on the book by Cormac McCarthy. It's set in America after a nuclear winter has set in and follows a father and son travelling down a deserted road trying to get to the coast. All they have are the clothes on their back, a pistol and some food.

The film stars Viggo Mortensen, Charlize Theron and 11-year-old Kodi Smit-McPhee was shot in Pittsburgh, New Orleans and on Mount St. Helens in Washington state for scenes of devastation.

"It's tangible, the misery and hopelessness and the bleakness," Mortensen says. "It gives you much more to work with if you're filming in that world instead of a green screen."

Sounds like a bundle of laughs, but I've heard really good things about the book and Mortensen is a solid actor. Think I'll be picking up the book.

The Road is directed by ex-music video director John Hillcoat, of The Proposition. The screenplay was adapted by Joe Penhall, of Some Voices, Enduring Love, and The Undertaker and is based on Cormac McCarthy's novel of the same name first published in 2006. The Road hits in November 2008

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