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Sometimes there's a down side to being considered a comedic genius. Right now in the world of TV comedy, Tina Fey and Steve Carell are the 'Prom Queen and King', and with all that popularity comes the price of raised expectations. The couples comedy Date Night, starring Fey and Carell as a married couple looking to spice up their romance, was bound to be scrutinized. So now that the first trailer has arrived (via Apple), reactions have been mixed. But I think there's hope for this film, if for no other reason than the fact that Fey and Carell are some of the most talented comedians working right now (although I'm still holding out for Fey to start writing some more movies of her own).

Date Night was directed by Shawn Levy (of Night at The Museum fame) and written by Josh Klausner, who only has a couple of credits as a writer (mainly for Shrek films). But Klausner has also worked with the Farrelly brothers, so he must know his way around a joke, right? I guess that's why I'm willing to give Date Night the benefit of the doubt, because on paper, all the elements are there for a good comedy -- the least of which is a strong supporting cast of funny folks like James Franco, Mila Kunis, Jason Segel, and Kristen Wiig. Maybe I'm grasping at straws, but the film has also yet to be rated, so there's always a chance the funnier bits weren't 'ready for prime time'.

So watch the trailer and tell me what you think. Am I just kidding myself, or is there a chance that Date Night will surprise us all and turn out to be a pretty funny flick?

Watch the trailer after the jump...

Yahoo! has posted an incredibly cool video of George Clooney acting out his role as Mr. Fox in the freakin' adorable Fantastic Mr. Fox. The video shows cool side-by-side comparisons of Clooney acting out different scenes on a farm with costar Wallace Wolodarsky, who voices loopy sidekick Kylie, as well as just running around pretending to be Mr. Fox, down to rolling around on the ground and doing his super cool whistle.

This behind-the-scenes peek at Mr. Fox also offers mini-interviews with director Wes Anderson, producer Allison Abbate, and Bill Murray (Badger) about working with Clooney on the film. The funniest part shows an argument between Mr. Fox and Badger, which involves growling and swiping, split-screened against the actors themselves doing the voices in an office.

As Abbate notes, "There couldn't be a more perfect Mr. Fox, because he has the Cary Grant suave, debonair sparkle where he can talk his way out of any situation, which is so our Mr. Fox character. He's just got a great voice."

Clooney's got a rather full docket this season, with The Men Who Stare at Goats coming out this week, Fantastic Mr. Fox coming out at the end of November, and Up in the Air out on Christmas day.

Click through to see the video itself, then let us know which Clooney feature you're going to be lining up for at the theaters this season, by cuss!

Some super-fan made a crazy audio/video remix of scenes and sounds from Pulp Fiction that you have to check out. It's so good that it could be confused with an underground techno mash-up. The remix uses multiple split-screens with the sounds from the scenes remixed to a beat, like Jules's delicious shake, Butch's getaway, Jimmie Dimmick slapping soap into Jules's hand, Zed slapping the Gimp's head and shushing his victims, and Marsellus Wallace grunting behind a ballgag.

The detail on this is impressive, especially the remixing of the different scenes. The person's YouTube channel is otherwise made up of music performances, so I'm very curious if there's a collaborator involved or what. There's a lot of Pulp Fiction mashups on YouTube that pale in comparison, although this one is pretty cool. The music mashup culture is a fascinating one; it seems more underground than the video mashups, probably because of how easy it is to share things via YouTube and perhaps how much more litigious the music industry is. Personally, I love music mashup artists like A Plus D and think that creating new forms of art through pre-existing work, like the source files offered by Sita Sings the Blues creator Nina Paley, will become more acceptable as artists realize the potential of sharing their work.

Then again... everyone's got bills to pay.

Watch the Pulp Fiction Remix after the jump ...

