The trailer for The Brass Teapot, directed by Ramaa Mosley starring Juno Temple and Michael Angarano, has just hit, and it looks potentially like the most out-there high concept, big-budget comedy since the eighties. The eighties was a great decade for batshit high-concepts, and probably not coincidentally, also for cocaine. As I’ve said, it was like an entire decade of people getting stuck in quicksand and complaining about anchovies on pizza. Some movies we take for granted and forget how nutty they actually are because they pulled it off. But try explaining Ghostbusters to someone who’s never heard of it. It has a ghost in it that’s a big ball of snot who ruins dinner parties. Whose ghost was that? Was there a living snot ball at one point? Every plot point in that sounds f*cking insane. Then there was Mannequin, Weird Science, Innerspace, etc. etc.
Point being, aside from the occasional body-swap romp, we haven’t had too many genuinely weird high-concept comedies for while. But The Brass Teapot could change that. It appears to be about a down-on-their-luck couple who discover a mysterious teapot that spews money, but only when they hurt each other. So they spend the rest of the trailer finding more and more elaborate ways to hurt each other. Until one day, some orthodox Jews show up saying their grandma saved the teapot during the Holocaust. Whoa. Is this an elaborate way to explain the self-hating Jew stereotype? Or some kind of anti-Jew propaganda about how the Jews caused the Holocaust themselves by being greedy? (I mean really, I didn’t even have to read much into this to get here). Whatever it is, it looks f*cking weird. Not necessarily good, but weird.
