Director: Michael Bay
Cast:Ewan McGregor, Scarlett Johansson, Djimon Hounsou, Steve Buscemi, Sean Bean, Michael Clarke Duncan
Release: July 22, 2005
Synopsis: Lincoln Six-Echo (McGregor) is a resident of a seemingly utopian but contained facility in the mid 21st century. Like all of the inhabitants of this carefully controlled environment, Lincoln hopes to be chosen to go to the “The Island” – reportedly the last uncontaminated spot on the planet. But Lincoln soon discovers that everything about his existence is a lie. He and all of the other inhabitants of the facility are actually human clones whose only purpose is to provide “spare parts” for their original human counterparts. Realizing it is only a matter of time before he is “harvested,” Lincoln makes a daring escape with a beautiful fellow resident named Jordan Two-Delta (Johansson). Relentlessly pursued by the forces of the sinister institute that once housed them, Lincoln and Jordan engage in a race for their lives to literally meet their makers.

Letting that name sit there like that almost feels like setting up a bulls-eye for people to take a shot at. It would be easy to tear the name apart. With half-baked crap like ARMAGEDDON and the laughable hysteria fest that was PEARL HARBOR (Did the former really deserve a Criterion release and, the latter, really warrant its multiple disc DVD double-dippings?) it wouldn’t be hard. It’s akin, I believe, of smacking the stack of books being precipitously carried by a high school freshman though a crowded hallway.

However, he does fill a niche. We all have friends who don’t share our love for well-written movies like LOST IN TRANSLATION or even the sweet Asian action flick TIME AND TIDE but they do respond to shit that blows up. And lots of it. Que sera sera, right? Whatever makes the world go ‘round I think they would say but we know they’re right.

This trailer looks to continue that hallowed man’s tradition of making big explosions, running roughshod over common-sense like it was an ATV in a wet field of sod as it does doughnuts but, as I watched the trailer, there seems to be something else going on.

I like the opening.

It’s very soothing with the sea crashing in the background.

“What if there were a place where you could live forever?”

The glassy sea waves curling over on top of the ocean’s face just induce a spring-time itch in me to go directly to the nearest tropical locale with a pina colada in tow. As Scarlett Johansson comes into delicate focus, I realize what else needs to be in tow with me.

Things get a little kooky as she’s seen kissing Ewan McGregor one minute and then we find ourselves surrounded by a freaky set of shiny steel hypodermic needles. This would be the point where someone, even voiceover guy, would be chiming in with some idea what is going on. It’s odd that we’re left to guess what’s up. It’s almost disconcerting.

We next get some dude walking down a cave-like hallway, while another dude is getting off a helicopter (I am a fan of the way Bay likes to shoot helicopters, with their blades ever so gently turning in slo-mo. Very tell-tale. I think he could trademark that shot), there’s a shot of a city, there’s Scarlett looking like a real temptress as she saunters down a white walled hall, but this is all prelude as it leads up to the science fiction stuff.

It looks like it’s a mix between THE MATRIX (with dozens and dozens of people all lined up on slabs instead of in cocoons, technology really at the root of all evil, just like in LOOKER from 1981), RUN (Patrick Dempsey was the 80’s, friends, and don’t let Carrot Top from I Love the 80’s tell you different), and a smidge of THX 1138 with the way it draws some storytelling elements of a future where people are being experimented on. The last comment is only really validated when Michael Clarke Duncan is hauling some ass as he’s booking like a man running from the cops with muscle stimulator pads stuck to his boobs.

Steve Buscemi pops in to tell our fleeing, whatever the hell they are, people that the lives they thought they led really didn’t happen and some groovy looking floating speed bikes whip quickly across the screen. Next, a whole bunch of people who look like the kids in INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM run for their lives into the bright light, not knowing what’s really going on and some car rips another one in half a la Bay’s memorable chase in Frisco from the ROCK. Lastly, Duncan is dragged back to his captors as he’s crying out like a little girl knowing full well the gimp is probably awake and ready for some fun.

I have zero idea what the hell is going on in this movie but I can tell you it does poke at the more base sensory synapses in my mind.

Director: Ken Kwapis
Cast: Amber Tamblyn, America Ferrera, Blake Lively, Alexis Bledel
Release: June 3, 2005
Synopsis: The movie is based on the young adult book, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, by Anne Brashares. As four best friends spend their first summer apart from one another, they share a magical pair of jeans. Despite being of various shapes and sizes, each one of them fits perfectly into the pants. To keep in touch they pass these pants to each other as well as the adventures they are going through while apart.

