The recently renamed Legend of the Guardians is the first CG-animated film from director Zack Snyder, if you don't count Watchmen and 300. Rimshot! What's interesting about the new trailer for the film, though, is how it tries to sell Guardians as a fun family film with talking animals, while playing down the many Snyder trademarks on display.
If there's one thing Patrick Wilson specializes in playing on screen, it's the good-looking wimp. Whether it's Little Children, Phantom of the Opera, or Watchmen, his characters might seem like attractive, decent guys on paper, but when it comes down to it, they lack that decisive, manly je ne sais quoi. Now, Wilson's SXSW entry Barry Munday has made that manifest: This time, Wilson has literally been de-balled.
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Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time started filming almost two years ago, and it's had an unusually long post-production schedule, which is a good thing for a (typically rushed) summer movie, right? Hey, it worked for Star Trek! So why, then, is this new trailer so leaden?
When it comes to movie ideas, there's high concept, and then there's "high" concept; one sells itself on its easy-to-grasp conceits, the other tends to die shortly after the weed wears off, and you begin to see the holes in your vision of a $100 million summer blockbuster in which a cat spends 90 minutes trying to get out of a bag. I think we can safely put The Joneses into the latter category, and yet it somehow still got made. If you saw the spoilerific poster, you might have already gathered what the very high concept at the center of The Joneses is. For the rest of you, watch the trailer and see if you can figure it out.
In a new trailer for Warner/New Line's "contemporary re-imagining" of A Nightmare on Elm Street, clocks tick backwards in a roadside Edward Hopper painting, as Kellan Lutz wanders past pig heads through an abandoned kitchen. "Hello?" he asks. "Anybody here?" YES! SOMEONE IS DEFINITELY THERE! He's wearing a cute, red-and-green-striped hipster sweater and fedora, has knives for fingers, and goes by the name Freddy Krueger.
Remember all the hand-wringing at Sony about its remake of The Karate Kid -- specifically whether to retitle it to something more reflective of the fact that, well, there's no karate in it? Not only did that concern disappear, but in the new trailer for the Jackie Chan-Jaden Smith crowd-pleaser, the studio is actually selling the contradiction.
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Every so often, Hollywood gets behind a rising star and just tries to make him happen. We've got a Sam Worthington and a Taylor Lautner as proof, but we don't have anyone like a Russell Brand, the British dervish of comic energy that also comes with a valuable Judd Apatow imprimatur. Still, for as many projects as Brand has lined up, there's a definite wait-and-see sense surrounding this summer's Get Him to the Greek, where he costars with Jonah Hill. What does the new trailer reveal about whether Brand's star will be cemented?
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A few months ago, the teaser trailer for Toy Story 3 laid the pathos on thick. "The toys have been abandoned as their owner grew up," it told us. "You are old. MTV has taken the phrase 'Music Television' out of its logo. Everything dies." It was heavy, is what I'm saying. Perhaps sensing that they overreached, the minds at Pixar released a full-length Toy Story 3 trailer today that's big on jokes, light on existential angst.
A commenter asked here the other day if I could ever discuss Katherine Heigl on Movieline without being needlessly bitter or snarky. The answer all along was and is "yes," as evidenced by my first reaction to the new trailer for her forthcoming film Killers. Heigl looks as though she may have perfected a role she's played several times: the fussy, neurotic single woman who lands the unlikely man of her dreams when she least expects it. She seems to handle her half of their screwball romance -- especially the part after she discovers he's a CIA operative -- with conviction and charismatic aplomb. Alas, there's a problem: "He" is Ashton Kutcher.
Our ongoing efforts to free up your Sunday afternoon by posting the most essential Super Bowl movie commercials continue with this ad for Ridley Scott's Robin Hood, a decidedly BraveHeartier take on the legend of the famed medieval outlaw. Had you seen the first trailer, you were already well aware that this wasn't your tights-wearing-father's Robin Hood, as Scott offers a (wait for it) darker, grittier take on the story we think we know. If you've missed Russell Crowe as the archetypal scowling warrior, then join him and his band of Surly Men on their royal-looting adventures. We'll even throw in Cate Blanchett on horseback!
Verdict: THIS! IS! SHERWOOOOOOOD! Or something.
Back in the day, you'd have to actually watch the Super Bowl to see its buzzed-about ads, but eventually, YouTube made that need moot. Now, movie studios are doing us the service of releasing their vaunted Super Bowl spots ahead of time -- hence this brief ad for M. Night Shyamalan's The Last Airbender. You can glimpse some good effects work and what looks like some well-executed large-scale action, but I can't help but be disappointed that it doesn't include what a recent AICN test screening review described as a scene where "a certain baddy punches a fish to death." Gotta save something for the full trailer, I suppose.
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Lionsgate and Tyler Perry have unveiled the final trailer for their sequel to the director's hit Why Did I Get Married?, cannily (if nonsensically) entitled Why Did I Get Married, Too? You might recall the original teaser from November, a wild mood swing of a preview blending urban romance, island ennui and the pulsating psychosis of every thriller made since about 1984. The new trailer downgrades the storm warning a bit, foreshadowing much of the same relationship carnage while withholding the slapped-in-the-face-with-taglines feeling that accompanied the original. In other words, expect all the fierce drama -- plus a wigged-out Janet Jackson -- with none of the migraine.
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Nearly a year and a half ago, HBO announced that it was teaming up with Judd Apatow and Funny or Die creators Will Ferrell, Chris Henchy and Adam McKay, for a ten episode series called Funny or Die Presents. And finally, Will Ferrell & Co. have released the trailer for their sketch comedy orgy, which features no less than two dozen comedians (count them!), a classic FoD bit (Drunk History), Wayne Newton and at least one hawk. Click through for the insane result.
The teaser trailer was released today for Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (oh, they're really going with that title?) and you can watch it over on IMDb. What will you find there? An incongruously rockin' soundtrack, Carey Mulligan, an 80's cell phone joke, Shia LaBeouf riding a motorcycle (apparently, they're not just for Megan Fox to lean suggestively over anymore!), and an assumption that the younger generation knows who the hell Gordon Gekko is. That said...it kind of looks like fun trash? If greed is good, then what's greedily resuscitating a dated, dormant property? I dunno, I'm already programming the Wall Street 2/Basic Instinct 2 double feature.
VERDICT: Interested. [IMDb]
Chosen earlier this week as one of the likeliest subjects of a Sundance 2010 bidding war, Buried has a new trailer featuring pretty much exactly what we expected: Ryan Reynolds underground, in a box. It also appears to answer a key question we had going into the film's premiere tomorrow in Park City -- to wit, if the whole film is set in a coffin beneath the surface of the Iraqi desert, how and when do Reynolds's co-stars appear? That spoilerish theory (and the video) in a special Two-Minute Verdict after the jump.
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