Director:Jeff Feuerzeig
Cast: Louis Black, Bill Johnston, Daniel Johnston, Mabel Johnston, Jeff Tartakov
Release: March 31, 2006 (Limited)
Synopsis: Daniel Johnston, manic-depressive genius singer/songwriter/artist is revealed in this portrait of madness, creativity and love.

Prognosis: Positive but with corrections. I think that one of the worst things you can do when pimping your product to a populace is shower too much praise on it; this only results in heightened expectations that fall short. Every time.

When I see a synopsis claim that uses the word “genius” to describe the subject that we’re about to watch I get instantly cynical and skeptical. I don’t care if this batshit crazy music man really IS a genius but I want to come up to my own conclusions about such things. Thankfully, the trailer never drops the G word and I am amazed that I am so drawn in by this movie’s substance.

On first glance this trailer immediately grabs me when we see our musical, filmic namesake standing on a stage, looking at a handheld camera as a throng of fans cheering in the background. The musical interlude that twinkles in the background as the screen flickers to a NAPOLEON DYNAMITE-esque hand-scribbled Sundance award proclamation along with words of praise from AIN’T IT COOL is endearing.

The archival video footage of Daniel Johnston from years ago, in his own voice, explaining who he is and allowing us to get a feel for this un-rock star is appropriate in a way that the modern footage that’s interlaced with it offers the audience a nice balance of offering something old with something new.

On top of getting information, quickly, about who this quirky songster is you also get a voiceover from someone who sounds well versed in musical comings and goings; it could be one of those twats that love to pour endlessly over old issues of Rolling Stone or NME and are proud as punch to think they are a part of a critical literati but it’s evenhanded. When you hear someone else, a woman, say that underneath all this talent there was something really really wrong with the guy you can sense that this is why the film got made in the first place.

This point is expounded upon as, ostensibly, those who knew him clue is in on the fact that not only was this dude tossed like a rainbow into a mental ward but that the doted on the devil much too much for his own good. Again, the sounds of those talking are laid out over a bed of fresh looking images. An abandoned, dilapidated nuthouse is used as background for Johnston’s audio diary of his time spent inside the kook clink. Shots of deliciously piled drugs from our nation’s pharmaceutical overlords give the idea that Daniel was somehow eventually treated for his psychoses.

The last moments of this trailer are spent showing the once rail thin Johnston about three times the man he used to be, perhaps a side effect of the medications, as his own music plays along images of his life as it is now. There are still people cheering for him, he still has that wily sense about him and his music seems just as poignant as it was over twenty years ago.

I don’t know a thing about him but yet, simply based on what I see here, I think I’d like to.

Director:Mary Harron
Cast: Gretchen Mol, Lili Taylor, Jonathan M. Woodward, David Strathairn, Cara Seymour
Release: April 14, 2006 (Limited)
Synopsis: The story of Bettie Page, uber-successful 1950’s pin-up model, one of the first sex icons in America, and the target of a Senate investigation (based on her bondage photos).

Prognosis: Negative. Don’t you love seeing those faux hipster chicks who wear their hair like Bettie Page? They wear those same kind of era sunglasses, usually carry themselves with the kind of bitchiness that’s usually reserved for captains of the cheerleading team in high school and like to surround themselves with like-minded dweebs who feel that they’re all worse off living in the now instead of being really cool by emulating long dead iconoclasts? No? Maybe I’m the only one who loves seeing these kinds of ladies and making fun of them.

Off the bat, I love that this movie is rated R for “Nudity, sexual content and some language.” There needs to be more of these kinds of movies in circulation as the dearth of them only make it harder for young boys to come of age with the right kind of material laying around the Blockbuster. They’re sure not going to get it with all these actresses who want to go the tease route and I am even more pleased when the first barrage of images for this film is Bettie in all kinds of poses. They’re tame, to be sure, but you can’t just expect to have things get wild from the word go.

But, oddly enough, the trailer just explodes right into things with showcasing our talent young femme in color and black and white. I am not sure what’s more exotic or erotic but Bettie really isn’t shown to be so much of an innocent girl drawn into a world that was not her choosing but that being a pin-up was just her destiny.

The trailer starts off with her just getting her picture taken in gun boat bras and granny panties but things take a turn for the kink when a nebbish little man brings out these mammoth looking leather boots. I haven’t a clue if this is where her S&M phase starts or what but when a man off the street walks up to her and asks whether it makes her feel like punishing, crushing, humiliating, among other things to dudes when they gravel in front of her. The moment is perfectly rendered and I start to realize that Bettie wasn’t just some Playboy fantasy girl but that she was a full-on dominatrix who reached her subjects from beyond the page.

One of the things I fault this trailer for, though, is its simple omission of any substance here. Yeah, it’s great that we get this woman romping around in her skivvies for a full two minutes and that we get some real titillating video to watch but what about this woman’s private life? I have to assume she wasn’t all about her underwear and was so much more than the sum of her parts. I wouldn’t know any of that, though, because all I get is a little hesitation from Bettie about her fame being so constraining but I want to teased and pleased. This trailer, though, just leaves me blue in more ways than one.

Director: Rian Johnson
Cast: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Lukas Haas, Nora Zehetner, Noah Segan, Noah Fleiss, Emilie de Ravin, Meagan Good
Release: March 24, 2006 (Limited)
Synopsis: Brendan Fry is a loner at his high school, someone who knows all the angles but has chosen to stay on the outside. When the girl he loves turns up dead, he plunges into the school’s social strata like a fist through a honeycomb to find the “who” and “why,” with the same single-minded devotion to his self-appointed task as the hard-boiled heroes of old.

Prognosis: Pass. Originality of Vision.

