When I posted the teaser trailer for “Battle: Los Angeles” a few months back, I was somewhat underwhelmed. After all, the alien invasion genre is pretty packed, and it’s hard to make a new addition to it stand out from the pack. The full trailer for the film provides a certain amount of hope that “Battle” will be unique enough to watch, taking hand-held camera techniques reminiscent of “Cloverfield” and combining them with a much more somber tone. This trailer also gives us a better look at the protagonists of the film (Michelle Rodriguez and Aaron Eckhart, among others) and the aliens they’re up against. Assuming it’s not randomly converted to 3D at the last moment or something, it could be some pretty entertaining stuff.
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Werner Herzog can make about anything interesting. He somehow elevated camp to art with “The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call- New Orleans” and already proved his documentary chops with “Grizzly Man,” so his new documentary “Caves of Forgotten Dreams” will definitely be worth catching. Herzog and his crew get a rare chance to venture inside the Chauvet caves in France, documenting their rugged beauty and the pictorials contained within. Though 3D is often a gimmick, I feel that the effect will actually beneficial to the viewing experience here, perhaps helping to add to the realism and recreate the claustrophobic feeling of being in a cave. Herzog is a fairly restrained director, so it’s unlikely he’s going to use 3D to send stalactite whizzing towards the audience or anything like that.
You know who’s not known for restraint? Scott Charles Stewart, the guy who directed the thoroughly awful “Legion.” And know he’s directing “Priest,” apparently his latest attempt at making Paul Bettany an action hero. In a post-apocalyptic world filled with vampires and ruled by the Church, a Priest (Bettany) disobeys orders and sets out to find his kidnapped niece, uncovering some sort of generic conspiracy in the process. A movie like this clearly isn’t going to break any new ground, so you pretty much have to go for broke and make it a visceral popcorn flick, but Stewart has decided that converting it to 3D will do instead. Given its sub-par storyline and the addition of an unnecessary extra dimension, this film will likely blow.
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