his article page contains archived daily blog entries with discussion of various movie trailers. Often, when the discussion focused on one trailer in detail, or I've gone ahead and constructed a movie review page for that film, I've gone back and removed the trailer discussion from this page and put it on the movie page. So check the movie review page for a particular movie if you want to know what I said about it. Comments you see on this page are usually very general in nature, or about movies I never noticed again.

Where to see movie trailers online? Here are my picks, in order.

#1) The Movie Box. The best source I know of, updated almost daily, with direct links to every new trailer that geeks may be interested in. They also link to TV footage, clips collection, etc, but you won't see much here for things like chick flicks, romantic comedies, etc.  Mostly action and Anime and horror and the like.

#2) Apple/QuickTime. A well known hub for high quality trailers, all from major studios or independent with major affiliations. Has perhaps 50% as many trailers as The Movie Box, but has more variety of genre.

#3) The Entertainment Zone and Movie City Geek. Much like The Movie Box, but less comprehensive.

#4) Rotten Tomatoes. They cover every movie you can think of, and on their movie info pages they link to the reviews, as well as cast/crew, still photos, and trailers. There is usually just one or two trailer links though, and often they point to low quality Real Player versions. RT is the best for movie reviews, but use them for trailers only if you can't find a movie elsewhere. You can usually find a link to the official site for a movie on RT, which will almost always give you a link to a good quality trailer.

#5) IMDB. Much like RT, in that they cover every movie, but the trailer links are very hit or miss.

#6) Search Engines. Use google or your search engine of choice to seek out the movie's official site or the hub site for the studio that's releasing it, and follow links from there.

Archived daily updates about upcoming movies and their trailers follow. More recent additions are on top.

May 15, 2004

¤ Speaking of movies I'm actually looking forward to, off the top of my head I can only think of two other big ones this year, and one small one. Well two small ones, if I count Hero, but given the two year wait Miramax has already put on it, I'm not going to commit to it being released this year. The other small one is Fahrenheit 911, Michael Moore's sure-to-be inciting documentary about how Bush has conducted the "war on terror" and his family's long history of ties to the House of Saud. (They are the ruling family, and yes, the country is actually named after them.) I doubt much in it will be news to me, and I know Moore distorts things in his films, but I still wanna see it.

The two major films? Shrek 2, as mentioned above, but the other two are The Bourne Supremacy, and The Chronicles of Riddick, oddly enough. I never saw Pitch Black, have never seen Vin Diesel in anything, (which might explain my interest) but I can't resist this one. It's action, it's big budget special effects, it's space battles, it's scifi weirdness on another planet, etc.  I can't imagine that it will be any good, but then again neither was Underworld, Van Helsing, Dawn of the Dead, etc, and I got some enjoyment from all of those. I just like the genre, providing the movie isn't so stupid or doesn't starring someone so annoying that I can't bring myself to sit through it.

There are lots of other movies that I'll probably see, or that I sort of want to see, but those are the only four that I can list off the top of my head that I know for sure I really wanna see.

¤ Elsewhere, The Incredibles trailer is online. It's the upcoming Pixar movie about a family of Fantastic Four-styled superheroes, and the fan boys are rejoicing, but I didn't personally get much joy from the trailer. The look is gorgeous, as with all Pixar movies, and after the plastic-y humans in Toy Story and Monsters Inc. it's nice to see that they've learned to make human expressions believable.  The scene of the elastic woman reacting while she watches her costume get blown up is brilliantly-done. But the overall trailer didn't do much to whet my whistle. It looks cute and light; but not LOL or brilliant.

¤ Mediocre though The Incredibles trailer might be, it's leagues better than the soggy, limp, cable TV-quality trailer for Shark Tale.  I've heard about this one forever, mostly for the astonishing amount of major stars they've got doing voices: Will Smith, Robert De Niro, Angelina Jolie, Jack Black, Renee Zellweger, and Martin Scorsese are headliners.  The movie may yet be brilliant, but since it's set underwater and stars talking fish, it's impossible not to compare it to Finding Nemo. And while I was quite underwhelmed by Nemo when I finally saw it on DVD, it was at least gorgeous.

Shark Tale doesn't look very good, at least in this trailer, and from all I can see of the plot it's sitcom material. Also, almost the entire trailer is Will Smith doing his dated, oreo-flavored jive talking schtick, while Jack Black does a blubbery son of a tough Godfatheresque mafia guy (Martin Scorsese). Bleh.

