Director: Dan Harris
Cast: Sigourney Weaver, Emile Hirsch, Jeff Daniels, Michelle Williams, Kip Pardue
Release: February 11, 2005 (Limited)
Synopsis: The Travis family façade is destroyed by an event incomprehensible to them — an event which will open locked doors and finally reveal the secrets that have haunted them for decades.

Prognosis: Hell Yeah. Sandy Travis. Sigourney Weaver plays another mom on the verge, one of her best performances that came in the form of THE ICE STORM, as she’s introduced trying to buy rolling papers to buy a little weed from the local Quick Stop.

Emile Hersh, fresh off the better than expected THE GIRL NEXT DOOR, plays a son who gets into a car crash and is laid up for a bit in the hospital. The kid even cracks a little wise with some other hospital patients by telling them it’s an old war injury. “Which one?” they ask. “Vietnam,” he says, matter-of-factly.

Ben Travis. Jeff Daniels, a superb everyman, plays the dad. He tries to connect with his son by letting him know if he needs any cash to see that new band whatisname, Nirvana, to let him know. The family laughs at him and I feel his wimpish pain.

Penny Travis. Michelle Williams, the daughter of Ben and Sandy. She’s less than thrilled to be home for the holidays.

I love dysfunctional families.

Let me interject here and say why this is a good trailer thus far:

1) No voiceover.
2) No explanation about what’s going on.

Sigourney gets busted by the po-pos. Her drug habit is less than under control and the cops let her know that while she sits in the back of a squad car. The whole family seems to be in free fall and it’s not until we get back to Emile when the gloves come off and the knuckles start connecting: he lets his dad know he’s a pretty horrible father. Jeff Daniels concedes the argument to his son while, in the next scene, he’s asking his wife what she thinks about cosmetic surgery as he plays with her face. Note to men everywhere: wait ‘till she comes to you, dude. You are begging for her to jump in the sack with the cashier from Ralph’s when you do this. Sigourney obviously doesn’t need my help because she does this very thing in the next scene.

Emile expresses some discontentment about living with the family he’s saddled with, but there is something funny that happens. Emile seems to be picked on by a large bully at school to which Sigourney responds by traipsing over to the trailer park where the bully lives with his mother (the obvious location for most all bullies in this world) and unleashes some real motherly love and venom at the kid that is to be seen to be believed.

The last section of this trailer is snippets of all the main characters wallowing in their own despondency. What I really like, first of all, is the use of the Postal Service’s “The District Sleeps Alone Tonight,” excellent trailer song choice, and, second, that the use of color and transition works well throughout. There is a seamlessness to the snippets shown and it never feels jarring. The ending to this thing, as well, is bittersweet as Jeff Daniels tries to have a moment with his wife.

He tells her he loves her. They’re sitting outside and it’s a nice day. Signourney looks back and him and simply says, “You’ve gotta be kidding me.”

Disfunction always makes for a great story. Always.

Director: Rob Zombie
Cast: Sid Haig, Bill Moseley, Sheri Moon Zombie, Matthew McGrorey, William Forsythe, Leslie Easterbrook, Danny Trejo, Natasha Lyonne, Ken Foree
Release: August 12, 2005
Synopsis: After killing Sheriff Wydell, the Firefly family is caught in the path of a vengeful cop (Sheriff Wydell’s brother). The police raid the family and Baby, Otis, Captain Spaulding and the rest head out. Rumor is that a prostitute named Candy falls for Otis. Get ready for a nation-wide killing spree!

Prognosis: WTF??? The trailer opens up with a news guy reporting on a horrific scene discovered by cops. Right away you know there’s gonna be some violence but what’s odd is that the footage is immediately faded out to show some blonde honey cavorting and mincing around for the camera and it’s none other than Sheri Moon Zombie (Rob’s wife). She plays Baby Firefly, one of the three titular Rejects on the run after the 1st movie “House Of 1000 Corpses.” (Big ups to Sean B. for the reader assist on that)

William Forsythe shows up on the screen acting all tougher than leather and I am whisked back to his seminal role as Frank Whaley’s boss in CAREER OPPORTUNITIES, the man who was about to “pump the pasties” off of some piece of white trash. After him we get the freaks from the first HOUSE OF A 1000 CORPSES.

