Wednesday, August 25, 2010
Trailers Fall film preview, 1: These! Are! Serious! Trailers!
Posted by Curt Holman @Curt_Holman on Wed, Aug 25, 2010 at 9:05 AM
It's getting on that time of year again, not only when leaves fall from the trees, but the tone of movie trailers makes a precipitous drop from light to heavy. With the end of summer the Academy Award contenders start coming out in earnest, so it's like the makers of movie trailers crack open paint cans of Patina of Importance. Some of the following are total Oscar bait, while others simply try to steamroll potential audiences with their gravitas - if you don't see these movies, you're clearly a shallow person. (Incidentally, if you can find a trailer for Clint Eastwood's Hereafter, let me know.)
The Town (Sept. 17) Fans of Gone Baby Gone should note that Ben Affleck directs (cool!) and stars in (hmmm...) this action-thriller about a victim of bank robbery (Rebecca Hall) who finds herself torn between a federal agent (Jon Hamm) and a scruffy tough guy (Affleck) with a connection to a string of high-profile robberies. Said connection is spoiled by the trailer. It looks a little too car-crashy to be a big Oscar movie, but it features Best Actor nominee Jeremy Renner in his first high-profile role since The Hurt Locker.
The American (Sep. 1) This George Clooney film gets a jump on Fall movie season by casting the swoony Ocean's 11 star as a hit man — taking one last assignment — in the photogenic corners of Italy. It looks to be more of a character study than an action flick.
The Next Three Days (Nov. 19) Russell Crowe appears to be reliably anguished in this tale of a husband who sees his wife (Elizabeth Banks) convicted of murder and plots an escape attempt. This remake of the Frech thriller Anything For Her is helmed by Paul Haggis, director of Crash and In the Valley of Elah, who isn't exactly known for his light touch. In the trailer, I love how the softness of the happy-domestic scene at the beginning of the trailer is inversely proportional to the noise of the subsequent agita.
Fair Game (Nov. 5) The phrase "Inspired by true events" suggests that the embellishments will be off the hook in Doug Liman's docudrama about outed CIA operative Valerie Plame, starring Naomi Watts as Plame and recent Oscar-winner Sean Penn as her husband, former ambassador Joe Wilson. Brace yourself for self-righteous pieties.
Conviction (Oct. 15) When her brother (Sam Rockwell) is wrongfully convicted of murder, his single-mom sister (two-time Oscar-winner Hillary Swank) gets her GED, puts herself through law school and takes his case herself. With all due respect to the real people on whom this film is based, the phony uplift in the trailer is unintentionally hilarious.
Never Let Me Go (Oct. 1) Kiera Knightley and Carey Mulligan star in a film about the children of a boarding school with a sinister purpose (that the trailer basically gives away). This adaptation of the novel by The Remains of the Day's Kazuo Ishiguro looks so sad, I can barely watch the preview all the way through.
Biutiful (TBA) "Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions." Sure, why not? This trailer is better at communicating a pseudo-profound storm metaphor than whatever it is that the movie's actually about. I don't see this on the fall release schedules, but Javier Bardem won Best Actor at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival in the latest film from Alejandro González Iñárritu (Babel, Amores Perros), so it's got to be kind of a big deal.
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