Deleted Scenes 05.08.08: Trailer Park Roundup #4
Posted by Robert Sullivan on 05.08.2008
A virtual calvacade of trailers that will make you feel amusement, bemusement, and/or righteous anger.
Hey everybody. I'm Rob, and welcome back to another edition of Deleted Scenes. I have to mention the array of very interesting E-Mails I received the past couple weeks from people who dug the Slow Starters concept, suggesting some of their own, etc. Nice to know that there are those who do read these various manifestos. Perhaps that'll be a vaguely recurring segment. I would just have a mailbag of the best ones, but I felt like going over some trailers instead, as I haven't done so in a while. Let's get into it.
Maybe it's just me, but lately it seems that I've been seeing this trailer prior to every film I've seen. An interesting development from that has been this - total polarization of the audience's response, seemingly unconnected to much of anything else.
By that I mean either one hundred percent of the audience is laughing hysterically by the time Liv Tyler's character lights up a smoke and a ghostly masked figure suddenly comes into the frame...or the entire audience is whispering "What the fuck is that?" worriedly to their partners and making "ohshitohshitohshit" noises for the rest of the clip's duration.
How does that bode for possible box office performance? No idea, especially considering it's running smack into Sex and the City for counterprogramming purposes...but I do know that I fall mostly into the latter category instead of the former. Looks like the Funny Games I was expecting when I went to go see Funny Games, so I'll have to check it out.
"You are my girl" line excepted as good stuff, though, that shit is just painful. Eww.
Meet Bill
Stars: Aaron Eckhart, Jessica Alba, Elizabeth Banks
Yeah, April 4th has already passed, but it's an indie. So that pretty much still counts as "coming soon to a theater near you," even though I have seen the DVD announcement over at DVDActive and it says Meet Bill will be released sometime in July, I believe.
Hey, I did preview The Poughkeepsie Tapes in a past Trailer Park Roundup, and it looks like that thing's going to be sitting on a studio's shelf for the next couple years, so. This kind of thing is not unusual.
Anyway, what of the trailer? Well, you all know my feelings about Aaron Eckhart, a vastly underutilized talent that I hope gets a whole new level of attention due to his role in The Dark Knight. Will this help?
Hard to say, as it's pretty uncertain if this movie's already left theaters. That's never a good sign.
Meet Bill seems like another Hollywood attempt to show a "real guy" in crisis...and then show him dealing with the horrendous problem of choosing between Jessica Alba and Elizabeth Banks. That's something I deal with every day. The incredibly phony gut Eckhart's sporting in this doesn't raise the confidence levels, but it's a pretty amusing trailer on the whole.
The next in the Apatow oeuvre, and one I really hope doesn't go the sellout route by the end. Please, no hugging and no life lessons when it comes to the story of two stoners being chased by a hitman who leaves the fucking curtains open when shooting somebody.
That slightly bitter aside...aside, Pineapple Express seems like the man's golden touch hasn't taken leave of him yet. Very funny stuff here, including a random Fruit Roll-Ups mention and why imitating action movies in real life doesn't work.
However, a bit of a trouble spot here. Remember how I said the trailer for The Strangers has had reactions at either end of the spectrum? Same stuff with this one. As I've found audiences either go into hysterics at "Because I'm in the dumpster already" or they don't find anything remotely amusing.
You know, if there could possibly be a theme to an assortment of trailers, I guess "polarization - positive or negative" could be this week's. Discuss.
