Director: Doug Liman
Cast: Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, Adam Brody
Release: June 10th, 2005
Synopsis: John and Jane Smith are an ordinary suburban couple with an ordinary, lifeless suburban marriage. But each of them has a secret — they are actually both legendary assassins working for competing organizations. When the truth comes out, John and Jane end up in each other’s cross-hairs.

Prognosis: Positive. I need more beautiful people in this one. I just do.

The trailer opens stealthily with Brad having a gun tucked in the back of his pants.

Next, at a different locale, Angelina holsters a knife in a thigh-high sheath.

We’re off to a great start with all the mystery surrounding this flick and right away the trailer people have to start effin’ up the works with the old “deaf or blind” approach; this is characterized by having the voice over guy repeat, verbatim, the words that I see on the screen. Are the studios trying to imply most of you are illiterate, after all there are many millions of you out there, needing someone to lead your hand through this thing or are they just incompetent? I would like to say I think it’s the latter but I know it’s really the former. They don’t know what they want in the ice cream shop so they go with both.

So, we are told/shown that these two are the most freaking unbelievable assassins this side of the Rio Grande. Now, before we get ahead of ourselves, I would like to think that, yeah, Brad could be a good assassin. He very well could be. He would get all that sweet meat overseas to spill the goods about their governments but, Angelina, on the other hand, would be road kill on her second day of training. I’ve read enough about spy craft that the only job she’d be good for in the intelligence agency is the kind of job I can’t talk about in a public forum. (Wink, wink, nudge, nudge) Although, in fairness, if she had her freakish looking brother with her they could team up and be a sort of ambiguously incestuous A-Team, but I digress from the matter at hand.

In the next scene, Brad wields a shoulder powered rocket launcher (I could care less what kind of a movie it’s in but a shoulder powered rocket launcher could be in a Care Bears movie and I would love it just the same) and we get a nice looking explosion. Angelina, on the other hand, repels down the side of a building. Some of you younger readers out there are strongly encouraged to use QuickTime to see if you can slow down the images ever so slightly as I think you get a fuzzy shot of her underwear as her dress hikes up; be first to post it on the Internet and discuss it with your friends, you pervs.

Now, I know it seems like I’m being harsh, I am, but I like where this film is going when we deduce that they are husband and wife and neither of them know what the other does; I’ll admit that’s a good premise. Now, Brad and Angelina as a married couple? I actually believe that without breaking a sweat. We’re getting somewhere, people.

Of course, their lives aren’t all happy as Brad seems to be talking with a therapist. He makes a choking motion with his hands as he describes as how sometimes he just wants to choke the crap out of Angelina. Wow, we’re really hauling down the highway of cinema verite. I, too, can relate to that impulse whenever subjected to her presence for too long of a time.

What’s weird, and I was going to bring this up sooner, is that the first thing that popped into my head when I realized the premise is like it’s a double TRUE LIES. The husband has a secret but the wife doesn’t know, etc… but as we get further into this trailer the music of the dance that Arnold and Tia Carrere shook their groove thang to in the beginning of the film starts playing as Brad and Angelina start dancing to it as well. Déjà vu.

Vince Vaughn makes a brief cameo mid-way though this thing and it adds some levity to the whole shebang when the both of them realize that they are competing agents and Vince approves quite audibly about the weapon of choice that Brad selects.

Then, the fun really begins as they try to kill each other. I could do without the “Who’s your daddy?” jokes as they’re about as tired and busted as any Baha Men “Who Let The Dogs Out?” reference of any kind. The use of a minivan in a high speed chase is a cute twist on the whole suburban life meets COMMANDO thing and I am even more impressed that Doug Liman, the eyes behind THE BOURNE IDENTITY, has taken the reigns for something as enjoyable as this. There are guns everywhere, there are explosions aplenty, and the premise is somewhat engaging.

Dare I admit this public but I very well may pay to see an Angelina Jolie movie.

Director: David Dobkin
Cast: Vince Vaughn, Owen Wilson, Rachel McAdams, Christopher Walken, Jane Seymour
Release: July 22, 2005
Synopsis: John Beckwith and Jeremy Klein, a pair of committed womanizers who sneak into weddings to take advantage of the romantic tinge in the air, find themselves at odds with one another when John meets and falls for Claire Clearly.

