seen any good previews lately?

i mean for films that seem interesting*? something i watched last week had a preview of linklater’s philip k. dick adaptation. it uses the same technology/style he used in “waking life”. it may fit well with the mood of dick (quite apart from the ways in which it presumably frees him up from the laws of physics). but i can’t think of anything else. oh yes, the “narnia” trailer makes me want to read those books–then again unlike you cynics i am a fan of tolkien.

i continue to wait for someone to pick up my idea of a screen in a multiplex that only shows previews. i tell you, people would be willing to pay for that. i’d be willing to watch a whole series of previews like this one.

*though i suppose we could talk about the preview as genre as well, if we’re really bored, as we probably are.

147 thoughts on “seen any good previews lately?”

  1. Wow – that Shining preview is funny. Kind of gives away the whole film though…

    In LA, there is a TV show on channel 10 called “For Your consideration which is nothing but trailers. I think the E! Network, aka gay CNN, also runs a show of trailers.

    I think Richard Kelly’s in-production film Southland Tales had a cool internet half-trailer going for a while. The King Kong trailer looks amazing even though I hated the idea of a KK remake.

    Noah Baumbach’s new film alas does not star Eric Stoltz, but it has a good title. And Jeff Daniels as William Hurt. http://www.apple.com/trailers/independent/thesquidandthewhale.html

    Domino’s trailer looks horrible, except the bits with Walken, and it’s written by Richard Kelly, so… I can hope on that. plus Kiera, hummana hummana. is she the new Winona? A winona with a posh accent? and what’s wrong with the old Winona anyway? …reduced to Adam Sandler films… all is forgiven. please come home.

  3. The trailer for the new George Clooney film is taut, intense, and makes me want to see the film on opening day. The trailer for Capote is something of a wild ride–Hoffman is definitely taking a risk and the trailer almost makes you believe he’s going to pull it off. I also like the romantic granduer of the Brokeback Mountain trailer. Beyond all of the film fest accolades, this is going to be a hard sell between the coasts, but I’m weeping already.

  6. The theaterical trailer for Hitchcock’s “Marnie” is fantastic. Almost 5 minutes long. It’s on the Collector’s Edition DVD. Hitchcock himself stars in the trailer, making his entrance on a camera crane, and he provides some wonderful commentary. Some if it seems silly, as if some hack in the publicity department wrote it up. But the commentary is actually quite revealing. For instance, at one point Hitchcock says “Marnie’s trouble goes deeper than that…far deeper” (cut to the tree crashing through the window of Mark’s office) “and this is the problem that Mark must probe” (silence, cut to a still shot of the tree trunk lying on the floor). Then when the rape scene is shown, Hitchcock says “I don’t think that was necessary.”

    I’m sure even a Hitchcock would take care not to undermine the success of the film by fucking around with the trailer, by not paying careful attention to how the film is to be marketed. But watching the trailer, it’s hard not to see that the film’s ambition was to be something else besides a conventional psychological thriller, and that the trailer is actually very skillfully handled. I wonder if audiences (many of whom saw the trailer and remembered it) had a unique take on the film. Weren’t some of them guided, to a certain degree, by Hitchock’s irony? More so than contemporary audiences who have never seen the trailer? Few Hitchcock scholars even bother with film except to see it as a lesser “Vertigo.” And biographers are more insterested in talking about what was going between Hitchcock and ‘Tippi’ Hedren behind the scenes.

    For me, the trailer affirms some of my suspicions about the film–that it’s much, much closer in spirit to David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet” than to “Rebecca” or “Notorious.”

  7. Ooops. I guess I should be talking about previews of coming attractions, not trailers of past films. Is anyone excited about “King Kong”? I certainly am.

    “Cheaper by the Dozen 2.” Christ. That trailer is painfully bad. What the fuck happened to Steve Martin? If the movie is even 10 times better than what the trailer indicates, I’d still rather eat my own stool than watch it. Strike that. I’d rather eat my own stool while watching the remake of the “Pink Panther.”