It's not due until November, and who knows, maybe I'll be blogging in six months and talking about the great new film clips from Shark Tale, and how excited I am to see it opening day.  But somehow I doubt it.

¤ No matter how bad Shark Tale might be, at least it's not Catwoman, which looks so bad and has such negative buzz that the movie studio has actually pulled the trailer offline.

A source says, "Early online trailers of Catwoman have been pulled and they're sending cease-and-desist letters to websites that were playing it.

"Everyone is really embarrassed by it - especially Halle."

The only problem with this amusing story is... it's not true.  You'd think the National Enquirer would do a little fact checking before they post this sort of rumor/lie, but I the facts always get in the way of the best gossip. The Movie Box's direct links to the trailer on the WB site still work, and you can still see it on other sites as well. It's not a good trailer, and the catwoman suit still belongs on a biker slut at a Hell's Angels convention, but it's no worse than the trailers for plenty of other dumb action movies. I Robot, King Arthur, and Anaconda 2, for instance.

May 7, 2004

The summer movie season unofficially opens this weekend with Van Helsing.

Malaya and I are a lot less interested in it now than we were several weeks ago, and the 80% negative reviews aren't helping much either, but we're probably still going to see it Friday evening. Every review, even the positive ones, says more or less the same thing; too busy, too frantic, too much mediocre CGI, and the guy playing Dracula does much to redefine bad acting.  I suspect Malaya and I will come away with much the same reaction, but in the past we've found some joy in gory, action-filled cheese-fests like Underworld and Freddy vs. Jason, so we just have to go into Van Helsing not expecting a masterpiece or one line of decent dialogue, and enjoy the pretty lights and colors.  Check back Sunday to hear how successful we are.

In happier movie news, there are a ton of cool new trailers out now. The best place I know for them is The Movie Box's trailer page, and while I'm not going to go down a whole long list of them like I did a week ago, here are a few recommendations:

¤ Collateral: Tom Cruise is a hit man trying to wax five guys in one long night in LA. I had no interest in this one pre-trailer, and though I didn't dislike the trailer, my interest in it is still pretty faint. I've never been a fan of Cruise, and though he's not playing his usual smirking pretty boy here, I don't see why he's in the movie. He looks stocky, John Travolta-esque, and he's got platinum dyed hair and plays everything very seriously. Why pay Tom Cruise money for a role a dozen other actors are better suited for? Sure, the movie would make $40m with anyone else, and it'll make $100m with Cruise, but this just doesn't sound like anything anyone was asking for.

¤ Speaking of movies no one was asking for, The Chronicles of Riddick is coming in June.  The #2 trailer is new and improved, and I guess I'm interested in seeing it, but only because I like this sort of scifi/war/action movie. I never saw Pitch Black and since it only made $39m in the US and $53m worldwide, and wasn't a huge hit on DVD, I'm not sure too many other people did either. It's pretty clear that it would never have warranted a $100m+ sequel if not for the success of the Vin Diesel starring Fast and Furious, and it's equally clear that they started working on this one long before Vin's last headline pictures substantially under-preformed.

¤ Shrek 2 has a second, somewhat better trailer out, but it's still nothing to get all that excited about. I hope that every good joke in the movie isn't in the trailer, since 1) that makes actually watching the movie boring, and 2) there aren't really any funny jokes in the trailer. Unless this one has a lot better plot and funnier stuff in the movie than the trailer, it's never going to make a fraction of what the first one did. The first one was a really good movie, got great reviews and word of mouth, plus three years ago fully CG movies were still somewhat of a novelty, and people were willing to see it a second time just for the visual candy. No longer.

¤ There's a new, Internet-only trailer for I Robot, and while it improves over the first one by not including any horrible Will Smith attempts at smirking humor, it's still not any good. Lots of cheesy-looking CGI robots leaping around, with machine guns and people running. This could be any movie, starring any actor, and it's got nothing to compel anyone to see it. And I'm saying that as a person who goes to see damn near every semi-decent action movie. The marketing for this one needs a huge overhaul if they intend to break even on their $100m+ budget.

The only good trailer for it yet was the first teaser one, in the form of a fake, Mac-like ad. It ends with a website URL listed: http://www.irobotnow.com. So if you're like me, you had to wonder who beat them to http://www.irobot.com? Check and see if you're curious; it appears to be a real robot selling company. They list the Roomba automatic vacuum cleaner, and also have pictures of tank-like things that look to be used for mine field detection or bomb disposal.

