Andy and I also saw The Simpsons movie on Friday night and enjoyed it immensely. I laughed my butt off when the extended version of the Spider Pig song started playing.

As far as the advertisements, I share in your disdain. I now pay anywhere from $9-$10.50 to see a movie in the theater. I pay that amount to see the MOVIE on the big screen, not commercials. And no, they do not end at the time the movie is listed to start, I can tell you that right now. I'm sure they're "supposed" to, but I know they don't. Our movie was listed to start at 11, we got to the theater at 11:10 (dinner ran late), and they were just starting the previews...grrrrr...

I am filled with jealous rage that you have seen the movie.

Curse you, Parker people!

That said, "Spider Pig" has been sung endlessly around our house thanks to the commercials and a pair of boys who think it's the funniest thing they've ever heard. And yet, it is still funny...

I am with you as far as advertising goes—I loathe the "commercials" before the movie. I'm not sure if they're any dumber than television commercials, but since they're so much bigger, they seem proportionally more stupid.


But now I am going to lay down the hammer of disagreement. I delight in movie trailers; if they had half an hour of trailers before the film, I'd be happy. Granted, I often think the movies the trailers are for look awful, but I get a 3-minute version of the film and can definitively say, "That looks really dumb." And trailers for good movies make me smile. Heck—I go searching out trailers on the internet just to watch 'em, and if they're shown when the movie is supposed to start, that just extends the entertainment. (It's not like they shorten the movie to fit in the trailers or anything...)

I do sometimes wonder why they show certain trailers before particular films, especially when they seem to have little to do with one another. When we took the boys to see Transformers, there was a trailer for I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, which I was grateful not to have to try and explain. (I'm also glad that a half-naked Jesica Biel doesn't interest them quite yet.) I get that it has to do with the venue and the target audience (a lot of twenty-something geek boys who might also like Adam Sandler due to toxic exposure when they were children) and a number of other factors, but still.

So bring on the trailers! Huzzah!

(I think I can work the word "trailers" in at least one more time in this post.)

(There I go.)

Oh, don't get me wrong - I love trailers in general. As you say, when they're not so good, they're warnings to me that I will not like the movie. When they're miniature versions of the movies they purport to advertise, I usually turn to Marilyn afterward and say, "And now I don't have to see that movie, because I've just seen it!" When the trailers are good, they're a joy. Every now and again I'll go to the Apple website and watch trailers.

It's just that these particular trailers were really painful. There was "Daddy Day Camp", which pulled out every hoary old cliche of summer camp movies combined with precocious child movies with a "punch in the groin" joke literally every five seconds, I think. There was "Rush Hour 3" which I may have found somewhat amusing on a good day, but was already put into a foul disposition by the advertisements and the previous trailer. There were also "Horton Hears A Who" and "Bee Movie", which drove home the fact that animated big budget movies outside of Pixar seem to be nothing more than vehicles for particular comedians' acts (Jim Carrey in the former and Jerry Seinfeld in the latter) which kind of depressed me - "Horton" is, of course, based on a Dr. Seuss book, and looks just like the Dr. Seuss book, but the content just plain isn't Dr. Seuss. I don't know - I just found them largely depressing.

That I will second you on.

Can I say I was amused that during the same set of trailers, both Bee Movie and Pixar's forthcoming W.A.L.L.-E used Michael Kamen's "Central Services/The Office" song from Terry Gilliam's Brazil (the jaunty, bouncy little number that plays over the super-chaotic unending bureaucracy shots. I guess the idea of robots and bees working tirelessly fits nicely with that theme, but to see two trailers in a row with the same music was bizarre.

Even more bizarre, the music is featured in a Visa commercial—one of the ones with the perfectly timed machine of consumers buying endlessly with Visa cards except for some poor schlub who chooses to pay with some outmoded, uncool method of remuneration, like a check, or *gasp* cash. (The commercial in question is the one set in the gardening supply store, I believe.) I'm going to brand myself yet further as a total aesthetic snob by saying this, but I find it deliciously ironic that Visa is underlining is paean to consumer greed and easy, nearly mindless electronic fund transfer with a song from a movie about nightmarish, bureaucratic corporate/consumer dystopia...

Just to clarify, I was not complaining about the trailers before the movie, I was commenting that if the previews were just starting 10 minutes after the listed start time, you know that it was nothing but commercials before that...

Now for slightly related rants: I actually do hate how MANY previews there are before the movie starts. Movies now start 20 minutes after the listed start time, which is absolutely ridiculous. Further painful and irritating when you are taking children to a movie. By the time the movie starts, in every single case, I've forgotten what movie I was there to see. I'm not kidding. And yes, the deciding of which previews to show before which movies is bizarre and nonsensical.

I absolutely abhor those stupid Visa commercials. I love how they sell it to people by showing how easy it is because you don't have to show your ID. Because people NEVER steal credit cards or try to use them fraudulently, and taking those extra five seconds to show your driver's license to an indifferent clerk who doesn't really look at it anyway is just SUCH a hassle. And cash, oh my gosh, you're asking them to make change???? Grrrrrrrr...

Things will all be so much easier and faster as soon as we outlaw paper currency. Makes things faster, keeps people on the grid, and weeds all of those smelly poor people out of the line!

The Glorious Future!