Last July we got the first trailer for The Amazing Spider Man and this week we got the full theatrical trailer, which is thankfully less emo than the first trailer and give the first glimpses of The Lizard.  Marc Webb of (500) Days of Summer is directing this reboot and The Social Network’s Andrew Garfield is taking over as the web slinger with Martin Sheen, Sally Field, Emma Stone and Denis Leary and Rhys Ifans co-starring.  I think everyone would have preferred a continuation of the Sam Raimi trilogy instead of going back to the origin yet again but this new trailer reveals some new stuff that could be interesting, like Peter’s father working with Dr. Connors at Oscorp and Peter being seemingly unmasked in public.  The Lizard looks pretty different from his previous incarnations and almost looks more like Killer Croc from Batman.  I’m slightly more excited for Spider-Man now than after the first trailer and will definitely check it out when it comes out.  What do you guys think of this trailer?

The found footage genre is expanding out of the horror genre this year with movies like Project X and this weekend’s Chronicle, which puts the super hero/super powers genre through the found footage genre.  The gimmick of found footage doesn’t really add much but Chronicle is still a surprisingly fantastic movie with an amazing climax, interesting characters and great effects.

Chronicle follows a trio of high school students; Steve, Matt and Andrew, as they find a mysterious cave in the woods while at a rave and gain mysterious powers from whatever is in the cave.  The guys start messing around and slowly grow more powerful, which starts to effect Andrew in dangerous ways.

The three main guys are all pretty great and manage to avoid becoming stereotypes, even though it would have been easy for them to revert into them.  Andrew is the shy, loner who has a sick mom and abusive dad, Matt is Andrew’s cousin and tries to act smarter and cooler than he actually is and Steve is the super popular jock/class president.  The discovery of their powers however knocks down all the social barriers that would have kept them in their respective circles and they become extremely close friends, which makes what happens later that much more affecting.  One of the things that makes the guys endearing is their genuine glee over gaining super powers, something I think we all would experience.  Their experimentation and progress results in some hilarious moments, like their Jackass style visit to a department store and their attempts to discover how invulnerable they are by hitting each other in the face with a baseball.  The movie also smartly handles typical high school problems like bullies and girls along with the problems caused by gaining super powers.  Andrew’s arc is the main thrust of the story as his powers seemingly give him more confidence and popularity but his new found confidence is shattered by an embarrassing moment at a party and the pressure of his mom’s sickness and his dad’s abuse causes him to start giving in to the darker aspects his powers allow him to do.

Speaking of the super powers, they are all done amazingly well, especially considering the budget of the movie.  The guys manage to gain invulnerability, flight and telekinesis, with the latter being the showcase for some of the most impressive effects.  The progression of the powers is also handled extremely well as the guys are able to move bigger and bigger objects, fly for longer period of times and become more impervious to damage.  One aspect that isn’t explored quite as well is the fact that the guys are seemingly psychically linked but it’s never really explained why and only serves as a way to get the characters to plot points. The invulnerability aspect of their powers is not really explored as far as the flight and telekinesis powers are.   All of the build up of the powers leads to the absolutely spectacular finale where *SPOILERS* Andrew fully unleashes his powers and goes on a rampage throughout downtown Seattle with Matt trying desperately to stop him.  It’s everything a super powered fight should be with cars getting thrown through the air, people smashing each other through buildings, and cops getting thrown around like rag dolls.  It puts the finales of some of the bigger superhero movies to shame.

The one thing I wish is that Chronicle wasn’t a found footage movie.  It doesn’t suffer from the crazed shaky cam of movies like Cloverfield but the gimmick doesn’t really add much and it takes you out of some scenes because you start asking yourself, “Why would he be filming this right now?” and there’s a little too much dialogue from characters asking and justifying the camera.  There’s also the completely unnecessary element of Matt’s girlfriend also filming everything for her “blog”, which is where some of the footage for the movie comes from.  If Chronicle had just been a traditional superhero movie, you would probably be that much more invested in the characters and the set pieces would be that much more spectacular.  That being said, the found footage gimmick does add to some of the scenes like when the guys are flying for the first time and a sequence during the finale where the camera is the car with Matt and his girlfriend as they are trapped by Andrew and taken to the top of the Space Needle.  There’s also a pretty clever gimmick where Andrew levitates the camera so that all three guys can be on the screen at the same time.

Chronicle is a surprisingly great super hero/super powered movie that features some incredible effects for it’s budget and full fledged characters that you actually care about.  It doesn’t really need to be found footage but the gimmick doesn’t detract that much from the quality of the film.  If you’re in need of a movie superhero fix, Chronicle is definitely worth checking out.

