BLOGS
For the staff at Movies Without Pity, there is usually only one reason to watch the Super Bowl: to recoup our gambling losses for the season. Also, new movie trailers! Granted, not all of them are first looks -- all of these films have had teaser trailers and even full trailers before -- and all of them are a content-light 30 seconds. But for movie buffs like us, the excitement of who will win the game nicely translates into excitement (and sometimes disappointment) for the films advertised.
Best: The Last Airbender
Man, we're glad to see M. Night Shyamalan working. Sure, his movies only got more and more ridiculous as his career progressed, but you can't deny that the guy has a visual flair and that The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable were both pretty damn good. Thankfully, he seems to have abandoned his home-grown "what if" scripts to pen an epic action movie based on the popular cartoon Avatar: The Last Airbender. I wasn't too sure about the looks of the teaser trailer, which featured a kid blowing out a lot of candles, but this new trailer looks amazing, with battle scenes and martial arts and plenty of air-bending and fire-bending and water-bending and earth-bending, and the special effects really look top-notch. If the movie is successful, we can expect two more of these from Shyamalan, and I'm going to go out on a limb and say he'll get the greenlight the weekend it opens. Of course, looking at this trailer, one has to wonder if it will be recognizable as an M. Night joint at all, but as long as it doesn't have a twist ending, we're cool with it.
Worst: Robin Hood
When you've only got 30 seconds to sell a Robin Hood movie, what do you focus on? Award-winning actress Cate Blanchett? Russell Crowe as the doughiest Robin Hood in the history of film? No, silly, you focus on the archery. Previous longer trailers may have had the same amount of archery, but the generic battle scenes that filled it out made it look less like Robin Hood and more like Braveheart or, God forbid, King Arthur. (Yet another "before they were famous" epic.) So on the one hand, archery good; on the other hand, not going with the movie's original idea and having Crowe play a sympathetic Sheriff of Nottingham? Kind of a letdown. (Note: The trailer below is slightly different than the one that aired during the game.)
Best: Alice in Wonderland
While the excessive CGI and more-nightmarish-than-enchanting vibe make us think of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, we're still psyched to see the latest from Tim Burton, gigantic-headed Helena Bonham Carter and all.
Worst: Shutter Island
We get it -- Martin Scorsese has directed a lot of good movies. But couldn't you just pick a couple to mention, rather than a half-a-dozen? With all of those precious seconds to pointing out how great Scorsese's movies are, we almost didn't get the requisite shot of the creepy woman with the thinning hair shushing DiCaprio.
Best: Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time
With this video-game movie, simple seems the best way to go, since its longer trailers have only made this look like a convoluted mess. In only 30 seconds, this trailer got across the fact that Jake Gyllenhaal is in it, he has a knife that turns back time, and the special effects are jaw-dropping. We're in.
Best: The Wolfman
We've been watching trailers for this movie for so long that any trailer that doesn't spoil the entire plot for us is a winner in our book. Luckily, 30 seconds is only enough time to show us some key imagery and get us excited to see more, rather than basically laying out the movie from beginning to end.
Best/Worst: The Back-Up Plan
We should clarify -- the format for this trailer is pretty ingenious, and we weren't quite sure what we were watching for a few seconds. The horror-movie aspect of a home birth was a clever tack to take for the Super Bowl, but once we realized that it was an ad for this cheesy movie about J. Lo's biological clock, and we saw J. Lo scream and pass out in the birthing tub (ew?), we were over it.
Your favorite? Sound off below.
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