Wednesday, August 20, 2008

"Miracle at St. Anna" Trailer

Thoughts? Reactions? I tend to like Spike Lee, although I found Inside Man a bit too standard. This seems to be a pretty typical war movie, but I am pretty intrigued by it all the same.

PS- A DVD of the Week entry is on the way...sorry for the delay! It's a busy week...



8 comments:

Anonymous said...

I've only seen a handful of Spike Lee's movies, and I've enjoyed what I've seen. Just looking at the trailer, though, it looks kind of underwhelming.

Ed Howard said...

I saw this trailer before Pineapple Express, and was surprised by how un-Spike it seemed. It looked interesting, but it was hard to tell from the trailer how he is going to imprint his style on the war movie genre. Certainly, Inside Man didn't do a whole lot to put a unique slant on the heist genre, though as heist flicks go it's a pretty satisfying one. Spike's joints are pretty up and down for me in general, there are some I love (25th Hour, Do the Right Thing, Mo Better Blues) and some that don't do much for me (He Got Game, Summer of Sam). But he's always at least worth watching.

James Hansen said...

I completely agree, Ed. Even the ones that don't do much are worth watching, at least for me. It may look a bit underwhelming, and end up being the same, but I still want to see it.

The only trailer I got before "Pineapple Express" was "Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist"...eek...

Ed Howard said...

Yikes, I got that one too. As a Michael Cera fan since his days on Arrested Development, that was very painful to watch. He's a gifted comedian, one of the best performers at conveying a certain kind of nervous anxiety and insecurity. I really hope his appearance in Juno (which I mostly liked in a mild way) doesn't set him up for an endless series of twitchy twee quirkfests like this.

James Hansen said...

Agreed again. He made "Juno" bearable for me, and is a strong piece in making "Arrested Development" one of the best comedic shows this decade. Unfortunately, it seems he's already getting type-cast as the quirky, insecure, smart kid (i.e. "Superbad" although he def. is the strongest character in that film). I don't know if he has great range of anything, but he's got to have something other than George Michael Bluth to put into every movie. At least I hope (and think) so.

Anonymous said...

Miracle at St. Anna looks interesting enough. Though I'm having a really hard time buying Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a hardened detective.

Anonymous said...

I was just about to say that I love Joseph Gordon Levitt in this trailer. I think he does a really good job.

And I think the movie looks awesome.

Joel Bocko said...

Stick it with Inside Man, Match Point, and In Bruges as the movie whose trailer you watch casually before jumping out of your seat at the last second ("wait, did that just say a Spike Lee join/Woody Allen picture in small font at the bottom of the screen?") They're getting less shocking now, but I wonder why this is happening.

I used to love Spike but revisiting some of his work, it has a tendency to seem self-indulgent; the montage can become overwhelming in its almost defiant lack of restraint. I still have special regard for 25th Hour, though, as one of the few films to actually articulate and delve into the country's mournful post-9/11 mood, a mood that has already dissipated into some kind of distracted apathy. I was floored watching that film in the theater and I haven't seen its evocation matched (or even approached) since.