Watch/Discuss: Kick Ass 2 gets a red-band trailer.

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Movie Trailers, Movies Blog

I'm not allowed to post my The Incredible Burt Wonderstone review quite yet, but I will say that this film and the one opening Friday marks an interesting turn for Jim Carrey, theoretically eschewing the pure star vehicle in favor of broadly comic "I'm just here to be funny" supporting turns.  Since Carrey never really had that portion of his career where he slowly broke into lead vehicles (like for example Will Ferrell), this is pretty new territory for him and something I look forward to as we near the 20th anniversary of Ace Ventura: Pet Detective next January (congrats - you're old).  Anyway, the rest of the trailer seems fine, although I can't help wondering if this will be a classic case of 'rooting against action', where we want to maintain the happy ending of the first film, with Dave living happily with his father and dating Katie (who happily is returning) while young Mindy gets the childhood she was previously denied.  

Better roles for child actresses than adult actresses? Jennifer Lawrence graduates to 'adult' roles by playing the token girlfriend/manic pixie dream girl.

Yes, this started as deleted material from my Silver Linings Playbook essay from Saturday. I don't want to get into another 'roles for women' rant, but it's interesting that Jennifer Lawrence may win an Oscar for arguably the first role of her career where she exists purely to support the male lead's arc (even her token girlfriend role in The Beaver had a character arc for *her*). She has not a single scene in this film where she exists as a character outside of her role as Bradley Cooper's girlfriend/spiritual healer. She is basically a glorified manic pixie fuck toy who exists purely to support the male lead's emotional journey, not fit for even a single scene disconnected from Cooper's story. This parallels the career trajectory of the likes of Shailene Woodley and Blake Lively, solid actresses who did film and/or television work as leads who only earned real acclaim after they took supporting roles in more automatically prestigious 'manly dramas'. Blake Lively was a lead in films like Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants and the television show Gossip Girl.  But she was written off as a kid-friendly television star before she played a strung-out junkie with romantic feelings for Ben Affleck's oh-so-conflicted bank robber in The Town. Shailene Woodley was a lead actress in ABC Family's The Secret Life of the American Teenager, but critics only started taking her seriously once she played supporting fiddle to George Clooney in The Descendants. It's a great film and Woodley is terrific in it, but would critics have even noticed the picture had it been told from her point of view? I suspect we'll be seeing a lot more of this as the newer crop of child actresses 'come of age'.

Mega-spoilers aside, Carrie remake gets a potent teaser.

On one hand, this is a very very effective horror teaser.  The imagery is terrifying and the build-up is genuinely creepy.  On the other hand, it does blatantly give away the finale for the young kids who don't know their Stephen King and/or Brian De Palma history (to be fair, it's not like the original film's marketing hid the finale back in the day).  On one hand, you could argue that the Carrie story has an added timeliness in the wake of yet more bullying-related tragedies of late.  On the other hand, the original book/movie was as much about sexual repression and religious fundamentalism as it was about a shy and awkward girl being picked on.  Is there any chance that a mainstream film in 2013 will be as blunt about the story's sexual content as the 1976 film was?  Still, director Kimberly Peirce's claim to fame is the ever-so-slightly similar Boys Don't Cry which remains a one of the better films of its type.  I'm not sure the world needs another Carrie.  But I'm also willing to allow that a remake of Carrie will have more to offer than a remake of Robocop, so I'll try to keep my pessimism in check for now.  Plus, any movie that stars Chloe Grace Moretz and Judy Greer has my automatic interest.  Anyway, if you already know the ending, do check out this rather good teaser.  Carrie opens March 15th, 2013.  As always, we'll see.

Scott Mendelson

Review: Confused, rambling Dark Shadows (2012) sucks the life out of longtime Tim Burton/Johnny Depp fans.

Dark Shadows

2012
113 minutes
rated PG-13

by Scott Mendelson

Dark Shadows is a movie with pretty much nothing to say.  It uses its culture-clash and fish-out-of-water narrative not for any kind of social meaning or parable, but purely for cheap offhand laughs.  It is filled with wonderful actors who all look spectacular but have little or nothing to do.  The film tries to play around with mixing supernatural horror, cheap comedy, and genuine soap opera theatrics, but nothing really meshes as it should.  It looks gorgeous as most Burton films do, the actors do what they can with very little, and the 70s soundtrack is filled with a mix of well-known classics and lesser-known hits.  Whether it is better or worse than Planet of the Apes or Alice In Wonderland is a moot point, it's simply yet another very bad Tim Burton film.  In short, Tim Burton's Dark Shadows can best be described in the same manner in which Alfred Hitchcock derogatorily referred to Ingrid Bergman: So beautiful... so stupid.

A whole bunch (9) o' character posters for Tim Burton's Dark Shadows...

