Smorgasbord of Vengeance.

Lots of scores to settle and cold dishes served in the trailer bin of late…

Antebellum musician Solomon Northrup (Chiwetel Ejiofor) finds himself way down on the wrong side of the Mason-Dixon line in our first look at Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave, also with Benedict Cumberbatch, Paul Dano, Michael Fassbender, Paul Giamatti, Lupita Nyong’o, Sarah Paulson, Brad Pitt, and Alfre Woodard.

Some strange musical cues here, including the themes from Pearl Harbor and The Wolfman (the latter used to better effect in the original, still-creepy Tinker Tailor teaser). In any case, I liked Hunger and Shame less than most, but I’d be up to give this a go.

Please Hammer Don’t Hurt ‘Em: Josh Brolin discovers to his dismay that he can check in but never leave in the red-band trailer for Spike Lee’s remake of Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy, also with Elizabeth Olsen, Sharlto Copley, Samuel L. Jackson, Michael Imperioli, Lance Reddick, and James Ransone. I’m still trying to un-watch the original — some things involving octopi and tongues I wish I never saw in that there film.

One good remake deserves another: Deserve’s still got nothing to do with it as Ken Watanabe fills Clint Eastwood’s shoes for Sang-il Lee’s Yurusarezaru mono, the Japanese remake of Unforgiven, also with Akira Emoto, Koichi Sato, and Yuya Yagira. From The Seven Samurai to The Magnificent Seven, there’s a long and fertile history for this sort of cultural exchange, so I’d watch it.

What I likely won’t be watching is Sergei Bodrov’s fantasy epic Seventh Son, based on a series I haven’t heard of called The Wardstone Chronicles, even if it does have Jeff and Maude Lebowski operating on opposite sides of the ball. (Between this and R.I.P.D., Bridges seems to be in full “paying for an extension to my house” mode these days.)

I thought at first this might be based on Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising, but then I remembered they already made a lousy adaptation of that a few years ago. In any case, also along for the ride: Ben Barnes, Kit Harington, Alicia Vikander, Djimon Hounsou, Jason Scott Lee, and Antje Traue.

When bad things happen to his brother (Casey Affleck), Christian Bale goes vigilante to take down the local ne’er-do-well (Woody Harrelson) in the first trailer for Scott Cooper’s Out of the Furnace, also with Zoe Saldana, Willem Dafoe, Forrest Whitaker, and Sam Shepard. (TL;DR: Bale meets Death Wish meets Winter’s Bone.) Alrighty then.

When bad things happen to his brother (Matt Barnes), Ryan Gosling goes vigilante to take down the local ne’er-do-well (Vithaya Pansringarm) in the newest trailer for Nicholas Winding Refn’s Only God Forgives.

Along with presumably another hyper-catchy soundtrack like Refn and Gosling’s Drive, this also has the added benefit of Kristin Scott Thomas apparently doing her “Ben Kingsley in Sexy Beast/Ralph Fiennes in In Bruges” turn. As with Oldboy, I expect this to be hyper-violent, tho’.

And finally Wong Kar-Wai, Yuen Woo Ping, Tony Leung, and Zhang Ziyi band together to tell the story of Ip Man (again) in the newest trailer for The Grandmaster. This still looks to me like an unnecessary remake of the third Matrix movie, but you can’t fault the pedigree involved.

Update: One more down the pike today: Benedict Cumberbatch channels Julian Assange, and has some Social Network-style angst with his partner Daniel Bruhl, in the first trailer for Bill Condon’s The Fifth Estate, with Anthony Mackie, David Thewlis, Alicia Vikander, Peter Capaldi, Carice van Houten, Dan Stevens, Stanley Tucci and Laura Linney. Linney’s smarmy “truth, justice, and the American way” line is wince-inducing, but otherwise this could be promising.

Update 2: Blanchett, meet Blanche DuBois? After Madoff-y husband Alec Baldwin becomes only the second person in America to be prosecuted for misdealings during the financial crisis, Cate Blanchett learns how the other half lives in the first trailer for Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine, with Sally Hawkins, Bobby Cannavale, Andrew Dice Clay(?), Michael Stuhlbarg, and (hopefully) the Woodster’s new best friend, Louis C.K.

The Very Picture of Youth.

Ben Barnes (a.k.a. Prince Caspian) goes more than a little Wilde in the bedrooms and backalleys of London in in the teaser for Oliver Parker’s Dorian Gray, also with Colin Firth and Rebecca Hall. Looks a bit Red Shoe Diaries, to be honest, but Ms. Hall is always a draw. That being said, why already show Dorian’s doppelganger?

No New Tale to Tell.

