Wednesday, May 13, 2009

"THE ROAD" Release Date - Oct. 16th



One of the most powerful and elegantly written novels I've ever read in my life was Cormac McCarthy's "The Road". If you haven't read this book, you must go out and do so as soon as you possibly can. It is poignant, lyrical and poetic in its language and heartbreaking and stunning in its prose.

The film has been in development and post-production for quite a while now. There was some fear that the story wouldn't translate well to the big screen and that movie audiences would balk at the bleak subject matter (the end of the world) and the long, empty scenes where no one talks and silence suffocates the two survivors (a father and his young son).

Finally, the film has a release date (Oct. 16th) and an early review by Esquire magazine calls it "the most important film of the year".

The film stars Viggo Mortensen (Aragorn from LOTR to most) and was filmed primarily in locations of ruin and along abandoned freeways and in actual ghost towns to provide a stronger sense of realism and destruction.

I've been looking forward to this film even before I had read the novel.

Here's the blurb on the Esquire review:
Esquire magazine calls The Road, the post-apocalyptic movie based on Cormac McCarthy's best-selling SF novel, "the most important movie of the year."

"Go see it because it's two small people set against the ugly backdrop of the world undone," writes reviewer Tom Chiarella. "A story without guarantees. In every moment—even the last one—you'll want to know what happens next, even if you can hardly stand to look. Because The Road is a story about the persistence of love between a father and a son, and in that way it's more like a remake of The Godfather than some echo of I Am Legend. Only this one is different: You won't want to see this one twice."

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