On The Half-Blood Prince

First of all, I know you just said you were streaming it, Hulu, but...some of us were watching The Office at 9 p.m. EDT, and waited until the commercial break. So, that was sort of a dick move. "WATCH IT HERE SO EXCITING ZOMG WE'RE NOT EVEN GOING TO TAKE DOWN THE 'WATCH THIS NOW' MARQUEE!" Lame.

As for the trailer itself, well:

This is going to be the most awesome movie ever since Iron Man. (I loved that movie with an unhealthy, greedy love.) While I still have a few doubts about various little things (shut up, Fairy Voldemort*), visually, it looks like it'll be fantastic. Draco looks appropriately haggard and sickly, "Groovy" Dumbledore is always awesome, and the Inferi are apparently Smeagol clones.

*I don't mean Voldemort is gay, I mean he literally behaves like a fairy, flitting about and talking in that completely unmenacing voice that completely ruins the entire experience for me. Seriously, all Ralph Fiennes had to do was talk like he did in Red Dragon or something, and it would have been great. Oh, and not move around like a mythical female bug thing. Sigh.

Cloudy With a Chance of Crap

Sigh.

Okay, so I think we can all agree that this whole "taking all the symbols of my childhood and raping them for profit" thing has gone way too far. Granted, the poster for Where the Wild Things Are (below) looks pretty awesome.



But for every WtWTA, there's a Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs. The just-released trailer is over here.

How horrendous does this look? Let's put aside the idiotic 3-D whatever for right now (hell, that deserves its own post) and just look at it from the point of view of a child and/or adult who's read and loved the book:

The whole point of kids' books is that they look awesome. Cool illustration is what separates the Animals Should Definitely Not Wear Clothings from the...Well, I can't think of any crappily illustrated children's books off the top of my head, but I'm sure there are plenty out there. Once you take away the unique style of illustration (something Spike Jonze appears to not be doing, thank God), you're left with...a story. A story that is very, very thin on plot. And while a lack of plot sometimes works for books (coughmostofTwilightcough), that's really hard to get away with in a movie. So, the director comes up with a plot. This plot is usually banal and overdone (The Cat in the Hat, anyone?), and the entire experience turns out to be no different from any other crappy kids movie (see: most animated movies not produced by Pixar/Pixar alums).

So why not just...let sleeping books lie? How about we come up with a rule that says, "If you have to invent a plot that is not contained in the source material (be it children's book or game), you're not allowed to make that movie"? Yes?