More trailers for everyone!
Yes I appreciate that sounds like the sort of the slogan that a movie mogul running for re-election would use – you know, assuming they had to run for re-election, which you know, they, um, don’t … moving on … – but it is exactly what I would want to be offered by anyone wanting to get my attention.
Which clearly they have because I have put three of my favourite recent trailers, plucked with speed and unerring eye for a catchy hook, from the unceasing flood of pop culture goodness that courses around me at every turn.
So dive on in with me and check what’s coming and why you might want to get a little excited.
OK a lot … get bat s**t crazy, whoopin’ and a-hollerin’ excited … starting … NOW!
PARADISE
SNAPSHOT
After a nearly fatal accident, 21-year-old Lamb Mannerheim (Julianne Hough) is beginning to realize that the world is much bigger than her small, God-fearing Montana town. Armed with a big, fat insurance payout and a checklist of untried sins, there’s only one place for her first taste of temptation…Las Vegas! And, with the help of a few new friends (Russell Brand and Octavia Spencer), Lamb embarks on an oddball odyssey of lost souls, broken faith and cheap cocktails…a true journey of the heart. (source: geektyrant.com)
“Some people say this whole world is broken. I say it’s paradise.”
I love this line, which Lamb Mannerheim, a woman undergoing the mother of all crises of faiths undergoes when a major life changing event forces her to re-assess everything she ever believed in life.
It’s one of those perfectly-formed observations of life that Diablo Cody, making her directorial debut with Paradise, who brought us the delights of Juno and the complex and engaging The United States of Tara, is adept at filling a script with, and it neatly sums up this movie which will be available on demand via DirectTV on 8 August 2013, with a wider US release to follow 18 October.
While it will be interpreted in some more conservative quarters as an attack on faith itself, it is really asking the sort of questions that anyone who wants an authentic, well thought-through faith in anything should be asking.
And shaken to her core, Lamb takes her “Napkin of Sin” (must get me one of those!) and sets out to explore what life is really about with the help of a wise-cracking bartender (Brand) and an aging world weary show girl (Spencer).
While played for laughs to an extent, at its core it carries with it Cody’s trademark willingness to ask the big questions of life, and layer in as much vulnerable, exposed humanity as we can handle.
And with a writer, and yes now director as talented as Cody in charge, I am happy to handle as much as she will give me.
SHERLOCK (season 3)
“2014, my dear Watson, 2000 and bl**dy 14.”
Yes that’s how long we all have to wait for series three of Sherlock, the acclaimed contemporary re-imagining of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s evergreen sleuth Sherlock Holmes (Benedict Cumberbatch, Star Trek Into Darkness) and his trusty companion and partner in crime solving, Watson (Martin Freeman, The Hobbit) by Dr Who executive producer Steven Moffat and writer Mark Gatiss.
But fear not eager viewers for a teaser trailer is at hand!
And it shows that contrary to appearances, Sherlock did not fall to his death at the end of series two.
You could have been forgiven for thinking that he did but it appears he survived with all limbs and that handsome face quite nicely intact, something that Mark Gatiss made clear wasn’t beyond the realms of possibility at Comic-Con 2013:
“There really are only a few ways you can fall from a roof and survive,” “Sherlock” co-creator Mark Gatiss said at Comic-Con. “It’s not black magic.” (source: huffingtonpost.com)
Oh and Watson has a moustache!
Yes a hairy caterpillar has crawled across his upper lip.
Quite what Holmes will make of that is not clear but we should find out sometime in 2014 when the series premieres.
THE SECRET LIFE OF WALTER MITTY
SNAPSHOT
“Stiller stars as Mitty, a mild-mannered employee at LIFE magazine who dreams of becoming worthy of the periodical’s pages (and of his co-worker Cheryl, played by Kristin Wiig). Of course, as with most short stories that become movies, the plot doesn’t cleave precisely to the source material: unlike the original Mitty, whose adventures are purely internal, Stiller’s Mitty ends up taking action.” (source: time.com)
Almost from the moment James Thurber’s short story The Secret Life of Walter Mitty was published in The New Yorker on 18 March, 1939, it captured the attention of beleaguered people everywhere, all of whom felt that there must be more to life than 9-to-5 clocking on and off and the endless banality of the daily commute.
It struck a chord precisely because it spoke to one the great agonies of the human condition – that life is never quite what we imagine it will be.
So much a part of the popular lexicon did it become that a “Walter Mitty” is now defined as an ineffectual person who seeks release from their boring, self-constrained life through extravagant daydreams, sometimes resorting to deceit to give their long-denied fantasies a semblance of reality.
Proving that this great existential dilemma can still speak to audiences today, Ben Stiller is bringing Thurber’s tale to life once more on the big screen – it was previously made into a movie starring Danny Kaye in 1947; by all accounts, Thurber was not a fan of the movie which bore little resemablance to his story offering Samuel Goldwyn Mayer $10,000 to leave his story alone – with a release date set for 25 December this year.
It will however make its world premiere at the 51st New York Film Festival on Saturday 5 October, according to deadline.com, which means we should fairly quickly if the much-anticipated film is the stuff of dreams or nightmares.
I very much suspect the former, and may be tempted to jump out of helicopter into the sea in my own evocation of Ben Stiller as Walter Mitty’s larger-than-life wanna-be hero.
Or I may just wait till 26 December 2013 when it opens in Australia and heroically saunter into my cinema seat instead.
Which one/s are you most looking forward to?