And I must say that I am even more unimpressed then I originally thought I would be. Post-apocalyptic films should be right in my wheel house, instead The Book of Eli gives me what looks like an overly serious Yojimbo rehash, Denzel Washington badly channeling a religious version of the Man with No Name and Gary Oldman parading around like a freaking lunatic.

As if that isn’t enough, the trailer doesn’t seem to show any footage of the people I actually would care to see in a film like this, namely Ray Stevenson, Michael Gambon and Tom Waits. Instead the trailer focuses on the Karate Kid influenced plotline of Denzel training Mila Kunis. Mila Kunis! Oh sure she’s great in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, but the idea of a girl who weighs 79 pounds as an action star is completely ridiculous.

Now the question is which will I hate more, the trailer, or myself for inevitably watching this movie?

Tags: Action, denzel washington, film, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, gary oldman, karate kid, man with no name, michael gambon, mila kunis, movie, post-apocalyptic, ray stevenson, The Book of Eli, Tom Waits, trailer, Yojimbo

As a youth I used to live in the shelves of my local video store. Most summers I would spend my days down at the local strip mall (a scant 1.3 miles away) bowling for hours, reading comics off the rack at the drug store, picking out the most essential candy at the grocery store and finally wandering in the stacks, searching for the perfect movie to watch that weekend. All this time spent in the stacks lead to a curious skill of recognizing films based solely by their cover art, and I’d often know the plot of the films based off of the descriptions on the back. Soon it became a bit of a game for my friends to quiz me on what the films were about, but only the films I’d never actually seen and using simply the cover as a hint.

Of course, back then I was still very young and simply didn’t have the time nor the resources to watch every film I wanted to. So I would pick and choose which I would watch, often leaning heavily towards science fiction and fantasy films (my horror obsession didn’t really kick in until my early twenties). So how is it that I never watched a post-apocalyptic film about a nomadic swordsman? Simple, I hated the cover.

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