Director: Tony Scott
Cast:Keira Knightley, Mickey Rourke, Mena Suvari, Delroy Lindo, Lucy Liu, Christopher Walken
Release: August 12, 2005
Synopsis: Based on the true story of Domino Harvey, the daughter of actor Laurence Harvey, a former Ford model, who rejected her life in Beverly Hills to become a bounty hunter.

When you’re talking about true stories and Tony Scott is the man directing a film based on one you might be well inclined to think, if nothing else, it’ll be pretty to look at. The truth will most likely bend as far as a Chinese acrobat performing the triple-lindy but, again, the visuals will no doubt be in high ocular overload. Watching MAN ON FIRE last year secured my faith in a man who has shown remarkable prowess as someone who is good behind the lens and adept enough to deliver a visual story if nothing else.

That said, though, I don’t know how well I believe Keira Knightly as a bounty hunter. Sure, Boba Fett takes all the glory for the galaxy’s root-tootinest gun slinger, until Lucas gave him one of the weakest ass exits if ever there was one, but Keira? Like RuPaul said, “Girl, you better work…” Further, I assert that there’s something oddly too feminine about a bounty hunter looking like she does. The root of my concern stems from watching too much DOG The Bounty Hunter on A&E. Have you seen that woman, Beth Smith? That girl could crack me like a walnut and have me begging for sweet mercy where if Keira was the bounty hunter I would WANT her to crack me like a walnut. See the difference?

Keira introduces herself by means of a voiceover, the action on the screen muddled by cinematography and the blaze of twin machine guns, rattling off ammunition into some space that Keira is screaming into, and it is all good. She’s hot with an automatic, I’ll give her that, and the trailer doesn’t let us sit idly by for a moment.

“I am a bounty hunter…”

She says that what she is about to say determines whether or not she goes to prison. So, we already know she’s been caught, that there is no real risk to her person throughout this entire movie and that she’s going to be alive by the end. That sucks to know because maybe I would’ve wanted her to go out like a Vasquez in ALIENS. Maybe I wanted her to go out with bullets shredding her innards like a beef jerky machine but for the sake of being able to see her last throughout this movie that’s alright and I realize I’m thinking way too much for an action movie.

What’s really screwy, though, is that we see her pre-Alias transformation and, of course, she has long hair to juxtapose with her current short bob and she has a real bad attitude to go along with it. The vibe is like that of Bridget Fonda before that hit squad turned her into a hottie assassin in POINT OF NO RETURN. Then, next scene, she’s all experienced with the weaponry.

We go from point A all the way to point Zeta on the Greek alphabet without so much as an explanation. All is forgiven, I guess, as she looks pretty good holding the firearms, unbelievable as it is.

Next we get some more jarring video of people getting all sorts of crazy with their guns and Christopher Walken pops up as a network executive. What one has to do with the other I still have no clue.

“Did you just say Blacktino?”

We get more clowns out of this car of characters and, from what I see, there isn’t a whole lot connecting anyone to anything. We get people popping up on the screen to only really point out that they exist somewhere in the narrative but we’re not really clued in to how they shoehorn into Domino’s past, present or future. I’m nearly feeling trapped by these multiple personalities with nothing to ground any of them.

The end of this trailer is just a lot of quick clips that leave you breathless and cockeyed from the exposure of film going in and out as many times as it does. Keira’s voiceover letting us know again and again that her name is, indeed, Domino Harvey, and that she is a bounty hunter, skirts the line between repetition and annoyance.

Director: Patrick Read Johnson
Cast: John Francis Daley, Steve Coulter, Christopher Lloyd, Kenneth Mitchell, Colleen Camp, Emmi Chen
Release: Sometime in 2005
Synopsis: Pat Johnson has things get in the way of him seeing Star Wars.

I knew nothing about this film’s existence but then, stumbling into it like a urinal at Oktoberfest, I saw the trailer and thought that it was a great trailer for being so under the radar. You’ve got nerds, nerd love, geek infatuation with popular cinema and a little independent ingenuity behind it all.

