Because sometimes amazing things happen, ComingSoon.net put up the first five minutes of The Three Musketeers. (Thanks to eagle-eyed cleolinda, who discovers all things.)
I’m calling it now: Comedy of the year. It and Jonah Hex will have to duke it out for best of the decade.
This is one of those bad movies that delights in its awfulness; the sort of movie where Matthew Macfayden got to fill out a little bubble-sheet.
Check Which Things You Wish Written in to Your Character:
- Rising slowly from water in a Venetian mask
- Using collapsible multi-shot crossbows
- Killing half a dozen guards even though we learn ten seconds later that he didn’t even need to bother
X Be the most chiseled Musketeer
- Cheesy dialogue only
- Kissing Milla Jovovich
X Wearing period-accurate lace collar
X Use bouncing wall-bits and chains and stuff like it’s heavy. (We don’t know about this part yet, we’re hoping Ray will say yes, feel free to X this one out, we’ll take care of it.)
- Deliver all the exposition
Then, in the Special Notes section, he added:
- I’d rather not do all the bending down to unlock the secret passage, my knees are acting up.
I’m seeing this tomorrow, which seems like ages to wait, but I suspect it’s one of those movies so wonderfully dreadful that, after I see it, I will feel as though it’s always been in my life.
This is the poster for the Footloose remake. The tagline they have chosen to accompany this epic story? CUT LOOSE.
The sad thing is that, in the sea of completely baffling remakes and other surrounding creative decisions, I guess I understand how this movie happened more than I can understand, say, the Smurfs movie (ever). On paper, this is a story about liberal youth culture rebelling against increasingly conservative and despotic exercises of power, and about the dangers of suppression or repression of self-expression (every -ession!), and about rejecting small-town theocracy in order to get into some PG-rated big-city shenanigans.
However, that stuff didn’t work in practice even in the original Footloose (tagline “One town. One kid. One chance.”), which tried to balance scenes of John Lithgow tightening his despotic grip on the town as a way to deal with his grief over his son and scenes of Kevin Bacon’s dance double Fosse-ing his way through warehouses. To no one’s surprise, the balance was way off, and Lithgow’s character goes from foil for the two-dimensional teens into complete plotcakes. At the end of the movie, he’s interrupted in mid-tirade about how no one can dance or express dissent or disobey by someone announcing a nearby book-burning. Now, he’s outlawed drinking and dancing and all other kinds of young-person fun, and has held his iron fist over the town for years, and hates the kid trying to make prom happen, and uses God as a weapon to instill fear in people, but book-burning? That is just a WILD idea he couldn’t have anticipated WHATSOEVER! So he runs to the book-burning and tells them that books are great, and dancing is ALSO great, and he can’t WAIT for prom, can you? Yay, prom! The end for no reason!
It’s to Lithgow’s credit how much you end up buying this in the moment, because he’s such a phenomenal actor that you can actually see him suppressing his grief and struggling with the edicts he’s put in place as they’re challenged by the new kid and his collection of Bible quotes about dancing that he reads to City Hall as reasons dancing should be allowed, because separation of church and state something something. However, this movie is most famous for its dance sequences (Opening Credits, teaching Chris Penn to dance, Angry Warehouse Dance, and Worst Prom Imaginable), and not for any of the underlying themes that the movie addresses (poorly) at random intervals, and reverses on a dime.
Given that we’re actually in a political climate that’s welcoming exactly this sort of counter-intuitive theocratic lawmaking, and dismissing the expression of dissent by having cops mace them all and arrest them for daring to protest, I’m very curious to see how this movie tries to stick it to The Man while still getting flyover-state butts in the seats. Early signs are mixed: the current leading man is their fourth choice, which sounds a little awkward, but Dancing with the Stars alum Julianne Hough is in it, so the corporate synergy is all lined up!
However, I might be entirely shortchanging the deep artistic goals of this remake, and need to keep an open mind, lest I become the John Lithgow Preacher of today. So I, for one, look forward to this movie’s hard-hitting small-town politics and attack on neo-conservative despotism, viewed through its well-rounded characters and honed through its keen dialogue. I can only hope it lives up to its predecessor in the revolution, whose powerful and emotional conclusion can teach all of us something about what it means to live life, fight for your freedoms, and most importantly, cut loose:
(So, watching this musical number, I realize that the part of Footloose where everyone was suddenly a professional dancer has never bothered me, because musicals live in their own universe where that is just something that happens, and also because just being caught on celluloid in this scene forever must have been punishment enough.)
One of the weirdest things you can do to a kid with an overactive imagination who does not at all resemble me in any way is show that child a movie trailer. That anonymous child will extrapolate the entire movie in their minds using that trailer as a touchstone, and then when they go see the actual film, they will either be vaguely baffled at a good movie that isn’t THEIR movie, or they will see Bram Stoker’s Dracula years later and have a bad taste in their mouth forever, because seriously, what the hell, Bram Stoker’s Dracula. What the hell.*
I’m still a sucker for previews, though. I have especially become fond of artsy-fartsy trailers that stray from the “And of course, some of this!” type, especially because “some of this” tends to be “needless 3-D explosions” or “terrible jokes about how being married takes all the joy out of life because women are harpies” or “harried women on a desperate quest to find love with a man who will resent them based on extremely recent evidence.”