This film was awarded a prize at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival for it’s originality of vision but does that mean it had a nice way of telling a story or that it just looked good on screen? I’m not sure what kind of an award an OOV really is but I can’t say that anything about this trailer really makes me want to find out for sure.

It opens up really wonderfully, though, when we get the R rated red banner that comes before everything. I am jazzed that, at the very least, there will be some wildly objectionable content to follow. I am quickly slowed down in my enthusiasm when we see our first player standing in a phone booth.

Now, why there happens to be a phone booth out in the middle of nowhere I don’t know but the little scroll of jive/slang that appears when our other player, the one on the other side of the phone, is hysterically rambling on about a “brick” and a “pin.” Ooo…I feel so in with the hip kids.

When I see that the crying girl on the phone was our Australian outback steakhouse fraulein from Lost: Emilie de Ravin. She seems to have gone missing following the exchange between our guy from the beginning but that’s quickly run over as we go back to our dude who brings in his buddies into this situation.

Our man starts to rattle off those code words again: brick, tug, pin. All the while these words are rattled off we get real smoky visuals of these words appearing and dissolving off the screen. I’m not really impressed as I am perturbed by these Sesame Street phonics lessons. I know they’re trying to be all sort of indie with the vibe and look but I’m not feeling very engaged with the material.

What starts to change my direction on this movie is the motion we gain by starting to show what all of this means within the context of the flick. The characters start interacting with other people, the mystery starts to grow deeper as discordant images piece themselves together.

Our hero gets his ass kicked by a Buddy Revell look-a-like in his high school’s parking lot. He, of course, gets to make a smoky cool joke about how he never saw that kid who beat him up before in his life and that he was glad he was looking for lunch money because he was…brown baggin’ it. Oh, SNAP! Did you fuc%&ing see that come back?? “Brown baggin’ it.”

Yeah, it’s edgy in that wink-wink sort of way. And the trailer doesn’t especially award you for paying attention to what’s happening as it does make you feel special just for watching what it has to offer in the sense of how cool it is trying to be; and it’s trying hard.

What’s odd is that I still want to see this movie however complex this story might be. There seems to be something between all of this and I can’t help but feel this flick rises ever so greater above the rest of the usual sludge.

Director: Kurt Wimmer
Cast: Milla Jovovich, Cameron Bright, William Fichtner
Release: March 3, 2006
Synopsis: Set in the late 21st century, a subculture of humans called Hemophages has emerged who have been genetically modified, giving them enhanced speed, incredible stamina and acute intelligence. To the government’s dismay, more and more of the population are being transformed, and they have set out to rid the world of this new subculture that they deem menaces to society. One rogue warrior is bent on protecting her race – and seeking revenge on those who changed her life forever. With fierce fighting skills and chameleon-like abilities, Violet (Jovovich) sets out to destroy a government-designed time bomb that will eliminate all Hemophages. To Violet’s surprise, the deadline device is a nine-year-old-boy, who was raised in a laboratory and goes by the name of Six (Bright).

Prognosis: Can’t believe the hype…yet Do you know that there are only two movies I ever really came close to walking out on? I usually reserve the opportunity to see a movie as a chance to allow a filmmaker their chance to tell me a story all the way through. That’s why THE JERKY BOYS and THE FIFTH ELEMENT will always hold special places in my filmic heart as two of the worst films I had to ever endure. Milla Jovovich was only part of the problem in that movie but she’s kind of a one-note actress.

Case in point is the trailer for this movie.

Okay, so Milla is narrating this trailer. We open up with her kicking the crap out of some baddies who are wearing plastic scuba gear apparati, using the same kind of billy clubs made famous in DEMOLITION MAN. What’s amusing to me is that she’s trying to be this hardcore lady but when she finally stops kicking all these dudes asses for a moment and her gut is flopping up and down, she wants to break down the story from the beginning.

I don’t know what futuristic society set out to make super warriors who bear an un-original likeness to Nazi soldiers with samurai swords but it’s like a 13 year-old was given the chance to bring their comic book to life and they’ve included every old and busted archetype they’ve ever seen. AEON FLUX seems to have fused with the leftovers from THE 6TH DAY and those obnoxious shiny black bad guy uniforms from SPACEBALLS.

I’m not sure whose idea it was that this new futuristic world was so unkind to our lungs that people have to wear plugs in their noses which look about as serious as seeing them in the nostrils of Bob and Doug McKenzie from STRANGE BREW but it’s all downhill from this point forth.

We get more of our super soldier Nazi ninjas doing all they can to look as cool and dangerous as they can and Milla brings up the rear, or specifically, her rear in some retro Hypercolor pants and matching half-shirt. And let’s get this out of the way: she’s always wearing a half shirt. I so forgot to consult my military training from the future manual where it states that standard issue uniforms for the good guys are no longer are to be used for maximum protection but should, instead, incite chubbies from all men who dare gaze on her fleshy tummy. It’s mindless, stupid and completely doesn’t serve any logical purpose.

What’s more is the dreadful dialogue. When it is employed, Milla saying crap like “copy that” or “killing is what I do, it;’s what I’m good at” makes being an apologist for all the bad movies I still defend by the likes of Jean-Claude Van Damme so shaming; how can I stick up for those when I want to run screaming from this trailer? I don’t know but I am sure I’ll rationalize it somehow.

And, to be fair and balanced, I can’t dismiss this trailer completely out of hand. Even though the music is downright pedestrian I like some of the visuals employed. The effects work in some places is interesting and the handling of some of the battle sequences brings a fresh perspective on how a B movie can be properly executed if enough cheese is tossed at the screen.

I can’t wait until I ignore this movie completely when it’s released theatrically and then rent it when it explodes, or implodes, depending, on DVD. If it does bad enough at the box office I hope to see it being released on DVD within the month.

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