Odds & Ends

Monday, August 15, 2005

Trailer Trash

I love trailers. Sure, they are cinematic junk food: films cut down to the most basic of visceral pleasures. Like junk food, over-exposure could probably be bad for you, reducing your attention span and leaving you a visual adrenalin junkie. (I assume something like this happened to Michael Bay at some point). But just as sometimes you really need a Big Mac, there are times when you just want to gorge yourself on the juicy bits of a film without having to absorb all the cinematic nutritional value (such as plot, character, and exposition). And now that they are routinely included on DVDs and circulated on the internet, it's easier than ever to indulge a trailer habit.

I'm sure this increasing availability means various cinema studies students at universities are preparing theses on the evolution of movie marketing. Certainly there are a few observations even a casual observer can make. Old trailers always seem slow and clunky, for example, but generally do not give away as much of the plot as those made in the last few years. (The progression seems to be towards trailers that give away the entire plot through a rapidfire montage of single frame stills).

Watching a particularly bad trailer the other day (for Stealth, about which I say more below) got me thinking about some of the good and bad trailers I've seen over the years. So, just off the top of my head, here are a few that I consider to be good and bad examples of the form. Where possible, I've given a link to the one I'm talking about.

Good

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
(The internet only trailer, which you can find here).

I've mentioned this one before here; it's an excellently done piss-take of all the cliches of trailer-making. The clever thing about it is that even while it's taking the mickey out of the techniques of trailers, it is utilising those same cliches effectively. The self-consciously rapid-fire montage at its end, for example, really does get you fired up and wanting to see the movie. The other thing I like about it is that it manages to be reasonably true to Douglas Adams' writing style, even though it isn't based on any of his material. As an Adams pastiche, it's more effective than any of the original material that appeared in the movie itself.

Jaws
(I can't find this one on the internet, but it's on the 25th anniversary DVD).

Much has been written about the industry-changing box-office performance of Jaws in the summer of 1975, but I don't often see attempts to explain why it was such an instant hit: its success seems to be accepted as some kind of historic inevitability. Obviously it's an excellent movie, but the film was a smash before there was chance for any word-of-mouth to build. However, when the film finally appeared on DVD with its original trailer, it all made a lot more sense. Unlike pretty much every trailer of such a vintage, Jaws' original trailer is still effective today, and it must have gotten quite a buzz going before the film opened. It has the same uncanny instinct for editing rhythms evident in the feature itself, to the point where I wonder if the film's editor (Verna Fields) put it together herself.

The Phantom Menace
(The main theatrical trailer, which you can find here).

This is notable partly as an example of a really good trailer made for an atrocious film. But it also does something I really like in a trailer, which is construct a story that is something of a red-herring. The trailer builds up a small part of the overall plot of the movie as if it's the whole thing, which leaves a fair bit of the movie still to be discovered by its audience. (The trailer for Tony Martin's Bad Eggs is another example where this was done well).

Psycho
(The theatrical trailer, which you can find here).

This is another example of an effective older trailer. They don't make them like this anymore: a six-minute-plus epic with Alfred Hitchcock touring the Bates motel and house. Hitchcock is in fine form, keeping the film's secret but also playing up the fact that the film is an enormous sick joke. Surveying the bathroom in which Marion is killed, he says with relish: "Well, they've cleaned all this up now. Big difference. You should have seen the blood. The whole... the whole place was... well, it's - it's too horrible to describe." And yet its leisurely pace is itself something of a ruse, lulling the audience into a false sense of security before a final shock audio cue of Marion screaming.

Bad

Titanic
(The main theatrical trailer, which you can find here)

This one stands out in my mind as being a particularly egregious offender in the "trailer-gives-the-whole-movie-away" stakes. They all do this now, but at the time, I don't think they usually did it this badly. (I've heard it said that this is an American thing, and that European trailers are traditionally less explicit, but not having lived in Europe I can't comment: this has a whiff of knee-jerk anti-Americanism to me). Yes, we know the boat sinks, but the Titanic trailer really did give pretty much every story beat away.

Stealth
(The theatrical trailer, which you can find here)

Only time will tell if the movie is as bad as the trailer makes it look: if so, it would be quite an achievement. This trailer prompted this post: people were openly laughing at it when I saw it. First it makes the movie out to be an inferior rip-off of the already dumb Top Gun, but then - in a moment of almost transcendental idiocy - it reveals that no, the movie is in fact even stupider than that.

Speed 2: Cruise Control
(The theatrical trailer, which you can find here)

On the subject of audiences openly laughing at trailers: the trailer for Speed 2 was the first time I remember it happening. Not so much because the trailer was badly done, but simply because it laid out the stupidity of the premise with such transparency. Speed had centred on a concept - the bus that couldn't slow down - that was perfect for an action film, in that it gave the film an unrelenting kineticism. So what do they do for the sequel? They set it on the slowest moving vehicle they can find. (Imaginary dialogue: "The boat will blow up if it goes over 5 miles per hour!"). Also, the scene where the cop gets suspended by his commanding officer is now officially the most laughably overworked cliche in Hollywood moviemaking: so while it may be an obligatory inclusion in the movie itself, it really shouldn't be one of the scenes you put in the trailer. And finally - the "Cruise Control" tag was surely the dumbest sequel subtitle since Die Hard 2: Die Harder.

The Phantom Menace
(The "tone poem" series of ads: you can find the entries in this series here, here, here, here, here, and here.)

Yes, despite its main trailer being good, The Phantom Menace did manage some ads that were as bad as the film itself. Possibly the most pretentious series of commercials ever prepared for a motion picture were the series of "tone poem" ads made for this movie, each of which featured a solemnly intoned original piece of pseudo-poetry that perfectly captured the feel of bad angst-ridden teenage writing. A sample from the series, narrated by Natalie Portman's character, Queen Amidala:

There are things I cannot do
I cannot watch while people suffer
I cannot sit when something must be done
I cannot judge those who are different
There are things I cannot do
Run
Hide
Ignore
There are things I cannot do

But there are certainly things I will do.

Eck. If trailers really were junk food, I think I would have just got acid reflux. It's a worry when the movie is terrible, but the trailer still manages to be worse.

Posted by Stephen Rowley @ 15.8.05

Comments:

Actually, if you go back to, say the thirties and forties, there are many trailers that give away entire movies, right up to famous final scenes. Casablanca comes to mind, though I can't remember others. However, since the pace is slower and you get long snips from fewer scenes, it's harder to tell that what you're seeing is the whole story until you revisit the trailer after the movie.

# posted by

Kenny : 29/12/05 10:18 PM