Charles Bramesco
Snap Your Elastic Waistband In Time With Weird Al’s ‘Captain Underpants’ Theme Song
Serious question: does any single entertainer have such complete dominion over their chosen field as Weird Al Yankovic wields over the song parody? Skeptics may scoff that musical spoofery is a stupid thing to become really, really, virtuosically good at, but the point stands that Yankovic has completely and totally mastered his preferred art form. So when the producers behind the upcoming film adaptation of the Captain Underpants chapter book series needed to find a talent for their theme music, of course their choice was obvious. In no insignificant way, Weird Al Yankovic was born to write a peppy pop tune about tightened-whiteys.
Kirsten Dunst Gets High in the Forest in the Dreamy ‘Woodshock’ Trailer
Step aside, Tom Ford, another scion of a vast fashion empire has deigned to make the jump into feature directing. Or rather, a pair — designers Kate and Laura Mulleavy, better known as the sister-creators of the haute couture label Rodarte, want to flex their artistic muscles a little more than the occasional fashion show can allow. Boutique distributor A24 was all too happy to accommodate the young visionaries, and will front their debut Woodshock for a premiere on September 15 of this year. This project has been an intriguing enigma for some time now, but between the striking poster released yesterday and this morning’s dreamy, beguiling new trailer, we’re getting a first look at one of this fall’s most intriguing new offerings.
The ‘Workaholics’ Boys Suit Up and Light Up in ‘Game Over, Man!’ Teaser
On the long-running Comedy Central slacker sitcom Workaholics, bros-for-life Anders Holm, Blake Anderson, and Adam DeVine made no bones about their affinity for recreational marijuana use. But for those fans who had their healthy sense of skepticism, suspecting that it may all be an act for the sake of creating an onscreen persona, the Workaholics boys are back to re-affirm that they really and sincerely do love getting high. Just to prove it to you, all three actors light up in the teaser for their latest on-screen outing, and what’s more, they’re releasing it on April 20 of next year. As in, 4/20. Which is a weed thing.
Watch Gold Leader Deploy an F-Bomb in Unseen Footage From Original ‘Star Wars’
For a franchise about slightly sketchy space crooks and intergalactic military types, the Star Wars films are almost conspicuously free of profanity. It makes sense from a business perspective — keeping the series PG-13 ensures that it’ll be open to a wider array of viewers — and yet the absence of cussing feels especially noticeable in a movie starring the famously coarse-tongued Carrie Fisher. The closest the series came to a four-letter word was Han Solo getting dissed as a “scruffy nerf-herder,” but a recently discovered cache of lost footage from the original 1977 Star Wars is going to change all that in short order.
Sam Jackson Drops A Whole Lot of Mother-F-Bombs in ‘The Hitman’s Bodyguard’ Trailer
Much in the same way that I have always wondered who delivers mail to mailmen (if they live in their own district, are they allowed to deliver mail to themselves? is that a conflict of interest?), the writers of the new action-comedy The Hitman’s Bodyguard ponder who a career killer goes to when he finds himself a mark. Even professional assassins need a little muscle from time to time, and when one especially ill-tempered sunuvagun hires a body guard with a short fuse, violent egos clash with nose-crushing results.
We’re Watching You Watching the Trailer for WikiLeaks Documentary ‘Risk’
In appearances at film festivals or the occasional blockbuster exhibit at the Whitney Museum, documentarian Laura Poitras gives the impression of a pretty collected, cool-headed woman. Which comes as a surprise, seeing as few people on Earth would have more justification for turning into a raving paranoid lunatic. Poitras wowed the world in 2014 with her Edward Snowden documentary Citizenfour, wherein she risked life and limb to gain access to the classified intelligence whistleblower and ran afoul of the United States’ far-reaching surveillance programs in the process. A few years later, and she’s prepared to unveil her latest stunning exposé on the shady business of federal watching, the lightning rod Risk. If you weren‘t feeling uneasy about the virtual eyeballs monitoring your every move, now would be a fine time to get started.
