Terribly Happy | Bloggystyle

This is it, our last Trailers Without Pity video of our fourth season, for Christopher Nolan’s Batman finale, The Dark Knight Rises.

Pablo is a much bigger expert on Batman (and comics in general) than me, so he took the lead on writing this one and I jumped in, Robin-like, when I could to offer my own assistive heroics.

Wait, what, Robin’s not in this Batman series at all? Well, shiiiiiiit.

The video concludes our endless recent slog through superhero movies, but it’s also significant in that it caps off 13 episodes of our fourth season of Trailers Without Pity. And, truth be told, this might be the last video we do in the series.

We still enjoy doing them and they’ve only gotten easier over time as we’ve streamlined the production process, but with Pablo moving to Austin a few months ago, the getting together we do to record audio has gotten much, much harder to coordinate. No joke, we recorded the audio for one of the videos this season in the front seats of my car at the top of a parking garage. That’s how hard it’s been for us to schedule time/location on these.

So instead of coming back in two or three months, we may just have to wind it all down and move on to other stuff, like that comic we’ve been neglecting for so long. I’ll keep you posted on what happens, but in my mind, right now, this is probably the last Trailers Without Pity we’ll do. Thank you all for watching.

Which is what seems so weird about The Amazing Spider-Man, the Spidey reboot that we just did a video for on Trailers Without Pity.

Did Tobey Maguire not just do that?  Recently?  Is time passing so quickly that I don’t remember seeing that last movie just as my daughter was incubating in my wife’s belly (she had to keep leaving the IMAX theater as the kid started kicking and thrashing inside from all the noise).  That was only… what… four years ago?  A little more?

Well it matters not because Andrew Garfield is coming in and, hey, I kinda like the guy.  It might not be so bad.  It’s not gonna be Dark Knight (which will be our next video and our last for this season of videos), but it might still be fun.  Who knows.  Shoot some webs.  Swing and whatnot.  I don’t care, Spider.  Do your thing.  Maybe we’ll see each other this summer.  The video is below. Enjoy!

Is it over for Sacha Baron Cohen or can he knock out a stellar comedy and avoid the law of diminishing returns on his outrageous characters?

That’s the question we’re asking in our latest Trailers Without Pity video, on The Dictator, his upcoming comedy, which seems to be more straightforward and less pranky than Borat and Brüno.

We have two more videos to go in the season after this one before we take a summer break.

In other programming notes, I haven’t updated the site much due to South by Southwest earlier in March. I had been planning a big wrap-up blog post detailing it all and linking to everything I wrote during the fest but even that task has seemed so daunting that I’ve honestly just been avoiding it. That post will come in some form, but I’m so tired of talking about SXSW that I’ve been taking any opportunity to avoid it for the last two weeks. I’d love for everything to go back to normal and not feel like I owe any more wordage, but I also don’t want to just skip it and leave all those links uncollected, especially the weekly columns that are still going without any mention of them here. Maybe in a day or two when the weekend gets here. How hard have I been working to avoid it? I’ve been writing on a different project nearly every night, I read an entire book (The Hunger Games) and have done literally hundreds of drawings in Draw Something instead of doing that blog post. I work very hard to avoid work sometimes.

Thanks for watching the video. We’ve still got Spider-Man and Dark Knight coming up.

A bit late to posting this given all the SXSW madness (which I’ll post about very soon when I’m caught up on rest), but we worked on this video early to get it out of the festival fray and it’s been a on the TWOP site for several days now.

I mean, what can you say? Prometheus is an Alien prequel from Ridley Scott with perhaps the most genuinely scary and disturbing trailer we’ve seen in a while from a guy who knows how to create amazing things on screen. Something would have to go very wrong for this one not to at least be intriguing and full of thrills and the only thing I think could take it down is if it takes itself far too seriously to really dig in to the primal fears that made Alien work so well. Again, judging from the trailer, I don’t think it’s going to go that way and I can’t wait to see it. Our Trailers Without Pity video for it I hope gives you a sense of our anticipation.

We’re hitting the end of our fourth season of these videos. We’ll be doing two more big summer movies and then taking a hiatus until the fall. Enjoy!

Is there such a thing as superhero fatigue? What? Are you insane?! Superheroes don’t get fatigued! This is why they are superheroes. Oh, you mean for the audience? Oh, well, sure that. I had that like four years ago and it’s only gotten worse.

Despite my not having seen Thor, Captain America, Iron Man 2 or anything else pretty much besides Dark Knight, we still felt qualified to discuss the Joss Whedon superhero collective film The Avengers, which brings a bunch of Marvel heroes together into one big enchilada (minus the salsa). (Pablo has seen them all and is much more versed [or " 'versed" as it were when discussing Marvel] than me.)

