Benjamin Christensen’s silent opus is an interesting film on a number of levels. It’s an early enough film that many of the conventions and narrative devices that modern audiences simply accept at face value are still new, and indeed there are many points in the film where you can see that Christensen is “feeling out” a technique or method. The bulk of the film takes the form of something halfway like a documentary and halfway like a lecture. It opens with a mix of title cards and still slides of medieval woodcuts depicting witchcraft or demons, as Christensen (as I will refer to the narrative “voice” of the film for the sake of convenience) presents the introduction to his thesis; that belief in witches and demons was a peculiar example of superstitious ignorance and social pressure…only not entirely. Only the occasional pointer moving in the frame reminds us that this is in fact a “moving” picture and not a multimedia lecture. As Christensen delves into the historical explanations for this thesis, though, he slowly introduces film of mechanical toys depicting Hell and a rather impressive stop-motion animation of the medieval cosmological model of the universe and man’s place in it in relation to Heaven and Hell. It is only after this that Christensen drops the lecture mode entirely and switches almost entirely into a dramatic recreation of a medieval Danish village beset by a witchcraft panic and we transition into one of the earliest “horror” films.

Christensen starts out by showing us a “typical” witch’s cottage, and it soon becomes clear what he thinks of the idea of witchcraft. A woman comes seeking a “love potion” in order to tempt a priest, and we are treated to the sight of a fat monk stuffing his face while leering lecherously at the woman. Magic doesn’t seem particularly needed in order to get this particular holy man to break his vows, and every other request the witch is greeted with, including an extended and surreal depiction of a witch “dreaming” of a visit to a magical castle in the sky which includes some impressive visual effects and stop motion animation, at this stage is clearly intended to be viewed as wishful thinking more than magic. As if Christensen wasn’t clear enough, we are then treated to two medical students conducting a clandestine autopsy who are then denounced as witches by their neighbors. Christensen’s meaning is clear: witchcraft in general is a mix of superstitious wish fulfillment, particularly for those who practice it, and a dread of the unknown by those who fear it. Behind all of this is the specter of Satan himself, presented by Christensen as a manifestation of religious fervor and dread of the unknown and the different.

The lengthy middle section of the film mostly abandons the lecture pretense and becomes a different sort of film entirely. The film becomes a straight forward narrative drama about a village destroyed by witchcraft panic, when folk magicians use dowsing methods to “prove” than an old woman is guilty of creating a mysterious illness in a town figure. The Inquisition is called, and again we are shown a corrupt and morally questionable clergy, as a young priest becomes sexually drawn to a grieving wife and older, more experienced priests take delight in torturing and tricking the ignorant peasants. Things snowball when the accused witch in turn accuses her accusers, which ends in the entire household, and soon the entire village, being tortured or killed by the church. The highlight, and the real draw of the film for many people, is an impressive re-enactment of the witch’s “confession,” featuring elaborate costumes and special effects depicting an impressively bloody and lewdly profane dark Sabbath. It is this sequence that almost certainly led to the film’s rerelease in the 60s for the head-culture audience with an extremely ill-considered narration by William S. Burroughs, and the idea of people timing their drug dosages to kick in just as witches start flying through the air is depressingly plausible.

At the end the film slightly derails itself, mostly because Christensen tries to hard-sell a moral lesson, one that wasn’t entirely suggested by the film preceding it. Instead of ending on a note of skepticism towards moral authority and religious superstition, Christensen instead tries to contrast witchcraft fears and the persecution of those suspected of practicing witchcraft with modern prejudice against the mentally ill. Christensen is very unclear, though, on how exactly the two are linked. While his argument that outbreaks of mania in medieval nunneries that were popularly blamed on witchcraft at the time were more probably mass hysteria caused by profound social repression is compelling, Christen seems to want to argue that, in contemporary society (well, for 1922) that people who fail to treat the mentally ill with compassion are like hysterical, superstitious villagers but that doctors who treat the mentally ill are no different from the Inquisition in their callous treatment of sufferers. This would be forgivable if Christensen presented anyone as having a clear conscience on the issue, but he instead throws up his hands at the sorry state of the world. His film then, as a polemic, he fails to deliver. It’s still entertaining, and although not a conventional horror film by any means, his methods invite comparisons to the popularity of the “found footage” school of horror and his imagery is unassailable.

Every month Ken Lowery and I take a look at a selection of trailers for films being released in the next few weeks, to determine what is going to get us to part with our money. Some look good. Some look very good. And some look depressingly like object examples of how market research determines what gets made.

September 2nd

A Good Old Fashioned Orgy

DW: Experience has taught me that the more an R rated comedy devotes itself to the subject of sex, the more painfully unfunny it becomes. A lot of films try to mitigate this, it seems, by trying to make the movie “really about” relationships, or coming of age…whatever the conservative subtext du jour for raunch comedies happens to be this year elevated to a “very important lesson.” I’d be willing to bet a shiny nickel that, in the end, Jason Sudeikis foregoes the titular orgy in favor of joyful monogamy with the sexy lady real estate broker. I just don’t have the confidence in Hollywood studios to surprise me when it comes to sex. It’s a shame, because there are a lot of folks in this film whose work I enjoy, and I’d like to be surprised.

On the other had the “viral clip” they chose to release for the film was Jason Sudekis and Tyler Labine’s characters playing “gay chicken” in a way that (mostly) managed to be non-homopobic, so maybe there’s hope for the film.

KL: I’m sure wonderful, life-affirming lessons will be learned in between jokes about poop and penises. Snark aside, that’s actually a pretty good cast for a comedy that will at least try to be somewhat transgressive before backsliding into more family-friendly territory when Sudeikis hooks up with that sexy skeleton. This is, after all, a date movie, and the thing you don’t want to hit dating couples with is “go fuck all your friends, it’s better than the situation you’re in now.” But at least Martin Starr and Will Forte are getting some work!

Shark Night 3D

KL: Oh, horror genre, a largely failing 3D film industry turns its lonely eyes to you.

Look at that title. Look at that poster. If you’re like me, you figured “Piranha 3D but with sharks now!” And maybe that was pretty cool.

NOPE! It’s serious, I guess, and hooray! We need more “serious” horror movies about stupid things, like how people (who normally live on land!) can’t seem to escape sharks. Also, the black guy dies in the trailer. And it’s PG-13. What the hell else is there to say?

DW: I’m starting to associate the Rogue Pictures output in my head with Cannon Fims, and not in a good way.

I get that horror and exploitation have had a long history together, so I can’t begrudge the filmmakers the cheap, tacky nature of the film, or the utterly unnecessary 3D component. But reminding me that the people who made this also made a bunch of films that I have no interest in, on top of playing the premise straight, just turns me off entirely. There’s no shame in making a movie just to separate horny, socially awkward teenage boys from their money, but there’s no need to be so blatant about it.

September 9th

Contagion

KL: Hell of a cast, hell of a premise, solid writer-director pairing (Soderbergh and Scott Z. Burns, who’ve done The Informant! together) and striking trailer. Good premise, too, with hints toward a theme most often found in better zombie movies: the thing that makes humanity strong (namely, our connections to each other) is also one of the easiest ways to bring us down.

Yet a hint of concern tickles at the back of my brain, the part that still engages in the meta-gaming guesswork of figuring out why studios release certain movies when. There is a logic to it, a definite strategy, and when I was more on top of these things a September release for something that (on paper) should be prestigious award-bait says “dog” to me. But does that logic still hold, or is my thinking outmoded? I suppose we’ll see.

DW: When I meta-game the logic behind a September release for this, on the other hand, I see more of a calculated assessment that award-givers prefer their disease dramas to be about people nobly dying of real diseases. Releasing something more apocalyptic in tone earlier lets buzz build a little.

It says a lot about the trust I have in Soderbergh and Burns that I find myself really interested in this, despite, in general, not caring for either “end of the world” films or disease dramas. Yes, assembling a pretty much perfect cast helps too, but it’s really that writer-director combo that’s selling me on the concept. Soderbergh really excels when you give him less conventional material to work with, and something like this should be right for him.

Burke and Hare

DW: Didn’t John Landis used to be sort of a big deal? I mean, I know he’s been doing TV pretty consistently for about a couple decades now, but you’d think a new horror comedy by the guy who made American Werewolf in London and Animal House and Blues Brother would be a little more high-profile. Maybe it’s the subject matter. A comedy about real-life Scottish grave robbers doesn’t exactly scream “tentpole” movie, and a cast of people primarily known to those who follow the British comedy scene probably isn’t going to pack them in either.

I follow all those British comedy people, so I’m interested. The setting is interesting, and even though we already had a British horror comedy about grave robbing not long ago with I Sell The Dead this looks different enough to still be entertaining. So entertaining, maybe, but that’s a lot of poop and sex jokes in the trailer, so funny? We’ll have to see.

KL: Man, the “and so did these guys!” cutaway is just brutal. All that’s missing is a record scratching and maybe a guy going “derp!”

Um, I want to like this. Can’t go wrong with Simon Pegg and Tom Wilkinson and so on, and Landis is (or at least was) one of the great American comedy directors, and Young Ken had a strong fascination for the Resurrectionists this movie is based on. But I’ll be blunt: this isn’t moving the needle at all. Could be the forced “comedy” of the trailer’s editing. Could be the stink on this one is impossible to hide.

September 16th

Drive

DW: I’ve been looking forward to this since I heard about it. I like Ryan Gosling a lot, I think he’s highly underappreciated as an actor, and a lot of his best work seems to fly under the radar. Nicolas Winding Refn seems to be slowly working his way into film-nerd conciousness, with the Pusher films and Bronson and Valhalla Rising, and I’m actually pretty damn interested with what he can do with a decidedly American style of film.

What I think works best here in the trailers and promotions we’ve seen so far is the suggestion that this is an action movie for grown-ups. It’s guns and explosions and car chases, but not in the sense of spectacle and mindless destruction that you usually get in summertime films. Everything here feels very deliberate and steely toned. Almost restrained, even, which seems like a shocking thing to say about an American action movie.

KL: The month of crazy-good ensemble casts continues! As Dorian says, this feels like an action movie imported from another, better alternate Earth, where good actors are allowed to chew up scenery and exercise a little something called charisma to build a story’s stakes and make the action more meaningful than, say, Michael Bay movies that resemble Call of Duty fanvids on loop inside a blender.

It’s hard not to be a Ryan Gosling fan, too. He’s teetering on the point of “over-exposure,” but he seems able to pick his projects and do them well, so maybe that’s not such a bad thing. Bring it on, Refn.

September 23rd

Moneyball

KL: Another crazy-good ensemble cast, whose presence raises the same cynical reaction as Contagion! My engagement and interest in baseball might best be described as “limited,” and the broad sketch of the story’s arc doesn’t add much to that, but I will hold the outside hope that what we see in the trailer is really just the first third or two-thirds of the movie before it goes into different territory. I know it’s based on a true story and a book, but like, whatever. I only have so much time in the day.

DW: I am completely at sea with anything to do with baseball, as well as being the guy who doesn’t really quite get the appeal of either Jonah Hill or Brad Pitt. I’m just barely aware enough of Billy Beane and sabermetrics to know how the story ends (SPOILER: it doesn’t really work as well as they hoped it would). I’m still kind of curious about this, for no real reason that I can figure. Maybe I’m just getting old. Sports movies always feel like an old man thing to me.

Abduction

KL: Well that certainly looks like exactly what it is wait WHO is directing this?! Oh man, John Singleton, I apologize to you on behalf of the nation. But only after you apologize for Poetic Justice. (See she’s a POET and her name is JUSTICE.) Also Higher Learning.

DW: Oh, good, I had five bucks on Taylor Lautner in the “first to try to shed the Twilight association” pool. Okay, so he didn’t try very hard, but still…

I want to be dismissive and write this off as an action movie for teen girls, and then I stop and think to myself “why shouldn’t there be action movies for teen girls?” Okay, so, yeah, it’s completely by the numbers and cliché-ridden, and it totally wastes Molina, Isaacs and Weaver. And I think I just talked myself back around to being dismissive.

September 30th

What’s Your Number

DW: I like Anna Faris a lot. Of all the petite blond actresses out there, she’s one of the few who genuinely entertains me. As a comedic actress, she just works brilliantly. And, of course, it never hurts to throw Chris Evans into a film for a little eye-candy.

