“The opening 20 minutes of Dai Nipponjin are the most boring 20 minutes in the history of cinema.” That’s Grady Hendrix, selling one of the films he’s selected for the New York Asian Film Festival (the final lineup was just released today), on this podcast at The House Next Door. If that doesn’t have you marking your calendars, allow Grady to continue:

The first 20 minutes are like, him shopping, him complaining about how his wife divorced him and how he hates his job and his government salary isn’t very good, and he’s just this idiot…and then they pump 50,000 amps through his nipples and he turns into this giant super hero in purple underwear and beats up monsters…This is like the porno version of Cloverfield. You find out what happens when giant monsters go into heat. Which isn’t pretty.

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We have less than three weeks until Iron Man opens in theaters, but the way people are talking about the film today, that might be too long. Regardless of how subversive the comic book adaptation may be (check out Paul’s thoughts from yesterday), or otherwise how intelligent a blockbuster it is (according to an exhibitor, quoted here by Anne Thompson), or how “pretty darn amazing!!!!!” it is to a more mainstream, don’t-care-if-it’s-intelligent-as-long-as-it’s-awesome crowd (such as includes those who send reactions to AICN), the fact of the matter is that we may have already accepted the movie as all these things well before even seeing the whole thing. The big, hairy guy from Ireland, Karl Hungus, sums up his feelings of saturation, sparked by this latest hero-becomes-familiar-with-his-powers clip, on his blog (via IMDb):

The problem is, with all this cool stuff being flung at us, is there going to be any cool left to blow us away when the film finally hits? I know, this isn’t the first time I’ve said this, but there’s just so many new promo shots and trailers/TV spots being published, the main villain being revealed, the clips with the tank, battles being shown and now a lot of the development of the armour as well, my worry is growing that the final product will be ruined.

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In this week’s New York, David Edelstein lists a number of films that significantly represent the Big Apple. Because it’s a celebration of the magazine’s 40th anniversary, though, it only goes back as far as 1968 (the year of Planet of the Apes and Rosemary’s Baby). So, tragically no timely mention of The Naked City, which lost both its director and star recently.

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• Uh-oh! Brian Singer’s Tom Cruise-tries-to-kill-Hitler-with-an-eye patch drama Valkyrie has been pushed from prestige season to dumping season. The already much-mocked film was previously pushed down the pipe from July to October 2008; with re-shoots still looming, it’ll now open in February 2009.
• Benderspink, the agency that packaged Juno, has a new gambit for luring teen girls to the multiplex: they’re producing “a hip-hop musical reimagining” of Jane Austen’s Emma.
• Cloverfield is a huge hit in Japan. This is the surest sign I can think of that global-political cycle of the 20th century is complete.

I guess I will be seeing The Dark Knight no matter what, but this new video of “Rachel Dawes” (Maggie Gyllenhaal) endorsing “Harvey Dent” has me half-wanting to boycott the thing. While not entirely harmless, the clip is obnoxiously pointless, and it is written and acted poorly enough to feel like the opening of an SNL skit. I assume that Christopher Nolan didn’t have much to do with it, and I find viral marketing tactics like this to cheapen a film and do more harm than good. Who could watch this thing and honestly think it makes the Batman Begins sequel look appealing? Even if you’re smart enough to know the actual film won’t look like this, you might at least get the impression that Gyllenhaal’s performance here is a sampling of her portrayal of Dawes (previously played by Katie Holmes) in The Dark Knight.

And no, I’m not biased against Gyllenhaal. I do think she’s highly overrated, but she’s a decent actress most of the time (when she has more air, apparently). However, I do admit I already find this Harvey Dent political campaign-as-marketing campaign to be superfluous. It only continues to psyche up the geeks who are already psyched up anyway, making its an unnecessary cost to Warner Bros. And as happened on the road leading up to Cloverfield, my excitement for The Dark Knight is lately fluctuating between really pumped and really jaded. I shall now sit and wait for the backlash to the backlash.

I don’t normally pay notice to movies like The Ruins. What can I say? I just don’t care about generic horror. But for some reason (accidental? good marketing?) its trailer was shown twice, almost back to back, when I went to see Cloverfield, and it stuck in my head. However, merely having the thing in my memory doesn’t mean I’m interested. I didn’t think it looked good the first time around, and the second time it was met with much heckling and laughter from the rest of the audience. Much of this was obviously due to the awkwardness of the reappearance alone, but also the movie’s apparent faults, much of them simply based on conventional cheesiness, were certainly heightened by their repetition.

