Actress Lori Petty makes her directorial debut with the The Poker House, screening in competition at the forthcoming Los Angeles Film Festival, and its 90-second trailer is a very well put-together thing, an effective selling of an autobiographically-tinged tale of shattered adolescence, a la Frank Whaley’s Joe the King or Gary Oldman’s Nil By Mouth. Set in 1976, and co-starring Selma Blair, Bokeem Woodbine and David Alan Grier, the movie centers around 14-year-old Agnes (Jennifer Lawrence, below left). With a strung-out
mother, a pimp father figure and a home overrun by gamblers, thieves
and johns, Agnes’ life is a tangled struggle of dark days and lonely nights. The narration (“When a girl falls in the city and nobody sees it, did it happen?”) could tip the finished product into over-sentimentalized pap, who knows, but it’s undeniably arresting in short-form here. Nice score from Mike Post, too.
The Los Angeles Film Festival runs from Thursday, June 19 through Sunday, June 29.
Over the course of 10 days and 11 nights, the public is invited to take
advantage of world premieres including independent films and major
studio releases, as well as tribute screenings, outdoor movies,
celebrity-filled red carpets and more. Festival passes and individual tickets are now
available; for more information, click here.
The 90-second trailer for Transsiberian, writer-director Brad Anderson’s Hitchcockian thriller releasing July 18 from First Look, conjures up memories of just how effective Session 9 and The Machinist were as unremittingly stark, anxiety-provoking mood pieces.
The movie stars Woody Harrelson and Emily Mortimer as an American couple who decide to take the long way home from their recent sojourn in Asia, boarding the legendary express train from Beijing to Moscow. On their way, they meet another couple (Eduardo Noriega and Kate Mara), with whom they quickly form a bond as fellow travelers away from home. When Harrelson accidentally gets separated from Mortimer at a stopover, she begins to realize that their new friends aren’t exactly who or what they seem to be; more danger surfaces when a deceitful Russian detective (Ben Kingsley) arrives, asking questions about a heroin smuggling scheme.
The exoticness of the setting — its snowy landscapes and grim sense of containment — is a big part of what helps sell Transsiberian, certainly, but Anderson (who’s been busy between full-length features with work on HBO’s The Wire and Sounds Like, an entry in the Masters of Horror anthology series) is an ace with tone, and even if the last five seconds of the trailer seems to tip its hand a bit, this looks like to be a solid genre base knock.
The trailer for City of Ember makes it seem a moderately cool thing, as if sunnier, disparate elements of Dark City, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Bridge to Terabithia and Journey to the Center of the Earth were somehow all mashed together into one adolescent-leaning adventure smoothie. A Walden Media and Playtone co-production based on Jeanne Duprau’s best-selling novel, and releasing October 10 through Fox Walden, the movie is the directorial follow-up of Monster House helmer Gil Kenan, who was juggling doctors’ appointments that would allow him to travel internationally when last I interviewed him.
Starring Saoirse Ronan (Oscar-nominated for Atonement, but also very good in the under-appreciated I Could Never Be Your Woman, her first film role), City of Ember is set in an underground city where, for generations, people have flourished. With its once-powerful generator failing and the great lamps that illuminate the city starting to flicker, though, that time-tested “race against time” subsequently ensues, with citizens searching Ember for clues that will unlock an ancient mystery of the city’s existence before permanent darkness falls. Tim Robbins, Bill Murray, Martin Landau, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Liz Smith, Mary Kay Place and Toby Jones also star. For more on the movie, click here.
It’ll be interesting to see how Kevin Costner’s Swing Vote (Touchstone, August 1), the apparent mixed-feeling story of an apathetic, apolitical (read: American) loser who ends up casting the tie-breaking vote in a presidential election, plays in a such a momentous election year.
Watching the trailer, one goes through a few sea changes in emotion. If this is being played in something approaching only slightly canted reality, which it seems to be, there seems to be an awful lot of hoops to jump through to set up this conceit, and I still have a bad taste in my mouth from Barry Levinson’s Man of the Year, which terribly fumbled away a somewhat similarly interesting socio-political concept. The notion of a national election being held hostage by a single vote — especially post-Florida 2000 — may be too big of a bite to chew.
