The Unseen Costs of Bankruptcy

Dedicated watchers of movie trailers, and extremely dedicated watchers of movies, will wonder how the makers of the upcoming film Repo Men saw the role of their movie in relation to 2008's bizarre Repo: The Genetic Opera. In both movies, which are set in the not-too-distant future, people's expensive artificial organs are "repossessed" due to nonpayment. I have not exaggerated this similarity in any way. Want proof? Watch the trailer for Repo: The Genetic Opera here, and the trailer for Repo Men here. This reviewer doesn't feel equipped to address The Genetic Opera today, so today's subject is Repo Men. The chief impression given by the trailer for Repo Men, beyond that its twist is identical to that of The Genetic Opera, is that its plot is otherwise identical to that of Equilibrium, an under-appreciated sci-fi semiclassic about an enforcer of repression and seemingly invincible master of Gun-based martial arts who turns against the government in the name of something or other and ends up facing off against his seemingly invincible partner. Repo Men appears to be about of a seemingly invincible master of organ repossession who rebels against the organ repossession company he once served, once an artificial heart shows him the error of his ways, and has to face off against his seemingly invincible partner. All that said about the precedent for its plot, Repo Men is a generic, snappy trailer with some clever moments. The bulk of the trailer is a normal sequence of shots of fighting and snatches of dialogue, with some more exotic shots of organ retrieval, Personally, I love the shot at the end of the trailer where Jude Law draws two knives at once--it seems likely that some production assistant hunted for weeks to find such perfectly shaped weapons. Here's hoping that the movie is snappy and uses its concept as something more than an action-starter.

The Best Around

1984's The Karate Kid, driven by Joe Esposito's relentless hit "You're the Best Around", has long set the standard for preteen martial arts movies. I'm excited to say that that era may be drawing to a close, if the new remake of that movie lives up to its first trailer.

Watch it now, before I give away the game.

I'll air my one complaint first: this remake should really be called The Wushu Kid, or The Kung Fu Kid, because the wizened "karate" master of this remake has never made and probably will never make a karate movie. The rest is all good. We start with a foundation familiar to Karate Kid fans; a young man starting a new life far from home, confused, lonely. He catches the eye of an attractive young lady, and his troubles begin when her thuggish boyfriend notices. The confusion and misery build until a familiar face steps in, to our relief and delight; Jackie Chan to the rescue, ready to teach our hero what he needs to know to defend his body and his honor. A few snippets of a well-made training montage follow, complete with satisfying nods to the original and set to the block-rocking beats of Fort Minor's "Remember the Name." I will be seeing Jackie Chan dispense Kung-Fu wisdom in the theaters at the first opportunity.

My favorite trailer (of all time)

DH probably expected me to make my first post about THE TOOTH FAIRY, which it well could have been, but I've chosen instead to talk about what I think is the best trailer of all time. I'm talking, of course, about the trailer for Terminator Salvation.

The trailer for 300 had already established Nine Inch Nails as the best possible trailer-music, but this trailer took it to a whole new level, combining "The Day The Whole World Went Away" with the dark imagery of the post-apocalyptic future. Of course, the movie itself was disappointing, but the trailer is my favorite of all time.

Are You Saying This is the Apocalypse??

The trailer for Legion is almost certainly what convinced Dan to start this blog. It begins with a nice misdirection - the sun rising, mystical music, and then a cut to the No-Country-For-Old-Men scrub brush desert with mandatory barbwire fence. The voice over is of a sad woman reminiscing about her mother's prophesy of "a time when all the world would be covered in darkness." So, this is an artsy drama, or maybe a Michael Moore film, right?

Or is it? Next we find ourselves in a diner in Paradise Falls, and everything changes. I don't want to ruin the diner scene for you, so you should watch the trailer now:

The old woman puts this way over the top. There is one more great moment in the trailer, as you no doubt already know - "I knew He'd send you, Gabriel. You were always so eager to please Him."

The rest is, to be sure, competent trailersmanship . An angel firing two automatic weapons at once. Gabriel using some sort of modern club or flail not unlike the Witch-King of Angmar's. Dennis Quaid looking his folksiest. And the final line - "Are We Safe Now? ... No." We know where we'll be on January 22.

300: A good place to start

I will begin with one of my top five movie trailers: the first trailer for the 2007 semi-classic 300, a minimovie marked by several memorable lines and a sequence of exciting shots (in an unusual comic-book inspired visual style) tied together by great music, that last being the key to almost any trailer (the song is "Just Like You Imagined," by Nine Inch Nails, for the curious). Watch it here. Not only is it one of the finest trailers of all time, but never was a trailer better than the movie it previews by wider margin. 300, if you somehow did not see the movie, tells the tale of a detachment of 300 Spartan soldiers who fought a suicide mission, outnumbered more than three thousand to one, to save their homeland from an invading Persian army. It seldom hurts a trailer to start with one of history's most epic stories (though the same cannot be said about movies), and from there, this one hooks us with several mysterious shots followed by a thunderous line. The music is enough to let them serve us a more or less unconnected series of shots and bring us to the theaters, but here's the glowing material it played over:

Memorable Lines:

1. "Spartans! Tonight we dine in hell!"

2. The worthwhile but mildly wince-worthy "Madness? This. Is. Sparta."

3. "Then we will fight in the shade."

4. "This is where we fight! This is where they die!"

Memorable Shots:

1. The Spartans pushing some silhouettes over a cliff.

2. A man sitting on a giant silver throne, the sides formed by silver bulls.

3. The frenzied face of Leonidas (Gerard Butler) as he delivers line #1.

4. Leonidas whipping out his sword and pointing it at a Persian messenger, the messenger standing before a circular pit in an otherwise empty brick background.

5. Leonidas kicking that messenger into the pit as he shouts line #2.

6. A soldier in all black with an angry silver mask, at the head of a similarly clad army, raising his hand to stop a march.

7. The Spartans whipping their shields over their shoulders in perfect unison to form a wall.

8. The sun blotted out by Persian arrows.

9. A spartan breaking a bunch of arrows off of his shield with his spear