Business travel

The "Gulliver's Travels" trailer
Jack Black meets Jonathan Swift?

The horror, the horror

IT DOESN'T directly relate to business travel, but I figure we're required to cover this:

No, you're not in some horrible nightmare. This is real: Jack Black, the star of such films as Kung Fu Panda and Shallow Hal, has been cast in a "reimagining" of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels. There's no particular reason the movie has to be bad: the source material is great, and Mr Black is not untalented. But Swift's novel is funny. This trailer is not. Trailers generally show the best bits of films. Is Mr Black playing foosball with Lilliputians really the best Hollywood can do with Swift? If so, they should have left well enough alone.

Top-notch special effects and the frontman of Tenacious D aren't enough to do justice to Swift's imagination and wit. It could be worth holding out hope. Nicholas Stoller and Joe Stillman, the screenwriters for Gulliver's Travels, have decent records, so I guess it's possible the trailer is significantly worse than the finished product. Stillman co-wrote the film version of Shrek, whileStoller did his best work as a writer for Undeclared, Judd Apatow's short-lived television series. (He also directed Forgetting Sarah Marshall.)

All that is mostly wishful thinking, though. America's best living satirists aren't making Jack Black movies—one of them is hosting a talk show and the other two are making cartoons. The reimagined Gulliver's Travels is probably going to be bad. But at least we're in for an entertaining time when Swift inevitably rises from the grave to seek revenge on everyone involved.

(via io9)

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