4 out of 5

It was a close game at yesterday’s Super Bowl and it was a close battle at the box office between Chronicle and The Woman in Black, which featured two things teenagers love, found footage and PG-13 horror, respectively.  Chronicle had the best reviews and took the win by $2 million, making just over $22 million and, by the nature of the found footage genre, has already $10 million in profit.  The Woman in Black was one of the better, teen targeted, horror openings and the best opening for CBS films with just over $20 million.  The Grey had a pretty steep drop off from it’s number one weekend last week but still managed $9.3 million and brought it’s total to $34.5 million.  Big Miracle gambled that women would head out to theaters while the men of their lives watched the big game but that gamble blew up in their faces with a middling $7.8 million opening weekend.  It was a much worse opening also compared to the other recent “humans help sea mammal” movie, Dolphin Tale.  Underworld 4 rounded out the top 5.  Everything else pretty much just moved down one or two spots to accommodate the newcomers with the biggest drops going to Man on a Ledge and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, but dropping four spots from the previous week.  It’s a jam packed weekend this coming Friday with Journey 2: The Mysterious Island, Phantom Menace 3D, Safe House and The Vow all coming out so it’s anyone’s guess what will take the number one spot.

We’re highlighting another composer in this week’s Musical Montage with Italian legend, Ennio Morricone.  Morricone is responsible for some of the most well known scores of all time, especially his work for Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns like For A Few Dollars More and The Good, The Bad and the Ugly.  He also contributed a number of scores to Italian horror master Dario Argento and the fantastic synth score for John Carpenter’s The Thing.  Check out just a few of his many masterpieces below.

The Ecstasy of Gold from The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

For A Few Dollars More Main Theme

The Good, The Bad and The Ugly Suite

A Fistful of Dollars Theme

The Thing Theme

The Cat O’ Nine Tails Theme

Casualties of War Theme

In the Line of Fire Theme

“Pazuzu” from The Exorcist II: The Heretic

The Untouchables Theme

Another Super Bowl has come and gone and that means there’s a bunch of new trailers for, arguably, some of the year’s biggest movies.  The most exciting trailer was probably the new Avengers trailer, which showed the Hulk in action and had a great shot of all the Avengers going back to back to face whatever the big threat of the movie is.  The GI Joe: Retaliation trailer was pretty awesome as well and if you had told me in 2009 that I would be super excited for a sequel to Rise of Cobra, I would slap you in the face for being a liar.  John Carter and Battleship also had new trailers but I’m still not sold on either of them.  Check out all of them below.

The Avengers

Battleship

John Carter

GI Joe: Retaliation

Chronicle

Starring: Dane DeHaan, Alex Russell, Michael B Kelly, Michael Kelly

Directed by: Josh Trank

Plot: Three high school friends make a discovery that gives them superpowers that grow increasingly more powerful and dangerous.

Rotten Tomatoes Freshness: 86%

Critic Consensus: “It arrives during a glut of found-footage films, but Chronicle transcends its gimmicks with a smart script, fast-paced direction, and engaging performances from its young, talented cast”

The Woman in Black

Starring: Daniel Radcliffe, Ciaran Hinds, Janet McTeer, Shaun Dooley, David Burke, Liz White

Directed by: James Watkins

Plot: A young lawyer in Victorian England travels to a remote village to finalize the sale of one of his client’s house but discovers it’s haunted by a malevolent spirit.

RT Freshness: 66%

Critic Consensus: “Traditional to a fault, The Woman in Black foregoes gore for chills — although it may not provide enough of them for viewers attuned to more modern, high-stakes horror”

Big Miracle

Starring: Drew Barrymore, John Krasinski, Vinessa Shaw, Stephen Root, Ted Danson, Tim Blake Nelson, Dermot Mulroney

Directed by: Ken Kwapis

Plot: An reporter and an animal lover join forces to help free a trio of trapped gray whales who become trapped while migrating by quickly freezing ice.

RT Freshness: 68%

Critic Consensus: “Big Miracle uses real-life events as the basis for a surprisingly satisfying family drama”

Liam Neeson continues to cement himself as an action star with his latest movie, The Grey, but there’s a lot more going on in it than you probably expect from the “Liam Neeson punches wolves” trailers.

Neeson stars as Ottway, a survival expert/hunter who works perimeter security for an oil drilling station in remote Alaska.  He’s suffered some sort of personal trauma and is basically on the verge of suicide as the movie opens but he quickly has to put everything aside when he and a small group of oil workers survive a horrific plane crash on their way back to civilization.  As if the freezing cold and remoteness of their crash weren’t bad enough, the men have seemingly crashed into the middle of wolf territory, as a pack of vicious wolves starts stalking and killing the men.

