Summer Movie Posse: Movie stars don’t cut it with these kids
Every summer for the last 11 years, Patrick Goldstein has gathered together a group of young people to discuss the upcoming slate of summer movies. This year it is a set of 15 year-olds. Granted they live and go to school in west L.A., but teens are teens. They screened several movie trailers for this summer’s big studio releases. Here’s a sampling of comments:
‘The Campaign’
Max Nath: “Zach Galifianakis is really funny, maybe because he has such a strange innocence to him. It’s a great satire of the way politics in America works — that the candidates don’t really stand for anything.”
Elias Richter, 17: “It’s funny because it feels really different. We haven’t seen a comedy about politics in a long time.”
Jeremy Arnold: “I don’t like the premise — that the choice in elections is only between two idiots. But I have to admit it’s really funny.”
‘Prometheus’
Phoebe Kiekhofer, 16: “There’s way too much screaming in the trailer. It gave me a serious headache.”
Ariel Astrup: “The flashing is bad too. I was just getting into it, especially with the weird things crawling on the ceiling, but the flashing was too much like ‘Halo.’ Yuck!”
Jeremy: “It felt like a cross between ‘Alien’ and ‘National Treasure.’ I know there are some big names in the movie, but that’s not gonna get me to see it.”
Jannah Ustaris, 14: “I agree. The screaming was way too much for me.”
‘Snow White and the Huntsman’
Karim Sharif, 15: “I’m not a fan of this trend of taking fairy-tale classics and making them into dark, twisted stories. The plot was way too predictable, but it just didn’t feel like the story was my story anymore.”
Aria Lentini, 15: “I would’ve just blown this off as a cheesy, sappy movie ’cause Kristin Stewart was in it, but the trailer actually looks pretty good.”
Ariel: “I know everyone hates Kristin because of ‘Twilight.’ But if you’d seen her in her other movies, like ‘Panic Room,’ you’d see she can actually act.”
Jeremy: “Seeing her in the trailer was a bad omen. It just feels like they’re using her to get people out to the theaters.”
‘Men in Black 3’
Karim: “It feels really cheesy. I mean, another movie about time travel?”
Carrie Grossman: “This makes me want to go back and see the first one. But not this one.”
Jeremy: “Isn’t it kind of gimmicky to have Josh Brolin play a young Tommy Lee Jones? It’s like a ‘Saturday Night Live’ impression. And anyway, isn’t Tommy Lee Jones 75 or something?”
‘G.I. Joe: Retaliation’
Aria: “I don’t know why they make children’s toys into movies. It feels redundant. And was that the Rock? After he’s been in all those kids’ movies, having him in an action movie really doesn’t work.”
Ariel: “And was that Bruce Willis? Man, he’s getting way too old to be running around like that!”
The whole ‘movie stars don’t cut it with these kids’ thing doesn’t surprise me. This is a generation that has been raised on CGI laden movies where the special effects are the stars. What does strike me as interesting is that most of the movies about which they were excited were comedies.
I wonder if that is the very front edge of a shift away from all the action thrillers Hollywood has been acquiring and producing toward lighter fare. Looking at the tea leaves of the spec scripts that the studios bought last year, there was a decided bent toward ‘dark’ material, suggesting buyers think that fits the cultural mood around the world. Maybe moviegoers are getting a bit weary of the darkness and want a few laughs in their life.
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