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.

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.

January 5

Phil Ochs: There But For Fortune

KL: I don’t know what’s happening to me as I draw closer to the big 3-0. I was a teenage metalhead (now there’s a ‘50s movie title for you), but in these later years I’ve gravitated more and more to – well, not folk singers exactly, but folk songs and similar musical artifacts that withstand the test of time… and I’ve never quite lost my love for socially conscious, totally unmasked stances in art. This may be the perfect time for me to see this doc. Throw in Kenneth Bowser – who put together the endlessly entertaining documentary for Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, so yes please.

DW: You know how every year, every high school has some kid, usually male, who “discovers” some musician who stopped producing material before they were even born? Usually it’s the Jimi Hendrix Guy, or the Beatles Guy. An occasional Led Zeppelin Guy. Heck, I’ve even seen Nirvana Guys starting to show up.

I was That Guy with Phil Ochs in high school. I’m the one who buys every CD as it comes out, owns the biographies (even the French edition), and buys the albums on vinyl when I find them.

So I’m there. And I’m waiting for the pre-orders for the DVD to open.

January 7

Season of the Witch

DW: I know we’ve reviewed this before, but it got pushed back, and pushed back. And that little bit of knowledge is sticking in my head when I look at the new trailer. The film didn’t look like any great masterwork before, but the original trailer was laughably bad. Toning down the emo-rock helps immensely. So does adding in scenes of large, epic battles. It looks more like a dark fantasy film now, not yet another overdone and trashy shock-horror film with the almost clever twist of a Medieval setting. So now I’m curious as to how much was reshot and re-edited during the delay, because it feels like they’re selling this as a completely different movie now.

Still not one I particularly want to see, but it’s moving up to “maybe watch it on Netflix” instead of “avoid entirely.”

KL: Whenever I see a trailer, I perform a bit of “Movie Math” in my head to gauge my interest – I’m sure every seasoned movie-goer does the same. Actors, directors, writers, genre: each has quantifiable value, whether positive or negative. (Producers have no caché; whenever I see “from the producer of…,” all I think is “they got nothing.”) A January release is usually – but not always – a death sentence.

On the whole, Season of the Witch adds up to negative numbers. I never count Nicolas Cage entirely out, even in the latter-day “the IRS wants my head” stage of his career. Then there’s Ron Perlman, who’s never been in anything I liked without serious reservations. So: not good.

And yet I just can’t shake this one. I probably won’t see it in the theater, but “maybe watch it on Netflix” sounds about right. I mean come on, who else is even doing crazy Medieval Satanic horror stuff?

January 14

The Green Hornet

KL: Boy, this just probably isn’t going to be very good.

Putting aside a January release for a movie whose trailer screams “JULY!,” there is very little on display here that grabs my eye of even makes a lot of sense. I know the Green Hornet and Kato have, as characters, been around a long time, but after several years of balls-to-the-wall superhero movies with scads of talent and goliath budgets, I’m just not sure this kind of thing will tick anyone’s excitement. It’s hard to get excited about a prop plane after a decade of Concords.

I just don’t care about Seth Rogen anymore. I wouldn’t mind if I never saw Cameron Diaz in another movie ever again. Michael Gondry is tops, usually, but nothing in these trailers looks at all like a Gondry movie. Christoph Waltz? Pretty cool, but not nearly enough. Pass.

DW: It’s somehow reassuring that the lessons of The Shadow haven’t been learned. Or of Dick Tracy. Or of The Phantom. Or of The Spirit. I wonder how many more pulp and pulpish characters forgotten by the general public Hollywood can dig up before they realize that the well has run dry.

The thing is, critics whose opinion I’m not ready to discount have seen this already and declared it to be, if not good, at the very least not bad. But “not bad” isn’t really good enough anymore, especially when you have a lead as unappealing as Seth Rogen and material that we’ve seen dozens of times before.

The Dilemma

KL: Isn’t it nice how you can just see that the average age of filmmakers is on the rise? This looks like exactly the sort of thing that will be forgotten three months after its release, and rightly so – Kevin James is simply a comedic non-starter. And man, check out his freaky airbrushed face on that art!

