Ok so this is the late video and trailer of the week and im hella tried so this is going to be quick

The Video of the week is The Extra Life 2008 Video
Trailer of the week is The Spec Ops Mode Interview
BTW i finished off extra life with Tetris LOL!

Hello!

I hope everyone had a wonderful week watching videos, making them, or jumping back into writing.

I’ve decided to post a video of the week award for the trailer that most moved me. Most of the videos that I posted on this site were splendid, but this one stood out for its quality, story, and character. The winner is Blessings in Disguise by Gary Ryan. I implore you to watch the entire film (maybe twice) and admire the art Gary has put into it.

Well done, Gary!

-Vince

Here it is!

Bomb disposal scenes are a surefire shortcut to suspense. Doom-laden while at the same time full of hope; engrossing but maddeningly tense. The pared-down simplicity of the narrative – after all, there are only two possible endings when a bomb is within inches of your protagonist – is easy for audiences to grasp and even easier to hold onto. And the tiniest, momentary actions, the snip of a coloured wire, weigh heavy with potential catastrophe.

All this should help Kathryn Bigelow’s new film The Hurt Locker, which follows an elite bomb disposal unit in Baghdad, escape the curse of unpopularity that’s beset Iraq-themed films thus far. Her refusal to wade into the ideology of the war could also make the film slip down a little easier with patriotic americans.

The film promises to be more than just a succession of mindless set pieces: Bigelow is an artist who studied painting before moving to Hollywood; she’s also an intriguing, provocative aesthete of violence, whose first short film in 1978 showed two men fighting, accompanied by an academic voiceover deconstructing the scene and its significance. That fascination with destruction as art – the “cinematic heart attack” – translates into incredible film-making. You can have a peek at her style – courtesy of the NY Times -  here.

And, obviously, in the trailer below.

Sometimes trailers don’t do justice to a film. Other times, they showcase a certain magic that the actual movie sadly never attains. I have a feeling that might be the case with Terminator: Salvation, which has been notching up some pretty miserable reviews since it was released on May 21st in the US.

Stephanie Zacharek in Salon complains the film has “no brains and no soul; it’s just a mass of stiff, creaking metal joints”, while the Hollywood Reporter says it’s “terminally sullen”.

More supportive – while riffing playfully on the same robot theme – is A.O. Scott in the NY Times, who starts off by calling it “sturdy and serviceable” – hardly ringing praise – but goes on to applaud the film’s “brutal integrity”:

With its clanks and creaks and broken-down contraptions, this movie is a battered Wall-E to Star Trek’s sleek and seamless Eve.

Which is fitting, since part of the point of the Terminator movies is to register ambivalence about technological progress, which fills our lives with all kinds of cool, convenient stuff that somehow brings an intimation of our eventual obsolescence.”

I quite like the sound of that, but as with any cult franchise, there are of course many purists squirming in horror at the idea of the ridiculously named McG trying to steer the Terminator behemoth into glory. As my interest in the films was fairly late acquired (I was far too scared to ever watch them before I was officially allowed to aged 18, and only then because my dad told me they were works of considerable cinematic achievement), I don’t feel too concerned about where the franchise goes next – I’m just happy the others were made, and so well. I am however, slightly put off Christian Bale after I heard his ridiculously aggressive on-set rant against the director of photography on the film. Unbelievable scenes.

Terminator: Salvation is in UK cinemas from Wednesday 3rd June.

If this wasn’t stop motion I might actually find it too scary to see. Then again I am a bit of a wimp when it comes to the uncanny, even when featured in a children’s film, and this one looks so full of Freudian dissonance it practically redefines das unheimliche.

Coraline is a little girl whose parents don’t really have time for her. She finds a door into another world, where some very nice people say they are her “other” parents, and shower her with gifts. But there’s something a bit weird about them. For one thing, they have buttons where they should have eyes.

The original 2002 novel by Neil Gaiman won the Bram Stoker Award for Young Readers, which should tell you something about its horror credentials.

But Gaiman himself points out:

As a general rule, Coraline the book is much creepier for adults than it is for kids, who tend to read it as an adventure. I suspect that this will be true of the film as well.”