Prognosis: Positive I am a huge fan of Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn that it absolutely destroyed me when STARSKY AND HUTCH turned out to be a blasé match-up. It was one of those movies where the trailer truly did reveal all that was really funny.

Now, though, this looks like the two of them are coming together again and, really, this movie appears that it with either survive or die based on whether these two guys can stay consistently funny throughout the flick. With the exception of the great Walken, their personas will carry this film.

What’s refreshing about the trailer is that it doesn’t mind somewhat alienating the ladies in the house with its overt poke on how women react when it comes to weddings. There are enough “Oh yeah…” moments that guys will appreciate, much like when Vince described his weekends as a married man in OLD SCHOOL, but first things first.

“Two people will come together to celebrate the sanctity of marriage.”

With voiceover guy talking up the whole marriage as a sacrament the obvious thing that comes next is our two heroes completely disgracing it. Vince seems to the ringleader of the pack as he yells at Owen how it’s wedding season and it means the opportunity for them to take advantage of women who are so overtaken by the thought of marriage that they will, “throw their inhibitions to the wind.” Now, that’s a philosophy I can get behind.

Owen is nearly frothing at the mouth as he anticipates the coming onslaught of women but I am off in some other dimensional space as I wonder why in hell I didn’t think of that myself so many years ago when I was a wee lad.

“Hide your bridesmaids.”

What’s also funny is how these two take on a variety of fake identities to fit the occasion. From the last name of Schwartz at a Jewish celebration, to a Sanjay and a Seamus, at a Hindu and Irish gathering, respectively, these two guys infiltrate the ceremony to take the poon hunt even further than just showing up to take advantage of an open bar.

Vince uses the guise as a balloon animal maker to entice the ladies and Owen employs the flower girl at another to show how wonderful with kids he is. Owen then adds he’ll mention how he’s a charter member of Oprah’s book club. Vince eye-spies a woman with a tattoo on her lower back and he comments it might as well be a bull’s-eye. I would have to agree that both guys are going for the golden ring on this one.

From Green Day’s “American Idiot” providing the soundtrack to displays of all the frivolity these two cats are having, to copious amounts of skin and ladies in their undergoods, this trailer really speaks to me on a sleaze level that gets nothing but kudos from my corner.

The “Save the date” dig at the ladies who send those notices out to the potential wedding guest list is a nice touch and an added bonus that is not missed.

Director: Prachya Pinkaew
Cast: Tony Jaa, Petchthai Wongkamlao, Pumwaree Yodkamol, Rungrawee Borrijindakul, Chetwut Wacharakun
Release: November 5, 2004 (AFI Film Festival)
Synopsis: Booting lives in a small and peaceful village. One day a sacred Buddha statuette called Ong Bak is stolen from the village by a immoral businessman who sells it for exorbitant profits. It soon becomes the task of a young man, Boonting (Phanom Yeeram), to track the thief down to Bangkok voluntarily and reclaim the religious treasure. Along the way, Boonting uses his astonishing athleticism and traditional Muay Thai skills to combat his adversaries.

Prognosis: Positive. This is why it’s nice to keep an eye on Asian cinema. Sometimes you just find something that strikes an interest.

The cards that open this trailer, letting everyone know that there is a long history of martial art masters who have not only proven themselves great at their athleticism but at being able to be charismatic on film, aren’t pretentious. I thought they were when I first read them, as it would be easy enough to compare yourself with Bruce Lee or Jet Li, but could you actually deliver on that?

Tony Jaa delivers quite effectively and quickly, thank you very much.

Since this is a foreign language film there isn’t a need to dwell on the crappy dialogue that usually hampers an action film anyway, so they just show the goods while accentuating on some great selling points.

Right after we go through the history of martial arts on celluloid, there is a nice guitar intro as Tony starts leaping, bounding and swinging his leg at anyone getting in his way. Are they his enemies, bystanders? Who cares! It’s martial arts and it’s wonderful to watch.

“No safety nets.”

Tony seems to be a cross between a ferocious Jet Li while incorporating the confused-dog-head-how’d-he-do-that stunt action that made Jackie Chan a superstar. The man literally leaps many feet in the air, only to do the splits, and other near physical improbabilities, to evade swinging weapons meant for him.

