Trailer Trash: Mama Mia!

Movies with an exclamation point in the title are always good except for Moulin Rouge! Oklahoma! Oliver! And Win a Date with Tad Hamilton!

This trailer came on in the theater when I was seeing that George Clooney football movie, and thirty seconds in I was seized with an urge to light myself on fire in order to dull the pain. But I was on a date and thought it might send the wrong message.

Meryl Streep's daughter (the kind-of-hot daughter from Big Love) is getting married. The bride-to-be doesn't know who her father is because Streep was fucking three guys at once: the second to last James Bond, the neurotic British guy that's not Hugh Grant, and the gay professor from Good Will Hunting. For some reason, they’re all British, except for maybe the Good Will Hunting guy, who I guess is European or something (who am I, Rand McNally?) In order to figure out who the real father is, the three gents are invited to the wedding in order to participate in a horrible train wreck of homosexuality.

Not only is Mama Mia a musical, but it’s a musical based on the music of ABBA, making this the gayest movie since El Paso Wrecking Corp. I thought we had all gotten together and decided that disco music was a big mistake and should be stricken from the public consciousness, like Minimalism and Abu Ghraib.

From the looks of the trailer, Mama Mia! appears to be 70% dancing, 20% wise cracks about what a slut Meryl Streep’s character used to be, and 10% of these two ancient British women gasping or doing something else British. Oh, and I guess there’s bound to be a lot of singing too, but they don’t show that in this trailer probably because they want people to actually go see this thing. Smart guys, these trailer people.

(Oh wait, there’s a new trailer of them singing here. I can’t watch the whole thing, it’s too painful).

I know that I'm not exactly the target audience here, but c'mon, couldn't the filmmakers have thrown my demographic (straight males- there are quite a few of us!) a bone here? Besides the daughter from Big Love? Couldn’t second-to-last James Bond get into a karate fight with the groom, or shoot someone in the head? Something? Anything?

Trailer Trash: Wanted

It’s the Matrix meets the Matrix, with Angelina Jolie as Angelina Jolie, Morgan Freeman as Morgan Freeman, and that twerpy Scottish kid from Atonement as Luke/Neo/Jesus. Oh and you’ll never guess what his super-power is…

Why is Hollywood obsessed with assassins right now? Is it because we’re bogged down in a war we can’t possibly win, and we wished we had just assassinated a few people instead of destroying a country and trying in vain to rebuild it for the next 5 years? Just a theory.

So the superpower in this trailer is curving a bullet. From a gun. Kind of like putting spin on a bowling ball. What a useless super power! How many situations could there possibly be where that would come in handy? Maybe if something was in between you and your target… but couldn’t you just walk a few feet to the right?

Even though the trailer looks like a cut and dry Matrix rip-off, I smelled something über-nerdy about it, what with the totally lame engraved bullets, so I looked it up on Wikipedia. Here’s a shocker: this crap is based on a comic book. And check out this line:

“[McAvoy’s character] follows the death orders issued by the Fates, weavers who read individuals' destinies in fabrics produced by mystical looms.”

Fates? Weavers? Mystical looms? It’s as if some comic book dork read a Greek tragedy and thought, “While I’m ripping off the Matrix, I’ll rip-off this weird shit that I don’t even understand because there are no pictures.”

There once was a time where Angelina Jolie was hot. We called that time the 90’s. Now, all she does are crazy action films. When I imagine having sex with her, the fantasy ends with her killing and eating me. Not hot. Scary. Her sixteen adopted children must be terrified of her.

Remember that five hour spy movie with Matt Damon? Every time Jolie was on screen the movie became totally unrealistic, because she was wasn’t tearing someone apart with her bare hands or anything. It just goes to show the extent to which Hollywood controls our minds, because it’s not like she looks buff or manly, it’s just that movies have brainwashed us into thinking she’s the ultimate killing machine.

I understand this, and yet, I am still afraid.

Trailer Trash: The Dark Knight

Batman faces off against Hollywood’s most infamous villain: shit blowing up good and proper.

The Dark Knight represents pretty much everything I hate about movies: comic book adaptations, sequels, prequels, remakes of movies that are all ready pretty good that were made less than 20 years ago.

