Director: Gus Van Sant
Cast: Michael Pitt, Lukas Haas, Asia Argento, Scott Green, Nicole Vicius, Ricky Jay, Ryan Orion, Harmony Korine, Kim Gordon, Andy Friberg
Release: July 22, 2005
Synopsis: LAST DAYS is filmmaker Gus Van Sant’s meditation on the inner turmoil that engulfs a brilliant, but troubled, musician in the final hours of his life. Michael Pitt (THE DREAMERS, HEDWIG AND THE ANGRY INCH) stars as Blake, an introspective artist who is buckling under the weight of fame, professional obligations, and a mounting feeling of isolation. LAST DAYS follows Blake through a handful of hours he spends in and near his wooded home, a fugitive from his own life. It is a period of random moments and fractured consciousness, fused by spontaneous bursts of rock & roll. Expanding on the elliptical style forged in his two previous films, GERRY and the Palme d’Or-winning ELEPHANT, Van Sant layers images and sounds to articulate an emotional landscape, creating a dynamic work about a soul in transition.

What really happened to Kurt Cobain? Was it suicide, a hit, an attempt by Courtney Love to bring her hysterical oafishness and lumbering idiocy to the center stage where she thought it belonged? I don’t know the answers to the first two but I am 100% sure of the latter.

I admit I am infinitely curious to know what happens to people in the last days of their lives when it comes to suicide. Are there warning signs that people just don’t see or is it something so intrinsically quiet and muted that no one would ever be able to see it manifested in any physical way? Now, seeing how this film is all fiction, the man in the movie named Blake but who seems to be Kurt’s doppelganger, it’s striking to me that Gus would go to the trouble of making someone look exactly like Kurt…if this isn’t a movie about Kurt. If he wanted to really make the conceit a little more thrilling he would’ve had our “protagonist” take his double-barrel pump action shotgun in slo-mo, mowing Courtney down in a spray of millimeter sized metal spheres, the heavy orbs stenciled with the words “Hack bitch” all over them, but his vision not mine, right?

The trailer, though, is quiet. There is a certain delicate balance between something going on and nothing really happening that’s apparent to the viewer as this thing unfolds.

A phone rings off camera. It rings a few times and goes quiet. The man playing fake Kurt lights a cigarette in one of the dankest and most forsaken kitchens.

The next scene shows someone fumbling with a shotgun. The scene after that shows a ragtime festooned Cobain/Blake, draped in a long overcoat, sloppily trying to run around a banister with said shotgun in one of his hands. What is this, an episode of Kurt Get Your Gun?

Some guy comes to Blake’s door, we don’t even know what our strange man looks like, but we hear him talking about business and what Blake’s business is and would like to get a better idea of it as our strange man is from the Yellow Pages sales office. The placement of this guy seems odd and the silence from Blake is disquieting. And hey, I don’t understand it either and Cobain/Blake hasn’t even said word one at this point, but it’s interesting at the very least. It’s hushed in a way that intones some sense there’s something distressingly wrong with the man we’re looking at. But, reading this far, I think the response to this is “Duh.”

The next scene seems has a woman, Courtney?, opening a door and finding a slumping Cobain. We quickly move from this to a scene where Blake is statically listening to someone on the phone asking him what’s happening over at his house. He doesn’t say a word. He just lets the person ramble on as we wonder why he seems to be so verbally constricted.

We get some rather stark images of a wandering Blake, once of him naked in a river and another one of him walking aimlessly in a forest (Symbolism alert!) as a woman who doesn’t quite look like Courtney says to Blake that he could leave and get away from his situation.

Now, I don’t read French, but if my ability to decipher means anything to anyone I believe this trailer ends with a statement that the movie is a work of fiction and not really true. What’s more and, I believe, more insulting, is the fact that the very last few moments of this trailer is spent pimping the soundtrack to the film which you can buy on the 9th of May in French music stores everywhere. Shamless.