Things kick off like any good movie paying homage to a great time in cinematic history, 1977, with the playing of the theme to 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. Things usually are ironic in scope when that tune is inserted into a flick and this is no different. What sets this trailer apart, though, is that instead of telling you, explicitly, this is a movie from 1977, although the title is enough of a giveaway, we’re offered scenes from that year that set things in their proper context. We get a game of Pong, some Six Million Dollar Man, a clip from JAWS, and even Farrah Fawcett.

We’re introduced to our protagonist as he works on a large scale model, definitely a nerd in whatever decade we’re talking about, as a friend off camera asks who the hell Steven Spielberg is. Our man is nearly infuriated at query.

What happens next is that we get a slew of quick clips, usually reserved for the send off of every other trailer that I see, but it’s effective insofar as it gets me acquainted, real quick, to this nerdy guy’s life. He loves movies, he’s a moviemaker himself, he likes, no surprise, Steven Spielberg, enjoys making homage flicks like JAWS and there’s some obsessive behavior going on with his envisioning of CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND and even his version of PLANET OF THE APES.

What draws me in closer is that there is a real spirit to this flick and to the filmic persona of a man who is trying to recreate CLOSE ENCOUNTERS with aliens who can’t see out of their masks and fall off the ramp leading to the fabricated spaceship. He convinces a young boy, possibly his brother, to be a victim of a shark attack. The kid holds his own fake intestines out for his mother to see in the bathroom and, judging by her expression, she seems all too familiar with this kind of behavior.

The movie picks up more steam as it nears its end with the opening images of STAR WARS: A NEW HOPE, an obvious benchmark in the hapless lives of geeks everywhere. Christopher Lloyd even pops up in a moment of amazing surprises with regard to the level of quality this movie might possess should it ever screen beyond festivals.

Obviously, with no way of knowing anything more than what this trailer tells us there isn’t a way to really determine how thoroughly good this movie may be. From what I can tell, though, this does look like a great entry into a festival where its goodness or badness can really be tested.

And you know, even for a movie like this, you just have to be rooting for the little guy, even the nerdy ones.

Director: Michael Spierig, Peter Spierig
Cast: Felicity Mason, Mungo McKay, Rob Jenkins, Lisa Cunningham
Release: July 1, 2005
Synopsis: Peaceful, rustic Berkeley is a charming fishing community where life is sweet and the people friendly. All that is about to change. After losing her childhood farm to the bank, local beauty Rene decides to leave town and head for the big city. Suddenly, an avalanche of meteorites races through the sky, bombarding the town and bringing an otherworldly infection. Departing is going to be much more difficult than she had planned. The living dead are awakened and Rene is now caught in a nightmare of zombies hungry for human flesh. She manages to find salvation in a small isolated farm house owned by the town loony, Marion. There she is met with four other desperate survivors. Together they battle their way through a plague of walking dead and discover that there is more transpiring than just an infection.

What we have here is a fairly well made trailer for a movie that only metes out the information in slow drizzles. It’s intriguing to try and figure out what the hell is actually going on in this thing.

“In the town of Berkeley…Where life was simple…”

Essentially, yes, with the choral singing and the kids with their fishin’ sticks, and the old grandmas looking for yarn at the ye olde store. Life seems quaint and cheery. Only in the movies could life be so idyllic and we, as an audience, gullible enough that one exists. That is, until, you hear the booming noise over your head in the sky.

Large meteors streak against yellow clouds. The music stops. The atmosphere literally turns dark and evil.

We get a small girl aping the scary factor, which is fine, of the dead pre-teen of THE RING and that crazy bastard child that took a bite out of Sarah Polley’s husband in DAWN OF THE DEAD. I like it when kids are involved with the whole zombie ethos. It just makes the decision to blow their heads off with a pump-action shotgun, you know so they don’t bite anyone else and become zombies ‘cause you’ve got to protect yourself in these kinds of situations, that much more tenuous.

The screen goes black.

