HARRY POTTER AND THE PRISONER OF AZKABAN (INTERNATIONAL)

Ahhh, a palate cleanser. It's a great trailer, great spooky mood that I wanted in the other two trailers and didn't get, and then... you get to the end and you see the title come up in Japanese and you hear this announcer say, "HAREE POOTUR..." and I just lost it, man. Just put my head back and howled for about five minutes. Too, too funny. However, if you can stop the trailer right when the Dementor sticks his hand in the train carriage, you can pretend that's totally not there and go on your merry way. (There's something at the end, but I'm not sure what it is--a maid knocking on the door?) If I'm not mistaken, there is some new footage, so it's worth it.

THE VILLAGE (FULL TRAILER)

Good trailer. Freaky as all hell, in that Shyamalan floor-creaking door-slamming way. My sister will probably end up sleeping in my bed again if she sees this. I will pay good money bad money okay, I have no money to whoever can pony up a spoiler as to what those things in the woods actually are.

VAN HELSING CLIPS

As has previously been noted, I'm sort of in this one for the long haul (family on the crew), so I'll be the one to take the bullet on most of this stuff (with the exception of Vladimir's post below. He's in recovery as we speak).

The clips are... so very, very silly. For real. Kate Beckinsale's accent is awful, but she commits to the awful, and is therefore consistently awful. I admire this. One of the clips involves her brother, who does not seem to have inherited the Family Accent of Awfulness, being laid out as bait for a werewolf. I still haven't quite gotten over the stupidness of that. Then there's the clip of Anna and Dracula dancing, and he's all like, "One moment of pain and we can be together," like, can you be any more with the obvious there?, and she's all like, "You have no heartbeat!" GET WITH THE PROGRAM, ANNA, IT'S YOUR MORTAL ENEMY. And then in another clip "the Frankenstein monster" shows up and that's dumb. And then Richard Roxburgh shows up as Dracula and he is SO BAD. Seriously. And I love monster movies. I loved The Mummy. I love the people in the movie. I want to like this movie. I am this movie's target audience. If I think it looks dumb...

Be afraid.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE'S THE MERCHANT OF VENICE

You know, as opposed to Stephen King's Merchant of Venice. Anyway, once we have the obvious out of the way, and once we step over my "Do we not bleed? Hoo-ah!" joke from six months ago, we find... Shylock Pacino sporting an undisguised American accent. Go you, man. In a movie full of Brits, that doesn't sound discordant AT ALL.

On the upside, we do have Joseph Fiennes, that fixture of Elizabethan-era flicks, as Bassanio. Except that he looks like combed-over ass. Oh, and Jeremy Irons as Antonio. The strangest part of this trailer for me is that I remember when Ian McKellen was going to play Antonio, and Cate Blanchett was going to play Portia. In fact, if you go watch the trailer, Portia (the strawberry blonde) bears as close a resemblance to Cate Blanchett as is physically possible under the circumstances. Spooky. The whole thing basically comes off as cut-rate Masterpiece Theater, and you start to understand why the biggest names (after Pacino, who is clearly hellbent on playing this role no matter what) jumped ship.

THE DOOR IN THE FLOOR

What the shit is this? It's like a mad scientist tried to fuse a heartwarming midlife crisis/coming of age flick with a haunting psychodrama, and ended up burning down his lab in the process. Seriously, this trailer gave me whiplash. One moment it's all like, THE END OF INNOCENCE and "the Mommy saw some terrible things" (pseudo-subliminal FLASH! of trauma!) and then it's like, "This soundtrack was brought to you by a winsomely angsty songstress escaped from Dawson's Creek."

Oh, and thanks for giving away what looks like a pretty major plot revelation ("I hired you because..."). This is verging on one of those "Thanks, but I've now seen the entire movie" trailers.

(Link from Trailer News.)

LEMONY SNICKET

Again: not a trailer (actually, a one-minute TV spot) I'm very objective towards, as I loooooove these books and OMG everything looks so good SQUEEEE!

My one complaint is that there's a little too much Jim Carrey mugging. I define "too much" thusly: "It has nothing to do with the actual movie." Like him walking around like a dinosaur shrieking. Now, if the mugging has to do with the actual dialogue at hand, and it's appropriate for the movie, I'm cool with it. In fact, I forgive him for his delivery of the line, "All I ask is that you do everything that pops into my head while I enjoy the enormous fortune your parents left beHIND." That, and he's using a stagier, much deeper voice, so at least he's trying.

(Oh, and Klaus is the same height as, if not taller than, Violet. We notice these things, people!)

ETA: Screen caps!

TROY

I can't tell you much about this one, because the quality is shit. However, it seems much more Brad Pitt-based than previous trailers.