I saw "The World's End" at the end of last week and posted the review quite recently, but one thing I neglected to mention was the trailers before the movie. Okay so there's no obligation to discuss trailers. And it's NOT like these were GOOD trailers that made me EXCITED for the movies they were advertising. Quite the opposite. But it was interesting that before a highly anticipated and excellent British comedy, the adverts beforehand should decide to showcase how nightmarishly awful American comedies can get at the moment.
So here, let's make things clear. The trailers below are all for HORRIBLE movies. If you want to see a list of movies that are actually good my movie guide is here. What I'm sharing below is the showcase of horrors that greeted me prior to the main feature last time I was at the cinema. It's an increasingly horrific display of films promoting themselves as "comedies". NONE of the trailers linked to below are for movies that I would actually recommend. They look to me like bad bad BAD movies. Okay?
We started off relatively tolerable with the trailer for "The Heat". Melissa McCarthy (from "Bridesmaids", which, after some deliberation, I decided not to watch) teams up with Sandra Bullock in what looks relatively inoffensive but, the way it's advertised at least, rather lame as a comedy. (Could easily be another "21 Jump Street" situation of course. The trailer for that was pretty damn unfunny, but the final movie was remarkably good.)
(Click here if you want to see the trailer.)At this point I was thinking "they'll probably show the 'Elysium' trailer again in a moment". No such luck. The next film to be advertised was kind of tragic really, since it includes the excellent Will Poulter (though with any luck it'll get him noticed for something much better). You see I first saw Will Poulter in "Son of Rambow" starring alongside another awesome child actor, Bill Milner. Milner has since been in a number of films including "X Men: First Class" (where he played the young Magneto), "Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll" (where he played Ian Drury's neglected son), "Is Anybody There?" (where he starred alongside Michael Caine) and most recently in Joe Ahearne's mini-series adaptation of "The Secret Of Crickley Hall". Meanwhile, Will Poulter's career has been seemingly rather less active (perhaps he's been doing stage work). There's a gap in his filmography after playing Eustace in "Voyage of the Dawn Treader" (a film I never actually saw). However, I was recently very pleased to see him appear in "Wild Bill" and prove that he's still got what it takes to really carry a film.
The progression of Will Poulter's film career: Fantastic... still fantastic... wtf is he doing in that rubbish?
On the one hand, apparently his accent is acceptable enough to get him a lead role in an American movie as an American (though the accent sounds a little weird to me). Hopefully that means he'll get more Hollywood roles in the future. On the other hand, this appears to be a ridiculously cheesy comedy starring Jennifer Aniston (is she really still making movies?) and absolutely nobody else recognisable. The film is called "We're The Millers" and the trailer looked about as promising as that title would suggest. Hopefully Will Poulter is able to use this as a stepping stone. Just you wait, he'll be playing the next major Marvel superhero before you know it. ;)
(Click here if you want to see the trailer.)Next up was a trailer which is becoming depressingly familiar. (Seriously I thought this film had already been and gone?) It was the trailer for "Pain And Gain". An incoherent trailer showcasing ultra-violent slapstick, people acting as idiots but without doing anything funny, shots of faceless women's undulating body parts with no context and pretty much nothing that even looked potentially funny. The nearest thing to comedy is just one line from Mark Wahlberg taunting a young child on a basketball court that he's going to be his new stepdad. That one small part of the trailer could potentially be funny in a different context, but after this trailer i've got little hope that it actually IS funny in the movie.
Rebel Wilson (another "Bridesmaids" actress) looked pretty nice in the trailer and sadly I think the scenes of her being sexy are being played as fatphobic humour. (I've heard that Rebel Wilson is pretty good in the movie "Pitch Perfect" which I've mainly steered away from because it's a musical. But with her character in that movie being named "Fat Amy" I suspect it's probably fatphobic humour there too. *sighs*) From the trailer, "Pain And Gain" looks like "Transformers" (another Michael Bay movie) if you remove the fighting robots and explosions and just leave the crass and crude humour and the gross misogyny. Yay! :S
(Click here if you want to see the trailer.)Just when I was thinking that the trailers couldn't get any worse, along comes the trailer for "Grown Ups 2", the latest Adam Sandler comedy. The trailer starts as it means to go on with Adam Sandler and Salma Hayek being weed on by a deer. (What the hell?) There was admittedly one almost funny joke (which I presume was slotted in there by Chris Rock, who unaccountably appears in the cast too), where Chris Rock and another character show that their special handshake is just a normal handshake while saying "How do you do?" I somewhat appreciated that joke, even if I wasn't exactly laughing. The rest of the trailer, however, was non-stop gross-out humour. Did you know that this movie out-did "Pacific Rim" in the US box office? Raking in a colossal profit with a big opening weekend at the top of the box office chart? So weird.... I mean seriously, how many people even saw the first "Grown Ups" movie? I don't even remember noticing it being released!
(Click here if you want to see the trailer.)Y'know I don't normally resent watching bad trailers. I often quite enjoy the previews, even if it's for films that I'd never watch in a million years. But this was just taking the piss, y'know?