Trailer of the Week: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

For Presidents’ Day, a love story.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a movie that everyone can enjoy. It uses elements of science fiction, nonlinear narration and neosurrealism. This film shows how you can take all of these elements and blend them together into a profound movie that touches the core of human experience.

Does that go too far?

I don’t think so.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind was met with overwhelmingly universal acclaim, and Winslet’s performance was generally praised. Many critics cited the film as the “best movie of the decade”. The film has a 93% certified fresh rating on the Rotten Tomatoes website based on 216 reviews. The consensus is that the film is “a twisty, trippy, yet moving take on love, Kaufman-style.”

Roger Ebert commented, “Despite jumping through the deliberately disorienting hoops of its story, Eternal Sunshine has an emotional center, and that’s what makes it work.” Ebert later included the film in his “Great Movies” series.

That just goes to show you aspiring screenwriters and filmmakers out there that story is king.

The songs are:

Sneakers by James Horner

Mr. Blue Sky, by E.L.O.

A Beautiful Mind by James Horner

Trailer of the Week: Billy Elliot

Before Kurt Hummel caught crap for being a boy in the glee club, there was Billy Elliot.

Billy Elliot is about a boy who just wants to dance. Of course, everyone assumes there’s something wrong with him.

Unlike Black Swan, this is a ballet movie that won’t leave a bad taste in your mouth.

The film is set during the 1984–1985 UK miners’ strike, and centres on the character of 11-year-old Billy Elliot (Jamie Bell), his love of dance, and his hope to become a professional ballet dancer. Billy lives with his widowed father, Jackie (Gary Lewis), older brother, Tony (Jamie Draven), and his invalid Nan (Jean Heywood), who once aspired to be a professional dancer. Both Jackie and Tony are coal miners out on strike.

Jackie takes Billy to the Sports Centre to learn boxing, but Billy dislikes the sport. He is instead drawn to a ballet class that is using the gym while their usual basement studio in the Sports Centre is temporarily being used as a soup kitchen for striking miners.

Unknown to Billy’s father, he joins the ballet class. When Jackie discovers this after the boxing coach mentions Billy’s absence, he forbids Billy to take any more ballet. But, passionate about dancing, Billy secretly continues his lessons with his dance teacher Georgia Wilkinson’s help.

Jackie sees Billy dancing and realizes his son is gifted.

In the end, Billy is accepted by his family as they watch him perform the lead in Swan Lake.

According to Hollywood, that’s the only ballet that exists.

Billy Elliot won several UK Independent Film Awards and was nominated for three Academy Awards in 2001, including Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Supporting Actress (Julie Walters).

The song is Book of Days by Enya.

Trailer of the Week: Previews of the Super Bowl

Apparently, this year’s Super Bowl was more about debuting previews than football (okay, maybe not totally, but for us, it was). Which to highlight?

The ones I want to see, of course.

I hope the entire movie takes place in WWII. If they try to bring him to the modern era, the plot will spin out of control.

Here’s to hoping!

The other Marvel flick, Thor. While this wasn’t a premiere, it gave us some good nuggets.

This looks good in a weird way. I love Jon Favreau’s work, and anything Ron Howard puts his name on is usually good. Just ask all those jaded Arrested Development fans.

While I have a child-like giddy anticipation for Captain America, this is the trailer that makes my heart beat faster in anticipation. Super 8 has been called J.J. Abrams’ tribute to Speilberg, and this trailer seems to prove that.

I want to see this movie.

Honorable mention goes to: Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, Limitless, Rango, and Transformers 3.

Pirates and Transformers are a hard sell for me, as I didn’t see the third Pirates nor the second Transformers.

Unless Disney makes a Pirates & Transformers to compete with Cowboys & Aliens. I think I could dig that.

What was your favorite trailer?

Trailer of the Week: Stranger than Fiction

Probably one of the more interesting cast movies in the 00′s, Stranger than Fiction featured film legends Emma Thompson and Dustin Hoffman.  The cast was rounded out by Will Ferrell, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Queen Latifah. It almost seemed like a pass the torch movie, handing down movie tradition to a new generation.

The film is brilliantly acted. Ferrell doesn’t play his usual off-the-cuff improv funny man, but a more reserved, serious character.

