Movie Trailers #1

I'm feeling some quick thoughts about upcoming movies and their trailers today. Let's get right to it.

Nine



I'm always interested in animation that looks targeted directly at adults. Nine doesn't look quite there, but teen action movies are at least older than Disney's target audience. The cast is all people I don't immediately recognize but whose names bring a good feeling to mind. Post-apocalyptic worlds are always fun, and the giant robots running around are... well, they wont beat out Transformers, but they'll do fine. Whoever that old guy is at the beginning has a look to him that I love. Plus the release date is perfect. I'd be excited for any weird looking animated action movie produced by Tim Burton and set in a dark, horrible future. On the other hand, chances are it'll pull an I Am Legend and be great right up until they find the surviving humans and save the planet. Meh.

The Time Traveler's Wife



A great book, but the trailer isn't doing it for me. I like both of the leads. Rachel McAdams I recognize from The Wedding Crashers. Actually the way I found out this book was getting adapted was by snooping around on The Wedding Crashers' IMDB page. She's good but nothing special. Good looking, if nothing else. Eric Bana I recently saw in Funny People, where he plays a not-quite-over-the-top Australian husband-of-love-interest. Does it damn well, too. I liked his scenes a lot, and I imagine he'll make a fine Henry. My problem with the trailer is two-fold. First, I like both leads, but I don't love either of them. They'll do fine, and that will be fine. That's fine but not amazing. Second, the time travel looks shitty. One of my favorite parts about the book is that Henry time travels around his life in a very realistic way. He shows up with no food in his stomach and butt naked, which leads to him becoming adept at breaking into places with food and mugging people to take their clothes. These things are at times central to the plot of the book, or at least provide extra drama in a movie that wants as much sap as possible, so I don't expect they'll change. What they've done, though, is make Henry fade away in some sort of holy light. Bullshit. He just vanishes. One second he's there, then the next he's gone. Tension is built up for Claire because she never knows if Henry is just going to disappear whenever she turns around, even if they're just shopping for groceries. In the movie version she'd have to ignore the brilliant flash of light and the high pitched ringing to have that happen to her. I bet they'll use the "suddenly vanish" effect anyway because it's a good one, but to do it realistically they'll have to come up with some reason for Claire to be half blind and deaf. Realism is obviously very important in time travel movies.

Cold Souls



I somehow missed this one in my numerous passes over Hulu's trailer pages the past few weeks, but was alerted to it by Dan Haas when he asked why I'd been telling him about all sorts of movies he didn't care about and not this one. Glad he asked, because this movie looks great. I love Paul Giamati when he isn't in something terrible (note: this is most of the movies I've seen him in). The main character is named the same thing as the actor playing said character, which would be a nice stylasitic statement about the film, saying that it doesn't take itself too seriously while at the same time saying it's trying to say something about the real world. It would be if it weren't for the fact that the film's advertising campaign shoves this fact in your face, making it come across as more of a pretentious choice than an artistic one. The plot looks goofy and fun, and I believe it when they tell me there's good jokes in there. Add what appears to be some interesting thoughts on the nature of one's self and the soul on top of that, maybe throw in a dash of commentary on modern society, and you could end up with a fine couple of hours. I'm excited.

Daybreakers



Fuck yeah! Fuck yeah. I'm a fan of good vampire stories. Yes, they're over done, but that wasn't always the case. The road that Buffy paved back in the 90s was a good one, and it's not the vampire story's fault that so many angsty teenagers where the ones to drive down it. Then I'm a sucker for new takes on old ideas, and Daybreakers has a doozey of one of those. A world where the majority of people have become vampires... My head is filled with ideas from that sentence alone, and it looks like Daybreakers expands on a hell of a lot of them. A unique setting, explosions, escaping undead monsters, human farms, more explosions, crossbow machine guns (hopefully), Angel-esque vampires, and the inevitable "get the vampire cure into the blood supply" climax... I can see the whole movie playing out in my head already, and I love every minute of it.

An Education



Any movie based on a book by Nick Hornby is a movie I feel obligated to go see. This one doesn't look as good as About a Boy or High Fidelity, but that's some serious competition. Even if it's the worst of the three it could still be one of my favorite movies of all time. Not sure this one will be, though. Smart pubescent kids with problems stories are everywhere, I don't know if I need to see another. An Education does look more adult than most. I think the idea of a 15ish girl and a 30-something guy having a romance is just off-putting. Maybe it's a touching tale! Maybe it's a beautiful story. Maybe. Maybe it's just kinda weird.

Alright kids, that's all for now. Turns out there's a lot of trailers out there, and I'm determined to watch them all. Then once I've watched them, I'll be determined to write about them here. It's sad I didn't start this blog a few months ago; I would've loved to write about (500) Days of Summer, In the Loop, Public Enemies, Up, and the rest of the spring trailer season. Guess I'll just have to do a recap post sometime in early September or individual posts about those that I've seen.