The red band trailer for Crank 2: High Voltage, starring Jason Statham, is an awesome thing — a phantasmagoric swirl of profanity, scantily clad women, editorial choices that would make Michael Bay proud, and even a mullet-sporting Corey Haim. It makes great, smart use of The Crystal Method’s “The Name of the Game” (also used to slick, head-bobbing effect in Tropic Thunder), and also reveals that those nipple-taped photographs of Amy Smart that leaked last summer weren’t purely illicit candid shots… they’re in the movie! Oh, plus it ends with B-roll footage. Good times. Over-the-top, as it should be. Well played, Lionsgate…
Category Archives: Trailer Watch
Brad Pitt Makes Clear His Feelings About Nazi Scalps
The trailer for Inglourious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino’s Nazi-scalping, band-of-brutal-brothers World War II epic, is of course now online, after having (partially?) debuted on Entertainment Tonight or Access Hollywood or one of those other shows earlier this week. And it’s a fairly kick-ass thing, I have to say, just operating on a gut-level reaction.
Without an overload of snarkiness, it clearly and effectively conveys the over-the-top tone, in other words — this ain’t your father’s World War II movie. Brad Pitt‘s accent is sort of beautifully ludicrous, and the music, with its slight twinge of industrial grind, works well. Eli Roth‘s smirk after Pitt’s monologue about wanton cruelty, might make the whole trailer, though. Confounding young spelling bee participants, Inglourious Basterds releases August 21, domestically from the Weinstein Company and internationally from Universal Pictures.
Liam Neeson Talking Does Not Make Me Want to See Taken
Stuck as I presently am without a car, I got duped big time last night — baited with the promise of a meal at a superlative sandwich place, and thus tricked into going to the mall. Which, let’s be honest, guys, is the worst. For me the true urge to shop for clothes comes around like a Smurf baby, once in a blue moon, and if there’s one thing worse than shopping for some item of clothing you need — a new shirt, or suit — when you don’t really want to be there, it’s watching someone else shop for clothes. Terrible, just awful.
Feigning potential interest in some overpriced neckwear, though, I wandered off in Nordstrom’s, and began walking figure-eights through the men’s shoe department, which inexplicably has a bank of televisions posted in a corner pocket, and also alongside one wall. Averting my eyes from Texas’ impending bowl victory, I looked at one screen, and wondered why Liam Neeson seemed to be talking on the telephone. “Oh,” I realized, “it’s a movie trailer… for Taken.” I was most decidedly not taken, even with the sound turned all the way down. Watching it, I did my best to supress a yawn.
I just saw the trailer proper now, in talkie form, on television, and even though it’s action intercut with Neeson saying some bad-ass shit, about how his skill set will allow him to track down and kill his daughter’s Parisian kidnappers, nope, it’s still confirmed… Liam Neeson talking on the telephone doesn’t, on a purely gut level, make anyone want to see a movie. Quite the opposite, in fact. Taken releases January 30, from 20th Century Fox.
Jessica Biel Shakes Her Moneymaker in Powder Blue Trailer
Indie is as indie does in the new, redband trailer, now online, for Powder Blue, aka the movie where Jessica Biel will actually go nude, unlike the bra-and-panties teasing provided by her supporting turn in Kevin James and Adam Sandler’s gay-but-not-really air-quote comedy I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry.
A beautifully woozy piece of work, the clip makes one feel like they’re stuck in a Snow Patrol or Airborne Toxic Event music video. It’s the right sales job, too; best not to mention the subplot involving the transsexual prostitute, or the fact that Biel’s stripper-mom is working the pole to provide for her terminally ill son. Just show emotionally urgent emergency room footage, Biel dripping wax on herself and Ray Liotta making it rain! The three sentences at the end of the otherwise silent trailer puncture the haze of its otherwise pleasant, dreamy spell, which I have a problem with for the specificity of its content. Keep it shorter, or more obtuse. Or, if you are going to stick with these utterances, the tone here is a bit wrong; it needs to be more breathy come-on, or mysterious, not plaintive.
