Twixt

Francis Ford Coppola recently used his Comic-Con preview of Twixt to wax philosophic on the evolution of cinema, announcing a live “remix” tour that would find him personally reshuffling scenes and tweaking edits on the fly to create a unique experience for each audience. Of course, whenever a director (even one of Coppola’s stature) begins to rely too heavily on “live remix tours” or 3-D sequences, which Twixt also has, there’s a natural suspicion that the gimmickry is there to cover up something inherently lacking. So here’s your chance to pre-judge Twixt on its own, unadorned merits. The Tom Waits-narrated trailer sets the atmospheric (Or is it just awkward?) tone, bringing Val Kilmer’s “bargain-basement Stephen King” horror writer in contentious contact with Bruce Dern’s typically ornery sheriff, then unspools images of Elle Fanning's mysterious dead girl, Ben Chaplin as a ghostly Edgar Allan Poe, and what appear to be teenaged vampires on motorcycles. Coppola’s claim that he based Twixt on a dream he had while drunk certainly is borne out here, and whether it all makes sense in its straightforward or Coppola-on-the-ones-and-twos forms remains to be seen. But it seems pretty clear that Twixt will go down as Coppola’s weirdest film to date. (Yes, even counting Jack.)