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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Political satire in the movies has become kind of outdated and dull, since brilliant TV from Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert deliver political wit on a daily basis.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

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: 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: Nesting - How Did I Get Here

Hollywood's nostalgia machine is targeting gen-Xers and their mid-life. Nesting addresses a restless husband a little nervous about the way his has turned out. Searching to return a youthful spark, he buys their old Volvo, fills it with favorite mixed tapes and surprises his wife with it. "Let's go now," she says, and off to their old neighborhood in LA to try and relive their twenties, throwing a house party in their original apartment and mixing it up with the current youth. The end of the trailer shows the husband on the floor, hungover and being poked by a police baton. Rude awakening.

For a generation labeled with ironic distance from everything, this is a mainstream comedy basking in the glow of the past, putting this couple through the paces of going backwards to feel good. One would think a movie about this generation would have an alternative take. The only movie that's had a nice bitterness is Young Adult. Movies like this should have the past haunt the present. It's far more interesting. The Talking Heads are always great, but discovering the next Arcade Fire is more exciting.

Opening May 11, 2012, Verdict: Skip

Trailer Review: Lola Versus - La, La, La

The first time I noticed Greta Gerwig was in Greenberg when she danced for a minute to Paul McCartney's "Uncle Albert" alone in her apartment waiting for a phone call from Ben Stiller. It was the only scene that stuck with me from that movie and stole the show from Stiller's neurotic acting. It proved why she's been a darling of the independent film scene in recent years, and I've heard she's done another memorable performance in Damsels in Distress.

Success has now given her the opportunity to jump into the mainstream river of Hollywood with Lola Versus, about a woman dumped by her fiancé just after buying the wedding dress and now released back into the New York single scene to find love and her new self.

The jokes are routine with bad dates, useless girlfriend advice, and lots of anxious appetites for ice cream. Gerwig hasn't sold out, but she's been run through the machine; dressed up in the latest hair style and clothes, giving the usual look of surprise at dating disappointment and worried for her life in finding the right man. She's joined the club of desperation from Anniston to Witherspoon.

Gerwig deserves better. And so does this genre. Since seeing Young Adult, Diablo Cody's story of a woman searching for love broke all the rules that now these movies look stale and uneatable. Please Greta, don't pick up a gun or wear a cape in your next one.

Opening June 8, 2012, Verdict: Skip

Trailer Review: Dark Shadows - Run from the Light

Tim Burton appears to be in a rut. Trying to find inspiration in a supernatural soap opera from the late sixties, Dark Shadows casts his regular Johnny Depp, as Barnabas, a baron who is cursed by a jealous witch (Eva Green) to become a vampire. He goes to sleep in the eighteenth century and wakes up in the twentieth, specifically, funky 1972 Maine where he has to take back his manor from a quirky family of new owners who don't seem so shocked by their pale skin guest.

If this looks a little like Beetlejuice, Burton's enjoyable comedy horror that had a family of New Yorkers buying a retreat in rural New England to discover a ghost they're actually excited to find - extra historic character to their new home, Dark Shadows just moves the tale a decade before the eighties.

A decade won't make a difference. Another costumed character by Depp, it's a repeat performance of better creations from Edward Scissorhands to Ichabod Crane in Sleepy Hollow. In short, done before, and all I could do was yawn at the trailer. Burton is the Charles Adams of cinema, making gothic goofiness an enchantment of escape, but it's starting to look like his coffin. The dead is looking dead.

Opening May 11, 2012, Verdict: Skip

Trailer Review: Damsels in Distress - Dancing to Happiness

The director, Whit Stillman, is for those with eccentric tastes in preppy angst, Fitzgerald ambitions, and debutante manners. He made a well received first film with Metropolitan, a New York charm, about a year in the life of debutantes and their escorts (it also had one of the greatest movie posters). These young people were different, down right strange in their stilted talk with elitist anxieties. Compared to the usual mallrat films at the time, many couldn't relate. But some did, and a devoted following went to Barcelona and The Last Days of Disco. Then he disappeared.

Now, fourteen years later is Damsels in Distress, a story about a tight knit of preppy girls in college who seem on a mission to cure the depression of their classmates by dance. You heard it - dancing tap and other forms of slow waltzes. The girls talk in Whit's only-planet dialogue: drawing room attitudes with an aristocratic crispness. "The problem in contemporary social life is the tendency to always seek someone cooler than yourself," Greta Gerwig concludes. If you met this gaggle of geese at a party, you would either be bored and walk away or grab another gin and tonic with an extra lime.

For those fans, this is a long awaited return. For others, it'll be their last party.

Opening April 6, 2012, Verdict: Must See

Trailer Review: Seeking a Friend for the End of the World - Last Minute Details

Steve Carell plays his nice guy self before an asteroid named Matilda blows us away. As the clock runs out, Carrell is "getting his midlife crisis in just before the wire." He meets Keira Knightley, who helps him search for his first girlfriend, and their quest has them fall for each other. The end is full of everyone hooking up, a chance to always be the boss at your company, and listening to the final list of all-time classic rock favorites.

But this long winded title could easily have been called Last Night, a movie from 1998 that is so similar in plot, that I wonder if it's a remake. But Last Night didn't play it for laughs. It was less disaster film, then a serious drama about a man and woman reconciling their past and what they mean to each other. It even had a radio countdown and last minute orgies.

The wave of apocalyptic movies this decade reminds me of sci-fi films of the early seventies when America was facing gas shortages after stumbling from Vietnam and Watergate. The difference this time around is the subject is so popular and is so long in the tooth that it's hit the comedic phase. Going out of style soon.

Opening June 22, 2012, Verdict: Wait for the Critics

Trailer Review: Blue Like Jazz - College Faith

We go to college to learn, to meet new friends, and to challenge the assumptions of the world we've grown up in. Based on a bestseller I've never heard of, Blue Like Jazz is the story of a young man from a strict baptist upbringing going to college and questioning how his religious beliefs square against the diversity of ideas and people in school. "I came to escape because I was ashamed of it," Don confesses to a friend. "As it turned out, I'm ashamed of Jesus."

The school is Reed College in Portland, OR, where the student body is a hothouse of liberal thinking and lifestyle. He's a fish out of water. He seems to gasp for air by escaping into fantasy to make sense of it all. This is visually shown as him in a space suit floating above Earth listening to the voices of his college friends offering ways to live below. He has to fall back sometime.

One of the things that's strange about this movie is people dress in lots of costumes. Pope, astronaut, robot, rabbit, I didn't remember my days in college with everyday being Halloween. It's an odd look and I can't tell if this works, or it's too strange to enjoy. I like the premise of someone with with a deep religious background mixing it up with people of less committed beliefs. It could make for a serious drama, but this plays for laughs, which makes for routine college pranks. I hope it's not that funny.

Opening April 13, 2012, Verdict: Wait for the Critics