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Isn’t it the worst when you see a trailer for a movie that you’re looking forward to and it’s, well, a piece of crap? Sometimes it turns out that the movie is actually fantastic and just the victim of a bad trailer (such as Jack and Jill, to a very very minor extent), and sometimes that movie is just a flop (such as Grown Ups). I’ll be saving you that risk from now on, as I’ll be checking out the films with the lousiest trailers and seeing whether it’s just poor editing that made the trailer terrible, or if no amount of editing could make it good. Today’s study: John Madden’s The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel.

The trailer begins with some of the most familiar elderly British actors working today finding out about The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, a retirement community in India. Bill Nighy says that it’s like Florida, but with more elephants. Next, our friends are in a crowded bus, and Bill Nighy, being the gentleman I’m sure he also is in real life, offers Maggie Smith some food, but she turns it down because she can’t pronounce it, while none of the other passengers on the bus seem to get offended. Tom Wilkinson then tells Judi Dench that their time will be extraordinary, but then Dev Patel shows up and the hotel isn’t what they thought it would be! It’s run down, birds fly around everywhere, and Penelope Wilton and Bill Nighy stand next to each other, reminding me of Shaun of the Dead. Dev Patel then gives proverbial advice.

Judi Dench, in a voice over, begins to adapt to the new culture. She has a job, and there’s an old person sex joke. Bill Nighy then shares the screen with her and possibly flirts. Penelope Wilton doesn’t understand how Tom Wilkinson likes India, but he says that it teaches him something (you’ll have to see the movie to find out what!). Maggie Smith is given food as a gesture of thanks, and she refuses it because she’s racist. Dev Patel says that once the hotel is fixed up, people will refuse to die…but then someone keels over! All of them, in a bus, narrowly avoid collision, and then Judi Dench downs a gin and tonic. And what Fox Searchlight trailer would be complete without a necrophilia joke to cap it off?

I’ve worked at movie theaters that specialize in art-house, foreign, and independent films for the past eight years. I know that the average age of the customer is 87, the amount of entitlement is huge, and that anything with Judi Dench is a blockbuster. Now imagine a movie that not only has Judi Dench but her close friends Maggie Smith, Tom Wilkinson, and Bill Nighy, as well as having jokes pertaining to being 87 while making the audience feel good about themselves by being white in a non-white nation. There’s no movie more suited to an art-house crowd than The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. It’s the Avengers of the specialty cinema world. We’ve had preview screenings where I’ve seen 300 people constantly in stitches and our trailers have been worn out because they’ve been played so much. I had been dreading this release for a long time. Unfunny, obvious lines, neo-colonialism, and old people having sex are three things that turn me off from a film.

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