Forthcoming Film Furore!: Dinner For Schmucks, The Losers, The A-Team, The Expendables, The Good Heart

OK, so we're running through a few films here, but with good reason. With Summer just around the corner, we're seeing a lot of trailers for big brainless summer movies. Three of the films we're showing you the trailers for are "team of badasses on a mission" movies: The Losers, The A-Team, and The Expendables.

But first, let's look at the trailer for Dinner for Schmucks. A remake of a French film, Dinner for Schmucks stars Paul Rudd as a guy who needs to bring a huge idiot to dinner at his boss's house to get a promotion. Rudd finds Steve Carrell, a well-meaning simpleton who stuffs dead mice and puts them into dioramas. There's not a lot in the trailer that's laugh-out-loud funny, but Rudd and Carrell are two of the most likeable comedians around, and the supporting cast is strong, including Zach Galifianakis, Bruce Greenwood, Kristin Schaal, Ron Livingston, and Jemaine Clement. We'll wait for another trailer before we make up our minds about this one.

Right, let's look at our men on missions. First up is The Losers. Based on the Vertigo graphic novel, The Losers are a badass special ops team that is betrayed by the government and left for dead. However, they decide to get payback. Produced by Joel Silver, who produced movies like Predator and Lethal Weapon back in the day, and Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, Sherlock Holmes and Orphan more recently, the film seems to be going for fun more than anything else. The film stars Jeffrey Dean Morgan, who came out of Watchmen with reputation enhanced, action queen of the moment Zoe Saldana (Avatar, Star Trek), newly crowned Captain America Chris Evans (Sunshine, Scott Pilgrim), The Wire's Idris Elba, and Jason Patric as bad guy Max. Director Sylvain White's resumé isn't great, but it's only his third feature. At the moment, this looks like the film with the greatest potential to not be a disaster

Now onto the A-Team. As we all know, they're four men imprisoned for a crime they didn't commit, who promptly escaped and if you can find them maybe you can hire them. They can also use whatever's in a room to create something destructive with the help of a quick montage. This movie version of the series is written and directed by Joe Carnahan, who must be looking for some of the pedigree he got with gritty cop thriller Narc, and lost with overblown muddled assassin movie Smokin' Aces. The cast is good, with Liam Neeson getting paid handsomely for playing Hannibal Smith, Hangover star Bradley Cooper as Face, and District 9's Sharlto Copley as Howlin' Mad Murdock. They're joined by Watchmen's Patrick Wilson as the villain, and Jessica Biel as the love interest. Ultimate Fighter Quinton "Rampage" Jackson stars as B.A. Baracus. The trailer looks like they're going for fun, but it's a sad fact that, despite what Seinfeld taught us, most movies that feature anything falling out of a plane and shooting back at the plane are normally crap.

And now for The Expendables. Sylvester Stallone has managed to get almost every action star to sign for this men on a mission movie. Sly himself leads his team of bad-ass mercenaries, made up of Jason Statham, Jet Li, Terry Crews, Dolph Lundgren, and Randy Couture into South America to take down evil CIA agent Eric Roberts. Oh, and he gets the jobs from Mickey Rourke, and Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenneger cameo as shady government guys. With this cast list, I'm going to see it no matter how bad the reviews are. It basically looks like a Rambo film, but with a bigger supporting cast. Let's just hope that Stallone wrote his co-stars actual characters, rather than just having them stand in the background. I'm still looking forward to it!

Finally, to counter the big budget stupidity, here is a trailer for a little indie film called The Good Heart. It stars Brian Cox as a grouchy New York bar owner who takes in homeless Paul Dano to groom him as his successor. This trailer shows off Cox and Dano, who look like they're giving excellent peformances, and it looks like a nice mixture of Jim Jarmusch-style humour and Hal Hartley-esque dialogue. This may well be worth seeking out.

Recent release reviewed!!!!: Fantastic Mr. Fox

FANTASTIC MR FOX (2009)

Director. Wes Anderson

Written by: Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach

You know you're watching an idiosyncratic movie when a stop-motion human character, who is quite obviously Jarvis Cocker, is told off for "bad song-writing". Such is the spirit of Wes Anderson's oddball version of Roald Dahl's classic children's book. Any staunch fans expecting a faithful adaptation should really save their money and their blood pressure. This is not Roald Dahl's Fantastic Mr. Fox. It's Wes Anderson's Roald Dahl's Fantastic Mr. Fox, and either you embrace that, or you're going to have an infuriating 90 minutes.

The plot of this film? Well, Mr. Fox (George Clooney) is having a mid-life crisis. Mrs. Fox (Meryl Streep) just wants the best for her family. Their 12-year old (in Fox years) son Ash (Jason Schwartzman) is having difficulty reconciling his physique with his athletic ambitions. Matters are made worse for Ash when his athletic, meditation-practicing, cousin Kristofferson comes to stay. Meanwhile, Mr. Fox has set his sights on robbing the three mean local farmers, Boggis, Bunce and Bean (Michael Gambon). The farmers aren't going to take this theft lying down, however, and lay seige to Foxy's tree. Throw in a dim-witted but loyal opossum called Kylie, Fox's lawyer Badger (Bill Murray), and a psychotic Southern rat (Willem Dafoe), and that's the story in a nutshell.