Neeson is at his absolute best in The Grey, giving both emotional depth and bad assness to the character of Ottway.  He effortlessly goes from staring down the wolf pack to comforting a man who is about to die.   No matter what situation comes up, Ottway keeps a level head and tries, and unfortunately usually fails, to drag the other men along with him to safety.  I also loved his resourcefulness whether he’s tying himself in to his airplane seat with three seatbelts to creating “wolf sticks” with some found shotgun shells and homemade spears.  If I was lost in the Alaskan wilderness, I would follow Ottway in a heartbeat.  The rest of the cast is a bunch of extremely solid character actors with the standout probably being Frank Grillo as Diaz, who starts out as what seems to be the typical asshole character but slowly grows and accepts his situation until he comes to his heartbreaking end. All of the characters are fleshed out extremely well and through things like fireside conversations, you start to care about them, which makes their eventual deaths to wolves, etc. that much more effecting.

Joe Carnahan does a great job of relating how dire the survivors situation is and how desolate a region they are in.  There are tons of shots of the wintry landscape that feel more and more hopeless as the movie goes on.  Not to say that the movie isn’t exciting as well, especially as there’s the almost constant threat of the wolf pack and there’s numerous times where you will probably jump out of your seat as a wolf comes out of nowhere to snatch away another survivor.  The plane crash is also one of the best I’ve seen.  Besides the wolves, the guys also have to fight the elements and just as many guys succumb to the freezing cold and nature as to wolves ripping their throats out.  The big scene that most people are probably waiting for, Liam Neeson taping bottles to his knuckles and taking on one of the wolves, is definitely not what you are expecting it to be and, *SPOILER* you don’t actually get to see Neeson go one on one with the wolf but the build up to that scene is so great emotionally that it would probably cheapen everything else, even though it would probably be awesome in the short run.

Just as I hoped, The Grey is the first great movie of the year, even though it’s not the balls to the action movie you might be expecting.  It is a fantastic survival movie with an amazing Liam Neeson in the lead and just goes to show the versatility of Joe Carnahan as the The Grey is a complete 18o from his last movie, the awesomely insane A-Team movie.  It’s definitely highly recommended and sets a high mark for the other movies of the year to match.

5 out 5

Rade Serbedzija

Born: July 27, 1946

Number of Roles: 155

Best Known for Playing: Russian scientists, military officers and politicians

First Appearance: Mladic Branka in Illusion (1967)

Most Recent Appearance: Nebojsa in The Land of Blood and Honey (2011)

Can Be Seen/Heard in:

• X-Men: First Class
• The Saint
• Batman Begins
• Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1
• CSI Miami
• My Own Worst Enemy
• Fallen
• Snatch
• Mission Impossible II
• 24
• Surface
• The Fog
• Space Cowboys
• Mighty Joe Young
• Thick as Thieves

Making it’s premiere at Sundance this year is director Rodrigo Cortes’ follow up to Buried with Red Lights.  Robert De Niro stars as a world famous psychic who an ambitious psychic investigator/debunker (Cillian Murphy) decides to investigate and starts experiencing all kinds of weird phenomenon.   Sigourney Weaver and Elizabeth Olsen co-star.  Cillian Murphy is always great and it looks like De Niro could be a fun, scenery chewing villain so it might be worth a look if it ever gets a wide release (Millenium apparently bought the film).  Check out the trailer below.

This edition of The Lone Gunmen Total Recall features one of the episodes I remembered the most about and features a great guest star appearance by Stephen Tobolowsky.

The episode kicks of with Tobolowsky’s character coming home from work and going about his pre-bed ritual of watching TV, having a beer and going to the bathroom but unbeknownst to him, another man comes home and does the exact same routine, with the two men just barely missing seeing each other until finally they realize what’s going on when they accidentally get into bed with each other.  The other man and his wife are horrified by Tobolowsky (who we’ll soon learn is named Adam Burgess) but he accuses them of being in his house.

Byers and Jimmy go to meet Adam soon afterwards and they find out that he’s come with a crazy conspiracy about being from an alternate reality that aliens abducted him from and brought him to our reality, since his entire life has seemingly been stolen from him.  He offers up a tub of weird blue goo as proof and Byers quickly dismisses him as a loon but Jimmy notices a weird connector surgical implanted in Adam’s neck that makes Byers give him a second look.

