Angels and Basterds get trailers

Trailers for two of my most-anticipated films for 2009 have found their way onto the world wide web this week.

First up is Angels & Demons, the prequel-cum-sequel to Dan Brown's love-it-or-hate-it religious thriller, The Da Vinci Code. As I've written elsewhere on this blog, I really liked Ron Howard's film adaptation of The Da Vinci Code; it's not flawless, but there's plenty to enjoy, and it certainly didn't deserve the critical mauling it received upon its release.

That said, Angels & Demons is the superior book. There's less historical exposition, a tighter story and more action (I'm keen to see how the film handles one particularly fanciful stunt). The trailer's pretty standard for an action flick – it's the usual mish-mash of confusingly out-of-context quotes accompanied by a rising choral soundtrack – but I have high hopes for the film.

Tom Hanks returns as Robert Langdon (sans the hardly noticeable but inexplicably controversial mullet), joined by Ewan McGregor, Ayelet Zurer and Stellan Skarsgård.

With Howard breaking news this week that Brown has finished work on the third Langdon book (working title: The Solomon Key), expect Angels & Demons to be the second of a trilogy if it makes a wad of cash.

Personally, I'm still hanging out for a Deception Point adaptation.

Meanwhile, Inglourious Basterds (yes, that's the correct spelling) is shaping up to be a return-to-form for Quentin Tarantino. After the misstep that was his Robert Rodriguez collaboration Grindhouse (more of a throwaway curiosity than enduring cinema), the controversial filmmaker is back with this long-in-development World War II epic: Tarantino's first self-contained movie since 1997's Jackie Brown.

Inglourious Basterds, partly based on the more literate 1978 Italian film Inglorious Bastards, sees a group of soldiers dropped into Nazi-occupied France posing as civilians. The trailer focusses on a Brad Pitt (who looks to have given a terrific performance) making a long-winded speech to his troops about collecting Nazi scalps. Vintage Tarantino in the making.