Shorts 2009 89 minutes Rated PG (for mild action and rude humor - should have been a G)
by Scott Mendelson
Shorts is a gloriously old-fashioned kids flick made with a knowing cleverness. The picture is fast-paced, funny, colorful, exciting, and absolutely appropriate for children while entertaining for adults. Shorts is no classic, but it clearly does not want to be. It aims purely to be a breezy and pulpy children's adventure film, no more and no less. Robert Rodriguez again proves himself a jack of all trades, as his family pictures (Shorts, the Spy Kids series) are every bit as imaginative and often more entertaining than his R-rated action pictures (the Mariachi trilogy, Planet Terror, From Dusk Till Dawn).
A token amount of plot: told in seemingly random chronological order, this picture is a series of shorts concerning the discovery of a magic wishing rock and the effects it has on the town of Black Falls. While the stories generally center on the youngsters of the town, the inexplicable rock soon begins to have most unexpected consequences for the adults as well. Can Toe Thompson (Jimmy Bennett) use the rock to bring his parents (Jon Cryer and Leslie Mann) closer, while keeping the bullying Helvetica (Jolie Vanier) and his older sister (Kat Dennings) at bay? Can Nose Noseworthy (Jake Short) use the rock to cure his father's (William H. Macy) crippling fear of germs? And what effect will the rock have on the president of the town's leading company, Black Box (James Spader), who is desperately trying to make his 'do everything' Black Box gadget into the must-own vanity item? All these questions and more will be answered should you decide to dive into the wonderfully weird world of Shorts.
What's most refreshing about Shorts is its lack of pretension. It is a kids flick through and through, but it's an awfully good one. As you'll notice from the above synopsis, the cast is filled with talent, all of whom are relishing their chance to play in this particular sandbox. The only qualm is the lack of pretty much any and all Rodriguez vets, as even Danny Trejo is nowhere to be found. Still, everyone is game and their presence does wonders to elevate the simple fable. As always, this Robert Rodriguez film is cheerfully low-budget and cheap-looking in the best way. The special effects are gloriously hokey looking, which only adds to the old-school appeal. And like the Spy Kids trilogy, there are no real villains. Yes, there are antagonists who do bad things, but there is redemption and mercy for all. The seemingly random order of the stories allows kids to discover the relatively simple callbacks on their own, and some of them are genuinely funny (a lost homework assignment provides a great pay-off).
Despite or because of its shoestring budget and overtly innocent intentions, Shorts works as a perfectly charming film for the whole family. It works both because of what it does not contain (violence, profanity, any hint of sexuality) and what it does contain (charming characters, a clever narrative, witty dialogue, and eye-poppingly goofy visuals). Watch Shorts with your kids, or just borrow someone else's kids to give yourself a proper excuse.
Well, not really. But this is a funny little write-up from LA Observed about how a local news station organized their web-page, labeling stories in ways that would pop up in a web search around the word 'naked'. Nevermind that they were discussing the murder of a swimsuit model by a reality show star, the important thing was that they could say that she was NAKED. Luke Thompson (who twittered this this story and brought it to my attention) said it best. As sites depend more and more on 'buzz words' to get hits, this kind of thing will increase.
And speaking of the reality-show murder, David Poland had an amusing blurb about how quickly VH1 made all references to the show Megan Wants A Millionare vanish from its website almost instantly. He's right, this would make a great episode of Law and Order: Criminal Intent.
By any rational standard, the footage looks absolutely gorgeous. But, to be fair, it does not look that much more photo-real than anything else of this nature that we've seen, but the imagry is dazzling regardless. The action montage in the finale is surprisingly exciting, with the seemingly standard 'action music' proving quite effective. But since the movie's biggest trump card is supposed to be its immersive 3D effects, I'll hold off any serious judgment until tomorrow's preview. Again, by any normal standard, this looks like a visually dazzling and dramatically compelling science-fiction adventure film. I'm still a bit concerned about the plot similarities with The Battle For Terra, but that's my problem since I'm one of twenty people on Earth who saw that movie. So far, so good.
