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No Man Born of Woman Shall Miss the “Macbeth” Trailer
All you c-section babies can bail, though.
I’ve already written about the new adaptation of The Scottish Play with Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard in my Cannes Film Festival piece, but today they released the first trailer for Macbeth. It is bleak and gorgeous, offering an aesthetic more similar to the grime of Braveheart than the polish of your standard Shakespearean tragedy (even though sad things happen at the end, it is usually very pretty and opulent in the meantime). This teaser trailer, unnaturally long at nearly two minutes, provides us with an amazing view of the environment of this new Macbeth, gives us a glimpse into the lyricism of the language that will be employed, and is not afraid to show the main characters descend into power lust and madness. This is a perfect preview of the film, and has me even more excited than I was before.
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“San Andreas” Something Earthquake Pun
There is an undercurrent of awkwardness in almost every large-scale disaster movie that is very difficult to shake, and it is especially evident in San Andreas. The movie very badly wants to tell us the story of heroism in the face of abject disaster – and to do that the narrative necessarily focuses on a handful of characters for the audience to relate to during the calamity. Unfortunately, when coupled with the reality of showing city-wide destruction, the massive loss of life that must take place off-screen begins to weigh down the popcorn-flick levity that San Andreas really wants to create. This very basic conflict muddies this movie somewhat, but judged on the scale of a fairly mindless summer blockbuster movie, it does far more right than it does wrong, and most of what it does wrong is almost an artifact of this kind of disaster movie. if you’re capable of ignoring the massive loss of life occurring beyond the edges of the screen and focusing just on the characters that San Andreas wants you to, you will certainly have a fine time. If you’re not, you may start to wonder why you care so much about one girl when San Francisco just went 20 feet underwater after all of the buildings fell down and people were still trying to escape.
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The Manchurian Stoner: “American Ultra” Red Band Trailer
If you’re at all like me, then the second Jesse Eisenberg + Kristen Stewart pairing on the big screen might have evaded your feelers. I feel like I heard about American Ultra at some point, but may have dismissed it initially – even though I relatively enjoyed Adventureland (it wasn’t anything special, and I must admit that I have very little recollection of the plot specifics). Anyway, now that the Redband Trailer for American Ultra has been released, I decided to look into it in a little more detail. And now I’m pumped.
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“The Good Dinosaur” Teaser Trailer Looks a Little Wonky
With all the horn-blowing I have been doing for Inside Out, it sometimes slips my mind that we’re actually due for a second Disney / Pixar film in 2015 with The Good Dinosaur being released in late November, marking the first time we get two Pixar features in the same year. So far, we’ve been treated to mere descriptions of the film, and it has been plagued with pretty serious problems during production which I will not go into here, but I am sure you can seek them out if you want to. Anyway, earlier today the first teaser trailer was released. We obviously don’t get too much to go on here, but the idea has interested me since I heard about it, so it is good to get a first look.
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Vampire Film “A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night” Excels
In this century, properties like Twilight, Vampire Academy, and even things like Underworld and Blade have infantilized the vampire genre. These films are overtly focused on either relationship drama for the girls or supernatural action for the boys, leaving very few recent vampire movies capable of approaching these creatures of the night and their mythology with any nuance or depth. Enter A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, a wonderful bit of nuance and grim splendor.
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“Burying the Ex” Trailer Uses Zombie Girlfriend as Metaphor for Hobbled Relationships
Keeping in line with the horror comedy of something like Zombeavers, I watched the trailer for Burying the Ex. Here, we are introduced to Max (Anton Yelchin, of Star Trek fame) and his relationship problems. For reasons that are unclear (though not particularly important), he wants to break up with his girlfriend Evelyn (Ashley Greene) but is struggling to actually go through with it. He’s relieved of the chance when Evelyn is hit by a bus, presumably just before he had worked up the courage to pull the trigger. After spending some time moping around his apartment, his friend urges him to get back out into the dating pool where he meets Olivia (Akexandra Daddario). However, as the trailer explains to us, some relationships just won’t die.
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The B-Movie “Zombeavers” is Funny, Weird, and Spooky Schlock.
The very best B-movies are the ones that do not take themselves too seriously and can create a playfully scary tone, hopefully while people run away from puppets or people in rubber suits. Gore is a plus, too. If these are the criteria, then Zombeavers is a champion. The scene before the opening credits (which have some really fun animation) has Bill Burr and John Mayer as truckers transporting some toxic waste (of course). Burr’s character isn’t paying enough attention and slams into a deer, losing a barrel of the waste in the process. The barrel rolls into the creek, and gets caught in a beaver dam, where it begins to leak. This is all the explanation we will ever get for the origin of the zombeavers.
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Tomorrowland’s Wonder and Spirit Marred by Preachy, Unsubtle Third Act
There are moments in Brad Bird’s Tomorrowland that overflow with joy and awe as the film whisks us away to another world of boundless imagination, possibility, and promise. In fact, the more we are forced to decipher from the fleeting glimpses of Tomorrowland and the more we are encouraged to wonder at what it truly is, the more successful the film is. It is an unfortunate shock then that as soon as the film pulls back all obfuscation of the eponymous world, it descends into awkward preaching and pandering.
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Fassbender Disappears in Steve McQueen’s “Hunger”
Who wants to have exactly zero fun watching Michael Fassbender starve himself to death? If there are any takers, I’d love to point you to Steve McQueen’s Hunger, a dramatization of the 1981 Irish hunger strike. McQueen burst onto the scene with this sobering tale of a five-year-long protest by incarcerated members of the Provisional Irish Republican Army. In Hunger, McQueen offers up the raw filth of the history, but also reveals the depravity justified by a ruling government when dealing with “enemies”, a timely theme considering the ascension of the surveillance state and hard questions about the incarceration of enemies of the state.
Film Criticism and Fiction Writing by Derek Jacobs