¤ Lastly, and the best of the lot is The Bourne Supremacy trailer. I saw the first movie in theaters, and enjoyed it enough to blog about it and recommend it. I've never seen it since, letting Malaya (who never saw it at all) talk me out of paying $10 for the used DVD at Blockbuster when we saw it there months ago. Still, I remember aspects of the film fondly, and want to see it again. The action was good; raw and fast, especially the driving and fight scenes, and while much of the plot was ridiculous and the characters did various stupid action movie things, it was a pretty good spy thriller. What James Bond movies would be if they hadn't become such glossy event pictures.

The trailer for Bourne 2 has a tone very much like the first film. Hard, fast, very real stunts and action. Sort of the opposite of Van Helsing/Hellboy/X-men type comic book films, where everything is melodramatic, CGI, you see the fights coming 5 minutes before they begin, most of the action is in slow motion as character dive away from obviously-CGI fireballs, etc. I'm looking forward to the second one, and I've been looking for the first one used at Blockbuster for a couple of weeks, without luck. They had some months ago, when we passed it up, but we can't seem to find any now.

It's funny that the trailer is out now, since just a couple of days ago I was reading the Entertainment Weekly summer preview issue, saw a mention of Bourne 2 which sounded good, and realized that no, I hadn't ever seen a trailer for it, and that yes, it really was coming out in just two and a half months. Apparently they got the idea for it, wrote it, and filmed it quite quickly, and it's coming out very soon after the filming ended, which is one benefit of not doing 500 CGI shots in an action film. Still, not even having a teaser out three months in advance is unheard of for a major film, especially an action one of the type that Internet users like to debate. *cough* I wonder what the delay was?

Also, speaking of Blockbuster. I long boycotted their homogenized evil, but I have to admit that they're getting pretty good at stocking a variety of used DVDs. You'll never find any independent art films or foreign masterpieces, but let's be honest; for all that we criticize stores like Wal-Mart and Blockbuster for stocking nothing interesting or original, how many of us ever watch that stuff anyway?

Blockbuster only just started selling used DVDs in a major way a few months ago, and at first they were mostly $15 or more. Which was ridiculous, when you could usually get them new for $14, 3 months earlier. Prices have come down and selection as gone up since then, and they generally have every used DVD at $13 each, or 2 for $20. And since people seem to be bringing in their old DVDs for some miniscule trade in price, the selection is increasing, especially of movies from more than 6 months ago. Stop in and browse some; once you get past the 40 copies of Gothika and Bad Boyz 2, you might actually find something worth owning.

May 3, 2004

In Friday's blog I wondered which opening movie, Envy or Godsend, would end up getting worse reviews, after both of them were off to an amazingly bad start. With most of the reviews in, the winner is... us.

Both films were widely ignored and both films flopped miserably in their opening weekends.

• Godsend made a pathetic $6.9m, which is just $2970 per theater, and has just 3 positive and 87 negative reviews.
• Envy made an even worse $6.1m, "good" for $2494 per theater, and received just 2 positive and 68 negative reviews.

Just to put how bad these are into perspective, the new teen flick Mean Girls cleaned up with $25m, and Man on Fire and 13 Going on 30, both in their second week, made much more than any off the other debuts. Hell, the entirely ignored Laws of Attraction, staring replacement Clarice Starling and replacement Roger Moore, made $7m, good for 4th place. The last week in April is traditionally the last chance for studios to dump sub-blockbuster material and try to eek out one decent weekend before the big blockbuster behemoths start lumbering into town. Guess this year was no exception.

April 28, 2004

 ¤ AVP Featurette #3: Not bad; it almost makes this ridiculous comic book showdown of a movie appear to have a plot with human.  Not that anyone is buying a ticket for that aspect of things, but it couldn't hurt. The movie appears to be archeologist type humans with various interesting weapons in a Tomb Raider style Mayan temple deep beneath the ice in Antarctica, which they discover is infested with Aliens and the Predators who have come there to hunt them. Chaos ensues. It's utterly ridiculous, but of course that's the whole point.

