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Trailer Review: Nesting - How Did I Get Here

Hollywood's nostalgia machine is targeting gen-Xers and their mid-life. Nesting addresses a restless husband a little nervous about the way his has turned out. Searching to return a youthful spark, he buys their old Volvo, fills it with favorite mixed tapes and surprises his wife with it. "Let's go now," she says, and off to their old neighborhood in LA to try and relive their twenties, throwing a house party in their original apartment and mixing it up with the current youth. The end of the trailer shows the husband on the floor, hungover and being poked by a police baton. Rude awakening.

For a generation labeled with ironic distance from everything, this is a mainstream comedy basking in the glow of the past, putting this couple through the paces of going backwards to feel good. One would think a movie about this generation would have an alternative take. The only movie that's had a nice bitterness is Young Adult. Movies like this should have the past haunt the present. It's far more interesting. The Talking Heads are always great, but discovering the next Arcade Fire is more exciting.

Opening May 11, 2012, Verdict: Skip

Trailer Review: Rock of Ages - Pushing a Rock Up a Hill

Based on a Broadway play about a Hollywood club in 1987 and the front and backstage life of the rockers and fans around it, Rock of Ages revives - as if they were really dead - the monster rock classics from the eighties. This bad retro party looks like it was an open invite since a bevy of stars appear from Paul Giamatti, Catherine Zeta-Jones and Alec Baldwin dressed in clothes from the back of their closets.

But the guest that everyone wants to see is Tom Cruise, playing untouchable rock star (on the cover of Rolling Stone), Stacee Jaxx, a cowboy hat, no shirt wearing god. His concert is what's going to save the club and the movie. Say it aint so.

Cruise stops chasing something to give a freak-out performance, his second since Magnolia where he played an author giving lectures on how to seduce women. It was an over the top, hyperactive performance, that shocked everyone who saw it that the only thing to do was give him an Oscar nom to shake off the trauma.

If you want to listen one more time to music you've heard while getting a little too drunk, or experience Halloween early this year, be my guest. For the rest of us, stay sober.

Opening June 15, 2012, Verdict: Skip

Trailer Review: Lola Versus - La, La, La

The first time I noticed Greta Gerwig was in Greenberg when she danced for a minute to Paul McCartney's "Uncle Albert" alone in her apartment waiting for a phone call from Ben Stiller. It was the only scene that stuck with me from that movie and stole the show from Stiller's neurotic acting. It proved why she's been a darling of the independent film scene in recent years, and I've heard she's done another memorable performance in Damsels in Distress.

Success has now given her the opportunity to jump into the mainstream river of Hollywood with Lola Versus, about a woman dumped by her fiancé just after buying the wedding dress and now released back into the New York single scene to find love and her new self.

The jokes are routine with bad dates, useless girlfriend advice, and lots of anxious appetites for ice cream. Gerwig hasn't sold out, but she's been run through the machine; dressed up in the latest hair style and clothes, giving the usual look of surprise at dating disappointment and worried for her life in finding the right man. She's joined the club of desperation from Anniston to Witherspoon.

Gerwig deserves better. And so does this genre. Since seeing Young Adult, Diablo Cody's story of a woman searching for love broke all the rules that now these movies look stale and uneatable. Please Greta, don't pick up a gun or wear a cape in your next one.

Opening June 8, 2012, Verdict: Skip

Trailer Review: Total Recall - Redial

A remake of an earlier recall from 1990 originally starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and directed by Paul Verhoeven, based on a Philip K. Dick story which centered on a man needing a vacation in 2084, signs up for a tour of Mars with a virtual travel company. He sits in a chair, the gears spin, and he's implanted with the memories of a tourist - except something goes wrong with the program and his vacation turns into a chase and battle for survival.

The trailer for the new version stars Colin Farrell as the burnt out husband not looking for a vacation, but this time, not happy with how his life turned out. Needing a fix, he sees a company called recall that implants memories of any fantasy desired, but just as the gears start spinning, a SWAT team barges through the door (always) and points all guns at Farrell who quickly disposes them in a circle of knockouts (what a surprise). Farrell doesn't know how that happened, but we do.

The rest of the trailer is a pursuit through the streets of an urban design where buildings grow like mushrooms clouding the sky, car chases in the air much like The Fifth Element and women throwing punches as hard as the guys.

It's obviously got action. What's missing is the trip to Mars. This looks earthbound never leaving what looks like an overgrown Hong Kong. It also seems to be missing Verhoeven's humor and skirts with cheesiness that make his sci-fi films strange and beguiling. In short, it looks boring. Recycled, reused, refused.

Opening August 3, 2012, Verdict: Skip

Failure and Success

"This is yet another case ("Harry Potter,""Twilight Saga," "Lord of the Rings") where sticking to the material that excited readers in the first place was the right course." - Anne Thompson

"You could see Disney's "John Carter" (March 9) shaping up as a misfire from a long way off. No studio has projected "disaster" so loudly since Sony's misbegotten remake of "Godzilla" in 1998." - Anne Thompson

After another weekend of The Hunger Games dominating the box office, it's worth reading Anne Thompson's analysis of that movie's success to her added take on John Carter's franchise launch that is one of the largest box office flops in history.

Which means the solution to Hollywood's declining audience is the age old wisdom of making better stories. 2011 was already showing this with the quality and quantity by independent filmmakers and Thompson's articles prove there's immense talent even within the big studios that this country still can only produce the type of crowd pleasing action-adventure blockbusters, besides what other people think.