Thanks to 'Bloody Digusting TV' for this 'leaked' trailer for next weekend's Halloween 2. The preview feels relatively normal for most of its running time, before going off the Rob Zombie deep-end in the final frames. A friend of mine commented that this will likely be a Batman Returns-type sequel, in that it's Rob Zombie completely marching to his own drummer without studio interference or archetypes that need to be respected. Just as the original Batman was about 40% studio or outside input, 60% artist's vision, so too allegedly was the first Zombie Halloween picture. A successful (or at least profitable) original film often leads to studios letting their auteurs off the leash for the next go-around. Sometimes that creates great art (Chris Nolan's The Dark Knight), sometimes that creates utter garbage (Michael Bay's Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen). It'll be quite interesting to see how this one turns out in just over a week's time, or sooner if Weinstein Company actually screens this thing for the press.
With the somewhat groundbreaking 15-minute national sneak preview of Avatar just two days away (I have my ticket, but only because the AMC Promenade 16 is basically walking distance from my house), it is worth looking back at various instances in the last twenty-years where a movie was so highly anticipated that the preview was in itself an event. Of course, with the Internet, it is no longer necessary to actually go to a theater to see the must-see coming attraction of this film or that, and I genuinely miss the days when I would watch Entertainment Tonight, VCR all set up, hoping for a sneak peak at a major preview. Anyway, on to the show:
Batman(1989)
Premiered on Entertainment Tonight January 12th, 1989.
I can't tell you which new release or major movie this was attached to, because the only new releases that weekend were The January Man and Deepstar Six. I've written elsewhere about the 'throw-down-the-gauntlet' effect of this preview and how it pretty much erased any and all fears of the Batman fans regarding the casting of Michael Keaton and the overall dark and violent tone. But the trailer was also somewhat groundbreaking, as it contained no narration, no music until the very end, and no real attempt to explain a narrative or storyline (it's basically a 30-second Batwing action scene, then about a minute of random images). In my lifetime, this was the first trailer that I can recall people actually paying a full-price admission ticket for a movie (which was at most $5.00), watching the trailer, then going home.
Batman Returns (1992)
Premiered on Entertainment Tonight February 12th, 1992.
This first (and now difficult to find) trailer for Batman Returns premiered in theaters on February 14th, 1992, attached to prints of Wayne's World. Before the internet, people generally had to wait for the first preview to get a glance at who would look like what in a given franchise picture. Needless to say, everyone was in for a major shock when they got a look at Danny DeVito's mutant variation on The Penguin. A second trailer was released closer to the release, which was a more coherent, narrative-driven preview. Ironically, both trailers depict the film as quite dark, twisted, and violent, further proving that the parents whose four-year-old children were traumatized upon the film's release just weren't paying attention.
Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)
This may not have been a much-publicized trailer (and there was a prior teaser in 1990), nor did anyone I know trek to the theater just to see it. But I'm putting it on this list because it was the first trailer where a single shot made me desperately want to see a movie that I otherwise had no interest in at the time. Yes, the T-1000 effects looked neat, but the shot that astounded me was that climactic bit of the helicopter crashing into a truck. Up to that point, I had never seen an action stunt of that nature that looked so real. The whole trailer just promised a sheer scale of action that I had never seen before (as befitting the first $100 million-costing movie). And of course, it more or less delivered on that note.
Jurassic Park(1993)
It may have seemed a forgone conclusion in hindsight, but at the time, this beloved dinosaur horror picture was actually somewhat of a risk. Steven Spielberg was in a quasi-slump. Having failed to get his more serious pictures to blockbuster levels, and having been critically torn to shreds over Hook, Mr. Spielberg hadn't had an original out-of-the-park home run since ET back in 1982 (box-office-wise, he pretty much coasted through the late 80s on Indiana Jones sequels). What this trailer did was instill confidence, assuring audiences that this was more of a horror film in the vein of Jaws or Poltergeist than something warm and cuddly like ET. So confident was the marketing department that they got away with showing almost no actual dinosaur footage.