It’s a shame that the film looks like utterly and totally predictable romantic comedy by the numbers film-making. All the usual notes are here, from the “meet cute” right down to the awkward realization of love at a wedding. That puts this pretty firmly into Redbox territory in our house.

KL: Can I say it was pretty weird to see this trailer immediately after seeing Captain America? It’s like Steve Rogers hit the 21st century, told Nick Fury to fuck off and immediately set to catching up on all the ass he’d missed while trapped in ice.

Otherwise, you know, this is certainly a romantic comedy. The tropes here are so tired that even the jokes about them have become tired, so what can you say? I’ll say this: I hope Faris doesn’t get stuck making movies like these. She’s better than that. Maybe I’ll just go watch Observe & Report again.

Dream House

KL: Well, I like what I’m seeing, even if I think I know where this is all going. I was refreshing myself on director Jim Sheridan’s filmography (man, I liked In America a whole lot!) and found out he directed Get Rich or Die Tryin’¸ which, man, those are some read-throughs I wish I’d seen in person.

Um, anyway. I’m not going to rush to this one but if it gets solid press then I’ll be there.

DW: I wish the trailer had been a little more ambiguous as to what looks like it’s supposed to be a rather significant mid-film plot development, but oh well. Trailers giving away important plot points is pretty much a given at this point. The best we can hope for sometimes is that the entire film doesn’t get cut down to the two-minute, thirty seconds mark.

I’m a sucker for a good haunted house flick, and though this looks like it could run more into conventional thriller territory than ghost territory, I still really want to give it a shot. The set-up is strong, even with knowing the big secret from the get-go, and I’m curious to see where exactly the film goes with it.

Tucker & Dale vs. Evil

DW: As much of a horror fan as I am, there are a couple of genres that just bug the hell out of me. One of them is the “tourist horror” movies, where sophisticated city folks travel to another country, or more usually just anywhere outside a city, and find themselves menaced by the inbred mutant Satanic cannibal serial-killer locals. It’s a stupid cliché, it’s almost always explicitly classist or racist in execution, and it’s lazily unimaginative.

I pretty much fell in love with this movie from the moment I heard about it. For years I’ve been wanting to see a film where the city folks travel to the country and make life miserable for the locals in a horrific fashion, just to see someone, finally, take that damn stupid set-up and do something clever and original with it for just one time.

That the film appears to be both good and funny is just the icing on the cake for me.

KL: OK, that does look like a lot of fun, and how can you not like Alan Tudyk? It’s an inversion of genre expectations so simple and perfect it looks easy.

Two things: One, I am not sold on the necessity of Tyler Labine’s existence. Two, fun as the premise is, I’m suspicious that it can age gracefully over the course of 89 minutes. But I’m ready to be wrong.

Every month Ken Lowery and I watch the trailers for some of the films coming up to see what looks promising and what proves the creative bankruptcy of the film industry. This month we’ve got a remake, a remake, and a couple other remakes.

August 5

The Change-Up

DW: As much as I like Reynolds and Bateman, I’m more than a little taken-back that a film like this even got made. I mean, honestly? A body-switching comedy? I would have hoped that Kirk Cameron had driven the stake into the heart of that particular genre long ago, but I guess, given the current fervor for recycling ideas and concepts at film studios at the moment, its return was inevitable. I can’t tell if grafting the concept onto a raunchy dude comedy is a deliberate calculation to exploit a profitable market or aiming for the hoped for nostalgia for the genre trope amongst the target demographic.

Given the curiously reactionary bent most dude-comedies seem to be taking these days, I’ll be genuinely surprised if this ends on any note other than “family man discovers true value of family and monogamy, party guy discovers true value of family and monogamy.” And it’s that dreadful predictability that really kills any interest I might have for this.

KL: Despite the trailer’s hints at crassness, this looks to be about as safe and predictable as could be managed – a body-swap comedy of old with a little bit of latter-day dude-com raunch. Reynolds and Bateman are just fine, but they both seem to be rocketing toward that gooshy, mediocre center of mainstream, acceptable R-rated comedy. My disappointment with them is their presence has never been a “sure thing” on the big screen—but I always felt they could be, with the right scripts. Seems like that’s not going to happen, though.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes

DW: I was never really a fan of any of the Planet of the Apes films, so I’ve got no nostalgic connection to this. I’m neither affronted that continuity is being violated nor pleased that the thing I remember from when I was a kid is coming back.

Which means that this whole enterprise just rings hollow for me. I can see the “look how epic we are” vibe that the trailers and ads are trying so hard to sell, but mostly I can’t help trying to figure out if that’s anywhere near a reasonably believable estimate of the number of chimps and gorillas in San Francisco. The innate silliness of the premise is ill-matched to the earnest tone they’re taking.

KL: I was not born with the gene that makes me care about this franchise. I don’t hate it, nor do I begrudge anyone’s love and admiration; I simply don’t care. Perhaps it’s all in the timing: I’m just slightly too young to have enjoyed the movies the first time around, and I grew up in a house with cable and pay channels so there really wasn’t a reason to watch the endless repeats of the Apes movies on regular channels. The moment where all the joggers look up and see apes in the trees is cool, but otherwise, nope.

August 10

The Help

KL: Hooray, a feel-good movie about how great white people were in the segregated South!

Emma Stone is great and I love her (though I question the need to cast her in everything that does not star Amanda Seyfried). Viola Davis, Allison Janney, Bryce Dallas Howard – all great. Watching this trailer, I feel the questions Roger Ebert asked about Glory: this story is great. But why do we have to see it through the eyes of white people?

DW: If this were coming out later in the year, I’d guess that the studio was Oscar baiting, as this is the sort of “very important” story, with a feel good tone, that occasionally manages to beat out the stories of brave people nobly and tragically dying that usually win.

It seems like every couple of years we get a movie beating us over the head about how racism is bad that somehow manages to make white folks the heroes. In general, I prefer the more poppy feel of this and Hairspray to the grim seriousness of things like Crash, though I can’t help but feel that the insistence on setting these things in the past is just a convenient way to avoid dealing with contemporary expressions of prejudice. So, points for meaning well, I suppose.

August 12

30 Minutes Or Less

KL: I like everyone and everything going on here (though I find Danny McBride trying in anything but the smallest of doses), so, yeah, probably. It’s an August comedy release so I don’t think there’s a lot of faith in quality on behalf of Sony Pictures, but then maybe they think this’ll be a bigger hit if it doesn’t have to contend with The Hangover Redux. What’s to say? The movie math adds up, and barring horrible reviews I’m on board.

DW: McBride is one of those people that friends keep telling me is really funny, and I’m just not seeing it at all.

Apart from that, nothing really excites me here. I felt Zombieland was pretty over-hyped, and Eisenberg…I don’t dislike him as an actor, but there’s a certain sameyness to all the roles I’ve seen him in. And Swardson’s post-Reno 911 efforts have actually repelled me in their utter lack of anything remotely resembling humor. I think I can pass.

August 19

Conan the Barbarian

DW: I do love me some gladiator/barbarian/sword and sandal movies. I’m not sure that we’ll ever get back to the glory days of the 80s for the cheapie fantasy film, but between this, Immortals, and a few other films on the horizon, it looks like a half-decent attempt is being made.

Pre-teen me would have been thrilled by this. We’ve got a mostly naked lead, monsters, wizards. It’s almost literally a check-list of stuff you need to throw in there to have a barbarian fantasy film. It’s a total throw-back, just with the kind of slick look that a decent budget and modern CGI can allow you. Which isn’t to say that it particularly looks good. I’ve got no illusions as to whether or not this is going to be a good film at all. But I’ll be happy if it entertains me and puts me in a pleasingly nostalgic frame of mind.

And ninety minutes of nearly naked Jason Momoa won’t hurt, either.

KL: This is definitely a barbarian movie. Like Apes, I missed the boat on these—unlike Apes, I might go see this one anyway. Really, any kind of big action epic that’s skewing R and isn’t about superheroes is worth at least a glance from fans of action epics.

I do wonder if the movie will suffer from Protagonist Hyper-Competence. I don’t know where or when it happened, but action heroes of late are just a little too good at what they do, and the question of “can the hero survive this?” is all but gone. Re-watch Die Hard sometime to get a sense of what I mean, and how revolutionary and involving that simple concept is. Conan’s probably just gonna shred ‘em, though.

Fright Night

DW: I’ve never made a secret of my general distaste for vampire films. Mostly I’ve just never cared for their trite clichés and symbolism, being just a step above the even more terrible zombie films. And the “revisionist” vampires, the tortured misunderstood romantic souls, have become even more of cliché, to the point where anyone making a movie or writing a book where vampires are just plain, nasty old monsters, can act as if they’re doing something transgressive and original. One of the few bright spots was the original Fright Night, which I’ve written about before, and it was actually a pretty damn clever use of vampires as a reaction to the overuse of slashers and serial killers that dominated 80s horror, and brought back a healthy dose of eroticism, both hetero (Charlie’s peeping habits) and homo (everything else in the film), to horror movies. It was a knowing, ironic, postmodern take on horror before even that sort of thing got played out.

And now they’ve remade it. Horror remakes frustrate me, as the films that get selected are usually the ones that really don’t need remakes, and the creators of the new versions frequently seem to miss the essential merits of the originals. I want to set aside my fanboyism and my prejudices. I really do. I like pretty much everyone in this cast quite a bit. I want to see them working together and doing something fun and clever.

But right away those hints that the people behind this have staggeringly missed the point creep in. In the original, our hero Charlie was a nerd. He was such a nerd that even Evil Ed, the creepy proto-goth gay kid, made fun of him. Here Charlie is a cool kid and it’s Ed that is shunned for figuring out that Jerry’s a vampire. It’s a pointless reversal. Jerry creeps on women openly here, completely destroying that ambiguously gay cover identity that charged the original. The character of Peter Vincent looks to have been almost completely excised from the advertising, which makes me wonder how marginal a role he’s going to end up having. And the rest looks like your typical action movie with a horror gloss that I see way too much of these days.

Which is an extremely long way to say “nope, I don’t like it.”

KL: I have a deep and abiding love for the original Fright Night, and a deep and abiding dislike of most all horror movie remakes. This particular remake falls somewhere in the queasy middle, where the promise of Colin Farrell as an evil vampire may very well be outweighed by the roteness of the rest of it. The fun thing about the original (beyond all the hetero- and homoerotic tension) is how playful it is, especially in the character of Peter Vincent. But Peter Vincent is a very specific character from a very specific time in cinematic horror, and so Fright Night may very well be a very specific horror movie for a very specific time—as it stands, it sorta looks like Disturbia (which I like!) plus a vampire.

August 26

Colombiana

DW: Okay, I’m down for this. Sure the biggest star is Zoe Saldana, and that’s being generous with our usage of the word “star.” And it’s just another revenge film, hitting the same story beats and tragic back-story that every film of that type invariably gets. But I’ve got a soft-spot for French action films, and this is another team-up by Luc Besson and Olivier Megaton, and even if Transporter 3 was the weakest of those films I still liked it. Sometimes I’ll happily take style over substance.

KL: Zoe Saldana is pretty OK to watch, and this looks like the sort of thing Tony Scott would make if he kept up on his Ritalin. So yeah.

Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark

KL: On the plus side, this movie’s got Guy Pearce, Guillermo Del Toro on script and a flotilla of trailers with some style. But we also have the presence of Katie Holmes and the ol’ “kid crawling under the bed sheets” gag, so maybe there’s not as many fun ideas going on as I’d like.

In recent years I’ve actually crept away from jump-scare-style horror movies, only to find myself craving them anew. I was probably the last person in America to see Paranormal Activity (on DVD, just a few months back!) but now I want more of that, please. Also it’s fun to go to these things with your wife and she screams and jumps a lot. It just is.

DW: I’m actually really looking forward to this, despite Mrs. Tom Cruise. Del Toro I find hit or miss, but relegating him to producer and script-doctor are probably safe bets. And even though I’m generally opposed to horror remakes, the original film was part of that spate of 70s made-for-tv horror films that in general boasted very good scripts…and not much else that was praiseworthy. So taking the core script and touching it up is something I’m surprisingly pretty okay with. I like haunted house films, and the “little creature” genre hasn’t really been touched in awhile, and so melding the two sounds good to me. But mostly I’m happy because someone has made an R rated horror film, about a kid in peril no less, that’s not advertising itself on the basis of gore or brutality, but on mood. I have to get behind that.

