Now that we’re hip-deep in the muck of the winter movie season, we can look ahead to some of the more promising flicks–March and April, in particular, offer some tantalizing choices. I recall my younger days back in old Mt. Pleasant, MI, and the spring giving us little more than cheap horror, lousy John Hughes rip-offs, and tepid romantic comedies. I’d grab the Sunday New York Times and drool over the ads for the art-house flicks and wish, wish, wish that Tom Cruise would drop dead.
Today, of course, we have the internet, DVDs, and the like, to make the urchins back in my home-town waste their hours more productively. Those kids have coffee shops and laptop computers and… ah, hell.
Anyway, I’m always impressed by trailers, their ability to sum up a movie in a minute or two. Thus far, the best trailers I’ve seen in the past few months have advertised two of the worst movies I’ve seen: Little Children and the forthcoming Black Snake Moan. So take these with a grain of salt.
Grindhouse. What a concept: a double-feature (literally, there’s two full-length movies) by Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino, with trailers and ads in between. Three to four hours of blood and gore and sex like only they could offer up. It just occurred to me, though, that Tarantino might just be more prudish than we think–has there ever been a nude scene in any of his films? I don’t think so… The trailer is awesome, the movies look like they’ll be at least entertaining, though Rodriguez is unbelievably erratic. Could be a long night.
Zodiac. Lots of blood this spring. But this feature is already being billed as David Fincher’s (Se7en, Fight Club) masterpiece, two-and-a-half hours of utter tension. The story of the pursuit of San Francisco’s notorious Zodiac killer, this one’s being marketed brilliantly–great trailer, and they’re sending us critics these creepy replicas of the Zodiac’s Halloween cards. Eesh. Looks tremendously entertaining.
The rest of these have decent trailers, but the movies themselves… well, we’ll see:
Across the Universe. 60s musical featuring songs of the Beatles sung by the beautiful people! Didn’t they do this already with Hair?
Pride. The story of an African-American teacher in inner-city Philadelphia who, unbelievably, starts a swim team for the local toughs who can’t shoot hoops because they took the net down. What?! ‘Based on true events’ (what does that mean exactly?), the trailer’s fun until it devolves into a literal weep-fest, which means the movie’s much worse. I bet there’ll be a good soundtrack, though.
The Valet and Angel A. Two French films, one a typical sex comedy, the other a sexy action film. The first, a long-suffering valet accidentally walks into a paparazzi shot of a prominent and very married man walking with his lover, a supermodel. In order to protect his marriage, his handlers pay the valet to date and live with the supermodel, to make it seem that she was on that streetcorner with him. Get it? Like a croissant, The Valet could be buttery and light, a simple joy, or it could be dense and cheap and off-putting with its artificial taste.
Of the second, Angel A is about a punk in trouble with the local mob gets help in the form of a long-legged, sexy, sexy, sexy angel. She dispatches the mob, no doubt undresses, and vanishes. Is she the devil? What? From the guy who brought us The Fifth Element and The Professional. Will this film be the devil (as in, awful) or an angel (as in, fun).
Hot Fuzz is the new comedy from the guys who brought us Shaun of the Dead, which had its moments of brilliance. This one looks to have the same moments, especially in the scene where Simon Pegg points out that a fellow detective has a Guinness moustache. This time, Pegg is sending up action films. We’ll see.
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