Trailer Report: Lars and the Real Girl, The Kite Runner, Juno

The trailers in front of The Darjeeling Limited: a mixed bag.

Lars and the Real Girl



Meh. I was most interested to see how often the crowd laughed at this one- there was a chuckle when the doll first appears, another one at "she loves kids," and that was it: the joke gets old before the trailer is over.

Add in the unrealistic behavior of the townspeople, the not as poignant as they think it is dialogue with the brother, and it all looks very beige to me.

The Kite Runner



Haven't read the book, but I have this theory: reading an English novel about foreign cultures is all right, because words on a page don't take you out of anything. But a movie about a foreign culture where everyone speaks English all the time is distracting: they can be middling like Memoirs of a Geisha, or terrible like K-19: The Widowmaker.

And with all the slow fades, sweeping shots, gratuitous slow-mo, and music swells in this trailer, it really looks like they've Frank Capra-ized Khaled Hosseini's novel. And that title graphic looks like a Hallmark Original movie title.

Juno



The final entry in the trilogy of pregnancy movies about progressively younger people: first the late twenties country pregnancy Waitress, then the early/mid-twenties LA pregnancy Knocked Up, and finally the teenage pregnancy Juno.

And this looks good. The trailer does anyway, because it relies on the film itself to do the talking, not the Voice Guy or music. The only way to justify the feel-good montage at the end of the trailer is to make us care about the characters in the minute and a half that comes first, and they nail it.

Also, "shenanigans" is a funny word.