Trailer Blazer: 'The Happening,' 'Forgetting Sarah Marshall,' 'Where in the World Is Osama bin Laden?'
Feb 5, 2008, 04:34 PM | by Gary Susman
Categories: Movie Trailers
The Happening (June 13). Say this for M. Night Shyamalan: he makes terrific teasers. This one taps nicely into post-9/11 dread: It's a beautiful day; suddenly, people start dropping dead; and pretty soon they're evacuating New York. Very scary! Don't know if the rest of the movie can live up to it — if Mark Wahlberg's square jaw can save the East Coast from unspecified catastrophe, or if Zooey Deschanel can deliver line readings without irony — but this little clip is certainly promising.
Forgetting Sarah Marshall (April 18). Eh, I'm starting to get Apatow fatigue. This one looks like so many other films from Judd's comedy clique: same players (Jason Segel, Jonah Hill, Paul Rudd), same sexual embarrassment, same elusive shiksa goddess fetish (here, the blonde hottie is Kristen Bell, pictured with Segel). I'm worried that this revealing trailer (and I do mean revealing; it's pretty NSFW and shows a lot more of Segel than you may want to see) spoils all the best jokes, just as it spoils pretty much the entire plot: Nice schlemiel (Segel, who also wrote the film) gets dumped (by Bell), goes on Hawaiian vacation to forget his ex but keeps running into her anyway, and meets a nice gal (That '70s Show's Mila Kunis) who could and should turn his head. Still, I'm sure Ben Stiller is kicking himself that he's not in this movie.
Where in the World Is Osama bin Laden? (Spring 2008). There's only one joke in this trailer — and maybe in the whole movie, I fear — but it's a good one: Super Size Me director Morgan Spurlock's Indiana Jones-meets-Michael Moore quest to locate the Al Qaeda leader whom President Bush seems to have lost interest in finding and bringing to justice. "If i've learned anything from big-budget action movies, it's that complicated global problems are best solved by one lonely guy." Heh-heh, good one, Spurlock! Betcha didn't find him, though, didja?
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