"The Road" finally gets a trailer

I'm not too crazy about the beginning, because it looks like it's trying to hint too hard about what caused the apocalypse, which was part of what made the book so mysterious. It also looks as though they've made the story considerably...louder than the more bare, meditative style of the books. At this point, after nearly a year of delay, I just hope it's good, even if it's different in tone....

New (and much more encouraging) test screening review of "The Road" (2009)

saw a fine cut of THE ROAD recently and it is killer good. There was still some tweaking being done, and it was pre-sound mix/final score/color correction but I was mesmerized. I am one of the 12 people who did not read the book so I had no idea what I was in for. It is some of the finest filmmaking I have seen, and I see everything. It was gut wrenching, brutal, harrowing, and beautiful and left me an emotional puddle. Some of the images are tough to live with, but surprisingly and wonderfully, what I am left with weeks later is a profound sense of having enough, plenty, in fact way way more than enough. It’s scary times out there and I, like everyone else, am worried about retirement and providing for my family and basic survival. THE ROAD puts it into perspective – there are moments of relief that are so simple as to be unnoticeable in our everyday lives, but in extreme situations (like the majority of the world’s population faces every day) those moments become examples of pure grace. A brief moment of shelter, the kindness of a mother, the companionship of a dog transcend all. And I have never seen as beautiful a portrayal of a father’s love for his son. See this movie, and be prepared to have your heart ripped open.

Speaking of "The Road"........more unsettling news...

This is from a test screening held some time over the past two months...and contrary to the early script reviews, it's not terribly kind. Maybe the (brilliant) novel simply isn't fit for the silver screen.....yikes...

"...it was just a complete mess…the film never pretends to be interested in its opaque story, replacing what I assume would be literary details with bleak, miserablist [sic] moments edited together randomly, none feeling like they emerged from the same film. It might just be unadaptable, because after the first twenty minutes the rest of the film is a crushing bore of a foregone conclusion- I think you can all guess what happens to the one character who mysteriously coughs all the time.

The focus group I attended railed against the repetitive score, which was probably temp but sounded like a minimalist new Nick Cave score that was heavy on the piano and droned through the heavily dramatic moments.

There's no "movie" there. The main crux- that Earth has fallen into a post-apocalyptic wasteland- is dealt with pretty vaguely, enough to the point where there's really no allegorical parallel at all, and as far as intimate post-apocalyptic movies, they tend to be similar, in that they involve lots and lots of walking until someone important dies, and that seems to be the formula this follows. The focus group also tore into Charlize Theron's flashback role as Viggo's estranged wife, who comes across as a screaming harpy with only a couple of minutes of screentime who unpleasantly ditches the family for no explicit purpose, as well as Michael K. Williams' role as the only black man in the film, a guy who robs the hero and ends up humbled and without his clothes- cries of racism, as you could guess.

Product placement abounds as well, to a distracting level. Apparently there is a Coca Cola scene in the book, but in the film it plays like a separate commercial, as Viggo gives his son his first Coke. The boy remarks at how fizzy and delicious it is and the dad lets him finish it on his own as the child asks, "Is that because it's the last one I'll ever have?"

Harvey Weinstein was at the screening, and he left early- whatever that means, I'll leave to the pundits. But not only is the film unfinished for its supposed November release date, it's also a complete fiasco on every creative level."