A nominal tick in Swing Vote‘s favor is that it’s co-written and directed by Joshua Michael Stern, who did decent things with Neverwas; a big shrug comes in the form of the casting of Dennis Hopper and Kelsey Grammer as the candidates, though the trailer presents them as little more than ciphers. The participation of Paula Patton — so good in Idlewild and Déjà Vu — as a reporter has me intrigued, especially with regards to her billing; the participation of Nathan Lane, though, does not. On the other hand, Madeline Carroll, the naturalistic young girl playing Costner’s 12-year-old daughter, seems pretty good, less Abigail Breslin-y than I would have expected.
Costner took a crazy-hard swing for the fence with last summer’s serial killer flick Mr. Brooks, which I guess in a way I do sincerely appreciate. Costner every two years in rumpled, angry and/or weirded out fashion (e.g., The Upside of Anger) is better than him every year in something for which he doesn’t have any passion (e.g., The Guardian), no matter how much the movie works on its own merits. The question with Swing Vote, though, is how much Edtv — which is to say toothless satire masquerading as wacky, fun-time hijinks — is there? That will determine whether I break enthused or irritated, even if the movie likely won’t crack $35 to $40 million. Again, to view the trailer, click here.
Meeting Resistance, a documentary releasing May 20 from First Run Features, reveals a wholly different narrative about the Iraq War than the one portrayed by many in the mainstream news. In the only-slightly-redacted first-person-plural statement below, co-directors Molly Bingham and Steve Connors talk about their movie, which will be reviewed later in the month:
Meeting Resistance is about the people and make-up of the Iraqi resistance. Since it was released in theaters last fall, we have shown the film in more than 80 U.S. cities, as well as to several key military audiences. We’ve made more than 200 appearances with the film to talk about our understanding of the conflict in Iraq and take questions from the audience. When the lights come up, we are greeted with the kind of silence associated with people trying to reconcile what they thought they knew with what they now understand. We’ve come to realize that our film is delivering a paradigm shift about the Iraq conflict — one audience at a time.
There are two wars in Iraq, and Meeting Resistance explores the first war — the popularly supported resistance to occupation, which contains the majority of the organized violence that is happening in Iraq. Using primary source material, critical analysis and cross-referencing, we crafted a film that tells the story of that conflict. The second war is the civil war — an internal political struggle being waged over competing visions of Iraq’s future, of which the country’s sectarian violence is a symptom, not a cause. Meeting Resistance is a journalistic documentary, not an advocacy or polemic film. Although we did not set out to challenge the narrative of the Iraq conflict — the one that has been constructed in Washington — our reporting eventually led us to do so.
U.S. military briefings in the Green Zone during 2003 and 2004 told journalists that the violence against American troops came from “dead-enders” and “Ba’athi die-hards,” from common criminals, religious extremists, foreign fighters, and al-Qaeda — characterized as “fringe elements.” While some might fit some of these descriptions, the vast majority of those involved are citizens from the core of Iraqi society. In time, we came to see the U.S. military’s misnaming of the “enemy” as an intentional act — as a key part of their objective to control the “information battle space.” They aspire to control the perception of the enemy’s identity, and through the news media persuade the American public that these “fringe elements” of Iraqi society are the only ones who oppose the U.S. presence in Iraq. A military push (or surge) to isolate and eliminate them would accomplish a perceived “victory.”
The National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq delivered to the White House in October 2003 was leaked in February 2006 by Robert Hutchings, the 2003-2005 chairman of the National Intelligence Council. Speaking in interviews, Hutchings revealed that the report said that it is composed of nationalists fighting for their country with deep roots in the society and that the U.S. military, if it remains in Iraq, will be fighting a counterinsurgency war for years to come, a conclusion that echoed what we had found in our on-the-ground reporting for Meeting Resistance.
This spring, a front-page investigation by the New York Times revealed the Pentagon’s well-oiled “briefing” system for retired military analysts who are working for TV outlets and writing op-eds in ways that reflect and amplify the U.S. government’s narrative. The reporting done by the Times underscores the critical importance the Pentagon ascribes to its efforts to control the “message,” including how it defines the enemy.