“You wanna start the killin’ you best start it right here.”

Most noticeably we get Sid Haig, one of the most menacing looking dudes ever to get parts in both A and B movies, appearing all sorts of twisted with his yellow and black teeth. The man seems genuinely born for this role.

Some po-po’s, wearing gas masks and brandishing shotguns, knock down a door and enter a small room that looks like a run-down old shack. Sid, Ginger and a stand-in reject from Hee-Haw strut down a vacant highway in the middle of the day carrying firearms. While this is a wet dream for all you 2nd amendment nuts, the shotguns the police were holding up go off and then we are jerked, rather abruptly, to some waitress screaming at the top of her lungs. Why? I don’t know and we’re not shown. This trailer is knocking me around like a Tilt-A-Whirl.

From here there are all sorts of quick clips of images so random I’m not sure what the hell I’m looking at. There are no cards to intersperse the action, no voiceover to guide the plot and there isn’t a shred of dialogue to move things along. There are guns going off, people are screaming left and right, explosions pop on the screen, glass shatters everywhere and we even get a quick look at my hero of ugly Latin character actors, Danny Trejo. To the untrained eye, this could very well be a piece of crap well worth avoiding.

I’m completely sold on it though, believe it or not.

“A tale of murder, madness and revenge.”

The above scroll finally starts to roll across the screen as the camera quickly follows an empty highway at mid-day. There are garbled voices in the background as the music builds up to a fever pitch and the screen goes black. Rob Zombie is the only one credited with making the film but that’s fine. The man has shown he has the ability to craft something that will someday run on your local station as their midnight movie of the week.

This trailer is short, completely cheesy in every sense of the word, and I think everyone knows that. It would be easy to just expect minimal things from a film like this but that, I believe, would be a mistake. Rob has championed his own ability to create a film like no other person can do, or willing, to produce nowadays.

Director: Robert Luketic
Cast: Jennifer Lopez, Jane Fonda, Michael Vartan, Wanda Sykes, Monet Mazur
Release: July 29, 2005
Synopsis: A woman’s (Lopez) idyllic engagement is thrown into doubt after she meets her beau’s horrifying mother-in-law (Fonda).

Prognosis: Negative. “This Mother’s Day”

This is not any movie that any man wants to be subjected to for any length of time. I write this trailer review to let you know what will happen should you not get to the remote fast enough to turn this crap off if you see this thing on the television.

In this trailer, Michael Vartan, best known for getting dropped like 3rd period French (One of my favorite lines from OCEAN’S ELEVEN, sorry…) by Jennifer Garner, is taking J. Lo to his mother’s house to let the two of them get to know one another. She’s playing with her hair, telling Michael she’s nervous, acting completely irrational, and he lets it fly: Don’t be nervous. She’s gonna love you.

Have we learned nothing by behavior conditioning? Of course she’s going hate her. This wouldn’t be a movie if the two of them got along, but we are supposed to play along like the dumb sheep some women are when it comes to these ridiculous set-ups and so I do. I can’t help it but the violins in the background, the massive compound where his mother lives, the opulence that is everywhere, just feeds into this idea and chicks seeing this trailer are, by this time, just in awe at the lush landscape of her man’s life. I can see the gold-digger in her eye from here.

Jane Fonda, who has taken an extended fifteen year break from the silver screen and thought, “Yeah, I’ll make a statement and make a crap film to herald my triumphant return to the talkies,” takes on the role of a judgmental mother. Michael introduces J. Lo to her. Jane puts her hands on her hips, looking really great for a woman of her age to be completely honest, and eyes up Lo in a way that makes me feel weirded for a moment as I reflect on Oedipus. Before I start thinking Fonda’s gone back to her BARBARELLA days, the action breaks for a card that lets us know that the wag who directed LEGALLY BLONDE is to blame for this. As I conjure up all I had to endure for resisting to see that movie and eventually being harangued by my insistence, months prior, the wife see THE PROFESSIONAL with me on DVD as a great example of what an action movie can really be, we’re back to J. Lo and Fonda and I know I’m doomed. The two of them cavort and giggle with each other. At one point they even give each other high-fives. (I didn’t know people still did that)