I think Empire got these posters first, but thank you to Bohemea for making all nine into one easily-pasted image (Blogger is terrible with trying to line-up multiple pictures in an orderly fashion).  Anyway, above is the final theatrical one-sheet and below are the nine visually-striking character posters.  With just six weeks to go, Warner Bros has finally started the marketing campaign.  And I say good on them for waiting!  Now all they need to do is not release another trailer and not saturate the Internet with clips two weeks prior to May 11th and they can prove that studios don't have to spend a gazillion dollars on a year-long ad campaign for major releases.  Anyway, enjoy.

Scott Mendelson

Tim Burton's Dark Shadows gets a quirky and goofy trailer.

Well, this looks like somewhat of a return to a smaller scale for Tim Burton.  Yes there are stars galore, period decor, and various vampire/witch-related special effects, but this is a lighter and smaller picture that feels more like Beetlejuice than Sleepy Hollow.  Most of the 'fish out of water' humor falls flat, although Chloë Moretz earns the biggest laugh with her deadpan reaction to the climactic drug joke.  I could carp about a somewhat generic 'evil woman scorned' narrative, but I don't know enough about the original television show to protest what may be a faithful plotline.  Besides, if I may speak pruriently, Eva Green looks absolutely drop-dead gorgeous (pun intended I suppose), even if I prefer brunettes.  Frankly, the idea of a single and unattached bachelor spending an entire movie trying *not* to have sex with Eva Green verges on the ridiculous, but the movie does seem to have a goofy offbeat charm.  The best news is that this looks like less of a studio product and more of a somewhat idiosyncratic little flick.  It's still Tim Burton playing in someone else's sandbox, but it feels far-less mechanical than Alice in Wonderland (or Planet of the Apes for that matter).  Warner Bros. opens this one on May 11th.  Cursed release date aside, we'll see.

Scott Mendelson

(Mini) Review: Hugo (2011) features the best live-action 3D you've ever seen, in service of a powerful and enchanting fable.

Hugo
2011
127 minutes
rated PG

by Scott Mendelson

Pardon my theoretical laziness, but I'm not in the mood to do a formal review for Martin Scorsese's Hugo.  And frankly, since I went in knowing almost nothing aside from the general time period and a few of the actors, I suppose I should do my readers the same courtesy.  But know this: Martin Scorsese has crafted the most impressive and beautiful 3D you've ever seen in a live action film.  Since the film somewhat revolves around the early days of cinema (it takes place in 1930s Paris), Scorsese uses 3D technology to create a dreamlike visual palette that attempts to replicate what it was like for the very first moviegoers, the ones who allegedly jumped out of the way of speeding trains and ducked when the train robber fired his pistol at the screen.  There are times when this live-action feature feels like a living cartoon, and I experienced a kind of fever-dream sensation that I haven't felt since Coraline.  If ever there was a movie to justify that 3D ticket-price bump, this is it.

A cast photo for Tim Burton's Dark Shadows.

From left to right, we have... Helena Bonham Carter as Dr. Julia Hoffman; Chloe Moretz as Carolyn Stoddard, Eva Green as Angelique Bouchard, Gulliver McGrath as David Collins, Bella Heathcote as Victoria Winters, Johnny Depp as Barnabus Collins, Ray Shirley as Mrs. Johnson, Jackie Earle Haley as Willie Loomis, Jonny Lee Miller as Roger Collins, and Michelle Pfeiffer as Elizabeth Collins Stoddard.  

Anyway, it looks pretty sharp, and Depp's make-up certainly looks less weird than the paparazzi photos that made him look like Michael Jackson.  I know nothing of the Dark Shadows television show and would prefer to keep it that way so as to judge this picture as open-mindedly as possible.  It's no secret that I'm not the world's most optimistic Tim Burton fan at the moment, but the horror-fan has never actually dabbled with vampires before, so it would seem that this is something more than a paycheck job.  It is probably too much to hope that Warner Bros. lets this out with an R-rating, but that would certainly be a step in the right direction.  Come what may, the picture will be released on May 12th, 2012 (alas, the second weekend-of-summer death slot), so we'll see.

Scott Mendelson

Happily Never After: The sad (and sexist?) rush to cast some of our most promising young actresses as fairy tale princesses.

There were a few interesting articles written over the last several months about the unusual amount of ass-kicking (or at least take-charge) young female roles being written into mainstream cinema.  Whether it was Chloe Moretz in Kick-Ass, Hailee Steinfeld in True Grit, Jennifer Lawrence in Winter's Bone, or Saoirse Ronan in Hanna, the last 18 months or so has seen a mini-wave of genre pictures where young females were basically the lead characters (or in the case of Kick-Ass the star attraction), 'strong independent character' (god, I hate that cliche) who not only could fend for themselves but were not defined in any way, shape, or form by their male love interest (not a one of them had a boyfriend).  Yes, I would include Sucker Punch in this category, as it was basically a satiric examination of whether ass-kicking young women in pop culture were automatically sexualized by virtue of the salacious nature of such imagery (stop whining and read THIS).  The somewhat negative undercurrent of this trend is that these actresses were generally under 18, often barely passed puberty.  Point being, what would become of these actresses once they reached adulthood?  If recent developments are any indication, Hollywood has a genuine desire to roll back the progress clock and turn these actresses into fairy tale princesses.