If the predominant narrative about the Iraq conflict was truly based in reality, it would involve pointing out that the majority of Iraqis want a withdrawal of all foreign forces, and that the Department of Defense’s quarterly reports to Congress, on average, show that from April 2004 to December 2007, 74 percent of significant attacks initiated by Iraqis targeted American-led coalition forces. Americans would also find out that half of registered marriages in Baghdad in 2002 were mixed marriages between Sunni and Shia, Kurd and Arab, Christian and Muslim, and many of the tribes and clans and families are, in fact, mixed between Sunni and Shia. Also, nearly all of the Arab Iraqis polled oppose dividing the country along ethnic and sectarian lines, and the vast majority demands that Iraq have a strong central government, not the decentralized powerlessness imposed by the American-influenced constitution.
It is not that these points have never been reported, but the booming voice of “disinformation” — from which the Pentagon wants the American public to view the conflict — drowns much of this information out. Ultimately, our film has helped reveal the success of the Pentagon’s strategy to obscure the real nature of the war in Iraq. Unfortunately, too many in the news media have been willing to allow that to happen. Throughout the world’s history, there have been occupations — and resistance to those occupations. Why then do Americans have such a difficult time grasping that our troops are unwelcome by the vast majority of the Iraqi population? And why has reporting by our mainstream news media generally failed to recognize and draw our attention to this central, core aspect of the violence?
The second trailer for The Happening, opening June 13 from 20th Century Fox, is a markedly better thing than the first one — much more effective in its solicitous use of mood. M. Night Shyamalan’s follow-up to his career-dousing Lady in the Water, the movie centers on a mysterious and seemingly wide-scale apocalyptic crisis as it sweeps through suburban Pennsylvania, and seems carved from the same template of vague menace that has powered a spate of recent films (Cloverfield, Funny Games and I Am Legend, but also plenty of dramas and
anxiety-infused comedies) and emerged as the predominant American screen narrative of our
times: we
are lost, and scared and thrown off our collective stride by that uncertainty.
With all the backlash directed at particularly The Village and Lady in the Water, Shyamalan would probably do well to dial back on his ace-up-the-sleeve preferences, and just dive headlong into more air-quote pure genre manipulation. But he’s not a man of half-measures, that’s for sure, and that’s not what The Happening necessarily seems to hint at, with its point-of-view shots and Wahlberg doing his carefully modulated earnest speechifying, as in Invincible. And hey, I really dug The Trigger Effect, so color me there anyway.
The one-minute teaser trailer for Miss Conception, releasing theatrically June 6 from First Look and starring Heather Graham as a woman in the throes of a freaky early menopause, last-ovulation, ticking-biological-clock crisis, doesn’t inspire much amusement or hope, though I guess there hasn’t really been hope attached to a Graham-fronted project in some time. The British accents can’t (or at least don’t, here) mask the lack of wit, and while slapstick-y physical bits and yoga-sex positions are all fine and dandy, unless this movie gives it up with an R rating, and/or somehow ends with Graham and costar Mia Kirshner involved in a hot threesome, it doesn’t hold much appeal. It’ll also suffer from postpartum comparison to Baby Mama, no doubt, though I gather Miss Conception will be a fairly limited release anyway, before a quickie DVD roll-out.
Egads, is there anything at all notable and special about the trailer for Bangkok Dangerous, the collaboration between Nicolas Cage and filmmakers Danny and Oxide Pang, that makes it any different than all the Prague-set, anonymous actioners that Wesley Snipes’ career has devolved into? I watched it twice to make sure… and yep, it sucks that bad. And I just noticed the second time around, after typing the above, that it actually opens in Prague! Sigh… but of course.
From the morose voiceover narration (“I’d like to meet someone, but it’s tough when you live out of a suitcase…”) to all the spoken and visual clichés of the hitman-opening-his-heart tale, this looks like a giant yawn, and a disservice to the Pangs’ 1999 original flick. And for the record, “We had an arrangement… political assassination wasn’t in the contract!” may rank as one of the stupidest lines of righteous indignation ever peddled in an action trailer. Bangkok Dangerous opens August 22, from Lionsgate.
