Today's Trailer Happy Hour has sci-fi guns, big anime monsters, and Gus Van Sant

By Sam Barsanti  |  April 29, 2018 | 8:33pm
Aux Features Film
Today's Trailer Happy Hour has sci-fi guns, big anime monsters, and Gus Van Sant

It may be Sunday afternoon (depending on where you live), but it’s always a good time for Trailer Happy Hour—The A.V. Club feature where we grab a handful of trailers, toss them into a bucket, and then dump the bucket over our heads as an elaborate prank. Today, we’ve got James Franco looking down the wrong end of a sci-fi laser gun, Joaquin Phoenix staring down his demons and becoming a successful cartoonist, the return of anime hit Attack On Titan, and a documentary on Whitney Houston.

James Franco isn’t actually in this trailer for Kin very much, but it does have a rather confusing and seemingly NRA-friendly message. A kid lives in some kind of bad area, he finds a ridiculously powerful space gun that everyone says is very dangerous, and he uses it to blow away gang members and protect his brother. Replace the space gun with any other kind of gun and this trailer might as well star Dana Loesch.

This is a trailer for Gus Van Sant’s Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far On Foot, which stars Joaquin Phoenix as cartoonist John Callahan. In his Sundance review, The A.V. Club’s own A.A. Dowd praised Phoenix’s performance and noted that the movie is a “tearfully inspirational tribute to [Callahan’s] triumph over alcoholism.” It comes to theaters on July 13.

If you don’t know what Attack On Titan is all about, this trailer won’t help much. Luckily, it’s one of the biggest anime hits of the last few years, so there’s a good chance you do know what it’s all about. The show’s third season will come to FunimationNow in July.

Finally, here’s an emotional trailer for Whitney, Kevin Macdonald’s documentary about Whitney Houston. The YouTube page describes it as an “intimate, unflinching portrait of Houston and her family that probes beyond familiar tabloid headlines and sheds new light on the spellbinding trajectory of Houston’s life.” It’ll be in theaters on July 6.

 
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