Harold Crick (Will Ferrell) is an auditor for the Internal Revenue Service, living his entire life based on the timing of his wristwatch. He is given the job to audit an intentionally tax-delinquent baker, Ana Pascal (Maggie Gyllenhaal) to whom he is awkwardly attracted. On the same day, he begins hearing the voice of a woman that is omnisciently narrating the events in his life, but he is unable to communicate with the voice. On his way home, Harold’s watch stops working and he resets it using the time given by a bystander; the voice narrates “little did he know that this simple, seemingly innocuous act would result in his imminent death”.

Harold attempts to change his fate, becoming a different person (read: better person) along the way.

Stranger than Fiction is one that you come away from thinking: ‘That was a good movie’

Trailer of the Week: Wall·E

In this writer’s humble opinion, Wall·E should have been nominated for Best Picture.

WALL-E won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature and was nominated for Best Original Screenplay, Best Original Score, Best Original Song, Sound Editing, and Sound Mixing at the 81st Academy Awards. Walt Disney Pictures also pushed for an Academy Award for Best Picturenomination, but it was not nominated, provoking controversy as to whether the Academy deliberately restricted WALL-E to the Best Animated Feature category, Peter Travers commented that “If there was ever a time where an animated feature deserved to be nominated for best picture it’s Wall-E.”

Most of the characters do not have actual human voices, but instead communicate with body language and robotic sounds, designed by Ben Burtt, that resemble voices.He recorded 2500 sounds for the film, which was twice the average number for a Star Wars film, and a record in his career. Burtt began work in 2005, and experimented with filtering his voice for two years. Burtt described the robot voices as “like a toddler [...] universal language of intonation. ‘Oh’, ‘Hm?’, ‘Huh!’, you know?”

In addition, it is the first animated feature by Pixar to have segments featuring live-action characters (Fred Willard as CEO of Buy n Large Corporation and clips from Hello, Dolly!).

Music featured in the trailer:

• “At Last” - Etta James
• “Super Strength” - Two Steps From Hell
• “With Great Powers” - Immediate Music
• The Great Escape (1963): “Main Titles” - Elmer Bernstein
• The New World (2005): “A Dark Cloud Is Forever Lifted” - James Horner
• “Sneak” - Non-Stop Music
• “Olympia” - X-Ray Dog
• “The Portal” - X-Ray Dog
• Wall-E (2008): “The Spaceship” - Thomas Newman

Music featured in the teaser:

• Brazil (1985): “Central Services / The Office” - Michael Kamen
• Oscar and Lucinda (1997) - Thomas Newman

 

Trailer of the Week: Best in Show

Christopher Guest is an artist. While he is not the only person to ever use the “mockumentary” style, he is certainly a pioneer in the genre.

Like all of Guest’s movies, much of the dialogue depends on the improvisation of the actors. In his other films, such as This is Spinal Tap, Waiting for Guffman, and A Mighty Wind, the key players have collaborated on many projects. Catherine O’Hara, Parker Posey, and Eugene Levy are part of the cast that can be seen throughout Guest’s career.

Best in Show is presented as a documentary of five dogs and their owners destined to show in the Mayflower Kennel Club Dog Show, held in Philadelphia. The documentary jumps between the owners as they prepare to leave for the show, arriving at the hotel, and preparing backstage before their dog takes the show.

The film is number 38 on Bravo’s “100 Funniest Movies”

Trailer of the Week: Jurassic Park

“When Pirates of the Caribbean breaks down, the pirates don’t eat the tourists.”

Ah, Jurassic Park. A classic. Back when Stephen Spielberg was directing as opposed to producing, Jurassic Park was a marvel of special effects for its time.

For you novel purists, studios such as Warner Bros., Columbia TriStar, 20th Century Fox, and Universal had already begun bidding to acquire the picture rights before Michael Chrichton’s book was even published. Spielberg, with the backing of Universal Studios, acquired the rights to the novel before its publication in 1990, and Crichton himself was hired by Universal Studios for an additional $500,000 to adapt the novel into a proper screenplay.

David Koepp wrote the final draft, which left out much of the novel’s exposition and violence, and made numerous changes to the characters.

During its release, the film grossed more than $914 million worldwide, becoming the most successful film released up to that time, it is currently the 15th highest grossing feature film, and it is the most financially successful film for NBC Universal and Steven Spielberg.