Back at the Gunmen HQ, Frohike and Langly are skeptical when they find out the goo is udder cream and he’s still talking about aliens and alternate realities but Byers convinces them to perform an MRI to see what the deal with the connector is.  Using “Bessie”, Frohike’s homemade MRI machine, they find out that the connector is connected to a series of wires hooked in to various parts of Adam’s brain.  This definitely peaks the Gunmen’s interest so they head off with Adam to investigate his supposed house.  Adam seems to have intimate knowledge of the neighborhood and it’s resident’s routine which makes Byers hypothesize that Adam may have possibly been fed a feed of the house through hidden cameras, much like how people are able to become intimately familiar with TV locations.  Byers, Jimmy, Langley and Adam break into Adam’s “house” to search for hidden cameras while Frohike kills the power and stand guard outside.  Inside, the guys use handheld sensors to try and find any electronics and mark suspicious locations.  Adam gets impatient and uses a handheld saw to start cutting into the walls, eventually collapsing the entire wall of the kitchen, right in front of a pair of cops that have been called by nosy neighbor Rosey.  The guys then have to spend the night in jail but are sprung by Yves paying their bail.

Yves joins the guys in investigating Adam’s case and they get a lead when Adam flies into a rage when seeing a commercial for Maniac Marvin’s Electronics.  The guys got a hint of some sort of inner anger in jail when Adam flipped out on Langley and the guys, sans Frohike and Yves, head to Marvin’s store to question him.  Marvin claims he’s never seen Adam before but he has a picture of Adam with a dwarf woman hidden on his desk.  Outside, Adam flies into a rage again when he sees a standee of Marvin with a pair of midget wrestlers and slams Langley against the front window.  While the others are at Marvin’s, Yves and Frohike are paid a visit by a woman named Lois who claims to be Adam’s wife but is actually the head scientist behind a drastic behavior modification therapy.   Back at the HQ, Adam again goes crazy when he confuses Frohike for a midget wrestler named The Great Santini.  Yves finds out that Santini has a daughter named Sadie and the gang goes to pay her a visit.  It turns out that Sadie and Marvin are seeing each other and Sadie is Adam’s wife.  Adam’s real name is Charlie Muckle and he was an alcoholic, rageaholic, criminal who volunteered for Dr. Lois’ crazy therapy instead of going to jail for putting one of Marvin’s eyes out.  The treatment consisted of Charlie getting a virtual world fed into the connector on his neck and living the perfect life of Adam Burgess with Dr. Lois as his wife.  Confronted with how messed up his old life was, Adam/Charlie agrees to get plugged back into the virtual reality.

The guys are excited by having an actual, interesting story to write about for their next addition but Jimmy is disappointed by the ending of the story so he convinces the guys to help him reunite Charlie with Sadie.  The guys find that the hidden cameras at the site of Charlie’s virtual house are actually on the utility poles outside and they tap in and are able to stand in the front yard and talk to Charlie and are able to convince him that the virtual life is a sham and will never be as fulfilling as an actual life and they manage to get him to the wedding of Sadie and Marvin in time to stop it and get back together with Sadie.

Bruce Willis and Henry Cavill star as father and son in the upcoming action thriller, The Cold Light of Day.  Cavill stars as a Wall Street trader who is on vacation with his family in Madrid.  He goes into town for supplies and comes back to the family’s boat to find them all gone and signs of foul play all over.  He soon learns that his father is actually a CIA agent and his family was kidnapped by people who believe that Bruce Willis’ character stole a valuable briefcase.  Sigourney Weaver co-stars as a fellow CIA agent who may or not be corrupt.  It seems very similar to Abducted with Taylor Lautner (Sigourney Weaver even co-starred in that movie) but hopefully with actors who can actually, you know, act, that it will be a decent action movie.  Check out the trailer below and the movie is out in April.

There are great soundtracks, good soundtracks and then there’s soundtracks like 1998′s soundtrack for Roland Emmerich’s infamous and overhyped Godzilla.  Featuring mostly alternative rock from the likes of The Wallflowers, Foo Fighters, Fuel and Rage Against the Machine, most of the songs are not totally offensive but extremely forgettable but one song from the Godzilla soundtrack that has passed into infamy is P. Diddy’s “Come With Me”, which desecrates the Led Zepplin classic “Kashmir”, with the full consent of Jimmy Page.  The music video for the song is seven minutes of insanity as P. Diddy indulges in such things as free falling into Times Square and performing with a full orchestra with minimal interaction with the star of the movie (Godzilla seemingly destroys Diddy’s apartment early in the video).  If you still want to check it out, you can watch the video below.

