Closing my eyes was enough

I went to see Mortal Kombat today as part of a day off to use up some comp time. It being my first blockbuster in the theater in about six weeks (since Godzilla vs. Kong), I was exposed to a lot of trailers I hadn't seen before. (The movie itself was not terrible, but I was a bit bored by it, despite some enjoyable gore and f-bombs.)

Now, you may remember that I don't like to watch trailers nowadays. They give away too much. It doesn't matter so much if I don't care about the movie, but it's a tricky proposition, because sometimes you'll start watching a trailer without knowing what the movie is, and whether its images are something you'll want to avoid. You have to tread carefully.

It was that scenario that exposed me to a good deal of the Dune trailer in the lobby. I didn't even realize it was the trailer for Dune until I'd been watching it for about 20 seconds and Timothee Chalamet finally came on screen. I averted my eyes before the big final shot of the trailer, most likely the worm bursting out of the ground, as I could hear the way it shattered the earth around it.

Once I was seated, it was decision time again. I could tell straight away that the trailer for the next Fast and the Furious movie was coming on. Since I'm not a devotee of the series (though I've seen them all) and since I was kind of starved for the theatrical trailer experience, I made the decision to watch the whole trailer. By the end, I wished I hadn't.

So when the trailer for A Quiet Place Part II came on, I decided to go for my old standby behavior when I'm trying to block out all the information from a particular trailer: Close my eyes, cover my ears, and even making a loud murmuring sound so I don't hear the dialogue. (Not loud loud, but loud enough so I can't hear anything else myself.) 

It's a tedious endeavor, and I'm sure a ridiculous display to others sitting around me. Fortunately, there are not generally others sitting around me these days. Especially at 12:15 on a Friday, where the 500-seat theater had only about five other people in it. 

In this case, though, closing my eyes was enough. 

I realized straight away that the unique thing about A Quiet Place Part II was that the trailer would be almost entirely visual, because the movie is all about keeping your mouth shut. Oh, there were a couple lines of dialogue in the trailer, but it was almost a sort of zen experience having only my eyes closed and knowing that no further meaningful information would be imparted to me.

It had a funny conclusion though. I suddenly started hearing a lot of laid back voices that sounded like they were really having fun. Because I had no real audio queues to let me know the trailer was ending, I assumed it was still going on. My first thought was "Oh great, now I know our main characters are able to find some kind of safe haven where they can laugh and splash around in a pool." The spoilers had gotten past my defenses after all.

Of course, I opened my eyes and found that I was now watching a mobile phone ad.

Coming approximately sometime soon

When I went to the movies last night, The Maze Runner was just one of a couple trailers that had no idea when its movie was coming out.

Instead of something definitive like "this September" (which would have been accurate) or "this spring" (which would have also been accurate in the southern hemisphere), the movie only advertises that it is coming out "this year."

The same could be said for Dracula Untold, which is coming out here in October.

Your first assumption would be that this trailer was made for international release, and is trying to be as flexible as possible for a wide array of release dates. And I'm sure that's what the explanation is.

But we're not even talking about any voiceover that needs to be re-recorded -- almost no trailers have voiceover these days. We're only talking about title cards that can easily be switched out. And in fact, have already been switched out to become more generic than the U.S. trailers for the same movies.

What's even worse than "this year" is what I've seen on a couple other occasions: "this season." That draws even more attention to the differences in the seasons between here and the northern hemisphere, which this tactic is supposed to be de-emphasizing. I appreciate what they're going for, trying to be a bit more definitive about the soonness with which this is coming, but it just ends up seeming all the more absurd.

However, it is consistent with a ridiculous sort of advertising inexactness that we've noted on Australian television. My wife and I joke over the fact that ads for new shows won't actually tell you when they are debuting until, like, three days before the debut. Before that, the ads simply say "coming soon" or "this April" or the like. The advertising psychology is supposed to have something to do with keeping you committed to the station, so you have to keep checking back for updates and can't waste any valuable time on competing networks. But it was comical how difficult a time we had determining when the most recent season of Downtown Abbey was supposed to start. We couldn't even find out the information online.

Well, there was at least one movie I saw advertised last night that had a true sense of self. Interstellar boldly and somewhat surprisingly committed to a release date of NOVEMBER. Of course, that's only because Christopher Nolan's latest is big enough that it has essentially the same release date everywhere on the planet.

As for The Maze Runner, I'll be looking for it -- or not, as the case may be -- any time between now and December 31st.

Term limits

I have it on good authority that Short Term 12 is a very good film that I have a very good chance of liking.

However, if I see the trailer one more time, I may not go at all.

It's finally set to open in Australia on Boxing Day, which is probably the biggest release day on the Australian calendar (and actually happens to coincide this year with Australia's traditional release day of the week, which is Thursday). I say "finally" because, of course, its U.S. release was August 23rd. But I also say "finally" because the build-up for it has been almost intolerable.

Four straight weeks now I have seen a movie that showed the Short Term 12 trailer beforehand. Three Mondays ago I saw Ain't Them Bodies Saints, and it played before that. Two Mondays ago I saw Enough Said, and it played before that. Last Monday I saw How I Live Now, and it played before that. Then yesterday, I saw The Spectacular Now, and sure enough, Short Term 12 ushered me in.

Actually, I may have seen it first before The Butler four Mondays ago, and then not seen it during one of the intervening weeks. But it hardly matters. 

It's been proof that even seeing trailers for movies made from certifiably good materials can slowly drive a person crazy, if they see them too often.

It's a shame, too, because this looks like the kind of movie behind which I want to throw the full weight of my support. Brie Larson is doing some of the best work these days of any actor in the 20-25 age bracket, male or female, and this looks like the kind of indie that's smart and earnest, but not sickeningly so.

However, I have indeed started to become a bit sickened by the Short Term 12 trailer -- in part because I think it gives a lot away, and I definitely can't forget what I've seen after four viewings, and in part because that indie earnestness does start to get a bit sickening and precious the more you see it. That song "Montana" by Youth Lagoon sounds a bit more twee every time it touches my ears. (And what's with indie movies that have either real or simulated whistling as part of the songs in their trailers? Drinking Buddies, also a late bloomer in Australia on Boxing Day, followed, and contained whistling as well.)

Instead of being positive, I start resenting when the guy jokes about it being his cupcake that got smashed in Larson's face. Instead of being charmed, I start rolling my eyes over the impromptu rap that busts those two for trying to date. Instead of being delighted, I start to heave when the guy tells Larson she's the "weirdest, most beautiful person I've ever met."

It occurs to me, over the course of this rant, that while no movies are probably well suited to repeat viewings of their trailers, indie films are particularly poorly served by the process. That's because such movies are frequently treading a fine line between clever and cute, between joyous and intolerable. What will charm you once will make you want to stick your head in the oven after the dozenth time.

So, if Short Term 12 is indeed a bit tainted for me, here's who I blame:

1) Cinema Nova, for not having enough trailers in their rotation to show advertisements for any of the dozens of other movies opening there within the next month;

2) Me, for going to see a movie at Cinema Nova every Monday.

When all is said and done, whether I see Short Term 12 in the theater (in time to rank it with my other 2013 films) has everything to do with whether my wife has given birth by then. In fact, any day now it could be my last $6 Monday movie for a while. She's not due until January 10th, but the baby came 11 days early last time, and it could come even earlier this time. If her age put it her at risk of complications last time, it does so even more this time, when she's three years older.

So in the end, my wife's third-term pregnancy may torpedo Short Term 12 even more than its trailer has been doing.

Closing my eyes, covering my ears, and humming

I think I may have freaked out my friend when seeing Evil Dead Tuesday night.

The movie hadn't even started, and already I was showing signs of being possessed.

I can only imagine his thoughts as he first registered my behavior out of the corner of his eye. What would you think if your theater companion suddenly closed his eyes, covered his ears and started emanating a tuneless, demented hum? Whether or not he was actually rocking back and forth, you'd probably hallucinate it at this point.

