The Watch Teaser: Vince Vaughn Helps Debut New, Improved Marketing Push
Man, tip your cap to the marketing crew at 20th Century Fox, which redirected one of 2012's most unfortunate current-events overlaps into a completely revised angle that it probably should have pursued in the first place. Behold: the new and improved teaser for The Watch, complete with introduction by star Vince Vaughn.
The actor unveiled the package last night during a surprise drop-in on Conan, where the host's mock protest against unannounced guest appearances gave way to exactly that — just the thing the retitled summer comedy (née Neighborhood Watch) needed in the aftermath of the Trayvon Martin tragedy in Florida. Gone are the prowling, leering suburban vigilantes bringing to mind Martin shooter George Zimmerman, swapped out right up front for Vaughn, Ben Stiller, Jonah Hill and Richard Ayoade as a fierce, do-it-yourself, alien-hunting cadre.
(Skip to 1:55 for the teaser.)
OK, so still a little vigilante-ish and creepily gun-dependent in the end, but whatever. I laughed! Which is saying something, I guess, because that last trailer made this look almost wholly unsalvageable under the circumstances.
Also? Kudos to Fox for catching some of Men in Black 3's alien-comedy buzz for the week. You'd be forgiven for thinking Conan hadn't been able to book Josh Brolin for Thursday night.
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I hope this ends up being good, but this teaser, like the one before it, still contains the thing that makes me hate Vince Vaughn/Ben Stiller movies... out of control ad libbing. And Jonah Hill is usually in the same category (21 Jump Street being a major exception). The sequence where Ben Stiller and Jonah Hill are telling the kid to listen to one and look at the other is the perfect example of two idiots who think they are being sooo funny, but aren't. Everything about that smacks of ad libbing gone wild where each actor tries to one up the other with their ridiculous version of a line about who to listen to and who to look at. I can only imagine after each take they and the director were laughing hysterically at how they turned a simple line of dialogue into something outlandishly funny. The problem? Those laughs on set rarely translate into something actually funny in the movie because all their ad libbing amount to nothing more than a "you had to be there" moment. And Vince Vaughn is always fighting it out with Will Ferrell to be the king of those kinds of ad libs. The unfortunate thing is that these guys are funny people, but they need to learn RESTRAINT like all the great comedians before them.
The only hope is that they learned about restraint from the ridiculously talented Richard Ayowade, who they barely include in any of the trailers.
Somehow I doubt their egos would let them (and I pray that Ayowade didn't pick up any bad habits while working with them).
Jake... well put, my friend;)