All the same, the distributors clearly cottoned onto the fact that some of the more macabre aspects of the film e.g. doppelgangers who also happen to want to pluck out children’s eyes, aren’t particularly kiddie friendly.

So they’ve created two trailers, one that’s got a nice reassuring voiceover and one that – well – doesn’t.  It’s fun to compare and contrast. The latter is more scary, though also a better trailer, so that’s the one you can watch below.

Gaiman’s comment on the fact that sometimes children can cope with frightening things better than we think actually tallies with the theory of a book I’ve been reading, The Uses of Enchantment, by the controversial child psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim. Bettelheim’s views on autism have been roundly discredited but his thoughts on the importance of fairytales – and their darker aspects – are interesting:

Children may be faced with deep inner conflicts and anxieties but more often than not are unable to express this verbally, so they may end up expressing fears indirectly, by fear of some real or imaginary animal, or fear of the dark, or such.

Parents may belittle these fears or altogether overlook them. Much of modern children’s literature may do the same.

But fairy tales confront these problems seriously and provide ways of facing such problems. Fairy tales can provide an outlet to anxiety. They frankly confront problems such as the fear of losing a parent or fear of dying. They also give hope that no matter how bad things may now seem that there is still hope of a happy ending.”

Adding to its allure, Coraline was directed by Henry Selick, a man with a proven talent for teasing the bizarre and beautiful out of fairytales – he previously made The Nightmare Before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach.

Coraline is in UK cinemas from Friday 8 May.

Much as I like this poster, I need you not to see the film without first watching the original tv series. It’s for your own good, trust me.

David Yates directed the six part thriller for the BBC back in 2003, from a script by the legendary Paul Abbott, the writer of Cracker, Shameless and Clocking Off. Abbott’s dark, acerbic style, informed by his own troubled upbringing, makes him one of our best writers. The dialogue in the original State of Play crackles and spits, whether taking place at a bus stop or inside the Houses of Parliament. The story – which involves a politician, his dead lover, a journalist and some very dodgy blackmailing in the corridors of power – is enacted by an ensemble of the classiest British actors, including John Simm, David Morrissey, Bill Nighy, Philip Glenister, a young James McAvoy and Kelly Macdonald.

Fast-forward six years and the inevitable Hollywood adaptation is soon to be released, starring Russell Crowe.

Sadly it looks about 34 per cent as good as the series, judging from the trailer. My concerns were initially raised after Brad Pitt dropped out of the production due to script concerns. My other immediate worry is the dire state of Russell Crowe’s hair. All in all, it just seems very unlikely that the film will come close to the dramatic integrity of the original. For one thing, the movie can only be around 120 minutes, whereas the series consisted of six glorious hanging-off-the-edge-of-your-seat hour-long episodes.

Take a look at the trailer, and then do yourself a favour and get the series out on DVD.

State of Play is released in UK cinemas on April 24.

I saw the first trailer for this last year and wasn’t particularly excited. But at that point I knew nothing about Watchmen (I know, apologies to all comic-enthusiasts). I think I then filed it away in my brain alongside Night Watch and subsequently came to think of them as one and the same. Oops.

Thank goodness, then, that a friend of mine put me to rights yesterday, explaining that Watchmen was one of the best graphic novels of all time, and noting how annoying it was that the long awaited film adaptation had been held up in a post-production scrap between Fox and Warner Bros (full story here).

Turns out, that dispute has very recently been settled, and the film is now due out on March 6. The new trailer gives a far greater sense of narrative and character than the first, although I still wonder whether it really does justice to the film’s potential.

Partly that’s because trailers often focus on high-octane action in the hope of winning viewers through sheer visual violence; partly it’s because there’s been such a slew of superhero films in the last decade that it’s easy to feel jaded at the sight of yet another rubberized torso.

But it’s exactly this apparent superfluity of superheroes that the the novel and the film are interested in. Creator Alan Moore told one interviewer he wanted to explore “the idea of the superman manifest within society“, while in a brilliant literary analysis of the book, philosophy professor Iain Thomson called Watchmen a “masterful deconstruction of the hero”. All of which sounds pretty exciting.