Now, with this new Red Band trailer (age-checked here, if the YouTube fails), I feel like I’m seeing the trailer again for a third time. Actually, I think the original cut made the movie look scarier. Typically, the reason to have a Red Band trailer is to pull out the stops and show things you can’t have in a regular version, such as nastier gore, some swear words and, if you really want to go all out, some naked flesh. But this has none of that. For a minute I thought this was one of those illogical Red Band trailers made for PG-13-rated horror movies. But The Ruins is in fact Rated R, and is such for “strong violence and gruesome images, language, some sexuality and nudity.” Thank goodness the MPAA has let us know what’s in the movie, since DreamWorks’ marketing team fails to share any of the goods.

So, I’m confused. Why did I have to prove my age to see this trailer (before finding it on YouTube, that is)? This is the tamest (and lamest) Red Band trailer ever.

Villains are oftentimes more interesting than heroes. So, it isn’t surprising when a villain becomes popular enough to warrant his or her own comic/movie/book/etc. The latest, according to IESB, will be Venom, one of the three villains featured in the horrible superhero sequel Spider-Man 3. For Marvel Comics readers, this isn’t that shocking. Venom received his own comic titles long ago, and disappointingly turned semi-good-guy vigilante. But will the movie spin-off be the same kind of water-down? If we look at the two ways a villain spin-off typically goes, it’s probable.

First, there’s the villain origin piece, which includes movies like Hannibal Rising, The Scorpion King, Wicked, the upcoming X-Men Origins: Magneto and of course the Star Wars prequels. They attempt to show how the evolution of a wronged person who becomes the iconic villain we’re familiar with. They try to make us sympathize, but usually they just come close to ruining the character. Rarely there is an origin storyline that makes us like the character even more, as in the case of The Godfather Part II’s flashbacks. Fortunately, we already witnessed the Venom origin in Spider-Man 3 and won’t be subjected to one in the proposed Venom movie.

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Trailers for novels aren’t the newest idea in the world, but I still think they’re a neat concept. Unfortunately, they can sometimes actually do harm to a book’s appeal, as in the case of Amanda Goldberg and Ruthanna Khalighi Hopper’s Hollywood-set novel Celebutantes, which arrives in stores tomorrow. The book has four dramatized “trailers”, or clips, pulled from its pages, the best of which is viewable above. Yes, I said the best of which. And if you think that one is bad, then check out the three other truly embarrassing clips at the book’s MySpace page.

So if they’re so bad, why am I sharing them (and possibly helping to promote the book)? Because I wanted to point out that these are the work of McG, who directed the two Charlie’s Angels movies and is currently working on the next Terminator sequel, titled Terminator Savlation: The Future Begins. The actors in these “trailers” are Katrina Begin (featured in the above spot), Cloverfield’s Mike Vogel, My So Called Life’s “Rickie”, Wilson Cruz, and TV actresses Autumn Reeser (The O.C.), April Bowlby (Two and a Half Men) and Michelle Borth (Tell Me You Love Me). None of these people are completely talentless (yes, even McG is better than this), so I’ll state the fault is with the writing of the two authors.

After four seasons of Entourage, could this novel be any less interesting to fans of film-industry-set fiction? Celebutantes seems even dumber and less relevant an Oscar-themed satire than Christopher Guest’s recent disappointment For Your Consideration. It’s no wonder that Entertainment Weekly called the book “silly” and gave it a “C+” grade (it was reviewed alongside another Hollywood-themed novel titled Oscar Season, which fared a little better with a “B”). The magazine also notes that the book’s authors are the offspring of producer Leonard Goldberg (Charlie’s Angels) and actor Dennis Hopper. You’d think they would have a little more insight.

• How to craft a Variety box office trend story: line up your greatest hits of disingenuous statements from past stories (Juno–the little movie that could! Cloverfield dropped 68% in its second weekend, but that’s not so bad–even if it was really 72%!); find either wildly optimistic or severely apocalyptic structuring rubric to make these old chestnuts seem, uh, less old; repeat.
• Speaking of Cloverfield, Paramount, apparently turning a blind eye to the film’s lack of staying power, has offered director Matt Reeves two new jobs, including a Cloverfield sequel. He’ll also direct The Invisible Woman, “a Hitchcock-style thriller that probes the mind of a former beauty queen who turns to a life of crime to protect her family,” from his own script.
• Paul Haggis is setting up a production shingle at Tom Cruise’s Scientology rec center studio, United Artists.