RogerBW's Blog

September 2018 Trailers 01 October 2018

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

At Eternity's Gate: it's fine to be an asshole as long as you are a Great Artist. But I do like the visuals here.

Instant Family: there's the vague edge of something real sliding in through the generic fambly comedy. Weird. There just barely might be something here, which is certainly not what I expect from the premise.

Kursk: I love a good naval story. But the emphasis is on story: I already know how this one came out.

Wildlife: it's very stylised, and seems heavy-handed; somehow it just doesn't grab me, from first to last.

The Beach Bum (Teaser): the role McConaughy was born to play, once he accepted his natural skeeziness; but why should I care?

Dust 2 Glory: documentary or fictionalisation? Starts to look like the former. Might be quite interesting it if really does follow through on the people.

Viper Club: these helpful guys are criminals, right? It seems like such an obvious scam to run, and I can see exactly how I'd go about setting it up. If I were that sort of person. Instead I'll probably use it in a game.

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs: all these modern westerns look the same. Though this one has rather more blatant tinting than most. Good last line.

Captive State (Teaser): yeah yeah, generic police state stuff. Twist at the end is nothing new.

Mary Poppins Returns: poor, poor, P. L. Travers. At least she's safely dead and can't see this. Yes, indeed, nothing is gone forever; no story can ever be allowed to end.

Captain Marvel: people who say "superheroes, yay" will like this. People like me who say "superheroes, meh" have nothing to bring us in.

Stan & Ollie: if you like L&H, this is them got old and tired; if you don't, you probably aren't interested anyway.

The Marine 6 - Close Quarters: not, apparently, a video game, but seems a lot like one.

Tyrel: an effective growing menace from horrible people. But is that enough? Too confused for me to get much idea of what's going on.

Galveston: stay alert. Trust no-one (especially blondes). Keep your pistol handy.

If Beale Street Could Talk: does a slightly better job than the teaser of giving the idea of a story. It's not one that grabs me, but there's nothing wrong with that.

55 Steps: yeah, heroic crusading lawyer, Helena Bonham Carter, but it feels awfully cliché, taking the most superficial approach possible to what be quite interesting subject matter.

Creed II: so far away from things that interest me that I don't think I can get any idea of whether this film's target audience will enjoy it.

X-Men - Dark Phoenix: this series looks rather premature now, but I guess they're still making the things. What even I (a confirmed non-superhero fan) can see that the MCU films have got right is: not too long an interval between bouts of superpowered beat-em-up action, which is what the people came for, and what intervals you do have should keep up the frenetic pace. This doesn't appear to offer that.


  1. Posted by Chris at 12:40pm on 01 October 2018

    I wonder what if anything is the point of companies putting their trailers somewhere that requires you to sign on to Google in order to see them? Won't that just mean they lose any interest or goodwill from anyone who has not already sold themselves to that company? I can see that YouTube aka Google want to protect the kiddies from nasty stuff, but they do such a bad job of that in every other respect that it seems like hypocrisy to bother about it in the single instance of film trailers

    If I had contemplated seeing The Beach Bum, I have just uncontemplated it, for instance. Also Dust to Glory.

  2. Posted by RogerBW at 12:53pm on 01 October 2018

    For what it's worth, I saw all those trailers without signing in to anything; I use youtube-dl to fetch local copies rather than watching them in the browser, which may make a difference.

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