Trailers of the Week — Most Anticipated Comedy, Irish Drama, and Mission: Impossible

by Gabriel Valdez

It is really hard to get me interested in a romantic comedy. Not because I don’t like the genre – it’s none of that “I’m a guy, I can’t do this” guff. It’s because so many are made with the wrong priorities in mind: either stressing Disney-fied “one true love” views of love or deconstructing male friendship toward women as quiet obsessions that would be creepy as hell in the real world yet are nearly always rewarded with a woman-as-prize on film. Neither represents good lessons for either gender.

Give me a Sliding Doors or a 10 Things I Hate About You or even a Forgetting Sarah Marshall or Love Actually any day of the week. But hold the cloying copycat junk. Give me something unique, and I’m as excited for a romantic comedy as I am for any other kinds of film. Which leads me to:

TRAILER OF THE WEEK
MAN UP

I’ve been waiting for Lake Bell to become the next Sandra Bullock for a while now. Armed with a similar sensibility for communicating women finding their way in the world (and being OK with it), but with a voice actor’s knack for accents and an eye toward directing, she finally seems to be breaking through.

Pairing my favorite comic actress with my favorite comic actor – Simon Pegg – makes this film by British TV director Ben Palmer jump out of seemingly nowhere to near the top of my list. Like I said up top, I’m not a sucker for most romantic comedies – it takes a lot to get me interested. Lake Bell, Simon Pegg, and a trailer like this? That all gets me interested.

And while you’re at it, check out Bell’s directorial debut, In a World… (and what I wrote about it as one of 2013’s most overlooked films).

JIMMY’S HALL

No one films Ireland like Ken Loach, and the director of the quietly poetic war drama The Wind That Shakes the Barley returns to that 1920s and 30s era he depicted so beautifully to visit another moment in Irish history, when a new government – fearful of fascism and communism – cracked down on anything that seemed new or different, that questioned Catholicism or hinted at socialism.

Loach is among the best directors that few viewers know. His films are always visits into other places, times, and worlds, pieces of simmering working class drama filled with human connection and visual poetry. He’s a director who cuts you to your core in the gentlest of ways, like a singer whose voice both calms the soul and haunts it for days.

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – ROGUE NATION

For all intents and purposes, it looks like M:I picked up the borderless rogue state concept that the Bond series developed so well in Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace, brushed it off, wondered aloud why the hell Bond would just casually drop such a well-developed plot, and said, “Finder’s keepers.”

Why did Bond drop that plot anyway? Oh yeah, that’s why.

If Bond doesn’t want it, I’m happy for M:I to start mattering a bit more than it has in the past. The series continues to get better and fresher as Tom Cruise’s policy of a new director every film leads to giving upcoming action auteurs their best chance to show off all that they’ve got.

It’s a smart-as-hell business model that’s led J.J. Abrams and Brad Bird to bigger live-action fare, and Christopher McQuarrie, longtime writer (The Usual Suspects, Valkyrie, Edge of Tomorrow) and fairly new director (The Way of the Gun, Jack Reacher) may turn out to be a better director than either.

GOOD KILL

Do I put a serious movie about the ethics of drone warfare above or below the Mission: Impossible trailer? This is a monumentally worthless question, but it’s still one that gave me pause. In the end, it’s not a great trailer. Mission: Impossible‘s is better. But Good Kill looks like it could be a great project. I trust in most things Ethan Hawke, if not in the totality of every movie then at least in his very honest and forthright performances.

Director Andrew Niccol is one of the most up-and-down directors you find. Gattaca remains one of the most important movies of the 90s and one of the most important and singular science-fiction movies ever made. Lord of War featured, in my book, Nicolas Cage’s best performance. Then you have S1m0ne, a thoughtful but ill-constructed comedy, and The Host (the U.S. sci-fi movie, not the fun Korean monster flick). Somewhere in the middle, you have the stylish but rather void Justin Timberlake-vehicle In Time.

