RogerBW's Blog

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

Ralph Breaks the Internet - Wreck-It Ralph 2 (Teaser): much to my surprise, I rather liked the original. But this teaser doesn't tell me anything interesting, such as whether this one will rise in any way above the generic disposable kidvid that is most of Disney's output. Same director, which is a good start.

Book Club: tee hee, women over forty aren't supposed to have sex. Or use the Internet.

Higher Power: reality-show hijinks turn into superpowers. With a bunch of people I've never heard of. If there's anything good here, the trailer's going out of its way to hide it.

Mary Poppins Returns (Teaser): hurrah, the Travers estate didn't sue over the horrible misrepresentation that was Saving Mr Banks, so now we can get away with literary murder.

Christopher Robin (Teaser): ah, when you need an impressive building in London, use Senate House. And Disney has owned Pooh for so long that this other literary murder looks like originality.

The Swan Princess - A Royal Myztery: I guess this is part of an ongoing series, since the trailer makes no effort to introduce the characters. (And yeah, the last few seconds suggest this is number 8 in a series.)

RBG: good subject fror a biopic, but the emphasis on physicality is odd.

The Seagull: great cast and looks good, but do we really need a new adaptation of a play from 1895, when film can be so much less straightforward and obvious?

Tully: looks very heavy-handed, but it might work with this writer and these actors.

The Grinch: someone was asking for this? Really?

The House of Tomorrow: interesting start, but looks like an awfully generic coming-of-age music story.

Sorry to Bother You: comic butt does a horrible job and turns out to be good at it. Yeah, but… but… why do I care? Comedic value?

Adrift: starts generically enough, starts to look more interesting as it goes on. And I've been hoping Shailene Woodley would get a more worthwhile part after the was the best thing in the Divergent trailers.

Fantastic Beasts - The Crimes of Grindelwald: looks like terrible derivative CGI-filled rubbish, but people who like this sort of thing will presumably like this.

LifeItself: way to go not telling me anything about the film. What are you afraid of?

Can You Ever Forgive Me: boring literary fraud, by Melissa McCarthy carefully made up to look like a frump in a world of beautiful people. Meh.

Sicario 2 - Day of the Soldado: looks a lot more shooty than the first one, though at least as dirty, which I guess is good.

Tag: standard problem, assumes that stupid white men will immediately have my sympathy and therefore doesn't bother to explain why I should like them.

Action Point: and, er, same again really. Though I suppose the point is to show off the stunts.

The Spy Who Dumped Me: actually that just might work. Bond parody's been done, sure, but if they actually get to learn to be competent too, then it might come together.

The Titan: yeah, what if Titan could become our home? We'd only have to shift eight billion people. Which might actually be doable, if we could get them to stop breeding for a bit while we rounded them up. And couldn't there be a more interesting story to tell than "hugely unethical experiment goes out of control"?

Under the Silver Lake: young lad gets laid, but at least there's something more to it than that. Ah, the paranoid mindset.

The Untitled Deadpool Sequel: no doubt will appeal hugely to people other than me.

SUPERFLY: oh, but we can't be degrading women, we're black.

The House with a Clock in its Walls: Looks remarkably interesting for children's fantasy on screen; seems that this is based on a book from the 1970s (in the slump in adult fantasy between Tolkien and all his imitators). Edward Gorey illustrations probably informed the visual approach. And it's a decent cast. But Jack Black does the same schtick he always does, which doesn't leave me hopeful.

The Darkest Minds: so basically The Chrysalids plus teenage superpowed angst? Feels very much like shaking up the same old box of bits and putting them in a slightly new configuration.

Terminal: the teaser looked quite fun, but from this it looks very much as though Robbie got this part off the back of Suicide Squad and is playing even more into stereotyped male fears of women. Simon Pegg might save it.