The Half Dozen: 6 Most Interesting Looking Trailers For February 2012
So another February rolls around, and as usual I get a year older. This would also normally be a cracking month for movies, coming as it does at the end of the first of the film seasons of the year, Awards Season. But something’s gone wrong this year – the only Oscar Best Picture nomination coming out this year in February is Extremely Tom Hanks And Incredibly Mawkish, and there’s not a huge amount of other films that would have been in contention on the lists either. Consider that last February’s Half Dozen featured True Grit and Animal Kingdom, my favourite film of the year Confessions, and films like The Fighter, Rabbit Hole and Paul didn’t even make the list. (Admittedly West Is West did, and with hindsight that was a mistake, but you hopefully get my point.)
So this year it’s slimmer pickings, but that’s partly due to the quality of the Oscar nominations, and the fact that a lot of the best films this year were (a) British, so came out last year, and (b) completely overlooked, because they didn’t have Colin Firth in them. (Even more shockingly, one of those films was (a) outstanding and (b) DID have Colin Firth in, which just goes to prove that there’s no justice in Oscar world.) But, as much as I love the Muppets, I think the odds of this list providing three of my top 10 of the year are non-existent. Hopefully March will be better, with the Julia Roberts Snow White comedy movie by Tarsem Singh and the sequel to Clash Of The Titans. Hmm…
The Muppets
There was a large part of me that did contemplate making February an all-Muppets special, as they did rattle through enough parody trailers last year to easily fill a Half Dozen post. But if you’re not already looking forward to this, especially after the last six months of BlogalongaMuppets, then there is no hope for you.
The Woman In Black
Who would’ve thought, when teeny-tiny Daniel Radcliffe was starting out in the Harry Potter series, that we’d be seeing him on screen in ten years in leading man roles, able to carry a film on his own shoulders? Who’d have also thought that, ten years later, Daniel Radcliffe would still be teeny-tiny and be afflicted with UGS (Unconvincing Grown-Up Syndrome; fellow sufferers included, until very recently, Leonardo DiCaprio)? Still, proof positive that if you take anyone and surround them with the cream of British acting talent for ten years, they will eventually learn how to act.
A Dangerous Method
There are a small group of directors that, if you just showed me a poster with the title of the film and the name of the director on, I would happily fork out my cash for that film without knowing anything else. That list currently includes the likes of Christopher Nolan, David Fincher, The Coens, Paul Thomas Anderson, Michael Haneke, Edgar Wright and Wes Anderson, and could well see the likes of Tomas Alfredson and Steve McQueen being added in the next few years. David Cronenberg is on that list; the fact that the next names on the poster would be Viggo Mortensen and Michael Fassbender is just cherry and icing on top of a quite sufficient cake.
Position Among The Stars
Hollywood spends an absolute fortune on special effects, and more often than not fails to make them in any way special. Turns out all they needed to do was to get a young Indonesian boy to walk across a very high and extremely rickety bridge. The fact that Indonesia is the fourth most populous country in the world, yet most of us would be able to name little about it beyond possibly its capital city, might be reason enough to watch this, but the images should be strong argument to hunt
EDIT: This copy of the trailer was pointed out to me by the lovely folks at distributor Dogwoof. Now if they can only sort out distribution in the Fens so I can see the film as well. Hint hint.
Elephant White
From the sublime to the ridiculous, a reminder that the most interesting trailers of each month aren’t necessarily the best ones. Watching this trailer will tell you something about yourself as a person; if you think I’ve taken leave of my senses for including it, then fair enough, but if you think there’d be nothing better than grabbing a six-pack of your favourite beer, settling down on a Friday night and watching Kevin Bacon being cock-er-nee with elephants and huge, huge guns, then I think we may have a lot in common. (I’m not sure that’s a good thing, but it’s a thing, anyway.)
Blood Car
I would also define interesting as “Why in the name of all that is holy is a five year old film with the girl from My Girl and Uncle Buck as second lead getting a cinema release in this country?” Especially when you’ve actually watched the trailer.
The Movie Evangelist 