Man, I hate watching trailers. There’s so much to glean from them in terms of plot and style that I almost just prefer to stay away from them. Every now and then, however, I am drawn to a trailer that I cannot turn away from. “Where the Wild Things Are,” directed by Spike Jonze, is such a trailer.

The CGI-infected special effects world makes everything look the same after a while, and the tactile “wild things” in this movie (despite the fact that their faces have CGI elements) will go a long way towards making us feel that Max is actually interacting with something. Cinematical has posted a gallery of images from the upcoming Maurice Sendak adaptation and–if you must–the trailer is right here.

Richard Kelly is back. You remember him, right? He was the next big thing after “Donnie Darko” finally caught on on DVD. Then he released The Director’s Cut and over-explained everything. Then he released “Southland Tales” and we all wondered what deep end he’d gone off.

He’s back with “The Box,” a thriller starring Cameron Diaz, James Marsden, and Frank Langella that’s based on a Richard Matheson (”I Am Legend”) short story called “Button, Button.” I hope he can find the balance between explaining too much and not enough. It releases on October 30.

Kal Penn (star of TV’s “House” and the “Harold and Kumar” movie series) has joined the Obama administration. The Hollywood Reporter reports that he will “join the staff as an associate director in the Office of Public Liaison. His role will be to connect Obama with the Asian-American and Pacific Islander communities, as well as arts and entertainment groups.” Weird.

Twitter is the shit, simply put. Lots of celebs are using it, but “Iron Man 2″ director Jon Favreau is the only one working every day on a big-budgeted, much-anticipated sequel. He tweets a lot, and is constantly posting pictures from the set. Follow him here and see comments and photos from the “Iron Man 2″ set in realtime. His latest post refers to Garry Schandling, whose casting is very recent news: “Wrapped day two. Time for some sleep. So great to work with Garry.”

When I was at SXSW, Favreau was on a panel with the other stars of “I Love You, Man” and he was taking photos of Paul Rudd and Rashida Jones from the stage and posting them on Twitter. It’s a pretty unique way to experience life through the eyes of a newly crowned Hollywood giant. You can follow Jon Favreau’s Twitter account here.

The Playlist says that Overture Films has picked up the “semi-fictional/quasi-documentary” movie “Paper Heart,” starring Charlyne Yi (the crazy stoned-out chick from “Knocked Up”) and her boyfriend Michael Cera. The movie premiered at Sundance, and was directed by Nicholas Jasenovec, who co-wrote it with Yi. It sounds a like a weird mix of a travel documentary and the faux mocumentary style of “The Office.” “Paper Heart” will get a limited release on August 7 in New York and L.A. and will start expanding on August 14 everywhere else.

Is the box office disappointment of the rated-R superhero flick “Watchmen” to blame or was it a promotional tie-in with Pizza Hut? Whatever the reason,the latest chapter in the “Terminator” saga, “Terminator Salvation,” starring Christian Bale and directed by McG, will be rated PG-13 rather than the “hard” R the director originally promised.

Tags: iron man 2, Jon Favreau, kal penn, michael cera, obama, paper heart, poster, richard kelly, the box, where the wild things are

With a title like “Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay,” it would seem that the makers of its equally ridiculously-titled predecessor “Harold and Kumar go to White Castle” had returned with a more politically flavored sequel—one that expanded the racial stereotype humor of the first to and set their comic sights a little higher.

But after a promising setup, it is clear that writer/directors Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg instead will state and restate the obvious, perfectly content to rehash the same race-related jokes that have been around forever.

I get that having your heroes be a Korean American and Indian American who are racially profiled at every turn is an indictment of that very behavior. Taking these kinds of jokes to the extreme that a modern R-rated picture allows, however, is just not new enough or funny enough. “Guantanamo Bay” ends up coming off like an extended Carlos Mencia sketch, and it certainly can’t justify the film’s short 100-minute running time.

Hurwitz and Schlossberg move up to the directors’ chairs after only penning the first movie, and their inexperience shows. John Cho (Harold) and Kal Penn (Kumar) have an affable camaraderie together, but the movie feels strung together and gets a lot less than half the laughs it was going for. (Also, does anybody else notice how much older these guys look now?)

When a homemade bong gets the hapless pair mistaken for terrorists on a plane, the one joke that will be repeated ad nauseam throughout the movie is still fresh: White people are racist. But when “Daily Show” alum Rob Corddry is reduced to spitting lame, offensive racist jokes out at an alarming rate, it’s not “edgy,” it just ceases to be funny. Corddry is so over the top that he just seems desperate, like much of the film.

Besides the usual amount of dick and fart jokes (the movie starts off with Kumar taking a particularly nasty dump while Harold is in the shower—funny!), there are two kinds of jokes in this movie. The script either plays up stereotypes to an absurd degree (throwing pennies at Jews—funny!) or builds them up and then subverts them (thugs with tire irons who want to help change your tire—funny!). Whenever the movie approaches real satire (such as the moment the boys get thrown in Gitmo), it backs down from the challenge (like when they are forced to go down on their captors—funny!).

Thankfully, Neil Patrick Harris is back as “Neil Patrick Harris,” a ‘shroom-eating, whore-mongering maniac who has all the deadpan comic timing of well, “How I Met Your Mother’s” Neil Patrick Harris. James Adomian, who has made a career recently out of impersonating President Bush, does another dead-on impression and garners a few more big laughs as well.

Lest you think I don’t recognize “Harold and Kumar” for what it is—I do. It’s a raunchy, sophomoric stoner comedy with gratuitous nudity and shock humor that tries to shoehorn in two romantic subplots and celebrate America’s diversity by endlessly stereotyping it. I like laughing at rich, white people with perfect smiles as much as the next guy, but I guess I somehow expected more out of “Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay.”

Tags: Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay movie revie, Harold and Kumar movie review, john cho, kal penn