Watching this trailer for The Neverything intrigues and saddens me. At first, I think cheap laughs at the expense of a chubby bloke in tighty-whiteys; nothing particularly wrong with that. Then I think semi-viral marketing for Mercury in the vein of Napoleon Dynamite. Then, I get utterly swept up in the story of a novelist whose character knows he’s being written, and wonder where I’ve heard that idea before.

But I didn’t laugh. First, the good parts aren’t laugh-out-loud kind of humour. Second, the obvious laughter ploys just aren’t very funny (“I don’t think this is yoga.”) And finally, I want to see this plot to its fruition, but as an ad, I don’t know whether it will be made or even whether it’s a real idea (much like the “footage” from Gibson’s Pattern Recognition). If it does manage to make it to a screen, the ploys for laughter are too paper-thin and Hollywood to be worth sitting through for the sake of the interesting notion of a self-aware novel character.

This came out very stream-of-consciousness, but I don’t really have time for a properly written analysis. Enjoy it for what it is.