Trailer Mash

You like dogs? You like zombies? You like curly trees? Tim Burton has your number. Frankenweenie is apparently a stop-motion remake of his 1984 short about a kid who brings his dog back to life, Frankenstein-style, but updated with all those familiar Burton-esque touches he's accumulated over the years, including the voices of Martin Landau and Winona Ryder. For fans of black-and-white stop-motion IMAX movies, it just doesn't get any better than this. The mystery of the real Heathcliff that Emily Brontë had in mind is given a new perspective in Allison Anders's seemingly super-stark retelling of Wuthering Heights. The actors playing him at different ages are of Afro-Caribbean descent, and evidently much closer to Brontë's "dark-skinned gypsy in aspect" than, let's say, Lawrence Olivier or former U.K. Model of the Year Tom Hardy. Other than that, the portrait of Yorkshire as a land of bleak, sodden moors and grim, heartless skies is precisely the impression not a few of the locals will be happy to see, since that means you are less likely to visit and pollute with your foreign ways what they believe is God's Own County. Jennifer Garner, ex-Alias and now mother of Ben Affleck's brood, has seemingly graduated to a Sandra Bullock-esque level of self-deprecating beauty in Butter, a slightly bizarre comedy satire, it appears. Something about butter-carving competitions, adultery, strippers and orphans, here is a trailer whose goal is to tell you everything that happens in the movie without giving a hint of how it all fits together. A strangely likable quality, it turns out. For some, the words "Olivia Wilde as a stripper" will be enough, as, for others, will be the words "another Rob Corddry movie." The red-band trailer for V/H/S is the scariest thing to be put on the Internet since (your choice here—because no matter how scary you thought that was, this is scarier). If you watch this utterly weird narrative of looping realities and you don't believe that the whole movie will drive you to the brink of insanity with fear, then either you are already dead or you are a character in the trailer. The Paperboy is a tricky approach since a good part of its notoriety up to this trailer has been about a scene of Nicole Kidman peeing on Zac Efron, ostensibly to cure a jellyfish sting. With that in mind, you end up looking at Nicole in red dress and blonde fright wig, at Zac Efron, still struggling out of his adolescence, and wondering how the hell it plays out. Especially as they appear to be portraying Tex Avery cartoon characters. Elsewhere, Matthew McConaughey and his partner David Oyelowo attempt to get John Cusack's murder rap quashed, and everyone sweats convivially. And so to Taken 2, the sequel to the guilty pleasure of every male over the age of 35 and especially those with daughters approaching the age when they might want to take a holiday on their own. What fellow wouldn't want to be so badass he couldn't travel to Paris and singlehandedly take down an entire phalanx of the Albanian drug- and human-trafficking mafia. In his second outing as some retired government trained-death specialist, it's Liam Neeson's turn to be captured by the Albanian mafia, along with his wife Famke Janssen. Those Albanian mafiosi must be crazy, at least according to this trailer.

Brand Marketing

Trailer Mash

Our take on the ads for this week's opening movies, from Taken 2 to Frankenweenie

Stevan Keane

About

Subscriptions

Events

Publications

WORK SMARTER - LEARN, GROW AND BE INSPIRED.

Subscribe today!

Stevan Keane