Director: George Clooney
Cast: George Clooney, Matt Damon, Amanda Peet, Chris Cooper, William Hurt
Release: December 9, 2005
Synopsis: A political thriller that unfolds against the intrigue of the global oil industry. From the players brokering back-room deals in Washington to the men toiling in the oil fields of the Persian Gulf, the film’s multiple storylines weave together to illuminate the human consequences of the fierce pursuit of wealth and power. Each plays their small part in the vast and complex system that powers the industry, unaware of the explosive impact their lives will have upon the world.

Prognosis: Positive. There are George Clooney haters out there.

There are some who think that the guy shouldn’t be messing around with properties like his remake of NETWORK, a film which portended the vile and tabloidish way “news” is reported to the masses, that his films at times can be overly indulgent and that he used to rock a mullet on that one show with that girl named Tootie and that stuck-up blonde chick who now puts hot sauce on her kids’ mouths to discipline them. I don’t see an issue with any of these things, as he atoned for his Kentucky Mud Flap by keeping it short for many of his films, but I honestly think that Clooney is mistakenly written off by many people for his work. The guy’s skills are wickedly sharp, his directing of flicks like CONFESSIONS OF A DANGEROUS MIND was commendable beyond comment, OCEAN’S ELEVEN is movie which you have to admit can be re-watched again and again and again by understanding that Clooney helps to bring it all together but it is flicks like this, trailers like this, which really challenge any critic to sit down and rethink their positions.

When we open up and get the woman’s voiceover which asks us to imagine a world where 30% of American households are unable to heat their homes or the idea of us having to pay $20 at the pump for a gallon of gasoline.

“It’s running out, and 90% of what’s left is in the Middle East”

Matt Damon provides a nice, subdued, yet tinged with bravado, moment as he talks at someone who appears to be of Middle Eastern descent as they look out a window. As Damon says about this being a fight to the death a much paunchier Clooney strolls down a narrow street as a car explodes behind him. He doesn’t look, he doesn’t flinch, he just keeps on walking.

The piss poor 5-grade Photoshop lettering which lets us know that the brain trust behind TRAFFIC are responsible for this vision is excused for what happens as this graphic goes away.

In much the same way that TRAFFIC had a kinesthetic feel to it, like the part when Michael Douglas is speaking to a lot of the real politicians like Barbara Boxer, Orrin Hatch and Charles Grassley were talking to him, the same can be said when Clooney starts to mastermind a plot to kidnap the same Middle Easterner from the beginning of this trailer. The accompanying visuals which go along the play by play, which looks like they used the same SUV’s from TRAFFIC, is a real nice touch to this moment.

Damon has a nice speaking piece as he couches the entire issue of what oil production has meant to America and what we will do get what we want as he pinpoints what many people think of oil producing countries and their history. It’s sharp.

Jeffrey Wright, who is really one of the best working actors that I’ve seen in the last few years, gets introduced and it honestly feels like his is a character that is like Russell Crowe’s in THE INSIDER. He almost seems like he’s above it all, an innocent victim who is just trying to understand it all, but the whole time things are going on with him the context for what this film is all about, oil and its production and our willingness to do anything to get it, rings too loud for anyone to not notice its relevancy to events which are transpiring right now.

This almost doesn’t seem like a movie as it does a Hollywood embellishment of what we all think is happening behind oil magnates’ corporate boardroom doors.

This trailer takes an unexpected turn on a dime as Clooney, himself, becomes the kidnapped and he the prey. Now, why he’s being interrogated to give names, soaking wet like Danny Glover and Mel Gibson in LETHAL WEAPON right before Al Leong, Mr. Endo, gets all electrocutioner on their ass, I don’t have any clue why this is happening. Although, as the money shots, the real dramatic, meaty moments start unraveling at the end there is a moment when orders are given to take Clooney out from this bunker-type war room that can see him remotely; it’s the REAL GENIUS/popcorn scene all over again. Plus, George is trying to get the attention of a passing car, the one slated for mass destruction, and I think back to the Damon Wayans/Bruce Willis classic LAST BOY SCOUT. I’m not saying there was any cribbing going on here, ladies and gentlemen, but I do find the similarities in the execution a tad suspicious.

Now, even though this film has nothing to do with the Val Kilmer/Tony Scott opuses, opi, if you will, I can reccomend this flick, sight unseen, just based on the weighty performances I can read between the lines here. George Clooney haters? Let them try to be after this year is finished.