Which Andrew Niccol shows up to a given film is difficult to pin down, but Good Kill feels most in synch with Lord of War, and that’s promising. It also reteams Niccol with Hawke. The last time that happened, we got Gattacca. Count me cautiously optimistic.

THE TRANSPORTER REFUELED

This trailer to a FOURTH movie in a franchise that barely managed to hang together a first one has no business making me smile. It doesn’t even have Jason Statham in it.

And yet…

It looks like something I’d watch. Mind you, it doesn’t look like anything I’d have high expectations for. But sometimes those are two different things. In fact, when it comes to The Transporter series, those are always two different things.

WORST TRAILER OF THE WEEK
PIXELS

This idea of classic video game characters invading Earth wasn’t a bad one when Futurama did it. In 2002. It’s just that the cast, led by Adam Sandler and Kevin James, also seems better suited to 2002. Nothing against the actors, but they don’t seem the most appropriate to headline this level of comedy anymore. Hell, Sandler agreed to do one recent comedy only because it included a free trip to South Africa. Their star hasn’t burned out, but it has grown tiresome and repetitive. Imagine Tina Fey, Kevin Hart, Zach Galifianakis, Kristen Wiig, Jennifer Aniston, or Jason Segel in these roles.

Melissa McCarthy – who I’m generally not a fan of because she’s been stuck David Spade-like into movies that make fun of one element of her persona – would slaughter a movie like this. Dice it into little pieces and put it in a soup. Kill it. She would. McCarthy.

Point is, everything about this movie seems…well, not good but at least promising, until you see the faces. Then any notion of clever goes out the window, and “derivative” bolds, underlines, and ALL-CAPS itself. Obviously, I don’t hold out much hope for DERIVATIVE. Er, I mean Pixels.

Other trailers of interest:

Estonian war drama Tangerines.

Super cheesy-looking but kinda heartstring-pulling hero-dog movie Max.

Paper Towns actually looks like a fun teen mystery, but it smacks of promoting my least favorite lessons about men being rewarded with women by warrant of being obsessed, so good job ruining that.

And the disastrously titled Barely Lethal is proof that Samuel L. Jackson will act in anything. Oh well, it can’t be any worse than Vampire Academy, which was deceptively watchable.

“Frozen” and Creating a New Standard

This weekend, Frozen will overtake Iron Man 3 as the fifth highest-grossing movie ever made. It will join Avatar, Titanic, The Avengers, and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 in the top 5. Each of these films has something in common – though they may be outnumbered by the males, each has a strong female lead that doesn’t need the man in order to justify her role in the film: Zoe Saldana in Avatar, Kate Winslet in Titanic, Scarlett Johansson in The Avengers and Emma Watson in Harry Potter.

Frozen is the first in which the female protagonists outnumber the male. If you look at the top 20 films, or top 50, or whatever number you’d like, you’ll see a high rate of movies that boast female leads – Keira Knightley in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, Laura Dern in Jurassic Park, Natalie Portman in The Phantom Menace (it’s worth noting this is the highest grossing Star Wars prequel, and the only one in which Portman has narrative function instead of being treated like a fetish object or a McGuffin). For all its other problems, Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland contains no male leads, instead bouncing back and forth between Mia Wasikowska and Helena Bonham Carter (Depp is supporting in this). It’s #16. The highest-grossing Dark Knight is the one that finally gives us a female superhero.

Even the highest grossing Indiana Jones was Raiders of the Lost Ark, the one in which the woman punched and kicked and drank and spit, not the one in which the women screamed helplessly or turned out to be traitorous. It took 27 years, the benefit of inflation, and Karen Allen reprising her Raiders role to finally set a new Indy box office record in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

We shouldn’t pretend this is anything new. Adjusted for inflation, the highest grossing movie of all-time is, by a very wide margin, Gone with the Wind (1939), which follows a female protagonist. The Sound of Music (1965) sits at #3. Female lead. Titanic (1997) and Doctor Zhivago (1965) are effectively split leads, one man, one woman. The Exorcist (1973) boasts two female leads and a male one that enters late in the game. Snow White (1937), female lead. Six of the movies in the top 10 boast a leading woman. Four of them follow a woman exclusively, with the men in supporting roles, while four films follow men exclusively (Star Wars, E.T., The Ten Commandments, & Jaws). This does not include the Judy Garland-led The Wizard of Oz, which was never much of a hit in theaters but has earned more in syndication (adjusted for inflation) than any other film.

