Director: Darren Grant
Cast:Kimberly Elise, Steve Harris, Shemar Moore, Tamara Taylor, Lisa Marcos
Release: February 25th, 2005
Synopsis: The husband, Charles, is a powerful attorney while Helen has been a devoted housewife. They seem to have everything, money, a beautiful mansion — the American Dream. But just as Helen prepares to celebrate their 20th wedding anniversary, her picture-perfect life is about to takes an unexpected twist: Charles wants to divorce her for her best friend.

Prognosis: Kinda Positive. Hmm…this is an interesting way to begin things. What we have here, initially, is a love story of a man and woman who have been married for many years.

He’s successful, they’re living well, and when, after a gala event, the wife wants to give her man a little present the husband comes walking into the family room with another woman at his side. Now, at first glance I think, alright, cool, they’re all gonna get freaky with one another. However, as luck or damnation would have it the husband really is just telling his wife that he’s leaving her for this hoochie mama lookin’ piece of street trash.

So, after the chub subsides, I see that this once affluent woman has to go back to her life as it was before she had anything. I’m cool with how things are going but when she ding-dongs on the doorbell of someone she used to know from the old neighborhood, I’m thinking maybe a mother, an aunt, a friend, out comes this cross-dresser of a man if ever there was one who ends up answering the door. Now, I know there must be some reason why a dude in drag is playing the part of an older woman but it initially, and subsequently, freaks me out. However, I just roll on and let this thing play out.

Our rich girl turned poor starts to mingle with the dregs of society she only recently just started to get into a pattern of eschewing and learns that she’s an angry woman. She’s angry for the way she’s been treated in life, although some would have little sympathy for once having it all and then losing it, but decides to keep a journal of her experiences to chronicle her thoughts.

She’s one woman against a world that she has to rebuild on her own.

What I learn is that she takes a chance on a guy who she never before would have thought to do otherwise but it feels kind of formulaic. The subsequent moments she has with her mother who tells her, essentially, she needs to be her own woman is, I think, something that can draw the feminine crowd to the theater but, sadly, marginalizes the other 50% of the audience who have no real impetus to see the movie.

I like romantic comedies. I like dramas. When they’re sort of slap dashed together in this kind of mix, though, I’m not so sure that I would want to go.

The trailer sets it up as a womanly empowerment kind of film but I just can’t see any motivational reasons why a guy like me would want to get the kind of feeling to see the movie. It’s not a knock against the film itself but if the message of this movie is really one for females and how they need to be strong and independent I think I’d rather see something blow up or explode in flames for no apparent reason than take a chance on this.

That said, though, I can almost see the genuineness in the message of the film. It may be nothing more than STELLA GETTING HER GROOVE ON but movies where someone needs to lose everything in order to gain a better understanding of who they are as people are good ones to have in a pool of pictures that could care less about how people evolve as humans.

That woman, though, who our protagonist is living with? Creeps me out in ways I can only begin to describe as scary, frightening, strange and many other words that call to mind an overall sense of uneasiness.

Director: Huck Botko, Robert Capelli Jr.
Cast: Andrew Gurland, Eugenia Yuan, Adrian Martinez, Deborah Teng
Release: March 11, 2005 (Limited)
Synopsis: A documentarian funds a NYC doorman’s Asian mail order bride in exchange for the right to film the experience. But when Lichi arrives in America, she finds herself married to a recluse with a penchant for sadistic sexual role-playing. Objectivity flies out the window when she and the filmmaker become involved. Twists and turns are plentiful in this tragi-comic love triangle where all is not what it seems.

Prognosis: Positive. Now here’s an independent movie with a premise better than just the examination of the human condition: a movie about mail order brides.

A guy off-screen says he’s tried everything: bars, setups and hook-ups. We get a look at the schlub and see why he really hasn’t had any “luck”: he’s a bit of a slob. A guy in a cab, who could make a living at being John Tuturo’s little brother, who tries to say something nice, says he’s worked with scummier people than him. I think that’s a compliment.

This mocumentary is all about how this one Jabba looking behemoth, and who has the persistent facial expression of someone who just woke up, goes through the process of getting a wife. It’s a premise that’s not too unoriginal, although an ugly guy getting a wife using a catalog is an old plot device that’s as old as that one Night Court episode (that crazy Bull…), but this trailer moves fast and has moments of real hilarity.

Also, one of the things that works extremely well here is the use of the animated cards in-between the clips. The cards breakdown everything “Wanted” in a perfect wife if it could be ordered up in a misogynist culture like ours. The guy’s wife, Lichi, is very attractive and shows to be quite everything that he ordered. The interview style of the movie shows Lichi as a happy and content wife as she picks up after this guy, learns how to stir his favorite concoction on the stove, is told how to feed her husband’s snake and who then hooks up with the guy’s friend who we saw in the beginning.

