Our featured trailer this
week is a crazy, stupid one: Crazy,
Stupid, Love that is, a dramedy starring soon-to-be-leaving-The Office Steve Carell along with Ryan Gosling and
Julianne Moore. We also have a period thriller about the truth behind
Shakespeare’s work directed by Rolland Emerich … wait, let me check that … yes, ok
the man who directed The Day After
Tomorrow and 2012 is indeed
taking on a dramatic offering about the origins of the Oxfordian theory of
Shakespeare authorship.
Then, rounding out the top five trailers this week is
the UFC-themed Warrior headlined by
rising superstar Tom Hardy, the king of crazy Lars Von Trier’s latest Melancholia with Kirsten Dunst and
Kiefer Sutherland and finally the teaser for the Daniel Radcliffe-starring
horror flick The Woman in Black. It
don’t matter if you’re black or white, it’s Trailer Tracker.
New clips this week:
Crazy, Stupid, Love
Anonymous
Warrior
Melancholia
The Woman in Black
Crazy, Stupid, Love
Steve Carell has been a solid comedic force in film dating back to 2003 with his supporting role in Bruce Almighty and excluding some forays into more independent territory, he has thus far starred in an astounding seven $100 million-plus movies, roughly one per year. With his wildly successful stint as the clueless Michael Scott on the American update of The Office coming to an end, we should no doubt see the former Daily Show correspondent in a lot more big-screen fare. First, we have Crazy, Stupid, Love where he stars with Ryan Gosling, Julianne Moore, Emma Stone, Kevin Bacon and Marisa Tomei in this dramedy directed by Glenn Ficarra and John Requa who previously scribed Bad Santa and wrote/directed the Jim Carrey dark comedy I Love You, Phillip Morris just last year.
In “Crazy, Stupid,” Carell
stars as Cal Weaver, a man whose life is shaken when his wife (Moore) announces
their marriage will be coming to an end. Devastated, he sulks in bars where he
happens to meet a bona fide lady’s man (Gosling) who takes him up as a wingman
and shows him the life he had been missing. Love, however, is a funny force and
begins to make a mess of things (though possibly a good mess) for all those
involved. It is difficult not to be excited for this movie based on the cast alone,
featuring any number of up-and-comers and big name stars. Ficarra and Requa are
purveyors of black comedy, though they for once do not serve as screenwriters
here, which will be an interesting change of pace. Carell is a master at
playing the innocent screwball with a big heart and as far as I’m concerned his
charms have not gotten close to wearing off. Crazy, Stupid, Love churns things up on July 29.
Anonymous
No, it’s not a
fast-tracked sequel to Liam Neeson’s hit Unknown
though that would likely have been less odd. Anonymous is directed by the lord of the disaster movie, Rolland
Emmerich, who’s most famous past effort was the mammoth smash Independence Day. After working with
budgets arching far over the $100-million mark, he scales things down
considerably with this period thriller starring Rhys Ifans as Edward de Vere, the
17th Earl of Oxford, who according to a belief carried by a group of scholars was the real scribe behind the many works of William Shakespeare. Known as the
Oxfordian Theory, it suggests that masterpieces such as Hamlet and
Macbeth were actually produced under a pseudonym. Emmerich has owned the rights to
the script for some eight years, so he is passionate about the product. The
story is fascinating to be certain, though it will come down to if this action
director can successfully keep excess to a minimum.
Warrior
Mixed Martial Arts, or
MMA, has exploded in recent years and stands as one of the most popular sports
operating today. It was only a matter of time before the good ol’
Melancholia
You need only glance at a
few films in director Lars Von Trier’s filmography, which include Dancer in the Dark and Antichrist, to know the man is one
seriously disturbed individual. After self-proclaiming to bethe greatest
director of all time in recent years, he returns with Melancholia, a pseudo-disaster film centered on two sisters who
become increasingly distant from one another as the end of the world nears
courtesy of a Worlds Collide-style
impact between Earth and another planet. In a statement as bizarre as Von
Trier’s filmography, he stated that he considers all of his previous films to
end happily, and that this will be the first with an unhappy ending. Ok then.
The Woman in Black
The Woman in Black is an upcoming supernatural thriller based on
Susan Hill's hit novel of the same name and is a “remake” of the 1989 film. Harry
Potter himself, Daniel Radcliffe, stars as lawyer Arthur Kipps, a young counsel
who travels to a remote village to close an estate where he encounters a
vengeful spirit in black with a terrible secret. Radcliffe has not had much
opportunity to stretch his thespian legs outside of that aforementioned
blockbuster franchise, though he is certainly a talented young man and I think
he can hold is own in an atmospheric creeper, as long people can get past his role
as the famed wizard and focus more on the performance.