The Lion King (1994)
Premiered in theaters on November 12th, 1993.
"Holy crap" was all I could say. My jaw dropped, I muttered those words to my friend, and then I started softly laughing to myself. Disney had just announced that it was going to own the summer of 1994 and no other studio or movie was going to be able to do a darn thing about it. Premiering with the opening weekend prints of The Three Musketeers, this teaser for The Lion King just went ahead and showed the whole breathtaking 'Circle Of Life' opening sequence and then cut to black. They didn't need to say or do anything else. Sure, we can now gently mock the semantics of such a scene (it's basically a jungle buffet), and the movie clearly lacks a second act, but one cannot overstate the sheer awe of seeing that sequence for the first time. The film went on to open with a near-record $42 million, and it ended with $312 million domestic and $455 million overseas. It did end up owning the summer, even if Forrest Gump ended up the domestic box office champ of 1994 via the Oscar season of 1995 (Lion King still leads globally by about $110 million). This was the first time in the modern age that a studio simply showed off an extended sequence. This just proves that if you've got the goods, don't pussyfoot around.
Godzilla(1998)
Premiered in theaters on April 3rd, 1998.
While there had been two teasertrailers during the summer of 1997 (premiering, I believe, with The Lost World: Jurassic Park and Men In Black), the first honest-to-goodness trailer didn't premiere until April 3rd, 1998. Forever known as the weekend when Lost In Space finally removed Titanic from the top of the box office, this was also the weekend where Sony debuted its first real look at the much-anticipated Godzilla redo (it was attached to prints of the Bruce Willis stinker Mercury Rising). Going the Jurassic Park route, they refused to show more than a hint of the titular monster, keeping the creature a secret until right before opening day. While moviegoers where shocked that the fabled creature more resembled an amphibious lizard as opposed to a giant dinosaur, bad acting, poor pacing, and a lack of compelling narrative would be far more terrifying than any revamped monster (although the finale is a doozy).
Star Wars: Episode One: The Phantom Menace (1999)
Premiered on Entertainment Tonight November 18th, 1998.
In one of those tragic ironies, 20th Century Fox was (presumably) precluded from attaching this PG-rated trailer to prints of the hard-R-rated The Siege, which opened and underperformed on November 7th, 1998. So, they waited two weeks, attached it to general prints, and watched as most fans saw the trailer attached to... the R-rated Enemy of the State (and, possibly, the G-rated Rugrats: The Movie). Something similar happened two years later, when Universal declined to attach the trailer for the PG-13 The Mummy Returns to The Grinch, only to have other theaters attach other, even more violent PG-13 movie trailers to the prints. Anyway, needless to say, this was arguably the first 'buy a ticket just for the trailer' preview since Batman ten years earlier. It was definitely a tease, with only one true 'wowser' action image (that of Kenobi and Qui-Gon leaping to a nearby platform while in combat). This first trailer certainly didn't make the film feel any more adult that it ended up being. The second, plot-heavy trailer (released on March 12th with the Fox stinker Wing Commander) promised a darker tone than the final film provided, although it accurately acknowledged the politically wonky narrative that so many would complain about just two months later.
The Lord of the Rings Trilogy (2001)
Premiered in theaters on January 12th, 2001.
Although there was an online only teaser/making of featurette (which I now cannot find), this was the first look that most people got at the the much-anticipated trilogy. Attached to prints of New Line's Thirteen Days during its first weekend of wide release, there were signs in the lobby specifically warning people about buying Thirteen Day tickets and trying to get refunds after the Lord of the Rings teaser was shown. I'm sure quite a few hardcore geeks didn't mind, but the rest were simply forced to see an uncommonly compelling historical drama. As for the teaser itself, I wasn't crazy about that "You will find adventure, or adventure will find you." tagline, but the rest showed uncommon confidence. There was very little actual footage, but the climactic character role call was a nice way of showing off all the fellowship and the actors portraying them while assuring the uninformed that they would get all three movies no matter what happened with the first one.
