Continuing with our 2009 preview series, I've got an overview of what awaits us (non-comic-book) sci-fi/fantasy geeks this coming year.

Salivating:

- Coraline (Feb. 6) - Henry Selick + Neil Gaiman + some awfully creepy button-eyes.
- Push (Feb. 6) - Solely because Paul McGuigan (Wicker Park, Lucky Number Slevin) makes lovely, elegant films.
- Star Trek (May 8) - I'm kind of a Trekkie. Plus, that trailer.
- Game (Sep. 4) - Neveldine/Taylor are genre geniuses; if anyone can breathe new life into the futuristic-video-game genre, it's them.
- Pandorum (Sep. 4) - No pedigree, but that concept is right up my alley.
- 9 (Sep. 9) - Looks like beautiful, hyperstylized, post-apocalyptic sci-fi; sold.
- The Box (Nov. 6) - Because "extended Twilight Zone episode" isn't a criticism, it's a compliment.
- Avatar (Dec. 18) - You know why.

Pineapple Express
It might seem like your everyday stoner comedy, but Pineapple Express is a strange comedic beast. It was helmed by dramatic indie filmmaker David Gordon Green, it brought Huey Lewis and the News back to the world of cinema songwriting, and, of course, it gave us an excellent duo to get high with -- Seth Rogen and James Franco. Buy it on DVD or Blu-ray.

Righteous Kill
Righteous Kill is right, but not in the way that makes the eyes blaze with excitement, but the way that makes you groan in disappointment. While joining heavy weights Robert De Niro and Al Pacino was a big to-do, that was the only noteworthy piece of this police v. serial killer story. Still, it's Rob and Al, so if you're curious: Rent it on DVD or Blu-ray.

Disaster Movie
Oh, if only we could be back in the days of Airplane. Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer show no signs of stopping their terrible spoof addiction, and this time it's all about disasters. Need I say more? Skip it on DVD or Blu-ray.

Hit the jump for more new releases.

Jim Carrey's Yes Man struck me as an awful waste of a terrific premise.

Far from the retread of the Liar Liar gimmick that some people claim, Yes Man's central conceit really resonates, and gets at a simple but profound truth: saying "no" to opportunities is safer and easier, but saying "yes" is more rewarding and fun. Literally having the main character start saying "yes" to everything is not my preferred way of tackling this issue, but it could easily work as a goofy, absurdist approach. Jim Carrey's track record may be bruised, but the actor is still a national treasure. And Peyton Reed's filmography contains some films that managed to be thoughtful despite their staunchly populist aims.

What an unpleasant surprise, then, to see a film so terminally mired in the worst Hollywood comedy conventions. It's hard to be meaningful or even sincere when everything is hideously distorted to fit the confines of hoary old formulas, complete with scenes that don't fit, but which a movie like this simply must contain. Yes Man winds up shrill, manic and unpleasant (albeit sporadically funny) when it should have been breezy, earnest and simple.

I will keep it brief this week, as the box office took a break -- at least as far as new releases are concerned -- for the first weekend of the new year.

Marley & Me maintained its lead on Adam Sandler's Bedtime Stories, despite the latter holding up a bit better. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button's staying power doesn't seem terribly impressive, as it took a tumble comparable to the other big Christmas releases. All else equal, it looks like it will end up at around $110 million. If it gets a slew of Oscar nominations on the 22nd, that could change things.

Slumdog Millionare didn't expand this weekend, but saw a 10% bump in ticket sales anyhow. That's because it's great and everyone loves it.

That's it. I said I'd keep it brief. Here's the full top 10:

1 - Marley & Me (Fox) - $24.05 ($6,862) - $106.51
2 - Bedtime Stories (Sony) - $20.32 ($5,515) - $85.35
3 - The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (Paramount) - $18.40 ($9.036) - $79.01
4 - Valkyrie (MGM/UA) - $14.04 ($5,055) - $60.69
5 - Yes Man (Warner Bros.) - $13.85 ($4,033) - $79.41
6 - Seven Pounds (Sony) - $10.00 ($3,626) - $60.04
7 - The Tale of Despereaux (Universal) - $7.02 ($2,271) - $43.74
8 - Doubt (Miramax) - $5.03 ($3,909) - $18.73
9 - The Day the Earth Stood Still (Fox) - $4.85 ($2,075) - $74.30
10 - Slumdog Millionaire (Fox Searchlight) - $4.77 ($7,794) - $28.78

Numbers courtesy of Box Office Mojo

Next week sees the first official 2009 releases: Bride Wars and the David S. Goyer horror film The Unborn go wide, while Not Easily Broken opens on 600 screens.