First of all, big big fan of the xylophone music that opens this trailer up. It reminds me of the moments after Clarence almost gets his face shot off in TRUE ROMANCE (a movie you won’t find me offering my girl until we get to the lesson on Gary Oldman’s oeuvre which will come when she’s around 23), and for what this film is, an exploration into the lives of four girls, it fits perfectly.

So, the voiceover of one of the ladies lets us know these four girls will be spending their first summer apart. Boo-Hoo. It’s called life, girls, welcome to it. Anyway, we’re told that a mysterious pair of pants that the girls find in a thrift store will be the one thing that keeps them together whilst apart. Three of them are svelte enough that the jeans fit each one of them with ample ease while one, who looks healthy but is certainly not a size 4, comments on the jeans not exactly being this great sign from the Lord or something but I can’t help noticing that they’re showing one of the girls in her underwear as this is going on. She’s standing there nearly all of her B&P showing and I can’t help but feel like a skeevey perv. Isn’t there a law about this somewhere?

About the time when I wonder if I’m going to go to jail for watching this trailer, we get to the meat of the story. The girls will pass the jeans to each other all summer, all over the world. The first girl, Lena, is in Greece, some regional specific music plays in the background just so you know, and she is wearing the jeans when she tumbles into the sea. She narrates over her letter to her other friends about how this may not have been a good thing. Does anyone else smell a plot straight out of the Brady Bunch? I love that Hawaii episode.

Then we come back to another friend who is working in a Wal-Mart-like store, she’s utterly resplendent in her gauche looking vest, and wants to shoot a film. She gets a lippy assistant who reminds me of an annoying younger sister, in a good way, and you just see how little girls will eat this stuff up like Quaker Apple and Cinnamon oatmeal.

Our underwear model from the beginning of the trailer is in Mexico and plays soccer. No jeans were on display in her introduction but she seems to be the lusty sexpot of this feature.

Girlfriend Carmen is darker skinned, played by America Ferrera who was just kick ass in REAL WOMEN HAVE CURVES (growing up in Illinois and exposed to the ladies there I can attest that is a true statement), but she’s spending quality time with her dad who is, and I am going on record here, one of the best movie villains in history, Bradley Whitford; homeboy was just plain ol’ mean to the Tri-Lambs in REVENGE OF THE NERDS 2: NERDS IN PARADISE.

Carmen is probably having a bad day after she learns her divorced dad not only met someone new but he’s getting married to her in relatively quick order. There are some issues with her weight that are raised by her future stepmother that come up after trying on a bridesmaid dress for her dad’s wedding. This is a seriously good topic of exposure to girl’s who are growing up with impossible images to live up to in their glamour magazines but the real plus here is that there are real emotional issues here with regard to her father moving on with a family that doesn’t jive with the one she knew growing up.

The filmmaking chick’s assistant collapses and has to get carted away in an ambulance, with Kelly Clarkson’s “Breakaway” jingling in the background, the girl in Greece finds a dude she likes, much to the outbursting distain from family members there (probably because he’s an older dude and she’s literally fresh off the adolescence farm team), Carmen’s throwing big rocks at a window pane where, just beyond it, her father eats dinner with his new Aryan looking family, but the girls come together by the end for one large group hug.

I know, I know, but what I like about this movie, the way it’s being sold, is completely smart for the audience it’s intended to reach. You have a soundtrack that young women can dig, you give them a little bit of funny, a while lot of drama and end it all with their ephemeral “sisters” vibe still intact. These movies serve a purpose in much the same way tent pole pictures help dudes calibrate their manhood every summer when the explosions get bigger, badder and bloodier. Even young women need some Hollywood lovin’ too.

Director: Chris Wedge, Carlos Saldanha
Cast: Queen Latifah, Denis Leary, Ray Romano, John Leguizamo
Release: March 31, 2006
Synopsis: Sequel to the animated hit about talking animals in the prehistoric age.

Now, the animation was good, the ending was predictable. However, for me my money would rest on that crazy ass squirrel being the big draw throughout that entire flick that most parents would say kept them entertained. I know it’s not quite a squirrel but even though it didn’t say one word the whole film I was enthralled with the sub-plot of him trying to get into that nut and I think I was perhaps more interested in that than I was in the actual film.