Essentially, it's a Wes Anderson film. This is made abundantly clear in the opening seconds as we see the familiar bold yellow chapter headings, and chapter plots laid out in the book. The Fox family seem could be the Zissous or the Tenenbaums with only a few minor tweaks and changes. Meryl Streep even sounds a lot like Anjelica Huston! The "crazy eyes" from Life Aquatic are lovingly recreated ad nauseam. And the Anderson regulars are (mostly) all here, with Schwartzman, Murray, Dafoe, Gambon, Owen Wilson in a small role as Ash' gym coach, and Adrien Brody in a smaller role as a fieldmouse. On the villainous front, Gambon has a great time voicing Bean, the nastiest of the three farmers. Meanwhile, Dafoe gets to do a voice that sounds like Hannibal Lecter's impression of Clarice Starling while calling Mrs. Fox the town tart. Both are alternately funny and frightening. The family issues are given more of a foreground than they ever were in Dahl's book, but this is what Anderson is good at. And it works. Mr. and Mrs. Fox's relationship is handled sensitively, perhaps too sensitively for a children's movie. At one point Mrs. Fox tells her husband "I love you. But I shouldn't have married you."

But Anderson is also clearly enjoying subverting the ususal expectations for a kids' film. Around halfway through, Mrs. Fox gives Ash the "We're all different" speech, concluding "And isn't there something fantastic about that?" As she leaves, Ash sniffily tells her "For you, maybe. I want to be an athlete." There's also the "cussing" issue. Anderson has replaced every swearword with "cuss", leading to some creative dialogue. "You cussin' with me?" "The cuss you are!" "What the cuss was that?", "What a clustercuss", etc. That's not to mention the funny twists on redemption "He redeemed himself!" and bullying ("Are you a bully? You're beginning to sound a lot like a bully.").

I must admit that I've got no idea what children would make of this film. I'm always wary of saying that adult humour goes over kids' heads, but Anderson's sense of humour is so odd and particular that it probably will miss the children's funny bone fairly often. That said, the interplay between Ash and Kristofferson is fun, and Fox's dimwitted by well-meaning sidekick Kylie is funny enough for the little 'uns too. With regards to the animation, it's different enough to stand out. The stop motion is pretty seamless, and there's a hand-made quality to the animals that is very appealing.

Fantastic Mr. Fox is both a pleasingly sharp alternative to a lot of the kids' movies out there at the moment, and another excellent movie from Wes Anderson. Do you like Wes Anderson movies? Then watch this.

Recent Release Reviewed!!!!!!!!!: Trick 'r' Treat

Well, Halloween's gone now. All we're left with is the slow realisation that the fake blood probably won't wash out of the white shirt, and what to do with that jack o'lantern...it's going to rot.... Anyway, here's one last little Halloween themed post.

TRICK 'R' TREAT

The path of Trick 'r' Treat to any sort of audience was not a simple one. Due for release in 2007, the film was finally released straight to DVD just in time for Halloween this year. Despite the fact that the few early reviews were universally positive, the film kept getting pushed further and further back. Interesting marketing strategy, eh? Whenever I'd hear something about it my interest would be piqued. Then I'd get to the end of the article or review and I'd see that the film had been pushed back...yet again. But now it's out, and I've finally seen it. And it's very good.

The film is similar in structure to the classic George A. Romero/Stephen King collaboration Creepshow, or the less classic Tales From the Darkside Movie, in that it has several interlocking stories. Unlike the older films, however, all the characters are involved in all the stories, rather than having one narrator, and it all takes place on Halloween night. It opens with a couple (Leslie Bibb and Tahmoh Penikett) debating whether or not to get rid of their Halloween decorations, with impressively gory consequences that set the tone for the film. School principal Steven (Dylan Baker) decides to teach a jack o'lantern-trashing kid a lesson he won't forget, Laurie (Anna Paquin) feels pressured by her older sister to find a date for the big party in the woods, a group of kids decide to find the remains of a schoolbus full of murdered special-needs children, and cranky shut-in Mr. Kreeg (Brian Cox) is tormented by a violent supernatural monster that may be linked to his past.

In the studio's defence, it's easy to see that the film is almost impossible to market for anything other than a niche audience. Given that the closest point of comparison is Creepshow, how do you get a Saw audience to watch this? Too scary and gory for the PG-13 crowd, and too funny and strange for the torture porn fans. For fans of older horror, however, Trick 'r' Treat is a definite treat (Oh yes, that pun's intended). It's clever and funny enough to be a reference-filled Scream sort of film, but it never actually goes into parody. Writer/director Michael Dougherty balances the laughs with some genuine scares and some nasty gory shocks. The script is also full of excellent little twists and turns that subvert expectations rather than cheat them.

It helps that the film is cast superbly. Anna Paquin plays the Little Red Riding Hood of her group, and it's strange to think that the film was made before True Blood as a man in a vampire suit stalks her through the forest. Brian Cox has fun as the cranky hermit, all straggly hair and muttered curses. The children in search of the lost school bus are also excellent. Best of the lot, though, is Dylan Baker. Playing the creepy killer school principal, he carefully treads the line of over-the-top mugging and genuinely scary. It's a reminder that he's an underrated actor, and deserves more than the meager screen-time he's often given.

The problem with Trick 'r' Treat is that it's all over a little too quickly. Arguably, it's a good thing that we're left wanting more. However, it would have been nice to give the characters a bit more time (Baker is short-changed, as is Paquin). But it's funny, scary, and it's everything that a Halloween movie should be. Dougherty has said he'd like to make more with the film's mascot Sam as the returning character, and hopefully they'll let him. Seems unlikely.

Creepshow trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-oFRi2D7Ph8

Tales from the Darkside Movie trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_V13CAyumU&feature=related