You've all done it. It's midnight on a weekday and you want to go to bed in twenty minutes. It's too late to start a movie and you've already burnt through your Arrested Development boxsets twice in the past month.

"Oh, I'll just surf appletrailers for a while, then," you monologue internally. 

And then it's four A.M., you've eaten half a bottle of Cheeze Whiz as a snack and you find yourself wondering if you could pinpoint the exact moment Larry David started writing your life.

I had it all planned out how this was going to segue into an introduction for this article, but I forgot somewhere around "whiz." Here's what this is: I'm going to embed some YouTube clips of upcoming trailers and then share some scintillating commentary and/or some awful jokes with you. Here we go. 

The Road

Everything about this film augurs well. First off, it's directed by John Hilcoat, who proved with his superb Aussie-western The Proposition that he most definitely has the requisite eye for bleak, desolate landscapes, and everything that's shown in the above trailer looks appropriately haunting. What's more, The Proposition also featured some pretty impressively fraught-yet-taciturn performances from all of its leads, which is a style I think will suit Viggo Mortensen well as the mysterious, fraught-yet-taciturn lead of McCarthy's story. 

Second reason I'm hopeful is that the story actually looks to have been adapted. Though the novel is an incredibly moving portrait of a devastated world and McCarthy's description of it is--as ever--superhuman in its poetry, there just-plain ain't a whole lot that happens, plot wise. From the brief snippets of plot given away in the trailer, it looks as though all of the major events that do occur have been preserved (the showdown with the man in the woods, the fight with the archer at the end, cannibals!), but there's also a lot I didn't recognize. What's important is that--as far as I can tell from the trailer--the tone of the novel has been preserved. That is, 'quiet and unsettling moodiness punctuated by moments of unthinkable violence.' And as far as post-Border Trilogy McCarthy goes, the mood is going to be pretty damned important, methinks. 

Also, it has Omar from The Wire. In-deed. 

Nerdy-excitement-o-meter rating: Coolcoolcoolcoolcoolcoolcoolcool.

Surrogates

Things that are kind of cool about this:

• I really like the way the robot people look and move. It's just a little too perfect, and the actors really look to have nailed the unnervingly-still stances of someone who's lost the need to make constant minute adjustments in order to stay comfortable. 
• The premise invites some gnarly, intricate discussion of identity in a post-biological society.  

Causes for concern:

• The too-perfect production design is basically just Stepford Wives lite. 
• Any fun philosophical issues raised by the premise look to be lost amid a tide of 'splosions, boobs and Bruce Willis snarling meaningfully at the camera. 
• Anyone else get the "no feeling" when they saw it was "based on the graphic novel blah blah blah?" I'm glad that comics have achieved enough mainstream cultural cachet to be used as a selling feature for films, but--and maybe this is just the presence of ol' Willie--here it just feels a little me-too. 
• I can already foresee that, if someone gives me cash dollars to write down my opinion of this film (otherwise called "reviewing," when you aren't an idiot), I will probably call it "Blade Runner for anyone who actually liked the ending of Battlestar Galactica."
• In case I wasn't clear, the ending of Battlestar Galactica was astonishingly stupid.

Nerdy-excitement-o-meter rating: Eh?

Orphan

"Hey, you know who doesn't have a tough enough time as it is?" Asked Eric, super film producer, to a room full of sartorial accomplices, who were all sniffing coke and eating sushi off of strippers. "Fucking orphans." 

"Absolutely," said John, a blind super film producer who was also playing chess by himself in the corner. "We'll create a film that, while no one will ever admit to taking it seriously, will sew the seeds of doubt across an entire culture of potential adoptive parents, ensuring that at least one couple will have a hushed conversation that begins 'well, what if she's evil?'"

"Word," said Jim, another super film producer, who was only really agreeing because he'd done a good deal of crack, and was trying to appease the two thousand-tongued, baby-headed wolf monsters before him.

Congratulations fictitious cabal of evil film producers, your legacy is intact. 

(For the record, I don't actually think Orphan looks irresponsibly bad, as I've implied here. I just think it looks plain-old bad, mostly because including a creepy little girl as the centerpiece of a horror film was already cliche well before American filmmakers started paying attention to what the Japanese had been doing for the last twenty years.)

Nerdy-excitement-o-meter rating: Bad Peter Sarsgaard! That's a bad Peter Sarsgaard!