I saw the trailer for Young @ Heart when I went to see Juno (terrific movie, btw), and like the true dork that I am, I laughed my ass off at it. It’s a documentary about the Young @ Heart Chorus; a group of New England-based senior citizens that get together to sing songs you never thought you’d hear coming from grandparents (there’s no “Bingo was his name-o” going on here). So what’s so funny about a bunch of old people singing songs from The Clash, The Ramones, and The Rolling Stones? Everything!

What really appeals to me about this movie is that it seems to be everything most documentaries aren’t: heartfelt, hopeful, and uplifting. As someone with a grandparent who’s wasting away in front of my family’s eyes, it’s nice to see a group of old folks with some spirit left in them. They may be a bit tone deaf, and a bit too slow to always be on the beat, but they’re out there doing their thing, and making lazy young whippersnappers look like the boring ones. You had me at “Yes I can”, Young @ Heart, I’ll RENT IT.

Young @ Heart is not rated and opens in select cities April 18.

I only had to hear one thing to make Juno a SEE IT for me: that it re-teams Arrested Development alums Jason Bateman and Michael Cera. Granted, going by the trailer it looks like their characters don’t really have any interactions, but who cares?

Ellen Page (who in Hard Candy managed to scare men everywhere in ways a bunny boiling Glenn Close only wishes she could) is Juno, a teenage girl who finds herself pregnant after a misguided attempt at first-time sex with her awkward male friend (Cera). Rather than terminate the pregnancy, she decides to have the baby and then give it to a couple unable to have children. And what better place to find such a couple than in the local Penny Saver?! It’s there that she finds her ideal couple, played by Bateman and Jennifer Garner, who she attempts to build a friendship with before giving birth to her/their child.

The trailer for Juno gives off a very Little Miss Sunshine vibe in that it looks to be a mixture of quirkiness, bizarre charm, and a little bit of melancholy. The combination definitely worked for Sunshine, and with a cast like this being directed by the Thank You For Smoking director, Jason Reitman, I definitely think that Juno has more than a good chance of making the formula work for itself.

Juno is rated PG-13 and opens in limited release December 14. (Official site)

If Hollywood has taught me anything, it’s the children fall into one of three categories: wise beyond their years, annoying as hell, or creepy as f***. In this “psychological thriller” (the trailer’s words, not mine), the titular child falls into the third category. He’s a creepy little boy with a vacant stare and a monotone voice (and he’s wearing a suit the entire time, so he looks like an eerie miniature maitre d’). When his parent’s bring home a new baby sister, Joshua turns into an even bigger freak. He starts silently lurking behind doorways, animals that come into contact with him mysteriously turn up dead, and he wants to throw a rock at a hobo. Then the baby sister disappears…or something. I kind of stopped paying attention to the trailer after the hobo scene.

I’m going to give Joshua a SKIP IT. The genre of creepy kid psych thriller has been done to death, and better than this. The Omen, The Good Son, and The Sixth Sense all come immediately to mind. And anything Dakota Fanning has starred in. Hollywood seems to think she’s adorable, but there’s nothing scarier than a child who doesn’t even act like a child.

Joshua is rated R and opens in limited release July 6. (Official site)

I was able to score tickets to an advance screening of Waitress, so I get to do a review of an entire movie for you! The screening provided the viewers with small apple pies from a Manhattan bakery, and since the way to my heart is indeed through baked goods, it is somewhat difficult for me to be overly critical of this film. But I shall put my Homer Simpson-like love of pastries aside and review this film with an unbiased mind. You can read Julie’s review of the Waitress trailer and learn a bit about it’s tragic back-story here.

Keri Russell is Jenna, the titular waitress, and she gives the word ‘miserable’ a whole new definition. She’s trapped in a boring southern town, working as a waitress at a diner, and married to a man she no longer loves (played with the perfect blend of pathetic and horse’s ass by Jeremy Sisto). Then, to add insult to injury, she’s pregnant. The pregnancy is unplanned and very much unwanted (Jenna had actually vowed to stop sleeping with her husband, he had to get her liquored up to do the deed). The only solace in Jenna’s life is her pies. She is revered as a sort of Michelangelo of pies in her town and finds comfort in inventing new pie recipes that coincide with whatever is going on in her life at the moment (which is how they get names like ‘I Hate My Husband Pie’ and ‘Bad Baby Pie’). Her dream is to take first place at an upcoming pie contest, collect the $25,000 prize money, get the hell out of Dodge, and open up her own pie shop somewhere far, far away.

While her plan seems simple enough, it’s anything but.

Click here to continue reading Waitress..Mmm…Pie.

Which actors will win an Oscar in the next ten years? That was the question posed by Oscarwatch, and Don Cheadle was on the top of nearly everyone’s list. Sooner or later, the man will win an Oscar, it’s just a question of when. This year alone, Cheadle is starring in Reign Over Me, Ocean’s Thirteen, and Talk to Me. In Talk to Me, Cheadle plays an ex-convict who becomes a controversial DJ in 1960’s Washington D.C.

Could Talk to Me be the movie that lands Cheadle his overdue Oscar? Possibly. Cheadle is portraying a real person, which the Academy always loves. He’s been nominated before (for Hotel Rwanda) and the Academy will often award Oscars to actors who were overlooked in the past. On the other hand, Cheadle’s character, Ralph Waldo “Petey” Greene, is an ex-convict who peppers his dialogue with enough colorful language to get Don Imus fired several times.

Only time will tell what awards season has in store, but either way Talk to Me is a definite SEE IT. It’s a biopic (good) that will make you think (even better), and it has a great soundtrack (sign me up), and some really funny lines in the trailer (just take my $11 now). The trailer does a good job of highlighting the supporting cast–and telling you where you’ve seen them before.

