New Movies for Friday, June 4th, 2010

It’s kinda sad when there are four movies coming out this week and only one of them looks good. Anyway–

• Splice.  Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley mix human DNA with that of an animal and accidentally form a monster. R for disturbing elements including strong sexuality, nudity, sci-fi violence and language.
• Killers. Katherine Heigl has finally found the man of her dreams (Ashton Kutcher). Too bad he forgot to tell her that he’s a secret agent super-spy. PG-13.
• Get Him to the Greek. Jonah Hill only has 72 hours to transport rock star Russell Brand from London to LA in this raunchy comedy. R for strong sexual content and drug use throughout, and pervasive language.
• Marmaduke. The comic-strip canine leaps—and almost topples over onto—the big screen. The title character (Owen Wilson) moves to Los Angeles with the family cat (George Lopez) in tow. PG for some rude humor and language.

Great. Now we’ll have two new residents of LA. One’ll be loud and obnoxious, and the other—will probably be about the same. Check out the official websites for these films:

Splice

Killers

Get Him to the Greek

Marmaduke

Viral Video Film School: Local Commercials

Since today’s Friday, I’m going to share something fun. Everybody’s seen a local commercial. You know, the ones for car dealerships and other local services. Well, you haven’t seen these local commercials. They’re pretty…strange.

NaturalReader

I hate Microsoft Narrator. I can’t see small things all that well, and that includes text on webpages, so whenever I want to be able to read it I use NaturalReader instead. It’s a nice text-to-speech program that reads words well (it doesn’t have too much of a robotic voice) and highlights the paragraph it’s reading (unfortunately, it doesn’t highlight the individual words as it reads them to you). Other drawbacks include the absence of more than one voice and a pronunciation editor. If you want to save a copy of the speech to an iPod, you’re out of luck there; I don’t see a need for that feature so that limitation doesn’t bother me.

Free at www.NaturalReaders.com

Also: The free version comes with a trial edition of their paid-for software; it didn’t work for me.

Rio (Teaser Trailer)

Hmmm, let’s see. There are three new trailers for three new animated movies coming soon. Which one do I want to share? Megamind? Even the title sounds weird. Alpha and Omega? Doesn’t look good. I’ll let you find that one for yourself. So that leaves me with only one other option.

Rio, a beautiful-looking movie. This trailer is about a bluebird who longs to fly, with some help from a female blue and a toucan voiced by George Lopez. What can I say? It’s only a teaser.

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=11911432&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1

Rio (trailer) from Animatieblog on Vimeo.

New Movies for Friday, May 21st, 2010

• Shrek: The Final Chapter. Shrek is tricked into entering a parallel world of the city he lives in in the last installment of DreamWorks’ hit saga. PG for mild action, some rude humor and brief language.
• MacGruber. Will Forte stars as the only guy “still man enough to sport a mullet”: MacGruber, the action “hero” we see before about every commercial break on SNL. Seriously, the skits are so short. How are they going to turn them into a movie? R for strong crude and sexual content, violence, language and some nudity.

Here are the official websites for these movies.

Shrek: The Final Chapter

MacGruber

Super 8 (Teaser Trailer)

If you went to Iron Man 2 at midnight on Friday, you got to see this trailer. For the rest of us, here it is. Super 8 is a secret project between J.J. Abrams and Steven Spielberg. I’ll let you watch the trailer and be surprised, but I can’t wait for next summer. This one looks good.

Inception (Trailer)

Here’s a trailer for the upcoming Christopher Nolan (The Dark Knight) movie Inception, and it looks pretty awesome. Leonardo DiCaprio plays a man who can tap into people’s dreams.

http://www.traileraddict.com/emd/21788

You Again (Trailer)

I know that this is supposed to be a “girl comedy”, but it actually looks pretty funny. You Again is about a young woman (Kristen Bell) who realizes that her brother is marrying her arch-nemesis from high school (Odette Yustman). Sounds formulaic and standard, but the part that got me was when we find out that Kirsten’s mother (Jamie Lee Curtis) used to be  rivals with Yustman’s mom, too (Sigourney Weaver).

Does anybody know who plays Bell’s father, at 1:43?

New Movies for Friday, May 7th, 2010

• Iron Man 2. Genre: Action. Robert Downey Jr. returns as Iron Man in this much-anticipated sequel to the 2008 adventure to fight off new villain Whiplash (Mickey Rourke). PG-13 for for sequences of intense sci-fi action and violence, and some language.
• Babies. Genre: Family/Documentary. This film follows the lives of four newborns throughout four places across the world. PG for cultural and maternal nudity throughout.

Those are all the movies for this week. Check out their official websites.

Iron Man 2

Babies

Buried (Trailer)

Here’s the trailer for Buried, a new thriller film about trucker Paul Conroy (Ryan Reynolds) who somehow finds himself 6 feet underground in a tiny coffin. He has no idea why or who put him there, and only has a cell phone (with a draining battery, too) and a lighter for support. Will he make it to the outside world? Are we just going to be staring at a blank screen and hearing Reynolds struggle for 2 hours? Enjoy the trailer for Buried. I think it looks pretty good, myself.

http://www.traileraddict.com/emd/21543