Trailer trashing!

So Chris and I went to see Knocked Up this weekend (and we loved it, but more on that in a bit). And before the movie started we sat through the requisite commercials and videos and video-commercials and fake-movie-trailer-commercials, and then, finally, the actual trailers. One was for the new Hairspray movie, where they’ve replaced all the rare vintage R&B songs with self-important musical numbers and all the John Waters regulars with Scientologists. At least Tracy Turnblad is still fat in this version. As for the next two trailers—well, I’ll post links to them, but I feel compelled to describe them, too, since seeing them back to back was especially dismaying. Plus the huge prosthetic pimples don’t show up nearly as well on YouTube as they do on the big screen! So here we go:

Trailer 1: Dane Cook is the protagonist. We first see him at a wedding reception, where, during a toast, the bride calls him out as someone she dated before finally and triumphantly finding true love. Dane Cook has a reputation for being That Kind Of Guy, the one women sleep with just before meeting their husbands. But then he meets The Girl, and she is different. They stroll side-by-side down a scenic path, just about to kiss, when suddenly, BONK! she runs straight into a lamppost and falls the fuck over! Har har! True love ensues. Next comes the conflict and the gross-out parts: He has to sleep with a big fat girl with a mustache because he doesn’t want to be That Kind of Guy anymore and hopes he can break the patten by having sex with someone so ugly she’ll never get married. We see the fat girl’s huge prosthetic pimples and Dane Cook’s horrified expressions. But will he ever get with The Girl?

Trailer 2: Ben Stiller is the protagonist. We first see him at a wedding reception, where, during a toast, the bride calls him out as someone she dated before finally and triumphantly finding true love. Ben Stiller has a reputation for being That Kind Of Guy, the one who’s perpetually single and won’t ever commit. But then he meets The Girl. They ride bikes side-by-side down a scenic path, just about to kiss, when suddenly, BONK! she runs straight into a trash can and falls the fuck over! Har har! Marriage ensues. Next comes the conflict and the gross-out parts: On their honeymoon his new wife turns out to be weird and crazy and she farts loudly in the bathroom, but he puts up with it because he doesn’t want to be That Kind of Guy anymore. Then he meets The Other Girl, and she is different. We see the new wife’s huge prosthetic pimples and Ben Stiller’s horrified expressions. But will he ever get with The Other Girl?

From these you might conclude the following about men and women and love and relationships: Marriage is the ultimate goal for most women, who pursue it ruthlessly, though of course they have to be unoffensive enough to even deserve it in the first place! They are all hot, except when they’re disgusting! Running into stuff and falling down spectacularly are helpfully distracting things a woman can do any time a man is in imminent danger of expressing his feelings to her! And also, it’s funny! And…and I’m sure there’s more but that’s all I can stand to extrapolate from these, because I’m afraid that watching them too much will make my soul withered and small and sad.

But Knocked Up was nothing like this. I can sort of see how the trailer might indicate otherwise, with the childbirth scene serving as the women’s-bodies-are-scary joke and a of throwaway bit of dialogue used as the marriage-is-full-of-unsexy-bathroom-stuff joke. But those jokes have less to do with the movie itself than they do with the creepy latent phobias of the trailer editors and/or some horrible focus group somewhere. Really, the movie was terrific, though Chris and I own the Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared box sets so we’re probably biased.

And not for nothing, I read this article, and one of my favorite parts was where it mentioned all the stupid, totally puerile things that the guys in the cast do in real life. Because none of it seemed to involve laughing at fat women in bikinis, or pretty women falling flat on their faces, or any of the other thuggishly insecure little things that pass for funny in a lot of movies these days. No, it was mostly drinking games. And you know, I would rather watch a whole movie of Martin Starr playing Edward Fortyhands than one of these so-called “romantic comedies.” Hell, I would pay to just see the trailer.