(L)East Meets West.

In this week’s trailer bin, M. Night Shyamalan tries to get his groove back with some help from Nicktoons in the new trailer for his live-action version of The Last Airbender, with Noah Ringer, Nicole Peltz, Jackson Rathbone, Dev Patel and Aasif Mandvi. Sorry, M. Night, but after Signs, The Village, Lady in the Water, and that Mark Wahlberg Triffids movie (Google reminds me: The Happening), I’m skipping this unless reviews say otherwise.

And, elsewhere on Yahoo…what’s wrong with your FACE? Josh Brolin mounts up for his own third-tier comic book film in the first trailer for Jimmy Hayward’s Jonah Hex, also with Megan Fox, John Malkovich, Will Arnett, Michael Shannon, and Lance Reddick. Oof…seems pretty clear I’ll have to get my drink on before this bad boy.

Burden of the Bayou

Hidden over at the official FX Nip/Tuck site (click on the Sony lounge button at the bottom of the screen) are a number of new trailers for upcoming big-ticket films, including Freedomland (with Samuel Jackson, Julianne Moore, Edie Falco, and The Wire‘s Clarke Peters) and Memoirs of a Geisha (with Zhang Ziyi, Michelle Yeoh, Gong Li and Ken Watanabe.) Both, particularly the latter, look impressive.

Less impressive, unfortunately, is the trailer for one of my most eagerly awaited films of the year, All the King’s Men. To be fair, I have very high hopes for this flick. All the King’s Men is far and away my favorite “Great American Novel” for many reasons. (To name just one, anyone thinking of going anywhere near a history graduate degree should peruse Jack Burden’s trying experience at State University first.) Whatsmore, it’s being brought to the screen (again) through the efforts of my old boss, who’s got, you might say, a good handle on the source material.

But this trailer misses the punch of the book and, frankly, plays like not much more than warmed-over Oscar bait. Ok, no biggie, it’s just a trailer. But more worrying, Jude Law and Sean Penn, both excellent actors, seem miscast. As the passage cited above attests, Burden is by no means a fresh-faced kid when he enters Willie’s circle — he’s been around the block a few times, fallen in and out of love and lust, gotten kicked around when he’s down, and taken refuge more than once in the smothering arms of the Great Sleep. There’s a sadness and a resignation about him that’s just not gonna shake…Think Gabriel Byrne in Miller’s Crossing. But, here, Jude Law looks entirely too wide-eyed, beaming, and innocent — in a word, too pretty — to do justice to the part. As for Penn…well, he just seems off to me, particularly considering how perfect Sadie (Patricia Clarkson) and Tiny Duffy (James Gandolfini) look. But, well, perhaps I’ll get used to him. (The Stantons — Kate Winslet and Mark Ruffalo — are neither here nor there, but I’m getting a bad feeling about Anthony Hopkins, who’s been known to phone it in, as Judge Irwin.)