Looks vacant, all right

"Hey! Get our agents on the phone NOW!"

I've firmly given up on the hope that people will stop making bad horror films, but why do they have to drag bonafide movie stars into the mix? Usually this kind of role is reserved for, I don't know, Josh Duhamel. Or Jay Hernandez. Or, if the producers are really lucky, Cary Elwes. I mean, Kate Beckinsale was in Pearl Harbor! And Click! And... well, never mind. The thing is, horror movies almost never have names you can put above the title, so you see that and think, "Hey, maybe that could be good despite how it looks!" But come on. How often do trailers lie? It's the same movie we've seen 20 times in the last five years alone, even if you'll spend the first 15 minutes wondering "Why did Kate Beckinsale marry this guy anyway?" instead of "I hope the hot chick takes her top off before she gets killed."

Really I'm not even sure where the movie can go because there don't appear to be a lot of cannon fodder ancillary characters who can get killed before our "heroes" face the final big fight, although I'm sure there's an inevitable twist where the local sheriff turns out to be in on the whole thing or some shit like that. Presumably something more than just the basic plot outline has to happen, although if the trailer is anything to go by it's just "The Walls Have Eyes" and two hours of Luke Wilson peering anxiously into ventilation ducts.

Vacancy trailer (Yahoo! Movies)

Lies, Damn Lies, and Movie Advertising

This isn't really a "Movie that Will Suck," but one thing I've noticed becoming a huge trend - and it has been for a while now, but ever more so the past few years - is trying to sell movies not just based on the plots or the stars, but odd things like the director or producer, and sometimes even the studio. Today, we're going to take a look at upcoming movies that, while they may not suck, make me suspicious because of their curious selling points.

The Black Dahlia



Okay. Brian De Palma is something of a name director, sure. But "director of Scarface and The Untouchables?" Scarlett Johansson (who stars in Dahlia) wasn't even born yet when Scarface came out! How about some of his work in the last 20 years, guys? I realize that "director of Mission to Mars and Femme Fatale" doesn't have quite the same cachet, and Dahlia probably appeals to the same audience as The Untouchables in a way that his last two decades really don't, but... well, when you have to gerrymander his work that much, maybe we have cause to wonder about this one.

The Guardian



Andrew Davis, despite directing one of 1993's biggest hits, does not have name recognition, clearly. But again, we're talking about a movie that is 13 years old, here - Kevin Costner hadn't even ruined his reputation with Waterworld and The Postman yet. On the other hand, check out Davis' CV since - Steal Big Steal Little, Chain Reaction, A Perfect Murder, Collateral Damage, Holes. I'd say the last was the best received, but obviously it's a different genre - and "From the director of Chain Reaction" isn't packing anyone in.

Of course, this is exactly what I'm talking about. You're selling the movie based on the strength of one director who hasn't done anything worthwhile in the nearly 15 years since. What does this say about Andrew Davis? Either The Fugitive was a project he was lucky to latch onto or he's chosen poorly every time since, but either way, doesn't that kind of suggest that who the director of a movie is doesn't always matter? It's not like Davis is some Woody Allen-like auteur who controls every aspect of his films and has a really distinct style. I'm sure he's a competent director but he's just a workmanlike type who you hire when you need someone to crank out a, well, movie like The Guardian. You look at his resume, see that he has experience with big action sequences, and bring him aboard, but he's never going to be Spielberg.

So really, they're not using Davis to sell their film at all. (Especially since they left out his name.) They're using The Fugitive. And that's what I have a problem with. How misleading is it to market a film as "Remember this other film you probably liked? Well, we have a more or less superficial association with it! Check us out!" It's like the cookie cutter reviewer blurbs saying stuff like "If you liked Home Alone, you'll love Blank Check!" (That was a real blurb for Blank Check. While I liked Home Alone, even at 12 I thought Blank Check was a bit stupid. Though who doesn't like seeing Tone Loc get hit in the crotch by a pitching machine? Yet I digress.)

Flyboys



Oh, here we go. From the producer of Independence Day and The Patriot! Well, hell yeah! So he raised money for all three films, and perhaps made some hiring decisions. Your point? It looks more like they're trying to market this as a cross between the two (battle for freedom + old-timey), to avoid anyone pointing out that the film lacks any true star (no one even gets name-checked in the trailer). The producer they're referring to, by the way, is Dean Devlin, whose producing credits also include the surprisingly not named Eight Legged Freaks and Godzilla. The other producer (and that's not including the film's two co-producers, associate producer, and four executive producers) is Marc Frydman, whose producing credits include Welcome to Mooseport. I bet you don't see that on any posters anytime soon.

By the way, Flyboys gets the two-for-one bullshit combo pack, as the blurb on the apple.com trailers page uses the phrase "Academy Award-winning director Tony Bill." My first thought was that he won the Oscar for Most First Names, but it turns out that he won it for The Sting. Note that Mr. Bill did not direct The Sting. Oh noooooo! He was, in fact, a producer on it (one of three to win for the film when it took Best Picture). So in other words, he barely won an Oscar (it's not like Best Picture awards are really given to producers, they just make the most sense as far as acceptance goes), and while he has an Oscar, and is a director, the phrase "Academy Award-winning director" is horseshit. At least they don't say "Academy Award-winning actor" whenever they drag out the fact that Ben Affleck has an Oscar.

