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“Last Christmas” Trailer!

I waited a very long time for this trailer to drop last night, but eventually sleep beckoned, so I apologize for not rushing out a review at 1 A.M. This morning, when I woke up to find Last Christmas and Emilia Clarke trending, I thought I would have very little to talk about in a review: I watched it. It looked cute, charming, but inconsequential. I was already planning an excuse not to write about it – when I saw the main topic of discussion about this trailer, and realized that this has sparked a debate so weird and laughable, I simply had to get involved.

For those unaware, Last Christmas is a cheerful holiday rom-com inspired by the music of George Michael (though, there’s really no sign of that inspiration in the trailer, other than the accompanying music). It stars Emilia Clarke as a cynical, embittered Londoner suffering from what appears to be alcoholism, working as a Christmas elf in a department store. Somewhere in between electrocuting fish and getting yelled at by her store manager, Clarke’s character, Kate, runs into a man named Tom who seems almost too good to be true, always smiling and laughing, who donates to charity, volunteers at a homeless shelter, and is basically an all-around Awesome Person. Tom and Kate fall in love, and…well, it’s a romantic comedy. They fall in love. Is there supposed to be any more to it than that?

According to the internet, yes. The general consensus is that there’s no way this movie could ever be entirely happy. I’ve seen two theories gaining traction that both are theoretically plausible, but highly unlikely: the first is that Tom is so pure of heart that he must be an angel, come to change Kate’s life and teach her the values of love and Christmas spirit, etc, etc. The other, sadly, is that Kate, whom we see being wheeled into a hospital, communicating with a therapist, and getting wildly drunk, is actually dying, and that Tom is a hallucination, some last-ditch attempt by her brain to get her to change her ways – or that Kate’s condition is actually heart problems, and that Tom is the ghost of the heart donor who saved her life. We’ve seen funny plays on “I gave you my heart” before, but this one really takes the cake.

Is it that hard to believe that Henry Golding’s character Tom is just a decent guy?

If any of these theories turn out to be true, it would certainly be a shocking and bittersweet conclusion to what, on the surface, looks like a really sweet Christmas comedy. It would also be a startling choice from Emilia Clarke, who recently revealed that she barely survived two life-threatening brain aneurysms. I kind of want this to just be a cheerful, low-stakes romantic comedy that doesn’t have to be a tearjerker – we’re already going to be crying our eyes out over Little Women, another holiday movie: can’t anything just be nice? Do we absolutely have to make it weird?

What are your thoughts? Do you think the theories carry any weight, or is this movie just what it appears to be – Emilia Clarke dancing around in a bright green elf-costume while Henry Golding stands by, looking handsome and too-pure-for-this-world? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

Trailer Rating: 7/10

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“1917” First Trailer!

It’s shaping up to be a good year for World War I dramas – between this grim, harrowing account of two men racing against time to prevent a massacre on the battlefield, to The King’s Man, which seems to present a more romanticized view of British spies and assassins weaving through early 20th Century politics, pretty much all your bases are covered. So let’s talk about the first trailer for Sam Mendes’ 1917, which has just dropped today.

First up, the fact that it’s a joint Universal Studios/DreamWorks Pictures release stunned me right off the bat – I’m just not used to seeing the DreamWorks logo before a trailer filled with mustard gas, military chaos and the horrors of war: but here we are, and that’s what we’ve got. The trailer is masterfully edited to reflect the claustrophobia of the trenches on the front lines: it opens with a man running across an open field, being peppered with bullets and bombs, but the camera frame shrinks tighter and tighter around him, quickly becoming the second 1 in 1917, while the man himself is lost in a cloud of smoke. That’s quickly followed by darkly-lit shots of soldiers creeping through an abandoned building, guns at the ready – the shadows encroach around them oppressively before being abruptly shredded by a bomb exploding in their midst. As the air rings around the survivors, their voices are muffled and distant, their figures merely dark silhouettes in a fog. There are haunting shots of men wading through rivers clogged with dead bodies, or staring into the ever more rapidly shrinking title cards as if they’re caught in the enemy’s crosshairs, while the music beats in time to their gunfire.

And then, of course, there’s Benedict Cumberbatch: no decent British historical fiction would feel right without him. The cast also includes Colin Firth, Mark Strong and Richard Madden – as of right now, the film looks very (as in, entirely) male-driven: there’s only a single female character credited on IMDb, and since she doesn’t have a name except for “Mother”, I’ll bet she’s very unimportant to the story. That’s not necessarily a mark against the film, but plenty of war dramas can and do find enough time for at least one named female character to appear: though they’re typically little more than plot devices who inspire the soldiers to invoke their name as they charge into battle, or who can cry over said soldiers when their dead bodies are returned home for burial.

