Volume 15: The More Things Change…
Young Adult
Dir: Jason Reitman – Planned release date: December 9
Jason Reitman, son of Ivan, has directed but three films so far in his career. What’s impressive is that he’s a resounding 3-for-3, with each (Thank You For Smoking, Juno and Up In the Air) ranking among the best and most entertaining films of their respective years. This December, he will try to make it 4-for-4 with Young Adult, his second collaboration with screenwriter Diablo Cody. Only this time, the script seems to tone down the “honest to blog”-esque quips and replaces them with something a little more toned-down. Young Adult features Charlize Theron as a writer of—wait for it—young adult literature who returns to her hometown in order to win the affections of her high school flame, and along the way she develops a friendship with Patton Oswalt.
The trailer for Young Adult is refreshing in that it only seems to communicate the film’s premise rather than turning in to an exhaustive summary of the movie’s every comedic beat. After watching this preview, all I know is the basic outline of what I’m getting into, and that’s exactly how I like my trailers. If I have one worry about Young Adult, it’s that it seems like material that might devolve into cliché if handled poorly. However, Reitman is a director who has done things his own way from the beginning, and I don’t think this film looks like it’s going to change that. It’s going to be interesting to find out,
Chronicle
Dir: Josh Trank – Planned release date: February 3, 2012
Ah, the found footage genre. Inevitably, it has begun it’s migration from the realm of horror and into other areas, the first of which seems to be the superhero film. Now, behold Chronicle, which takes the format and applies it to the story of a few high school dudes how start doing extraordinary things after climbing into a hole in the ground. Forks are jabbed into hands, teddy bears come to life, and ultimately one of them just turns downright evil or something. It’s really vague, but I quite enjoy the sense of dread in this trailer, and it quite ably devolves from adolescent happiness into something noticeably darker by trailer’s end. It’s very likely this will just turn out incredibly dumb—and it doesn’t look like the work of an actual digital camera so much as a professional crew—but this is some fine teaser trailer work right here. Color me intrigued.
The Lorax
Dir: Chris Renaud & Kyle Balda – Planned release date: March 2, 2012
If you were recently watching a preview for J. Edgar and thinking “hey, where have all the colors gone?” then you are in luck. This trailer for The Lorax has so many bright colors going on that it’s borderline blinding. However, I find the insane amount of color refreshing, if only because movies these days seem to be getting darker by the day. If nothing else, I just wished more movies tried to look half as good as this. The plot presented here may not immediately grab me, and the environmental message may not be incredibly subtle, but this is a world that I would love to live in for five seconds. In the land of The Lorax, it seems as if it never rains.
However, my biggest complaint is one that can be shared with many other recent animated movies: the celebrity voiceovers are just downright distracting. It’s even more mystifying to me that these films choose to advertise the people who are doing the voices. To me, the whole idea of an animated movie is that it isn’t live action, but for the last couple decades there has been an obvious movement toward getting the biggest name and not necessarily the most talented voice artist. Name one good creative reason that Zac Efron and Taylor Swift should be the stars of The Lorax. Nice try, but there isn’t one. (At least Ed Helms seems like he could actually bring something to the medium. Efron and Swift are there just so their names are on the poster.) The same goes for Danny Devito, who—while awesome—will never sound like anything other than just Danny Devito no matter what character he’s voicing. In the age of modern, celebrity-driven animation, the illusion is slowly fading away.
American Reunion
Dir: Jon Hurwitz & Hayden Schlossberg – Planned release date: April 6, 2012
It is truly the golden age of belated sequels that have absolutely no reason to exist (see: Johnny English Reborn and A Very Harold & Kumar 3-D Christmas), and so it stands to reason that at some point they’d make a fourth American Pie movie. (Of course, this isn’t counting the likes of American Pie: The Naked Mile of Band Camp in the Beta House’s Book of Love, which were little more than breast-delivery machines.) This trailer provides us the first look at our matured heroes from the original trilogy, and… well, not much has changed. Except now there’s a reference to the Twilight books for topicality’s sake, and now they are all married and stuff. Keeping a long story short, what once existed in the ’90s now exists in 2011, and it’s as strained as ever. Here’s hoping Sum41 never appears on the soundtrack, or it’s going to seem even more laughably passé.
The Devil Inside
Dir: William Brent Bell – Planned release date: January 6, 2012
While this movie seems terrible and derivative of ever horror movie produced in the last 5 years, I’ll admit this trailer freaked the crap out of me when I saw it before Paranormal Activity 3. (It certainly freaked me out more than PA3 ever did.) There’s still no recipe for creepiness more surefire than a good exorcism movie, simply because it gives the filmmakers an opportunity to contort a female’s body into shapes it should never, ever attempt. Ever. It’s too bad just about everything in The Devil Inside seems so uninteresting, because the people who edited the trailer have figured out how to make me squirm to a tee.
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