Which of these things is not like the others?

No, not what you're thinking. And by the way, how dare you?

He's not different because he's black. He's not different because he's British. He's not different because he wears glasses. He's not different because he has big hair. (Speaking as a fellow Big Hair, I sympathize.)

Richard Ayoade is different from these others because he's not famous.

Were there not clearly four main stars of this film, but maybe seven or eight guys who qualify, the poster would probably just advertise the existence of Ben Stiller, Vince Vaughn and Jonah Hill. (In that order, I guess, though you could argue that Hill is currently the most successful.) But since The Watch offers up a main foursome of funnymen, that guy from the IT Crowd with a hard-to-pronounce last name gets billed alongside the household names.

They have made sure that his name and body are both pushed all the way to the right. At least they've done that.

Of course, I don't endorse some kind of exclusionary club where only actors whose movies have grossed x number of dollars at the box office are welcome. I merely think it's interesting to note how the understandable need to follow a certain advertising structure that's true to the movie can cause an up-and-comer to be promoted from the minor leagues.

In some ways it gives off the impression that the studio is trying to "make Richard Ayoade happen." Casting him in this role alongside the other heavyweights is actually what's trying to make him happen, not the advertising. But it might make the casual viewer ask "Richard Coyote? Am I supposed to know who that is?"

I know who he is, of course. Not only was he in the IT Crowd -- a show I've seen bits of here and there, and should have seen more because I actually work in IT -- but he directed a film that was pretty well-liked last year called Submarine. (Not necessarily well-liked by me -- although it showed a lot of talent, I found it a bit too derivative of a film like Rushmore.) Stiller was a producer on Submarine, so Ayoade's appearance in this film is not too surprising. Ayoade also had a bit part in a movie I recently saw and really enjoyed called Bunny and the Bull, but this would certainly qualify as the least-known of his credits.

So the reason I was probably inspired to write this post at all is because we don't usually see a relative unknown thrust into such a position of poster prominence. There's only so much real estate on a movie poster, and it's usually reserved for people whose name is going to help sell the movie to prospective viewers.

If I were being very cynical, I'd say the studio didn't care so much about Richard Ayoade's name as his face. The casting of a token minority among a group of white dudes, primarily to sell tickets to minority demographics, has a long history in Hollywood, certainly before Ernie Hudson showed up as Winston Zeddmore, a.k.a. the fourth Ghostbuster. Although I say I'm being cynical in attributing these motivations, I'm actually in favor of this kind of thing in general. I mean, every time I watch a movie that features only white people, my political correctness alarms start going off all over the place and I feel a little icky.

So I guess I'm glad Fox didn't take the "this guy's not famous, let's leave him off the poster" approach. That decision might have ended up sticking out more than including him, especially once people had seen the movie and realized he shares an equal amount of screen time with the Big Three. (I'm guessing he does, anyway -- from the ads, it appears that these four are inseparable throughout.)

And I suspect we're going to be glad that someone's "making Ayoade happen." From what I've seen of him, he seems like a pretty appealing comic presence. In fact, he may soon start steadily shifting to the left in poster group shots featuring three or more people.

So for the record: It's pronounced "eye-oh-WA-dee," according to IMDB.

The Watch gets its balls back

You may remember a couple weeks ago I trashed the trailer I'd just seen for The Watch, formerly Neighborhood Watch, which was an ill-conceived and disjointed pastiche of 20-second scenes from the movie that did whatever they could to deemphasize the words "neighborhood watch."

The thinking was, after Trayvon Martin was killed by an overzealous neighborhood watchman, audiences wouldn't come to see the movie.

It makes sense from a public relations standpoint, and secondarily, serves as some sort of tribute to Martin, or at least an acknowledgment that his death is not something to be made light of.

But in deemphasizing any reference to the original film's title, and then including these otherwise disconnected scenes in which it's so obvious the characters are talking themselves into circles, the studio neutered all the funny out of that trailer. Which is a shame, because that cast (and that director, Akiva Schaffer) are capable of great amounts of funny under the right circumstances.

Apparently, those circumstances came along a few weeks later.

The new trailer I saw last night before Prometheus (a film I won't delve into right now) starts with these words, narrated by Ben Stiller:

"There is an alien invasion happening. That's why I founded the neighborhood watch."

Own it, guys. Own it.

Oh, and the trailer that follows is more the conventional kind, made up of briefer snippets of action and dialogue, and it actually made me laugh a couple times.

It's a pretty shrewd change of course, when you come right down to it. It doesn't allow you a moment to wonder if the movie treads too closely to the story of a self-proclaimed security guard who felt threatened enough by a black teenager in a hoodie to shoot him. No, this story is about aliens, and therefore, is utterly divorced from reality.

It's probably what they should have done all along. Now, keeping the original title ... yeah, that would have been a bit trickier.