As I noted of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe back in 2005, I could take or leave the Narnia books as a child, even despite my inordinate fondness for Tolkien. I liked LWW well enough, but as the “Famous Five“-style adventure of that book yielded more to high fantasy, and particularly as the lion became more overtly arch-Christian in the later tomes, I pretty much tuned out of the series, and if I read the last few books, I don’t remember them at all. So it was that I ventured into Andrew Adamson’s The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian yesterday evening out a sense of fanboy dutifulness more than anything else. (Also, I’m not sure what it says of summer movie culture that this is the third review in three weeks that I’ve had to preface with an explanation of my relationship to the kid-oriented source material.)

In any event, dutiful is a good way to sum up Prince Caspian. It’s a competently-made fantasy-war film, and it hits all the beats I remember — In fact, unlike PJ’s LotR, the best parts of the film may be the deviations from the book. But I found the overall experience somewhat lackluster and prosaic, and I had the vague sense throughout of being forced to watch a high-end BBC production of an acclaimed children’s fantasy novel in school somewhere. To be honest, I’m not entirely sure if that’s due to Adamson’s film or Lewis’ tome. Either way, unless you’re considerably more fond of the Narnia books than I (or are looking to prosletize to children) I’d probably skip it. Caspian isn’t a bad film per se — it just feels like a hollow one.

Prince Caspian begins with an eclipse, a birthing, a midnight assassination attempt, and a Ford of Bruinen-style horse race, all of which suggest that we’ve moved pretty far afield from the twee satyrs and beavers of the last Narnia outing into more Elizabethan fare. The target of said attempt is one Prince Caspian (Ben Barnes), the rightful heir to the Telmarine throne, who’s now been forced out of the picture by his uncle, Lord Miraz (Sergio Castellitto)…but not before being given a magical horn from the ancient days of yore. After being accosted by dwarves (Peter Dinklage, Warwick Davis), Caspian toots his own horn and, lo, we’re back with the Pevensie children — Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy — in wartime London, one year after the events of LWW. The horn’s spell soon shuttles the four back to Narnia (a good thing, since they seem to be having trouble adjusting to the real world)…but now it’s 1300 years after their last visit, the land has grown more savage, and the Narnians are all but extinct, thanks to the depredations of the Spaniards, uh, Telmarines. And so it falls upon the Pevensies to come to the aid of Caspian, and to try to make things right in their former kingdom. But where is Aslan? Only Lucy (Georgie Henley), the youngest, believes He still might around to help, here in this darkest hour of Narnia. But, who’s everyone else gonna believe? Lucy or their lion eyes?

What ensues, give or take some alpha-male grandstanding between Peter (William Moseley) and Caspian — and goo-goo-eyes made between Caspian and Susan (Anna Popplewell) — is basically a two-hour fantasy-war film: In other words, this is the Two Towers of the bunch, with sieges, cavalry, trebuchets, the whole nine. And, while it’s interesting to see how much Tolkien shared with and/or borrowed from his fellow Inkling — we have the dispossessed king of Men, a variation on the Ents, and the aforementioned Ford here — it’s hard not to get the impression that medieval fantasy-wars are a bit played out in cinema at the moment. Aside from a stealthy incursion upon the Telmarine fortress, one that ends rather horribly (and includes a minotaur pulling a Gan), there’s a lot of been-there, done-that to the proceedings here. And, despite the valiant efforts of Peter Dinklage (making a solid case that del Toro’s Hobbit might do well to take a page from Time Bandits when to comes to Thorin Oakenshield’s band), the cast from the rather-bland Caspian on down is mostly unmemorable, particularly compared to James McAvoy, Ray Winstone, et al from LWW. (And Eddie Izzard’s turn as a mouseketeer, basically Shrek‘s Puss-in-Boots spliced with the Ratatouille gang, reinforces the unfortunate sense that Caspian has mostly been beaten to the punch, film-wise.)

One of the best sequences in the film is a surprise appearance by Tilda Swinton’s White Witch (one apparently added by Adamson), which not only helps round out Edmund (Skandar Keynes)’s story arc from the first film but, for a few minutes, brings both personality and a real sense of menace to the tale. Otherwise, alas, Prince Caspian is mostly a lot of medieval grunting, centaurs and satyrs cheering, and we the audience waiting around for the inevitable leonis-ex-machina. O Lion, why has thou forsaken us?

The Caspian Siege.

We’re an action movie, honest! The new trailer for The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian is now online. I’ll admit to having no real connection to the Narnia books (other than the first one). Still, this looks like little more than two hours of WETA-enhanced air conditioning to me.

Caspian See.

Timed to release with The Golden Compass this Friday, the trailer for Andrew Adamson’s The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian is now online. Liam Neeson and the kids are back again (if a little older), while replacing Tilda Swinton, James McAvoy, and Ray Winstone in the support department are Ben Barnes (of Stardust), Warwick Davis, and Peter Dinklage (of The Station Agent.)