There is also, of course, “the controversy,” wherein the original trailer for the movie contained a lame “gay” joke that was not offensive to me because of the underlying homophobia, but rather because it was so indicative of the auto-pilot humor that’s likely to saturate The Dilemma.

More than that I will not say. I trust Dorian with this one.

DW: Oh yes, “the controversy.” Which really wasn’t so much about the lame “gay” joke as it was the fact that, when they got called on it, Vaughn and Howard cried about how the mean old homosexuals were picking on them. And, sorry, no, wealthy, straight white men don’t get to complain about being oppressed.

Outside of all that, the film just doesn’t look to be funny or enjoyable at all. It’s the story of a bunch of unlikeable people dealing with problems of their own makings. I’ll put up with that once a week for 20 minutes on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, but I’m not paying $9.00 to see it in a theater.

Every Day

DW: I’m not a fan of the family drama film as a general rule. Too often they veer into the “pretty people with problems” genre for my taste. And so, even though in normal circumstances I might want to see this cast, the promise of really earnest moments and a slightly saccharine resolution in which the status quo is triumphantly maintained despite challenges to the integrity of the nuclear family unit is keeping me at arm’s length. I’m also a little frustrated with the trailer here, because all the promotional materials for the film have been spoiling the revelation that the older son is gay, but the trailer feels like it’s going out of its way to skirt around that particular plot point. I’m not a fan of films that try to keep gay content a secret from potential viewers for fear of frightening them off. It only leads to angry editorials from culture warriors complaining about “Hollywood’s PC agenda sneaking gay propaganda into films.”

KL: Oh good, another story about a writer!

I was open-minded up till the music started and, man, that was about it for me. Couple that sickly sweet tone with the trailer rough-drafting most of the movie’s emotional arcs for us and this is a pretty off-putting trailer. They even sketch out the burgeoning relationship between the wife and the father! Save the B-plot for the ticket buyers, guys.

Much as I like Carla Gugino in a bikini: No. No, a thousand times. No.

Rabbit Hole (wide release)

DW: John Cameron Mitchell gets cut a lot of slack for me because of Hedwig and Shortbus, but it’s still a good thing that he cast actors that I like as much as Aaron Eckhart and Nicole Kidman. I’ll be the first to admit that dramas are rarely high on my list of films I want to see. I understand the catharsis they serve for some people, and I appreciate them when the quality of acting and writing is high. But I primarily watch films to be entertained, and while watching a very good actor act well does have some entertainment value, if I want to plumb the depths of human emotion, well…I have novels for that.

So, I’ll see it. Eventually.

KL: In Movie Math terms, I’m like you, Dorian: I like Mitchell, Eckhart and Kidman all a great deal.

But that ain’t the whole equation. This movie’s actually been out for a few weeks here in Dallas, and last week, to kill time before a new job started, I scheduled out some movie screenings to get myself all caught up on critical darlings and other stuff I wanted to see. I’d heard vague-but-good things about Rabbit Hole, so I looked it up. And I saw in the first line or two that it was about a married couple dealing with the loss of their child, and I said, out loud, “who has time for this shit?”

Here’s the thing. I am beginning to suspect that movies like this are for adults what Saw IV is for teenagers: an emotional thrill ride with no real consequences. It’s like tourism for bad feelings, and the whole thing grosses me out. Maybe it’s cathartic for people who have gone through the experience, but I cannot justify spending two hours feeling sad for the sake of it. Life is too short.

January 21

The Way Back

KL: It’s hard to think of another actor I’ve come around on so strongly as Colin Farrell; he was the grouchy, cynical and bewildered centerpiece of In Bruges, and he was key to making that one of my favorite films of the past ten years. He’s done well to build on that credit since then, so his name joins that small rank of people whose involvement in a movie makes my ears perk up right away.

The rest of the cast is pretty solid, too, and though Peter Weir can turn out some wildly uneven—and, these days, infrequent—work, it’s never for lack of ambition. The overwhelming score on the trailer probably ticks a little too high on the “epic” meter, but whatever. This looks solid.

DW: Yeah, big, life-affirming epic adventure with gorgeous scenery sounds like something that’s needed right about now. And while you’re right about Weir being uneven, even when I’m not actually at all interested in what he’s making, he’s rarely done anything actually bad, especially if we all politely agree to pretend that Green Card never happened.