If anything, I believe we were once better at creating blockbuster films that featured women in lead roles. From a purely box office perspective, it makes no sense whatsoever that women are so outnumbered when it comes to leading today’s big-budget movies.

Despite female-led movies being so heavily outnumbered by the male-led ones in 2013, these pictures held 3 of the top 6 box office spots: boasting the United States’ #1 overall earner The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, and the worldwide overall earner, Frozen, as well as Gravity. Women owned live-action comedy – The Heat, American Hustle, We’re the Millers, and Identity Thief all featured (and advertised heavily on their) female protagonists. You have to plumb all the way down to the year’s #5 live-action comedy to find one led exclusively by men: Grown Ups 2. The year’s biggest surprise, as it always is, was a horror film led mostly by women: in this case, The Conjuring, which made $318 million worldwide on a $20 million budget, featured Vera Farmiga, Lili Taylor, and Patrick Wilson. It became the highest grossing period horror film ever made, surpassing Shutter Island.

In fact, you have to go all the way back to 2008 to find a year in which the highest-grossing film in the U.S. lacked a female lead – The Dark Knight. Before that, you have to go back to 2005 and Revenge of the Sith. Only two years in 10 bucked the stat, yet the ratio of female leads to male in film doesn’t reflect that success.

Look, Chris Hemsworth can’t launch anything outside of Thor – he earned Ron Howard one of his least successful films (using the United States’ second most popular sport) with Rush while his Red Dawn remake tanked. He might be making good movies, but Matt Damon has launched more flops in the last five years than hits. Jeremy Renner’s failed as a lead to the extent he’s had the Bourne and Mission: Impossible keys both taken away from him. Outside of playing Wolverine, Hugh Jackman has as many flops (Australia, Deception, The Fountain) as hits. Tom Cruise (Oblivion), Will Smith (After Earth), and Keanu Reeves (47 Ronin) can no longer reliably launch genre films on their faces alone. And let’s not even mention the failed experiment that was Taylor Kitsch (who I quite liked in John Carter, and scratched my head at in Battleship). I may critically champion many of the actors and movies just mentioned, but from a business perspective, the big-budget market is simply oversaturated with male leads.

Stop cramming those roles down our throats in the decades-long, failed search to come up with a new Arnold Schwarzenegger. Give us the actresses who have already proven themselves at the box office – not just Jennifer Lawrence, whose forward progress you couldn’t stop with an army of bulldozers, a Great Wall, and Godzilla, but also Rose Byrne, Alice Braga, Rooney Mara, Zoe Saldana, Kristen Stewart, Scarlett Johansson, Dakota Fanning and our entire surging, underutilized generation of actresses. And if Mr. Universe Schwarzenegger can be turned into a star, then certainly former UFC fighter Gina Carano can.

It’s been pointed out to me that Hollywood is a business and, like any business, it’s going to ignore gender-bias and racism if it can make an extra dime by doing so. I would humbly ask in what country these folks have been observing business, but without getting into a political argument, the proof that Hollywood is catching up is just not there. Female-led films might be more prominent because we’re going to see them more and more, but in large part they are not greater in number – certainly not in event movies.

