Spring is at our door … it’s
also pounding on our windows, hammering our roofs and turning everything to mud.
April showers may bring May flowers, but they also give us some great trailers this week on Player Affinity. Three festival faves, three raunchy comedies and
two red band clips are all on the proverbial table, so read on.
First off, Zombieland director Reuben Fleisher
teams up with recent Oscar nominee Jesse Eisenberg in the action comedy 30 Minutes or Less, and then Paul Rudd
joins a quartet of talented dames in the Sundance darling Our Idiot Brother. The body-swap comedy appears alive and well with
The Change-Up featuring Jason Bateman
and Ryan Reynolds, for which we have the R-rated clip and then things get a tad
more quirky in the acclaimed British coming-of-age dramedy Submarine. Finally we get the second
another-planet-enters-into-our-solar-system movie after Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia with Another Earth (though the latter almost certainly promises to be
the less disturbing of the two). Come on, get your head out of the clouds, it’s
Trailer Tracker.
New clips this week:
30 Minutes or Less
Our Idiot Brother
The Change-Up
Submarine
Another Earth
30 Minutes or Less
After making his start in
advertising and music videos,
Our Idiot Brother
Already being touted as the performance of Paul Rudd’s career, Sundance Film Festival favourite Our Idiot Brother teams the funnyman with the talented likes of Elizabeth Banks, Zooey Deschanel, Emily Mortimer and Kathryn Hahn who play sisters to Rudd’s Ned. Ned, as it turns out, is a little too clueless and a lot too trusting for his own good and after a moronic brush with the law he tests the patience of his kin with his overly easy-going attitude and many unintentional faux pas. Rudd has been a consistent though perpetually underappreciated comedic force for years now, so perhaps this will give him that tiny push he needs to achieve Vince Vaughn-level status (though that may be a bit of an insult looking at Vaughn’s most recent work). Forgiving random comparisons, Our Idiot Brother is certainly one of my most anticipated comedies of the year.
The Change-Up
Ahhh Freaky Friday with grown men, is there anything we could want more? Well, if that manly duo consists of Jason Bateman and Ryan Reynolds than don’t count The Change-Up down-and-out just yet. The formula is tried and true: one player (Reynolds) is a player (and not in the football sense, kids) and the other a family man (Bateman) who both piss in a mystical (figuratively) fountain and switch bodies and appreciate what they have and so forth. I’ll admit the red band trailer is amusing and these guys are just too darn likeable to dismiss outright. David Dobkin, who has given us two much-loved comedies in recent years with Shanghai Knights (ok, maybe not that one so much) and Wedding Crashers, directs. Give us the equivalent of some nuptial-inspired mayhem and maybe I won’t turn this raunchy offering down.
Submarine
Are you tired of hearing
about acclaimed festival films? Well, we only have, ummm, two more, beginning
with Submarine which made a splash at
TIFF and stars relative unknowns Craig Roberts and Yasmin Paige as two teens,
one an awkward (though talented) recluse and the other a pyromaniac who,
combined form an unlikely bond as Roberts’ Oliver Tate tries to reassemble his
fractured family. Supposedly sweet, quirky and at times brutally honest, Submarine marks a (mostly) debut effort
from Brit Richard Ayoade who has done consistent work with the band Arctic Monkeys
in a music video capacity and stars in The
IT crowd which is apparently popular in Britain but to which I can not
personally speak. For now, I’ll go with the buzz, and if Submarine lands in an art house theatre near me, I will take the
dive.
Another Earth
Lars von Trier unleashed
the trailer for Melancholia not too
long ago (which in case you missed that
past Trailer Tracker, follows the imminent demise of planet Earth and the
relationships that spring from that event). Also with a remake of When Worlds Collide on the way, I ask
the question: “how big is the
threshold for smackdown-ing planets?" Well, at least one more with Another Earth, which reeks of festival
buzz concerning a film about a mirrored version of Planet Earth in the sky which
appears to have the same general inhabitants, sans the nuances. After a
catastrophic mistake, the female lead (who I can find nothing about) dreams
about traveling to this newly discovered satellite in hopes of writing wrongs
conducted on Earth. Am I becoming an art house snob? Call me such, but I will
aim to check out this Sundance award winner if I have the chance.