The trailer for Step Brothers — starring Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly, and releasing July 25 from Sony — is online, and it totally works as a territorial pissing match/slice of locked-horn competitiveness between two oblivious man-children. A reunion of sorts between Ferrell and Talladega Nights co-writer-director Adam McKay — who also teamed up for the smash web short “The Landlord,” which was probably seen by more folks than saw Semi-Pro — the movie centers on two oafish fortysomethings who live at home with their respective parents (Richard Jenkins and Mary Steenburgen) who are then forced to coexist when their folks get married.
It’s good that that the movie seemingly pivots from being a thing of straight-up competition into, however ramshackle and loosely formed, an exercise in shared doofishness. Reilly and Ferrell both exude a certain affability, and their carefully constructed relationship was a good part of Talladega Night‘s success. Though the trailer is noncommittal in this regard, the studio-peddled logline seems to indicate the film is basically a re-do, on some level, of The Parent Trap, which could be great. The trailer also has the good sense to end with a great visual gag.
The teaser trailer for Hancock, the Los Angeles-set summer action comedy starring Will Smith and Charlize Theron, and opening July 2 from Columbia, spends most all of its energy selling us Smith in schlubby, irascible form rather than really telling us anything about the story, which centers around a misunderstood superhero. But of course that works fine for a first-wave trailer, and Hancock looks to be huge. His first summer flick in four years, it’ll allow Smith to reclaim the mantle of the July 4th weekend that he’s been renting out in the interim.
There’s little sense of the tone of the comedy here, but it thankfully doesn’t seem too jokey and forced, which I feared from the initial premise. Perhaps most impressive is the infrastructure destruction footage, which comes via special effects work that mimics lots of the incidentally “captured” Powerade commercials with Lebron James, Michael Vick, et al.
This poster for Street Kings is a nice enough Rorschach splatter of urban shoot-’em-up mayhem, with a pinch of bikini-clad temptation from 7 Dias‘ Martha Higareda (not a prominent component of the film, I can disappointedly tell you). It gets enough names and faces in frame, let’s admit, which is basically the thrust of Fox Searchlight’s entire marketing campaign for the film — to make it seem like it’s a really interesting, labyrinthine character ensemble cop actioner, like a gritty cross between Training Day and L.A. Confidential. The trailer for the movie, however, plays like a complete parody of testosteronized macho-cop bull-crap — which isn’t too far off the mark, I can tell you, having seen the finished product. More on this next week…
This grim, quick-cut trailer, while somewhat effective in its own
punch-to-the-face fashion, doesn’t do justice to the slow-paced,
much more legitimately unnerving trailer for The Strangers (Rogue, May 30) currently playing in theaters. The movie, seemingly a Vacancy-type killer-thriller, is about a pair of isolated young lovers (Scott Speedman and Liv Tyler) who find themselves under siege from a group (family?) of psychopaths who are perhaps taking a page from the original poster of Michael Haneke’s 1997 version of Funny Games with their choice of headwear. Yeah, the stalk-and-slash quotient of the final product is probably way up there, but the theatrical trailer reminded me a bit of In Cold Blood, actually, and the tense, long hold of a shot with a menacing figure standing silently in the background is virtually unprecedented in current trailer film vocabulary, especially for a genre piece like this. It freaked me out the first time I saw it, precisely because it’s so unexpected.
I should’ve gotten around earlier to posting and/or commenting on the trailer for the fourth Indiana Jones film, releasing May 22 from Paramount. But I was probably busy watching a not-very-good movie on DVD. The truth about the trailer is that the fedora and shadow-play introduction stuff is cool, the quick Roswell-stencil cutaway is appetite-whetting intriguing, and the action beats are all dutifully hit. This is a movie made by pros, and it thus far shows. But one of my good friends is right, Indy’s quip when crashing through a truck windshield (“Damn, I thought that was closer…”) is egregiously misplaced; it should come after the punches he throws. A hit-then-quip order abets the aged-Indy leap of faith the film requires; if they consistently do it vice versa, the movie will suffer mightily for it.
In advance of the 17th annual Philadelphia Film Festival in April, boutique distributor TLA Releasinghas acquired the rights to Epitaph, a lush, Korean, supernatural, psychological horror flick, for its “Danger After Dark” label.