Let’s simplify the process wholesale and say your mega-budget film features a half-dozen representatives making decisions – two executive producers, your company’s financier, a co-financier from the company you’re splitting the budget with, the director, and a major star. One of your execs doesn’t like the idea of a minority woman in a lead. That’s out because you don’t want to get in a territorial battle you could lose. One of your execs thinks Kristen Stewart has too much baggage – she’s out. Your co-financier feels uncomfortable with an entirely white cast, and you can’t risk losing half the budget. The director really wants to work with Alice Braga, who he’s worked with before, and who is Latina. Losing him would mean finding a replacement director and possibly losing other stars. Your major star wants his role to be expanded. How do you solve this? Cast Alice Braga but demand the role is reduced, through a rewrite, shooting adjustments, or editing, into a supporting character. Give her less agency in the film in order to make everyone happy and keep them all on-board. Is it likely that all these things happen? No. Is it likely that – among multimillion dollar projects that have far more than half-a-dozen decision-makers who can each enforce having their way – that enough of these “concerns” are raised to result in your film featuring “safer,” more standardized characters and plotlines? Abso-fricking-lutely.

Big-budget Hollywood films have an incredible ability to take advantage of these standardizations when it comes to messaging, but they also drag their feet when it comes to changing the surface presentation through which their stories are told. As Geena Davis’s Katherine Huling so coldly makes clear to Lake Bell’s Carol in In a World…, that surface presentation very often supercedes a movie’s messaging, no matter how well-intentioned and intelligent it may be. What’s standard and safe in Hollywood’s presentation needs to change, and that requires voices to keep on insisting that it does.

2013’s Most Overlooked Films

I have two criteria to determine the most overlooked films of 2013. First, the film had to have made less than $25 million in its theatrical run. Now, $25 million is a lot of money; I certainly wouldn’t turn it down. When it comes to movies, though, 99 made more than that in their U.S. runs last year. I may champion Oblivion as a sci-fi classic and argue that The Lone Ranger is cleverly subversive, but they both made a good chunk of change last year. That means audiences saw them. They’re not allowed on this list, especially when I can sneak them into my introduction. Second, to be overlooked means the film earned no major awards consideration. Dallas Buyers Club and Inside Llewyn Davis each earned a handful of Oscar nominations, so they’ll get four straight hours of advertising on March 2. Here are my most overlooked films of 2013:

In The East, a corporate intelligence agent, Sarah, goes undercover with a domestic, eco-terrorist group. Star and co-writer Brit Marling herself spent time with an anarchist group in order to research the role. The film is both a criticism of the mega-corporations that consider undrinkable water or unthinkable side effects the costs of doing business, as well as a judgment against the groups that claim the answer is drastic violence. As is the case with many terrorist acts, Sarah reveals that the group’s ideological claims are nothing more than excuses for vengeance based on personal grudges. She is caught between two groups too invested in destroying each other, obsessed with winning rather than doing the right thing. The East is thrilling and has some profound points to make. Marling sticks to the most independent of indie films, but she’s on her way to becoming a terrifically important actress. The East also proves that Ellen Page (Juno), as one of the anarchists, can do more than just play a quirky kid. It’s rated PG-13.

In a World, one of the best comedies to have come out last year, stars Lake Bell (who also wrote and directed) as Carol, a vocal coach who trains actors how to get rid of or develop an accent. Her father, Sam, is an iconic voice-over actor whose booming voice accompanies the most legendary of movie previews. It’s a big deal for both when a new trilogy of films announces it’s bringing back the most epic of voice-over gigs, starting with the words, “In a world…” Sam insists a serious movie can’t advertise with a woman’s voice-over, and Carol does what most kids do when a parent tells them they can’t do something. It’s a simple premise done well as the two compete for the role. Unlike most movies about Hollywood, this one avoids industry in-jokes and plays more like a romantic comedy. Comedian Demetri Martin, Rob Corddry (“The Daily Show”), and Eva Longoria (delightfully butchering a cockney English accent) co-star. It’s rated R for some brief sexual references.

Mud is the very definition of waiting for the other shoe to drop. Two Arkansas kids, Ellis and Neckbone, sneak out at night to explore the swamps along the Mississippi River. They dock at a lonely island and come across a drifter named Mud (Matthew McConaughey). He’s waiting for his girlfriend, Juniper (Reese Witherspoon), but needs the boys’ help. See, he can’t go into town because cops and bounty hunters are looking for him. Neckbone comes from a broken family and Ellis’s is breaking around him, so Ellis increasingly looks at Mud’s plight as his last chance to have faith in family and love. The tension is first-rate and McConaughey delivers a spellbinding performance. “Mud” is rated PG-13, and reminds me of a less fantastical version of the slow-boil movies Steven Spielberg made when he was first getting started.