“No computer graphics.”

He scales fences while being chased and he makes it seem effortless. He swings on a hook only to have another man’s chest stop his motion as he plows both feet into the man’s ribs.

There is a really sweet slo-mo shot of him flipping, doing multiple rotations in the Muay Thai ring, while doing the same thing on the streets, again, to avoid getting a beat down from some nameless thugs. Even though this trailer is from way across the sea the inclusion of some nice looking ladies, a fiery explosion and some alone time of him just doing martial arts for no else’s enjoyment but our own, shows a keen awareness of what we Americans demand of our action films.

There are snippets from the New York Times, Time and even Ain’t It Cool News, in praise of this film’s delivery, and it serves to elevate this film just a little bit more above the rest. The level of ass-kickery that is displayed here in the trailer just rivals most anything I’ve seen for quite some time. I used to think Jean-Claude Van Damme was the end all be all, I thought Steven Segal would have some longevity, and I even put a little hope in Ernie Reyes Jr.’s future when I saw him chop socky-ing over on ABC when I was 11, but all these false idols fell out of favor with me when I saw what real martial artists could do.

Without having seen the film I am not sure if Tony Jaa is it, but it would be nice to have someone else who could have a promising career beyond the lives of the Li’s and Chan’s who are as magnanimous as they are memorable.

Director: Clare Kilner
Cast: Debra Messing, Dermot Mulroney, Holland Taylor, Jack Davenport, Jeremy Sheffield, Sarah Parish
Release: February 5, 2005
Synopsis: Wedding Date centers around Kat Ellis (Messing), who returns to her parents’ London home for her sister’s wedding. Afraid of confronting her ex-fiancé, who dumped her two years before, she hires a top-drawer male escort (Mulroney) to pose as her new boyfriend..

Prognosis: Negative. Alright, as soon as voiceover guy says, “What was supposed to be strictly business…” I was done. I tuned out Tokyo and called it a night. Everything about the plot was meaningless and without any importance at that point, but I realized that it does have meaning to your girlfriends and wives who will no doubt drag your scraggly ass to see this one. I apologize in advance.

I will give you my honest opinion: if you like WILL AND GRACE you could do worse. If you hate WILL AND GRACE and find Debra Messing is indeed not the next Lucille Ball but a redheaded fraud, you’ll be scratching your eyeballs out by the end of the first act.

To give you some idea what’s happening in this film, it’s essentially a reversed PRETTY WOMAN. That’s all there is.

Debra is off to London to meet up with her family and she feels the need to get an escort. It’s her sister’s wedding, information gracefully given to us by an answering machine that Ms. Messing is choosing to ignore as she crazily gets her suitcase ready for international travel. She obviously feels the need to compensate for something, as it would be absolutely insane to assume that any woman who is comfortable with her singularity couldn’t tell her family that she’s completely fine with not having to depend on a man for her happiness but this is a movie after all so she has to be impetuous.

So, instead of finding someone she works with or maybe finding a friend who wouldn’t mind traveling to London for a quick spin, she hires a male escort. She hires an escort to be her date to her own sister’s wedding. Apart from the strange questions about how quickly this new man materialized into her life from people who know her he ends up being exactly the kind of cover she needs to feel better about herself and her life.

They land in London and her mother greets her new rented man meat with gracious hospitality. Now, in the next scene, where Debra gives us important plot information about how she spent six Gs on Dermot’s company the dude stands in front of her in tidy-whities, man sac on near full display, and I am feeling less comfortable about my viewing of this trailer. I move on past the mental sizzling from that image and then notice that Dermot is the talk of the family. All the ladies who get into the man’s perimeter gravitate to him like an old rich guy with a thick wallet and a willingness to part with his money indiscriminately.

Guests ask what he does. She lies to one and says he’s a therapist. What I don’t know is if that’s meant to be funny. Debra looks like it’s somehow supposed to be amusing in that whole Grace/visual shtick thing she does on Thursday nights but it’s only killing the chances to recommend the flick as I get an underwear butt shot of Dermot taking off his briefs.