    The trailer for “The Man” makes me cry. I’m such a huge fan of Eugene Levy and I want to deny that this film even exists. I pray the film is better. Or maybe it’s one big SCTV sketch? A promo for an even worse show? Like “Koffler and Meltzer” or “U.F.O. Sharkey.”

  10. “The Pink Panther” has been in the can for a long time–Steve’s just waiting for the right moment. I heard that Alexej Von Jawlensky’s “Sicilian Woman With Green Shawl” is up for auction at Sotheby’s in three weeks, so look for “The Pink Panther” in theaters in time for Thanksgiving.

  11. Good god, Jean Reno is in the PP remake as well. I remember seeing Micahel Caine being interviewed once and asked why, alongside the good stuff, he did so much crap. The occasion was the appearance of the remake of ‘Get Carter.’ To his credit, Caine said: “well, I haven’t actually seen the movie, but I have seen the house I bought with the check I received for agreeing to be in the movie.”

  12. The kids in the theater (when we were there Saturday for W&G) went *WILD* for the Cheaper 2 preview. And we saw some things that look like they’ll be so much better. Like Over the Hedge, which features probably the funniest Shatner-doing-Shatner moment. (He plays an opossum; I’m sure you can figure it out.)

  13. “Chicken Little” exists only as a trailer. I saw it well over a year ago, and I saw it again last week. This is a film that is not a film but a trailer, a trailer not for a film “Chicken Little,” which does not exsit. The trailer is the site of the desire for the film as such, set in eternal motion. Fort-da. “To trail” is “to come after,” which is to say that a trailer is that which comes after, not before, a film that has already come, or one that is always already coming. “This time the sky really is falling,” indeed. I think someone is fucking with us.

  14. One of my favorite funny books, Thank you for Smoking, by Christopher Buckley, is being made into a movie. Trailer is up on Apple. check it out. Looks really good. Aaron Eckhardt is back in major-asshole role.

    Also – and I mean this in all seriousness – I am really looking forward to Michael Mann’s Miami Vice. I don’t like Jamie Foxx or Colin Farrell, and I think they missed a big opportunity by not setting it back in the early 80s when coke was getting huge and overpowering local law enforcement. That said, it was frequently a great – and certainly visionary – TV show, and I think Mann will make a great movie.

  15. This has nothing to do with previews, so forgive me. Mark said: “they missed a big opportunity by not setting it back in the early 80s when coke was getting huge and overpowering local law enforcement.”

    How about setting it in the 80s when coke was being used by many a filmmaker/screenwriter/producer? This maybe more of an exercise in tabloid journlism (i.e. Biskind’s Easy Riders and Raging Bulls) than film criticism, but what do you think the greatest coke films of all time are (and I don’t mean films that have lots of cocaine in them or are “about” cocaine, like DePalma’s Scarface or Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, but films that look like they must have been made by people who were steeped in the stuff)?

    here’s a few:
    Steven Spielberg’s 1941
    Sam Peckinpah’s The Osterman Weekend
    Martin Scorsese’s New York, New York

  18. Previews seen at ‘Munich’:

    Mission Impossible 3 has Philip Seymour Hoffman as the baddie! Magnolia-haters start your engines… It appears to be directed by someone named J.J. Abrams who has directed nothing but episodes of ‘Alias.’ Take that John Woo.

    Spike Lee has a new movie called ‘Inside Man’ about (or is it?) a bank robbery with Denzel Washington, Clive Owen and Jodie Foster.

    X-Men 3 looks oh, so good.

  19. recently on some dvd or other we saw a preview for something called “brick”–a noir set apparently in a contemporary high school. looked quite good. i investigated and discovered that it won an award at sundance last year. did it actually get a theatrical release?

  20. According to http://www.film-releases.com, Brick will be released on March 24. I can’t imagine it will be a wide release. It’s blending of genres (“Veronica Mars” meets The Big Heat) suggests it will need to be marketed carefully, but the reviews have been quite enthusiastic. I imagine the Landmark theatres in Denver and Boulder will get it pretty quickly.