Michael Crichton originally conceived a screenplay about a graduate student who recreates a dinosaur; he continued to wrestle with his fascination with dinosaurs and cloning until he began writing the novel Jurassic Park. Spielberg learned of the novel in October 1989 while he and Crichton were discussing a screenplay that would become the television series ER.

Before the book was published, Crichton demanded a non-negotiable fee of $1.5 million as well as a substantial percentage of the gross.

For you LOST fans, you may recognize the location of the scene where the Tyrannosaurus Rex chases the Gallimimus as Hurley’s golf course (then again, I may be looking too closely). T

he American Film Institute named Jurassic Park the 35th most thrilling film of all time on June 13, 2001, and Bravo chose the scene in which Lex and Tim are stalked by two Raptors in the kitchen as the 95th scariest of all time in 2005.

On Empire magazine’s fifteenth anniversary in 2004, it judged Jurassic Park the sixth most influential film of the magazine’s lifetime. Empire called the first encounter with a Brachiosaurus the 28th most magical moment in cinema.

Trailer of the Week: Arthur Christmas

Why do I get so excited every time the Aardman logo appears on something?

The company behind Wallace and Gromit, Shaun the Sheep, and Creature Comforts brings us a full-length feature on Santa’s son, Arthur. With four Oscar wins, you know they’re legit.

Voices on the project include James McAvoy, Hugh Laurie, Bill Nighy, and Jim Broadbent.

Arthur Christmas reveals the incredible, never-before seen answer to every child’s question: ‘So how does Santa deliver all those presents in one night?’ The answer: Santa’s exhilarating, ultra-high-tech operation hidden beneath the North Pole. But at the center of the film is a story about a family in a state of comic dysfunction and an unlikely hero, Arthur, with an urgent mission that must be completed before Christmas morning dawns.

The film is set for release in 2011.

In the meantime, be sure to check out some of Aardman’s other creations.

Shaun the Sheep

Wallace and Gromit

Creature Comforts

Morph

Trailer of the Week: It’s A Wonderful Life

Buffalo gals, won’t you come out tonight?

Come out tonight, Come out tonight?

Buffalo gals, won’t you come out tonight,

And dance by the light of the moon.

Probably one of the best-known Christmas films of all time, the 1946 It’s A Wonderful Life was the story of George Bailey’s struggle with the life he lived. We find George (James Stewart) standing on a bridge about to commit suicide after everything in his life has gone wrong. An angel trying to earn his wings must show George what the world would have been like without him. It’s A Wonderful Life has similar themes as Charles Dickens’s Christmas classic  A Christmas Carol.

The film was considered a box office disappointment due to its high production costs. While it was nominate for five Academy Awards, it lost in all categories, but went on to be considered a classic and a staple of Christmas television. Despite its disappointing show at the time, it has been named one of AFI’s top 100 films ever made.

The film was remade as the 1977 television movie It Happened One Christmas starring Marlo Thomas and Wayne Rogers, with Thomas as the protagonist.

Three colorized versions of the movie were released. The most recent came out on DVD in 2007.

 

Trailer of the Week: Die Hard

You may argue that it’s not a Christmas movie, but you would be wrong. Like many trilogies turned quartets (Indiana Jones, Home Alone, Jack Ryan, X-men), the first film is good, the second is a solid effort, and the third is where everything starts to go downhill. Such is Die Hard.

John McClane, a New York City cop, travels to LA to see his wife on Christmas Eve. During a party at her office building, a group of German terrorist take over the building. Over the course of the evening, McClane contacts police is becomes a thorn in the side Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman) and his cohorts.

Michael Kamen provided the score. Beethoven’s 9th Symphony is featured prominently in Kamen’s score throughout the film, in many guises and variations (mostly as a leitmotif for Gruber and the terrorists), and thematic variations on “Singin’ in the Rain” are also featured as the theme for the character Theo. The score also features sleigh bells in some cues, as well as the Christmas pop standard “Winter Wonderland.” Two 1987 pop songs are used as source music: near the beginning of the film, limousine driver Argyle plays the rap song “Christmas In Hollis”, performed by Run-D.M.C., and later, while talking on the phone in the limousine, Argyle is listening to Stevie Wonder’s “Skeletons.” The end credits of the film begin with the Christmas song “Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!” (performed by Vaughn Monroe) and continues/concludes with Beethoven’s 9th Symphony.

One man. One catch phrase. 30 stories.