TRAILER TALK

Unfiltered, uncensored, uncompromising trailer reactions from team EMPIRE

Team Empire discusses the promo for Seth Rogen’s An American Pickle. Wonder what Seth Rogen’s favourite Robbie Williams song is. ‘She’s The One’? Everyone likes that one.

John Nugent (News Editor): Well, anyone who thinks that Seth Rogen is in too many movies won’t like this film. There’s twice as much Seth Rogen as usual.

Joanna Moran (Photography Director): [Reading from Wikipedia] “The premise is that an Eastern European labourer emigrates to America in the early 20th century, falls into a vat of pickles, and is brined for a hundred years, where he meets his great-grandson in modern-day Brooklyn.” And they’re both played by Seth Rogen. This is where we need to get one of those science people involved. How was he holding his breath for 100 years?

Alex Godfrey (Acting Features Editor):

I think you might be overthinking it.

John: Nobody seems to notice that he falls in a vat of pickles. And continue to not notice for another century. You don’t get highconcept premises like this anymore.

Alex: It’s very Jack Napier [from Batman], that vat of acid.

Chris Hewitt (Review Editor): This is one of those movies where the hero dies in the first three minutes and everything that follows is his dying fever-dream fantasy thing. If you fall into a vat of brine, you die.

John: Has anyone visited the country of Schlupsk?

Chris Hewitt: It’s right next to Krakozhia and Latveria.

John: Looks like there’s some classic fish-out-of-water comedy to be had.

Chris Hewitt: Classic fish-out-of-pickle comedy. This is the sort of joke I was hoping they weren’t going to do.

Alex: The first minute of the trailer is a bit Crocodile Dundee.

John: A bit Coming To America.

Alex: But when present-day Seth Rogen comes in, it’s clearly going to be about him.

Joanna: They’re both having to deal with grief, aren’t they?

John: Does anyone actually like pickle?

Joanna: No.

Liz Beardsworth (Production Editor): The ones in Mcdonald’s are alright. Or are they gherkins rather than pickles?

Joanna: I think they’re the same thing.

Alex: Pickles in salt beef sandwiches are good.

Chris Lupton (Creative Director):

That’s a gherkin!

Alex: Are they related?

Liz: Is it an American English thing? Like zucchini and eggplants.

Alex: I got a pizza from Italy once and the menu said “egg, plant”, and I thought it would be fried egg with a bit of spinach. It was a fucking aubergine. There was a rogue comma.

Chris Hewitt: Pickles are awful. I pick them off my hamburgers. Zero-tolerance policy. However, I don’t have a zero-tolerance policy for An American Pickle!

Liz: Branston Pickle. That’s a pickle…

Chris Hewitt: Seth Rogen looks great in this. The guy they’ve cast as his grandfather is a dead-ringer for Seth Rogen, too. One thing about Seth Rogen playing both of these roles is we may be spared an improv-athon. He won’t be able to improv with himself. So it’ll live and die by the strength of the script.

Alex: Does he do that a lot, to his detriment?

Chris Hewitt: I think so. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it can be a little flabby.

Alex: [Screenwriter] Simon Rich is a bit of a comedy prodigy. He’s been writing good stuff for years. I think he wrote on Inside Out. There’s a lot going for this film.

Chris Hewitt: I’m a big fan of Seth Rogen. He’s a really funny guy but a really good actor as well. It seems to be going for the feels. And Simon Rich is a really strong writer — he does quirk very well — so I imagine it’s a lot funnier than what we’ve seen in the trailer.

Alex: I think it looks charming. I don’t think it’s going to be an out-and-out comedy at all. I think it’ll be a ‘dramedy’.

Chris Hewitt: A ‘coma’. Comedy and drama.

Chris Lupton: [Rogen] seems to have a real thing about characters with mother-father relationships. This isn’t that far removed from that Barbra Streisand one [The Guilt Trip], where it was about his mother, where this one seems to be about fatherhood and his own history. Also, he’s super-handsome.

Alex: Which version?

Chris Lupton: Both!

Alex: It plays to Rogen’s strengths. It’s not written or directed by him, but it seems like it is, because he’s all over it.

John: The trailer almost feels Wes Anderson-esque. At least in the yellow font and the David Bowie soundtrack.

Joanna: The visuals do look good.

Chris Hewitt: It feels a lot like Lemony Snicket… one of those lovely overblown fantasies. More Tim Burton than

Wes Anderson.

Liz: It made me think of Moulin Rouge!.

I’d watch it. There’s something about Seth Rogen that’s very endearing.

Chris Hewitt: Let’s all hop into a vat of brine and wake up when this is released.

AN AMERICAN PICKLE IS IN CINEMAS FROM 7 AUGUST