  21. Along with an extended preview of X-Men 3 (which just looks better and better), I saw a preview for ‘Ultraviolet’ which appears to have an identical plot to ‘Aeon Flux.’ It’s probably crap, but evidence of the continuing trend towards B movies centered around female action heroes.

  24. why did they change Silent Hill’s protagonist from a man to a woman? Will they keep the stilted quasi-American speech? and most importantly, will those ghost kids at the school, with their little knives at crotch level, be as creepy as they are in the game?

  26. Couple new trailers that looked cool to me: Little Miss Sunshine – which isn’t a revelation – people loved it at Sundance so I hear. Nice to see Steve Carrell make another good film move.

    Also, Lonesome Jim, directed by Buscemi, starring Casey Affleck (Van Sant’s Gerry).

    And a new trailer up for A Scanner Darkly, which looks pretty great, featuring a veritable Who’s Who of admirable and disgraced actors.

  28. Hmm… yeah, looks like Spacey is channeling some classic Gary Oldman craziness there, which is nice, but I have my doubts.

    I generally avoid these popcorn movies like completely, and it still seems ponderously like the same thing we’ve seen before, except a constant ratcheting up of relying on SFX in place of acting and script. I’ll skip it unless the reviwes are great.

  30. I received, unsolicited, a complimentary copy of Coming Attractions: The History of the Movie Trailer. It’s by Michael J. Shaprio, and it’s narrated by Robert Osbourne. It’s actually pretty good, well-researched and well-told. I would have enjoyed more trailers (there are a lot of clips from trailers, very few if any are shown in their entirety), but overall pretty illuminating. In many ways, this is a history of the Publicity Department, as told from the point of view of creative editors (who are, understandably, not sympathetic to studios). I would recommend it, if you can track it down (don’t know if it’s playing on TMC or AMC or what…)

  31. Ah ha – Perfume. Yes, that looks quite interesting. They are showing it around L.A. now, though I no longer have the patience to get through those advance screenings. Or rather I have far more patience that lets me skip going to movies altogether, and wait for thge DVD release.

    That book came out in 89 or 90? Did Susskind ever write another book? (I’m actually just asking Reynolds if he wrote anything good, since I could easily just look on Amazon to answer my own question.)

  32. I of course just went to Amazon to see; he apparently has published since, but not much at all. (I get him and Patrick McGrath confused; the latter is more prolific.) _Perfume_ was pretty damn good as I recall, but the movie just looks far more interesting–and I have loved Tykwer’s films, especially Winter Sleepers.

  34. not bad. the must love jaws preview by the same people, is dire, however.

    by the way, chris, the word on the street is that there is an after-end credits sequence in the x-men movie.

  35. Good to know. I intend to be at the first showing on Saturday morning. I am trying to psych up my 12 year old for the movie, but the extended trailers for the new Zelda video game and next generation Nintendo console are all he cares about. Bloody kids today. Where are their values and priorities?

  36. Just saw two interesting previews: One everyone knows about, Al Gore’s film An
    Inconvenient Truth. The other is less hyped, but interests me more personally:
    Who Killed
    the Electric Car?

    I remember the excitement in LA about these things 8 years ago. Their spooky quietness, excellently fast pick-up and – most importantly – the instant infrastructure. Suddenly, all over Santa Monica and downtown LA and LAX there were special parking spots and free plug-ins for electric cars! Some still exist, like old Civil Defense Shelter signs. I say “most importantly” b/c that’s always the excuse why we can’t have alt-fuel cars: “It will take years to build up the infrastructure.”

    Anyway, when GM killed the EV1, I wrote them a flabergasted e-mail, which they answered, and I re-answered, and so on, and of course I never got an answer from them that made anysense. Only that “GM is fully committed to alternative energy vehicles.” Sure.

    Like An Inconvenient Truth, it’s narrated by a retired White House occupant, President Jeb Bartlett, and for those former Los Angelenos reading, you’ll see an old pal show up near the end of the trailer.

