Welcome to “Trailer Park,” our regular Friday feature where we collect the week’s new trailers all in one place and do a little “judging a book by its cover,” ranking them from worst to best and taking our best guess at what they may be hiding. We’ve got six new trailers this week, and — for the first time in the feature’s history — they all look varying degrees of worthwhile. Check ‘em out after the jump.
Arthur Christmas
Next to the Pixar juggernaut, Aardman Animations doesn’t get much credit (on these shores, anyway) for their efforts to make family movies that adults won’t suffer through. But they’re back with their first feature film in five long years, and (big surprise) it looks like a charmer — funny premise, clever gags, good voice cast (James McAvoy, Hugh Laurie, Bill Nighy, Jim Broadbent, Imelda Staunton, Will Sasso). And bonus points for using that Kill Bill cue.
Young Adult
At some point, about three weeks after its release, it became hopelessly uncool to like Juno, and that backlash never made a helluva lot of sense to your humble author, who maintains to this day that it’s a smart, fast, funny picture. But those who complained about its studied attitude and stylized dialogue (attributes that could be affixed to any number of Quentin Tarantino or David Mamet films, but that’s neither here nor there) should, in theory anyway, be pleased by this trailer for Young Adult, a new comedy that reunites Juno director Jason Reitman with screenwriter Diablo Cody. There’s not much in the way of Codyisms on display, at least at this point; however, the trailer also feels strangely restrained, as though the filmmakers muted their tale of a young adult fiction writer returning home to steal back her old boyfriend. But we’re still looking forward to this one — it’d be nice to see Charlize Theron in a good film again, and any movie with the good sense to cast Patton Oswalt in a supporting role knows what it’s doing.
My Week with Marilyn
A good cast (Michelle Williams, Kenneth Branagh, Eddie Redmayne, Dominic Cooper, Emma Watson, Judi Dench) and an intriguing concept (a first-person behind-the-scenes dispatch from the set of The Prince and the Showgirl, in which Monroe met Olivier) put this one on our fall “must-see” list months ago, and this dreamy trailer certainly won’t bump it off. It has left us wondering a bit more about the picture’s thin premise, though; so many of these celebrity docudramas make for better trailers than full-length features, so we’re hoping the final product delves a little deeper than the norm.
The Lady
The teaser for Luc Besson’s biopic of activist Aung San Suu Kyi caught our interest while telling us basically nothing; the new, full-on trailer rectifies that by giving us a healthy dose of political activism and war-torn romance (heightened by appropriately epic music). Besson appears to be working a David Lean vibe on this one, and — at least in this small dose — he’s pulling it off. Plus, we’ll see Michelle Yeoh in just about anything.
Norman
The troubled teen is one of moviedom’s most well-worn tropes, but this comedy/drama from director Jonathan Segal is promising indeed, delving into the complexities of the high school loner with some grace and humor. Stars Dan Byrd and Emily VanCamp are most familiar from their TV work (he’s on Cougar Town; she stars in Revenge), and it looks like the great Richard Jenkins is gonna make us all misty.
Another Happy Day
The red-band trailer for this Sundance winner from first-time director Sam Levinson quickly sheds the most obvious logline — “Rachel Getting Married, from the parent’s point of view” — and indicates something a little darker, a little stranger, and a little more unnerving. (That faux-Requiem for a Dream music doesn’t hurt.) Factor in that killer ensemble cast, and you can consider our RSVP in.