All in all, though, the film looks very good: with the market currently wanting more war dramas, I hope 1917 has enough appeal to win out over bigger, more mainstream releases like Roland Emmerich’s Midway, or The King’s Man.

Trailer Rating: 5/10

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“Gemini Man” Second Trailer!

Nobody’s changed the boring sci-fi logo for this film, which is a real shame – but at least this time around they’ve made it glow, so that’s something. Seriously, I give them three months to swap that logo out for something even remotely interesting, and they give me the exact same thing but in neon blue?

As for the trailer itself, its content has gotten more convoluted than last time, but at least they’ve extracted some of the cringey dialogue like “You made a person out of another person”. But just wait; I’m sure that memorable line is still somewhere in the movie itself, they’ll just trick you into thinking they’ve changed so they can get you into the theater. Who would do such a thing?, you might ask. David Benioff, I might answer in this hypothetical scenario. Benioff, one of the two Game of Thrones screenwriters now literally synonymous with “bad writers” in Google’s database,  is undoubtedly going through a hard time – but that honestly doesn’t excuse the fact that he apparently wrote this film: and besides, he’s getting a job with Disney writing a Star Wars trilogy, so I’m sure he’ll be fine.

Will Smith still seems to be trying really hard to sell this story about an assassin trying to rescue his young clone from a life of brainwashing and manipulation: granted, Gemini Man is able to get to that premise before the upcoming Marvel film Black Widow, which looks like it might include that element as well. But take a wild guess which one will succeed. Anyway, one problem with the trailer is that Will Smith – obviously – plays both himself and his younger-looking clone, and it’s very difficult to figure out when he’s talking or his clone is; leaving aside the fact that they look similar enough that it’s sometimes hard to tell them apart. And to top it off, Will Smith is the film’s only selling point, so he has to be the brunt of really bad title-card puns, like “Who WILL Save You?”

One thing this trailer improves is its action: apparently you can do quite a lot with a bicycle – though said bicycle scene seems to be the film’s crown jewel of action scenes so far, which makes me a little nervous. We’ve got a fight in a hardware store with young Will Smith riding a tank into battle – I think it’s young Will Smith, could be the random dude in the suit who shows up occasionally to look evil, though. There’s one cool sequence where our Will Smith throws a grenade at young Will Smith, only to have young Will Smith hit it with a bullet in mid-air and send it ricocheting back. Honestly, I’m having a very hard time finding anything interesting here at all. And having Will Smith (our Will Smith, not young Will Smith) tell the other Will Smith ominously at the end of the trailer that “This has to be stopped, because what if somebody knew what we really are?” – well, that doesn’t cut it either. Because I don’t frankly care what they really are: they’re Will Smith and a CGI construct of Will Smith – the trailers haven’t given me any reason to want to see what happens to them, or what secrets about their past might be uncovered.

Trailer Rating: 4/10

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“Harriet” Trailer!

This trailer makes me so happy and so sad at the same time: happy, because it’s about time someone adapted the incredible story of Harriet Tubman to the big screen; sad, because it’s a Focus Features film, and mainstream audiences rarely, if ever, go to see those in theaters (last I checked, the official trailer had less than a hundred likes on YouTube)  – for this one, though, I have to hope they’ll make an exception: it can’t just be critics who get to experience this!

The film will explore the true story of the life and times of Harriet Tubman, the legendary black abolitionist who fought to free African Americans from the horrors of slavery, as one of the leading conductors on the Underground Railway. The trailer showcases drama, and a lot of action: unusual for Focus Features, which tends to be more small-scale and intimate – but Harriet looks to have a whole bunch of battles and the like, led by one really awesome and inspiring black heroine. Plus, it’s got a really catchy song. Harriet herself will be played by Cynthia Erivo (inspired casting), while Janelle Monáe also has a substantial role in the film – yes, like, the real Janelle Monáe: as in, how many good reasons do I need to give you to go see this film when it comes out in November? Honestly, it looks better than the Fred Rogers biopic also premiering that month, and I didn’t expect that at all.

Maybe the film won’t be as good as it looks to be, but this trailer is a work of art: until I actually see substantial proof that I’m wrong, I’m declaring this to be one of those films that you must see at some point, even if you catch it on streaming afterwards or whatnot.

Trailer Rating: 10/10