Trailer Mash

Nine movies make it into our 60-second trailer mashup this week, part of our ongoing quest to save you time and money. Bully is the anti-bullying documentary that the bullies at the MPAA wanted to rate R for bad language. The Weinstein Co. appealed but was declined. Michigan high-schooler Katy Butler began an online petition, and the Weinstein Co. has now taken the rather bold step of releasing the film unrated. The trailer is exactly the tribute to human cooperation you might imagine it would be once the tragic suicide of an 11-year-old bullying victim is addressed, and ends with balloons, banners, much holding of hands and mentions of how it just takes just one person to make a difference. If you've ever seen the 1977 movie The Deep, you will recall two things—Robert Shaw's hilarious putdown of Nick Nolte's mustache (think about this next November, hipsters), but mainly the infamous title sequence, essentially an extended wet-T-shirt montage starring Jacqueline Bisset. Dark Tide (from the director of Blue Crush and Into the Blue) is the 21st-century version: It is the story of Halle Berry in a wet suit. Providing ballast is some hokum about what happens when Halle's professional diver is persuaded to take a multimillionaire thrill seeker diving with great white sharks "out of the cage." As you might imagine, everything that can go wrong does so, including the casting of Halle's boyfriend Olivier Martinez as some sort of deckhand. Couple of years back it looked as though David Fincher was about to complete a feature based on Eric Powell's cult comic book The Goon, about a lovable ultraviolent thug who beats up zombies. While that project languishes in development, we now have Goon, about a lovable ultraviolent thug who beats up hockey players. Seann William Scott seems ideal as the talentless halfwit brought into a hockey team solely for his fighting skills in a trailer designed to offer every hockey stereotype with unabashed glee. Also, Liev Schreiber as Scott's predecessor sporting a parody handlebar mustache—think about this next November, hipsters. Horror flick of the week Intruders delivers an exceptionally well-cut trailer that hits all the beats you'd expect of a story about an 11-year-old girl haunted by a demonic nighttime visitor. Narrated by the girl, the trailer effortlessly begs the question: Who is the bad guy, the so-called Hollow Face? Is it handsome perfect daddy Clive Owen, or the little girl herself? Mirror Mirror, the first of the year's Snow White movies, the one with Julia Roberts camping it up as the wicked queen, is the movie equivalent of a British pantomime. Had Prince Charming been played by a Principal Boy, the effect would be complete. What it also resembles, to a bewildering degree, is one of the strands of the TV series Once. In both cases, Snow White is not only an elfin brunette with a Mia Farrow bob, thicket eyebrows and a pretty face, she's also a bandit queen. Auguring well for Mirror Mirror is the fact that Once has become the No. 1 non-sports program with viewers and young adults on Sunday nights. If the planet's temperature rises two degrees, there are no more Maldives. In 2009, The Island President Mohamed Nasheed, only recently democratically elected after the 30-year dictatorship of Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, took his country's case to the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference. The trailer follows Nasheed through the process and reveals a dignified, highly intelligent and thoroughly engaging onscreen personality: Ensuring his country continues to exist seems doable. Until now. Since the movie wrapped, Nasheen has been ousted in a military coup and replaced by his vice president, Mohammed Waheed Hassan, a cohort of Gayoom. In other news, Manhattan "is as low as the Maldives." Like some kind of first-year undergraduate-ethics thought experiment, Womb asks the lengths to which you would to if the love of your life died. Would you clone him? Would you give birth to the clone yourself? According to this trailer, that's exactly what Eva Green would do, and with her popular passionate mad-woman face, you absolutely believe her. In an interesting career move, television's Dr. Who, Matt Smith, plays the chap who both enters and exits her. The new trailer for Turn Me On, Dammit! employs the permissible trick of not risking any dialog or subtitles to sell a foreign language teen-sex comedy. As a group of fresh-faced Norwegian kids are filmed sighing, giving the finger to their hometown, rolling on the floor with their hands in their pants and exchanging meaningful glances, we hear Orson Welles performing the song What It Is to Be Young. And finally, White Hot Ant Farts, aka Wrath of the Titans. Learning a lesson from The Hunger Games, there are more trailers and clips for this than there are Greek legends on which it is based. Nothing much has changed since the Titans clashed, though Sam Worthington has replaced his crewcut with a mini mullet and Alexa Davalos has been replaced as Andromeda by Rosamund Pike, looking more than ever like a field-hockey captain attending her first cosplay convention. Should be very noisy, at least according to this trailer.

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Trailer Mash

Bullies, goons and other fun characters from this weekend's opening movies

Stevan Keane

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Stevan Keane