 ¤ New York Minute Clips: It's an Olsen Twin movie, and it's not porn. Needless to say, I didn't click this one. I'm not sure I would have even if it had been (porn). I never saw whatever show they were on, and I've never really thought either of them were that hot. It does show the benefit of being twins; either of them by herself would be an unknown, ex-sitcom child star with a few lingering fans with vague pedophilic tendencies. But as twins, they're far, far more than twice as famous.

 ¤ The Village Trailer #2: This upcoming movie by M. Night Shamalayananayana might be a creepy, suspenseful masterpiece, or the cheesiest thing I've ever seen. The first trailer leaned more towards the second option, but this new one is closer to the first. I semi-jumped several times during the trailer, which has a medieval Blair Witch sort of vibe, where there's no actual sign of the monsters (or whatever they are), just shadowy things racing across the screen, people almost seeing them, hiding from them, fearing them, loud noises, etc.  I heard bad reviews of the script to this one months ago, people saying it was the most ridiculous thing they'd ever read, totally unbelievable, melodramatic, etc, but the director has a good track record (though I've never seen any of his films) and the trailers make it look pretty good.  Great atmosphere and cinematography, anyway.

 ¤ Van Helsing Film Clips: Nine new one minute clips from various spots throughout the movie.  Malaya was jonesing for this one months ago, when I was pretty indifferent. It looked too cheesy and stuffed full of monsters and villains, sort of reminiscent of the last couple of disastrous Batman movies when there were like 5 bad guys each and it just crowded the movies to death.  I began to feel more interest as I read more previews and learned to tune out the cheesy aspects of the teaser and first trailer, but I was still in the "It might be watchable if..." mode.

Then the early sneak reviews started coming in, and they were almost unanimously negative.

This is just an awful, awful movie. At the beginning I had hope, it seemed like other than the vampires it might be an entertaining movie. A little over the top but potentially fun. That hope died quickly.... 75% of this movie is computer generated and it gets boring fast. CGI characters fighting and swing on cables repeatedly is just tedious. The big final fight is a repeat of everything you've already seen just with a different background. The dialogue is mostly just laughable and when added to dreadful Romanian accents its even worse. The plot is so silly and stupid that its not even worth going into.

There are a dozen more like that over on AICN, if you care to follow the links. At this point, even Malaya is having doubts, and she's been hot to see Van Helsing ever since she first heard about it last year. I wish I could say that the movie clips on Yahoo turned my doubts around, but unfortunately they did not. They're a very mixed bag, but they all make Van Helsing look like an expensive B-movie. When the monsters and other special effects look obviously-fake on the thumbnail sized browser screen, it's a bad sign, since any imperfections will be greatly amplified on the big screen. The Dracula guy is featured in two or three of the clips, and he's not laugh out loud awful, but none of them inspire much confidence that he's not as cheesy as the sneak reviews say he is. I can envision wincing every time he starts to talk after an hour of screen time. I was wincing from 30 seconds of Kate Beckinsale's attempted Transylvanian accent, though I have to applaud their use of an entirely gratuitous butt shot of her, for no other reason that that she'd got a hella tight ass. As last year's Underworld trailer spent about five seconds establishing beyond any shadow of a doubt.

Also, that Santa's sleigh broken bridge horse/wagon leap doesn't look any less fake when you see the minute of movie that builds up to it.

At this point, I think Malaya and I are waiting to hear what some real critics think of the movie, and if they're as negative about it as they were about oh... The Punisher, we'll probably save our $8 for something later this summer with less publicity, but more quality. And the Punisher film clips were good, damnit!

 ¤ Harry Potter 3 International Trailer: It's much the same as the domestic trailer #2, and it still doesn't give me any desire to see the movie. The only change is that since I've now read all of the books, the scenes in the movie look familiar, and my only curiosity about it is to see how they turned the book stuff into visuals. There's a chance HP3 will be an entertaining movie; the first 2 were well-made, but basically boring, by a basically boring director. They've got Alfonzo Cuarón doing the third one, and he's supposedly a lot more visually exciting and creative.  We'll see.

Well, you might, I doubt I will, short of borrowing the DVD from someone next year. Malaya and I both liked the book, but neither of us gives a damn about seeing a practically-shot for shot movie version of it. Unfortunately, this ain't LotR, with a great team of writers and a great director turning an overlong, unfocused, literary fantasy epic into a more tightly-plotted movie with vast visuals. The HP books have their charm, but they're never vast or epic or anything you just have to see on the screen, after reading about it.

