The Puffy Chair

This is more a critique of odd marketing, but since trailers are pretty crucial in movie marketing, I will go about my business with only the usual burden of guilt and sorrow.

The Puffy Chair: The synopsis on apple.com goes like this:

Josh has failed at being a NYC indie rocker. Josh has failed at being a booking agent. Josh’s life is pretty much in the toilet. When he tries to figure out where it all went wrong he comes up with an idea that would be a small, yet life changing victory. He decides to purchase a 1985 Lazy Boy on eBay and deliver it cross-country.
Comedy

Sounds good so far - any movie whose trailer synopsis involves someone's life being in the toilet must be funny, right? Delivering a Lazy Boy cross country? Sounds a lot like the much-needed sequel to Road Trip.

Let's look at the trailer, play by play. Once they set up the story, we get the Daily Mirror telling us that this is "The funniest, hippest, twentysomething relationship drama of the year." First of all, I would raise the question - how many twentysomething relationship dramas are there a year? Five? That is like saying "The funniest, hippest, stock car racing comedy of the year" - it's not bad, but does it really mean anything? I posit that no, it does not. Immediately after that we get "Laugh out loud funny..." from Variety. What went where that ellipsis is? It seems like a perfect place for a qualifier, like "Laugh out loud funny, if you have no soul" or "Laugh out loud funny in an alternate universe where sad things are funny and make you laugh." - and that really gets to the core of what I am thinking about this trailer. This is not a funny trailer, it is a serious and kind of rough indie relationship trailer about unhappy people trying to be happy with each other.

Once the funny cards are past, the trailer essentially consists of a boyfriend making a nice dinner for his girlfriend, then he ignores her and gets on the phone and she smashes everything on the table. Ha ha. After that the same boy screams in the face of an old man over a piece of used furniture while his friend looks on. Hilarious. Then a card tells us this is one of the best American films of the past ten years, and then they end the trailer with this bit:

Boy (angrily): You want me to be this dude that I am not!
Girl: If you asked me to marry you right now, I would say yes. I would marry you and I would grow old with you and I would have your babies (she starts crying ) I would, because that's why I'm this relationship - because I love you. And I want that.

That is some comic genius. Watching that bit, which is done in a poorly lit room with a single handheld camera on this girl, I did not feel like I should chuckling to myself at the hip comedy of it all, I felt like I was watching a relationship come to that awful breaking point where one person puts everything out there, and suddenly there's a tremendous weight on everything you say and everything you do, and it's not funny at all.

So why market it as a comedy?

Trailer(apple.com)