The Dark Knight (2008)
Premiered in theaters on December 14th, 2007.
This was a classic bait-and-switch, another moment of flawless marketing by the WB team assigned to this picture. Everyone and their brother knew about the six-minute IMAX prologue teaser, a bank robbery scene which was attached to all IMAX prints of I Am Legend. But what no one knew about was the inclusion of a traditional trailer with 35mm prints of I Am Legend all over the country. A shockingly intense and violent two-minute tease, this introduced Health Ledger's performance as The Joker while reassuring fans that all of the old characters would be back (Morgan Freeman's single line was warm acknowledgment that we were in good hands). The bank-robbery scene works much better in the film that it did as a stand-alone teaser, but this two-minute clip made sure that every one of those $77 million-worth of ticket buyers who saw I Am Legend over that weekend were not talking about the completely worthwhile Will Smith sci-fi drama at all.
Ok, that brings us up to about now. I know I've left a few off (sorry folks, Independence Day is disqualified because it's 'blow up the white house' teaser premiered during the Super Bowl), and I'm sure there were a few before my time that merit mention. Which trailers were worth going to the theater all by themselves for you? Feel free to share. For more trailer reviews, including the first 2-minute teaser for Avatar, go to Mendelson's Memos.
I love the fact that someone in the studio chain thought that Taylor Lautner had to literally explain the character arcs of this second picture. I'd wager that 90% of the audience that watches this trailer has either read the book or knows enough about the general mythology to know precisely what the plot of this one is. And I'd hope that the casual fans are not so stupid as to need a tour guide for a 105-second trailer. If anything, this approach almost resembles the trailers of the 50s and 60s, where an over-the-top narrator robustly explained the entire movie as the respective moments played out on screen.
Of course, this trailer has a secondary purpose as well. Since Robert Pattinson has very little screentime in this second picture, this preview needs to get the hardcore 'Edward-philes' used to a movie that basically stars Lautner's Jacob, so we have lots of shots of the insanely ripped, shirtless Lautner jumping here and there, occasionally turning into a werewolf. We also have a token look at Rome, where we get bigger-budget crowd scenes, underwater adventure, and a first glance at the most interesting casting coup of this sequel, Dakota Fanning as a high-ranking member of the vampire equivalent of the MI5 (Graham Greene's appearance is also a welcome addition). Ironically, despite this attempt at showing off their new budget and bigger scope, the trailer still closes out on that much-mocked shot of Jacob turning into a werewolf mid-air. I enjoyed that shot for its cheesy, 'why-the-hell-not?' nature, but I was obviously in the minority.
Allison grabbed and tried to read a trade paperback of Untold Legend of Batman. I politely explained that those stories had been retconned out of continuity 22 years ago. She was confused, so I started to explain the concept of multi-verses and what not. She cried and lost interest before I got to the various Crises or Zero Hour. No wonder no one reads DC Comics anymore.
If anything, the acquisition of Matthew Vahn's Kick-Ass by Lionsgate is a true test of that whole 'we're a grown-up studio now' mentality that started about a year ago. If you recall, Lionsgate took out a big ($350 million) loan, more or less dumped their straight-to-DVD horror business and tried to rebrand themselves as a real studio that was about more than Tyler Perry melodramas and Saw sequels. Alas, a year later, they are still primarily known for Saw films and the various socially-contentious adventures of Madea. Ironically, they actually had a pretty decent start to 2009, with My Blood Valentine 3D and The Haunting In Connecticut opening near the top of the horror ceiling (around $23 million). And they scored a $40 million opening weekend with Madea Goes to Jail, which despite being Perry's worst film to date almost made it to $100 million (cough-second run theaters would have made the difference-cough). But they completely gave up on the surprisingly potent Battle For Terra 3D, they couldn't build on the audience goodwill for Crank 2, and the atrocious New In Town was destined to flop.