The biggest problem with a film like this for me, though, is that it looks like it’s going to be long, and probably with not that much talking or action scenes. Which means I can probably look forward to sharing the theater with the sorts of folks who don’t handle long movies with not a lot of talking or big action scenes well.

January 28

The Rite

DW: Nice touch of verisimilitude with the New York Times quote at the start, since “based on a true story” seems to be increasingly de rigueur in the marketing for horror films. It’s also pleasantly surprising to see Anthony Hopkins slumming it in an exploitative horror film. There’s been a glut of these exorcism and devil-themed horror films, which is probably a signal of some kind of social change or unrest that Hollywood is taking advantage of, or hoping to. It’s not really worth arguing about, anyway, since whatever mood in the population they’re reacting to probably happened two years ago. I’m actually okay with Satanic themes in horror; at this moment in time, it’s a welcome respite from yet another vampire or zombie film. I’m cautiously optimistic, then, that this could be watchable. Not good, no. It certainly doesn’t look good by any means. But entertaining.

KL: Oh man, hell yes. I’ve hit the part of the new year where I’m sick to death of Oscar bait and Serious Business and human-sized dramas and I want nothing more from my movies than balls-out craziness. Movies basically own the exorcism subgenre of horror, and this looks like a fine way to pass the time… if a touch over-produced and over-styled. The Last Exorcism traded fine on seemingly low-rent values. That is a good example to follow.

The Mechanic

KL: The long-running gag I have with my buddy Joe is that Jason Statham movies should cease to have individual titles and simply adopt his name and a Roman numeral. So starting with The Transporter, The Mechanic becomes Jason Statham VI. About which more I cannot say, other than that I wish Statham all the best and I like Ben Foster OK.

DW: It’s always nice when producers seem to realize that Statham’s movies attract a fair amount of women and gay men to theaters, and tailor them for those audiences. “Buddy” action movies tend to have plenty of homoerotic subtext, intended or not, anyway, and putting Statham and Foster into one…

Yeah…

I’ll watch it.

From Prada to Nada

DW: On the one hand, that there’s enough of a perceived market for English-language Latino films for a major distributor to pick up a teen-girl comedy for that market is impressive, even if it is only Lionsgate. On the other hand, that this looks suspiciously like that Ally Sheedy movie where she gets a job as a maid mixed with a fair amount of Clueless doesn’t exactly fill me with a lot of confidence. It looks like a decent, but very, very slight film. Something to be forgotten five minutes after leaving the theater, leaving you with only a vague sense of “well, that wasn’t too bad.” Which, honestly, is fine. While the film looks perfectly adequate, if there was ever a film that wasn’t being made “for me” it’s a film about privileged Latinas learning about the importance of family and culture.

KL: Yeah, this one is not for me. That’s OK; not everything needs to be.

The Last of Sheila is one of those many seventies ensemble pictures where a bunch of available celebrities show up and something horrible; like a crashing airplane, or a high-rise fire, or a gruesome murder, breaks out around them. In this particular case, on the one year anniversary of his wife’s death by hit-and-run, producer James Coburn (I’d give his character’s name, but honestly, one of the points of these films is that the actors are basically playing themselves) brings together a group of his Hollywood friends to the French Mediterranean for a week of games aboard his yacht, named for his late wife. The highlight of the week is a special game, in which each guest is given a “secret” and each night the party must try and discover what murder-worthy secret is being concealed. As is usual for these things, the trip soon turns murderous as it seems that the completely fictitious secrets, well, aren’t.

One of the markers I use for whether or not a mystery is good as a mystery is if it plays fair with the audience. That is, if everything an observant viewer needs to solve the central mystery is actually shown or told to the audience. That the investigator character doesn’t withhold information, that there is no final act character introduced who knows something important. It sounds like a very simple thing to do, but it’s remarkable how few films actually manage to give the audience all the information they need. One of the things I particularly like about The Last of Sheila is that it goes almost to the opposite extreme. Every last little bit of information is given to the viewer short of “who” actually commits murder. Every clue is neatly laid out, and it is up to the audience to actually realize the significance of what they just saw or were told. The film practically rubs the audiences face in it, in fact, once you go back after watching it and realize that the actual title of the film was, in fact, a pretty important clue.

