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.

Doomed by the Premise

So, the other day I off-handedly referred to Ryan Gosling as this generation's De Niro, and I got six Google hits searching for him specifically. Now, in the storied history of this blog, that's a lot of traffic.

I was of course then tempted to spend an entire week on Ryan Gosling, just to shamelessly bid for more traffic- I would even be excused in that he has a new movie out, Lars and the Real Girl.

But unfortunately, it looks ridiculous- another example of a film with a great actor that's doomed by the premise. A man that falls in love with a sex doll is either going to make for a crude, annoyingly base film that hammers the same joke into the ground, or an overly precious, whimsical movie that hammers the same joke into the ground. From the early reviews, Lars and the Real Girl is the latter. Of course it doesn't help that it's from the director of Mr. Woodcock.

So I probably won't see that one. Much like last year I didn't see Venus, because I love Peter O'Toole, but not Peter O'Toole chewing scenery and perving it up around a nineteen-year-old.

Then there's movies with reportedly great lead performances that are just too depressing to even be tempted: Angelina Jolie will probably get an Oscar nomination for A Mighty Heart, but I'm not a big fan of beheadings. I love Don Cheadle but I never worked up my enthusiasm for genocide enough to watch Hotel Rwanda. I'm not even huge enough into atrocities from the Iraq war to have made it to Tommy Lee Jones's recent In the Valley of Elah.

I can't imagine any actor or actress that I would see anything starring them, can you? But maybe that's because I understand that movies are more than star vehicles, if they're done right. I'll never forget all the people complaining about the lack of Jim Carrey's hamminess and crazy facial expressions walking out of the theater from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (a future Obscurity Hall of Fame member).

Well, maybe George Clooney. I've got a ticket for Michael Clayton tonight, and I've seen all of his starring roles in the theater except for The Good German.