Casual Shinji said:
Oh Ben Stiller, have you ever been in anything good other than The Royal Tenenbaums?
Yes.
Keeping the Faith.
Let me get this straight... He liked "TED" but hated "the watch" -_-
I can see where you're coming from with this, but in all fairness, there's a mile of difference between
Super Troopers and any given Adam Sandler movie. It's not about the content, it's about the delivery.
The only reason I can think of as to why Richard Ayoade is in this is because he owes a favour to Ben Stiller after Stiller helped get his directorial debut, Submarine, UK distribution
Networking, exposure, people using the leverage that others have to get more success? If it's his only in-road into "happening" in this country, so be it, I won't begrudge him, but I hate the fanboy attitude of "I don't know how he brain-farted his way into this" or "who has pictures of him kicking puppies because that's the
only possible reason he could be doing this crap." The fact is, he did this movie to break into US-mainstream movies, and, to use a colloquialism: Don't hate the playa, hate the game.
EDIT: sorry, not directed at you, per se. In fact, you're basically saying what I'm getting at. But I'm almost feeling the 'outrage' of how could 'this guy' be in 'this crap' from a lot of places for Ayoade. People forget that Hollywood is a business, and the actors treat it that way.
When I first saw the trailers for The Watch, I was convinced it would suck, but beside that point I thought that it might be trying to hit that Shaun of the Dead note, where a group of under-achieving everymen face a truly threatening and extraordinary situation, and the ensuing comedy is derived from their unfocused and deadpan approach to escaping the danger while still clinging to aspects of their ordinary lives that gave them comfort and security.
(Which for me is a more entertaining and arguably realistic reaction to something like a zombie outbreak than anything I've ever seen Romero cough up, but that's just my opinion.)
The problem is Hollywood has a very dismal, patronizing and outright insulting idea of what the American "everyman" is, characterizing them as over-exaggerated caricature of people pulled out of sensationalized media. You don't feel any kind of relation to these men because they're the kind of people you read about in the papers and decry as some kind of nut-jobs.
This, by God, this, is one of the most thoughtful things I've read about movies of late. Thank you. I'm glad you pointed this out. It DOES look dismal, and it COULD be something as good as SOTD, but just that joke about "these things are hard to kill" is so awful. In SOTD, there was a thoughtful moment of "don't throw
that record" while in this movie it's just "let's just shoot it again, because I'm sure it'll be funny at
some point."
