Back of the Trailer

Go Figure

"For the first 20 minutes or so, nothing special is going on, and it seems that “Men in Black 3” will be content to spin its wheels and collect its money en route through the usual overscaled action set pieces toward a superloud, planet-saving final showdown. The music sounds less like a score by Danny Elfman than like a score by Danny Elfman’s smartphone app, and it carries dreadful intimations of forced fun. But even as the movie carefully fulfills its blockbuster imperatives — with chases and explosions and elaborately contrived plot twists — it swerves into some marvelously silly, unexpectedly witty and genuinely fresh territory. Go figure."- A.O. Scott, NYTimes

"'People may be surprised in Hollywood, but the popularity of this film is no mystery to us,' said Laura Resnick, manager at the Plaza Frontenac Cinema, an upscale theater in suburban St. Louis. 'When there is a story being told on the screen, people respond.'" - Brooks Barnes, NYTimes

At the start of 2012, I began seeing trailers that made me more excited than years past for movies coming soon. Surprisingly, a lot of them were for summer releases (Prometheus, Dark Knight Rises). Versus the slog of watching mind melting digital sequels of sequels, I now only hope for one blockbuster to give me fun for two hours in the air conditioned season to make it memorable. And the trailers for mindmelters hadn't disappeared. The Avengers and Men in Black 3 looked to singe my eye and ear receptors again. I Still haven't seen it, but I'm eating my cape on the critical raves for The Avengers and, now, this morning, MIB3 is also over delivering the fun.

This fun will probably reverse the declining box office this year - it may even set records. An earlier story this week in the New York Times on the success of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel with senior audiences was also a telling article that there still exists a diverse moviegoing audience beyond teenagers, and a growing hunger for stories about real people against the oversupply of sci-fi/fantasy. But as the cinema manager says, it's all about story. It's the difference between failure and success. Go figure.

Let's just see if we can help you remember what happened

"This is Mr. Anderson’s fifth feature and it proves a breakthrough for him as a filmmaker. Although there are more differences than similarities between it and the Sinclair book, the novel has provided him with something he has lacked in the past, a great theme. It may also help explain the new film’s narrative coherence. His first feature, “Sydney” (also known as “Hard Eight”), showed Mr. Anderson to be an intuitively gifted filmmaker, someone who was born to make images with a camera. His subsequent features — “Boogie Nights,” “Magnolia” and “Punch-Drunk Love” — have ambition and flair, though to increasingly diminished ends. Elliptical, self-conscious, at times multithreaded, they contain passages of clarity and brilliance. But in their escalating stylization you feel the burdens of virtuosity, originality, independence. “There Will Be Blood” exhibits much the same qualities as Mr. Anderson’s previous work — every shot seems exactly right — but its narrative form is more classical and less weighted down by the pressures of self-aware auteurism." - Manohla Dargis, NYTimes

I wasn't a fan of Paul Thomas Anderson until Punch Drunk Love. I never saw Hard Eight, but thought Boogie Nights and Magnolia were trying too hard to be Robert Altman. When he stopped multitasking characters running around in a mad world was when his films got interesting. Slowing down to focus on one or two people settled his hyperactivity and showed his gifts of exploring the psychic depths of living in our reality.

And he drilled really deep into the character of Daniel Plainview with There Will Be Blood. When I walked out of the theater, I felt like I had watched the start of 2001, the middle was Days of Heaven, and it ended like Citizen Kane. These aren't bad inspirations, but again, I thought it was a smart film school thesis. But I was wrong. I bought the movie out of impulse and I haven't stopped watching it since. There is dialogue and shots that are just mesmerizing in their strangeness. Its reputation will grow, it's ahead of its time, it's a masterpiece.

And as Dargis points out, the movie was a turning point for Anderson, a breakthrough to being an artist. His new movie, The Master, is coming later this year, and the teaser, edited by him, conveys the singular power of his mature sensibility. It's unlike other trailers, because it plays out long scenes, never conveys plot, no quick editing, just a spellbinding mystery.