Well, all I was really doing was trying to limit my exposure to the latest trailer for This is the End, the ensemble end-of-the-world comedy in which the stars you see in this poster play themselves, facing the apocalypse.

I don't usually go to such extreme lengths. It's usually too much trouble to prevent yourself from seeing trailers in the movie theater. Usually I just hope that the movies I really want to see are not the movies they've chosen to advertise.

But especially with a comedy, there's a very good chance that some of the best jokes will be spoiled in the trailer. And this is one of those movies where I want the best jokes to remain a surprise to me.

This is the End did it the right way by starting out with an excellent teaser trailer, in which five of the six people you see above (sorry Jay Baruchel) have a conversation on what I guess is the "morning after." Enough bad shit has already happened that they know Danny McBride shouldn't be wasting their food supplies on the lavish breakfast he's cooked up, but not so much that their world has been torn asunder (though they do say that Michael Cera has already died, and that this could be a benefit of the apocalypse). It's a funny scene, and I kind of suspect it's not actually in the movie. This two-minute bit is followed by maybe 30 seconds of images that I do expect to actually be in the movie.

However, I could tell that this was a new trailer that was intent on showing me a lot more. So I decided, then and there, that I needed to use whatever means were at my disposal to prevent it from reaching my eyes and ears.

Fortunately, I did have the presence of mind to immediately snap out of it once the sounds of the trailer stopped, and to immediately explain to my friend what I'd been doing. However, that meant that for the length of your average trailer, he thought his friend might have just had a psychotic break with reality, and he probably spent a good 30 seconds debating what his next move should be.

Next time, I think I'll only try to create a personal sensory deprivation chamber when I'm alone at the movies.

The Watch gets its balls back

You may remember a couple weeks ago I trashed the trailer I'd just seen for The Watch, formerly Neighborhood Watch, which was an ill-conceived and disjointed pastiche of 20-second scenes from the movie that did whatever they could to deemphasize the words "neighborhood watch."

The thinking was, after Trayvon Martin was killed by an overzealous neighborhood watchman, audiences wouldn't come to see the movie.

It makes sense from a public relations standpoint, and secondarily, serves as some sort of tribute to Martin, or at least an acknowledgment that his death is not something to be made light of.

But in deemphasizing any reference to the original film's title, and then including these otherwise disconnected scenes in which it's so obvious the characters are talking themselves into circles, the studio neutered all the funny out of that trailer. Which is a shame, because that cast (and that director, Akiva Schaffer) are capable of great amounts of funny under the right circumstances.

Apparently, those circumstances came along a few weeks later.

The new trailer I saw last night before Prometheus (a film I won't delve into right now) starts with these words, narrated by Ben Stiller:

"There is an alien invasion happening. That's why I founded the neighborhood watch."

Own it, guys. Own it.

Oh, and the trailer that follows is more the conventional kind, made up of briefer snippets of action and dialogue, and it actually made me laugh a couple times.

It's a pretty shrewd change of course, when you come right down to it. It doesn't allow you a moment to wonder if the movie treads too closely to the story of a self-proclaimed security guard who felt threatened enough by a black teenager in a hoodie to shoot him. No, this story is about aliens, and therefore, is utterly divorced from reality.

It's probably what they should have done all along. Now, keeping the original title ... yeah, that would have been a bit trickier.

More surprising than the sudden confident ownership of the phrase "neighborhood watch" is that the trailer does not shy away from making light of excessive gun violence. In a bit I must admit I found pretty funny, the quartet of watchmen appear to have killed one of these aliens, who were not shown in the previous trailer. Having (understandably) little knowledge of alien physiognomy, the guys continue to pop an additional seven or eight caps in the corpse, unconvinced that it won't still rise, horror movie style, and lunge at them. The last two or three, spaced out over five seconds, are casual afterthoughts.

So these are a bunch of regular guys who don't really know how to use guns and unleash more bullets than they probably need to.

Not unlike George Zimmerman, for whom one bullet was too much.

However well meaning the changes in the marketing of The Watch may have originally been -- and really, profit was probably the biggest motivator -- I like this honest approach better. Some movies are just cursed with poor timing, but it isn't their fault. It doesn't mean they should be exiled into the deepest, darkest corners of the studio's basement.

So will I see The Watch in the theater?

I think it's up to the third trailer to convince me of that.

Spare me the complete scenes, please

I noticed a disturbing trend in the trailers I saw before The Dictator on Tuesday night. Specifically, the comedy trailers, which were all but one of them.

Not just snippets of "funny dialogue," but entire scenes.

Like, eight consecutive lines of dialogue each, for two or more characters, in the same setting.. 

If it had happened in just one trailer, I might not have noticed it. But since it happened in two, it graduated to the level of a post topic.

It may be no coincidence that both The Watch (formerly Neighborhood Watch) and That's My Boy felt they needed to supply whole scenes to convince us the writing is funny. If the trailers are any indication, neither movie looks likely to supply many laughs. (There's a reason I put "funny dialogue" in quotes earlier.) And as an added sign of desperation, The Watch trailer had to drop in about three f-bombs, in the hopes that merely employing profanity is enough to convince audiences of the writers' comic genius. Red band trailers are a little puerile, aren't they?

Here, check out the trailers below:



I'm counting about five scenes here, the first of which lasts, astonishingly, the entire first minute of the trailer. And basically tells you nothing about the movie. It's downright awkward to watch such long scenes play out with such little payoff. I must admit I think the kid with the ice cream cone is kind of funny, but what does he have to do with the creative talents behind this film? That painfully protracted comparison of the alien goo's viscosity to the viscosity of semen -- now that's what I expect from these guys.

In the case of The Watch, I can understand the need for this going-nowhere vagueness about the movie's content. They kind of don't want you to know what the movie is really about. The Watch was almost derailed by the high profile shooting death of Trayvon Martin at the hands of over-zealous neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman. In fact, it's a major surprise the movie is even coming out this year. Too bad Neighborhood Watch is no longer a viable title, because the new title is lame.

Here's the trailer for That's My Boy, a potentially funny idea that looks poorly executed:



This is not as guilty as The Watch in terms of the wholesale reliance on complete scenes, but the one in particular where they discuss the finer points of Adam Sandler's parenting techniques was agonizing for me to sit through. I kept thinking "Please let this end." And not because the dialogue itself is so bad or anything. Just because it seems awkward to sit through such a long, uninterrupted part of the movie -- until you're, you know, actually sitting through the movie. You're waiting for the zinger, which should come in five seconds or less, and then on to the next joke. When you have to wait 20 seconds for it, you've gone limp at least ten seconds before that.

What these trailers tell me is not that comedy writing is much worse today than it has been in the past, because Lord knows cinema history is littered with awful comedies. No, these trailers tell me that the studios don't trust the audience to pick up on nuance, to fill in the blanks, to reach a conclusion based merely on suggestion. Take the scene where Sandler laughs at Andy Samberg's New Kids on the Block tattoo. In the past, the trailer might have been cut to end with Sandler laughing at his own bad behavior, leaving it up to the audience to put two and two together: he gave the tattoo to his son during a drunken stupor sometime in the late 1980s. Instead, they really hit us over the head with the next couple lines of dialogue: "Their heads are all warped!" "That's because I got it when I was in the third grade! My body grew!" And just to hammer it home, a second later Samberg tells he him that he sucks. That clears it up for those of us who thought he liked being tattooed by his teenage father.

I wish I could say that the studios were wrong. Fact is, people probably are too stupid to get nuance these days. And unless you're sure people get what you're saying, you're not sure they'll pay theater prices to see your movie.

It goes without saying that you have to show funny clips from a comedy, so people will want to see it. But you don't have to show the whole scene. I've had experiences in the past where the trailer whetted my appetite for something funny, then I got more than I bargained for when the parts of the scene they didn't show were even funnier. When trailers show everything, you know exactly what you're going to get. Which probably provides a certain comfort for people -- another sad sign of where we find ourselves, collectively, as an audience.