Of course, "family film" usually translates into "kiddie film," with the parents and older siblings left to grit their teeth and endure while the tykes laugh at the singing chipmunks. Rare is the film that is truly entertaining for the entire family -- which is why I'm always excited about a new Pixar project, since they're the only ones who pull it off regularly.

Pixar's Up (due May 29) is this year's entry, and there's no reason to suspect it will be any less admirable than the company's previous work. Coraline (Feb. 6), from the director of Nightmare Before Christmas, looks like it could be an imaginatively macabre treat for grown-ups and kids. There's also a Harry Potter movie due in July, though that series becomes darker and less kid-oriented as it progresses, so you might want to leave certain younger family members at home.

Here's as complete a list as I can muster for what family-oriented flicks are coming in 2009, including live-action, animation, and whatever the Jonas Brothers are.

January: Hotel for Dogs, Inkheart.
February: Coraline, Jonas Brothers: The 3D Concert Experience.
March: Race to Witch Mountain (Disney + The Rock = $$$), Monsters vs. Aliens.
April: Hannah Montana: The Movie.
May: Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian, Up.
June: Imagine That (warning: contains Eddie Murphy).
July: Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs (is this a prequel? How are the dinosaurs dawning after the mammals?), G-Force, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.
August: None, unless you count G.I. Joe, which is based on a line of children's dolls.
September: Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs.
October: Toy Story (3D re-release), Where the Wild Things Are, Astro Boy.
November: A Christmas Carol (one of those crazy 3D motion-capture things, like Polar Express), The Fantastic Mr. Fox, Old Dogs (aka John Travolta and Robin Williams remake Daddy Day Care).
December: Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakuel (GET IT?!!!?!?!?), The Princess and the Frog.

This past week, a whole lot of you probably took in a screening of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (I took the girl to see it last night), and you've probably shared your opinions with friends, family and significant others. Some feel it's just way too long, while others argue it needs to be long in order for you, the audience member, to "feel" and adequately "experience" the main character's life-long journey. One aspect of the film a lot of people have discussed was how -- and there might be mild spoilers here -- if Brad Pitt's character starts out as a tiny old man, he should turn into an adult-sized baby at the end of the film. That would make the most sense, right?

Well, director David Fincher sat down with MTV recently and admitted that the original plan was to have Pitt play the baby. He says, "We were prepared to do that ... We just ran out of money. We could have made him into a baby. Anything you want to do, you can do now." Now THAT would've been worth the price of admission all on its own ... even though the image of Pitt as a big, weird-looking baby may have been all folks talked about afterward. Fincher also addressed those comparisons to Forest Gump, noting: "Forrest Gump? What's that? Instead of the ordinary man in extraordinary circumstances, I thought of [Benjamin] as an extraordinary man in very ordinary circumstances. I don't know how much an audience can relate to a guy who's aging backwards that ends up looking like Brad Pitt. My whole thing from the beginning has been that it's not high concept. The reason it's relatable is how it's dramatized. Everybody remembers their first kiss and hangover and person they fell in love with."

For those who've seen it, what do you think: Should Pitt have played an adult-sized baby?

(We're reposting our SXSW review of The Lost Coast to coincide with the film's release via Amazon VOD)

By: Eric D. Snider

As Jasper, the narrator and protagonist of The Lost Coast, begins to describe the events of Halloween night, he says, "We found a dead body -- but more on that later." You know it's an eventful night when discovering a corpse isn't even the lead story.

In this moody, occasionally dreamlike drama, it's not what happens to Jasper and his friends that's important, so much as what happens within Jasper's soul. Yes, most of the drama here is internal, and while writer/director Gabriel Fleming falls prey to some of the missteps typical of new filmmakers, he gets a lot right, too, with a lot of emotional insight.

The film is constructed around an e-mail that twentysomething Jasper (Ian Scott McGregor) is writing to his fiancee overseas, in which he explains what happened the previous night. We gather from his tone that the events were of some importance, and the fact that it was Halloween in San Francisco -- one of the most raucous nights in a raucous city -- suggests there may have been shenanigans (if you know what I mean).

Christmas fell on a Thursday this year, leading to a very lucrative four-day weekend for all but one of the Christmas Day openers.

The pattern has always been to open one, maybe two big films around Christmas. This year we got five. Marley & Me was the best family option, and led the pack with $51.7 million over the long weekend, setting a Christmas Day record in the process. Good word-of-mouth is likely -- the audience reaction at the showing I saw can only be described as "epic." I think I may have actually caught some inanimate objects crying toward the end. Scarves, handbags, etc.