I find these stories interesting because Hollywood has been doing a lot of handwringing and scratching about its declining box office against online forces in recent years, but 2012 is already up 20% year to date over last year, and BoT is seeing great trailers, which I predict, will make one of the best years in box office history. Coming soon.

Trailer Review: Dark Shadows - Run from the Light

Tim Burton appears to be in a rut. Trying to find inspiration in a supernatural soap opera from the late sixties, Dark Shadows casts his regular Johnny Depp, as Barnabas, a baron who is cursed by a jealous witch (Eva Green) to become a vampire. He goes to sleep in the eighteenth century and wakes up in the twentieth, specifically, funky 1972 Maine where he has to take back his manor from a quirky family of new owners who don't seem so shocked by their pale skin guest.

If this looks a little like Beetlejuice, Burton's enjoyable comedy horror that had a family of New Yorkers buying a retreat in rural New England to discover a ghost they're actually excited to find - extra historic character to their new home, Dark Shadows just moves the tale a decade before the eighties.

A decade won't make a difference. Another costumed character by Depp, it's a repeat performance of better creations from Edward Scissorhands to Ichabod Crane in Sleepy Hollow. In short, done before, and all I could do was yawn at the trailer. Burton is the Charles Adams of cinema, making gothic goofiness an enchantment of escape, but it's starting to look like his coffin. The dead is looking dead.

Opening May 11, 2012, Verdict: Skip

Trailer Review: Damsels in Distress - Dancing to Happiness

The director, Whit Stillman, is for those with eccentric tastes in preppy angst, Fitzgerald ambitions, and debutante manners. He made a well received first film with Metropolitan, a New York charm, about a year in the life of debutantes and their escorts (it also had one of the greatest movie posters). These young people were different, down right strange in their stilted talk with elitist anxieties. Compared to the usual mallrat films at the time, many couldn't relate. But some did, and a devoted following went to Barcelona and The Last Days of Disco. Then he disappeared.

Now, fourteen years later is Damsels in Distress, a story about a tight knit of preppy girls in college who seem on a mission to cure the depression of their classmates by dance. You heard it - dancing tap and other forms of slow waltzes. The girls talk in Whit's only-planet dialogue: drawing room attitudes with an aristocratic crispness. "The problem in contemporary social life is the tendency to always seek someone cooler than yourself," Greta Gerwig concludes. If you met this gaggle of geese at a party, you would either be bored and walk away or grab another gin and tonic with an extra lime.

For those fans, this is a long awaited return. For others, it'll be their last party.

Opening April 6, 2012, Verdict: Must See

Trailer Review: Seeking a Friend for the End of the World - Last Minute Details

Steve Carell plays his nice guy self before an asteroid named Matilda blows us away. As the clock runs out, Carrell is "getting his midlife crisis in just before the wire." He meets Keira Knightley, who helps him search for his first girlfriend, and their quest has them fall for each other. The end is full of everyone hooking up, a chance to always be the boss at your company, and listening to the final list of all-time classic rock favorites.

But this long winded title could easily have been called Last Night, a movie from 1998 that is so similar in plot, that I wonder if it's a remake. But Last Night didn't play it for laughs. It was less disaster film, then a serious drama about a man and woman reconciling their past and what they mean to each other. It even had a radio countdown and last minute orgies.

The wave of apocalyptic movies this decade reminds me of sci-fi films of the early seventies when America was facing gas shortages after stumbling from Vietnam and Watergate. The difference this time around is the subject is so popular and is so long in the tooth that it's hit the comedic phase. Going out of style soon.

Opening June 22, 2012, Verdict: Wait for the Critics

Trailer Review: Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter - Buffy the Presidental Slayer

When I saw the title on the shelf of a bookstore to mash-up history with fiction to tell the secret story of Abraham Lincoln being a Civil War Buffy, I laughed and thought it crazy enough. Go for it. Now, here comes the movie, and it looks more ludicrous on the screen.

With a voiceover of Lincoln making a portentous speech in Gettysburg Address meter about facing death, he floats in slow motion fighting supernatural foes with an axe. It's all Matrix style violent ballet in nineteenth century clothing. This president is kick ass. From jumping between cars on a steam engine with a bridge on fire, leading an army on horseback to take out vampires while dodging cannon shells, or swinging his axe in the White House - ridiculous doesn't begin to describe it.

But the most important thing is this doesn't look fun. A humorless slog to watch. Something headed for the trash, to be rescued by Mystery Science Theatre 3000. In fact, I think they've already reviewed the prequel to this (Santa Claus Conquers the Martians). Wait for Joel, Tom Servo, and Crow T. Robot to screen it for you.

Opening June 22, 2012, Verdict: Skip

We Are the Gods Now

This summer, Ridley Scott returns to science fiction since Blade Runner in 1982. I've talked about the significance of his new film, Prometheus.

Go to the link, and watch one of the most brilliant trailers I've seen that slyly doesn't call attention to the upcoming movie, but makes direct connection to Alien. The details and twist ending only fans of the film will notice. Introducing a TED talk in 2023, from a corporate CEO played by the superb actor, Guy Pierce, the speech references Scott's legendary Apple commercial introducing the Macintosh. I'm sure this is going to go viral. A trailer for history. Expect lines for this movie as long a wait for the newest iPhone.