  38. two very amusing previews before the x-men movie this afternoon: snakes on a plane and my super ex-girlfriend. the latter with luke wilson, uma thurman and dwight from the american the office; the former with samuel jackson and snakes on a plane. more on the x-men later.

  40. District B13 opened in Minneapolis today though the reviews haven’t been stellar. I’m always weary of anything Luc Besson “produces.” According to Rex Reed, this import contains a plethora of “time images” which pissed Rex off royally.

  41. OK I take it back. Looks like District B13 is actually getting some strong reviews (the film does sound like fun). I read the Times this morning and while Metacritic does give Nathan Lee’s review a positive number, I didn’t remember the review being so enthusiastic.

  42. Word of the sweet stink wafting from Nacho Libre continues to convince me that this summer is total ass for movies (not that I expected anything from the creators of Napoleon Dynamite but a boy can dream). I’m so desperate I’m going to go see The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift because I miss the smell of stale popcorn and oily butter flavoring. This, however, looks like a film that could save my summer (if only it could be true).

  46. It looks Oscar worthy to me. So its a movie and a video game? Or is it simulacra of the highest order? Where does Robin Hood fit into it all? I probably could benefit from a tutorial from your kids.

  47. It is a fan-made simulacra. We have to assume that the fan likes to dress up in green pointed hats. He is meant to be Link. My older son just dictated several more pages of arresting detail, but I have spared you. Wait until he becomes a full-fledged blogger!

  48. Actually, having absolutely very little knowledge of gaming and gamers, your son’s treatise would be fun to read (my daughter digs Barbie on computer generated horses but I’m thinking that doesn’t quite live up to the mythic status of the “Legend of Zelda”). The fact that the “trailer” was actually scripted and filmed by a fan (or a gaggle of them) makes it a lot more intriguing and impressive. That’s the kind of love that makes a legend, yes?

  49. I am kind of looking forward to Clerks 2. Kevin Smith is a funny guy, there’s little doubt about that, but he doesn’t hit a home run every time. Even the first Clerks I didn’t love.
    Still, Clerks 2 may be one of the only films I go out to see in a theater this summer. THIS, however… this is really very funny. Kevin Smith talking about his Superman script and John Peters.

  51. I almost always end up liking Smith talking more than I like his movies, ‘though I have enjoyed the one clip from Clerks 2, with Jason Mewes doing the Gumb dance from Silence of the Lambs. I’m hoping it’s good… but I’d frankly be pretty excited just to see him sit down for dinner with someone equally funny and engaging, trading barbs for 2 hours. (I enjoyed the “Party of Five” episode he did with Favreau, Affleck, and I forget who else.)

  52. i enjoyed most of clerks, chasing amy and dogma. haven’t seen anything else by him. was this (above) really an off-the-cuff reply? seemed like a well-practised routine.

  53. The ‘Casino Royale’ preview looks promising, if you like that kind of thing (and I do). I notice that Paul Haggis had a hand in writing the script and the always wonderful Jeffrey Wright has a part as a CIA agent. The reviews have so far been excellent.

    I should apologize in advance to Gio for the testosterone-induced hysteria that accompanies the opening of a new Bond film, but perhaps she will be mollified to learn that Giancarlo Giannini also has a part; I will never forget his fall from a great height, intestines spilling out, in ‘Hannibal.’ I watched it with Reynolds and still occasionally have nightmares about that movie.

  55. I kinda like that Craig appears to be facially scarred in several scenes in the preview. He is much less the pretty boy that Moore and Brosnan were, not that there is anything wrong with being a pretty boy…

    The bar is not high for the actor portraying Bond, but Craig has ‘Layer Cake’ and ‘Munich’ to his name, and he was good in both.

  56. he was also in a lara croft movie–which is a far better ad for this sort of thing.

    at the borat screening there was a preview of a dire ben stiller movie which nonetheless ended with the funniest thing in the theater that afternoon: stiller and a tiny monkey slapping each other back and forth, followed by stiller explaining in his patented aggrieved voice to someone asking him what’s he’s doing: “he’s just been pushing me, and pushing me, and pushing me.” that, my friends, is comedy. though mike falling face-first into his own sick after dinner that night while trying to nude-wrestle jeff wasn’t bad either.