Knowing Trailer Leaves Fence-Dwelling Cage Fans Guessing
The trailer for Knowing, starring Nicolas Cage and releasing March 20 via Summit Entertainment, is online, and in very broad surface strokes it comes across as a slightly glummer, twistier version of 2007’s time-and-space-bending Next, which is to say inessential Cage, through and through. I say this with some regret and heaviness of heart, given that the movie is directed by Alex Proyas (The Crow, Dark City), who’s a top-notch visual stylist.
The story centers around a professor who stumbles on a series of terrifying
predictions about the future, and sets out to prevent them from coming
true. In 1958, as part of the dedication ceremony for a new
elementary school, a group of students is asked to draw pictures to be
stored in a time capsule. But one mysterious girl instead fills her sheet of
paper with rows of apparently random numbers. Fifty
years later, a new generation of students examines the capsule’s
contents and the girl’s cryptic message ends up in the hands of young
Caleb. Caleb’s father, professor Ted Myles, makes the
startling discovery that the encoded message predicts with pinpoint
accuracy the dates, death tolls and coordinates of every major disaster
of the past 50 years. As Ted further unravels the document’s chilling
secrets, he realizes it foretells three additional events — the
last of which hints at destruction on a global scale, and seems to
somehow involve Ted and his son.
Befitting a Proyas flick, the tone looks suitably atmospheric (for what it is, more thriller than sci-fi), and things that work in the trailer notably include the plane crash sequence, chiefly because it seems less “spotlighted” than so many effects-laden sequences. Things that don’t work: mention of the “whisperer people,” standing far afoot (never set up global catastrophe, then jerk it back to something corporeal); Ted promising to never let his son die (?!); and, while we’re at it, the movie’s title font and poster, the latter of which looks very much like War of the Worlds from a squinting distance. Also, right now Knowing is being billed as being written by Ryne Douglas
Pearson, Richard Kelly, Juliet Snowden & Stiles White, Stuart
Hazeldine, and Proyas, which just underscores the too-many-cooks-spoil-the-concept feeling. To view the trailer, click here.
I Love You, Man Trailer Earns Man-Hug, Respect
The trailer for I Love You, Man — a “bromance” in which Paul Rudd, lacking in the substantive male friendship department, seeks out the perfect best man (Jason Segal) following his engagement to the lovely Rashida Jones — is online, and I’ve decided it’s a winner.
All the dog crap stuff is a push — supposedly revelatory character humor forced into a box of test audience-approved crassness — but the rapport between all the major players here seems great. Segal’s schlubby vibe is a good fit, seemingly, for this sort of role (the edgy new pal), and Rudd scores with the same sort of smart, tone-appropriate yet still slightly canted delivery (as with “Deep — in my mouth” after Thomas Lennon’s kiss, and “C’mon!” after the walk-by belch) that’s been a hallmark of his comedic screen performances dating all the way back to 1995’s Clueless.
Commercial prospects will be partially determined by rating, but the R-rated Role Models has done $64 million and counting, so things look good for a mid-sized spring hit. Directed by John Hamburg, from a script by Hamburg and Larry Levin, I Love You, Man is currently slated for release on March 20, from DreamWorks/Paramount. It will also open the South by Southwest Festival on March 13, in Austin, Texas.
Fired Up! Trailer Induces Heavy Sighs
The trailer for Fired Up! (Screen Gems, February 20) is online, and not inspiring much confidence about the current state of genre screenwriting. The plot? Two high school guys, Nick (Eric Christian Olsen) and Shawn (Nicholas D’Agosto, great in the under-seen Rocket Science), are dreading the prospect of another summer at football camp. So when Nick hatches a scheme for the two to follow their school’s cheerleaders to cheer camp instead, they find themselves awash in a sea of gorgeous young women. Everything goes great until Shawn falls for Carly (Sarah Roemer), the beautiful head cheerleader who sees right through their plot.
