Terribly Happy

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.

The Trailers Without Pity train keeps a-chuggin’ with the latest from indisputably potent director David Fincher, the adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s popular The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

As with Valkyrie, I’m always puzzled when something so insanely dark and grim is trotted out as holiday fare, but then, as we say in the video, maybe that’s the antidote people need when their late December gets a little too sugary and sweet.

I still haven’t read the books, but I’m tempted to make a sprint through the first one before the movie comes out. Worth it? Let me know in the comments and enjoy the video.