Clearly this is not only a completely different film from Night Watch or Day Watch or whatever that other film with watch in the title was called, it could also be a pivotal film for the whole superhero genre.

Watchmen is in UK cinemas from March 6.

* Time magazine agrees: it was the only graphic novel in their list of the 100 greatest novels, and here’s why: “Told with ruthless psychological realism, in fugal, overlapping plotlines and gorgeous, cinematic panels rich with repeating motifs, Watchmen is a heart-pounding, heartbreaking read and a watershed in the evolution of a young medium”

On Friday a cluster of films come out that have each been trailers of the week: Milk, Frost/Nixon and Rachel Getting Married.

A cause for celebration but simultaneously, a teeny bit frustrating; why did they have to schedule them all at once? Couldn’t the distributors have sprinkled the good stuff more evenly through those arid weeks when the only movies in sight were slushy stacks of generic romcoms and kids adventure movies aimed at milking parental holiday fatigue?

I just hope that all three are so successful that the cinemas agree to keep screening them for at least a fortnight. I think I’ll start with Milk though, on the basis that A.O. Scott, writing in the New York Times, called it “the best live-action mainstream American movie that I have seen this year”.

One of the best trailers I’ve seen in ages. No dialogue for 53 seconds, and then only a sparse two lines. Cat Power’s jangly, mournful Sea of Love getting stuck like an old-fashioned record; signalling breakdown and fracture better than any scripted voiceover. Everything else left to our imagination, unlike almost every other trailer you see these days. Not to mention an ingenious revival of the split screen and tantalising glimpses of Roger Deakins‘ sublime cinematography.

But even if the trailer wasn’t this good, Revolutionary Road has a lot to recommend it. Sam Mendes makes striking films, and though sometimes they bear fairly visible flaws – see Jarhead and Road to Perdition – it seems to me those flaws are mostly just a testament to his profound cinematic ambition.

The film is adapted from an acclaimed American novel by Richard Yates. First published in 1961, it became recognized as a pivotal twentieth-century tragedy of suburban disquiet and disappointment. According to the author, the ‘revolutionary road’ of the title did not lead anywhere but was in fact disappearing, as Yates explained in an interview in 1972:

there was a general lust for conformity all over this country, by no means only in the suburbs – a kind of blind, desperate clinging to safety and security at any price, as exemplified politically in the Eisenhower administration and the Joe McCarthy witch-hunts.

Anyway, a great many Americans were deeply disturbed by all that – felt it to be an outright betrayal of our best and bravest revolutionary spirit…”

Frank and April Wheeler, the young protagonists of Yates’ novel, are the everyman figures doomed to play out this betrayal in the shape of their marriage. Some critics have complained that the film adaptation of Revolutionary Road too closely suggests American Beauty transplanted to the fifties, but I imagine the dream team of Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio – in their first on-screen reunion since Titanic – will ensure a very different kind of movie. Both have matured into outstanding actors, with the stature and depth to carry a grown-up, subtle tragedy.

Fortunately they also boast the charisma to make even domestic purgatory watchable, and in fact, many say Winslet could garner another Oscar nomination for her role as April (she won Best Actress at the Golden Globes last night). Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers says: “the glorious Winslet defines what makes an actress great”, while in New York Magazine, David Edelstein swoons: “There isn’t a banal moment in Winslet’s performance—not a gesture, not a word. Is Winslet now the best English-speaking film actress of her generation? I think so.”

Let’s see. Revolutionary Road is in UK cinemas from January 30.

The first glimpses of Michelle Williams’ stricken, timid beauty in this trailer make it look like a film that is sure to beget tears.

It also seems to be a truly independent movie; shot in twenty days, highly textured with an unfamiliar, meditative rhythm. The kind of film that evokes such an authentic landscape you come out of the cinema taking big gulps of the cold air, just to check you’re still real.

Williams plays a hard-up young woman trying to make her way to Alaska to find work, accompanied only by a beloved dog.

Manohla Dargis called Wendy and Lucy a “pitch-perfect triumph”, explaining:

With uninflected realism, an attentive camera and no weeping strings, [director] Ms. Reichardt makes palpably, tragically real what it means to be struggling at the very edge of the economic abyss.”