The Greatest Game Ever Played



These are my absolute favorite. Hey, remember that great golf movie The Rookie? Of course you don't, because this is a trailer for The Greatest Game Ever Played. And in it, Disney plugs the last three sports movies it released, or at least the last three good ones (Remember the Titans, The Rookie, and Miracle), in the hope of convincing everyone that Game was going to be exactly as good. "From the studio that brought you Remember the Titans!" Come on, man. You know how many other dozens of movies, some impossibly shitty, have been brought to us by the Mouse? One need only scroll through their trailer section at Apple to find some illustrious names - The Shaggy Dog, Herbie: Fully Loaded (does that count as a sports movie?), The Pacifier, Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen, and The Country Bears. New classics all. Sure, I guess Disney has a decent track record with feel-good sports movies, but is that really the studio's doing?

Blech. Anyway, I hope to get back to making some posts in this blog, most of which will be funnier and shorter than this one.

Tons of the opposite of fun

Let me see if I can sum up the plot of Phat Girlz, the doubly-misspelled Mo'Nique vehicle that no one asked for, in three sentences:

1. Mo'Nique is fat.
2. Mo'Nique is also sassy.
3. African guys like their women fat.

Based on the trailer, this appears to be the entire plot. It's not clear to me that there is anything approximating the usual "unhappy person finds acceptance/love" trajectory going on; the one guy may like her, but where's the suggestion of some cathartic end scene where Mo'Nique's detractors either accept her or fall into a pool, and then if the film were made with white people a Smash Mouth song would play? Eh, it's probably in there. They just didn't want to spoil it.

I'm glad Mo'Nique has been able to find the humor in being a large woman in today's America, because really, the world of film hasn't adequately mined the fat-person comedy angle prior to now. It does seem kind of odd to me that Mo'Nique would be willing to take a role where the only time she's respected is when she meets some African guy... and he likes her because Africans objectify big asses. Girl power, sister! Though there's clearly a heartwarming ending where someone decides to use Mo'Nique's clothing designs, because this is a movie.

Two other things that bugged me about this trailer. One, here's a movie that supposedly wants to explode stereotypes - not that it does that, but bear with me - and yet Mo'Nique's girlfriend bemoans their lack of male attention, and why? Because she wears glasses! Horror of horrors! I'm sure there won't be a scene where she takes them off and is suddenly hot. Two, half the video is of such obvious low quality, it looks like it was taken from one of those videos on "Wheel of Fortune" where they show you a quick montage of the location where you'll go on your trip if you land on that space. Did they go back and shoot half the movie after returning their film cameras to Rent-a-Center? I realize that no one besides Mo'Nique's parents could possibly want to see this - take away all the most clichéd parts of the trailer and what's left is still inescapably unfunny - but if you're going to put a movie in actual theaters you might as well splurge. Plus, you wouldn't want anyone confusing this with the inevitable porn spinoff of the same name.

Phat Girlz trailer (Yahoo! Movies)

"Dallas" messes with Texas

When the director of Win a Date with Tad Hamilton! and Monster-in-Law walks away from your project before filming has even commenced, maybe it's time to re-evaluate what you're doing. Although to take the opposite viewpoint, Robert Luketic really has some balls to walk away from the film adaptation of Dallas no matter how potentially bad it is; once you've done Tad Hamilton, there's really nowhere to go but up. Luketic's opposition to the film apparently springs from some of the casting decisions, and I think I can see why - with John Travolta signed on to play J.R. and Jennifer Lopez as Sue Ellen, the only way to get more prima donna ego on the set would be to add Cowboys below the title and bring in Terrell Owens to play Bobby. Or maybe Kevin Costner would like to read for the Cliff Barnes role?

The second-most important question regarding the film is whether it will be played straight or whether it will take the route of every other 70s-80s TV remake and just camp it up, because it's really annoying and seems kind of pointless to make all your remakes into virtual parodies. On the other hand, the most important question is whether it makes any difference at all, especially with the questionable casting. For example, I don't think being a Scientologist automatically qualifies John Travolta to fill the role of a love-to-hate-him type; have you seen this guy play a villain? Fox ought to take out insurance on its shooting locations in case of teeth marks. Sure, Larry Hagman was never the epitome of subtle, but John Travolta? He's just going to be Gabriel from Swordfish wearing a ten-gallon hat.

Meanwhile, officials in Dallas are apparently desperate to make sure the production films there, which makes sense, because nothing classes your city up like association with a bunch of slimy characters from a primetime soap opera. It really does seem kind of perverse how much civic pride the city takes in the show, but I guess it's understandable when you consider that most people wouldn't even have heard of Dallas otherwise. But that's okay - some cities have famous landmarks, some have centuries of history, and some just have fictional oil barons. To each his own. You know who I feel bad for in all of this, though? The good people of Knots Landing. Their city won't even be considered as a location when someone gets around to making that movie, although that's mostly because it doesn't actually exist.