The best friend, although I guess that could be debated, macks on the dude’s wife and then takes her for himself after he convinces her that she doesn’t want that pile of chubby goo. Although he thinks he has done a service to the lady, because being a servant isn’t any way to be married, the per diem her new husband bestows on her she blows on all things pig. This is where the fun begins.

The chick gets crazy.

She starts screaming and unleashes her true self. The result turns this whole premise on its ear and I think that’s what gives this thing a new twist. For a film to be a made like this, for it to be an independent picture at that, takes a lot of mettle. The genre of the independent film is littered with the most self-serving crap at times and it’s nice to see someone go outside of the mold to offer something new, something funny.

Now, whether this film has anything to offer beyond the setup, ultimately, is yet to be seen but the trailer is enough for me, and convinces me, that this looks like an interesting way to spend an hour and a half.

Director: Garth Jennings
Cast: Martin Freeman, Mos Def, Sam Rockwell, Zooey Deschanel, Bill Nighy, Warwick Davis, Stephen Fry
Release: April 29, 2005
Synopsis: Mere seconds before the Earth is to be demolished by an alien construction crew, journeyman Arthur Dent is swept off the planet by his friend Ford Prefect, a researcher penning a new edition of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.”

Prognosis: Positive. Martin Freemen, right after Ricky Gervais, really made The Office for me.

The guy has this Everyman look to him, to say nothing of the comedic talent he possesses, and his style is simply enthralling to watch as he worked every scene in that all too short-lived series; he’s absolutely wonderful in the episode when the trainer comes for a visit to Wernham Hogg. Here, though, in this trailer, we get a glimpse into why nerds everywhere are clutching their Douglas Adams books and pinning their hopes on this small little adaptation.

I’ve never read the series. I had a friend who loved it, and I think you know you’re a part of this grand legion known as Nerddom if you can say that you have at least one degree of separation from someone who has, but I couldn’t be bothered with it. I still would never read it even by chance. Doesn’t interest me in the slightest. Give me Crane, give me Dubus, give me the back of a cereal box of Wheaties, but I simply can not stomach science fiction; not because it’s beneath me, mind you, but because I sucked at all things science. I just couldn’t comprehend that world. But that’s ok. This trailer really gets me going.

We get Freemen as he rousts himself out of bed. After he stirs himself awake and bangs his head on a low ceiling as he walks down his stairs the idea is already in motion that something is going to go terribly wrong in this man’s life today.

I am completely appreciative of this trailer for cutting through so many years of haze for me as to why this book was so popular with the guys who I knew. And it does it quickly.

We immediately get the point that Freeman’s friend turns out to really be an alien, played by the more that adept Mos Def, and that Earth is about to get demolished so that a “hyperspace express route” can be constructed. I laughed. I found that premise amusing.

The big, boxy spaceship that hovers over Freeman’s head, who is really unaware of what’s happening, fits in perfectly with me because I, as an outsider, am still unsure of what this all means; there’s some verisimilitude in what’s going on in context with the film and how we are all experiencing it. When Mos puts up his thumb to hitch a ride, and the camera pulls back to see the armada of those long, rectangular ships, I believe in this film’s ability to draw me into the theater, into this world.

After this we get Voiceover Guy to tell us all those little superlatives to get us all pumped to see the flick but I am seriously unaffected by anything he has to say because I am enthralled by the visual effects. Some, like those from inside the ship, seem a little cheesy, but the exteriors with the battles and that one dude who looks like a cross between Elton John in the 70’s and Kenneth Branagh’s character in WILD, WILD WEST are really stunning.

Overall, you get a nice package here. It starts from the beginning and sets up an honest depiction of what someone can expect going into this movie. I am sure there’ll be enough Adams loyalists who will push this movie to some big box office numbers for the very first weekend, if nothing else. I hope I don’t feel excluded from the experience that has, for so long, lingered on the perimeter of my perception of the friends around me.

Director: Rob Cohen
Cast: Josh Lucas, Jessica Biel, Jamie Foxx
Release: July 29, 2005
Synopsis: In the near future, the Navy develops a fighter jet piloted by an artificial intelligence computer. The jet is placed on an aircraft carrier in the Pacific to learn combat manuevers from the human pilots aboard. But when the computer develops a mind of its own, it’s the humans who are charged with stopping it before it incites a war.

Prognosis: A guy who won an Academy Award is starring in this???. “You are pilots of the US Navy. I expect nothing less than perfection.”

Yeah, if that’s the case then why does this movie look like a bad mix between FIREFOX and the more ostentatious moments of obnoxiousness in TOP GUN?

At first I believe I’m looking at the sequel to that one movie with the Eastwood classic but then I realize this doesn’t look as good.

I mean, I like explosions, I like fast moving aircraft but there is something in the way that they sell Jessica Biel’s bikinied body in the first 15 seconds of this trailer that have me wondering what it is, exactly, this is all about. I don’t mind that they’re hawking it this way, it probably compensates for the lack of believability I have in Ray Charles and “that chick from 7th Heaven” being these ultra-cool Navy fighter pilots. You know how sometimes you think it’s just actors just pretending and you, in good conscience, can’t even give yourself over to the suspension of disbelief?

