It’s been said (mostly by me) that the current crop of ensemble romantic comedies, fueled in large part by Love Actually early last decade, are this generation’s version of disaster movies. Except back then, Oscar winners like Charlton Heston, Shelley Winters and Jennifer Jones put in lots of time and were even required to participate in some stunt work (in favorites like Earthquake, The Poseidon Adventure, and The Towering Inferno, respectively).
More recent flicks like He’s Just Not That Into You and Valentine’s Day have simplified the recipe for the stars du jour: they simply have to come on set for a couple of days, act out a sitcom-lite thread, and if the movie opens big, they can all lay claim to a hit!
New Year’s Eve, which arrives on December 9, is the latest entry in this canon. Though it’s not a literal sequel to Valentine’s Day, both movies were written by Katherine Fugate and directed by Garry Marshall, and there are a few cast crossovers, as you’ll in the following trailer.
There are manysigns that Rise of the Planet of the Apes, which hits theatres on August 5, will suck. For one thing, it’s being released in August, which is where movies like Final Destination 5: Bitch, You Dead get dumped like soiled underthings For another, star James Franco dissed the movie pretty hard in a recent Playboy interview, suggesting that what began as a project full of character development has devolved into a mindless action film.
However, I’m choosing to ignore these signs, as though they were Cassandra and I were Agamemnon, strolling to my seat in the cineplex without noticing that Clytemnestra seemed awfully insistent that I buy this particular bag of buttery popcorn.
And why am I acting that way? Because the trailer looks so damn cool, that’s why.
Judging by the trailer, there are a billion reasons I shouldn’t want to see I Don’t Know How She Does It, the September 16 romcom starring Sarah Jessica Parker as a woman trying to balance her career with her family.
You guys, I’ve had great luck with summer films this year. I’ve enjoyed arty flicks like The Tree of Life and Midnight in Paris, and I’ve gotten a kick out of tentpoles like X-Men: First Class and Super 8.
(The latter, by the way, seems destined for my year-end top ten. I cared about the characters, I was delighted by the acting and the emotional twists regarding the alien, and I was totally absorbedin the pace of the storytelling.)
And yet this joy has been tempered by the threat of horrible pictures to come. Before every good movie, I’ve seen trailers for inevitable dreck like Captain America, Transformers 43: The Moon Is My Bitch, Horrible Bosses, and Real Steel, which the good people at Extra Hot Great have helpfully dissected in all its crappiness.
And let me just add: The trailer for Real Steel wants us to get emotionally invested in robots that aren’t sentient. They just sit there lifeless until that irritating kid controls them with a joystick, yet we’re supposed to care about them. There’s an essay to be written here… about how this movie reflects our culture’s emotional and spiritual alienation as our personal experiences are replaced by the proxy experiencesof by machines. As these robots do our fighting for us, so email does our talking for us, etc. But I doubt I can write that essay, because every time I try, I’ll just get distracted by that irritating fucking kid.
Ahem.
But even Real Steel looks better than Zookeeper. It’s clearly going to be the worst movie of the year. Maybe of all time.
Here’s a clip-n-save reference guide to the reasons this movie will blow :
Like a wary acolyte, I approached the trailer for Super 8 with trepidation. Yes, Steven Spielberg (the executive producer) and J.J. Abrams (the writer-director) have served very good alien over the years, but could they really convince me they’d done something new? Didn’t the plot of this film—a group of kids are shooting a monster movie when they see an actual monster/alien/freak crash on a railroad track–sound like a fusion of things they’d done before? Like Cloverfield mixed with E.T. and maybe a pinch of War of the Worlds?
But oh, I was a fool. Even though I do recognize many of the plot elements here—and there are also touches of Stand By Me and Breaking Away and every other “gang of young boys” movie—I don’t care. I am in. If nothing else, Spielberg and Abrams both know how to tell sci-fi/fantasy stories that brim with human feeling, and this movie appears to have plenty of characters worth caring about. Like, tell me more about this guy who actually saw the creature. Why is he so sad?
Plus, the trailer’s rocking an aw-shucks-I’m-just-a-moseyin’ energy, which seems like an interesting way to approach an alien apocalypse story.
Oh… and Noah Emmerich’s in it! He’s one of my favorite Hey! It’s That Guy! actors, what with his unusual mix of soulful regret and I-might-touch-you creepiness. No matter which part her plays, be it Marlon in The Truman Show or cloistered CDC survivor Dr. Jenner in The Walking Dead, he always seems like he’s about to cry or fuck you up. Or maybe both. And I find that fascinating.
What do you think? Are you down for Super 8? Or would you rather Super wait? HA!
Did you read Tad Friend’s recent New Yorker article on Anna Faris? It chronicles her efforts to push beyond the limited opportunities offered to women in Hollywood comedies, but more than that, it gets blunt, damning quotes from producers, writers, directors, and actors about why those opportunities are so limited to begin with. When I finished it, I was infuriated, because I happen to prefer smart movies about women to dumb movies about boys. In a pinch, I’ll even take a dumb movie about women over the latter because I’m alienated by depictions of heterosexual boy-men who are terrified of women and gay guys and who only relate to each other like stunted children.
