A Tale Of Two HOST Trailers

One of the upcoming spring films I have been looking forward to the most is the Korean horror import The Host. With its simple yet arresting poster image of a tentacle pulling a young girl through the air, the film promises an interesting genre-blending of classic monster movie thrills and perhaps more modern day horror film chills. The film is already a blockbuster hit in its home country of South Korea and U.S. distributor Magnolia Pictures is hoping that it will click with American audiences as well.

Interestingly, Magnolia films has put together not one but two trailers to whet movie audiences' appetites for the film. The first uses a bit of bait-and-switch, initially appearing as if advertising a light comedy import before dropping the second shoe in the form of a mutated creature emerging from Seoul's Han River.



The second trailer is a more straightforward trailer, letting audiences know up front that this is a monster movie. Surprisingly, though, this is a red-band trailer, meaning that it can only be shown in front of R-rated films. While not particularly more gruesome in content, this second trailer represents an interesting move from Magnolia Films, as the film is currently only set for a limited platform release.



The Host starts hitting screens on March 9 and will continue to roll out to screens through mid-April. You can get more information at Magnolia Films website.

SUNSHINE Trailer!

If you're a fan of director Danny Boyle (Trainspotting, 28 Days Later) like I am, you're probably excited that his new film Sunshine, a science-fiction actioner about a spaceship crew tasked with restarting the failing sun.

To whet your appetite, here's the film's trailer courtesy of Fox Searchlight Pictures-

Embed This Video Visit Fox Searchlight

BORAT’s Secret Scripters Revealed!

When the Writers Guild announced the nominees for their annual awards, I’m sure more than a couple of people who actually bothered to read the nomination list were probably shocked to see Sacha Baron Cohen’s genius comedy Borat: Cultural Learnings Of America For Make Benefit Glorious Nation Of Kazakhsta (see FilmBuffOnLine review here) to be named as a contender for Best Adapted Screenplay.

Most people assumed, and the creative forces behind the film seemed happy to let them, that Borat was improvised from only the broadest of outlines. But the truth of the matter is that even though Cohen as the bumbling foreign journalist was interacting with people who were clearly not in on the joke, each encounter was meticulously planned by Cohen and three other writers- Peter Baynham, Dan Mazer, and Anthony “Ant” Hines.

Recently the group allowed the Writers Guild “out” them in the Guild’s publication Written By. Fortunately, the Guild publishes their magazine online so you don’t have to pay hefty Guild Membership fees to read the article. Just click here to read how the quartet constructed the film from etching out its main plot points to a debating over what’s the funniest kind of bag for Borat to carry a turd into a fancy dinner party.

Get in on the GRINDHOUSE fun

If there’s one movie coming this summer that has me excited, it’s Grindhouse- the faux- exploitation double feature from directors Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino. Both short films – Rodriguez’s Planet Terror and Tarantino’s Death Proof – sound like pure turgid cinematic pulp, the kind that both directors have acknowledged as influences on their work. And to further replicate the experience of attending one of the broken down movie houses during the 70s, the pair of enlisted some friends to create some fake coming attraction trailers.

Joining in on the fun is Cabin Fever director Eli Roth, contributing a trailer for the nonexistent slasher flick Thanksgiving (the only holiday that hasn’t had a slasher flick named after it), and Shaun Of The Dead helmer Edgar Wright. Meanwhile, director Rob Zombie’s Werewolf Women Of The SS (perhaps one of the best titles to grace any film- real or fictional) trailer will feature the likes of former exploitation stars Sybil Danning and Udo Kier and a special appearance from Nicholas Cage as evil Asian crimelord Fu Manchu!

And now, Tarantino and Rodriguez are giving other filmmakers to get in on the act. The South by Southwest Film Festival is sponsoring a grindhouse trailer competition to be judged by Rodriguez himself. From the festival’s press release-

The South by Southwest (SXSW) Film Festival is putting out a call to filmmakers who would like to submit their best "grindhouse trailer," in honor of the April release from Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino, Grindhouse. A sample of the best submissions will be judged by Rodriguez himself, and presented during SXSW, on March 11, 2007.

Filmmakers have a deadline of February 12 to submit their “grindhouse trailer” (no longer than two minutes in length) to SXSW. The trailer should be made for a fictional feature-film, just like those being made by celebrity directors Eli Roth and Rob Zombie for Grindhouse. From those submissions, Rodriguez will determine the best of the bunch, and it will screen during a special presentation entitled “Robert Rodriguez’s Grindhouse 101” on Sunday, March 11. During the presentation, Rodriguez will share stories and footage from the making of the upcoming Dimension Films release.

“We really want filmmakers to come up with something fun, scary, freaky, and out-of-this-world for the competition,” says SXSW Festival Producer Matt Dentler. “This competition, like Grindhouse itself, is in the true spirit of innovative and fast-paced filmmaking.”