The sort of naked brazenness with which Bring It On is ripped off comes across as eye-stabbingly bad, sure, but more damning is the fact that this trailer seems to go on for-ever, which is not a good sign for the movie’s long-play prospects. With presumably a bit more forward-leaning of a character, Roemer, aka the chick from Disturbia, gets a chance to prove her mettle in something else, and survive and advance in the Hollywood starlet sweepstakes. Other thoughts: the 31-year-old Olsen as a high schooler, no matter how jocked out, is a real stretch… and if John Michael Higgins shouldn’t yet completely stop receiving work, he should definitely be excised from trailer rotation. His hiring now says one thing, and one thing only: sure, we didn’t write a funny character, but we paid a little bit extra to get this guy you’ve seen before, in the hopes that he has some residual goodwill still in the tank.
Fast & Furious Trailer Teaches Lesson About Gas Hauling
The trailer for Fast & Furious, the streamline-titled fourth installment in the zippy-brightly-colored-car franchise that helped Vin Diesel and especially Paul Walker eat and dress well, is a slick, well-pitched thing, even if its turbo-charged automotive shenanigans seem a little bit wince-inducing and bone-rattling after my own unnerving dance with vehicular mayhem on I-405 tonight. Sure, the moving hijacking of a “gasoline land train” in the Dominican Republic (“street value: $1.4 million”) is totally absurd and over-the-top, especially when one considers that apparently the driver of said vehicle is given only a prop-store pistol for self-defense, but this series has never been particularly concerned with subtlety or reality. Ergo, gingham-clad cholos will rejoice, among other twenty- and early thirtysomethings.
Coming home from Tokyo, the fourth movie’s tagline — “New Model, Original Parts” — is representative of Hollywood studio-think at its best, and summons to mind those few times when your parents completely yielded to all the pressures of juggling work and family life and just let you eat McDonald’s and a fifth of a pound of Oreos for dinner. For more on the film, which bows April 3 from Universal, despite the “this summer” tag in its trailer, click here.
Dance Flick Has Zeitgeist on Its Side for Genre Takedown
Sure, by all reasonable accounts heretofore Dance Flick seems just another lame spoof-o-rama (e.g., Disaster Movie, Superhero Movie) stuffed to the rafters with sight gags and over-foleyed slapstick, this time from the Wayans brothers. But I can live with it, and the one-sheet brought a smile to my face because it’s an overpeddled genre that needs to be taken down, notwithstanding the honest-to-goodness, yes-I-said-it pop-vibrance of Step Up 2 the Streets. It’s ripe material, in other words — the first ingredient for good satire. And who knows, maybe the cast will help elevate it a bit; the fact that in the trailer they’re peddling unknowns instead of Carmen Electra or some such star cameos actually gives one a modicum of hope. Yet to be rated, Dance Flick releases February 6 from Paramount.
UPDATE 1/02/09: Apparently fearing The Pink Panther 2, Dance Flick has now moved to the more wide open pastures of August 14, probably a wiser move in that it abuts the autumnal commencement of high school.
Twilight Trailer Gets Young Blood Pumping
The new, full-length trailer for teen-vampire love story Twilight, releasing wide November 21, into that lucrative slot vacated by the latest entry in the Harry Potter series, is now online after an Access Hollywood (or was it Entertainment Tonight?) premiere, and I can totally see the appeal, even if some of the action seems nipped from 2006’s The Covenant, and Robert Pattinson’s ridiculous hairstyle seems curiously inspired by Billy Joel’s “Keepin’ the Faith.”
