So, as you know, due to all the jokes and stuff about it, The Road was a book about a guy and his kid who are heading south in a hideous post-apocalytpic United States, in the hopes-one sort of gathers-that if there won't be food and maybe some still-living trees there that maybe at least it will be vaguely warm down there. Nuclear (or whatever) winter kills! So do people, who are the only food left, which is why this is a perfect movie for Thanksgiving release. So this very spare book became a movie, and it is very rare that a popular movie can be as equally spare as a spare book, and that is the case with this, where the movie becomes movie-like. It becomes cinematical. This is not all terrible. John Hillcoat, who directed The Proposition, which, it must be remembered, was an pre-apocalyptic nightmare of a film, which is to say, an Australian historical film, that was produced by, among others, Tina Brown's brother Chris, and so he can strike a balance between austerity and exciting movie-ness. Nick Cave wrote that very excellent screenplay for The Proposition, and also did its quite great soundtrack, along with his regular collaborator Warren Ellis, who actually is Australian. Cave and Hillcoat are now at work on a screenplay for The Wettest Country in the World, which is a fictionalized true-life book about bootleggers in Virginia. But, despite their devotion to each other, Nick Cave is where The Road goes terribly wrong. READ MORE

This is a very weird new trailer for The Road, which gets worse and worse as it goes on, what with the increasingly swelling music and the way it looks like Titanic meets 2012. Obviously we will be discussing this movie quite a bit soon enough, when you have all had a chance to see it, but I can definitely assure you this trailer does a disservice to the movie, by fronting what are the fairly few wrong impulses in the film. The book was antiseptic; this trailer portrays the film as a lush, silly weeper.