If I was a heartless, soulless movie executive trying to make a quick buck I would’ve had a direct-to-video release of nothing but that squirrel doing his thing. To me anyway it hearkened back to the Weasel in those Foghorn Leghorn cartoons I watched as a kid. That Weasel was tenacious, insane and you could sense his deep rooted desire for a chicken even though he never said a word. That’s why, here, it was very smart to lead off the sequel for the first movie, which came out 3 years ago and doesn’t qualify as a quick cash in, with my man the squirrel.

We open with a large glacier wall. It’s fractured in some spots but its mammoth size is apparent as we hear the sounds of ice splintering, on the verge of breaking off. The camera sweeps back and forth around the corners of this thing until we come to our star, our little squirrel skitch-skitching up the vertical edifice, trying quickly to get to the top.

His desperate climb, clinging upside down to the glacier, is compounded by his desire to lick the ice. It gets stuck, hilarity ensues, but he loosens it before finally getting to a plateau. His bug eyes get wider as he sees the object of his desire: an acorn. It’s stuck in a glacial wall but he runs straight up, grabs a hold of it and starts to pull backward with all his might. What I think is going to happen, that he’ll pull it out only to freefall off the side of the mountain, doesn’t. Instead, after he pulls the acorn out he opens a spout of water that comes gushing out. He stops it only for it, as we all know from watching cartoons, only sets off another spout. He manages to stop them both, in his nutty-eyed own way, but it starts a swelling spigot that doesn’t stop. And, by the time he puts his mouth over the hole and fills up with water, it’s just a matter of time before he spins out like a deflating balloon and is jettisoned from his mountainside.

The end really is funny only because I like that sort of thing and because I know that even though computer animation doesn’t always ensure repeat business I can say with some belief that I think they’ll get mine if it’s anything like the first one.

But, damn, 2006?

Director: Catherine Hardwicke
Cast: Emile Hirsch, Victor Rasuk, John Robinson, Michael Angarano, Heath Ledger, Nikki Reed
Release: June 3, 2005
Synopsis: In Venice, California, in the mid ’70s, the sport of surfing brought together a group of teenagers from a rough neighborhood. Riding the waves at the Pacific Ocean Park pier, a graveyard of a former amusement park, the boys from “Dogtown” joined the Zephyr skate team (or Z-Boys). Known for their aggressive style, awe-inspiring moves and hard street attitude, the Z-Boys spent mornings surfing and afternoons skateboarding. Taking the death-defying moves of surfing and applying them to skateboarding, the Z-Boys became overnight sensations — local legends — and revolutionized the art of skateboarding, transforming youth culture forever.

I’m not so sure about him, but the original documentary DOGTOWN AND Z-BOYS, was perhaps one of the most interesting examinations into a cultural phenomenon of the 20th century. Thus, when the opening shots of this movie, which really appear washed out and dank, show some dudes skulking around the docks of an abandoned amusement park, Heath Ledger making his way through a maze of wooden stilts to get to some choice waves, I am at once trying to understand why the documentary needed to be remade in the first place and whether I believe that Heath was a good choice for the role as someone who was really an outsider just looking for some endless summer.

Now, and I know this is a small detail, but when we see the Columbia Tri-Star logo, with the sounds of a whirling movie projector whiling away in the background as the “film” dissolves away, I have to give props right away for a most creative way in implying the events we’re looking at happened in the past. It’s the thought that counts here with regard to setting the scenes up. The card that explains we’re looking at Venice Beach, 1975, really puts the events that follow into context and establishes the frame in which we see what’s happening before us.

What’s great/crappy about the first third of the trailer is that it just goes over the same events as they happened from the documentary. I know that this film will reach out to a larger audience, and the look of the film is really trying to capture that, but I’m just itching to see something that will convince me this isn’t just a paperback version of a hardcover story I’ve already read.

It goes on this way for a while, events transpiring as I understood them in the docu, but there does come some moments that are nice attempts to make things fresh and add something to the story that just interviewing and photographs couldn’t capture.

The assembling of the first real threat to laid-back boarders everywhere is shown with quick and dirty ferocity and I appreciate the care that’s taken to not make these guys’ stories works of Hollywood fiction but, rather, something in-between reality and flat out crap.

