Ho! Ho! Ho! It's Time for the December Don LaFontaine Awards

The above photo is what comes up when you Google Image search "Don LaFontaine Santa Claus." I was hoping that someone had taken a photo of our illustrious awards' namesake in a HoHo suit. But, alas, no such luck. On the bright side, though, if you're in the LaFontaine, Michigan area December 12th-19thish, make sure you drop by and have a seat on old Saint Nick. But of course, that's not the reason you and I have gathered here for our weekly one-way conversation. No, friends, it's time again for the Don LaFontaine Awards for Best Trailers for Movies Released Sometime in Approximately the Next Thirty Days. Our December honorees are a special bunch. Since the holiday movie season gets into full swing this mont, the studios are bringing out their big guns and leaving the Runner Runners of the movie world for après-Oscars. So, there are significantly less stupid trailers for unavoidably awful movies to make fun of. But fear not! Just like every Christmas, there's plenty to be disappointed about and more than enough to geek out over. So, come on! Hit that jump. Let's watch some trailers.   WINNER, Best Pseudo-Biopic of an Obscure Folk Singer You've Probably Never Heard of (Justin Timberlake Division):  Inside Llewyn Davis Release Date: December 6 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXLmorEMEhA Oh, you brothers of Coen, how well you know the twisting paths that lead to my heart. You're making another music-centric movie, like all-time fave Oh Brother, you say? Oh, and it's sort of -- but not really -- but sort of -- a Dave van Ronk biopic? Hmm. Who's the female lead? Oh, Carrey Mulligan, the extremely captivating star of the best episode of Doctor Who ever?? Did you guys dig this one out of my dreams or what? For the uninitiated, Joel and Ethan Coen are among the greatest popular American filmmakers of the past quarter century, responsible for classics such as Raising Arizona, Miller's Crossing, Oh, Brother, Where Art Thou?, The Big Lewbowski, and No Country for Old Men. So, seriously, how do you not know who they are? You probably do, which is the point. And if you know who they are then you know that you probably want to go see any movie they're involved with (unless is costars Marlon Wayans), so this trailer is almost pointless. Except that it's extremely unlikely that you've heard of Dave van Ronk, a 1960s Greenwich Village folk scene fixture whose popularity never quite lived up to his immense talent. But you've definitely heard of people who idolized van Ronk. That version of "The House of the Rising Sun" that Bob Dylan recorded and that the Animals took and made into the version you hear on the oldies station every day? Yeah, that's van Ronk's version. And unless you're a Doctor Who fan, you've probably never seen the episode of that show called "Blink," which stars Carrie Mulligan, so you don't squeal with delight every time you see her name attached to something else. I don't squeal either, of course. Or at least not that loudly. So you might want to watch the trailer. Look at that door busting open at the beginning, springing Oscar Isaac's Llewyn Davis onto the acrid, garbage-tinged air of a New York City alley. Listen to those dulcet tones covering the soothing shapes and colors of the scenes like a warm country quilt. How could you not want to watch this movie? Also, JT's Amish beard.   WINNER, Most Likely to Be at Least One Hour Too Long: The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug Release Date: December 13 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I19urBw1cLM Ugh. Jeeeezus. Here we go again. If teenage me -- the one who spent hours of his waking life actively lamenting the fact that the best Tolkien-related movie he could watch was Ralph Bakshi's unfinished animated Lord of the Rings  -- heard present-day me utter a single complaint about Peter Jackson's Tolkien movies, he would punch me square in the nose. But you know what? That kid was a wuss. I think I could take him. As much as I loved Jackson's LOTR films, and as much as I love him in general (because how could you not love these movies?), I've so far been disappointed by the direction he's taken The Hobbit movies. Two hours of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey were really enjoyable. There was the first hour with all of the myth-making and drunken dwarves running around and the final hour with its rock-giant battles and ridiculous escape-from-the-goblin-kingdom/riddles in the dark awesomeness. But that middle hour was insufferably extraneous. The biggest difficulty associated with adapting literature to film is that there is so much extraneous material to work with. Scriptwriters and directors are charged with the task of whittling hundreds of pages of single-spaced prose down into somewhere around 100 pages of script-formatted text. There's so much fat to cut that film adaptions often falter because their creators don't have the guts to cut enough material out (see numbers 4 and 5 of the Harry Potter movies). Inexplicably, Jackson and company decided that The Hobbit needed more material than Tolkien gave it, which means that the first movie had way too many non-canonical scenes involving Radagast the fricken Brown running around sniffing stuff. The let's-try-to-improve-on-a-classic-of-English-literature-with-stuff-we-made-up tomfoolery continues in The Desolation of Smaug, with Orlando Bloom's Legolas showing up and prancing around the woods with Evangeline Lilly as a new elf that never appeared in any of Tolkien's work -- not even The Silmarillion.  No thanks, trailer. I don't need Orlando Bloom back in my Tolkien movies. I also don't need the three Hobbit movies to be the types of prequels that set up every little theme in the LOTR movies because THE HOBBIT IS ALREADY THE EFFING PREQUEL TO THE LOTR BOOKS AND IT DOESN'T TRY TO DO IT SO WHY WOULD THE MOVIE NEED TO. Sorry, I need to move on before I write seven more paragraphs of caps-locked nerd-rage rants about the stupidity of what's going on with these movies.   WINNER, Best Don't Lie to Yourself by Pretending for a Second that You Won't Watch This Movie Eventually Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues Release Date: December 20 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Elczv0ghqw0 Also winner of the coveted MOST UNNECESSARY TRAILER EVER award. What, beyond the fact that there is an Anchorman sequel, do you need to know about the Anchorman sequel before you decide to give in to inevitability and just watch the danged thing? Is the whole cast back? Yep. Ok, sign me up. Wait, it's set in the eighties. I don't care. And they're moving into cable news.  Shut up, I'm trying to buy my tickets. Oh, there's a scene at a dinner table with an African American family. Is Tim Meadows playing one of the family members? No. Oh well. That would have been awesome. But in no way does it change the fact that I will definitely watch it because it is the sequel to Anchorman. You job has already been done for you, trailer.   WINNER, Best You're Got-Danged Right Jennifer Lawrence is Making an Appearance in this List:  American Hustle Release Date: December 20 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECMHgFnhTqU Because, at this point, I'm 97% sure that 99% of the Funkhouser readership is made up of Funkhouser writers, and we're not letting this die anytime soon.   https://twitter.com/CM_Tomlin/status/406956009303719936   Do you realize that there are other trailers for American Hustle that don't even show Jennifer Lawrence? Whoever edited those trailers should be fired from their jobs, blacklisted from all Hollywood employment, and have their families thrown to the wolves. You have one job when creating a trailer for a movie that Jennifer Lawrence is in and THAT IS TO SHOW THE AUDIENCE JENNIFER BY-GOD LAWRENCE. Pro-tip: let her trot out that Kentucky accent.   WINNER, Best Wait So This Movie is Really Happening?: Grudge Match Release Date: December 27 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NX7jsXJ6MfA Just when I thought there weren't going to be any stupid movie trailers to make fun of this month, Hollywood gave me Raging Bull vs. Rocky here. I'm so happy that I don't even know where to start, so here are three quick questions: 1. Are we still supposed to respect Robert De Niro as an actor? 2. Isn't the plot of this movie the same as the plot to Rocky Balboa? 3. Does Stallone look animated like a character in a video game already, or is it just me?   Thanks, Hollywood. You never disappoint.