Director: Alex Ferrari
Cast: Daniel Samantha Jane Polay, Paul Gordon, Amber Crawford, Derek Evans, Tony Gomez, Ruben Gomez, Eric Townsend
Release: Coming Soon
Synopsis: A gun blast, a flash of light, and a young woman awakens to the comfort of her own bed. Bonnie Clayton has it all, a great relationship, a challenging career, and the burden of a dream that grows more vivid and disturbing with each passing night. But when Bonnie is abducted by a sadistic stranger and his colorful entourage, she discovers that the key to her survival lies within the familiar realms of her recurring dream.p> View Trailer:
* Medium (Windows Media, QuickTime)

We start off with a woman, gagged, being pushed in a wheelchair. The location seems unimportant but it definitely is industrial. The music is perfect. It’s a mix between someone beating on a thin oil drum and a stopwatch. It creates mood, which is good, and also sets up tone, two vital parts to a story like this.

Quickly, we see an odd object being pulled off screen, a bloody implement is dripping with its latest kill, and we see our gagged woman having the tape on her mouth forcibly removed. I’m sure it would’ve been more painful looking if it was due to a Brazilian wax.

A man, impeccably dressed in a crisp white shirt, vest and tie, asks our frizzled haired woman if he looks familiar. The music changes.

The song then becomes the song from THE MATRIX RELOADED, “Teahouse” by Juno Reactor and Gocoo. It’s a great Taiko drum composition and one that easily raises the excitement level for anything it plays underneath. The primal and visceral mode this trailer shifts gears into just launches it to the next step of keeping an audience’s attention.

Here, in this trailer, it works beautifully to play against the images of wanton and merciless violence being perpetuated in every which direction. There are guns, knives, big dudes with bigger arms, scopes, night vision and every other clichéd, albeit necessary, element to a short film where you want to create the illusion that it is possible to have mass amounts of people converging on one location to either save, kill or abscond with a woman at the center of it all.

The trailer even ends with the woman crying out that she wants her life back as the camera violently shakes side to side, which looks like the effect employed in FIGHT CLUB when, at the end, Ed and Brad’s characters quake in the same physical space. It’s very crafty and I can appreciate the time it must have taken to get this one just right with regard to timing and scene placements.

This has to be one of the better made action trailers I’ve seen in some weeks.

Director: Richard Ledes
Cast: Michelle Williams, Tim Guinee, Meat Loaf, Merritt Wever, Louis Zorich, Bill Raymond
Release: May 6, 2005 (Limited)
Synopsis: Set in small-town America circa 1953, A HOLE IN ONE is a screwball-noir starring Michelle Williams as Anna, a young woman whose desire for mental health leads her to covet its latest fashion–transorbital lobotomy.

Prognosis: Positive. I’ve never watched a single episode of Dawson’s Creek and the first time I did see Michelle Williams in a big budget production of a movie was her “performance” in HALLOWEEN: H20. It was my first exposure to Josh Hartnett as well and it soured me completely on the two of them and rightfully so. I didn’t come off my high horse until I saw DICK and BLACK HAWK DOWN, respectively.

This trailer, though, warms me up further to Williams’ acting abilities and, to add a little more to it, the editing of the trailer itself is simply alluring.

Usually, right before I see a trailer I get an idea of what I’m seeing. Other times, though, I just like to see if I am able to “get” what they’re selling by having no hints about the plot or who’s even in the film.

Michelle pops with flavor as she narrates the opening shot of this advertisement; she is standing on a beach, alone, with a head scarf wrapped around her head.

“My memories of the time leading up to my decision to get a lobotomy are fragmented…”

It’s a period piece and, just like a page ripped from ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST, deals with the subject of using medieval and savage science to treat and diagnose a problem that’s not easily solved with a pair of alligator clips and a DieHard car battery from Sears; the only place where it was done to good effect, making for some great comedy, was in STRANGE BREW and I believe the premise of shock treatments is comedic, albeit black, in nature here as well.

