Posts Tagged ‘movie trailer’

The movie trailer for Punisher: War Zone was released a few days ago. Strangely, when I went and saw The Incredible Hulk, neither it nor The Dark Knight played before it, though I’m guessing most theaters got a whiff of it.

The teaser trailer is pretty good considering the quality of the movie, which looks questionable at best. The marketing department has done a good job of building an action-packed, gun blazing, exciting teaser trailer, but Punisher: War Zone does not have me begging for more. I’m sure it will be mindless fun, but the action just screams of Hitman, which was all style and not much substance. Seeing Frank Castle spin around on a chandelier firing dual pistols means fun action, but not necessarily good action. Throw in a really bad one-liner at the end and we have ourselves a problem, folks.

Maybe I’m being unfair to Punisher: War Zone, but this looks like a really good teaser trailer for a not-so-good action movie.

I’ll provide my opinions on this one and the several other movie trailers that have been released in recent days later this week, but here’s the third, all-new movie trailer for the new Batman movie, The Dark Knight returns:

The movie trailer really doesn’t show much new footage, but things are presented in a different way. They are taking great care to slowly tune each marketing piece that comes to audiences, as this movie trailer is even better than the last. The music fades out in a couple weird spots, and I wish they would end the trailer with more of a money shot, but that’s just being picky.

It’s no surprise that on the eve of the release of The Incredible Hulk, audiences get treated to the teaser trailer for the upcoming movie sequel Punisher: War Zone. Watch the teaser trailer below and let me know what you think:

Check out the new movie trailer for the upcoming limited-release film Kabluey, which stars Lisa Kudrow, Teri Garr, Christine Taylor, Conchata Ferrell, Chris Parnell and Jeffrey Dean Morgan.

The official Kabluey synopsis is as follows:

Inept Salman (Scott Prendergast) comes to help his sister-in-law (Lisa Kudrow) tend to her homicidal toddlers while Salman’s brother is off fighting in Iraq. Salman must take a humiliating job as a giant blue corporate mascot to help make ends meet and hold the family together. Packed with a parade of delightful comedy character actors, “Kabluey” is a hilarious, unique and heartfelt comedy.

Here’s the movie trailer for Vin Diesel’s upcoming sci-fi action movie Babylon A.D.:

Paramount Pictures has just released the movie trailer for the upcoming movie Hotel for Dogs, which debuts January 16, 2009. You can watch the Hotel for Dogs movie trailer below:

Here is the official synopsis for Hotel for Dogs:Hotel for Dogs, stars Emma Roberts, Jake T. Austin, Lisa Kudrow, Kevin Dillon and Don Cheadle in a smart, funny comedy adventure that shows how far love and imagination can take you. When their new guardians forbid 16-year old Andi (Roberts) and her younger brother, Bruce (Austin) to have a pet, Andi has to use her quick wit to help find a new home for their dog, Friday. The resourceful kids stumble upon an abandoned hotel and using Bruce’s talents as a mechanical genius, transform it into a magical dog-paradise for Friday – and eventually for all Friday’s friends. When barking dogs make the neighbors suspicious, Andi and Bruce use every invention they have to avoid anyone discovering “who let the dogs in.”

After complaining about the lack of a really good English-language movie trailer, the English-language version of the Russian X-Files: I Want to Believe movie trailer has popped online over at YouTube. Now that the trailer’s in English, we can actually get a few clues about the plot – but still, Carter and 20th Century Fox are keeping the plot well under wraps.

Here’s the new X-Files: I Want to Believe movie trailer (I expect a higher quality version to pop online sooner than later):

The Red Band trailer for the upcoming Coen Brothers movie Burn After Reading went online today over at Apple.com. It is definitely not along the same vein as Joel and Ethan Coen’s last film, No Country for Old Men, but still looks pretty good. Here’s how the studio describes the movie, which is set to be released in September 12, 2008:

A dark spy-comedy from Academy Award winners Joel and Ethan Coen. An ousted CIA official’s (Academy Award nominee John Malkovich) memoir accidentally falls into the hands of two unwise gym employees intent on exploiting their find.

The trailer is pretty funny, in an offbeat way – what else would you expect from the Coens? Most noticeable is the fact that the movie has an absolutely killer cast, specifically George Clooney, John Malkovich, Frances McDormand, Brad Pitt and Tilda Swinton. You really can’t get much better than that unless you threw in a Meryl Streep.

Learn more about Burn After Reading, or watch the movie trailer.

While I was disappointed that the new Batman movie trailer didn’t premiere with Iron Man, I was delighted to see a new, longer and much better movie trailer for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull before the comic book film.

