Ben wrote:Looks like I'm the only one that thinks this could be genius. Last time Azaria and Gosnell teamed up we got the sublime Mystery Men.
No, despite the clever screenplay, Mystery Men was (unfortunately) Kinka "Insulting 'Got Milk?' Commercials" Usher.
(Which explains why one the first scenes took place in a rest home of decrepit old people...A director must have his trademarks.)
Gosnell is the director of Beverly Hills Chihuahua, Big Momma's House, the Yours Mine & Ours remake, Home Alone 3, and both Scooby-Doo movies, and one might suspect one of the two above-listed titles was the reason for the casting.
Well, all I know is Gosnell is doing the Doo and I'm interested to see the results, before doing my Doo all over it. Let's wait for a trailer before we start to rubbish the movie...it's not like The Smurfs haven't been realized in various media before, and there's nothing to say that Gargamel has to be animated. In this day and age, this is exactly the kind of film I'd expect, and the real test will be on how the characters are treated.
They could use an old hackney plot (wait, they are!) but the treatment could absolutely provide much fun, unless they screw with the characters too much and it's just a repulsive modern update for no reason. Keep the characters true - and Azaria's makeup says they are at least with him - and wherever it's set and however it plays, it should make for a decent contemporary Smurfs movie.
For a teaser it's alright. Gives a slight vibe of being Alvin like in it's approach. But I do have to give the creators a thumbs up for including the theme song in the trailer. Nice for them to acknowledge a show existed before the movie, it's when of my gripes about the first live action Transformers movie - no connection to the original theme song.
They've made the Smurfs look not like Smurfs at all, but like those little plastic figure Smurfs! And even though there's less than five seconds of animation, it looks terrible! And is it me or in the shot on top of the cab, are they a bit too big or what!?
I'll wait to see a full trailer, but my bright attitude to this just plummeted. Maybe they should just go the whole hog, ruin the characters, and call this "Smurf'd!"?
They certainly seem to have smurfed up this first look.
Was I the only one reminded of the teaser for the original live action "101 Dalmatians" film by this? Or am I the only one who even remembers that trailer?
"Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, but today is a gift--that is why it's called the present."
The last time the online "animation mafia" and fans trashed a live-action adaptation of an animated series/cartoon strip ("Garfield") that film became a huge hit.
I subsequently saw "Garfield" on TV about 2 years later and it wasn't half-bad.
Bill Murray was probably the next-best Garfield after the late Lorenzo Music. Frank Welker in the new CGI series hasn't been a bad Garfield, either.
I don't know much about this Smurfs film.
Frankly, the characters look about the same as they always have. Maybe the height scale's off a bit but that's the least of the things that could go wrong with the film!
Fingers crossed for fans of the characters.
I'm not a huge Smurfs fan and frankly will probably be doing something else when the film gets released...
Last edited by GeorgeC on June 20th, 2010, 6:52 am, edited 1 time in total.
GeorgeC wrote:The last time the online "animation mafia" and fans trashed a live-action adaptation of an animated series/cartoon strip
that film became a huge hit.
...It did?? I thought "Marmaduke: the Movie" already closed!
But seriously, tell us about your opinions you opted to post on the film:
Dacey wrote:Was I the only one reminded of the teaser for the original live action "101 Dalmatians" film by this? Or am I the only one who even remembers that trailer?
Nope, I remember that too. The commercial success of that Dalmatians was what got the industry moving towards these kinds of "kid-event" pictures. In their own varying ways, they each have teasers that mimic the early Dalmatians spots. That film was the first real non-animation film at Disney's that went all out on an animated-style marketing campaign. Obviously they marketed their films before that, but Dalmatians had the whole weight of the company behind it in a way a live-action title (at least of the Eisner/Katzenberg regime) never had been done before. It paid off, the film was huge, and every commercial kids' film has followed suit. And you just know that, had the technology been around to do it cheaply enough, those one hundred and one Dalmatians would have spoken and acted just like the recent rash of CG critters and animals in animation/live hybrids...
Yep, there was that one, but I also remember a "character" teaser that had the "Bow-Wow-Wow" song playing over it, introducing us to Pongo, using the intro scenes where he wakes Jeff Daniels up...and not much else. It was cut down to being very short, basically Pongo doing a couple of tricks, waking up his human and then the title "smashed" onscreen. That was the start of the basic "show a little, not a lot, make the title the best thing ever" kind of teasers we get as routine now, though this "auditioning" style has also been done to death recently too.
Wait until an actual breathing audience sees the film.
Online critics and Rotten Tomatoes aren't always right.
People really trash films based on childhood animated series -- which mostly weren't THAT good to begin with(!) -- fairly visciously.
I'm reminded of how silly it was for people to get upset about the live-action Transformers films when the animated TV series was junk, too!
They forget at the end of the day that these are films and that you don't have to watch them... You also don't have the right to tell other people NOT to watch them, either.
Time AND audiences will tell if films become classics, not the immediate box office receipts.
Dacey wrote:So...thoughts on the new "Smurfs" trailer...
Let's click off the things we expected to see:
- Pop-ref movie parody
- Characters discovering each other and screaming at the same time
- Use of "Smurf"(verb) as wacky substitution for toilet-humor line
- The ever-present NYC struggling-yuppie hero
- And the general confusion that the producers didn't know whether the studio wanted them to homage the original or kitsch-parody it.
Lucky for us, we're living in the ruins of the post-Yogi era, where studios aren't as confident in the CGI-hybrid assembly line as they used to be back in Alvin's day.
Last edited by EricJ on March 11th, 2011, 1:00 pm, edited 1 time in total.