Perfect for the credit crunch then. You can watch director Kelly Reichardt talking with Michelle Williams at the New York Film Festival here.

Could there be a Dracula Global PR company somewhere, and if so, are its staff working overtime? Because there’s a slew of vampire-driven entertainment coming out, and the common theme is that vampires aren’t all bad. Evidently some of them are still nasty old blood-suckers, but then there are the ones who are apparently just like us; people trying to better themselves and conquer their darker instincts.

In HBO’s new series True Blood (reviewed by Slate’s Troy Patterson here) vampires have found a way of getting along with humans by sipping on synthetic blood, though predictably not everyone plays nicely and therein lies the rub. Then there’s the very dark but apparently sublime Let The Right One In, a critically acclaimed arthouse Swedish film about two unhappy children who become each other’s only friends, even though one of them is a vampire.

And finally there’s Twilight, this week’s trailer of the week. I didn’t choose Let the Right One In, because no matter how good it is, I really don’t like gore so there’s no way I will be going to see it. But Twilight should be a little bit more tame, being as it is an adaptation of a cult teen fiction series by Stephanie Meyer, which became a New York Times bestseller and one of the American Library Association’s ‘Top Ten Books for Young Adults’.

Also it’s a damn good trailer. And Robert Pattinson looks rather fine in his first major role since playing another tragic teen heartthrob, Cedric Diggory.

Twilight is due in UK cinemas December 19th.

Zack and Miri Make a Porno(2008) Video Trailer, latest news, photos and trailers, Zack and Miri Make a Porno Teaser Trailer, Watch online trailer for Zack and Miri Make a Porno on youtube video.

Source : http://movievideos.b4tea.com/2008/10/17/zack-and-miri-make-a-porno2008-video-trailer/

There’s a worrisome dearth of fun trailers around. So, in honour of the late, great Paul Newman, I thought we could all sip on a shot of good strong melodrama. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is showing in London from November 8 – 29 as part of the British Film Institute’s Tennessee Williams season.

Though there is comedy, and whimsy, and beautiful, intricate staging in Williams’ plays, they are not really for the fainthearted.  The emotional violence visited on his characters is rarely less than brutal, though in amongst the verbal assaults he pries open the darkness and the light. Williams won his second Pulitzer prize when Cat on a Hot Tin Roof premiered in 1955 (his first was for A Streetcar Named Desire). Three years later, MGM’s film adaptation was released, powerfully evoking the bitter, fierce sexual tension that Williams had laid bare in the play. But the film was also a sad betrayal of the boundary-breaking tenor of the original work, for the scriptwriters had assiduously removed all references to the central character’s homosexuality, in order to soothe the American film censor.

Interestingly, although the film was originally to be shot in black and white, once the most famous pair of blue eyes in the world signed on to star, the movie execs decided to splash out and film it in colour.

No doubt partly thanks to those baby blues, aswell as the similarly stunning violets of Elizabeth Taylor, the film became one of the top ten box office hits of the year and was subsequently nominated for six Oscars.

I’ve had a soft spot for Anne Hathaway ever since her good-natured, witty performance in the cheeky fairytale Ella Enchanted. She also provided strong support in Brokeback Mountain. But apart from that, her career thus far has been a bit, well, lite – characterised by the sort of low-calorie fluff that gives momentary sweetness but lacks any lasting nutritional value (The Princess Diaries 2, The Devil Wears Prada, Hoodwinked!, Get Smart).

So it’s good to see her stretching her talent a bit and going for a less saccharine role in Rachel Getting Married. Script-writer Jenny Lumet (daughter of the fabulous Sidney) ploughs the rich seam of drama inherent in family get-togethers, charting the progress of a daughter fresh out of rehab who returns to the family home for her sister Rachel’s wedding.

Director Jonathan Demme (Silence of the Lambs, Philadelphia) seems to have favoured a roaming camera that swoops in and out of familiar household set-pieces, somewhat reminiscent of Thomas Vinterberg’s masterful Festen (also an acerbic exposé of deep familial fissures). The rugged camerawork lends a scratchy authenticity and promises to deflate any potentially sentimental moments with a sense of their realism, while at the same time mirroring the characters’ emotional turbulence.