Since everything happens around 1948 it’s funny to note that you’re not quite sure if it’s all supposed to be amusing or wickedly on the mark with how medical science was back then. In fact, the trailer has some doctor giving a speech to a gaggle of simpletons who are being new schooled on modern lobotomy techniques. Michelle nearly swoons at the idea of having her head scrambled as she says she’s already absent-minded. This can only help, right? All the while she’s stating on how she wants to have this done to her we suddenly get introduced to her boyfriend, Meat Loaf. Disregarding the really churlish comments one can make about her and him being an “item,” the years between them are nothing compared to the obvious absurdity of their pairing. It’s bizarre, in a John Waters kind of way, to hear Loaf validate Williams’ wish to get a lobotomy in a romantic statement of support.

The plot doesn’t get any easier to decipher than that.

She ends up getting one, something goes screwy where she ends up more withdrawn than before (imagine that), she hooks up with a young doctor who wants to give her another lobotomy along with a good rogering, and her life seems to schism on these different experiences.

“To pursue forgetfulness is to pursue happiness…”

The film is listed as a comedy and I can’t see how you could construct such a film in any other way. You could go for the dramatic angle but something like this, where a woman is steadfast in her desire to lobotomize her problems and only ends up creating more, but seeing Loaf again in a role where he plays the unintended heavy like he did in FIGHT CLUB just makes this black comedy that much more appealing.

Director: Michael McGowan
Cast: Adam Butcher, Campbell Scott, Shauna MacDonald, Gordon Pinsent, Michael Kanev, Tamara Hope, Jennifer Tilly
Release: May 13, 2005
Synopsis: Set in Hamilton in 1954, Saint Ralph is the unlikely story of Ralph Walker, a ninth grader who outran everyone’s expectations except his own in his bold quest to win the Boston Marathon. Ralph is a fatherless 14-year-old with a seriously ill mother, who knows he’s a time bomb waiting to explode into greatness, except that he has no idea where that greatness will manifest itself. An unfortunate incident of self-abuse in the community pool inadvertently sets him on this road when, as penance, Ralph is conscripted to the cross-country team. Desperate to believe a miracle will bring his mother out of a coma, Ralph becomes a convert to the church of running, and determines to win the Boston Marathon.

Ever since SINGLES I’ve been a quiet fan of the guys work. He’s nearly, completely, off the mainstream Hollywood radar but yet his stints in ROGER DODGER and THE SPANISH PRISONER are simply the kinds of performances that make you believe he’s just that good.

The trailer here starts out amusingly enough. You’ve got your standard boy who can’t do anything else but think of impure thoughts about women. The fact that after he stares at a woman bending over, revealing ample cleavage that would easily make the baby Jesus cry, and runs straight into a tree just shows us the kind of kid who we’re dealing with here. Add in a little Catholic school where he’s having problems fitting in with the program, disregarding the hideous cards in-between the scenes that are simply useless and distracting, and punctuating everything with a little showboating to the girls he’s trying to impress, you have all the markings for a fairly standard coming-of-age story.

However, things take a sharp turn to the left when our protagonists’ mother falls into a coma for reasons we’re not quite sure of. What is clear, though, is that event awakens something in this pre-pube, pre-pubescent lad and gets him thinking more about the big picture than of big mammaries.

Campbell Scott plays the inspirational educator who mentions that faith requires you to truly believe in something that doesn’t make any logical sense. Campbell is the motivator here and, unlike his Hollywood contemporaries who, in a coaching role, teach their wards the value of winning by working hard and striving for blah blah blah, I actually believe Campbell’s interest in this boy’s trajectory is genuine.

Then, something else happens. Our young lad feels the need to run. More specifically, he feels the need to run the Boston Marathon. When Scott mentions that the young boy actually winning the marathon would constitute a miracle the “ding” of the Please Ring For Service bell clues us in on how this meshes with the kid’s notion of his mother needing a miracle to come out of her coma and, ta-da, you have our goal that needs a resolution.

