Gnomeo and Juliet is this week's most ridiculous trailer

Once upon a time, when garage/post-hardcore was at the apex of its popularity, a friend and I came up with the concept for Black Back Lotion, a band that would -- this is hilarious! -- only do Black Black Ocean covers. Like many other concepts that start with a play...

By Jef Otte

February 11, 2011

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Once upon a time, when garage/post-hardcore was at the apex of its popularity, a friend and I came up with the concept for Black Back Lotion, a band that would -- this is hilarious! -- only do Black Black Ocean covers. Like many other concepts that start with a play on words, the joke pretty much ended there. And that was probably for the best, because it's pretty easy to imagine that the idea for Gnomeo and Juliet was conceived in exactly the same way -- I would put a lot of money on it, actually -- and if the trailer is any indication, the idea is not nearly enough to justify its elaborate, flimsy execution.

It's pretty difficult to think of a more ridiculous way to start anything than with the image of a lawn gnome in a mankini -- it's kind of impressive, actually -- but what's more impressive is that what the trailer accomplishes with this joke is not humor, but rather to effectively ensure that the mankini, as a cultural in-joke, will never be funny again.

In other areas, the jokes mostly involve gnomes trying to be stealthy, but then -- LOL! -- they're totally not stealthy! About a quarter of the trailer's runtime is devoted to rehashing this joke in three different scenarios, which doesn't really bode well for the variety of the jokes in the film. Also, it FEATURES THE CLASSIC MUSIC OF ELTON JOHN, which is... We're not really sure what to make of that. Is it because Elton John kind of looks like a gnome? We're assuming so.

Really the only hope for this movie is if it is, as the trailer bills it, an actual adaptation of the Shakespeare play -- at least then you can be sure there'll never be a sequel.

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