Greeted with a standing ovation at this year’s Cannes, at once poetic and horrifying, Waltz with Bashir depicts the true-life experience of its director, Israeli documentary maker Ari Folman, as a young soldier during the first Lebanon war of 1982.

Four years in the making, the animated documentary examines the trauma of war through the prism of Folman’s own inability to remember almost anything from his time in military service. By interviewing friends, comrades and experts, he pieces together the dark episodes his own memory had managed to repress.

The film has been beautifully animated in rotoscope – Folman conducted the interviews and then worked with a team of six animators to redraw the images – and the power of those images will no doubt be deepened by a haunting score by UK-based composer Max Richter.

If, like me, you’re too young to remember the film’s central focus, the terrible Sabra and Shatila massacre on 17th September 1982, in which up to 3,000 Palestinians were slaughtered by Christian militia while the Israeli army stood by, you could start by reading an eyewitness account via the BBC’s ‘On This Day’.

When you want a dose of the strange, go to Charlie Kaufman.

His scripts for Being John Malkovich, Human Nature, Adaptation, and my personal favourite, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, all play at the puckered seam where the unconscious meets the real; where unspeakable desires and spoken lies get mixed up. His characters -subtle and complex, a gift to the actors who play them- are never quite sure whether they’re awake or dreaming.

It doesn’t work all of the time, and there are moments in Human Nature and Adaptation that are just plain annoying, but at his best Kaufman helps us glimpse below the banalities of social mores to see how our unignorable, nethermost human needs drive our relationships. In this way he’s an incredibly imaginative and brave screenwriter, a contra-flow amidst the Hollywood churn, and someone whose films never fail to surprise.

Whether Kaufman can direct as well as he can write will be tested in his new film, Synecdoche, New York, which plays at the London Film Festival in October. The movie has the great good fortune of starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, aswell as a bevy of excellent actresses including Catherine Keener, Michelle Williams, Samantha Morton and Jennifer Jason-Leigh. Kaufman apparently conceived the film as a horror script for Spike Jonze to direct, inspired by some anxiety dreams Jonze was having. Once the script was done, Jonze was already stuck into his own project Where the Wild Things Are, so Kaufman took the reins himself.

P.S. A synecdoche (which I’m told is pronounced Sih-NECK-doh-kee) is a kind of metaphor, in which a part stands for a whole, or vice versa. An example would be “fifty sails crossed the sea”, where sail stands for ship. The title also plays on Schenectady, NY, a city in the east of New York state.

Confused? That’s part of the plan, according to Kaufman. “One of the things I think is really exciting and joyful about the experience of being an audience member is figuring things out,” he says. “When you make a connection, it’s yours, and there’s a thrill to that.  So people can look up “synecdoche,” if they want. And if they do, maybe they’ll think about some things it might correspond to in the movie, and if it opens up another understanding of the film for them, that would be great.”

Sometimes movies sound Oscar-worthy even before you see them. The Academy likes biopics, unconventional heroes, historical drama and political martyrs. Somewhat like Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi (1982) Milk ticks all those boxes. And what’s more, it stars the always-exceptional Sean Penn: three times Oscar-nominee (Dead Man Walking; Sweet and Lowdown; I Am Sam) and Best Actor of 2004 (Mystic River).

Milk dramatizes the true story of America’s first openly gay elected official, Harvey Milk. An ex-investment banker, hippie and camera-store owner, he ran for office three times, facing down the Christian Right, death threats and rivalry from within San Francisco’s political establishment, to finally became a city supervisor in 1977.

Milk campaigned courageously for an end to “the lies, the myths, the distortions” surrounding homosexuality, stating in a speech, “We are coming out to tell the truths about gays, for I am tired of the conspiracy of silence, so I’m going to talk about it.” His so-called “Hope” speech became a rallying cry for the LBGT community, and as a supervisor Milk successfully passed a gay rights law prohibiting discrimination in employment and housing.

Charismatic, excitable and generous, the media-savvy Milk also had an innate sense of drama and understood the power of his own symbolism. He left a tape recording with a lawyer for release in case of his own assassination, including the plangent line: “If a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet destroy every closet door”.