Adapted from Stephenie Meyer’s popular series of young adult novels, and directed by Catherine Hardwicke, it’s a Romeo & Juliet-type thing about an immortal bloodsucker and a regular human girl, with rampaging “bad vampires” and all the complications that presents. I’ve been told good things about the books — that they’re eminently readable, and not at all embarassingly done — and advance tracking for movie is huge, so I need to resign myself to the fact that I might be intermittently writing about this series for several years. This is great for Stewart, who’s turned in a variety of mostly good work since 2002’s Panic Room. Having not yet seen anything with Pattinson (who’s also a musician, in fall-back fashion), I’m a bit more suspicious… are there projects for which Shane West and Jared Leto are not available? OK, not fair. Pattinson’s a lot younger, I guess. Still… watch that ‘do, chief; a height of five-plus inches nudges you inexorably toward douche-nozzle status.
Sex Drive: Red Band Señor Donut Clip
New W. TV Ads Spotlight Economic Crisis
I commented a few days back on the brilliant, evocative new trailer for Oliver Stone’s W., and it’s now up and running in chopped-and-diced form in 30-second television spots, including on MSNBC and CNN. There’s a new line not glimpsed in the theatrical/online long-form cut (“I don’t understand why you’re bringing this up at lunch,” says President Bush says to Vice President Cheney when the latter starts talking about the potential for an anthrax attack), but perhaps most fascinating is the inclusion of voiceover and text narration that sells the film as “based on the unbelievable true story of George W. Bush, and the trillion dollar mistake.”
Wait… which trillion dollars, again? I know it’s not the Iraq War (which currently sits at around $585 billion, but runs as high as $3 trillion when factoring in long-term costs). And it’s not the total federal deficit, which has ballooned to $10 trillion-plus under Bush. Oh, right… it’s that other $1 trillion or so ripped from taxpayers’ futures, in the form of the Congressional economic bail-out package. Put a saddle on this guy. I can’t recall any other agitated-entertainment promotional campaign — and this includes Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 — so openly, contemptuously bagging on a public figure, and incorporating up-to-minute material. Of course, I can’t really recall anyone else who has so brought it upon themselves and deserved it, either. Regardless, it’s the right campaign to run for W., really, stripping the bark off its own subject of focus. This push has me rethinking my previous assessment that Stone’s movie is financially doomed; talking to a few friends and colleagues recently opened my mind to at least the possibility that the filmgoing public could be receptive to a cathartic dismissive experience, something I hadn’t previously considered.
W. Gets Taken for Spin By Talking Heads
The previous trailer and TV ads for Oliver Stone’s W., opening in a few weeks from Lionsgate, were wrongheaded things, a bit too centered around Shakespearean-level Bush family grappling, and cutesy introductions of all the made-up bit players. This new trailer, blending quick-cut news footage with footage from the film, and set to Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime,” is a gem. Ignoring the fact that the same song was notably used as part of The Truman Show‘s advertising push, this qualifies as a top-notch sales job, because it both firmly establishes the film’s authorial point-of-view and advances the narrative itself, in miniature. The moments all fit together — beautiful wife, beautiful house — right down to the “how did I get here?” shrug and the dizzy scream of madness at the end — a placeholder for national opinion about the flaming wreckage of the Bush 43 presidency. It compels multiple viewings, this trailer. Nice adjusted tagline, too: “based on a true story.” The question, of course, is whether any of this translates into an iota of increased general audience interest in actually seeing this movie. With the economy so prodigiously in the crapper, I have to think not. For more information, click here.
Ballast Trailer Flashes Filmmaker Artistry
It’s a nice, delicate thing, the trailer for Lance Hammer’s stirring directorial debut, the Sundance-minted Ballast, but it still doesn’t fully convey the top-shelf artistry with which this elegiac tale is told. So many films from freshmen filmmakers evince no cohesive visual scheme — or, failing that, are all nervous, jittery, look-at-me energy — but this movie is the exception to the rule. The story — about a young Mississippi boy, his mother, and the slow thaw of their fraught relationship with said boy’s uncle, the twin of his late father — is simple and slow to unfold, but Hammer’s emphasis on quiet emotional truth is impressive. His approach with the camera and eye for unfussy natural composition, meanwhile, summons to mind Terrence Malick, and David Gordon Green’s George Washington.