Not that I myself am completely above this. When I saw The Dictator, I was actually disappointed that my favorite line from the trailer didn't make the movie. "America, the birthplace of AIDS," muses Admiral General Aladeen (Sacha Baron Cohen) in a moment of faux awe. But he doesn't muse this in the movie, only the trailer. And yeah, I missed not seeing/hearing the line.

That seems like a problem neither The Watch nor That's My Boy is likely to have -- so much good material that you have to leave some of it out.

Everything's a mashup

When, according to some folks, pop music became stale and needed to be revitalized, along came mashups. Mashups took two very different songs, possibly even from different genres, and combined them to forge something thrilling and new.

Now, it looks like Hollywood has judged that movies have become stale, and they're trying to do the same thing.

I finally added to the impressive coffers of The Hunger Games last night, and I could have devoted today's post to discussing my thoughts on it. But that's not really what you come here to read. So instead, I want to talk about movie mashups, since I saw trailers for three of them last night. (It helped that I also saw two movies, sneaking into Casa de Mi Padre after Hunger Games finished up.)

It seems like Hollywood is really into reenacting those old Reese's Peanut Butter Cups ads these days. You know the ones -- "Hey, you got chocolate in my peanut butter!" "Hey, you got peanut butter in my chocolate!" If the trailers I saw last night are any indication, cinematic peanut butter is getting mixed with movie chocolate left and right, as unfamiliar genres are shaking hands, placing their faith in each other and hoping for the best.

Let's examine the trailers I saw last night ...

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, directed by Timur Bekmambetov
Basic idea: Before Abraham Lincoln was president of the United States, he fought vampires.
Genres mashed: Historical epic/biopic and vampire movie
Will it work? The trailer looks fun as hell. However, I have come to distrust Bekmambetov since not particularly liking the last four features in which he was involved: Apollo 18 (producer), 9 (producer), Wanted (director) and Day Watch (director). In fact, the thrilling Night Watch is now starting to feel like a distant memory. Perhaps returning to vampires is just what little Timmy Bekmambetov needs to win us back over to his side.

Dark Shadows, directed by Tim Burton
Basic idea: A man cursed to live as a vampire in 1752 wakes up in the 1970s.
Genres mashed: Seventies movie and vampire movie
Will it work? I think this one looks fun too, even though I distrust Burton far more than I distrust Bekmambetov. (Coincidentally, Burton is a producer on Abraham Lincoln.) There's something I like about the anachronistic vampire played by Johnny Depp -- anachronistic both because he's a supernatural creature, and because he lived in a different time -- interfacing with television and listening to Tom Jones. So even though Burton and Depp have worked together more times than any other duo in cinematic history (exaggeration), I'm looking forward to this one in part because it's also a property I was not previously familiar with -- a big change for Burton.

Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, directed by Lorene Scafaria
Basic idea: Weeks before an asteroid will end life on earth, a man (Steve Carell) seeks out his childhood sweetheart with the help of his neighbor (Keira Knightley).
Genres mashed: Apocalypse movie and romantic comedy
Will it work? I sure hope it does. I love the idea of examining what human beings would do in the end of days from an absurdist, comedic perspective. The trailer is chock full of comedic gold. Example: Carell tells his maid it's not really necessary for her to come back ... ever. But she doesn't seem to understand that concept. The only thing checking my enthusiasm is the fact that Scafaria is primarily associated with Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist, which she wrote. I hated that movie.

The other trailers were all a bit more standard, though I must say, that G.I. Joe: Retaliation trailer filled me with a huge amount of optimism as well.

So three trailers for three mashup movies that look very promising. Is it just that I'm a sucker for trailers in general, and almost every movie seems like it could be good when you just see the trailer? Or are mashups really the way to breathe life back into moribund genres that have been repeatedly picked over? And I know there are more on the horizon ... Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, also written by Abraham Lincoln writer Seth Grahame-Smith, is supposed to be made into a film, even though it's had some problems getting into production.

Or maybe what I'm identifying is not really a true phenomenon. Maybe what I'm seeing is only a variation on the Hollywood mandate to "put an original spin" on such and such reliable cinematic chestnut. Maybe what I'm identifying as mashups are really just injections of creative spirit into tired entities. After all, you could expand this argument outward and say that Hollywood doesn't want to make anything unless it can figure out that small way that a thing is different from similar things that came before. I'm not saying Hollywood wants to take risks -- Hollywood in general is pretty risk averse. I am saying that even the least courageous studio executives realize they can't serve up the exact same dish as they served up last week -- something has to be different. And maybe those "differences" is what I'm describing as "mashups."

In any case, I don't know why I should have any confidence at all given the unqualified failure of last year's big mashup movie. If you want a prototypical example of a movie mashup, look no further than Cowboys and Aliens. It was a western mixed with a movie about aliens. And boy did it stink.

But something tells me that at least one of the three chocolate-peanut butter combos mentioned above will taste pretty sweet.

Still a sucker for Titanic

Hello, and welcome to my second straight post about trailers I saw while at the movies last week.

Looks like I still have the potential to weep like a baby at Titanic.

I saw my first theatrical trailer for the 3D re-release of Titanic before my 3D screening of The Adventures of Tintin. I have to say, the way it was cut to Celine Dion's "My Heart Will Go On" made me ready to well up with tears all over again. (Whether you can be "ready" to well up with tears or not is open to debate. I'd say, you either well up or you don't. I guess I'm being vague in an attempt to maintain my credibility as a high-minded film fan.)

I was genuinely surprised by my own reaction. Now, I have never thrown Titanic under the bus, and remain a person who argues ardently for its importance as a film and the uniqueness of its achievement. But did I expect that it would still be able to tug at my heartstrings, a full 14 years after I first saw it?

No, I did not.

I believe I've seen Titanic three times -- twice in the theater, then once on video. They would have all been within the first year after it was out. During the intervening 14 years, my affection for it has been only slightly muted, since I still consider it to be one of the most overwhelming and involving theatrical viewing experiences I've ever had. The unique combination of awe-inspiring visuals and human drama left me babbling incoherently when I left the theater.

I'd expect the visuals to still inspire awe in me, but shouldn't the human drama have lost some of its potency over the years? Especially as Titanic has been repeatedly parodied, as its iconic scenes have become so familiar to us, and as it has been the recipient of some of the greatest backlash of any film in history? As it's become downright shameful to admit that the justifiably reviled Celine Deon could have sung a song you even liked, let alone one that moved you to tears?

Yet despite all the factors that should work against Titanic still having an emotional impact on me, the way that trailer is cut brought me right back to December of 1997, to that theater in Massachusetts where I first saw James Cameron's film. (For the record, it's the old couple lying on their bed as the water rushes under them that devastates me the most.)

I'm going to blame it on the big screen. And the 3D. Yeah. Definitely the 3D. The 3D got me all verklempt. That's it.

But am I ready to pay $15 to see it again in 3D?

I don't know, maybe I am.

Now to figure out the alibi I'll use with my wife, a strident Titanic hater ...

John Carter had me at "hello," lost me at "how are you?"

When I hunger for new cinematic visions that seem to represent a clear departure from things I've seen previously, John Carter is the kind of movie I think of.

Or so I thought from the first trailer, anyway.

Here's that first trailer:



Of course, everything that was minimalist, ominous and visionary about this first trailer felt pedestrian in the trailer I saw last week, before either Tintin or War Horse.

Here's that trailer:



Now I think it just seems like any other gladiator movie, any other ripoff of Star Wars, with one shot that seems like a ripoff of Avatar (which itself was a ripoff of oh-so-many things).

So I don't know where I stand with respect to John Carter. Am I excited to see it? Watching that first trailer again just now, I felt so. Watching the second trailer again reminded me that I might not be.

I think it gets at the difference between a teaser (which, even at 1:45, the first trailer essentially is) and a trailer (which tells you more of what the movie is essentially about). And so that explains the title of this post, which you thought was just a clever riff on the oh-so-current cultural reference, Jerry Maguire.

