trailers with Captain America: The Winter Soldier

[kate_nepveu]

I've got the kids' Cold of Doom, surprise surprise, and took an unplanned snooze getting His Pipliness down for his nap, so something easy to get my brain working again. Here are the trailers I had with Captain America: The Winter Soldier (more thoughts on which coming, unsurprisingly).

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: no. Absolutely not. (Grimdark? The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles?!)

Lucy: if it weren't "let me make a damn Black Widow movie, already," I would be a titch concerned about how much like The Matrix it looks like, but hey: let Scarlett Johansson make a damn Black Widow movie, already.

Blended: As if Adam Sandler and romcom weren't bad enough, they had to go set it in Africa. Run away! Run away!

The Amazing Spider-Man 2: I still have no interest in this.

X-Men: Days of Future Past: I'd like to be convinced, but (1) I am allergic to time-travel stories and (2) even if Brian Singer is back, I'm not sure how much goodwill I have left for this franchise. The trailer is notable for having some really impressive eyefucking and at least three perfect single tears, which . . . I dunno, could be good or bad depending on my mood, I guess.

Maleficent: I love her design, and I have zero idea what kind of story is coming out of it.

Guardians of the Galaxy: I don't want to like this movie, and nothing about the trailer is making me feel conflicted about this stance. (The audience was pretty cold toward it.)

Comments

[lnhammer]

The Maleficent trailer makes me think the filmmakers took the wrong takeaways from the recent Narnia movies.

I can't tell if the story is aiming for a moralistic revision or a feminist revision, and fear the result will be a complete muddle made upon the excuse of a love affair with Angelina's cheek bones. (I might hope for at least a hegemonic critique, but there's no sign of that either.)

---L.

[kate_nepveu]

Yeah, I am just stumped what they're going for. And trailers aren't everything, but . . .

[rilina]

I didn't see the TMNT trailer, but aside from that, had al the same ones you did. The audience was pretty "meh" toward Guardians of the Galaxy at my showing as well.

[kate_nepveu]

And these audiences ought to be the prime targets for that movie!

[rilina]

There frankly wasn't a huge amount of excitement for Amazing Spider-man 2 or X-Men: Days of Future Past either.

[kate_nepveu]

I'm less sure about those, because I wasn't listening for it. (It was a pretty lively audience; the end of the first fight got cheers, as did various other points along the way.)

[kjn]

Lucy is made by Luc Besson, so it's more like that the Matrix movies borrowed a lot of their aesthetic from him in the first place. If Besson can manage to make a superhero-equivalent of Nikita (released in the US as La Femme Nikita, he's going to blow everything that the other studios makes this year out of the water.

[kate_nepveu]

Yes yes, but whether or not it's fair, that doesn't change that to a USian audience it may look or feel derivative, to its potential detriment. Hey, I WANT it to do well and be good, I'm just saying.

[kjn]

On the other hand, the Matrix are, what, 10 years or more old now? And using the digital number overlay has pretty much entered into the common set of visual movie tropes now, I think.

I wouldn't worry that much about it. The fact that it's French-produced is probably a much bigger strike against it.

[canyonwalker.livejournal.com]

Merhawk and I saw Cap this weekend. Our trailers weren't the same as yours but where they overlap my sentiments are similar to yours.

TMNT: WTF? Are Hollywood types truly so devoid of creative energy and contextual awareness that they're going to reheat, with no visible irony, a second rate comic from the 1980s that was a parody of second rate comics in the 1980s? (Note: This is a rhetorical question. The answer is unambiguously "Yes".)

Blended: The industry refers to this as an "Adam Sandler vehicle". Any movie with the word "vehicle" in its three word synopsis is a turd. Obvious exception: the Cars franchise.

Maleficent: The trailer, while suspenseful and visually beautiful, told me almost nothing about what this film will actually be about. I can imagine a nuanced coming-of-age morality. Much the same as I could always imagine Ed McMahon bringing me a check for ONE MILLION DOLLARS.

Guardians of the Galaxy: I actually said this comment out loud in the movie theater: "This looks like a fine advertisement for why we need to keep building prisons."

[kate_nepveu]

Sorry to be humorless, but I do too much prison work to agree with the form of your last sentiment, though I definitely agree with the spirit behind it.

[canyonwalker.livejournal.com]

Actually, I too am concerned about 1) the conditions in which prisoners are kept, 2) the corrupting effect of commercially managed prisons, 3) high mandatory minimum sentences for crimes that shouldn't (always) be punished so severely, 4) the shortage of effective rehabilitation programs that leave excons with few gainful prospects after release, and of course 5) everpresent concerns about the wrongfully convicted.

Despite all that, of course, there really are people who are guilty of terrible acts and need to be confined. I find it hard to sympathize (in the context of a story) with people who people who are demonstrably destructive, murderous, and remorseless.