Trailer Hitch

By Eric Hughes

July 9, 2008

Keanu is even more robotic than this dude.

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Welcome to Trailer Hitch, BOP's look at the latest movie trailers to hit the Internet. This week: High schoolers learn the proper way to party, Mark Ruffalo's vision fails him and Keanu Reeves acts alien-like (wait, what exactly is different about that?)

Frozen River – Opens August 1st

Columbia film grad Courtney Hunt marks her writing and directing debut in Frozen River, a drama that snagged the Grand Jury Prize at this year's Sundance Film Festival. Starring Homicide: Life on the Streets' Melissa Leo, the film explores the lengths one New York mom will go to make ends meet. Here, that means teaming up with a professional smuggler to carry illegal immigrants over the U.S.-Canadian border (think Weeds, only it's human lives, not pot, and probably a heck of a lot less funny, too). The trailer has a gritty, low budget feel to it – let alone Hunt's use of cinema verite – all which effectively highlight the drama's core themes of lost hope and making do-or-die sacrifices.

Grade: B
Also expected to be released on this date: The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, Swing Vote, Midnight Meat Train, Sixty Six




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College – Opens August 29th

First-time scribes Dan Callahan and Adam Ellison tackle every high schooler's wet dream in sex comedy College, a film originally scheduled to be released in January. In it, Drake Bell, Andrew Caldwell and Kevin Covais play prospective college freshmen who pay the local college campus a visit for (at most) the best weekend of their lives. There, the boys connect with the campus' craziest fraternity, which offers the pre-frosh all-access passes to wicked parties in exchange for endless hazing and humiliation. If the funniest parts – Ryan Pinkston detailing his sloppy college weekend, Caldwell showing some cleave, Covais receiving the most unfortunate of blow jobs – aren't just in the sneak peek, than I'd say this little MGM project could be a sleeper hit. The film also benefits from its August 29th release date, which is just about the time its target audience is back at school/raging uncontrollably.

Grade: B-
Also expected to be released on this date: Babylon A.D., Disaster Movie, Hamlet 2, Sukiyaki Western Django, Ballast

Blindness – Opens September 12th

Please God don't tell me the entire movie uses the same echo effect utilized to the absolute max in this dramatic thriller's trailer. Nearly every word of dialogue, which there is plenty to sift through here, is replayed two or three times, and in close proximity to each other to produce said echo. The film, an adaptation of a 1995 novel about a society suffering through an epidemic of spontaneous blindness, is said to be hyper-stylized, even reflecting the lack of point-of-view that the newly blind characters would experience. In which case there is "hope" – good God – that the trailer's annoying reverberations are in fact a reality.

Outside of this potential calamity, the movie looks like it could be okay, given its solid casting – Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, Gael Garcia Bernal, Danny Glover – and unique story (even if the trailer ends on some fairly melodramatic moments). A line of particular cheese is from Ruffalo, who presumably says to Moore: "I see you ... After all this time I actually see you."

Grade: C+
Also expected to be released on this date: Righteous Kill, The Family That Preys Together, The Women, Assassination of a High School President, Burn After Reading, Phoebe in Wonderland


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