See, the teaser is kind of a "hello." It says "Hi, I'm a thing. You may or may not have known I was a thing, but this footage is designed to give you that knowledge and get you a little excited." A teaser is great, because it leaves open the possibility that the movie could go in so many different directions from what you're seeing. How skillful, for example, to give us the detail that this man started in 19th century England before ending up on Mars. That bit of information is meant to give you the Keanu "Whoa" reaction.

However, once the full trailer is revealed, it can no longer hide what it's about. That's the "how are you" -- literally, how is the movie. How do those images we've seen coalesce into a story.

And that's where John Carter appears to trip. Clearly, Disney thought its best bet to get a big audience on the first weekend (still almost two months off) would be to highlight the movie's action. You'll notice that 19th century London makes no appearance whatsoever in the second trailer -- that only confuses people who came for an action movie.

But what we're left with is a bunch of lame Star Wars prequel stuff, including gladiator footage that seems to be right out of Attack of the Clones (that was the movie where they fought in an arena while chained up, right?). Then there's a bit of warmed-over Braveheart ("He will fight for us!") or any of the countless movies that involve a rallying speech to an underdog army.

I guess I'm giving away the change in my excitement level by the poster I chose to accompany this post. If I'd still been in giddy-teaser-phase, I might have led with this poster, which is even listed as the "teaser poster" in the file name (I hadn't consciously realized there was such a thing, but it makes as much marketing sense as a teaser trailer):


Oh, how I long for those days when John Carter could still have been about anything.

John Carter seemed to have the cross-genre potential of a movie like Cowboys & Aliens, where elements of our past and elements of a science fiction future fit together naturally in a way that both expands and blows our mind.

Oops, except Cowboys & Aliens didn't pull that off, either.

Here's hoping John Carter pulls it off better than Cowboys & Aliens. If it doesn't, not only will it fail to be the first awesome movie of 2012, but it may not even be worth watching on video.

Teaching kids to say the f-word

Is it just me, or are animated films involved in some kind of conspiracy to insinuate, use replacements for, and in all other ways put the word "fuck" into kids' minds?

This occurred to me as I was waiting for Rango to start on Saturday afternoon, when two straight trailers alluded to the word "fuck" without actually saying it.

First it was the newest trailer for Rio -- which, darn it, I can't find online -- in which the bird played by George Lopez says "Yippee Ki Yay [something something]." (See, that's why I needed to find the trailer.) Suffice it to say that he says a four-syllable phrase beginning with "M." That is, of course, an allusion to Die Hard, in which Bruce Willis famously says "Yippee Ki Yay, Motherfucker!"

The second was the newest trailer for Kung Fu Panda 2, in which the word "freakin'" makes several appearances. The word "freakin'" or "freaking" would not exist at all if it weren't being used as a non-vulgar substitute for "fucking."

You might say this isn't much evidence. In the first instance, you have to have actually seen Die Hard to get that the word "fuck" is being referenced. In the second, if you haven't heard the word "fucking" before, you have no idea that "freaking" is a cleaner synonym.

But we parents ... we get both of them, don't we? And it does make a person wonder.

And then, when Rango started, the allusions to swear words came fast and furious. I don't know about you, but when I grew up, I learned that these were the swear words: hell, damn, bitch, shit, ass and fuck. Yeah, there are words that are worse than all of these, that aren't technically swears, and at least half of these curse words can freely be said on television ("shit" and "fuck" being the only definite exceptions, and you can even say "shit" on basic cable now). But I think we can generally agree that none of them have a real place in a children's movie, right?

Well, I counted at least three instances of one of these words, either said or alluded to. When the hawk attacks Rango and that other lizard in the desert, and ends up grabbing the other lizard and flying off, you hear the other lizard curse Rango's name as he disappears into the sky: "You son of a biiiiiii ..." He doesn't get the whole word out, so it's okay. Then later on, the word "hell" is spoken at least twice. The first of which is really chilling, and may be the single clearest indication that this movie is not appropriate for young kids. The villain Rattlesnake Jake makes the following threat: "I'll send your soul straight to hell!" Yeah, I bet some kids were asking their parents about that one. Then the heroine, a lizard named Beans, tells Jake later on to "go to hell." Relatively tame by comparison.

I'm no prude -- not in the least. (If I were, would I have written out the word "fuck" eight times in this post already? Make that nine.) I just like to point out apparent hypocrisies when I see them. Here you have three children's movies that are, I'm sure, being embraced by conservative parents' groups everywhere, and each is doing its damnnedest (pun intended) to give their children a potty mouth.

But maybe it's much simpler than I'm making it out to be. Maybe those groups talk the talk about keeping young minds in pristine condition, but they don't really want to walk the walk. Maybe they really want their kids to learn these words.

Think about it. How much easier would it be if children could learn the bad language they're eventually going to learn, now, and just get it out of the way?

Parents would no longer have to worry about what their kids are watching on TV. They'd no longer have to wonder if the music their kids listen to contains explicit lyrics. Most importantly, they'd no longer have to worry about the words coming out of their own mouths. I think it's safe to say that a lot of us like dropping an f-bomb now and again, regardless of whether we're churchgoing folk, new-age liberals, or somewhere in between. If the kids knew those words already, it would let us all off the hook.

I'm obviously being a little bit disingenuous when I say this. It's straight-up bad parenting to not care what your kids watch or listen to, because it's not the word itself that is usually the problem, but an undercurrent of violence the word may suggest, in the context it is being used. We probably observe a difference between the way "fuck" comes out of our own mouths and the way it comes out of the mouths of gangsta rappers. At least when it's us saying it, we can control the context.

Still, I think it's interesting to note the way animated films are pushing their own standards of decency, just as the other parts of the entertainment world are doing the same. In the interest of making the movie seem like it speaks to adults -- and Rango may actually speak to adults more than it does to kids -- the writers want to give the movie some clear-cut adult content, or at least content that adults recognize is intended for them. The surest way to do that is something like the "Yippee Ki Yay" line in Rio, which will be entirely over the heads of children, but work as a wink to their parents. At some level it is simply a calculated attempt to get a higher box office. The best path to a good box office is when you can also get people to go without their kids -- like I did on Saturday.

I guess it's probably a freakin' good idea.

Retro DVD trailers

As I mentioned previously, Buried was the last film I watched before I closed the rankings on my 2010 movie list.

But when I first put it in the DVD player, you might have thought I was working on my 2003 movie list or my 2006 movie list, rather than 2010.

In fact, I was quite sure I did not have Buried at all, but some impostor wearing the Buried DVD artwork.

See, the first trailer that came on was for Open Water. Not Open Water 2: Adrift, which would have been a slightly more recent movie to be pimping. Even if Open Water 2 came out in 2006, that would have been better than the 2003 release date of the original.

An anomaly? No. Because the next trailer that came on was for An American Haunting, which came out in 2006. It took until the third trailer to get something from 2010, at which point I breathed a sigh of relief.

Can you ever remember seeing DVD trailers for movies that were this old? Usually you can be pretty sure that the movies advertised have only just hit DVD, or, more likely, aren't even on DVD yet. In fact, sometimes they aren't even in the theater yet. You can so take this to the bank, that it can be fun to watch older DVDs just so you can be reminded of the time when this film and these other four films were all current releases. It's like a snapshot of a bygone era, a little time capsule.

The sudden inexplicable hawking of these older movies could only be explained by one thing: that Lionsgate, which released Buried, was attempting to clear out its old catalogue. But only Open Water was also released by Lionsgate; An American Haunting was not. Even if they'd both been from Lionsgate, why these movies? Why now? Did they have 10,000 copies of An American Haunting just sitting around in a warehouse somewhere, because the movie is total crap?

You could also posit a thematic relationship between the movie I came to see and Open Water, at the very least. Being trapped in a coffin is an equivalent impossible situation to being stranded at sea in shark-infested waters. But that just gives An American Haunting a second reason to be an illogical choice for this particular DVD. Or third, if you're counting its lack of a contemporaneous release date, its origins at a different studio and its failure to have anything to do with Buried.

I guess I will just scratch my head and move on.

