There is a moment late in The Hangover 3 in which the franchise’s sort-of villain and sort-of sidekick Chow (Ken Jeong) jumps off a Caesars Palace balcony and paraglides across the city, yelling “I love cocaine!”

It’s indicative of director Todd Phillips’ approach that we don’t actually see anything go up Chow’s nostrils. The emphasis is on punchlines irrespective of setups, pay-offs for jokes that haven’t even been invoiced. You can see it in the aberrant, flaky face expressions of star Zach Galifianakis, as if he were a grown-up Haley Joel Osment from The Sixth Sense (1999), stoned instead of spooked.

The jokes that work — such as a freeway accident caused by a giraffe beheading and a heart attack after a tense emotional exchange — required investment in characters and situations.

Over zealous trailer editors reveal the best bits in movies well before you cough up your hard-earned to see them. But can a trailer really spoil the cinematic experience? I invented a way to find out.

What do Klingons, bikini babes, legendary film directors and Tom Cruise have in common? All feature in this fortnight’s The Parallax Podcast. Tune in to listen to myself, co-host Rich Haridy and cult film guru Zak Hepburn discuss a variety of cinema and DVD releases.

At first blush, provocateur Harmony Korine’s new film doesn’t have much in common with The Great Gatsby. Under the bonnet, and away from the bikinis, it may echo the themes of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s seminal work more powerfully than Luhrmann’s movie.

Derek Cianfrance’s follow-up to his 2010 head turner Blue Valentine has guns, shoot-outs and Ryan Gosling — but it’s also a daring and unconventional work. There was plenty to talk about.

There is a great shot in The Place Beyond the Pines that comes and goes in a heartbeat. Ray Liotta leans on the side of a car, peering through the driver’s window. He plays a cop — and given this is Liotta, not one of the by the book variety — who is intimidating the man behind the wheel in that distinctively Liottian way: a calm, seething glare that puts the frighteners on without so much as flexing a face muscle.

To establish the scene visually, the obvious inclination for a director would have been to show Liotta’s face in all its rumpled glory then return to the driver: a simple shot reverse shot. Instead Derek Cianfrance, whose previous film was 2010′s Blue Valentine, reveals a sliver of it, a quarter or less, Liotta obscured by the window of the vehicle and a bobbing frame more interested in the space around him. Virtually unseen, the actor’s presence is seismic — and key to the scene’s emotional impact.

There is a shot much later on of a different character trying on a pair of sunglasses. These glasses are of special significance. Cianfrance again sidesteps conventional framing, not showing us the character’s face. Our view is from behind and a bit to the side.

The iGeneration’s Star Trek crew are back on the USS enterprise, turning dials, gawking at screens, swiveling in chairs and squinting through a layer of lens flares in director J.J. Abrams’ second stab at the monolithic sci-fi franchise.

In his 2009 reboot, Abrams established himself as Hollywood’s go-to guy for sequences bathed with flashes of techie-looking light and colour. In Star Trek Into Darkness he does his best to ensure gratuitous use of lens flares will live long and prosper. Only the most ambitious film critics profess to interpret why he does this, other than to observe that the effect looks kind of cool.

Use of such arbitrary aesthetic would ordinarily provoke lashings of “style over substance” finger pointing, but it’s apparent from the get-go Abrams is better than that. Like his last trek, Into Darkness is a mighty piece of work: epic in size and stature but lovingly nuanced with small details, and tied together with fist-pumping oomph equally as appealing to devotees and non-Trekkies alike.

Twenty minutes into The Hunt, writer/director Thomas Vinterberg’s grim slow-burner about a man unfairly accused of a heinous crime, protagonist Lucas (Mads Mikkelsen) stalks and shoots a deer. A few scenes later the symbolism becomes obvious: he will be the creature caught in a scope, and the weapon used against him will be public opinion.

To accentuate a sense of dread and claustrophobia, Vinterberg bases his story in a small Danish community where Chinese whispers escalate into violence and confrontation. Lucas works at a kindergarten where he is loved by the kids and appreciated by colleagues until a young girl (Annika Wedderkopp) who knows no better suggests inappropriate conduct has taken place.

The film takes its time moving between key moments, but it’s clear early on this is a cautionary story about not leaping to conclusions, the importance of assumed innocence and the dangers of mob justice. Vinterberg stays on message, rolling out a predictable array of confrontations.

Marlon Wayans isn’t known for critically acclaimed work. But comedy is subjective and sometimes — as he says of the critical populace — “you guys have got a thumb up your ass.”

Could scenes from one of the biggest movie releases of the year and one of the most expensive literary adaptations of all time have been directed via Skype?

