Terribly Happy

Oh my goodness, do my brother and I love monkeys. I mean we LOVE them. We ARE them, in our dreams, I think. Goddamn a banana sounds good right now. I’d settle for a plantain, even. Know where I could score a plantain?

Anyway, it was a no brainer (or rather, a chimp-brainer, which is a big step up) for us to do a Trailers Without Pity video about Rise of the Planet of the Apes (and Of the Preposition). Monkeys, James Franco and science. What could be finer?

This movie looks like it could be really, really bad, but awful in a great, entertaining way. Can. Not. Wait.

After this episode we’ve only got two more videos left before the end of the season when we’ll go on a break for a few months. Enjoy!

So… cowboys. They are dusty! And aliens. They are often shiny or slick with grossness! Put them together and you have… this movie thing.

Despite the potential of this concept, I wasn’t too thrilled about the initial trailer that ran during the Super Bowl; it feels way too on the nose and like a grim, money-extracting mechanism you install in a movie theater, not unlike an obligatory system software update.

The trailer we ended up looking at for our latest Trailers Without Pity video is a little more lively, but that’s like saying an old, sedentary man barely clinging to life is more sprightly than most zombies. It’s not exactly a useful comparison.

In any case, here’s our video for the Jon Favreau-directed Old West alien invasion movie Cowboys & Aliens.

When we made the list of some of the summer movies we would be covering on Trailers Without Pity, I was alarmed to see so many superhero movies. I didn’t think there was any possible way we’d have much to say about them (and, honestly, I really stopped watching them after Dark Knight. I mean, who’s gonna top that?).

But then I saw the trailer for Green Lantern, which is genuinely weird. And not really in a bad way. This movie has big, glowing green balls for how out there it seems to be. I thought Thor looked nuts, but this looks even stranger.

Which is all to say we had more fun than usual with this one. I might even go see it! (OK, probably not). Enjoy our Trailers Without Pity video for it!

I don’t know what we were thinking taking on the new J.J. Abrams movie (with Spielberg on deck) Super 8 as our latest Trailers Without Pity video. How can you snark on something that looks so purely good? Perhaps you have to find humor in your own squeeing fannishness, which is what we tried to do. It doesn’t hurt when you’ve got period clothing, probably aliens and Kyle Chandler from Friday Night Lights. That is a good way to sell me a movie ticket.

At least it’s not a superhero movie. (At least we don’t think it is. What a bummer it would if Superman jumps out of that wrecked train.)

Check out the video on TWOP or view it below.

I really wasn’t too thrilled about doing a video for a fivequel since I never even saw the last X-Men movie (the Origins one with Wolverine) and I didn’t think we’d have anything interesting to say about it.

But I apparently underestimated our ability to make three minutes of digital hay out of a stinky field for our Trailers Without Pity on the subject of X-Men: First Class. We were able to get a lot of the video done while I was in Las Vegas vacationing, which just goes to show that you can do an awful lot of collaborating and work online as long as there’s decent Wi-Fi around. Our next video will be for the J.J. Abrams/Steven Spielberg summer space jam Super 8.

I was not a fan of Cars. I saw it once on DVD and just was bored silly. Come to think of it, I’ve never been fascinated by cars, lowercase, wheeled. Sure, I had some Hot Wheels when I was a kid, but I was never slavishly devoted to them (or dinosaurs for that matter). I mean who wants to roll a vehicle around the carpet when there are Transformers fighting for Cybertron and G.I. Joe trying to defend the country against insane terrorists? I mean, jeez. Do you really think this is the time for a joyride?

Pablo indulges me in the Trailers Without Pity video for Cars 2 in which I rant against the only Pixar movie I really don’t like and which I’ll probably do a 180 on when I see the sequel. (Yes, I’ll probably see it. I’m not completely made of stone when it comes to Pixar.)