Do I assume too much?

I'm going to take a break this week from my normal Friday morning new release post, for two reasons:

1) I don't have a concrete perspective on either The A-Team (cast looks good) or The Karate Kid (remakes blah blah blah);

2) I don't know that I'm doing a service to these movies by issuing a concrete perspective on them in the first place.

You see, this week I got involved in a debate in the comments section of another film blog, about the intrinsic value (or lack thereof) of writing a post every Friday in which you make snarky predictions about the quality of the new releases. Of course, those of us who write such posts are not always trying to tear these films down -- sometimes we talk about how we're giddy with excitement. But the basic point of the blogger taking the other position was that whether we're excited for a film or cursing its name, "reviewing by trailer" is a dangerous practice, and the whole thing is speculative and a little suspect. It isn't giving these films a fair shot.

This debate has stuck in my craw the last few days, so I decided I'd move it to my own blog and flesh it out a little bit. And since the other blogger will probably be reading this, I'll address him directly now: I certainly don't want to just write a dozen bullet points about why you're wrong, precisely because I'm not sure you are wrong. Sometimes, I start writing without even knowing where my mind will be at the end. Today is one of those days.

The first thing I felt during this discussion was a defensiveness about my own Friday new release habits, even though the comment was not addressed at me specifically. So it caused me to look back and examine my tendencies when writing about Friday new releases. Yeah, there's some amount of assuming that certain films will be bad. But more than anything, I am trying to use these releases as what we in journalism call a "news peg." (I actually went to journalism school.) A "news peg," if you're not familiar with the term, is any kind of current event that gives you the opening to write about a more general trend. For example, if someone wanted to write a think piece about how we're allowing young people to take unconscionable risks, their news peg would be the 16-year-old sailor who was almost lost at sea while trying to sail around the world, solo. (Thankfully, a search team found her and she's okay.)

For me, the Friday new releases are often used as news pegs more than as specific films whose strengths and weaknesses I want to discuss. Take last Friday, when I wrote about Splice. I actually didn't write almost a single thing about the content of that particular movie -- instead, I used it as a news peg to discuss my wife's pregnancy, and to offer up a list of ten movies a person wouldn't want to watch while pregnant. But even when I'm being snarky, and making dire predictions about particular movies, it's usually so I can talk about other trends. For example, when I wrote about Date Night, I was less interested in whether Date Night in particular was bad (though I assumed it would be), and more interested in the idea that Steve Carell and Tina Fey are great TV personalities but not great movie personalities. And this was based on my opinions of movies I'd actually seen (Baby Mama, Dan in Real Life, Get Smart, etc.).

So okay, I was reacting too defensively during this week's debate -- not only was the comment not aimed at me, but maybe it doesn't even apply to me. I'm not "reviewing by trailer" at all -- I'm using trailers and release dates to get ideas of other things to write about. If you've read me much, you know that I don't do much in the way of actual reviews on this site -- I save that for my paying work. Even posts devoted to the quality of films, and not larger trends, are not things that I necessarily consider "reviews," because the reviews I write are only 300 words, and don't use the first person singular.

But I think I actually do want to support those bloggers who do "review by trailer," because I do think there's some value in it. Here's why: Writing a blog is about presenting your opinions to the world, and who's to say what limitations should be placed on a person's opinions?

Let's take things out a step. Any time you see a trailer for a movie, you are probably struck with one of three different impressions: 1) "That looks great, I want to see it!" 2) "That looks terrible, I don't want to see it." 3) "Hmm, that could be interesting -- I need to see the trailer again and process it a little more."

My argument is, if you are thinking these things anyway, what's the harm in writing about them on your blog? The only way you are really doing the films a disservice is if you are trying to convince people that you've already seen a movie you know you haven't seen, and are offering a bogus review merely out of some kind of spite. Anything else you write is the justifiable speculation of a consumer being sold a particular product. What's the harm in talking about whether the movie is doing an effective sales job, or isn't?

I guess it's really a matter of what hat you're wearing when you write your blog. If your blog is almost exclusively reviews, and you have a personal creed to give every film the benefit of the doubt, no matter how insipid it looks -- and you should if you are acting only as a critic -- then that's one thing. But me, I call my blog The Audient for a reason. Yes, I'm a critic, but I'm also a member of an audience, and I embrace that part of my relationship with movies as well. If I were wearing my critic hat on this blog, then it might be a violation of my principles to give some movies a fair shake, and throw others under the bus without all the information. But I actually started this blog to give myself an alternate way to write about films that wasn't reviewing them. Which I think is all the more reason for me to include content that relies on my own interpretation of the film industry, even if it involves certain low-level assumptions about certain films I may not have seen. The alternative is that you can't write about a film at all unless you've seen it, and I think that's just too strict of a stance.

I think it makes sense to pause at this point and support the general perspective of this other blogger: That every film deserves the chance to be the best version of itself it can be. There is no genre of movie, no type of movie (remake, reboot, etc.), or no intellectual level of movie where I could be 100% sure the movie would be bad -- any movie can surprise you and be better than it looks like it will be. I'm a firm believer in that, and I proudly tell people which movies that are generally hated are movies that I actually like (such as the first Transformers).

But I think if we prevent ourselves from assuming certain things about certain movies, we are basically just muzzling ourselves. Is it really unfair to adopt a weary outlook on the latest remake of a 1980s horror movie, and to write about that on your blog? I don't think it is. Your knowledge of the motivations that went into making that movie (financial rather than artistic) earn you the right to be skeptical, and you don't have to keep that skepticism to yourself. As long as it's clear in what you write that you are merely stating your concerns, and that you are basing those concerns on the apparent similarity of this films to other films you've seen, you are being fair enough, I think.

Might you be wrong? Hell yeah. And that's part of the fun of eventually sitting down and watching the movie in question.

I'd love to hear what you think. Do you take a post less seriously when it talks abstractly about movies the writer hasn't seen? Or do you think it's fun to have debates about new releases as they come out, when there's the greatest "news peg" relevance for discussing them, even if you are necessarily speculating?

Here a gun, there a gun, everywhere a gun gun

I'm glad The Losers was a box-office loser, with under $10 million in domestic grosses on its opening weekend.

Could that mean that audiences are finally wise to the studios marketing hip shoot-em-up movies to them like they were morons?

It seems hard to believe -- audiences are not usually wise to anything, which is why they are so easily manipulated.

But the makers of The Losers tried extra hard to make sure it would appeal to as many people as possible. They assembled a perfectly ethnically diverse cast. They peppered the trailer with pop culture references. They pictured knockout Zoe Saldana shooting as many weapons as possible, often wearing only her underwear.

Yet it did not appeal to many people at all. If you assume the opening weekend is a film's biggest weekend, and the box office takes giant steps downward from there, The Losers will be lucky to clear $25 million.

The thing is, my guess is that The Losers is not bad. It is probably highly watchable. But there's something about what it is, as epitomized by this poster, that makes it pernicious. It's got too much "cleverness." It's got too much "style." It's an action comedy, and therefore doesn't need to have much substance, but it's as though they didn't even consider for a moment giving it substance. It's just a collection of guns, quips, slow-mo, and PG-13 eroticism. The trailer certainly wouldn't be complete without Saldana leaping into that bathtub in her shape-hugging undies, a pistol in each hand.

And how about those guns? Everyone's shooting something in this poster, though that's not altogether surprising. A gun is probably the most commonly occurring prop in movie posters the world over. But the trailer just kicks it up a notch. An SUV and a motorcycle blow up. Two different people shoot bazookas. There's a crossbow. There's a military grade gun that shoots rounds rapidly from a tripod. There are all caliber of other guns, often one in each hand of the person firing them. There's even a guy who picks off several people with a gun he makes from his fingers -- with the help of a sniper sitting in the building across the way.

Maybe The Losers was the point when this kind of advertising stopped thrilling us and started making us yawn. We've seen it all before. And maybe even your average dumb moviegoer finally had that conversation with him/herself: "You know, this is just a commodity they're trying to sell me, nothing more." Forgive my assumption that the average moviegoer even knows what the word "commodity" means.

