Trailer Mash

A piquant assemblage of new releases may be sampled in a mere 60-second tasting above. And since there are so many of them this week, each trailer gets a single-sentence sentence, below. (Mashup by Max Becker.) Modern New York love story The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jane appears to be a possibly moving biography of two outsider artists who made an art-and-life project of seeing their own reflections in each other—even having the same breast implants, leading their child to wonder if she had two mummies. It is a rare trailer plagued by press so awful that prospects for the movie diminish with every click, but such is the case with John Carter, which at best appears to be a mashup of Conan the Barbarian and The Phantom Menace, and at worst, the most boring 17 hours you will spend in a cinema all year. Teasing a remake of a low-budget Uruguayan flick that pretended to be a single take, the trailer for Silent House, starring Elizabeth Olson, presents a haunted house no more silent than any other haunted house, and, peaking with a resounding crash and gut rumble to accompany a ghostly girl in a nightdress, probably a noisier one. Greece is not simply a national debt crisis, it is the cradle of Western civilization and the place where quirky sexual-behavior comedy Attenberg (a mispronunciation of Attenborough, as in the BBC's David, whose job is to watch quirky animal sex behavior) was produced to no small acclaim. Dearly departed Dr. Who David Tennant is the chap due to marry self-obsessed celeb Alice Eve on a Local Hero-esque Scottish isle, but finds himself falling for Kelly MacDonald, The Decoy Bride, in what may be a lovely little comedy and may well have given Tenant a nice Hugh Grant-like rom-com boost, were he not already so famous a dearly departed Dr Who. Jennifer Westfelder, the woman John Hamm abides with despite the wishes of every woman in your office, directs and stars in Friends with Kids, which appears to be a cheery comedy of manners about two people not in love who resolve to raise the kid they bring into the world—to the curious entertainment of friends played by Hamm, Kristen Wiig, Ed Burns, Maya Rudolph and the only good thing in Gulliver's Travels, Chris O'Dowd. As when hipsters make coffee that takes four hours per cup and usually tastes like it was almost worth the effort, New Zealand-made Western Good for Nothing takes the old ingredients of a cowboy going on the run with a ladylike lady to produce what seemingly will be almost worth the effort of seeing in its entirety. If you know true chefs, you know all they care about is the pursuit of perfection in their kitchens, and should you want to see that obsession embodied on film, and are excited by the idea that the world's greatest sushi restaurant is in a Tokyo subway station, then you will probably eat up the documentary of the week, Jiro Dreams of Sushi, with or without salad or miso soup. Michael Fassbender must be taking a rest, so Ewan McGregor resumes his status as Pre-Eminent Celt in Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, a talent-packed palimpsest of the best-seller (Lasse Hallstrom directing a Simon Beaufoy script), and seemingly does a capable job of impersonating a charisma-free salmon farmer charged with helping anglophile Yemeni Prince Amr Waked fish salmon in the Yemen. Following on the heels of Agnieszka Holland's WWII Holocaust drama In Darkness comes the two-year-old Saviours in the Night, in which super-Aryan-looking but Jewish nevertheless wife and mother Veronic Ferres is hidden on a farm by a group of nice Germans, even as Nazis stomp about shouting, "Schnell!" The trailer for horror movie Playback receives an unimprovable review on YouTube from Petit Tabarnak: "I took 5 minutes to find the password of my youtube account so that I could be able to dislike this shit." There's an agreeable sheen of misanthropy all over the trailer for Seeking Justice, and if you are going to make a seedy, '80s-ish movie about a Faustian pact with a vigilante group populated by law enforcers, then you can have no better Faust than Nicholas Cage, no better casus belli than January Jones and, on this evidence, no better Mephistopheles than Guy Pearce. Yikes, it's another Eddie Murphy movie, only instead of surrounding himself in prosthetics and career-diminishing one-liners, he's picked up a Jim Carrey cast-off script about some mystical flibberty flob that results in having only A Thousand Words left to say before you die, and what happens is, of course, epic mugging, at least according to this trailer.

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Trailer Mash

This week's lucky (or not) 13 opening movies, all boiled down to a single minute

Stevan Keane

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Stevan Keane