RogerBW's Blog

Some trailers I've seen recently, and my thoughts on them. (Links are to youtube. Opinions are thoroughly personal. I still hate everything.)

Beckett: ghost story or racism story? Or maybe, if we're lucky, both? No, looks more like an everyone-against-the-hero conspiracy.

The Addams Family 2: the first of these animated things vanished from my ken almost at once, but it made $200 million off a $30 million budget, so I suppose this was inevitable. Speaking for myself, since there's both a jolly good TV series and a jolly good live-action film series, I see no need to add this to my experience.

Encanto (Teaser): it might even work, but it's so obviously focus-group-first that it feels as though there's no room for individual creativity in the House of the Mouse.

Queenpins: well, at least I can tell that it's meant to be a comedy, even if the comedy itself doesn't work for me.

No Man of God: this relies, I think, on the viewer being the sort of person who finds serial killers individually fascinating, as people rather than as sets of conformances to depressingly standard patterns.

Sweet Girl: I guess playing Aquaman wasn't the multi-film meal ticket that more popular superheroes have been. This looks as if it has a bit of cleverness and a lot of pointless violence.

Chance the Rapper's Magnificent Coloring World: it's a concert film. And the trailer has so much talking over the music that one can't tell anything more about it.

Turning Red (Teaser): gee, do you think maybe that could be a metaphor for something?

Blue Bayou: bad things gonna happen, and the foreshadowing is heavy. Thing is, is anyone going to listen who wasn't already listening? Maybe.

Cryptozoo: weird art style. Somebody did this deliberately? Expensive cast so presumably they weren't trying to cheap out on the look…

After We Fell: this is volume 3 of at least 5. Utterly safe, utterly predictable.

The East: it's been done before, but usually in Vietnam. Maybe interesting, maybe not.

Jackass Forever: will appeal to people who like this sort of thing. I actually don't want to watch people getting hurt, in reality or otherwise.

Malignant: standard jump scare stuff from the go-to director for standard jump scare stuff.

The Last Duel: if you make it very clear what happened and therefore who's telling the truth, doesn't that take half the tension out of it, leaving only the tension of who's going to win?

Vacation Friends: punching down. Of course whitey can force his way into a black folks' thing if he wants to; what are they going to do, call the cops?

Dune: I know lots of people who are really excited about this. I really don't get it. Take all the crap out of the book… and why wouldn't you just tell a new story? This looks as if someone fed the book through the Star Wars Film o Matic.

Ghostbusters - Afterlife: so the distinctive thing about the original film – and the remake – was that they spotted a problem and decided to invent the tools with which to do something about it. Well, we can't have that! Let's just hand it to them on a plate!

Lamb: sheep are basically evil. I start knowing this.

The Card Counter: why do I care? The actual motivations are barely touched on here.

Flag Day: again, why do I care? Criminal was a nice daddy on the rare occasions he bothered to show up, woo hoo.

King Richard: take a real story and reduce it to sports underdog cliché to make it more digestible to a mass audience. So, yay?

West Side Story: yeah, they remade it. Same music, younger actors who look (like most young actors) as if the hardest decision they've ever had to make is which colour jacket to wear today. Presumably Spielberg wanted to direct this?

Vivo: might have an interesting core, but like Encanto it's been put through the Disneytron (here's where we pipe in ground-up focus groups) until there's very little left. But hypersaturated colours!

House of Gucci: yeah, but does it have anything more than horrible people being horrible to each other? I know, unreasonable demands.