Promogasms & Adspasms

Remember when DVDs were introduced? Great days. Here’s a disc, stick it in, there’s a menu, press play and Bob’s your uncle, you’re off and watching something disgusting and a bit phallic plop out of John Hurt’s guts in nauseatingly gross detail and super-squidgy-sloppy-squealy 5.1 digital surround sound. All well and good.

But at some point some Hollywood marketing drone realised there was a small oasis in our lives that wasn’t crammed to bursting with adverts, and as a direct result most DVDs now feature about six days of trailers before you even get to the main menu, and this makes The Incredible Suit very very cross. I have a suspicion that Blu-Ray was introduced because standard DVDs no longer have the capacity for all the promogasms distributors want to force into our faceholes every time we watch a film.

Take the following examples of a few DVDs released in the last twelve months:

The Dark Knight – Four ads before the main menu, one of which is for Warner Brothers’ Blu-Ray range, a pointless exercise if ever there was one. Not only can you not see how much sharper the picture is or spangly the sound is because you’re watching it in standard definition, but the standard definition pictures look chuffing magniferous anyway, so why bother? The Dark Knight also features a trailer for Get Smart, in which Steve Carell is extremely unfunny, only this time in a phone box.

Quantum Of Solace – Three trailers, two studio stings and that bloody anti-piracy thing, which – thanks to hairy genius Adam Buxton – now has lyrics and is finally bearable:



Star Trek – Thankfully only two ads, but both for awful films, GI Joe: Rise Of The Cobra and Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen (known to normal human beings as GI Joe and Transformers 2), the latter of which features Shia LaBeouf uttering the open goal: “Megatron wants what’s in my mind!”

The worst offender, however, is WALL•E, which relentlessly beats you – and, crucially, your children - around the head with so many adspasms it’s a wonder any of you can stand up. Before you can even get close to the menu there’s a generic Disney promo; a short and very rubbish teaser for Up; another futile Blu-Ray con; a trailer for Pinocchio, and last but by all means least, an ad for the unspeakably awful-looking and badly dubbed The Secret Of The Magic Gourd. Yes, really. And no, I’ve no idea what a gourd is, but on the evidence presented in this trailer it’s a walking, talking turd.



Now you might like to counter my argument by suggesting that you can skip all this shizzle and just go straight to the main menu, and you’d be right. But that’s not the point. I don’t know what the point is, but that’s not it. If anyone knows what the point is, please send it to me along with several commercials for other points I may be interested in.

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The Quaid

A few days ago I tried to share with the world my respect and admiration for Dennis Quaid, but for reasons I don’t fully understand it swiftly turned into an ugly rant against Mary Jane Watson from the Spider-Man movies. Well you’ll be pleased to know I’ve got that out of my system and I find myself in a much happier place. Quaidland.

“The Quaid”, as I expect he likes to be known, is a legendary actor of great likeability, vast talent and cheeky dimples. Sadly it’s been his misfortune to appear in some utter bum chutney over the years. I don’t know why this is; perhaps his agent is a mallard or a wombat or some other creature incapable of identifying a good script.

Part of The Quaid’s problem is that he’s very similar to Harrison Ford in appearance and demeanour, and he had the hard cheese to be making his name in the 1980s, a decade which will probably one day be rebranded as ‘the Harrison Fordies’ due to his scruffy-but-lovable-hero-based dominance of the box office.

Incidentally, I was in a restaurant once when I overheard this conversation between some middle-aged types at a nearby table:

“We watched Air Force One yesterday”
“Who’s in that?”
“Harrison Ford, I think”
“You mean, Harrison Ford Fiesta!”
“HA HA HA HA HA!!! Yes, Harrison Ford Fiesta!”

I had to be physically restrained from going over and replacing all of their eyeballs with pickled onions.

So The Quaid had to pick up the scraps Harrison Ford left behind, which was a shame because he might have made a good Jack Ryan in Patriot Games, and he could have done something with Regarding Henry and Working Girl that didn’t make them the movie equivalent of a glass of cod liver oil and raw eggs. Had he been in Frantic he may even have been able to give the impression of being awake.

Fortunately, The Quaid has brought us some gems over the years. InnerSpace is a groovy sci-fi adventure romp; Dreamscape is a cathedral of bonkersness about entering and manipulating people’s dreams, and Frequency is a heartwarming slice of cheesecake about a dead bloke talking to his son, across time, through a knackered radio. Less fortunately, American Dreamz, in which The Quaid finally gets to play the President, is quite literally one of the worst films ever made, and Vantage Point is as predictable and annoying as a Coldplay album.

What’s important, though, is that The Quaid is legend in all these films. He’s in his fifties now and he’s always been stuck at the border patrol of Megastardomland, frantically waving his passport and begging to be let in, so it’s time he found something truly brilliant to show how skill he is. Sadly everyone in the civilized world can see that his next two films, GI Joe: The Rise Of The Cobra and Pandorum will suck bowling balls through a straw, so it looks like we’ll have to wait a bit longer.



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