Best Case, Worst Case: Monsters, Epidemics, Adam Sandler

Hellboy II: The Golden Army (trailer)

Best case: Potentially incredible costumes, makeup, and effects in the same vein as Pan’s Labyrinth, and more scenes with the uniformly excellent Jeffrey Tambor. The trailer is loaded with monsters, and with some of the origins and introductions of the first film out of the way, this film should have a lot more room to breathe.

Worst case: Pan’s Labyrinth’s effective mixture of the real and surreal broke director Guillermo del Toro out of his genre confines, but it also set a high standard for his future films. Hellboy II appears to share a similar theme, with the real battling the mythical, but the more conventional action-based story may mean that Hellboy II garners unfavorable comparison to Pan’s Labyrinth. Even the preview features a creature with eyes in all the wrong places – look familiar? More generally, del Toro’s participation in bigger and bigger projects (including a commitment of as much as four years to The Hobbit) could prevent him from doing smaller, more novel fare.

Blindness (trailer)

Best case: The director of one of the best films of the past few years interprets a baffling, numbing, revelatory book. You do the math.

Worst case: An interesting or sort of good movie that can’t quite translate the distinctly subversive phrasing and punctuation at the heart of José Saramago’s book. The story has no character names and weaves its dialogue directly into its action and description – it doesn’t even use quotes. It’s difficult to read and thus presumably not at all easy to transpose into another medium. It also features several sequences that are so deeply disturbing that one wonders how they could possibly appear on a theater screen.

You Don’t Mess With the Zohan (trailer)

Best case: The new film from Adam Sandler, the king of the man-children. From the (relative) highs of films like Happy Gilmore, he has descended into the mindless depths in search of previously unknown lowest common denominators, and the marginal premise of this film (Israeli soldier becomes New York hairdresser) is not promising. But here, Sandler shares writing credits with Robert Smigel (Saturday Night Live and TV Funhouse) and Judd Apatow (the comedy guru with his fingers in basically every film coming out this year). Sandler was excellent in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love, so it’s not as if he isn’t capable of good things if he’s working with the right people.

Worst case: Put the Apatow-bong down for a moment and think this over. Adam Sandler. Adam Sandler talking in a completely rubbish accent. Adam Sandler physical comedy. Adam Sandler. Ugh…