The film opens in New York City at the Film Forum on October 1, and then spreads its wings to an additional top 20 markets, including San Francisco on October 17, Boston and Chicago on October 31, Los Angeles on November 7, Philadelphia and Washington D.C. on November 14, Detroit on November 21, and St. Louis on November 28. A full review will follow later this coming week; for more information on the film, meanwhile, click here.
Sex Drive Revs Its Engine
Sex Drive is coming, and it’s not at all a bad thing.
As much as the play’s the thing, teen sex/road trip comedies live or die on the strength of their casting and chemistry, and in this regard this flick — with Josh Zuckerman, Clark Duke (above right) and Amanda Crew as its main three players, and James Marsden and Seth Green (above left) put to good use in supporting roles — easily delivers the goods. More soon on the movie, which releases October 17 from Summit Entertainment, but the red-band trailer smartly spotlights both some of the film’s quips and, via quick-cut montage, its surging energy, which is one of its strongest selling points. Nice use, too, of MGMT’s “Time to Pretend,” for my money the true song of the year.
Good Dick Raises Brow, Half-Heartedly
The red-band trailer for Good Dick, an idiosyncratic, Los Angeles-set romance starring Jason Ritter and writer-director Marianna Palka which played earlier this year at Sundance, earns a cocked eyebrow or two, with its sullen leading lady’s assaultive use of the word penis. But it seems very much an achingly constructed indie “thing,” and suffers as well from Ritter’s bland anonymous face. All apologies to his late father, but Ritter is like Jason Behr or Ryan Merriman or one of those mop-haired Canadians that get cast in runaway productions lensing in Vancouver — guys that look conventionally attractive, at once familiar and utterly forgettable. You know, future Edward Burns-types. When I see them cast, I inwardly yawn.
Lakeview Terrace Seems a Weird Fit for Neil LaBute
I’ve now twice watched the trailer for Lakeview Terrace, a September flick about Samuel L. Jackson’s problems with a young couple that moves in next door, and apart from the major themes of discord there’s little to suggest it as the work of director Neil LaBute, whose career has taken a decidedly bizarre turn ever since 2003’s The Shape of Things. It feels more like a film for Gregory Hoblit (Fracture, Untraceable) or someone of that ilk, a respectable genre hand who has a touch of “thriller” experience. Maybe Harold Becker, if he’s still working. In short, it doesn’t seem like a work that allows for the imprint of much of a worldview, or sense of personality. Who knows, though — maybe that was part of the appeal for LaBute, after the commercial washout of The Wicker Man, abetted by Warner Bros.’ snuff publicity campaign.
On the plus side, I dig the matter-of-fact manner in which it presents the interracial marriage between Patrick Wilson and Kerry Washington, which is more than heavily implied as being at the core of Jackson’s problems with his new neighbors. That’s refreshing. Halfway through the film’s trailer it also plays the “color” card — as in blue, since Jackson’s character is a cop — which would seem to be a really effective second act twist played too soon (a la Ransom‘s ante-upping bounty), though there’s no evidence that the script is that intelligently withholding, since a few intercut scenes seem to show Jackson engaging in workplace shootouts and/or skull-cracking, which are probably an introduction to his character. I’ll be seeing the film fairly soon, and might revisit some of this in non-spoiler-ish fashion, we’ll see.
First Dubya Trailer Leaks to “Internets”
It likely won’t last long, given that they’re still cutting and this isn’t the official version, but the first trailer* for Oliver Stone’s W. (yep, with a period) is up on YouTube, and offers a confirmative glance at the Shakespearean familial grappling it assays. (*Note: see below.) Starring Josh Brolin as the current President Bush and James Cromwell as his daddy, #41, the film, of course, is a look at the wayward youth and young adulthood of our still-commander in chief, and how he turned things around to, you know, rule the free world.