Director: James Gartner
Cast: Josh Lucas, Derek Luke, Austin Nichols, Jon Voight
Release: January 13, 2006
Synopsis: GLORY ROAD tells the inspiring true story of the underdog Texas Western basketball team, with history’s first all African American starting lineup of players, who took the country by storm, surprisingly winning the 1966 NCAA tournament title. Josh Lucas stars as Hall of Famer Don Haskins, the passionately dedicated college basketball coach that changed the history of basketball with his team’s victory in this time of innocence.

Prognosis: Sappy. May induce diabetic shock. I don’t know what it is about Disney and their need to make so many movies which are “Inspired by a True Story” but I do long for the days when they could go back to making flicks like CONDORMAN or THE APPLE DUMPLING GANG.

Things, obviously, they do a change and I guess this just represents a new avenue for them. What gets to me, however, is that this movie, much like REMEMBER THE TITANS (an awfully saccharine foray into the nature of race relations couched in the language of football) and MIRACLE (an awfully saccharine foray into the nature of the polemics which existed between nations who weren’t seeing eye-to-eye) is that this follows the same kind of filmmaking. It’s just like a blend of TITANS, MIRACLE and a dash of COACH CARTER. I’m not the one who goes out to buy a ticket so I am left to assume there is a market for movies which tell the same story. And I don’t mean to be hard on this flick, I’m not, and I am even impressed by Josh Lucas, an actor who is really evolving well in this profession. In fact, I really like the vibe of the trailer. It’s the kind of film I EASILY could see a family packing up the car to go see.

Texas, 1965.

Josh is playing b-ball with his young kid on his dusty driveway. He passes the ball to his mute little boy who is barely able to walk and gets him right in the head. I surprise myself when I laugh but I like the way we’re entering Josh’s world.

We waste no time in establishing that he has packed up his family to move to a school to coach basketball. It’s shown that he was a winning coach but, as the frame cuts, we see it was only in the women’s league. Quickly, we cut back to Josh walking down a men’s dormitory at said college, his wife gasping at the towel-clad dudes strolling down the hallway, as the voiceover saying his family has no other housing choices but to stay in the men’s dorm. Mental note: get wife to obtain employment at women’s college across town, preferably in gymnastics or volleyball. What I like about the whole “blown up” aspect of putting Josh’s family in this situation is that it feels fun. The cinematography has a golden hue to it and I can’t help but feel a certain playfulness with which the way this movie is being sold.

And then it happens. Josh has voiceover duties as he says he needs to change everything the team used to do before, including who they recruit. Of course here there is a change in visual hue, going from gold to a cobalt blue, as we see that Josh is talking about recruiting black talent. Now, it’s a pink elephant in the room and I understand that no one is coming out to say it but it’s true: a team of white dudes versus a team of black dudes shouldn’t make a difference but for the purposes of this movie it is the catalyst of all the events which will follow from here on out.

Of course Josh sees the talent in these guys who no one else wanted, making it seem like they were just ignorant schools who couldn’t spot talent in a line-up when in fact it was because they were racist pigs who needed to have a piece of broken wet hose slapped across their collective nuts, and, of course, the white kids see our black friends as oddities. The white crackers appear to never have seen a black person up close as a collective bunch of them literally squeeze themselves against a wall of glass, like they’re looking at an animal in a zoo, and awe at the splendor of dudes who will, no doubt, show who has the real skillz.

Now, we start rolling through the actual execution of these players “coming together” and we get Josh saying how hard his brand of basketball is; his intonation of this line kind of creeped me out. Oh, and the requisite, the absolute neccessary compent of any sports movie, the screaming coach, being all bombastic for the camera, gets a full-on showcase here as he flexes his lungs. Josh also thinks that having one of the college students’ mothers go along with him to his classes to make sure he brings up his grades is not only wise but amusing as all fuck.

Cue the inspirational music as we head to the end, the slow-mo of our dudes dunking and I am genuinely suprised that the Disney folks decided to put the pink elephant right in the trailer as we hear that this is a true story becuase this marks the first time five black players came out to represent in an NCAA tourney. Bravo, dudes, for having the minerals to speaketh thy name.

Yeah, it looks about as enlighting and informative as the IT’S A SMALL WORLD ride at Disney proper but these genre flicks serve an audience who like seeing padded tales of inspiration.

Director: Fruit Chan, Takashi Miike, Chan-wook Park
Cast: Byung-hun Lee, Hye-jeong Kang, Jung-ah Yum
Release: October 28, 2005 (Limited)
Synopsis: An Asian cross-cultural trilogy of horror films from accomplished indie directors.

Prognosis: Oh my. You know whose singular vision of horror really skeeved me out as a kid? Tom Petty.