Our Idiot Brother

KL: Paul Rudd has all but burned off his good will with a string of forgettable comedies where he plays, well, Paul Rudd. Here at least he’s revisiting a stoner concept not unlike his memorable bit in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, so that’s something. The cast surrounding him is pretty solid, too, but not quite enough to dazzle me into forgetting that there doesn’t seem to be much of a plot to this. Um oh hey Zooey Deschanel and Rashida Jones are a couple. What was I saying again?

DW: As much as I like looking at a scruffy Paul Rudd, and as tolerant as I can be of the “wacky stuff happens” comedies, that there doesn’t really seem to be much of a plot does count against this. I think this is a “wait for the reviews” film, followed by a Redbox trip when it makes it to home video.

August 31

The Debt

KL: Doesn’t raise a pulse at all. Hooray for Helen Mirren and hooray-with-reservations for John Madden, but this is a trailer and premise that fails to grab me on almost every level. It doesn’t help that it’s written by three folks (Matthew Vaughn, Jane Goldman and Peter Straughan) whose collective and individual work has not impressed me. Not for me.

DW: As much as I might otherwise be intrigued by a thriller that takes place in two different periods, with all the potential for interesting storytelling techniques that can offer, this is looking pretty by the numbers. What? A secret from the past has the potential to ruin the reputations of the heroes today? How utterly original.

Every month Ken Lowery and I look at a selection of trailers for movies hitting theaters in the next few weeks to see what catches our eye, what looks fun, what looks good, and what will prompt vitriolic reviews that will be linked to all over the internet and terrify studio PR flacks.

July 8th

Horrible Bosses

DW: I’m probably unreasonably excited about this. With the large and notable exception of Jennifer Aniston, just about every actor involved in this is someone whose past work I’ve enjoyed immensely. There are moments in the trailers where I do laugh out loud, and I’m not the slightest bit apologetic about that. Even with R-rated comedies turning into a thing again, we’re still early enough in that cycle that we’re still getting comedies for adults, not a flood of cash ins on a perceived trend while studios chase an easy buck. And this film in particular suggests that it has less of a reliance on being offensive for the sake of being offensive or gross-out jokes to get that R.

Eh, but really, I guess I’m just down for anything with Charlie Day in it.

KL: I really do like these people. My sincere hope is that the movie will be as potentially mean as it hints at in this trailer: specifically, the “hiring people to kill our bosses” bit has sincere promise. I don’t want Very Bad Things, exactly, but a little touch of Bad Santa would be very welcome in all this. Everyone here is probably too likeable for that to be reality, but, man, look at Colin Farrell’s haircut. That thing is magnificent.

The Ward

KL: I’m a sucker for any horror movie set in an insane asylum, especially one by John Carpenter. His In the Mouth of Madness left a very strong impression on my young mind, and the insane asylum sequences in that film—with kooky John Glover and his reliably crazy hair—are still one of my benchmarks for how to make an asylum setting just creepy as fuck.

The Ward has gotten some pretty bad early reviews, though, most pointing toward a ludicrous third-act twist. Carpenter’s getting old, there’s no way around that. But he had some life in his Masters of Horror contributions, notably Cigarette Burns—which, actually, shares a lot of thematic elements with In the Mouth of Madness.

OK, I’m sidetracking. I will see this movie. I’m not expecting a lot. But Carpenter has earned a little trust from me.

DW: I think Carpenter has earned some trust, too, but apart from his Masters of Horror episodes, his last few films were, to be polite, disappointing. So we’ve waited ten years for something new from him, and it looks like we’re getting a pretty conventional film. I want to be excited about this, but it looks like every other supernatural thriller that’s come out in the last few years. I’m hoping that Carpenter can surprise us, give us something more original than a warmed over ghost story.

I’ll almost certainly end up seeing this as well, but it may just be to satisfy my curiosity.

July 15th

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2

KL: I’m a fan of the books and I’m a fan of (some/most of) the movies. That said, it can be a rocky relationship. Rowling’s gift is the strength of her ideas and characters, and not so much in the art of her prose; this made some of the longer passages in (especially) her later books pretty tedious. Likewise, the changing guard of directors has given us some serious ups and downs; Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, I was ready to give up.

Deathly Hallows, Part 1 won me back, though, and that was far from guaranteed. David Yates directed the aforementioned Prince and likewise forgettable Order of the Phoenix, but somehow turned it around for Hallows Part 1, which was no small feat considering the first half of that book contained some of the most deadly boring and obviously water-treading text in the whole series. Its structure was quite unlike a movie and more like the book it came from; I found myself drowning in it, and not wanting to leave.

So basically, yeah: opening weekend, if I can get past all the crazier Potter fans.

DW: You almost have to feel a little bit sorry for Warner Brothers executives right now, knowing that their biggest cash cow is now over and that they’ve got nothing on deck to replace it.

I still feel about this ultimate outing the same way that I felt about the last few; once the books ended, any interest I had in the films pretty much went away. So I look at the trailers, and ooh and aah over the pretty lights, but I’m still not feeling like this is anything I have any particular interest in seeing.

The husband is already saving up for the inevitable complete series Blu-Ray set, though, so I suppose I’ll watch it then, solely for the purposes of domestic tranquility.

Winnie the Pooh

DW: This looks pretty, but I’m pretty safely beyond the target audience now. I mean, I still watch animated movies, sure. But another sequel to another Disney film just can’t excite me. So, yes, pretty, and maybe I’ll even watch it if it shows up on Watch Instantly or it’s a slow night and I pass a Redbox machine. At the very least it looks better than just about every other film for kids released recently.

KL: Winnie the Pooh fans are not QUITE as crazy as Muppets fans, but they can get there. I’ve got nothing against Winnie and Co., though; I grew up on the Disney renditions just like everyone else my age, and I like the characters well enough.

That is the thing, though: I like the concepts and characters and don’t particularly care to see a story about them, nor do I remember the many stories I saw and read in my youth. I’m basically OK with the whole Hundred Acre Crew (Acrew?) being abstract concepts symbolic of things, rather than actual things themselves. If that makes sense.

July 22nd

Captain America: The First Avenger

KL: I believe we’re fast-approaching the heat death of the superhero genre in blockbuster filmmaking, but that doesn’t mean I can’t try to enjoy some of the scraps being thrown out in the meantime. I do not expect this movie to be great—Joe Johnston is perhaps better than his resumé, but is still far from “great”—and I do not expect it to be admirably self-aware and fun, as that is increasingly verboten in these precious, precious superhero franchises.

But I like Chris Evans. I like Hugo Weaving. My sincere hope is that they can capture some of Cap’s unbending goodness along with some great campiness and memorable set pieces. That’s all I want from any blockbuster, really, and this one seems to have a better chance than other recent offerings (Green Lantern, Thor) to give me that.

DW: I’m in the same boat as you, I think. I like Evans. I like Weaving. I’m a lot more lukewarm than you on Johnston, I suspect, but that’s more to do with feeling like I’ll never get the time I wasted on Jumanji back, ever.

The trailers have been fun, yes, and I’m getting pretty excited, but more for the idea of a fun, unpretentious period action movie. Not so much the super-hero angle. After every other super-hero film I saw this summer being mediocre at best, and after feeling like Thor in particular was more of an extended trailer for the Avengers film, I’m just about at the point where I’m pretty much exhausted with super-heroes on screen. If this can stand on its own and deliver a fun summer punch-em-up movie, great.

I just hope Evans can live up to the legacy of Reb Brown.

July 29th

Cowboys and Aliens

KL: All I knew about this movie project when it was announced was that it was based on a comic book written pretty specifically to be optioned as a film. Spielberg and Favreau took the bait, and here we are.

I assumed, given the name, that it was a tongue-in-cheek comedy. Apparently I wasn’t the only one, because articles were written about the filmmakers and marketers getting frustrated that people were disappointed their movie was not a tongue-in-cheek-comedy, or a fun nod to the kinds of creative acrobatics kids use to incorporate all their toys into playtime.

If the movie were either of those things, I’d be there. But no, it intends to be serious. So I’m out.

DW: I’m still trying to wrap my head around the idea that there are people who thought that a film called Cowboys and Aliens that is actually about cowboys fighting aliens should be treated earnestly.

Even if I can accept that, I can’t muster any enthusiasm for this film. I’m not actually hostile to it, but I’m just completely disinterested in it. This is simply a thing of whose existence I am aware, that’s it.

Attack the Block

KL: “The Inner City vs. Outer Space” is a great tagline.

I have this on-again off-again theory that sci-fi filmmaking can actually be hindered by large budgets; that, if you give someone too much money, they’ll spend too much time on the beep-boops and not nearly enough on what makes the whole deal worth watching. This looks worth watching, and the good buzz behind it only supports that.

And can I just say how great it is that Attack the Block appears to occupy the same physical spaces as the execrable Harry Brown, thereby redeeming them? Well done, Joe Cornish.

DW: The high concept pitch for this really is great. As a setting for an alien invasion flick, it’s surprising that it hasn’t apparently occurred to anyone before. The political allegories that could be drawn alone must have seemed tempted to someone. And it’s nice to see a “kids vs. monsters” movie in which everyone isn’t so blasted white (Super 8, looking at you here…).

I should really be looking forward to this, to be honest, but I’m actually not feeling it. I think I know what it is, too. It’s that it’s being pushed as a “from the people who brought you” type film. If you’re promising me something original, something I haven’t seen before, don’t turn around and then tell me “but it’s just like this other movie you really liked.” Have the courage to stand by your concept, you know?

The Smurfs

DW: It’s way too easy, and tempting, to just rip into how awful this looks. And as someone who is actually a fan of the Smurf comics, I really want to rip into it. But there’s plenty to get into here without going the easy route of internet-cynical “it sucks” levels of discussion.

Peyo’s classic designs have been abandoned for a more conventional CGI creature with disturbing human eyes. The story, of the Smurfs being transplanted to New York, just begs the question of who in their right mind wants to see that story, other than studio executives. And we’ve got celebrities doing the voices of the cartoon characters. These are all symptoms of an inherent laziness on the part of the film-makers, of deliberate choices to go the easy route when making this film and doing something that looks like every other kid comedy being released.

About the only thing I’m curious about is if Neil Patrick Harris, who is best known these days for adult comedies and being gay, will be accepted as the lead in a movie for kids. And, if the movie bombs, if he’s going to the factor blamed. Not the incredibly ugly character designs and uninspired story.

KL: Here’s a quiz for you. Has a teaser trailer for a kids movie that featured deceptively epic imagery and copy ever heralded a good movie? How about a teaser trailer that uses “Wild Thing”? OK, how about a campaign for a kids movie that spins adult truisms (“Shit Happens”) into a slogan (“Smurf Happens”)?

Run those numbers and get back to me.

Crazy Stupid Love

DW: Well, it’s nice to see Steve Carell comfortably settling into a niche with his film roles.

Despite how…familiar this whole thing looks, I am finding myself interested in it, and that’s pretty much just because of Ryan Gosling. I’ve yet to see him in anything that I didn’t think was very good, and as an actor he’s tremendously under-rated. So I’m genuinely curious to see what he can do in a straight-forward comedy role. Everything and everyone else is just, at best, what I can live with.

Although Muse is kind of an odd choice for music for your romantic-comedy trailer. Not sure what that’s about.

KL: Julianne Moore got her mandatory crying over with early in the trailer, so that’s good!

OK, I am being flippant. The Ryan Gosling plot (playboy falls for the one woman who won’t fall for his tricks) is as creaky as an old ship, but Gosling and Emma Stone are both tremendous, so perhaps charisma will save the day. I like Steve Carell just fine, and Julianne Moore is… tolerable. This will probably end up being a DVD watch, if it does happen.