Anyhow, the party is all sorts of busted when J. Lo says she’s so happy that Fonda’s going to be her mother-in-law. The music warbles to a halt; again, I don’t know who I need a draft a memo to but cut that crap out. The whole needle thing, slowing down the music, it just screams first-year film student who needs to give it up if that’s the game they’re bringing. So, after the bomb is dropped Jane starts to scream as she pummels her sofa. Repeatedly. And repeatedly. This obviously isn’t done in front of J-Lo but maybe it should have been. It would’ve added a certain something.

Fonda and J. Lo are then shown hugging on a couch and then the most wonderful thing happens: Lo gets her face slammed into a cake repeatedly. And repeatedly. It’s absolutely delightful.

It is every man’s duty to be aware that this movie is on the horizon and I do hope you treat it like the Hantavirus. If you’re not familiar with the exact origins of this disease, I suggest you look it up; it’ll all seem perfectly clear.

Director: John Lasseter
Cast: Bonnie Hunt, Paul Newman, Richard Petty, John Ratzenberger, Owen Wilson
Release: November 4, 2005
Synopsis: A collection of classic automobiles set out for adventure on Route 66.

Prognosis: Negative. There’s this old cartoon that ran way before my age, but it was when I was a wee lad that I stumbled upon it. The cartoon ran in-between episodes of Woody Woodpecker and Chilly Willy (Willy doesn’t get enough love, in my opinion) and the premise was that cars talked and mostly acted like regular people. The wife car, though I still have no idea how the deed was actually done, gives birth to a little P.O.S. that eventually learns he is a P.O.S. and tries to change things by experimenting on himself. (I know, I swear this is G rated ‘toon) The young car comes to grips with who he is and fights his father’s insistence on being a regular car even after we see the kid get a spanking and we see that it has a human ass (what the hell was that all about?), and it eventually makes peace with his dad after a near death collision.

Why do I bring this up? Because this new feature from Pixar seems like the same story, just brought up to speed with the times with a little NASCAR tossed in for some hillbilly goodness.

The trailer opens up with a little bumblebee pollinating the flowers of a country meadow. The music is very soft and precious. The bee goes in one flower and buzzes off to another while we’re told, just like the trailer for the INCREDIBLES, that these are the same people who brought us TOY STORY, A BUG’S LIFE, and while we’re waiting for what else this studio has delivered the bee gets squashed onto the windshield of a redneck tow truck. The truck swerves, yelling how he’s blind, the bee caught in his big eyes, and I am reminded of that cartoon from yesteryear. I appreciate the dig at Southern culture as they make the tow truck bucktoothed, but up comes Owen Wilson, voice talent for the sleek looking NASCAR vehicle, trying to tell the truck to grow up before getting a mouthful of bees himself. I’m sure the kids will find it amusing but I didn’t feel anything one way or the other.

Cut quickly to a Green Day song as we’re treated to a big eyed NASCAR race. The sounds of speeding cars whipping around a track fills the sound field, other vehicles attend to the ones in the pits, and we even get a little shimmer off the asphalt to create a heat illusion with the rest of the pack. Owen’s car gets slammed from the side, by the bad car I’m assuming, and he eventually wins the race.

The camera pulls back to see that Owen and his backwoods friend are just at a drive-in watching the trailer to a film called CARS. The bumpkin has some funny thing to say about how he will do anything to see that movie before the trailer comes to a speedy conclusion and we’re left thinking exactly what, then, is the movie about? It’s too late to know as the November 2005 comes on the screen. In all, though, I wasn’t that impressed by this trailer, unlike the ones for last year’s INCREDIBLES which ran with FINDING NEMO, only because I’ve already seen this movie so many years ago, albeit in a two-dimensional way.