The hype for this has been great, and rumors abound that it's about a cult leader similar to the biography of L. Ron Hubbard and scientology. Maybe it is, but this trailer doesn't reveal that. It's just a character study, a conversation about something that Joaquin Phoenix (glad he's back) should never had done. Only Anderson knows what this is about. What a tease.

Note: The presentation of this teaser's website is wonderful in its simplicity. I feel the web still doesn't know how to present video: it takes too long to download, I hate the frozen boxes with the ugly start buttons, and they often stutter. It's why this site isn't embedded with YouTube videos. Less is more.

Trailer Review: The Campaign - Kissing and Punching

One of my favorite quotes from the movies is in The Hunt for Red October when analyst Alec Baldwin talks with defense official Richard Jordan who gives him advice about taking on the mission for finding the submarine Red October. "I'm a politician which means I'm a cheat and a liar, and when I'm not kissing babies I'm stealing their lollipops." That truth has always stuck. Now, after seeing the trailer for The Campaign, add punching babies to a politician's bag of tricks.

From the comedic gang of Will Ferrell and company comes a satire of political campaigning, timed in celebration of our current presidential election year. An against-all-odds story where the champ is Ferrell who has been an unopposed congressman for years, is ready to be reelected again, when Zach Galifianakis, short and frumpy (even gay?) everyman decides to challenge him. It's tall vs. short, professional vs. amateur, powerful vs. powerless. The jokes are sexual, religious and injurious.

But all those jokes aside, the trailer's cutting edge punchline is (I'm not being funny) punching a baby. Babies, the new banana peel in comedy, replacing the dog which dominated the last decade.

Political satire in the movies has become kind of outdated and dull, since brilliant TV from Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert deliver political wit on a daily basis. Movies can only make broad swipes, where TV can deliver sharp stabs with every realtime government scandal. Which is why this movie doesn't look that funny. Real life is funnier than fiction.

Opening August 10, 2012, Verdict: Skip

The Hottest Summer

As we enter another season of blockbusters filled with fantasy and science fiction, the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema is doing a retrospective festival this month through August of what many consider the greatest summer of movies ever.

I was twelve at the time, still high from Raiders of the Lost Ark the summer before, and on the edge from The Empire Strikes Back the year before that. When school ended, I was nuts to escape to the air conditioned darkness. There were rumblings of a dangerous punk movie called The Road Warrior that was playing in New York City I had no way of getting to. But the first one I got in line for was Star Trek II. I had loved the first, and even though this looked closer in scale to the late TV series, I was also looking forward to combat in the Trek universe. Little did I know that I would watch Kirk worry about his immortality, lost fatherhood, and watch his best friend die in his arms. It was heavy stuff, and I had my first lessons in death, sacrifice and sorrows of adulthood. Then E.T. My parents took me to a packed late night theater (only time to get a seat) and I cried when Elliot and E.T. flew off the cliff riding high above a midnight forest. It was tears of my slow knowing that I was leaving childhood - twelve wishing I was nine again. Then I saw the trailer for Tron. Video games were the other obsession and this wrapped all that in an imaginative revolution not seen since Star Wars. Light cycles were the new light sabers. "Man is the warmest place to hide." That was the line to an ad in the newspaper of a man in the Antarctica with blazing light coming from his face. Friends who were allowed by their parents to see it spoke of the grossest sights ever seen, an unexplainable alien that ate people and took them over, cell by cell, with merciless violence. You couldn't stop it from spreading like the people dying in the news from another insidious virus. Saw a trailer for The Dark Crystal and thought they filmed on location on that fantasy world. I mean, where else did they find those creatures. The movie was a beautiful nightmare. The death of the evil leader of old age at his bed in the beginning made me realize dying was not a peaceful falling to sleep, but a riot of hissing organs to stay alive. Then two amazing animations. The Secret of Nimh, and even better, The Last Unicorn were sorrowful fairy tales. The voice acting in Unicorn, Alan Arkin and Mia Farrow, I still remember to this day. The bounty was so much, that I had to catch Poltergeist, The Thing, and Road Warrior on cable years later watching all of them many times over.

Many of these films were panned in the day. The Thing was too gross and violent. Tron was all effects and no story. Secret of Nimh wasn't Disney. Don't see Poltergeist because someone tears their face off. Yet kids my age knew. This was a summer of much darker stories. There were less tie-in toys to play with, but they had something beyond just being fun. They were cool. Long live 1982.