The Devil’s Double

DW: I’m intrigued by the film for pretty much one reason. They could have taken a story that touches on contemporary history and gone with a political angle, but instead the film-makers look to be focusing on the “true crime” angle. It’s a much more original and interesting approach to the material, to give audiences what is essentially a gangster film. Looking at the rulers of Iraq as a decadent criminal cartel instead of despots is so much easier to contextualize and a comparison that seems so apt when it’s presented that way.

KL: Oh man, yes. I saw this trailer for the first time a month or two ago and fell in love with it immediately. I couldn’t quite put my finger on why, but Dorian, I think you have it: the “true crime” angle, the luridness of it, the spectacle and decadence and the eventual arc—that all crime stories must obey—into ruin and oblivion. Lovely.

Every month, Ken Lowery and I look at the trailers for some of the high profile and more interesting sounding films coming out in the next few weeks. Some look good. Some don’t.
With the summer box office race moving into full swing, it’s probably a safe bet which most of these will be…

June 3rd

X-Men: First Class

DW: It’s probably pretty telling that it’s only been eleven years since the first X-Men film was released and already the franchise and already the franchise is being rebooted. Or “reimagined” or “given a prequel” or whatever term film marketers are using to try and sell this as anything other than an attempt to restart the X-Men franchise after the critical panning of the last film and the perceived financial underperformance, out of fear that admitting that they want a fresh slate might alienate comic fans. Who are going to see the film anyway, on opening weekend, because that is what they always do.

As a comic fan, I can’t say that I find this particular line-up of characters, outside of Beast and Emma Frost, particularly noteworthy. I mean, honestly, Banshee and Havok? Those are your big name characters? You’ve actually dredged up Azazel for your film? These are baffling character choices. And the move back to the 60s as the time period strikes me more as an attempt to cash in on the perceived demand for period dramas than as aAnd none of the trailers really sell me on the action. Lots of shots of Professor X and Magneto brooding and talking and some CGI subs and ships blowing up. It’s all a bit underwhelming, really. I want ludicrous displays of silly powers and improbable set-pieces out of an X-Men film. Not something this pedestrian.

KL: I watched Megamind the other night and it was pretty OK. Not bad, not great, mostly forgettable but possessing some great concepts and killer lines. The thing that struck me is that the structure and story of it – as with almost any unbranded superhero movie (Hancock, for example) – would just about never appear in an adaptation work like this. Marvel and DC are busy building franchises, damn it, and barring the screenwriter or director’s ability to color creatively within those lines, the strait-jacket requirements of franchise-building will keep branded superhero movies within very safe guard rails.

Which seems to be the case with X-Men: First Class, which by appearances shares a title and little else with writer Jeff Parker’s fun, fresh comic series. I hear tell the movie’s more fun than the trailer indicates, but it is such a deadly serious trailer, indicating yet again that real fun – not quips, not lame recurring jokes – is verboten in works like these. (One of the reasons Iron Man 2 was so much less than its predecessor is that it was a bunch of unlikeable personalities slogging through depressing storylines, rather than awesome people kicking ass and being charismatic.)

Oh, sure, this is ostensibly a prequel to the other X-Men movies, which were fairly serious, but nothing about that continuity makes sense, so why should the tone have to match up? Maybe it’ll be a good enough time, but the trailer sings “missed opportunity” to me. Not that that’ll stop the movie from making it rain.

June 10th

Super 8

DW: When I described this to friends as “Steven Spielberg presents Steven Spielberg Movies: The Movie” I was being flippant, but that is honestly the reaction I’m having every time I see the trailer. It feels like such a deliberate riff on Spielberg’s 80s “sensawonduh” type of films that words like “homage” and “pastiche” feel inadequate. “Ego stroking” may be more on the mark.

Apart from that, though, this still doesn’t really grab me. Abrams is one of those creators who has garnered a following, but I haven’t really connected with or enjoyed most of his work. A lot of the same marketing tactics that went into Cloverfield seem to be at play here, suggesting that the primary tactic is to turn this into the kind of event where you feel obligated to see the movie just to figure out what the hell all these commercials and ads are supposed to be referencing. I’d much prefer it if they gave me a reason to see the film other than cool explosions and getting unimportant questions answered.

KL: I’ve never gotten the hang of Abrams. I did not care for Lost, I was mildly entertained by Star Trek, and he’d have to pay me to watch Cloverfield.

And boy, Dorian, was that Cloverfield marketing off-putting. “Come find out what the monster behind the door looks like!” is just the absolute wrong way to get people to check out a sci-fi/horror/thriller thing; it fundamentally misunderstands the genre, and Super 8 does seem to carry some of that mystique.

But look, I like Poltergeist. I like early ‘80s Spielberg. I like Kyle Chandler an awful lot. As with Star Trek, I will walk into this movie asking–wanting–Abrams to prove me wrong about him.

The Trip

DW: Two British comedians that most Americans have either never heard of or only know as “that guy” go on a cross-country trip where they sit around in restaurants telling jokes and doing impressions. It’s…a novel idea for a film, very My Dinner with Andre for the new millennium. But enjoying it is pretty much dependant on you being a fan of Coogan and Brydon. If you’re not, this is probably going to be an insufferably dreadful film, but if you’re not, why would you even bother to go see this in the first place? It’s a very specific film for a very specific audience.

Hell, I’m part of that audience, and even I find the idea of listening to the two of them riff off each other kind of tedious.

KL: It’s Michael Winterbottom directing Steve Coogan. Can I go ahead and buy my tickets now?

Troll Hunter

KL: “Found footage” raises a red flag and prominent blurbing from Ain’t It Cool News raises another, but, man, I have to say, I’m kind of charmed by that huge troll. Maybe “charmed” isn’t what they’re going for, but it’s a three-headed… troll, and it looks like it’s at least partially miniatures and not just CGI, and oh my God do I forget how much I miss practical effects. They’re like seeing a ‘70s skin flick after a decade of accepting terrible breast implants as the norm.

Um, so anyway. Yes, please.

DW: I’m right with you on the “found footage” gimmick being a disincentive. But on the other hand, yeah…trolls. Really would never have seen that coming.

Between this and Rare Exports I’m really starting to wonder what other interesting stuff is going on film-wise in Northern Europe.

June 17th

Green Lantern

DW: On a basic level, I’m just glad I get to see a movie where Ryan Reynolds runs around in a skin-tight outfit for a good ninety minutes or so.

More broadly, I think pitching this as a big epic space opera, with lots of “look at all the neat aliens” scenes is probably a good thing. Kids like that sort of stuff, and it would be good to make a super-hero adventure film that’s more concerned with entertaining kids than with getting adult men to shell out nine bucks each. The flaw there, though, is that what we see of the villains is less than inspiring. A guy with a big head and giant space slime don’t really seem appropriately epic threats for a space opera. Still, as long as there’s overwrought super-hero melodrama and preposterous action scenes, I suspect I’ll probably be happy.

KL: My wife shares your feelings re: Reynolds and skin-tight outfits, Dorian.

I do so hope they stick with “space epic,” because that will at least break us out of the mold I talked about above with First Class. I would like to see more amazing, daring things in superhero movies, especially if you’re talking about DC’s premiere space cop. He’s a cop in space, show me some crazy alien space shit, even if that means using so much CGI this may as well be an animated feature film.

Mr. Popper’s Penguins

DW: Boy, Jim Carrey is looking a little rough these days.

That and the unwelcome reminder of Vanilla Ice’s existence are all that are really sticking with me from this. It’s a children’s film with lots of cute CGI creatures that will take a fair amount of liberties from the source material and end on a heartwarming lesson about the true meaning of family. Kids will probably like it and adults will mostly suffer through it and hope that their kids don’t get the jokes that the film-makers threw in to try and convince people that no, really, adults can enjoy the film too.

KL: I had that same feeling, when you see that sequence of him dancing with the penguins: that I could almost see it on his face, him really thinking about what he was doing as an actor. And this just a scant six months after I Love You Phillip Morris, which was wild and inventive and fun. Not every script can be a winner and I know everyone’s got bills to pay, but yeesh.

June 24th

Cars 2

KL: Fact one: Pixar, on the whole, makes terrible trailers. Which is pretty weird, considering how great their shorts are. Fact two: Cars is probably the least-well-liked Pixar movie out there for people over the ages of 10, because it is Doc Hollywood but with talking cars.

Fact three: This still looks like a mess. Really, truly, I am a Pixar booster, but I can’t figure out what the hell is going on here. Lightning is racing in Japan, but also there’s some mixed identity stuff about being a secret agent? Sure, why not. Maybe it’s fun, but I have this queasy feeling now that we seem to have entered Pixar’s sequel phase. Everyone in the world loved Toy Story 3 to death, except me; I felt it said absolutely nothing the previous two films did not say. That still makes it a cut above most other animated offerings, but all the same, higher quality of work breeds higher expectations.

DW: Cars was the only Pixar film I never bothered to see. Not only because all the trailers spelled out, in excruciating detail, that “small towns are where the real values are” storyline we’ve seen thousands of times before. But also because I knew I would never be able to stomach over an hour of Larry the Cable Guy’s voice.

This at least looks slightly more inventive than the first film, even if it’s basically just Gotcha with creepily anthropomorphized cars. And what look to be sight gags about the bathroom habits of same.

Yeah, still feeling like I can live with not seeing this.

Bad Teacher

KL: The problem here is I don’t buy Cameron Diaz in this role. I guess it’s lazy thinking, but the title can’t but make me think of Bad Santa, which a role Billy Bob Thornton owned and then some. Diaz, while charismatic (I guess, having not seen one of her movies in many a year), just can’t do “hilariously terrible human being,” which should make her final-act transformation all the less engaging.

Jake Kasdan, I still have a soft spot in my heart for Zero Effect. But you have done nothing but a whole lot of blah since then.

DW: There’s a knack for telling stories about fundamentally unlikeable people. The British can do it. American television can do it. American film…eh, not so much, and certainly not in an upbeat comedy starring that perky Cameron Diaz. Most of the antics here are more of the “cute rude” variety, not anything really horrifying or uncomfortable. If you’re going to make a film called Bad Teacher I expect something that’s going to make me marvel at how terrible a human being can be, not an uninspired comedy with a what is almost surely going to be a “very important lesson for us all” ending.

Well, that or a documentary with lots of cable news talking heads ranting about greedy teachers wanting health benefits.

A Better Life

KL: Though the name and imagery make this out to be feel-good bait, I appreciate that this is a relatively big movie directed by a not-terrible director that, by God, does not have a white lead. Or worse, a white lead who is our entry point into the lives of a minority group. I will file this one under “cautiously optimistic.”

DW: Yeah, what Ken said. Under normal circumstances, this would not be for me. The tone of that trailer veers a little too far towards that Oscar-baiting self-regard that frustrates me in dramas, but who the characters are is so far outside the accepted norms for that kind of film that I’m strangely glad the movie even exists.

June 29th

Transformers: Dark of the Moon

KL: Transformers: Revenge Of the Fallen was one of those times I felt like a film was trying to “assault my senses.” People usually use the phrase “assault your senses” to denote something good, or at least engaging. Not so for TF:ROFL; it was a numbing, bewildering and queerly saddening experience, much like watching a super-advanced robot try to feign human emotions like love and tenderness to the tune of $200 million. That’s how I think of it now; back when the movie came out, I likened Michael Bay to a five-star general who sees the audience as an enemy to attack with an arsenal of special effects. I think both metaphors are apt.

The “Apollo moon landing” trailer is actually offensive to me, but offensive in the way that it makes me tired rather than angry. That spot’s budget was probably bigger than the budget of some of last year’s best films. And sure, why not mine a truly great moment in American history for your bullshit talking robots movie?

As a critic once said, I have no problem with Michael Bay’s claim that he’s making movies for teenage boys. It’s that other directors (from James Cameron to Sam Raimi) make movies for teenage boys, too, and their movies aren’t mindless, soulless, idiotic exercises in CGI and Dutch angles. There’s nothing wrong with bombast. There is something wrong with bombast that is way, way stupider than it needs to be.

DW: It actually saddens me that in all likelihood every single human adult who has seen these trailers knows that this movie is going to be stupid and terrible and incomprehensible, and yet a sizeable number of them will go see it anyway. (I don’t blame children for wanting to see it; children have terrible taste.)

I knew all I needed to know about this film when I heard that Bay had taken out the racist illiterate robots and replaced them with NASCAR robots with mullets and trucker caps. Dude is straight up trolling us all.

