SkimIt
As the grosses for The Avengers keep piling up, the summer movie season has officially kicked off strong. Let's have a look at which trailers are doing the best job of making us excited to hit the multiplex.
The Dictator (opening May 16) The Details: Writer-star Sacha Baron Cohen and director Larry Charles abandon the mockumentary structure of Borat and Bruno in favor of an R-rated scripted comedy in which Cohen plays the strongman leader of the fictional country of Wadiya, forced to start over in America after he's deposed in a democratic revolution. Think Eddie Murphy's Coming to America with Muammar Gaddafi in the starring role.
The Trailer: Opening with some cleverly deployed film of President Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and British Prime Minister David Cameron talking about the necessity of taking down an unnamed tyrant, the trailer skips back and forth between scenes from the dictator's pre-revolution life and his arrival (on camelback) in New York City. Admirably, the trailer completely ignores the early plot twist, doing a fine job of not giving away the entire joke. Plus there's a Kardashian joke, and those are always welcome.
The Buzz: I hated Cohen and Charles' earlier movies, which to me consisted almost entirely of cheap shots against people whose primary crime was gullibility and lack of critical thinking skills. Crucially, Cohen's character here is the butt of the joke, which is new for him, and which allows him to evince a level of raffish charm he'd usually been missing before. I think I'd actually like to see this.