People start screaming, the obligatory news guy (who, even in the face of a plague, as they call it in this trailer) seems calm and disaffected with the panic that’s ensuing everywhere else, people douse themselves with water for some unknown reason, and some dude, who looks like Rob Zombie playing the part of the heavy, is out to tell everyone exactly what’s up with this situation.

It seems like this is going to be another sort of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD as all the players who are still alive exist together in a house as a zombie horde closes in on them.

“Those things you saw out there? Those are only the beginning.”

I don’t care if it comes close to Romero’s original idea of zombies + house + people defending the castle = profit. It looks visually pretty close to what I demand of my scare flicks: screaming chicks, big guns, attitude, near nudity if possible (I did see a bra ever so briefly), good looking zombies and a strong female lead to school all the foolios who think they’re better than she is (because it’s important for women to have strong action heroes too…) if at all attainable.

I’m putting this one on the radar. If I haven’t seen the best bits in this trailer I am definitely making the time to see this one, otherwise, I am waiting for DVD.

Director: Jorge Furtado
Cast: Lázaro Ramos, Leandra Leal, Luana Piovani, Pedro Cardoso
Release: April 22, 2005 (Limited)
Synopsis: André, relatively poor, falls in love with Silvia, a neighbor whom he spy’s with a telescope. Falling more and more in love with her, he begins to follow her around the city and realizes she works in a clothing shop. He works in a Xerox place and makes a copy of a brand new 50 real bill in order to buy a dress from her store. This becomes a vice and he begins to photocopy more and more money, until it gets out of control. However, things begin to go wrong when he decides that photocopying is not the only way to make money.

The premise is real simple: you have a dude who works in a copy store (man, I love that Pop Copy sketch on Chappelle’s Show), he has a couple of friends who he hangs out with, he likes to spy on chicks with a pair of binoculars across the way from his own apartment building (MEN AT WORK, anyone? Man do I love that movie in ways I should be embarrassed for admitting), and he eventually sees one he likes and wants to get to know better. He seems fairly normal beyond just being a guy who makes copies for people…and who likes spying on unsuspecting women. In fact, this seems like a pretty normal movie except that our protagonist is the one narrating this trailer, a rarity I like to see more often as it intimately informs the action on the screen, but we do have a love story where the words “didn’t even know I exist” are uttered. I really hate that line when I hear it anywhere else outside a Lizzie McGuire or Even Stevens episode but I let it slide here because it’s all in the translation.

What gets me here, and what people will take notice of, is that the guy is a cartoonist. He animates like Savage Steve Holland did in BETTER OFF DEAD and ONE CRAZY SUMMER. The artwork is nice to look at but it helps to define things as well and that’s a plus. What’s more is that our protagonist gets the idea that he’s a damn good copier. He thinks he’s the 1984 Mary Lou Retton gold medal champ at making copies so good that he could probably make counterfeit money and not get caught. He goes for it.

“You know what I say? Money is only paper that people believe is worth something.”

From here the riches, pun intended, natch, start to spoil him. With a CCR’s “Travelin’ Band” playing in the background and with some nice video and audio effects that create the appearance of a copier as we go from one scene to another this story is easily told in the actions of the people we see on the screen. It’s an absolute delight to see a foreign language film glide so easily along the lines of understandability to an American audience.

This movie won some awards, although this information is really helpful to people if you put it at the beginning of a trailer as it helps them make an empty value decision that only helps a movie out immensely, but what’s really nice is how this kid starts to spend lavishly because you can just feel the eventual outcome of this situation coming to a head quicker than an approaching tsunami.

The decadence is too much to last too long without something bad happening and this film doesn’t look like it’s going to disappoint on that level. With guns, officers in bulletproof vests and shotguns, lots of running, an apartment explosion and even the possibility of some hooker action I am all in for this ride.

Director: Timour Bekmambetov
Cast: Konstantin Khabensky, Vladimir Menshov, Maria Poroshina, Galina Tyunina, Victor Verzhbitsky, Dima Martynov
Release: July 29, 2005
Synopsis: Set in contemporary Moscow, NIGHT WATCH (NOCHNOJ DOZOR) revolves around the conflict and balance maintained between the forces of light and darkness — the result of a medieval truce between the opposing sides. As night falls, the dark forces battle the super-human “Others” of the Night Watch, whose mission is to patrol and protect. But there is constant fear that an ancient prophecy will come true: that a powerful “Other” will rise up, be tempted by one of the sides, and tip the balance plunging the world into a renewed war between the dark and light, the results of which would be catastrophic.