Every month, Ken Lowery and I take a look at the trailers for upcoming films to see which ones look like hits, which ones look like misses, and which ones you barricade your doors against.

May 6th

Hobo With A Shotgun

DW: Remember back when The Simpsons was good, and there was an episode set in a rock concert, and two random teens had a conversation about how they didn’t even know whether or not they were being sarcastic? That’s pretty much the reaction I’ve got watching this. Now, normally, I’m all for a bit of ironic distance, especially when it comes to the “so bad it’s good” school of film-making. But we’ve been getting an awful lot of this over the last few years, and too much of a good thing is still, at the end of the day, too fucking much of something. And while I’m happy that a pastiche of Death Wish is largely avoiding the grim earnestness of Harry Brown, and it’s good to know that Rutger Hauer is still getting work, I have to go with “Jesus, ENOUGH with this shit already” as my ultimate reaction.

KL: Hey look, another Grindhouse trailer (in some markets) turned into a feature-length movie! That worked out so well last time, why not do it again?

OK, yes, there has been some good buzz around this, but you have to consider the source: people who are actively seeking out screenings of the movie and who are, shall we say, predisposed to like it. Maybe the whole title-as-premise thing is a Rorschach, so if you like it you’re going to like the movie, and vice versa. Then again, I wanted to like Machete, but then I actually went and saw the thing.

Jumping the Broom

DW: What we have here is a pretty standard, to the point of cliché, romantic comedy about family conflicts threatening to disrupt a couple’s plans. It just happens to be two black families this time, with jokes and character nods that are aimed quite specifically at an African-American audience. I’m all for that, but this sort of obvious, tired comedy just isn’t my thing. Still, it seems like major studios seem to be waking up to the fact that there’s more money to be made by narrowcasting their films like this.

KL: I wonder if Loretta Divine gets tired of playing the mom at weddings and funerals?

Something Borrowed

DW: Another in a long line of films about pretty white people getting into romantic misunderstandings that would have been instantly cleared up if they just fucking talked to one another. There’s nothing original here, there’s nothing clever here. Outside of Krasinski, there’s not even an appealing cast here, and even Krasinski is more a matter of taste.

Some films just seem to exist for the sake of existing. This looks like one of them.

KL: There are quotas to be fulfilled, Dorian, and Something Borrowed is this year’s federally mandated romantic comedy starring Kate Hudson. I guess “missed chances” is a slightly more mature tack to take with romantic comedies over the usual “on a dare”/”misunderstanding” shtick, but unless the ticket you buy for this is made of solid gold hand jobs, I think I’m going to pass.

Thor

DW: I’m more than a little curious to see what “civilian” reaction to this ends up being. I wouldn’t consider Thor one of the A-List characters for Marvel Comics, more of a reliable character that people familiar with comics know and respond to. He’s not a Spider-Man or a Wolverine, where people who have never read a comic in their life actually have an opinion about the character and buy merchandise featuring him. You pretty much have to be in the club already to give a damn about Thor.

I also have to say that none of the various trailers have gotten me particularly excited. Oh, it looks like a passable, probably even fun super-hero action romp. But I haven’t seen anything yet that makes me feel like I need to see the movie. And the buzz I do feel like I’ve seen hasn’t really felt like its focused on the film. I’ve gotten the impression that I need to see this if I want to understand the Avengers film. I’ve been told that I shouldn’t see this because it is apparently the worst thing ever to have Idris Elba play a Norse god (which back-fired, because telling me that Elba is playing Heimdall makes me think that Heimdall is going to be a much more interesting character than Thor). And I know plenty of people who are looking forward to seeing Chris Hemsworth with his shirt off. But it doesn’t feel like I’m being told that I’ll want to see a Thor movie because it’s going to be really good and entertaining.

KL: I’ve read my share of superhero comics, but I’ve never gotten into the Avengers. They don’t seem to make much sense thematically, unlike my childhood favorite X-Men, who had a common cause and persecution to unite them, and I find most of their good characters to be more appealing in solo series. Thor is, to me, the also-ran of also-rans, a fun concept that is just terminally uninteresting when forced to stand on its own two feet.

All of which is about Thor but isn’t really about Thor, if you follow me. It could be fun; early buzz is good and I’m always open to being wrong. But aside from a fresh chance to hear Kat Dennings crack wise, I am not interested.

The Beaver

KL: Soooooo many questions.

You are stunned into silence by the rightness of what I say, by the full comprehension of the staggering height and quantity of hurdles this film must jump before it can even approach “good.” Thus concludes our brief conversation.

DW: Let’s not completely brush aside the Mel Gibson issue, though, because given that the movie appears to have been partly funded by a nation that banned books by Jewish authors from its universities in 1999, eyebrows are going to be raised. And while the Lars and the Real Girl comparison seems apt, Ryan Gosling hadn’t spent the last couple of years before that was released making sure everyone associated him with racist, anti-Semitic, misogynistic drunken outbursts.

Some of the previews I’ve read suggested that the entire point of this movie is to rehabilitate Mel Gibson’s public image by casting him as this broken man in need of redemption. And the comparisons between Gibson’s personal situation and his character’s appear too on-the-nose to be entirely coincidental. Which means that regardless of its quality, whether it succeeds or fails is going to be seen in many quarters as a statement on whether or not audiences are willing to forgive Gibson for being an asshole in public.

Now, setting all that aside, man, do I not need to see this film after having the trailer spell out every thing that happens.

May 13th

Bridesmaids

KL: I like just about everything going on here. I like all the actresses I’m familiar with (and have high hopes for the unknowns, given the company they’re keeping). I like Paul Feig in the director’s chair. I like that this is a big comedy with a big push and six female leads.

And boy oh boy, is Universal Pictures aware of it. The early quotes on the posters loudly declare “CHICK FLICKS DON’T HAVE TO SUCK,” indicating the marketing is fully aware of the accepted truth that women don’t go see movies even if a female-fronted movie blows out the box office once a year or so, to the surprise and dismay of everyone. I sincerely hope that in a couple weeks we’ll be reading about the shocking success of Bridesmaids and “what it means for Hollywood” for the umpteenth time.

DW: Yeah, they really want to sell this as the female equivalent of something like Knocked Up or The Hangover, don’t they? And I actually have no problem with that, that’s the kind of purely mercenary financial decisions that results in scripts that otherwise would have been ignored getting made. And there is a lot of people here who I’ve seen before and liked, including a curious number of British tv people which is…surprising, I guess, as having Matt Lucas and Chris O’Dowd just show up for no apparent reason in bit parts is pretty unexepected.

I’m pretty curious, as it does look funny, but I kind of suspect that I’m only curious enough to rent it through Netflix or Redbox. It looks funny, and I like the idea, but man, they’re pushing that one particular angle so hard I’m starting to get a bit suspicious.

Priest

KL: Paul Bettany/Scott Stewart powers active! Were you a fan of Legion? Look no further; Priest likewise looks to blend light religious overtones (just enough for flavor, not enough to count as actual theology) with crazy action. Probably no more than six months ago I would’ve dismissed this outright, and some part of me still says that’s the wise course of action, but whatever. Good trash is still good, and I like the bit in the trailer where Karl Urban conducts an actual symphony of destruction. I expect I will see this the day it shows up on Netflix Watch Instantly, which should be a year from now.

DW: I did like Legion…or rather, I wanted to like Legion, and found that while I enjoyed watching it, I could never really find myself overlooking the many problems the script had and the terrible ending that felt like it was mandated by bad reviews of early screenings.

But as Ken says, good trash is still good, and this looks very watchable, if not actually a high point of cinema or the careers of anyone involved in this. I’m even willing to overlook my usual adversion to any films that even look like they might hint vaguely at the notion of being about vampires, because this is just sci-fi/horror cheese.

May 20th

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides

DW: I really was pretty certain that I did not want to see another Pirates of the Caribbean movie. But despite myself I find that I’m looking forward to this. That the characters who had more than worn out their welcome by the third installment are gone is probably one of the reasons why. That the film appears to have a much stronger narrative hook than the last two films probably helps as well. Yeah, there’s a certain sense of “status quo successfully maintained” going on, with Jack yet again trying to recover his stolen ship, but I’m prepared to accept that in a soft reboot. The first film in the series was good because it was fun, and it straddled the line between adult and kid fare very well. I’m getting a strong sense that those elements have been maintained here, but that the film is still different enough from the earlier films to avoid many of the usual sequel problems.

KL: Movie Math is failing me on this one. No more Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightly: Yay! Deep focus on Jack Sparrow: Hmmmm. Ian McShane as Blackbeard: Double yay! Directed by Rob Marshall, known for flashy fun (Chicago) and tone-deaf flops (Memoirs of a Geisha, Nine): Hmm. Barring terrible word-of-mouth I might find myself in line for this. The first Pirates was one of the most surprisingly fun times I’ve had at a blockbuster in years; I hope against hope to recapture that feeling.

May 26th

The Hangover Part 2

KL: Second verse, same as the first. The first Hangover is just plain fucking hysterical, which only adds to the challenges of a sequel. Humor is spontaneous and unexpected; the quality of The Hangover was both those things, and now everyone expects the sequel to be just as good, or better, or possibly far, far worse. No element of surprise, in other words, compounded by a trailer cut to show you that these movies are very similar indeed.

Nonetheless, I could watch those three guys riff and yell at each other for hours and never get tired of it, so I expect that short of catastrophic failure I will be entertained. Is it as fresh as the first movie? By its nature it can’t be. But I don’t care.

DW: Yep, that definitely looks like a sequel to The Hangover, all right.

This really will come down to the appeal of the cast and the ability of the script-writers to give us new situations. On the cast angle, we’re probably good. Almost everyone here is appealing, or at least is appealing enough to get through this film. On the script side…I don’t expect sequels to diverge too far from their originals, and several of the gags suggested by the trailer feel like variations on ones from the first film. So, we’ll see. I hope I’ll be surprised, but oddly, I won’t be surprised if I’m not.

May 27th

The Tree Of Life

KL: It’s probably pointless to try and approach this movie from a linear/narrative perspective; the best I can do is sort of vaguely wave at it and go “it looks like it’s about the cosmic and the mundane and how these two things are the same thing, maybe. Also, Sean Penn is sad.” But that’s flippant and vague, and Terrence Malick deserves better. I don’t know if the trailer/marketing circus is fair to this kind of movie; either you see it all or you don’t. I’m keeping myself in a black box until I can get to a theater.

DW: I feel like I should like Malick more than I do, because he’s one of the handful of directors who really seems to get that films are not just recordings of plays. They’re beautiful to look at, but the ultimately seem to leave me cold. And the visuals of this film look to be incredibly apt and well-chosen, and he’s assembled a very good cast, although they don’t seem to have been asked to do much other than stand around for Malick to film them. But that’s probably more the fault of the trailer. It must be hard to capture a film that doesn’t concern itself with plot or narrative and sum it up in two minutes. So you pretty much have to sell it on the cast and director. If you like Malick, you’ll probably like this. I may get around to it eventually.

Another of the items that got left with me, a page from the 1996 Hepcats Ashcan.
I had pretty much entirely forgotten that Hepcats ever existed…

Every month, Ken Lowery and I look at the trailers for some of the films hitting theaters in the next few weeks, to see which look good, which look bad and which call into question the fundamental principles of the universe with their very existence. This month, we’re joined by a selection of writers from the Fake AP Stylebook, authors of Write More Good, available in stores this coming Tuesday, April 5th (order your copy now!).

April 1^st

Hop

Mike Sterling: Tossing out the blurb “FROM THE DIRECTOR OF ALVIN & THE CHIPMUNKS” partway through this trailer is almost redundant, as HOP appears to essentially be, in part, the same movie, only narrowed down to one rabbit versus three chipmunks: talking CGI animal freaks out live action human, said animal interferes in lead human’s romantic life, animal seeks success in human rock ‘n’ roll industry, and also, poop is eaten. True, in HOP the poop is in the form of delicious, delicious jellybeans, but you see that rabbit pinch off a bean-loaf right onscreen, so c’mon, that still counts as poop-eating.