  57. daniel craig is the first james bond i’m excited to see, ever. and i like testosterone like the next gal. only, it would be nice to see some estrogen around here as well. but this is a dead dead horse and i have no desire whatsoevah to beat it!

  58. PS it’s just past one AM in miami and i’m listening to the current. it’s really good. thanks for the rec, jeff. right now it’s playing bright eyes, for whom i feel a little bit of antipathy. why is that? i don’t know. too breathy maybe?

  60. I just watched then re-watched the new “Smokin’ Aces” trailer. I tell you, this better not be another let-down. That thing has me locked firmly in its grip, salivating as the bell rings again. Please let there be a meal this time.

  64. Grindhouse looks like my sort of movie. but isn’t it odd that we celebrate this genre in big budget mainstream films just at the moment when it’s no longer viable? unless you consider the proliferation of straight-to-video horror and sleaze a continuation of the grindhouse tradition. are there any grindhouse theaters left?

  65. there’s also something weird about this particular mode of genre/medium reconstruction: spend a lot of money and use cutting edge technology to recreate the feel of something cheap and tawdry (and whose pleasures came from being cheap and tawdry). i think i noted a similar disconnect in the gigantic amounts of money spent to make a film look like a cheap comic-book in sky captain and the world of tomorrow.

  66. Has anyone seen Soderbergh’s The Good German? Although he neither spent a lot of money nor recreated the feel of something cheap and tawdry, I think there’s a similar mode of genre/medium reconstruction here. I’m probably staying away from this one, just as I stayed away from Van Sant’s Psycho. Actually, The Good German makes me want to watch Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid again.

  70. We saw this latest edition of The Host trailer before Pan’s Labyrinth the other night and it is a pleasure to watch (the number of trailers for this film is dazzling and whoever is behind US distribution just keeps making this thing look better and better . . . of particular interest is the way the trailer works so damn hard to make you think you are not watching a foreign film).

    Also, check out the latest issue of ArtForum, in which Bong Joon-ho’s creature feature is prominantly displayed on the glossy cover of the pomo art journal. The article by Gary Indiana is quite good. Reynolds, I just picked up a region 3 disc of Bong’s Barking Dogs Never Bite through eBay and will look forward to that until The Host arrives stateside in early March.

  77. Well, I think they are both Yahoo trailers. Google trailer, Yahoo, Across the Universe for #74 and trailer, Yahoo, Knocked Up for #75. For what it’s worth, they work on my computer at home but I posted them from my computer at school.

  83. Anthony Lane’s review of ‘The Host’ in the New Yorker is ecstatic, gushing even. This may be the first real monster movie I rush to watch.

  89. I’m guessing, but I think it was made to make money, to, perhaps, break into the American market, but, more interestingly, I suspect a small minority of Americans have seen the original version and that the American adaptation will both attract and repell those “torture porn” audience members who seek out these kinds of narratives with relish (the trailer certainly plays into that however baroque the soundtrack). If Haneke can get his steely grip on the American audience that would be something. And imagine what they might let him do (at least once) if the film actually turns a profit.

  93. ah, the return of bill the butcher. i don’t give a tupenny fuck about paul thomas anderson, but i’ll watch anything in which day lewis is allowed to chew the scenery.

  94. At Michael Clayton I saw a frightening selection of previews. Apparently upcoming movies fall into two modes: either twee romantic comedies like 27 Weddings and P.S. I Love You or honey-dipped Quality films like Atonement and Love in the Time of Cholera (whose preview boasts “new songs by Shakira”!). also a preview of the upcoming Jack Nicholson film The Bucket List which demonstrates that, as in P.S. I Love You , death is really inspirational. In P.S. the dead boyfriend sends messages from beyond the grave, demanding that his former fiance “celebrate herself” and giving her other tips for “rediscovering” herself. gives me the creeps. In Bucket,old guys with terminal cancer do things like sky diving. Terminal illness gives them a real zeal for life, you see. Now, stop reading this, and go out there and CELEBRATE YOURSELVES!