It Happened One Night.

What do stars do? Well, apparently, they mince around in petticoats. Although, like Knocked Up, Matthew Vaughn’s well-meaning but uneven Stardust is probably best enjoyed as a date movie, preferably with a large crowd of similar Princess Bride-leaning folk, I went ahead and caught an empty matinee of said fantasy yesterday afternoon, as it’s the last mainstream summer outing (with the possible exception of Ratatouille) I had any interest in seeing before the fall film deluge.

And, well, I wanted to like it, being a fan of both the genre and of Vaughn’s first feature, the sharp Brit gangster flick Layer Cake, and Stardust has its moments, scattered here and there — In fact, I think it eventually even comes off better than the sum of its parts. But, for most of its run, I thought the film overshot its intended target of whimsy and landed on the far side of twee. The movie’s two leads — Charlie Cox and Claire Danes — are affectionately engaging, and Michelle Pfeiffer chews up the scenery with aplomb as this fairy tale’s most wicked witch. But, to be honest, there’re just too many notes, and the film barely hangs together as a whole. If anything, Stardust reminded me of Terry Gilliam’s (superior) The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, an ambitious and episodic attempt at high fantasy that doesn’t quite work. But, then again…as the Dylan song goes, true love tends to forget.

Much of the action of Stardust takes place, Ian McKellen’s authoritative voiceover informs us early on, in the enchanted realm of Stormhold, which happens to be connected to our mundane world via a hole in the wall near the sleepy English village of…uh, Wall. In said village, eighteen years after his father indulged in a happy dalliance over on the Other Side, a shopboy named Tristan (Cox) decides he will woo the town beauty (Sienna Miller) by tracking down a fallen star for her in what he first presumes is a nearby field. (Would he feel the same if he knew about her Steve Buscemi daddy issues?)

The problem is, this star isn’t the hunk of smoldering space rock one might expect, but a delicately shimmering and seriously annoyed girl named Yvanne (Danes), who’s just been randomly pelted out of the sky by a large, translucent ruby. This magical gemstone, recently sent aloft by the spirit of King Peter O’Toole (still looking like Berkeley), holds the key to the kingdom, so to speak, and thus all of the monarch’s living (and dead) heirs are mercilessly tracking it down. But Stardust is much too complicated for only one MacGuffin — Three wicked witches (most notably Pfeiffer) also seek out this fallen star, in order to cut out her glowing heart and restore their vanished youth. So, by the time our hero arrives on the scene via a teleporting “Babylon Candle” (as with a lot of fantasy, there’s a lot of setting up of the ground rules here), he discovers he’s now in a much bigger pickle than he bargained for…and, eventually, that love has a funny way of sneaking up on you when you least expect it.

As I said, Stardust‘s problems are myriad. For one, a lot of what should come across as sly, understated British humour a la Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett, or (naturally) the author here, Neil Gaiman, is instead telegraphed and overdirected to feel like a poke in the eye. (See, for example, the poisoning of the archbishop scene.) For another, the film aims to be wryly dark at times — there’s quite a bit of fun with reading entrails — but we’re still in Belle & Sebastian, Lisa Frank lunchbox territory a lot of the time. (I’m looking at you, unicorn.) For yet another, Stardust is burdened with one of the most bombastic and intrusive scores in recent memory. (Ilan Eshkeri did great work with Layer Cake, but this is just bad.)

And then there’s De Niro, preening in a supporting role as the cross-dressing buccaneer Capt. Shakespeare. I know De Niro is lauded as one of the greatest actors of his generation, and I’ve got Raging Bull sitting on my coffee table at the moment to prove it. But, lordy, is he terrible here. Making Elton John seem as in the closet as Larry Craig, De Niro’s wildly over-the-top performance is a flat-out cringeworthy embarrassment. It plays like he’s never met a gay person in his life, or as if some abrasive guy at a party was doing an impression of De Niro doing an impression of Liberace. (Along those lines, The Office‘s Ricky Gervais, in an extended cameo, seems like he’s playing his character in Extras here — he even gets in Andy’s unfortunate catchphrase. Waking Ned‘s David Kelly and the Lock Stock boys are hanging around too, but the funniest cameo is probably Mark Williams, a.k.a. Arthur Weasley, as an ornery old goat of an innkeeper.)

All that being said, I thought the movie did manage, somehow and despite itself, to stick the landing: However caustic and subversive Stardust pretends to be at first, it’s ultimately turns out a rather staid and traditional fairy tale about the enchantment of true love. And, with that in mind, I found myself willing to forgive the film most of its substantive flaws — and there are many — by the time the inevitable coronation coda rolled. However cynical I get as the years go by, it seems, like Fox Mulder, I want to believe.