I also don’t exactly care for the work of the director, Christopher Nolan. That movie where everything was backwards was such a piece of shit. I think the reason why everyone liked it so much (yeah, I know you liked it) was because it made people think they were watching a deep and thoughtful art film, but really it was just some dumb revenge fantasy with serious narration (written with Nicholas Cage in mind, no doubt).

I didn't like the last Batman movie either. There was all this kung-fu nonsense. Not enough shit blowing up. All that lame pop-psychology. What was the bad guy’s evil plan, making people hallucinate? Where I come from, that’s called a free high. I pray every day for a super villain like that.

I was therefore surprised out how awesome this trailer is. Shit blows up good and proper! I counted 11 ‘splosoins (although some of these coulda been mulitiple shots of the same ‘splosion). And these are quality ‘splosions. It doesn’t hurt that they got a goddamn genius to cut this trailer, making the ‘splosions look even more cool. Al-Qaeda should use this preview as a recruitment film.

This is basically Heath Ledger’s trailer, and he looks incredible. Morgan Freeman gets about three seconds in this trailer (twice as much as 50 Cent in whatever that other movie was.) I don’t think he’s the butler, because the butler is the British guy. He probably plays the president, or God, or something like that.

Gary Oldman’s moustache gets a few shots. Aaron Eckhart, who is also supposedly in this film, is nowhere to seen.

[Editor's note: Mr. Eckhart is plastered all over the second trailer. Don't even think about reviewing it though.]

I can't wait for them to remake Batman and Robin. Who will play Mr. Freeze? My guess is Billy Cruddup, or maybe Paul Giamatti.

Trailer Trash: Bangkok Dangerous

Cage. Haircut. Bad.

Bangkok Dangerous? What is that? It's not a sentence, or a description, or anything! It's two words placed next to each other!

Apparently, this is a re-make of a Thai movie called... Bangkok Dangerous. Maybe the title somehow makes sense in a country where heroin is cheaper than milk. Still, that's no excuse. They should at least put some fucking punctuation in there. What about, Bangkok? Dangerous! Or at least, Bangkok; Dangerous. Bet you’ve never seen a movie with a semi-colon in the title.

Does Nicholas Cage have it written into his contract that every movie he makes has to have really serious narration with the main character going through some existential crisis? Is it like a focus group thing, where audiences expect it and are disappointed if there isn't any grim voice over?

Speaking of Cage, his haircut in this trailer is just an absolute disaster. The embarrassing thing is that I had the exact same haircut junior year in high school. I mean identical. It’s like he went back in time, shaved my head, and made a wig out of it. All I can say is that it was a different time.

Now, I don’t expect every Cage movie to be completely original. They can’t all be Ghost Rider (or can they…). But Bangkok Dangerous seems to be pushing the limits of hackneyed filmmaking. An expert hitman developing a conscience? Why not make Cage’s character a retard, rename the movie Forrest Gump, and call it a day?

I usually let trailer narration slide, because it’s all so weird it hardly seems fair to single any one out. But there’s a line in Bangkok Dangerous that’s just priceless: “When you deal in the business of death, saving a life can be the most deadly job of all.”

Um… is that like one of those sayings that’s supposed to clear the mind of conscious thought, like the tree falling in the woods, or licks in a tootsie roll pop? I’ve read it like fifteen times. The more I read it, the more I’m convinced that Robert Frost has been resurrected and is now writing trailer copy for shitty action films.

Trailer Trash: Chapter 27

In which Jared Leto looks like a fat ass, Lindsay Lohan still looks hot, and hopes for a Beatles reunion crash like a Ringo drum fill.

I wonder if fat people are pissed off at this movie. There are plenty of fat actors that are talented but out of work. And yet Hollywood is always casting skinny actors to play fat people. It's unfair, like when when they cast Koreans to play Chinamen, or when white actors put on black face.

Of course, Jared Leto did gain 67 pounds for the role of Mark David Chapman, making him, technically, a fatty too. That shitty Emo band that Leto is in must have been pissed off. Who ever heard of an emo band with a fat lead singer? Did he still wear tight shirts?

