Trailer Blazer: 'Jesse James,' 'Strangers With Candy,' 'Wah-Wah'

Here are three new trailers for upcoming movies built around larger-than-life characters:

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (September) Something tells me this title is going to get severely edited before the movie opens in September. Sorta like this severely edited teaser, which doesn’t show much — some rolling Gus Van Sant clouds, locomotive smoke, Brad Pitt looking mysterious as the outlaw hero, and Casey Affleck looking nervous as his Judas. A few glimpses of Pitt may be enough to lure moviegoers, but I need more to go on before deciding whether this movie looks cool or pretentious.

Strangers With Candy (June 28) This teaser is also frustratingly sketchy; if you weren’t already familiar with Amy Sedaris’ Jerri Blank character (pictured) from her old Comedy Central show, you’d have no clue what’s going on here. The voiceover bills it as a prequel to the show, so apparently, we’ll learn how Jerri became a middle-aged high school student. One thing that seems different from the show: The makeup budget is bigger, as Jerri looks more hideous than ever. I did not need to see her Howard Hughes-esque toenails.

Wah-Wah (May 12) Because Withnail & I is the funniest movie ever made (rent it now!), I’m willing to cut Richard E. Grant a tremendous amount of slack, and that encompasses the trailer for this autobiographical movie that looks like a Merchant/Ivory film on a bender. Set in Swaziland in 1969, it features a group of classy British thespians (Emily Watson, Miranda Richardson, Julie Walters, Gabriel Byrne) drinking, cheating, and behaving in grandiosely awful ways, forever scarring the psyche of the poor lad who grows up to be Grant. Think of it as White Mischief meets About a Boy (Nicholas Hoult, the traumatized kid from that movie, plays the boy in this one.) If Grant himself were playing one of the drunken, debauched adults, I’d be buying my ticket right now, but as it stands, I’ll just have to hope that his tart sensibility is enough.