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.)

Teen Titans Go! To the Movies: appears to be pretty strictly for the fans.

A Simple Favor (Teaser): does the teaser thing fairly well: I'm interested in seeing more.

Robin Hood (Teaser): I suppose it was inevitable that he'd get the Legolas-style superhero treatment. Meh.

The Yellow Birds: looks like another War Is Horrible, and claerly there are people who haven't got the mesage yet, but doesn't hold much appeal for me.

The Catcher Was a Spy: a drearily literal reading of the title. Yeah, not the film's fault I guess.

Loving Pablo: not a fascinating subject, but it looks like a pair of solid performances from the leads.

Searching: the "everything done by screenshot" isn't particularly innovative any more. What's left?

The Predator (Teaser): no, it's not a remake of the classic. It's a demolition of it.

BlacKkKlansman: Lee might just pull it off. Might.

Bohemian Rhapsody (Teaser): I hate the montage they've done with the music, but the film might be quite fun even so.

Mile 22: oh, it's the Rough Men fallacy again. Yay. I find it rather hard to watch these days, now that there are so many people who seem to have used action films like this as the basis for their political philosophy.

Destination Wedding: looks like very generic rom-com, but with leads who are older then the leads in these things are usually allowed to be. And not as utterly crass as these things usually are. Is this what Stockholm Syndrome feels like?

Mission Impossible: Fallout: you know, the point of the Mission: Impossible TV series was that it wasn't about beating people up and shooting them. Anyone can do that. This is just generic Rough Men action with comic-book levels of human resilience.

A.X.L.: ah, a boy and his robodog. With bonus dirt-bike stunts.

Bleeding Steel: Jackie Chan vs the Stone Cold Combat Chick, fair enough, but this really looks like garbage, suffering from generational loss from all the copies of copies that come between it and any original ideas.

Leave No Trace: no, school is about learning to knuckle under. Looks like a potentially excellent character piece, though

Shock and Awe: er, yeah, but I was there. It wasn't the Brave Newspapers trying to Get The Truth Out, it was everybody knowing the truth and government not caring. And the New York Times, among many others, being happily complicit in the lie. (But that's not why people stopped trusting journalists. No, no, it's the Internet and those darn millennials.)

The Happytime Murders: so basically it's Meet the Feebles meets Zootopia, only without the originality of either. Poor Melissa McCarthy.

City of Lies: based on a true story, perhaps, but also on all too many conspiracy films. Gratuitous stripper!

Mowgli: 'Serkis has stated that the film would be "darker" and more "serious" in tone than from [sic] previous Jungle Book adaptations'. Because that's what we need, dark remakes of everything.

Damsel: comedy western, oh dear. Who would call this "refreshingly original"? Someone who'd never seen a comedy western before, maybe.

Down A Dark Hall: no, it's not an adaptation of Every Heart a Doorway (though I imagine one will be coming); it's generic creepy-school. As I write this I'm part-way through The Third Eye, which is over 80 years old, and manages to be distinctly more interesting than this mess of jump-scares.

Finding Your Feet: Joanna Lumley is always a bright spot, but oh dear, Crumbly Romance is a genre now.

Papillon: because the 1973 film (with Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman) doesn't have enough pretty bankable actors in it. But I'd rather watch them than Charlie Hunnam (can't act at all) and Rami Malek (only one performance style he can do well, and this isn't it).

Hotel Artemis (Red Band): yes, it's crap, but it looks like enjoyable crap, which far too many films forget to be. And Jodie Foster is clearly having fun.

The Sisters Brothers: so whom do we care about here? Nobody.

Upgrade: yeah, well, "it's got gunfire in it" is most of the content of this. The earlier trailer was rather better.

Christopher Robin: yeah, this is even worse than the teaser made it look. With bucketloads of schmaltz. You know what schmaltz is? Rendered chicken fat.

Ocean's 8 (bonus): starts to make it look too heavy on the comedy for my taste. Might still work.

Under The Tree: disguises itself as wacky neighbour comedy, but looks as if it'll be more like wacky neighbour drama/tragedy. I'm mildly tempted.