We got here your standard based-on-a-true-story-of-a-crazy-person film, meant as Oscar bait for Leto and comeback fodder for Lindsay Lohan. Neither of which will work, because the movie is gonna be total shit. The problem with the movie told from the point of view of the crazy person, is that not only is the crazy person completely unreliable, he’s also fucking annoying. That’s probably what made him so crazy in the first place, the fact that no one could stand to be around him.

So if Lohan really does sleep with Fat-Leto, as the trailer seems to suggest, it’ll completely blow the film’s credibility. You may as well have Paul McCartney take the bullet for John and sing the first verse of Blackbird as he slowly bleeds to death.

And how come the only way to show that a person is crazy is to show flash frames of random shit? Aren't there some crazy people that are just mellow? I bet some lunatic’s point of view is more like a Jim Jarmusch film, all long static shots, with John Lurie mumbling at the edge of the frame.

Trailer Trash: War, Inc.

We will fight this war with the most brutal weapon in our arsenal: irony.


The trailer for War, Inc. begins with two literary references piled one on top of the other: H.G. Wells (The Island of Dr. Moreau) and Céline. Gee, you think this movie’s gonna be pretentious?

It’s also the first trailer that could actually have its own soundtrack album. I counted no less than 5 music cues (at least four of which have been in other movies; count this as the second red flag).

Incidentally, 5 is also the number of times the main character of the film, Brand Hauser, has requested my friendship on Facebook. I am assuming that this is part of some elaborate guerrilla marketing campaign and that Brand Hauser is not actually a real person, despite the fact that we seem to have 12 friends in common.

This sort of looks like a sequel to the film Grosse Point Blank on crack. Coincidently, if you ever see me watching a sequel to Grosse Point Blank, you’ll know that I’ve just smoked crack.

This trailer is so all over the place, it’s almost impressive. Ben Kingsley as a tiny southern war-hawk! Hillary Duff as a sexy A-rab pop star! A snake pops out of a suitcase, a scorpion goes down Duff’s pants, and a Popeye’s chicken explodes. Did I mention that John Cusack drinks hot sauce while wearing a ski mask? Hot sauce! Who thinks of these things?!

Nitpicking aside, this trailer suffers from one fatal flaw: a lack of the funny. There are a couple lines, like the LeBron James joke at the end, that made me think, “Gee, that’s kind of funny,” but didn’t actually make me laugh or even chuckle. In a comedy, that’s generally a bad sign.

Some liberals will watch this trailer and think, “Far out, way to stick it to the man.” I’d love to be on that bandwagon, but instead, what I see is an unfunny, unoriginal, pretentious film that promises to be the 20th failed movie about our failure in Iraq. How’s that for irony?

Trailer Trash: Righteous Kill

Who the hell came up with the title for this movie, a bunch of dirty hippies? “Dude, we should call it Righteous Kill,” bro, cause then it’s like a double meaning. That’d be righteous!”

What would have been even more righteous would be if Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino made a movie together 20 years ago. I guess that movie Heat was pretty good, except that it was about 16 hours too long.

Both DeNiro and Pacino have, sadly, become carbon copies of carbon copies of their former selves. Pacino plays the dry, sarcastic New Yorker with a penchant for yelling inappropriately. DeNiro plays the hapless, disgruntled New Yorker with a penchant for mumbling.

But at a combined age of 131 years, these are no spring chickens. Don’t cops get to retire once they hit 60? I mean, my dad is 65. I like him just fine, but I don’t want him chasing after a serial killer.

If you blink while watching this trailer, you might miss Curtis Jackson, aka, 50 Cent. Poor Fiddy appears in a grand total of one and a half non-consecutive seconds in this trailer. The black man has a tough enough time getting a decent role in movies, now he can’t even get a line in a trailer? Hollywood is so fucking racist.

To top it all off, some poor bastard (someone in G-Unit?) has gone and made a Sympathy for the Devil hip-hop remix, and stuck it on the end of this trailer.

This is what happens when baby boomers make movies- it’s like if the characters from the Big Chill decided to write a screenplay together. They take these great things from the 60’s and 70’s- DeNiro, Pacino, and the Stones- and re-package them as something that’s new, hip, and relevant. Except they’re none of those things, they are just fucking old.