So a year later, they are left as they have been for the last few years, with one or two mainstream hits to smooth the ride while they wait for Jigsaw and Tyler Perry to save their asses. Their truly ambitious twelve-film-release strategy during the last quarter of 2008 was more or less a draw. For every solid hit (Saw V, The Family That Preys), there was an embarrassing flop (The Spirit, Bangkok Dangerous). And for every studio dump that looked good on the roll call (Religulous, The Lucky Ones) there was an "either spend the money or send it straight to DVD" clunker (Repo: The Genetic Opera, Midnight Meat Train). Yes, The Spirit wasn't exactly a winner, but strong marketing can by definition open lousy movies. And opening The Transporter 3 and Punisher: War Zone within a week of each other was a stunningly bad idea that maimed both pictures. It's do or die time for Lionsgate to prove that they can open a geek-friendly film that isn't already presold from the get-go (for that matter, they need to learn how to sell top-quality dramas like Akeelah and the Bee and Away From Her).
But come what may, they paid $50 million for this much-publicized Comic-Con favorite. They aren't going to just turn around at the last minute and dump it in a bunch of dollar-theaters just to honor contractual agreements (also, I hope that Kick-Ass is actually a better film that the limp-to-the finish line Midnight Meat Train). This is likely going to be a full-on marketing push, the sort that opened a star-less, low-key PG-13 Haunting In Connecticut to more than any Sony Screen Gems opening weekend to date. But the $15 million opening, slow-ride to $55 million finish of 3:10 to Yuma won't be good enough this time. The studio is at a crucial juncture if it doesn't want to be the studio that Jigsaw built and Madea maintains. If anything, Lionsgate will try much harder on this one than a bigger studio that just saw this as another mid-budget comic-book adaptation. Kick-Ass being acquired by Lionsgate may actually be a blessing. Because Lionsgate needs Kick-Ass more than Kick-Ass needs Lionsgate at this point.
Shorts
A token amount of plot: told in seemingly random chronological order, this picture is a series of shorts concerning the discovery of a magic wishing rock and the effects it has on the town of Black Falls. While the stories generally center on the youngsters of the town, the inexplicable rock soon begins to have most unexpected consequences for the adults as well. Can Toe Thompson (Jimmy Bennett) use the rock to bring his parents (Jon Cryer and Leslie Mann) closer, while keeping the bullying Helvetica (Jolie Vanier) and his older sister (Kat Dennings) at bay? Can Nose Noseworthy (Jake Short) use the rock to cure his father's (William H. Macy) crippling fear of germs? And what effect will the rock have on the president of the town's leading company, Black Box (James Spader), who is desperately trying to make his 'do everything' Black Box gadget into the must-own vanity item? All these questions and more will be answered should you decide to dive into the wonderfully weird world of Shorts.
What's most refreshing about Shorts is its lack of pretension. It is a kids flick through and through, but it's an awfully good one. As you'll notice from the above synopsis, the cast is filled with talent, all of whom are relishing their chance to play in this particular sandbox. The only qualm is the lack of pretty much any and all Rodriguez vets, as even Danny Trejo is nowhere to be found. Still, everyone is game and their presence does wonders to elevate the simple fable. As always, this Robert Rodriguez film is cheerfully low-budget and cheap-looking in the best way. The special effects are gloriously hokey looking, which only adds to the old-school appeal. And like the Spy Kids trilogy, there are no real villains. Yes, there are antagonists who do bad things, but there is redemption and mercy for all. The seemingly random order of the stories allows kids to discover the relatively simple callbacks on their own, and some of them are genuinely funny (a lost homework assignment provides a great pay-off).
Despite or because of its shoestring budget and overtly innocent intentions, Shorts works as a perfectly charming film for the whole family. It works both because of what it does not contain (violence, profanity, any hint of sexuality) and what it does contain (charming characters, a clever narrative, witty dialogue, and eye-poppingly goofy visuals). Watch Shorts with your kids, or just borrow someone else's kids to give yourself a proper excuse.
