Esquire call THE ROAD "the most important movie of the year"
A provocative headline from Esquire, especially considering John Hillcoat's adaptation of Cormac McCarthy'sThe Road when finally released in October will have been delayed for 11 months. Usually that's a sign of a movie in trouble, but I suppose recently history suggests that might not be the case and The Weinsteins have only ever claimed that The Road's delay is because the special effects weren't quite up to the standard they were aiming for.
Everything about the film seems disconnected in this way shocky and post-traumatic. This is what happens: A father and a son walk from point A to point B through a desolate landscape. Cities are deserted. People-zombies, some of them hungry for human flesh, stare out from abandoned office buildings and sometimes hunt other people. It's always cloudy. Everything is dead. There is no color left in anything not the people, not the plants, not the faces of mountains. Ruined, wrecked, used up it is our world, consumed at its edges by fire, at its center by rot. In good times or in shit times, you can ask why people go to see movies at all.The Road may be a kind of historical countertwitch to Depression-era Busby Berkeley musicals, to a time when people used movie theaters as places to forget. (Although how a kaleidoscopic mess like 42nd Street ever generated hope in 1933 is baffling.) But make no mistake, hit or miss, The Road, a risky, dyspeptic, and serious road movie, will be easy to lampoon, to dismiss, to skip. Unwary couples will walk out. Teenagers in search of the comfort nipple of cinematic apocalypse, with its blank-slate promise and its tinny hope for a new tomorrow, will roll their eyes.But the fact that Bob Weinstein calls the film a "zombie action movie" and by the wording of the article, he single handedly decided to put in news reel footage explaining the events of the disaster in the trailer which wasn't in the novel before seemingly on a whim, deciding to take it out because (at least we hope anyway) it won't be in the final film and was all along just a marketing tool for the trailer... well it shows ya that he isn't quite aware that he hasn't got a crowd pleasing movie on his hands but instead a potential classic.