Now, if I could only poll those same moviegoers to see why Alice in Wonderland has cleared $320 million ...

Didn't anyone else see the trailer?

George Clooney: "You know that moment when you look into somebody's eyes, and you can feel them staring into your soul, and the whole world goes quiet?"

Anna Kendrick: "Yes!!"

George Clooney: "Right, well I don't."

I'd seen/heard this joke about 12 times, which matched the number of times I'd seen the trailer for Up in the Air. Yesterday was the 13th time, when I actually saw the movie. (And aren't you jealous of those of us who live in Los Angeles, who get things a week earlier than you do?)

Needless to say, I don't usually laugh at a joke I've heard 13 times. Even if it's the best joke in the world, you still don't laugh after 13 times. Our repeat viewings of funny movies are not so we can necessarily laugh anew -- it's so we can smile at the cleverness and be reminded of how much we laughed the first time.

At its core, laughter is an expression of surprise. You can only really be surprised by a joke the first time you hear it. If you laugh the second and third time, it's not usually as hard as the first, and usually benefits from hearing it alongside someone else, someone who hasn't heard it before.

This is not a point that needs belaboring. But I am trying to analyze why the audience with whom I watched Up in the Air laughed so hard at the joke above, or at a couple other jokes the trailers have beaten into us.

Didn't anyone else see the same trailer I saw?

I have to think they did. As much as knowing George Clooney is in it can sell a movie, and as much as good buzz can sell a movie, most people who see a movie on opening weekend have seen the trailer at least once. In this day and age of easy access on the internet, it's probably more than once. And it was especially the case with this movie, whose trailer was/is ubiquitous.

So why did they laugh so hard at that joke?

I guess whether you laugh at a joke from the trailer has something to do with how well the movie has caught you in its spell. If you're really loving it, that means you're just waiting for that moment to arrive, so you can expel your giddiness through a hearty guffaw. I even wonder if there's a little subconscious politicking going on here. You laugh because you want to sell the others in the audience on a movie you've already decided is great. You are doing the movie's PR campaign for it so everyone else can realize what it's taken you only a couple minutes to realize: You love this movie.

Because I didn't laugh, does that mean I didn't love Up in the Air?

I won't answer that question directly, but I will say this: Usually when I've seen a trailer too many times, I get burned out on the movie in question. I'm very wary of that happening with Avatar, for example. But I think because the Up in the Air trailer is so charming, I didn't consciously get burned out on it. Instead, I felt a near anxiety developing about needing to see it -- and now I wonder if that was so I didn't have to see the trailer yet one more time beforehand. Perhaps the reason I saw the movie two days after it was released (and five days before it's released in most of the country) is that I was anxious about that burnout, and wanted to head it off at the pass.

Now, with any movie I see, I'm not expecting to laugh at jokes from the trailers. I'm expecting there to be enough other good jokes for me to laugh at. I'm expecting to smile at those jokes and check them off my mental checklist of moments from the trailer -- maybe you keep one of those checklists too. But those jokes played their intended role -- they made me laugh at the trailer and made me want to see the movie.

Okay, so I'm not expecting to laugh again. But I did find my inability to laugh at those jokes more problematic yesterday, in part because the rest of the audience was laughing so much. This isn't the first time I've blogged about laughter disparities, but it's the first time I've tied the phenomenon to my expectations of how much we should be laughing based on trailer burnout.

It's the double-edged sword of trailers, which we all discuss: We want to see some footage of the film, in order to get excited about it, but we want there to be plenty of surprises remaining for the actual theatrical viewing. For a current example of a film whose entire plot, and probably its only funny jokes, appear in the trailer, check out the trailer for Did You Hear About the Morgans? (You won't have to go out of your way -- that one's pretty ubiquitous, too.)

Of course, it's difficult to find a balance. You have to include some funny jokes in the trailer, or else how will people know if the movie looks funny?

I don't know why I was so tired of these Up in the Air jokes, and the other people were not. Maybe just because I was tired, period -- I was recovering from a late Christmas party the night before, as well as a hard session of basketball that morning. Or maybe I'm just smarter than they are. Yeah, that's it.

But it distracted me to no end how much the girl on my right was laughing. She covered her mouth with both hands several times during the movie, in fits of hysterics, and several other times said things like "Oh my God!" and "Oh gosh!" My wife and I each had to suffer through a terrible neighbor yesterday -- the woman to her left was crinkling food wrappers for almost the entire movie.

Up in the Air won the National Board of Review's honor as best film of the year last week. The last two Oscar winners, Slumdog Millionaire and No Country for Old Men, were also honored by that board. So Up in the Air is going to be seen by a lot of people in the coming weeks.

Therefore, I won't spoil anything by giving you my review. All I'll say is that it is not my #1 of the year -- you'll get a look at which film takes that honor this January after the Oscar nominations are released, per my annual tradition.

In the meantime, I'll just prepare you to laugh -- or not laugh, as the case may be.

Whose definition of appropriate?

Saw District 9 on Friday, and I'm not going to discuss that here, but I did want to mention the trailers I saw beforehand. They were hardcore.

Whether they were "appropriate" or not is another question.

District 9 being an R-rated movie, they were allowed to show us some pretty intense trailers. The first of the ones I want to discuss here was for The Fourth Kind, a movie about a really scary owl, and abductions occurring in Nome, Alaska as a result of said creature. The second was for Legion, a movie about angels sent to earth to exterminate the human race, which looks to be in the Constantine family, and has the inauspicious release date of next January 22nd. The third was for Zombieland, a jokingly violent comedy about a post-apocalyptic earth populated almost entirely by zombies. The last was basically just a teaser for Saw VI.

What I noticed about each of these trailers was the banner beforehand:

THE FOLLOWING PREVIEW HAS BEEN APPROVED FOR APPROPRIATE AUDIENCES BY THE MOTION PICTURE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA

Maybe it's been awhile since I've seen a good juicy R movie in the theater, but this one was new to me.

It seemed to me that "appropriate audiences" must be the new name for what they used to refer to as "mature audiences." "Mature" is clear. "Appropriate" is ambiguous at best.

So ambiguous, in fact, that I was genuinely confused about what it meant before the Legion trailer came on.

I'd just survived the Fourth Kind trailer, and I was somewhat relieved to see that the next trailer was for "appropriate audiences." (I guess I didn't catch the banner for The Fourth Kind). I must have read that as "appropriate for all audiences," because I thought, "Okay, this will be pretty tame relative to what I just saw." (And what did I just see? It definitely got my scare juices flowing -- a number of subjects from supposedly real video recordings being scared absolutely batshit by this freaky owl that they're all seeing in their dreams. And seeing someone scared batshit can be pretty scary if it's done well. In fact, I searched for the poster for The Fourth Kind to accompany this post, but apparently it doesn't exist yet, even though the movie is coming out on November 9th. Anyway, it wasn't anywhere on the internet).

So the Legion trailer began, and I saw a windmill, a desert fence, a couple other things that could go either way. Then there's a cafe, and an old lady in the cafe. Someone approaches the old lady and asks her a question. Upon which her face morphs into that of a demon, she screams that everyone's going to die, and she scurries up to the ceiling of the diner. Pretty freaky.

Appropriate for all audiences? I don't think so.

Clearly, I realized, I just read it wrong. But what really does "appropriate audiences" mean? Appropriate for what? And what was so wrong with "mature audiences"?

I haven't been able to find an explanation on the internet, but I have been able to find a number of other bloggers curious about the same wording. But these bloggers aren't commenting on the trailers they saw before District 9. One of them was talking about the trailer for New Moon, the sequel to Twilight. Another for the trailers they saw before Harry Potter.

Both of those movies -- the one being advertised, and the one people paid to see -- are suitable for teens. So, wait, what?

But here's where it gets even more interesting. Another blogger talked about seeing this "appropriate audiences" banner before seeing Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs. A movie that has a PG rating, as we know from this post.