It’s a brief, fairly simple thing, this trailer, effectively conveying the I’ll-show-you fire that, once lit, powered Dubya out of the wilderness and into the limelight. It ends with a role call of some of the bit players — Laura Bush (Elizabeth Banks), Condoleezza Rice (Thandie Newton), Colin Powell (Jeffrey Wright), Donald Rumsfeld (Scott Glenn), Karl Rove (Toby Jones), Dick Cheney (Richard Dreyfuss) — that have helped make up the tragicomedy of the last eight years. A couple impressions: the make-up jobs range from spot-on to a bit awkward, but the musical choice of “What a Wonderful World” (nudge, nudge… yeah, I get it) is a cop-out, and only serves to underline and buttress the knee-jerk reactions this film engenders. Also, if Jason Ritter (b. 1980) really is playing Jeb Bush, that’s a bit disappointing, only insofar as it indicates the focal limitations of this pared-down piece; the flaming wreckage of Jeb’s political career, as seen through his eyes or his father’s, would have made for a really good scene or two, flash-forward.
Still, regardless of the probative value as it relates to his presidency, the movie is a pleasure to have exist, if only for the socio-entertainment coverage it will foist upon the MSNBC and CNN reporters (always good for laughs), and the spin that will emerge from the Bushies and their surrogates when they’re dutifully trotted out to nitpick over this detail or that. I’m sure it’ll make for a couple great segments on The Daily Show, too. W. releases in mid-October, from Lionsgate.
* UPDATE, 7/28: The official trailer, running basically the same length, is now online, but the version with slightly saltier language (e.g., #41’s paternal admonition about “chasing tail,” is still available here, and here, if you beat the copyright police.)
What If Spy Game and Enemy of the State Mated?
The new trailer for Body of Lies, Ridley Scott’s adaptation of Washington Post columnist David Ignatius’ globe-trotting novel about terror-hunting gone awry, is online, and it terribly undersells the thing, I’m afraid. I’ve watched the trailer twice now, and it says nothing, really — either in the way of plotting, or moral complexity.
Starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Russell Crowe, the movie centers around an ex-journalist turned CIA
agent who starts tracking down an Al Qaeda leader who may be planning a
new attack on the United States, only to get jerked around by his Stateside case officer. It’s easy to see why The Departed
screenwriter William Monahan was brought in for the adaptation, what with all the deep-cover shenanigans and what not, but this trailer — with all its cell phone cross-chatter and vacuous doublespeak — comes across like some dusty casserole of Syriana, Spy Game and Enemy of the State, just with a filmic upgrade. Body of Lies releases October 10 via Warner Bros.
Watchmen Trailer Sees You Watching It
The trailer for Watchmen, Zack Snyder’s adaptation of the same-named celebrated graphic novel, and his follow-up to 300, is now online, and of course attached to The Dark Knight this weekend. All in all, it is what it is, and does what it does — more super-stylized, frame-speed-manipulated action; more brooding, color-saturated posing; more music from Tyler Bates. The effects look pretty cool, though, which will erect tents in the pants of many a comic book geek. Nice use of Smashing Pumpkins, too. Watchmen releases March 6, 2009 from Warner Bros. For more information, click here.
Terminator Salvation Trailer Greets Edward Furlong Rudely
So the first trailer for next summer’s Terminator Salvation, directed by McG (who was honestly once called “McGenius” by an actress I interviewed), is online, but it’s only a teaser thing of franchise callbacks and action mayhem: skulls crushed underfoot, Christian Bale, shit gettin’ blowed up good, robots, etcetera. If Warner Bros. really wanted to play it bold with the Terminator Salvation teaser, it just would’ve been 30 seconds of a bloated, boozed-up Edward Furlong trying to get hold of his agent on the phone, demanding why he couldn’t even get a meeting for the film.