That blonde, David Spade-in-a-taffy-pulling-machine, dude just blew my mind up with his video for “Don’t Come Around Here No More.” Besides being a poor role model for my eventual foray into English education, his abuse of double negatives left something to be desired, his video for this song became the basis for every other visual which came after it if it used black and white floor tiling, to say nothing of the band’s gorging of Alice when she is turned into that really tasty looking cake. I know, it sounds completely bizarre and it’s like how dudes associate the smell of freshly cooked halibut to their glory days with their nympho girlfriends but this trailer for THREE EXTREMES triggered the same sympathetic response I get when I watched that video all those years ago.

Thankfully, it still jives with my viewing because this trailer is all about the weird.

When we begin we look out onto an icy plane. It looks cold, barren and quite minimalist. It’s creepy. FARGO creepy. When we tighten in on what’s happening we see someone filling in a shallow grave. I like that there is no sound other than the “ka-chunk” of someone scooping another shovelful of dirt back into the hole they created. There isn’t any context for what this all means but I like it.

A woman with a scarf wrapped around a 1/3 of her head walks slowly through a hallway. She dons a coat and, again, it just feels cold. The sounds of the wind whipping through the place is enough to couch everything in the right way.

We see a carnival. There isn’t anyone there but we see the big tent, dirt on the ground, wooden rider where a barker might try to get you to see the Chicken Lady or the Bearded Midget, and there is a colorful box on the ground where, possibly, the woman who was all muffled up before reels from what she sees when she opens the spooky container.

Some crazy looking Asian looks up at me as she slurps something red, like an oyster with a dollop of raspberry jam on it, and, instead of feeling, “Ooo, that’s spooky!” I am getting annoyed with the lack of information. It’s a crazy visual but there’s nothing grounding me to why I should feel one way or another. But then, just as quickly as we meet Staring Asian Woman, we switch to someone who looks all sorts of jacked up in a body cast. The person is positioned on a piano bench, sitting in front of one, as they’re attached to a series of strings. These strings, dozens of them, jut out in all sorts of directions. Is this person tethered to something? Don’t know, there isn’t any voiceover. When The Voice does decide to pop in, giving me nothing more than a, “…comes one singularly terrifying…” Blah blah blah. I’ve heard this jive before. In between seeing the black and white flooring from the Tom Petty video I see someone who might be the same strange Asian Slurping Woman supping on some dudes neck. The trailer makers get some thumbs up from me for adding in the sound effects of what that noshing might sound like if you had a vampire wired for audio.

We get more discordant images of Tom Petty tile, a guy holding up a Zippo for some available light, a woman and girl holding onto each other because something spooky might be happening (although it looks like the woman has the girl in a headlock position which would be advantageous to snapping her neck like a Wayne Brady on Chapelle’s Show) and a half-dozen more “What the fuck?” shots which don’t get you any closer to finding anything out about this film.

Now, I’d like to say that this is a slam dunk kind of film and, to me, it is but I can honestly see some people shying away from seeing this only because we don’t know what the hell is happening. Yes, Virginia, even in movies like this the target audience does deserve more than just spooky money shots if they think they’re going to get their money from them. I just happen to know from word of mouth that this is a really good flick and so it already has mine.

Director: Roger Kumble
Cast: Ryan Reynolds, Amy Smart, Anna Faris
Release: November 23, 2005
Synopsis: The romantic comedy JUST FRIENDS stars Ryan Reynolds as a former high school geek turned trendy Los Angeles music executive. When he gets stranded in his New Jersey home town due to bad weather with a superstar singer he is trying to sign, he finds himself reunited with his high school crush and discovers she is his true love.

Prognosis: Negative. Hmm…Can’t say this was anything special.

I think I want this to be funny, I do. VAN WILDER was everything it should’ve been and everything else Ryan Reynolds has done since then follows the same approach. There is a certain cookie-cutter quality to his films, in much the same way Adam Sandler has a corner of the doofus with a heart of gold market, but that isn’t meant to take anything away from him. He’s good at what he does but I just don’t feel anything either way after watching this trailer.

We start off by seeing Ryan enjoying his wonderful life. He is a successful music producer and has the double-teaming chicks to prove it. It’s awfully superficial but I guess it’s important to have about as shallow of understanding of our protagonist as possible when we’re talking about shallow comedies. Oh, and he’s absolutely irresistible to the ladies. Even the ones who already have dudes are attracted to his thin manliness. And this is when we find out that he wasn’t always this way. He, gasp!, used to be fat. The “I Swear” lip-sync that Ryan does as we transition to his past is amusing as is Amy Smart’s protestation that even though Ryan looks about as fugly as you could possibly make him she really loves him, like a brother.

