Movie Trailers #5: Coming Soon

This time we've got a couple movies that are coming out soon.  Note that in addition to these I recommend the following movies coming this month and early October that I've commented on in August:

9 - coming September 9th because they're clever.
The Invention of Lying - September 25th
Zombieland - October 2nd
A Serious Man - October 2nd
Toy Story Double Feature - October 2nd

Damn.  I might have to pull a quadruple feature October 2nd.  Now on to the meat.

Extract - September 4th




I thought this was a documentary from the movie poster.  Boy was I wrong.  Jason Bateman is never any character other than Michael Bluth, so I guess it's a good thing that Michael Bluth is a fun character to watch.  Juno's dad is rapidly becoming my favorite actor; so good in both Juno and Burn After Reading. Ben Affleck is Ben Affleck.  Mila Kunis is pretty good...  LOOKING.  That beauty pageant judge from Little Miss Sunshine is so much fun to hate.  Man, I wonder what that actress is like in person.  She must be the most lovable middle-aged lady ever to parody horrible moms as well as she does.  Anyway, even if the premise sucked (which it doesn't), the cast is fantastic.  Plus it looks funny.  Definitely on my list to see.


I Sell The Dead - September 7th




You go, Dominic Monaghan.  Looks mildly entertaining.  Not great, but deece.  Grave robbing is just such a hilarious concept, man, it's a wonder this thing doesn't look like a total riot.  But yeah.  Zombedy told through flashback.  Nothing wrong with that.  It's got some awards, too, so maybe it's better than it looks.

Gamer - September 4th



Okay, first of all, didn't this movie just come out last year?  Except then it was called Death Race.  No, seriously, if you watched the Gamer trailer go watch this Death Race trailer now.  It's the same fucking movie except one is Twisted Metal and the other is Counter-Strike.  I would bet a large amount of pride that the one twist Death Race has (that is given away in the trailer) also shows up in Gamer.  They even look the same with that overly gray, gritty modern action movie look going on.  Someone aughta be sued.

Okay, so that's silly, but let's move on to ridiculous.  The plot.  Um... what?  Death row inmates are put up to be controlled in some sort of real life Counter-Strike thing?  Aside from the fact that this remote controlling people technology is just stupid, if it existed, I don't think we'd be using it to control death row inmates in some sort of stupid video game.  Why the fuck would we bother with that?  I don't think there'd be much of a market for watching that game over regular games, and I don't think there'd be much of a market for playing that game instead of a digital one.  But I'm being silly; that's not what this movie is about.  This movie is about a premise that thinks it's clever and the market that comes along with the word "gamer".  They're trying to appeal to gamers, and it's fucking working.  I only know about this movie because someone said to me "d00d, did you hear about this Gamer movie?  I think it's about video games."

It stars Gerard Butler, who I just saw as the lead in The Ugly Truth.  Yes, this is King Leonidas again.  I will never be able to take him seriously.  Gamer seems to think it's a serious movie, or at least it wants us to think that it thinks it's a serious movie so that we can laugh at how stupid it is that it thinks it's a serious movie.  So you've got Gerard Butler in this stupid, "serious" action movie just a couple weeks after I've seen him giving people pep talks in The Ugly Truth about men and women.  I wonder if he magically always has the same amount of stubble in this movie, too.

Also, what the fuck.  The premise is so stupid.  If you survive 30 games you get to go free, right?  What the shit is up with that?  You have no control over whether or not you win.  That's like saying "if you play 30 dota games in a row and don't have any leavers you go free."  You have to get super lucky; you have to get a good player controlling you every time, and your player has to be lucky every time.  That's just stupid.  That's just... I can't express how bad this premise is.

Of course the biggest problem with the premise is that it requires a teenage guy to be in a lead role.  I've never met a pubescent guy who doesn't piss me off in one way or another, myself included.  It also means that if what plot there is requires this kid to be anything except a total fuckhead, it's not going to be realistic.

I hate middleschoolers.

Then there's a cameo by Ludicris.  Like... I've been writing about this trailer for about 5 paragraphs now, and I still have more to say about how stupid this movie looks.  What does that tell?  I bet I could go see it, come home, and write a blog post about this film by cutting and pasting this rant, then adding "also there was this one part where the action sequence was particularly cool."  Yeah.

I'd probably see it if Danl was in town, though.  Oh, that reminds me.  Riddle me this:  Danl wants to see this movie but thought G.I.Joe looked like a waste of time.  At least the preview for G.I.Joe had some sweet bullet time dives, cool green smoke effects, and a tag-line to kill for.  "What does it accelerate?"  "You."  Hahaha.  So good.

Apparently I have a lot to say about Gamer.  I don't think there's much else I've heard of coming out in September anyway, so let's stop here.  If you want more previews, though, I recommend Avatar and Inception, both of which I'll be talking about soon.