Movies Daily by Zach Cannon

July 5 in the Trailer Park

It’s interesting sometimes how differently a movie looks depending on the way a trailer is cut. The red band trailer for The Wackness focused more the relationship between Ben Kingsley and Josh Peck and the little weed-selling outfit they run. In this new trailer, it’s made to look more like a quirky love story set in the early ’90s.

Here’s a preview for a strange looking indie comedy. Called Harold, it’s about a teenager who’s already massively afflicted by male pattern baldness and has trouble fitting in at school so he uses his older look to buy beer, get friends, that sort of thing. That one joke is stretched pretty far in the trailer, so I can’t imagine the film itself being much fun.

Since thousands of freshmen are about to hit college, we’re getting, College, a late-August col-com (that’s college comedy) about a group of high school kids who go to a college campus for a weekend of debauchery. It looks OK; not particularly funny. It’s coming out against the probably horrible Disaster Movie and will get buried behind the other August comedies of Pineapple Express and Tropic Thunder but it could become a popular cult hit like Road Trip. Find the trailer here .

Mathieu Kassovitz has had some memorable roles in many movies (Amelie, Munich), but the last American film he directed, Gothika, didn’t turn out to well. Now, he has a very big futuristic actioner with Vin Diesel. It’s not quite my cup of tea, but you can catch the preview here.

Speaking of foreign directors, the last times Fernando Meirelles directed an English-language film, The Constant Gardener, his leading lady, Rachel Weisz, won an Academy Award. He’s back with claustrophobic thriller about a group of people who get locked in quarantine after a strange illness leaves its victims blind. You can catch the trailer here.

Earlier this week, I linked a Russian Web site that had the trailer for the remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still. Now a high-quality version of the trailer is available here.

Finally, the big trailer for the week is the first one for the new Bond film, Quantum of Solace. It’s very reminiscent of a Jason Bourne film (have you ever noticed how Jason Bourne, Jack Bauer and James Bond have the same initials?), with Bond going rogue and hunting down the terrorist group he busts at the end of the first. There’s good action and some of the beautiful cinematography that director Marc Forster is known for. You can find it here.

June 28 at the Trailer Park

We’ll start this Saturday with three non-trailers. First is an extremely well-edited fake trailer for a Batman movie in which the four iterations of Batman — Keaton, Clooney, Kilmer and Bale (that’s right, no love for Adam West) — battle over turf in Gotham City. You can catch it here.

In the upcoming Watchmen film, advertisements and commercials from various Veidt products will be visible in the background throughout the film on TV sets and as part of the scenery. (For the uninitiated, in the Watchmen universe Adrian Veidt is a retired superhero who reveals his secret identity and uses it to cash in.) Director Zak Snyder gave fans the opportunity to make the commercials for Veidt Enterprises and this week they picked the winners. You can find them here.

On Monday, the trailer for the new James Bond flick, Quantum of Solace, will debut on the ‘net. Until then, there’s a short preview of the preview here.

Now that Pixar guru John Lasseter is at Disney, the Mouse House is trying to get back into animation. The trailer for Bolt, their first feature-length cartoon since the Disney-Pixar merger is available here.

Shia LaBeouf (I’ve added his name to the spell check on my computer since I type it about once a week) reteamed with his Disturbia director D.J. Caruso in Eagle Eye. The trailer is available here and it looks like a huge, smash-bang thriller with equal shades of The Matrix and The Patriot Act.

Unfortunately, the makers of Epic/Date Movies and Meet the Spartans haven’t been kicked out of Hollywood yet, so they’ve made another spoof flick, Disaster Movie. It looks absolutely terrible. See for yourself here, but you’ve been warned.

Even though there are already a handful of trailers online for Hellboy II: The Golden Army, Apple debuted a new one this week. I was already sold on this movie — from the previews it looks like Del Toro has solved all the problems of the first one — and this trailer just gets me a little more excited for it. See it here .

Guy Richie’s latest, RocknRolla, looks to be a return to what he’s good at: Smart, quick and dark comedies set in London’s underground. See the trailer here.

Last year I got to see a clip from Bruce Campbell’s My Name is Bruce at an event. It was hilarious, but there hasn’t been much news about it’s release anywhere. This week, it was reported that the studio liked the film, poured some more money into it and allowed for a second round of shoot. The trailer is online here.

June 21 at the Trailer Park

This week brought a slew of new trailers to the Web. I posted earlier this week that The Curious Case of Benjamin Button trailer was finally available in high quality on Apple (available here ). If you’re jonesing for some more Brad Pitt after that and you dug the first Burn After Reading trailer, there’s a fun international trailer available here on MSN. It focuses less on the story, but gives you more of an idea of the tone of the movie.

There’s already been a handful of X-Files: I Want to Believe trailers online and in the theaters, but Apple debuted an “Online Exclusive Trailer.” It doesn’t show much new footage and it’s not all that different from earlier stuff, but here ’s the link anyways.

In the new movie Taken (unrelated to the Steven Spielberg mini-series), Liam Neeson plays the father of a kidnapped daughter who is on the phone with her when she’s nabbed from her apartment. When her captors pick up the phone, he just stops short of giving them his resume, revealing he’s some bad-ass CIA type who vows to get his daughter back and give her captors hell. The trailer’s tone and its editing are reminiscent of the Bourne films and it looks like it could be a genuinely exciting ride. You can catch it here.

Matthew Broderick became famous for playing Ferris Beuller and then made a career out of playing characters very unlike Ferris Beuller. In the trailer for Diminished Capacity, he looks to be continuing the trend of playing stuck up, stuffy characters. This time, he visits his uncle (Alan Alda), who reveals he owns a priceless baseball card. Together they set out to sell it, fall in love, learn important life lessons, blah blah blah. It’s in the vein of Sideways and the trailer puts it in the same quirky/indie world that Little Miss Sunshine was in. You can find the trailer here .

Now, this is what Red Band trailers were made for. Often, there’s the kind of movie you can’t fairly advertize because of its subject matter, so, naturally, a period comedy about a teenage drug dealer and the old guy (Ben Kingsley) he works for probably needs a red bander so you can get a true sense of what the film is like. Take a hit of The Wackness here.

While the teaser for Terminator 4 won’t debut until The Dark Knight hits theaters, AICN has a pretty detailed description as to what the trailer will be like. Check it out here.

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