And this is one of the reasons why this is one of my favorite mystery films. Even with practically spelling everything out for the viewer, even with putting a significant clue in the actual title, the film still manages to have the revelation of the “who” and the “why” be a surprise by very cleverly subverting the crucial tropes of the mystery genre in the last act. The film plays fair with all the clues, but the brilliance of that is that all that’s happened is that we’ve been led into a false sense of security. We’ve been undone by our own cleverness, our own desire to “outwit” the film.

And, apart from that, it’s actually a very good film. The script by Stephen Sondheim and Anthony Perkins is not only clever on the mystery angle, but in the dialogue and characters as well. The dialogue is snappy and funny and very, very biting, but still believable in a “these people are bitchy actors and writers and producers and somehow still friends” way. The actors are playing to type, naturally, but James Coburn and Richard Benjamin still pull off very good, and even nuanced, performances. Dyan Cannon in particular gives an excellent performance in what is perhaps the most overtly comic role, and still makes her character very, very human. And the major set-pieces, the games that the guests must play to uncover the “secrets” are impressive and brilliantly realized.

I read Guillermo Martinez’s book The Oxford Murders and thought it was clever, with some interesting ideas on the nature of mystery fiction, but ultimately a somewhat disappointing book. It’s a short book, but ponderously slow, filled with characters who would rather talk about what is going on than actually go and do anything. Partly this is because the novel falls more on the “serious” and “literary” side of the mystery novel continuum. And partly this is probably because, as a translated novel, the book is perhaps overly precise and deliberate in its adapted form. Which made me curious to see the film version from 2008 (though not released in the U.S. until this year), as it’s the sort of material which has a strong story that could translate well into film, and could, frankly, benefit from a more visual approach.

The resulting movie is just about as mixed, though. While a lot of the fat is trimmed, it’s still ponderous, with characters that speak almost entirely in exposition and declaratives.

The film stars Elijah Wood as a young mathematics grad student who has come to Oxford to work on his thesis, living in the basement apartment in the house of with an elderly, seriously ill woman who worked with Alan Turing during World War Two, and her much put-upon daughter, with a side agenda of working with his logical/mathematical/philosophical idol Arthur Seldom, played by John Hurt as, well, John Hurt. Hurt’s casting is actually quite good, as an arch, pretentious and slightly arrogant Oxford intellectual is a good fit for his usual screen persona. Wood’s casting is…all right. Wood’s a good actor, but the material he has here is quite serious and dramatic, and there often feels to be a conflict between his big, puppy-dog eyes acting and the gravitas of the lines he’s being asked to deliver. It’s slightly more problematic that his role, which was an Argentinian grad student in the novel, has been turned into an American student in the film. In terms of film financing and logistics, this is probably fine, as its doubtful that American film-goers would have been widely interested in a movie about a Latino mathematician who becomes involved in intellectually motivated serial killings in England, but the change requires an alteration to a significant clue, one which renders the clue in question rather unfortunately coincidental and far-fetched.

The story begins in earnest when Wood and Seldom discover the body of Wood’s landlady, an old friend of Seldom’s . She has been smothered, and the conjecture is quickly formed that the killer was attempting to make the death look like natural causes before going wrong. In interviews with police, Seldom tells them that he received a note, detailing the date and time of the murder and a circle, along with the message “first in a series.” Seldom has recently written a book on logic and mathematics, and in it he has disproven the idea of a purely intellectual motive for murder, that all murder is essentially psychological in motive, and Seldom and the police believe that the killer has taken this up as a challenge. The crimes seem to be purposefully designed to look as much like natural deaths as possible, and the police interpret this as the specific nature of the challenge to Seldom, to solve crimes that the rest of the world would not perceive as crimes at all. Wood, meanwhile, is too busy getting himself involved in love triangles and being over-sensitive to do much more than brood over how Seldom isn’t paying enough attention to him. Two more deaths follow, both with no detectable method of execution, before the killer appears to finally best seldom in a spectacularly tragic display.