Adam Sandler's Bedtime Stories was next, underperforming slightly with $38.6 million. Sandler is somewhat untested in the PG family film arena, but I had expected Bedtime Stories to land somewhere in the vicinity of Click, which grossed $40 million on a three-day weekend in June. Bedtime Stories' $28 million three-day is the lowest for a film headlined by Sandler since Eight Crazy Nights in 2002, or if you think that doesn't count, since Little Nicky in 2000. Of course since Bedtime Stories opened on a Thursday, using the three-day number isn't quite fair. In any event, the fact that Marley took off certainly didn't help.

The third-place, $39 million finish for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is a draw. That the heady, nearly three-hour drama was able to compete in this marketplace is surely a relief to Paramount, but the movie is so expensive ($150 million) that people were probably hoping for more. On the other hand, $30 million for Valkyrie -- which people had written off as a stinker after some release date shuffling and an upswing in general Tom Cruise negativity -- is cause for some high-fiving at MGM/UA.

You may have noticed there was no release list this past Tuesday, as the big releases are all hitting shelves today (or yesterday or tomorrow -- it' seriously varies depending on store), and we're fully in the Christmas lull. Read on for today's handful of Hollywood films and 12/23 releases.

The Duchess
Ah, another film with Keira Knightley in period clothing. This time around, she's Georgiana, the Duchess of Devonshire, and she's a powerful woman reduced to love in secret under the reign of a rigid and mean husband (Ralph Fiennes). However, while Mr. Fiennes pulls off a chilling performance as the Duke of Devonshire, this period offers little of Georgiana's triumphs, much of her romantic turmoil, and not enough compelling cohesiveness to give her story a chance. Skip it.

Eagle Eye
First, DJ Caruso brought us Shia LaBeouf under house arrest in Disturbia. Now he's let Shia run around maniacally with Michelle Monaghan for Eagle Eye, as two innocent strangers become at the whim of a powerful phone caller who turns them into fugitives. This is one of those action flicks that did well in the box office, but didn't get a lot of critical love. Nevertheless, it's action to break up the holiday monotony, so Rent it.

It sounds like a can't-miss concept: a Disney movie about a guy who tells wonderful, fantastic bedtime stories that actually come true in real life. And when the guy is Adam Sandler, how can this possibly be a bad movie? Aren't you buying tickets online for your entire family right now, even as you read about this possible cinematic land of delights? Except that watching Bedtime Stories is about as delightful as peeking into your Christmas stocking and finding it empty except for a few lint-covered peppermints.

The movie opens with a little tale narrated by the most stereotypically folksy voice you can imagine, a distillation of Wilford Brimley and Roy Rogers ... and it's Jonathan Pryce, setting up the story of Sandler's character Skeeter. Seeing Pryce at this time of year made me think of Brazil, thus triggering nostalgia for a movie that is the diametric opposite of this one. Pryce's character, Marty, has to sell the hotel to a Brit who gets to keep his accent, Barry Nottingham (Richard Griffiths), who promises that someday Marty's little boy Skeeter can earn the chance to run the hotel himself. (Marty's daughter is SOL, one presumes.) Barry agrees, then replaces most of the homey motel with a snazzy high-rise hotel.

It's hard to ignore the Oscar polish involved in Revolutionary Road; an Oscar-winning director, Sam Mendes, reunites the stars of the Oscar-gobbling Titanic. To that end, Mendes does his best to make the film look serious and prestigious. And if you give it a cursory glance it's possible to come away with the impression that it is indeed a great and important film. But in truth, it's both relentlessly grim and nearly pointless.

It's "nearly" pointless because the subject matter -- that the suburbs have mutated and destroyed the American spirit -- has already been covered, many, many times in far better films, ranging from scary (Blue Velvet) to romantic (Far from Heaven) to funny (Edward Scissorhands). In a way, those outside genre elements helped keep the material from becoming overbearing. For Revolutionary Road, Mendes and screenwriter Justin Haythe have adapted a novel by Richard Yates, which was groundbreaking for its time; Yates wrote it in 1961 when polite society just didn't discuss such things as infidelity, ennui, drugs and booze and insanity. But Mendes creates a period picture and thus fails to justify why the material is still relevant in 2008, especially when this stuff has by now become its own movie subgenre. (Click on "Suburban Dysfunction" at allmovie.com.) The main factor for Mendes is that it's an "important novel." Never mind why -- or when.

Warning: This post contains spoilers for The Da Vinci Code.

I read about fifty pages of The Da Vinci Code before hurling it across the room. I sat through the stupid movie – the whole thing – and hated every miserable moment. It now faces some stiff competition from Twilight, but before this year I would have been hard-pressed to come up with a less interesting pop culture phenomenon. At least for a non-Christian like me, who has no reason to be stunned by the notion of Jesus Christ having procreated, The Da Vinci Code simply had nothing to offer.

I don't consider myself a masochist, but I don't mind being a guinea pig. So I thought doing Angels & Demons in this column would be fun, in a way.