What’s not supposed to be funny, but is, is when Dermot the man whore whispers into Debra’s ear about how she should feel safe and know what an incredible woman she is. She looks like she’s just learned it’s now possible for her to have an orgasm. She’s the female equivalent to those insipid guy friends we’ve all had that swear that a stripper they see on a consistent basis is spending time with them at the club because she really likes his company and has nothing to do with the piles of money being forked over.

After some montage to Stevie Wonder’s “Signed, Sealed, Delivered” where Debra finds herself falling in love with her mimbo and seeing how absolutely wonderful Dermot is with everything he does we get more strategic viewing of Dermot’s naked body. Seriously, when can this end?

Dermot then starts spouting about how it’s important to have the courage to let someone love you back (I can just hear the ladies amping up their charge cards to get advance seats for this), we get Dermot’s naked chest, again, as we wind down with him talking about how it was just “something” in Debra’s voice that made him want to take on this assignment.

What would be neat, and completely possible, is if Dermot wasn’t a man whore after all and it was all a joke. I’m already predicting that the two of them somehow end up together, but I could really care less at this point.

Director: Sydney Pollack
Cast: Nicole Kidman, Sean Penn
Release: April 22, 2005
Synopsis: Political intrigue and deception unfold inside the United Nations, where an interpreter overhears an assassination plot.

Prognosis: Positive. Sean Penn, again, pops his head up for the second time in two weeks in a movie that no doubt steps right up to the line of the mainstream and knocks on its mediocre door. With Nicole Kidman onboard this vehicle you can be sure Sean will probably be on Oprah with her as he shares his feelings and innermost secrets about romance, home decoration, how freaky Kirstie Alley looks nowadays, before they ever get around to talking about the film for all of five to seven minutes.

Things for this trailer open up interestingly enough. Nicole is an interpreter at the UN in New York and she overhears a possible assassination attempt against a UN ambassador for some piddly little country.

Some guard at the UN, when approached by Secret Service foreign dignitary protection, which includes some lady and Penn, lets the two of them know they’re not on US soil. It’s international territory. Ooo…the international intrigue thriller has begun, ladies and gentleman.

Penn, looking very mature action movie star-like, asks Kidman if she could pick out the voice again if she heard it. She says yes and then the whole background of this movie is set up like a softball toss at a drunken picnic. Essentially, Kidman hears this assassination attempt after having to go back to the UN after hours for something she left behind. Only she and, according to Penn, about eight other people could understand the language that the plot was discussed in which puts her on a very tiny list of possible suspects.

I’m already tossing in some Jiffy Pop as I get giddy trying to think of whodunit.

Penn doesn’t really put a lot of credibility into Kidman, Pollack (who has a very distinctive look about himself) pops up as a player in his own film, and then the cat and mouse games begin. Kidman begins to have delusions about being followed, Penn still has problems believing her, and then a dude, with a weird gold lamee mask, dangles outside of Kidman’s apartment in a tree as the mystery deepens about who could be behind it all.

“Is she a victim or a suspect?”

Penn interrogates Kidman after he uncovers some photos of her at a rebel rally (that is, men with guns and not a pack of inebriated Billy Idol fans in a parking lot before his concert at the Topeka, Kansas state fair) and wants to know what her deal is.

This trailer asks more questions than it really does in informing the plotline.

Things really start to heat up as Kidman boards a bus. Someone hollers back on a radio that she’s getting on the bus as Sean realizes that she’s about to become a part of a bombing. Kidman gets off, confused at what’s happening when someone tells her to shag ass off of it, as the bus lights up in a whopping explosion. Nice.

The rest of this thing is filled with so many discordant images, as it tries to throw everyone into a spin cycle of confusion, that I’m not sure what the hell is happening by the end of it. I definitely see a snipers rifle, a lot of running, a lot of guns, and Sean closes this thing by ominously saying that, during the investigation, the person with the darkest history is Nicole. Ooo….

So what that it’s not going up for an Oscar or that it’s not out to change the way movies are made; its only purpose is to entertain. Keeping these three tenets in mind when looking at a film of this kind will help to adjust expectations accordingly.

It’s been a while since a really good “check your mind at the door” flick has come out and I think this is worthy for consideration to keep on the radar.

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