At which point Wood starts paying enough attention to whats going on to realize that everyone has been had.

There’s a lot of meta-commentary on mysteries here that I actually like. There’s an implied conflict between the world of logic, in which truth is not a thing that can ever be known, and the apparent comfort of mystery novels, which have the comforting benefit for an explanation for everything that just happened at the end. The idea of an “imperceptible crime” is also a strong one, a crime that can’t even be proven to actually be a crime. It’s an idea that, as used in the book and film, is very nearly too clever for its own good as it invites a rather obvious objection. The objection is only heightened when Seldom begins to emphasize that the only truly “perfect crime” is not the one that’s never solved, but the one that is solved with the wrong solution. What seems to be the suggestion here at first glance is a fundamental undermining of that whole “everything is explained at the end” factor for mysteries. What we’re actually given, though, is a fairly bold declaration of the actual plot of the book and a warning that pretty much everything that we’ve been shown or told was just part of an elaborate red herring device. This works if we want to view the book and film purely as intellectual narratives on the nature of truth and its ultimate unknowability. As a plot element of a mystery novel or film, however, it’s a fairly cheap trick to distract the audience from realizing that you haven’t played fair with the information that you’ve presented.

If you’re going to call a new thriller by Dario Argento Giallo, you’re setting up certain expectations in the audience. Specifically, you’re leading the audience to expect a crime film with visceral, stylized death scenes that bridges the gap between the slasher style of horror film and the whodunnit of mystery films. What you’re not lead to expect is a rather conventional thriller that feels like a belated response to The Silence of the Lambs.

At first blush, this seems like a return to form for Argento, after his rather lack-lustre catalog of recent films. You’ve got an inexplicably American lead solving a series of brutal murders in Italy, and…well, that’s about it, to be honest. I’m not enough of a stickler for adherence to genre conventions to object to the fact that, from the beginning, we pretty much know who the killer is, but the casting of an English speaking B-lister as the lead is the only thing here that feels like you’re watching an Argento film. Adrian Brody is a fine and surprisingly appealing actor but he’s not given much to do here other than smoke and brood soulfully over dead bodies.

The plot is surprisingly conventional as well; a taxi driver is kidnapping and brutalizing beautiful foreign women, and Brody, as Inspector Avoli, is the only detective who really pursues the case. His search for the killer is heightened when Linda, an airline stewardess reports her model sister missing, giving Avoli a chance to research and pursue the killer while the crime is fresh, rather than attempt to back-track clues after a body is discovered. The film then splits about half of its time between Avoli and Linda’s rather plodding investigation, taking time for the occasional flash-back to Avoli’s deeply traumatic childhood, and scenes of the killer brutalizing his victims. These scenes feel oddly out of place, not because violence and murder is unexpected in a horror film, but the length and nature of the scenes seems unnecessarily protracted. They’re not even particularly graphic, but the casual disregard for human dignity evokes, in an odd way, the same disregard for humanity that I expect from torture-porn films. But without the graphic pay-off, there’s also a lack of conviction. Given how badly Euro-horror tends to be edited for American release, this may just be a case of squeamish producers cutting away, but the scenes still feel off-putting and unneeded.

In the end, the title isn’t so much an evocation of the genre as it is a horribly literal explanation for the killer’s motivation. Which is even more of a cheat because the title then makes absolutely no sense in English. In Italian, it works, as (spoilers) “giallo” means “yellow.” Retitling the film for English audiences would have worked, but then, we wouldn’t have had that wonderful opportunity to mislead the viewer as to what the film was going to be.

So, if you created an instant horror classic, which was a massive commercial success, and spawned the equally rare well-received and contextually appropriate sequel, what do you do for a threepeat? Well, if you’re John Carpenter and Debra Hill, you ditch everything that your audience wants to see in your franchise for a surreal pagan-themed thriller that casts the Irish as a race of child-murdering lunatics, alienating both the general public and hardcore fans and leaving those few who are actually willing to give your film a shot completely baffled at your film’s nonsensical plot.