One “original” element to this iteration of the story is a layering of a “disappointing the family to fulfill one’s destiny” subplot, which, by the way, you should note the use of the quotes around the word “original” back there. The other is that it appears the human eventually enters the fully-CGI homeland of the rabbit, which looks like it could be fairly entertaining, but you’d still have to make it through the rest of the movie first.

Maybe a rental, skipping through the predictable boring stuff and going right to the bits with James Marsden pretending to react to a world full of cartoon animals. That’s gotta be good for a laugh or two.

Dr. Andrew Kunka: When I was three years old, I got a stuffed bunny rabbit for Easter named Hop-Hop, and he was my constant companion through childhood. The preview for Hop looks to answer a question I have lingering from my childhood: what if Hop-Hop came to life and tried to fuck a human woman, like my mom?

Hop looks like a mess, and every trailer seems to present a completely different movie. One appears to be a delightful interspecies romantic comedy. Another looks like a generational conflict between a father (The Easter Bunny), who wants his son (E.B.) to follow in the family business, while the son wants to find fame and fortune as a rock drummer. And finally, it also seems to be a Marxist allegory where the chick workers, led by their outrageously accented leader, Carlos, fight against their brutal bunny oppressors. None of those is a movie I would want to see.

Also, E.B. apparently shits jelly beans. Who the hell thought that was a good idea? And are they shit flavored?

Rubber

Josh Krach: Rubber is a dadaist horror-comedy about Robert, a living car tire with super powers who wanders the Southwest, exploding the heads of anyone in his path. That’s enough high concept to crush a dozen Zach Snyder flicks. Can any film, much less a low-budget indie, hold up under all that weight? I suspect not, but the trailer’s got moxie, and does a really good job of making me root for what I hope is a plucky little weirdo flick. Rubber could be turn out to be one of those genuine cult classics like Evil Dead 2.

And if it’s not, there’s still every chance it will live on for eternity in the form of nerd merchandise, internet memes, and decades-too-late comic-book adaptations. If nothing else, I can’t wait to see how the cosplayers pull this one off.

Mike Sterling: The big gag in the Rubber trailer is that it starts off almost looking like a whimsical, almost Pixar-esque movie, where a tire comes to life and hits the road, looking for purpose and adventure…at least until the tire telekinetically kills a cop. It’s a bizarre premise that, from all appearances, is played almost completely straight. I suspect the ultimate entertainment value and success of the film hinges on its ability to keep that straight face, contrasting the peculiar star character with its crime story.

I have no idea if the novelty value of the premise can sustain itself for the full runtime of the film, but frankly, just out of desperation for seeing something, ANYTHING that’s unique and strange and possibly wonderful on the big screen, I’m willing to give this flick a shot. Definitely worth seeing in a theatre, but will probably end up having to rent it, because God forbid any of the local multiplexes show one less crappy 3D kids movie to make room for something new.

Source Code

Dorian Wright: Duncan Jones earned a lot of goodwill from me for Moon. It’s so rare to find a science-fiction film that’s actually built on concept and character, instead of being just another action movie, only in space. That it was a very good film, with an exceptional performance from Sam Rockwell, were just bonuses.

This is not the slightest bit what I thought his next film might be like. I’m hoping that this is yet another example of a film’s marketing and execution being off, and this isn’t just another in the string of “alternate reality” films we’ve been getting lately with some action sequences and explosions throw in. But, even if it is just that, I think I’m okay. As I said, Jones earned a lot of goodwill.

Of course, it also has Jake Gyllenhaal in it. That’s pretty much almost never a bad thing.

Ken Lowery: Well, this is a no-brainer. I like everyone involved with this; the only hang-up is writer Ben Ripley, who has two of the lesser Species titles in his four-title resume. Early reviews are very good, so there’s that.

Two things stick out to me: One, it’s a very good time to have a solid science fiction pitch with some heart to it. Inception made a bajillion dollars and won critical acclaim and The Adjustment Bureau has decent reviews and has nearly doubled its money in just under a month. Wouldn’t you know it, people like being dazzled by big ideas and human emotion.

Second, I’m glad someone remembered that Jake Gyllenhaal can act. Yeah, he’s a pretty face; he’s also the guy that knocked four roles straight out of the park with Brokeback Mountain, Proof, Jarhead and Zodiac. Welcome back, Jake!

April 8^th

Arthur

Matt Wilson: Based on the trailers I’ve seen, this is essentially the exact plot of the original, 1981 “Arthur,” with, obviously, a cast change–Helen Mirren for John Gielgud is an even trade, Greta Gerwig is a big step up from Liza Minelli and Russell Brand is basically a methed-up Dudley Moore anyway–and, most notably, very prominent Batman and Star Wars scenes which don’t seem to contribute to plot or character development in any measurable way. They’re just in there because, hey, Batman! And hey, Star Wars. Truly, we have reached the pinnacle of Nerds Ruining Everything.

Andrew Weiss: The folks behind the Bedazzled remake must be feeling much better about themselves right now.

Hanna

Doctor Andrew Kunka: When I first saw Joe Wright’s adaptation of Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement, I thought to myself, “I would really like this movie better if that girl were an unstoppable killing machine.” At the time, I meant Vanessa Redgrave, but I guess the idea could also work with Saoirse Ronan as well.

Seriously, though, this trailer for Hanna pushes a lot of the right buttons for me. The lone, highly trained assassin going up against the CIA recalls the Jason Bourne movies, and Cate Blanchett should fill the Joan Allen role well. Also, the plot has a kind of comic book pedigree, with echoes of Wolverine and the Cassandra Cain Batgirl.

While I didn’t care much for Wright’s adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, I admire his masterful adaptation of Atonement, one of my favorite novels of the past decade. Hanna, however, looks like a significant departure from those movies, but I hope he can take a page out of the Bourne playbook and combine compelling characters with an attractive plot.

Dorian Wright: I’m not familiar with Wright’s work, but I am a fan of stylized, European action films and thrillers, and Wright is certainly channeling that vibe here. The “girl who kicks ass” theme is one that’s become terribly degraded over the last few years with dumb, exploitative films that think putting a weapon into a little girl’s hands is some bold feminist statement in and of itself, but films like this, that appear to treat the material with intelligence and some sophistication, show that there’s still some merit to it.

It looks like The Crimson Rivers mixed with a distaff, juvenile Bourne Identity, and I can dig that.

Your Highness

Anna Neatrour: I thought Pineapple Express was hilarious and it actually managed to be somewhat surprising with its sudden shift into third act violence. So I am looking forward to this movie just because it stars James Franco and Danny McBride. I’m not sure how commercially successful a high fantasy action comedy pastiche is going to be, but Danny McBride is as hilarious as you might expect and even Natalie Portman manages to come off as tolerable.

I’ll happily watch this to experience Danny McBride’s horrible British accent and Franco’s mugging, yet I am fearful that this will become some sort of horrible nerd quote machine for fantasy fans who have decided to move on from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Ken Lowery: As I said when I first found out about this movie’s existence, “I will happily pay money to watch James Franco, Danny McBride, Justin Theroux, Zooey Deschanel and Natalie Portman do some LARPing.” That opinion still holds.

And as goofy as the concept is, there’s a lot of serious weight behind Your Highness, specifically in the writer/director department; director David Gordon Green and writers McBride and Ben Best are all Eastbound and Down alumni. I do not expect Your Highness to reach the heights (or depths?) of that caustically hilarious show, but I expect McBride to be McBride and I expect to laugh my damn ass off at these guys playing dress-up.

Anyway, that line Theroux has about why women might want to be with him is worth the price of admission all by itself.

April 15^th

Atlas Shrugged, Part One

Andrew Weiss: Q: Who is John Galt?

A: That dude from One Tree Hill, apparently.

Finally, the right-wing rebuttal to Thomas the Tank Engine the world has been waiting on for years! Seriously, there are a shitload of train scenes in this thing. Maybe it’s supposed to be (obviously and clumsily) symbolic but it gave me the impression that the director really wanted to make an IMAX documentary titled Rail Journeys Across America and realized they only way he could fund it was to pander to the Tea Party crowd. Ironic, considering that the federal subsidies which keep the railroad business afloat are a favorite target of that set.

I also have to wonder who the intended audience is for this is. Is the studio hoping for a “Passion effect,” counting on die hard objectivists to buy multiple tickets out of a desire to stick it to the Hollyweird liberals? The problem with that logic is that the Tea Party rank and file would rather drop fifteen bucks to see Hop or Fast Five than to park their asses in a seat watching rich folks act like the same elitist dickwads they accuse liberals of being.

Ken Lowery: I have seen the rumblings on this, from the usual corners, and it’s about what you’d expect. Those of us who are not Rand converts are “scared” of this movie, because it will show us for the cowardly parasites blah blah blah you know the routine by now. It’s the kind of zealous self-righteousness that only the truly insecure can muster; likewise the simple certainty that anyone who isn’t an immediate convert when exposed to The Truth is simply lying to themselves and to others.

But nevermind. Rand scholars (both pro- and con-) can’t seem to make up their mind about whether Atlas Shrugged the novel is meant to be taken as a novel, or as a screed, or neither, or both; a movie that hopes to succeed in mainstream theatres has no luxury to quibble with whether or not it wants to be entertaining. This thing will have to perform to earn dollars, and that’s one thing it just can’t do. I expect this will barely register at the box office or in serious critical circles, which will only confirm that the rest of us are scared parasites too afraid to face up to blah blah blah.

Scream 4

Josh Krach: Hey, has anyone seen Neve Campbell around? Remember her? I could have sworn I saw her right—oh, there she is!

Full disclosure: Any time it’s on the tube, I’ll stop and watch the first Scream, a slick American giallo for the Joss Whedon generation that deconstructs the slasher film even as it milks all the cliches for maximum tension. I even sat through both sequels in the theaters, despite sharply diminishing returns. I’m squarely in the wheelhouse for this franchise, is what I’m saying, and even I couldn’t tell you who this movie is supposed to be for.

If the point of Scream is to take shots at film horror’s state of the art, well, nothing in the trailer suggests Number Four is taking on the torture porn, J-horror retreads, or squicky paranormal romance we’ve been getting for the last decade. If the point is to make more money, wouldn’t the producers have been better served by the sort of bottom-up, PG-13 reboot that attracts younger audiences?

Ken Lowery: I have a long, complicated history with this franchise. For a very long time I was categorically against it; while I do think Wes Craven is just damn good at his job, I rebelled against the notion of meta-commentary becoming the new horror. I just plain didn’t think smirking through the proceedings was the bold step forward for horror that everyone else did.

I still mostly feel that way, but I’ve come to recognize that not all horror is about real scares. Scream is about entertainment—literally and figuratively—and the first movie, at least, is pretty entertaining. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

Here’s Scream 4’s challenge: getting the voyeuristic thrills of “found horror” and the no-holds-barred bloodletting of torture porn flicks while still retaining the make and model of the slasher film. All these sub-genres of the horror movie are related, yes, but they do different things and they do them differently. I’m not entirely convinced it can be done. But I’m willing to be wrong.

April 22^nd

Apollo 18

Matt Wilson: Contrary to my initial belief, this is not the long-awaited fifth sequel to Apollo 13, though it apparently uses half of the stock footage that film did. No, the elevator pitch for this one appears to have been, “Paranormal Activity…in space! That is, in the space program! Specifically, in the ‘lost’ last Apollo mission!” Which is a really long elevator pitch. Step it up, producers! Anyway, I’m going to go ahead and give away the twist ending without having seen the movie: Somehow, the little creatures/demons/the virus/the deadly goo from the moon figured out a way to pilot the lander! And it took them until about…April 2011 to do it! AHHHHHHHHHHH!

Dorian Wright: There’s one thing here that I do like. A moon lander is actually a pretty good setting for a nicely claustrophobic horror film. It doesn’t look like we’re getting a good horror film, just another blurry, something jumps at you film, but I guess we can’t have everything we want.

The big problem for me is the way the film is being presented. I’ve said it before, but I’m really not fond at all of the “found footage” or “mockumentary” movies, especially in the horror genre. That trick really only ever worked once, in The Blair Witch Project, and not even terribly well then. I suppose the cost to profit ratio is just too strong to expect the genre to ever really go away.