More specifically: I’m alienated by how much fucking attention that type of man gets in the movies. One or two I Love You Mans could be awesome, but fifty is nauseating, particularly for someone who has never had a problem accessing his feelings, has never thought women were scary, and has never thought guys were “adorable” when they forgot to act like grown ups.
Seeing that type of character at the expense of all others—and seeing the vapid women and gay men who are so often propped up around those characters—is exhausting. Can’t we leaven this bread with some other points of view?
Well… we can try. Or Anna Faris can. Her upcoming comedy What’s Your Number? is trying to put a feminine spin on the comedy of male sexual panic, just as May’s Bridesmaids, starring Kristen Wiig, is trying to be a Hangover for ladies.
The trailer for What’s Your Number just dropped today (thanks to My New Plaid Pants for pointing it out), and I’ve got to say… it looks pretty funny. I’m guessing Bridesmaids is going to be more my speed—that trailer really makes me laugh—but I’m willing to give What’s Your Number? a chance. I’ve only seen Farris in Brokeback Mountain and Lost in Translation, and I know some people really hate her breakthrough film The House Bunny, but the ethos of this movie, about a woman trying to come to terms with all the losers she’s slept with, seems geared to produce laughs that also provoke thoughtfulness. If nothing else, the women in the movie will probably be complex and interesting, which means I’ll probably relate to them.
It doesn’t hurt that there are about 40 hot guys in the movie (Joel McHale! Chris Evans! Zachary Quinto!) and that Farris nails funny lines like that one about the scientist.
But ultimately, I’m interested in seeing this movie because I feel like it needs to exist. I want to see more films that support the feminine point of view.Does that make me weirdly political, and is that maybe not the greatest mindset while watching a raunchy comedy? Perhaps. But I’ll be politically laughing will all my sisters, by god!
p.s. — I’d also love to see smart comedies about gay men, since I could relate to those even more than I could relate to What’s Your Number? But… um… I’m not sure those comedies exist. Gay movies are usually terrible. Though I’m still eager to see I Love You Philip Morris, which may be an exception, and I will always have a soft spot for the sweet romance in Big Eden.
The trailer for Fast Five (or as I like to call it, We’re Still Going This Fast? I’m Furious!) is doing me a solid: It’s pandering so shamelessly to its target audience that it’s not even pretending there’s anything in the movie for me. Maybe that’s what happens when you reach the fifth film in a franchise. You know who your people are, and you know there’s no point in catering to anyone else.
At any rate, here are the subtle clues I’m picking up from the trailer:
I am a simple man. In the spring, all I need from a movie is some ass-kicking, some crazy wigs, and a wolf statue that looks like it was commissioned by Satan’s Putt-Putt Golf Course.
It looks like Hanna will provide all that and more. That surprises me, since the poster I’ve been seeing (embedded above) makes it look like Braveheart for Girls, which turns me right off. Fortunately, Roommate Joe suggested I watch the trailer, which is serving this…
Do you know who sucks? College graduates. And people who speak French. Do you know who’s really lonely and probably going to drink too much? That educated woman over there. Do you know has no idea how to be a decent person because she’s obviously too wealthy and well-dressed to understand religion and tradition? Any character played by Angela Bassett.
But do you know who’s amazing? Anyone who is the opposite of those people. They’re salt-of-the-earth, you see, and by sprinkling their simple wisdom like so many jimmies on a cupcake, they’re going redeem those pole-up-the-ass successful types.
I’ve known these things for years, of course, because I’ve been fortunate enough to live in a culture where the dominant narratives focus on succeeding, but not succeeding too much; on working hard but not working too hard; on moving up to a deluxe apartment in the sky, but feeling really guilty about it. I’ve been inundated with movies, plays, books, and television shows that remind me that once I actually achieve the purported American dream of becoming independently successful and educated, I will lose touch with what makes me a good person. To counteract that, I’d better find “primitive” angel—you know, someone who works in a mine, or is four years old, or is from a foreign country that isn’t in Europe. That angel will teach me so much! And I won’t have to, like, give my money away, and my angel won’t get sophisticated on me like some above-his-raising jerk, but everyone will feel so damned good that we’ll eat together at a shitty hot dog stand and feel like royalty.
I love these stories, because they spare me from icky thoughts about how economic status and educational history don’t actually dictate a person’s character. I mean… can you imagine? What if poor people could be assholes, or successful businesswomen also had the capacity for joy? Chaos! That’s why I hated David Lindsay-Abaire’s new Broadway play Good People, in which Frances McDormand plays a desperately poor woman from south Boston who tries to manipulate a kid from the neighborhood who went and got rich. In that play, everyone had moments of grace and moments of treachery… wisdom came from all quarters, and so did douchebaggery. It was so complex and layered, and it made me mad!
Thank God there are two movies coming out this spring that promise to make things authentically simple again. At least, that’s the promise their trailers make, and the movies had better live up to the trailers, by God!
You guys, I wasn’t even planning to write a Trailer Scaler today. I was planning to write about the unexpected correlation between The Hunger Games and The Unbearable Lightness of Being, but that will have to wait until tomorrow. This morning, you see, Roommate Joe alerted me that For Colored Girls has released a trailer. And if you know me at all, then you know that I have to stop the presses to make room for it.