Director: Rob Bowman
Cast: Jennifer Garner, Terence Stamp, Goran Visnjic
Release: January 14, 2005
Synopsis: Kirigi and The Order of the Hand send Elektra on a mission to kill the widower Mark Miller — a man who must pay for an act committed by his grandfather years earlier. Upon being introduced to Miller by his young daughter Abby, however, Elektra aligns herself with him and defends them both from Kirigi’s ninja assassins. But is there more to the Millers than meets the eye?

Prognosis: It makes me all tingly down there. I have a girlfriend who is obsessed with Jennifer Garner. Strike that. The chick is dangerously close to being one of those people you see on Inside Edition with their hair all mussed and their clothes all wrinkled to crap after trying to scale the gates to the stars’ home only to be met by big and burly security people and they do a sit down interview after they’re let out on bail and then, quite politely, say that they’re married or something to that effect to the object of their insanity but the star just doesn’t know it yet. Yeah, she’s about one more season away of buying ALIAS on DVD before Jennifer should start worrying.

I don’t know why but the scrolling Marvel logo gets me every time. I like it because, even before you know what’s gonna be on the screen, you already know that it’s going to be a comic book flick. Yeah, PUNISHER wasn’t all that punishing but it’s a solid calling card and it deserves some credit for the kind branding the marketing team has done with it.

There is nothing teasing about this trailer as it gets right into things with the appearance of an SBD villain that goes by the name of Typhoid Mary. She walks through a forest, radiating a deadly circle around her, possibly fueled by a few glasses of sour milk and a half-dozen crispy/crunchy Taco Bell gorditas but the cleavage helps to see past what could be the source of her evilness.

The next shot I’m look at I think is Jennifer, wielding some swords as she twirls them around her body, and I’m thinking about how hot that is but then, as the camera comes in closer, I realize it’s a dude.

I quickly go back to Typhoid Mary’s part again and stare at some cleavage before proceeding further.

After I get the sword wielding guy, there is someone else I clearly identify as a male who has a wolf literally materializing from his chest. I am completely in this trailer’s palm when I see the Hand start traipsing around the large manse that I believe is Elektra’s base of operations. Not only do I get black hooded ninjas, I get white hooded ones as well. Before I am able to praise all that was holy about Michael Dudikoff’s AMERICAN NINJA series, Jennifer’s bodice is smashingly revealed like that woman from the Hot for Teacher video as she gets up on that table to dance. All that’s missing is the kicking beat, but, alas, there is none.

We get real quick scenes of her kicking some air ass as she twirls around her sais but I notice there is a little girl involved. There’s a kid who seems to be part of Elektra’s life in this movie and I rush to my nerd encyclopedia (back issues of the series, natch) and I cannot find a single flipping issue where Elektra has a sidekick that young. Somehow I think that Goran Visnjic has something to do with the kid being there, but I can’t say for sure as I reel in horror as this movie’s plot is revealed to me by voiceover guy.

“One generation must protect the next.”

So this is going to be a damn kidnapping flick? As I come to terms with this being a buddy movie on the level of a Sidekicks TV special (I loved that show) one of the stills that comes up between the fight scenes says that this movie is being brought to us by the forces that gave us X-MEN. I’m calling shenanigans on that remark. Yeah, Zak Penn helped to write X2 but it was really the synergy between Singer and David Hayter that were the real forces that brought us the X flicks, chumps. That kid thing still irks me, though, as we head into the final moments of the trailer.

That little bending of the truth in the previous statement is quickly overlooked by some great looking effects as the man who I thought was a woman who ended up being a guy appears again only to turn into a fine mist as Garner tries to slice him in half and as the guy who had a wolf appearing from his chest has dozens of snakes materializing from his midsection. Plus, this trailer gets kudos from me for the near lesbian kiss between Garner and Mary and for including a crapload of martial arts. Evidenced by the latter MATRIX movies kung-fu does not a film make but seeing how this film is slated for release on January 14, when the collective movie scene is ensconced in movies pretentiously preening for an Oscar nod, a little Garner in a skimpy red top whipping around sharp blades seems like a good reason to at least keep a watchful eye on this one.

And Aime, seriously, get some help.

Leave a Reply