Okay, so I'm changing my analysis here. "Appropriate audiences" is not a synonym for "mature audiences." Maybe it just means "age-appropriate." But then again, are you going to tell me that a trailer you'll see before Ice Age is not appropriate for the adults in the audience?

It seems to be a bit of a tautology, actually: "This trailer is appropriate for anyone who is already watching it anyway." (Is that a tautology? Upon looking it up to confirm my definition, my answer is "sort of," so I will leave it.)

I guess you could conclude that it's the ultimate example of insider baseball. Whoever makes the decisions about which trailers play before which movies has already determined that the trailers you are going to see are appropriate. They've done the vetting so you don't need to even worry. Just sit back and enjoy.

Hmm.

Good old MPAA. The notoriously secretive ratings body does it again -- comes forth with a system that makes sense only to them.

In the old system, trailers themselves had ratings -- not letter ratings, but wording that told you whether you needed to proceed with caution. While this only gave you about a two-second window to cover your kids' eyes, at least that was something. Plus, if you were finding it on the internet, and you were not of the appropriate age to view it, you could theoretically police yourself and stop watching, if you didn't want to have bad dreams or something. (Yeah, like anyone looking up hardcore trailers on the internet is actually going to do that).

But now? Some kid could be looking up The Fourth Kind -- oblivious to its subject matter, because the title doesn't really tell you anything -- and say "Ah! I see it's approved for appropriate audiences. I guess I qualify . . . ?"

Then ... bam! Some dude sitting straight up in bed, his mouth so far open in a brink-of-insanity scream that his face might peel apart, like the Nazis at the end of Raiders.

And yeah, that theoretical innocent self-policing internet surfer is going to be shit out of luck. Bad dreams aplenty to follow.

I'll be monitoring this thing for you, dear readers. Next time I'm in the theater, I'll be watching those trailers like a hawk. Or a really disturbing owl.

You can count on me. I'll always do what's appropriate.

Because hey, if I'm the one defining what's appropriate, that could be just about anything, right?

When life makes things less funny

The Hangover did excellent business this weekend, raking in an impressive $43.3 million -- which is frankly phenomenal for an R-rated comedy. What's more impressive is it more than doubled the box office for the opening weekend of Land of the Lost, in what must be a huge disappointment for Will Ferrell, whose appeal as a leading man appears to have flat-lined.

But I have to wonder if many of those in the Hangover audience watched it with some amount of melancholy.

You see, the part of the TV commercial that made me laugh out loud was when Mike Tyson is drumming and singing along to Phil Collins' "In the Air Tonight," and punches out Zack Galifianakis on the final beat of percussion. (My guess is that's how it's cut in the trailer, not how it actually happens in the movie).

This was, of course, before Tyson's four-year-old daughter strangled herself on the wiring of a treadmill at their house.

From a purely business standpoint, Warner Brothers, the film's distributors, must have panicked when they found out about the death of little Exodus Tyson. How can you keep showing an ad in which a joke about Tyson is the tag (is that the right term? DGB will tell me), when the real-world Tyson is engulfed in tragedy?

I didn't notice them pulling the ad. Nor did I notice, obviously, any effect on the film's box office. But when I see it myself -- probably sometime this week -- I expect to feel a bit melancholy during Tyson's scenes.

It's really interesting how something like this humanizes a guy we all love to feel superior toward. They cast Tyson in this movie, I'm sure, because of how absurd he is, and it shows the guy is a better sport than we thought that he decided to be in on the joke. Well, now the joke's on us for making Tyson our clown. He's a pretty sad clown right about now.

It's been a prominent year for Tyson -- James Toback also released a documentary about him called Tyson a couple months ago. I heard mixed things about it -- some said it was brilliant, some said Toback, his good buddy, made a puff piece and failed to ask the probing questions. Either way I expect to be seeing it as soon as it comes out on video.

Here's hoping the big box office for The Hangover at least helped the former ear-biter feel a little bit better after the bitter pill he's had to swallow. After all, a lot of that was people coming to see him, people who laughed out loud at his appearance in the commercial, like I did. For a guy who loves the spotlight, Tyson may need a little personal validation to help get through this.

I'm easy

Just throw a little Nine Inch Nails in your trailer, and you've got me. Hook, line and sinker.

Take Terminator: Salvation, for example. They showed the trailer during last night's season finale of Lost -- an honor I thought was reserved exclusively for Star Trek during J.J. Abrams shows -- and I was reminded of the fact that Nine Inch Nails' "The Day The World Went Away" scores it.

I was going to see this movie anyway, but now -- whoa. Watch out.

I should say that Nine Inch Nails is my favorite band, so there is nothing purely objective about what I'm saying. But I also think there's a reason Trent Reznor's music is chosen for trailers. It increases the awesomeness factor by ten.

It did the same for me back when 300 came out. This trailer also gooses the excitement level with a little NIN, this time "Just Like You Imagined," also from the album The Fragile. I have no doubt the song itself contributed to my near-feverish level of desire to see that film, and therefore, also to my ultimate disappointment in its ability to live up to my expectations.

I've written at length about the power of trailer music, so I don't need to go into another dissertation here.

However, it would be useful to pause a minute to reflect on why NIN's stuff works so well in particular. It's those cinematic industrial soundscapes that Reznor is so good at concocting. In many a Nine Inch Nails song, you can hear the clanking, the mashing, the sound of one piece of metal scraping against another. These are highly effective sonic attributes when you've got something like a Terminator movie. If ever the world is going to be destroyed by machines, you want a Nine Inch Nails song to usher in the end -- even if "The Day the World Went Away" could be construed as a little on-the-nose in this case.

I will say that the use of a Nine Inch Nails song within the body of a film does not have a 100% success rate for me.

While scoring a cool-ass car chase through the desert with NIN's seminal "Closer" probably took the remake of The Hitcher up a couple levels for me, the same cannot be said of the use of "Every Day is Exactly the Same" in Wanted. In fact, you might say that's the moment when I realized Wanted was going to suck. "Every Day is Exactly the Same" is not a particularly deep song to begin with, but when it was used to demonstrate the daily drudgery of the existence of Wesley Gibson (James McAvoy), it was as obvious as being smacked in the face with a two-by-four.

Then again, that's not Trent Reznor's fault. It's Timur Bekmambetov's. His Wanted isn't much for subtlety in any respect.

When trailer music sets impossible standards

When I first started this blog way back in January, and was flooded with ideas, one of the things I'd wanted to write was a post called "The impossibility of Pineapple Express ever being good enough." It would have begun this way:


In the past year, I believe I've listened to the song "Paper Planes" by M.I.A. between 50 and 75 times. Because it's a really, really good song, I still haven't gotten sick of it. And because it's a really, really good song, I had ten times higher expectations for Pineapple Express than I should have.


Okay, back to the post that's actually being written right now. I'm not sure if you had the same experience I did, though I know some of you did, because we've discussed it. The original trailer for Pineapple Express was going along compellingly enough, looking like a fun and probably hilarious blending of the stoner and action genres. But then M.I.A.'s enthralling anthem -- with its gunshots, cocked hammers and cash registers providing crucial instrumentation -- kicked in. After that, Pineapple Express became The Awesomest Movie Ever.

Or so I was hoping. When months of anticipation finally culminated for me in a screening on opening weekend last August, the word that came to mind was "disappointment." Not only does the movie's tone turn too violent toward the end, resulting in a bunch of gory deaths that are out of synch with what you want from a comedy, but most crucially, "Paper Planes" never makes an appearance. And I'm sorry, but Huey Lewis' eponymous theme song just didn't satisfy me as a substitute.

It's a phenomenon we've seen numerous times before. A really well made trailer is distinguished by its choice of music far more often than we may consciously acknowledge. Sure, the editing has to be good, and it has to give more of a sense of what to expect, rather than a miniature synopsis of the entire plot. We remember those things. What we may not remember as consciously is how the music can also whip us up into a fervor. Whether it was the stirring Mozart score to the trailer for the Sly Stallone actioner Cliffhanger, or Wyclef Jean covering "Stayin' Alive" for The Big Hit (another sub-par action movie), I remember the way the combination of the perfect music and the perfect images jazzes me up exponentially.