Some people complained that the last preview was a little too goofy and comical; apparently, someone was listening, because this new trailer has almost no humor whatsoever. That’s a good thing. The trailer starts off with a little more explanation about the myth of the Crystal Skull – essentially more information about the plot than anyone has heard about before (the Crystal Skull is believed to be some relic that, when returned to a sacred temple, the person who is responsible for its return will be able to control its power any way he or she sees fit). Beyond that, the movie trailer digresses into an action montage, some of which we’ve seen before as well as a few new tidbits.

Overall, the new Indiana Jones movie trailer is much more cohesive and really gets you pumped up, whereas the teaser trailer was entertaining but not particularly motivating. With only a few weeks left before its release, this trailer made me just a tiny bit more excited.

The new movie trailer for the upcoming Kate Hudson movie My Best Friend’s Girl arrived today, and it looks awfully a lot like… How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days. The only difference is that in this movie, Dane Cook is trying to lose Hudson as fast as possible, and Dane Cook is no Matthew McConaughey.

In reality, I like the concept for the movie. In what could also be described as a reversal of Good Luck Chuck, Cook plays a guy who gets paid to act like an ass some ex-girlfriends will run back to the boyfriends they just dumped. Jason Biggs plays Cook’s best friend who, after being dumped by Hudson, hires Cook to work his “charm” on her. Naturally, the two fall in love, putting Cook in a very precarious position.

The movie trailer isn’t particularly funny (it ones again features Dane Cook tripping in front of a girl!), but it looks harmless enough. Here’s the My Best Friend’s Girl movie trailer:

I just watched the so-called movie trailer for the upcoming George Lucas movie Star Wars: The Clone Wars, which is an animated film that takes place between the second and third movies. The movie trailer, which can be seen below, looks more like an unofficial teaser trailer, as it really is just a montage of scenes and special effects without any kind of storytelling narrative, setup or exposition. The trailer also ends on a cheesy note, which makes me think that this video is not intended to be any kind of official preview (plus it lacks credits and MPAA approval).

Anyway, I have no clue what to make of this new Star Wars movie. It’s going to be challenging watching a feature-length Star Wars movie as a cartoon, no matter how good the visuals are. The action will probably be pretty engaging as Lucas has always been good at drawing his audiences into battle sequences, but the movie is really going to struggle when the characters are on the screen and talking. The actual human characters are cartoons originally intended for the small screen – they certainly aren’t up to Pixar standards, and that’s a problem. Will I be able to get past the poor facial features and focus on the story? I don’t know.

Ultimately, I am 50/50 on the movie. Part of me is excited that another Star Wars movie is coming out, but part of me wishes that the movie just remain a TV pilot. If the prequel movies didn’t ruin the Star Wars experience for you, a theatrical cartoon version might. While I have to assume that this movie will make a decent amount of money, I have to wonder how many people will actually go see it. The casual viewer is not going to be so thrilled to go watch a cheesy Star Wars cartoon; it’s going to be for die hards only.

Only time will tell… Until then, here’s the Star Wars “movie trailer:”

I finally gave in and watched some promotional material for Zombie Strippers, a movie about… zombie strippers. I have seen some movie posters floating around recently, but disregarded the film as B-grade crap. Having now watched the new red band trailer, which is included farther down this article, it definitely looks like B-grade crap, though if Sony markets the film right and takes a Snakes on a Plane angle, they might be able to squeak a few dollars out of the concept.

But that’s not what this post is about.

The Red Band trailer for Zombie Strippers is just plain awful. I’m not talking about the content, the forced dialogue, the cheesy script or the B-grade look. No, I’m talking about the lack of material, or the lack of the lack of material in the trailer. Just so you know, Red Band trailers are previews that are only allowed to be viewed by restricted audiences – i.e. people who can legally get into R-rated movies. Hence, as seen in the Pathology Red Band trailer, gore, nudity and the like are technically allowed.

The Zombie Strippers Red Band trailer looks like a toned-down version of a Green Band (approved for general audiences) trailer. There’s no nudity, no gore and absolutely nothing that would entice me to go see this flick. If I’m going to pay money to waste an hour and a half of my time watching a crappy movie, I better get some brilliant gore and a lot of breasts, and it’s the Red Band trailer’s job to notify me if such a movie is worth the investment.

So far, it appears as though Zombie Strippers is going to be a PG-rated waste of time.

Here’s the Zombie Strippers Red Band trailer:

I just watched the new movie trailer for House Bunny, the latest comedy starring Anna Farris. I have actually grown to find her quite hot… unfortunately, she continues to choose absolutely idiotic movies. I have absolutely zero interest in House Bunny, which looks about as original… hell, I don’t have to work anymore this week – thus my mind has shutdown and I can’t think of anything clever to say.