Challenge: There's one movie missing at the Alamo Drafthouse. I avoided writing about it so you can take a guess, but it's not that hard. One more masterpiece.

Trailer Review: Your Sister's Sister - Rebound and Recoil

Mark Duplass is a grieving soul after the death of his brother. Things have fallen so much apart in his life that his best friend, Emily Blunt, offers him to stay at her family's cabin secluded on a pristine lake in the beautiful Pacific Northwest. Arriving, he discovers the house also occupied by Blunt's sister, Rosemarie Dewitt, and as new neighbors getting to know one another, share shots to confess their respective reasons for exile. Dewitt has just broken up with her boyfriend of seven years. Tragedy loves company, mixed with tequila, and the results are a hazy morning naked with someone next you. When Blunt arrives, there's the awkward dance of telling or not the sister. When confessed, the chips fall where they may between family and lovers, heartbreak and joy.

This independent comedy/drama is a step-up in seriousness above typical rom-coms. Any man would love to have a best friend like Blunt, but I'm sure we'd want much more, and the surprise of this, is Blunt is the one who has desires for her friend. Duplass doesn't play the dumb guy caught between two women, making bad jokes about his luck, but plays the genuine confusion and stress of trying to make the right decisions, losing friends, gaining lovers. This looks like a film about real people and the rules of attraction.

Emily Blunt is not only beautiful, but shows to be a smart actress, making good choices between studio and independent features, creating loyalty with audiences from both camps. This movie looks like one of the best examples of combining those skills to great effect. The studios are releasing exciting projects this summer, and I've been on the hunt to find what the independent equivelents will be. This looks like one of them, a nice retreat and surprise.

Opening June 15, 2012, Verdict: Must See

Trailer Review: Piranha 3DD - Eat Before It Melts

If you want to know how outsider culture drifts to the mainstream, one good example is the series of Piranha movies. The original was a rush to cash in on the phenomena of Jaws, using another type of man-eating fish to scare people out of the water. While it stole Spielberg's plot, it also took advantage of the hunger to see women in wet bathing suits frolicking on the beach. Considered trash, it was thrown into the heap of garbage made in seventies cinema that joyously rolled around in sex and violence. There was a sloppy looseness to these type of flicks that felt like watching dirty cousins to porn. But once the studios sniffed the money, they got cleaned up with better production and calculated scares. The unpredictability was scrubbed out. If you wanted to defend this type of exploitation cinema you stamped it as camp. That word used to be a subversive aesthetic. Like porn, a know-it-when-I-see-it concept that some wrote long essays to try to identify and defend.

But no one needs to anymore. After thirty long years, it's turned into a fun genre, not even an insider wink, but a comedy of manners. Piranha 3DD is a sequel to the 2010 remake of the 1978 original. What made me notice in the reviews two years ago was the comeback of skin, in 3D no less, and no one made a fuss. Critics laughed it off and enough went to see it with parental approval to make another.

I've always thought nudity in movies is tied to our country's economic success. In boom times it goes away, in bad times it comes back. With less money, there's room to get away with more. The stakes are not as high. So instead of obsessing over unemployment rates, go for a swim and see how many more piranhas are in the water.

Opening June 1, 2012, Verdict: Half Full or Half Empty, There's Fish In It

Trailer Review: Beasts of the Southern Wild - Floods of Imagination

Whispers of greatness have been buzzing about this film since it was shown at Sundance this year. Manohla Dargis called it one of the best debuts at the festival in over a decade. A lot of its reputation is hanging on her words. I've been curious for months to know what this thing would look like.

It's kind of a dreamy mash-up of Days of Heaven, Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep, and Spike Jonze's Where the Wild Things Are. Awash with a precocious child's voiceover describing how the universe fits together as we watch the flooded bayou she lives in with her father and the townsfolk warning of beasts at the edges. There's lots of celebrations, warnings of storms approaching, and a frontier pride in the life these people have chosen. The child and the music have a triumphant spirit, less dark and dangerous, more brave and brighter than I expected.