There’s a point where I cringe as Green Day’s “Boulevard Of Broken Dreams” plays as some maudlin speech given by one of the Z-Boys characterize their crew as important, the melodrama dripping from the forced moment and I am equally sure I don’t like the words “They Risked It All” and other cards that try to encapsulate these guys’ lives. So far as I knew it, these kids liked to surf and they wanted to do something that would extend that year-round and all-around. Did they have 9 to 5 gigs they ditched in order to see if this “skating” thing was going to work out? No, they didn’t and the documentary showed how they were just all looking out for number one and trying to have a good time doing it. So, it’s not that they were risking it all but, rather, just seeing what they could get away with.

I am really comforted, though, that Stacey Peralta is credited as the one who wrote the screenplay. If nothing else this should help keep the inaccuracies to a minimum.

Director: Steve Box, Nick Park
Cast: Peter Sallis, Helena Bonham Carter, Ralph Fiennes, Peter Kay, John Thomson
Release: October 7, 2005 (Limited)
Synopsis: It’s ‘vege-mania’ in Wallace and Gromit’s neighborhood, and our two enterprising chums are cashing in with their humane pest-control outfit, “Anti-Pesto.” With only days to go before the annual Giant Vegetable Competition, business is booming, but Wallace & Gromit are finding out that running a “humane” pest control outfit has its drawbacks as their West Wallaby Street home fills to the brim with captive rabbits. Suddenly, a huge, mysterious, veg-ravaging “beast” begins attacking the town’s sacred vegetable plots at night, and the competition hostess, Lady Tottington, commissions Anti-Pesto to catch it and save the day. Lying in wait, however, is Lady Tottington’s snobby suitor, Victor Quartermaine, who’d rather shoot the beast and secure the position of local hero-not to mention Lady Tottingon’s hand in marriage. With the fate of the competition in the balance, Lady Tottington is eventually forced to allow Victor to hunt down the vegetable chomping marauder. Little does she know that Victor’s real intent could have dire consequences for her …and our two heroes.

You can’t help but remain slack jawed during THE WRONG TROUSERS if for nothing else than that one bit with the toy train getaway. It goes by so fast that I am still amazed at how long it must have taken to complete the entire scene. Here, though, I am delighted to see that Nick Park is doing this first feature-length adventure with the two of these guys all these years later.

This teaser trailer could have easily started the name pimping early with how this film is being brought to you by the same guy who did CHICKEN RUN, another fabulous entry from Aardman Studios, but it doesn’t.

In fact, it launches into the story quite fast and I am nearly taken off-guard as we try to piece together the idea that this human/dog combo are now bringing security systems to the fine people of England. They’re the equivalent of a two person ADT crew, except Wallace is a bit daft and the dog can’t do much more than look after Wallace and be the brains of the operation at the same time.

I like the idea, though, that instead of the po-pos coming to nab whoever tried to break into a person’s home Wallace and Gromit spring into action themselves to catch the perpetrator themselves. The world that Park has created is one where you would believe that this could very well happen; it’s engrossing and feels completely feasible.

As this trailer progresses I end up feeling that props have to be given to Park who takes a small stereotype of people who live in England, that their teeth are jacked up so bad that you don’t know whether to laugh or to start thinking what kind of beer bottles could reasonably be opened with them, and magnifies it to an amusing level. An English woman calls in distress about a yard full of rabbits that seem to be literally consuming her yard, this plot revolving around some sort of deranged bunny, and the toothy expression that is smeared over her mug is worth the price of the preview alone.

I am also a big fan of the demonic lawn gnome, his angelic doppelganger being that twit in all those lame Travelocity commercials, and it seems to serve a nefarious purpose to the plot although I am not sure how. There’s a subsequent scene of people from the town, all gathered around to yell about what could be invading their gardens, saying how they’re eager to get whatever it is that’s eating all their veggies. It’s cheeky fun.

And the end, with the 50’s style spooky organ music, that tries to instill a sense of dread into the presentation of the monstrous bunny who’s out to eat all their goodies, only gets a send up when the local constable shouts at the old bag who’s working the organ to quit it. It’s childish, breaks the 4th wall of narrative structure, but it’s innocent and everything you’d expect from a Wallace and Gromit feature.

I would say that I hope Nick Park hasn’t lost what made his first three ½ hour adventures such enjoyable, and amazing, displays of clay animation, but I just have to believe that someone who has to physically move a character nary an inch again and again for days, months and years on end to get just a minute’s worth of action has to believe in the product they’re selling.

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