Our latest Trailers Without Pity video discusses whether the power of Whedon is enough to deftly balance so many franchises and decades of expectations. We’re gonna say… “maybe?”

We have not one but two more superhero summer movies we’re doing after this one. Can you guess what they are?

Enjoy the video!

If you made a 1990s time capsule and asked me to put 100 things in it, I’m not sure I would have even remembered to put American Pie in there. It’s one of those movies that was a thing at one time and now it’s not really a thing at all other than a thing that happened and that we all sort of forgot about despite its wide influence and Zeitgeisty moment.

Which I guess is a good enough reason to bring it back for at least one more go-round, but as we say in our new Trailers Without Pity video, American Reunion seems kind of desperate and unnecessary. The fact that they got all the original cast members back kind of says something about their availability, you know?

My own 20-year reunion comes up next year and that just seems like an insane, unimaginably large number. I’m old, I just realized. Next time: we’ll be doing Avengers next.

May you ever have luck… uh… killing 23 young people… MUCH LIKE YOURSELF?

Is that the tagline for Hunger Games? Already I’ve forgotten it from the movie trailer we put through the paces of Trailers Without Pity for the movie adaptation of the popular book series The Hunger Games. It’s like “The Lottery” but with fewer rocks and more arrows and acne, right?

My brother, Pablo, recently read all the books but I’m still lagging behind. I can tell you that I loved the trailer, though, based mostly on my undying affection for Jennifer Lawrence after seeing her just be freakin’ amazing and heartbreaking in Winter’s Bone. I don’t get to see a lot of movies these days, but I saw that one and it knocked my fucking socks off. Put her in every movie and you will see the total Rotten Tomatoes score for the entire movie industry rise by about 20 points, I guarantee it.

This movie, this regulated amusement of famishment, is depresso-futuristic but not so shiny as to be off-putting. It looks like it might be really good, taking the source material seriously, with a little bonkers thrown in for good measure.

You can check out the video below or see it on TWOP.

We’re not sure what we’re doing next, but at some point we’ll get to that Prometheus trailer, I’m sure.

Thirteen years have apparently not mellowed us out on the idea of seeing the first of the George Lucas Star Wars prequels if our latest Trailers Without Pity video is any indication. Our summation of the unfortunately titled, Star Wars Episode 1 – The Phantom Menace in 3D is that things that suck in the first place are going to suck just as much (if not more) when another dimension of suck-depthening is added on.

The weird thing is that after a long while of being completely indifferent about Lucas and Star Wars (after having been obsessed as a child), I’m actually really digging Jedis and Sith right now as I play the remarkable Austin-developed MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic. I’m at about level 16 in the game and I just was given a spaceship by the galactic Jedi Council like I’m the luckiest learner’s permit-carrying teenager in the galaxy. It’s a lot of fun.

Check out the video below. Next time we’ll be talking about the first movie for The Hunger Games.

I know I say this every three or four episodes, but this is honestly my favorite Trailers Without Pity we’ve done in a while. I found the trailer for The Grey, an Alaskan wolf-fighting movie, to be hilarious on its face and it wasn’t hard for us to put together a video combining a Liam Neeson job interview (“No, not basically like dogs at all!”), Muppet-looking creatures with glowing eyes and the obligatory cannibalism joke.

It was a lot of fun to do this one. It went up on Television Without Pity last week, but I didn’t have a chance to post about it till now.

You can see the video on TWOP or view it below.

Programming note: my grandmother, Diamantina Gallaga, passed away over the weekend. I’m working today and calling upon my awesome powers of compartmentalization to get through the afternoon. I recognize the weirdness of posting about a funny online video even as my family is mourning. I’m clearing the decks of work and ephemera to get everything off my plate for now. For those who’ve already reached out of offered their well-wishes, my brother Pablo and I really appreciate it. Thanks so much.

Sure, this movie is directed by Steven Spielberg, is being released on Christmas day and has a tie to an acclaimed Broadway production, but my number one criteria for us doing a video for War Horse was simply, “We will get to make lots and lots and lots of horse jokes.”

And so we did. At the very least, I knew there’d be an endless supply of stock photos of horses to choose from. (There were.)

As to what the movie will actually be like, I thought for sure this was going to be amazing, but the closer it gets to the release date, the move I’m convinced it’s going to be a manipulative weepie that perhaps I may not actually want to see in a theater.

The other notable thing about this video is that it contains one of maybe five of my favorite jokes of all the videos we’ve done. The visual just really cracks me up. It’s near the end of the video and involves the equine embodiment of pure evil. Nevermind that it’s a joke recycled from Twitter, I still laugh at it every time I see the photo Pablo put together.

Next up for us: the weirdly hypnotic trailer for Liam Neeson’s The Grey.