Bonus Video: Green Day’s Brain Stew Remix from Godzilla (which is a remix only in the sense they added random Godzilla roars to the song)

God Bless America is the latest, certain to be controversial, movie from Bobcat Goldthwait that indulges a lot of people’s secret desire to murder all the annoying assholes of pop culture, from the Kardashians to the Westboro Baptist Church to the horrible teens of My Super Sweet 16 and all the other MTV shit.  Joel Murray (Freddy Rumsen from Mad Men) stars as Frank, a man who is diagnosed with untreatable cancer and decides, since he’s going to die anyway, he might as well take down all the aforementioned horrible people with him.  He picks up a teenage girl as his sidekick and the two go on a rampage across America.  I appreciate the sentiment of the movie but it feels like an Uwe Boll movie, Postal in particular, and seems like it’s using shock as punchlines instead of actual jokes.  There’s probably going to be less horribly offensive 9/11 jokes in God Bless America.  The movie will be On Demand in April and in select theaters in May and you can check out the red band trailer below.

Liam Neeson continues his domination of the early parts of the year by having another number one action movie in The Grey this weekend, following on previous number ones Taken and Unknown.  The Grey took in a solid $19.6 million, a little bit under those other Neeson action flicks but they both also came from bigger studios.  Underworld: Awakening fell by 51% from it’s number one weekend last week but still took second place with another $12.4 million.  One for the Money performed above expectations, which granted were extremely low, with a gross of $11.5 million.  It probably got a boost from it’s Groupon promotion where you could get a ticket for $6.  Red Tails and Man on a Ledge rounded out the top 5 with Man on a Ledge having a pretty terrible opening, getting beat by previous Sam Worthington movie The Debt, which made $9.9 million it’s opening weekend.  In other box office news, The Descendants returned to over 1,000 theaters over the weekend and rocketed back into the top ten, going from 16th last week to eighth this week.  Going in the opposite direction, Haywire and Contraband both fell drastically from previous weeks with the former barely staying in the top ten.

Starring: Liam Neeson, Frank Grillo, Dermot Mulroney, Dallas Roberts, Joe Anderson

Directed by: Joe Carnahan

Plot: A group of oil workers on their way home from Alaska are forced into a fight for survival when their plane crashes.  To make matters worse, a pack of vicious wolves is stalking the group.

Rotten Tomatoes Freshness: 76%

Critic Consensus: “The Grey is an exciting tale of survival, populated with fleshed-out characters and a surprising philosophical agenda”

Man on a Ledge

Starring: Sam Worthington, Elizabeth Banks, Ed Harris, Jamie Bell, Edward Burns, Genesis Rodriguez

Directed by: Asger Leth

Plot: A wrongly fully accused ex-cop, Nick Cassidy, becomes a distraction for his accomplices by feigning a suicide attempt while they break in to a nearby building to get proof of Nick’s innocent.

RT Freshness: 20%

Critic Consensus: “Uninspired acting and preposterous plotlines diffuse Man on a Ledge’s mildly intriguing premise”

One for the Money

Starring: Katherine Heigl, Jason O’Mara, Daniel Sunjuta, Nate Mooney, Sherri Shepherd, John Leguizamo

Directed by: Julie Anne Robinson

Plot: Stephanie Plum loses her job at Macy’s and decides to become a bounty hunter at her sleazy cousin’s bail bondsman office.

RT Freshness: N/A

Critic Consensus: N/A

Mark Boone Junior

Born: March 17, 1955

Number of Roles: 116

Best Known for Playing: Corrupt cops

First Appearance: Business Manager/Porn Customer in Variety (1983)

Most Recent Appearance: Robert Munson on Sons of Anarchy (2011)

Can Be Seen/Heard In:

• Memento
• Se7en
• Batman Begins
• In Plain Sight
• Halloween II
• 30 Days of Night
• 2 Fast 2 Furious
• The Thin Red Line
• The Game
• Seinfeld
• Die Hard 2

There was a brief teaser trailer for Lockout, the latest from Luc Besson’s company Europa, a couple months ago but now there’s a full trailer and consider me infinitely more excited.  Guy Pearce stars as Snow, a criminal who is given a chance at freedom if he goes on a mission to rescue the President’s daughter from a maximum security prison that has been taken over by the inmates.  The big catch is that the prison is a space station orbiting the Earth.  I’m hearing a lot of people making comparisons to Escape from New York and Guy Pearce to Kurt Russell and I can definitely see it along with Europa’s most recent hit, Taken.  I’m a fan of Guy Pearce and he looks like he’s gonna be a great, wise ass action hero in this.  Check out the trailer below and the movie is out in April.