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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: 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: 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

Trailer Review: 96 Minutes - Speeding through America

All movies are reflection of their times, but some put their finger better on the underlying pulse, the nerve of our present sensations. Zeitgeist. In the arts, it's an elusive prize to capture. A sum of the now. Hollywood loves to catch this lightning in the bottle because it can translate into big box office (Saturday Night Fever). The risk is these movies can look dated as time flies (The Breakfast Club).

The trailer for 96 Minutes doesn't tell much of what the story is about. It has a young bright cast and cars racing around. There are threats of violence and ends with the sound of a gunshot. But this one minute ad feels right now. The kids are from opposite sides of race and class and nothing in between. There's no middle because it's becoming an endangered species. The notes say this is about a carjacking gone bad, but I couldn't find it. What's in the foreground is the mood, tension and struggle for our next generation trying to make it in this new America. It doesn't feel marketed, a product for how to improve, but a genuine mirror of where we are. I'm wondering how far past nighty-six minutes this will go.

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

Trailer Review: Musical Chairs - Get into the Groove

I find it kind of nice to see the recent popularity of dance in American culture. With our life moving rapidly online, dance forces physical interaction, and old-fashioned opportunities for romance. It also looks great on film. The Step-Up franchise capitalized on the trend and has spread across TV with Glee and Dancing with the Stars to name a few.

The trailer for Musical Chairs follows a typical plot line of an out of step male dancer discovering a girl and a dance floor for a new passion against the consternation of his family and friends.

What makes this film interesting is its direction by Susan Seidelman, who made one of the best pop films of the eighties, Desperately Seeking Susan. That movie introduced Madonna, but also gave a tour through the funky underground of New York City punk culture for a wider audience. It was a comedy of mistaken identity with a feminist center about differences in domestic and unmarried life. Seeing Madonna get into the groove in a downtown bar was one of the visual touchstones of the decade.

So it's nice to see Seidelman return to the streets of New York. Following a Bronx-bred Latino who mixes it up with a respectable dancer at a Manhattan studio, there's a lot of bridge and tunnel rivalry to keep them apart. But like Desperately Seeking Susan, the trailer skims across the diversity living in and on the margins of the Big Apple. From uptown to downtown, handicapped to the cross-dressers, Seidelman seems to be returning to the music of the streets, a boulevard open for everyone.

Opening March 23, 2012, Verdict: Wait for the Critics

Trailer Review: The Grey - Weather and Wolves

Liam Neeson, like George Clooney, is able to cross between serious art house and big-bang box office movies. The Grey looks like a mashup showcasing his repertoire. Playing someone providing expert protection for oil-rig workers in the Alaskan wilderness, he rides escort on a plane when it goes down in a remote winter wasteland. Suddenly, it's a survival story, with the major threat being not themselves, but a pack of hungry wolves.

The best scene in the trailer is Neeson lying in bed with his wife under white sheets blowing in the wind when the image explodes, sucking her away and Neeson wakes up covered in snow in a blank landscape. This backstory of Neeson with a broken heart, shows signs of a dramatic thread through this action laden flick.

Since Robinson Crusoe, the survival tale has been a storytelling staple. But when it turns from a solo to a group, my favorites are Flight of the Phoenix, about a crashed plane in the desert and Pitch Black, the sci-fi version with a crashed spaceship.

Truth be told, I don't think I can watch this, because being an owner of two dogs, I can't stomach watching wolves get killed. Too close to home. But that shouldn't discourage an open mind. If the drama is effective in making more at risk with the action, then this will be a fun ride. Neeson has the vulnerability and toughness to pull it off.

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

Trailer Review: In the Land of Blood and Honey - Love when Everything is Breaking Apart

Popular actors directing their first movie is a warning to drive slowly. Only a few Hollywood stars ever pull off the transition successfully while most embarrassingly trip over themselves (John Travolta's Battlefield Earth). When I heard Angelina Jolie had written and directed a movie about the Bosnian War, I got worry (especially one with a long title). What a perfect PR stunt to glorify her charitable personality towards strife ridden corners of the globe. Those good intentions don't sound bad, but sneaking social causes into the movies can look like propaganda or one note messages two hours too long.

The first surprise watching the trailer for In the Land of Blood and Honey were the gritty fight scenes. The machine gun fire by soldiers scurrying around ruined cities begets imagery to larger wars of history than the commonly perceived guerrilla warfare in Bosnia. But the story moves on to a male Serb police officer who falls in love with a woman Muslim artist as their country gets torn apart along their ethnic backgrounds. The Muslims are being rounded up and executed, and the officer is fighting to protect her from the fatal end of ethnic cleansing happening around them.

This story can easily be taken from any World War II tragedy of Germans hiding Jews from the Holocaust. Certainly, ethnic cleansing was an update of that earlier vicious act on humanity. The production looks swift and unsentimental for a romantic story. The actors are handsome, but not Hollywood types. They look like locals which gives the movie a better reality. I don't know if all this fits together, but from the trailer, it looks like an old fashioned romance, swept up in a war, against the backdrop of a too easily forgotten tragedy. That's a lot to chew on for a first time writer/director, but in some ways, all that historical importance is a safe place to hide under. Sometimes too safe.

Opening December 23, 2011, Verdict: Wait for the Critics

Trailer Review: Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close - Soggy Search

Precocious kids and feel good is a dangerous combination for me. It combines annoyance with didactic sentimentality that makes me twitch and shut it off when watching a movie. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close is based on the novel by Jonathan Safran Foer. The story is about a boy and his father who dies on 9/11 and his son discovers a key his father left and searches New York City to find out what it locks. The boy is described as having a gift for seeking out objects from the twentieth century, which doesn't seem that hard, since we're only ten years in the new one. He isn't a real nine-year old, but one of those gifted children that come from another planet giving words of wisdom which adults too clueless pray at their feet for knowledge.

I was already annoyed at this trailer introducing the kid, but the added saccharine of 9/11 gives it a false importance, and more important, feels dated. We've moved away from that event far enough to put together more sophisticated interpretations of what it means to us. The loss of family is a given.

Another surprise is the talent invested in this, with Tom Hanks, Sandra Bullock, Max von Sydow, and Lydia Davis roped in. This type of macro style (Crash) is, fortunately, fading out and adds to this movie's outdatedness. I wonder if it was in development hell for a long time. Extremely wasted and incredibly bad.

Opening December 25, 2011, Verdict: Skip