Cinetology understands blockbuster filmmaker Baz Luhrmann last year called the shots from the (cyber) director’s chair for his highly anticipated adaptation of The Great Gatsby some 16,000 kilometers from where the action was taking place.

Having blown his budget and his schedule, Luhrmann was bunkered down in an editing suite in New York late last year while secret final reshoots wrapped up in Sydney. He used Skype to monitor the set.

Hollywood loves a comeback story, and Shane Black was in need of one. Throughout the 80s and 90s the 51-year-old Iron Man 3 director lived a Hollywood screenwriter’s dream, delivering hit script after hit script and getting paid progressively more for each.

Riding on the success of the Lethal Weapon movies (1987-1992), The Monster Squad (1987), The Last Boy Scout (1991) and Last Action Hero (1993), Black was paid a whopping US$4 million to write 1996′s The Long Kiss Goodnight — one of the most expensive screenplays in history. When the movie tanked, so did his career.

Alcoholism and depression came with the paucity of work. It took Black almost a decade to get another gig, a snazzy neo-noir film called Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, which also marked his directorial debut. It took another eight years for Iron Man 3, a blockbuster Black signed on to after Jon Favreau departed the director’s chair. Black was thrown a lifeline by an old friend and colleague, star Robert Downey Jr.

Zach Braff has snubbed the Hollywood studio system and launched a remarkably successful Kickstarter initiative to finance his new film. In the resulting commotion and commentary, some important factors have been neglected.

Terrorists storm the White House. Aliens roam the surface of a ravaged earth. A comedian sleepwalks and Hugh Jackman sings. Listen to myself and Rich Haridy discuss Olympus Has Fallen, Oblivion, Sleepwalk With Me and more in this fornight’s The Parallax Podcast.

If control of the White House is ever lost to enemy forces the appropriate phrase is apparently “Olympus has fallen.” God forbid this actually happens, those words may now be misinterpreted as a reference to a Gerard Butler movie.

For the last decade America has been reluctant to blow itself up on screen, the perceived wisdom being that general audiences — heads still throbbing from a 9/11 hangover — don’t like having their sovereignty dowsed in digital kerosene and given the Roland Emmerich treatment.

As if to make up for lost time, director Antoine Fuqua (Training Day) serves up a mean dish of terrorism porn in Olympus Has Fallen aka Die Hard 6: Koreans Take the White House. Tagline: “This time John McClane really is on vacation.”

Gerard Butler works hard not to smile in a broad, humourless performance as former Presidential bodyguard Mike Banning, who saw the First Lady tumble off a snowy bridge and die on his watch.

A fresh batch of Paul Hogan related headlines reminds us that while the Crocodile Dundee star might have a large knife, he may also have a limited capacity for smart business decisions.

The official plot synopsis for Oblivion, a large, expansive, empty-looking science fiction movie featuring Tom Cruise as one of the last human beings on earth, describes the relationship between its protagonist and his love interest as “a connection that transcends logic.”

In layman’s terms this generally means “didn’t put a lot of thought into it.” It came as something of a surprise to discover director Joseph Kosinski’s follow-up to his eye-boggling Tron: Legacy (2010) is a big-thinking movie that touches on several knotty themes: constructed realities, God and the “creator”, nature versus science and the pernicious influence of drones, which are rendered like angry-looking versions of Pacman crammed into square slabs.

Set in a post-apocalyptic 2077, the earth has been decimated by a war against aliens. The hurlyburly is done, the battle lost and won (by us) — but the bastards smashed our moon and most habitable land fried like a leaf torched by a flame thrower, so mankind shuffled off to another planet.

One would be tempted to slap the “style over substance” label on Danny Boyle’s frenetic new thriller Trance — a whirl of flashing colours, whiplash edits and throbbing electronica — were it not for a restless screenplay hellbent on inventing and reinventing itself, as if the writers kept turfing pages as soon as they flew out of the printer.

The MacGuffin is a good old fashioned art heist from which auctioneer Simon (James McAvoy) walks away with a squillion dollar painting then, one whack to the head later, forgets where he put the damn thing. As if to make the incident more relatable to the general public, writers Joe Ahearne and John Hodge take him to hypnotist Elizabeth Lamb (Rosario Dawson) to ask whether she can help him find his keys.

“Keys” are code for “painting” but Simon and his criminal outfit (led by a smarmy Vincent Cassell) don’t trust the unsettlingly talented hypnotist until Lamb does what any opportunistic mind-controller would: decides to join them and starts calling the shots.

The floundering Simon is under pressure to remember but is scared he’s going to get popped after he plays his final card, thus incapable, Lamb reasons, of mentally retrieving this information. The goons must show their sensitive side, she says, going on to make one convulse and froth from the mouth out of fear of being buried alive, then spearheading an assortment of preposterous plot twists.