Side Effects is allegedly Steven Soderbergh’s last feature film, so I’ll bend my $25 million rule just this once. He’s the most dynamic director of our time, best known for Ocean’s Eleven, Erin Brokovich, and Traffic. Here, Rooney Mara (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) plays Emily Taylor, a woman suffering from manic depression. Her husband, Martin (Channing Tatum), is a Wall Street banker just being released from jail. Soderbergh hits a lot of points early on. The same way convicts develop gang connections in high-security jails, Martin uses a minimum-security prison to develop his Wall Street connections. Emily goes through a retinue of pharmaceuticals, each with new side effects, before her psychiatrist, Dr. Jonathan Banks (Jude Law) decides to try her out on a new, experimental drug. Soonafter, Emily begins to sleepwalk. Tip of the day – don’t sleepwalk and try to dice vegetables with a kitchen knife at the same time.

Side Effects goes through a lot of twists and turns. It lets you outsmart it just long enough to outsmart you. What starts as psychiatric drama becomes a legal thriller, and as soon as you’ve settled into that, you’re watching a family drama turn into a conspiracy film with shades of Hitchcock’s man-on-the-run films. If there were an Oscar for Best Twists and Turns, this’d be the film to get it. Soderbergh’s career is defined by changing style from one film to the next, so if this is his swan song, it’s a fitting one. A film that changes genre, tone, and protagonist so quickly can’t just pass a genre sniff test; it can’t just be functional. It has to be a very good movie in each of its genres. That’s where Soderbergh is better than any other director, and that’s where he takes most advantage of Mara and Law – their characters suffer the drama and threat, but there’s always a hint of the actors having fun with it. It’s an approach that keeps heavy material very light on its feet. Side Effects is rated R.

Spring Breakers. I’ve already written a good amount on the qualities of the film and the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink performance of James Franco as rapper/courtroom-pickup-artist Alien, so let me preface by saying this: Spring Breakers is not appropriate for anybody. It’s a film that levies judgment on a materialistic, celebrity culture by being absolutely obsessed with it. We follow four college girls to spring break in Miami, where they’re arrested on drug charges. Alien bails them out with an offer to chauffeur them around the city for a day. He introduces them to a hedonistic lifestyle that hits on the darkly possessive side in many.

One in particular turns away from the temptation, a girl named Faith (Selena Gomez), while the others draw into Alien’s wiles. I have my doubts as to whether Gomez is capable of succeeding as a serious actor. She’s got more than enough comedic timing and popularity to lead her own sitcom, so I applaud her for taking on thankless roles when she could still be printing money out of Disney. Sometimes a role is lightning-in-a-bottle, and her last scene opposite Franco, the moral tatters of one girl being broken down by a remorseless, consumptive creature without conscience, is the terrifying, overwhelming heart to a film that’s simultaneously very difficult and disturbingly easy to watch. Spring Breakers might be the film we most deserve right now, a hard-R-rated movie so sex-and-drug filled that it numbs the viewer to either, edited the way rap songs are tape-looped, constantly recursive to the point of cannibalizing itself. It’s balanced between the repercussion-free zone of absurdism and your own conscience. It’s a brilliant achievement.

You’re Next is both my favorite horror movie and dark comedy of 2013. The set-up seems familiar. Three masked attackers invade a home and terrorize a helpless family, but there are a few things that make You’re Next different. The first is how passive-aggressive this family is. Even as they get picked off one by one, they can’t stop bickering. The second is the twist, halfway through the film, that gives the attackers’ actions their logic and turns everything on its head. The third is that one son brought a date, Erin (Sharni Vinson), who was raised as a survivalist in the Australian outback. Setting traps and fighting back, she’ll quickly become one of your favorite horror movie heroes. You’re Next is rated R.