Just think back to that M.I.A. song and the Pineapple Express trailer. "I fly like paper, get high like planes ..." Meanwhile, in the background, James Franco is doing the worm, Seth Rogen is doing some kind of upper-body breakdancing move, James Franco kicks his foot through the windshield of the police car he's driving, Seth Rogen jumps off a balcony onto a baddie below. Awesome stuff, right?

If it weren't for this trailer, I think I probably would have liked Pineapple Express a lot better. After all, the main thing it's guilty of is not being quite as good as it should have been. And I blame the trailer for giving me my notion of how good it should have been. But I wouldn't trade it. I'll always consider that a perfectly executed trailer, and I get chills even now when I watch it, even knowing I was ultimately disappointed.

So how does this all relate to Watchmen? Well, it's happening to me all over again. Watchmen -- based on what's widely considered to be the greatest graphic novel of all time -- has lots of much more significant reasons it's being anticipated than good trailer music. However, most of those reasons belong to the comic book geeks. And though I like a good comic book, I am far from a comic book geek. In fact, when I first saw the cast of Watchmen on the cover of Entertainment Weekly last summer, timed with Comic-Con, I thought, "Who're these fucking guys?" (Thank you, Major League, for the quotation.)

But as soon as I saw the first trailer, it was all over for me. The music got me again.

It's Smashing Pumpkins doing the honors this time. And even though I haven't been a regular listener of Smashing Pumpkins for ten years, there's something about the way "The End is the Beginning is the End" just pushes this trailer over the top. As the music really kicks in, a giant amphibious flying machine bursts through the surface of a river next to a major American city. Then the beats are timed up again for a man being thrown backwards through a plate-glass window. Then again for a masked man using an aerosol can as a flamethrower. The goose bumps are coming out on my skin.

As the music continues to pulse forward, a number of wondrous sites hit our eyes -- a hairless blue dude making people explode by shooting rays from his hands, a Molotov cocktail smashing into a truck, and what's that crazy-ass contraption rising out of the desert? Sure, the images themselves are doing a lot of the work here. But you'd be lying if you didn't acknowledge how well the music brings you to that place.

Will Watchmen live up to the hype? I'll be able to answer that question for you this weekend. You better bet I'm seeing it no later than Sunday, and I'll be opting for IMAX to heighten the experience.

Comic book fans will be trying to see how it measures up to the graphic novel. Me? I'll be wondering if and when that Smashing Pumpkins song will appear.

Trailer bowl

I was going to write a longer piece, but I ran out of time, so thought I'd at least check in with something shorter.

It's no great revelation that for a lot of people who watch the Super Bowl, the commercials are the best part. (These days, that's debatable). For film fans, though, you have to increase that by one layer of specificity. While your average fan just wants to see how Danica Patrick will make a new innuendo about her breasts for GoDaddy.com, or the latest shenanigans of the Budweiser clydesdales, film fans are eager for their first look at a bunch of new films.

Of course, the value of this used to be higher. Nowadays, the hardcore geek can find any trailer he/she wants online. But I like to take a little bit more of a laid back approach to trailer watching. If someone sends me a link saying I "gotta watch this," then I will. But otherwise, I won't go seeking them out.

And so it is that I still look forward with some giddiness to what the Super Bowl has in store for me. I still remember the burst of excitement I felt over such films as The Hulk, Transformers and Wanted. Ah, what great films they all turned out to be. (Please note my sarcasm).

And one thing I noticed -- no matter how my attention was diverted elsewhere, toward socializing or drinking or eating scrumptious appetizers, and sometimes even toward football, I somehow maintained a sixth sense for tuning in when a new trailer started. (I reviewed, just to be sure, by fast-forwarding the copy on my DVR tonight. If you don't watch the commercials you missed the day afterward, you'll never watch them).

So instead of doing the rundown of which commercials were good and which sucked -- and this year, it would weigh heavily on the latter category -- I thought I'd give a quick recap of the film trailers, and my impressions based on one (or in some cases, two) viewings.

Duplicity. With Clive Owen and Julia Roberts yukking it up like there's no tomorrow, this looks like Mr. and Mrs. Smith meets Oceans 12. In other words, I'm not interested. In case you're interested, IMDB says this will be the third film called Duplicity since 2004. (March 20th)

G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra. I have a number of concerns here: 1) If it's the first movie in the series, do you really need a secondary title? 2) It's releasing in August -- not a good sign. 3) Aren't these guys supposed to be military? How come there's no sign of a battlefield? Looks more like X-Men to me. 4) It's directed by the guy who directed The Mummy. 5) The ad played before kickoff, which means it can't be good. Other than all that, I'm excited. Hey, I played with G.I. Joes when I was a kid. (August 7th)

Angels & Demons. I admit to referring to this as Gods and Monsters when the ad came on. Hey, I'd had a couple beers. The only thing I will say is that when I saw The Da Vinci Code, I thought it was an exact replica of the book. Well, I haven't actually read the book this time, so maybe there'll be some surprises. But I will probably not go. Oh, and I loved how the ad referred to the first movie generically -- "He uncovered one of the greatest cover-ups in history," or something to that effect -- and then, lacking the confidence that you'd know what they were talking about, threw in a whispered voice saying the word "Da Vinci." Thanks, I needed that. (May 15th)

The Year One. Jack Black and Michael Cera get stoned -- but not in the way you're thinking. I liked the idea when I first heard of this, but the ad did nothing to build on that. The sets look cheap, but not in a good way, and the humor seems like it'll be pretty warmed over. Though it is nice to see Michael Cera taking a break from playing Michael Cera. (June 19th)

Fast & Furious. Okay, we have to figure out something here ... is it a series reboot if it's the same cast? Or is it just the fourth in the series? "New model, original parts." My head is spinning. This is the first time I have ever seen a series try to create a different title just by removing a couple of definite articles. I guess that ampersand is new, too. Does this mean that Vin Diesel has finally admitted he needs to make some safe choices? Blah. (April 3rd)

Land of the Lost. I was a huge fan of Will Ferrell's in Step Brothers, so this looks like a step backward to me. However, Danny McBride is in this movie, so that bodes well. But why didn't they put him in the ad? (Remember, I'm going on a single screening here). Ultimately, this reminds me a lot of a number of other movies. Where's Brendan Fraser when you need him? I think the main reason this movie exists is so that Ferrell could say "Matt Lauer can suck it!" (June 5th)

Star Trek. Every other trailer for Star Trek has been awesome. This one was no different, even in short form. I've honored it by giving it the accompanying art for this post. (May 8th)

Up. I was overjoyed by the appearance of this one when I first saw the trailer, but on second viewing, I was a little more hesitant. Will I grow to love the old man and the boy scout just like I've loved all the other Pixar characters? Probably. Will definitely see this one in 3D. (May 29th)

Monsters vs. Aliens. Speaking of 3D glasses ... I did not have them to watch this. But I still liked the trailer. I'm wondering if it's possible I could prefer a Dreamworks picture to a Pixar picture for the first time ever. Probably not. (March 27th)

Race to Witch Mountain. Huh? This movie is confusing as hell. Didn't Hellboy already impress us by standing in front of a car, and Hancock already not quite impress us by standing in front of a train? I guess we've never seen a kid do it. Eh. Dwayne Johnson or not, I will pass. (March 13th)

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. Okay, I know most of us have seen Transformers ... but do any of us remember who "the fallen" were? This assumes some kind of deep investment in the angst and mythology of the Transformers world. Which none of us had. Hey, I liked Transformers better than almost anyone I know, and Michael Bay can still blow stuff up, but I am not excited for this. (June 26th)

Most regret not seeing an ad for: Terminator: Salvation (May 22nd)

Not a bumper crop overall. In fact, weakest field in years. So it goes.

Okay, so it wasn't that short. But I wrote it fast.