April 19, 2004

Speaking of movie trailers, if you have broadband there's really no reason you can't see every trailer for every upcoming movie with minimal waiting.  The only problem is finding links to all of them, with trailers posted on individual movie sites, studio sites, news sites, etc. The hub that's probably best known and most used is the Apple/QuickTime site, and it's a good place to start, largely because every link there is in quicktime, the best encoding technique, in terms of image quality.  It's horrible if you're on dial up, with larger files in the 80-100meg range, but you'll note that I said "broadband" a few sentences back.

The problem with the Apple Trailer site is that it's very far from encyclopedic. They tend to have only major movies, and only some of the trailers for those, along with selected smaller/independent/foreign films.  You're better off going to movie sites that link to every trailer; Rotten Tomatoes does a decent job on their upcoming movie pages, but they tend to only link to one or two trailers, often crappy image size ones on Yahoo or other news sites.  I don't use RT for that except as a last resort.  You can also use movie news sites like AICN or Counting Down, but AICN is usually days late and only mentions a few movies, and Counting Down has such an absurd number of pop ups and ad pages that I can't stand it.

My personal favorite is The Movie Box, an unimposing little site that nevertheless manages to collect links to about 95% of all movie trailers online, good, bad, or mediocre though the films may be, and then sorts them onto convenient individual movie pages.  They also link to the short film clips that come out when a movie is about to be released, TV commercials people have encoded, and more. It's quite the resource. I check it a couple of times a week and see all sorts of interesting foreign action movies, Hong Kong releases, major Anime films, and other interesting stuff. Check out Appleseed, Blueberry, Casshern, Delgo, Immortel, and Steamboy for just a few upcoming movies that look quite interesting, and that you'll never see anything about on the Apple Trailers page. I enjoy watching the odd trailers even if I don't have any intention of ever seeing the movie. Better two minutes of entertainment than none, eh? Ironically, Hero isn't on Movie Box, nor any of the other trailer sites, but you can see links to the various mediocre trailers from the Rotten Tomatoes page.

Two other trailer resources that try to do what Movie Box does, with varying degress of success: The Entertainment Zone and Movie City Geek. They're not as good, but they occasionally get something The Movie Box misses, if I'm bored and surf-happy.

One last piece of advice: some trailers simply won't play in my browser (MIE 6.0), usually ones in QuickTime. If I right click and save target as to my desktop, and then watch them directly with QuickTime, the problem is always solved.

April 17, 2004

We saw Kill Bill yesterday, and had a bonus of 7 fricking trailers pre-feature.

No good ones even. They had a trailer for Hero, which may be a great movie, a sort of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon thing. Unfortunately it was called Ying Xiong and released in Asia about 3 years ago, and still isn't available in the US on anything other than very expensive imported DVDs that won't play on US DVD players anyway. It's finally getting released in the US in June, apparently, but it keeps being delayed. It was due out last year in the Fall, and then this year in the spring, and finally it's coming in the summer. Pending further delays.

It looks awesome in theory; huge battles, sword fights galore, wire fu, gorgeous scenery, etc. And yet they can't seem to put together one decent trailer, and you can't tell if it's a romance or a battle movie or what. I've been following this one from foreign trailers since before I even knew Malaya, and she was previews for it when she was working overseas like two years ago, before she'd ever heard of me. And here we are still waiting. It's now being handled by Miramax, and the trailer kicked off with a mention of Quentin Tarentino's name, as if he's got anything to do with it other than it appealing to people who like Kill Bill 2 type movies.

They also showed the ineffably-lackluster King Authur trailer, and no, it couldn't look any more like Gladiator UK. Or perhaps Gladiator crossed with Timeline. While the trailer was playing and the Mr. Voice was blathering on about how King Arthur was based on a legend, I leaned over to Malaya and said, "They've only got 12 hours to find their father, and bring him back from the past!"  She laughed.

Can we just put a moratorium on any more movies featuring a huge ragged army of savages in loincloths, where flights of burning arrows are seen soaring majestically across the sky? It was cool in Gladiator, it was a rip off in Timeline, and now in King Arthur it's just embarrassing.

Malaya laughs, but she still wants to see it, and and I'll go, but I just can't imagine that it'll be any good.

