Month: May 2011

This again

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Below, the new(er) trailer for “Friends With Benefits.” Might as well be right upfront about this: YES, it is in fact kinda funny that Mila Kunis has made a movie with an identical premise to a Natalie Portman movie from a few months ago.



Eh, can’t say it doesn’t look funny. A big plus is Timberlake – guy has turned out to be a crazy-good onscreen talent, especially in comedies.

"We Are The Night" U.S. trailer

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Of the many crimes the “Twilight” phenomenon has committed against genre fiction and the vampire-subgenre in particular, by far the worst is it’s very conscious attempt to suck the decadence and debauchery right out of the whole enterprise. Seriously, think about it: Co-opting a fictional creature that functions almost exclusively as a sex-metaphor as fodder for abstinence propaganda? That’d be genius satire… except Stephenie Meyer isn’t joking.

Fortunately, the “fun part” of the bloodsucker genre proves hard to kill. Below, the U.S. trailer for “We Are The Night,” a German production that just got picked up for a stateside run under the IFC Midnight label…



The basic pitch seems to be: “What if Paris, Kim, Lindsay etc’s ability to ‘survive’ in the fast-lane was that they were a coven of lesbian vampires?” I’ve heard worse ideas, and I like how “big” it looks – i.e. it’s not just the low-end sofcore cheapie they could’ve made – and of course that German filmmakers are unlikely to wimp-out on the good stuff.

This opens stateside in SOME capacity next Friday.

"The Help"

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This is good, because I was just the other day thinking “y’know what we need another of? Movies where enlightened White People teach Black People how to stand up for themselves.”



You’ve gotta love the naked, self-congratulatory (and yet UTTERLY unself-conscious) pandering involved in a setup like this – i.e. how, in this scenario, an early kickoff for the Civil Rights movement is basically a happy side-effect to the REAL important triumph: An upscale white girl learning to stand up to her tradition/marriage-fixated mother.

"Straw Dogs" remake has a trailer

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Sam Peckinpah’s “Straw Dogs” is one of the most controversial movies ever made; and certain parts of it remain a tough sit to this day. It’d easily be near the top of my list of films that NO ONE has any business remaking; and that goes double for when the remaker in question is well-meaning but chronically-heavy-handed Rod Lurie…

http://cdn.springboard.gorillanation.com/storage/xplayer/yo033.swf

The original featured a young Dustin Hoffman as a nerdy American college professor who moves into a rural farmhouse in his new wife’s backwater British hometown; where his intellectual/pacifist nature puts him on the wrong side of the leader of the local hooligans… who happens to be the wife’s ex-boyfriend. Infamously, it includes a scene where said ex participates in the gang-rape of the wife, and the staging of the scene implies that she partially (or wholly) welcomes/encourages the experience because she’s somehow not “over” the bad guy or the brute/caveman ‘type’ he represents.

In turn she (and other events) “goad” Hoffman’s character with escalating moments of emasculation (the “battle” for The Girl is symbolic of the caveman/”new-man” culture-clash, is the idea), culminating in a “fight or flight” seige sequence where he’s forced to improvise a brutal defense of the homestead, “Die Hard” style, when the bad guys attack. It’s all played pitch-black, right down to the implication that the wife’s “rescue” is unimportant next to Hoffman’s “rescue” of his own alpha-confidence over the heavies.

This trailer for the new one looks about like I’d feared it would: Overly-slick and void of the key moral ambiguity that made the original more than just another revenge-exploitation movie. The action has moved to the American south, and it looks like Lurie’s most consistent weakness – blunt socio-political message-mongering is on full display: The hero (James Marsden) is now a “liberal” atheist/agnostic Hollywood screenwriter (author-insert much?) while the main baddie is an ex-jock redneck churchgoer. Yeesh.

Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate where Lurie is coming from, but it seems a bit much even just from this trailer. The original had it’s omnipresent bigger themes (America vs. Europe, urban vs. rural, brains vs. brawn, etc.) but they were dressing for the main setup of a modern person’s forced-descent into primal survival-mode; remaking it into a straight-up “Red State vs. Blue State” thing seems like a tremendous missed-opportunity.

"Horrible Bosses"

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Another one of these, huh?

Don’t get me wrong, looks alright… but at this point I’m expecting the next Friedberg/Seltzer project to be “Barely-Functional Emasculated Thirty-Something Douche Movie.” (alternate title: “Man! White Surburban Asshats In Middle-Management Have It ROUGH!”)