This is one of those times.

Oh boy, and let’s talk about the hardware these guys are flying. It looks really sweet in design which looks like a mutated SR-71 but it just has the overall appearance of something that I played G.I. Joe with back in the day. I do know, though, that Jessica handles it with as much grace as she probably does her Porsche on the Los Angeles 405 freeway but the importance here, obviously, is suspension of disbelief.

“They have no equal”

At one point in this trailer, and I have to give the music department credit on this one, the techno beat sounds just like one that played under one of the first trailers for the X-MEN movie, Foxx cracks wise about the number 4 and its inherent unluckiness. I like Foxx. He’s actually a funny guy and I am reminded of his In Living Color days. But then, as they’re flying in their fake aircraft, their 4th wingman appears.

The plane is completely automated and, it too, is completely fake.

Foxx, looking like a 21st century extra on Battlestar Galactica with that helmet of his, makes another joke about something or another but this is where the tension starts building for this flick. Obviously, something is going to go terribly wrong with this AI-driven piece of machinery and I am not disappointed when, after a lighting strike hits the plane, “rewires” its thinking.

Now, this is a small tangent but it seems awfully convenient, the use of lightning. It always has a curative effect of doing something that couldn’t be done before. Like in BACK TO THE FUTURE, a lighting bolt was needed to send a car back to 1985; in FRIDAY THE 13TH PART VI: JASON LIVES, a lightning strike wakes him up; and, in this one, a lighting strike “turns on” a computers mind and lets it start thinking for itself. Some say it’s creative but I think it’s just plain lazy writing but that’s just me.

Even though Rob Cohn, who is a very serviceable action movie director, is helming this one from behind the lens and I think it’s important to at least see that some of the effects, while neat, will not be able to save this one from getting clipped at the box office knees if people can’t believe the preposterous reasons why these people are up in the air fighting this plane with a brain.

Director: Todd Solondz
Cast: Richard Masur, Debra Monk, Ellen Barkin, Chris Penn, Christopher Penn
Release: April 13, 2005 (Limited)
Synopsis: Thirteen-year-old Aviva Victor wants to be a mom. She does all she can to make this happen and comes very close to succeeding, but in the end, her plan is thwarted by her sensible parents (Ellen Barkin and Richard Masur). So she runs away, still determined to get pregnant one way or another, but instead finds herself lost in another world, a less sensible one, perhaps, but one pregnant itself with all sorts of strange possibilities. Like so many trips, this one is round-trip, and it’s hard to say in the end if she can ever quite be the same again, or if she can ever be anything BUT the same again.

Prognosis: Positive. A slut nixes sex in Tulsa.

I learned that palindrome from Sarah Zabrenski in high school. I really was a dope back then, I didn’t know any better, but the thought of a phrase that could mean the same going forward as it did going backward always stayed with me. Compound this feeling with how a Todd Solondz film lingers with you like a wafting perfume stench that doesn’t ever go away and this is an interesting way to start what, I am sure, people will raise a few eyebrows at: A 13 year-old wants a kid and will do anything to get one.

Never the one to shy away from stories that no doubt make studio heads ask the question “Are you sure you don’t have anything else you’d like to sink a lot of money into?” Todd starts this trailer right away with the premise as our protagonist echoes her need to love something forever as Ellen Barkin looks on.

The music that plays behind the action on the screen is melodically haunting (give it up for the largely ignored but fabulously talented, and my vote for one of the best ladies in music today, Nina Persson of The Cardigans…woot woot!…) as the disconnected universe that Solondz’s characters move around in swirls around everyone. We get Jennifer Jason Leigh, Tom Smykowski from OFFICE SPACE, and a cast of other dysfunctionals who will, no doubt, be wrestling with issues that many people would otherwise not even entertain as a thought.

The words child whore, slut and other epithets get uttered quite clearly as we try to piece together the plot of what is happening before us. I can see that the environment all of these people live in isn’t what you would call progressive but I can understand quite quickly how it is being used in order to tell this story.

Ellen Barkin is playing the part of a woman who seems slightly maladjusted when justifying why her only child is exactly that and it makes me wonder why she’s been gone for so long from the screen. The backgrounds and foregrounds really give this world a weight that you can almost touch.

What’s more is that I appreciate the names it drops in terms of telling what festivals this film has played at, and it’s really all the big ones, Telluride, Venice, Toronto, et al., and even plugs in some of the positive press this film has received. This is good for a number of reasons but the biggest one that I can think of is that it shows, while the subject matter is a little tough to wrap your heads around, the payoff was good enough for at least a few people in the know to make mention of in good reviews.

Yeah, I don’t think this will hit America big but what I can say is that one who can appreciate the kind of work Solondz does in movies today will appreciate this effort as well. He gets knocked around, sometimes unfairly, but he definitely has his own vision of life and how he translates that to the screen and I am every bit impressed with every interpretation so far.

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