Trailer trash
Entry posted by Guest
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I seldom go to movies anymore, mainly because they're too expensive. For the price of admission and snacks, I could buy it on DVD instead.
While on vacation though, I managed to get out and see The Chronicles of Narnia, and I enjoyed it quite a bit. I hadn't read the book, but I've been told the movie follows it pretty faithfully. And although it may not be among my all-time-favorite movies, I'd certainly put it in the "very enjoyable diversion" category, which is a pretty good recommendation if you're looking for something to do. I can certainly see why kids would love it, because the whole premise revolves around four kids who get swept into a grand, fantasy adventure. Fortunately, I still have quite a bit of kid left in me, which is why I liked it, and also still like things such as videogames and animation.
Which brings me to the point of this post. Prior to Narnia, the theater ran the obligatory trailers. I don't recall all of them, but I do remember four.
First, was Curious George. This is a traditionally animated (and very good-looking) film, based on the children's books. The animation looks first-rate, although the story is what will make or break it. Basically, the man in the yellow hat goes to a jungle, finds a mischievous monkey, the monkey stows away and goes back to the city where he proceeds to cause mischief. Sort of like a mini-King Kong, or Tarzan in reverse. What will determine if it's a good film or not, will be how much personality they can bring to the characters, and if they can make such a simple plot stretch out to 90 minutes, without boring the audience. I hope they can, because I'd love to see a traditionally animated film do well at the box office. The film looks great visually, hopefully the story is as well-crafted.
The next one is Pixar's Cars. This one worries me. Pixar has a history of putting out these "teaser" trailers, which often don't have any actual footage from the movie in them, so it's really hard to make a fair assessment of it. The new trailer is far better than the first one (which looked more like an ad for a racing videogame than a movie), but so far, the movie just doesn't have any appeal to me at all. And as a kid, I loved cars. Racing games are still my favorite videogame genre. So if this is going to appeal to someone, it should be me. But there's no hint of who the main character(s) might be, or what the story might be about. Did they leave that out because they want to surprise us later? Or is it because they're not happy with the direction the film is going, and haven't worked all that out yet? Right now, there's nothing about this movie, other than Pixar's name, that interests me in the least. But Pixar has managed to turn mediocre trailers into great movies before (except A Bug's Life, which - except for the circus bugs - completely fell flat for me), so hopefully they can do it again.
Third was Ice Age 2. The trailer for this looks great, and is a lot of fun. The question is - can they maintain that for the entire film? I still have yet to see the first Ice Age movie, but I've heard good things about it. Maybe it's time to rent the DVD.
The fourth trailer though... where to begin? Hoodwinked looks awful. Actually, it looks worse than awful, but I'm at a loss for words to really describe how bad it looks. This is the type of film that I've been dreading. The "cheap, computer-animated cash-in" movie. This is nothing more than a Shrek knock-off, but without Shrek. Another "funny" take on a classic fairy tale, this time being "Little Red Riding Hood". The characters look terrible, as if they were modeled by a 12-year-old using an old PC with antiquated 3D software (sorry 12-year-olds - that isn't meant to insult you, I'm sure you could do a much better job). The animation is horrendous, and looks like it was rendered on a PlayStation in real-time. Not a PS2, either. A PS1. This is a low-budget film, and nobody that I know in the animation business had even heard of it before it just appeared in theaters. So where it was produced and by whom is anyone's guess. I can't imagine sitting through this mess, so I'll probably never know just how bad it is, but I refuse to waste my money supporting this kind of cheap movie trash.
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