The other thing that annoys me, and this is especially true of this film, is that the insistence that “no, really, this is all true, honest” does something of a disservice to the people who actually, you know, wrote, directed and acted in this. I always wonder how those folks react to being told that, nope, sorry, we’re not sending you out to do any press, it would hurt our marketing efforts if people found out you’re real.

April 29^th

Fast Five

Dorian Wright: I’ve never actually seen any of the films in this series. I saw Torque, the motorcycle themed knock-off, and about fifteen minutes of a Christian themed knock-off, but my knowledge of the franchise itself doesn’t extend past knowing of its existence and hearing people talk about the apparently hilarious unintentional homoeroticism.

This looks like a movie about men in tight shirts driving cars, explosions, and really awful dialogue. I’m going to toss out the phrase “not for me” and leave it at that.

Anna Neatrour: This is exactly what I’d expect from a Fast and the Furious trailer – people shoot guns, jump off roofs, drive cars, and there are lots of jiggling girls gyrating around sports cars.

I have a high tolerance for dumb summer action movies, and Fast Five looks like it will deliver plenty of stupidity and explosions. I had to laugh when I caught a glimpse of The Rock’s weedy beard as he intoned “Don’t let them get into cars.” I will be disappointed if the cars towing safes scene is the major demonstration of action movie physics in the movie, because I do occasionally like to be surprised when I go to the movies, and I’m always disappointed when the trailers essentially show all of the movie in two minutes. I suspect that my major complaint about the movie will be the same thing that bugged me about the trailer: not enough Sung Kang.

Each month Ken Lowery and I take a look at the trailers for a selection of the films hitting theaters in the upcoming weeks, to see what looks good and what the studios are dumping before the summer films start to hit.

March 4^th

The Adjustment Bureau

DW: Feels like it’s been awhile since we’ve had an attempt to turn a Phillip K. Dick short into a big star vehicle. As a Dick fan, I should know better than to get my hopes up, since just from the two minutes in the trailer this is already obviously only very loosely based on the original story. But then, putting Matt Damon in a sci-fi thriller that appears to aspire to something more cerebral than Total Recall suggests that the film-makers have their hearts in the right place, as he’s certainly more apt for a role like this than, say, Ben Affleck. So, let’s go with “cautiously optimistic that this won’t be terrible.”

I also sort of wonder if the public is going to burn out on sci-fi films that muck about with the notion of reality and subjectivity. It feels like we’ve had quite a few in the last few years, with more coming up, and while it’s a pretty natural subject matter fit for film, they all mostly seem to be walking a very fine line between actual engagement with the audience on an intellectual level and precocious high school pseudo-intellectual attempts at philosophy.

KL: I just straight up like Matt Damon. I’m not crazy about the title and not altogether sold on the premise – as executed in the trailer, I get a Dark-City-turns-the-lights-on vibe—but he’s a smart guy, a great actor, and not prone to going with out-and-out bad projects.

I’ve also been waiting for Emily Blunt to be as good as I suspect she is. I first came across her in The Devil Wears Prada (straight dudes have needs, and sometimes those needs are Anne Hathaway smiling) and liked her… OK… in Sunshine Cleaning and The Wolfman. Maybe this is it? Anyway, this is writer-director George Nolfi’s first “director” outing, and his writing credits are a mix of the good (The Bourne Ultimatum) and the alarmingly terrible (Ocean’s Twelve, though to be fair a lot of that was probably improvised). We’ll see. Or I will, anyway: Count me in.

Rango

KL: Nothing here really appeals to me, but I have to give points to a no-doubt big-budget CGI movie that’s willing to make everything—from the main characters to the setting—intentionally unappealing to look at. I don’t buy like half the people involved as good voice talent and the story promises to be utterly free of surprises (do you think the wannabe hero rises to the occasion and becomes a real one!?), but, uh, at least it has the guts to be ugly?

DW: In the hierarchy of CGI children’s film makers, you’ve got Pixar at the top, Sony and Dreamworks duking it out for second place while neither seems to show any understanding of why Pixar is at the top…and then Nickelodeon, who don’t seem to have any understanding at all of how to make an appealing film but are bound and determined to make them anyway. Yeah, this is an ugly film, and it’s a by the numbers film, with no originality or wit or surprises at all. The best I can say about it is that it doesn’t appear to be as pandering as some of the other talking animal movies have been of late, nor is it as bald in it’s mission statement of shutting the kids up for an hour and a half.

Take Me Home Tonight

DW: An ‘80s nostalgia romantic comedy aimed at people who weren’t born when the film takes place? Okay…I guess there are people out there who get all jazzed up over being reminded that Suncoast Video was once a thing, but I can’t really see them being interested in a run of the mill sex comedy with nothing unique on offer other than the setting. Oh, look, our hero even has a “wacky” and out of control fat friend.

I actually like Topher Grace, but this is pretty white straight people with problems of their own making and I’ve just got absolutely no interest in that whatsoever.

KL: For whatever reason the wife and I have been watching a lot of That ‘70s Show on Watch Instantly. I’m fond of the show and the cast, and though Topher Grace’s characterization on that show was fairly narrow, I always thought he had potential. What HAS that guy been up to?

And wouldn’t you know it, the writers are career television writers who spent a bunch of time on That ‘70s Show. Anyway, I always take notice when Anna Faris pops up in a new comedy; I think she is genuinely brilliantly hilarious, especially when the material she’s working with is there. Color me “cautiously optimistic.”

March 11^th

Battle: Los Angeles

DW: I’m finding it really hard to get excited about yet another alien invasion film. I mean, I like Eckhart and Rodriguez, so I’m okay with the cast. But there’s nothing here to suggest that this is anything other than a big, loud, explosion-based action film. And that’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with big, loud, explosion-based action films. I’m just not particularly eager to see one unless there’s some kind of hook I can get behind. And I’ve seen enough films now where aliens try to invade a major American city that it’s no longer enough of a hook to get me to shell over my money to see it happen. Again.

About the only thing that really works here for me, apart from the cast, is the vague suggestion that the humans don’t win this one. There are certainly enough downbeat and grim moments in the trailer to suggest that this may be less of an “America, Fuck Yeah” film than so many other work in the genre. But I also don’t have any faith whatsoever in film studios to trust audiences to accept an action film where the good guys lose.

KL: I think the video-game appeal of this movie is apparent: there are just so damn many titles that, in some way or another, grant players the license to treat familiar environs (like Los Angeles) as a war zone. As you say, Dorian, there’s nothing wrong with that sort of thing. But beyond the simple realism of the rendering and the presence of Eckhart and Rodriguez… ehh.

Mars Needs Moms

DW: There’s just absolutely nothing here to like is there? Stupid title, odd throwback hip-hop theme song in one of the trailers, disturbing flesh-mannequins as protagonists…it’s going to make an insane amount of money, isn’t it?

I’m not even sure why this is an animated film, if they’re just going to use motion-capture performances and try to make the human characters as realistic looking as possible (and fail, hence my flesh-mannequin description). Just put some actors in front of a green-screen, put in a CGI background and aliens, and you’re good to go. It can’t possibly be that much more expensive than doing an all animated cast, can it?

KL: Come on now, at least it’s got.. um.. Joan Cusack? Hm.

That one character – I’m going to assume it’s Dan Fogler’s, because come on – is a dealbreaker all by himself. I’m almost positive it won’t end with him up and eating all the children, but it should. Look at that guy.

Red Riding Hood

KL: Having dated a writer who specialized in urban fantasy and dark fairy tales for several years, I can safely say I am “over” this filmmaking trend before it’s barely even started; and yes, there are more movies exactly like this one in the works. I cannot tell if the trend away from “irreverent fairy tales” to “dark fairy tales” is a net gain or loss, but I suppose we’ll find out soon.

Gary Oldman’s in this, which is nice, but not really an indicator of quality. (Neither is the presence of Catherine Hardwicke – Yes, haha, she directed Twilight, a thankless task she did her best with. Did you see Thirteen?) The film’s not yet been rated, but I’m going to guess “PG-13,” which is no way to run a werewolf show. Oh well. At least the trailers make good use of Nine Inch Nails and Soul Savers tracks.

DW: I’m probably more willing to put up with “dark fairy tales” as a new popular genre if it means that it displaces the “urban fantasy/women having sex with vampires” genre.

I’m pretty much going to see this no matter what. I read at least one copy of that Jack Zipes book about Red Riding Hood stories to pieces, it’s a horror film in a Medieval setting, and it’s a werewolf film. That’s just too many of my weaknesses in one film for me to ignore. It looks a lot more aimed at the Twilight fandom than I’m normally comfortable with. But, hey, if people wanting a piece of that action gets me more werewolf movies made, I’m not going to complain.

Black Death

KL: I have no idea what is inspiring this latest wave of medieval horror stuff, but I am ALL ABOUT IT. Swords, knights, is-it-or-isn’t-it witchcraft, Sean Bean – it all taps into my inner 15-year-old in ways that superheroes never can. If this movie is even halfway competent – and I have no idea the credibility of the quotes cited – then I’ll be fine and dandy. This is The Stuff.

DW: Mark Gatiss calls this genre “folk horror” and I really like that description. And I’m really glad to see people at least attempting to move horror films away from some of the contemporary clichés into broader and more interesting areas. So I like the idea of this film a lot, but everything I’ve read about it says that it’s more Witchfinder General than Wicker Man, and that a lot of the moral ambiguity that the trailer suggests is secondary in the finished product to torture and brutality. Which isn’t exactly surprising, given the subject matter, but I was hoping for something a little more ambitious than Medieval Saw and it’s not sounding like I’m going to be getting it.

March 18^th

Paul

KL: Hmm.

In general, I like everyone here – the list of players borders on the divine, mixing the Pegg/Frost troupe with that of director Greg Mottola, who did plenty of time on Arrested Development before going on to direct movies like Superbad and Adventureland. I’m kind of lukewarm on the “wayward stoner alien” premise, but whatever; I’ll buy a ticket on the strength of pedigree.

DW: I’m in the same boat. Stoner jokes weary me at the best of times, and nerd-centric humor isn’t something I particularly welcome of late either. But I like just about everyone in this, Pegg is a really under-rated comedic writer, and Adventureland was surprisingly good given how much of “not my thing” it ended up being. The baseline for quality is there and too hard to ignore, even if the “what if ET was an absolute jackass” set-up just does nothing for me in the slightest bit.

Limitless

KL: “You know how they say we can only access 20% of our brain?” says a guy in the trailer, and I am forced to respond. One, no one says that, they either say eight or 10 percent. Two, that’s a misunderstanding of how brains work: we only use that much of our brain at a time, because our brain’s different sectors do different things.

Aside from that (and also possibly “Bradley Cooper is a handsome man”) I don’t know what to say about this. I liked Neil Burger’s The Illusionist an awful lot; however, his writer, Leslie Dixon, has a background that’s mostly in adaptations and family-friendly fare like Mrs. Doubtfire. I got nothing, guys. That’s me being real.

DW: Bradley Cooper really is handsome.

Apart from that, I really don’t have much to say. It looks to be a fully adequate thriller with mild sci-fi elements for people who like that sort of thing. There’s some mild potential for satire, and it sounds like that’s what the original novel was sort of going for, but I’m not getting the impression that it was an angle the film-makers thought was particularly important. Decent cast, director who appears to know what he’s doing…it’s a solid B picture in a market that doesn’t really make a lot of room for those.

March 25^th

Sucker Punch

DW: Well…it’s visually entertaining, at least.

I honestly really don’t know what to make of it. Visually interesting, but not doing anything we haven’t seen before, from the same director no less. It flirts with the suggestion that it’s about empowering women, but every outfit on every female character just screams out that it’s really just wank material for nerds. Still, given how depressingly low the bar is set to be considered a feminist work in the sci-fi or fantasy genres, I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if the film starts getting used as a defense against charges of exploitative and pandering misogyny in genre films.

Kinda pretty, though, even if the old blue-orangey lighting is horribly over-used in it.

KL: So here’s where all my smart movie friends on Twitter are going to erupt.

I kinda dig this trailer. Yes, it’s ridiculous – of COURSE it’s ridiculous. Yes, it’s filled with childish empowerment fantasies and sexy ladies – of COURSE it is, and as it appears to be a movie ABOUT childish empowerment fantasies (and incidentally, sexy ladies), that doesn’t really ding it, either.