March 20, 2004

In other movie news, the Japanese trailer for Casshern is getting a lot of attention around the geek circles on the Internet.  I've received the link in 2 emails at this site as well as over ICQ, and it's even plugged in Friday's Penny Arcade.  And as you probably know, once something non-game related shows up in the PA news, it's officially gone mainstream.  By definition, owing to PA's something like 150k regular viewers.

As for Casshern; I'm pretty sure that I saw it months ago from a link on AICN or some other geek film site, but there are several foreign, weird, very anime-inspired mostly live action movie trailers floating around now, and I might be confusing this one with Wonderful Days or something like that.  Casshern looks pretty cool, though it's hard to see how so many disparate scenes and settings could be knitted together into a coherent movie. You've got barking military leaders, marches of robots, super-powered humans battling robots, humans in sword fights, and so on, all with very different visual looks, color schemes, and so on.  It's visually glorious, but would it be a decent movie? And does that even matter, if it's visually glorious enough?  (Yes, and a case in point is coming to DVD in two weeks.)

March 15, 2004

Taken from my review of Spartan.

Once in the theater, saving a seat while Malaya ventured forth in search of something vaguely-affordable on the menu, I looked around at our fellow movie-goers, and noticed something immediately. They were hella old!  I'd never seen a movie with an audience skewing so old; afterwards Malaya remarked that we were probably the youngest people in there, and she might have been right. In front of and to the sides of us were nothing but 40 y/o+ couples, with gray-hairs scattered around as well.  I never saw a TV ad for Spartan, and they obviously didn't have much of a promotional budget or effort behind this film, but perhaps what few ads they did have were on old people TV shows?  Or is Val Kilmer just skewing 40+ now?

We got the usual five trailers, but nothing new.  I did see the Denzel Washington trailer for Man on Fire at last.  I've clicked the link for it on trailer sites at least half a dozen times, forgetting what it's about, but every time I see the picture with Denzel playing a tough guy, I laugh and click back. He's not a bad actor, but he's just too friendly and smiley a guy to be believable with a gun.  (I skipped Training Day, obviously.) At least that's what I thought, but when I was finally forced to watch the trailer... it wasn't bad.  I still think it would be a far better movie with another actor, basically anyone but Will Smith or Jim Carrey or some other comedian, but Denzel wasn't glaringly out of place in it. I'm not going to pay to see it, but hey, it wasn't a disaster. It's a very informative trailer, but one that anyone who wanted to see the movie already would hate, since it gives away virtually the entire plot.

They also showed the inexplicable trailer for the overly-wordy Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, The Whole Ten Yards, another one I can't remember, and The Ladykillers.  Ladykillers got the only audible audience response, as people murmured and I heard a couple of, "I like him." or "I want to see that." type remarks as the trailer began with Tom Hanks. It's grown on Malaya and me also, and we'll probably go see it.

As for the others, The Whole Ten Yards is an odd case.  I clicked on it recently on the Apple site, with the name ringing no bells at all.  And winced through it, thinking it was another Hudson Hawk disaster for Bruce Willis, as he tried to combine action with comedy.  Until Malaya, who was watching it on my computer with me, pointed out that it was a sequel, and that yes, that dorky guy was one of the idiots on Friends.  At that point The Whole Nine Yards belatedly came into my memory as a movie title I'd once heard and had negative interest in. I'd totally forgotten it, and the overly-cute title of the sequel hadn't reminded me at all. It's a bad title, since every American man and most American women who hear it will think it's a football movie (Ten yards being the amount required for a first down in football, the overly rule-stuffed most popular sport in America.) Apart from the title, it's a train wreck of a trailer, needing only a cheesy line-spitting "Mr. Voice" narrator to drop it down to the train wreck level of Garfield the Movie. I didn't hear one chuckle during the whole awkward slapstick-filled trailer, as one bad line after another assaulted my ears. It's hard to believe that such an awful trailer could be created from a movie that wasn't equally as bad, but I suppose it's possible.  Not that I'll ever find out personally, I assure you.

