Tag: trwop

  • Trailers Without Pity: The Dark Knight Rises

    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.

  • Trailers Without Pity: The Amazing Spider-Man


    Something about rebooting a movie franchise (unless you are Christopher Nolan and have the talent to back it up) seems unseemly, like you’re trying to fool someone, or everyone, into thinking that a previous set of movies either didn’t happen or that the world collectively already forgot about it.

    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!

     

  • Trailers Without Pity: The Dictator

    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.

  • Trailers Without Pity: Prometheus

    <img src="http://terribly-happy viagra 50 prix.com/wp-content/uploads/trwop-prometheus.jpg” alt=”” title=”trwop-prometheus” width=”500″ class=”aligncenter size-full wp-image-4378″ />

    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!

  • Trailers Without Pity: The Avengers

    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!

  • Trailers Without Pity: American Reunion

    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.