Director:Lori Silverbush, Michael Skolnik
Cast: Anny Mariano, Paola Mendoza, Judy Marte, Dominc Colón
Release: January 27, 2006
Synopsis: A dramatic narrative feature based upon the real stories of girls from the streets and juvenile jail, who lent their voices and unique stories to the filmmakers. These are girls who struggle with all the highs and lows of teenage life in an inner-city world that makes its own rules.

Prognosis: Positive. My real, elapsed city time of what I spent in downtown Chicago proper? It comes out to 4 months. I spent one semester at a school that was successful for me, academically, but completely wrong when it came to defining my professional and artistic goals. The city is alive with pleasure but I can’t imagine what it must be like for some kids to be mainlining that electricity, that vibrancy, of a big metropolitan town.

“I ain’t come here to change your life…That’s a fact.”

I thought it was Don Cheadle who starts this thing out. It looks like a tinier Mean Joe Brown from LEAN ON ME but it’s a nice man in a collared shirt and a black, armless sweater.

One of the other things that you learn quickly, and this is where the props begin, is that this movie has been around. The NOMINATIONs, the OFFICIAL SELECTIONs this movie has been accorded is impressive for a movie that doesn’t sport a real noticeable “name.”

Our Cheadle-esque character is barking at a pack of girls who don’t look like debutantes and are obviously being yelled at because of whatever happened before this trailer began. The mix of a real nice slice of music and the delicate way this trailer delivers us to the first moment of this film’s core through its cutting is very well appreciated.

Also, what’s nice is that while there are a lot of quotes flying around, The Post, Newsday, Entertainment Weekly, the trailer doesn’t let it stop telling the story of why we’re here, trying to figure out if the flick is worth our time; the narratives of these women, these hardcore chicas, rolls right through the words.

I start to worry that this is going to stray into derivative territory as we discover these are women come from a pedigree of drug dealing, addiction and runaways. I have to believe that this territory has been treaded on before and that this has something new to say. The three ladies who are focused on are all shown in the middle of their lives of destruction.

When each one of them are tarried away to the clink I am pleased that things get more interesting with the advent of finding out, through our Cheadle stand-in, whether there can be a change in the ways people either change their life or become a statistic of recidivism.

As this trailer comes to a close, the real meat of this story obviously not being able to come in the form of a money shot, I think that this is the kind of movie that GET RICH OR DIE TRYIN’ should’ve been. You want to show the dangers of people, kids, getting involved with the kind of trades which put them behind bars and destroy lives but by putting some real looking faces on the issue without sweetening the story with bulletproof vests and ho’s you are doing the narrative a great service.

Director:Christophe Gans
Cast: Radha Mitchell, Sean Bean, Laurie Holden, Deborah Kara Unger, Kim Coates, Tanya Allen, Jodelle Ferland
Release: April 21, 2006
Synopsis: SILENT HILL is based on the Konami game in which Rose (Mitchell) desperately searches for her lost daughter in the mysterious, terrifying town of Silent Hill, where they are trapped.

Prognosis: Negative. Quick, name the most successful movie to have been adapted from a video game.

That sound of crickets chirping? Yeah, there haven’t been that many to speak of. Sure, you’ve got Milla Jovo-whatever who was serviceable in RESIDENT EVIL and even The Rock who was a part of an experiment gone awry, both cinematically and literally, have proven that movies which are first video games only have so much steam when you try and make an hour and a half of entertainment.

That said, then, this trailer looks like it’ll rise above, if only by a little bit, the common expectations which a flick like this engenders by its very nature of what it is: a not quite horror movie.

I will say, though, I was a bit bored by the initial offering of this trailer. It starts out all soft with a mother and daughter talking about the nature of sleep and dreams while walking down some pussy willow populated country hilltop. I know we’re going to get to the spooky real quick as these trailers only last so long but, come on, I see that we’re already a quarter of a way through this when the conceit that there’s something in the road in the middle of the night that causes mom and daughter to spin out of control. If there are any video geeks among us here today I ask of whether this is the way things begin in the game because I can’t see this being a real “explosive” beginning to things.