It would have been great to be able to say that Angels & Demons was some sort of revelation (no pun intended); it certainly would have made this post easier to write. Alas, it ranks among the dumbest things I've ever read: an adventure book for fourth-graders, seemingly written by a sixth-grader. In an effort to make itself "accessible" to absolutely everyone, it makes its characters into nitwits – which is problematic since its characters are Harvard professors and world-class particle physicists. Dr. Robert Langdon, played by Tom Hanks in both films, has never heard of a particle accelerator – or maybe he has, and is just astounded to learn that it's an enormous underground structure. Antimatter is a new concept as well. At one point, the novel helpfully explains who Galileo was. You get the idea.

You really expect a movie headlined by Will Smith -- the consensus Biggest Movie Star in the World -- to at least break $20 million in its opening weekend. You'd have to go back to 2001's Ali to find one that didn't. Instead, Seven Pounds -- poorly reviewed and marketed to emphasize the central mystery in a way that turned out mystifying -- played second fiddle to Jim Carrey's Yes Man, pulling in $16 million to Yes Man's $18.1 million.

The Seven Pounds result is actually not terribly surprising, even given the Will Smith factor -- the movie is a morose downer, with none of the uplifting, holiday-appropriate draw of 2006's affable The Pursuit of Happyness (another Smith-Gabriele Muccino collaboration), and the people looking for that sort of thing have a lot to choose from this time of year, most of it carrying more cred. I'm a bit more taken aback by Yes Man's relatively weak opening. For a high-concept Jim Carrey comedy, opening a good three weeks after the last big light-hearted offering, $18 million is uninspiring. It's in the same ballpark as Fun with Dick and Jane, opening around the same time three years ago, but that one went up against three other comedies opening the same weekend, and was harder to market. I wonder if Jim Carrey's draw might be waning a bit.

The Saturday before Christmas tends to be the biggest shopping day of the year (the idea that it's the day after Thanksgiving is an urban legend) -- so that's all the more reason to skip the malls and go to the movies instead! The multiplexes have a variety of offerings in store for you, but the Indie Spotlight is here to tell you about what's happening at the art houses. 'Tis the season for limited-release Oscar-bait!

Today's new offerings are: The Class, Moscow, Belgium, Nothing But the Truth, Scott Walker: 30 Century Man, and The Wrestler. Here's the lowdown on each of them:

The Wrestler
What it is: OK, it stretches the definition of "indie," but this drama about a washed-up professional wrestler seeking redemption certainly feels like a non-studio film.
What they're saying: This one's been getting raves ever since it won the top prize at the Venice Film Festival in September. Cinematical's James Rocchi, reviewing it at Toronto, called it "one of the best American movies of 2008." At Rotten Tomatoes, all but two of the 58 critics weighing in have praised it -- and one of the two naysayers is Armond White, who can usually be counted on to have the opposite opinion of everyone else and who I think might be a fictional character anyway.
Where it's playing: New York City (Lincoln Plaza, Landmark Sunshine), Los Angeles (ArcLight Hollywood, The Landmark).
More info: The official site has a long list of release dates for other cities, including some next week.

Mice have enjoyed a great ride in the movies. The animated variety first rose to prominence thanks to Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse in the late 20s, enjoyed a rebirth as heroes in the late 70s and 80s with The Rescuers, The Secret of NIMH, The Great Mouse Detective, and An American Tail, and overflowed into live-action territory a few years later with Stuart Little. More recently, Flushed Away was a superior entertainment about a spoiled upper-class mouse who must learn to survive in the wild and wooly sewers, while the superb Ratatouille gave a rat a rare favorable turn in the spotlight as a culinary artist.

Adapted by Gary Ross (Pleasantville, Dave) from the award-winning book by Kate DiCamillo, The Tale of Despereaux features both a rat and a mouse in leading roles, but the self-described fairy tale is much more than a slapdash character study of two rodents. The setup makes it sound like a cousin to both Flushed Away and Ratatouille: a disgraced rat must learn to survive in a dark dungeon, a mouse develops a friendship with a human, and gourmet soup features prominently. Yet as the tale unfolds, it deepens and broadens its themes to a welcome degree. Though it never climbs too far above average and too often embraces the familiar, Despereaux remains a gentle and nurturing children's story, imparting lessons without being too condescending to its audience.

While Despereaux is aimed squarely at the little ones, adults may enjoy the top-notch animation and appreciate the above average performances by a celebrity voice cast (Matthew Broderick, Dustin Hoffman, Emma Watson, Tracey Ullman, Robbie Coltrane, Kevin Kline, William H. Macy, Stanley Tucci) that is well matched to the characters they play, which is a rare pleasure indeed.