What's New in the World of NSFW Movie Trailers?

First and foremost, nothing in this post is appropriate for viewing by anyone with any sense of decency or a well-adjusted moral compass.

As a critic and media prophet, it's my job to be aware of what's coming your way in the world of transgressive cinema. It's also something that I- well, let's not say enjoy, but it's something that I'm more than willing to do.

I don't endorse violence and degradation in real life.

Movies are not real, but they can express aspects of the human condition just as any art form does.

And now that we have that out of the way (and seriously, this is your last chance warning; if you don't regularly discuss contemporary art cinema, please skip this piece and move on to the photography and the section where I talk about Tyler Perry), here we go...



SHOWGIRLS: THE RETURN

This film's director Marc Vorlander is apparently battling it out with Rena Riffel (you know, Penny/Hope from the original) for dueling Showgirl movies.

I say "please, y'all, may I have some more." Everyone should make a Showgirl movie. Quentin Tarantino, Claire Denis, Philippe Grandrieux, and Gaspar Noe should all make Showgirl movies. Because I have no idea what to think of this. It's just under five minutes, and has been trimmed from the unending ten minute monstrosity at the film's official website. And the music feels like a riff on John Carpenter's Halloween music over the beat from Schooly D's "PSK (What Does it Mean?)."

Notable fan of timeless American values and human decency Erik S pointed out, quite accurately, that this totally looks like a Fantom Kiler movie.
Also, just for comparison's sake, here's Rena Riffel's trailer for her own Showgirls sequel.

"How bad do you want it? Bad..."



ENTER THE VOID ("Soudain Le Vide")

Gaspar Noe is kind of awesome. A few years back, he hosted a night at the IFC Center in NYC where he showed 35mm prints of Seul Contre Tous and Salo, and in between the two I got to talk to him for a couple of minutes about his work, Kubrickian motifs, and Bruno Dumont's Flanders; he even signed my ticket, so full props to him.

He's made two beautiful misanthropic masterpieces (the aforementioned Seul Contre Tous and the staggering Irreversible), and now here comes his third feature, with an inordinate amount of sex and drugs and pinballing through the streets of Tokyo. Music by Thomas Bangalter from Daft Punk, no less. Here's the Japanese trailer.

The colors... I've actually talked to people who have seen this, and I am super-pumped, especially since (unlike every other film discussed on this page) it actually has U.S. distribution from the lovable freaks at IFC Films. And seriously, how can you not love one of the most twisted characters in the world cinema game who confesses to crying when they killed HomeTree in Avatar?



KINATAY (which, for some reason has been given the English language title of "The Execution of P")

This film, like Enter The Void, premiered at Cannes '09, where its director Brillante Mendoza (who made the porny, atmospheric Serbis a couple of years ago) won the Best Director Award and Roger Ebert lost his mind about it. It's about corruption, Catholicism, misogyny, dehumanization, and the darkest parts of physical space and the human heart.

There's no English-friendly trailer yet, but this French-subtitled one gets the point across (though I actually think it soft-pedals the film's brutality and experimental quality- this could easily be an American trailer for a foreign film, the way it focuses on aspects of family and moral choice).

Kinatay sur Comme Au Cinema

The actual translation of the title is "Butchered" or "Slaughter." You probably guessed that, though.



and that brings us to the big nasty.

This film hit Texas this week with the force of several hundred dropped jaws, countless buckets of tears and vomit, and dozens of spontaneous religious awakenings. I'm talking, of course, about...



A SERBIAN FILM ("Srpski Film")

If even an eighth of what has been said about this film is true, I fear it may cause crops to wither, pregnant ladies to explode, and sex to stop happening across the board. Explicitly political and super-upsetting, this is currently the most scandalous film in the world.

Now my question is this- what is the song used in the latter half of the trailer? Y'all know I love squelchy synth drones as a counterpoint to shock and horror.

So, that brings us to the end of this compendium of What's New in the World of NSFW Movie Trailers. Many thanks are due the lovable freaks at Twitch Film and Zack H for bringing some of these to my attention, and big ups to you for making it this far.

Damn.

Well, I'm sold.

Classic Movie Trailers: Tenebrae.

At the movies: Tropic Thunder.

Any discussion of Tropic Thunder must begin and end with Robert Downey Jr. He plays Kirk Lazarus, an Australian multi-award winning actor who undertakes a controversial surgical process to darken his skin to play a black soldier in a war film. Thematically and semiotically, he’s like a one-man boxed narrative focusing on performance, race, and the fluidities of identity with each line he delivers. I foresee dissertations focused exclusively on this performance popping up throughout academia over the next decade or so, and even if there had been nothing else worthwhile in Tropic Thunder, it would have been worth it just for this.

Fortunately, though, Tropic Thunder is kind of great. It’s an overblown spectacle about overblown spectacles that’s meant to read as a Hollywood insider movie. These kind of films are usually excruciating to anyone not in the film industry, and are often tonally confused as to what kind of message they are trying to convey. But Director/co-writer/star Ben Stiller finds the razor-sharp balance of the material, using the structure of the action event film as the perfect scaffolding on which to layer all of the horror and hilarity of big-budget filmmaking. Take the opening of the film; displaying an understanding of the contemporary moviegoing experience much deeper than anything seen in theatres in years, we are hit by a commercial and trailers set within the universe of the film. We are given context, backstory, and metatextual action before the film even properly starts, but it works, and beautifully.

Matthew McConaughey and Tom Cruise do great supporting work as two sides of the Hollywood coin, both relaxed and trying something different to an impressive yield. Know at least that no one will ever be able to hear Flo Rida’s “Low” again without thinking of Tom Cruise dancing his way into the dark heart of the human soul. Similarly, there’s a relaxed and breezy interplay amongst the entire cast that deflates the unspoken yet near-palpable tension that comes from making (and watching) a big summer blockbuster, making this the most effervescent 100 million dollar-plus action flick since Paul Verhoeven’s 1997 masterpiece Starship Troopers. Stiller has made something truly unique in the realm of the event movie: a film that rewards knowledge. You don’t have to know anything about the movie industry or semiotics or action films to enjoy Tropic Thunder, but if you do, you’ll find a film with as much hardcore arthouse truth-telling as it has big summer action.

If Pineapple Express is the quieter, scruffy egghead takedown of the action genre, then Tropic Thunder is the amped-up, Senior Varsity takedown. Just as funny, just as smart, but in completely different ways. It’s been long overdue, this expansion of the action film, and it bodes incredibly well for moviegoers.