The eccentric stop-motion geniuses (and identical twins) the Quay Brothers, aka Stephen and Timothy Quay and/or the Brothers Quay, create mesmerizing and wonderfully creepy stop-motion films since their first films in the '70s. With a wild assortment of esoteric influences from Polish animators, Kafka and Bruno Schulz (whose book The Street of Crocodiles inspired their short film by the same name), and an assortment of Eastern European composers and puppeteers, the Quay Brothers could be (and have been) studied in great detail by film scholars -- or just enjoyed by viewers who love their dark and uncanny worlds of broken dolls, over-loved stuffed animals, and clockwork creatures.

One of my favorite short films of theirs is a video they did for the song "Are We Still Married?" by the haunting Michigan group His Name is Alive. The two groups of artists mesh perfectly, and in fact did collaborate on another video as well, for the song "Can't Go Wrong Without You." The brothers have also done videos for other artists like Peter Gabriel and Sparklehorse, but HNIA just seems like the most perfectly delicious collaborators with their mercurial music -- soft with sudden outbursts, with just a hint of ominous anger lurking beyond the surface.

You can watch the video for "Are We Still Married?" after the jump, but if you want to see a high quality version of it, go to the official 4AD site, bite the bullet, and install RealPlayer just long enough to enjoy the beauty. The video is also available on the two-disc collection of their short film work from Zeitgeist Films.

I am obsessed with all things even vaguely related to The Mighty Boosh, a bizarre comedy from the UK that features besties Howard Moon, a gloomy jazz fan, Vince Noir, an androgynous mod, Naboo the shaman, and Bollo the talking gorilla as they go on "a journey through time and space." (Incidentally, the DVDs of the show are finally available for region 1 DVD players!)

There have been rumors of a Boosh movie, and Noel Fielding is also in a bizarro fake documentary called I Spit on Your Rave as the Zombie King. (It's described as "a mockumentary by director Chris Boyle about the first post-apocalypse zombie music festival" and is due out in 2010.) But meanwhile, I'll sate my ravenous hunger for more of the Boosh crew with their new movie, Bunny and the Bull. Boosh director Paul King wrote and directed the screenplay, and fans will be excited to see Boosh regulars Julian Barratt (Howard Moon) and Noel Fielding (Vince Noir) among the cast, as well as Simon Farnaby, who plays Bunny, and Richard Ayoade. It sounds as bizarre and hard to describe as The Mighty Boosh, based on the write-up on the TIFF website.

If you are a regular around these parts, then you have probably noticed that I have a streak of feminism in me a mile wide, and while I've read all the great tomes on equality, most, if not all of my 'girl-power' tendencies can be traced back to Dolly Parton. So for today's installment of Terrific Trailers, I went back all the way to 1980 to bring you the trailer for the greatest feminist film ever made, 9 to 5. Colin Higgins' comedy was the story of three working women (played by Parton, Lily Tomlin, and Jane Fonda) as they banded together to bring down their pig of a boss, and was the first time the idea of a 'gender divide' made it's way into my kiddie consciousness...and I've been a card-carrying little feminist ever since.

It's strange to see a trailer that looks nothing like what passes for a quality trailer or teaser these days. There is no star power, no "In a world without...", in fact, we don't even glimpse the principal players until the end of the clip. But what is truly funny is that considering the huge social and political point the film is trying to make about women in the workplace, the trailer seems content to treat it all as a silly joke -- "Oh that wacky boss who steals your ideas and grabs your ass..." But, I'm realistic enough to know that if you aren't trying to scare people off, you have to make sure you don't use the dreaded "F" word -- which I guess means not much has changed since 1980, after all.

After the jump; the personal gets political...

Let's be honest. Some of you watched the MTV Video Music Awards on Sunday night. (OMG, did you see what Kanye did to poor Taylor Swift?? That rascal!) Although technically the VMAs are supposed to celebrate achievement in music videos – you know, those things MTV used to play all the time – the night belonged to one decidedly non-musical entity: Twilight. Stars Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, and Taylor Lautner introduced a new extended trailer for The Twilight Saga: New Moon that just might have earned the Summit property something that previous teaser trailers haven't been able to nail: male interest. That's right, Twilight's gunning for you action fans - and from the looks of things, you might even like it.