Sources: Director Quits 'Dallas' Movie (IMDb); 'Shoot J.R. in Dallas,' city tells filmmakers (CBC)

It stands for Re-Volting

As problematic as the "urban remake" trend is in Hollywood, there's one thing worse: when the urban remakes subsequently get made again with white people back in the leading roles. Okay, the new Robin Williams vehicle R.V. may not be a direct remake of Johnson Family Vacation; it will probably rip off Vacation as much as the latter did, but it's not like Hollywood couldn't come up with two independent ideas that shitty. Incidentally, didn't you think we'd passed the point in time where the words "Robin Williams vehicle" could still be used in that order and make any sense? Though we've certainly passed the point where such words would be considered appealing - right around Patch Adams, I think.

When I first saw that this film existed I thought, "Great, an excuse for Robin Williams to mug like a maniac." That might actually be preferable to the real film; Williams' insanity is occasionally amusing, whereas the trailer is a black hole from which no comedy is allowed to escape. Williams' last starring role in a full-out comedy was in 1997's Flubber, so it may just be that he's forgotten how exactly one makes other people laugh (not that Flubber made anyone over the age of eleven laugh); the comedy here is apparently supposed to be "This family doesn't like each other, and look at their huge RV!" Gold. I'd almost guess it was intended as an inspirational family dramedy if not for the redneck jokes and the scene where the RV's waste system turns into a literal geyser of shit. As opposed to the film, which will be merely a figurative geyser of shit.

R.V. trailer (Yahoo! Movies)

Ocean's 13 prepares to dive

George Clooney wouldn't be a newly-crowned Oscar winner if he didn't almost immediately take up making a movie far below his new station, and I'll be damned if the just-officially-announced Ocean's 13 isn't that film. Obviously it's not surprising that a successful film would have a sequel, even though Ocean's 11 didn't call for one, nor is it surprising that the success of that sequel would generate a third film. The confines of the genre film, however - in this case the "heist picture" - require that the films' plots are all rather similar. Either that or Clooney and company are just trying to make the same film three times and hoping no one will notice, even though the quality is bound to deteriorate each time. If getting Ocean's 12 from Ocean's 11 was like taking a color plate and making a black-and-white copy of it, I expect Ocean's 13 will be like taking that copy and sending it via fax, and then the fax machine on the receiving end is located under a two-ton pile of horse manure.

Ocean's 11 was actually a fun movie, but the worst thing that could have happened was that its stars enjoyed working together. That made the second movie awful because everyone was just going through the motions, probably to avoid getting too tired to attend various all-night poker parties. It's okay to make a movie about how much cooler you are than the general populace if you're actually the Rat Pack, but I thought that kind of gin-soaked lounge-act machismo went out of vogue when the mob stopped owning so many casinos.

Source: Clooney, Pitt to resume scheming for "Ocean's 13" (Reuters)

My basic instinct is not to see this film

I know that Basic Instinct 2 was stuck in neutral in Hollywood for a long time before finally getting made, but has it really been around since the last time "Sharon Stone gets naked" was enough to sell a movie? In the 14 years since the first film was released, Stone has gone from "hottest woman in Hollywood" to "still pretty attractive" to "barely even shows up in anything these days" to "getting older and kind of crazy." Considering how little marketability she seems to have left, it's amazing how desperate the producers were to get her, but I guess you need something to sell the film if you're going to have no other connection to the original; look what severing 99.9% of all ties to the original film did for the sequel to The Blair Witch Project.

Perhaps more troubling is the fact that the plot of Basic Instinct 2 seems remarkably similar to the plot of the first Basic Instinct, except this time it's set in London, the male lead is played by a total nobody, he's a psychiatrist instead of a detective, and Stone is almost 50 years old and has to be shot through three filters and a layer of wax paper smeared with Vaseline. Also, the script is written not by trash-master Joe Eszterhas but rather, based on the trailer, by the James Bond franchise's old innuendo generator, which I think the Basic Instinct producers bought at a yard sale after the Broccolis retired it.

Basic Instinct 2 trailer (Yahoo! Movies)

Scary Movie 4 will be an unholy terror

In what appears to be a continuing quest to force the Guinness Book of World Records to create a category for "Most Absolutely Horrible Movie Ever Made," the Scary Movie franchise is back for more. Including cameos by Dr. Phil, Shaq, and Chingy does seem like a pretty good recipe for utter pain, and just to make sure that this film will make absolutely no sense to anyone within five years at the most, the plot features giant alien iPods and Tom Cruise surrogate Craig Bierko re-enacting Cruise's Oprah shenanigans. The trailer is so bad and the film as depicted within so poorly-done that I initially thought it was one of those "Don't forget to turn off your cell phone" fake trailers they're running these days, but then I realized that the movies invented for those ads all look way better than this piece of shit.

Scary Movie 4 Trailer (Yahoo! Movies)