Trailer Trash: Valkyrie

Tom Cruise. Wearing an eye patch. Fighting Hitler. It’s like someone made a movie just for me.



I got no problem with Scientology, at least as far as it being a cult. All religions are cults. But for a while, it was looking like Scientology had ruined Tom Cruise. All of a sudden he was jumping on Oprah’s couch, holding cute little Katie Holmes hostage, and his last few films have been total shit, and Baby Suri looks nothing like Tom.

But the trailer for Valkyrie shows that Tom’s still got it, and that Scientology is therefore as benign as Christianity or Islam. Cruise is back, and in Valkyrie, he looks like a fucking pirate. A Nazi pirate. Trying to kill Hitler.

I really hope this movie ends with Cruise and Hitler having a karate fight, and then Cruise stuffs a grenade in the fuher mouth, and says something clever like, “heil this, Hitler,” or, “I got a hundred year plan for you. It’s starts with your head exploding!” and pulls the pin.

CUT TO: Close up of Hitler’s eyes wide open.

CUT TO: Slo-mo, Cruise running away from Hitler, who explodes in a ball of flame.

Cruise, looking sleek in his SS uniform and black eye patch, is surrounded by all these delightful little British actors like Kenneth Branaugh and Eddie Izzard, even the non-science-guy Bill Nighy. It actually makes the smirking Cruise look even tougher, kind of like how when I went to Japan I felt like a fucking giant. When you’re the only non-British guy in the room, you’re also the most masculine. Maybe Cruise could use this strategy in other parts of his life.

The genius of Valkyrie is that it makes the bad guys Nazis, but makes the good guys Nazis too. I hope this starts a trend: we’ll get the A-rab from Lost trying to kill Bin Ladin and that Asian dude from Harold and Kumar going after Kim Jong-Il (I’ve already registered both those ideas with the WGA, so don’t even try to steal my shit).

Trailer Trash: Tropic Thunder

The making of a Vietnam War film with Robert Downey Jr. as an actor in blackface. Why isn’t this trailer funnier?

I’m having trouble putting my finger on exactly why this trailer is so mediocre when it clearly should kick so much ass. Maybe it’s because the plot is a little too close to The Three Amigos. Maybe because it strays dangerously close to really-bad-movie-parody-land (see: Epic Movie, Date Move, and so on). Or maybe it’s because Ben Stiller is completely devoid of talent. (editor's note: Yes, he is.)

Ok, so Cable Guy is pretty good. But I’ll tell you why: Ben Stiller doesn’t try to be funny. When it comes to comedy, Ben Stiller always looks like he’s trying too hard, like the guy at work who tell his jokes really loud because he thinks the reason you’re not laughing is because you can’t hear him.

Jack Black is even worse. The weird thing about Jack Black is that he’s actually pretty funny in Indie movies. But put him in a Studio film, and he turns into a cross between Chris Farley and the Hamburglar.

The Robert Downey Jr. as a fake black guy part of the trailer does look pretty funny, especially the scene at the end when he starts quoting The Jeffersons theme song to the other black guy. You can really see why all those D.W. Griffith movies used blackface. Because it’s funny! What do you bet that this is the only good part of the movie?

If nothing else, shit blows up good and proper in this preview. That should be worth at least $200 million at the box office. I also hear that there are all sorts of crazy cameos, like Tom Cruise and that hippie guy that always takes his shirt off. I bet the Tom Cruise part is funny, too. Have you seen The Last Samurai? The man knows funny.

Trailer Trash: Where in the World is Osama bin Laden?

Giving Morgan Spurlock money to make a movie is like giving me money to make a spaceship. I can give you a rough idea of what a spaceship looks like, because I’ve seen a picture of one. But that’s about it.



I’m not sure Morgan Spurlock has ever seen a movie. Maybe he’s heard about a movie, or read an article about what a movie is like. Maybe he’s seen a TV episode where the characters go to the movies. Spurlock’s films are so bad, so banal, so completely inconsequential, that you have to wonder, “Who gives this guy money to make movies?” followed by, “Where do I get in line?”

The trailer for where in the world is Osama bin Laden consists primarily of Spurlock dressing up in an A-rab outfit, flying to A-rab countries, and asking people where Osama Bin Laden is.