I admit, that's a big "might." The Twilight franchise hasn't yet expanded beyond its key demographic of teenage girls and Twilight Moms, but as evidenced by Sunday's trailer, the November sequel aims to change all that.

I have this pet theory about movies, and that is sometimes I think it's much more fun to watch everything go wrong than go right. What I mean by that is that when you get that feeling that the film had every intention of being a straightforward action, drama, whatever, and instead winds up as a comedy. Call me crazy, but it makes me like a film just a little bit more. The reason I mention this is that after watching the first English language trailer for Solomon Kane, in two minutes flat I was able to figure out that this film might look silly, but I don't mean that it looks bad. Instead, this particular flick shapes up to what I like to call a 'Cornball delight' -- and to give you an idea of what I mean, think of a movie like Reign of Fire.

Kane is based on Robert E. Howard's series, and stars James Purefoy (clad in an leather coat and hat combo that looks like a reject from the Van Helsing costume department) as a cursed swordsman tasked with defeating an evil wizard and saving a village from a demonic army.

Usually for a film to earn the 'Cornball' moniker from me, it comes down to my personal tastes. But sometimes you have to respect a movie more for being willing to take it so far over the top that you can't see the ground anymore. Then again, maybe I'm wrong, because in the midst of all the silliness, the film is chock full of respectable actors like Pete Postlethwaite (The Omen) and Max von Sydow (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly). But I'm going to go with my gut and saying that, yes, the cheese factor might be strong with this film, but I'm kind of digging it ... how about you?

After the jump: the English language trailer for Solomon Kane...

It was a roundabout trip that led me to my local IMAX for Avatar day. For starters, I'm not a big fan of 'sneak peeks' -- I'm all for teasers and trailers, but I'm a firm believer in going in to a movie with as much as a blank slate as possible, and that's not always easy in this job. But the thing is, I love a cultural phenomenon, and brother -- Avatar is one of 'em. So I decided to put up with stalled servers at Fox and multiple confirmation emails with threats of everything short of a cavity search to watch a 16 minute commercial. Add to the fact that while I admire the technical stylings of James Cameron, I've never counted myself as one of the devoted. So as you can see, I was hardly the perfect audience for his experiment and I went in to that theater with an open mind, but very few expectations.

Now, thankfully, I tend to be little high strung about these things, and so I showed up an hour early with email and ID in hand -- and judging by Elisabeth's experience with Fox flacks, boy am I glad I did. So there I was in my seat, and as I looked around I kept thinking: what was with the half empty theater? After listening to horror stories of line-ups and sold out shows this made no sense to me. So I have to wonder if all that talk of sold out showings were an attempt by Fox to limit 'exposure' of the film (and piracy). Maybe they just wanted to beef up the hype surrounding the event by touting sold out tickets. But if that was their plan, then it might have backfired because to me, a half-empty theater made the movie look like the bloated, over-hyped flick that some detractors were calling it in the first place. That said, after a brief intro from the man himself (and in 3D no less!) it was time to get on with the show.

After the jump: my two cents on what I saw...

The new trailer over at Yahoo for Did You Hear About the Morgans? looks... adorable. There, I said it. Hugh Grant and Sarah Jessica Parker play two high-strung, high-powered NYC couples on the verge of divorce when, oops, they witness a murder and have to enroll in the Federal Witness Protection Program. They're sent to the middle of nowhere -- catch always-fab Mary Steenburgen wielding a shotgun -- and are forced to reexamine their relationship in close quarters. And milk cows.

Yes, hijinks ensue. Yes, it's Hugh Grant being neurotic and English, and SJP is being, well, a slightly more chill version of her Carrie Bradshaw character, and it's the whole "New Yorkers stuck out in the Midwest, oh noes!" thing, but it looks like a cute holiday flick. And I was instantly won over by Steenburgen. Sue me.

Check out the trailer for yourself after the jump (or over on Yahoo) and give me your two cents.