Submissions must arrive no later than February 12, to: “SXSW Grindhouse Trailers,” P.O. Box 4999, Austin, TX 78765. There is no application fee, but the trailers must be under two minutes in length, and made within the last 12 months. Films that have already been submitted to SXSW for 2007 consideration, are not eligible.

To get yourself in the mood, you can check out Grindhouse's trailer right here-



You can check out the official Grindhouse website here.

Silent STAR WARS

While George Lucas may have some skill at constructing classic storylines (with the appropriate thanks to Joseph Campbell), most people would agree that his dialogue writing is not as honed. It was Harrison Ford who once told the writer/producer/director "You can type this shit, but you don't have to say it."

Well, if there's ever any demonstration that proves where lucas' strength lies, it's in the following video found on (Where else?) Youtube.com. Titled, appropriately enough, "Silent Star Wars," it distills Lucas' six-hour plus original Star Wars trilogy to a one minute and fifeteen second silent short. Sure it's done in a jokey manner, complete with sped-up motion and grainy black and white footage, it still manages to convey most of the major storypoints of the saga without a single word of dialogue uttered or appearing as an intertitle card.

Enjoy.

Bond, Penguins and a Tale of Numbers

According to a report last week in Variety, the latest James Bond film Casino Royale (see our review here) has grossed over $448 million worldwide at the box office, making it the top grossing Bond film of all time.

While this is certainly a validation for the new approach that the producers of the franchise have adopted following the casting of Daniel Craig in the role of the British super spy, almost predictably this news was neglected to be reported by the folks over at the anit-Craig-as-Bond site cleverly named DanielCraigIsNotBond.com.

DanielCraigIsNotBond.com made a splash back in late 2005 following the announcement of Craig as the inheritor of the role of James Bond from actor Pierce Brosnan. Some in the Bond fan community where fairly vocal in their feelings that Craig might not have been the best choice for the role and the website soon became a rallying point for them to air their grievances.

And while they are certainly welcome to voice their opinion, the site’s spin on the film’s box-office performance in the early weeks of Casino Royale’s release have revealed them to be nothing more than petty, petulant children. While they may have a point - relevant or not I leave to you to decide – that Craig doesn’t much resemble Cary Grant, whom was favored for the role by Bond’s literary creator Ian Flemming, their gleeful reporting of the film’s alleged failure at the box office transcends opinion and ultimately arrives in the realm of outright misrepresentation of facts.

“The happy penguins dance all over Craig!!!” proclaim a site’s headline in large blue type, complete with multiple exclamation points in what looks like a text book example of Schadenfreude. And on the surface, it appears to be true- the animated penguin film Happy Feet, released the same weekend as Casino Royale, pulled approximately $700,000.00 more at the box office than the Bond film during their first weekend in the theaters, a rather narrow margin considering that both films had grossed over $40 million. However, a closer examination of the box office information may reveal a different story than what DanielCraigIsNotBond.com would like you to believe.

(For the sake of the rest of this discussion, let’s put aside the abject ridiculousness of comparing the box-office performance an animated children’s movie to that of a live action thriller with a much different target audience.)

When looking at box office performance, two numbers that are arguably more important than just flat out gross receipts are the number of films that a film is screening on and that film’s per screen gross average. Casino Royale opened on 3,434 screens around the country, 370 screens less than the 3,804 screens that Happy Feet debuted on. And on each of those 3,434 screens, Casino Royale earned an average of $972.00 more than Happy Feet did. (Box 0ffice figures courtesy of BoxOfficeMojo.com) A quick bit of math soon reveals that with all things, or in this case the number of screens each film was seen on, being equal, Casino Royale would have outperformed Happy Feet by almost $3.7 million, a much wider margin than the $700,000 DanielCraigIsNotBond.com was championing. And that’s not even factoring in Casino Royale’s nearly half an hour longer run time, which cuts down the number of times the film can be screened (and tickets sold) per day versus the number of screenings of Happy Feet per day. Levelling that number would Casino Royale’s lead even wider in the neighborhood of another $10 million.

We should all be so cursed with such a failure.

But then again, facts never stood in the way of a good argument and for DanielCraigIsNotBond.com to try and present Casino Royale as some sort of box office catastrophe either on its own merits or in comparison to a completely different type of film is at least intellectually disingenuous and at the most the antics of the people behind the site only serve to make them look like spoiled children throwing a temper tantrum.

Sour grapes only produce bitter wine.

One post script- Oddly enough, Bond will be fighting penguins at the box office in 2008 as the next, currently untitled, installment is currently scheduled to open against the animated Madagascar 2 on November 7 of that year. Who will be the tuxedo-clad winner of that round? Who can say, but I know of one spot I’m not going to go to for any analysis of the film’s box office performance.