I refer to Sky Captain and the really long title is as "inexplicable" since I have no idea how they got the money to make it, who thought it was a viable movie idea, and what their target audience is. You really have to watch the trailer to know what I'm talking about, and it's worth watching even if you don't think the movie will be any good.  It's some sort of past history scifi, with 50's looking robots/aliens invading the earth and stomping cities flat while search lights crawl across their impressively-riveted bodies and hundreds of others fly overhead like planes on their way to a bombing run in World War II. All done in this weird, soft focus, glowing silver light that's obviously created with computer graphics.  Mixed into this is some guy, the Sky Captain, who flies around in a circa WW2 fighter, complete with propeller and wing-mounted machine guns and has dog fights with the robot alien things, in between wooing a hot, eye-patched Angelina Jolie, and Gwyneth Paltrow in the Lois Lane reporter role. Sky Captain is played by Jude Law, who I would have sworn was Brendan Fraiser after seeing the trailer.  He's got that same, overly-earnest but stupid face.

Putting aside the absurdity of a WW2 plane with a top speed of about 300 miles an hour engaging in dog fights with robots so advanced they couldn't even be built today, and the total lack of any discernable plot other than some War of the World-esque invasion flick... who the hell is going to see this?  The robots are appealing to 60 y/o men who played with similar things when they were kids, and antique toy collectors. The computer graphics aren't the cool type kids will like, and they're too obviously CGI for toy robot loving adults to be interested in. All of the stars are quality actors but none can "open" a movie, and they're all adults near 30, so the movie isn't going to pull kids or the 18-24 bracket. The trailer doesn't tell you anything about the movie other than that there are some aerial dogfight scenes and lots of giant robots; no love story or human element to make women or couples want to see it... who does that leave?  It doesn't look bad, it's just one that I see everyone thinking, "Pretty, but not for me. Maybe a rental..."

It could be the best movie of the year, but who would know? I'd hate to be the marketing department working on this one.

All of the trailers were all adult-skewing films, as you'd expect given the audience for Spartan. When they started playing, I whispered to Malaya, "What if they show Shrek 2?" She shrugged, probably too horrified at the thought of being hit with spoilers for her most-anticipated film of the summer to think rationally. Luckily for her, they didn't show it.  Not that we thought there was much chance they would, given how they bundle trailers with movies by demographic interest.

April 28, 2003

Just to digress and discuss the TR2 trailer, I think there are two good shots in it. And oddly, neither of them are action.  The ending shot of her standing in the middle of the hologram of the earth, with the cute little kids watching is good.  But my favorite is near the middle where she handcuffs the guy while straddling him, and then hops backwards quickly.  I can't even describe her expression there, even with photographic aid.

As for the overall trailer, it's hit or miss.  The special effects don't look especially good, and you don't get any sense of what the huge final battle is going to entail.  The rest just seems to be a lot of action for the sake of action, and the plane falling into the water and the motorcycle on top of the castle wall are both pretty fake-looking.  Also, there's no real rhythm or plot or theme to the trailer.  It's just a bunch of shots from the movie, thrown in in no particular order.  Which is pretty par for the course on movie trailers, but occasionally one really seems to tell the story without giving the whole movie away, and feels coherent and intelligent.  Not using one of the intoning "Mr. Voice" guys is always a good start, and Tomb Raider doesn't.

Lots of times on cheesier trailers for your average romantic comedy type film, I literally can't get through thirty seconds of it, with the oh-so-familiar editing and establishing shots and the stupid "A woman, who couldn't find her place..." type narration.

For example, Uptown Girls.  I forced myself to sit through most of it just now, but... *shudder*.  I don't see the point in that type of movie.  As soon as I see it's an immature woman who turns to being a nanny and gets a super mature uptight girl, I know the entire plot. The kid will learn to be a kid again, the adult will learn to be an adult, they'll grow to be friends after initial hardships, she'll find a perfect guy, the girl's distant parents will discover just how wonderful their daughter really is, etc.  Why see a movie that you know the entire plot to in advance?  At least when there aren't fights, explosions, and car chases to make it exciting. *cough*

Anyway, the trailer begins with a bunch of dumb establishing shots, and the Mr. Voice yammering on with the same script every movie uses.  "So and so was a rock and roll princess... who lead a charmed life..." And in such a soothing and empty tone.  Ugh.

Those voice guys could all die and no one would ever know, since it would be easy to splice their existing comments into new movie narration, since they just say about the same 25 lines over and over again. And it's all so "advertising copy" sounding, I just gag.  I turned off the Uptown Girls one when they finally said, "In a comedy about a grown up who needed to grow up... and the kid who taught her how."

God I just about vomit hearing that.  It's so fucking banal and corny.  Like the worst simperings of a low budget greeting card.  And some poor person had to sit around for weeks and work on that dialogue, coming up with the meaningless lines that almost have a rhythm.