It's obvious, one of Benh Zeitlin's influence is Terence Malick which made me immediately compare him to another buzzing festival debut by David Gordon Green a decade ago for George Washington. That was also children running through Southern ruins where the weeds have overgrown the rusted railways as they talked and played through time. This kind of visual poetry has been done enough, that it could be considered a freshman genre, like horror, a way to get in. Locations are cheap, kids love imagination, nature is the greatest CGI. It's a way to make a mark, a Walt Whitman Song of Myself. If you're going to rip-off, take from the best.

Opening June 27, 2012, Verdict: Wait for the Critics

Trailer Review: Take This Waltz - Doubting Destiny

Singles meet cute on the airplane and share a taxi back to their apartments in Toronto which happen to be on the same street. Just as they exit, Michelle Williams confesses she's married. "That's too bad," Luke Kirby says. Williams's husband is Seth Rogen, playing his affable self, a cookbook writer happy with domesticity. He's no man-child. Kirby makes his living driving a rickshaw and his more alternative style is enough to doubt her long-term commitment with Rogen. She takes up meeting Kirby on summer afternoons, flirting with temptation, and asking herself what's most important to her. Luckily, she's got some help from Sarah Silverman as the acerbic best friend offering this-is-how-it-is advice, but the answers aren't played for one-line laughs.

The director, Sarah Polley, is making something at stake with Williams's options on the rules of desire in a marriage. This is no black or white choice. Williams has to decide between two nice guys. What does she do? The trailer hints that she leaves Rogen for quirky Kirby, which would be disappointing, because for a film that seems to be about consequences, at the end, it looks like the choice is made for the expected fantasy instead of the usual reality. The last movie I can remember that successfully examined who we should be with, was TiMER, a film with a sci-fi bent, about new technology helping us decide our life-time mates. The choices weren't obvious, but the film haunted me with questions about destiny. This movie will work if she chooses the tougher, and more common fate.

Download May 25, Opening June 29, 2012, Verdict: Wait for the Critics

Trailer Review: Magic Mike - Take It Off

Show'em what you got. That's the message of Magic Mike, a movie starring Channing Tatum as a male stripper which was an actual day job for him before coming to Hollywood. This isn't a sordid look at the sex industry, but rather a fun tale of beating the odds as Tatum works at a strip club by day while following his dream to be a craftsman of coffee tables by night.

There's scenes of parties, bare abs and close friendships in the skin trade, but these guys aren't raunchy pick-up artists, but sweet men with smiles. When Tatum meets a girl, she's the one with issues of what he does for a living. It's a subtle shift of gender roles, with men searching for empowerment and trying to find a meaningful relationship outside of work, upending movie tradition. But the girl still falls for her man - or make that girls fall for their man.

Soderbergh regularly bounces between mainstream and independent cinema with uncanny success. This looks like one of his day job projects. His coffee table.

Opening June 29, 2012, Verdict: Wait for the Critics

Trailer Review: The Avengers - Fanboy Flameout

When is the big superhero crash going to happen? If it doesn't with The Avengers then I have to eat my cape. Based on an all-star comic combining the greatest Marvel hits, Avengers are a club of Captain America, Thor, Iron Man, Hulk, Hawkeye and Black Widow battling an army of CGI destruction. It looks as out of control as the Transformers with people and populations having debris falling all around them like a demolition blizzard. Snarky comments are made of the mayhem, especially zingers by Robert Downey Jr., that ring of imperial indifference.

This pop establishment is being directed by fanboy favorite, Joss Whedon, who engendered loyalty from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and added another denomination with cancelled TV series Firefly. This is his biggest budget badass, with the studio's patronage of coordinated marketing with prequels to cash out for at least five years, and the film delivers with lots of POW!

But I've been hit with BANG! CRASH! and WHACK! enough to have a serious headache. Unless this has the quiet laziness of Whedon's Serenity, then I don't know if anyone beyond fandom will want the abuse. It's a crowded summer of movies, from caped crusaders to alien invaders, hinting at originality instead of origin stories that these Avengers may end up dead enders.

Opening May 4, 2012, Verdict: Wait for the Critics

Update: This cape is really hard to tear into bite-size pieces.