The directorial debut of the Jung brothers, Epitaph is scheduled to play New Directors New Films in New York, as well as the aforementioned Philadelphia Film Festival on April 9 and 10, with a domestic release in late 2008 through TLA. The film opens in 1942, with the Korean capital of Kyung Sung occupied by the Japanese. The Anseng Hospital, in the center of the city, represents the twin glories of Japanese Imperialism and western modernization, but mysterious things are happening there. An intern bound by his parents to marry a girl whom he never met instead finds himself romantically drawn to a corpse; a traumatized little girl, the lone survivor of a horrific car crash, is tortured by bloody visions; and a married couple, both doctors, desperately try to manage their colleagues’ behaviors, yet find themselves investigating a series of brutal murders. To watch the movie’s trailer via TLA Releasing’s YouTube Channel, click here; there are unfortunately no English subtitles, though. Still, better than this week’s Shutter, one has to imagine.
The trailer for Deception (20th Century Fox, April 25), formerly titled The Tourist, is online and in theaters, pegged to this weekend’s Shutter, and it crackles like nicely made genre fare should. Starring Ewan McGregor, Hugh Jackman, Michelle Williams and Maggie Q, with a bit of Natasha Henstridge also thrown in for good measure, the film is centers on a workaholic number-cruncher who gets introduced to a white-collar sex club by a slick lawyer, only to become a suspect in a woman’s disappearance and and possibly bigger crimes.
As the overwhelmed accountant who has to account for his actions, McGregor is back in nebbishy mode, something he does surprisingly well, for those who might have forgotten. Jackman, meanwhile, is the slick power broker. It looks like a combination that works, these two playing off of one another. Despite the fact that its title is now completely anonymous, and will likely eventually share shelf space with some Shannon Tweed straight-to-video “erotic thriller,” Deception looks stylish, fun and well put together. The trailer seemingly conveys a few of the twists — chiefly just that it will eventually be a game of tables-turned retribution — but mainly strikes a nice balance between the lurid and the conventional, which is what this collision-of-worlds conceit is all about. For more information on the movie, click here.
The involvement of writer-director Daniel Waters (Heathers) pretty much mitigates some of the feelings of queasy, not-so-hot execution that the trailer for Sex and Death 101 induces. The central idea itself also helps. A comedy starring Simon Baker as a successful guy who, on the eve of his marriage, receives a list with the names of everyone he ever has and ever will have sex with (a list that notably doesn’t end with the name of his wife-to-be), the movie — releasing in limited theatrical fashion on April 4, from Anchor Bay Entertainment — costars Winona Ryder as a mysterious temptress, named Death Nell, who becomes an urban folk hero when she targets men guilty of sex crimes against women.
A couple things: first, the female nudity in the movie (assuming it’s there) had best be limited to Sophie Monk, Leslie Bibb and/or other nameless costars, and not trumped-up outrageousness involving The Facts of Life‘s Mindy Cohn. Just sayin’. Second, is it just me or does Baker — who I really liked in the underrated Something New — seem to be subtly channeling John Travolta in his performance, at least cadence-wise? Overall, the trailer elicited some meh-type feelings, but not enough to be a deal-breaker. I should still catch this and have more soon. Also of note, and no small amusement, is some of the film trivia on this page from its web site. Perhaps my favorite tidbit: “Much of Death Nell’s wardrobe comes from Winona Ryder’s closet in the
form of vintage clothing from old Hollywood films, such as a Claudette
Colbert outfit from It Happened One Night.” Hmmm… yes, I wonder how Ryder got that outfit?
The trailer for the PG-13 martial arts flick The Forbidden Kingdom (Weinstein Company/Lionsgate, April 18), starring Jet Li and Jackie Chan, elicits a shrug, for the most part. It mixes its message a bit, with varying tonal signals. It opens with typically earnest, historical narration (“In a land… where heaven touches Earth… with an empire divided by war”), and seems to have a fairly legit scope in terms of production design and setting. The floating-arrows-and-spears stuff is pretty cool, but then the prophesied-American-teen-transported-back-to-ancient-China stuff starts getting played up a little more, and the brow furrowing commences. There are lines seemingly meant to convey a sort of pithy jocularity (Chan to Li: “We can kill each other when it’s over”), but they essentially fall flat, and I don’t know that Michael Angarano (aka “the kid,” Jason) can pull off enough of a transformation to make any of this pop, or matter. There’s one legitimate laugh here (Chan’s petulant “He’s got no kung-fu — none!”), but the movie definitely doesn’t seem to be going for Shanghai-type hijinks. Maybe it should, given the mash-up/fish-out-of-water plot. Also, randomly, I do have to admire, on a certain level, Chan’s steadfast refusal to iron out his English. It’s obvious (even if you haven’t seen the bloopers and deleted scenes from any of the Rush Hour films) that he still learns his lines phonetically, bless him, and I think the weird intonations are inextricably part of his charm. For more about The Forbidden Kingdom, click here.
