So many trailers hitting recently. So little time to Yes No Maybe So them all. So let's catch up with three of the newer ones after the jump: Crazy Rich Asians, Venom, and Woman Walks Ahead...
Crazy Rich Asians
YES
• It seems absolutely insane that this is (unless we've forgotten something?) the first all Asian US studio release since The Joy Luck Club (1993), which was incidentally a hit. That movie was followed less than a decade later by a SUBTITLED Asian picture that made over $100 million at the domestic box office so there's absolutely no excuse for Hollywood being all shy about these things for the past 25 years!
• Constance Wu is a delight and the supporting cast looks particularly fun here. Especially excited about Awkwafina (who is also in Oceans 8 this summer) and Sonoya Mizuno (Ex Machina alum alert!)
• Handsome male lead / find in Henry Goulding. The desexualization of Asian men has been a much-discussed US problem in social media but it does seem to be changing (finally) with this and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and Into the Badlands and Riz Ahmed and John Cho fanbases and more... to which we must offer our hearty approval. And thirst.
• "Comfortable... that's something a super rich person would say." - LOL. so true.
NO
• The accidental golddigger trope -- get married for love but find out you won the lottery because he's insanely rich! -- has decades and decades of dust on it. It's pure wish fulfillment shell game fantasy, greedy without all the moral ugliness of greed! So we're hoping this is extra funny to make up for that or that it least has a few interesting things to say about wealth and fantasy.
MAYBE SO
• We ♥️ Michelle Yeoh and she should've been Oscar nominated for Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon (2000) but we'll have to hope that her role has more pizzazz in the actual movie than in this trailer where she seems to be kind of doing a simple stock character (disapproving uptight mom)
Are you a yes no or maybe so? And is any of that contingent on being a Constance Wu Fresh Off the Boat Emmy campaigning fan in your spare time?
Woman Walks Ahead
YES
• Jessica Chastain.
• All those landscape shots. The cinematographer is Mike Eley who recently shot the remake of My Cousin Rachel but his first high profile project was the Grey Gardens TV miniseries from nine or ten years ago. God, has it been that long? Soon we'll all be ecccentric old ladies holed up in family houses
NO
• Let's hope the movie is more focused than this because the trailer is overstuffed and unfocused. As if it has to show you selections from every single scene of the movie in 2 minutes lest you lose interest.
• Starting to worry about Sam Rockwell being typecast as a racist. It's such an uncomfortable niche. This is three back-to-back roles now (Three Billboards, A Woman Walks Ahead, and Best of Enemies). He probably needs to play a nice evolved guy soon, don'cha think?
MAYBE SO
• It might take a bit to get used to Chastain's Brooklyn accent.
• It's somewhat morbidly amusing to remember that civil rights struggle movies used to be a "safe" way for (white) filmmakers to win accolades. But public discourse has changed a lot in the last 10 years. American history is now not so much well-trodden non-divisive ground but landmine-filled as new wars are fought on old terrain. I'm not personally sorry to see that era of historical films vanish since it bothered me my whole life that history films felt so "safe" and cozily proud of their 'modern' understanding. Your mileage may vary but I've always personally felt that more artists should address their own era rather than pat themselves on the back about being on the ride side of wars already won / lost / agreed upon.
But it's even more complicated than distance and political correctness. Now there's much more complex discourse about racial identity and authorship. Cue "Hamilton" music:
Will they tell your story?
Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?
Will they tell your story?
Who lives, who dies
Who tells your story?
As we move into this new era filmmakers would probably be smart to really think long and hard about what stories they want to tell and interrogate the why of that. History is no longer at the safe remove it once was (but probably never should have been) in the arts. I haven't read reviews of this film yet but one can bet -- no matter how graceful or clumsily the movie proves to be about its central relationship between the painter Catherine Weldon (Jessica Chastain) and her subject Chief Sitting Bull (Michael Greyeyes)-- that they'll all complain that a white woman is the lead in a story that's steeped in the suffering of people of color.
Okay let's end with something sillier after that heavy topic. How about an alien symbiote with a silly devil-on-your-shoulder cartoon voice?
Venom
YES
• Are our ears malfunctioning or is Michelle Williams still doing her I Feel Pretty comedy voice? Why the hell not when you're cashing a check, right!?!
• Speaking of voices, are weird voices the theme of these trailers? Tom Hardy is always welcome on our screens but doesn't his voice seem all over the place in this trailer, accent and pitch wise? Let's hope this is a sign of a totally risky BIG performance because the movie will surely need it to be watchable.
NO
• This storyline wasn't all that compelling when they let Topher Grace do it 11 years ago, you know? In fact it kind of ruined that particular movie.
• Anti-heroes with quips might prove a difficult subgenre to pull off and/or a super quickly tiresome subgenre to watch in the wake of Deadpool and Deadpool 2.
• Looks kinda cheap and ugly, no?
• And that's before that stupid looking shot of the Venom face covering up something we'd MUCH rather look at and then sticking out a Freddie Krueger tongue. We always have and will continue to consider it a crime against beauty/humanity that filmmakers are relentlessly intent on covering up Tom Hardy's mug. We blame Christopher Nolan in perpetuity.
MAYBE SO
• Ruben Fleischer hasn't made that many films but he's hit and miss thus far. Zombieland: yes; Gangster Squad: no.
• Riz Ahmed as villain!? That'd be a yes except his role looks super small / dull in the trailer.