Anyway, House Bunny is about a Playboy Bunny, who, after getting kicked out of the mansion for being too old (at age 27), moves into a sorority with a bunch of loser girls. As one might imagine, she teaches the intellectuals how to look pretty and get guys, while she falls for a guy who is more interested in smart women. Sound like any other college movie? I thought so.

The movie trailer really isn’t funny at all, but you can see for yourself:

The new movie trailer (or is it a teaser trailer?) for Space Chimps (view Space Chimps movie details here) is now online in all its glory, but before I get to that, let me touch on the Space Chimps official site. What a frikkin’ disaster.

I don’t like wasting time, especially when it’s for watching a movie preview that should take up at most two-and-a-half minutes of my life. I also don’t like jerky loading times, video that pauses mid-stride and so on and so forth. So, I headed over to the official movie website to check out the new Space Chimps trailer, and this is my encounter:

1. I hit a very slow-loading Flash intro screen that takes abnormally long.
2. This leads to an intro screen with some guy in a lab dance doing a weird dance and talking (singing?). Unfortunately, the video is so choppy I can’t understand what he’s saying. I should have hit “Skip.”
3. I am then funneled into the actual official site, where the movie trailer begins to load. Good, I think.
4. Except that after another long Flash loading screen, things are still problematic. I can see in the play bar that trailer is loading at a decent clip, but not only does it not start playing automatically, when I click on the play button, nothing happens.
5. Frustrated after about a minute of this, I open up Internet Explorer to see if I can get better luck in there. Just as I do that, the trailer starts playing in Firefox.
6. The trailer comes to an abrupt halt about four times during its short running time, even though it had fully loaded a couple minutes earlier.
7. I’m waiting so long that I switch screens to start working on something else. The trailer starts playing and, with the audio at its normal level, I nearly have a heart attack each time it resumes from a pause.

I don’t know who to blame here. Maybe I’m on a bad connection, but I doubt it. Maybe the server administrators are to blame for underestimating the amount of bandwidth needed to host the website. Maybe the Flash designer coded something poorly so everything takes a really long time to load. I don’t know, but this isn’t a great first impression for a movie in the year 2008.

As for Space Chimps the movie, it looks decent enough. The trailer, which I’m pretty sure is actually a teaser trailer, has its moments as we get to see some animated chimpanzees prepare for lift off. It appears as though they end up traveling through a wormhole, though that’s as far as we get to see initially. As a teaser, this works, though you can certainly tell this is not going to be an animated classic by any stretch of the animation. The visuals are pretty decent, but appear to be made more to make a quick buck than win any awards. The humor should appeal well enough to young children.

The new, full-length movie trailer for Guillermo Del Toro’s Hellboy II: The Golden Army is now online, and guess what? I watched it!

Yes, exciting news I know, but hold your breath because there’s more: I wrote a review about Hellboy 2‘s trailer! I know, it’s shocking that I of all people would cast my opinion so valiantly into the night, as if nothing frightened or shocked me, but it’s true. But enough about me, on with the Hellboy 2 movie trailer review…

I don’t know what it is about the big blockbuster movie trailers this year, but they are just not connecting with me. Am I being too picky? Maybe. Am I in a bad mood? I’ve been a bad mood all week. I’m not exactly sure what the reason is, but since I consider myself perfect, I’m going to blame someone else. The movie trailer for Hellboy 2 is… good. Good, but not great. It has a fair amount of action, some impressive special effects, so on and so forth, but once again, something just didn’t click for me. The setup for the characters and plot line seems uninspired, as if the trailer team was more intent on summarizing the film rather than promoting it. The introduction to the main villain at the beginning of the trailer seemed a bit too casual; the villain himself is never made out to be all that intimidating (besides being rather homely).

When Hellboy shows up, there isn’t that, “Ohhh, it’s Hellboy!” It’s more like, “Well, clearly it’s Hellboy. I saw that coming from a mile away.” Again, that might be overly picky, but I’m big on good setups in movie trailers – start off with a little mystery, present the threat, and then, in glorious fashion, present the solution. The Hellboy 2 trailer bypasses the mystery and doesn’t introduce the threat or solution in any amazing way.

All that being said, the movie trailer is still pretty entertaining. The dry humor is clearly still intact, and the theme music is back. There looks like they’ll be plenty of action and strange creatures, which is good. All in all, Hellboy 2 looks like it could end up being pretty good, but the movie trailer hasn’t convinced me of it.

More interesting to see will be whether Hellboy 2 does better than the original; it’s got the sequel thing going for it, but did the original gather that much of a following to make this sequel a true blockbuster sequel? I’m hesitant to say, “yes.”

Get the skinny on the movie at my Hellboy 2 details page.