The reign of its amusing but hardly revelatory teaser trailer was brief, but the full-length trailer for Tropic Thunder has gone online, and it’s a nice, streamlined thing; it sells the movie’s concept with grace and a muscular confidence, plus features a crazy-eyed Nick Nolte to boot. Particularly amusing, for those perhaps worrying about it, are the segments selling Robert Downey, Jr. as a hotheaded Australian actor who undergoes a “controversial procedure” (i.e., he darkens the pigment of his skin) to play an African-American member of the film’s “band of brothers” platoon. Downey, to one of his fellow soldiers, after being called out for quoting the theme song to The Jeffersons: “Just because it’s a theme song doesn’t make it not true…”
So I’ve watched it twice, but the trailer for American Zombie, co-directed by Grace Lee and John Solomon, and releasing March 28 via Cinema Libre, does little to advance a positive case for this mockumentary about “high-functioning zombies living in Los Angeles, and their struggles to gain acceptance in human society.” I guess this seemed like a hot idea after Shaun of the Dead and the first, legitimately clever wave of those Geico “Caveman” ads, but there’s not a single moment here — with the arguable exception of the Asian zombie woman talking about her hopes and dreams, then losing her train of thought — that evidences rich, inventive parody, let alone a moment that pops, which is really what an independent flick’s trailer has to have. And what’s with all the hand-held action-cam stuff in the last third of the trailer?
So the trailer for The Incredible Hulk, starring Edward Norton and releasing June 13 from Universal, is online. Oh, I get it. He’s now “a hero for our times.” Reluctant rage and all that, ultimately channeled into one of those Matrix-esque, mano-a-mano head-on dives. Yawn. I actually dug the Transporter flicks, also helmed by director Louis Leterrier, but based on this trailer I’d probably be more stoked about this movie the less effects-oriented action there was. Another note — is it just me, or is Norton making a smoldering, make-out face at that vial, above?
The trailer for Righteous Kill, aka the Al Pacino-Robert De Niro cop drama from director Jon Avnet and Overture Films, is online, and it’s a real mixed bag that doesn’t necessarily give one hope that the movie is much more than an angular punch-card genre flick with a few hoo-ah! interactions between the two screen legends, who play police partners. It starts out strong enough, with the pair butting heads with an on-trial perp sprung from rape charges, and typically wry, on-the-job voiceover narration from De Niro (“Most respect the badge… everybody respects the gun”), but the preview’s musical choice of a loose-limbed version of “Sympathy for the Devil,” remixed by the Neptunes, is wrongheaded. It’s effectively lean, but this trailer whiffs on all the necessary menace and edgy cool that should be here. This would-be red-band trailer (self-made?) is much preferred, even if the punch of the voiceover from De Niro is dialed down a bit. Righteous Kill is set to release nationwide on September 12.
A red-band trailer of Tropic Thunder, releasing August 15 from Paramount/DreamWorks, has now gone live online, and it’s a nice, short piece of gung-ho war parody, even if all it does is basically slap up costumed pictures of the cast and have them yell and/or fire a weapon. Be advised, though, that you’ll have to access the stumper question of your birth date. Tricky, that…
The trailer for The Ruins, opening April 4 from Paramount, is online, and it looks like a matinee-level mash-up of Turistas (the travelogue elements, the latent xenophobia) and 2003’s Cabin Fever (the viral elements, the in-fighting). An R rating (which this movie has as well) and arguable “realism” presumably somewhat dented the former movie’s grosses, limiting it to only $7 million domestically in late 2006, while the same rating was seen as a big part of the latter’s insurgent, $21 million success. Here I expect it will act as more of a suppressor, necessarily excluding 14- to 16-year-olds who might otherwise drift in.