I get some jolly enjoyment, though, after we move through this little portion of the movie as when ma wakes up and discovers a) it’s now daylight b) her daughter is gone and c) the snow flakes that are falling aren’t snow flakes at all, and thus bringing back one of the most terrifying moments in SCHINDLER’S LIST, it is all about the errie. I don’t know how you would start out with this being the beginning of the trailer but now I’m engaged with things and this is what I should’ve been feeling about 30 seconds ago.

Now that we’ve established that this woman has a missing kid and is all alone in this desolate town called Silent Hill the interesting stuff is supposed to start, right? No, it doesn’t and I can’t imagine why a lot of people on the Internets are gushing over a trailer that takes me from mildly boring, to heightened delight and then plunges me into confusing cock-tease territory with a montage of clips that renders my man, Sean Bean, into one of those movie guys who are all sorts of bombastic in his quest to find this lost wife, neverminding the fact that if Silent Hill is supposed to be this podunk town which is essentially wiped out for some reason why do they still have functioning cell towers, and makes Radha Mitchell into one of those movie heroines who seem hysterical, not empowered.

Adding to this frustration is the false sense of horror this movie is trying to build to. I get that there is a girl who is slithering around this condemned town who looks exactly like the protagonist’s little lady but the effusiveness with which we keep this doppelganger’s visage out of view, almost like a GODZILLA-like shell game, doesn’t entice me as a viewer.

“To find your daughter you must face the darkness of Hell.”

The above quote just makes my eyes roll in the back of my zombiefied head. EVERYTHING in a horror movie is people talking about Hell this, Hell that and, to me, it’s just lazy storytelling. Yes, if you’ve got to work hard at something it feels like Hell but unless you’re making a movie adaptation of Dante’s “Inferno” you’ve got to come back to me later with something better than that as I would sooner give you a C- on your ability to create tension rather than relying on poor metaphors like this.

Director: Peter John Ross, John Whitney
Cast: Jon Osbeck, Joe Lorenzo, Daniel Alan Kiely, David Carroll, Chip Kocel, Kim Carey
Release: May 5, 2006
Synopsis: Feeling the pressure from Allied advance, Hitler unleashes his secret weapons. Throughout the European theatre of WWII, Lieutenant John Schmidt comes face to face with these “weapons” which terrorize U.S. soldiers fighting the Third Reich. The Office of Strategic Services (The O.S.S., precursor to the C.I.A.) initiates missions behind enemy lines to find the source of these weapons, a mysterious scientist by the name of Dr. Schaltur. Schmidt is joined by Captain Joe Russo and his group of war-hardened GIs who have experienced for themselves the all-too-real horrors of war in battle. Together, they must find the Dr. Schaltur and stop him before Hitler’s horrific vision can be fully realized.

Prognosis: Positive. Now, one of the best things about finally being able to enjoy Kevin Smith’s Spiderman and Black Cat mini-series is that Dr. Josef Mengele is dropped in seamlessly in order to move the plot along to where it needs to go which brings me to this trailer: nothing says “wicked awesome” better than paring a WWII movie and Nazi zombies together in one film. Usually it’s one of the three which get my motor runnin’ but all three together is like a mutated pairing in heaven.

Also, what’s important to note, is that there’s no messing around here. We get right into things tout de suite without any background bull crap that usually hampers indie trailers.

Yeah, the exchange between two Allied soldiers who want to talk about “what they’ve seen” seems a little stiff but the quick cut to the all red screen with the visage of a zombified Nazi doesn’t even begin to explain the delight I felt when I see the white eyes of the undead cutting in and out of the screen as some other soldiers walk a night patrol. I don’t have any context to where we are or when this verbal exchange is happening but it’s just enough that we’re somewhere in the battle of WWII.