Sometimes, a conceptual trailer can be a little odd. I still remember sitting in the theatre and seeing the first trailer for The Fifth Element, where the camera pans back along some endless, amazing spaceship, and then it pivots and is a huge 5, and the music sweelllls, and the words THE and ELEMENT flank the 5, and then it goes black, and you’re left in the theatre looking around like, “Well, I do enjoy sci-fi, I guess…and, uh, numerals…”
Then I went to actually see The Fifth Element and it was a camp wonder that had absolutely nothing to do with the numeral spacecraft in any form. Well-trailered, movie!
But artsy-fartsy trailer development has improved in the intervening years, especially with the rise of high-concept (and high-budget) TV shows that recognize the importance of fan-friendly promo even as they scramble to prevent spoilers from leaking.
In related news, this is the trailer for the second season of Boardwalk Empire!
For those who didn’t watch this series last year, it was a meticulous historical recreation and had a cast packed to gills with talented actors (and also Paz de la Huerta), but as much as I enjoyed the performances and the dialogue in particular scenes, it just never came together for me with any sense of overarching narrative urgency. I mean, I am all for a TV series that is all people sitting in rooms talking, all the time (that is my favorite thing), but this show felt like people were always sitting in rooms making appointments to talk later, and also occasionally someone would get shot or have sex, and somehow it just never gripped me.
Which is funny, since this trailer does a fantastic job of lining up all Nucky’s enemies in a really smart, creepy way, and shows how all his maneuvering in the first season to be the nexus of the trace might backfire this season when they all start gunning for him at once. Basically, despite being aware of what it’s trying to do (and despite that green-screen at the end, sigh), it’s still singlehandedly making me think twice about watching the second season.
Bonus: spoiler-free! Dash cunning, HBO.
However, for my money, the reigning conceptual TV-series trailer is the trailer used to promote the first season of Lost to UK viewers. They abandoned any glimpses of plot in favor of a character-sketch music video; it’s marketing genius, and I continue to enjoy this trailer much more than I ever enjoyed the actual show.
I will probably be saying that same thing about Boardwalk Empire by October, but in the meantime, that trailer has done its job but good. See you in the fall, show.
* I cannot BELIEVE I have not QTTed Dracula yet. I will have to remedy that pronto.
So, I didn’t realize this trailer came out over the long weekend (the problem with Netflix is that it is like a beautiful trap from which there is no escape), and that means I am late to the Musketeers-trailer party, but I can’t not blog this, so I am.
As someone who had no real interest in this film for a long time except that Milady’s brocade dresses were lookin’ sharp, I was not aware of many of the plot issues they were putting into the adaptation until this trailer.
Without wanting to put all my eggs in one basket or predict the future on this one, I would put money down that someday, a picture from this movie is going beside the entry whenever they finally admit “shitmazing” into the OED.
I hope it’s this picture:
Because it makes me so happy that Orlando Bloom has finally found a home for himself at the Ham-Off Academy; I hope this is his doctoral thesis, and that he nails it.
Some other things you can expect from this movie, according to this preview:
Character Actor Camp alumni – naturally.
Buckling some swash? But of course!
Countries that hang in the balance – check.
Airships! Just like Dumas wrote about.
Booby-traps where lady assassins try to break in! You know how they do.
A little of this action.
Holy crap, his face, I seriously cannot stop laughing.
This movie is now on my list to review, because how can you not. For those who have yet to see this majesty unfold for themselves, click below!
In a pretty iffy comic-book-movie year, and on the totally inept heel of Green Lantern, Marvel brings us a nice, crunchy 2-minute Captain America trailer for us to sink our teeth into!
Let’s! (No spoilers for plot, in case you’re wary of that. I mean, let’s be fair, the plot is probably “Also, Nazis and Explosions!”, but still, I’m not giving anything away here.)
- What this movie is up against: Captain America is a really loaded superhero deeply tied to nationalism and whose popularity waxes and wanes with global perception etc etc, and this movie has a big fight ahead of it in the current political climate. Plus, there’s the ever-present pitfall of American-made World War II movies that pretend the war was just getting started when the U.S. rolled up; I’m not saying this movie falls prey to this, only that the potential is there. I’ll spare you this essay on these guys until the movie actually comes out.
- That said, Chris Evans is a very personable and really underrated actor (doubters should check out Sunshine!), and he is selling the shit out of the good-hearted hero here. Gotta love the character beats they provide.
- If you look really hard, you can see JJ Feild for half a nanosecond. (The man is a magnet for period pieces.) See you soon!
- Hayley Atwell, this is your chance to really impress me after Pillars of the Earth and Brideshead Revisited (neither of which were your fault, because yikes). You can do it!
- I like the feeling I get that Hugo Weaving was only in this movie because he hadn’t been Ham-Offing in a franchise for nearly eight months and he was getting antsy.
- Sebastian Stan, I liked you in Kings. See you soon!
- I am the only person in the world who doesn’t care about the Stark mythology for one second, so you guys can have fun with that!
- I am probably also the only person in the world who cares more about everyone else’s costume than about the Cap’s. Production design looks great.
- Richard Armitage, I see you actorbombing this franchise. You get your foot in the door, dude, it’s time you broke out big. JJ Feild will be right behind you.
- Supporting Actor Camp: loving all your hammy little faces. See you soon!
- If you don’t have enough explosions, use flamethrowers. It’s mostly the same.