I’m usually good with my Crap Detector when I think I’m being artificially manipulated into feeling all goosey for something so obviously done out of pseudo sympathy and dripping with treacle but I’ll be dammed if I didn’t start to get all gooey as this kid trains his heart out. Campbell Scott has his own issues to deal with as he helps the young boy on his quest to win the marathon, as there is some bombastic yelling from the head priest/deity/headmaster/potential pedophile/whatever when Campbell is admonished about helping the kid along any further, but you really do think there’s something to this story right before the gun goes off at the start of the race.

You just have to know that the kid’s not going to win the race but here is an example of a movie where the obvious outcome, the protagonist winning it all in the end, is supplanted with the possibility of an ending actually fitting in with some sort of reality and, for a film of this size, I sure do hope it’s more about the journey than the goal.

Director: Hayao Miyazaki
Cast: (Voices) Emily Mortimer, Jean Simmons, Christian Bale, Billy Crystal, Lauren Bacall, Blythe Danner, Josh Hutcherson
Release: June 10, 2005
Synopsis: A distinguished cast of actors, under the direction of Pixar’s Pete Docter (“Monsters, Inc.”), lend their vocal talents to this English-language version of the film. Sophie (voiced by Emily Mortimer), an average teenage girl working in a hat shop, finds her life thrown into turmoil when she is literally swept off her feet by a handsome-but-mysterious wizard named Howl (voiced by Christian Bale), and is subsequently turned into a 90-year old woman (voiced by screen legend and two-time Oscar® nominee Jean Simmons) by the vain and conniving Wicked Witch of the Waste (voiced by screen legend and Oscar® nominee Lauren Bacall).

Prognosis: Positive. HOWLS MOVING CASTLE had me frothing popcorn kernels from the sides of my mouth.

As you watch the opening scene from this trailer you can start to see why CGI hasn’t yet dominated everything that’s colorful and exciting with regard to animation.

I was all wOOt’s and claps when Miyazaki won the Academy Award for SPIRITED AWAY and this trailer, as it unfolds, possesses that certain charm that animated movies, great ones, exude.

The music is jaunty as tanks and war machines roll through a small European town with a beautiful but sad looking woman watching this all unfold. She’s quiet but the colors and animation are doing all the communicating. The scenes, background, and weather pop off the screen; it’s nearly kinesthetic. It’s a world I can see existing.

The real and normal, though, in true Miyazaki fashion, bends and shifts into the unnatural.

Our beautiful young woman hooks up with a Danish looking Dutch Boy representative, wearing a very fey short coat and open Fabio-style shirt where a small amulet hangs from his neck. The guy/eunuch turns out to be doling out witchcraft instead of high glossy house paint.

What this relationship has to do with her being cursed as she’s subsequently turned into an old woman, and her fleeing the safe confines of her town, I haven’t a clue. I do know, though, that the vagabonds she eventually gets hooked up with, looking like extras from the much failed RETURN TO OZ flick from the 80’s, are all sorts of crazy. I mean that in a good way, though.

Wizards, spells, magic, faerie dust, most unnatural creatures, and various other mythical elements pop off the screen with a pizzazz and subdued glee that kids everywhere would no doubt put down their PSP’s for. Obviously, almost being 30 myself, I can’t help but feel wonderment at the imagination that is whirling the real with all too surreal together in a blending of mythos and traditional storytelling.

As for the voice talent, well, Billy Crystal? I’m not so sure about that guy. If you can keep him from being a parody of himself I think I’ll be able to ride the wave for the hour and a half this thing runs and wait for the DVD version where I’ll be able and turn the subtitles on. Christian Bale, however, is perfect. In the trailer you can feel his power as a narrator. His talking in AMERICAN PSYCHO, best exemplified in the scene where he’s ruminating on his business cards with his other cronies, is hands-down the best example of why I could listen to that guy rattle off the contents of the letter M in an Encyclopedia Britannica and why he’s great here.

The trailer ends on a whimper of sorts and the lame presentation of the movie’s website doesn’t really help things to end well but the fact this is Miyazaki’s newest addition to the canon of good animation the chances of this stinking are less than that of guaranteeing that Disney’s next home-grown animation entry will pale in comparison to this and is worth the risk of seeing this sight unseen.

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