Trailers Undone

The Reader quicktime trailer

Valkyrie quicktime trailer

There are two types of movies about the Holocaust: those that offer to take us back to a simpler time, when it was easier to distinguish between good and evil; and those that offer to comfort us for our own modern sins with the knowledge that Nazi Germany contained just as much moral ambiguity as anywhere else.

This second idea is more palatable as we gain more and more chronological distance from the events themselves. But it also has increasing appeal for Americans who have the disturbing feeling that they are living in the belly of a beast that has the potential to do a lot more damage than Hitler’s machine. The fact that Berlin, is becoming a thriving cosmopolitan cultural center, doesn’t hurt either. People want to convince themselves that it’s okay to like Germany again, and movies like these help.

This play about a guy trapped in his own mind is obviously being brought back to the stage and on DVDs to capitalize on the success of The Diving Bell And The Butterfly (and popular anti-war sentiment in the US).

The most interesting part of this trailer is “Live on stage, on film.” This is not really possible; the audience is either in the same physical space as the performance, watching it unfold in real time, or they aren’t. Sure, you can listen to a CD of a live concert event, enabling you to hear the audience respond to the music, to hear any accidental or deliberate variations that took place on that particular night. But films of stage plays don’t work that way. The audience (if there even is one) is quiet. The camera angle changes to give you the best view. But most of all, you simply are not sitting there breathing the same air as the performers, supporting them with your respectful silence, feeling that by being in the room, you are helping to make the magic happen, which is what live dramatic performance is really all about.

The difference is especially important in the case of a story about a guy trapped in his own mind, literally unable to share a room with another human being. His whole inner life is about the impossibility of reconciling live participation in human events with an inner movie that goes on forever, always referencing life, but never becoming it.

Here’s the trailer.

This is a “stubborn old man just trying to do one thing right” movie.

The death of the dog, of course, is symbolic, and this film isn’t going to draw a mainstream crowd, no matter how it’s promoted.

Sadly, the studio (or the distributor) has decided that it’s not enough to just sell the movie for what it is; they’ve got to try and make this subtle, quiet, character-driven film look like it’s an action-packed bonanza.

Since very little happens that’s conventionally dramatic until late in the story, that means showing audiences a trailer that gives away most of the ending. I was a sucker to see this movie after 30 seconds into the trailer. Now that I know what happens (and now that I associate the ruined ending, rather than the powerful story, with the movie’s release), I probably won’t see it.

Pictured: The Straight Story, about an old man who takes his tractor for a long journey to visit his estranged brother, and Babe, about an old man who enters his talented pig into a shepherding contest. The quirks are what sold both stories, but what made them good was the human characters’ simple, plodding determination to do one simple thing the right way, no matter what.

Too bad whoever cut the trailer for Red didn’t have the same philosophy.

Here’s the trailer.

Several overlapping formulas here:

Movies about girls playing boys sports aren’t very interesting in themselves anymore, and even real-life stories about girls playing on boys’ teams are common. This formula only really worked by itself when the audience could imagine that the battle for serious recognition of female athletes was still being fought. That’s not to say that it can’t still work, but something new would have to be brought to it. Ironically, the villainous kids’ taunt to “get a little dirt in your skirt” echoes a self-empowering zinger often shouted by the female baseball players in A League Of Their Own.

Speaking of A League Of Their Own, it featured a down-and-out coach with a drinking problem (Tom Hanks). So did Hoosiers (Dennis Hopper, assistant coach), and so did The Bad News Bears (Walter Matthau in the original). These are all what we might call “fallen mentors.” They take a path parallel to, but different from, the misfits they guide. The misfits want validation, the mentors want redemption.

That the title, The Longshots, is so reminiscent of the very recent The Comebacks, which is a parody of exactly this kind of film, is revealing in terms of just how not-self-aware this production is.

It’s not an accident that all the jeers in the trailer are made by white kids, and aimed at black kids. That’s a lame effort to get you angry enough at the white kids to pay for your ticket. Is it going to work?

Here’s the trailer.

Usually, American trailers for foreign films are all either a) all in the original language, with English subtitles, or b) edited so that you never actually hear the actors speak, but instead you hear only the American voice-over, a technique designed to keep you from realizing that the movie is not in your native language.

Here, we have something very unusual. The trailer is in French, there are English subtitles, and there is a voice-over in English, and there are additional narrative titles in English to lead you through the trailer (”It was the wedding of a lifetime,” etc.).

This is because the movie is packaged (much like Asia Argento herself) as exotic fare for Americans. Face it, you saw the trailer but you have no idea what this movie is about, except that Asia Argento is hot and foreign. People will go to see this movie because they want to feel honest when they say that they only read Playboy for the articles.

One man…two women, one an angel, the other a diabolical schemer…historical French drama…nobody sees this trailer without thinking of Dangerous Liaisons. Nobody. And that’s not an accident.

Paramount asked YouTube not to show the trailer for this movie. So in its place, we give you the trailer for Youth Without Youth below. The trailer for Benjamin Button is here.

Stephen King’s short-lived The Golden Years had a similar idea:

But when it comes down to it, the “man growing younger” motif is much, well, older. Look at this excerpt from William Blake’s “The Mental Traveller”:

Her fingers number every nerve
Just as a miser counts his gold;
She lives upon his shrieks and cries—
And she grows young as he grows old,

Till he becomes a bleeding youth
And she becomes a virgin bright;
Then he rends up his manacles
And pins her down for his delight.

Then later, he gets young and she gets old, and it goes on forever. Here’s the complete poem.

These aren’t just “fountain of youth” stories; they are about someone old becoming younger. Is that just because the transition provides more texture for the story, more time for the anti-ager to marvel at his own transformation, or is there something else to it?

The “fountain of youth” story goes back forever, and the appeal is as simple as the universal fear of death. (Isn’t it?)

Here’s another one (of many) in the larger genre:

Web 2.0 is booming so rapidly right now that many observers can’t help but remember all the hype leading up to the crash that took down startups looking to capitalize on Web 1.0. I work in the industry, and one question I get a lot from people outside it is, “Do you think we’re headed for another crash? Is this another bubble?”

Made to order for the syllabus of some future film survey course, August will be discussed in terms of both the era in which it takes place, and the era in which it was released. The public is anxious about where the Internet is taking us. Should we all be jumping in head first? Should we be running for the hills? Do you, yes you, have a fortune just waiting to be made online if you do X, Y, and Z? Do you have the guts to find out?

For those who don’t (99% of the population), Continue Reading »

This is part of a long-standing tradition in movies: The Guy Who Just Can’t Take It Anymore.

Part of the way this formula works is that it has to appear very current. The things that the guy is annoyed with are particularly modern problems.

And yet, every modern decade is full of new annoyances. The nature of day-to-day life is changing faster
than it ever has before, and the rate of change is also increasing. People who grew up in times of relatively slow change are going to feel this pain until they die. After they’re all gone, maybe we won’t see these movies anymore.

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