Hasta La Creative!

Learning a new language is never easy, and for many Peruvians, it’s a lot easier to just read the Spanish subtitles on their favorite U.S. movie trailers.

Armed with that insight, language school Euroidiomas has been trolling these viewers with clever YouTube banner ads that covered subtitles on movie promos and urged them to sign up for English classes.

“The action’s up there, not down here,” notes one ad.

“Go to watch movies, not to read them,” says another.  

Clever as they may be, it’s unlikely they worked very well if (as in the case study below) the ads were written in English. We’re going to guess the real ads were in Spanish and that this version was just created for us English speakers to appreciate the campaign. 

Now, if we’re done, I’d like to get back to this Tortugas Ninjas trailer. 

Via Creative Criminals.

Wes Anderson is one of the few filmmakers whose trailers are still met with great anticipation and debate, with today being a good example of why.

The first official preview of The Grand Budapest Hotel is packed with everything that makes Anderson a divisive darling of Hollywood and hipsters alike. On pace to rival Robert Altman in terms of celebrity pull, Anderson squeezes an entire film festival's worth of stars into Grand Budapest. The trailer also features plenty of his signature oddities, too, like the antiquated choice of a 4:3 aspect ratio rather than the standard widescreen format.

Most oddly, though, Anderson continues his somewhat awkward theme of minorities working for whites (Pagoda in The Royal Tannenbaums, Vikram Ray in The Life Aquatic, pretty much everyone in The Darjeeling Limited, etc.), with Grand Budapest centering around the mentorship of a boy named Zero Moustafa by Ralph Fiennes' eccentric hotelier, Gustave H.

In a 2007 piece called "Unbearable Whiteness," Slate's Jonah Weiner skewered Anderson for "the clumsy, discomfiting way he stages interactions between white protagonists—typically upper-class elites—and nonwhite foils—typically working class and poor." That interaction definitely seems to be a centerpiece of The Grand Budapest Hotel, but I guess we'll find out on March 15, 2014, whether Anderson has become a bit more refined in his race relations.