It's Trailer Happy Hour, and Viola Davis is kicking ass
Welcome back to Trailer Happy Hour, where a dream is a wish your heart makes, provided your heart is regularly dreaming about the latest movie trailers and TV promos. Today we’ve got Buzzfeed reporting, date-able swords, and John Krasinski playing a robot trying to Jim its way into your heart, so let’s dive right in.
But first up: Oh, shit, new Widows trailer. We’ve been hearing about Steve McQueen’s latest for a while now, but that didn’t necessarily prepare us for how badass this latest look at the film (and Viola Davis) would actually seem in motion. Davis plays the widow of a thief (Liam Neeson) who gets himself killed on a job gone wrong, and recruits a team of other widowed women (Michelle Rodriguez, Elizabeth Debicki, Cynthia Erivo) to run a score to pay off their dead husbands’ debts. The result looks tense as hell, and a welcome return for McQueen, directing his first film since 12 Years A Slave. The film hits theaters on November 16, 2018.
Next we’ve got Netflix’s recent acquisition Next Gen, in which Krasinski’s recent identity struggles—Is he a badass superspy? A respected horror director? Or the smirky Jell-O man with the floppy hair?—give way toa new answer: “cuddly robot buddy.” (Also, it’s about a world where Apple makes murder robots, so that’s fun.) There’s a pretty stacked voice cast—including Charlene Yi, David Cross, Jason Sudeikis, Constance Wu, and more—on display here, but if we’re being honest, the only part of the trailer that actually knocked a laugh out of us was a bit part from the always-recognizable Betsy Sodaro, coming in right there at the end. Next Gen is out on September 7.
Movies about stand-up comedy always run into the same problem: Is the actor giving the performance as funny as, say, any average mid-bill stand-up currently working in America? The trailer for Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s new dramedy All About Nina wisely dodges the question; we get a few glimpses of the title character on stage, but most of the emphasis is on her general misery, plus a blossoming relationship with a worryingly charming dude being played by Common. The film arrives in theaters on September 28.
Whoooooo wants to kiss a sword? That’s the alluring question presented by recent Kickstarter sensation Boyfriend Dungeon, the game where your weapons are all people, and you go on dates with them to make them stronger. It’s all very ridiculous, but also kind of sweet, especially if you’ve ever wanted to make out with a lightsaber without slicing off the entire front part of your face.
Finally, we’ve got our first look at Netflix’s new Buzzfeed collaboration, Follow This. Following various reporters around as they investigate various, let’s say, “click-friendly” topics—deep fakes, drugs, sex work, survivalism, and more—the trailer feels a little bit like having the front page of Buzzfeed get shouted into your face by an enthusiastic stranger. We’ll have to wait until the series debuts on August 23 to see if it can calm down a little bit in the long-term.