That’s not true, I like clowns. I actually think what’s scary is in the inversion of simple childhood pleasure. But clowns are an effective way to do that. Now:
As one YouTube commenter says, “I don’t know if this is an actual movie or a fake trailer and I am not sure which I want it to be.”
I’m looking forward to the November premiere of Monsters, a sci-fi film that looks like it will be about the characters more than it is about the special effects.
That’s the way the director talks about it, though, in this piece from Wired:
“We couldn’t make the big-budget kind of film Hollywood can, so I figured, ‘Let’s make the kind that Hollywood can’t because they haven’t got the balls to do it,’” he says. “They wouldn’t have the balls to invest this much CGI into something and make it a character piece, whereas if you’ve got loads of things exploding and big fight scenes and monsters everywhere, you’ve got a guaranteed return. We felt kind of obliged to do something different.”
With a five-guys-in-a-van ethos, the picked up weird and unusual shots where they could, flipping through the script to see what scene might fit in with the backdrop they had found.
Makes me want to make a movie! But I guess I will have settle for watching this one.
Oh, another plus — it’s R-rated. Hooray for a movie that doesn’t feel like it has to whitewash things.
The trailer for “The Shining” is sublime. Seriously. It’s just one long shot … waiting … waiting … waiting … until the elevator door opens and a torrent of blood gushes out.
Shivers.
Here: watch it!
Now, here’s an odd thought — what if the trailer is actually the film? And the movie itself — all 146 minutes of it — is actually an extended trailer for, well, the trailer.
Consider arguments put forward by Jane Hu at The Awl:
Throughout the trailer, a list of credits scrolls up the page as what is surely Penderecki swells louder and louder. “The Shining / Directed by Stanley Kubrick” occurs twice, bracketing the names of the two lead actors (Nicholson and Duvall) and Stephen King, whose novel inspired the film. By presenting the film’s title and director twice, Kubrick presents the trailer as a film—complete with opening and closing credits.
“Trailers these days attack you with fast edits, sketch out the entire movie—except rearranged, of course—and present footage that won’t ever appear in said film,” she continues. And, compared to the trailer, this is exactly what you get in the film — the “elevator scene” is chopped up, presented out of order, and stripped of its narrative coherence.
At any rate, I much prefer this trailer to any modern version. I’ve often said that trailer should just be a single scene from a movie — not fast cuts of a hundred scenes — that would set the mood and only hint at the story.
“The most important documentary of the year is Norwegian,” screams the trailer for Troll Hunter. “It will change how you view society.”
And it would — if it weren’t a tongue-in-cheek mockumentary.
Says Twitchfilm:
the picture is a tongue-in-cheek moc-doc that proposes that the Norwegian government has been hiding the fact that they have a secret population of trolls - real, actual trolls - living on game preserves in the far north of the country, kept safe and secure and out of the public eye to prevent mass panic should people realize that these fairy tale creatures are real. Those high tension power lines you see stretching out over the horizon in unpopulated areas, seemingly going nowhere? Not power lines at all but an electric fence to keep the beasts contained!
A still from the movie, above, was obtained by Afterposten, where you can read more about it (if you read Norwegian).
But here’s the trailer, with English titles.
I. Can’t. Wait.
Sadly, I anticipate a big-budget Hollywood remake of this idea in about 2013.
by Amy Breen
I love movie trailers. Often, I will sit on Apple watching them, a pass-time Grant and I realized we shared. I look at them as practically an art form; a two minute advertisement for a movie that needs to blend the scenes with the perfect song that will make you curious and eager to see the actual film. The best movie trailers, for me, ellicit an emotional response, tug on my heartstrings or make me giddy with laughter. The worst movie trailers, obviously, take the two minutes and outline the entire plot for you. Groan.
That’s why IFC’s 50 Greatest Movie Trailers was really intriguing to me.
Ultimately, we decided that the best trailers are those that most effectively combine art and commerce, and that sell and entertain with equal skill. Some of the previews on our list are for classic films, but many are for mediocrities. Some are for absolutely bombs. That speaks to the magic of the trailers. You could argue that these clips play to our basest instincts in order to convince us to see movies that aren’t always good. But considered from another perspective, trailers provide a version of cinema that’s essentially utopian, in which every film is perfect, if only for two and a half minutes.
Cloverfield, which I included above, is number three on the list. After seeing this trailer before the first Transformers movie, I was hooked. It tells you practically nothing, but is edited in such a way that you cannot wait to see the movie. To me, it’s the perfect trailer. A lot of people were disappointed with the actual film, a (not so rare) case of the trailer offering greater things than the movie could deliver. (I, however, still loved the movie.)
The writers at IFC give detailed explanations as to why they picked each trailer. If anything else, it’s kind of fun to re-live the movies through their trailers.
