Abe Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

I know, I promised you guys more Trailer Talk, and I fully intend to deliver. The problem is that I have a day job and night school, and neither are very conducive to watching trailers. So! Movie news that I can report to you whilst in my downtime at the office.

(In a perfect world, I would get paid scads of money to do nothing except watch trailers and gab about them. Alas, that doesn't currently come with health care, and I don't even have dental as it is.)

I read Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter on the recommendation of a friend, because I had so thoroughly enjoyed Pride & Prejudice & Zombies. (Sense and Sensibility and Seamonsters, not so much.) Seth Grahame-Smith did what I didn't think was possible: he made this seemingly ludicrous and hilarious concept a serious, emotionally impacting story. I loved the way it was set up through a mix of historical facts and the fabricated diaries of Lincoln; it was satirical in subject matter but not in tone.

When I heard that it was getting made into a movie, I was excited - I'm usually excited when books I like get made into films (weird, right?) because I love visuals, and honestly, this story was made to be a film (or maybe a mini-series). As one does, I gossiped with the friend that had lent me the book originally about who we wanted to see in the two starring roles: Abe and his vampire mentor, Henry.

I'm convinced that Adrien Brody has spent his film career preparing for this role. We've seen him tackle roles with gravitas successfully, such as in The Pianist, not to mention this and this as well, so we know he'd be able to bring all the weightiness and stature that Lincoln would need to be convincing and effective. But, as anyone who paid good money to see Predators knows, dude can BRING it in the physical arena.

But for me the roles that most convinced me Brody would be perfect here are his turns in The Brothers Bloom and Darjeeling Limited. Both movies are kind of silly, but Brody dead-pans his way through in total seriousness, making them poignant as well as weirdly funny. I don't think Abe Lincoln: Vampire Hunter can succeed if it doesn't give us a LITTLE tongue-in-cheek, and I think Brody could have balanced that with deadly believability.

In the roll of Henry, the vampire that takes over Abe's education and mentors him through slayer-dom, well, who better than Johnny Depp? However tiresome I may find his current cash cow, the way he handles even his sillier roles, like in Benny & Joon and Sleepy Hollow, with deftness and sympathy that would have made Henry believable as a sympathetic monster-type. And his flamboyancy in said cash cow just demonstrates that Depp's Henry would still retain that vampire nobility and libertine attitude that many ascribe to them.

As movie news has revealed, both my choices were denied. Instead of Brody and Depp we're getting this guy and this guy, who do not exactly fill me with joy. You know what does, though? The fact that Timur Bekmambetov is directing.

No, I don't care how you felt about Wanted, or its infamous in-production sequel. This dude directed Night Watch, one of the best gritty supernatural noir pieces to be made in the last ten years. There are vampires, and great fight scenes, and the whole thing is darkly, eerily, beautiful. If you watch it (AND YOU SHOULD), please please PLEASE watch the subtitled version; Bekmambetov plays with the actual subtitles to reflect how a certain person talks is incorporated into the world. It's inspired.