Tragically, the first part of that plea was all too soon played out. After only eleven months in office, Milk was shot twice in the head by a political rival, Dan White; the only supervisor to have voted against Milk’s gay rights legislation.

Milk’s death and the subsequent trial of his murderer accelerated the process of gay emancipation in the U.S. but sadly not all the closet doors are yet destroyed. As the Huffington Post reported, Sarah Palin’s church recently promoted a conference promising to straighten out gays through prayer; Palin herself opposes gay marriage.

As an outsider battling prejudice and preaching a message of hope, Milk of course also bears comparison with a certain Presidential nominee (except, we hope, in their fate). The film’s distributors must have born this in mind when planning its release; Milk will premiere in San Francisco the week before the U.S. elections.

I wouldn’t normally flag up a Keira Knightley film; her publicity machine is quite efficient enough to do that without extra help, and her performances almost always fail to live up to the enormity of her profile.

But the outsize ringlets of her newest role surely deserve some kind of acclaim, and, more importantly, The Duchess has been directed by a British filmmaker, Saul Dibb, whose first feature was the excellent Bullet Boy.

Saul is a very smart, thoughtful director who paints vivid pictures with subtlety and deserves more attention than the movie world seems willing to give. For that reason I hope the film does his serious talent justice.

Saul Dibb on the set of Bullet Boy

Incidentally the trailer below replaces a rather dodgy earlier promo that was widely slated for including images of Princess Diana alongside the legend: ‘History repeats itself’.

Thank goodness the marketing people gave in and produced a more tasteful version.

The Duchess is released nationwide on September 5th, and will, I hope, inspire a new hairstyle across the country.

There have been so many extraordinarily powerful films about the Holocaust that it’s hard to imagine one more telling us anything new. The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas might, because it proffers a view from the other side: from the eyes and ears of a child whose father runs a concentration camp behind their back garden.

Originally a book by John Boyne, written in a childish prose that belies its dark subject, it’s a startling, challenging narrative where our sympathies are tugged awkwardly against type and our hearts expertly strung. The fact that the book’s central scenario seems somehow unlikely (the Commandant’s bewildered son secretly meets and befriends a child from the camp – the boy in the striped pyjamas) becomes irrelevant as the book gathers momentum.

All credit to Boyne for an ending that refuses to flinch from the unchildlike horror of the camps. I hope the film keeps that faith.

The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is in UK cinemas from Friday 12th September.

There aren’t many movies with just one letter for a name. In fact, I couldn’t think of any. Listology says there are at least 50, though their list was last updated in 2004, so who knows.

Here’s a tip. The title W. makes most sense when you say it outloud. With a deep southern accent.

i.e.

Dub-ya.

Some people are saying it’s too early to make a movie about a President who hasn’t yet left office (the film’s provocative release date is October 17; just three weeks before the Nov.4 elections).

But at least Oliver Stone has experience in the presidential biopic genre: he previously made JFK (1991) and Nixon (1995) (aswell as Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July and Wall Street).

Nice cast, too. Thandie Newton definitely has something of the Condi Rice about her; Ioan Gruffudd as Blair could be more of a stretch (surely his hair was never that blonde?) And that’s Josh Brolin as George W. himself.

Today’s Trailer of the Week shows I’m not the only one to think climate change is the biggest threat to humanity since the atomic bomb. The Day The Earth Stood Still suggests that even if we’re bound for catastrophe, at least doom gives filmmakers a new reason to bring out the aliens again.

Starring Keanu Reeves and Jennifer Connelly, the film’s a remake of a 1951 epic about a visit from strange men wrapped in foil, who warned the world of the dangers of atomic bombs. (Duh). Now they’re back, to warn us of another threat to, well, everything. Here’s what Keanu has to say: “The first one was borne out of the cold war and nuclear détente…

“The version I was just working on, instead of being man against man, it’s more about man against nature. My Klaatu says that if the Earth dies, you die. If you die, the earth survives. I’m a friend to the earth.”

Just for fun, here’s the original film’s trailer:

And here’s the new one, a bit scarier, but ultimately with some comic moments too:

Good to see Jon Hamm (Don Draper from AMC’s Mad Men) looking at home on the big screen.