looking forward...

January is a graveyard, a pit for Hollywood to dump its detritus on a public stultified by holiday overindulgence and cabin fever.  That's how we end up with gems like Season of the Witch and Country Strong.  And while I was hoping that The Green Hornet might surprise everyone and prove to be a fun little slice of mindless entertainment, the prospects for that are looking worse and worse.  The only saving grace for the month is the holdover of films from late last year (The King's Speech, The Fighter, Black Swan, True Grit, and so on) looking to stay fresh in voters' minds as they reach for the brass ring of Best Picture.

Realizing that most people are not going to be satisfied with the new releases currently trying to trick us out of our money, the studios are starting to draw our attention towards the future, hoping we'll remember they are occasionally capable of offering something actually worth the eleven bucks.  Which explains why all of the following seem to have sprung up just this week:

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That's Social Network alums Andrew Garfield and Rooney Mara, respectively, in the first looks at their next big roles.  Garfield is obviously starring as Spider-Man in the reboot of that franchise (no more Sam Raimi or any connection to the previous films), while Mara takes on the role of Lisbeth Salander in the American version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, which reunites her with her Social Network director, David Fincher.

Spider-Man isn't the only big comic franchise giving us a peek this week.  Below is the first image of Sinestro, the main enemy in the upcoming The Green Lantern:

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That's the one that worries me the most though.  Not that I ever really read Green Lantern anyway, but I don't know how well all this cosmic guardian power ring stuff is going to play.  Very few of the comic book movies over the past decade have required the level of suspension of disbelief that is one will. (Maybe the Fantastic Four films, but I think this goes well beyond even those.)

Pictures never really do a film justice though (the X-Men looked just as foolish when those first pictures came out before the original movie).  It's not until you see some footage that you can really get a sense for how well a movie might work.  And until now, Battle: Los Angeles is not a movie that was high up on my radar.  Not until I saw the trailer released this week:

That actually looks like it has some potential.  Then again, that's what I started thinking after that last Green Hornet trailer too.  We'll see what happens come March 11th when it hits theaters.

UPDATE: Of course, only and hour or two after I wrote this post, I come to find out there is a new pic of Captain America going around as well, and I'd be remiss if I didn't include that, since it seems relevant to the topic.  So here it is:

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