2006 Movie Preview

MSNBC points out some highlights for the 2006 movie season. I hope they are right, because when I went to see Kong the previews they showed were horrid. I wouldn’t watch most of them. The movie industry is going to have another poor outing if they continue to release these mediocre to poor features.

Proposed highlights for this year. I’ll pick my highlights from their highlights:

“Superman Returns” (June 30)
“X3” (May 26)
“Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest” (July 7)
“Casino Royale” (Nov. 17)
“Cars” (June 9)
“Underworld Evolution” (Jan. 20)

Here is the iffy one:

“Miami Vice” (July 28): Michael Mann oversaw the TV cop show that helped define hip ’80s style and music. Now he’s got Jamie Foxx and Colin Farrell as his smooth new undercover cops as they take on Miami drug runners.

Jamie Foxx and Colin Farrell playing the parts forever immortalized by Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas? I don’t see it happening.

Here are the ones I won’t touch and I don’t think the movie industry should have either:

“World Trade Center,” (August), “Flight 93” (April 28): Have we reached that point where the shock of Sept. 11, 2001, has worn off sufficiently where we want to see the events reprised on the big screen?

The curiosity factor — and two very different approaches — bode well for the first theatrical dramatizations about the terrorist attacks.

Oliver Stone’s “World Trade Center” stars Nicolas Cage and Michael Pena in the real-life story of Port Authority policemen trapped in the rubble of the twin towers.

“Flight 93,” directed by Paul Greengrass (“Bloody Sunday,” “The Bourne Supremacy”) uses a casts of unknowns as passengers who fought back against terrorists on the plane that crashed Sept. 11 in rural Pennsylvania.

While both of these stories are tragic and inspiring at the same time, I don’t think America is ready for a dramatization of the events of 9/11. It is too soon. Maybe in a few years yes, but not yet.

Of course, anything with Nicolas Cage in it is iffy to begin with.