New ‘Alien: Covenant’ Trailer Teases the Return (and Fate) of Noomi Rapace’s Elizabeth Shaw
In space… no one can hear your crackly John Denver records. The timeless country standard “Take Me Home, Country Road” provides an eerie soundtrack for the latest peek at Ridley Scott’s long-time-coming Alien prequel Covenant. Over some rather breathtaking shots of a hostile, foreign world (no offense, New Zealand), we hear the familiar ode to the beauty of the American South, contrasting the harsh new climate with mental pictures of the gentle, rolling hills of West Virginia. Things get progressively creepier as the Xenomorph descends on our motley crew of intergalactic colonists, scaling their spacecraft and trying to get at the humans inside like they’re the filling of a delicious meaty empanada.
Sate Your Hunger for the ‘War for the Planet of the Apes’ Trailer With a New Teaser
Five days ago, I denounced the banal evils of the recent trend of running trailers in promotion of trailers when covering the latest buzz for the upcoming Justice League movie. It would appear that the marketing executives at 20th Century Fox have not been reading my daily news writing (I know, I’m as shocked as you are), because they’ve returned today with an 18-second amuse-bouche for tomorrow’s brand new trailer for War for the Planet of the Apes. Give it a look above, it’ll only take a moment. Or, to be precise, 18 moments.
See Spidey’s Tricked-Out New Suit in New ‘Spider-Man: Homecoming’ Trailer
The suit makes the man, and that’s seldom more true than for the superhero set. Batman would be another joe-schmo billionaire industrialist without the arsenal of weaponry built into his armor, Iron Man would literally die without his hardware, and now we can add Peter Parker to the list of superheroes whose own clothes act as unofficial sidekick. In the latest trailer for upcoming threeboot Spider-Man: Homecoming, we get a glimpse of some nifty new modifications (courtesy of Stark Industries) to Spidey’s trademark red-and-blue spandex. A new generation’s Spider-Man needs some modern upgrades, and the latest iteration of the suit includes a detachable mini-drone and what I can only describe as “skintight suction technology.”
‘Baywatch’ Trailer: More Intentional Comedy, Same Amount of Slo-Mo Running
It’s weird — with every new trailer, the upcoming big-screen reboot of beloved ‘90s TV series Baywatch appears to get a little bit better. The first trailer promised a lightly amusing clone of the smart-alecky 21 Jump Street reboot, the second trailer advertised a competently-produced action tentpole with a healthy sprinkling of meta humor, and now, the so-called “official” trailer (does that make the first two unofficial?) teases what appears to be a sincerely funny comedy. At the very least, whoever cut this thing made it abundantly clear that stars Zac Efron and Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson have more chemistry than an eighth-grade science class.
Jeff Garlin Does the Bumbling Detective Bit in Trailer for Netflix’s ‘Handsome’
The hyper-competent likes of Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot have their place, but when it comes to detectives, I prefer the bumblers — your Clouseaus, your Columbos, your Ace Venturas. Whether inadvertently stepping on clues or grilling perps in farcical interrogation sessions, sleuth stories come bursting wth potential for humor, and it looks like Jeff Garlin will be the latest actor to follow the zig-zagging footsteps of the goofy gumshoes that came before. Today brings the first trailer for Netflix’s upcoming mystery movie Handsome, and with it, our first look at Garlin’s accident-prone (and well-named) LAPD homicide investigator Gene Handsome.
‘La La Land’ Gets David Lynch-ified in Creepy Mashup Trailer
Humor me for a moment — is Damien Chazelle‘s old-school romantic musical La La Land really all that far removed from the cinema of David Lynch? Like the avant-melodrama triumph Mulholland Dr., Chazelle’s film is obsessed with the artifice that defines both Los Angeles and the entertainment industry around which it was built. Both films revolve around a pair of people inexorably drawn to one another, linked even as they drift apart due to the vicissitudes of circumstance. Both Lynch and Chazelle are fond of stylistic breaks from reality, exploring a dreamlike or otherwise surreal plane beyond this dimension. Hell, “here’s to the ones who dream” might as well be the mission statement of Lynch’s entire filmography.