Starring Jonathan Tucker, Jena Malone, Laura Ramsey (above right) and Shawn Ashmore, The Ruins is based on Scott Smith’s novel about a group of friends whose leisurely Mexican
holiday takes a turn for the worse when they head to an “ancient Mayan temple, off the beaten path,” where some long-dormant evil
stirs and presumably makes them all pay in ways other than just insincerely “friending” it on MySpace. Ensemble cardsharp flick 21 and Superhero Movie, each opening the week before, seem to have a commercial leg up on The Ruins, and with George Clooney‘s latest directorial effort, the period piece football comedy Leatherheads, opening directly against it, I don’t see a way that The Ruins makes inroads with audiences outside of its wheelhouse demographic, especially since everything other than the setting and that one, forced perspective well shot that echoes There Will Be Blood has already fled from my mind as I write this.
With respect to the movie’s dual posters, I think the first one — of a stretched-back head, with prone neck — is far and away the most effective. The second poster, an outstretched hand, is a little bit Evil Dead, but mostly just vague. For more information on the movie, click here.
The 80-second trailer for 10,000 BC, Warner Bros.’ PG-13 prehistoric action opus which has been getting heavy
rotation TV ad support these last two weeks but unreturned emails and phone calls to editors
all over Los Angeles with regard to screenings, makes it seem a passable enough piece of glossy, effects-laden, stroke-off entertainment for the undemanding 12- to 18-year-old set — no Quest for Fire, that’s for certain.
Directed by Roland Emmerich, the movie’s story follows a hunter (Steven Strait, above) who goes questing to rescue his kidnapped woman (Camilla Belle, of When a Stranger Calls and The Quiet), though I’m not sure how one goes about enlisting the orderly service of marauding woolly mammoths, as one sequence seems to suggest. (If that’s actually possible, I have a new addition to my list of Top 10 things to do when I come into possession of a time machine.) The first poster for the film, meanwhile, obviously takes its inspiration from that back-to-the-cliff one-sheet of last spring’s big hit, 300, and is trying to ring a subconscious bell of reflection and excitement in audiences. The other poster, though, is more problematic. Folks aren’t used to seeing mammoths cavorting about, and a couple weeks back I honestly had someone ask me if that was art for the latest animated Ice Age flick.
A long day ended last night with a screening of The Hammer, radio personality Adam Carolla’s leading man big screen debut. Despite the swirl of real world irritations, I generally dug the movie on its own low-fi terms, though I confess an affinity for Carolla’s trademark saltiness, an acquired taste to be sure.
The story has its roots in the radioman and former The Man Show co-host’s real-life rise from working-class anonymity, with Carolla playing Jerry, a just-turned-40 Los Angeles carpenter who moonlights teaching boxing class at Bodies in Motion, and gets a new shot at both love and the big time, in the form of a public defender pupil and a shot at the Olympic trials, respectively. The romantic stuff of course doesn’t really play (Kissing Jessica Stein multi-hyphenate Heather Juergensen, above right, tries gamely, but Carolla is all knees-and-elbows when it comes to flirtatious banter, even of the wiseacre variety), the production design is super-threadbare and director Charles Herman-Wurmfeld, also of Kissing Jessica Stein, isn’t a great match for the material, over-relying on ADR fixes and jump-cuts to spotlight his leading man. Still, the movie has an indefatigability of spirit that I admire, and it’s also completely genuine in its unbowed, non-held-tongue affection for multiculturalism and the working class, something rare in movies, big or small.
The trailer for the film, meanwhile, highlights at least some of this vaguely politically incorrect backtalk, which isn’t the main thrust of The Hammer but is among its high points — stuff like Jerry’s aside to his friend and fellow day-laborer Ozzie’s family (“You guys seem to all love Nicaragua so much, except for the part where you risked your lives not to live there anymore”), and his snappish interjection when a fellow boxer questions why he has to train with an old white dude (“Yeah coach — when is the black man going to get a fair shake in the fight game?”). More will follow in the coming weeks, including a possible interview with Carolla; The Hammer opens March 21, from International Film Circuit. For more information, click here.