I also appreciate the effects work that is on display here. The shot of a plane with its wing on fire, the battle scenes of guns going off with bombs of smoke trying to create the realism of war, the cutaways of the mad scientist’s lab where these zombies are being created should impress even the most ardent stickler of details.

Sometimes the most tragic thing that a movie can do is to have its characters loaded with one-liners and dialogue so stiff it feels like a corpse but intermingled with the scenes of action, which should also be testament to the amount of work which was put into trying to mimic some kind of battlefield realism, but this is the exact kind of lot which should be delivering these kinds of lines. This is WWII, the era of pulp fiction, of Mickey Spillane and these army guys’ grandiose delivery is easily glossed over in order to try and understand why there is this Master Zombie which doesn’t look like he is so easily put down by ordinary machine gun fire.

As we come close to the end we should be pleasantly surprised that the trailer doesn’t follow the current trend in trailer construction which states that you blow your wad in explaining, and showing, everything that’s going to happen. The cards aren’t all on the table, as our narrative stops just as our men in green are going to after the last zombie in the line, “daddy” they call him, and it’s much appreciated as it leaves the audience with just enough questions about what is going on in this movie.

Kudos.

Director: Hal Haberman, Jeremy Passmore
Cast: Alexandra Holden, Jack Kehler, Andrew Leeds, Ian McConnel, Josh Peck, Michael Rapaport
Release: January 30, 2006 (Sundance)
Synopsis: LES FRANKEN (Michael Rapaport) leads a painfully unremarkable life as a metermaid until he enrolls in a drug study for an experimental anti-depressant. An unexpected side effect of the drug convinces Les he is developing special powers and must quit his job to answer his new calling in life… Superhero. A very select group of people in life are truly gifted. Special is a movie about everyone else.

Prognosis: I Have No Idea. Like to spark up a little? Having a hard time trying to use your “high time” effectively? I’d like to suggest you watch this trailer to truly put psychotropic drugs to good use.

I don’t know how to really put into words what we’ve got cooking here but it’s something I’ve never really tasted before and I like the way it hits the tongue, so to speak.

When we open up the trailer we see Michael Rapaport, really a likeable loser or annoying Brooklyn-ite who ought to learn how speak good, I choose the former, sitting in a stark doctor’s office as he holds a bottle of pills. He asks if they work, the doctor say they do and the next thing you know, and we see, he’s hovering in his family room as his bong load buddy looks on.

Now, the pills he took could possibly be inducing a state of insanity on our protagonist but the early 80’s synth music, popping and crunching in the background, and the static camera shot of Michael just floating as he tries to explain his condition to his roommates glazes everything with a funky craziness.

Not to be undone in his own apartment, Michael returns to his doctor’s office only to leap off his desk and hover above the ground on his chest. The doctor is confused, I’m confused but when he announces that being a superhero takes some adjustment time I am all on board.

Michael then appears at the local police station to tell the officer on duty that he stops crime and then takes off, like Batman fleeing the scene, only to run himself into the nearest brick wall. At first I don’t know what to even say about this but as Michael gets hit by a car, has his buddies shuttling him around town to ostensibly fight wrong do-ers and espouses a credo about not doing good being tantamount to doing evil I can’t help but feel either very impressed at the level of insanity or completely freaked out by where this story is going.

It doesn’t help matters any more that as this trailer progresses, Michael’s condition worsens and looks more and more beat-up.

There is a definite slide Michael’s character takes, as we get the idea that it DOES have something and everything to do with the medication he begins to take, and there is a certain amount of sadness to seeing him slowly burn out in a tailspin of psychosis and paranoia.

I can’t help but sit in awe and amazement as I try and get a handle with where exactly this movie’s story really is going but it’s too much fun to see Michael’s delusion of his own abilities get the best of him as he’s repeatedly thrashed and ass-kicked.

I promise you, though, once you watch this trailer you will have the musical bed that these visuals rest on popping for a very long time afterward.

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