Baldness Doesn’t Faze Harold’s Spencer Breslin
The quality and production value of the trailer for Harold, Spencer Breslin’s new movie, makes it at times look like it was shot by me, or some knucklehead friends, as part of a high school A/V Club assignment, but the kid’s comic timing undeniably pushes it along — the story of a high school kid with premature male pattern baldness. Breslin’s wry delivery on lines like, “I’m going over the nerd wall” more than makes up for the presence of Cuba Gooding, Jr., who really shouldn’t be allowed to ever be shown dancing in another trailer. Ally Sheedy and Nikki Blonsky also co-star. Harold opens July 11 in Los Angeles and New York, with a top 20 market roll-out tentatively planned after that.
My Best Friend’s Girl Inspires No Thoughts Whatsoever
The trailer for My Best Friend’s Girl, the latest wrinkle-nosed rom-com confection starring Kate Hudson, is online, and it could not possibly seem like more of a bland, corporate-manufactured piece of fluff.
It’s all there — the totally anonymous title (bonus points for nipping it from an old pop song); the scene where a ruckus is created at a wedding; the presence of Jason Biggs, who still has the rot of Over Her Dead Body, not to mention the general stench of inconsequentiality, hanging over him; and a guy like Howard Deutch directing. The brief flash of bra from Hudson should fool no one, this is a movie that asks nothing of its audience, just as it asks nothing of its actors. No nuance, no semi-relatable real-world angst or moments of reflection, nothing. But, hey, whatever. It’ll do what it does, which is probably around $50-70 million domestically (I’m erring on the side of generosity), with steady ancillary revenue for the foreseeable future. Movies like this were made to play on airplanes. I’ll say this, though — best to dial down the Dane Cook, and dial up the Lizzy Caplan and Alec Baldwin, no matter their actual (in)significance in the finished product. My Best Friend’s Girl opens nationwide on September 19, from Lionsgate. For more information, click here.
Asylum Red Band Trailer Offers Up Gore Aplenty
The red-band trailer for Asylum, the new direct-to-video horror thriller starring Sarah Roemer (aka, the chick from Disturbia) that streets on July 15, is online, and seems to promise plenty of gore, or at least a nice clip reel for the foley artists who labored on it. There’s a pinch of Session 9 here, it seems, but mostly the movie appears to be an excuse for a ghastly-looking “doctor” to ram sharp implements into the eyes and/or heads of a bunch of college students. The voiceover narration is clumsy and derisible (“at history’s most notorious asylum for teenagers,” and, “students hiding their mysterious past have unlocked true evil”), but who’s really paying attention, right? The flick is directed by Snakes on a Plane helmer David Ellis, whose previous work doesn’t much recommend him. (He parlayed stunt coordinator and second unit gigs into directing work on Final Destination 2 and Cellular, the latter of which I never saw.) Holy crap… Ellis is doing Final Destination 4 as well. Somehow missed the news on that one. So this was the in-between paycheck gig, I guess.
Bill Maher Gets Religulous with Gnarls Barkley
Religulous, Bill Maher’s documentary examination of organized religion and some its more fanatical leanings, about which I thought I’d posted something earlier but apparently didn’t, has a new, full-length trailer up/out, and if it doesn’t pitch a throughline other than one of generalized sardonic inquiry, does it really have to? The answer to that is of course no, especially with intimations of hulking dudes threatening to pound Maher for disrespecting their God.
This is a blue-state niche film, through and through. One never really needs an excuse to play Gnarls Barkley (“Does that make me craaaaaazy?”), but it’s a good match here. Also, priceless is Maher’s reaction shot to being told by a federal lawmaker,
“Well, you don’t need to pass an IQ test for the U.S. Senate.” Yes, I’m looking forward to this film. Helmed by Larry Charles, the director of Borat, Religulous opens via Lionsgate on October 3.