I don’t think I’ve had the pleasure of looking at a Russian made film in this space before and what a shame that is. You’d think with the kind of money that the new oligarchic infrastructure is infusing into that once crumbling house of cards we’d be getting all sorts of crazy ass movies like IVAV AND ERIK GO TO RED CASTLE, REVENGE OF THE BOLSHEVIKS or even something where we could get a nice car chase through the center of Red Square in Moscow or a Russian mafia original using real Mafioso’s who no doubt still loiter along the Russian promenades.

This trailer, though, looks just great as we get our protagonist, a young boy, having fun in the local swimming pool. I can’t say for sure that it is a swimming pool, as that might be reactor water he’s wading in, this being Russia and all, but it’s all very peaceful. The camera cuts away to a little girl swinging by herself against a backdrop of a dark sky and housing projects.

Our kid shows up again, doe eyed and innocent, and he walks slowly to his front door where he no doubt heard a knocking. It’s quiet and he slowly steps to his peephole to see who’s there. There’s no one.

The surprise that follows scared the living shiat out of me and it’s a red herring at that. Sneaky bastards.

Here’s where things get weird. The screen gets black and when it comes up again we see some dude’s face. Only, what happens next is that it gets all veiny, like he’s turning into a zombie or like he just had a tongue session with a young Rogue, and it cuts away. Quickly we see some blonde, some older MILF-ish lady, with her hair blowing straight up into the air in a wave of follicles. Then we get a lot of bats flapping around. The word huh doesn’t even begin my confusion but, and I have to be honest, I’m intrigued to know why all this weird stuff is going down. I’m not upset, I am hungry for information.

Next, we get some people dressed up like Vikings. They’re sort of like those gimps who dress up here in the States doing battle recreations of civil war era fights where the results are always the same, except in this flick they’re going hand-to-hand on a small stone bridge. And here’s something that’s interesting: this movie has Voiceover Guy. It’s an actual American voice that’s narrating this thing. Again, this is something I don’t hear everyday and it’s really interesting to have this kind of verbal backing.

It helps, too, because from what he’s saying and what I am seeing, it’s sort of like an Eastern Bloc version of UNDERWORLD. Expect here, in this movie, you have people who possess some pretty odd superpowers in addition to kung-fu. At one point one of the factions, the rulers of the night no less, put their hands up to a kid’s head only for the child’s melon to go completely invisible with the exception of all the kid’s red subcutaneous veins in his head. Sweet!

There are a lot of sunglasses worn in this movie, more than in all the THE MATRIX movies combined it seems, but there’s no mention of vampires or any of that goth wannabe hippie Anne Rice crap. There’s lot of rundown buildings in this thing too but I bet you dollars to doughnuts that those are real places and not just cleverly decorated soundstages with the way their economic situation has been plodding along since Communism took a header.

Not only that but the scenes that are given up in this trailer just rock the block. At one point you have a woman walking in her nightgown down a busy Russian highway. Cars bump her out of the way, as they go by at full speed, and she seems disassociated with anything relating to pain. It’s a nice effect to look at and wonder how they did it.

Also, the music used, by M87 near the end? It’s haunting as it is emotionally perfect for what this film seems to be about. It looks like a violent movie, a fun movie, but has that tinge of Russian stoicism that I thought was forever lost after the release of RED HEAT; that opening fight in the snow still induces shrinkage in me. There is so much more going on in this thing I just have to implore someone to see it and report back quickly. It’s not for everyone but it’s packed with gorgeous imagery and it’s on my Geek Watch 2005 list of anticipated movies.

You just can’t go wrong with this trailer. In fact, let me say, for the record this is perhaps the best trailer I’ve seen for a movie so far in 2005.

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