A common thread that’s emerged in my movie tastes over the past few years is a hunger for things you don’t and/or can’t see anywhere else. Zack Snyder, for all his flaws, is a guy who specializes in the crazy and the heretofore unseen, and he never half-asses anything he makes. Say what you want about 300; that kind of virtuosity in the creation of a new and distinct aesthetic is something you’re lucky to run across once, maybe twice a year in mainstream movies. Snyder doing his thing is always welcome, even if this is the first time he’s done a major production not adapted from something else.

Each month Ken Lowery and I take a look at the trailers for a selection of the films hitting theaters in the upcoming weeks, to determine just whether or not they’re doing their job of getting us to want to part with our hard-earned money.

February 4th

The Roommate

DW: Oh, good. A Fatal Attraction/Single White Female remake mash-up with lesbian subtext for an audience that’s too young to remember either of those films.

Well, I guess that’s all right. Horror, more than most genres, has a tendency for the core audience to age out of it, so these kinds of retreads are to be expected. It might be good, it might be bad. I’m just not interested in psychos carving up college students anymore.

KL: The joke I’ve heard is it’s probably not a good idea to cast this movie with two young female leads who strongly resemble each other, but I can at least tell them apart because Minka Kelly was in Friday Night Lights and Leighton Meester is in some bullshit I don’t care about. Single White Female but PG-13, which saps most of the interest right out of it.

Sanctum

KL: Everyone from the marketing flaks to James Cameron himself is pushing this movie HARD, and hoping that—maybe—you might have spotted Mr. Cameron’s name above the title. Cameron’s just producing it, but I don’t doubt that his level of perfectionism made sure Sanctum hits a bare minimum of… whatever it is they’re going for. Thrill-a-minute ride, I guess. I remain unmoved, and despite the absolutely breathless tone of the press e-mails I get about this thing (and I have not been an active critic since September), I don’t see that changing.

I think I have hit a weird spot in my movie-going life. Usually at this point in the year I’ve digested all of the award season’s epic battles and florid melodramas and the only thing I want is some gee-whiz spectacle. Sanctum is probably that, and yet I am nonplussed by its arrival. I’m not sure what I want right now, but this isn’t it.

DW: I’m fairly underwhelmed by everything I’m seeing here as well. While it looks pretty, it also looks to be Cameron and his company once again pushing the technical aspects of film-making and letting things like character and story fall to the wayside. I’m willing to concede that this might just be a gut reaction to something that is clearly “not for me” but it’s hard to overlook the feeling that this appears to be yet another drama about a young man with daddy issues with some thriller elements shoehorned into the story. Those negative reactions aren’t balanced out by the fact that I can see nicely lit caves and water in 3D on an Imax screen. But the audience that wants comfortably familiar tropes in their films is also the audience that is dazzled by things like Imax and 3D, so at the very least Cameron knows who he is making films for.

What I find particularly frustrating is that there seems to be something of a resurgence of these “man vs. environment” films lately, and this has every indication of being a big, stupid, loud version of those movies. And, again, those are not something I’m particularly interested in, but I’ll take something like Frozen or 127 Hours over something slick and soulless.

February 11

The Eagle

KL: Disclaimer: If you put some dudes in Roman armor and point a camera at them, I will probably watch it. Some people are suckers for Merchant-Ivory movies, or 20th century period pieces, or whatever, and my thing is Rome.

That said, there’s a fair amount to recommend The Eagle on pedigree alone. Director Kevin Macdonald’s turned out some great work in his time, and he last worked with screenwriter Jeremy Brock in The Last King of Scotland, that fabulous display of Forrest Whitaker’s talent. Channing Tatum’s kind of a non-factor to me—yes I get it, he’s dreamy, but that’s not an automatic discount—but I’m going to trust Macdonald’s choice there. Also pretty psyched to see Jamie Bell in something like this.

DW: We’ve had a few films about Roman Britain lately, and I’m starting to feel that I like the idea of them more than the actual products that get released. Yes, the people making this film have done some good work in the past, and the book the film is based on is highly praised as well. And while I will probably eventually sit down to watch the movie, there’s still a few things that are causing me to approach the film with some skepticism. That the main character is seeking to restore his father’s name turns me off. That the slave character is still faithful when given a chance for freedom turns me off. And yeah, that it’s Channing Tatum turns me off. Because while he’s pretty…he just doesn’t seem to fit a role like this.

Cedar Rapids

DW: Well, that trailer pretty much sketched out the entire film from start to finish, didn’t it? I like Ed Helms, but I think I’ve seen this same sort of naïve, potentially developmentally disabled, innocent abroad bit in films more than enough times already. The same is true of the loud, belligerent asshole who takes in the innocent role (oddly enough, played by John C. Reilly a number of times as well). So it doesn’t feel as if there’s anything new or original, or even particularly clever here. It feels like a bunch of good comedic actors (and Anne Heche for some reason) taking a gig in between the films that people actually plan on seeing.

KL: I like Ed Helms an awful lot; until they saddled him with lame romance plots in a desperate attempt to make him Jim 2.0 on The Office, I thought he was the best thing on that show and possibly the funniest character/actor combination on TV.

Cedar Rapids has gotten some praise out of Sundance. I want to like it; I like the people involved, and I think Ed Helms is good enough to buoy a movie. But I am at the same time getting a little weary of mild little festival darlings about mild people having mild little adventures and finding themselves, mildly. SLICE OF LIFE, GOT IT. Can Helms’s charisma pull it off? Possibly. Enough of a chance that I’ll see for myself.

Drive Angry

KL: Nicolas Cage, crazy casting decisions, bills to pay to the IRS, et cetera, et cetera.

The optimist in me—the one that’s slowly dying out, I’ll admit—says that, hey, maybe this time is the time the promise of balls-out craziness in an action flick will actually pay out. The rest of me knows better, and thinks about all the good times I didn’t have watching Ghost Rider and Gone in 60 Seconds, and then imagines combining those two peculiarly shapeless beacons of mediocrity and groans. The director and his co-writer don’t have much but schlock horror in their filmographies. I guess now they have another one.

DW: You know, normally I’d be at least curious about something that looks so unapologetically and shamelessly dumb and exploitative. But there’s too much going on. Cults would have been enough. Demons would have been enough. Driving fast and explosions would have been enough. All three of those, and Nic Cage? No, that’s just gilding the lily. It’s too much stupid for one film and that tests even my patience for dumb, bad horror films.

Gnomeo & Juliet

DW: My initial reaction to this is that everyone involved should be ashamed of themselves. But then I get to thinking that it’s not exactly fair, people worked hard, no one sets out to make a bad, unfunny film just to separate desperate parents who want to shut the damn kids up for an hour and a half from their money. And at the very least it doesn’t look anywhere near as bad as just about every animated from Dreamworks or Sony. And it’s not as if the jokes in the trailer are actually bad, just horribly groan-worthy and obvious and clearly dumbed down for kids because its not as if you actually need to make a good film for kids and they wouldn’t appreciate it even if you did.

And then somehow I’m back around to thinking that everyone involved in this should be ashamed of themselves.

KL: Ever get the feeling a movie’s script was built entirely around the punny title? I do.

Are gnomes really a big enough of a thing to base a Toy Story/Romeo and Juliet spoof around? I get the feeling garden gnomes live on in popular culture in vastly disproportionate numbers to reality – for instance, how many heart-shaped boxers do you see in real life, versus the number you see in cartoons? Anyway, I guess the title provides parents enough of a clue on what to expect. So… mission accomplished?

February 18

I Am Number Four

DW: Comparisons to the Twilight films suggest themselves. It’s not just the pretty-boy with magic powers who must hide himself from the world angle. It’s also that we’re looking at a teen angst vehicle with romantic themes and just a hint of action to keep the audience perked up. And it’s based on a young adult novel. And is brought to us by people who worked on Smallville and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. That’s quite a pedigree. Not necessarily a good one, as I look at those properties and see mostly people who super powers who devote most of their time to feeling sorry for themselves.

KL: This is the first adapted property to come out of James Frey’s content farm-like writers’ house. As you may or may not know, desperate young writers looking for a way to break in to the industry can sign onto the Frey train and give up almost all control of their work in exchange for writing formula-driven stories and the privilege of being associated with a man who is famous for lying to the reading public. This movie may contain the missing reel from The Magnificent Ambersons, but I’ll never know because I won’t give that fucker a dime, however indirectly.

See also: Cowboys and Aliens.

Unknown

KL: A comparison to Taken seems inevitable, but I haven’t seen that movie, so look elsewhere for that.

There’s a story like this in that old ghost stories collection, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.(And since that’s a folklore collection, that means, by necessity, there’s versions of this story all over the world.) In that story, a young woman goes to Paris with her mother. Her mother, feeling ill, stays at the hotel while the young woman goes out to shop. The young woman returns to find her room is empty, and the hotel claims that the young woman checked in alone. What happened?

Unknown takes a bit more of a thriller angle, and, I don’t know, something to do with a conspiracy. It was a fatal mistake for the editors of the trailer to indicate that the wife is “in on it,” because now I know what kind of movie it is—namely, not much of a mystery—and so I no longer care.

Can I just step aside a moment and say I miss the old Liam Neeson, the one that didn’t trade on his mere presence to get by? Once upon a time Neeson was the guy who could play Oskar Schindler one year and a clever rural sheriff the next. Now he just plays Liam Neeson. Hell of a voice, but it takes more than that to act.

DW: This may be another example of what is unique in a film, namely the concept of a man trying to prove his identity in a world that insists he is not who he thinks he is, being watered down and made unsatisfying by giving it a big Hollywood treatment. As an indie film or foreign film I could see this working. Something smaller scale and more character focused. But turning it into a big action movie with some thriller or mystery elements just drains all the personality out of the idea and turns what could have been a nice, paranoid little work into The Bourne Identity for the Baby Boomer audience.

February 25

Hall Pass

KL: You know you’re getting older when the comedic filmmaking icons of your youth are now making pictures about midlife crises and dissatisfaction in long-term marriages. Here we’ve got the Farrelly Brothers with a concept that may exist, though I’ve never heard of it: the “hall pass,” where married men get to do whatever they want “with no consequences.” (And if you believe that, I’ve got a bridge to sell you.)

Despite finding Jason Sudeikis and Owen Wilson pretty funny when they try, this just looks plain terrible. That’s “terrible” as in “boring and mundane,” not so much “terrible” as in “actually offensive to my humanity.” I sure like a lot of the people in the cast (and hey, Farrelly veteran Vanessa Angel!), but no. Too distasteful.

Maybe I’ve gotten older, too.

DW: Sometimes I’ll watch a trailer and the only thing it leaves me thinking is “Boy, straight people are weird.”

The implausibility of the premise aside, this really does look, as you say, boring and mundane. I was never a fan of the Farrelly Brothers, even in their heyday. That they’ve been pretty thoroughly eclipsed by the Apatow-brand of Dude comedies must sting a little, but putting out a bland, domesticated film in response doesn’t seem the right tack to proving that you’re still relevant.

Shelter

DW: Satan sure seems to be making a comeback in horror films lately. At first glance, Michael Cooney seems to be taking that appetite horror fans have for the Devil as the bad guy and throwing in some of the unreliable identity issues that made his script for Identity seem clever and original to some film-goers. So, here, he’s not only aping the style of a many other recent films, but his own as well.

Advance reviews have been pretty uniformly terrible, in any case. Even if the presence of Julianne Moore and Johnathan Rhys-Meyers would otherwise suggest that the film is at least watchable. I think I can give it a pass. It looks as cliché and generic a possession film can get, and when the most interesting thing about it is the arguments about whether or not the film is a Book of Eli-esque stealth evangelism movie or just completely incoherent in its presentation of issues of faith, I’m really not inclined to give it a chance.

KL: Odd thought to have mid-trailer: boy, horror’s just about the only genre where people can film original concepts anymore, huh?

The cast is good, but I note from IMDB that this one’s been on the burner since before The Kids Are All Right, also starring Moore, which came out last year. Probably not a good sign. I do so like possession and exorcism movies, but this trailer doesn’t actually tell me a hell of a lot about what’s going on. No sale.