Trailer Tuesdays: RoboCop

I just don’t understand why I should care. I never thought RoboCop was a very interesting story anyway, even when it was an original story, and I am not at all impressed with what I have seen of the remake. Let me explain why.

Trailer Tuesdays: How to Train Your Dragon 2 Teaser

It’s been quite a while since I’ve seen the first movie—which was all sorts of awesome—and I’m even more excited for this one. The movie is based off a series of twelve books by Cressida Corwell, and from what I know about the books, since I haven’t read them, is that they don’t have that much in common with the movie, outside character names. Unfortunately, I’m also further lacking in my How to Train Your Dragon knowledge, as I haven’t watched the television show either. I probably won’t get caught up on that for a while yet.

What I do know is that the first movie was amazing—and though we can’t tell much from this teaser, I hope this one will be just as awesome. One of the things that I liked about the first movie was Toothless. Not because he’s cute, not because everything about him is endearing, but because he’s disabled. Due to Hiccup’s own actions, Toothless’s tail is injured, and now Toothless cannot fly without the aid of a prosthetic that Hiccup made for him. Additionally, at the end of the first movie, Hiccup loses a leg, making them both disabled characters.

Though we see Toothless as disabled for most of the movie, Hiccup isn’t injured until the very end, and I really want to see how How to Train Your Dragon 2 will handle that. There doesn’t seem to be much out in the way of a synopsis for this movie, but according to Wikipedia, it is the second in a trilogy, and so far, the plot seems to be as follows:

[Hiccup] discovers a larger conflict brewing between humans and dragons and he finds himself at the center of it.

Hiccup is also going to come across new dragons and meet different people from other cultures. So far, it sounds like a bundle of everything I love.

Trailer Tuesdays: After Earth

Yes, I know this movie just came out recently, but I haven’t seen it yet, and it only came out a couple days so I think I’m still within my blogger rights to review the trailer.

It’s summer time and Will Smith is in an action movie. That seemed to be the norm for a long time, but now that I think about it, I haven’t seen Will Smith in many movies lately, or at least many action ones. But this time it seems like the burden of providing most of the action actually is on Will Smith’s son, Jaden Smith. In After Earth, Will and Jaden play a father and son team that crash lands on… Earth? So apparently one thousand years ago humanity left Earth for… reasons, but now Will Smith and his son have crash landed there, and they need to retrieve some sort of beacon in order to get home. But there’s a twist: everything on Earth has evolved to kill humans now. Again because of reasons… reasons that I assume will be connected with some surprise twist ending about why humans left the planet in the first place. Maybe the plants killed people? No, wait, it’s all actually Jaden Smith’s dream, or it’s faeries, or normal people dressing in yellow robes to scare everyone and hide the fact they live in modern times. Or maybe the twist is that it’s set in a world where Avatar: The Last Airbender didn’t suck.

As you may have guessed from my thinly veiled sarcasm, this movie is directed by M. Night Shyamalan. Which leaves me in something of a conundrum when it comes to whether or not I should see this movie. You see, almost all Will Smith movies are good. That is just fact. Even if it’s not good in the sense that it has a good plot, it’s always at least entertaining and enjoyable to watch. But M. Night Shyamalan has, in recent years, been a terrible director, but his early movies were so good I think I just want to always given him a chance to redeem himself. The movie looks exciting. Furthermore, and perhaps most importantly, the movie stars two characters of color, which is something movies don’t often do, especially sci-fi movies. That alone might be the reason I see this movie, even if the plot seems to set itself up with one too many twist endings.

We’ll have to wait and see if this will be an exciting movie or another M. Night Shyamalan failure at making a comeback.

Trailer Tuesdays: Despicable Me 2

I am so excited for this movie I can’t even contain my joy!

Despicable Me 2 brings us the return of Edith, Margo, Agnes, and their now formerly villainous parent, Gru. I’m not sure what Gru is doing now that he is no longer villainous. The trailer kind of implies that he has been out of the game for a while. I hope we get to see Gru working some tedious normal job so that he can make enough money to raise the girls. Whatever the case, it will be nice to see three of my favorite young female characters.

For a brief second I was excited that Margo asked why it mattered if she was texting a boy or a girl, because I thought that maybe there would be some young love between her and another young girl, which would be awesome. There are so many movies for kids that stress heteronormativity (like every Disney movie ever), which can makes things really awkward for LGBTQ kids growing up, since they never see any sort of relationships that apply to them. It’s time for a kids movie or show, or whatever to step up to the plate and makes this a reality. It’s time. Sadly, the trailer doesn’t suggest that Margo may be in love with a girl, but it doesn’t preclude the possibility either—though I’m probably just projecting my own desires on to this brief scene.

We also have an awesome new red-headed female character named Lucy, played by the equally awesome Kristen Wiig. At first I thought she might be acting as the bad guy in this film, but the trailer seems to imply that they will actually be allies. So yay! New female character!

So yes, beyond excited for this movie. If I were you, I would go see it come July.

Trailer Tuesdays: Girls Against Boys

(Trigger Warning: Rape, sexual assault, torture, murder)

If there is one movie you should definitely avoid, it’s Girls Against Boys.

From what I can tell from the trailer a girl, we’ll call her Girl One, is sexually assaulted outside her apartment. Girl One meets another girl, that we’ll call Girl Two, that offers to kill Girl One’s rapist. It turns out that Girl Two “gets off” on killing people and particularly targets men who have done women wrong. The entire premise of the movie seems to be “girls get revenge on men who are assholes.”

Now, maybe you are wondering why I, a feminist, am telling you not to see this movie. I’m telling you not to go see this movie because based on the trailer it’s looks like a terribly sexist movie! And what’s worse, despite the fact that neither of the women identify as feminists, people are already calling this a feminist movie, feminist porn, and even worse, feminist torture porn.

Let me reiterate, this is not feminism! If the writers and directors of this movie think this is feminism then they are wrong–very, very, very wrong.

Trailer Tuesdays: After Earth

While I’m not the biggest fan of Will Smith or his son, I was actually really excited for this. Anything involving a post-apocalyptic Earth tends to grab my attention immediately. And this one doesn’t even seem to have anything to do with zombies, and yet humans are still no longer the dominate species on the planet. So I was already interested in what happened. I wanted to know how it came to be that humans are afraid of Earth. On top of that, Will and Jaden have appeared together in movies before, and being actual father and son makes their relationship on screen all the more real. So there are not a lot of instances in their relationship where I could see bad—or rather, unbelievable—chemistry pulling me from the movie.

I say I was excited because the movie’s director is none other than M. Night. Shyamalan—or, Shyamalamamon, as my brother likes to call him.

Maybe at one point Mr. Shyamalan was a great director, but his movies just seem to keep going downhill, and I honestly thought we would never see him again after The Last Airbender movie bombed for being a complete disaster. That movie was so bad that all of the characters’ names were mispronounced. The girl who played Katara couldn’t even say Avatar correctly. On top of that, I had no idea what was happening or why it was happening.

I’m worried the same thing will happen here. I’m worried that the characters will have no agency. That they’ll be cardboard cutouts. That the plot will be a convoluted mess impossible to follow. That we’ll be force-fed some annoying message that will take precedence over what’s happening on the screen.

So here’s me wishing that Shyamalan will turn around and produce something worth watching. But I’m afraid to get my hopes up.