Quicktime trailer

Watchmen Quicktime trailer

Both movies are about people who see in themselves, or want to see in themselves, a closer personal connection to the myths that inspire them.

Special Quicktime trailer

Historians like to say that the early Egyptian pharoahs were “open behind,” meaning that they were both god and man at once. The god was a sort of magic shell that could be inhabited by many people over time. It wasn’t seen as a trick or a deception; that’s just how it worked. Unfortunately, being a god/man meant that you could only reign for a short period of time; after that, your subjects would ritualistically kill you in order to demonstrate reverence for the natural rhythms of nature. Eventually, the pharoahs changed that ritual to keep themselves alive, but they were no longer open behind; they were simply men claiming to be gods.

The point is: Everyone wants to connect with the supernatural. Everyone wants to be the supernatural. If you don’t have a myth that breaks the fourth wall and invites us inside, then we are going to find a way into it ourselves.

On the other hand, as much as I’d like to believe that this movie represents a more sophisticated facet of Van Damme, I don’t. It has the feel of something that was put together by an agent trying to re-infuse their client’s career. Van Damme doesn’t seem to be acting any more than usual here… he’s just been stuck inside a self-referential indie movie.

Does the fact that he made a career decision to do something that would make him seem more interesting, actually make him more interesting? He didn’t write it or direct it. He probably just agreed to be in it.

Here’s the quicktime trailer.

Also pictured: Boris Karloff, Jerry Lewis, and Peter Falk as characters based on themselves, in Targets, King Of Comedy, and Wings Of Desire.

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.

Yes, there’s nothing about abortion in the trailer, and there probably isn’t much about it in the movie, either. But that’s the way of things… you can’t touch someone’s true feelings on a hotly debated topic without abstracting it away to the point where it’s possible to deal with the primal as separate from the political.

Quicktime trailer

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.

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.

Rain Of Madness trailer (requires iTunes)

A lot of interesting stuff going on here. Tropic Thunder is a parody of, among other things, Apocalypse Now. So Rain Of Madness, the non-existent documentary about Tropic Thunder, is a parody of Hearts Of Darkness, the documentary about Apocalypse Now.

It’s an interesting time to make a comedy about the war in Vietnam, given that the US is currently involved in another endless police action. But Tropic Thunder isn’t, on its face, a comedy about war. It’s a satire of the whole idea of making a movie about war.

This extra level of remove insulates the audience from having to think directly about what this movie really is: a sophisticated comedy about the war in Iraq. Not just the war itself, but the perceptions that surround it: the way it’s imagined vs. the way it’s realized, what it’s like to really be in combat vs. what it’s like to feel so immersed in war toys, imagery, and information that you feel you might as well be there, even when you’re not.

If you pay attention to the Tropic Thunder trailer, you’ll see that the heart of it is just the old Seven Samurai formula: A group of misfit performers find themselves having to actually do what they previously only pretended to do. For them, the comedy becomes serious. The audience gets the chance to laugh at a situation that’s both serious and funny, but above all, pathetic. In this context, it means that Americans can laugh at how ridiculous it is that we’re still sending troops to Iraq.

The same trick is being used to make jokes about racial stereotypes. If I’d told you last year that Robert Downey Jr. was going to do a movie in blackface, you might not have believed it. But now, ha ha, he’s doing a movie about an actor doing a movie in blackface, so that’s okay, because it’s not really Robert Downey Jr. doing a movie in blackface. But it is.

Isn’t it?

See my discussion of Hancock from months ago, where I suggest the same thing.

I’ll embed the YouTube clip of the Colbert-Smith interview as soon as someone posts it…don’t see it yet. Anyone else?

TV Tropes has a great breakdown of similar shots.

Here’s the short trailer, with the famous arrow shot at the end:

Here’s the longer trailer, featuring the arrow shot sooner, but not as prominently: