Movie Trailer Report: Bedtime Stories and Notorious

This will be the "family movie" of the Christmas season. Adam Sandler stars as a handyman whose bedtime stories for his niece and nephew magically come to life.

This is really all you need: crazy things happening and wild special effects. Even if there is no romantic angle or larger life lesson to be learned (and there probablyis ), there's nothing wrong with a movie that is just wall-to-wall fun.

This looks like the kind of movie people will watch more than once. The trailer goes a little too far in that it gives away the trick that the kids control the bedtime stories, not Sandler. I would have rather learned that during the movie.

The HAUNTING of MOLLY HARTLEY

I liked this trailer a lot more than some of the other fright-fests I saw during the previews of Saw V ("Friday the 13^th"... again?) because it incorporated more real-life elements.

Molly (Haley Bennett) is traumatized by her mother's mysterious death. We see her try to start a new life at a private school. We even see her "sealed" records, so nobody at the new school knows about her past.

Things start off great, as she makes friends and meets a boy who looks a lot like Zac Efron (Chace Crawford). Then, a typical "mean girl" discovers her secret and calls her a "freak."

That's when the haunting begins, as Molly keeps seeing the ghost of her mom, as her promising new life falls apart. This looks like a good, tense thriller.

This movie gets bonus points for employing Jake Weber, who does a great job as the husband/dad on NBC's Medium. He plays Molly's dad.

THE UNINVITED

Like Molly, this is another good "scary" movie without monsters or rampaging serial killers. In this case, the monster is the modern-day evil stepmother, played by Elizabeth Banks.

Another high school girl, Anna, loses her mother and then spends time in a mental hospital. When she returns to her father's seaside home, she discovers that her dad has married another woman WAY too soon.

The stepmother tries to make nice, but everyone can tell something is wrong with her. Then a dream sequence reveals...the ghostly black-and-white stepchildren that she already murdered!

Are you running yet? I am ... straight to the box office!

NOTORIOUS

I really wanted to like this trailer. You hear a quote from rapper Biggie Smalls about where he wants to be in 10 years. He answers that he wants to make music and chill with his family.

Then the interviewer asks what he thinks will really happen, and Smalls responds that his luck is usually not that good.

It seems like the guy playing Biggie (Jamal Woolford) really looks like him, but unfortunately, the trailer doesn't convince me that Biggie had an epic life story like Ray Charles (Ray) or Johnny Cash (Walk the Line).

I shouldn't talk about epic life stories, though. I wrote my autobiography at age 35, and it was only 99 pages long!