Talk to Me is rated R and opens on July 13.

As much as I’d like to pretend that TrailerSpy is a household name by now and that the Weinstein brothers are calling us on the phone every night, the truth is that we’re still a young site and we’re still trying to work our way up the Internet hierarchy. That said, however, we do have a couple of film promotion companies that send us regular emails to get us to promote one of their movies.

Now, as much as Julie and I enjoy these emails (and we really do), the truth is that most of them aren’t much help to us. This is because they’re usually about movies that either we’re already well aware of or else they’re about movies that don’t interest us in the slightest.

Which is why I was so shocked when this trailer for The Savages arrived in our inbox. Not only does this movie look GREAT; the fact is that I hadn’t heard a single word about it (as I’m guessing you haven’t either).

Now, I understand that we live in a commercial world, where popcorn flicks like Spider-Man 3 and The Transformers are going to generate a lot more buzz than an art-house film like this one. But there is absolutely no good reason why this movie is not better known than it is. Just the simple fact that Laura Linney and Phillip Seymour Hoffman are staring in a movie together should be enough to trigger the alarm bells. I mean, these are two of our best actors in the history of film, and even if they were playing coma patients in adjacent hospital beds, they deserve our full attention.

Since there’s been so little press about this movie, I thought I’d attach a description of the film directly from the PR lady’s email:

“The last thing the two Savage siblings ever wanted to do was look back on their undeniably dysfunctional family legacy. Wendy (Academy Award® nominee Laura Linney) is a self medicating struggling East Village playwright, AKA a temp who spends her days applying for grants and stealing office supplies, dating her very married neighbor. Jon (Academy Award® winner Philip Seymour Hoffman) is an obsessive compulsive college professor writing obscure books on even more obscure subjects in Buffalo who still can’t commit to his girlfriend after four years even though her cooking brings him tears of joy. Then, out of the blue, comes the call that changes everything…”

That description and the above trailer makes The Savages look excellent, which is part of the reason why I am going to SEE IT. But mostly, it’s because this film reminds me a lot of You Can Count on Me, which is one of my all-time favorite films (if you’ve never seen You Can Count on Me, please stop reading this post immediately and RUN to your nearest Blockbuster store!). More importantly, though I hope that you see it, and that you tell your friends that this movie exists. It’ll be a absolute crime if this movie bombs at the box-office.

The Savages is rated R and opens sometime in late summer.

It is impossible to talk about Waitress without discussing its sad backstory. Waitress was written and directed by Adrienne Shelly, an independent film actress who began making her own films in 1994. Last November, Shelly was found dead in her Manhattan apartment in what was presumed to be a suicide. A few days later, a housepainter that Shelly had hired confessed to the murder. When she died, Shelly had already finished Waitress and was waiting to hear whether the movie had been accepted into the Sundance Film Festival. The Sundance committee had already selected Waitress before Shelly died, and in January the film played to capacity crowds at Sundance and shortly sold to Fox Searchlight for $5 million.

After watching the trailer, I’m not surprised that Waitress was one of Sundance’s bigger sales. Although it is undoubtedly aimed at women, Waitress is not your typical chick flick and looks far superior to most films of that genre. (We’re talking about you, Georgia Rule.) Keri Russell plays a Jenna, Southern waitress who is pregnant, unhappily married, and feeling trapped by her own life. By day, Jenna works at a diner with waitresses played by Curb Your Enthusiasm’s Cheryl Hines and by Shelly herself, behind big black glasses. By night, she pours her heart into unique pies and writes letters to her unborn baby. Jeremy Sisto plays Jenna’s husband and the one and only Andy Griffith plays one of Jenna’s regular customers.

In short, Waitress looks to be a poignant comedy about what happens when life doesn’t turn out just as you’d hoped it would. I definitely want to SEE IT when Waitress opens in limited release on May 2. (Official Site)

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I was unsure which trailer to post today until I saw that The Last King of Scotland is opening nationwide on Friday. Like many Oscar contenders, the movie had a limited release in 2006. Now that Forest Whitaker is winning every Best Actor award in sight, Fox Searchlight is wisely expanding the movie nationwide.

One look at the trailer and you’ll see why Whitaker’s performance has been so acclaimed. He disappears into the role, without needing make-up or a drastic weight change. His droopy eyelid (he told Esquire he could have it fixed, but he chooses not to) makes him look truly evil in the role, and therefore perfectly cast. Oscar voters love accents and portrayals of real people; this performance has both.

Even without all the accolades for Forest Whitaker, The Last King of Scotland gets my vote to SEE IT. It is a compelling story based on true events in Uganda, and James McAvoy and Kerry Washington look like they turned in some pretty impressive performances of their own.

The Last King of Scotland is rated R and opens nationwide on Friday, January 19. (Official site)

I finally saw Little Miss Sunshine recently, and I am happy to report that all the rave reviews in the trailer are completely accurate. There were several points where Jared and I were literally laughing out loud. The trailer reveals just enough and doesn’t reveal any of the hilarious secrets of the movie. Little Miss Sunshine just opened nationwide, hurry up and see it.

Previously: Little Miss Sunshine trailer

When young Olive unexpectedly gets a slot in the Little Miss Sunshine pageant, her dysfunctional family piles into a vintage VW bus to cheer her on. All the buzz (that I skimmed anyway) coming out of the Sundance Film Festival in January was all about Little Miss Sunshine. By the Oscars in March, presenter Steve Carell was already being touted as a potential nominee for next year’s awards. Rave reviews are packed into this trailer. And best of all the movie looks like a funny, feel-good flick, and those are always my favorites. It times like that I’m glad I live in New York and I get to see these great films weeks ahead of middle America. See it, See it, See it.

(Official Site)