Hollywood Unoriginality Ratio: Up

June 1st, 2009

I feel like I’ve put this HUR thing off for far too long! Luckily, I kept copious iPhone notes of the last few movies I went to see in terms of their trailers, so I should be able to piece a few together. I’ll be backdating these to the dates I saw the movies, so these posts will fall behind more recent Apple Cow-related fare, but whatEVS!

The movie was Up! I’m up with Up. Up was friggin’ awesome, y’see. Like with WALL•E, this did not surprise me in the slightest since it’s a Pixar flick. This particular movie was notable for a jarringly sad introductory sequence. Sometimes I think such moments are missing in family films these days, so it was nice to see Pixar continuing to take its all-ages audience seriously for the sake of good storytelling.

T-t-trailers!

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–The Princess and the Frog
ADAPTATION it may be, but I’m still excited! I haven’t honestly seen all that much footage yet, since this trailer uses up almost a third of its runtime for introspective retrospectives on past Disney successes (ooh, going for success by association! Clever girl), but I’m mostly excited for the idea of a new Disney musical with traditional-style animation. It very well may bomb, but I’m just glad to see Disney supporting old-school animation again.

–G-Force
I get the feeling they don’t even know enough funny things about guinea pigs. I don’t want to confess that this is ORIGINAL.

–Imagine That
This seems awfully familiar for an ORIGINAL story. I should probably be giving these kid movie trailers a break, but come on! Does anyone NOT know how this movie ends? Man, it would really be something to have a movie like this end with the father continuing to be estranged from his quirky-and-sometimes-magical child. One can dream…

–Shorts
I really hope Robert Rodriguez is making mountains of dough from these awful kid movies he keeps churning out. I die a little inside every time a trailer starts by saying “From the director of Spy Kids” and not “From the director of El Mariachi”. At least he’s avoiding the all-too-common trap of adaptations from books with ORIGINAL scripts.

–Planet 51
One might think this ORIGINAL story about a role reversal between humans and aliens might appeal to a sci-fi fan like myself. Well… wrong? After the initial joke has set in, there can’t possibly be anything else to a film like this. So the aliens (instead of humans) are frightened of the human (instead of alien), and… 90 minutes?

–Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs
SEQUEL (and a frequent occurrence as trailers go)

TOTAL: 33.33% (2/6)

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As of a June 1st screening of Up, Hollywood’s kid movie industry scored an impressive 33.33% unoriginality index for trailers! As usual, of course, the stories themselves look plenty unoriginal in their own rights.

Funny thing about letting a backlog pile up: I know what’s coming next! Stay tuned for the HUR of Harry Potter and the Sequel of Adaptationing!

[discuss]