Spurlock is a poor man’s Michael Moore. Moore, of course, is also a total hack. His films are simplistic and intellectually dishonest. But at least Moore has something to say. The bin Laden trailer plays like a bad sketch on the Daily Show, minus John Oliver's cute accent.

The most telling line of the trailer is about a minute in, where he tells a man, “I’m looking for Osama bin Laden.”

The man laughs.

Spurlock asks, “Why is that funny?”

Exactly.

Trailer Trash: The Happening

Something may or may not happen in this film by M. Night Shama-Lama-Ding Dong...

In the trailer for The Happening, something is happening. Something big. Something bad. Something having to do with but not limited to bees disappearing. Or not! Maybe it’s all a hoax! Who knows what glorious surprise-twist ending awaits us?

The most painful part of the trailer, the part that makes you embarrassed to be watching, is Mark Wahlberg. Don’t get me wrong, I dig Marky Mark. But in The Happening, Mark plays a teacher. A teacher! Isn’t that kind of like Harvey Firestein playing a straight man? You just wouldn’t buy it. Wahlberg has made a career out of playing dumb characters who think they’re smarter than they really are. This might be, and this is a working theory, because Wahlberg is dumb and thinks he’s smarter than he really is. Now he’s decided that he wants to play an actual smart person.

The first line of the trailer is Wahlberg saying, “I don’t know if any of you guys have heard about this article in the New York Times…” Yeah right, buddy. You read the New York Times. Sure.

Trailer Trash: Iron Man

Iron Man is responsible for the next terrorist attack.



Hey assholes, the 80’s were awesome for a reason. We had badass action stars as heroes, not smartass geeks like Toby McGuire and now, Robert Downey, Jr. What's next, Michael Cera as the Incredible Hulk? Schwarzenegger is a fucking governor right now. The people have spoken.

In Iron Man, directed by Jon Favreau (yeah, the guy in Swingers, no, really, I swear), Robert Downey Jr. plays a sarcastic, MySpace joke cracking arms dealer who gets kidnapped by terrorists and is forced to make missiles for them. Judging from the trailer, Downey “realizes what he has to do,” what any of us would naturally do: build a steel suit that’s bullet-proof and shoots fire and can fly. I don’t care if that is what happened in the comics, it’s still retarded and comic books are retarded. There, I said it, someone had to.

Also, I'm a little shocked at the racism in this trailer. I’d be delighted to see villainous A-rabs making a comeback True Lies-style, but where's the bona fide jee-had freedom-hatin'? In Iron Man they're just there to push the man-becomes-machine plot. This portrayal is demeaning and offensive. I demand that the A-rab culture be given more prominence in future trailers.

Halfway through the trailer, Iron Man escapes from jail and into your standard, syncopated-drum-beat-making-out-with-hot-chick-action-trailer montage, culminating with his flying in formation with F-16s.

This is why other countries hate us.

Oh, and guess what song the montage is cut to? Iron Man. Pretty fucking clever.

Trailer Trash: Jumper

Not based on the terrible Third Eye Blind song...


My first thought was this movie must be pretty fucking cheap. It has a Topher Grace look alike, the less anorexic chick from the O.C., the gay kid in Billy Elliot, and Sam Jackson. Turns out the Topher Grace look-alike is actually Hayden Christenson, the teenage Darth Vader (God, aren’t you glad you don’t have to see that movie again?).

Actually, this trailer is pretty cool. Teenage Darth Vader and the gay kid in Billy Elliot star as two anonymous looking white guys who can teleport. They use their superpower to rob banks and vacation in Egypt. Then Sam Jackson, in full on magical Negro mode (as opposed to Snakes on a Plane mode), goes after them with some kind of grappling hook. Much of the preview is spent showcasing the teleporting special effects: see Hayden Chistianson teleport from an icy lake to a library, or from one side of the kitchen to the other.

In the absence of large expolosions and people getting their heads blown off, this will do. Most super hero movies make me want to cry, but this one looks different, as the super heroes have no desire to save the world, nor do they sport fruity costumes. Also, that chick from the O.C. is really hot. I thought her and the nerdy guy made a cute couple. I'm willing to wait 18 years to penetrate their progeny. Male or Female.