I love movie trailers

While most people skip through the trailers at the beginning of DVDs, I watch them. The same goes for the ones in the theater. I always make sure that I get to the theater early enough to watch all of the previews. If I don't, it somehow ruins the whole trip to the movie for me.

When the trailers start rolling, I put every future movie into one of three categories - I must see it, you couldn't pay me to see that and maye if it was playing nearby as a matinee I might see it. You could say the trailers are background research for future movie columns. While it sounds fun, writing a movie column can be a lot of work. I added up the movies I saw in the theater for 2008 and it totaled more than 30. That's more than one movie every two weeks. Crazy.

The good thing is that even when a movie isn't a hit for me, at least I leave the theater with something to which I can look forward. The last three weeks I saw "The Ugly Truth," and "Funny People," which I reviewed in the Pinnacle and didn't like, and "Julie and Julia," which will be reviewed Aug. 14.

The one thing I got out of all those visits to the theater is a list of must-see and maybe-see films. Here are a few of the ones that caught my attention.

Gamer - This is a sci-fi thriller about a video game in which players control the actions of real human beings who are prisoners sentenced to death. Not generally my type of movie, but it stars Michael C. Hall who is awesome in "Dexter." Gerard Butler and Alison Lohman are also in it, and the storyline reminds me of the short story "The Most Dangerous Game." This is one of those maybe for a matinee movie.

Zombieland - Okay, who doesn't love a campy zombie movie, especially when it is a horror comedy? This one stars Emma Stone, Abigail Breslin, Woody Harrelson and Jesse Eisenberg as gun-toting zombie fighters. This is a must see,but I do have some worries that it will never be able to live up to "Shaun of the Dead."

2012 - This is another apocalypse movie from the director of "Independence Day" and "The Day After Tomorrow," Roland Emmerich. It is based on a Mayan belief that the world will end in December 2012, and to the chagrin of all the nonbelievers things really start falling apart then. From the trailer it looks as though U.S. government has secretly planned for this, but only the lucky will get safe passage out of the disaster. The movie stars a bunch of people including Thandie Newton, John Cusack, Amanda Peet, Danny Glover and more. This is a couldn't pay me to see it movie.

Couple retreat - Parts of this trailer about a group of married friends who go on a couple's retreat looked pretty funny, but movies like this sometimes give all the laughs in the previews. The two reasons I might see it are Kristen Bell who played the ever-sarcastic girl detective Veronica Mars and Vince Vaughn who is just funny. This is a maybe.

The next two movies are both based on books I really enjoyed, and generally I go to see movies that are based on books I really enjoy, and then I am disappointed because the movie never tells the entire story.

The Lovely Bones - This is a tear jerker of a story about a young teen girl who is murdered, and whose family can't get over her death. In the movie, Susie is caught between this world and the next, as somewhat of a ghost who haunts her family. It is a heartbreaking story, but beautiful in the way author Alice Sebold tells it. Hopefully with the acting powerhouses of Saoirse Ronan, Mark Wahlberg, Rachel Weisz and others the movie will stand up to the book.

The Time Traveler's Wife - When I heard this book by Audrey Niffenegger was being adapted into a movie, I wondered how it would work. The story is a circuitious one of a man who travels through time, but with no control over it. He is not a scientist, but just someone born with a mutation that makes his molecules travel back and forth through time. He knows his future before it happens, and he revisits his past. The big concerns is how the filmmakers will deal with Henry's (Eric Bana) disappearances on screen, and also whether Bana and Rachel McAdams can carry a movie on their own.