It looks like Robert Zemeckis is going to shoot the rest of his movies using motion-capture CG, and when the trailer for his version of A Christmas Carol begins, it's hard to see why. Incredible expense and computing power appears to have been used to...make people look like people. Seems kinda redundant, no? And then the ghosts come, and it quickly becomes apparent what mo-cap could do that real-life shooting could not: lard the classic Dickens tale with as many insane 3-D action sequences as possible.
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After promising a whole lotta Krueger back in July and offering a whole lotta nothin', the onus was on the producers of the revamped A Nightmare on Elm Street to include a big reveal in the brand-new trailer. And while their new take on Freddy's burned face does indeed make an appearance, it's clear that the real star is Freddy's wounded psyche.
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Have you happened to notice there's a rash of movies coming out set in post-doomsday Americas overrun by lawless (sometimes cannibal and robot-killing-machine!) villains? And they are shot in muted, duotone palettes meant to evoke the very bleakness -- the very lack of color, if you will -- of the lives and worlds they choose to depict? Well, I have, and it's time now to welcome one more addition to the growing canon of what I call the sepiapocalyptic movie:
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Some romantic comedies are content to just be, and for them, a major victory is a $50 million gross or landing an original Duffy song for the end credits. Not Valentine's Day! Valentine's Day will eat those romantic comedies, then grow stronger as it adds their souls to its own. Valentine's Day is the ur-romantic comedy. The more you fear Valentine's Day, the stronger it becomes. You don't believe it? Take in this titan of a trailer, which employs every Jessica who's ever landed the cover of Esquire (but not Katherine Heigl!) and boasts Julia Roberts and Bradley Cooper as its star couple.
Oh, but wait.
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Though The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3 didn't perform to expectations, John Travolta is not going to be dissuaded: He's got another installment of his "goateed anger bear" action movies ready to go, and this one -- From Paris with Love -- is from the director of spring hit Taken. So how does the trailer look?
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Microbudget ghost story Paranormal Activity -- which at a cost of $11,000 makes The Blair Witch Project seem like a bloated, runaway production -- has been eliciting squeaks, whimpers and eardrum-shattering screams wherever it's screened, most recently at an outdoor theater at Telluride. Now Paramount, who's picked up U.S. distribution, has released the first official trailer.
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Here's what we know about Stone: It's a psychological crime thriller set in a prison that re-teams The Score's Robert DeNiro and Edward Norton, only with Milla Jovovich now added to the mix, making her the de facto Marlon Brando (only more butch). Norton plays cornrowed prisoner "Stomp," DeNiro's the ... jaded parole officer? ... and Jovovich is Stomp's beautiful wife, sent by her husband to seduce DeNiro.
Still, we're left with more questions than answers.
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A lot of trailers featuring pasty-white androgynes debuted last night on MTV, and here's the other one: the final full trailer for The Twilight Saga: New Moon. After a months-long marketing campaign that focused almost exclusively on Taylor Lautner's abs, Summit has put an unclothed Robert Pattinson front and center for this clip so that teenage girls everywhere can start pondering the age-old question of which type of man's chest they prefer: the Tanned, 24-Hour Fitness look, or the Malnourished, Indie Rock Hip Bones variety?
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The trailer to the upcoming Michael Jackson concert film This is It premiered last night during the MTV Video Music Awards, and frankly, it's a little hard to know how to feel about the clip without Madonna first telling us her own reactions. Still, there's two-and-a-half minutes of footage here of something that had been unglimpsed and speculated about for weeks. What do we see?
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Shape-shifting! Dodgy Southern accents! Swampy mysticism! For a moment there, while watching the new trailer for Disney's The Princess and the Frog, you might be forgiven for thinking that Disney had been feasting from the same magic gumbo that HBO uses to fuel True Blood. Only this time, instead of leavening the proceedings with occasional glimpses of Alexander Skargard and Anna Paquin's breasts, Disney's offering fart humor and some slightly off-putting racial whatnot.
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Telluride exports Paranormal Activity and The Red Riding Trilogy certainly have their devoted partisans, but it seems like everyone was a fan of Jason Reitman's George Clooney dramedy Up in the Air. As we wait to see whether the film's Toronto debut will throw at it any turbulence (otherwise, a smooth landing in Oscarville seems assured), Slashfilm's got its first teaser trailer, embedded after the jump.
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For many women, the character that John Krasinski plays on The Office is their idealized man. "OMG," they type (even the seventy-year-old women type this, on account of Krasinski's dreaminess). "Can you beliiiieve what Jim did for Pam last night? When am I gonna find a guy like that, amirite?" The marketers of Krasinski's directorial debut have an interesting challenge, then: They want to woo as many Jim fans as possible, but the film Krasinski has made is positively filled with anti-Jims.
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Ready or not, here Oscar season comes. Or maybe, as for so many films this time of year, the operative phrase is "worthy or not." That's the judgment facing Trucker, the microbudget indie that has corralled early awards-season hype for star Michelle Monaghan on the basis of a couple early festival raves and a distributor ballsy enough to say, "Yes, we want an Oscar." But first it has to convince audiences to see it, which I'm not terribly sure this Trucker's new trailer [ahem] is going to accomplish.
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Lost in the hubbub of Quentin Tarantino's recent Jason Biggs veneration was that Tarantino's list of the greatest recent movies included two by Korean director Bong Joon-Ho: Memories of Murder and The Host. Everyone loved The Host, right? Well, yes, which made my not loving it all the more alien. Now, Bong's got a new movie out, and Magnolia's announced distribution. Can the trailer woo even my Bong-skeptical heart?
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Director Alejandro Amenábar (The Others) isn't necessarily doing himself a favor by naming his new Rachel Weisz film Agora, and all it takes is a wave of bad reviews bearing the headline "Agora-phobic" to see why. Does the new, full trailer do a better job of selling the movie?
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