More surprising than the sudden confident ownership of the phrase "neighborhood watch" is that the trailer does not shy away from making light of excessive gun violence. In a bit I must admit I found pretty funny, the quartet of watchmen appear to have killed one of these aliens, who were not shown in the previous trailer. Having (understandably) little knowledge of alien physiognomy, the guys continue to pop an additional seven or eight caps in the corpse, unconvinced that it won't still rise, horror movie style, and lunge at them. The last two or three, spaced out over five seconds, are casual afterthoughts.

So these are a bunch of regular guys who don't really know how to use guns and unleash more bullets than they probably need to.

Not unlike George Zimmerman, for whom one bullet was too much.

However well meaning the changes in the marketing of The Watch may have originally been -- and really, profit was probably the biggest motivator -- I like this honest approach better. Some movies are just cursed with poor timing, but it isn't their fault. It doesn't mean they should be exiled into the deepest, darkest corners of the studio's basement.

So will I see The Watch in the theater?

I think it's up to the third trailer to convince me of that.

Spare me the complete scenes, please

I noticed a disturbing trend in the trailers I saw before The Dictator on Tuesday night. Specifically, the comedy trailers, which were all but one of them.

Not just snippets of "funny dialogue," but entire scenes.

Like, eight consecutive lines of dialogue each, for two or more characters, in the same setting.. 

If it had happened in just one trailer, I might not have noticed it. But since it happened in two, it graduated to the level of a post topic.

It may be no coincidence that both The Watch (formerly Neighborhood Watch) and That's My Boy felt they needed to supply whole scenes to convince us the writing is funny. If the trailers are any indication, neither movie looks likely to supply many laughs. (There's a reason I put "funny dialogue" in quotes earlier.) And as an added sign of desperation, The Watch trailer had to drop in about three f-bombs, in the hopes that merely employing profanity is enough to convince audiences of the writers' comic genius. Red band trailers are a little puerile, aren't they?

Here, check out the trailers below:



I'm counting about five scenes here, the first of which lasts, astonishingly, the entire first minute of the trailer. And basically tells you nothing about the movie. It's downright awkward to watch such long scenes play out with such little payoff. I must admit I think the kid with the ice cream cone is kind of funny, but what does he have to do with the creative talents behind this film? That painfully protracted comparison of the alien goo's viscosity to the viscosity of semen -- now that's what I expect from these guys.

In the case of The Watch, I can understand the need for this going-nowhere vagueness about the movie's content. They kind of don't want you to know what the movie is really about. The Watch was almost derailed by the high profile shooting death of Trayvon Martin at the hands of over-zealous neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman. In fact, it's a major surprise the movie is even coming out this year. Too bad Neighborhood Watch is no longer a viable title, because the new title is lame.

Here's the trailer for That's My Boy, a potentially funny idea that looks poorly executed:



This is not as guilty as The Watch in terms of the wholesale reliance on complete scenes, but the one in particular where they discuss the finer points of Adam Sandler's parenting techniques was agonizing for me to sit through. I kept thinking "Please let this end." And not because the dialogue itself is so bad or anything. Just because it seems awkward to sit through such a long, uninterrupted part of the movie -- until you're, you know, actually sitting through the movie. You're waiting for the zinger, which should come in five seconds or less, and then on to the next joke. When you have to wait 20 seconds for it, you've gone limp at least ten seconds before that.

What these trailers tell me is not that comedy writing is much worse today than it has been in the past, because Lord knows cinema history is littered with awful comedies. No, these trailers tell me that the studios don't trust the audience to pick up on nuance, to fill in the blanks, to reach a conclusion based merely on suggestion. Take the scene where Sandler laughs at Andy Samberg's New Kids on the Block tattoo. In the past, the trailer might have been cut to end with Sandler laughing at his own bad behavior, leaving it up to the audience to put two and two together: he gave the tattoo to his son during a drunken stupor sometime in the late 1980s. Instead, they really hit us over the head with the next couple lines of dialogue: "Their heads are all warped!" "That's because I got it when I was in the third grade! My body grew!" And just to hammer it home, a second later Samberg tells he him that he sucks. That clears it up for those of us who thought he liked being tattooed by his teenage father.

I wish I could say that the studios were wrong. Fact is, people probably are too stupid to get nuance these days. And unless you're sure people get what you're saying, you're not sure they'll pay theater prices to see your movie.

It goes without saying that you have to show funny clips from a comedy, so people will want to see it. But you don't have to show the whole scene. I've had experiences in the past where the trailer whetted my appetite for something funny, then I got more than I bargained for when the parts of the scene they didn't show were even funnier. When trailers show everything, you know exactly what you're going to get. Which probably provides a certain comfort for people -- another sad sign of where we find ourselves, collectively, as an audience.

Not that I myself am completely above this. When I saw The Dictator, I was actually disappointed that my favorite line from the trailer didn't make the movie. "America, the birthplace of AIDS," muses Admiral General Aladeen (Sacha Baron Cohen) in a moment of faux awe. But he doesn't muse this in the movie, only the trailer. And yeah, I missed not seeing/hearing the line.

That seems like a problem neither The Watch nor That's My Boy is likely to have -- so much good material that you have to leave some of it out.