A few weeks ago, Summit Entertainment released the first seven minutes of The Brothers Bloom online. Normally, this kind of marketing strategy is useful, particularly if the movie isn’t well known. However, it helps for such a movie to have a terrific opening, which grabs the viewer in and makes him/her need to see what happens after that teased beginning. The Brothers Bloom, unfortunately, has an unbearable start, enough that I couldn’t even get through the entire seven minutes. I turned the streaming video off at the 4:24 mark.

The primary cause of my annoyance was the voice-over narration, provided by actor/magician Ricky Jay, a man whose speech is easily recognizable, only not for good reason. His lisped reading, sounding like a poor man’s Wallace Shawn, ruined the movie for me immediately. And I decided within those few moments that I wouldn’t bother to go see The Brother’s Bloom in its entirety.

I later learned that Jay’s narration is only in the film for that seven-minute prologue that opens the film, so I am willing to give it another shot, with hope that it gets better. Due to my initial irritation, though, I’ve decided to share a list of ten other movies ruined by their voice-over narration.
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• Strike talks broke down last night, with both sides refusing to budge on DVD residuals. The producers say the’re willing to make concessions on everything else; the writers say that after three months of negotiation, “the AMPTP still has not responded to a single one of our important proposals. Every issue that matters to writers, including Internet reuse, original writing for new media, DVDs and jurisdiction, has been ignored. This is completely unacceptable.” WGA has scheduled a membership meeting for 7pm tonight; they may or may not return to the bargaining table tomorrow.
• IFC has picked up all North American rights to In Search of a Midnight Kiss, a one-night-in-LA romantic comedy by first time director Alex Holdridge. The film premiered at Tribeca and won the “Best of the Fest” prize at the Edinburgh Film Festival.
• Clive Owen Alert: The constant object of Karina’s imaginary affections will again star opposite Julia Roberts, this time in Tony Gilroy’s Duplicity. They’ll play “longtime lovers who happened to work as spies on opposite sides. They team up to stage an elaborate con to rip off corporations and steal a valuable product.”
• Terry Gilliam’s next project will be “a modern-day fantasy adventure” called The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. It’ll co-star Heath Ledger, who previously worked with Gilliam on The Brothers Grimm.
• Simon Wincer–who, in the picture tagged to the Variety story, actually looks a bit like Kevin Costner, but for a tweak in the aging process–will direct a sequel to Dances with Wolves called The Holy Road. Costner, who won two Oscars for directing and producing Wolves, doesn’t seem to be involved in the sequel.