RogerBW's Blog

November 2017 Trailers 16 November 2017

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

In The Fade: makes a nice change, that it's dead dad and son motivating mum rather than dead mum and daughter motivating dad. And this looks really quite promising.

Winchester - The House That Ghosts Built (Teaser): fascinating setting, plot to get the owner declared batty… isn't that enough without having jump-scare ghost hijinks too?

24 Hours to Live: same old same old same old. Even Crank looked more fun than this, and that was just manly grunting and occasional gunfire.

Den of Thieves: and talking of manly grunting and occasional gunfire, here we go round the cops and robbers path for the 5,000th time.

Permanent: horrible people are funny, ho ho.

I, Tonya: how do you blow up a few seconds of incident into 90+ minutes of film? Stretch it out to the aftermath, and lose the people who remember the original media circus, or stretch it to the lead-in and worry that everyone knows how it ends? Or both?

Age of Kill: oh, one of those. Captive woman as motivation, second woman as decoration, just like Commando, but Commando was more than thirty years ago. And had a more challenging plot.

Serpent: ah, the obvious way to fix a troubled marriage is to go somewhere horribly dangerous and isolated. And then make it all go wrong. (Don't phones have, you know, screen locks?)

The Shadow Man: not forgetting the vital monster power of "hide in itty bitty place until heroine has taken her clothes off". Meh, jump-scares.

Mayhem: seems like an even more blatant excuse for violence porn than The Belko Experiment. If it works, great, but it needs more than a trailer will show.

Fifty Shades Freed: meh. Everything is perfect except it isn't… except it is.

On Wings of Eagles: we have met plenty of variants of this kind of story before. Will this one work? Will it say anything that the others haven't? That's what I look for, and it's a thing that trailers rarely tell me.

Slamma Jamma: basketball as redemption, standard sports movie template, it would appear.

Sherlock Gnomes: seems like heavily genericised wainscot fantasy. You could plug in funny animals or Minions and barely have to change the script.

Stratton: oh no, he's a soldier who doesn't play by the rules. Not seen that one before. Generic bad guy is only slightly more generic than generic good guy.

The Post: newspapers! Weren't they great! Until they sold themselves to the advertisers and nobody cared any more.

Game Night (Teaser): oh, right, "you're not going to know what's real and what's fake", that's new. Really, it's new. Why don't you believe us? Because we stole our best joke from an episode of Firefly?

Hostiles: post-traumatic Civil War western. Christian Bale hides behind the whiskers.

Comments on this post are now closed. If you have particular grounds for adding a late comment, comment on a more recent post quoting the URL of this one.

Search
Archive
Tags 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s 2010s 3d printing action advent of code aeronautics aikakirja anecdote animation anime army astronomy audio audio tech base commerce battletech beer boardgaming book of the week bookmonth chain of command children chris chronicle church of no redeeming virtues cold war comedy computing contemporary cornish smuggler cosmic encounter coup covid-19 crime crystal cthulhu eternal cycling dead of winter doctor who documentary drama driving drone ecchi economics en garde espionage essen 2015 essen 2016 essen 2017 essen 2018 essen 2019 essen 2022 essen 2023 essen 2024 existential risk falklands war fandom fanfic fantasy feminism film firefly first world war flash point flight simulation food garmin drive gazebo genesys geocaching geodata gin gkp gurps gurps 101 gus harpoon historical history horror hugo 2014 hugo 2015 hugo 2016 hugo 2017 hugo 2018 hugo 2019 hugo 2020 hugo 2021 hugo 2022 hugo 2023 hugo 2024 hugo-nebula reread in brief avoid instrumented life javascript julian simpson julie enfield kickstarter kotlin learn to play leaving earth linux liquor lovecraftiana lua mecha men with beards mpd museum music mystery naval noir non-fiction one for the brow opera parody paul temple perl perl weekly challenge photography podcast politics postscript powers prediction privacy project woolsack pyracantha python quantum rail raku ranting raspberry pi reading reading boardgames social real life restaurant reviews romance rpg a day rpgs ruby rust scala science fiction scythe second world war security shipwreck simutrans smartphone south atlantic war squaddies stationery steampunk stuarts suburbia superheroes suspense television the resistance the weekly challenge thirsty meeples thriller tin soldier torg toys trailers travel type 26 type 31 type 45 vietnam war war wargaming weather wives and sweethearts writing about writing x-wing young adult
Special All book reviews, All film reviews
Produced by aikakirja v0.1