  96. Oh my! Angelina Jolie looks a little the worse for wear, presumably all that motherhood, but with Timur Bekmambetov at the helm and an endless supply of bullets and explosions, this one has my name on it.

  98. I’m not sure what to make of this, but I’m surprised to see Christopher Hitchens showing up as a villain. Why didn’t anyone think of this before? Leave it to the Wachowskis.

  99. I love the trailers for Speed Racer. There’s no other movie trailer I’ve seen inyears that I dig as much as this one.
    And finally someone has cast Christopher Hitchens as a bad guy in movie. Excellent move.

  105. We saw a flurry of good previews, none of which I’ll link to, as I’m lazy — but Doubt and Milk really stood out, and I’m even intrigued by The Soloist…

    I found it interesting, as we awaited the Coens’ new film, to watch the hyperAmerican ad-pitch for the National Guard (Kid Rock crooning then croaking about heroism and WARRIORS!), which mashed up its patriotism so that service in Iraq, helping evacuate from fires in California, and driving for Nascar were all equated with Nat’l Guard service. And then, following, trailer after trailer with veiled or very pointed critiques of America and the world today — full of paranoia, righteous certainty and dismissal of doubt, corporate malfeasance and conspiracy, and a shameless disinterest in race and poverty at home…. followed by the Coens’ brutal derision about American solipsism (and the macguffin of the spy/intelligence thriller is an equally sharp joke about the solipsism of that enterprise, too)….

  114. I can’t speak for Ron Howard’s latest, but Tom Hanks was quite funny last night on SNL (as was Norm McDonald, Maya Rudolph, Will Ferrell, Anne Hathaway, Paul Rudd, Amy Poehler, Darrell Hammond, and Elizabeth Moss . . . not to mention the regular cast). There was a truly bizzare musical production number set to Billy Joel’s Vietnam War epic “Goodnight Saigon” which really can’t be explained (well it can but I won’t). Green Day was fun too.

  116. I saw a preview for something called Cop Out . Get this–a white cop and a black cop team up and hilarity ensues. See, they don’t follow department guidelines and the black guy is a goofball and the white guy is a tight-ass….I’m really pulling for this one to be a success.

  123. That looks pretty fantastic. I just put up a copy of Malick’s Days of Heaven on my apple tv so I can just let it play in the background during Christmas parties.

  128. This certainly looks better than Hook . . . there is an element of whimsy we haven’t seen from Spielberg in a while (though thoughts of Warren Beatty’s Dick Tracey did cross my mind).

  129. Anybody want to read the new Tarantino script Django Unchained? I’ve got a copy dated April 2011. I’ve read Christoph Waltz, Leonardo DiCaprio and Idris Elba are currently in the running for major roles (with DiCaprio playing the nasty white guy). Can I attach a PDF to this site or will you have to contact me via e-mail?

  136. Here’s one possible reason it’s been remade: the director, Rod Lurie, has a thing about bear traps.

    Here’s what the film critic/journalist turned filmmaker says about his 1995 book, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood: Moviemaking, Con Games and Murder in Glitter City, which is based on the true-life story of Jon Emr. This quotation from Lurie is from a review of his book which appeared in Publisher’s Weekly:

    According to L.A. radio talk-show host Lurie, Emr realized that “the access to Hollywood glamour could be used as a bear trap.”

  137. I would almost argue this to be a devilishly brilliant (and hilarious) parody if I wasn’t already aching to buy a ticket. Salinger-esque whimsy never looked so goddamned good.

  138. Precious is the word that comes to mind about this latest Wes Anderson, or indeed any Wes Anderson.

    The Straw Dogs remake is not very good. Dustin Hoffman made a more plausible wimp-into-avenger than James Marsden. And the bear trap is foreshadowed way too much, though its execution is not bad.

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