It makes a certain sort of perverse logic, actually. Halloween really was an instant classic and it represents the strongest bridge between the slasher genre and the mystery genre. (Setting aside the almost as brilliant, and earlier, Black Christmas, which Halloween certainly owes a debt to, because sometimes doing it right is more important than doing it first.) Unfortunately, after two films all that really could be said about Michael Myers had been said, and every subsequent sequel only confirmed that more and more. Not to mention that the success of Halloween inspired so many, frankly, utterly shit imitators and wannabes, and it’s not hard to see why Carpenter and Hill would maybe want to back away from that particular legacy. The downside to that, though, is that when you have control of a potentially lucrative franchise like that, you don’t want to just abandon it entirely. The devised solution, turn the “Halloween” brand into an anthology series, which each film continuing the themes of Halloween horrors, but with a new plot and characters periodically. And, actually, it’s a really good idea. The film itself, though…that’s where the problems set in.

The film opens with a man holding a Halloween mask running away from well-dressed men. He takes refuge in a gas station, and gets taken from there to the hospital, where his head is split open by a well-dressed man, who then sets himself on fire. Attending physician Dan Challis finds this whole situation awfully suspicious, especially when the pretty and half-his-age daughter of the dead man, Ellie Grimbridge starts asking questions as well. Their investigation reveals that just before he died, Ellie’s father was set to pick up a delivery of Halloween masks from the Silver Shamrock festival in Santa Mira, California; a novelty company in a sleepy mid-state town populated by Irish immigrants. The Silver Shamrock masks are the must-have item this Halloween, with their curiously tame and retro designs and maddeningly aggravating jingle which also promotes the “Horrorthon Giveaway” Silver Shamrock is hosting on television Halloween night. Challis and Ellie contrive to join a private tour of the company given to their top salesman and his family, and while on it Ellie sees her father’s car hidden in a warehouse. That night she is kidnapped by the security personnel from the company and Challis breaks in to rescue her. He is quickly captured and Conal Cochran, the company’s charismatic owner, explains his plan; to return Halloween to a night of terror and death in celebration of his Pagan heritage, by using chips from a megalith stolen from Stonehenge which have been placed inside the masks and, when activated by an electronic signal hidden in the Silver Shamrock commercial, will burn the heads of children wearing the mask and cause them to vomit up snakes and insects. Challis eventually manages to escape with Ellie, destroying the factory and Cochran in the process by causing the megalith to overload, but before he can warn the world about the commercial he is attacked by Ellie.
Because she’s a robot built by Cochran. Which pretty much destroys the entire plot and internal logic of the film.
The film ends on pleasingly ambiguous and downbeat note with Challis able to get the commercial removed from only two of the channels broadcasting it, with the fate of the commercial on the third channel (this being 1982) left unresolved.

The kernel of the idea here is actually pretty good: Pagans returning Halloween to its roots because it is their holiday, dammit. It’s a clever tweaking of the attitude some Christians take to secular Christmas celebrations. But then, it’s a Nigel Kneale idea, the man behind Quatermass. Unfortunately, his name doesn’t appear on the film because he had it removed, rather than live with the studio-mandated inclusion of several gorey, and incredibly silly and not at all necessary to the plot, scenes included in order to justify an R rating and satisfy the demands of the target audience. Who, as I said earlier, really only wanted yet another slasher film with sluts being sliced up, not a satiric riff on The Wicker Man set in California. It’s a case of the audience not quite being worthy of the material they’re being presented with, and the film suffers because of its desire to please them. Which isn’t to say that it would be a perfect film without the gore-hound pandering. The plot holes in this film are legendary. The film implies that the Horrorthon is rolling out cross-country. But if it’s being simulcast, no self-respecting kid on the West Coast is going to give up prime Trick-or-Treating hours to watch a commercial. And if it’s going time-zone by time-zone, of which there are four in the continental United States, than again, only the kids on the Eastern time are going to die. Maybe Central. But surely by the time it gets to Mountain the link between the commercial and kids fucking dying would be noted. About the only hole that’s addressed is the question of how a Stonehenge megalith was transported from Salisbury to somewhere near Gilroy, and even that is only by so purposefully lampshading the problem as to make it moot.

So, no, not good. But I’m strangely inclined to give them points for effort.
Except for the robot thing. That’s just fucking stupid.