My example of how to do a proper trailer would be any of the LotR ones, or the Matrix 2 trailer, for a current one. No narration at all, just various lines from the movie edited in to serve as a sort of narration.  It starts off with big action, shows all of the characters in a bit of action, shows enough of the plot to let you know what's happening, and in order. It's establishing stuff first, showing you new things in the sequel, then some background info, then about 2/3 through you get, "The machines are tunneling down to Zion." with shots of that, so you know what the actual peril is, if you're at all familiar with the plot of the films, and then there is more cool actiony stuff to end it up.

Speaking of movies, while Tomb Raider II has a decent trailer, I don't have any thought of going to see it, barring some shockingly good reviews.  The first one was widely-held to be one of the worst action movies ever, and while most of that is blamed on the director and script, and they have a new director (and presumably script) for the second one, I'm not real likely to bother with it unless someone drags me.  And I doubt Malaya has any interest in it.

There are a bunch of new, short X-men 2 trailers on the Quicktime Trailer Site, and they are pretty good.  The Special Effects one is my favorite, mostly for the Nightcrawler stuff.  The fact that the director looks like he's 1) 17, and 2) a backup dancer for N'Sync doesn't inspire a lot of confidence, and I didn't think the first movie was very good, but I'll go see this one, and not just because Malaya wants to see it too.

My main issue with the first one was how fake most of the special powers were.  Not that they looked fake, but that they were used to poorly or randomly. Wolverine is supposed to be so bad ass and a fighter, but he couldn't hit an elephant in a phone booth despite having claws attached to his hands. His only visible special power was to heal rapidly after he repeatedly got his ass kicked since he couldn't fight for crap.  Though it came in handy since he could let Rogue borrow it the seventeen times she was nearly killed. And so on.

It looks like a repeat of that in the sequel, with the fire-throwing guy repeatedly taking several minutes to throw big streams of fire, while police with guns watch and wait to be hit by the fire. I might expect them to oh, shoot him? I mean rather than waiting to be incinerated.

It's not that I mind them having super powers; I love that.  It's just that it reminds me of how the Jedi work in SW 1 and 2, where it's clear at all times that a single Marine with a machine gun and some grenades could fight more effectively than every living Jedi put together. The comic books and Anime movies do a good job of showing super powers that are actually used along with conventional weapons, and augment them, making the superhero more effective. Rather than just able to throw fire, which is devastating assuming all the people with guns are slow and frightened and just stand there and wait to be hit.

It's just a question of writing the scenes intelligently and realistically, rather than being all overwhelmed with the shiny special effects at your disposal, and throwing logic out the window to showcase them, thus turning everyone who doesn't have them into a stupid punching bag.

Someday, my movies will be so much more clevererer. *cough*

And while Matrix and X2 trailers are very good, I still think the best trailer on the Internet is the teaser for Charlie's Angels 2, with the amazingly-improbable truck crash, tank/RPG blast, screaming free fall, helicopter escape.  The nicely-photographed and edited action overload overrides the stupid opening to the teaser with the phone line thing, IMHO. The full Charlie's Angels trailer is now out, and after a brilliantly-edited first 60 seconds, it goes a bit "typical action movie" and runs out of gas.  It's an okay trailer on the whole, though it doesn't really make me want to see the movie.  The teaser did.  Does.  And no, I had no desire to see the first one, and never have.

I still find the casting interesting, since the whole premise of the old TV show (which I never really saw, except some in reruns when I was a kid) was to have supermodels, though it was before there were "supermodels", so they just got the most beautiful actresses around, and acting talent was optional.  Sort of a precursor to Baywatch, I suppose.  Which makes it odd that the Charlie's Angels movie(s) star three attractive and vivacious actresses; Drew Barrymore, that really skinny Asian chick with no boobies, and um... the blonde with the bad complexion who banged Matt Damon in the ocean.  Oh hell, I can't remember her name.

Anyway, I believe Drew Barrymore's production company owns the property, which of course guarantees her a spot in the films, and obviously she doesn't want to be standing there looking like someone's kid sister next to oh... Elizabeth Hurley and Nicole Kidman, for example. Of course Elizabeth can't act, and I don't think Nicole would be good in such a role, but anyway.  Better they're all cute and lively, rather than supermodel statuesque. Makes for a better movie.  I just remark upon it since it's a change from the original TV series.

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