We transition back to thin Ryan as he heads to his old home with the “hottest” pop singer in teh whole wide world, this being an obnoxious as a plot twist as that could be, and eventually finds out, double gasp!, that Smart still lives there. He has a chance to make this right again with her but this whole pop star girlfriend thing puts a cramp in his style.

Anyway, somehow we have Ryan on the ice, battling some 12 year-olds in a game of hockey. This, of course, turns ugly as Ryan gets a beat down from a kiddie. I’m not sure how this all pertains to the plot but when AMERICAN PIE’s Chris Klein comes into the same situation as Ryan is I am just scrambling to keep all these plot threads together. Chris is after Amy as well and you can only imagine the things which will happen from here.

Like I said earlier I am just not sure what to make of this film. You’ve really got to rate this one on the Doug and Bob McKenzie Beer Scale of how many it will take to get a guffaw or chuckle (neither of which really exist but you get me) out of this turkey.

Director: Hany Abu-Assad
Cast: Kais Nashef, Ali Suliman, Lubna Azabal, Amer Hlehel, Hiam Abbass5
Release: October 28th, 2005
Synopsis: The story of two young Palestinian men as they embark upon what may be the last 48 hours of their lives. On a typical day in the West Bank city of Nablus, where daily life grinds on amidst crushing poverty and the occasional rocket blast, we meet two childhood best friends on their way to carrying out a strike in Tel Aviv.

Prognosis: Positive. I am absolutely tired, mentally, of hearing how Palestinians and Israelis find that tit for tatting with regards to coming to an end of the conflict that separates the two independent states is acceptable.

Just growing up in America you’d have to admit that if you really weren’t an informed, educated adult that you would see one side or the other as the obvious aggressor in this conflict. I wouldn’t even dream of taking sides on this, as I don’t live there and only know what my totally honest, forthright, un-biased government and news media have to tell me.

I do know, though, that I like this trailer a lot. It evokes something that I think is now relevant to all of us as we hear about IEDs in Iraq and the nature of suicide bombers as they make headlines on a near daily basis. What at first I thought was going to be a flick about two dudes, just look at the poster, and one I was going to roll right through, the mood is heavy right from the beginning.

“From the most unexpected place comes a bold new call for peace”

First of all, I have to disagree with the statement. Yeah, it’d be great to have these two states come together but it should be obvious to anyone with half their brain left that it’s going to take action, not a call. It’s all semantics but you can see where this coming from.

The opening shot is wonderful, though. You take a look at this tightly packed city, buildings upon buildings in a valley, like a desert-style Hong Kong in full golden glory. You get an idea of the space in which this movie takes place.

Geographically specific music coats the scenes we see: a couple of men meet on the street wearing suits; a beautiful woman passes a border soldier in full body armor; a line of people walk down a path off a hill only to grab cover when an explosion happens off camera.

The music grows in intensity when we see a freedom fighter getting his picture taken in a darkened room, his machine gun hoisted high, his face vacant of any emotion. We see our woman once more as she rides a bus looking forlorn. Machine gun guy and another dude have their beards shaved. Something very bad is about to go down and the application of plastic explosives to the chest of a willing suicide bomber really intensify what’s happening on the screen.

The two men don clothing which will help them submerge into the populace they are trying to strike against. They have haircuts, suits and nice looking demeanors. The two of them, we’re told, are longtime friends.

Things, though, take a sharp turn when we see one of the guys acting erratic; he’s running along a hillside; he’s almost getting into a car accident; he has some woman flipping out on him. The latter is probably due to the fact he’s told her about what he’s planning on doing.

One of the suicide bombers sits at a bus stop and waits for it to arrive. He has his hand at the ready on the trigger which will no doubt detonate his armament. You’re just waiting for him to go boom when you see a kid getting off the bus. He slows his hand down. We cut to Good Looking Woman just lost in her thoughts. We come back to our suicide man on the bus, this time looking like he’s ruminating on something important.

The screen throws us back in time. The two men, their hair clearly curly and mussed, share a smoke on a hill looking out at a sunset. There is peace in their sitting. The slow, acoustic music playing in the background is soothing.

The tail end of this trailer is just as powerful as its beginning and I have to think, having read so many other news stories or seen snippets on the nightly news, that this is one tale that I hope makes its way to this part of the world where it seems so distant yet poignant considering what’s going on in our lives today.

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